Re: Dedicated Z-wave sites?

["Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:yJDgh.9487$hI.3724@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> "Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:ceGdnWdPDegACx_YnZ2dnUVZ_vyunZ2d@xxxxxxxxxx
> > No, I am saying (and research that I cited appears to agree) is that
> > crappy
> > drivers come from "good" companies *and* "bad" ones and it sounds as if
> > one
> > has to have a considerable amount of driver evaluation expertise to be
> > able
> > to tell what they can load on a CQ system.  I'm trying to determine how
> > you
> > implement what you claim to be immunity to the types of driver issues
that
> > plague other software applications.  I'm wondering how that's done in an
> > environment where a driver can disrupt a data structure in the kernel
that
> > shits (too good a Freudian slip to elide!) er . . . *shuts* down the
> > systems.
> >
>
> I'm not claiming immunity from bad drivers. I'm claiming that bad drivers
> are NOWHERE as common as you seem to think, and that within a couple
months
> of the release of a driver for a highly used piece of hardware (the only
> kind you should be using) many thousands of people will have used it in
many
> different configurations, and that's a pretty good sign that it will be
safe
> for you to use. The best thing to do when you need high reliability is to
> 'buy behind the curve'. Buy hardware that has been out long enough to be
> heavily vetted.

You don't do much gaming, do you?  You can get sometimes find a driver per
week at some of the high end video card support sites.  As more feedback and
problem reports arrive, the fixes soon follow.  The same is true for BIOS's
in any new motherboard.  You can see them issued once a month, if not once a
week, after a new board is released.  Some of these fixes are not minor
cosmetic polish, either.

It may well be that in your corner of the world you don't see driver issues
but I see them continuously.  As Dennis B. pointed out, the arrival of Vista
is going to seriously alter the driver landscape.  Let's just chalk this
disagreement up to our differing experience  regarding drivers.  Let's, for
the moment, forget that the author of NOOKS reported drivers were at fault
it 85% of all system crashes and that 5% of all Windows machines have to be
rebooted daily.

<stuff snipped>

> Panasonic Netcam into their Ethernet.
> >
>
> We'll, they do have to worry about it, but they also get to charge for it.
> If the customer breaks the system, and they call the installer to fix it,
> and it turns out to be the customer's fault, the customer pays. OTOH, if
you
> are doing it yourself, and you plug in the camera, and your system stops
> working, you can sit down and draw some diagrams and within a few hours of
> hard thought, you'll probably figure out that the camera is the problem
and
> remove it until you figure out what the problem is.
>
> > Are you calling Panasonic a "junk" company or are you just impugning my
> > buying habits in general?  (-:   I happen to own a lot of very high end
> > equipment.  It's usually when anything inferior just won't do.  Browning
> > is
> > a favorite choice of mine because it's so reliable.  So is Nikon because
a
> > picture is only as good as its lens.   Sony is, too, because very little
> > was
> > able to match the quality and performance of something like the D8 DAT
> > recorder.
> >
>
> No, I'm not calling anything junk. But, if it breaks your entire system
when
> you plug it in, then it obviously has problems.

Are you sure it's the camera and not the system?  Perhaps there was a flaw
in the OS's video driver that never came into play until Camera X came on
line.  I suppose that's where you and I differ the most.  My experience in
troubleshooting PC's has been that they are a LOT of trouble, and the more
SW and HW that's installed, the more troublesome they become.  I want to
know the process by which you decided what's junk and what's not and what
will break your system and what won't.  I found that a slightly loose mouse
plug on a ASUS PIII Coppermine motherboard stopped the entire system from
booting.  No cogent error messages.  It just stopped after writing some boot
up information to the screen and hung there.

> Look, if these products
> broke systems all the time when they were plugged in, it would be pretty
> well known and a trivial amount of research on the web would tell you
that.
> It's your responsibility to do the research if you choose ot to pay a
> professional to do it for you.

I'm not going to bother researching the numerous tales of people who have
done nothing more sinister than download the MS patch of the month and who
have then had scanners, printers, cameras, sounds cards, applications and
more just stop working.   They didn't choose or load "bad" equipment.  They
were caught in the "you have to upgrade bind where the upgrade can both
giveth and taketh away.

Anyone working with more than a home installation of Windows knows how easy
it is for a Windows system to grind to a halt for any number of reasons.  We
both know, or at least I hope we do - me from bitter experience and you from
writing drivers both to spec and to actual hardware in hand - you can
research something to bloody death but the rubber hits the road when you
install it.  With the outrageous variety of HW and SW available on the PC
market, it's entirely likely a serious error in a driver will go totally
undetected until it runs into just the right hardware and software
combination.  Truthfully, can you say that your research results have always
corresponded to the real world behavior of a piece of HW?


<stuff snipped>

> > a major market player to my CQ HA server or do I need to wait
> > until you get around to coding for it?  Please explain!  I'll send you
> > mine
> > to evaluate if you're not sure how to answer the question.
> >
>
> If it breaks the whole thing, then it would be so disfunctional a product
> that you should send it back. Whether it is supported or not depends. If
it
> can use a web client, then you can just embed a web browser widget in your
> CQC interface to view the camera. This is the most common way. We will be
> looking for some to support more directly in the future.

That's what I wanted to know.  Thanks.  Does it seem so unusual that I would
see an IP camera from a respected player in the business like Panasonic at a
price point that I find agreeable and want to fold it into my HA setup?

While turning on lights to simulate occupants while away leads people into
X-10 and light automation, the desire to install a nanny cam or to see the
home while on travel on the cellphone is another very popular "entry point"
for people into home automation.  I would expect a general use HA SW product
to be able to accommodate them both generically and specifically.

> If you are going to use untested stuff, then what is your complaint here?

Untested by whom?  I have a little problem here trying to visualize the
process by which Joe Average is able to test and evaluate a driver, or to
even figure out who to trust to test the equipment.  This is what I call a
"magic dingus" in that it calls for process that's not visible.  In your
case, granted, you have skilled installers and maintainers making these
decisions about drivers and what is "good gear" and what is "bad gear."  To
the average end user, if it says PC compatible, they believe it should run.
I doubt if one percent of the population is able to scan a driver with
HexEdit, look to see if the author filled out an informative property table,
look for misspellings or in any other way evaluate the quality of a driver
supplied with something like an IP camera or a printer.

> Yeh, it might break something. This is not a suprise. But the bulk of
people are
> NOT going to do that. They will use well known, well vetted hardware
because
> they are interested in stability.

You live in a far, far different world than most of the people I know and
work with that use PC's.  The truly experienced know that every piece of HW
or SW they add is akin to playing Russian Roulette in that you never know
when the whole thing will just stop.

As for "bulk people" I would have to counter your observation and say that
the "bulk" of the people I know just install things.  They don't backup
beforehand, they don't use an install log, they don't examine the processes
list before and after to see what's changed and they neither back up the
registry nor do a registry concordance to see what a new program has done to
their system.  Those are among the many things it takes to approach 24/7/365
reliability.  Very, very few average users do them.

> > I think that once Vista hits, with its very different way of doing
things,
> > your already incredible workload will double and you won't be able to
keep
> > up.  It's a pattern so common it's sad, really.  I've seen it, closeup,
at
> > least ten times, maybe more.  Those are the spectacular ones I can
recall,
> > where someone mortgaged his home to propel the software business.  This
> > goes
> > back to the days of 386MAX, built and marketed just blocks from where I
> > worked 20 years ago.  When MS put EMM's inside the OS, the bottom fell
out
> > for third party memory managers.  Can you really afford to split your
> > current level of resourcing when Vista arrives?
> >
>
> I'm not sure where you are getting this from. Vista isn't going to be that
> big a deal for us. What exactly in Vista do you think is going to be so
> difficult to support that we will end up being broken on the rocks and go
> under? Please be specific. Are you a software engineer? If so, I assume
you
> have some specific concerns as to what could be that horrible. Personally,
I
> figure it will take a few days to make any required updates for Vista. I
> think we can handle that

A few days?  I think you're quite the optimist, Dean.  We'll have to wait
and see.  I've worked on a number of software projects for various clients.
When you have to support another OS, particularly a new one, it can double
your testing load, it can increase the size and complexity of your
distribution media, it can require multiple sets of help files tailored to
each OS.  Housekeeping and version control can just eat you alive if you run
into significant issues porting.

Has CQ ever had to make the trip to a brand new OS?  It's an interesting
journey.  My organization created several widely used in-house applications
over the years for thousands of users.  The programs ranged from collecting
survey data to decision modeling software.  When we had to bridge from DOS
to WIN3 to Win98 to NT to W2K we had to spend a fortune.  We had to set up a
very complex test lab so that we would have each different OS available to
bench test with a variety of configurations and network topologies.  New
documentation was required, much more complex and "environmentally aware"
installation programs were needed, issues with video drivers cropped up and
were quite a plague until MS and ATI worked them out after months of mutual
fingerpointing, etc. and various bug reports and feedback from the field
kept us working double shifts.

> And there isn't even that huge a need to move to Vista anyway. As alreayd
> mentioned, mostly our system is running on servers in a closet and kiosk
> style touch screens. The OS is not exposed and therefore the OS version is
> not important. And our customers (being conservative about reliability for
> their automation system) will not be rushing to to Vista anyway. They will
> likely give it some break in time, as I mentioned above as the most
obvious
> means to insure reliability. So we have plenty of time to move to Vista.

Did I miss it (my delete key was toggled for a while)?  Did you explain how
your business plan would cover a prolonged illness of you, the key man?
That little issue alone has been enough to sink projects far larger than
yours.  It's rumored that Wordstar died because the key man left.  It's
pretty obvious at ADI that when Dan Boone left, development on ADI and
Ocelot gear stopped.  If you get overwhelmed by a Vista port being harder
than you expect, who takes up the slack and covers for you?   If I were to
evaluate your attitude now as compared to a year ago, you seem far more
tense than you did before.  That probably means the workload is creeping up
on you more than you realize.  (-:  Chill dude, chill.

--
Bobby G.