Re: Dedicated Z-wave sites?

["Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:_s2dnf4eBMnszh7YnZ2dnUVZ_ua3nZ2d@xxxxxxxxxx
> 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.
>

No, I don't. And we are talking about automation, not gaming, so I'm not
sure what the relevance is.

> 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.
>

The differences he pointed out was NON-AVAILABILITY of drivers for old
hardware, nothing to do with quality. I have no idea what the author of
NOOKs knows or how valid any of his information is. I don't particularly
doubt it, but it's not particularly relevant to the discussion at hand that
I can see, because 85% of the problems that our customers have would be a
small absolute number.

>> 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
>

Irrelevant, for the most part. The OS is there. It's what you are using. If
the camera doesn't work with it, then it doesn't work with it. Your options
are work with the relevant parties to figure out why or move on.

> 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

I'm sorry, but I don't see these problems. I have 4 systems in my home right
now, recently replaced one that I used every day for hard core development
and it never game me any problems except occasionally it would fail to shut
down after upgrades. The others have been working just fine. I've had
automaton controllers that run without problems for a year or more (and
would have continued had I not replaced them.)

This is because I either buy a pre-fab configuration (Dell's mostly) or I
research what other people have been using and use hardware that I know
other people are using without problems.

> 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."

The average person will probably not do this, any more than the average
person will fix their own car.

> 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 was refering to the bulk of people implementing an automation system, not
of the public at large, since I thought that was the issue at hand.

> 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.
>

I've done more cross platform software development than most people on the
planet, I'm sure. I've already explained how our product is architected to
minimize platform impact. You can believe it or not.

> 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.

No CQC the product, but the underlying object infrastructure has. I'm well
aware of the issues, and have long since put the mechanisms in place to deal
with it. The underlying object platform used to run on XP and Linux
simultaneously back in the day, and because of the very mechanisms I've
pointed out it required no changes in the code, just the use of the virtual
kernel layer being implemented on each platform.

> 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.

We've made it clear that if, in the very unlikely chance that would happen
before we are in a position to deal with it, that we would open source the
product. So no one would be screwed, except me if I died.

> 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.
>

I'm not tense at all actually, at least not about the software issues, which
are primarily in your imagination. We are in a better position than ever and
interest in our product is ramping up at an ever increasing rate, because
it's a quality product and doesn't suffer from any of the problems you seem
obsessed with. I just find that your arguments seem primarily oriented
towards spreading FUD, without any actual factual basis, and frustratingly
incomphensible.

---------------------
Dean Roddey
Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems, Ltd
www.charmedquark.com