Re: is x10.com dead?

["Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Bill Kearney" <wkearney99@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:2ridnaseAcm94mnenZ2dnUVZ_sOdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > If I were to switch today, I'd be giving up a ton of tangible benefits
for
> a
> > marginal increase in reliability.  No way.
>
> That's just it, the reliability difference wasn't marginal.  It was 50%
(at
> best) versus 100%.

I don't think that anyone here who runs X-10 successfully tolerates a 50/50
chance of each command working or not.  If that's *really* the kind of
reliability you were getting, you probably own some piece of equipment
you've been taking around from site to site that's stepping on your X-10
signal.

Hopefully you're just engaging in a little hyperbole and perhaps a
subconcious need to justify that the system you spent so much money on was a
good investment.  If you were getting only 1 command out of every 2 to work,
then you were right to switch to a more robust protocol.  But your
experience doesn't match that of those of us who are very happy with the way
X-10 it works.  I would never tolerate a 50/50 HA system.  I doubt many
people here in CHA would.

> > Perhaps the plethora of oddball electronic goodies represents a hostile
> > enviroment for X-10 and you need Lutron the way the US Army needs EMD
> > hardened gear.
>
> The point is if X-10 wasn't such a shitty product it wouldn't HAVE trouble
> with this sort of thing.  Blaming the billions of other devices being made
> worldwide is NOT a realistic excuse.

Bill, X-10 was designed at a time when the average home powerlines looked
very different than they do today.  It's not realistic to expect a design
hardened against threats that didn't exist.   It's just part of the
double-edged sword of standards.  In the beginning they unify and advance
progress and towards the end of the cycle they stifle innovation.  X-10 did
a hell of a job *creating* a large part of the home automation industry.