Re: Mini-ITX PC's a the future of HA

["Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> As for it being a necessity, isn't that a little like the cart pulling the
> dog?  Isn't that an admission that Windows can't really multitask well and
> that to get it to behave you have to treat it like a mental category 5
> (dolt) recruit in the Army:  "Go here, do this, come back and sit
> quietly."
> If you tell them to do more than that at one time, something's going to go
> wrong.

No, I don't see it that way. It's nothing to do with multi-tasking really.
It's that most people who end up with any automation in their homes are
going to get it profesionally installed. The DIY market is very small, so
they don't drive this. If you are putting an automation system into
someone's home, and you are the one who has to deal with problems, you are
going to be conservative, no matter what OS it is running, and not let the
user directly use this machine for day to day purposes. It's just the safest
thing to do. And this machine really does want to be a server, not a client,
which means it won't be a small VIA machine, it'll have ot be something with
more ooph.

> I'm sorry but I see this as an admission of MS's failure.  To me it says:
> "Windows is pretty damn touchy when it comes to multitasking." This is
> what
> I was alluding to earlier when I talked about it crashing often, and no
> one
> caring enough to complain to MS or to stop buying the product.

No, it can multi-task extremely well. You keep ignoring that the problem is
the HUMAN, not the machine. If you let completely non-technical end users
poke around in any machine and modify themselves and install anyo old thing
the they run across on the internet, and they will, then nothing is going to
stay stable.

My previous system (the VIA one) was running XP and stayed up for over a
year until I took it down to replace it. It had not glitched in the
slighted, leaked any memory or anything else of that nature. This is because
it was treated as an appliance, as an automation system should be.

> I'm sorry that I haven't kept up with recent Windows releases.  I own, but
> don't use, XP because an OS that will stop working without "phoning home"
> just because you replace a NIC can't possibly be considered "robust" in
> any
> sense of the word.  I've been reading through their site at:

I think that you are overstating the situation to make it sound as bad as
possible. It may ask to phone home if you change multiple aspects of the
machine at once. That can only happen if you've already taken the machine
down in order to make hardware changes. A quick and painless call will fix
it if it happens. In a profesionally installed system, this will be handled
by the installer.

> Holy Double Moses!  You want to use your combination HA/security system to
> watch movies?
>
> Really?  (-;
>
> Then we're very disconnected on same basic level, Dean.  To me that's just
> asking for trouble.  The HA and security need very little user interaction
> once they're up.

No, I don't watch movies on it. Movies are in a changer controlled by the
box. I do listen to music off of it, which is a very light weigth operation
for a modern machine, and I partly do it because I'm using mine mostly as a
home theater controller, not as a whole home automation system (because I
don't have a home, just a small apartment.) If it were being used in a whole
home automation installation, then it would just be serving up data for
playback on other devices.

> What kind of PCI cards are you using for your newest server?
>
> (So much for "terser!")

We have a 4 zone IR blaster card, one or two 4 port serial cards, and a
digital input/contact closure card.

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