4 ms·

A good summary and I propose three minor additions to the issue list: 1) One big part of IoT is replacing capital goods with decades long depreciation with goo

by VLM 10y ago

A good summary and I propose three minor additions to the issue list: 1) One big part of IoT is replacing capital goods with decades long depreciation with goods having months long depreciation. Yes your $20 Honeywell lasted three decades and a new one would last three more decades, but this $200 IoT thermostat simply won't be supported in a large number of months and the end users need an economic plan to replace it, say, annually, rather than a couple times per century. Which has interesting environmental/ecological concerns of its own. Your 1996 dumb thermostat works fine in 2016, but your 2016 IoT thermostat absolutely will not work with whatever passes for an iphone in 2036, or probably even 2026. 2) Demarcation points and interoperability and DRM need to be monitored. Oh so sorry your IoT thermostat got powned and tried to burn down your house, unfortunately instead of the standard current loop interface it uses a DRMed proprietary RS-485 based interface to talk to the DRMed furnace so rather than swapping in a new thermostat (which would just get powned in minutes anyway) you'll need a newer model thermostat and those only connect to new furnaces, so an IoT thermostat with a severe DRM infestation getting powned means a $5000 new HVAC system not just a new thermostat. 3) As more and more people recognize IoT as an anti-feature or unwanted at best, people are going to refuse to set it up, sorta like the millions of VCRs blinking 12:00 in the 80s/90s. My MiL has a long obsolete smart TV that's never been connected to the internet and is merely a dumb TV. Selected because she liked how the bezel matched her home decor. Likewise IoT devices are going to have to get used to the idea that very soon many/most users will never connect them to the internet, yet they still have to at least minimally operate.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
Did your MiL refuse to set it up as a protest, or just because she couldn't be bothered, same as the blinking 12:00? My understanding of the blinking 12:00 wasn't that people refused to set them up, but most simply couldn't figure out how, and didn't see the advantage in spending more than five minutes in trying to figure it out, when there was probably a clock hanging above the TV anyway. When we bought a new TV, we picked the dumbest possible one, and did the bare minimum to make it work, skipping all the solicitations to hook it up to our wifi.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  > Did your MiL refuse to set it up as a protest, or just because she couldn't be bothered, same as the blinking 12:00? Does it matter? An unwanted feature is an unwanted feature. There's not much difference between buying a dumb tv and buying a smart tv and disabling the "smart" features.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    If people actively hate the smart features, they might actually opt not to buy them, signaling to the market. If they're just ignoring them, companies will plow on full speed ahead adding more garbage to what should be a dumb screen.
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      As long as you can turn the smarts off, few people will go to the trouble of protest-purchasing a dumb tv. 99% will buy based on the features they want and leave the stuff off that they don't want.
- VLM 10y ago
  For the decades of the VCR the blinking of the 12:00 was used socially to signal ignorance (because being ignorant used to be cool) or signal "only kids are capable of learning technology like programming VCRs and I'm a respectable adult so I don't program VCRs" or general complaints about American laziness. Also it was a poster child for bad UI, with the assumption that everyone wanted to use it (false) and users were only stopped by the UI not having enough flair or whatever was trendy at that time (also false) therefore look how important UI design is. What it really meant was the product was multipurpose and sold to two markets, the enormously numerous pre-recorded viewers, and the tiny little subset of timeshifters who would program clocks and start and stop and channel and rewind the tape (or not) and day of week and various other settings so as to watch a broadcast program later. A large mythology sprung up around why Americans didn't timeshift blaming everyone but the content not being worth it and the viewer not being interesting, neither of which was culturally acceptable to express, especially on TV itself perhaps on a sitcom, so it turned into a weird trope. For my MiL she wanted/needed a certain size and she really liked the bezel (and the stand, too) and that's how she selected her TV. It happened to be a smart TV but she was uninterested in that feature. She has no interest in wifi. At that time there was no choice or freedom in the market, its smart TV or no TV. Likewise 95% of the countries VCRs blinked 12:00 because the market at that time was fancy time shifting capable VCR or no VCR at all.

by VLM 10y ago

pavel_lishin 10y ago

Did your MiL refuse to set it up as a protest, or just because she couldn't be bothered, same as the blinking 12:00? My understanding of the blinking 12:00 wasn't that people refused to set them up, but most simply couldn't figure out how, and didn't see the advantage in spending more than five minutes in trying to figure it out, when there was probably a clock hanging above the TV anyway. When we bought a new TV, we picked the dumbest possible one, and did the bare minimum to make it work, skipping all the solicitations to hook it up to our wifi.

ryandrake 10y ago
> Did your MiL refuse to set it up as a protest, or just because she couldn't be bothered, same as the blinking 12:00? Does it matter? An unwanted feature is an unwanted feature. There's not much difference between buying a dumb tv and buying a smart tv and disabling the "smart" features.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  If people actively hate the smart features, they might actually opt not to buy them, signaling to the market. If they're just ignoring them, companies will plow on full speed ahead adding more garbage to what should be a dumb screen.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    As long as you can turn the smarts off, few people will go to the trouble of protest-purchasing a dumb tv. 99% will buy based on the features they want and leave the stuff off that they don't want.
VLM 10y ago
For the decades of the VCR the blinking of the 12:00 was used socially to signal ignorance (because being ignorant used to be cool) or signal "only kids are capable of learning technology like programming VCRs and I'm a respectable adult so I don't program VCRs" or general complaints about American laziness. Also it was a poster child for bad UI, with the assumption that everyone wanted to use it (false) and users were only stopped by the UI not having enough flair or whatever was trendy at that time (also false) therefore look how important UI design is. What it really meant was the product was multipurpose and sold to two markets, the enormously numerous pre-recorded viewers, and the tiny little subset of timeshifters who would program clocks and start and stop and channel and rewind the tape (or not) and day of week and various other settings so as to watch a broadcast program later. A large mythology sprung up around why Americans didn't timeshift blaming everyone but the content not being worth it and the viewer not being interesting, neither of which was culturally acceptable to express, especially on TV itself perhaps on a sitcom, so it turned into a weird trope. For my MiL she wanted/needed a certain size and she really liked the bezel (and the stand, too) and that's how she selected her TV. It happened to be a smart TV but she was uninterested in that feature. She has no interest in wifi. At that time there was no choice or freedom in the market, its smart TV or no TV. Likewise 95% of the countries VCRs blinked 12:00 because the market at that time was fancy time shifting capable VCR or no VCR at all.