6 ms·

Back in the day when Bill Gates was CEO of Microsoft and was hitting the big money, I remember hearing about his building a huge $5M house (when a million dolla

by foobar1962 9y ago

Back in the day when Bill Gates was CEO of Microsoft and was hitting the big money, I remember hearing about his building a huge $5M house (when a million dollars was a million dollars) that would have digital-everything and be 100% buzzword compatible. This was probably the 1990s. I'm wondering 1) how it went then; and 2) is the house now obsolete after just 20 years? A house being obsolete in 20 years is one thing, but a whole city being obsolete is quite another.

im3w1l 9y ago
The important thing will be to build for upgradeability, so that a house/city with 20 year old tech can be upgraded without tearing it down and rebuilding from scratch.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  To be fair, that's always been the case with technology. The difference is that digital moves faster than analog and adds an additional layer of incompatibility. NYC is currently learning that lesson all over again (or more likely failing to learn it) with the long overdue and long-dragged-out upgrade of our subway's 80 year old signaling systems. (Not to mention the hundred year old water tunnels that we can't afford to take out of service for repairs.)
bluthru 9y ago
I remember reading about that as well. Something about everyone wearing electronic badges that identified to the smart house who was in the room. Also a trampoline room.
tonyedgecombe 9y ago
2) is the house now obsolete after just 20 years? It probably ran on Windows 3.1 and they lost the install disks.
mtgx 9y ago
Not just obsolete. Think about all the security issues appearing only 5 years later. I sure hope all "smart city solution vendors" are required to provide lifetime updates, and there's also a mechanism to switch the maintenance of those products to some other company if the original companies go under. It shouldn't be like "Hey, so now we'll go bankrupt. Good luck with our DRMed proprietary products, though!" This is why it's so important for governments to move towards open source solutions as much as possible despite the "high-cost of switching and training" and whatnot. Technology is going to be ingrained so much more in our institutions in the future. And it's going to be way more expensive to solve issues if there is proprietary products lock-in.
- Roritharr 9y ago
  To be the contrarian on the subject: this is also already the case with machinery. If the company i bought the water heater from goes bankrupt, there's no way to get spareparts and i have to replace the thing once one plastic nubbin breaks. Not much different if there's no one there to patch its openssl version.
  - someonewhocar3s 9y ago
    If the intellectual property of a bankrupt company would not be sold off to repay debtors, but instead, made public, it would be trivial to hire professionals to: * Build you spare parts * Perform repairs * Enhance software The latter needs to be enabled from the software side as well. Some security models etc might depend upon secrets. Those should be made illegal (false assumption that you can keep a secret anyway), and these releases should become mandatory. This will hurt shareholders but greatly benefit all those that actually supported a company by buying their products. It greatly enhances the value of every product on the market.
  - foobar1962 9y ago
    If we wanted to make a low-maintenance, low-energy city, we'd use the LOWEST technology possible to get the job done. Round-a-bouts, not "smart traffic lights". My personal view is that to see the cities of our near future, go to practically any big city in Asia today. High population density, everybody (whole families and and their farm animals) racing about on small motor scooters. Not a bad standard of living, but nothing like what we in thew west are used to (I'm in Australia). Segways and flying cars are too expensive to make, too hard to fix, and too expensive to run. Ditto for maglev trains running in vacuum tunnels under cities.
expertentipp 9y ago
The households’ antivirus probably eats up all water, electricity, and internet bandwidth occasionally not letting in any humans.
- kirk781 9y ago
  Also, it'll randomnly turn blue at odd moments and shut down for some reason.

im3w1l 9y ago

The important thing will be to build for upgradeability, so that a house/city with 20 year old tech can be upgraded without tearing it down and rebuilding from scratch.

twobyfour 9y ago
To be fair, that's always been the case with technology. The difference is that digital moves faster than analog and adds an additional layer of incompatibility. NYC is currently learning that lesson all over again (or more likely failing to learn it) with the long overdue and long-dragged-out upgrade of our subway's 80 year old signaling systems. (Not to mention the hundred year old water tunnels that we can't afford to take out of service for repairs.)

bluthru 9y ago

I remember reading about that as well. Something about everyone wearing electronic badges that identified to the smart house who was in the room. Also a trampoline room.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago

2) is the house now obsolete after just 20 years? It probably ran on Windows 3.1 and they lost the install disks.

mtgx 9y ago

Not just obsolete. Think about all the security issues appearing only 5 years later. I sure hope all "smart city solution vendors" are required to provide lifetime updates, and there's also a mechanism to switch the maintenance of those products to some other company if the original companies go under. It shouldn't be like "Hey, so now we'll go bankrupt. Good luck with our DRMed proprietary products, though!" This is why it's so important for governments to move towards open source solutions as much as possible despite the "high-cost of switching and training" and whatnot. Technology is going to be ingrained so much more in our institutions in the future. And it's going to be way more expensive to solve issues if there is proprietary products lock-in.

Roritharr 9y ago
To be the contrarian on the subject: this is also already the case with machinery. If the company i bought the water heater from goes bankrupt, there's no way to get spareparts and i have to replace the thing once one plastic nubbin breaks. Not much different if there's no one there to patch its openssl version.
- someonewhocar3s 9y ago
  If the intellectual property of a bankrupt company would not be sold off to repay debtors, but instead, made public, it would be trivial to hire professionals to: * Build you spare parts * Perform repairs * Enhance software The latter needs to be enabled from the software side as well. Some security models etc might depend upon secrets. Those should be made illegal (false assumption that you can keep a secret anyway), and these releases should become mandatory. This will hurt shareholders but greatly benefit all those that actually supported a company by buying their products. It greatly enhances the value of every product on the market.
- foobar1962 9y ago
  If we wanted to make a low-maintenance, low-energy city, we'd use the LOWEST technology possible to get the job done. Round-a-bouts, not "smart traffic lights". My personal view is that to see the cities of our near future, go to practically any big city in Asia today. High population density, everybody (whole families and and their farm animals) racing about on small motor scooters. Not a bad standard of living, but nothing like what we in thew west are used to (I'm in Australia). Segways and flying cars are too expensive to make, too hard to fix, and too expensive to run. Ditto for maglev trains running in vacuum tunnels under cities.

expertentipp 9y ago

The households’ antivirus probably eats up all water, electricity, and internet bandwidth occasionally not letting in any humans.

kirk781 9y ago
Also, it'll randomnly turn blue at odd moments and shut down for some reason.