"Dan Lanciani" ddl@danlan.*com wrote in message
...
In article ,
(Robert Green) writes:

| Someday,
| items like refrigerators will contain an ethernet jack and can be
remotely
| monitored for abnormal conditions with ease.

Of course, you will have to pay a monthly fee to the monitoring service.
The protocol used will not be available to the consumer for "safety
reasons".

We can only hope that "open standards" will prevail but I have my doubts. I
read a news item about Intuit just completely screwing over its users who it
had migrated to the "cloud" and only providing a data converter when hounded
by thousands of irate loyal customers. I wonder when the first national
cloud computing disaster will occur. Critical business data stored and
managed off-site by who knows who or what working from where? Yeah, I'll do
that. (-:

It would be great if all home appliances (and maybe even cars) had a LAN
jack and all basic setup functions and data analysis could be performed with
a web browser. It really is a great modular design and all the standards
are already in place.

| In the next house, we'll have
| an autostart generator,

I'm working on this now. I told the propane company that I wanted a
remote tank level indicator in the house. They said they had a great
service where I could check my tank level on the Internet. I explained
that I wanted a wire from the tank to a box in the house that showed the
level and had alarm contacts for low level. (I even showed them some
sample devices in catalogs.) They said they could program their "modem"
to call me when my tank was low. I said that I didn't want to involve
their "modem" at all.

When I first started to install CCTV around the house that I wanted to be
able to see over the internet, the vendors all proposed solutions involving
running all access through servers in China with javascript and all sorts of
other security holes enabled. Uh uh. No way.

They said I shouldn't worry about it because
something could always be done after the tanks were installed. I pointed
out that the nice monitor device in the catalog supported only two of
the four popular tank gauge fittings (not including snap-in) so it would
really be better to work this out before the tanks were in the ground,
especially since I'm buying the tanks.

It's been several weeks and still no quote.

That's a clear indication your salesmen is way outside his comfort zone. If
you pester him he might eventually find someone up the food chain that knows
about these things, but you'd really have to pester him. Sounds like they
want your remote access device installed *afterward* so they can blame any
problems (which will most likely be related to their inexperience with the
device) on you.

You can tell the pioneers by the numbers of arrow stuck in their backs.
(0-:

--
Bobby G.