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Comment by aSplash0fDerp | Hacker News Reader

Cloud is dead.

Games stop working, lifelong memories are erased (yahoo groups,photo sites), watches stop being smart (pebble) and even smarthomes become a complete waste of an investment.

Bare-metal will always be sexy (and higher maintenance), but prosumer tech is not there yet to fill-in all the gaps in smarthomes.

IMO, once we start seeing inexpensive 10TB-100TB home storage appliances, we'll start to see more tech engineered for decade+ operations.

Over 99% of tech is disposible. Just the data is carried over, so you're lucky if you get 5 years use out of any device nowadays. 10 years is pushing it, even for smarthomes.

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I don't think the storage is the problem. Everything in computing scales up with available storage - apps, documents, media, all just get larger to compensate. If we couldn't solve this with readily available 100GB drives, or 1TB drives, why would we suddenly be able to with 10TB drives?

The problem is that normal people no longer have a machine at home that’s always left on. As much as I dislike apple, their Apple TV might be one of the things that pushes everyone in the direction of owning their IOT network.

There’s also (IMO) a serious lack of open source tools for managing IOT devices. Right now a lot of the cheaper ones speak PnPP but there’s only one functional client I was able to find for this (a buggy and obscure GTK app.) There are a lot of good libraries though so maybe that will change.

> The problem is that normal people no longer have a machine at home that’s always left on.

They do, their router. The better models are half a home server anyway. They have wifi, USB for storage, do voip, have direct internet access (no NAT issues!). They would be an ideal platform for home automation.

Except that they usually don't own it, they rent it from the ISP.

I think the concept of home server - some box you buy separately from Internet connection - is a concept that needs more marketing, until it becomes normalized.

Microsoft used to make Windows Home Server, a server OS with a simplified UI on top. Shame it didn't take off and they killed it.

No they rent the modem from their ISP.

IME, it's typically an integrated router and cable modem.

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