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Re:An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities by foobar1962 on Saturday November 18, 2017 @01:49AM (#15728056)
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.

Re:An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities by mtgx on Saturday November 18, 2017 @03:35AM (#15728264)
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.

Re:An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities by Roritharr on Saturday November 18, 2017 @06:01AM (#15728563)
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.
Re:An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities by foobar1962 on Saturday November 18, 2017 @06:35AM (#15728636)
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.

Re:An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities by tialaramex on Saturday November 18, 2017 @10:44AM (#15729380)
As someone who loves in an area with both, traffic lights and roundabouts are very different and solve different problems. One critical thing lights offer is you can drop in a pedestrian crossing sequenced to the lights. These days you would use puffin crossings (sensors check the crossing is clear of pedestrians before giving signals back to motor traffic, also the cross/don't cross indication is mounted where pedestrians looking at it are also facing the nearest lane of motor traffic, increasing safety). On the other hand roundabouts are great for junctions where a lot of traffic enters the junction but most doesn't conflict.

In some scenarios it makes sense to have both lights and roundabouts, in extreme cases it even makes sense to fit roundabouts on a circle of roundabouts which then have lights at peak times.

Re:An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities by im3w1l on Saturday November 18, 2017 @02:02AM (#15728089)
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.
Re:An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities by twobyfour on Saturday November 18, 2017 @07:23AM (#15728719)
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.)

Re:An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities by bluthru on Saturday November 18, 2017 @02:17AM (#15728120)
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.

Re:An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities by expertentipp on Saturday November 18, 2017 @05:00AM (#15728444)
The households’ antivirus probably eats up all water, electricity, and internet bandwidth occasionally not letting in any humans.
Re:An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities by kirk781 on Saturday November 18, 2017 @05:09AM (#15728465)
Also, it'll randomnly turn blue at odd moments and shut down for some reason.
Re:An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities by tonyedgecombe on Saturday November 18, 2017 @04:06AM (#15728339)
2) is the house now obsolete after just 20 years?

It probably ran on Windows 3.1 and they lost the install disks.