Need a job? The 'Internet of Things' WANTS YOU If you're looking for your next career move, one that will guarantee you job security with a company that's dying to hire you, ARM's CEO has three words for you: "Internet of Things." The Internet of Things – or the IoT as chief exec Simon Segars referred to it during his keynote at the ARM TechCon geek-fest in Santa Clara, …
They're just like normal IT skills. But more - you know - thing-y.
I guess there's going to be a use for all those Raspberry Pi's after all.
I'm especially proud of the Bayesian Inference Engine I built on my Pi to run the heating. So I expect to do very well on the new thing-y front. [nods]
>>I'm especially proud of the Bayesian Inference Engine I built on my Pi to run the heating.
So that's where I've been going wrong - I've been using my Pi to control the gas boiler! Any suggestions for where I can buy a Bayesian Inference Engine, and how many cylinders it should have to heat a 4-bed semi?
Mine's the one with the gravy stain, cos I keep a Pi in my pocket...
Working at a company which tries to bring household appliances "into the Internet", it's the following:
* able to code code under undocumented commercial RTOSes with interfaces of varying quality of course that operating system is designed for 10 times more RAM than you have. Of course all the interesting parts of the project are outsourced so you are left with trying to find out how bad APIs work while trying to code semi-event based without being able to actually store any meaningful amounts of data since a new process would take _far_ more RAM than you have.
* accepting obvious flaws in concepts like no webserver on the device so you'll need to use some weird app on a mobile device
* working inside companies which consider FOSS as a thread which needs to be avoided at all cost, particularly since the company isn't able to set up an e-mail address and man it so any copyright claims can be dealt with in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. 2 months)
* working inside companies where decisions are made by the people who neither are willing to make compromises nor able to understand what they are doing
"Finding IT professionals whose skills encompass all these things is difficult".
This is exactly why employers are destroying the economy. Employ a collection of people who TOGETHER have skills that encompass all the things required. Nobody in their right mind would try to recruit a brain surgeon who was also a skilled dentist, optician and bricklayer. Why the hell is it the expectation in IT?
Here, the reason is because HR is too stupid to know the difference, the IT director has no budget and the workaday teams are often extremely tribal and the computer is still the magic box to most people so a programmer is no different than a hardware support guy is no different than the network guy is not different than the server admins.
If you want to have a successful company you need people who know more than what they are hired for. People who had the time to try out other things. People who at least know about other things out there so they can selectively study in on those fields when needed.
The problem is, you cannot do this with narrow minded people, not even with courses as those people will always choose courses in the areas they already know about. This is the kind of people who live inside their "Windows bubble" where installing Exchange is the only way to have locally hosted e-mail and the alternative is some Azure backed Cloud system.
Another problem is that once your company is infested by narrow minded people, you won't be able to keep open minded ones.
So.. what actual use cases does this have? I mean, I've been in buildings with thermostats, temperature sensors, steam heat converted to be computer controlled, all fed into HVAC controller.
Why would any of that need to go outside the network running to the HVAC controller? Even if I wanted to remote control say a home version of this, I'd still want the HVAC controller to be my single point of access, not every valve and sensor. For traffic management, the sensors and street lights can be as "smart" as the local roads department can afford to make it. Some towns clearly don't even try to synchronize lights or anything. But beyond that I think there are rapidly diminishing returns on investment except in very congested areas.
Why would this any of this need massive network upgrades? How much data would a sensor produce anyway?
Why does this need new IT skills. If someone can decide what they want a so called "internet of things" to actually do (like an actual use case where something does something useful....) then I'm quite sure it can be put together right now. But vaporware alone does not make a produceable product.
1) Blu Ray player (not connected)
2) NAS drive that does cloud (disabled cloud bit),
3) TV not connected
Sure there must be other stuff coming along, like fridges, kettles, wifi enabled irons with spam bots, but they won't get a wifi password either.
Just because you can connect a device to a network does not mean people will or will want too.
I also foresee so clever marketing like "DEVICE NOT WIFI ENABLED, MAKE SPY FREE TEA"
For IoT. The rest of my gadgets are already blabbermouths and turncoats concerning my lifestyle and preferences, why would I want my smart grill grassing me up to health thought police, or my smoke alarm giving some twat at a data warehouse a insight into my brand and habit? All that's left is for my smart toilet to tell them whether I'm getting enough fibre. Over FTTC, natch.
There is one thing that inter-"thing" comms might be good for - and that is coordinating power use so as to present a smaller peak load to the grid.
A lot of short-term generation capacity is needed simply to cover stuff like half the country turning on their electric kettles simultaneously at half-time or at the commercial break of a soap opera; if that were offset by a load of washing machines pausing their cycle, ovens and fridge-freezers biasing their thermostat by a notch and air-conditioners shutting down for a few minutes, it might reduce the overall cost of electricity measurably. And, just maybe, us consumers might just get to see that as lower prices.
Unfortunately, that's also the sort of thing that doesn't appeal to marketing types, so it never actually gets done.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
