Dont worry, next year will be ruined by the hotels. They already announced there will be a 20% increase in hotel prices next year.

2 years ago it was a lot better, this year is probably my last year as I just cant afford $600 a night for a 4 night minimum stay anymore Plus $80 a day parking at the hotel. Makes my VIG passes look cheap in comparison.

Plus the bonus of chicago is if you take the red line to far south, you get murdered for free in your costume!

Gencon consumes all of indy that weekend. you cant get a hotel within 30 miles. Every single hotel room is already booked for that weekend. Every restaurant in a 10 mile radius of the center is packed full of people.

I honestly hope they move because Indy is too dinky of a town for Gencon. I want them to move to Vegas. Cheaper and better hotels, cheaper and easier flights. And a shitload more to do outside of the convention.

It's already this way. Amazon uses Dematic handling systems and robots.

you have to buy those on ebay.

It's a hobby that makes me $102,000 ish a year. (actually more if you include the company car and benefits)

I design and install the real stuff and program homes and even freaking hospitals with Lutron,Vantage, Crestron and AMX control systems. using real sensors and systems to do some amazing stuff. A major hospital in michigan has my code running the lighting on all 12 floors using sensors on the roof and each room, hallway, etc and floor for light harvesting and lighting control. I even adjust the color kenetics RGB accent lighting based on the current weather conditions outside.

Hell the last home theater I did cost more than 90% of the people posting here will make in 10 years. The very rich and corperations all use the real stuff extensively. The consumer items are exactly what you called them, Toys for someone's hobby.

Yup none of this is automation. I do real automation with Vantage, AMX and Crestron. Most of this stuff is simply cheezy remote control with a huge flaw of requiring internet connections for them to work.

If it's cloud based it's crap.

These companies need to stop with the freaking data harvesting and give us controllers that will work 100% when the internet is down like it is whenever it rains in DSL land.

Let's get this ever-recurring debate out of the way. Why would one want Home Automation at all? Answer: it's a hobby, get over it. It adds some convenience and security, and these days it's reliable and easy enough to use; a well designed system will keep working and keep being used with a minimum of maintenance. But the cost doesn't really justify the expense at the current state of the art... unless you see it as a hobby on which to blow some cash.

If you don't have a hub, or if you are using your mobile phone as one, then you don't have home automation but integrated remote control only. You need a hub to build some intelligence into the system, and have it work for other members of the household as well as yourself, and have it work when you are not at home. A mobile phone makes for a great way to remotely control your smart home, but a good smart home works without it. I use my phone for remote access, but for day to day stuff when I am at home I prefer dedicated remotes and switches.

And the cloud? This stuff needs to remain private and has no place in the cloud. Another good reason to do HA using a hub that you own and control.

I fully agree that the 30% cut is not excessive for what it offers. In addition to distribution and payment, they also take care of VAT headaches and legal matters. And in some cases, the stringent curation works in my favour: people might have been hesitant to enter personal info or account credentials in my app if it came from some random website, but the fact that Apple has checked things out makes people more confident to buy and use my app. (I've no idea to what extent Apple actually checks)

Professionals working for bigger companies who build apps for millions of users or on commission for businesses get paid pretty well. But for people working alone on in small groups, developing apps for smaller crowds, the income isn't all that good, because they are competing with hobbyists. Another factor is the size of the market: in principle it is nice for any developer to have a market of 10s of millions of potential customers, but in practice it alters the economics and customer expectations to their disadvantage.

I have an app on the app store, which I sell for $4.99. It sells reasonably well at that price, but if I look at the income it generates versus the hours I put in developing it, I should charge something closer to $39.99 at the same sales volume, in order to arrive at a decent hourly rate. At the same time, customers ask me why I don't shell out for professional artwork, a UX designer, and better support. Other apps offer all that for *free* or for a buck, so why not expect the same from my more expensive app? Simple: the outlay will never cover the little bit of extra revenue it might generate. Those numbers work if you sell a $.99 (or ad supported) game to 50 million people, not if you sell an app to serve a niche-within-a-niche. But both apps are judged the same, and anything over say $1.99 is perceived as "expensive" (which is a joke if you're willing to spend $899 on a phone).

"Performance" in that context is highly subjective. Apple stuff does what I want pretty much out of the box; Android phones don't. For some people, it will be the other way around. These days I have more money than time to dick around with devices, so I am willing to pay top euro for whatever device works best for me, even if it is overpriced (in terms of profit margin).

As a developer, I understand that the race to the bottom is even worse on the Play store, at least it was a while ago, perhaps the App Store has caught up by now.

The horrible evil and completely corrupt people who currently control congress are the same people who created the Patriot Act.

FTFY

The point of customer data, big or small, in the end appears to be to improve the ways companies can sell us crap (and doesn;t the whole world seem to revolve around that, sometimes?). Google does not sell the data to others directly because they can do so indirectly: they (claim to) provide advertisers on their network with a competitive edge by using customer data.