There are certainly startups hoping to become redwoods, but there seem to be many with goals or target markets that would likely limit them to shrubs at best. Of course, there is also a large class of "startups" that are a lot more like Christmas tree farm seedlings.
I don't know if it's the same brand, but they use it in the conference rooms at one of the places I work and it's terrible. It's so difficult to clean that they've already repainted after just a couple of months. Now no one is allowed to keep their work on them overnight, and they've banned low-odor markers (apparently those stain more?).
Here's what I did when we built our house about 10 years ago:
I ran a bundled cable containing 2 cat5 and 2 coax to each bedroom, the kitchen, my office and the family room. Even with wireless it's nice to be able to put another access point in pretty much any room. I did additional single cat5 runs to various places where I didn't think I'd need all four. Today I'm not sure the coax is still justified, but it has been handy for satellite. Now, I'd at least run several cat6 to each location and just leave it in the wall.
I ran speaker wire everywhere, every room including the garage, outside for the deck, even the laundry room. It's just sitting in the walls/ceiling in most places still, but I add a new "node" occasionally.
For the music nodes, I have a bunch of airport express units in the basement where all the wiring terminates. They're not running in wireless mode, just plugged into a gigabit switch with a single channel amp hanging off each one.
You can spend as much as you want on speakers, but I usually go for the cheap ones since they're generally just for background music anyway. That lets me put in a new node for under $150.
Are these Airports really the cheapest/best way to get music playing? seems like a lot of wasted technology in them if I'm just connecting them to ethernet.
Agreed, it does seem like a waste, but I haven't found a better solution that allows the same flexibility. You could split a bunch of speakers out of a bigger amp if you just want the same sound everywhere, but I really like being able to choose any combination of sources and output. My family all have macs and ipod touches or iphones. There's something cool about any of the kids being able to pipe their ipod's music through the deck speakers, for example, while my office plays itunes off my laptop.
Depending on how noisy your house's electrical system is, the commands and responses between controllers and devices can be lost. I control my sprinkler system with X10 from a Linux box and my first iteration flooded my back yard when I was on vacation a couple of years ago when a power-off command wasn't received.
So the problem is lack of feedback, you can't check if a command succeeded, only that it was sent? Can this be fixed at the application level with a status check?
For feedback it depends on the device. Cheap light switches, for example, might just have on and off commands. Better versions will have a status command as well, and maybe a multi-level dim, etc. In my case the sprinkler switch did have status capability, but my cheesy little shell script was just assuming the commands succeeded.
