The reason Arduino took off was not all because of the low price, it was because of the ease of use. Atmel gave out the IDE for free, and it was almost literally plug-and-play. You could get a "blink the LED" program up and running in under an hour, including installation of software. WinAVR (based on GCC) is a perfectly acceptable C compiler, also for free.
I've programmed both the 68HC11 and the Atmel ATMega128, but without the Auduno cult. He's right about the 68HC11 - back in the 1980s, it was really hard to get a C compiler for the thing. At one point I used a commercial Forth interpreter.
For the ATMega128, which is a reasonably modern low-end microcontroller, the Atmel tool suite is free, and quite straightforward if you're a programmer and an electrical engineer. But if you give someone whose previous experience is limited to Javascript an ATMega development board and the software to develop for it, they'll be overwhelmed.
What the Arduno has is beginner-friendly documentation and some simplified programmingtools. There have been other machines that did - the PIC and the Basic Stamp powered a generation of low-end hobbyist hardware projects, for far longer than they should have. There were better microcontrollers for years, but they were not hobbyist-friendly. (Motorola 680x0-based microcontrollers, for example, were cheap and powerful, but never caught on in the hobbyist world.)
There's nothing magic about development boards - most complex general-purpose parts have one. That's not a security issue. Nor is there much mystery about how industrial control systems work. You don't need the resources of a nation-state. The gear tends to be more expensive than consumer gear, but we're talking thousands, not millions. Anybody who can afford to customize a car can play in that game.
Now this is something Slashdot readers need. Slashdot, with its incredibly inefficient Javascript that sometimes goes into a compute loop, can now be outsourced to an Amazon server. Not that this benefits anyone; Slashdot's code isn't doing anything useful with all those cycles.
This is a generic problem. Since everybody went "Web 2.0", page bloat has become insane. I've seen pages from major news sources with over 4000 lines of HTML, only 70 of which had anything to do with the story. CSS was supposed to make pages shorter. It didn't. With some "content management" systems, every page has its very own page of CSS. So there's no gain in caching.
Entire companies have gone out of business because of this. "RushmoreDrive.com" (a search engine, part of the Barry Diller media empire) had a 7-second page load time for their home page. They'd loaded it up with so much "social" stuff that it became useless.
There's an architecture for this. It's awful. It's an approach to real-time control designed by web people. They want to use Cisco routers to talk to actuators, so that remote applications can operate the actuators. That's just wrong.
The right way to do this involves most control being very local, with some data flowing up to a higher level for supervision and some commands flowing down. Better designs can operate with the higher level supervision off line, at some loss of performance.
An example of this is an advanced HVAC system for a medium to large building. Return air ducts for each room are equipped with sensors that measure temperature, humidity, CO, CO2, and smoke. (Humidity and CO2 give a measure of how many occupants are in the room. More people require more airflow. Empty rooms require very little airflow. This is a huge win for hotels and classroom buildings, where the people load varies widely.)
These talk to a local controller for part of the building, which can control local dampers and fans. It talks to the building HVAC controller, which controls the heaters, chillers, outside air vents, and has some sensors of its own. This in turn may talk to a remote building management system, to report units that need repair, fuel consumption and availability, and other management data. It's not unusual to outsource this, usually to a company that handles maintenance.
But the remote building management system does not directly control actuators. It may set some policy parameters, or order some units off line. The "urban OS" people are proposing a much more centralized system. That has much more potential for large scale failure.
See Butch Cassidy. The story behind "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" is that E.H Harriman, (owner of the Southern Pacific Railroad, the Union Pacific Railroad, etc.) got fed up with train robberies.
The actual story is close to that.
The Union Pacific Railroad under Harriman established the Union Pacific Bandit Hunters. They had staff, money, special trains, and the best equipment.
From 1891 to 1914, they chased down train robbers. By 1914, only two train robbers were still known to be alive. The "wild west" era was over. Mission accomplished.
That could happen to botnets. There aren't that many botnet operators. With a well-financed operation hunting a small number of operators, running a botnet may become a dangerous career choice.
I proposed, back in 2000, that Microsoft be required to provide a full warranty on their products as part of their antitrust remedy. "Full warranty" has specific meaning in US law; see the article. A few vendors have provided full warranties and not found it too expensive. Notably, GTech, which builds gambling systems, is held financially responsible for errors made by those systems. This costs GTech less than half of one percent of their revenue.
It's time for the computer industry to grow up and take on warranty responsibilities. The auto industry had that forced on them by Congress in the 1960, over the screams of the auto industry. Cars rapidly became safer and more reliable.
Single-payer national health insurance, like Medicare, would have had no constitutional problems. If the "public option" had been retained in the bill, it might have ended up as the only option.
That's not a bad thing; Medicare's overhead is about 3%, while private insurers run a lot higher.
That's probably 4 second data. Not granular enough to provide meaningful information at that response level.
Generation management doesn't require that kind of ramp rate. Read How PJM Operates and Dispatches, especially slide 7, for the ramp rates in the biggest power grid in the US. Ramp rates for generation and load are measured in minutes, not seconds.
That's the generation side. For the load side, see Demand Response Load Management. PJM requires 5-minute response to load regulation signals. PJM (which operates the wholesale grid) sends those signals out to their connected utility companies, who then send out signals to their loads that are prepared to receive them. If the utility is able to cut their load as requested, they get a payment. The whole system is normally run as an economy, driven by price signals. However, most pricing and scheduling decisions are made a day ahead. (The awful deregulation model of an auction every half hour tried in California is not used.)
If you are smart about how you build machines, they can be upgraded and serviced without ever being opened.
That never really caught on. In the early days of PCs, before the form factor had settled down, several manufacturers, including Wang and NCR had easy-to-replace components, in the form of boards one could slide in from outside the case. They assumed that consumers wouldn't want to open the box. The industry didn't go that way.
Nor did things like PCMCIA cards, another form factor for easy upgrading, ever catch on in a big way.
Desktops aren't dead in the business world, where there are, well, desks. On the other hand, over 80% of computer cases are never opened during their lifetime. What's dead is buying components and plugging them together.
Bad idea. Little generators and engines are much less efficient than big ones, so using hybrids as peaking plants is a desperation move. For pure electrics, the general idea is to keep the battery charged up in case the user wants to go somewhere.
The whole "smart grid" thing is mostly a marketing move to collect information about consumers and get rid of meter readers. All that's really needed for peak management is a system that broadcasts how much the grid needs power right now and the current power price, plus receivers on big loads which respond to that data.
Sure. If the company is making money and returning value to stockholders, you want to keep the CEO, and will have to pay them a lot. Underperfoming CEOs will feel shareholder displeasure.
The big problem with CEO pay is that failing and mediocre CEOs are being paid like they're winners.
This may just be Hon Hai deciding to move some production capacity. Hon Hai makes the products, remember. Apple is a "hollowed out" company, with no manufacturing capability.
Historically, that's the beginning of the end.
The day may come when Apple is just a brand name licensed to real manufacturers. That's what Westinghouse and RCA, once major companies, are now.
The way CEO pay for publicly held companies should work is that shareholders should enter the amount on the proxy. The share-weighted median is the CEO's total compensation. (And no default value for unvoted shares.)
Also, voting rights should pass through as far as the tax break does, so mutual fund managers have to pass voting rights through to their shareholders.
Except that e-readers offer a screen fundamentally different from those on general-purpose tablets.
That's going away. Users seem to prefer fast color displays over slow reflective monochrome ones. There's a color Nook, and this new color Kindle is not an "e-Ink" device.
This is encouraging. This is an approach that's different from most of what's been tried. Also, it works on a feature that the virus has to have. If the virus evolves to not have a cholesterol coating, regular immune system responses will dispose of it. Most of the previous vaccines latched onto some non-critical part of the molecule and, as a result, were specific to some strains of the virus.
If this is going to be on the public Internet, I'd question the wisdom of managing it yourself when you've admitted it's not one of your core strengths. Instead, I'd set up a cheap & cheerful shared hosting account.
Agreed. Shared hosting is about $5 to $10 a month now. Dreamhost and Hostgator are quite capable of hosting a forum system of 2500 users on a low end account. They handle server administration, backups, and replacement of the hardware when it breaks. And, importantly, they have a lot more bandwidth to the Internet than you do.
There are reasons to run your own server, but none of them apply to your case. You're not developing new code. You're not running persistent processes like a game server or a virtual world, or even an IRC client. There's no background processing like a web crawler. You're not streaming video. So outsource.
What's annoying are all these material science articles where someone has made a new material at lab-scale and this is immediately extrapolated to commercial products Real Soon Now. About one of those appears each week. This is one of the saner ones, though.
The Great New Material usually turns out to have some problem. It costs too much to make, it's too brittle, it won't work when hot or cold, it's too hazardous, or it has a short lifespan in the intended application. Sometimes this is overcome, but most of the time, not.
There's nothing wrong with having articles about this stuff, but writers should be clear on where they are in the range between "theoretical chemistry indicates this molecule would be insanely great" and "the product is shipping in volume".
The ships still have to go back. Sending them back with collapsed containers and empty space rather than full stacks of empty containers doesn't seem to save much. Also, at the moment there's a shortage of empty containers.
Slashdot Mirror
Preview of the iPhone 5
You're not the customer. You're the product.
Didn't we discuss this Yesterday?
This points up a classic, unrecognized problem with forum systems - few of them support merging threads.
The reason Arduino took off was not all because of the low price, it was because of the ease of use. Atmel gave out the IDE for free, and it was almost literally plug-and-play. You could get a "blink the LED" program up and running in under an hour, including installation of software. WinAVR (based on GCC) is a perfectly acceptable C compiler, also for free.
I've programmed both the 68HC11 and the Atmel ATMega128, but without the Auduno cult. He's right about the 68HC11 - back in the 1980s, it was really hard to get a C compiler for the thing. At one point I used a commercial Forth interpreter.
For the ATMega128, which is a reasonably modern low-end microcontroller, the Atmel tool suite is free, and quite straightforward if you're a programmer and an electrical engineer. But if you give someone whose previous experience is limited to Javascript an ATMega development board and the software to develop for it, they'll be overwhelmed.
What the Arduno has is beginner-friendly documentation and some simplified programmingtools. There have been other machines that did - the PIC and the Basic Stamp powered a generation of low-end hobbyist hardware projects, for far longer than they should have. There were better microcontrollers for years, but they were not hobbyist-friendly. (Motorola 680x0-based microcontrollers, for example, were cheap and powerful, but never caught on in the hobbyist world.)
There's nothing magic about development boards - most complex general-purpose parts have one. That's not a security issue. Nor is there much mystery about how industrial control systems work. You don't need the resources of a nation-state. The gear tends to be more expensive than consumer gear, but we're talking thousands, not millions. Anybody who can afford to customize a car can play in that game.
Now this is something Slashdot readers need. Slashdot, with its incredibly inefficient Javascript that sometimes goes into a compute loop, can now be outsourced to an Amazon server. Not that this benefits anyone; Slashdot's code isn't doing anything useful with all those cycles.
This is a generic problem. Since everybody went "Web 2.0", page bloat has become insane. I've seen pages from major news sources with over 4000 lines of HTML, only 70 of which had anything to do with the story. CSS was supposed to make pages shorter. It didn't. With some "content management" systems, every page has its very own page of CSS. So there's no gain in caching.
Entire companies have gone out of business because of this. "RushmoreDrive.com" (a search engine, part of the Barry Diller media empire) had a 7-second page load time for their home page. They'd loaded it up with so much "social" stuff that it became useless.
There's an architecture for this. It's awful. It's an approach to real-time control designed by web people. They want to use Cisco routers to talk to actuators, so that remote applications can operate the actuators. That's just wrong.
The right way to do this involves most control being very local, with some data flowing up to a higher level for supervision and some commands flowing down. Better designs can operate with the higher level supervision off line, at some loss of performance.
An example of this is an advanced HVAC system for a medium to large building. Return air ducts for each room are equipped with sensors that measure temperature, humidity, CO, CO2, and smoke. (Humidity and CO2 give a measure of how many occupants are in the room. More people require more airflow. Empty rooms require very little airflow. This is a huge win for hotels and classroom buildings, where the people load varies widely.) These talk to a local controller for part of the building, which can control local dampers and fans. It talks to the building HVAC controller, which controls the heaters, chillers, outside air vents, and has some sensors of its own. This in turn may talk to a remote building management system, to report units that need repair, fuel consumption and availability, and other management data. It's not unusual to outsource this, usually to a company that handles maintenance.
But the remote building management system does not directly control actuators. It may set some policy parameters, or order some units off line. The "urban OS" people are proposing a much more centralized system. That has much more potential for large scale failure.
See Butch Cassidy. The story behind "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" is that E.H Harriman, (owner of the Southern Pacific Railroad, the Union Pacific Railroad, etc.) got fed up with train robberies.
The actual story is close to that. The Union Pacific Railroad under Harriman established the Union Pacific Bandit Hunters. They had staff, money, special trains, and the best equipment. From 1891 to 1914, they chased down train robbers. By 1914, only two train robbers were still known to be alive. The "wild west" era was over. Mission accomplished.
That could happen to botnets. There aren't that many botnet operators. With a well-financed operation hunting a small number of operators, running a botnet may become a dangerous career choice.
I proposed, back in 2000, that Microsoft be required to provide a full warranty on their products as part of their antitrust remedy. "Full warranty" has specific meaning in US law; see the article. A few vendors have provided full warranties and not found it too expensive. Notably, GTech, which builds gambling systems, is held financially responsible for errors made by those systems. This costs GTech less than half of one percent of their revenue.
It's time for the computer industry to grow up and take on warranty responsibilities. The auto industry had that forced on them by Congress in the 1960, over the screams of the auto industry. Cars rapidly became safer and more reliable.
Single-payer national health insurance, like Medicare, would have had no constitutional problems. If the "public option" had been retained in the bill, it might have ended up as the only option.
That's not a bad thing; Medicare's overhead is about 3%, while private insurers run a lot higher.
It's really an e-reader, a way for Amazon to sell books. In time, they'll probably give those away.
That's probably 4 second data. Not granular enough to provide meaningful information at that response level.
Generation management doesn't require that kind of ramp rate. Read How PJM Operates and Dispatches, especially slide 7, for the ramp rates in the biggest power grid in the US. Ramp rates for generation and load are measured in minutes, not seconds.
That's the generation side. For the load side, see Demand Response Load Management. PJM requires 5-minute response to load regulation signals. PJM (which operates the wholesale grid) sends those signals out to their connected utility companies, who then send out signals to their loads that are prepared to receive them. If the utility is able to cut their load as requested, they get a payment. The whole system is normally run as an economy, driven by price signals. However, most pricing and scheduling decisions are made a day ahead. (The awful deregulation model of an auction every half hour tried in California is not used.)
If you want to understand the power grid, PJM has training material.
If you are smart about how you build machines, they can be upgraded and serviced without ever being opened.
That never really caught on. In the early days of PCs, before the form factor had settled down, several manufacturers, including Wang and NCR had easy-to-replace components, in the form of boards one could slide in from outside the case. They assumed that consumers wouldn't want to open the box. The industry didn't go that way.
Nor did things like PCMCIA cards, another form factor for easy upgrading, ever catch on in a big way.
Desktops aren't dead in the business world, where there are, well, desks. On the other hand, over 80% of computer cases are never opened during their lifetime. What's dead is buying components and plugging them together.
Do you have to pay in Facebook Credits, where Facebook takes a 30% cut? If Spotify works through a "Facebook app", the App terms require that.
Bad idea. Little generators and engines are much less efficient than big ones, so using hybrids as peaking plants is a desperation move. For pure electrics, the general idea is to keep the battery charged up in case the user wants to go somewhere.
The whole "smart grid" thing is mostly a marketing move to collect information about consumers and get rid of meter readers. All that's really needed for peak management is a system that broadcasts how much the grid needs power right now and the current power price, plus receivers on big loads which respond to that data.
They didn't cash out by selling to Google when they had the chance. Just like Yahoo refused to be bought out by Microsoft. Big mistakes.
Next, Facebook. They missed their chance to IPO when they were at their peak.
Would anyone vote for more than 0?
Sure. If the company is making money and returning value to stockholders, you want to keep the CEO, and will have to pay them a lot. Underperfoming CEOs will feel shareholder displeasure.
The big problem with CEO pay is that failing and mediocre CEOs are being paid like they're winners.
This may just be Hon Hai deciding to move some production capacity. Hon Hai makes the products, remember. Apple is a "hollowed out" company, with no manufacturing capability.
Historically, that's the beginning of the end. The day may come when Apple is just a brand name licensed to real manufacturers. That's what Westinghouse and RCA, once major companies, are now.
The way CEO pay for publicly held companies should work is that shareholders should enter the amount on the proxy. The share-weighted median is the CEO's total compensation. (And no default value for unvoted shares.)
Also, voting rights should pass through as far as the tax break does, so mutual fund managers have to pass voting rights through to their shareholders.
Except that e-readers offer a screen fundamentally different from those on general-purpose tablets.
That's going away. Users seem to prefer fast color displays over slow reflective monochrome ones. There's a color Nook, and this new color Kindle is not an "e-Ink" device.
$300 is too much for an e-reader.
Special-purpose e-readers have to be a lot cheaper than comparable phones and tablets, or they're not going to sell.
Ultimately, the phone/tablet market will probably eat the e-reader market. Look what happened to standalone PDAs.
This is encouraging. This is an approach that's different from most of what's been tried. Also, it works on a feature that the virus has to have. If the virus evolves to not have a cholesterol coating, regular immune system responses will dispose of it. Most of the previous vaccines latched onto some non-critical part of the molecule and, as a result, were specific to some strains of the virus.
It's a long way from a vaccine, though.
If this is going to be on the public Internet, I'd question the wisdom of managing it yourself when you've admitted it's not one of your core strengths. Instead, I'd set up a cheap & cheerful shared hosting account.
Agreed. Shared hosting is about $5 to $10 a month now. Dreamhost and Hostgator are quite capable of hosting a forum system of 2500 users on a low end account. They handle server administration, backups, and replacement of the hardware when it breaks. And, importantly, they have a lot more bandwidth to the Internet than you do.
There are reasons to run your own server, but none of them apply to your case. You're not developing new code. You're not running persistent processes like a game server or a virtual world, or even an IRC client. There's no background processing like a web crawler. You're not streaming video. So outsource.
I am becoming jaded with such articles.
What's annoying are all these material science articles where someone has made a new material at lab-scale and this is immediately extrapolated to commercial products Real Soon Now. About one of those appears each week. This is one of the saner ones, though.
The Great New Material usually turns out to have some problem. It costs too much to make, it's too brittle, it won't work when hot or cold, it's too hazardous, or it has a short lifespan in the intended application. Sometimes this is overcome, but most of the time, not.
There's nothing wrong with having articles about this stuff, but writers should be clear on where they are in the range between "theoretical chemistry indicates this molecule would be insanely great" and "the product is shipping in volume".
The ships still have to go back. Sending them back with collapsed containers and empty space rather than full stacks of empty containers doesn't seem to save much. Also, at the moment there's a shortage of empty containers.