That's a cute idea. But actually, I think you'd pretty quickly get good at that. Putting a tiny rubber band on a tiny cone of gelatin is much harder than playing Operation.
Sorry I don't data -- would you like an anecdote instead?
Da Vinci provides quite a bit of training. I had the chance for a company tour, and got to use a Da Vinci for about 20 minutes. They had an 8 inch diamater field of cones and other shapes made from gel set up on a table near the operation position, and an assortment of tiny rubber bands and such. It was a basic familiarization task -- can you put a tiny rubber band on a cone? And it was set up so that I could come out of the hood and glance down at the work, which I did a lot for the first few minutes. Pretty quickly, I got familiar enough that I could do the simple manipulation tasks just with the hood.
Obviously 20 mintes of playing around as a robo-tourist is not training. But they did say the surgeons start with similar tasks, and go through a lot of training before actually using the machine on a patient. I can't recall the actual number, sorry.
One of the interesting things about the Da Vinci system is the tremor filter and other augmentations such as the motion multipler (manipulator moves x/10 the distance you move your controller, for instance). The tremor filter is said to extend the working life of experienced surgeons by up to 10 years -- that is a huge win. It keeps all that experience and training available to help patients.
I've seen video of old-fashioned laproscopic surgury, and I've seen video of Da Vinci surgury, and I've had the chance to play with a Da Vinci for a few minutes (the benefits of living in Sili Valley and having friends in robotics...) and I can't imagine how outcomes from a Da Vinci as compared to traditional laproscopy can be anyting but better. No surgury is risk-free.
Re:"do not want to ride after seeing ... injuries"
on
How Safe Is Cycling?
·
· Score: 1
survivability, pure and simple.
Re:"do not want to ride after seeing ... injuries"
on
How Safe Is Cycling?
·
· Score: 1
Did you have a point? My story is true. Is yours? If so, how are you commuting now?
Or are you trying to argue that a 15 mph side-swipe collision between two motor vehicles travelling the same direction is no more survivable that a 15 mph side-swipe collision between a mid-size sedan and a bicycle? Because if that is your argument, I'm going to ask for some objective data.
"do not want to ride after seeing ... injuries"
on
How Safe Is Cycling?
·
· Score: 1
'Lots of my colleagues do not want to ride after seeing these [city biking] injuries.'
No shit. A few years ago, one of my coworkers who regularly biked to work had me totally conviced to try it out. After weeks of encouraging me, I had finally made the decision "OK, next Monday." This was on a Thursday. That very Thursday night driving home from work, I went by an intersection that was directly on my planned bicycle route. I had to go around the EMT and police vehicles at an accident scene... as I watched the EMT pull a sheet over a body next to a crumpled bicycle.
That is pretty much when I decided bicycle commuting was not for me.
The easiest way to blow this up is for the open hardware community to simply delcare, "Hey, USB-IF, we've decided we're going to sqat on this VID, namely , so be sure not to hand it out. We'll handle PID allocation under it.". The USB-IF is completely impotent to do anything about it. There are already numerous products that use randomly chosed VID/PID combinations that are *not* registered with USB-IF, and USB-IF does nothing about it. It is true that these products don't use the USB logo, no license fee paid, obviously, but also in part because they aren't USB devices in the traditional sense -- most of them simply used USB as a way to re-flash firmware or as debug ports, so consumers don't really buy the product for the USB functionality.
IMHO, the best way to handle this, though, would be to simply squat on a VID *without* making a beligerant declaration to the USB-IF. After a dozen or so USB devices get popular, then USB-IF will have no recourse except to write off the VID as a dead loss and move on. After all, they've already had to do that with the VIDs used by the current squatters that we just never hear about.
The only stick USB-IF can beat you with is the license needed to use the logo. If you don't care about the logo, then there is nothing, absolutely nothing at all, that keeps you from sqatting on a VID.
It is going to get ugly, without a doubt. The sooner it is tackled, the less ugly it will be.
Slashing the budget during a recession with already-high unemployment is a GREAT way to drive us into a real depression. So yes, doing this soon is a TERRIBLE idea. It needs to wait until the economy is growing.
Everyone who remembers the great depression is at least in their eighties, and they were just children then. Ask them what it was like in order to prepare yourself. Those days were ugly, and we may see a repeat.
I agree... If we follow your idiotic advice, that's exactly what we'll get.
What advice did I give, exactly? You'll have to tell me, because I don't think I gave any, except to say that the problem needs to be tackled in a deliberate manner.
Only this time, instead of 50% of the population being rural/farm and having the ability to at least grow a garden for their own food, today only 1% of the population lives on farms
So, I take it you've never read or watched "The Grapes of Wrath", and have never heard of The Dust Bowl? Farms didn't save the US from the depression AT ALL. Roosevelt's government programs did...
Again, who said farms saved us from the depression? Only an idiot could think that. That did not happen at all. Farms allowed people to subsist, instead of starve at the end of a broken supply chain. Don't have that luxury this time.
I didn't need to read Grapes of Wrath (although I have). I have a rancher/neighbor who *lived* it. He is a genuine Okie who travelled back and forth between Oklahoma and California, and worked the farm fields. My own father had a farm in the midwest, where men came by daily and begged to be allowed to work there in return for one meal a day and the right to sleep in the hay barn.
Your reading skills are pretty sloppy. Go back and reread what I really said. Between your projecting and bizarre parsing, you missed most of it the first time.
Voting against is for the contituents back home. The party whip knows how to count votes. Those who most needed to vote against this in order to get re-elected were allowed to vote against it. Don't read too much into it.
Bah. Weak sauce. Both Reps and Dems want to use the coercive power of the state to control my life. They just have different priorities. It's not that the Dems want a nanny state and the Reps want to set me free. The Reps just want to fire the current nanny and install a different nanny with different rules. Unless the libertarian-leaning wing of the Republican party manages to give Boehner and his ilk a full spinal transplant we are doomed. Oh... and all the Republican bible-thumpers need to back-off, too. Don't use the coercive power of the state to enforce your morality on your neighbor. You see we have this thing called the constitution, and you have to live by the parts that you like as well as the parts that you don't so much agree with.
I agree with you on all points but one -- this wasn't really a chance to stop the crazy. The budget is too out of control to come up with a fix in a few days. It is going to take a very difficult debate among the entire electorate to decide which sacred cows are going to be slaughtered. It has gotten to the point where no politician is willing to bring the subject up because everyone is going to feel some very real pain in order to solve all of this.
It is going to get ugly, without a doubt. The sooner it is tackled, the less ugly it will be. I think it is a 70/30 chance to be bloody, as well.
Everyone who remembers the great depression is at least in their eighties, and they were just children then. Ask them what it was like in order to prepare yourself. Those days were ugly, and we may see a repeat. Only this time, instead of 50% of the population being rural/farm and having the ability to at least grow a garden for their own food, today only 1% of the population lives on farms and 99% is at the end of a food supply chain with a 5 day buffer. Just a few days ago EBT went out in a few states for a couple of days and we came close to food riots. The only reason we didn't have actual riots is that WalMart let people simply shoplift any food they wanted.
All you are saying is that the interest of rural states don't matter to you, and you think most people agree with you. YOU are the poster child for the reason the electoral college is a good thing. You are not engaging in a dialog here. You are not even making an attempt to understand my arguments. You simply talk past them by repeating the same thing you have said before. The electoral college exists to protect people like ME from people like YOU -- there, is that clear now?
The reasons I want to eliminate the electoral college are:
1. Past history of Presidents elected despite not having a plurality of votes.
I do not see that as a problem. It is a feature, not a bug. As I said above, part of the reason for the electoral college is to keep mob rule from trampling the rights of the minority. These days, the rural states are a minority population and are often mistreated at the hands of the federal government. If in a few close cases the presidency goes to someone who gets the majority of electoral votes, but not the popular vote, then the system is working exactly as intended. In most cases, though, the popular majority and electoral vote count yield the same result.
You are trying to change something that is: a) working as intended, and b) working well, and c) some people actually like because it works reasonably well.
You need to study the effects of what you propose and try to post again.
We have term limits in California. They have empowered the permanent staff and the public employee unions. They have made things worse, not better.
Campaign finance limits always run up against First Amendment challenges. Sort that out coherently, then let's talk. Until then, it's a pipe dream. You don't get to ingore the parts of the consitution you find inconvenient in the moment.
What do you mean by "representative of the state's demographics"? That could be interpreted a hundred different ways. We just had a non-partisan citizen committee do redistricticing in California, chartered with drawing districts along natural boundaries. The process was about as non-partisan as is possible to get. The results were "safer" districts overall. The scheme totally backfired, despite good intentions all around.
Eliminating the electoral college has zero effect in most years. When it does, it has the effect of disenfranchising the rural minority. No thanks. That is why we have a republic, not a direct democracy.
Disenfranchisement of minority rights is the pox on American politics. In the case of California, we could correct a lot of the state's disfunction by making the state Senate one seat per county. Let the assembly seats be drawn in areas of equal population. Then legislation will no longer be mob rule by the urban interests. The legilature will have to come up with compromise legislation that solves real problems without trampling on the rights of minority interests. Yes, it would be a lot harder to get both houses to agree on legislation -- that is a good thing.
If one has been paying attention, one would have to conclude that this is the most corrupt DOJ in the nation's history. Yet the press doesn't call them on it, or investigate any of the many curious leads.
The bad: "classic" view wastes huge amounts of screen space. Yuk.
The very, very bad: The new default view wastes ginormous amounts of screen space on images I don't want to see on the headline page, or wait for to load.
Over all, a slower, less functional web site that I'm sure some misguided designer is very proud of. If I wanted to see lots of white space, I can always go to about:blank. Slashdot should be providing actual, you know, content.
The accredited invenstor thing has been around forever, and hasn't changed much recently. What killed venture capital is two provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley:
1. The reporting requirements for small enterprises are insanely expensive to meet. I've been through a couple of pre-SarBox startups, and every employee knew every member of the board of directors (mostly VC's) on a first-name basis. Those VC's don't need any D.C. beaurocrats to look out for them. They know how to read a balance sheet, and how to look beyond the balance sheet to the stuff that really matters. All the SarBox reporting requirements did is make the reporting so expensive that no VC wants to sink 7 figures down that rat hole for nothing in return.
2. SarBox made it extremely difficult to give insentive stock options to all the employees. You want me to work start-up hours? Show me the ISO plan, or go home. I've not worked in a startup since. One place I worked, the first admin (later office manager of all clerical staff) made a killing on her stock options. Had a beatiful powder-blue Corvette that cost her US$25 -- at least that's what she paid for the stock she sold to buy it. That is why people work at startups -- for the chance to become wealthy if it all works out. SarBox pretty much killed that off.
The "accredited investor" thing is really lame anyway -- if your net worth is high enough, you are accredited. It's a pretty sketchy filter, actually -- rich idiots are easily accredited.
Good idea. All it would take is a reference design that can capture and upload license plate information, and contains the letters "duino" in its name. It will be an overnight sensation, mainly because of the "duino" part, but in any case I'm sure lots of folks would pay $10 to know where all their city's police cars are at the moment.
So, do you guys have multiple Beagle Boards, Beagle Bones, Ras Pi's, and other sitting on your bench right now? And you have experience using them? I do.
I have nothing Beagle (too expensive), but I have lots of Pis, both on my desk and out in the field doing productive work.
Take a look at Beagle Bone Black.
You haven't looked closely at the Minnow.
Considering that the news just got here about the Minnow, no, I haven't "looked closely" at it. I've read the fine article about it, however.
If you count on SlashDot to keep you informed about embedded electronics you are about 9 months behind the rest of us. The minnow has been shown around as prototype hardware for at least 6 to 9 months.
The I/O is much easier to use and much richer than you find on a 'bone or a raspi.
The Pi appears to be able to be overclocked to 1GHz, although I haven't tried, and have no need to. I've had no problem porting the things I needed to port, I just copied the source code and compiled it. Well, the PC I developed the code on had a real serial port and the Pi doesn't, so I had to change the value of one constant from "/dev/ttyS0" to "/dev/ttyUSB0". Is that what you call "porting headaches"?
No, I'm thinking of ROS and OpenCV. Which the ROS foundation is supporting BTW, but without them putting in a man-year or so on top of community effort, ROS on a raspi would not be as close to running as it is.
You can't compare a raspi to a minnow until you try to hook up a CAN bus and a camera and start doing vision processing and motor control like you need for a robotics application.
I wasn't aware that a CAN bus was a requirement for robotics. I thought servos made use of PWM signals.
R/C servos, sure. That's what high school kids use to get started in robotics. That's legitimate. Bigger/better robots have better motors, and better communication systems.
I'm not dissing the raspi, it is a decent value for what it is. Mid-range ARM, limited I/O, delicate.
I argue that there is value in having the ATOM architecture available in a small form factor board with easy access to I/O. Price out your application, if raspi wins, good for you. raspi isn't up to what I need, and is therefore not a good a value in my applications. (BTW -- I *am* aware of what the raspi can do -- the originator of Raspian is a good friend, and the build farm lives in his basement. We meet almost every week to talk about robotics. We have explored the limits of robotics with the raspi quite thoroughly.)
Really, this is all about hitting the right spot on the price/performance curve. Raspi is simply in a different place on the curve than Minnow, or BeageBoneBlack, for that matter. Trying to compare them directly without reference to an application is pointless.
So, do you guys have multiple Beagle Boards, Beagle Bones, Ras Pi's, and other sitting on your bench right now? And you have experience using them? I do.
You haven't looked closely at the Minnow. The I/O is much easier to use and much richer than you find on a 'bone or a raspi. The CPU has more horsepower, and yon don't have porting headaches to get reasonable things running on it. $200 seems like a good value to me. You can't compare a raspi to a minnow until you try to hook up a CAN bus and a camera and start doing vision processing and motor control like you need for a robotics application. The pi will be straining. I have hopes for the minnow.
First, post your benchmarks, and BOM for all the add-on you needed to make it work. Then you can grouse about the price.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a cute idea. But actually, I think you'd pretty quickly get good at that. Putting a tiny rubber band on a tiny cone of gelatin is much harder than playing Operation.
Sorry I don't data -- would you like an anecdote instead?
Da Vinci provides quite a bit of training. I had the chance for a company tour, and got to use a Da Vinci for about 20 minutes. They had an 8 inch diamater field of cones and other shapes made from gel set up on a table near the operation position, and an assortment of tiny rubber bands and such. It was a basic familiarization task -- can you put a tiny rubber band on a cone? And it was set up so that I could come out of the hood and glance down at the work, which I did a lot for the first few minutes. Pretty quickly, I got familiar enough that I could do the simple manipulation tasks just with the hood.
Obviously 20 mintes of playing around as a robo-tourist is not training. But they did say the surgeons start with similar tasks, and go through a lot of training before actually using the machine on a patient. I can't recall the actual number, sorry.
One of the interesting things about the Da Vinci system is the tremor filter and other augmentations such as the motion multipler (manipulator moves x/10 the distance you move your controller, for instance). The tremor filter is said to extend the working life of experienced surgeons by up to 10 years -- that is a huge win. It keeps all that experience and training available to help patients.
I've seen video of old-fashioned laproscopic surgury, and I've seen video of Da Vinci surgury, and I've had the chance to play with a Da Vinci for a few minutes (the benefits of living in Sili Valley and having friends in robotics...) and I can't imagine how outcomes from a Da Vinci as compared to traditional laproscopy can be anyting but better. No surgury is risk-free.
survivability, pure and simple.
Did you have a point? My story is true. Is yours? If so, how are you commuting now?
Or are you trying to argue that a 15 mph side-swipe collision between two motor vehicles travelling the same direction is no more survivable that a 15 mph side-swipe collision between a mid-size sedan and a bicycle? Because if that is your argument, I'm going to ask for some objective data.
'Lots of my colleagues do not want to ride after seeing these [city biking] injuries.'
No shit. A few years ago, one of my coworkers who regularly biked to work had me totally conviced to try it out. After weeks of encouraging me, I had finally made the decision "OK, next Monday." This was on a Thursday. That very Thursday night driving home from work, I went by an intersection that was directly on my planned bicycle route. I had to go around the EMT and police vehicles at an accident scene... as I watched the EMT pull a sheet over a body next to a crumpled bicycle.
That is pretty much when I decided bicycle commuting was not for me.
The easiest way to blow this up is for the open hardware community to simply delcare, "Hey, USB-IF, we've decided we're going to sqat on this VID, namely , so be sure not to hand it out. We'll handle PID allocation under it.". The USB-IF is completely impotent to do anything about it. There are already numerous products that use randomly chosed VID/PID combinations that are *not* registered with USB-IF, and USB-IF does nothing about it. It is true that these products don't use the USB logo, no license fee paid, obviously, but also in part because they aren't USB devices in the traditional sense -- most of them simply used USB as a way to re-flash firmware or as debug ports, so consumers don't really buy the product for the USB functionality.
IMHO, the best way to handle this, though, would be to simply squat on a VID *without* making a beligerant declaration to the USB-IF. After a dozen or so USB devices get popular, then USB-IF will have no recourse except to write off the VID as a dead loss and move on. After all, they've already had to do that with the VIDs used by the current squatters that we just never hear about.
The only stick USB-IF can beat you with is the license needed to use the logo. If you don't care about the logo, then there is nothing, absolutely nothing at all, that keeps you from sqatting on a VID.
Smells like Alinsky's dirty socks.
Beat me to it, and said it better than I would have.
Well, I agree partly with what you said. The Democrats have *also* demonstrated their complete unfitness to govern.
Slashing the budget during a recession with already-high unemployment is a GREAT way to drive us into a real depression. So yes, doing this soon is a TERRIBLE idea. It needs to wait until the economy is growing.
I agree... If we follow your idiotic advice, that's exactly what we'll get.
What advice did I give, exactly? You'll have to tell me, because I don't think I gave any, except to say that the problem needs to be tackled in a deliberate manner.
Only this time, instead of 50% of the population being rural/farm and having the ability to at least grow a garden for their own food, today only 1% of the population lives on farms
So, I take it you've never read or watched "The Grapes of Wrath", and have never heard of The Dust Bowl? Farms didn't save the US from the depression AT ALL. Roosevelt's government programs did...
Again, who said farms saved us from the depression? Only an idiot could think that. That did not happen at all. Farms allowed people to subsist, instead of starve at the end of a broken supply chain. Don't have that luxury this time.
I didn't need to read Grapes of Wrath (although I have). I have a rancher/neighbor who *lived* it. He is a genuine Okie who travelled back and forth between Oklahoma and California, and worked the farm fields. My own father had a farm in the midwest, where men came by daily and begged to be allowed to work there in return for one meal a day and the right to sleep in the hay barn.
Your reading skills are pretty sloppy. Go back and reread what I really said. Between your projecting and bizarre parsing, you missed most of it the first time.
Voting against is for the contituents back home. The party whip knows how to count votes. Those who most needed to vote against this in order to get re-elected were allowed to vote against it. Don't read too much into it.
Bah. Weak sauce. Both Reps and Dems want to use the coercive power of the state to control my life. They just have different priorities. It's not that the Dems want a nanny state and the Reps want to set me free. The Reps just want to fire the current nanny and install a different nanny with different rules. Unless the libertarian-leaning wing of the Republican party manages to give Boehner and his ilk a full spinal transplant we are doomed. Oh... and all the Republican bible-thumpers need to back-off, too. Don't use the coercive power of the state to enforce your morality on your neighbor. You see we have this thing called the constitution, and you have to live by the parts that you like as well as the parts that you don't so much agree with.
I agree with you on all points but one -- this wasn't really a chance to stop the crazy. The budget is too out of control to come up with a fix in a few days. It is going to take a very difficult debate among the entire electorate to decide which sacred cows are going to be slaughtered. It has gotten to the point where no politician is willing to bring the subject up because everyone is going to feel some very real pain in order to solve all of this.
It is going to get ugly, without a doubt. The sooner it is tackled, the less ugly it will be. I think it is a 70/30 chance to be bloody, as well.
Everyone who remembers the great depression is at least in their eighties, and they were just children then. Ask them what it was like in order to prepare yourself. Those days were ugly, and we may see a repeat. Only this time, instead of 50% of the population being rural/farm and having the ability to at least grow a garden for their own food, today only 1% of the population lives on farms and 99% is at the end of a food supply chain with a 5 day buffer. Just a few days ago EBT went out in a few states for a couple of days and we came close to food riots. The only reason we didn't have actual riots is that WalMart let people simply shoplift any food they wanted.
All you are saying is that the interest of rural states don't matter to you, and you think most people agree with you. YOU are the poster child for the reason the electoral college is a good thing. You are not engaging in a dialog here. You are not even making an attempt to understand my arguments. You simply talk past them by repeating the same thing you have said before. The electoral college exists to protect people like ME from people like YOU -- there, is that clear now?
The reasons I want to eliminate the electoral college are:
1. Past history of Presidents elected despite not having a plurality of votes.
I do not see that as a problem. It is a feature, not a bug. As I said above, part of the reason for the electoral college is to keep mob rule from trampling the rights of the minority. These days, the rural states are a minority population and are often mistreated at the hands of the federal government. If in a few close cases the presidency goes to someone who gets the majority of electoral votes, but not the popular vote, then the system is working exactly as intended. In most cases, though, the popular majority and electoral vote count yield the same result.
You are trying to change something that is: a) working as intended, and b) working well, and c) some people actually like because it works reasonably well.
You need to study the effects of what you propose and try to post again.
We have term limits in California. They have empowered the permanent staff and the public employee unions. They have made things worse, not better.
Campaign finance limits always run up against First Amendment challenges. Sort that out coherently, then let's talk. Until then, it's a pipe dream. You don't get to ingore the parts of the consitution you find inconvenient in the moment.
What do you mean by "representative of the state's demographics"? That could be interpreted a hundred different ways. We just had a non-partisan citizen committee do redistricticing in California, chartered with drawing districts along natural boundaries. The process was about as non-partisan as is possible to get. The results were "safer" districts overall. The scheme totally backfired, despite good intentions all around.
Eliminating the electoral college has zero effect in most years. When it does, it has the effect of disenfranchising the rural minority. No thanks. That is why we have a republic, not a direct democracy.
Disenfranchisement of minority rights is the pox on American politics. In the case of California, we could correct a lot of the state's disfunction by making the state Senate one seat per county. Let the assembly seats be drawn in areas of equal population. Then legislation will no longer be mob rule by the urban interests. The legilature will have to come up with compromise legislation that solves real problems without trampling on the rights of minority interests. Yes, it would be a lot harder to get both houses to agree on legislation -- that is a good thing.
If one has been paying attention, one would have to conclude that this is the most corrupt DOJ in the nation's history. Yet the press doesn't call them on it, or investigate any of the many curious leads.
The good: cleaner design over all.
The bad: "classic" view wastes huge amounts of screen space. Yuk.
The very, very bad: The new default view wastes ginormous amounts of screen space on images I don't want to see on the headline page, or wait for to load.
Over all, a slower, less functional web site that I'm sure some misguided designer is very proud of. If I wanted to see lots of white space, I can always go to about:blank. Slashdot should be providing actual, you know, content.
The accredited invenstor thing has been around forever, and hasn't changed much recently. What killed venture capital is two provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley:
1. The reporting requirements for small enterprises are insanely expensive to meet. I've been through a couple of pre-SarBox startups, and every employee knew every member of the board of directors (mostly VC's) on a first-name basis. Those VC's don't need any D.C. beaurocrats to look out for them. They know how to read a balance sheet, and how to look beyond the balance sheet to the stuff that really matters. All the SarBox reporting requirements did is make the reporting so expensive that no VC wants to sink 7 figures down that rat hole for nothing in return.
2. SarBox made it extremely difficult to give insentive stock options to all the employees. You want me to work start-up hours? Show me the ISO plan, or go home. I've not worked in a startup since. One place I worked, the first admin (later office manager of all clerical staff) made a killing on her stock options. Had a beatiful powder-blue Corvette that cost her US$25 -- at least that's what she paid for the stock she sold to buy it. That is why people work at startups -- for the chance to become wealthy if it all works out. SarBox pretty much killed that off.
The "accredited investor" thing is really lame anyway -- if your net worth is high enough, you are accredited. It's a pretty sketchy filter, actually -- rich idiots are easily accredited.
Yes. Exactly. They just plead guilt to selling snake oil, as we knew they were doing all along.
And my mod points ran out yesterday :-/
Good idea. All it would take is a reference design that can capture and upload license plate information, and contains the letters "duino" in its name. It will be an overnight sensation, mainly because of the "duino" part, but in any case I'm sure lots of folks would pay $10 to know where all their city's police cars are at the moment.
I think this question has been asked before.....
So, do you guys have multiple Beagle Boards, Beagle Bones, Ras Pi's, and other sitting on your bench right now? And you have experience using them? I do.
I have nothing Beagle (too expensive), but I have lots of Pis, both on my desk and out in the field doing productive work.
Take a look at Beagle Bone Black.
You haven't looked closely at the Minnow.
Considering that the news just got here about the Minnow, no, I haven't "looked closely" at it. I've read the fine article about it, however.
If you count on SlashDot to keep you informed about embedded electronics you are about 9 months behind the rest of us. The minnow has been shown around as prototype hardware for at least 6 to 9 months.
The I/O is much easier to use and much richer than you find on a 'bone or a raspi.
The Pi appears to be able to be overclocked to 1GHz, although I haven't tried, and have no need to. I've had no problem porting the things I needed to port, I just copied the source code and compiled it. Well, the PC I developed the code on had a real serial port and the Pi doesn't, so I had to change the value of one constant from "/dev/ttyS0" to "/dev/ttyUSB0". Is that what you call "porting headaches"?
No, I'm thinking of ROS and OpenCV. Which the ROS foundation is supporting BTW, but without them putting in a man-year or so on top of community effort, ROS on a raspi would not be as close to running as it is.
You can't compare a raspi to a minnow until you try to hook up a CAN bus and a camera and start doing vision processing and motor control like you need for a robotics application.
I wasn't aware that a CAN bus was a requirement for robotics. I thought servos made use of PWM signals.
R/C servos, sure. That's what high school kids use to get started in robotics. That's legitimate. Bigger/better robots have better motors, and better communication systems.
I'm not dissing the raspi, it is a decent value for what it is. Mid-range ARM, limited I/O, delicate.
I argue that there is value in having the ATOM architecture available in a small form factor board with easy access to I/O. Price out your application, if raspi wins, good for you. raspi isn't up to what I need, and is therefore not a good a value in my applications. (BTW -- I *am* aware of what the raspi can do -- the originator of Raspian is a good friend, and the build farm lives in his basement. We meet almost every week to talk about robotics. We have explored the limits of robotics with the raspi quite thoroughly.)
Really, this is all about hitting the right spot on the price/performance curve. Raspi is simply in a different place on the curve than Minnow, or BeageBoneBlack, for that matter. Trying to compare them directly without reference to an application is pointless.
So, do you guys have multiple Beagle Boards, Beagle Bones, Ras Pi's, and other sitting on your bench right now? And you have experience using them? I do.
You haven't looked closely at the Minnow. The I/O is much easier to use and much richer than you find on a 'bone or a raspi. The CPU has more horsepower, and yon don't have porting headaches to get reasonable things running on it. $200 seems like a good value to me. You can't compare a raspi to a minnow until you try to hook up a CAN bus and a camera and start doing vision processing and motor control like you need for a robotics application. The pi will be straining. I have hopes for the minnow.
First, post your benchmarks, and BOM for all the add-on you needed to make it work. Then you can grouse about the price.
"Hippy 2.0" has to be the phrase of the week.
and pretty soon you're talking some real money.
(Often attributed to Senator Dirksen, but it has not been positively confirmed.)