Flying cars and jetpacks aren't some future tech, we can have them today. That doesn't make them practical, and I, for one, absolutely don't care for a flying car or a jetpack. On my morning commute today we had probably a 100ft ceiling and perfect icing conditions. I would only feel safe taking off in an empty 777 in such weather. I also like to come to work without having red rings around my ears from wearing a helmet or hearing protection. You really need them when you fly a jetpack or a flying car, both are ridiculously loud affairs. I'd be ever so slightly pissed if my neighbor was taking off to work in a jetpack at 5.50am (he needs to be there at 6am). Heck, I wouldn't choose to fly even a completely quiet flying car to work, even if it had auto-pilot, unless it was some completely futuristic tech that's orders of magnitude more reliable than anything with moving parts today.
I want my self-driving electric car, though - the sooner, the better.
You must not be getting the meaning of simple sentences, then: the cliched phrase implies that it will never be available for practical use. Given experience with development of other tech, it's patently false on its face, and an unproductive thing to say, too. Just a waste of breath and keystrokes, pretty much.
Using an Armitron for fine assembly tasks is far from trivial. These cheap arms have a lot of play and backlash in every joint, and aren't stiff at all. With open loop or trivial control, they are barely good enough to manipulate a Rubik cube. Even then you have to lube up the damn cube first to reduce internal friction, I kid you not. Doing optimal closed loop control on these things requires graduate-level controls knowledge; it's not something a random Arduino-wielding kid will be able to pull off without first learning a lot of hard-core math. You have to be running system identification parallel to the control, as these arms wear in, wear out, and also change behavior as the ambient and internal temperatures change. I've seen this done while first coupling such an arm with a $10k+ motion tracking system. Then the sensors were designed for on-the-arm feedback, and were validated against the motion tracker. And only then could the motion tracker be removed, and the arm operate on its own sensors. The parts for the sensors cost way more than the arm itself and were anything but trivial. We ended up placing several strain gages on the molded parts of the arm, in addition to resolvers, current sensors, etc. The observer required to obtain arm configuration from the sensor data required on the order of a million floating point operations for a single update with a 0.5ms time step. To use it with a controller you need to run both hard-realtime, with 1ms latency from inputs to outputs.
$50k for test fixtures? What are you guys testing? I do most test fixturing for precision analog instrumentation in-house and it's way cheaper than that, if you ignore the value of my time spent designing it and doing software tooling to support the fixture.
The slo-mo guys would have probably loved to film their 100kRPM props and drone in action. If someone claims 100kRPM anything, ask for vetted high framerate videos or tell them to fuck off.
If you're onto something that's actually feasible, Kickstarter can be the infusion of capital you need to bring an otherwise fleshed out and well tested premarket prototype to market properly. Say that I had a widget that is pretty much ready to go other than the funds needed for regulatory approvals (FCC/CE/UL), and for whatever prepayment the production facility needs - and the costs of setting the production up (face to face meetings are a thing!). That's IMHO what Kickstarter should be for. Not for basic R&D. In my case, if I decide to offer my project(s) for sale, Kickstarter will cover the costs needed to bring an otherwise finished project to market. The only R&D it'd cover would be potential manufacturability and compliance tweaks. Even then, you really don't want to be designing late prototypes without compliance as a key requirement. I don't believe in post-facto EMC or Low Voltage Directive fixes... You really have to be doing the design with relevant standards in hand. It bothers me to no end that so many "engineers" are doing designs without being able to reference the regulations that apply to their damn products. If you can't afford to access the standards pre-Kickstarter, at least attempt to find downloads of the things - it's not that hard.
Your assumption about the bombers is that anything that they did was religiously driven. I seriously doubt that. These were just people who took the first excuse for murder and ran with it. Calling it "religiously motivated" is IMHO silly.
it's because you're a bored idiot who can't come up with better things to do with your time
This argument can be applied to any religion that requires a particular dress code or practice that runs afoul of law such that it requires a special exemption from compliance.
Frankly said, you're the only one thinking that they "try to take this seriously". Nobody does take FSM "cult" seriously, other than as a tool in pointing out the absurdity of religion in general, and the interface between law in religion in particular. You're either trolling or just dense:(
I really wonder how it is then, that I have an iPad Mini 2, and can run two synthesizer apps, a sequencer app, all in the background, listening to their output, while browsing in Safari and switching between two single-html-file webapps, and they work just fine. If you call that "pseudo"-multitasking, I'm OK. Whatever, it works for me.
You're really hung up on descriptions. It doesn't matter that some ignorant fools describe vaccines as treating "like" with "like". What matters is that they work. Please read on how vaccines were invented, and what problems they were initially used to solve. The major difference between vaccines and homeopathy is that homeopaths had a crazy idea that was never shown to work. The vaccines, on the other hand, were a solution to real-life problems and were invented as a real fix for a real problem. TL;DR: They literally saved entire families livelihoods when they were a new thing. They still do, although people don't appreciate it as much anymore.
I worry about conflating storing forms in digital format with their validation. These are separate concerns. If you're literally replacing paper with digital storage, you don't need to validate anything. The users still need to do their due diligence in filling out the forms, and the govt. monkeys still need to do whatever they do to check compliance with law. Except that now no paper is involved in handling the form itself.
Remember that the more modern a compiler is, the more the code you provide as input is taken for its semantics only. All that the compiler must do is take the meaning of your code and produce output with the same meaning. Compilers are getting cleverer each day at extracting meaning from your code, and using the meaning in isolation, without using the particular way you have implemented that meaning. For example, on the particular embedded platform I'm using, when you write
typedef struct { uint16_t hi, lo } word;
word add(uint16_t a, uint16_t b) {
word r { 0, a+b };
if (a+b < a) r.hi ++;
return r; }, the compiler understands that you meant to check for carry in addition, and will generate the following code for the function (this is complete): _add: mov r0, r28 ; r28 contains zero mov r1, r16 ; arguments are in r16:r17 add r1, r17 add.c r0, r28 ret ; result is in r0:r1.
Furthermore, if you happen to use this add in a constant expression, it will pre-execute the code for you and emit no code for it at all, only the results. And that's how it's supposed to be.
doomed C++ code to forever be ruined by C-style coding
This is very true. The especially troubling aspect of how C++ is usually taught is that they start with the C feature set and then "build" on top of that. It's completely ass-backwards, and I hate these teachers with a passion. I then have to undo the damage they've done to the impressionable students that then work with me...
auto_ptr doesn't exist, as far as anyone sane is concerned. unique_ptr is not passed around, it's moved around. shared_ptr is supposed to be used with make_shared.
I fully agree that using C++ without understanding of what's going on will catch up with you, sooner or later. I have an engineer to train in C++ with very little programming background and all I can say is that it requires that I pay a lot of attention to detail, so as not to teach destructive overgeneralizations or oversimplifications, while teaching enough to make her productive on real code.
That's true, but even if I wanted to throw money at them, I can't. They don't offer a stand-alone product. It's a Visual Studio plug-in. I don't use Visual Studio, other than for the compilers, so - meh.
That's correct. The oft overlooked aspect of RAII is that C++ has strictly defined order of object destruction. It forms the core language semantics and modern C++ would be useless without it. Calling it "automatic finalization" is completely missing the point.
LOL. A good academic library will have access to thousands of journal titles online. It's 22 cents only if you assume that one journal is all that everyone on campus needs.
Ha ha, cost of "archiving", LOL. Good one. They could put it on github pages for all I care. Sometimes, the cloud can be a good thing, you know. If someone wants it in print, they can get it printed at any on-demand printer they choose. The library/university should be able to deal with that cheaply and effectively.
Nothing really. I'm pretty sure that places like archive.org or even google would gladly host the content. So even the old "teh servers ain't free" BS excuse is just that: nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
Flying cars and jetpacks aren't some future tech, we can have them today. That doesn't make them practical, and I, for one, absolutely don't care for a flying car or a jetpack. On my morning commute today we had probably a 100ft ceiling and perfect icing conditions. I would only feel safe taking off in an empty 777 in such weather. I also like to come to work without having red rings around my ears from wearing a helmet or hearing protection. You really need them when you fly a jetpack or a flying car, both are ridiculously loud affairs. I'd be ever so slightly pissed if my neighbor was taking off to work in a jetpack at 5.50am (he needs to be there at 6am). Heck, I wouldn't choose to fly even a completely quiet flying car to work, even if it had auto-pilot, unless it was some completely futuristic tech that's orders of magnitude more reliable than anything with moving parts today.
I want my self-driving electric car, though - the sooner, the better.
You must not be getting the meaning of simple sentences, then: the cliched phrase implies that it will never be available for practical use. Given experience with development of other tech, it's patently false on its face, and an unproductive thing to say, too. Just a waste of breath and keystrokes, pretty much.
Using an Armitron for fine assembly tasks is far from trivial. These cheap arms have a lot of play and backlash in every joint, and aren't stiff at all. With open loop or trivial control, they are barely good enough to manipulate a Rubik cube. Even then you have to lube up the damn cube first to reduce internal friction, I kid you not. Doing optimal closed loop control on these things requires graduate-level controls knowledge; it's not something a random Arduino-wielding kid will be able to pull off without first learning a lot of hard-core math. You have to be running system identification parallel to the control, as these arms wear in, wear out, and also change behavior as the ambient and internal temperatures change. I've seen this done while first coupling such an arm with a $10k+ motion tracking system. Then the sensors were designed for on-the-arm feedback, and were validated against the motion tracker. And only then could the motion tracker be removed, and the arm operate on its own sensors. The parts for the sensors cost way more than the arm itself and were anything but trivial. We ended up placing several strain gages on the molded parts of the arm, in addition to resolvers, current sensors, etc. The observer required to obtain arm configuration from the sensor data required on the order of a million floating point operations for a single update with a 0.5ms time step. To use it with a controller you need to run both hard-realtime, with 1ms latency from inputs to outputs.
$50k for test fixtures? What are you guys testing? I do most test fixturing for precision analog instrumentation in-house and it's way cheaper than that, if you ignore the value of my time spent designing it and doing software tooling to support the fixture.
The slo-mo guys would have probably loved to film their 100kRPM props and drone in action. If someone claims 100kRPM anything, ask for vetted high framerate videos or tell them to fuck off.
Circuit boards even auto placed and tested have a MAX 3 month lead
Heck, you can get prototype runs (qty 100) done in under a week!
If you're onto something that's actually feasible, Kickstarter can be the infusion of capital you need to bring an otherwise fleshed out and well tested premarket prototype to market properly. Say that I had a widget that is pretty much ready to go other than the funds needed for regulatory approvals (FCC/CE/UL), and for whatever prepayment the production facility needs - and the costs of setting the production up (face to face meetings are a thing!). That's IMHO what Kickstarter should be for. Not for basic R&D. In my case, if I decide to offer my project(s) for sale, Kickstarter will cover the costs needed to bring an otherwise finished project to market. The only R&D it'd cover would be potential manufacturability and compliance tweaks. Even then, you really don't want to be designing late prototypes without compliance as a key requirement. I don't believe in post-facto EMC or Low Voltage Directive fixes... You really have to be doing the design with relevant standards in hand. It bothers me to no end that so many "engineers" are doing designs without being able to reference the regulations that apply to their damn products. If you can't afford to access the standards pre-Kickstarter, at least attempt to find downloads of the things - it's not that hard.
Your assumption about the bombers is that anything that they did was religiously driven. I seriously doubt that. These were just people who took the first excuse for murder and ran with it. Calling it "religiously motivated" is IMHO silly.
it's because you're a bored idiot who can't come up with better things to do with your time
This argument can be applied to any religion that requires a particular dress code or practice that runs afoul of law such that it requires a special exemption from compliance.
How can you claim that these are not authentic? What makes a religion authentic? Just think about it.
Frankly said, you're the only one thinking that they "try to take this seriously". Nobody does take FSM "cult" seriously, other than as a tool in pointing out the absurdity of religion in general, and the interface between law in religion in particular. You're either trolling or just dense :(
I really wonder how it is then, that I have an iPad Mini 2, and can run two synthesizer apps, a sequencer app, all in the background, listening to their output, while browsing in Safari and switching between two single-html-file webapps, and they work just fine. If you call that "pseudo"-multitasking, I'm OK. Whatever, it works for me.
You're really hung up on descriptions. It doesn't matter that some ignorant fools describe vaccines as treating "like" with "like". What matters is that they work. Please read on how vaccines were invented, and what problems they were initially used to solve. The major difference between vaccines and homeopathy is that homeopaths had a crazy idea that was never shown to work. The vaccines, on the other hand, were a solution to real-life problems and were invented as a real fix for a real problem. TL;DR: They literally saved entire families livelihoods when they were a new thing. They still do, although people don't appreciate it as much anymore.
I worry about conflating storing forms in digital format with their validation. These are separate concerns. If you're literally replacing paper with digital storage, you don't need to validate anything. The users still need to do their due diligence in filling out the forms, and the govt. monkeys still need to do whatever they do to check compliance with law. Except that now no paper is involved in handling the form itself.
Remember that the more modern a compiler is, the more the code you provide as input is taken for its semantics only. All that the compiler must do is take the meaning of your code and produce output with the same meaning. Compilers are getting cleverer each day at extracting meaning from your code, and using the meaning in isolation, without using the particular way you have implemented that meaning. For example, on the particular embedded platform I'm using, when you write
typedef struct { uint16_t hi, lo } word;
word add(uint16_t a, uint16_t b) {
word r { 0, a+b };
if (a+b < a) r.hi ++;
return r;
},
the compiler understands that you meant to check for carry in addition, and will generate the following code for the function (this is complete):
_add: mov r0, r28 ; r28 contains zero
mov r1, r16 ; arguments are in r16:r17
add r1, r17
add.c r0, r28
ret ; result is in r0:r1.
Furthermore, if you happen to use this add in a constant expression, it will pre-execute the code for you and emit no code for it at all, only the results. And that's how it's supposed to be.
doomed C++ code to forever be ruined by C-style coding
This is very true. The especially troubling aspect of how C++ is usually taught is that they start with the C feature set and then "build" on top of that. It's completely ass-backwards, and I hate these teachers with a passion. I then have to undo the damage they've done to the impressionable students that then work with me...
auto_ptr doesn't exist, as far as anyone sane is concerned. unique_ptr is not passed around, it's moved around. shared_ptr is supposed to be used with make_shared.
I fully agree that using C++ without understanding of what's going on will catch up with you, sooner or later. I have an engineer to train in C++ with very little programming background and all I can say is that it requires that I pay a lot of attention to detail, so as not to teach destructive overgeneralizations or oversimplifications, while teaching enough to make her productive on real code.
That's true, but even if I wanted to throw money at them, I can't. They don't offer a stand-alone product. It's a Visual Studio plug-in. I don't use Visual Studio, other than for the compilers, so - meh.
That's correct. The oft overlooked aspect of RAII is that C++ has strictly defined order of object destruction. It forms the core language semantics and modern C++ would be useless without it. Calling it "automatic finalization" is completely missing the point.
Exactly. Modern C++ should mostly read like a high-level managed language would, not C.
LOL. A good academic library will have access to thousands of journal titles online. It's 22 cents only if you assume that one journal is all that everyone on campus needs.
Hosting is free. Nobody should really be paying for that anymore. For an open access journal, github pages is all you need, really.
Ha ha, cost of "archiving", LOL. Good one. They could put it on github pages for all I care. Sometimes, the cloud can be a good thing, you know. If someone wants it in print, they can get it printed at any on-demand printer they choose. The library/university should be able to deal with that cheaply and effectively.
Nothing really. I'm pretty sure that places like archive.org or even google would gladly host the content. So even the old "teh servers ain't free" BS excuse is just that: nonsense.
Who gets to keep their switches product lines? I kinda like them, and they are an excellent value on the used market.