Makes me wonder if there's specific case law for this kind of thing though, pretty sure it's happened before, and some people are likely to take it to court instead of accepting the involuntary donation
There is plenty of case law precedent to prevent her from successfully wining anything. She voluntarily dropped the equipment off at a recycling location. Just because she had no idea that it was valuable doesn't mean she is entitled to protection from her own ignorance. Contrary to popular belief, the laws are not intended to protect stupid people from doing stupid things to themselves.
In the US, you can fire anyone who doesn't belong to a union, at any time, for any reason. This makes jobs have no sense of permanence, and as a result, you constantly get "more expensive, less efficient" people replaced with "cheaper, less competent" people.
It is the basic conflict that the conservatives hold as justification for anti union action, and anti labor stance. The trouble is that they are not wrong, and Mandirva is a perfect example why. A company that employed expensive employees in an extremely employee biased legal framework has now been destroyed and all of those employee are out of work. In replacement of that company are any number of companies that have the exact same business model except that they operate in places that do not afford employee protections. In essence, the jobs were not lost, simply transferred to another location (All those Mandriva customer are now Red Hat, or Microsoft customers). At the end of the day, all other things being equal, employment will work like any other unregulated economy, and the jobs go to the lowest bidders (In this case, anywhere except France). Ultimately Conservatives and Liberals are fighting about labor laws, when they have all accepted a bad premise. The problem is neither the conservative viewpoint nor the liberal viewpoint. The problem is that everyone works from the assumption that capitalism is mandatory. Everyone is so busy arguing about which political faction has the right answers, when in fact none of them do. There is not a single political group on earth that has the right answers. They are all too busy worrying about the short term details that ultimately are irrelevant to the problem. Meanwhile the real root cause (human nature) is being almost completely ignored.
Gunmen Kill 12, Wound 7 At French Magazine HQ
Officer Not Charged In Michael Brown Shooting
Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour
How To Execute People In the 21st Century
Seattle Approves $15 Per Hour Minimum Wage
Those just seem like rather unrelated links.
No, that seems about right. whenever I think Freescale, the idea of shooting somebody normally occurs to me...
Top tier household wiring is only good for 20Amp. "Typical" household wiring is only good for 15Amp (or 10Amp for older houses). The situation is worse in Europe where 230Volt is the norm, and the wiring is only speced for half the current of the 100Volt systems. Far too often you see people trying to pull far more current through their in-wall wires than they are rated for, and putting a bigger breaker in the box to stop the breaker from tripping every 5 minutes. These are the same people you see on the evening news, homeless because they burned their house down by running a microwave and refrigerator off a circuit that was install 50 years ago with using lamp cord.
Do you know what the most efficient switch is for voltages over a kilovolt? I'll give you a hint: it's not based on semiconductors. Especially for high power. There's this little matter of "breakdown voltage," for one. Also "channel resistance." When someone comes up with a transistor [1] that can do three-nines [2] voltage conversion, we can talk.
Granted, most of these are only pushing 99% efficient, but at the current rate of improvement, MOSFETs will surpass 3 nines at 10kV by 2030. 3 nines at 100kv by 2050. Somewhere in there, you start reaching limits of physics, but IIRC its not until somewhere around the 50kV mark, and even there, you can compensate by increasing the size of the gate to allow enough insulation around the device to prevent arcing around it.
Huh? This article is about an application processor (imx6), and you are comparing it to a cortex M microcontroller (PSOC series which is more equivalent to the freescale Kinetis series)
They are different things.
Corporate culture is the same no matter which product line you're talking about. Ever since Motorola ejected Freescale in '04, they have gotten more expensive, they stopped developing half their product lines, and they are gauranteeing their product line for 10 years! a whole whopping ten years? The 68000 series Motorola introduced in the late 70s is still in production. If they cant offer at least 20,I dont want to hear about it. Their track record over the last ten years gives me serious pause before considering their product lines, and given the power, availability and cost of the arm processors this has to compete with, I'm willing to pretty much write them off. If they hadn't been gouging us for the sub-par dev tools, I might have even been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but when they have 8 year old open bugs on a tool that they are charging $ks in yearly maintenance contracts for, I have little sympathy. If I need power, give me a broadcom. if I need IO, give me a Cypress, if I need both, i'll plant both and still come out way cheaper than anything Freescale has put out thus far.
And just for giggles if I need massive amounts of IO, I can plant 3 100 pin PSoCs, a quad core broadcom armv8, have more horsepower than the imx6, and still cost less. As an added bonus, I can save a pile of money by not having to deal with the god-damn BGAs. Just like Intel, Freescale is chasing a market that is caving in on itself. These days, you're arm or you're nobody. It should also be noted that unless you are planning on selling M+ units, it'll be cheaper and vastly easier to simply buy RPi2s, and build a custom daughter board than it ever will be to produce your own GHz speed boards. The days of custom PCBs with state of the practice or better CPUs are over. Any design house that sells low to middle volume products are either moving to off the shelf Pi / BBB based systems or are actively being made irrelevant by one or more startups. Even higher volume stuff that can fit a Pi or BBB is likely to benefit from being able to drop one of them in and avoid huge amounts of dev time which means faster time to market which means bigger market share.
We use the freescale processors where I work, in no small part due to an inexplicable bias on the part of one of the founders of the company. Now that he is no longer actively involved in the engineering process, we are leaving freescale and if we never look back it'll be too soon. Their processors cost 5x what we are paying for the ST and Cypress replacements, and the freescale dev tools (codewarrior) suck. To add insult to injury, they are the only major CPU vendor left that charges for the dev tools (did I mention they suck). If you want awesome SOC processors and a sweet dev toolchain, look at the Cypress PSOC 4 / 5 series processors. Thanks to these suckers, our new designs are 40% smaller, and cost between $10 and $30 less because we have been able to replace a lot of off-board parts with PSOC functionality.
No, you really don't. That job can and will be handled by inexpensive machines soon. In our current free market economy, those would be street sweepers have no real value at all. If they did not exist at all, society would be no worse off. The best that we can hope for under capitalism is that these people are quietly and humanely sterilized.
I say this entirely tongue in cheek, as my oldest son will likely never amount to more than a drain on our family and society (He is autism spectrum). In yesterdays world, he could have gotten a decent job in any of a number of blue collar industries. In todays world, he might make ends meet working at McDonalds, In the world of 2030 and beyond, there is no job that he will be capable of doing that it wouldn't be cheaper to have a robot do. So the question now becomes, if he has negative value to society, what should society do with him? (Notice I am not asking what I should do with him, I don't really have a choice in the matter.)
No amount of teaching him the difference between winners and losers is going to change the fact that in the world of tomorrow, he will be a loser, so why not let him have a little happiness now.
1. You have your job because the company you work for felt you were the best person to do it.
You have your job because the person who hired you liked you the best out of the pool of people available to him or her at that time. This decision may or may not have been based on technical merit. Depends on the person.
2. Your manager has their job because the company you work for felt they were the best person to do it.
Your manager has their job because of the same process as above, but likely included more politics and less technical merit. I wouldn't rule out some golf at this level of management.
3. Your manager is not there to do or understand your job.
It has been demonstrated that managers that cannot do the job functions of their subordinates have a lower rate of success as measured by average task time to completion, turnover, morale, quality of team work-product, etc... In short, understanding the work that your team does is critical to effective management. That is why promote from within is a thing.
4. Your manager is there to ensure you do your job, to support you, to coordinate with the rest of the business that your job interacts with, leadership, users, finance etc.
Finally, one we can agree on.
5. Your manager should be looking to you as the expert in your position. If they are not then you are not doing your job.
Depends how long you have been in that position. If it is less than a year, then it is absolutely unreasonable (but not uncommon) for a manager to have that attitude towards an employee. From 1-5 years, it would be reasonable to expect competency. After that, expert level knowledge would be a reasonable assumption.
So now you expect them to layout a USB circuit on a PCB?
It is a simple as connecting three pins to a connector, plus ground. It doesn't get any simpler than that, and it doesn't require any extra circuitry or much care as it is a low speed connection.
It is definitely not that simple. As with most things, it depends what version youre working with. USB 1.0,1.1, sure you can do whatever, but you wont get much throughput. USB 2.0, you have about a 50-50 chance of handling full speed operation unless you use impedance controlled traces and make damn sure they are the right length, etc. USB 3.0 is an extremely high speed connection, and without extreme care, it simply wont work. A newbie is as likely as not to try to use whatever the chip can sustain (2.0 bare minimum these days) without knowing the headache they're in for.
It is a suggestion appropriate to prototyping something. If you are going to the point of producing numbers of things, then you need to learn a bit more or risk spending more time and/or money, which is true for just about everything...
I have worked for two startups, one that uses the Raspberry Pi (various models) in all of their products, and one that uses the BBB. Both are doing quite well. The first has 50M in gross annual revenue, and the other just got its first wholesale order for 1000 units at $2000 per unit. I get paid good money to come in and get customers products the rest of the way to market, and when I give them the options matrix, they almost invariably choose to save the development time and get the product into mass-pro right away. The idea is simple, once they have revenue, they can chase the pennies. Put another way, if their unit will cost an extra $20 by using a Pi vs embedded, and they expect to sell 1000 units per year, saving that expense better cost less than $20,000. Any given product in todays market is as likely as not to last about a year before a new version / competitor shows up. Any startup that thinks they are going to sell something with a microcontroller in it in large quantities in years 1-5 is dreaming, and are going to be very disillusioned when reality hits... High volume low margin products are not conducive to startup companies. They can try to fudge the numbers as much as they like, but when push comes to shove they get steamrollered.
Crystals are in no way shape or form even remotely out of range for a beginner to use.
Crystals are almost entirely unnecessary. Lower frequency crystals can be completely ignored with the right choice of processor. The only other place you might need them would be specialty applications like DTMF decoding, but even there, the right processor can handle it sans crystal.
I tutored Team Project I at university. We literally had every student designing PCBs and programming AVRs in their first year and not a single person had issues with it, even the really dumb rejects of the class managed to get something running, they just couldn't code to save themselves.
You were teaching a class who's entire point was to learn how to do such a thing. Theres a world of difference between that and someone with literally no background in circuits at all, or complete self taught.
The solutions you listed above would be zero help to someone with no background in embedded processors.
Connect a $15 ISP programmer to 6 pins.
What programmer? what 6 pins? where is it documented? google search for ISP programmer get me lots of link to website developer jobs, but not much in the embedded world. Remember, these people dont know jack about embedded systems. Its simple for you, not them.
Buy AVRs with the Arduino bootloader pre-installed.
Where would you buy them? mouser? digikey? what are they called. Again there isn't even enough there to google search for. An amateur might even know what a bootloader is, but how does one get them "preinstalled"?
Buy any USB AVRs which all come with bootloaders pre-installed.
So now you expect them to layout a USB circuit on a PCB? I thought you said this was a simple task?
Pop the AVR out of your Arduino and into your application board.
So once again, they are buying an arduino for every product they sell, my way was easier from a manufacturability standpoint.
While prototyping is possible in surface mount,permanent circuit boards remain very difficult to create. I appreciate the many circuit board services but they will never be a better alternative than do it yourself circuit boards created from raw material. In my opinion we need to recover the lost ability. If only I knew of a place were a lot of engineers hang out I would go there and ask them to try to invent the tools we need. If only radio shack could help us!
Even through hole PCBs were a pain to DIY. If you have a little money to spend, and are insisteant on DIY, get a PCB mill. I think Adafruit has one. I know of a few online stencil houses that will make one for you for about $40. Better yet, just suck it up and solder the protoboards by hand. I use a headmount magnifier and lamp for the 0402s. Most people can handle 0603s and bigger without a magnifying glass. If you're talking production boards, you can get a square meter PCB and assembly for about $5,000. For a typical design that'll be 100-200 boards for $5,000. If your product cant handle a $50 PCB cost, it either shouldn't need a PCB in the first place, or the business model is doomed to failure (or both).
If you download and follow the manufacturer's guidelines for crystal layout you will be good.
If you're even using a crystal at all, you're doing something wrong. You would be far better served using a uC that has an internal clock. The external crystal just adds complexity and cost that are unneeded. The only applications that would require an external crystal are projects that a newbie has no business anywhere near, especially without any actual PCB experience.
No, raspberry pi is quite complicated. An Atmel AVR based design is trivial.
Oh really? How do you get your software onto it? Remember to explain for a person who's only experience is downloading an SD card image and booting his Pi into Raspbian...
It's pretty easy, actually, if you follow a few simple guidelines.
It depends entirely on the complexity of the design and the microcontroller chosen. If you pick something like an AVR, then it will be simpler, but will not handle very many IO, and will be severely firmware limited. If it is a very simple project, it might work the first time or it might not. If it is a very simple project, it is also very unlikely to be commercially viable, as someone bigger will already be in that space and not want you there. If it is complex enough to warrant high margins (enough to support an up-start player in the market, or a new market), then you're better off putting the arduino / pi to it because you already have the working design. Just PCB up your parts of the circuit and you have a viable product. Once you have some money coming in, hire an engineer to cheap it up for you.
I'll offer you a challenge: If you think it is easy to make circuits based around micro controllers, I challenge you to guarantee debugging assistance to anyone who takes your advice and builds a uC based PCB design. I on the other hand, want nothing to do with anyone who rolls their own without knowing what they are doing, because they are going to find messed up ways to make it not work. They will assume everything works the way it does on the Arduino / Pi, and if they even read the processor documentation (all 100+ pages of it), they are unlikely to understand everything they need to know anyway. Further, they now have to learn an embedded programming environment and figure out how to get their program onto the device itself, which is non-trivial if the only experience you have is with the arduino / pi which both have a bootloader. In summary, for you and me its simple. For the average person playing with an arduino / pi, it is likely to be anything but.
With parts like AVR, it's become nearly stupid simple. All the fiddly bits you are talking about are on the chip now. In some cases where you can use the internal clock, you really only need power and a reset connection (just a pull-up and a momentary switch will do, add a cap to be really clean about it).
That is exactly what I’m talking about. For someone with design experience, figuring out why it didn't work will be immediately obvious, or even more likely, it will work the first time because we know what the gotchas are. For an amateur, it is overwhelmingly likely they will get bit by a gotcha, or something even simpler like crossing two traces. If you are trying to debug a system with two crossed traces, its going to be a real pain when it involves a CPU, because you have to figure out what’s wrong: is it your software? is it a bad chip? is it the PCB? If you had a schematic, there are thousands of places to post questions where people will help, and if you had the schematic in the first place, you wouldn't have a crossed trace in the first place. If all you have is a PCB layout, nobody is going to help you dig through it to figure out why it doesn't work. Its the little things that make a real mess out of these types of projects. Simple things like needing a debounce on your switches, or needing a bypass cap on a chip, or trying to pull half an amp out of a 20mA pin. These things will all be very obvious from a schematic, but will be anything but, if all you have is a layout. Even more importantly, if you have a working prototype involving a pre-existing micro-controller (Arduino / Pi, etc.), then why mess with it. Work your design around it instead. Once you include the cost of making PCB in low volumes, you will be talking about an expensive product. If the cost of a Pi A/B or an arduino is going to break your price point, then you are very likely making the wrong product altogether.
The original article talked about laying out your design with a microprocessor. Several things should be noted:
First, don't roll your own PCB with a microcontroller on it unless you know what you're doing. This is an involved process and not for newbies. You will need expensive lab equipment to debug even the simplest problems, and it is best to sidestep the problem if at all possible. Consider instead simply incorporating an arduino / Pi / Beaglebone into the actual product and do it that way instead. If the margins are low enough to make this impractical, and you don't have any experience designing microcontroller systems, then I would humbly suggest you are out of your depth, and the profit margins are probably too low for you to make money selling your product.
Second, take a serious look at your design tools. there are plenty of free tools out there that do an excellent job. Eagle and gEda come to mind. Both are free, and both will handle just about any job that an amateur is trying to accomplish. Eagle is primarily windows, and gEda is Linux only. The key part is that you want to design your system as a schematic, then export to the PCB layout. That way the tools will automatically check your PCB layout for errors such as short circuits, disconnected circuit, and a whole host of other problems that the free prototype tools don't handle. Put another way, if you get lucky on your first shot and the layout is perfect, then any tool will do. If you make a tiny mistake somewhere in your layout, then the expressPCB, etc tools will not catch it and your boards will not work. The schematic capture tools will catch the fault, and will save you massive amounts of trouble.
Be prepared for new debugging tools. Debugging a problem with the arduino or Pi is something you probably already know how to do. Debugging an embedded microcontroller is a whole other world. Even if the hardware is 100%, debugging software is trickier. Do your homework and be prepared for a radical departure from what you’re used to.
If your time is expensive and you will only be running a very small number of PCBs, consider using ExpressPCB's design tool, because it's easy to learn and it seamlessly connects to their board printing service. (Their service is expensive though, so this is only good if you're doing a few boards, and thus the labor you save will not be eaten up by the extra you pay per board.)
Do not use any of the express layout tools if you are handling a CPU. The layout will not work on the first try, and you will have to modify it. Doing this with a schematic is relatively straightforward, and spotting faults is easy. Doing the same from a layout is obscenely difficult and prone to failure. You want to use a schematic capture / PCB layout combination tool such as kicad, eagle or gEda to name a few. The ability to check your layout against a schematic is invaluable, and will save you huge amounts of time.
The computer industry has seen a continual influx of new players. IBM was not the company driving pricers down, it was the new players.
It should aalso bne noted that the new computers are not drop in replacements for the old. Each new generation of computer could do things the old generation couldn't, making them effectively new products. Early in the industry, the upstarts established the pattern that each new generation would be more powerfull than the old, and a stead influx of new players kept coming along to add fuel to the fire. Even as recently as 2005, there have been new brand name entries entries into the PC market such as alienware. There is a continual introduction of new asian no-name brands.
When the computer industry reaches maturity (The end of moores law), and each successive computer is not significantly different from the last, then there will be a culling of computer companies, and after that the prices will remain stable, even in the face of occasional reductions in manufacturing cost.
A better place to look would be consumer electronics like DVD players and the like. A typical DVD player costs about $20 to make. They still sell for $100ish, a healthy margin. These could come down a lot, but none of the incumbent companies have any interest in dropping the prices for greater market share because it would be a race to the bottom. Every so often you see walmart causing some price reductions by introducing off brand asian devices at significantly reduced prices, but Walmart is in a unique monopoly position that almost no other company in history has enjoyed. Walmart has produced the price reductions that we would otherwise expect from a free market economy, but they have to abuse their monopoly position to do it (brow beating suppliers by refusing to carry their products otherwise). If Walmart had instead chose to maintain slightly higher prices, they could have pocketed a large portion of that profit for themselves (oh wait, they did...).
Your brother is correct. Professional drivers can drive hundreds of thousands of miles per year, while Joe Blow in his Honda may do 15,000. Statistics show that most accidents involving a larger truck are, in fact, the fault of the car. So automating trucking won't help.
More importantly, the autonomous vehicles will keep a multisensory log of everything that happens, so an accident inolving one of these trucks will not be a he-said, she-said situation. The perfect log of data will spell out very clearly what happened, allowing the owner of the autonomous vehicles significant liability protection from idiot drivers that they do not enjoy today.
Autonomous vehicles will also advance the way all technology advances. Each failure will allow engineers to find ways to improve the outcomes of similar events in the future, meaning that as the technology gets more mature, it will get safer.
You have over-simplified the economic situation. When costs fall, if there are enough sellers, one of them will reduce his profit margin to try to gain market share. The others must follow, until prices reach a new equilibrium. An example of this is the computer industry. Prices for a unit of computing capability have been falling steadily for 60 years.
That only happens if one of the players in a given industry does not understand economics. No company with even remotely competent leadership is going to lower their prices unless very specific criteria are met:
1: A competitor lowers their prices, and the company still has enough margin to lower their prices to match. This is a reaction to stimulus, and not a first strike move. This reaction will be automatic, and all competitors know it.
2: The company can cut their prices within their margin, but know that their competitors can't match the price. This is an anticompetitive move, and is designed to drive competitors out of business. This requires insider information about the state of competitors that can only be obtained illegally, and as a consequence is typically prohibited by law.
3: The company cuts their prices to below their cost as an attempt to drive their competitors out of business, relying on saved up money to hold them through until their competitors are destroyed. This is also anticompetitive and prohibited by law.
No company will ever willingly lower their prices except under conditions 2 or 3. The reason for this is condition 1. They know if they cut their prices, the competition will do so also. They will likely not be able to gain significant market share, but they will loose money by lowering their margins. Established players don't lower prices unless they think they can get away with driving competitors out of business. The only players that effectively reduce prices are new companies in a given market. Usually a start-up leveraging new technologies will cause a drop in prices due to a more efficient manufacturing process, but if an existing company comes up with a new way to make a product cheaper, they will simply pocket the higher margin.
There is no need for price fixing, It requires only enlightened self interest, and leaders at that level really are enlightened enough to know how they need to behave for everyone to keep bringing home the high margins. The single dumbest thing any executive anywhere can do is get into a price war. That's why you really don't see it happen anywhere.
Neither pure socialism, nor communism can work in the real world. In a perfect world, they could exist, but in the real world, they can exist only in a power vacuum. As soon as a real one existed, that power vacuum would be filled, and your communist government would be transformed into something else (usually either a dictatorship, or a cleptocracy). Democracy / Capitalism cant really work either, as democracy requires the populace be capable of enlightened self interest which requires the enlightened part. Capitalism is doomed to failure because the free market economy requires scarcity. When Demand of labor far outweighs the supply, Capitalism works fine. Even when the demand is close to the supply, it can work, but once the demand falls significantly below the supply, the value of labor falls and people starve. Every time we have a new technological advance, old unskilled jobs are eliminated, and new skilled jobs are replacing them, but each of these events renders another slice of the population unemployable. 200 Years ago, there were plenty of manual labor jobs that a person with an IQ below 50 could perform that would earn them enough to survive. Today, these people occupy make-work jobs for companies like New Horizons, or NYS ARC. They are still just a small percentage of the population, but every advance in technology renders another larger slice of the population unemployable. What happens when people with an IQ below 100 are not smart enough to handle any of the available jobs? What about 80? What about 90? The world only needs so many waiters. What happens when even that job is done by an autonomous robot? Those that make the robots, and those that employ them would make money. Those that used to have those jobs will starve.
Slashdot Mirror
Makes me wonder if there's specific case law for this kind of thing though, pretty sure it's happened before, and some people are likely to take it to court instead of accepting the involuntary donation
There is plenty of case law precedent to prevent her from successfully wining anything. She voluntarily dropped the equipment off at a recycling location. Just because she had no idea that it was valuable doesn't mean she is entitled to protection from her own ignorance. Contrary to popular belief, the laws are not intended to protect stupid people from doing stupid things to themselves.
In the US, you can fire anyone who doesn't belong to a union, at any time, for any reason. This makes jobs have no sense of permanence, and as a result, you constantly get "more expensive, less efficient" people replaced with "cheaper, less competent" people.
It is the basic conflict that the conservatives hold as justification for anti union action, and anti labor stance. The trouble is that they are not wrong, and Mandirva is a perfect example why. A company that employed expensive employees in an extremely employee biased legal framework has now been destroyed and all of those employee are out of work. In replacement of that company are any number of companies that have the exact same business model except that they operate in places that do not afford employee protections. In essence, the jobs were not lost, simply transferred to another location (All those Mandriva customer are now Red Hat, or Microsoft customers). At the end of the day, all other things being equal, employment will work like any other unregulated economy, and the jobs go to the lowest bidders (In this case, anywhere except France). Ultimately Conservatives and Liberals are fighting about labor laws, when they have all accepted a bad premise. The problem is neither the conservative viewpoint nor the liberal viewpoint. The problem is that everyone works from the assumption that capitalism is mandatory. Everyone is so busy arguing about which political faction has the right answers, when in fact none of them do. There is not a single political group on earth that has the right answers. They are all too busy worrying about the short term details that ultimately are irrelevant to the problem. Meanwhile the real root cause (human nature) is being almost completely ignored.
Gunmen Kill 12, Wound 7 At French Magazine HQ Officer Not Charged In Michael Brown Shooting Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour How To Execute People In the 21st Century Seattle Approves $15 Per Hour Minimum Wage Those just seem like rather unrelated links.
No, that seems about right. whenever I think Freescale, the idea of shooting somebody normally occurs to me...
Typical house wiring is good for ~30A of current
Top tier household wiring is only good for 20Amp. "Typical" household wiring is only good for 15Amp (or 10Amp for older houses). The situation is worse in Europe where 230Volt is the norm, and the wiring is only speced for half the current of the 100Volt systems. Far too often you see people trying to pull far more current through their in-wall wires than they are rated for, and putting a bigger breaker in the box to stop the breaker from tripping every 5 minutes. These are the same people you see on the evening news, homeless because they burned their house down by running a microwave and refrigerator off a circuit that was install 50 years ago with using lamp cord.
Do you know what the most efficient switch is for voltages over a kilovolt? I'll give you a hint: it's not based on semiconductors. Especially for high power. There's this little matter of "breakdown voltage," for one. Also "channel resistance." When someone comes up with a transistor [1] that can do three-nines [2] voltage conversion, we can talk.
http://www.hvswitch.com/
http://www.behlke.com/
http://www.mouser.com/new/ixys/ixys-4500vmosfet-mosfet/?cm_mmc=PressRelease-PR-_-IXYS-_-4500V+High+Voltage+Power+MOSFETs-_-2013-08-07
Granted, most of these are only pushing 99% efficient, but at the current rate of improvement, MOSFETs will surpass 3 nines at 10kV by 2030. 3 nines at 100kv by 2050. Somewhere in there, you start reaching limits of physics, but IIRC its not until somewhere around the 50kV mark, and even there, you can compensate by increasing the size of the gate to allow enough insulation around the device to prevent arcing around it.
Huh? This article is about an application processor (imx6), and you are comparing it to a cortex M microcontroller (PSOC series which is more equivalent to the freescale Kinetis series) They are different things.
Corporate culture is the same no matter which product line you're talking about. Ever since Motorola ejected Freescale in '04, they have gotten more expensive, they stopped developing half their product lines, and they are gauranteeing their product line for 10 years! a whole whopping ten years? The 68000 series Motorola introduced in the late 70s is still in production. If they cant offer at least 20,I dont want to hear about it. Their track record over the last ten years gives me serious pause before considering their product lines, and given the power, availability and cost of the arm processors this has to compete with, I'm willing to pretty much write them off. If they hadn't been gouging us for the sub-par dev tools, I might have even been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but when they have 8 year old open bugs on a tool that they are charging $ks in yearly maintenance contracts for, I have little sympathy. If I need power, give me a broadcom. if I need IO, give me a Cypress, if I need both, i'll plant both and still come out way cheaper than anything Freescale has put out thus far.
And just for giggles if I need massive amounts of IO, I can plant 3 100 pin PSoCs, a quad core broadcom armv8, have more horsepower than the imx6, and still cost less. As an added bonus, I can save a pile of money by not having to deal with the god-damn BGAs. Just like Intel, Freescale is chasing a market that is caving in on itself. These days, you're arm or you're nobody. It should also be noted that unless you are planning on selling M+ units, it'll be cheaper and vastly easier to simply buy RPi2s, and build a custom daughter board than it ever will be to produce your own GHz speed boards. The days of custom PCBs with state of the practice or better CPUs are over. Any design house that sells low to middle volume products are either moving to off the shelf Pi / BBB based systems or are actively being made irrelevant by one or more startups. Even higher volume stuff that can fit a Pi or BBB is likely to benefit from being able to drop one of them in and avoid huge amounts of dev time which means faster time to market which means bigger market share.
We use the freescale processors where I work, in no small part due to an inexplicable bias on the part of one of the founders of the company. Now that he is no longer actively involved in the engineering process, we are leaving freescale and if we never look back it'll be too soon. Their processors cost 5x what we are paying for the ST and Cypress replacements, and the freescale dev tools (codewarrior) suck. To add insult to injury, they are the only major CPU vendor left that charges for the dev tools (did I mention they suck). If you want awesome SOC processors and a sweet dev toolchain, look at the Cypress PSOC 4 / 5 series processors. Thanks to these suckers, our new designs are 40% smaller, and cost between $10 and $30 less because we have been able to replace a lot of off-board parts with PSOC functionality.
I need someone to sweep my streets.
No, you really don't. That job can and will be handled by inexpensive machines soon. In our current free market economy, those would be street sweepers have no real value at all. If they did not exist at all, society would be no worse off. The best that we can hope for under capitalism is that these people are quietly and humanely sterilized.
I say this entirely tongue in cheek, as my oldest son will likely never amount to more than a drain on our family and society (He is autism spectrum). In yesterdays world, he could have gotten a decent job in any of a number of blue collar industries. In todays world, he might make ends meet working at McDonalds, In the world of 2030 and beyond, there is no job that he will be capable of doing that it wouldn't be cheaper to have a robot do. So the question now becomes, if he has negative value to society, what should society do with him? (Notice I am not asking what I should do with him, I don't really have a choice in the matter.)
No amount of teaching him the difference between winners and losers is going to change the fact that in the world of tomorrow, he will be a loser, so why not let him have a little happiness now.
Did the 3d power or the custom display tech required for HTC/oculus exist in 2010-2012?
In a word: Yes
1. You have your job because the company you work for felt you were the best person to do it.
You have your job because the person who hired you liked you the best out of the pool of people available to him or her at that time. This decision may or may not have been based on technical merit. Depends on the person.
2. Your manager has their job because the company you work for felt they were the best person to do it.
Your manager has their job because of the same process as above, but likely included more politics and less technical merit. I wouldn't rule out some golf at this level of management.
3. Your manager is not there to do or understand your job.
It has been demonstrated that managers that cannot do the job functions of their subordinates have a lower rate of success as measured by average task time to completion, turnover, morale, quality of team work-product, etc... In short, understanding the work that your team does is critical to effective management. That is why promote from within is a thing.
4. Your manager is there to ensure you do your job, to support you, to coordinate with the rest of the business that your job interacts with, leadership, users, finance etc.
Finally, one we can agree on.
5. Your manager should be looking to you as the expert in your position. If they are not then you are not doing your job.
Depends how long you have been in that position. If it is less than a year, then it is absolutely unreasonable (but not uncommon) for a manager to have that attitude towards an employee. From 1-5 years, it would be reasonable to expect competency. After that, expert level knowledge would be a reasonable assumption.
So now you expect them to layout a USB circuit on a PCB? It is a simple as connecting three pins to a connector, plus ground. It doesn't get any simpler than that, and it doesn't require any extra circuitry or much care as it is a low speed connection.
It is definitely not that simple. As with most things, it depends what version youre working with. USB 1.0,1.1, sure you can do whatever, but you wont get much throughput. USB 2.0, you have about a 50-50 chance of handling full speed operation unless you use impedance controlled traces and make damn sure they are the right length, etc. USB 3.0 is an extremely high speed connection, and without extreme care, it simply wont work. A newbie is as likely as not to try to use whatever the chip can sustain (2.0 bare minimum these days) without knowing the headache they're in for.
It is a suggestion appropriate to prototyping something. If you are going to the point of producing numbers of things, then you need to learn a bit more or risk spending more time and/or money, which is true for just about everything...
I have worked for two startups, one that uses the Raspberry Pi (various models) in all of their products, and one that uses the BBB. Both are doing quite well. The first has 50M in gross annual revenue, and the other just got its first wholesale order for 1000 units at $2000 per unit. I get paid good money to come in and get customers products the rest of the way to market, and when I give them the options matrix, they almost invariably choose to save the development time and get the product into mass-pro right away. The idea is simple, once they have revenue, they can chase the pennies. Put another way, if their unit will cost an extra $20 by using a Pi vs embedded, and they expect to sell 1000 units per year, saving that expense better cost less than $20,000. Any given product in todays market is as likely as not to last about a year before a new version / competitor shows up. Any startup that thinks they are going to sell something with a microcontroller in it in large quantities in years 1-5 is dreaming, and are going to be very disillusioned when reality hits... High volume low margin products are not conducive to startup companies. They can try to fudge the numbers as much as they like, but when push comes to shove they get steamrollered.
Crystals are in no way shape or form even remotely out of range for a beginner to use.
Crystals are almost entirely unnecessary. Lower frequency crystals can be completely ignored with the right choice of processor. The only other place you might need them would be specialty applications like DTMF decoding, but even there, the right processor can handle it sans crystal.
I tutored Team Project I at university. We literally had every student designing PCBs and programming AVRs in their first year and not a single person had issues with it, even the really dumb rejects of the class managed to get something running, they just couldn't code to save themselves.
You were teaching a class who's entire point was to learn how to do such a thing. Theres a world of difference between that and someone with literally no background in circuits at all, or complete self taught.
The solutions you listed above would be zero help to someone with no background in embedded processors.
Connect a $15 ISP programmer to 6 pins.
What programmer? what 6 pins? where is it documented? google search for ISP programmer get me lots of link to website developer jobs, but not much in the embedded world. Remember, these people dont know jack about embedded systems. Its simple for you, not them.
Buy AVRs with the Arduino bootloader pre-installed.
Where would you buy them? mouser? digikey? what are they called. Again there isn't even enough there to google search for. An amateur might even know what a bootloader is, but how does one get them "preinstalled"?
Buy any USB AVRs which all come with bootloaders pre-installed.
So now you expect them to layout a USB circuit on a PCB? I thought you said this was a simple task?
Pop the AVR out of your Arduino and into your application board.
So once again, they are buying an arduino for every product they sell, my way was easier from a manufacturability standpoint.
While prototyping is possible in surface mount ,permanent circuit boards remain very difficult to create. I appreciate the many circuit board services but they will never be a better alternative than do it yourself circuit boards created from raw material. In my opinion we need to recover the lost ability. If only I knew of a place were a lot of engineers hang out I would go there and ask them to try to invent the tools we need. If only radio shack could help us!
Even through hole PCBs were a pain to DIY. If you have a little money to spend, and are insisteant on DIY, get a PCB mill. I think Adafruit has one. I know of a few online stencil houses that will make one for you for about $40. Better yet, just suck it up and solder the protoboards by hand. I use a headmount magnifier and lamp for the 0402s. Most people can handle 0603s and bigger without a magnifying glass. If you're talking production boards, you can get a square meter PCB and assembly for about $5,000. For a typical design that'll be 100-200 boards for $5,000. If your product cant handle a $50 PCB cost, it either shouldn't need a PCB in the first place, or the business model is doomed to failure (or both).
If you download and follow the manufacturer's guidelines for crystal layout you will be good.
If you're even using a crystal at all, you're doing something wrong. You would be far better served using a uC that has an internal clock. The external crystal just adds complexity and cost that are unneeded. The only applications that would require an external crystal are projects that a newbie has no business anywhere near, especially without any actual PCB experience.
No, raspberry pi is quite complicated. An Atmel AVR based design is trivial.
Oh really? How do you get your software onto it? Remember to explain for a person who's only experience is downloading an SD card image and booting his Pi into Raspbian...
It's pretty easy, actually, if you follow a few simple guidelines.
It depends entirely on the complexity of the design and the microcontroller chosen. If you pick something like an AVR, then it will be simpler, but will not handle very many IO, and will be severely firmware limited. If it is a very simple project, it might work the first time or it might not. If it is a very simple project, it is also very unlikely to be commercially viable, as someone bigger will already be in that space and not want you there. If it is complex enough to warrant high margins (enough to support an up-start player in the market, or a new market), then you're better off putting the arduino / pi to it because you already have the working design. Just PCB up your parts of the circuit and you have a viable product. Once you have some money coming in, hire an engineer to cheap it up for you.
I'll offer you a challenge: If you think it is easy to make circuits based around micro controllers, I challenge you to guarantee debugging assistance to anyone who takes your advice and builds a uC based PCB design. I on the other hand, want nothing to do with anyone who rolls their own without knowing what they are doing, because they are going to find messed up ways to make it not work. They will assume everything works the way it does on the Arduino / Pi, and if they even read the processor documentation (all 100+ pages of it), they are unlikely to understand everything they need to know anyway. Further, they now have to learn an embedded programming environment and figure out how to get their program onto the device itself, which is non-trivial if the only experience you have is with the arduino / pi which both have a bootloader. In summary, for you and me its simple. For the average person playing with an arduino / pi, it is likely to be anything but.
With parts like AVR, it's become nearly stupid simple. All the fiddly bits you are talking about are on the chip now. In some cases where you can use the internal clock, you really only need power and a reset connection (just a pull-up and a momentary switch will do, add a cap to be really clean about it).
That is exactly what I’m talking about. For someone with design experience, figuring out why it didn't work will be immediately obvious, or even more likely, it will work the first time because we know what the gotchas are. For an amateur, it is overwhelmingly likely they will get bit by a gotcha, or something even simpler like crossing two traces. If you are trying to debug a system with two crossed traces, its going to be a real pain when it involves a CPU, because you have to figure out what’s wrong: is it your software? is it a bad chip? is it the PCB? If you had a schematic, there are thousands of places to post questions where people will help, and if you had the schematic in the first place, you wouldn't have a crossed trace in the first place. If all you have is a PCB layout, nobody is going to help you dig through it to figure out why it doesn't work. Its the little things that make a real mess out of these types of projects. Simple things like needing a debounce on your switches, or needing a bypass cap on a chip, or trying to pull half an amp out of a 20mA pin. These things will all be very obvious from a schematic, but will be anything but, if all you have is a layout. Even more importantly, if you have a working prototype involving a pre-existing micro-controller (Arduino / Pi, etc.), then why mess with it. Work your design around it instead. Once you include the cost of making PCB in low volumes, you will be talking about an expensive product. If the cost of a Pi A/B or an arduino is going to break your price point, then you are very likely making the wrong product altogether.
The original article talked about laying out your design with a microprocessor. Several things should be noted:
First, don't roll your own PCB with a microcontroller on it unless you know what you're doing. This is an involved process and not for newbies. You will need expensive lab equipment to debug even the simplest problems, and it is best to sidestep the problem if at all possible. Consider instead simply incorporating an arduino / Pi / Beaglebone into the actual product and do it that way instead. If the margins are low enough to make this impractical, and you don't have any experience designing microcontroller systems, then I would humbly suggest you are out of your depth, and the profit margins are probably too low for you to make money selling your product.
Second, take a serious look at your design tools. there are plenty of free tools out there that do an excellent job. Eagle and gEda come to mind. Both are free, and both will handle just about any job that an amateur is trying to accomplish. Eagle is primarily windows, and gEda is Linux only. The key part is that you want to design your system as a schematic, then export to the PCB layout. That way the tools will automatically check your PCB layout for errors such as short circuits, disconnected circuit, and a whole host of other problems that the free prototype tools don't handle. Put another way, if you get lucky on your first shot and the layout is perfect, then any tool will do. If you make a tiny mistake somewhere in your layout, then the expressPCB, etc tools will not catch it and your boards will not work. The schematic capture tools will catch the fault, and will save you massive amounts of trouble.
Be prepared for new debugging tools. Debugging a problem with the arduino or Pi is something you probably already know how to do. Debugging an embedded microcontroller is a whole other world. Even if the hardware is 100%, debugging software is trickier. Do your homework and be prepared for a radical departure from what you’re used to.
If your time is expensive and you will only be running a very small number of PCBs, consider using ExpressPCB's design tool, because it's easy to learn and it seamlessly connects to their board printing service. (Their service is expensive though, so this is only good if you're doing a few boards, and thus the labor you save will not be eaten up by the extra you pay per board.)
Do not use any of the express layout tools if you are handling a CPU. The layout will not work on the first try, and you will have to modify it. Doing this with a schematic is relatively straightforward, and spotting faults is easy. Doing the same from a layout is obscenely difficult and prone to failure. You want to use a schematic capture / PCB layout combination tool such as kicad, eagle or gEda to name a few. The ability to check your layout against a schematic is invaluable, and will save you huge amounts of time.
The computer industry has seen a continual influx of new players. IBM was not the company driving pricers down, it was the new players.
It should aalso bne noted that the new computers are not drop in replacements for the old. Each new generation of computer could do things the old generation couldn't, making them effectively new products. Early in the industry, the upstarts established the pattern that each new generation would be more powerfull than the old, and a stead influx of new players kept coming along to add fuel to the fire. Even as recently as 2005, there have been new brand name entries entries into the PC market such as alienware. There is a continual introduction of new asian no-name brands.
When the computer industry reaches maturity (The end of moores law), and each successive computer is not significantly different from the last, then there will be a culling of computer companies, and after that the prices will remain stable, even in the face of occasional reductions in manufacturing cost.
A better place to look would be consumer electronics like DVD players and the like. A typical DVD player costs about $20 to make. They still sell for $100ish, a healthy margin. These could come down a lot, but none of the incumbent companies have any interest in dropping the prices for greater market share because it would be a race to the bottom. Every so often you see walmart causing some price reductions by introducing off brand asian devices at significantly reduced prices, but Walmart is in a unique monopoly position that almost no other company in history has enjoyed. Walmart has produced the price reductions that we would otherwise expect from a free market economy, but they have to abuse their monopoly position to do it (brow beating suppliers by refusing to carry their products otherwise). If Walmart had instead chose to maintain slightly higher prices, they could have pocketed a large portion of that profit for themselves (oh wait, they did...).
Your brother is correct. Professional drivers can drive hundreds of thousands of miles per year, while Joe Blow in his Honda may do 15,000. Statistics show that most accidents involving a larger truck are, in fact, the fault of the car. So automating trucking won't help.
More importantly, the autonomous vehicles will keep a multisensory log of everything that happens, so an accident inolving one of these trucks will not be a he-said, she-said situation. The perfect log of data will spell out very clearly what happened, allowing the owner of the autonomous vehicles significant liability protection from idiot drivers that they do not enjoy today.
Autonomous vehicles will also advance the way all technology advances. Each failure will allow engineers to find ways to improve the outcomes of similar events in the future, meaning that as the technology gets more mature, it will get safer.
You have over-simplified the economic situation. When costs fall, if there are enough sellers, one of them will reduce his profit margin to try to gain market share. The others must follow, until prices reach a new equilibrium. An example of this is the computer industry. Prices for a unit of computing capability have been falling steadily for 60 years.
That only happens if one of the players in a given industry does not understand economics. No company with even remotely competent leadership is going to lower their prices unless very specific criteria are met:
1: A competitor lowers their prices, and the company still has enough margin to lower their prices to match. This is a reaction to stimulus, and not a first strike move. This reaction will be automatic, and all competitors know it.
2: The company can cut their prices within their margin, but know that their competitors can't match the price. This is an anticompetitive move, and is designed to drive competitors out of business. This requires insider information about the state of competitors that can only be obtained illegally, and as a consequence is typically prohibited by law.
3: The company cuts their prices to below their cost as an attempt to drive their competitors out of business, relying on saved up money to hold them through until their competitors are destroyed. This is also anticompetitive and prohibited by law.
No company will ever willingly lower their prices except under conditions 2 or 3. The reason for this is condition 1. They know if they cut their prices, the competition will do so also. They will likely not be able to gain significant market share, but they will loose money by lowering their margins. Established players don't lower prices unless they think they can get away with driving competitors out of business. The only players that effectively reduce prices are new companies in a given market. Usually a start-up leveraging new technologies will cause a drop in prices due to a more efficient manufacturing process, but if an existing company comes up with a new way to make a product cheaper, they will simply pocket the higher margin.
There is no need for price fixing, It requires only enlightened self interest, and leaders at that level really are enlightened enough to know how they need to behave for everyone to keep bringing home the high margins. The single dumbest thing any executive anywhere can do is get into a price war. That's why you really don't see it happen anywhere.
I said _socialism_, not communism.
Neither pure socialism, nor communism can work in the real world. In a perfect world, they could exist, but in the real world, they can exist only in a power vacuum. As soon as a real one existed, that power vacuum would be filled, and your communist government would be transformed into something else (usually either a dictatorship, or a cleptocracy). Democracy / Capitalism cant really work either, as democracy requires the populace be capable of enlightened self interest which requires the enlightened part. Capitalism is doomed to failure because the free market economy requires scarcity. When Demand of labor far outweighs the supply, Capitalism works fine. Even when the demand is close to the supply, it can work, but once the demand falls significantly below the supply, the value of labor falls and people starve. Every time we have a new technological advance, old unskilled jobs are eliminated, and new skilled jobs are replacing them, but each of these events renders another slice of the population unemployable. 200 Years ago, there were plenty of manual labor jobs that a person with an IQ below 50 could perform that would earn them enough to survive. Today, these people occupy make-work jobs for companies like New Horizons, or NYS ARC. They are still just a small percentage of the population, but every advance in technology renders another larger slice of the population unemployable. What happens when people with an IQ below 100 are not smart enough to handle any of the available jobs? What about 80? What about 90? The world only needs so many waiters. What happens when even that job is done by an autonomous robot? Those that make the robots, and those that employ them would make money. Those that used to have those jobs will starve.
A functioning society requires jobs that pay a livable wage
No, Capitalism requires that. There is nothing fundamental to society that requires capitalism.