An MSP430 has idle currents measured in uA, and a chip costs in the region of $1.50, with no external components required. BBB isn't useful in applications that require running off of a watch battery for a year, and isn't cheap enough to consider adding as an additional component in consumer electronics.
and the MSP430 doesn't have enough horsepower for most things I want to do, and even if it did, the additional resources needed to design with it, and the additional time-to-market that these would introduce make it non-viable in todays world. As I said, time-to-market is everything. MS didn't get where they are because they made a superior product, they got there because they had a working product when the market opportunity arrived. Short TTM doesn't guarantee success, but TTM that is too long guarantees failure...
Maybe not. The law says they need to charge shipping costs, so unless their couriers are charging them Ã0.01 they are probably not complying. They are just hoping that it takes the authorities a long time to get around to forcing them to charge the real price, which will be obfuscated as much as possible, by which time the will have forced even more of the competition out of business.
This actually presents an interesting problem. Many carriers contractually require that shippers not disclose the discounts they are being given. That means that if Amazon discloses the discounted shipping rates they are paying, then they loose their discounts, and everyone pays retail. This basically royally screws the shippers, and the consumers. As usual, the French have completely failed to think through the consequences of their actions. It continues a fine decades long tradition of fucking up in the name of protectionism. Its the reason, they have double and triple the rate of unemployment of the rest of the world.
Protectionism only works if your society is close to export parity. If you can afford to close your borders completely without collapsing your economy, then protectionism will work (and you actually don't need it under those circumstances). Whenever there is an imbalance, protectionism screws up the local economy. If there is a trade deficit, then your economy hemorrhages money until everyone is broke and in debt. If there is a trade surplus, then protectionism shuts it down, as no one wants to buy from the over-priced asshat who actively blocks foreign competition. With parity, you can afford to significantly reduce trade in both direction (and you will), but any other time its a bad idea.
Why would I bother when I can just use the BBB platform and run with it. Unless you're going to be selling millions of units, The time-to-market of the BBB platform trumps all.
I'm sure that TI will be making 335x until people stop buying them. TI generally doesn't EOL parts like that. But putting whole BBBs in products seems a bit risky for a lot of other reasons.
As opposed to undertaking to spin your own processor board? The BBB is a complete functional platform that is cost competitive for all but the largest quantities, and shows all the signs of being at the beginning of its life-cycle. Its undergone 2 minor revisions in 12 months, and there are several active design communities. The list of peripherals is growing by leaps and bounds. Lastly, by Beagleboard.orgs own accounting, the demand far exceeds the supply, and people are clearly using them as more than just a prototyping platform.
It all goes back to time to market. These things allow even relatively inexperienced users to build off a powerful platform and create good-enough-to-market products that can be ready to ship in a fraction of the time. Dev houses using the BBB and RPi as base systems are going to eat everyones lunch. It is the comoditization of embedded hardware design. It was bound to happen sooner or later. the RPi started it, but the BBB brought enough IO channels to really get the ball rolling..
The vast majority of cell phone makers use ARM based processors, and with Smartphones, battery life is a gigantic deal breaker. This would suggest to me that large numbers of design engineers concluded that ARM was at the very least "good enough" in power efficiency to allow its use.
This leads me to conclude that either ARM is better in this department, or that the difference is trivial enough that other trade offs make it worth it.
How much does it really matter when a small project will only take 15 seconds to compile on the BBB. So what that a cross-compiler can do it in 2 seconds. it'll still take close to 15 seconds total when you include the time to type the commands to download the executable. Even if it was only 7 seconds, it is still only a negligible gain.
now if you were compiling a kernel, or god-forbid something really big like open-office, or some such then I could understand, but for the vast majority of embedded work, it just doesn't matter. The embedded devices are fast enough.
If you are building a project which requires some special hardware then you don't have to waste time porting a driver from x86 to ARM, MIPS, Sparc, etc.
In my experience, most embedded machines these days are ARM, and finding x86 ports is more of a challenge. Between the explosion of ARM based cell phones, and the Rpi/BBB, x86 is becoming less and less relevant (and with it MS/Intel)
Active android development is almost all ARM, and x86 is ported as an afterthought.
The new BBB version is popular and hard to find but the extra flash is nice.
https://specialcomp.com/beaglebone/index.htm
How many do you want? These are not from Beagleboard, and are not Beagleboard certified, but they can be had in almost unlimited quantities and work as advertised. They are manufactured to the open specs. They are being manufactured by a third party in China in vast quantities for commercial use. They cost more than the official versions mostly because you can actually get your hands on them from these guys in nearly limitless quantities (up to 100+ they have in stock to ship right now, more than that might take a day or two, and order for a couple thousand might actually take them a week, but i doubt it) Rumor has it they are moving more than 100k units/month
Because of the poor reliability of MMC, I prefer to use SSD these days
MMC reliability is fine. I thought I was going to have problems using the MMC on the BBB as well, so I set about beating several of them severely. I setup accelerated read-write-read testing, and started pounding on the BBB internal MMC. with 3 boards at over 5M writes to a single 512Byte block each, none of the devices failed. I read some literature which suggests that the MMC rotates sector usage to even out wear, which, if true, means that you would have to do the equivalent of recording 100,000 hours of HD video before you will burn out the MMC.
The other issue with the Beagle Bone is that the processor is kind of on a dead end in terms of development cycle. That is, TI is not actively developing new OMAPs, but they have been authoring most of the Linux drivers for these chips. TI will continue to produce the OMAPs that are on the Beagle Bone, but I wonder how much they will continue to support driver development for future Linux.
Embedded devices are install and forget machines. It doesn't matter much who supports them or doesn't once they are in the field. As far as unit availability, Special Computing is ramping up production and already surpassed all the other BBB manufacturers combined. Last I heard, they were over 120k per month production, the vast majority of which is going into mass-production doo-hickeys from various manufacturers. Our own embedded system uses 1 or more of them in every unit we sell.
The biggest advantage to the BBB (and to a lesser degree the Rpi) is time-to-market. An embedded system used to take 3 to 4 years to develop from conception mass-pro. With the BBB, we were able to do an entire embedded system, From absolute zero to mass-pro in 18 months. The case took longer to design than the embedded hardware!
Which to anyone that has actually DONE this sort of development is nonsensical.
I happen to like doing my dev work directly on the BBB. I have a full scale machine that I use as a glorified display, and other servers that house subversion, and other needed resources.
Doing dev work directly on the BBB makes it far easier to deal with debugging problems in the field, because, by definition, I have my full debugging environment with me at all times. My dev environment is always exactly identical to the production environment, so I never have the "it works fine in the lab" scenario.
Sure it may take longer to compile, but I can take a virgin board, and have my dev environment up and running anywhere anytime. Give me any laptop with an SSH client, and I have a full dev environment. It is also much easier to debug embedded hardware problems when the development and production machines are the same.
The GPP is 100% right when he says "Just because you don't understand their needs doesn't mean you need to step in and try to change what you think they need. (Ever think they just MIGHT be smarter than you or know their needs better?)"
Which once again returns us to the basic questions being asked by the would be helpers: "What are you trying to accomplish?" Without that fundamental part of the picture, all but the most generic help is pointless.
To return to the current case in point, Say the person is trying to build a plant monitoring doo-hickey. The choice of platforms depends a great deal on a hundred little specifics. For example, if each device being designed will handle one plant only with just a few sensors, and it is going to run on a non-trivial power source (car battery, wall power, large-ish solar panel, then a Rpi is probably the best choice. If the device is going to monitor a row of plants with sensors, then a BeagleBone is probably a better choice for its expanded IO. If it has to monitor an entire greenhouse with dozens of rows, then perhaps a distributed collection of 1 wire sensors is in order in which case just about any platform will do. If, on the other had, the whole thing has to run on a pair of AA batteries, then you are going to have to roll your own solution, and some kind of FPGA board would be a better bet, since you're going to need to understand where every bit flip is going to keep the power consumption down.
The original questioner did not provide enough details to suggest that they even understand all of the options available, so it quickly becomes clear that further questions are needed to find out what they do and don't know.
Key questions that need to be answered:
What does "low power" mean? 5 watts, 0.5 watts, 50 watts?
What does embedded mean? Is he referring to embedded to mean that it is a headless device? Does he mean that it has to run from a limited power source? Does he mean that he needs a device with GPIOs?
In what ways will the device interact with the world? By Ethernet? by 1 wire? by dedicated GPIOs? Does the submitter even understand this question enough to answer it? I'm not so sure from the way the original question was phrased
How many of these device does he intend to build? Just the prototype? Low volume run (Less than 100 units)?
Mass-Pro?
In conclusion, the question was not properly framed, most likely because the submitter did not understand the topic well enough to ask intelligent questions, and samzenpuss sure as hell doesn't understand the topic well enough to properly filter these kinds of questions.
It's users are arguably less technically savvy.
Can you imagine the cost with establishing a secure 1 million user network, where Linux isn't an OS but more probably some disease that was eradicated back in the 1800s. Training would cost so god damn much, take a year or two.
Sure, probably don't need IIS servers. But users need to be on Windows.
But every couple of years, MS hands out a perfect reason to convert: New versions.
The cost of retraining to use Windows 8 for example is probably going to be on par with retraining to use Ubuntu or Debian. It could probably even be reduced for Ubuntu or Debian by using a more windows 7 like GUI to help keep the environment as familiar as possible. Any organization that cites conversion retraining costs as their primary cost justification for staying with MS now is either lying (to cover a conflict of interest, bribe, etc...), or incompetent at doing cost analysis.
Not so long as the true costs are deferred until the consumer no longer has any choice in the matter. If you didn't have to pay the loans back if you couldn't find work in your field, then the cost would be in free fall because so many people wouldn't be required to pay back the loans.
Demand is kept artificially high by hiding the true cost, false advertising, and a corporate greed machine that is almost custom built to drive wages down, and job requirements up.
It all depends on what kind of applications you need to write.
If you're looking to write back-end or network applications that do not require a GUI, then I would still recommend C++ with one caveat. Get and use the Boost libraries. You will find that these libraries fix most of the crap that was broken about C and C++. C++ is not necessarily the easiest language to use, but you already know it which is a tremendous advantage.
If you need to do front end / GUI development, I recommend JavaScript. Not because its easy to use, but because web browsers are everywhere, and largely platform agnostic at this point. There are plenty of systems out there that build on top of JavaScript, and any of them would be worth a look.
But it is already expensive enough that it doesn't make a lot of sense to buy if you want to buy one to save money on gas. The price difference is $15350. If we assume $4/gal for gas, then that's 3837.5 gallons. Fiat 500 gas version gets 31mpg city, 40mpg highway. If we average that, then we get 136,231.25 miles before the price difference pays for itself. And that's assuming we paid cash for the car. If you finance it, then add interest on top of that.
The Gasoline price difference is only a part of the cost savings, and it isn't even the majority. The fact is that pure electric vehicles are much cheaper to maintain. They have no oil, so you can scratch off $200 / year in oil changes. There is no rotating alternator, no starter, of fuel pump, no oil pump, no water pump, No distributor cap. The single biggest difference is a lack of wear and tear on the brake pads. A *properly* built EV will have full regenerative braking which effectively prevents the driver from *ever* using the brake pads. (most EVs today do not have full regen braking, and instead use the brake pads part of the time. This is a result of incompetent design engineers who still do not understand electronics, and insist on a mechanical solution). A typical EV will go 5 years between maintenance visits. I have had mine for two, and the dealership offers "free oil changes for life" on all of their vehicles, So i take it to them once every three months, and they top the windshield wiper fluid and wash the car. Outside of that, there has been no maintenance at all since I bought the car, and the first sched maintenance (according to the factory) isn't until 100k miles when they will check the control diagnostics to see if everything has been running correctly. I get the brake pads every year at the cars inspection, and every year they comment that the brake pads look essentially brand new. They don't expect I will need new brake pads until somewhere well north of 100k miles.
At the end of the day, the cost for the first 5 years are a little cheaper for the gasoline car. You have $250/ month for car payments, plus $80-100ish for gas, plus $40-50/ month for maintenance (oil, brakes, etc.
The comparable EV will cost about $500 / month in payments, plus $25 / month in additional electric costs.
Total Gas: $370-$400 / month. Total Electric: $525-$530/month
After 5 years, the cost dynamic changes radically. The two car payments go to 0. The operating costs for the EV remain around the $25 / month in electric costs. The monthly cost for the gas vehicle actually go up. You still have $80-$100, and you still have the $40-$50 for regular maintenance, but now things start to break. You have an additional $100 / month for unexpected maintenance, (maybe twice a year, something like an alternator goes, costing $600, maybe you accidentally fry a brake rotor, so that $100 brake job now costs $500.
5 years to 10 years old: Gas car: $220 - $230 / month. EV: $25 / month
After 10 years, it gets truly ugly. The gas can now has major mechanical trouble on a regular basis. The total average monthly maintenance costs are up over $250 / month, and most people consider it cheaper to replace the vehicle. The EV on the other hand is still in perfect working order, and there is no particular reason it should have significant costs this decade. The only two parts to suffer any real wear and tear are the motor controller, and the motor itself, both of which if designed properly, for the EVs usage profile, should last many decades. The motor controller will eventually fail due to a phenomenon known as silicon fingers, but in large quantities motor controllers would be very cheap to build. ($300 or less, and it should be at least 2 decades before it fails.)
1/2mV.terminall^2 since 83 miles away we presume it will be on the downslope of a parabolic-ish arc. 23lb at 300mph - 10kg at 136m/s = 10 x 136^2 = 185kJ give or take. So about the same as a Toyota Yaris going 40mph or a Ford Focus going 35mph.
These things will be going much much faster than terminal velocity, even 100 miles downrange. They simply will not have enough time to slow down. The shuttle on re-entry came in basically belly-into-the-wind to bleed of energy as fast as it could, and it still took a half hour and 6,000 miles to bleed off all that energy.
This shot is designed to be stremlined, and will not bleed very much energy at all. I wouldn't be surprised if its still moving mach 6 when it gets to its target... Try redoing your calculations for 4,000 MPH, and see what you get.
Unions work to maximize their own profits. everything else is secondary. They are a business that employs people, same as every other company, even the ones they are paid to protect their members from.
Maybe if it weren't for the fact that organized religion is a form of tribalism/conformity, which is the sole cause of war. Without such anti-social behaviors, wars would be impossible.
Please, name an established fact and explain how this differs from a normal fact.
Force equals mass times acceleration.
The equation yeilds accurate predictions for 100% of use cases where velocity is less than 0.01C, and distances are greater than 0.1 nm.
This fact differes from other facts becasue it involves a usefull method of predictiing behaviors of systems. It is verifiable, and falsifiable (although it has only been falsified for very high speeds where it is replaced by a more complicated set of equations, and very small distances where it is replaced by even more complicated equations). The point is that scientific facts are theroies that are overwhelmingly supported by evidence, and are falsifiable by nature. Much of the trouble people have understanding this concept stems from the unending stream of bullshit advertising they see on TV to the affect of "Our new dieting pull is scientifically proven to reduce your body mass index in just three minutes!", and other such nonsense.
Teaching critical thinking in school will only help so much because people inherently believe what they want to believe, even scientists. That is why there is so much faking of data in the science community. They are only human after all. A better solution would be a group who are granted the copyrights to most science related words like "scientifically", and "proves". This group could prevent most crap science just by suing advertisers out of existence who insist on improperly using these terms. After the media is forced to stop using the terms incorrectly, people will slowly stop using them incorrectly as well.
So from whom is something being stolen, the one who offers to buy at $100 and receives $100? Or the one who offers to sell at $99.99 and receives $99.99? It seems by your definition all retailers are stealing from their customers.
The money is stolen from the second party.
The way it works is this. Party one offers the stocks for $99.99, but doesn't have the full amount of stocks that Party 2 wants to buy. Party 1 sells all of their stocks to Party 2 for $99.99, but the HFT intercepts the sale, and uses that information to buy shares from parties on other exchanges for $99.99, and then offers those shares to Party 2 at a slightly inflated price of $100.00. As the HFT has effectively depleted the stocks available, Party 2 has no choice but to buy from the HFT. The difference in price is within the margin, so Party 2 buys form the HFT never even knowing that they paid more for the stock than was originally asked, all Party 2 knows is that they offered $99.99, but that sale never completed, and the new price they could get was $100.00. The very act of offering $99.99 caused the price to change before the willing buyer at $99.99 and the willing seller at $99.99 could even complete the sale. All of this happens within fractions of a second.
The stock market only functions correctly when all parties have the same opportunity and access to the same information. When one party has access to information that no one else has, or can get, we call it insider trading, and the HFTs have created an artificial insider trading scenario. It is legal, but only just barely, and is still morally wrong. It adds nothing to the market, and unjustly enriches the HFT who provides no value added to the market.
Any competent institutional broker has a wide variety of ways to defend its customers against that, all you need is a little time for their algorithms to work. If you don't have time, well, you pay the price just like any motivated seller.
The problem with dark pools, is that the customers need to be defended from their own broker. These trades happen so fast, and there is so much raw data out there that verifying that the price you got for your stocks was optimal is prohibitively time consuming, so no one double checks that their broker actually got the best price. The high frequency trading takes a very small amount from each trade (0.1% is the amount I saw in the article). Its small enought that it gets lost in thebackground noise of the market, but it is really no difference between this and stealing a penny every time someone withdraws money from an account. Stealing is stealing no matter how you dress it up, or pretend its for the good of "The Market".
You would think more victims of our "justice system" with nothing left to lose would kill the judges and police responsible for ruining their lives.
That is a remarkably difficult thing to do once a person has been found guilty, and up until then there is hope that the "system" will work in their favor.
Besides, the world wouldn't really be better off with hardened crimninals going around killing police, prosecutors and judges. That just leads to more corruption, not less.
Carmack screwed the analysis quite thoroughly, and now its too late for them. One of two scenarios is in play here:
1) Facebook bought OR because they wanted to diversify their holdings to make themselves more resilient to changes in their core market. In this case, Facebook will likely leave OR mostly alone and except for adding some money to the pot, but when it becomes clear that OR can not or will not scale at the growth that Facebook wants/needs, then it will get the axe.
2) Facebook bought OR because of some overriding strategy that involves OR's technology. In this case, Facebook will not be allowing OR to keep going the way they have been going, which more than likely means very little if any emphasis on VR gaming, and instead is intended as a social platform for virtual interaction. In this scenario, the best that OR can manage will be to get some games developed and released, but to that end there will likely be no support from Facebook.
Carmack was correct when he stated that OR needed two things: first, they would need cash infusions at several points to be able to scale at the rate that flash-in-the-pan games require in order to meet their sales goals. Without that cash, developers would be reticent to make any games that truly took advantage of the platform because then they would be locked to it with no guarantee that OR could manufacture enough units to *not* severely limit sales of the game developers product. Facebook solves the cash problem, but only by reintroducing another reason for developers not to get involved: Facebook itself. Facebook has burned many developers before, and consequently developers are less likely to become involved with them than they would have been with any other company (possibly excepting Microsoft).
The second thing that OR needs is developer support, which, for the reasons described above, the Facebook deal makes far more difficult than it would have been if OR had been bought by almost any other company.
All things considered, OR might fare better having been bought by Facebook than going it alone, but that is by no means clear.
Facebook and Google are worlds apart. Googles Net earnings is greater than Facebooks gross revenue. Ditto, every other tech company that counts. Facebook has made a concerted effort to generate revenue any way they can, to the point of almost pissing off customers, and they still are almost an order of magnitude below any of the other big players (Google, MS, Apple). Worse still, the market is showing signs of a shift, and as Myspace can tell you, when your user base goes, they go quick.
Slashdot Mirror
An MSP430 has idle currents measured in uA, and a chip costs in the region of $1.50, with no external components required. BBB isn't useful in applications that require running off of a watch battery for a year, and isn't cheap enough to consider adding as an additional component in consumer electronics.
and the MSP430 doesn't have enough horsepower for most things I want to do, and even if it did, the additional resources needed to design with it, and the additional time-to-market that these would introduce make it non-viable in todays world. As I said, time-to-market is everything. MS didn't get where they are because they made a superior product, they got there because they had a working product when the market opportunity arrived. Short TTM doesn't guarantee success, but TTM that is too long guarantees failure...
Maybe not. The law says they need to charge shipping costs, so unless their couriers are charging them Ã0.01 they are probably not complying. They are just hoping that it takes the authorities a long time to get around to forcing them to charge the real price, which will be obfuscated as much as possible, by which time the will have forced even more of the competition out of business.
This actually presents an interesting problem. Many carriers contractually require that shippers not disclose the discounts they are being given. That means that if Amazon discloses the discounted shipping rates they are paying, then they loose their discounts, and everyone pays retail. This basically royally screws the shippers, and the consumers. As usual, the French have completely failed to think through the consequences of their actions. It continues a fine decades long tradition of fucking up in the name of protectionism. Its the reason, they have double and triple the rate of unemployment of the rest of the world.
Protectionism only works if your society is close to export parity. If you can afford to close your borders completely without collapsing your economy, then protectionism will work (and you actually don't need it under those circumstances). Whenever there is an imbalance, protectionism screws up the local economy. If there is a trade deficit, then your economy hemorrhages money until everyone is broke and in debt. If there is a trade surplus, then protectionism shuts it down, as no one wants to buy from the over-priced asshat who actively blocks foreign competition. With parity, you can afford to significantly reduce trade in both direction (and you will), but any other time its a bad idea.
Try developing for an MSP430 on the MSP430...
Why would I bother when I can just use the BBB platform and run with it. Unless you're going to be selling millions of units, The time-to-market of the BBB platform trumps all.
I'm sure that TI will be making 335x until people stop buying them. TI generally doesn't EOL parts like that. But putting whole BBBs in products seems a bit risky for a lot of other reasons.
As opposed to undertaking to spin your own processor board? The BBB is a complete functional platform that is cost competitive for all but the largest quantities, and shows all the signs of being at the beginning of its life-cycle. Its undergone 2 minor revisions in 12 months, and there are several active design communities. The list of peripherals is growing by leaps and bounds. Lastly, by Beagleboard.orgs own accounting, the demand far exceeds the supply, and people are clearly using them as more than just a prototyping platform.
It all goes back to time to market. These things allow even relatively inexperienced users to build off a powerful platform and create good-enough-to-market products that can be ready to ship in a fraction of the time. Dev houses using the BBB and RPi as base systems are going to eat everyones lunch. It is the comoditization of embedded hardware design. It was bound to happen sooner or later. the RPi started it, but the BBB brought enough IO channels to really get the ball rolling..
Citation please.
The vast majority of cell phone makers use ARM based processors, and with Smartphones, battery life is a gigantic deal breaker. This would suggest to me that large numbers of design engineers concluded that ARM was at the very least "good enough" in power efficiency to allow its use.
This leads me to conclude that either ARM is better in this department, or that the difference is trivial enough that other trade offs make it worth it.
How much does it really matter when a small project will only take 15 seconds to compile on the BBB. So what that a cross-compiler can do it in 2 seconds. it'll still take close to 15 seconds total when you include the time to type the commands to download the executable. Even if it was only 7 seconds, it is still only a negligible gain.
now if you were compiling a kernel, or god-forbid something really big like open-office, or some such then I could understand, but for the vast majority of embedded work, it just doesn't matter. The embedded devices are fast enough.
If you are building a project which requires some special hardware then you don't have to waste time porting a driver from x86 to ARM, MIPS, Sparc, etc.
In my experience, most embedded machines these days are ARM, and finding x86 ports is more of a challenge. Between the explosion of ARM based cell phones, and the Rpi/BBB, x86 is becoming less and less relevant (and with it MS/Intel)
Active android development is almost all ARM, and x86 is ported as an afterthought.
The new BBB version is popular and hard to find but the extra flash is nice.
https://specialcomp.com/beaglebone/index.htm
How many do you want? These are not from Beagleboard, and are not Beagleboard certified, but they can be had in almost unlimited quantities and work as advertised. They are manufactured to the open specs. They are being manufactured by a third party in China in vast quantities for commercial use. They cost more than the official versions mostly because you can actually get your hands on them from these guys in nearly limitless quantities (up to 100+ they have in stock to ship right now, more than that might take a day or two, and order for a couple thousand might actually take them a week, but i doubt it) Rumor has it they are moving more than 100k units/month
Because of the poor reliability of MMC, I prefer to use SSD these days
MMC reliability is fine. I thought I was going to have problems using the MMC on the BBB as well, so I set about beating several of them severely. I setup accelerated read-write-read testing, and started pounding on the BBB internal MMC. with 3 boards at over 5M writes to a single 512Byte block each, none of the devices failed. I read some literature which suggests that the MMC rotates sector usage to even out wear, which, if true, means that you would have to do the equivalent of recording 100,000 hours of HD video before you will burn out the MMC.
The other issue with the Beagle Bone is that the processor is kind of on a dead end in terms of development cycle. That is, TI is not actively developing new OMAPs, but they have been authoring most of the Linux drivers for these chips. TI will continue to produce the OMAPs that are on the Beagle Bone, but I wonder how much they will continue to support driver development for future Linux.
Embedded devices are install and forget machines. It doesn't matter much who supports them or doesn't once they are in the field. As far as unit availability, Special Computing is ramping up production and already surpassed all the other BBB manufacturers combined. Last I heard, they were over 120k per month production, the vast majority of which is going into mass-production doo-hickeys from various manufacturers. Our own embedded system uses 1 or more of them in every unit we sell.
The biggest advantage to the BBB (and to a lesser degree the Rpi) is time-to-market. An embedded system used to take 3 to 4 years to develop from conception mass-pro. With the BBB, we were able to do an entire embedded system, From absolute zero to mass-pro in 18 months. The case took longer to design than the embedded hardware!
Which to anyone that has actually DONE this sort of development is nonsensical.
I happen to like doing my dev work directly on the BBB. I have a full scale machine that I use as a glorified display, and other servers that house subversion, and other needed resources.
Doing dev work directly on the BBB makes it far easier to deal with debugging problems in the field, because, by definition, I have my full debugging environment with me at all times. My dev environment is always exactly identical to the production environment, so I never have the "it works fine in the lab" scenario.
Sure it may take longer to compile, but I can take a virgin board, and have my dev environment up and running anywhere anytime. Give me any laptop with an SSH client, and I have a full dev environment. It is also much easier to debug embedded hardware problems when the development and production machines are the same.
The GPP is 100% right when he says "Just because you don't understand their needs doesn't mean you need to step in and try to change what you think they need. (Ever think they just MIGHT be smarter than you or know their needs better?)"
Which once again returns us to the basic questions being asked by the would be helpers: "What are you trying to accomplish?" Without that fundamental part of the picture, all but the most generic help is pointless.
To return to the current case in point, Say the person is trying to build a plant monitoring doo-hickey. The choice of platforms depends a great deal on a hundred little specifics. For example, if each device being designed will handle one plant only with just a few sensors, and it is going to run on a non-trivial power source (car battery, wall power, large-ish solar panel, then a Rpi is probably the best choice. If the device is going to monitor a row of plants with sensors, then a BeagleBone is probably a better choice for its expanded IO. If it has to monitor an entire greenhouse with dozens of rows, then perhaps a distributed collection of 1 wire sensors is in order in which case just about any platform will do. If, on the other had, the whole thing has to run on a pair of AA batteries, then you are going to have to roll your own solution, and some kind of FPGA board would be a better bet, since you're going to need to understand where every bit flip is going to keep the power consumption down.
The original questioner did not provide enough details to suggest that they even understand all of the options available, so it quickly becomes clear that further questions are needed to find out what they do and don't know.
Key questions that need to be answered:
What does "low power" mean? 5 watts, 0.5 watts, 50 watts?
What does embedded mean? Is he referring to embedded to mean that it is a headless device? Does he mean that it has to run from a limited power source? Does he mean that he needs a device with GPIOs?
In what ways will the device interact with the world? By Ethernet? by 1 wire? by dedicated GPIOs? Does the submitter even understand this question enough to answer it? I'm not so sure from the way the original question was phrased
How many of these device does he intend to build? Just the prototype? Low volume run (Less than 100 units)? Mass-Pro?
In conclusion, the question was not properly framed, most likely because the submitter did not understand the topic well enough to ask intelligent questions, and samzenpuss sure as hell doesn't understand the topic well enough to properly filter these kinds of questions.
It's users are arguably less technically savvy. Can you imagine the cost with establishing a secure 1 million user network, where Linux isn't an OS but more probably some disease that was eradicated back in the 1800s. Training would cost so god damn much, take a year or two. Sure, probably don't need IIS servers. But users need to be on Windows.
But every couple of years, MS hands out a perfect reason to convert: New versions.
The cost of retraining to use Windows 8 for example is probably going to be on par with retraining to use Ubuntu or Debian. It could probably even be reduced for Ubuntu or Debian by using a more windows 7 like GUI to help keep the environment as familiar as possible. Any organization that cites conversion retraining costs as their primary cost justification for staying with MS now is either lying (to cover a conflict of interest, bribe, etc...), or incompetent at doing cost analysis.
Yes, you are.
No He's not.
If that were true, tuition would be in free fall.
Not so long as the true costs are deferred until the consumer no longer has any choice in the matter. If you didn't have to pay the loans back if you couldn't find work in your field, then the cost would be in free fall because so many people wouldn't be required to pay back the loans.
Demand is kept artificially high by hiding the true cost, false advertising, and a corporate greed machine that is almost custom built to drive wages down, and job requirements up.
It all depends on what kind of applications you need to write.
If you're looking to write back-end or network applications that do not require a GUI, then I would still recommend C++ with one caveat. Get and use the Boost libraries. You will find that these libraries fix most of the crap that was broken about C and C++. C++ is not necessarily the easiest language to use, but you already know it which is a tremendous advantage.
If you need to do front end / GUI development, I recommend JavaScript. Not because its easy to use, but because web browsers are everywhere, and largely platform agnostic at this point. There are plenty of systems out there that build on top of JavaScript, and any of them would be worth a look.
But it is already expensive enough that it doesn't make a lot of sense to buy if you want to buy one to save money on gas. The price difference is $15350. If we assume $4/gal for gas, then that's 3837.5 gallons. Fiat 500 gas version gets 31mpg city, 40mpg highway. If we average that, then we get 136,231.25 miles before the price difference pays for itself. And that's assuming we paid cash for the car. If you finance it, then add interest on top of that.
The Gasoline price difference is only a part of the cost savings, and it isn't even the majority. The fact is that pure electric vehicles are much cheaper to maintain. They have no oil, so you can scratch off $200 / year in oil changes. There is no rotating alternator, no starter, of fuel pump, no oil pump, no water pump, No distributor cap. The single biggest difference is a lack of wear and tear on the brake pads. A *properly* built EV will have full regenerative braking which effectively prevents the driver from *ever* using the brake pads. (most EVs today do not have full regen braking, and instead use the brake pads part of the time. This is a result of incompetent design engineers who still do not understand electronics, and insist on a mechanical solution). A typical EV will go 5 years between maintenance visits. I have had mine for two, and the dealership offers "free oil changes for life" on all of their vehicles, So i take it to them once every three months, and they top the windshield wiper fluid and wash the car. Outside of that, there has been no maintenance at all since I bought the car, and the first sched maintenance (according to the factory) isn't until 100k miles when they will check the control diagnostics to see if everything has been running correctly. I get the brake pads every year at the cars inspection, and every year they comment that the brake pads look essentially brand new. They don't expect I will need new brake pads until somewhere well north of 100k miles.
At the end of the day, the cost for the first 5 years are a little cheaper for the gasoline car. You have $250/ month for car payments, plus $80-100ish for gas, plus $40-50/ month for maintenance (oil, brakes, etc.
The comparable EV will cost about $500 / month in payments, plus $25 / month in additional electric costs.
Total Gas: $370-$400 / month. Total Electric: $525-$530/month
After 5 years, the cost dynamic changes radically. The two car payments go to 0. The operating costs for the EV remain around the $25 / month in electric costs. The monthly cost for the gas vehicle actually go up. You still have $80-$100, and you still have the $40-$50 for regular maintenance, but now things start to break. You have an additional $100 / month for unexpected maintenance, (maybe twice a year, something like an alternator goes, costing $600, maybe you accidentally fry a brake rotor, so that $100 brake job now costs $500.
5 years to 10 years old: Gas car: $220 - $230 / month. EV: $25 / month
After 10 years, it gets truly ugly. The gas can now has major mechanical trouble on a regular basis. The total average monthly maintenance costs are up over $250 / month, and most people consider it cheaper to replace the vehicle. The EV on the other hand is still in perfect working order, and there is no particular reason it should have significant costs this decade. The only two parts to suffer any real wear and tear are the motor controller, and the motor itself, both of which if designed properly, for the EVs usage profile, should last many decades. The motor controller will eventually fail due to a phenomenon known as silicon fingers, but in large quantities motor controllers would be very cheap to build. ($300 or less, and it should be at least 2 decades before it fails.)
1/2mV.terminall^2 since 83 miles away we presume it will be on the downslope of a parabolic-ish arc. 23lb at 300mph - 10kg at 136m/s = 10 x 136^2 = 185kJ give or take. So about the same as a Toyota Yaris going 40mph or a Ford Focus going 35mph.
These things will be going much much faster than terminal velocity, even 100 miles downrange. They simply will not have enough time to slow down. The shuttle on re-entry came in basically belly-into-the-wind to bleed of energy as fast as it could, and it still took a half hour and 6,000 miles to bleed off all that energy.
This shot is designed to be stremlined, and will not bleed very much energy at all. I wouldn't be surprised if its still moving mach 6 when it gets to its target... Try redoing your calculations for 4,000 MPH, and see what you get.
Unions work to protect workers from a bad boss.
Unions work to maximize their own profits. everything else is secondary. They are a business that employs people, same as every other company, even the ones they are paid to protect their members from.
Ah, the obligatory /. cheap shot at religion
Maybe if it weren't for the fact that organized religion is a form of tribalism/conformity, which is the sole cause of war. Without such anti-social behaviors, wars would be impossible.
Please, name an established fact and explain how this differs from a normal fact.
Force equals mass times acceleration.
The equation yeilds accurate predictions for 100% of use cases where velocity is less than 0.01C, and distances are greater than 0.1 nm.
This fact differes from other facts becasue it involves a usefull method of predictiing behaviors of systems. It is verifiable, and falsifiable (although it has only been falsified for very high speeds where it is replaced by a more complicated set of equations, and very small distances where it is replaced by even more complicated equations). The point is that scientific facts are theroies that are overwhelmingly supported by evidence, and are falsifiable by nature. Much of the trouble people have understanding this concept stems from the unending stream of bullshit advertising they see on TV to the affect of "Our new dieting pull is scientifically proven to reduce your body mass index in just three minutes!", and other such nonsense.
Teaching critical thinking in school will only help so much because people inherently believe what they want to believe, even scientists. That is why there is so much faking of data in the science community. They are only human after all. A better solution would be a group who are granted the copyrights to most science related words like "scientifically", and "proves". This group could prevent most crap science just by suing advertisers out of existence who insist on improperly using these terms. After the media is forced to stop using the terms incorrectly, people will slowly stop using them incorrectly as well.
So from whom is something being stolen, the one who offers to buy at $100 and receives $100? Or the one who offers to sell at $99.99 and receives $99.99? It seems by your definition all retailers are stealing from their customers.
The money is stolen from the second party.
The way it works is this. Party one offers the stocks for $99.99, but doesn't have the full amount of stocks that Party 2 wants to buy. Party 1 sells all of their stocks to Party 2 for $99.99, but the HFT intercepts the sale, and uses that information to buy shares from parties on other exchanges for $99.99, and then offers those shares to Party 2 at a slightly inflated price of $100.00. As the HFT has effectively depleted the stocks available, Party 2 has no choice but to buy from the HFT. The difference in price is within the margin, so Party 2 buys form the HFT never even knowing that they paid more for the stock than was originally asked, all Party 2 knows is that they offered $99.99, but that sale never completed, and the new price they could get was $100.00. The very act of offering $99.99 caused the price to change before the willing buyer at $99.99 and the willing seller at $99.99 could even complete the sale. All of this happens within fractions of a second.
The stock market only functions correctly when all parties have the same opportunity and access to the same information. When one party has access to information that no one else has, or can get, we call it insider trading, and the HFTs have created an artificial insider trading scenario. It is legal, but only just barely, and is still morally wrong. It adds nothing to the market, and unjustly enriches the HFT who provides no value added to the market.
Any competent institutional broker has a wide variety of ways to defend its customers against that, all you need is a little time for their algorithms to work. If you don't have time, well, you pay the price just like any motivated seller.
The problem with dark pools, is that the customers need to be defended from their own broker. These trades happen so fast, and there is so much raw data out there that verifying that the price you got for your stocks was optimal is prohibitively time consuming, so no one double checks that their broker actually got the best price. The high frequency trading takes a very small amount from each trade (0.1% is the amount I saw in the article). Its small enought that it gets lost in thebackground noise of the market, but it is really no difference between this and stealing a penny every time someone withdraws money from an account. Stealing is stealing no matter how you dress it up, or pretend its for the good of "The Market".
You would think more victims of our "justice system" with nothing left to lose would kill the judges and police responsible for ruining their lives.
That is a remarkably difficult thing to do once a person has been found guilty, and up until then there is hope that the "system" will work in their favor.
Besides, the world wouldn't really be better off with hardened crimninals going around killing police, prosecutors and judges. That just leads to more corruption, not less.
Carmack screwed the analysis quite thoroughly, and now its too late for them. One of two scenarios is in play here:
1) Facebook bought OR because they wanted to diversify their holdings to make themselves more resilient to changes in their core market. In this case, Facebook will likely leave OR mostly alone and except for adding some money to the pot, but when it becomes clear that OR can not or will not scale at the growth that Facebook wants/needs, then it will get the axe.
2) Facebook bought OR because of some overriding strategy that involves OR's technology. In this case, Facebook will not be allowing OR to keep going the way they have been going, which more than likely means very little if any emphasis on VR gaming, and instead is intended as a social platform for virtual interaction. In this scenario, the best that OR can manage will be to get some games developed and released, but to that end there will likely be no support from Facebook.
Carmack was correct when he stated that OR needed two things: first, they would need cash infusions at several points to be able to scale at the rate that flash-in-the-pan games require in order to meet their sales goals. Without that cash, developers would be reticent to make any games that truly took advantage of the platform because then they would be locked to it with no guarantee that OR could manufacture enough units to *not* severely limit sales of the game developers product. Facebook solves the cash problem, but only by reintroducing another reason for developers not to get involved: Facebook itself. Facebook has burned many developers before, and consequently developers are less likely to become involved with them than they would have been with any other company (possibly excepting Microsoft).
The second thing that OR needs is developer support, which, for the reasons described above, the Facebook deal makes far more difficult than it would have been if OR had been bought by almost any other company.
All things considered, OR might fare better having been bought by Facebook than going it alone, but that is by no means clear.
Facebook and Google are worlds apart. Googles Net earnings is greater than Facebooks gross revenue. Ditto, every other tech company that counts. Facebook has made a concerted effort to generate revenue any way they can, to the point of almost pissing off customers, and they still are almost an order of magnitude below any of the other big players (Google, MS, Apple). Worse still, the market is showing signs of a shift, and as Myspace can tell you, when your user base goes, they go quick.