In this pathological social construct we call civilization the rich elite have convinced the masses that by removing a person's inherent ability to construct a house for themselves and ensuring a monopoly for the construction companies they are somehow protecting people.
What? I can only conclude one of two things from the tone of your post:
Option A, you have never actually tried to build your own home and so have no idea what the process actually entails
Option B, You actually tried to build your own home, but your own ineptness caused you to fail so miserably that the local building department put a stop to you, probably saving your life in the process.
I have built 1 house completely from scratch, and renovated almost a dozen others in the course of my life. I am not a builder by trade (Software engineer currently). I do not have any professional certifications or licenses in the building trades, and I live in NY state, second only to California when it comes to building regulations. In spite of that, I have never had undue trouble with the building department or the building inspector. On the very first house, I did have to hire an architectural engineer to draft the plans for the renovation I wanted. They didn't know me from adam, and they wanted some assurance that the walls I was planning to move weren't just going to fall over. All of my other work was very straight forward. I did all of the plumbing and electrical myself. The inspectors all came through and sometimes asked for some changes for relatively minor things, but never made me take anything out or completely redo anything. Truth be told, the most trouble I ever had was with a lineman from the electric utility. He didn't like the electrical entry I had planned, and was of the opinion that it did not meet code in spite of the requisite signatures from the building inspector. I had to spend about 2 days playing phone tag with the chief building inspector and the utility supervisor before the whole thing finally got straightened out.
If you want to get along with your local building department, seek them out before you start work on anything, and be sure to do your homework as far as what regulations apply so that you can have plans in place to address them appropriately. The first time you deal with them, expect to have to pay somewhat extra for certain engineering related costs, but once they know you, and trust you are not a nitwit, they will start working with you to help you save money on the things you don't need. If you go in with a combative attitude in the first place, you can expect the most miserable and expensive process imaginable, and you will deserve every minute of the pain you get for being a douche.
10 years ago, I asked at the local IBEW about it. I already have a degree that would allow me to skip half of the requisite experience to get my license, and I know what I am doing thanks to a family history (Grandfather was a lineman for a utility in California before he retired). Because I would be coming in at low seniority, I could expect two years of hit and miss work (maybe one week a month of paid work, and when they call I must show up or get dropped). After that, they said once I got a permanent position somewhere, I could begin my actual apprenticeship and could expect 2 more years of full time employment at $15 per hour before I could test for my license. Once I got the license I would have more options, but until then I was effectively a slave.
Even at that time, I was making $25 as a line supervisor. Granted it was a dead end job at what can only be described as the shittiest company I have ever heard of, but to get that license I would have to basically go back to living in my mothers basement for 5 years, and wait with my fingers crossed that I got lucky and got the shorter end of the waiting period. Even then, I could expect a cap of around $80k per year unless I was willing to put in 80 hour weeks for years to start my own company and handle all of the business side of that deal.
I elected to go a third route. I fought tooth and nail to get back into my principle field of study and now I make that same 80k, working 40 hour weeks, and can expect to go management sometime within the next few years to get into 6 figures.
Going into the trades only makes sense when you still have the option of living at home to cover the rough years, and even then it only makes sense if you don't have the means to get that higher education and the degree that goes with it.
Look at the opportunity out there and become skilled at something completely different. There's a crapload to be made in many skilled trades now that Baby Boomers are retiring out. Some trades like plumbing and electrician can't find enough people, and the opportunity to become very successful is wide open. Be a long time before robots take the job of a plumber, electrician and other skilled laborer.
It is also painfully difficult to break into either of those trades from the outside. Most places require you to be licensed to practice, and even if they don't, no insurance will touch you if you don't have the requisite certifications and/or licenses.
If that doesn't sound too bad, look at what is required to get those credentials. Almost all accreditation programs and licensing rules require you to have at least a year or two as an apprentice under a master. The problem with that, is that there is absolutely no reason in the world that any master is going to want to take on a random apprentice. For the first two years of apprenticeships, on average the apprentice has negative value to the master (They cost more time and effort to look after than they produce in useful output). That is why the few that do offer apprenticeships, do so at minimum wage for two years. Most of the rest, even if it were of net value to the master to take on an apprentice, they would still be wary because every new apprentice that you support now will be a competitor in 5 years, and in any given middle size city (50,000 - 100,0000 metro area population), can have as few as a few dozen actual plumbers or electricians. For each new master that gets added, every single existing master will take an approximately 3% paycut; why would they willingly do that to themselves?
Most times when you see an apprenticeship, it is a son or daughter following in the family trade, and the only reason that elder master takes on the apprentice is because they are kin.
If you're tired of data science already, jump on the AI bandwagon!
I would have to agree, if you have an interest in big data (data science is the gateway to big data analytics), then by all means, pursue it. You're already ahead of the curve by quite a bit.
If you want something outside your comfort zone, but close enough to your experience to be very interesting, I would suggest playing with a Raspi, especially the hardware end of things. Understanding RS232/RS485, I2C and/or SPI communications can be very rewarding work, both intellectually speaking and financially. Embedded hardware is fascinating because it really forces you to start considering all the ways that things can go very very wrong. High level development has a lot of simplicity in that you can pretty much always count on a certain subset of fundamental operations always working as expected. In the embedded space, you can write data to an I2C bus, and what arrives at the far end isn't always what you sent. The only error correction is whatever you bring to the table.
You might even be set in a very enviable position of being able to bridge the divide between big data and embedded systems. In the near future, the IoT will start producing simply vast quantities of data, even by today's standards. All of that data will be worthless without data analytics to figure out how to make it actionable.
But in their case there is no "cycle" they get hot and stay that way.
Running electronics hot has its own host of problems. Heat softens all materials if only a little, and then you have the problem of ion migration and tin whiskers which both get much worse with high heat.
It's hard to determine because people don't advertise use of them at all. However, I know that my electric toothbrush uses an Epson 4 bit MCU of some description. It's got a status LED, basic NiMH batteryb charger and a PWM controller for an H Bridge. Braun sell a *lot* of electric toothbrushes.
To implement a NiMH or NiCD charger, you need to have an analog input, which the PIC doesn't have. You will also need to be able to store at least 32 samples at 10 bits each sample so that you can detect the charging peak and the *small* voltage drop that signals end of charge. Given that, you will have to have a separate battery management IC, and most of them come with an charge state pin that can be tied to an LED using a $0.004 FET to indicate charge status. The rest is simply a mechanical switch with the appropriate FET and resistor to drive on LED directly from the switch. Putting a uC on a toothbrush is a pointless waste of money, and the fact that it has one in it will last only until downward price pressure from cheap Chinese knockoffs that do not have a uC push the over-expensive product out of the market. I'm not saying that a uC wont be a better solution, as the battery charger chips start at around $1.50 in quantity; What I am saying is that these low end PICs are essentially useless.
Any gadget that's smarter than a simple switch will probably have some sort of basic MCU in it. Alarm system componets, sensor interfaces, timer chip replacements, MOSFET drivers, smart TRIAC drivers and so on. Appliances will have this sort of thing built in. My Bosch stick blender has some sort of speed controller for the motor. You don't need much to deal with that.
Alarm products can come in two varieties: Centralized control and distributed control. For a centralized control, you have "dumb" remote sensors, and a central control IC that can ready the electrical signals from multiple channels. In this case, the central IC needs to have many pins (at least one for every IO sensor attached to the system). For the decentralized controls, the individual devices need to have enough smarts to understand their addressing, but not much more. In the first case, a PIC just isn't going to cut it. In the second case, it would be cheaper to simply use any of a variety of addressable buses devices that can handle the i/o and the bus interactions. again, there is no need for a uC in the "smart" sensor, so why waste the money?
For the blender, motor control requires a feedback mechanism that will require an analog input that the PIC can't handle.
You want a MOC3021. No need to do any programming, it is a standalone chip that does the same thing, is cheaper per unit than the micro, and has the opto-isolation built in.
Oh and the dimers I've got in my house are definitely MCU controlled. You can communicate using a series of presses to do the setup (rising versus falling edge, minimum level and so on). Basically 3 inputs there (switch, pot and mains phase) and one output. And the dimmers are pretty cheap, so perfect for a 17 cent MCU.
You can do the same thing with a 555 timer chip ($0.03 in large quantities), and a half dozen external passives to gate the behaviors. The trick is setting the "modes" by charging and discharging specific capacitors using the 555 to control behaviors based on timing. If you are going to sell 10M units per year (not at all unreasonable for light bulbs), then a cost difference of $0.01 per unit is $100,000 per year. For that much, it is cost effective to hire an engineer for two years to do nothing but design this one circuit. In reality it will take a competent (read as expensive) engineer about a month to design and test that circuit.
If you want that product to do anything fancier, the PIC wont have enough horsepower for it anyway, so you need a beefier uC anyways
Either there are a *lot* of people who want to blink LEDs in an interesting pattern or you're mistaken about the use.
So what are the uses for that? I am curious what things people have put these to use for.
Just because a manufacturer has made a lot of something doesn't make them used for much. When a fab is spinning up a plant, they often have to do several runs of small batches (10k to 100 units), and it is useful to have those runs be a very small core that is easy to verify so that they can get a very accurate idea of the number of defects per unit area. Processors make great test runs because you can write simple software that exercises all of the silicon and identifies the number of defects per 100k units. Because of this need, the manufacturer will provide the resulting parts to their customers at very low prices.
In the end, just because PIC only charges $0.17 for them doesn't mean they actually sell very many of them, it could very easily just be a fab test run that they warehouse and sell of until they are gone.
In basic concept I agree with your theory, it fits my own anecdotal experience well, but I find that your numbers are off. The top bracket is actually closer to 20%. The reason it seems so low is that a large portion of the highly competent people are running one programmer shows, so they have no co-workers to appreciate their knowledge and skill. The places they work do a very good job of keeping them well paid and happy (assuming they don't own the company outright), so they rarely if ever switch jobs.
The middle bucket I find to be about 30%. You have to inspect their code carefully during reviews, and they do not carry the ego that would prevent them from taking quality criticism and making the minor changes they need to make to improve the quality of the code.
The bottom bucket you listed is actually 2 buckets merged into 1: The first are the irredeemably bad. These are around 40% of the total programmers. These are the people who became programmers because it seemed like a good career move, but otherwise have no interest in programming. They are the ones who actually learned how to program by sitting through 4 years of university coursework, and have to be spoon fed everything (The worst are the ones in this category with loads of experience. They think their shit doesn't stink because they have been doing this for 25 years...)
The last category are the ones who suck now, but will be good when they gain more experience. They are about 10% of the whole.
It makes up for this by being totally stand-alone with a built-in clock, costing about fifteen cents in volume and coming in a 6 pin package the size of a grain of rice.
And in the grand scheme of things, it is about as useful as a grain of rice in the programming sense.
Six pins? You've got two for power, at least one for programming, so that leaves you with 3 pins, and with so little actual compute power, the best you could really manage is to blink a few LEDs in an interesting pattern. You don't even have enough space to properly handle an I2C or serial interface on two of the pins, so what the hell are you going to do with this thing?
4K monitors are not as great as you think they are. I upgraded to a samsung 28" monitor a year ago thinking the same thing. To actually be able to see anything I had to increase the UI to 150% of normal.
The smallest that a 4k screen is really practical as a computer monitor is at about 36". Anything less and you have to bump up the UI settings as you indicated, so you're basically wasting the extra pixel density.
For 8k monitors, the smallest practical size to see the benefit will be at about 70".
This may sound crazy, but there are plenty of use cases for a desktop surface that large, and none of them have anything to do with gaming. The most important use I have is for CAD and software development. Even with my current 4k system, both of those task are somewhat tedious. For CAD, having the entire file open and visible at once without having to zoom and scroll all of the time saves me a huge pain in the ass. For software development, I have so many windows open with so many things I want to pay attention to, that dual 4k screens still get cluttered. A single 8k would have double the window height which would give me the ability to keep event the longest functions visible in their entirety. Once any reasonably large 8k screen and video card are available for less than $5k, they will get my money.
LED lights so far don't seem particularly better than CFLs.
That depends on brand. If you buy the crap CREE ones that home depot sells, or the off-brand Chinese knockoffs, then yes, they burn out fast. If you pony up for the somewhat more expensive GE or Phillips, then they will last. I replaced over 30 lights with Phillips LED bulbs back in '07 and '08 and all of them are still lit today. The only ones I have ever had to replace were the Home Depot special buys, and the Ebay "deals" that I have purchased since that initial purchase.
If you want good quality lights, find your local lighting specialty store, and buy whatever brand they use in their showroom (They usually sell them as well).
And worse, why do Dell laptop batteries die so suddenly?
The number one battery killer is heat. The absolute worst place to have a laptop battery is inside a laptop next to 50 watts of space heating. Cooking a battery at temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit will destroy it quickly even if it is not being actively used. That is why laptop and phone batteries don't last very long. Car batteries on the other hand are actively cooled to prevent damage to the battery, and they are not subjected to external heating from other system components.
I have an extended battery for my phone so I now do the same thing roughly; on a typical day I will limit the charge to 84% and discharge to maybe 30-40%.
Just as important for phone battery longevity is keeping them in a healthy temperature range, which means not keeping them in a pocket, and keeping them out of direct sunlight when driving. A belt mounted phone clip can effectively double the lifespan of the battery.
I'd like to see the results of Tesla's amazing battery tech on electric bicycles.
This does not appear to be exclusive to Tesla batteries. I have two EVs, the older one has more than 60k miles on it, and the decrease in capacity is barely noticeable
I expect that this has to do with the battery conditioning that is present on all modern EVs, which means that it would be impractical for bicycles.
AI is going to take over, so why not have high fucking standards?
Because Self Driving Vehicles are already safer than the AVERAGE human. That means the every day you delay replacing human drivers with SDCs, is a day in which somewhere between zero and 3500 extra people die that didn't have to.
I'm not sure if its basic math, or basic safety engineering you don't understand, but either way, I would personally appreciate it if you would keep your opinion to yourself until you are qualified to have one.
The truth is, a good driver would not have hit that pedestrian.
That is only half of the truth. The whole truth is that only a small percentage of humans are good drivers. As a professional driver, I can tell you that even professional drivers are only good drivers for part of the time they are on the road. There are many times when they are not at their peak. There are a large set of drivers who can only be classified as "crappy" when they are on their game, and "drunken lemurs" when they are not.
LIDAR should always see pedestrians, easy. But when you're pushing a bike - large object made of interconnecting angular metal structures - across the road, it should be a glowing beacon to radar.
It probably did appear and was likely mis-classified as something that could be safely ignored. I give odds that this is a software bug of some kind.
The test of the thing will be if the engineers can properly identify the root of the software problem and fix the system so that it properly identifies the hazard when the saved sensor data is replayed through the controller software.
Level 3 shouldn't exist; it's too dangerous. Even Level 4 probably shouldn't exist, in that it can leave people stranded when things go wrong (but it's supposed to always avoid accidents / unsafe situations and pull over safely when it can't handle them). The levels should be 1, 2, 5.
I'm sorry to have to bring reality into your delusion, but that is not how engineering works. You can't just go from level 2 to level 5 without many millions of miles of real world experience.
The best example of how this process works is the airline industry. In the airline industry, all kinds of new auto piloting features have been added over the years. They were mostly good, but flaws have been found that have caused crashes. Without those crashes, the flaws would never have been found because they are so subtle. That is why the NTSB investigates crashes, and very rarely are criminal charges brought. The reason is simple. If you start bringing criminal charges, then people stop co-operating, and the system that we have now that results in constantly improving safety doesn't work. There isn't anyone that will argue anymore that what we have now for airline safety is far better than it would have been if we stayed solely with 1950's technology in the cockpit, and you can't get where we are now any other way than the way we did: Billions of flight miles of testing with live passengers.
The NTSB seems to be taking the same approach with self driving cars, and I applaud their approach. The NTSB doesn't (and nothing else can) guarantee that there wont be accidents like this. The assurance you do get is that every year, the technology will improve and the danger will be less than before. The systems will always get safer because of the way the NTSB works.
It was long ago determined by our good friends at NASA and the NTSB that the single most dangerous piece of equipment in power air flight is the pilot. This part cannot be significantly improved over its current state, so it has been systematically replaced in the cockpit over the last 50 years. Today, the Pilots are largely just there in case something goes truly wrong, but we are quickly approaching the time when the presence of a pilot will not significantly improve the odds of surviving any given flight.
Applying that same principle to over the road travel is a no-brainer, and given that there are some tens of thousands of traffic deaths in any given year, self driving cars would need to kill on the order of thousands people for every year sooner that they bring about an end to humans in the driver seat.
So far self driving cars have killed less than 10 people that I know of, and if it takes them 10 more years to get it right without killing anyone, then it would be worth the trade if they had to kill 10,000 people to get it right in 9 years instead of 10.
We do know that it didn't brake. There was no change in orientation of the camera that would have resulted from even slight braking. Braking force results in the front of a car dropping and the rear rising. This happens in all cars, even those with active suspension (although with A.S., the level is restored pretty quickly and the dip isn't nearly as noticeable). This camera did not change orientation at all; ergo the vehicle did not apply the brakes.
Currently people work well in the 60's and even 70's and work 40 hours a week with a mere 2 weeks of vacation. OK so people retire in the 40's and 50's or change the work week to 32 hours, etc. Why not embrace the increase in productivity instead of fearing it or worse impede its inevitability?
The problem is that labor follows the law of supply and demand just like everything else in capitalist economics, and the labor supply at the lowest skill levels vastly outstrips demand already. That is why average wages have been stagnant for nearly an entire generation. The only thing preventing wages from actually falling in the bottom brackets is minimum wage laws. The trouble is that it is now becoming viable to simply replace the human workers outright, which only makes the supply and demand economics worse for unskilled and low skill laborers.
As technology gets more sophisticated, this same effect is working its way up the skill levels. At the current rate of progress, within one generation, the supply of laborers with an IQ less than 100 will outstrip the demand for such laborers by nearly 3 to 1. It does absolutely no good that the demand for 130+ IQ will be sky high, since no amount of training will allow a below 100 worker to do a 130+ job. The only way to convert below 100 workers into 130+ workers is with a huge investment in education (Think trillions of dollars per decade) at all grade levels. Start education at 3 years old, and put the same resources into every child as the left wants to put into special needs children. Treat each one like they might be the next Einstein.
But, that is not what we will do. What we will do is continue to marginalize ever greater portions of the population, and continue to argue over the mostly irrelevant minimum wage like that is the solution to anything. We might even try a Universal Basic Income scheme that is destined to failure juts like every other flavor of communism that has come before it. Maybe we will even start internment camps for the poor or forced sterilizations. God knows, we're a fucked up country already, it wouldn't take much to go that extra mile...
All told, I hope it never comes to that, but I'm teaching my kids how to handle anything that might happen, just in case it really does get ugly.
The firing will come next month when the humans are done training their replacements.
These companies (Fed Ex, UPS, DHL, etc...) all have massive turnover problems. Last I had seen, UPS was turning over 50% of their part time workforce every year. They don't have to fire anybody to replace the workforce with robots, just stop hiring for 3 months...
The union at UPS (Teamsters if anyone cares) is royally screwed. The company wants to bring in automated vehicles, and automated sorting, and all manner of other productivity enhancements and human labor replacement technologies, but the company has no interest in firing anyone. They just want to avoid having to be continually hiring. Those people that work there, will continue to have a job for as long as they want, but when they leave or retire, they will be replaced with a robot instead of a human.
This means that the workforce doesn't really care one way or the other. Their job is assured, but the union will see dwindling membership and reduced income from dues which means that all those people that work down at the union hall are going to be the only ones who actually find themselves out of a job. I can't say I have a lot of sympathy for them either, most union officials were just as big of douchebags as the managers.
if (ptr != NULL) {
delete ptr;
ptr = NULL;
}
And then come and claim a GC is slower...
Its not the code that you execute to free memory alone, its when you choose to do so...
Generic GC hasn't the foggiest idea when is a good time to reap, its just does it whenever the hell it feels like it. With real languages, I control when memory is reaped.
If you are writing performance code in C++ and you don't know what a custom allocator looks like, you're hopelessly out of your depth, consult a professional.
Slashdot Mirror
Or spring mechanical energy. Large pistons into the earth.
I now have this vision of a giant trebuchet!
Mandatory siege weaponry for everyone!
In this pathological social construct we call civilization the rich elite have convinced the masses that by removing a person's inherent ability to construct a house for themselves and ensuring a monopoly for the construction companies they are somehow protecting people.
What? I can only conclude one of two things from the tone of your post:
Option A, you have never actually tried to build your own home and so have no idea what the process actually entails
Option B, You actually tried to build your own home, but your own ineptness caused you to fail so miserably that the local building department put a stop to you, probably saving your life in the process.
I have built 1 house completely from scratch, and renovated almost a dozen others in the course of my life. I am not a builder by trade (Software engineer currently). I do not have any professional certifications or licenses in the building trades, and I live in NY state, second only to California when it comes to building regulations. In spite of that, I have never had undue trouble with the building department or the building inspector. On the very first house, I did have to hire an architectural engineer to draft the plans for the renovation I wanted. They didn't know me from adam, and they wanted some assurance that the walls I was planning to move weren't just going to fall over. All of my other work was very straight forward. I did all of the plumbing and electrical myself. The inspectors all came through and sometimes asked for some changes for relatively minor things, but never made me take anything out or completely redo anything. Truth be told, the most trouble I ever had was with a lineman from the electric utility. He didn't like the electrical entry I had planned, and was of the opinion that it did not meet code in spite of the requisite signatures from the building inspector. I had to spend about 2 days playing phone tag with the chief building inspector and the utility supervisor before the whole thing finally got straightened out.
If you want to get along with your local building department, seek them out before you start work on anything, and be sure to do your homework as far as what regulations apply so that you can have plans in place to address them appropriately. The first time you deal with them, expect to have to pay somewhat extra for certain engineering related costs, but once they know you, and trust you are not a nitwit, they will start working with you to help you save money on the things you don't need. If you go in with a combative attitude in the first place, you can expect the most miserable and expensive process imaginable, and you will deserve every minute of the pain you get for being a douche.
10 years ago, I asked at the local IBEW about it. I already have a degree that would allow me to skip half of the requisite experience to get my license, and I know what I am doing thanks to a family history (Grandfather was a lineman for a utility in California before he retired). Because I would be coming in at low seniority, I could expect two years of hit and miss work (maybe one week a month of paid work, and when they call I must show up or get dropped). After that, they said once I got a permanent position somewhere, I could begin my actual apprenticeship and could expect 2 more years of full time employment at $15 per hour before I could test for my license. Once I got the license I would have more options, but until then I was effectively a slave.
Even at that time, I was making $25 as a line supervisor. Granted it was a dead end job at what can only be described as the shittiest company I have ever heard of, but to get that license I would have to basically go back to living in my mothers basement for 5 years, and wait with my fingers crossed that I got lucky and got the shorter end of the waiting period. Even then, I could expect a cap of around $80k per year unless I was willing to put in 80 hour weeks for years to start my own company and handle all of the business side of that deal.
I elected to go a third route. I fought tooth and nail to get back into my principle field of study and now I make that same 80k, working 40 hour weeks, and can expect to go management sometime within the next few years to get into 6 figures.
Going into the trades only makes sense when you still have the option of living at home to cover the rough years, and even then it only makes sense if you don't have the means to get that higher education and the degree that goes with it.
Look at the opportunity out there and become skilled at something completely different. There's a crapload to be made in many skilled trades now that Baby Boomers are retiring out. Some trades like plumbing and electrician can't find enough people, and the opportunity to become very successful is wide open. Be a long time before robots take the job of a plumber, electrician and other skilled laborer.
It is also painfully difficult to break into either of those trades from the outside. Most places require you to be licensed to practice, and even if they don't, no insurance will touch you if you don't have the requisite certifications and/or licenses.
If that doesn't sound too bad, look at what is required to get those credentials. Almost all accreditation programs and licensing rules require you to have at least a year or two as an apprentice under a master. The problem with that, is that there is absolutely no reason in the world that any master is going to want to take on a random apprentice. For the first two years of apprenticeships, on average the apprentice has negative value to the master (They cost more time and effort to look after than they produce in useful output). That is why the few that do offer apprenticeships, do so at minimum wage for two years. Most of the rest, even if it were of net value to the master to take on an apprentice, they would still be wary because every new apprentice that you support now will be a competitor in 5 years, and in any given middle size city (50,000 - 100,0000 metro area population), can have as few as a few dozen actual plumbers or electricians. For each new master that gets added, every single existing master will take an approximately 3% paycut; why would they willingly do that to themselves?
Most times when you see an apprenticeship, it is a son or daughter following in the family trade, and the only reason that elder master takes on the apprentice is because they are kin.
If you're tired of data science already, jump on the AI bandwagon!
I would have to agree, if you have an interest in big data (data science is the gateway to big data analytics), then by all means, pursue it. You're already ahead of the curve by quite a bit.
If you want something outside your comfort zone, but close enough to your experience to be very interesting, I would suggest playing with a Raspi, especially the hardware end of things. Understanding RS232/RS485, I2C and/or SPI communications can be very rewarding work, both intellectually speaking and financially. Embedded hardware is fascinating because it really forces you to start considering all the ways that things can go very very wrong. High level development has a lot of simplicity in that you can pretty much always count on a certain subset of fundamental operations always working as expected. In the embedded space, you can write data to an I2C bus, and what arrives at the far end isn't always what you sent. The only error correction is whatever you bring to the table.
You might even be set in a very enviable position of being able to bridge the divide between big data and embedded systems. In the near future, the IoT will start producing simply vast quantities of data, even by today's standards. All of that data will be worthless without data analytics to figure out how to make it actionable.
But in their case there is no "cycle" they get hot and stay that way.
Running electronics hot has its own host of problems. Heat softens all materials if only a little, and then you have the problem of ion migration and tin whiskers which both get much worse with high heat.
Interesting, lets pick those apart a bit.
It's hard to determine because people don't advertise use of them at all. However, I know that my electric toothbrush uses an Epson 4 bit MCU of some description. It's got a status LED, basic NiMH batteryb charger and a PWM controller for an H Bridge. Braun sell a *lot* of electric toothbrushes.
To implement a NiMH or NiCD charger, you need to have an analog input, which the PIC doesn't have. You will also need to be able to store at least 32 samples at 10 bits each sample so that you can detect the charging peak and the *small* voltage drop that signals end of charge. Given that, you will have to have a separate battery management IC, and most of them come with an charge state pin that can be tied to an LED using a $0.004 FET to indicate charge status. The rest is simply a mechanical switch with the appropriate FET and resistor to drive on LED directly from the switch. Putting a uC on a toothbrush is a pointless waste of money, and the fact that it has one in it will last only until downward price pressure from cheap Chinese knockoffs that do not have a uC push the over-expensive product out of the market. I'm not saying that a uC wont be a better solution, as the battery charger chips start at around $1.50 in quantity; What I am saying is that these low end PICs are essentially useless.
Any gadget that's smarter than a simple switch will probably have some sort of basic MCU in it. Alarm system componets, sensor interfaces, timer chip replacements, MOSFET drivers, smart TRIAC drivers and so on. Appliances will have this sort of thing built in. My Bosch stick blender has some sort of speed controller for the motor. You don't need much to deal with that.
Alarm products can come in two varieties: Centralized control and distributed control. For a centralized control, you have "dumb" remote sensors, and a central control IC that can ready the electrical signals from multiple channels. In this case, the central IC needs to have many pins (at least one for every IO sensor attached to the system). For the decentralized controls, the individual devices need to have enough smarts to understand their addressing, but not much more. In the first case, a PIC just isn't going to cut it. In the second case, it would be cheaper to simply use any of a variety of addressable buses devices that can handle the i/o and the bus interactions. again, there is no need for a uC in the "smart" sensor, so why waste the money?
For the blender, motor control requires a feedback mechanism that will require an analog input that the PIC can't handle.
Here's an example of using one as a zero crossing TRIAC controller: http://ww1.microchip.com/downl... [microchip.com]
You want a MOC3021. No need to do any programming, it is a standalone chip that does the same thing, is cheaper per unit than the micro, and has the opto-isolation built in.
Oh and the dimers I've got in my house are definitely MCU controlled. You can communicate using a series of presses to do the setup (rising versus falling edge, minimum level and so on). Basically 3 inputs there (switch, pot and mains phase) and one output. And the dimmers are pretty cheap, so perfect for a 17 cent MCU.
You can do the same thing with a 555 timer chip ($0.03 in large quantities), and a half dozen external passives to gate the behaviors. The trick is setting the "modes" by charging and discharging specific capacitors using the 555 to control behaviors based on timing. If you are going to sell 10M units per year (not at all unreasonable for light bulbs), then a cost difference of $0.01 per unit is $100,000 per year. For that much, it is cost effective to hire an engineer for two years to do nothing but design this one circuit. In reality it will take a competent (read as expensive) engineer about a month to design and test that circuit.
If you want that product to do anything fancier, the PIC wont have enough horsepower for it anyway, so you need a beefier uC anyways
Either there are a *lot* of people who want to blink LEDs in an interesting pattern or you're mistaken about the use.
So what are the uses for that? I am curious what things people have put these to use for.
Just because a manufacturer has made a lot of something doesn't make them used for much. When a fab is spinning up a plant, they often have to do several runs of small batches (10k to 100 units), and it is useful to have those runs be a very small core that is easy to verify so that they can get a very accurate idea of the number of defects per unit area. Processors make great test runs because you can write simple software that exercises all of the silicon and identifies the number of defects per 100k units. Because of this need, the manufacturer will provide the resulting parts to their customers at very low prices.
In the end, just because PIC only charges $0.17 for them doesn't mean they actually sell very many of them, it could very easily just be a fab test run that they warehouse and sell of until they are gone.
In basic concept I agree with your theory, it fits my own anecdotal experience well, but I find that your numbers are off. The top bracket is actually closer to 20%. The reason it seems so low is that a large portion of the highly competent people are running one programmer shows, so they have no co-workers to appreciate their knowledge and skill. The places they work do a very good job of keeping them well paid and happy (assuming they don't own the company outright), so they rarely if ever switch jobs.
The middle bucket I find to be about 30%. You have to inspect their code carefully during reviews, and they do not carry the ego that would prevent them from taking quality criticism and making the minor changes they need to make to improve the quality of the code.
The bottom bucket you listed is actually 2 buckets merged into 1: The first are the irredeemably bad. These are around 40% of the total programmers. These are the people who became programmers because it seemed like a good career move, but otherwise have no interest in programming. They are the ones who actually learned how to program by sitting through 4 years of university coursework, and have to be spoon fed everything (The worst are the ones in this category with loads of experience. They think their shit doesn't stink because they have been doing this for 25 years...)
The last category are the ones who suck now, but will be good when they gain more experience. They are about 10% of the whole.
It makes up for this by being totally stand-alone with a built-in clock, costing about fifteen cents in volume and coming in a 6 pin package the size of a grain of rice.
And in the grand scheme of things, it is about as useful as a grain of rice in the programming sense.
Six pins? You've got two for power, at least one for programming, so that leaves you with 3 pins, and with so little actual compute power, the best you could really manage is to blink a few LEDs in an interesting pattern. You don't even have enough space to properly handle an I2C or serial interface on two of the pins, so what the hell are you going to do with this thing?
4K monitors are not as great as you think they are. I upgraded to a samsung 28" monitor a year ago thinking the same thing. To actually be able to see anything I had to increase the UI to 150% of normal.
The smallest that a 4k screen is really practical as a computer monitor is at about 36". Anything less and you have to bump up the UI settings as you indicated, so you're basically wasting the extra pixel density.
For 8k monitors, the smallest practical size to see the benefit will be at about 70".
This may sound crazy, but there are plenty of use cases for a desktop surface that large, and none of them have anything to do with gaming. The most important use I have is for CAD and software development. Even with my current 4k system, both of those task are somewhat tedious. For CAD, having the entire file open and visible at once without having to zoom and scroll all of the time saves me a huge pain in the ass. For software development, I have so many windows open with so many things I want to pay attention to, that dual 4k screens still get cluttered. A single 8k would have double the window height which would give me the ability to keep event the longest functions visible in their entirety. Once any reasonably large 8k screen and video card are available for less than $5k, they will get my money.
LED lights so far don't seem particularly better than CFLs.
That depends on brand. If you buy the crap CREE ones that home depot sells, or the off-brand Chinese knockoffs, then yes, they burn out fast. If you pony up for the somewhat more expensive GE or Phillips, then they will last. I replaced over 30 lights with Phillips LED bulbs back in '07 and '08 and all of them are still lit today. The only ones I have ever had to replace were the Home Depot special buys, and the Ebay "deals" that I have purchased since that initial purchase.
If you want good quality lights, find your local lighting specialty store, and buy whatever brand they use in their showroom (They usually sell them as well).
And worse, why do Dell laptop batteries die so suddenly?
The number one battery killer is heat. The absolute worst place to have a laptop battery is inside a laptop next to 50 watts of space heating. Cooking a battery at temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit will destroy it quickly even if it is not being actively used. That is why laptop and phone batteries don't last very long. Car batteries on the other hand are actively cooled to prevent damage to the battery, and they are not subjected to external heating from other system components.
I have an extended battery for my phone so I now do the same thing roughly; on a typical day I will limit the charge to 84% and discharge to maybe 30-40%.
Just as important for phone battery longevity is keeping them in a healthy temperature range, which means not keeping them in a pocket, and keeping them out of direct sunlight when driving. A belt mounted phone clip can effectively double the lifespan of the battery.
I'd like to see the results of Tesla's amazing battery tech on electric bicycles.
This does not appear to be exclusive to Tesla batteries. I have two EVs, the older one has more than 60k miles on it, and the decrease in capacity is barely noticeable
I expect that this has to do with the battery conditioning that is present on all modern EVs, which means that it would be impractical for bicycles.
AI is going to take over, so why not have high fucking standards?
Because Self Driving Vehicles are already safer than the AVERAGE human. That means the every day you delay replacing human drivers with SDCs, is a day in which somewhere between zero and 3500 extra people die that didn't have to.
I'm not sure if its basic math, or basic safety engineering you don't understand, but either way, I would personally appreciate it if you would keep your opinion to yourself until you are qualified to have one.
The truth is, a good driver would not have hit that pedestrian.
That is only half of the truth. The whole truth is that only a small percentage of humans are good drivers. As a professional driver, I can tell you that even professional drivers are only good drivers for part of the time they are on the road. There are many times when they are not at their peak. There are a large set of drivers who can only be classified as "crappy" when they are on their game, and "drunken lemurs" when they are not.
LIDAR should always see pedestrians, easy. But when you're pushing a bike - large object made of interconnecting angular metal structures - across the road, it should be a glowing beacon to radar.
It probably did appear and was likely mis-classified as something that could be safely ignored. I give odds that this is a software bug of some kind.
The test of the thing will be if the engineers can properly identify the root of the software problem and fix the system so that it properly identifies the hazard when the saved sensor data is replayed through the controller software.
Level 3 shouldn't exist; it's too dangerous. Even Level 4 probably shouldn't exist, in that it can leave people stranded when things go wrong (but it's supposed to always avoid accidents / unsafe situations and pull over safely when it can't handle them). The levels should be 1, 2, 5.
I'm sorry to have to bring reality into your delusion, but that is not how engineering works. You can't just go from level 2 to level 5 without many millions of miles of real world experience.
The best example of how this process works is the airline industry. In the airline industry, all kinds of new auto piloting features have been added over the years. They were mostly good, but flaws have been found that have caused crashes. Without those crashes, the flaws would never have been found because they are so subtle. That is why the NTSB investigates crashes, and very rarely are criminal charges brought. The reason is simple. If you start bringing criminal charges, then people stop co-operating, and the system that we have now that results in constantly improving safety doesn't work. There isn't anyone that will argue anymore that what we have now for airline safety is far better than it would have been if we stayed solely with 1950's technology in the cockpit, and you can't get where we are now any other way than the way we did: Billions of flight miles of testing with live passengers.
The NTSB seems to be taking the same approach with self driving cars, and I applaud their approach. The NTSB doesn't (and nothing else can) guarantee that there wont be accidents like this. The assurance you do get is that every year, the technology will improve and the danger will be less than before. The systems will always get safer because of the way the NTSB works.
It was long ago determined by our good friends at NASA and the NTSB that the single most dangerous piece of equipment in power air flight is the pilot. This part cannot be significantly improved over its current state, so it has been systematically replaced in the cockpit over the last 50 years. Today, the Pilots are largely just there in case something goes truly wrong, but we are quickly approaching the time when the presence of a pilot will not significantly improve the odds of surviving any given flight.
Applying that same principle to over the road travel is a no-brainer, and given that there are some tens of thousands of traffic deaths in any given year, self driving cars would need to kill on the order of thousands people for every year sooner that they bring about an end to humans in the driver seat.
So far self driving cars have killed less than 10 people that I know of, and if it takes them 10 more years to get it right without killing anyone, then it would be worth the trade if they had to kill 10,000 people to get it right in 9 years instead of 10.
We don't know that it didn't break
We do know that it didn't brake. There was no change in orientation of the camera that would have resulted from even slight braking. Braking force results in the front of a car dropping and the rear rising. This happens in all cars, even those with active suspension (although with A.S., the level is restored pretty quickly and the dip isn't nearly as noticeable). This camera did not change orientation at all; ergo the vehicle did not apply the brakes.
Just as famous as tech CEOs Bob Gates, Steven Jabs and Marco Zurkberg.
Somehow, "#^@& the Zurk", just doesn't have the same ring...
Currently people work well in the 60's and even 70's and work 40 hours a week with a mere 2 weeks of vacation. OK so people retire in the 40's and 50's or change the work week to 32 hours, etc. Why not embrace the increase in productivity instead of fearing it or worse impede its inevitability?
The problem is that labor follows the law of supply and demand just like everything else in capitalist economics, and the labor supply at the lowest skill levels vastly outstrips demand already. That is why average wages have been stagnant for nearly an entire generation. The only thing preventing wages from actually falling in the bottom brackets is minimum wage laws. The trouble is that it is now becoming viable to simply replace the human workers outright, which only makes the supply and demand economics worse for unskilled and low skill laborers.
As technology gets more sophisticated, this same effect is working its way up the skill levels. At the current rate of progress, within one generation, the supply of laborers with an IQ less than 100 will outstrip the demand for such laborers by nearly 3 to 1. It does absolutely no good that the demand for 130+ IQ will be sky high, since no amount of training will allow a below 100 worker to do a 130+ job. The only way to convert below 100 workers into 130+ workers is with a huge investment in education (Think trillions of dollars per decade) at all grade levels. Start education at 3 years old, and put the same resources into every child as the left wants to put into special needs children. Treat each one like they might be the next Einstein.
But, that is not what we will do. What we will do is continue to marginalize ever greater portions of the population, and continue to argue over the mostly irrelevant minimum wage like that is the solution to anything. We might even try a Universal Basic Income scheme that is destined to failure juts like every other flavor of communism that has come before it. Maybe we will even start internment camps for the poor or forced sterilizations. God knows, we're a fucked up country already, it wouldn't take much to go that extra mile...
All told, I hope it never comes to that, but I'm teaching my kids how to handle anything that might happen, just in case it really does get ugly.
The firing will come next month when the humans are done training their replacements.
These companies (Fed Ex, UPS, DHL, etc...) all have massive turnover problems. Last I had seen, UPS was turning over 50% of their part time workforce every year. They don't have to fire anybody to replace the workforce with robots, just stop hiring for 3 months...
The union at UPS (Teamsters if anyone cares) is royally screwed. The company wants to bring in automated vehicles, and automated sorting, and all manner of other productivity enhancements and human labor replacement technologies, but the company has no interest in firing anyone. They just want to avoid having to be continually hiring. Those people that work there, will continue to have a job for as long as they want, but when they leave or retire, they will be replaced with a robot instead of a human.
This means that the workforce doesn't really care one way or the other. Their job is assured, but the union will see dwindling membership and reduced income from dues which means that all those people that work down at the union hall are going to be the only ones who actually find themselves out of a job. I can't say I have a lot of sympathy for them either, most union officials were just as big of douchebags as the managers.
How much of a loser do you have to be to cheat and still lose?
Its not the code that you execute to free memory alone, its when you choose to do so...
Generic GC hasn't the foggiest idea when is a good time to reap, its just does it whenever the hell it feels like it. With real languages, I control when memory is reaped.
If you are writing performance code in C++ and you don't know what a custom allocator looks like, you're hopelessly out of your depth, consult a professional.