I own a Phatbox for my VW that I hacked and put a 120GB laptop hard drive in. It has probably been in my car for about 7 years and it is still going strong, so I call BS on a lot of this stuff.
This is an anecdote- it has no statistical basis. Repeat it many, many times under controlled conditions, and then you can extrapolate with a good probability as to if it is BS or not.
I take issue with the 'doesn't support huge numbers of older PICs' Microchip has something on the order of 600-700 different PICs in production (and which rarely if ever get obsoleted) - looking through the latest MPLAB 8, I see a few rfPICs and some PIC18s that are not supported by ICD3. But if the part you're using isn't supported, that can be a huge issue.
I've seen quite a few issues with the boost circuit, they haven't traced back to an issue with the ICD3 itself- they were due to the resistor on the MCLR pin being too low, and dragging down VPP. The datasheets pretty universally (now) specify 10K on the MCLR pull up. The boost circuit on the ICD3 is more controllable, but not as strong as the one on the ICD2. With some of the newer parts, the ICD2 can very easily over-voltage MCLR.
On top of that they both seem very limited in terms of the number of breakpoints you can set, lack of data breakpoints and so forth.
If they could just sort their hardware out they might have a nice platform there.
Breakpoints and other debugging features are a matter of hardware- it adds silicon, and therefore cost. Some PICs come with embedded debugging hardware (in every part), some have special debug parts ($25-$50 US)- compared to the development parts of yesteryear, these are super-cheap.
The ICD2 is a *really* old design- it is now obsolete, unfortunately, there are lots out there. The ICD3 is a far more robust platform, from the drivers on up.
The Raspberry Pi will not replace a regular Windows machine- but I find it hard to think of any easier way to have something that also allows the user to have the freedom to poke around, modify files, even destroy the filesystem, and the system can be restored in a few minutes. SD cards are cheap enough that part of the lab setup costs could include a huge number of cards that each user could take their setup with them in their pocket.
An Android powered stick is a great choice for someone who already knows Linux, but the learning curve is way too steep for an educational environment. The Android stick doesn't have anywhere near the install base (throwing in Android phones/tablets is a red herring) or the documentation in a hacker sense- how many well supported Allwinner A10 Android distributions can you just write to a SD card with virtually any windows machine with a SD card reader? I'm not saying RPi is perfect, just that it would be a good alternative in an educational environment- far, far easier to re-write a SD card than to do even a Live-CD based install.
I was thinking about this- in the long term, you really want to encourage people to play around with things rather than run a static collection of applications. If people want to just browse the net and search, Raspberry Pi is a poor choice, but for learning about programming- the Raspberry Pi is great because if things get messed up, just flash a card with the reference image- system is re-imaged. Cards are cheap enough that you could hand them out to people and they would end up keeping their entire setup with them.
If I'm at a counter and the person behind the counter is just reading things off a screen to me, what's the point? If the person adds nothing to the transaction, what I really should be talking to them about is what they are going to do after their job is eliminated.
Yep, gigabit to the home would be cool, and I would score massive geek points, but in terms of an individual user, what use would it be? A big pipe makes a lot of sense when you're aggregating traffic from a bunch of different sites, but a normal residential customer (torrents aside) is going to be pulling most of their bandwidth from a small number of sites at any one time. Of course, this is for the near term, and I would expect that we are a pretty long way from putting a 2 way gigabit connection to use.
On the other hand, I expect that TWC already has plenty of experience in delivering one way multi-gigabit bandwidth- digital television.
On all parts I've seen, if the datasheet says 100K PE cycles minimum, is at the maximum rated temperature for the part. The physics of flash works out that the worst case is when hot. Without a temperature bound, the number of PE cycles is meaningless.
I'm not sure what you're saying is badly wrong- 40C is pretty cool for most laptops. If your drives are 31-34C, you have *very* good cooling available. a temperature sensor on the front of the hard drive (if the ambient air is coming from the front) only tells you the lowest possible temperature the rest of the drive could be. On most servers I've seen in data centers, internal temperatures in the 30's would be an indication of a very light load.
The temperature dependence is a very strong factor that does seem to be missing from the analysis- to add to what the AC parent said, my experience is that the minimum number of erase cycles is when the device is at maximum temperature, take it down to room temperature, and the typical number of erase cycles goes up by an order of magnitude. Most computers have an internal temperature of over 40C when run in a normal environment,
Your drive will fail, SSD or HD. You must be prepared for that.
Why does it matter at all? It doesn't matter the relative processing power of my phone, there's a hell of a lot more to it than processing power. Like the simple fact that my phone isn't on a different planet.
What I don't see in TFA is something that describes how the one big hurdle of this type of design will be overcome- the IMMENSE costs! The speeds that processors and RAM runs is so high you can't just drop it down on a board and expect it to work- you're in a long loop of simulate, build, test, repeat, and each iteration is extremely costly- we're not talking Arduino here- in reality, these boards (populated) in mass production will cost hundreds in just BOM costs, not counting the assembly. If the biggies in the industry are truly willing to foot the bill, great, but no matter what, these boards will still remain expensive, and likely still in the NDA wasteland as the individual parts that make it up are unlikely open up their documentation (or distribution chains) any time soon (yes, Broadcom, I'm talking about you).
With the talk of stalkers and such, what is the maximum range we can read the badges? Passive RFID has to power the badge from the reader- at long range at the frequencies that these run, you're going to need a powerful transmitter and a big antenna, which makes it pretty hard for the stalker to hide at least. I do understand that advancements are being made all the time, but we still can't break the physics and basic information theory with respect to power and signal-to-noise.
Find that IT job, and look at who is trying to sell to you. The quality jobs are going to be found via networking (the person to person kind) anyway. Not all companies are run the same way- do the legwork- find the companies that already employ people like you... and then you have a place to concentrate your search.
Classes are great- they give you the deadlines and some basic knowledge, but like any other skill, it must be practiced to be fully developed. Programming can mesh well with online learning- the physical requirements (equipment) are pretty easily available. A class is great, it is only a complement to actually doing something, and that requires commitment from the student.
However, I think "programming" is just way too generic a designator. Knowing how to program is mostly about knowing syntax- it doesn't really show you how to actually do anything terribly useful- that's what the rest of your education is for. An online programming course is awesome, but only taken as part of a whole- the math, science, language, etc. education are also vital aspects to actually getting things done.
Heard the story on NPR this morning- In all likelihood, their careers are over. They also showed some of their specialized gear to the game makers. In general, these types of things are allowed in the military if: #1 they don't get paid, and #2 they get permission first. I think they violated both.
The tech support will kill you. You can buy the hardware and wires etc, but the physical infrastructure is not the challenge- it's the human support infrastructure. Support will crush any free time you have, and also any love you have left for your fellow man. Your clientele is low income rural people, probably not tech savvy. Problem is, that they will probably also (mostly) be really nice and your neighbors. You do want to help them- without a decent size group of technical people with good personal skills as your support team, you'll be floundering.
There is no one frequency that is good for every application- it depends far more on what you're doing and you should be focused on delivering that, rather than a pretty arbitrary metric. Look at the value of what you're doing. What is the cost of things breaking? Don't forget, MTBF *includes* the time to fix the failure.
Think about live broadcasting. If you're selling informing people of what is happening right now, you better be able to recover from a link down quickly, even if it means not keeping records- but if you're selling an archival service, data loss is a problem, and some delay is acceptable.
If it's cheap, far more people just aren't going to care about the license. Raspberry Pi is a good example- Yes, like the masses, I got one. Getting pretty frustrated now with the poor (nonexistent) documentation on the hardware, particularly with respect to the mechanical aspects of the design. I'd love to be proven wrong. Fact is, it's cheap and available, so it's popular.
Make a 3D printer really cheap and/or really easy to use, and the demands for open source are quickly drowned out by the sounds of people actually using it.
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I own a Phatbox for my VW that I hacked and put a 120GB laptop hard drive in. It has probably been in my car for about 7 years and it is still going strong, so I call BS on a lot of this stuff.
This is an anecdote- it has no statistical basis. Repeat it many, many times under controlled conditions, and then you can extrapolate with a good probability as to if it is BS or not.
I take issue with the 'doesn't support huge numbers of older PICs' Microchip has something on the order of 600-700 different PICs in production (and which rarely if ever get obsoleted) - looking through the latest MPLAB 8, I see a few rfPICs and some PIC18s that are not supported by ICD3. But if the part you're using isn't supported, that can be a huge issue.
I've seen quite a few issues with the boost circuit, they haven't traced back to an issue with the ICD3 itself- they were due to the resistor on the MCLR pin being too low, and dragging down VPP. The datasheets pretty universally (now) specify 10K on the MCLR pull up. The boost circuit on the ICD3 is more controllable, but not as strong as the one on the ICD2. With some of the newer parts, the ICD2 can very easily over-voltage MCLR.
On top of that they both seem very limited in terms of the number of breakpoints you can set, lack of data breakpoints and so forth.
If they could just sort their hardware out they might have a nice platform there.
Breakpoints and other debugging features are a matter of hardware- it adds silicon, and therefore cost. Some PICs come with embedded debugging hardware (in every part), some have special debug parts ($25-$50 US)- compared to the development parts of yesteryear, these are super-cheap.
The ICD2 is a *really* old design- it is now obsolete, unfortunately, there are lots out there. The ICD3 is a far more robust platform, from the drivers on up.
What products have Intellectual Ventures developed and brought to market?
The Raspberry Pi will not replace a regular Windows machine- but I find it hard to think of any easier way to have something that also allows the user to have the freedom to poke around, modify files, even destroy the filesystem, and the system can be restored in a few minutes. SD cards are cheap enough that part of the lab setup costs could include a huge number of cards that each user could take their setup with them in their pocket.
An Android powered stick is a great choice for someone who already knows Linux, but the learning curve is way too steep for an educational environment. The Android stick doesn't have anywhere near the install base (throwing in Android phones/tablets is a red herring) or the documentation in a hacker sense- how many well supported Allwinner A10 Android distributions can you just write to a SD card with virtually any windows machine with a SD card reader? I'm not saying RPi is perfect, just that it would be a good alternative in an educational environment- far, far easier to re-write a SD card than to do even a Live-CD based install.
I was thinking about this- in the long term, you really want to encourage people to play around with things rather than run a static collection of applications. If people want to just browse the net and search, Raspberry Pi is a poor choice, but for learning about programming- the Raspberry Pi is great because if things get messed up, just flash a card with the reference image- system is re-imaged. Cards are cheap enough that you could hand them out to people and they would end up keeping their entire setup with them.
If I'm at a counter and the person behind the counter is just reading things off a screen to me, what's the point? If the person adds nothing to the transaction, what I really should be talking to them about is what they are going to do after their job is eliminated.
Yep, gigabit to the home would be cool, and I would score massive geek points, but in terms of an individual user, what use would it be? A big pipe makes a lot of sense when you're aggregating traffic from a bunch of different sites, but a normal residential customer (torrents aside) is going to be pulling most of their bandwidth from a small number of sites at any one time. Of course, this is for the near term, and I would expect that we are a pretty long way from putting a 2 way gigabit connection to use.
On the other hand, I expect that TWC already has plenty of experience in delivering one way multi-gigabit bandwidth- digital television.
Since SD cards are the standard storage medium for the Raspberry Pi, what about a speed comparison for that?
On all parts I've seen, if the datasheet says 100K PE cycles minimum, is at the maximum rated temperature for the part. The physics of flash works out that the worst case is when hot. Without a temperature bound, the number of PE cycles is meaningless.
I'm not sure what you're saying is badly wrong- 40C is pretty cool for most laptops. If your drives are 31-34C, you have *very* good cooling available. a temperature sensor on the front of the hard drive (if the ambient air is coming from the front) only tells you the lowest possible temperature the rest of the drive could be. On most servers I've seen in data centers, internal temperatures in the 30's would be an indication of a very light load.
The temperature dependence is a very strong factor that does seem to be missing from the analysis- to add to what the AC parent said, my experience is that the minimum number of erase cycles is when the device is at maximum temperature, take it down to room temperature, and the typical number of erase cycles goes up by an order of magnitude. Most computers have an internal temperature of over 40C when run in a normal environment,
Your drive will fail, SSD or HD. You must be prepared for that.
Why does it matter at all? It doesn't matter the relative processing power of my phone, there's a hell of a lot more to it than processing power. Like the simple fact that my phone isn't on a different planet.
What I don't see in TFA is something that describes how the one big hurdle of this type of design will be overcome- the IMMENSE costs! The speeds that processors and RAM runs is so high you can't just drop it down on a board and expect it to work- you're in a long loop of simulate, build, test, repeat, and each iteration is extremely costly- we're not talking Arduino here- in reality, these boards (populated) in mass production will cost hundreds in just BOM costs, not counting the assembly. If the biggies in the industry are truly willing to foot the bill, great, but no matter what, these boards will still remain expensive, and likely still in the NDA wasteland as the individual parts that make it up are unlikely open up their documentation (or distribution chains) any time soon (yes, Broadcom, I'm talking about you).
With the talk of stalkers and such, what is the maximum range we can read the badges? Passive RFID has to power the badge from the reader- at long range at the frequencies that these run, you're going to need a powerful transmitter and a big antenna, which makes it pretty hard for the stalker to hide at least. I do understand that advancements are being made all the time, but we still can't break the physics and basic information theory with respect to power and signal-to-noise.
Find that IT job, and look at who is trying to sell to you. The quality jobs are going to be found via networking (the person to person kind) anyway. Not all companies are run the same way- do the legwork- find the companies that already employ people like you... and then you have a place to concentrate your search.
And there is a version that works on Android tablets. In terms of scientific computing, Matlab is the standard, and Octave is a very good work-alike.
Isn't a subpoena a court order?
Classes are great- they give you the deadlines and some basic knowledge, but like any other skill, it must be practiced to be fully developed. Programming can mesh well with online learning- the physical requirements (equipment) are pretty easily available. A class is great, it is only a complement to actually doing something, and that requires commitment from the student.
However, I think "programming" is just way too generic a designator. Knowing how to program is mostly about knowing syntax- it doesn't really show you how to actually do anything terribly useful- that's what the rest of your education is for. An online programming course is awesome, but only taken as part of a whole- the math, science, language, etc. education are also vital aspects to actually getting things done.
Heard the story on NPR this morning- In all likelihood, their careers are over. They also showed some of their specialized gear to the game makers. In general, these types of things are allowed in the military if: #1 they don't get paid, and #2 they get permission first. I think they violated both.
The tech support will kill you. You can buy the hardware and wires etc, but the physical infrastructure is not the challenge- it's the human support infrastructure. Support will crush any free time you have, and also any love you have left for your fellow man. Your clientele is low income rural people, probably not tech savvy. Problem is, that they will probably also (mostly) be really nice and your neighbors. You do want to help them- without a decent size group of technical people with good personal skills as your support team, you'll be floundering.
There is no one frequency that is good for every application- it depends far more on what you're doing and you should be focused on delivering that, rather than a pretty arbitrary metric. Look at the value of what you're doing. What is the cost of things breaking? Don't forget, MTBF *includes* the time to fix the failure.
Think about live broadcasting. If you're selling informing people of what is happening right now, you better be able to recover from a link down quickly, even if it means not keeping records- but if you're selling an archival service, data loss is a problem, and some delay is acceptable.
Start at free and increase the price by a $0.01 for every troll or offtopic comment in their history.
If it's cheap, far more people just aren't going to care about the license. Raspberry Pi is a good example- Yes, like the masses, I got one. Getting pretty frustrated now with the poor (nonexistent) documentation on the hardware, particularly with respect to the mechanical aspects of the design. I'd love to be proven wrong. Fact is, it's cheap and available, so it's popular.
Make a 3D printer really cheap and/or really easy to use, and the demands for open source are quickly drowned out by the sounds of people actually using it.