Adaptive cruise is what finally made cruise control useful again. A bummer that rain confuses it, but other than that, it works perfectly on all the Toyota's I've had it on. Until I got that, I couldn't remember the last time I bothered with normal cruise. These days you really need to be out in the boonies to have sufficiently light traffic that you're no constantly having to tweak your speed.
Bonus points now is that Toyota bundles this with pre-collision detection. That has kicked in a number of times. Most of those it was just reacting a split-second quicker than I was and I would have avoided the collision even if it wasn't there. But there are at least two times where the situation changed around me so quickly that I would credit it for significantly lowering the odds that I would have had a big problem on my hands.
Having jumped into this world recently, I have some observations...
At least in my age-bracket (early 50-something, but trolling for 40-somethings and even 30-somethings that are interesting), nearly all the women on Tinder want to replace their lost soul-mate and they want to do it yesterday. This seems to be true of most of the dating sites I'm on. And if you are not existentially clamoring for the same thing then you must be just a serial-dater or a hookup guy and are a waste of their time.
The notion that a soulmate is a difficult thing to find, and that sometimes it needs to develop organically, is just lost on them. Seems they'd rather sit at home alone rather than entertain the notion that perhaps getting out and about with a less-than-ideal match might be a better use of their time. They might even learn something about how other people work/think/behave, and maybe learn something about themselves in the process. And if that less-than-ideal match is physically attractive, not the end of the world to let off some steam in the pent-up-hormones dept.
Personally I try to go in with an open mind, and if the date goes nowhere, I got an evening out at the very least. Or it might cultivate a beneficial platonic relationship, which has happened more than once for me. If it's a good fit and grows into something more, then I'm open to that too. You know, just like how real dating works. But the "ya-gotta-be-looking-to-get-married-and-yesterday" filter is a huge obstacle for everyone involved.
I *am* puzzled at the blatant dishonesty on physical attributes. Lying on your height? Really? And I've gotten really good at reading between the pixels, as it were, on the women's photos. Or at the very least, figure they will be one or two notches less attractive in person. But I'm open to the notion that after a couple of hours, if a person's personality is attractive, the physical appearance truly does go down in importance. Which is one of the biggest limitations in online dating, which is that it's a rare photograph that also conveys a person's soul (to be a bit melodramatic).
My pictures are representative of how I look. And of course I pick ones that make me look good, but not deceptively so. The only fudging I do is with age. And I'm unapologetic about it. There are a statistically unlikely distributions of 39 and 49y/o women on the site. Sorry, no way. The only explanation is they are trying to game the age filter. In my case, losing 25lbs and hitting the gym regularly means an age filter would unfairly bias me out of searches. *Every* time I've come clean on my age after meeting someone, I always get surprised reactions that I really do look mid-40's (I usually advertise upper 40's), and a few times people have commented that my upbeat demeanor is more of a upper-30/lower-40's person.
So I won't be happy if they somehow implement age verification, as I truly believe that people put more importance on it than they should. But I imagine that the women will be even less happy, based on the number of 9's I see in the ages.
One thing I loved about the Intel Edison was the seamless support for LiPo batteries. Of course, Intel is as fickle as Google when it comes to killing off good products, so the Edison is no more, much to my disappointment.
With the caveat that I'm a SW guy, and only an amateur HW tinkerer, I tried for a very long time to prototype a decent charging/step-up converter that could be tacked on to the compute module. Never got anything stable, and in the end ran out of time. (I suppose I could have lifted Sparkfun's design, but the chip they used is very difficult to work with, even if you are reasonably comfortable with surface-mount/reflow construction)
Other than that I'd love to have time to tinker more with the CM, but most of my projects involve a battery.
All the other commentary aside, could they one day fix my pet peeve: the fixed-size, microscopic font for the street names. Doesn't matter how goddamn close you zoom, it always reduces the street name back down to the 0.4 point font. Yeah, I'm a 50-something now who's eyes aren't what they used to be. But I'm pretty sure that even when my eyesight was better, I would still have trouble reading the tiny print. Is it such a crime against humanity to set a zoom threshold where the text size starts to grow with the other features of the map?
No one is talking about loan forgiveness. What the article is about the mess they and society are in.
Here are the facts:
1. If you have a HS diploma you will live with your parents until 40 and have a life of poverty. HR won't give you the chance to build your resume outside of your grocery store or McDonalds. It kind of forces you to go to a trade school or a university of you want a non horrible sucky life. Don't bother talking about your friend Jon or yourself if you developed computer skills in the late 1990s. That was abnormal and still a very minority statistic.
2. Cost of living is VERY VERY HIGH. You can't attack the kids for not planning when your first jobs pay $35,000 a year with no experience. How the fuck can you pay rent of $1500 a month with that kind of salary? Let alone pay off the loan and a car payment?
So you can blame the kids for being stupid but if you are older which I assume you are, then you have no right to speak as you never had to pay these outrageous prices the youngers folks pay today. In the 1970s you could work at McDonalds and pay your Harvard Degree no problem. This is not true today.
Being one of those "older" persons, lucky enough to have parents who could balance between paying for a state college and taking out manageable loans, this is spot on. Back when I was doing this (mid-80's) I rubbed elbows with plenty of less-fortunate students who hustled at grocery-store jobs to make it happen.
But today, if your demographic is such that your parents are in a position where their feasible contribution to your education is $0, you are more or less screwed.
I witnessed this close-up-and-personal with an early-20-something acquaintance, who despite working so much that school could only be a part-time thing from a financial and time perspective, plus had some atypical sources of mentoring and support, they simply couldn't do it. And this was a relatively humble attempt at an Associates at a local CC.
It was both saddening and eye-opening when they gave up, because I came of age when "if you just try hard enough you'll make it" was good enough. Their decision to not go the loan route turned out to be fortuitous in the end.
I'm not even going to profess to know the answer to this, I wish I had one.
Yes, one of many rationales they may have. Whether my phone's pristine condition would survive being cracked open for a battery replacement, even by a certified Apple tech, was definitely a question in my mind at the time. Which was partly why I decided to not push back hard this first time around. If the current battery really is in OK shape and can be improved via some settings, then there's one fewer incursion into a device that's not designed to be serviced.
My experience was similar. Basically they ran some diagnostic that claimed that the battery was a 93% performance of a new one, and poked around looking for settings and apps that might be causing battery drain. They came up with a few things I could tweak, and just kept saying that a newer battery wouldn't perform much better than the one in the phone.
Which is odd, as after two+ years I've definitely noticed my 6se+ dropping to lower percentages during the day than it used to, but I also go more frequently where the phone is not docked on my desk all day. So hard to say whether it's my usage pattern or the battery.
The dog-and-pony show of going through the diagnostics and claiming that a new battery wouldn't help things definitely reeked of trying to dodge the discounted upgrade if they could get away with it. Which is the first time I've ever seen Apple's service do anything short of going the extra mile for me. I figure I have all year to take advantage of the battery discount, and will just see if reducing run-in-background and the number of apps with Location Services is a noticeable help. If not I'll go back and just insist they replace the battery, regardless of their diagnostic.
..."that's easy! Show me where the edge of the Earth is! That'd be the coolest place ever! Heck, I'll build a house right at the edge of the world!"
Personally, my favorite corollary is that the presence of cats is disproof of a flat Earth. If the Earth were flat, there would be an edge somewhere. Which is where all the cats would be, knocking things off the edge, rather than piddling around with us mere humans.
This, a thousand times this. In the current software world, it is basically a cardinal sin to actually spend time developing and deploying a product using a specific technology. Because by the time you come up for air after actually accomplishing something, the landscape is completely changed, and now you're behind the curve again. God forbid you actually spend enough time on a product to maintain it. It's freakin' ridiculous.
I'm continually wondering when this unsustainable situation finally stops being sustained, and what it will take for that to happen.
Intel's Atom/Quark proc is really the best offering i've ever seen in that segment, though working with the Quark directly without signing an NDA is a complicated mess (though one can figure it out).
I am glad i bought several Edisons. Yocto may be a pile of shit, but better support will come in time, and it'll become more reasonable to roll your own OS for the Atom side, and people will figure out the Quarks, and you'll be able to do direct loads onto it without negotiating with some way-heavier-than-needed real-time OS kernel running on it.
Unfortunately I've been around enough to see what happens when ecosystems dry up. The Linux will age and have more and more issues that the community cannot keep up with. The community will shrink by attrition, and no new blood will come in simply because you can't buy the hardware anymore. Dead end, as much as I hate to think about it.
Turns out I only have three Edisons, and I while I'd love to dive in and figure out the potential of this wonderful part, I just can't justify the extremely limited bandwidth I have. I'm fighting the temptation to buy another ten of them to have around when you can't get any more of them, vs selling my entire investment in the platform and just put the whole thing behind me. I've got an embarrassing number of Sparkfun blocks (easily a dozen or more) that I've never used. Nor am I likely to unless a miracle happens and Intel does an about-face on keeping the Edison in their portfolio.
Anyone want a bunch of barely-to-never-used Edison kit?
All that gloom and doom aside, I'm totally on the same page. Real-time is a lot like memory and performance optimization. It's tempting to code every line with those requirements in mind, whereas the reality is that at best only 10% of your code really needs the extra scrutiny. Such it is with real-time. Usually only 10% of the functionality really needs to be real-time, and that can then interface to queues that feed the non-real-time code which does the actual work. The Edison's architecture had that dynamic totally nailed.
Well, I don't really give a rats ass about x86, and especially don't care about compatibility with PC software or hardware. The closest alternative is the Pi (which is ARM), and perhaps if the Yun came in a smaller form factor (which is MIPS). And for my purposes the GPU on the Pi just adds cost and power consumption.
The power of the Edison is in its form factor, low power consumption, built-in battery support, USB, and wireless. That plus a good mix of compute cores---two medium-strength cores for Linux plus a lightweight real-time core.
Intel just isn't the right kind of company to succeed in the Maker market, but I will miss the availability of their processors on clean and cheap development boards.
Sigh, yeah. I think the Atom/Quark combo on the Edison had tremendous potential. The Atom running Linux for the heavy lifting (yet has full access to the I/O), and the Quark for the 10% of the things that actually need to be real-time. Nice.
Sparkfun did a lot to overcome the prototyping problem introduced by that damned connector, but I think Intel lost the war in terms of perceptions. Any Maker-class guy takes one look at that connector and wonders how in the hell he's going to overcome that hurdle, and Intel's two solutions to that were way off base. The small breakout wasn't breadboard-friendly and still had to be level-shifted, good luck with that. The Arduino dev board is overwrought has no target audience that I can understand. Using an Edison to interface to Arduino-class hardware misses the point entirely. Anyone sufficiently unsophisticated to only be comfortable in the Arduino space is not going to get very far with Yocto, and loses the benefit of the Edison if they limit themselves to the Arduino emulation layer. Anyone sophisticated enough to appreciate the Edison's architecture probably doesn't care about being able to connect a shield to it.
Then there's the culture. Reading Intel's datasheets on these things drives home with a sledgehammer that this is a Big Iron company. There was probably no hope of bridging the divide between that and the Maker community. I liked the hardware enough to want that to somehow not be true, but alas.
I was really hoping something would gain traction. Solve the byzantine Yocto problem. Make the learning curve easier, either with more accessible docs, or mature out of the dysfunctional support into a more robust ecosystem. Drop the price point, even by $10. Something.
As you say, it's not cool on Slashdot to like anything Intel or Microsoft does, but I was excited about the potential of this board. It's both sad and maddening that they would walk away from it in only two years.
I'm not heavily invested in this platform except over the past couple of years I've had a fetish for the Sparkfun blocks and "any day now" was going to open up some time to use it in a custom board for a side gig, or worst case, resume fodder. So I've got 5-6 of them laying around, the big breakout and the little breakout,
and as I said, a bunch of red prototyping boards.
At this point I don't know how I'm going to justify experimenting with all the kit I've accumulated. For all the flaws in the product---mostly unit cost, and as everyone has said, support, documentation, and no ecosystem---I really like the little thing
So what's the alternative? My low-volume custom board needed to be portable (i.e., LiPo), low power, small, have USB connectivity, and while the Wifi wasn't required it simplifies at lot of the requirements. That Bluetooth is on there is not useful, but could be at some point. The closest competitor, the Pi Compute Module, has significant complications. It's not optimized for low power. Network has to be added externally. Battery-aware power management is roll-your-own, right down to how a soft power button gets handled. From what I see on the datasheet, it's up to you to supply VBAT, 3.3, and 1.8, and it's important the order and timing in which they come up. Lots of stuff to reinvent, whereas the biggest glue-logic issue with the Edison was level-shifting to 3.3V and 5V.
What else is this small, has Wifi/BT baked in, is easy to deploy on a battery, and runs Linux? It's a serious question
They went from 1.6GHz to 1.8GHz, option to upgrade to 256 or 512GB SSD even on the low-end model, but still stuck at 8GB.
Thanks for that, it wasn't obvious on their web site that anything had changed at all. It would have been nice to go beyond 8G, but relatively small price to pay to preserve a usable array of ports.
Looks like the Air lineup is unchanged. Which on one hand, means they get more underpowered (by comparison) every year, but also means that they don't get the "who needs more than a single USB-C port?" wrecking ball.
So at the moment I consider that a win. For me I think it hits a perfect balance of size, weight, compute power, and battery life. At least for the computing load of non-power-users. And is now the only Apple notebook not stricken by the USB-C-is-all-you-need syndrome.
I've had two Airs in the past three years, and the 2nd one only because the first was stolen. It was covered by insurance, so I tried like hell take advantage of the situation as an opportunity to upgrade. But I ended up buying the exact same configuration. For my purposes, given it's not a primary device, the thing is perfect. Will go all day and then some, is almost as easy to carry around as an iPad, yet you can throw some moderately compute-intensive chores at it and performs admirably. The only thing it doesn't have is retina, but that would just add weight or subtract battery life or both---so no thanks.
But for the love of Pete, Apple, please don't trash this gem. I have nightmares of them going with two USB-C ports. Or going Retina. Please, just don't. Up the RAM max, update the CPU, give us more SSD capacity, whatever. Just don't fuck with the mag-jack, keep the SD card slot in there, and only put USB-C in as replacements for the USB3 ports that are there already if you must. But that's probably wishful thinking.
The current iteration of Air is about as perfect a light-to-medium workflow laptop as you can get right now, and now I fear it will be history.
(and before you trash me as a fanboi, my career has been Windows/Linux software development for 30 years, and I've gone through at least 5-6 generations of Dell laptops in the course of my work).
Exactly this. To me this essentially sounds like trying to implement version control within the code. Reinventing the wheel and doing a poor job of it to boot.
There may occasionally be something so trivial that a runtime switch makes sense to back out the functionality (probably in the UI layer). The original poster was talking about an extremely large, layered, and complex system. Feature flags in that context will eventually just make a bad problem worse, if not immediately
Can't add much more, other than it's interesting that nowadays the headlines are made by talking about how much these currently-in-the-vaporware-stage technologies will affect phones. Ten years ago it would have been all about how much better the PC's and laptops would get.
That works where? On an original Commodore Green-Screen? An Apple-II? A TRS-80? A Commodore 64? A VIC-20? An Atari? One of those Sinclairs with the hex keypad?
I hear ya, but remember that back then it was just a given that software worked only in one environment. The ultimate walled garden. The notion that software would run on anything else beside what it was written for was all but science fiction.
And as another person pointed out, we're talking the days when memory mapping was non-existent. I personally wasted hours of my life trying to track down a stray pointer gone awry in my code, since the goddamn DOS machine would just simply corrupt memory and then eventually fail in code that was thousands of lines away from where the actual problem was. I sure as hell don't miss that.
Are they porting compiler and build system or the entire IDE?
If they are porting IDE than with what? Isn't VS IDE done with WPF these days? Perhaps they target...ehem...WINE?
Or are they rebuilding it around Visual Studio Code?
As usual, the Slashdot article title is misleading. What they are describing is not really the porting of Visual Studio to Linux, although MS has been hinting at that for awhile. What the article is describing is the integration of the IDE (running on Windows) with a Linux tool chain (running on Linux). Which per my earlier post, has been possible before with third-party Visual Studio add-ons. For some use cases it is a win.
If you are not already a Visual Studio user and are developing exclusively for Linux, then you are not the target audience.
Since I'm developing for a Linux platform, I already have one of these here. So explain again why I have to drag another platform (Windows with Visual C++) into my toolchain when perfectly good IDEs are available for the native Linux environment.
Explain who, exactly, is putting a gun to your head to switch to a different tool chain when what you are using now is perfectly fine?
What makes you think that doesn't happen now? If they were going to do that (and I'm not yet so paranoid as to think they do that), not like this feature would have been the only way to do it.
And Emacs has been there since the 80's. So...? The article was about Visual Studio finally getting some serious work done on being more multi-platform. Which is good news for a segment of developers. That there are already multiplatform IDE's out there is not news.
...I wonder if they licensed any of that technology. I bought a copy of VisualGDB a few years ago and it was slick as hell. I had to port a bootloader written in C that was Windows-only, turning it into a simple command-line program on Linux. It was easy as using a native toolchain (easier, in fact, if you have Visual Studio muscle-memory), and so seamless that it was easy to forget that this was all over-the-wire interaction between a Linux box and Windows.
In my case I was porting it over to a Raspberry Pi to prototype a portable diagnostic device for a hardware project. Came out swimmingly, was one of the highest-impact things I did for them. I was starting with all Windows code, both C and C#. Between VisualGDB and Mono, the porting was extremely easy to do.
I'd have chosen Voice of America as the foil there, given how Trump just turned it over to some breitbartish characters.
Wouldn't argue with that. The difficulty is that there are so many jaw-droppers to choose from you may as well just throw a dart at the wall. Which should be another clue that this isn't politics-as-usual.
If Obama was performing hostile takeover of this scope and magnitude in the first seven days of office, not only would conservatives be calling for blood, I truly believe that people who supported him would be having their share of WTF? moments.
Slashdot Mirror
Adaptive cruise is what finally made cruise control useful again. A bummer that rain confuses it, but other than that, it works perfectly on all the Toyota's I've had it on. Until I got that, I couldn't remember the last time I bothered with normal cruise. These days you really need to be out in the boonies to have sufficiently light traffic that you're no constantly having to tweak your speed.
Bonus points now is that Toyota bundles this with pre-collision detection. That has kicked in a number of times. Most of those it was just reacting a split-second quicker than I was and I would have avoided the collision even if it wasn't there. But there are at least two times where the situation changed around me so quickly that I would credit it for significantly lowering the odds that I would have had a big problem on my hands.
Having jumped into this world recently, I have some observations...
At least in my age-bracket (early 50-something, but trolling for 40-somethings and even 30-somethings that are interesting), nearly all the women on Tinder want to replace their lost soul-mate and they want to do it yesterday. This seems to be true of most of the dating sites I'm on. And if you are not existentially clamoring for the same thing then you must be just a serial-dater or a hookup guy and are a waste of their time.
The notion that a soulmate is a difficult thing to find, and that sometimes it needs to develop organically, is just lost on them. Seems they'd rather sit at home alone rather than entertain the notion that perhaps getting out and about with a less-than-ideal match might be a better use of their time. They might even learn something about how other people work/think/behave, and maybe learn something about themselves in the process. And if that less-than-ideal match is physically attractive, not the end of the world to let off some steam in the pent-up-hormones dept.
Personally I try to go in with an open mind, and if the date goes nowhere, I got an evening out at the very least. Or it might cultivate a beneficial platonic relationship, which has happened more than once for me. If it's a good fit and grows into something more, then I'm open to that too. You know, just like how real dating works. But the "ya-gotta-be-looking-to-get-married-and-yesterday" filter is a huge obstacle for everyone involved.
I *am* puzzled at the blatant dishonesty on physical attributes. Lying on your height? Really? And I've gotten really good at reading between the pixels, as it were, on the women's photos. Or at the very least, figure they will be one or two notches less attractive in person. But I'm open to the notion that after a couple of hours, if a person's personality is attractive, the physical appearance truly does go down in importance. Which is one of the biggest limitations in online dating, which is that it's a rare photograph that also conveys a person's soul (to be a bit melodramatic).
My pictures are representative of how I look. And of course I pick ones that make me look good, but not deceptively so. The only fudging I do is with age. And I'm unapologetic about it. There are a statistically unlikely distributions of 39 and 49y/o women on the site. Sorry, no way. The only explanation is they are trying to game the age filter. In my case, losing 25lbs and hitting the gym regularly means an age filter would unfairly bias me out of searches. *Every* time I've come clean on my age after meeting someone, I always get surprised reactions that I really do look mid-40's (I usually advertise upper 40's), and a few times people have commented that my upbeat demeanor is more of a upper-30/lower-40's person.
So I won't be happy if they somehow implement age verification, as I truly believe that people put more importance on it than they should. But I imagine that the women will be even less happy, based on the number of 9's I see in the ages.
One thing I loved about the Intel Edison was the seamless support for LiPo batteries. Of course, Intel is as fickle as Google when it comes to killing off good products, so the Edison is no more, much to my disappointment.
With the caveat that I'm a SW guy, and only an amateur HW tinkerer, I tried for a very long time to prototype a decent charging/step-up converter that could be tacked on to the compute module. Never got anything stable, and in the end ran out of time. (I suppose I could have lifted Sparkfun's design, but the chip they used is very difficult to work with, even if you are reasonably comfortable with surface-mount/reflow construction)
Other than that I'd love to have time to tinker more with the CM, but most of my projects involve a battery.
All the other commentary aside, could they one day fix my pet peeve: the fixed-size, microscopic font for the street names. Doesn't matter how goddamn close you zoom, it always reduces the street name back down to the 0.4 point font. Yeah, I'm a 50-something now who's eyes aren't what they used to be. But I'm pretty sure that even when my eyesight was better, I would still have trouble reading the tiny print. Is it such a crime against humanity to set a zoom threshold where the text size starts to grow with the other features of the map?
No one is talking about loan forgiveness. What the article is about the mess they and society are in.
Here are the facts: 1. If you have a HS diploma you will live with your parents until 40 and have a life of poverty. HR won't give you the chance to build your resume outside of your grocery store or McDonalds. It kind of forces you to go to a trade school or a university of you want a non horrible sucky life. Don't bother talking about your friend Jon or yourself if you developed computer skills in the late 1990s. That was abnormal and still a very minority statistic.
2. Cost of living is VERY VERY HIGH. You can't attack the kids for not planning when your first jobs pay $35,000 a year with no experience. How the fuck can you pay rent of $1500 a month with that kind of salary? Let alone pay off the loan and a car payment?
So you can blame the kids for being stupid but if you are older which I assume you are, then you have no right to speak as you never had to pay these outrageous prices the youngers folks pay today. In the 1970s you could work at McDonalds and pay your Harvard Degree no problem. This is not true today.
Being one of those "older" persons, lucky enough to have parents who could balance between paying for a state college and taking out manageable loans, this is spot on. Back when I was doing this (mid-80's) I rubbed elbows with plenty of less-fortunate students who hustled at grocery-store jobs to make it happen.
But today, if your demographic is such that your parents are in a position where their feasible contribution to your education is $0, you are more or less screwed.
I witnessed this close-up-and-personal with an early-20-something acquaintance, who despite working so much that school could only be a part-time thing from a financial and time perspective, plus had some atypical sources of mentoring and support, they simply couldn't do it. And this was a relatively humble attempt at an Associates at a local CC.
It was both saddening and eye-opening when they gave up, because I came of age when "if you just try hard enough you'll make it" was good enough. Their decision to not go the loan route turned out to be fortuitous in the end.
I'm not even going to profess to know the answer to this, I wish I had one.
Yes, one of many rationales they may have. Whether my phone's pristine condition would survive being cracked open for a battery replacement, even by a certified Apple tech, was definitely a question in my mind at the time. Which was partly why I decided to not push back hard this first time around. If the current battery really is in OK shape and can be improved via some settings, then there's one fewer incursion into a device that's not designed to be serviced.
My experience was similar. Basically they ran some diagnostic that claimed that the battery was a 93% performance of a new one, and poked around looking for settings and apps that might be causing battery drain. They came up with a few things I could tweak, and just kept saying that a newer battery wouldn't perform much better than the one in the phone.
Which is odd, as after two+ years I've definitely noticed my 6se+ dropping to lower percentages during the day than it used to, but I also go more frequently where the phone is not docked on my desk all day. So hard to say whether it's my usage pattern or the battery.
The dog-and-pony show of going through the diagnostics and claiming that a new battery wouldn't help things definitely reeked of trying to dodge the discounted upgrade if they could get away with it. Which is the first time I've ever seen Apple's service do anything short of going the extra mile for me. I figure I have all year to take advantage of the battery discount, and will just see if reducing run-in-background and the number of apps with Location Services is a noticeable help. If not I'll go back and just insist they replace the battery, regardless of their diagnostic.
..."that's easy! Show me where the edge of the Earth is! That'd be the coolest place ever! Heck, I'll build a house right at the edge of the world!"
Personally, my favorite corollary is that the presence of cats is disproof of a flat Earth. If the Earth were flat, there would be an edge somewhere. Which is where all the cats would be, knocking things off the edge, rather than piddling around with us mere humans.
This, a thousand times this. In the current software world, it is basically a cardinal sin to actually spend time developing and deploying a product using a specific technology. Because by the time you come up for air after actually accomplishing something, the landscape is completely changed, and now you're behind the curve again. God forbid you actually spend enough time on a product to maintain it. It's freakin' ridiculous.
I'm continually wondering when this unsustainable situation finally stops being sustained, and what it will take for that to happen.
Intel's Atom/Quark proc is really the best offering i've ever seen in that segment, though working with the Quark directly without signing an NDA is a complicated mess (though one can figure it out). I am glad i bought several Edisons. Yocto may be a pile of shit, but better support will come in time, and it'll become more reasonable to roll your own OS for the Atom side, and people will figure out the Quarks, and you'll be able to do direct loads onto it without negotiating with some way-heavier-than-needed real-time OS kernel running on it.
Unfortunately I've been around enough to see what happens when ecosystems dry up. The Linux will age and have more and more issues that the community cannot keep up with. The community will shrink by attrition, and no new blood will come in simply because you can't buy the hardware anymore. Dead end, as much as I hate to think about it.
Turns out I only have three Edisons, and I while I'd love to dive in and figure out the potential of this wonderful part, I just can't justify the extremely limited bandwidth I have. I'm fighting the temptation to buy another ten of them to have around when you can't get any more of them, vs selling my entire investment in the platform and just put the whole thing behind me. I've got an embarrassing number of Sparkfun blocks (easily a dozen or more) that I've never used. Nor am I likely to unless a miracle happens and Intel does an about-face on keeping the Edison in their portfolio.
Anyone want a bunch of barely-to-never-used Edison kit?
All that gloom and doom aside, I'm totally on the same page. Real-time is a lot like memory and performance optimization. It's tempting to code every line with those requirements in mind, whereas the reality is that at best only 10% of your code really needs the extra scrutiny. Such it is with real-time. Usually only 10% of the functionality really needs to be real-time, and that can then interface to queues that feed the non-real-time code which does the actual work. The Edison's architecture had that dynamic totally nailed.
Well, I don't really give a rats ass about x86, and especially don't care about compatibility with PC software or hardware. The closest alternative is the Pi (which is ARM), and perhaps if the Yun came in a smaller form factor (which is MIPS). And for my purposes the GPU on the Pi just adds cost and power consumption.
The power of the Edison is in its form factor, low power consumption, built-in battery support, USB, and wireless. That plus a good mix of compute cores---two medium-strength cores for Linux plus a lightweight real-time core.
Intel just isn't the right kind of company to succeed in the Maker market, but I will miss the availability of their processors on clean and cheap development boards.
Sigh, yeah. I think the Atom/Quark combo on the Edison had tremendous potential. The Atom running Linux for the heavy lifting (yet has full access to the I/O), and the Quark for the 10% of the things that actually need to be real-time. Nice.
Sparkfun did a lot to overcome the prototyping problem introduced by that damned connector, but I think Intel lost the war in terms of perceptions. Any Maker-class guy takes one look at that connector and wonders how in the hell he's going to overcome that hurdle, and Intel's two solutions to that were way off base. The small breakout wasn't breadboard-friendly and still had to be level-shifted, good luck with that. The Arduino dev board is overwrought has no target audience that I can understand. Using an Edison to interface to Arduino-class hardware misses the point entirely. Anyone sufficiently unsophisticated to only be comfortable in the Arduino space is not going to get very far with Yocto, and loses the benefit of the Edison if they limit themselves to the Arduino emulation layer. Anyone sophisticated enough to appreciate the Edison's architecture probably doesn't care about being able to connect a shield to it.
Then there's the culture. Reading Intel's datasheets on these things drives home with a sledgehammer that this is a Big Iron company. There was probably no hope of bridging the divide between that and the Maker community. I liked the hardware enough to want that to somehow not be true, but alas.
I was really hoping something would gain traction. Solve the byzantine Yocto problem. Make the learning curve easier, either with more accessible docs, or mature out of the dysfunctional support into a more robust ecosystem. Drop the price point, even by $10. Something.
As you say, it's not cool on Slashdot to like anything Intel or Microsoft does, but I was excited about the potential of this board. It's both sad and maddening that they would walk away from it in only two years.
I'm not heavily invested in this platform except over the past couple of years I've had a fetish for the Sparkfun blocks and "any day now" was going to open up some time to use it in a custom board for a side gig, or worst case, resume fodder. So I've got 5-6 of them laying around, the big breakout and the little breakout, and as I said, a bunch of red prototyping boards.
At this point I don't know how I'm going to justify experimenting with all the kit I've accumulated. For all the flaws in the product---mostly unit cost, and as everyone has said, support, documentation, and no ecosystem---I really like the little thing
So what's the alternative? My low-volume custom board needed to be portable (i.e., LiPo), low power, small, have USB connectivity, and while the Wifi wasn't required it simplifies at lot of the requirements. That Bluetooth is on there is not useful, but could be at some point. The closest competitor, the Pi Compute Module, has significant complications. It's not optimized for low power. Network has to be added externally. Battery-aware power management is roll-your-own, right down to how a soft power button gets handled. From what I see on the datasheet, it's up to you to supply VBAT, 3.3, and 1.8, and it's important the order and timing in which they come up. Lots of stuff to reinvent, whereas the biggest glue-logic issue with the Edison was level-shifting to 3.3V and 5V.
What else is this small, has Wifi/BT baked in, is easy to deploy on a battery, and runs Linux? It's a serious question
They went from 1.6GHz to 1.8GHz, option to upgrade to 256 or 512GB SSD even on the low-end model, but still stuck at 8GB.
Thanks for that, it wasn't obvious on their web site that anything had changed at all. It would have been nice to go beyond 8G, but relatively small price to pay to preserve a usable array of ports.
Looks like the Air lineup is unchanged. Which on one hand, means they get more underpowered (by comparison) every year, but also means that they don't get the "who needs more than a single USB-C port?" wrecking ball.
So at the moment I consider that a win. For me I think it hits a perfect balance of size, weight, compute power, and battery life. At least for the computing load of non-power-users. And is now the only Apple notebook not stricken by the USB-C-is-all-you-need syndrome.
I've had two Airs in the past three years, and the 2nd one only because the first was stolen. It was covered by insurance, so I tried like hell take advantage of the situation as an opportunity to upgrade. But I ended up buying the exact same configuration. For my purposes, given it's not a primary device, the thing is perfect. Will go all day and then some, is almost as easy to carry around as an iPad, yet you can throw some moderately compute-intensive chores at it and performs admirably. The only thing it doesn't have is retina, but that would just add weight or subtract battery life or both---so no thanks.
But for the love of Pete, Apple, please don't trash this gem. I have nightmares of them going with two USB-C ports. Or going Retina. Please, just don't. Up the RAM max, update the CPU, give us more SSD capacity, whatever. Just don't fuck with the mag-jack, keep the SD card slot in there, and only put USB-C in as replacements for the USB3 ports that are there already if you must. But that's probably wishful thinking.
The current iteration of Air is about as perfect a light-to-medium workflow laptop as you can get right now, and now I fear it will be history.
(and before you trash me as a fanboi, my career has been Windows/Linux software development for 30 years, and I've gone through at least 5-6 generations of Dell laptops in the course of my work).
Exactly this. To me this essentially sounds like trying to implement version control within the code. Reinventing the wheel and doing a poor job of it to boot.
There may occasionally be something so trivial that a runtime switch makes sense to back out the functionality (probably in the UI layer). The original poster was talking about an extremely large, layered, and complex system. Feature flags in that context will eventually just make a bad problem worse, if not immediately
Can't add much more, other than it's interesting that nowadays the headlines are made by talking about how much these currently-in-the-vaporware-stage technologies will affect phones. Ten years ago it would have been all about how much better the PC's and laptops would get.
So what do I miss? I miss software that works.
That works where? On an original Commodore Green-Screen? An Apple-II? A TRS-80? A Commodore 64? A VIC-20? An Atari? One of those Sinclairs with the hex keypad?
I hear ya, but remember that back then it was just a given that software worked only in one environment. The ultimate walled garden. The notion that software would run on anything else beside what it was written for was all but science fiction.
And as another person pointed out, we're talking the days when memory mapping was non-existent. I personally wasted hours of my life trying to track down a stray pointer gone awry in my code, since the goddamn DOS machine would just simply corrupt memory and then eventually fail in code that was thousands of lines away from where the actual problem was. I sure as hell don't miss that.
Are they porting compiler and build system or the entire IDE?
If they are porting IDE than with what? Isn't VS IDE done with WPF these days? Perhaps they target...ehem...WINE?
Or are they rebuilding it around Visual Studio Code?
As usual, the Slashdot article title is misleading. What they are describing is not really the porting of Visual Studio to Linux, although MS has been hinting at that for awhile. What the article is describing is the integration of the IDE (running on Windows) with a Linux tool chain (running on Linux). Which per my earlier post, has been possible before with third-party Visual Studio add-ons. For some use cases it is a win.
If you are not already a Visual Studio user and are developing exclusively for Linux, then you are not the target audience.
This, exactly.
Since I'm developing for a Linux platform, I already have one of these here. So explain again why I have to drag another platform (Windows with Visual C++) into my toolchain when perfectly good IDEs are available for the native Linux environment.
Explain who, exactly, is putting a gun to your head to switch to a different tool chain when what you are using now is perfectly fine?
What makes you think that doesn't happen now? If they were going to do that (and I'm not yet so paranoid as to think they do that), not like this feature would have been the only way to do it.
And Emacs has been there since the 80's. So...? The article was about Visual Studio finally getting some serious work done on being more multi-platform. Which is good news for a segment of developers. That there are already multiplatform IDE's out there is not news.
...I wonder if they licensed any of that technology. I bought a copy of VisualGDB a few years ago and it was slick as hell. I had to port a bootloader written in C that was Windows-only, turning it into a simple command-line program on Linux. It was easy as using a native toolchain (easier, in fact, if you have Visual Studio muscle-memory), and so seamless that it was easy to forget that this was all over-the-wire interaction between a Linux box and Windows.
In my case I was porting it over to a Raspberry Pi to prototype a portable diagnostic device for a hardware project. Came out swimmingly, was one of the highest-impact things I did for them. I was starting with all Windows code, both C and C#. Between VisualGDB and Mono, the porting was extremely easy to do.
I'd have chosen Voice of America as the foil there, given how Trump just turned it over to some breitbartish characters.
Wouldn't argue with that. The difficulty is that there are so many jaw-droppers to choose from you may as well just throw a dart at the wall. Which should be another clue that this isn't politics-as-usual.
If Obama was performing hostile takeover of this scope and magnitude in the first seven days of office, not only would conservatives be calling for blood, I truly believe that people who supported him would be having their share of WTF? moments.