Almost agreed on modal editors: Trying to convert from EDT (Digital: RSTS/E and VAX) to vi on joining AT&T B.L. in 1988 was a real challenge. My EDT fingers ruined editing sessions for days until I unlearned the "just type and go" habit.
Vim's key mapping has improved with the result that many of the control operations (indent controls, selection, movement, including mouse wheel scrolling and ) to work without mode change. It also allows automatic entry of "insert mode" on startup. But vim is not GUI so clicking into a search bar is not available to the best of my knowledge, so it remains old-school.
For my purposes, the big win for emacs and some other visual editors (jedit) is the ability to create multiple windows. I am surprised by the limited options for my preferred style, which is to have multiple toplevel windows showing and allowing editing in the same file. I still work in C (embedded etc.) and really like having header fragments in one place while actively editing in another, with "instant" switching between them with a mouse click. That can be sort-of emulated in atom and other "splittable" editors, but there are still speed bumps.
Not necessarily, given even a little bit of planning.
A house we just sold in a nearby suburb (Central Ohio, northwest side) that we had been renting out is in an area where services (electric power, gas, cable, communication) are all underground. The house is not a McMansion, more of a step up from a "starter home" and it's not in a fancy rich neighborhood. Reasonable property taxes too. (The point about reasonable property taxes not directly relevant, but supports the argument that underground service is not the exclusive domain of expensive/wealthy neighborhoods.)
The ubiquity of the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Linux on PCs (modern or ancient), IOT devices, the top 500 supercomputers, routers, etc.: All made possible by open source software.
Schools in nations with emerging economies, research labs, DIY home makers all over the world build little (or big) process control and measurement boxes: These decisions are simplified by the presence of the invaluable library of open source software.
The company I work for has 8 Odroids, 6 Raspberry Pis, about a dozen workstations, and our main product line runs on embedded boards running Linux. All of these resources are critical to our success, and the availability of system that run those machines without struggling with license-counting has left an indelible mark on our organization. Even the industrial CNC milling machines are controlled by Linux systems.
I am a certified grey-beard who has developed in and watched this industry since graduating in 1977 who is simply amazed by the easy availability of today's tools. Moore's law has helped on the hardware side (no more 500 grand for a 1 Mbyte core-memory mainframe with 90 Mbytes disk...), but in my opinion the real enabler for much of this industry has been the software toolkit. I have seen a transition from Fortran-II on OS-8 (low end) or Fortran-IV and COBOL on System/370 (high end) to systems running SciPy, Postgres, Apache, Octave, R, openssl, etc. etc., all available for download.
Open source systems have delivered power in excess of anything I ever imagined.
In my experience most technology patents seem to be pretty obvious to anyone who is in the industry, however.
This.
The central issue. Far too many patents are of the type "With A Computer", or "On The Internet", "on a touchscreen", or as you say obvious to someone in the industry. I am careful never to read any patent documents, as it's quite likely that some bright bulb wrote a patent about moving data, or packets, or whatever it is I build on a given day. If some dipshit company tries to sue the company I work for, at least we won't get hit with treble damages.
Generally speaking, if an architect or developer in cubeland in the course of normal work can write a routine or a really nice way to achive a functional goal, then it's unlikely that a patent should be granted for the work. That's approximately my test for patentability: If I can come up with an idea in the normal course of work, then it's probably not a real invention. On the other hand, if in my role as a developer/architect, I take several months or longer to work out a brand new way of achieving something, that could be patentable.
As a poll worker ("volunteer": they paid us, about 1/10 of a day's pay for an 18-hour day), I totally agree with the idea of consistent and reliable ID methods.
So you are half right. But it's the thin and weak half.
Those of us who were born into families with the basic resources to give us a good start were able to spend the effort to set up drivers licenses (the typical ID) which are trivial to renew once set up. To us, it does not appear to be a very high bar.
"Conservatives" are careful to avoid, and have largely successfully avoided an important point: There are many people who would otherwise be fully capable were born to families so far down that they could not get that start. And from that position, they often do not have the resources to get the legal documents that get the ball rolling.
Countries with good quality voter ID laws/practices do not erect the legal impediments to getting that initial start, and their citizens do not experience the disenfranchisement that we see in too many places in the U.S.
Responding to AC.... But the temptation is too great...
Dipshits (bot or not) writing from nether regions (either ass or somewhere else worse).
The only free market is one where regulation allows for a level playing field. All market participants always want to get the upper hand. In nearly all markets I see (particularly mature markets), ordinary nonlinear effects produce situations where a few players are either lucky or smart enough to gain enough power to control price movement.
There has never been, nor will there ever be, a truly free unregulated market: It is either regulated or not free.
The word "socialism" does not mean what your friends in the former Soviet Union want you to think it means. The original meaning of socialism was not "government overreach" but rather (in essence) governing for the greatest good/opportunity/etc for the population. The word you seek is "tyranny", as practiced by every small group of xxx_archs ("olig"archs, "mon"archs, etc) wherever they gain the upper hand over the societies they seek to control.
Being a developer, I am ok with some regulation: Much of the initial funding for semiconductor technology is an outgrowth of government competing against tyranny during the cold war. The U.S. manufacturing juggernaut in the 1950's was the result of gunvernment funding of large scale manufacturing of tanks, planes and ships in WW2. The (decreasingly neutral) internet is a government program originally intended to build distributed comms infrastructure capable of surviving catastrophic events (nuclear attacks, etc.).
It is my belief that the dominating reason for the internet bjringing communication to so many so broadly and so powerfully is EXACTLY government regulation: The original requirements, definition and research that produced inter-networking in the early days was interoperability among all manufacturers of equipment that is allowed to join in the program.
To repeat: The big invention of the internet was government-defined and required interoperability.
Bottom line:
1) There is no market that is both free and unregulated.
2) Capabilities leading to strategically valuable economic growth almost always required significant investment (and regulation) from an entity powerful enough and unbiased enough (like a properly democratic government) to fund development of technologies that would otherwise be locked into little walled gardens that don't work together efficiently.
My wife and I just bought two Prius model 2 cars (one last week, one yesterday) and spend $25200 including all taxes and fees and with the 8-year extended warranty on each. The price of the car would be about $21000. These are 2017 models, and Toyota is offering a $2000 rebate.
Moore's law has brought the cost of perception, computation and automated controls down so quickly and effectively that our new cars have all sorts of safety options (lane assist, blindspot monitor, impending collision warnings, parking assist, etc. etc.) without all the upcharges.
For a few more days, I have one of the VW diesels that were the subject of the recent pollution control action. (I am choosing the "sell back to VW" option). That one cost $25500 or so in 2010.
I admit that we have a strong addiction to efficiency, and are willing pay a bit for that efficiency. I estimate that we could have equivalent quality, performance, features, etc. for about $2000-4000 less if we were willing to give up on the safety features. Based on my study of the market in preparation for buying the new cars, we noted that the safety features we seek are available only in the $23000+ price range, efficiency or not.
1) Incumbent energy providers (oil, gas, coal, nuclear) have the gift of an ongoing revenue stream: Extracting and refining all the crude oil, gas and coal and for nuclear, spent fuel reprocessing, are all capital and energy intensive processes.
2) Hydro, wind and solar fail to provide that ongoing revenue stream: Those sources of energy arrive the point of collection whether or not there's a collector (turbine, PV) to get it.
3) Wind and solar are structurally distributed sources, so it is not easy to concentrate ownership of the means of collection and distribution in the hands of a small number of executives.
3a) It is surprisingly easy for individuals to put up solar arrays, providing a modicum of freedom from manipulation (rent-seeking) the incumbent providers.
It is no wonder that fuel executives have and will continue to lie, cheat, steal, kill, buy congress members, fund bogus think-tanks, and either take over or in some notable cases, become entire governments to preserve their rights to near monopolistic profit grabbing. It is my belief that all the talk from "conservatives" about "freedom" and "small government" is a thin veneer over their real goal: To persuade enough of the general population that efficiency, energy independence, local control/ownership/benefit are all a sinister government plot to "limit our freedom".
Apparently 9 years ago is "history", and I infer from your comment that you didn't do too well there.
The bailout began on Bush Jr's watch. Bernanke and Paulson brought a single-page set of required steps to the U.S. Congress in October 2008 to prevent an immediate and complete meltdown of a worldwide financial system.
Following up on the Bush bank bailout, Obama had a challenge: Continue supporting the bailout of the motherfuckers that almost took out the world economy, or put up with the fallout of the worldwide depression without it.
<conjecture> I am guessing that you and your other apparatchik friends are all good with the new tax bill the U.S. Senate just passed. You may think that by sucking up to the new oligarchy that they will grant you some space in their world. You are wrong. </conjecture>
History (there's that word again) shows that societies destabilized by extreme inequality always fall and when they do, they tumble down hardest on the general population.
For decades the skills and liars in government, media, and banking have perpetuated the myth that everyone should go to college. Tens of millions of Americans were promised that their degree would lead to a good job.
It was all a pack of lies (to quote the great Phil Collins). College is largely a scam. It serves mostly as an indoctrination center to keep people have thinking critically, and while wasting four years and gobs of money, most graduates walk away with no useful skills.
"largely a scam".... Bogus generalization and demonstrably false.
As a developer, I have worked with many people who went to college, many who did not. Those who attended a good program of study were consistently better prepared for the work. More disciplined, better informed, more confident, better prepared to keep up with the changes to the intellectual environment required to make proper contribution to our products. That has been true in every organization I have worked in from Cable TV through avionics, logistics automation, communication, industrial data acquisition and control. Co-workers with the discipline to get a proper grounding in the theory consistently hit the ground running and are more productive, more flexible, and arrive with a better toolkit for delivering results.
There have been exceptional workers who are just plain brilliant and have learned on the job, and there have been those who managed to get through the course of study while avoiding the getting education part of it, but those are exceptions not the general rule.
On the original subject: Taxing people who managed to get into and be successful in advanced grad programs for the tuition that they would be paying if not for doing the work of teaching or research is a perfect example of short term thinking. It shows a complete failure to understand where improvements in productivity that produce true economic growth come from.
My wife had some blood tests done a few years ago, which initially were not covered by insurance. Cost to us: $1047.00; the provider helpfully offered a payment plan.
After much discussion and expenditure of hours we don't really have to spare, insurance covered the blood tests. Cost to the insurance company: $44.00, our copay was $4.00
So if your name is "anthem", $44.00; if your name is "nobody", $1047.00.
23.8 to 1.
This system is beyond fucked, it is simple ordinary Mafia extortion: Your money or your life.
Very similar to the net neutrality question, where the golden rule applies: He who invests properly in congressional races makes the rules.
The 2006 Supreme Court ruling about campaign donations was a silver-plated invitation to the party for a few, and a red hot poker for the asses of the many.
I wish I could criticize your post beyond being a bit exaggerated...
There are huge numbers of boom-generation people hanging on to what remains of their work lives and careers by the last millimeter of their fingernails. Add to that the fact that there's no such thing as a "savings account" any more: The only way to not fall behind inflation (see paragraph below) is to "invest" in equity, bond and/or international markets. Those markets are gyrating madly and some who needed to see a bit of safety for their 10 year money bought into the real estate market. They hope to put their hard-earned savings into a material investment vehicle they could see (and not evaporate suddenly), that should at least keep up with inflation. Some of them bought into the explosive adjustable rate mortgages, having been lied to by the fuckheads selling those (IMHO) fraudulent loans. My wife and I bought a house (using our 30+ years of savings) for that reason, though we would never get sucked into such a sick excuse for a loan.
Now about inflation: I think I agree that easily shippable goods have experienced reduction of inflation due to the Amazons of the world. But let's not be confused about "inflation". My wife and I have experienced increases in the costs of stuff we cannot do without far far in excess of "inflation". These things are things that cannot be shipped from countries engaged in "the race to the bottom": Medical insurance, taxes (property, sales, etc.), communication (I am a developer, my wife is a psychologist. There is no business without it.) We are grateful that another source of monstrous and damaging inflation, education (also local and increasingly profit driven) is not killing us financially as it is so many others.
My observation is that inflation has developed a bimodal distribution: services that can only be acquired locally have a high inflation rate, while goods or services that can be globalized have a low inflation rate.
Bottom line: Some unwise boomers didn't save and may have taken advantage of the bullshit loans, which contributed to the meltdown; I suppose the temptation of a McMansion might be part of it. I pin blame for the meltdown on the lying thieving bankster fuck heads (if I believed in Hell, they belong there, they knew exactly what they were doing to their mark^H^H^H^Hcustomers). There are also "wise" boomers that have savings who are getting fucked over by the lack of any investment vehicles that can be trusted in less than 20 year time horizon.
What could go wrong?:-) One of the cheesiest, silliest Sci-Fy TV movies that I ever saw (yes, I saw it when it first aired, now get off my lawn). But great fun exploring unintended consequences nonetheless.
Lots of people "on the left" simply do not believe the promises of the companies and trade groups that their products are known to be safe (GMO) or known to be managed safely (nuclear).
Something that I do not see enough is documentary evidence that the decisionmakers in technical agriculture or in management of nuclear facilities could give two shits about the long term effects of their work (GMO) or costs of waste management (nuclear).
I for one fully trust decisionmakers to increase their profits to the exclusion of all other goals unless they are held strictly and personally accountable for their choices.
GMO gives strong, almost monopolistic market power to their companies. Nuclear is so capital intensive and the fuel reprocessing/waste issue is so expensive that they have a hard time competing without cutting corners.
Solve the incentive problems and allow for well-managed creative solutions to the downside risks, and the discussion will change dramatically. Until we see that these liars are held to account for lying then the greenies will use whatever (admittedly weak) logic they can muster to prevent or limit the fucking-over of those who lack influence over the decisions.
Fits real well for tools that don't have your particular preferences baked in...
Every time I need to use whatever editor happens to be available on whatever platform I need to maintain on whatever day I maintain it, those damn tab settings screw over formatting.
Note how that last comment refers to "the average cloud-ready server"...
NO competent large scale developer would ever even think in terms of of a "cloud-ready server"! That's exactly what I meant by technological refactoring. It IS happening but we're not bothering to notice it. (Other than some fat-fingering maintenance at Amazon last week) We have uptime expectations, performance expectations, that were impossible a few years ago.
As younger generations of developers move in to replace older ones, the loss of implicit and limiting assumptions of the older ones will allow for newer ways of thinking about the problem space. That is where the stepwise improvements will come from, just at they have been arriving all along.
I remember those days too... No stack, non-reentrant architecture, insufficient resources to emulate it in software (no base-indexed addressing like the IBM 360, for example). In fairness, the sorts of things we did with -8's were simple enough that the lack of resources was an acceptable tradeoff.
In response to the endless comments about bloated software, etc., expectations have increased either in step with, or perhaps ahead of, capacity improvements due to Moore's law. Being old enough to remember how much time was spent on a given "capability" in 1973, the godlike power granted to developers by a $10 pi-Zero-W, $35 Pi (quad 64 bit? way past Sci-Fi...) or Odroid is a wonder to behold. The average cloud-ready server is multiple orders of magnitude more powerful yet.
I would argue that we have no real sense of how dramatically today's world differs from those days, even those of us who were there. The word "inconceivable" just doesn't reach far enough into fantasy to compare with normal expectations. It is unsurprising that some deep technological refactoring is in order given the orders of magnitude differences between then and now.
There has been some paradigm-shifting between then and now, but more is needed to really take advantage of current technology. Until then improvements will look a bit anemic. I wonder whether I'll live long enough to see that shift.... It promises to be *very* interesting.
Business people in general have to compete with other businesses.
True for small businesses and individuals engaging in economic activity where the market tends to be far larger than the entities participating in it. A serious problem arises when a marketplace experiences consolidation in one side of the buyer/seller populations: I claim that conditions (where a single entity or a small number of entities gain control of one side of the market) attracts people who absolutely take improper advantage of people.
Several examples in our current economy:
Health insurance (rates increasing between 3 and 8 times core inflation)
College (faster than inflation, though I don't have specific numbers. In the '70's students could work part-time and in summer to cover the year's expenses; that is flatly impossible now.)
Lifesaving medical treatments (not the expensive new ones, I'm thinking of the ones off patent for years but still egregiously priced)
Laborer excess, such as in coal mining, where equipment and technology have decimated need for human labor while preserving margins for the owners
My wife and I have a rental house, which we think approximates a "dividend stock" requiring a lot of yard maintenance:-) but returning about 4-6% ROI depending on maintenance requirements in any given year.. The home rental market has not (yet) consolidated so badly that we get to compete with lots of other small-time owners in a market with lots of renters. It works well.
Then there's the energy market, the communication (ISP) market, the hospital system market in most cities, the health insurance market, manufacturing big ticket items, etc. Those large organizations are run by executives who know exactly how much market power they have, and they use it relentlessly.
...Great comments, especially WRT the UBEC. My work is always in a lab environment (or at home, where I use beefy USB chargers...), so it never occurred to me to look toward the RC world for an inexpensive DC-DC converter. Thank you for that!
The RPi is not designed for industrial application, and every one of the characteristics you cite, while being important for "pro-grade" product performance, also add cost that is unnecessary for 99.9% of Pi use-cases. Professional engineering time (that's us...) is precious, so we don't screw around with toys for delivered production hardware. The RPi, Odroids, Pines, Pi-clones, even the Beaglebone Black are all fabulous toys that we use to support diagnostics, lab automation, etc: If a $4.99 SD croaks we image a new one and we're back in business.
Industrial strength hardware (fanless industrial PC) costs about 20x the toy hardware: about 700-1000US but it's still fabulously cheap compared to the way it used to be. (I won't get into the ugly details of trying to talk my management into getting rid of VME hardware and 25 year old designs...)
Especially when combined with trick like RAM-resident root and tmp filesystems, EXT3/EXT4 on modern high-endurance flash is fine, as far as I can tell. I've run endurance checks of our current CF cards (1 or 2 gig, extended-endurance) and they are still just fine after 10-15 years of simulated activity. Our product uses flash only for logging and vehicle reporting. Modern wear-leveling and larger media let us forget the whole endurance question. NO more JFFS2!:-)
Personal note: I have and use Odroid -U2, -U3, -C, -C1, -C2, RPI2, RPI3, and a UDOO (original backer), mostly as micro-servers. I don't require much customization and as long as that remains true, I find them to be great machines.
The Odroids are definitely better hardware, but the story gets more complicated when the question of kernels (and the binary blobs needed for media) are updated to mainline. I've heard but not verified that the original Exynos CPUs in the Odroid-Ux are supported by mainline kernels.
The Allwinner chips in the Pines, Banana Pis, Orange Pis, etc. lack complete HW docs and need critical binary blobs (At least the Allwinner H8 has long needed a DRAM controller library blob, for example). If Allwinner were to clean up their documentation and make truly complete hardware docs available, then the overall product would be better than RPi. Until then, RPi support is so much better than their competitors that it overwhelms the otherwise obvious performance advantages.
However, the support isn't complete for the Allwinner A64 and is blocked in part by lack of proper documentation. Andre commented, "Due to a lack of official documentation and hardware availability this doesn't go any further at this moment."
The Allwinner A64 is comprised of the less-powerful Cortex-A53 cores, supports H.264/H.265 video decoding, and is widely talked about as being the "$5 ARM SoC." Hopefully this mainline kernel support will get figured out in time for the Pine A64 shipping.
Read John Perkins' book "Confessions of an Economic Hitman".
Agreed....
His followup book "Hoodwinked" reports that the predatory nature of the bad actors from "Confessions" was so successful that many of those techniques are being used closer to home.
Look at some of the comments in this Slashdot article to see how well it works.
RISC-V still hasn't yet designated different parts of their NOP space for trapping and non-trapping NOPs, so extension is going to be difficult, and the RISC-V Foundation still doesn't have a process for introducing extensions for review and standardisation. This is why the ARM ecosystem is so valuable and the MIPS ecosystem is a wasteland.
I remember ARM's earlier work, which had the very same difficulties you describe for MIPS architectures. Every implementer had a separate memory protection/paging architecture, every one had a different interrupt routing architecture. What a grinding mess that was... They wised up *just in time* (IMHO), establishing core ("Cortex") functionality which is required for all implementers. That stabilized the ARM ecosystem enough to allow it to grow dramatically.
If the implementers of RISC-V are wise, they would establish and agree on functional (powerful, effective) support structures such that it's possible for developers to implement kernels and OSes around it.
Given Softbank's purchase of ARM, I am watching their actions very closely. All of the embedded devices used in my company and many others are Cortex-M3, -M4F, and the many -A series processors. Softbank is in a position to increase their IP licensing fees for immediate profit, screw over the entire embedded marketplace, and would end up, after much consternation in the embedded world, ceding the market to competitive low-end X86 and one of the lesser-known architectures (MIPS: Microchip's choice for PIC32. Irony...:-) ). This is a good place to mention RISC-V *if* they are smart about portability.
My father did me the favor of "leaving his Scientific American" mags around the house and a bored kid started looking at them.
At first it was very abstract and conceptual. It must have stuck, though. I will be 60 next month and still read every issue cover to cover and with special emphasis on quantum mechanics and cosmology.
Also: My uncle's gift of "Mathematics: A Human Endeavor", an introductory college text, probably "math for humanities students", but at 12 it opened the world.
I watched an old Twilight Zone episode on Netflix the other day (1966) which was about a factory where all the workers were being replaced by a computer and robotic system. They have been saying the same thing for 50 years. How many jobs today were not even imagined in 1966?
There are lots of new jobs, most of which are either beyond the capabilities of the people being displaced or which require several (5 or more) years of retraining during which time the displaced worker is starting over, earning nowhere near a sustainable income.
You note correctly. In my US-centric view, which is where the big jobs question is being asked, people whose careers are being replaced are out of luck. And I am frustrated that here in the US especially, the people who are hit hardest by economic dislocation have the least resources to recover. The source of my frustration is that the benefits of technological development and world trade are shared broadly, while the costs are concentrated on those least able to find viable work in the new economy.
it's entirely possible to pay big bucks for entry into school
Education definitely is not a libertarian paradise. As to the rest of your US-centric criticism, where is the acknowledgement of the US government's decades old role as driver of inflating education costs at several times the rate of monetary inflation? That most definitely is not libertarian policy.
Libertarian philosophy is *explicitly* to "keep government out of the way", limiting government's role basically to defense and police work. Over the last 40 years, while demand for quality education has become strongly inelastic (it's necessary for individual economic survival, we'll pay through the nose to get it), the libertarians in our society have successfully reduced education funding at all levels, with college and grad school seeing the largest shift from public funding to students and families.
Libertarians in the US tend to be strict constructionists, and since education is not mentioned in the US Constitution, they believe it does not belong in the hands of federal government Cato Institute article. The states' management of education funding is inconsistent at best, and with the rise of "center-right" politics in the US, the states are reducing their funding too.
Thus my argument that the people who are dislocated by technological change rarely have the resources to restart at mid-life. Getting education is expensive, changing from skilled trade work to intellectual work is very difficult, and income while starting over is insufficient to cover expenses typical to a worker in mid-life.
It's late now, so I don't have the time to do a proper search for references... But I am pretty sure I've read that a high quality education policy tends to have a high return on public investment, particularly when it's properly managed.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost agreed on modal editors:
Trying to convert from EDT (Digital: RSTS/E and VAX) to vi on joining AT&T B.L. in 1988 was a real challenge. My EDT fingers ruined editing sessions for days until I unlearned the "just type and go" habit.
Vim's key mapping has improved with the result that many of the control operations (indent controls, selection, movement, including mouse wheel scrolling and ) to work without mode change. It also allows automatic entry of "insert mode" on startup. But vim is not GUI so clicking into a search bar is not available to the best of my knowledge, so it remains old-school.
For my purposes, the big win for emacs and some other visual editors (jedit) is the ability to create multiple windows. I am surprised by the limited options for my preferred style, which is to have multiple toplevel windows showing and allowing editing in the same file. I still work in C (embedded etc.) and really like having header fragments in one place while actively editing in another, with "instant" switching between them with a mouse click. That can be sort-of emulated in atom and other "splittable" editors, but there are still speed bumps.
So I prefer emacs and jedit as a result.
Not necessarily, given even a little bit of planning.
A house we just sold in a nearby suburb (Central Ohio, northwest side) that we had been renting out is in an area where services (electric power, gas, cable, communication) are all underground. The house is not a McMansion, more of a step up from a "starter home" and it's not in a fancy rich neighborhood. Reasonable property taxes too. (The point about reasonable property taxes not directly relevant, but supports the argument that underground service is not the exclusive domain of expensive/wealthy neighborhoods.)
The ubiquity of the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Linux on PCs (modern or ancient), IOT devices, the top 500 supercomputers, routers, etc.: All made possible by open source software.
Schools in nations with emerging economies, research labs, DIY home makers all over the world build little (or big) process control and measurement boxes: These decisions are simplified by the presence of the invaluable library of open source software.
The company I work for has 8 Odroids, 6 Raspberry Pis, about a dozen workstations, and our main product line runs on embedded boards running Linux. All of these resources are critical to our success, and the availability of system that run those machines without struggling with license-counting has left an indelible mark on our organization. Even the industrial CNC milling machines are controlled by Linux systems.
I am a certified grey-beard who has developed in and watched this industry since graduating in 1977 who is simply amazed by the easy availability of today's tools. Moore's law has helped on the hardware side (no more 500 grand for a 1 Mbyte core-memory mainframe with 90 Mbytes disk...), but in my opinion the real enabler for much of this industry has been the software toolkit. I have seen a transition from Fortran-II on OS-8 (low end) or Fortran-IV and COBOL on System/370 (high end) to systems running SciPy, Postgres, Apache, Octave, R, openssl, etc. etc., all available for download.
Open source systems have delivered power in excess of anything I ever imagined.
In my experience most technology patents seem to be pretty obvious to anyone who is in the industry, however.
This.
The central issue. Far too many patents are of the type "With A Computer", or "On The Internet", "on a touchscreen", or as you say obvious to someone in the industry. I am careful never to read any patent documents, as it's quite likely that some bright bulb wrote a patent about moving data, or packets, or whatever it is I build on a given day. If some dipshit company tries to sue the company I work for, at least we won't get hit with treble damages.
Generally speaking, if an architect or developer in cubeland in the course of normal work can write a routine or a really nice way to achive a functional goal, then it's unlikely that a patent should be granted for the work. That's approximately my test for patentability: If I can come up with an idea in the normal course of work, then it's probably not a real invention. On the other hand, if in my role as a developer/architect, I take several months or longer to work out a brand new way of achieving something, that could be patentable.
As a poll worker ("volunteer": they paid us, about 1/10 of a day's pay for an 18-hour day), I totally agree with the idea of consistent and reliable ID methods.
So you are half right. But it's the thin and weak half.
Those of us who were born into families with the basic resources to give us a good start were able to spend the effort to set up drivers licenses (the typical ID) which are trivial to renew once set up. To us, it does not appear to be a very high bar.
"Conservatives" are careful to avoid, and have largely successfully avoided an important point: There are many people who would otherwise be fully capable were born to families so far down that they could not get that start. And from that position, they often do not have the resources to get the legal documents that get the ball rolling.
Countries with good quality voter ID laws/practices do not erect the legal impediments to getting that initial start, and their citizens do not experience the disenfranchisement that we see in too many places in the U.S.
Responding to AC.... But the temptation is too great...
Dipshits (bot or not) writing from nether regions (either ass or somewhere else worse).
The only free market is one where regulation allows for a level playing field. All market participants always want to get the upper hand. In nearly all markets I see (particularly mature markets), ordinary nonlinear effects produce situations where a few players are either lucky or smart enough to gain enough power to control price movement.
There has never been, nor will there ever be, a truly free unregulated market: It is either regulated or not free.
The word "socialism" does not mean what your friends in the former Soviet Union want you to think it means. The original meaning of socialism was not "government overreach" but rather (in essence) governing for the greatest good/opportunity/etc for the population. The word you seek is "tyranny", as practiced by every small group of xxx_archs ("olig"archs, "mon"archs, etc) wherever they gain the upper hand over the societies they seek to control.
Being a developer, I am ok with some regulation: Much of the initial funding for semiconductor technology is an outgrowth of government competing against tyranny during the cold war. The U.S. manufacturing juggernaut in the 1950's was the result of gunvernment funding of large scale manufacturing of tanks, planes and ships in WW2. The (decreasingly neutral) internet is a government program originally intended to build distributed comms infrastructure capable of surviving catastrophic events (nuclear attacks, etc.).
It is my belief that the dominating reason for the internet bjringing communication to so many so broadly and so powerfully is EXACTLY government regulation: The original requirements, definition and research that produced inter-networking in the early days was interoperability among all manufacturers of equipment that is allowed to join in the program.
To repeat: The big invention of the internet was government-defined and required interoperability.
Bottom line:
1) There is no market that is both free and unregulated.
2) Capabilities leading to strategically valuable economic growth almost always required significant investment (and regulation) from an entity powerful enough and unbiased enough (like a properly democratic government) to fund development of technologies that would otherwise be locked into little walled gardens that don't work together efficiently.
Your information is out of date.
My wife and I just bought two Prius model 2 cars (one last week, one yesterday) and spend $25200 including all taxes and fees and with the 8-year extended warranty on each. The price of the car would be about $21000. These are 2017 models, and Toyota is offering a $2000 rebate.
Moore's law has brought the cost of perception, computation and automated controls down so quickly and effectively that our new cars have all sorts of safety options (lane assist, blindspot monitor, impending collision warnings, parking assist, etc. etc.) without all the upcharges.
For a few more days, I have one of the VW diesels that were the subject of the recent pollution control action. (I am choosing the "sell back to VW" option). That one cost $25500 or so in 2010.
I admit that we have a strong addiction to efficiency, and are willing pay a bit for that efficiency. I estimate that we could have equivalent quality, performance, features, etc. for about $2000-4000 less if we were willing to give up on the safety features. Based on my study of the market in preparation for buying the new cars, we noted that the safety features we seek are available only in the $23000+ price range, efficiency or not.
Interesting and imho informative essay.
I would add a few additional points:
1) Incumbent energy providers (oil, gas, coal, nuclear) have the gift of an ongoing revenue stream: Extracting and refining all the crude oil, gas and coal and for nuclear, spent fuel reprocessing, are all capital and energy intensive processes.
2) Hydro, wind and solar fail to provide that ongoing revenue stream: Those sources of energy arrive the point of collection whether or not there's a collector (turbine, PV) to get it.
3) Wind and solar are structurally distributed sources, so it is not easy to concentrate ownership of the means of collection and distribution in the hands of a small number of executives.
3a) It is surprisingly easy for individuals to put up solar arrays, providing a modicum of freedom from manipulation (rent-seeking) the incumbent providers.
It is no wonder that fuel executives have and will continue to lie, cheat, steal, kill, buy congress members, fund bogus think-tanks, and either take over or in some notable cases, become entire governments to preserve their rights to near monopolistic profit grabbing. It is my belief that all the talk from "conservatives" about "freedom" and "small government" is a thin veneer over their real goal: To persuade enough of the general population that efficiency, energy independence, local control/ownership/benefit are all a sinister government plot to "limit our freedom".
Unfortunately it's working wonderfully for them.
Yo Sparky,
Apparently 9 years ago is "history", and I infer from your comment that you didn't do too well there.
The bailout began on Bush Jr's watch. Bernanke and Paulson brought a single-page set of required steps to the U.S. Congress in October 2008 to prevent an immediate and complete meltdown of a worldwide financial system.
Following up on the Bush bank bailout, Obama had a challenge: Continue supporting the bailout of the motherfuckers that almost took out the world economy, or put up with the fallout of the worldwide depression without it.
<conjecture>
I am guessing that you and your other apparatchik friends are all good with the new tax bill the U.S. Senate just passed. You may think that by sucking up to the new oligarchy that they will grant you some space in their world. You are wrong.
</conjecture>
History (there's that word again) shows that societies destabilized by extreme inequality always fall and when they do, they tumble down hardest on the general population.
For decades the skills and liars in government, media, and banking have perpetuated the myth that everyone should go to college. Tens of millions of Americans were promised that their degree would lead to a good job.
It was all a pack of lies (to quote the great Phil Collins). College is largely a scam. It serves mostly as an indoctrination center to keep people have thinking critically, and while wasting four years and gobs of money, most graduates walk away with no useful skills.
"largely a scam".... Bogus generalization and demonstrably false.
As a developer, I have worked with many people who went to college, many who did not. Those who attended a good program of study were consistently better prepared for the work. More disciplined, better informed, more confident, better prepared to keep up with the changes to the intellectual environment required to make proper contribution to our products. That has been true in every organization I have worked in from Cable TV through avionics, logistics automation, communication, industrial data acquisition and control. Co-workers with the discipline to get a proper grounding in the theory consistently hit the ground running and are more productive, more flexible, and arrive with a better toolkit for delivering results.
There have been exceptional workers who are just plain brilliant and have learned on the job, and there have been those who managed to get through the course of study while avoiding the getting education part of it, but those are exceptions not the general rule.
On the original subject: Taxing people who managed to get into and be successful in advanced grad programs for the tuition that they would be paying if not for doing the work of teaching or research is a perfect example of short term thinking. It shows a complete failure to understand where improvements in productivity that produce true economic growth come from.
Mod parent up...
My wife had some blood tests done a few years ago, which initially were not covered by insurance. Cost to us: $1047.00; the provider helpfully offered a payment plan.
After much discussion and expenditure of hours we don't really have to spare, insurance covered the blood tests. Cost to the insurance company: $44.00, our copay was $4.00
So if your name is "anthem", $44.00; if your name is "nobody", $1047.00.
23.8 to 1.
This system is beyond fucked, it is simple ordinary Mafia extortion: Your money or your life.
Very similar to the net neutrality question, where the golden rule applies: He who invests properly in congressional races makes the rules.
The 2006 Supreme Court ruling about campaign donations was a silver-plated invitation to the party for a few, and a red hot poker for the asses of the many.
Hello, baby boomer here...
I wish I could criticize your post beyond being a bit exaggerated...
There are huge numbers of boom-generation people hanging on to what remains of their work lives and careers by the last millimeter of their fingernails. Add to that the fact that there's no such thing as a "savings account" any more: The only way to not fall behind inflation (see paragraph below) is to "invest" in equity, bond and/or international markets. Those markets are gyrating madly and some who needed to see a bit of safety for their 10 year money bought into the real estate market. They hope to put their hard-earned savings into a material investment vehicle they could see (and not evaporate suddenly), that should at least keep up with inflation. Some of them bought into the explosive adjustable rate mortgages, having been lied to by the fuckheads selling those (IMHO) fraudulent loans. My wife and I bought a house (using our 30+ years of savings) for that reason, though we would never get sucked into such a sick excuse for a loan.
Now about inflation: I think I agree that easily shippable goods have experienced reduction of inflation due to the Amazons of the world. But let's not be confused about "inflation". My wife and I have experienced increases in the costs of stuff we cannot do without far far in excess of "inflation". These things are things that cannot be shipped from countries engaged in "the race to the bottom": Medical insurance, taxes (property, sales, etc.), communication (I am a developer, my wife is a psychologist. There is no business without it.) We are grateful that another source of monstrous and damaging inflation, education (also local and increasingly profit driven) is not killing us financially as it is so many others.
My observation is that inflation has developed a bimodal distribution: services that can only be acquired locally have a high inflation rate, while goods or services that can be globalized have a low inflation rate.
Bottom line: Some unwise boomers didn't save and may have taken advantage of the bullshit loans, which contributed to the meltdown; I suppose the temptation of a McMansion might be part of it. I pin blame for the meltdown on the lying thieving bankster fuck heads (if I believed in Hell, they belong there, they knew exactly what they were doing to their mark^H^H^H^Hcustomers). There are also "wise" boomers that have savings who are getting fucked over by the lack of any investment vehicles that can be trusted in less than 20 year time horizon.
...Plus Guardian
What could go wrong? :-) One of the cheesiest, silliest Sci-Fy TV movies that I ever saw (yes, I saw it when it first aired, now get off my lawn). But great fun exploring unintended consequences nonetheless.
Lots of people "on the left" simply do not believe the promises of the companies and trade groups that their products are known to be safe (GMO) or known to be managed safely (nuclear).
Something that I do not see enough is documentary evidence that the decisionmakers in technical agriculture or in management of nuclear facilities could give two shits about the long term effects of their work (GMO) or costs of waste management (nuclear).
I for one fully trust decisionmakers to increase their profits to the exclusion of all other goals unless they are held strictly and personally accountable for their choices.
GMO gives strong, almost monopolistic market power to their companies. Nuclear is so capital intensive and the fuel reprocessing/waste issue is so expensive that they have a hard time competing without cutting corners.
Solve the incentive problems and allow for well-managed creative solutions to the downside risks, and the discussion will change dramatically. Until we see that these liars are held to account for lying then the greenies will use whatever (admittedly weak) logic they can muster to prevent or limit the fucking-over of those who lack influence over the decisions.
Fits real well for tools that don't have your particular preferences baked in...
Every time I need to use whatever editor happens to be available on whatever platform I need to maintain on whatever day I maintain it, those damn tab settings screw over formatting.
Note how that last comment refers to "the average cloud-ready server"...
NO competent large scale developer would ever even think in terms of of a "cloud-ready server"! That's exactly what I meant by technological refactoring. It IS happening but we're not bothering to notice it. (Other than some fat-fingering maintenance at Amazon last week) We have uptime expectations, performance expectations, that were impossible a few years ago.
As younger generations of developers move in to replace older ones, the loss of implicit and limiting assumptions of the older ones will allow for newer ways of thinking about the problem space. That is where the stepwise improvements will come from, just at they have been arriving all along.
I remember those days too... No stack, non-reentrant architecture, insufficient resources to emulate it in software (no base-indexed addressing like the IBM 360, for example). In fairness, the sorts of things we did with -8's were simple enough that the lack of resources was an acceptable tradeoff.
In response to the endless comments about bloated software, etc., expectations have increased either in step with, or perhaps ahead of, capacity improvements due to Moore's law. Being old enough to remember how much time was spent on a given "capability" in 1973, the godlike power granted to developers by a $10 pi-Zero-W, $35 Pi (quad 64 bit? way past Sci-Fi...) or Odroid is a wonder to behold. The average cloud-ready server is multiple orders of magnitude more powerful yet.
I would argue that we have no real sense of how dramatically today's world differs from those days, even those of us who were there. The word "inconceivable" just doesn't reach far enough into fantasy to compare with normal expectations. It is unsurprising that some deep technological refactoring is in order given the orders of magnitude differences between then and now.
There has been some paradigm-shifting between then and now, but more is needed to really take advantage of current technology. Until then improvements will look a bit anemic. I wonder whether I'll live long enough to see that shift.... It promises to be *very* interesting.
From your response to Gravis Zero:
Business people in general have to compete with other businesses.
True for small businesses and individuals engaging in economic activity where the market tends to be far larger than the entities participating in it. A serious problem arises when a marketplace experiences consolidation in one side of the buyer/seller populations: I claim that conditions (where a single entity or a small number of entities gain control of one side of the market) attracts people who absolutely take improper advantage of people.
Several examples in our current economy:
My wife and I have a rental house, which we think approximates a "dividend stock" requiring a lot of yard maintenance :-) but returning about 4-6% ROI depending on maintenance requirements in any given year.. The home rental market has not (yet) consolidated so badly that we get to compete with lots of other small-time owners in a market with lots of renters. It works well.
Then there's the energy market, the communication (ISP) market, the hospital system market in most cities, the health insurance market, manufacturing big ticket items, etc. Those large organizations are run by executives who know exactly how much market power they have, and they use it relentlessly.
...Great comments, especially WRT the UBEC. My work is always in a lab environment (or at home, where I use beefy USB chargers...), so it never occurred to me to look toward the RC world for an inexpensive DC-DC converter. Thank you for that!
The RPi is not designed for industrial application, and every one of the characteristics you cite, while being important for "pro-grade" product performance, also add cost that is unnecessary for 99.9% of Pi use-cases. Professional engineering time (that's us...) is precious, so we don't screw around with toys for delivered production hardware. The RPi, Odroids, Pines, Pi-clones, even the Beaglebone Black are all fabulous toys that we use to support diagnostics, lab automation, etc: If a $4.99 SD croaks we image a new one and we're back in business.
Industrial strength hardware (fanless industrial PC) costs about 20x the toy hardware: about 700-1000US but it's still fabulously cheap compared to the way it used to be. (I won't get into the ugly details of trying to talk my management into getting rid of VME hardware and 25 year old designs...)
Especially when combined with trick like RAM-resident root and tmp filesystems, EXT3/EXT4 on modern high-endurance flash is fine, as far as I can tell. I've run endurance checks of our current CF cards (1 or 2 gig, extended-endurance) and they are still just fine after 10-15 years of simulated activity. Our product uses flash only for logging and vehicle reporting. Modern wear-leveling and larger media let us forget the whole endurance question. NO more JFFS2! :-)
Personal note: I have and use Odroid -U2, -U3, -C, -C1, -C2, RPI2, RPI3, and a UDOO (original backer), mostly as micro-servers. I don't require much customization and as long as that remains true, I find them to be great machines.
The Odroids are definitely better hardware, but the story gets more complicated when the question of kernels (and the binary blobs needed for media) are updated to mainline. I've heard but not verified that the original Exynos CPUs in the Odroid-Ux are supported by mainline kernels.
The Allwinner chips in the Pines, Banana Pis, Orange Pis, etc. lack complete HW docs and need critical binary blobs (At least the Allwinner H8 has long needed a DRAM controller library blob, for example). If Allwinner were to clean up their documentation and make truly complete hardware docs available, then the overall product would be better than RPi. Until then, RPi support is so much better than their competitors that it overwhelms the otherwise obvious performance advantages.
Quoting from https://www.phoronix.com/scan....
However, the support isn't complete for the Allwinner A64 and is blocked in part by lack of proper documentation. Andre commented, "Due to a lack of official documentation and hardware availability this doesn't go any further at this moment."
The Allwinner A64 is comprised of the less-powerful Cortex-A53 cores, supports H.264/H.265 video decoding, and is widely talked about as being the "$5 ARM SoC." Hopefully this mainline kernel support will get figured out in time for the Pine A64 shipping.
Read John Perkins' book "Confessions of an Economic Hitman".
Agreed....
His followup book "Hoodwinked" reports that the predatory nature of the bad actors from "Confessions" was so successful that many of those techniques are being used closer to home.
Look at some of the comments in this Slashdot article to see how well it works.
This society is being worked over, "big time".
RISC-V still hasn't yet designated different parts of their NOP space for trapping and non-trapping NOPs, so extension is going to be difficult, and the RISC-V Foundation still doesn't have a process for introducing extensions for review and standardisation. This is why the ARM ecosystem is so valuable and the MIPS ecosystem is a wasteland.
I remember ARM's earlier work, which had the very same difficulties you describe for MIPS architectures. Every implementer had a separate memory protection/paging architecture, every one had a different interrupt routing architecture. What a grinding mess that was... They wised up *just in time* (IMHO), establishing core ("Cortex") functionality which is required for all implementers. That stabilized the ARM ecosystem enough to allow it to grow dramatically.
If the implementers of RISC-V are wise, they would establish and agree on functional (powerful, effective) support structures such that it's possible for developers to implement kernels and OSes around it.
Given Softbank's purchase of ARM, I am watching their actions very closely. All of the embedded devices used in my company and many others are Cortex-M3, -M4F, and the many -A series processors. Softbank is in a position to increase their IP licensing fees for immediate profit, screw over the entire embedded marketplace, and would end up, after much consternation in the embedded world, ceding the market to competitive low-end X86 and one of the lesser-known architectures (MIPS: Microchip's choice for PIC32. Irony... :-) ). This is a good place to mention RISC-V *if* they are smart about portability.
Mod up parent.
My father did me the favor of "leaving his Scientific American" mags around the house and a bored kid started looking at them.
At first it was very abstract and conceptual. It must have stuck, though. I will be 60 next month and still read every issue cover to cover and with special emphasis on quantum mechanics and cosmology.
Also: My uncle's gift of "Mathematics: A Human Endeavor", an introductory college text, probably "math for humanities students", but at 12 it opened the world.
I watched an old Twilight Zone episode on Netflix the other day (1966) which was about a factory where all the workers were being replaced by a computer and robotic system. They have been saying the same thing for 50 years. How many jobs today were not even imagined in 1966?
There are lots of new jobs, most of which are either beyond the capabilities of the people being displaced or which require several (5 or more) years of retraining during which time the displaced worker is starting over, earning nowhere near a sustainable income.
In today's libertarian paradise
I'll note such a thing doesn't exist.
You note correctly. In my US-centric view, which is where the big jobs question is being asked, people whose careers are being replaced are out of luck. And I am frustrated that here in the US especially, the people who are hit hardest by economic dislocation have the least resources to recover. The source of my frustration is that the benefits of technological development and world trade are shared broadly, while the costs are concentrated on those least able to find viable work in the new economy.
it's entirely possible to pay big bucks for entry into school
Education definitely is not a libertarian paradise. As to the rest of your US-centric criticism, where is the acknowledgement of the US government's decades old role as driver of inflating education costs at several times the rate of monetary inflation? That most definitely is not libertarian policy.
Libertarian philosophy is *explicitly* to "keep government out of the way", limiting government's role basically to defense and police work. Over the last 40 years, while demand for quality education has become strongly inelastic (it's necessary for individual economic survival, we'll pay through the nose to get it), the libertarians in our society have successfully reduced education funding at all levels, with college and grad school seeing the largest shift from public funding to students and families.
Libertarians in the US tend to be strict constructionists, and since education is not mentioned in the US Constitution, they believe it does not belong in the hands of federal government Cato Institute article. The states' management of education funding is inconsistent at best, and with the rise of "center-right" politics in the US, the states are reducing their funding too.
Thus my argument that the people who are dislocated by technological change rarely have the resources to restart at mid-life. Getting education is expensive, changing from skilled trade work to intellectual work is very difficult, and income while starting over is insufficient to cover expenses typical to a worker in mid-life.
It's late now, so I don't have the time to do a proper search for references... But I am pretty sure I've read that a high quality education policy tends to have a high return on public investment, particularly when it's properly managed.