The people who have dedicated large pieces of their lives learning to be effective in the jobs being shifted to automation have been, are, and will continue to be, fucked.
The TOTAL number of jobs may be only slightly reduced or even increased (though again usually somewhere else...), but the people whose careers are destroyed have no hope of recovery. So your argument is bullshit. Our society doesn't do a goddamned thing to mitigate the destruction that is focused on the people who have nowhere to turn.
I believe that those of us with privileged IQs and who learn for a living do not understand the flatly gut-wrenching transition from journeyman/master craftsman in a trade (machining, driving; choose a skill formerly limited to humans) to pre-junior apprentice intern. Interns *sometimes* make a minor stipend... The ex-tradesman is near or past middle age with children heading into college, a mortgage, car payment, medical costs, etc.
In today's libertarian paradise, it's entirely possible to pay big bucks for entry into school. There is no room for someone whose cost of living exceeds the pay of early stage career development. Those who don't have the wherewithal to pay up are "obviously slackers unwilling to invest properly in their own futures".
I have worked in high-tech places and in very low-tech places (trying to bring tech to improve business processes, etc.). Generally, a small fraction of the younger workers are prepared for the inevitable changes, but once past a certain age, that flexibility goes out the window as family and financial commitments place extremely tight restrictions on a worker's choices.
My family moved to an area near southeastern Ohio in 1972, and the community there was *already* depressed due to reduction in coal employment. That was before much of the current explosion in technology came along to make a bad situation into a complete disaster for the community.
I made the mistake of coding "JMS" instead of "JMP" in a disk boot routine exactly *once*, teaching an important lesson... Three days later, I had recovered most of the files on the RK-05.
The IBM 360 instruction set didn't have a hardware stack but the SAVE macro served well in its place.
Async (the select/poll model) and multithreading both have their place, the toolkit should match the application.
For the embedded world, I've discovered that run-to-completion "tasking" is so much easier these days, when the average microcontroller's clock speed is >= 120 MHz. The ARM Cortex world has such friendly exception handling that we simulate foreground/background "tasking" with ISRs.
Scaled floating point, unless you're working with an IBM Z series (does Power8 have decimal float?).
Every modern processor has fast floating point; a double can store and express 53 significant bits, so express the floats in pennies. Or if not in USA, the smallest denomination in the money system you use. Server class machines probably do long doubles.
("Every" includes all Raspberry Pi models, the Odroids, Banana PIs, Orange Pis, etc.; essentially every X86 since 1991, Every Power since about 2003 and all ARM since Cortex-A.) I haven't kept up with MIPS. Even the microcontroller world has single-precision floating point hardware in wide deployment: We use Kinetis parts (ST's parts have Cortex-M4F too), so easy 32-bit ints and floats is the order of the day. A reasonably structured interrupt service function (no assembly required, BTW) executes to completion in 1 microsec... It has truly changed the nature of our deeply embedded work.
The result: Use a commonly available toolkit competently.
Good points, I agree. Too bad reality does not and can never measure up.
What makes the book a piece of fiction rather than "serious commentary" is the idea in the book that leaders of society could be worthy of respect, wielding their authority responsibly. What I've found in way too many years in Corporate America is that we see all of the authority and none of the responsibility.
Thus, a nicely thought-provoking read is left behind in my childhood, overrun by reality.
Authority must be earned, and upon being properly earned, respected.
Starship Troopers was an important part of my educational reading (not school assigned, but I learned much from it nonetheless...).
I learned to despise what passes for authority in the real human world, because they are utterly devoid of the sense of responsibility that Heinlein's officers and leaders showed in their actions and words. The contrast between Heinlein's descriptions of leaders and what we see today in authority figures could not be more clear.
Heinlein's leaders as described in Starship Troopers generally respected those they commanded, and were not on the take. There is no valid comparison of today's dipshit thieves and Heinlein's world.
Anyone linking what passes for authority today with Heinlein's story is bound to confuse the "wielding power" we see today, which is at best Feudalist and at worst Fascist, with respect-worthy leadership.
I am not sure whether a movie made today could possibly accurately reflect the leadership and social commitment philosophy in the book.
Your point about it going to everybody is a good one, and is the way social security managed to get past the conservative politicians in its day.
My question revolves around how society decides on the size of the allotment, balancing the temptation to demand endless increases in UBI against productivity.
How do we make it reasonably valuable while preventing it from becoming a political bribe to buy votes? In a comment below someone offered the suggestion that one can accept UBI or vote but not both. That would lead to serious, and IMHO, destructive divisions.
In conversations with like-minded coworkers, we thought about dividing a certain fraction of GDP, offset by various costs of government operations, split evenly among all citizens (including their children). In our thought experiments, we figured it might be enough to ensure that changing that fraction would require something like 90% consensus in the voting population (I cannot imagine the number ever decreasing). We were optimistic that level of consensus would be so difficult to achieve that it would offset the temptation to raise UBI excessively.
Uh, Bernie was pushing Socialism hard and were it not for the entrenched and dirty DNC and the Clinton Machine, he would now be the candidate of the Democratic party.
As a Bernie supporter, I would like to respectfully disagree, with the following argument: When Bernie began his challenge, he was nearly unknown to the general voting population. I think that the Democratic Establishment was planning on an essentially uncontested primary season, conserving resources to prepare for what they were certain would be a ugly, expensive general election campaign. They almost certainly failed (*really* failed) to understand the power of so many people that were left out of the conversation during and after the Clinton Triangulation era. (I also Obama arrived with such a delicate economy that his hands were tied...)
I think that if Bernie had gotten going 2 months (or better, 6 months) earlier in the run-up to the primary, the actions of the party and likely the results of the primary would have been totally different.
Finally, while think Hillary is too centrist, she has remained standing in the face of attacks that would demotivate nearly everyone else, and to the best of my knowledge is a walking encyclopedia of policy. I am not sure Bernie really had the connections or the policy background. It seems like he has a very attractive philosophy which I had hoped would lead to greater detailed policy objectives and plans.
I am all for UBI if it can be implemented intelligently.
The money quote:
Remove loopholes and incentivize productivity as much as possible.
Is that possible? Philosophically, I am attracted to the concept but have a concern that the UBI would be the topic of ugly political (or worse, violent) struggle: Those on UBI want bigger UBI, those whose work (or those whose AIs work) want smaller UBI. It seems fraught with subjectivity.
Some rational way to balance those two forces must exist or a society implementing UBI would ultimately fail.
Wasn't easy to find, and very manual. That said, I finally found the option and after about an hour of clicking little boxes, I got (what I hope are) all of the messages transferred.
A coworker who regularly works in China finds WeChat to be the most effective semi-real time communication channel, a requirement when we are installing or supporting new installations.
As one who likes recordkeeping, I've been looking into ways to offload the informal but valuable information in the chat sessions. A bit of Internet searching has revealed that it might be possible to decrypt the database (apparently an encrypted sqlite3 db) given mobile device identification but it takes lots of extra effort and probably violates both DMCA and the EULA.
As far as I can tell, TenCent has ensured that the customer cannot save records of their own conversations.
I am suspicious of any organization that knows how to decode my conversations while simultaneously preventing me from keeping my own record of those conversations.
I've had good luck with the Odroid product line. The closest match to (what I asssume are) your needs is the Odroid C1+, which has PI-like extensibility, a much faster processor (faster than the Model PI 2B) which probably doesn't matter much, and built-in analog input. Note that the analog input is 0-1.8v.
hmm that reminds, me what ever happened to internet over electric cables? The elect company's are not saving and replacing old infrastructure as they should be. I've seen plenty of news stories about how bad our grids are and how everything needs to be replaced but is not. Who owns the cables??
The neighborhood grid is owned by a single delivery company (AEP in most of central Ohio), while the generation is provided by "competitors".
The U.S. generally does not have broadband over power lines for two reasons:
We have more transformers, each with a smaller step-down ratio, than other countries (Europe, Japan, etc.) since our grid started earlier. BPL needs a repeater over each transformer.
Ham operators put up a pretty major stink about delivering high bandwidth over power lines due to an expectation of (and possibly experimental data showing) interference.
On the original article topic, I would totally vote to have an entity that is (at least lightly) accountable to citizens/voters in order to put a little competitive pressure on the current crop of duopolists. Digital/internet communication has transformed the way most of us work, and has become non-optional. I believe it's informative to note that many times that localities have tried to provide comms services, the entrenched players usually sue. I'm thinking it's a pretty good gravy train or they wouldn't be so protective of the turf.
I am damn tired of the unreliability of our current grid. I am in central Ohio: our power blinks at least once/month, and every few months it's out for hours. After any real storm, it's a week or more.
If my house weren't surrounded by trees, I would have solar to offset/augment in normal times, and to work when the local power providers fail to deliver service.
I'm with others upthread whose expectation is not that "nuclear is impossible to do properly", but rather "Nuclear is impossible to responsibly here". Executives with authority over large projects have an essentially perfect record of focusing on finances and schedule to the exclusion of all other factors, most notably the safety of the many people who are likely affected by the executives' decisions long after the executives have deployed their golden parachutes.
It's also worth noting that the executives involved have an essentially perfect record of focusing (there's that word again) on the difficulty of proving that increased frequency of negative health effects are due to the facilities that they manage.
So in the context of applying "scientific principles" to policy debates whether the debate is over nuclear safety or AGW, it's my opinion that people with well-financed megaphones argue that "science cannot prove anything" while simultaneously arguing that "scientific proof is required" before taking any action. Works for them, not so much for everyone else.
Some specific examples
Dangers of smoking
Nicotine addiction
Effects of polychlorinated bisphenols
Groundwater pollution due to nuclear technology
Finally, I'm old enough to remember that the only way to get industrialists off their lazy asses in the 60's and 70's was by "government action". "Self-regulation" wasn't worth a good GodDamn.
I tend to favor light regulation to ensure a level playing field, or alternatively a way to ensure a large enough pool of providers that customers have choices.
I really HATE the idea of reducing the market power of the end customer. It is my opinion that the current stream-of-consciousness rulemaking from the current FCC chair has that goal in mind. As things are progressing, with large content-providers being stuck with paying priority upcharge fees for the bandwidth and connectivity that THEY ALREADY PAY FOR, the ISPs (Comcast, TW, etc.) have another set of partners to collude with, without the need to satisfy the paying customers.
A plan that gives local ISPs a revenue stream other than their end customers is yet another erosion of the power of the customers in the marketplace, which is already so weak that we pay double or more for equivalent access than our international counterparts. Our market power is already severely limited by the lack of ISP choice in most communities, linked to the fact that there are only a few large providers nationwide.
I propose a rule requiring that an ISP's only source of income must be its customers. Is this "government regulation"? Or would it pass muster for the free market fundamentalists out there?
Just one developer's observation... I have not yet seen Google fuck over developers and customers with the naked contempt shown by Microsoft or impenetrable garden wall of Apple.
Being operated by humans, I am sure Google will come over to the dark side and mis-use their market power eventually. Hopefully I'll be retired before then, as I am getting bloody tired of having to change infrastructure every time a formerly functional organization's mis-use of its market power becomes an unbearable burden.
Apple had a very well-designed, well-built and convenient product with iPod. They followed up with the well-designed and convenient software product, iTunes. iTunes is so profitable and flawlessly exemplifies vendor lock-in, that they followed up with the same model for the iPhone and iPad.
One ecosystem, which just happens to not work very well with other vendors' products, and essentially never with open-platform systems.
That model is even sweeter than Microsoft's lock-in model, which was an improvement over IBM's lock-in model.
The company I work for has implemented some infrastructure with iXxx and they basically regret the decision; Apple's control is *very* effective at many levels, much to our disappointment.
what this means is the memory is not on the same piece of silicon as the CPU, just stuffed in the same chip package.
Which allows the designers to count on carefully controlled impedances, timings, seriously optimized bus widths and state machines, and all the other goodies that come with access to internal structures not otherwise available.
Such a resource could, if used properly, be a significant contributor to performance competitiveness.
Teensy would be tempting to anyone who has already done embedded development in the ARM microcontroller world. Insufficient memory to run any Linux, but plenty of flash and RAM to run any of many deeply embedded RTOS. Looking over the reference manual shows that the chip's peripheral blocks are powerful, including what appears at first read to be a pretty snazzy DMA controller.
I've been seriously considering it as a target for developing a communication front-end for a project at work. Previous experience is with a Cortex-M3 (Atmel AT91SAM3U) which was a great MCU to work with. GCC is available and I've been able to do all development on Linux workstations.
At least from the point of view of the executive manglement team.
The last time I saw a mid level manager require written documentation from more than one stakeholder (marketing, business analysts, etc.) at a time, he was FIRED, for "being inflexible". This after he offered *many times* to help shepherd the process including discussing the effort of various options that might be chosen for implementing the ideas under discussion. Also after >3 years of trying to implement under-specified, over-promised features whose priority was always greater than refactoring and cleanup as the application experienced shifts in functional emphasis to match changing market conditions.
I've been doing this stuff since 1977 and the most consistent statement that could be made about top management people was "he or she has never felt the pain of an ink pen in hand". Fear of commitment. Frequently we who had to keep things going just did as much work as possible, hoping for the best. Unfortunately, even with the willingness to get into the work, our vision was necessarily limited, and consequently so was our success rate.
Beyond a certain point, high level managers become extremely risk-averse. It's explainable: The challenges of getting details right are many, and the likelihood of success is small due to the vicissitudes of most business marketplaces. I believe this is why there's lots of talk about "taking risks" but truth be told, risk taking is such a fear-inducing process that it's never used.
With that complaint out of the way, I agree with your premise. I merely observe that I've seen it carried through about once or twice in 35 years.
Your comment is on target given that ARM systems have a history being both lightweight and worse yet, inconsistently equipped with floating point hardware. The consequence has been that application and package developers face a choice between being able to run on lots of hardware by avoiding dependency on FP, or to provide good performance by limiting their applicability to systems with that hardware. I do not know whether ARM can overcome that history in a bid for a place in the server marketplace.
I expect that ARM architects recognize the need for consistency, with the result that the ARMv8 64-bit spec is way more specific about what developers can count on, so they can use high performance compiler settings consistently, while still being sure their applications can run on all servers.
This is a very important place where the Intel IA32 and AMD's x86-64, won. Beginning with the i486 (not SX), developers had a consistent set of compiler optimization choices providing "really good" performance. Anyone wanting really kick-ass, custom-optimized performance is welcome to go with tightly customized, processor-specific compilation, as one might be able to justify in HPC.
So the question is whether ARM's history of support for giving silicon implementers major freedom in selecting from among many options, will leave a legacy of inconsistency or whether they can get past that to enter the marketplace where consistency is required for success.
BTW, as an embedded developer, I've found the flexibility of choosing silicon that's well-tuned to my device-specific needs to be very important.
My 2010 TDI "Sportwagen" gets 35+ under constant in-town acceleration/deceleration during rush hour, gets 40+ in off-hour in-town driving, and 52+ on disciplined long trips.
Plenty of room for a custom bicycle (I am 6' 4", and the bike's frame is enlarged to accommodate exceptionally long legs). Or alternatively room for 4 people and all their luggage for a long weekend at a family wedding.
Being a slashdot poster, you should know about "refactoring". Doesn't happen enough in the software world, and it for sure doesn't happen often enough in the legislative world. But the answer is not "deregulating": which merely cedes the power to those who really want to socialize their responsibilities while privatizing their profits.
There has never been a free market. The only question to be answered is "who controls the market"? It could be, and usually is, the group who have the concentrated market power, or an entity that should be responsible to the society at large, whose capacity to design and implement the regulations is admittedly imperfect, but without that imperfect process, we're all fucked.
Mitigation strategies become more expensive as "we" delay efforts to develop and apply those strategies.
There is now a huge separation of interests between those control access to concentrated capital from those whose lives are most directly affected by environmental conditions.
The "capitalists" have a strong interest in preserving their existing revenue streams. The interests of the rest of society are irrelevant. The truly poor in other countries, many of whom live in low lying areas and depend on water supplies that are already turning brackish due to the current rise of only a few inches. Such people have almost negative value to high-concentration capital operators, usually being in the way when one investment or another involves their displacement.
The Koch brothers and their friends the major fossil fuel industries have a strong interest in their current business model, and will fuck the rest of the world if necessary to prevent losses in their investments.
The delays that the Heartland Institute, and other thinktanks advocate WILL cause mitigation strategies to become prohibitively expensive and count on it coming out of our asses. The longer we wait, the more painful the movement will be.
To those who are skeptical of government intervention, I hesitantly agree, for two reasons: 1) It's been bought off by highly concentrated capitalists expressing their "free speech rights" drowning out all others in the public square, 2) Too many people have a problem with learned helplessness and are unwilling or unable to see the effects of the endless talk of "freedom", failing to see that "freedom" usually means "free to fuck over those that do not have the countervailing power to prevent it".
The place where I flat out disagree with that logic is that the people who pull the strings of highly concentrated capital are *far* worse. My preference for "government" intervention is precisely because in a society that has not entirely lost its capacity for small-D democratic action, government is weakened by the constant re-election of legislators & "leaders". Throw away that feedback loop by *endlessly* whining about "government" with the effect of ceding control to the few lever-pullers, and you will have something way more interesting.
P.S. I am a white guy in my mid-fifties who has been working in corporate environments large and small for 35+ years. I have seen the effects of narrow interests screwing over the others for most of those years. When authority is not balanced by strong accountability WITH TEETH, that authority is misused one hundred-point-zero percent of the time. Those with insufficiently accountable authority have an absolutely perfect record of misusing it.
Slashdot Mirror
The people who have dedicated large pieces of their lives learning to be effective in the jobs being shifted to automation have been, are, and will continue to be, fucked.
The TOTAL number of jobs may be only slightly reduced or even increased (though again usually somewhere else...), but the people whose careers are destroyed have no hope of recovery. So your argument is bullshit. Our society doesn't do a goddamned thing to mitigate the destruction that is focused on the people who have nowhere to turn.
I believe that those of us with privileged IQs and who learn for a living do not understand the flatly gut-wrenching transition from journeyman/master craftsman in a trade (machining, driving; choose a skill formerly limited to humans) to pre-junior apprentice intern. Interns *sometimes* make a minor stipend... The ex-tradesman is near or past middle age with children heading into college, a mortgage, car payment, medical costs, etc.
In today's libertarian paradise, it's entirely possible to pay big bucks for entry into school. There is no room for someone whose cost of living exceeds the pay of early stage career development. Those who don't have the wherewithal to pay up are "obviously slackers unwilling to invest properly in their own futures".
I have worked in high-tech places and in very low-tech places (trying to bring tech to improve business processes, etc.). Generally, a small fraction of the younger workers are prepared for the inevitable changes, but once past a certain age, that flexibility goes out the window as family and financial commitments place extremely tight restrictions on a worker's choices.
My family moved to an area near southeastern Ohio in 1972, and the community there was *already* depressed due to reduction in coal employment. That was before much of the current explosion in technology came along to make a bad situation into a complete disaster for the community.
Sounds like a PDP-8.
I made the mistake of coding "JMS" instead of "JMP" in a disk boot routine exactly *once*, teaching an important lesson... Three days later, I had recovered most of the files on the RK-05.
The IBM 360 instruction set didn't have a hardware stack but the SAVE macro served well in its place.
Async (the select/poll model) and multithreading both have their place, the toolkit should match the application.
For the embedded world, I've discovered that run-to-completion "tasking" is so much easier these days, when the average microcontroller's clock speed is >= 120 MHz. The ARM Cortex world has such friendly exception handling that we simulate foreground/background "tasking" with ISRs.
Scaled floating point, unless you're working with an IBM Z series (does Power8 have decimal float?).
Every modern processor has fast floating point; a double can store and express 53 significant bits, so express the floats in pennies. Or if not in USA, the smallest denomination in the money system you use. Server class machines probably do long doubles.
("Every" includes all Raspberry Pi models, the Odroids, Banana PIs, Orange Pis, etc.; essentially every X86 since 1991, Every Power since about 2003 and all ARM since Cortex-A.) I haven't kept up with MIPS. Even the microcontroller world has single-precision floating point hardware in wide deployment: We use Kinetis parts (ST's parts have Cortex-M4F too), so easy 32-bit ints and floats is the order of the day. A reasonably structured interrupt service function (no assembly required, BTW) executes to completion in 1 microsec... It has truly changed the nature of our deeply embedded work.
The result: Use a commonly available toolkit competently.
Can't argue that... The book discussed a utopian ideal that (as you note correctly is much like Atlas Shrugged) cannot exist in reality.
Good points, I agree. Too bad reality does not and can never measure up.
What makes the book a piece of fiction rather than "serious commentary" is the idea in the book that leaders of society could be worthy of respect, wielding their authority responsibly. What I've found in way too many years in Corporate America is that we see all of the authority and none of the responsibility.
Thus, a nicely thought-provoking read is left behind in my childhood, overrun by reality.
Being of the "get off my lawn" age, I respond:
Authority must be earned, and upon being properly earned, respected.
Starship Troopers was an important part of my educational reading (not school assigned, but I learned much from it nonetheless...).
I learned to despise what passes for authority in the real human world, because they are utterly devoid of the sense of responsibility that Heinlein's officers and leaders showed in their actions and words. The contrast between Heinlein's descriptions of leaders and what we see today in authority figures could not be more clear.
Heinlein's leaders as described in Starship Troopers generally respected those they commanded, and were not on the take. There is no valid comparison of today's dipshit thieves and Heinlein's world.
Anyone linking what passes for authority today with Heinlein's story is bound to confuse the "wielding power" we see today, which is at best Feudalist and at worst Fascist, with respect-worthy leadership.
I am not sure whether a movie made today could possibly accurately reflect the leadership and social commitment philosophy in the book.
.... And making sure we *always* the banking transaction tax that ranges anywhere from 1.5 to 3% per transaction.
The fuckers bleating loudest about "taxes" are dead silent about the transaction taxes they extract to buy supercars to add to their collections.
Your point about it going to everybody is a good one, and is the way social security managed to get past the conservative politicians in its day.
My question revolves around how society decides on the size of the allotment, balancing the temptation to demand endless increases in UBI against productivity.
How do we make it reasonably valuable while preventing it from becoming a political bribe to buy votes? In a comment below someone offered the suggestion that one can accept UBI or vote but not both. That would lead to serious, and IMHO, destructive divisions.
In conversations with like-minded coworkers, we thought about dividing a certain fraction of GDP, offset by various costs of government operations, split evenly among all citizens (including their children). In our thought experiments, we figured it might be enough to ensure that changing that fraction would require something like 90% consensus in the voting population (I cannot imagine the number ever decreasing). We were optimistic that level of consensus would be so difficult to achieve that it would offset the temptation to raise UBI excessively.
Uh, Bernie was pushing Socialism hard and were it not for the entrenched and dirty DNC and the Clinton Machine, he would now be the candidate of the Democratic party.
As a Bernie supporter, I would like to respectfully disagree, with the following argument: When Bernie began his challenge, he was nearly unknown to the general voting population. I think that the Democratic Establishment was planning on an essentially uncontested primary season, conserving resources to prepare for what they were certain would be a ugly, expensive general election campaign. They almost certainly failed (*really* failed) to understand the power of so many people that were left out of the conversation during and after the Clinton Triangulation era. (I also Obama arrived with such a delicate economy that his hands were tied...)
I think that if Bernie had gotten going 2 months (or better, 6 months) earlier in the run-up to the primary, the actions of the party and likely the results of the primary would have been totally different.
Finally, while think Hillary is too centrist, she has remained standing in the face of attacks that would demotivate nearly everyone else, and to the best of my knowledge is a walking encyclopedia of policy. I am not sure Bernie really had the connections or the policy background. It seems like he has a very attractive philosophy which I had hoped would lead to greater detailed policy objectives and plans.
I am all for UBI if it can be implemented intelligently.
The money quote:
Remove loopholes and incentivize productivity as much as possible.
Is that possible? Philosophically, I am attracted to the concept but have a concern that the UBI would be the topic of ugly political (or worse, violent) struggle: Those on UBI want bigger UBI, those whose work (or those whose AIs work) want smaller UBI. It seems fraught with subjectivity.
Some rational way to balance those two forces must exist or a society implementing UBI would ultimately fail.
Wasn't easy to find, and very manual. That said, I finally found the option and after about an hour of clicking little boxes, I got (what I hope are) all of the messages transferred.
They limit each transfer to 100 messages.
So you are correct.
A coworker who regularly works in China finds WeChat to be the most effective semi-real time communication channel, a requirement when we are installing or supporting new installations.
As one who likes recordkeeping, I've been looking into ways to offload the informal but valuable information in the chat sessions. A bit of Internet searching has revealed that it might be possible to decrypt the database (apparently an encrypted sqlite3 db) given mobile device identification but it takes lots of extra effort and probably violates both DMCA and the EULA.
As far as I can tell, TenCent has ensured that the customer cannot save records of their own conversations.
I am suspicious of any organization that knows how to decode my conversations while simultaneously preventing me from keeping my own record of those conversations.
I've had good luck with the Odroid product line. The closest match to (what I asssume are) your needs is the Odroid C1+, which has PI-like extensibility, a much faster processor (faster than the Model PI 2B) which probably doesn't matter much, and built-in analog input. Note that the analog input is 0-1.8v.
http://www.hardkernel.com/main...
If you're in the U.S., the easiest supplier is Ameridroid:
http://ameridroid.com/products...
I have and used the Odroid-U2, Odroid-U3, and an Odroid C1 (before the C1+) They all worked just fine out of the box.
hmm that reminds, me what ever happened to internet over electric cables? The elect company's are not saving and replacing old infrastructure as they should be. I've seen plenty of news stories about how bad our grids are and how everything needs to be replaced but is not. Who owns the cables??
The neighborhood grid is owned by a single delivery company (AEP in most of central Ohio), while the generation is provided by "competitors".
The U.S. generally does not have broadband over power lines for two reasons:
On the original article topic, I would totally vote to have an entity that is (at least lightly) accountable to citizens/voters in order to put a little competitive pressure on the current crop of duopolists. Digital/internet communication has transformed the way most of us work, and has become non-optional. I believe it's informative to note that many times that localities have tried to provide comms services, the entrenched players usually sue. I'm thinking it's a pretty good gravy train or they wouldn't be so protective of the turf.
Bull shit. ...Hippy girls....
I am damn tired of the unreliability of our current grid. I am in central Ohio: our power blinks at least once/month, and every few months it's out for hours. After any real storm, it's a week or more.
If my house weren't surrounded by trees, I would have solar to offset/augment in normal times, and to work when the local power providers fail to deliver service.
I'm with others upthread whose expectation is not that "nuclear is impossible to do properly", but rather "Nuclear is impossible to responsibly here". Executives with authority over large projects have an essentially perfect record of focusing on finances and schedule to the exclusion of all other factors, most notably the safety of the many people who are likely affected by the executives' decisions long after the executives have deployed their golden parachutes.
It's also worth noting that the executives involved have an essentially perfect record of focusing (there's that word again) on the difficulty of proving that increased frequency of negative health effects are due to the facilities that they manage.
So in the context of applying "scientific principles" to policy debates whether the debate is over nuclear safety or AGW, it's my opinion that people with well-financed megaphones argue that "science cannot prove anything" while simultaneously arguing that "scientific proof is required" before taking any action. Works for them, not so much for everyone else.
Some specific examples
Finally, I'm old enough to remember that the only way to get industrialists off their lazy asses in the 60's and 70's was by "government action". "Self-regulation" wasn't worth a good GodDamn.
I tend to favor light regulation to ensure a level playing field, or alternatively a way to ensure a large enough pool of providers that customers have choices.
I really HATE the idea of reducing the market power of the end customer. It is my opinion that the current stream-of-consciousness rulemaking from the current FCC chair has that goal in mind. As things are progressing, with large content-providers being stuck with paying priority upcharge fees for the bandwidth and connectivity that THEY ALREADY PAY FOR, the ISPs (Comcast, TW, etc.) have another set of partners to collude with, without the need to satisfy the paying customers.
A plan that gives local ISPs a revenue stream other than their end customers is yet another erosion of the power of the customers in the marketplace, which is already so weak that we pay double or more for equivalent access than our international counterparts. Our market power is already severely limited by the lack of ISP choice in most communities, linked to the fact that there are only a few large providers nationwide.
I propose a rule requiring that an ISP's only source of income must be its customers. Is this "government regulation"? Or would it pass muster for the free market fundamentalists out there?
Just one developer's observation... I have not yet seen Google fuck over developers and customers with the naked contempt shown by Microsoft or impenetrable garden wall of Apple.
Being operated by humans, I am sure Google will come over to the dark side and mis-use their market power eventually. Hopefully I'll be retired before then, as I am getting bloody tired of having to change infrastructure every time a formerly functional organization's mis-use of its market power becomes an unbearable burden.
No, "network effects" is the right term.
Apple had a very well-designed, well-built and convenient product with iPod. They followed up with the well-designed and convenient software product, iTunes. iTunes is so profitable and flawlessly exemplifies vendor lock-in, that they followed up with the same model for the iPhone and iPad.
One ecosystem, which just happens to not work very well with other vendors' products, and essentially never with open-platform systems.
That model is even sweeter than Microsoft's lock-in model, which was an improvement over IBM's lock-in model.
The company I work for has implemented some infrastructure with iXxx and they basically regret the decision; Apple's control is *very* effective at many levels, much to our disappointment.
what this means is the memory is not on the same piece of silicon as the CPU, just stuffed in the same chip package.
Which allows the designers to count on carefully controlled impedances, timings, seriously optimized bus widths and state machines, and all the other goodies that come with access to internal structures not otherwise available.
Such a resource could, if used properly, be a significant contributor to performance competitiveness.
Teensy would be tempting to anyone who has already done embedded development in the ARM microcontroller world. Insufficient memory to run any Linux, but plenty of flash and RAM to run any of many deeply embedded RTOS. Looking over the reference manual shows that the chip's peripheral blocks are powerful, including what appears at first read to be a pretty snazzy DMA controller.
I've been seriously considering it as a target for developing a communication front-end for a project at work. Previous experience is with a Cortex-M3 (Atmel AT91SAM3U) which was a great MCU to work with. GCC is available and I've been able to do all development on Linux workstations.
The price at PJRC, $19.00 can't be beat.
http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html
BLASPHEMY.
At least from the point of view of the executive manglement team.
The last time I saw a mid level manager require written documentation from more than one stakeholder (marketing, business analysts, etc.) at a time, he was FIRED, for "being inflexible". This after he offered *many times* to help shepherd the process including discussing the effort of various options that might be chosen for implementing the ideas under discussion. Also after >3 years of trying to implement under-specified, over-promised features whose priority was always greater than refactoring and cleanup as the application experienced shifts in functional emphasis to match changing market conditions.
I've been doing this stuff since 1977 and the most consistent statement that could be made about top management people was "he or she has never felt the pain of an ink pen in hand". Fear of commitment. Frequently we who had to keep things going just did as much work as possible, hoping for the best. Unfortunately, even with the willingness to get into the work, our vision was necessarily limited, and consequently so was our success rate.
Beyond a certain point, high level managers become extremely risk-averse. It's explainable: The challenges of getting details right are many, and the likelihood of success is small due to the vicissitudes of most business marketplaces. I believe this is why there's lots of talk about "taking risks" but truth be told, risk taking is such a fear-inducing process that it's never used.
With that complaint out of the way, I agree with your premise. I merely observe that I've seen it carried through about once or twice in 35 years.
Your comment is on target given that ARM systems have a history being both lightweight and worse yet, inconsistently equipped with floating point hardware. The consequence has been that application and package developers face a choice between being able to run on lots of hardware by avoiding dependency on FP, or to provide good performance by limiting their applicability to systems with that hardware. I do not know whether ARM can overcome that history in a bid for a place in the server marketplace.
I expect that ARM architects recognize the need for consistency, with the result that the ARMv8 64-bit spec is way more specific about what developers can count on, so they can use high performance compiler settings consistently, while still being sure their applications can run on all servers.
This is a very important place where the Intel IA32 and AMD's x86-64, won. Beginning with the i486 (not SX), developers had a consistent set of compiler optimization choices providing "really good" performance. Anyone wanting really kick-ass, custom-optimized performance is welcome to go with tightly customized, processor-specific compilation, as one might be able to justify in HPC.
So the question is whether ARM's history of support for giving silicon implementers major freedom in selecting from among many options, will leave a legacy of inconsistency or whether they can get past that to enter the marketplace where consistency is required for success.
BTW, as an embedded developer, I've found the flexibility of choosing silicon that's well-tuned to my device-specific needs to be very important.
My 2010 TDI "Sportwagen" gets 35+ under constant in-town acceleration/deceleration during rush hour, gets 40+ in off-hour in-town driving, and 52+ on disciplined long trips.
Plenty of room for a custom bicycle (I am 6' 4", and the bike's frame is enlarged to accommodate exceptionally long legs). Or alternatively room for 4 people and all their luggage for a long weekend at a family wedding.
Being a slashdot poster, you should know about "refactoring". Doesn't happen enough in the software world, and it for sure doesn't happen often enough in the legislative world. But the answer is not "deregulating": which merely cedes the power to those who really want to socialize their responsibilities while privatizing their profits.
There has never been a free market. The only question to be answered is "who controls the market"? It could be, and usually is, the group who have the concentrated market power, or an entity that should be responsible to the society at large, whose capacity to design and implement the regulations is admittedly imperfect, but without that imperfect process, we're all fucked.
Mitigation strategies become more expensive as "we" delay efforts to develop and apply those strategies.
There is now a huge separation of interests between those control access to concentrated capital from those whose lives are most directly affected by environmental conditions.
The "capitalists" have a strong interest in preserving their existing revenue streams. The interests of the rest of society are irrelevant. The truly poor in other countries, many of whom live in low lying areas and depend on water supplies that are already turning brackish due to the current rise of only a few inches. Such people have almost negative value to high-concentration capital operators, usually being in the way when one investment or another involves their displacement.
The Koch brothers and their friends the major fossil fuel industries have a strong interest in their current business model, and will fuck the rest of the world if necessary to prevent losses in their investments.
The delays that the Heartland Institute, and other thinktanks advocate WILL cause mitigation strategies to become prohibitively expensive and count on it coming out of our asses. The longer we wait, the more painful the movement will be.
To those who are skeptical of government intervention, I hesitantly agree, for two reasons: 1) It's been bought off by highly concentrated capitalists expressing their "free speech rights" drowning out all others in the public square, 2) Too many people have a problem with learned helplessness and are unwilling or unable to see the effects of the endless talk of "freedom", failing to see that "freedom" usually means "free to fuck over those that do not have the countervailing power to prevent it".
The place where I flat out disagree with that logic is that the people who pull the strings of highly concentrated capital are *far* worse. My preference for "government" intervention is precisely because in a society that has not entirely lost its capacity for small-D democratic action, government is weakened by the constant re-election of legislators & "leaders". Throw away that feedback loop by *endlessly* whining about "government" with the effect of ceding control to the few lever-pullers, and you will have something way more interesting.
P.S. I am a white guy in my mid-fifties who has been working in corporate environments large and small for 35+ years. I have seen the effects of narrow interests screwing over the others for most of those years. When authority is not balanced by strong accountability WITH TEETH, that authority is misused one hundred-point-zero percent of the time. Those with insufficiently accountable authority have an absolutely perfect record of misusing it.