Early stage here - self funded. After many years in land mobile radio industry, I decided to start my own thing. Hand held radios are still around, and will be, for many years. We're making them much better - the range, battery life, .. and open sourcing them.
As other said, development can be very expensive and iterations long, unless you're smart about it.
Very nice post. I also miss the early days of the internet.
I'm currently trying to come up with the cheapest, but still safe, design for a Li-Ion battery charger. This is for my work and saving on the component cost translates to decent $$$. It's a kind of a journey back in time for me as I no longer do much of low level hardware design otherwise. I'm happy now that I got it down to about $5 for the PCB, without using any unobtainium parts. It's really hard with the ongoing semiconductor supply chain crisis.
Outside of work, I'm way too much into fishing. Moved to a new coastal city a few years ago and got into it via my work mates. It's mostly rock fishing for me. It's really addictive to me. I have always been fascinated by marine life. I think some deep part of our brain craves the fishing/hunting aspect with the random reward. If we'd be able to get a good fish whenever we wanted, it would not be nearly as addictive. I've had some good successes because I put way too much time and money into this hobby. But, my family loves seafood as well and they support me in this. The trick is to find "liminal time" in between family, work, etc, and get up very early to drive to my fishing spot, get my few hours of fishing, then drive back and work from home. So no one is feeling like I'm stealing too much time.
In my world of embedded single core processors, we use "multi-threaded" code all the time. There is a single core so nothing truly ever executes in parallel and that makes it easier: Someone else already wrote the RTOS, and figured out how to prevent priority inversion, etc. So long as one follows a few rules, and the general pattern is tasks and ISRs communicating via the primitives provided by the RTOS, there are never any issues.
"Karaka explained that the book glorified a sexual relationship..."
This is the issue. And a misunderstanding. That's not at all how I took the book when I read it. It does not glorify anything - it is quite the opposite. What made the book an interesting read (although I have no interest in revisiting it) was the contrast between the tragedy of the story, and the playful language. The unreliable first person narrator is trying to make himself look sympathetic to the reader, all the while confessing to all his despicable endeavors.
Overall, quite jarring and I can see how it can be misunderstood.
What I find sad about this is that the effort and skill required to debunk this nonsense is an order of magnitude higher than the effort and skill required to create it in the first place.
Aka, the "Gish Gallop" and other analogues, observations and quotes about this effect, made many times.
"They should have a rigid spec and a publicly available test kit, and a certification process for spec compliance."
They do. One can only put the Bluetooth logo if the product passes compliance tests. For the pairing, Bluetooth allows different modes. Predictably, the least secure one became the most popular.
As I've been more in leadership positions over the years, this has been one of my challenges. We all have unproductive days (weeks?). What's interesting: I now work at a company that relies on hard work. I work in product development with significant software component, DSP and other specialties. When one team member does not deliver their part, the whole product is delayed and it becomes very visible. On the other hand, given that most of the stuff we do is new/unique, it is hard to see how much time a task "should" take. Sadly, people ocassionally hide behind this. One recent extreme example: We've hired a supposed senior "gun" that has been in the industry for 20+ years. Then he subsequently failed to deliver basic piece of software in 6 months. After some discussions with him, we realized he lacked even basic fundamentals. Our failing was that we didn't pick up on this during the hiring process. Anyway, someone else had to take over and complete it in a few weeks. This "senior gun" has been bullshitting his way through decades of career.. Btw, the companies that he worked for are failing (or failed already), so there's that indicator. My point is - developer's productivity can have a huge impact, depending on what the business is. I would hate to be working in a job where my work (or lack of) has no impact..
Yeah, I think the 650GS was too good, in a way. So they cancelled it, and focused on marketing those over-engineered half-ton things that people get regularly stuck on, anywhere off-road.
The BMW G650GS was the best bike I've had. Almost zero maintenance. Reliable. Amazing fuel economy. Decent on road when sat down. No probs doing 600km days. Decent off-when road standing up. It could handle deep sand when fitted with good tires. Not very sexy looking, but the perfect jack of all trades. And, yes, master of none - which is why BMW could not market it much further, I think. Pity.
Nope. Native Czech speaker here. The style is akin to a nursery rhyme or an old folk song. It doesn't carry any hidden meanings. A better English translation might be "..spray the field wet". The pronoun "your" is not present in the Czech phrase.
This would be okay for experimentation. It will not be able to run as a UMTS or LTE base station or anything like that. Mostly because the software required to do that is not available and not feasible to be done "from scratch". Those protocols are huge and riddled with patent claims.
A minor issue would be that UMTS and LTE base stations need 0.1ppm frequency precision (a GPS lock) which is missing here.
I wonder if the authors misrepresent their product knowingly, or if it's just a lack of knowledge.
Electronics is pretty broad. There are books for each area, depending on what you want to do:
- Building kits?
- Building circuits someone else designed?
- Designing printed circuit boards?
- Designing digital circuits?
- Designing analog circuits?
- Designing power electronics?
- Designing RF and microwave electronics?
- System design and assembly?
It's a great hobby. You can spend decades learning all this, and more. I have.. And don't get just one book. Get a few different ones. Google for stuff. Search Isohunt for ebooks. Get application notes from component manufacturers. There are tons of free useful info in those.
You guys in the US & friends probably don't see it as clearly. The US focus on self esteem - justified or not - and the vague post-modern concern with various shallow attributes, like gender, background etc., is actually quite stunning to me. I've grown up in a progressive part of the eastern bloc. The schooling in science and math there has traditionally been focused on tangible results.
From the year 1 onwards. Unannounced in-class tests used to be common. If you solved the math problem you got good marks, if you didn't you get poor marks. There was nothing judgmental about it. And you could not move into higher education if you didn't have good marks.
Let me give you an analogy. Have you met the wacky person on a party who is an awful dancer, but doesn't realise it? You know, like Elaine from Seinfeld. Embarasing, obnoxious and feeling good about it. If it were a child, the US&friends school system would tend to encourage them and telling them how awesome they are, lest their feelings get hurt. An eastern block school would just give them bad marks and let them move on...
Emacs + customisations.. nearly like Textpad but easier to use. Emacs is not really a text editor. It is some sort of OS for making text editors. You can have any text editor you like. Why would you use anything else?
# There is a native Windows build. It is a normal Win app, with file selection dialogs, etc...
As other said, development can be very expensive and iterations long, unless you're smart about it.