floating-io

Is it just me, or is that just a wood mock-up? That was kinda disappointing to realize.

I look at the image of all those people and wonder: will they have additional "floors" in the real thing? Because all I see is the possibility of someone getting stranded in the middle in zero G, unable to reach a surface to push off of...

Except SLS?

Not that I think it's a good thing, but...

That sounds like it would be an issue for anything. If the kernel knows that N pages need to be paged in, it should be able to optimize that behind the scenes in whatever way is needed.

I'll agree that mmap() would probably have issues with prediction there (other than basic readahead), but I would think that issuing a simple bulk read() call (or more likely an equivalent zero copy call; vread() if memory serves? Been too long) would give the kernel enough information to optimize bulk transfers.

Small async reads will always be slow if done serially, but there's already "standard" scatter/gather calls that should let the kernel optimize that as well.

In short, all but a truly naive application should be limited by the SSD or PCIe bandwidth before they ever hit issues like that if the kernel is optimizing correctly, and assuming that the application can predict its own needs.

The seemingly critical parallel job performance issue sounds like it can and should be handled transparently by the OS when multiple pages are involved, and should thus be an area of research if it isn't already.

Frankly, the idea that it isn't already a solved problem makes me wonder if that could possibly be the case...

The writes thing... Outside of very rare circumstances, I would think that properly batching inserts/updates within transactions at the app level would resolve half of that, and multi-user concurrency would buy back the rest.

What am I missing?

P.S. I'm mad at the author for enlightening me to the real-world performance impact of enterprise SSD. i'm about to buy, and that might just cost me...

I'm not running 4's or 5's. I'm running 2's and 3's. And they're mostly idle; DNS, DHCP, and Consul are all extremely lightweight. No video, wifi, or anything else; just ethernet and an SD card.

No sense in running anything more powerful than that. Having the latest and greatest -- and top-tier performance -- isn't always necessary.

And I still consider to be a credit card sized server to be tiny. Though watch-sized machines do take the cake there...

Also check your USB cables if they're supplying power. Low-quality cables are notorious causes of instability with older Pi's, and I doubt the 5 is any different in that respect.

I'm starting to wonder if we're seeing the ramping up of an Arm vs. Intel war at the same level as Mac vs. Windows, or emacs vs. vi, with Raspberry Pi as a convenient proxy, and all the usual foibles of every other us vs. them war.

It wouldn't surprise me if paid influencers were fanning the flames, either; certain folks have a lot to lose if arm goes mainstream on the desktop.

And then there's the recent Raspberry P-IPO or whatever it was, which seems to have pissed a bunch of people off...

The timing is interesting.

I can see the appeal of the N100 and similar -- and am currently considering one -- but it's hard to beat the ~1W DNS/DHCP/Consul servers that have been humming away in this house trouble free for the last decade...

I don't need those to power my homelab. There's a reason they're separate, and tiny low-power Pi's are ideal for that job.

I have in my possession more than merely a hammer. :)

Whoops! Sorry 'bout that. I misread it.

True. Though I've not been that specific, and there's a lot of variability even in the general area. Texas is odd that way.

Should give an idea how much values have shot up, though, and how fast. A $75k home in 2010 can easily be over $500k now. It's crazy.

No, I really won't. This is a well known issue in my area. Considering that I haven't said where I live, you shouldn't make assumptions.

> The tax doesn't really increase wealth disparity[...]

Counterpoint:

Where I live the land values have, at minimum, 4x'ed in the last couple of decades. This used to be a sleepy little retirement town, where retirees lived far away from the city, where nobody was interested in living except for those retirees -- hence why it was so inexpensive.

Those retirees are now being driven out en masse because they can no longer afford their property taxes.

These people retired on salaries and retirement packages (if they were lucky) from twenty and thirty years ago. They do not have an income beyond that. They are not millionaires, or anywhere close. Often, they're retired blue collar workers, barely getting by. They cannot actually purchase an equivalent property if they sell their own even at the higher rates--

--because they can no longer afford the taxes on it, and all the other properties around them have gone up just as much in value. They were driven up by the vastly wealthier tech types. These people have nowhere reasonable to move.

Bear in mind, we're not necessarily talking about multi-acre properties here, btw; we're talking modest homes that these people have been living in for fifty or more years.

They're being driven out because the much richer folk value their property. And to make matters worse? If they do sell the property, they instantly lose what little tax cap protection they had, so they'll be paying even more in taxes.

How is that not wealth disparity? If the tax hadn't gone up, they'd still be happily living there. They're only being pushed out because the younger, richer folk want their land.

If that's not increasing wealth disparity, then I don't know what is.

I find that to be irrelevant when employers start looking at your GitHub stats during the hiring process...

I intensely dislike the exposed contribution metrics, personally. Partly because I'm a natural introvert and find it intrusive, but mostly because I feel that it tends to thoroughly emphasize quantity over quality.

[edit: It's GitHub, not GutHub!]

I really don't get why people think git is uber-complicated for normal users.

I know: clone, pull, push, branch, checkout -b, merge, rebase -i. Those are my mainstays. The stash/stash pop stuff for a convenient power tool. And very occasionally, export to make a tarball.

It's so exceptionally rare for me to need anything else that I can't even think of anything else I've used offhand.

The first six are basic SCM, and IMO simpler to deal with than svn ever was. The rest... are conveniences that most don't need. Except rebase, debatably.

Rebase takes a short time to learn, but is well worth the trouble.

I've used a number of source control platforms over the years; git has been by far the easiest and most natural to work with for me. I've used it exclusively since around 2010ish, and have no regrets.

Amen.

On the other hand, I do miss things like $Id$...

I disagree.

My observation: instead of gaming likes, people are gaming contribution metrics. It's a subtle sort of "social credit score" type thing these days.

It may not be Facebook, but the social aspects and impacts are nevertheless strong.

People said similar things about the cloud: shrink your IT staff!

I don't think that dream quite materialized.

I doubt it will with AI either; they will just be supervising the AI, or spending time on more important things that the AI frees them up for.

That's my "prediction", anyway...

Certainly not SDLC.

That's what I read it as the first time through. How annoying.

> but if you want to actually sell your products, you still have to go through the process of RF certification (although at a lower cost. Only you can decide if the higher upfront cost of using a module vs. spinning your own is offset by the lower certification cost)

I doubt it was your intention given the disclaimer there, but based on my own research into this issue, this is a highly misleading statement, especially for small volume products.

Full FCC RF certification is not only very expensive, but also very complex from what I understand. It is NOT an easy process. That is why these modules are so popular in many actual commercial products.

If you need FCC certification for your product and use a pre-certified module (and presuming no other radio hardware is present), you only have to undergo the testing for an unintentional radiator I believe, which is a much simpler prospect.

The difference in cost is said to be in the neighborhood of $5K to $10K, though I haven't gotten any actual quotes yet, so I can't give anything definitive there.

Disclaimer: IANAL of any description, and I have not yet gone through this process myself; I'm just researching it as I get ready to produce a product. Do your own research, or better yet, hire someone who truly knows this stuff!

Your designs are better than mine! I can figure out what buttons should be where, but the aesthetics escape me... :)

Kudos on this one.

Forget the "I'm running it on a Pi" angle, which is cool in its own right; the application itself is great, and just went on my surf list.

Great work!

Constructive comments:

- Could use a visible "about this site" link, maybe pointing at that blog post or something similar.

- Could use to make a link to the source site's comments page more visible instead of just "click on the logo".

JMHO there. =)

Not to mention all the diodes down it's left side?

It depends only on how closely your profit is tied to the amount of time the customer spends on the product.

To take Netflix for example, it's probably better for them in terms of subscription profits if your "addiction" causes you to watch one episode each month, and not use it at all the rest of the time.

Unless you have non-revenue reasons to addict people, but that's probably headed into conspiracy theory territory... :)

That said, I'm pretty sure netflix has ad revenue, so the point is kinda moot.

Only if your revenue comes from ads or a pay per play style product. There exist many services that can retain users without them needing to log in every five seconds to maintain the revenue stream.

This was a fascinating read if for no other reason than seeing how the filters were assembled. I have much more understanding of digital than analog, to say nothing of RF stuff.

I would love to see more stuff like this that is so understandable! Makes it seem much less like black magic...

Employer-offered plans tend to be extremely good value, so the vast majority take advantage of them.

I was paying <~$300/mo on that plan. I now pay over $700 on a directly-acquired plan. So that's problem one.

The bigger problem, IMHO, is that quitting means changing your insurance, which isn't just a financial change. It can also end up requiring you to change medical providers, which is no small deal!

This adds massive friction and stress to the act of quitting/changing jobs, a major source of leverage on the employer's side.

And that's to say nothing of the fact that it's effectively an overly burdensome tax on new entrepreneurs. It's a reinforcement of the concept, "you have to have money to make money".

JMHO on the topic; for reference, I'm a new entrepreneur very early in the process. I'm just lucky enough to be able to risk the attempt.

I never said it was false; only that it suggests fraud.

I only skimmed this briefly (no time), but things operating as suggested (eg the banks loaning money they do not have) would fall into the category of fraud IMO.

Whether that's currently legal or not is another matter that I cannot comment on.

I do not personally see money in those terms.

I see money as units of resource allocation. There are only so many available resources at any given moment. More units of allocation means less resources allocated per unit.

I'm also not an economist. :)

Citation needed. I do not believe this for even a single moment.

The only institution that can "create" money from thin air is the government. And even that is a polite fiction when you realize that "printing more money" also inherently devalues the money already in the system.

I worked at a startup way back when which using (I believe) a competing algorithm to match both images and audio. I really wish it had been Shazam... I might be rolling in it now...

That was... 2001ish?

(warning: too much alcohol in the system. Read with skepticism!)

I miss the dot com boom.