91 karma · joined July 10, 2022
The story is funnier because of stereotypes. That's the function mentioning the group serves. Taking a joke overly seriously and then having it explained to you is also a stereotype. It's just mildly humorous, and now it's slightly moreso.
This works for cheap oscilloscopes because you're not simultaneously driving a car. What you're proposing would make the safety issues worse, and probably be unacceptably frustrating for most people.
https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Path_Workbench
My thesis is that the bigger challenge is "economic", not technical.
There's no money in CAD by itself, meaning just the drawing part. Drafting is a low-value activity often performed by low-value workers who don't write software. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't make software tools for themselves. It's not like when web developers make web development tools, or when machinists make machinist tools.
CAD is sort of a piazza where the value a company gets from it comes from everything that's attached to it - reporting, CAE, CAM, etc. And they do invest in those things, often quite heavily.
It's big business to create these tools. The investment and expertise that go into them is enormous. That's why many of them cost as much as hiring another employee. They do at least as much work as one. They keep up with all the latest and greatest regulations, technologies, manufacturing processes, etc. And they give you access to a lot of valuable proprietary information.
Even if a company threw twice as much money at open source CAD, they'd still get basically none of that. They would just have an expensive drawing tool. It would be basically worthless and worth almost nobody's time.
For customers with low requirements, the less expensive tools do the job at just the right price point where it doesn't make sense to invest in advancing something like freecad.
Also, many companies in many countries are pretty much "allowed" to pirate the really expensive software. Once they get big enough, the software company will ask them to start paying some reduced amount. So there's an unofficial free tier that's way better than any open source toy.
Languages without yes and no are called echo languages. English used to be four-form with yes/no and yeah/nay, but now it's two-form.
> small modular reactors (SMRs) are designed to be small enough to build in a factory before being shipped
Nowadays, there are additional market forces that drive higher quality. Technology also advanced beyond what you could do with discrete components and simple building block ICs. So the cost-benefit scales tipped towards allowing single source.
There are many parts of a control loop. An analog comparator is faster and lower power than an ADC + digital comparator, for example.
Analog still has not left power supplies. The dynamics are just too fast for low-power digital. So the solution for a long time has been mixed analog and digital.
At higher power, there's usually a hierarchical control scheme with an all-digital supervisor at the top. Analog isn't required at that level because the dynamics are slower, and digital has the extra benefit of more control options that analog can't do.
As the dynamics get faster, there's an even greater need for analog. You start needing increasingly expensive op amps. But op amps trade speed for convenience. So the fix is even more analog, but the integrated type. At that point, you might as well throw in more digital features.
Which is why I think we'll just see even more mixed-signal options at the lowest levels. Different ways of leveraging analog speed and low power under an increasingly sophisticated digital manager.
The estimate is for late 2020s costs, which is not too far away. I'm guessing they ignored the end of the solar subsidy, and all the necessary grid changes to reach 100% renewables.
The O'ahu batteries replace the last coal plant, but not the last fossil fuel plant. Also, it's meant for black-start.
Nobody knows exactly what the last mile will look like yet. The graphic doesn't claim to know either. As a reader, you should not extrapolate those near-term forecasts and anecdotes all the way to the end.
But he wants DIP, which he said they don't have in stock. So now he pays extra for DIP, extra for rarity, and again for shipping from another seller. It costs probably more like 10€ at this point. Why pay 5x when you can pay 0.5x?
You don't want to waste money like that on multiple parts in each project, across multiple projects each year.