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.
> The unreliable first person narrator is trying to make himself look sympathetic to the reader, all the while confessing to all his despicable endeavors.
Do you know any other books like that? About some different topic?
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..
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.
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.
Same. I noticed some words use the letter "g" in place of "h" like in the word "another" -> "drugy" -> in Czech "druhý", otherwise it is very similar to Czech.
As other said, development can be very expensive and iterations long, unless you're smart about it.