I've found the users-first mentality degrading over the years at companies. It's a bit jarring too, since a lot of my early training was pretty user-centric.
I do have a feeling that the example of bigger players is carefully followed by many of the other companies, kind of as a cult of success. And that example for a long time has been rather lacking.
Only if they provide the software or software as a service. Then I suspect it's good enough if the modifications or forks made are shared internally if software is used only internally, but on the other hand I'm not a lawyer.
Employers might argue that such internal use and distribution would fall under the “exclusively under your behalf” clause in the GPLv3, which is inherited by the AGPLv3.
Maybe, but so what? Your remark lacks a conclusion.
Mine is that it could then well be required to do so by law. Companies are not individuals, so I don't think they are owed any freedoms beyond what is best for utility they can provide.
To me, the fact that the author of the article is the author of de_dust2 is the real highlight! For those who don't know, it's the most popular map ever in Counter Strike, and I expect so it remains to this day.
This is funny, as I always imagined these things to be made by some nameless author of good old Internet, and never bothered to check and look it up. Further less I expected to stumble upon it by said author's random blogpost where it's not even the primary topic.
I'm not following the scene for the last couple of years, but I doubt that. On the other hand, there are other very capable people doing very interesting things.
That C64 demo doing sprite wizardy and 8088MPH comes to my mind. The latter one, as you most probably know, can't be emulated since it (ab)uses hardware directly. :D
As a trivia: After watching .the .product, I declared "if a computer can do this with a 64kB binary, and people can make a computer do this, I can do this", and high performance/efficient programming became my passion.
From any mundane utility to something performance sensitive, that demo is my northern star. The code I write shall be as small, performant and efficient as possible while cutting no corners. This doesn't mean everything is written in assembly, but utmost care is given how something I wrote works and feels while it's running.
On that note, why does the PoE capability often add such a big proportion of the price of various items? Is the technology really costly for some reason, or is it just more there's fairly low demand and people are still willing to pay?
PoE is not obvious to implement (take it from someone who has done it with a fair share of mistakes), uses more expensive components that normal ethernet, takes up more space on the board, makes passing emissions certification more complex, and is more prone to mistakes that ruin boards in the future, causing support/warranty issues. In other words, a bag of worms: not impossible to handle, but something you would rather avoid if possible.
I wouldn't call it "better", but the least-effort path among hobbyists and low end gear is often 12v or 24v sent over a pair with Gnd and a forgiving voltage regulator on the other end.
A full-module add-on in this power class is about $7 at 1,000 unit scale [0]. It would be around $3 with your own custom PCB design in terms of BoM addon at scale. That’s power only. Add another dollar or two for 10/100 PHY.
The trick is as others have said in what adding it to your design does in terms of complicating compliance design.
PoE power supplies need to be isolated (except in rare exceptions) and handle much higher voltages than common USB-C or wall wart power supplies.
They have to use a transformer and a more complex control strategy, not a simple buck regulator with an inductor. PoE inputs need to tolerate voltages several times higher than the highest USB-C voltages, so more expensive parts are used everywhere.
Any Ethernet (well, any RJ45 you expect in a home/office) has to have at least 1500V isolation from the RJ45 wire to anything metal that can be touched or is a connector on the device.
A PoE-only device with no electrical connectors besides the RJ45 can just use a very cheap RJ45 port with integrated magnetics and PoE allowance (tiny bit bigger wires and a center pin exposed, less than 50ct more than the cheapest RJ45 with integrated magnetics) and a cheap buck from 40~80V to e.g. 5V.
Oh, and a cheap bridge rectifier and some signaling resistors to take care of input polarity and signal to the source that we in fact want the approximately 50V that could hurt a device not made for it.
That’s not a cheap buck lol. Order of magnitude more expensive then 12v not even mentioning capacitors that can withstand 80v is $$$ and your derating goes to shit
It sounds like the PoE spec was designed before the arrival of “IoT” type things like the esp32, raspberry pi’s, etc.
How much of the complexity is a “fundamental electrical engineering problem” and how much of it is just a spec written to solve a different set of problems?
Almost all of the complexity of PoE is fundamental. To get enough power over 100m of ethernet cable (10x longer than USB) you have to run at much higher voltages like 48V. The same has eventually come to USB: for USB-C Pd to reach 240W, it also has to use 48V.
There have long been lower-voltage "passive PoE" systems which expect a lower always-on voltage on some of the ethernet pairs (usually 12V, 24V, or rarely 48V), which can be very easy to implement so long as your users can handle the setup and incompatibility with other ethernet devices (in the most extreme case of passive PoE on 100Mb/s ethernet, you simply connect the positive pair to the input of the device and the negative pair to the ground, no additional hardware needed).
Whenever you combine two things into one, the complexity and cost go up considerably. A regular coffee machine is pretty cheap. Add high pressure so it can make espresso and it gets considerably more expensive. Add milk so it can make cappuccino, again more complex and expensive. The same holds for electronics. Isolating power when it's alone is fairly straightforward. It gets considerably more tricky and hence more expensive the moment you want to place any kind of a meaningful data signal in its vicinity.
I am afraid that without a major crash or revolution of some sort, user won't matter next to a sufficiently big biz. But time will tell.
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