Joined 8 years ago
5 and 5, 73.
I don't know if the parent comment was trying to equate American English and Simple English - I can see it as a way to dismiss American English as a "lesser" language (which it isn't, as you say), but I wouldn't start by assuming that.
(the two scales are due to price and bulk: the Sigma is about the size of a hardback book and a few hundred pounds, an XRF is the size of a large 3d-printer and many thousands).
I don't know why they did it, but it follows the same pattern as the pi400 - develop a whole new board, rather than a daughterboard for the pi4 compute module. If I had to guess, it's probably about reducing e-waste: if someone wants a compute module and it's out of stock but there are pi500s available, why wouldn't they buy a pi500, strip the compute module out and dump the rest of the machine in the bin?
And to be fair to them, they're dogfooding a fair amount - the RP1 and the RP2 are in the design, rather than a generic southbridge and keyboard controller.
The battery already lasts two days under my usage model, and the phone still has a five year warranty and OS support for another three years. I see that Fairphone are still selling some repair parts for FP2 and FP3, so I expect to be able to repair my phone through that whole time period unless something weird happens.
The FP5 looks like a nice upgrade, but I don't feel short-changed: I got a new phone when my old one was failing, and it's not absolutely top-of-the-line, and that's fine. Like you, I'll think harder about the next round of upgrades (maybe to the FP6, maybe the FP7), and I'd love it if Fairphone were to be clearer about their release schedule, but I understand that they don't want to Osborne themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Computer_Corporation#T...
Here's a link to the VHF band plan we use here in the UK - obviously I can't speak for other countries: [https://rsgb.services/public/bandplans/19/ ]. It's _littered_ with SSTV, beacon and digital mode allocations (and for clarity, that's a good thing). The digital mode allocations are full of people chatting in text using FT-8 or JS8Call (more in HF than VHF, those, but the principle holds). On the next page, there's an entire 1MHz allocation dedicated to wideband digital data modes.
If you're a licensee, there's plenty of innovation and digital experimentation space available. Sure, a chunk of the traditionalist ham community aren't excited about it, but there's plenty of us who are. And, as ever, you don't need a license to receive...
The shouting fanbeings of rust put me off looking into it for years, because when I kept getting "rewrite it in rust!" as the answer to "there's a problem with $THIS_CODE" when talking with colleagues, _even when those colleagues had minimal rust experience_, all I could conclude was that the whole thing was an empty promise and that no-one knew how to solve the problem, but everyone "knew" that the New Cool Language was the way to fix everything.
Generalisation from incomplete data - no doubt there was a sensible majority in the rust community, but the fanbeings were _loud_.
FWIW I was wrong: I'm getting into rust now and I like what I see, and the discussions around it online and with colleagues are pretty sensible. But, it's taken a while to get there and when you've been in tech for a couple of decades you see this hype cycle and get jaded to it. Erlang is the new hotness ... OCaml is the new hotness ... Java is the new hotness, rewrite everything in Java, wait C# is the new hotness...
I suspect rust is here to stay, and I'm gonna learn more about it, and I regret some of my past words about it. But my problem was never with the increased memory safety, or the language at all, pretty much, just the early community.
TL;DR: Other humans are the worst, bug reported, fix unlikely :)
