vrinsd

Maybe slightly off-topic from the main article but is there a good resource or site that clearly helps understand which of the "open" models are good for programming tasks, like C, C++, Python, Java?

I've looked and there are tons of sites that aggregate models vs. benchmarks but I'm not sure how much of that is trust worthy.

I'm sure this makes me seem like a "get off my lawn" type of person but is anyone considering the environmental impact of making almost 2000 "throw away" pieces of electronics just for a convention?

Yes, I get the cool factor and I love blinking lights too, but the low-cost factor comes from the environmental pollution occuring, it's just been pushed over to China.

I agree with this sentiment. If someone wants to do a bunch of reverse engineering, maybe they could try to get full mainline support for older Qualcomm mobile phone/tablet SoCs and minimize/get rid of BLOBs?

All the fun of reverse engineering and we know the processors already run Linux...

I agree with your sentiment ; very likely the Fairphone people are restricted by NDAs from the SoC vendor who are the ultimate cause for lack of proper mainline Linux support.

The SoC vendors get Android working, get the drivers going, help do ports or modifications for major customers and hide it all behind NDAs, blobs, sometimes a bunch of hacks and all of it is closed source work.

The postmarketOS guys to their credit are trying to do "proper" mainline work which is admirable but probably frustrating, non-trivial and requires a lot of reverse engineering.

Honest question here -- for doing 3D parametric design, is the "programmatic" approach a good thing? If you compare doing a design in LuaCAD to something like Solidworks or ProE, can you get to the end result faster, and easier?

Not to negate your core points but almost all the HW engineers I've worked with who are experienced absolutely consider sourcing and availability in the decision making process.

It was a reason years ago Maxim's ICs were almost always on a "never design in" list since obtaining them was near impossible in reasonable time frames.

Most "seasoned" HW engineers who are working lower volumes verify availability with distributors and for high-volume (i.e. 100K units+/yr) work with sourcing people internal to company to get commitments for key ICs.

No idea what you mean by "well built OS" when Android has so many corner cases and weird "hard coded work arounds" and crazy development process that its behavior is often unpredictable and downright irrational.

And what do you think iOS / macOS is based on? UNIX userland from the BSDs with the Mach kernel, Mach IPC, etc. Fun note: It's easier to cross-compile standard UNIX utilities and programs for iOS/macOS than it is Android since Android effectively has its own user-land.

macOS and by extention iOS are, by comprarison to Android, actually pretty well architected. The choice of kernel (Mach, Linux) is really not the limiting factor, it's how you plumb together the layers above the kernel and that's what Android has done badly.

Lastly, just because OpenMoko may or may not have done something ideally (~20 years ago?) doesn't mean the current efforts (postmarketOS, Plasma, PHOSH, Sailfish) have done it badly. Actually most of these efforts are leveraging the fairly refined parts of a modern Linux environment and are MUCH easier to work with at the lower levels than Android.

I think you are in the minority of people that feel Android is a well built "OS". Maybe from an end-user point of view it "does what you want" but its underlying architecture I think is pretty poor.

I have spent the past 2 years off and on modifying AOSP (for "reasons") and I am constantly amazed the poor quality of the code base and badly architected the overall system is.

It's a bunch of re-inventions of the wheel (start-up daemon manager, IPC, HAL, GUI, etc) with the "upper layers" written in Java with a mix of C/C++. Mixing the metaphor of a Java "run time environment" with a Linux-based kernel results in a hodepodge of pieces and having seen it up close it makes sense why "Android" user experience varies so much device to device.

Did Android need it's own bastardized libc for example (bionic)? Did Android need to have it's own start-up daemon manager? A "HAL" in C++ (wrapping Linux kernel capability) with a bunch of bridges to Java via JNI?

Writing an application for Android is also a byztantine mess of NDK, SDKs, Java build systems (Maven, Gradle, etc), XML files, Java, Kotlin, etc. Why can't icons just be SVGs, why do these have to be in some XML-formatted resource? The list goes on.

Except Motorola shipped an Android phone with an x86 CPU -- RAZR i (2GHz Atom) in 2012.

I think IF they had hired embedded software engineers with 40 years of experience, those people would have delivered a UI that meets or exceeds all UI needs (even if it didn't look as visually appealing as it could). A 40-year embedded veteran knows how to write real-time code, structure the system and make it work under all conditions.

In fact I wager the OPPOSITE happened -- that they hired or outsourced software to people who have "web technology experience" and the UI and graphics architecture is a mishmash software stacks hastily thrown together (read: not architected).

Jaguar has a similar issue with the I-PACE where the HVAC system couldn't keep up with the knobs and would lag. A real embedded engineer who worked on real-time systems would know how to properly handle a quadrature encoded knob and NOT lag. A web-technology-first person who slapped something together using nodejs and/or Python would likely not know.

Hi kens,

Thanks so much for the information. I am familair with the voting logic (I've worked on systems that implemented the same thing, odd-number of processor cores and the majority wins).

One question, were any "misbehaving" processor or actuation requests ever logged? As in, were there examples where one actuator or CPU didn't agree in the Shuttle flights?

Sadly, I think Craig might have done MORE for society by simply improving Craig's List and removing/reducing the amount of spam and junk posts it allows.

I can't claim the changes would be easy to implement, but if they made a FEW small changes the result would be 1000x better.

For example if you want to sell something on Craig's List they do some "you can't make this post because it looks too similar to a previous posting" kind of thing AND you might need a mobile number but somehow someone can stuff 1000 random keywords into a for-sale posting that's not at all about the item? So if you're looking for a "Miata" you'll end up getting listing for a bunch of other cars since someone is gaming the system?

Or it's an option to "reject duplicates" -- why do duplicates or clone postings even show up if they have their "this is too similar to another posting" capability?

Or, Craig's List lets AutoTrader and other "commercial" sites post items but if you want to actually message someone now on AutoTrader you need to upload your DRIVERS LICENSE just to send them a message? So Craig's List is OK with a reciprocal arrangement with a vendor who does not honor the same "equality" rules Craig's List was built on?

Sadly, many years ago I would send feedback to Craig's List and Craig himself would reply. I don't know if he's completely checked out of his site now, but if you're out there Craig a few simple changes could restore the utility of the service which you created. People like me would even PAY to see these improvements.

Feel exactly the same way.

All of the public money spent on going to the moon is really just a way to funnel $$ to a few sub-contractors the actual science value of going BACK to the moon is pretty low.

It takes such a huge amount of people time, effort, resources AND has an environmental impact to launch a payload into space, we should be expending these resources to help solve our societal/environmental issues, not for "showboat science".

1000% agree.

Sadly, this view is considered antiquated and anti-technology by a younger generation of people who think what we see in sci-fi shows should be reality (good or bad). And if you don't get that vision then you're some dumb luddite who should be banished from society.

What's kind of remarkable is the onslaught of vehicles, many EV, which have critical functionality issues that are being ignored, but they have WiFi + hotspot on board! And if you want to do basic things with your own vehicle, like get the climate control ready before you leave on a trip you now need an app, a smartphone, and Internet connection and a subscription...to do things that could easily be done via some local BLE or WiFi connection.

I see a lot of car companies rush to make "immersive" driving experiences while neglecting the basics. The Ioniq 5 / EV6 have ICCU issues that are not addressed which can leave the car stranded and the replacement parts have the same mysterious failure modes, the Jaguar I-Pace had numerous failures including a UI that would lag for basic things like changing air conditioning settings, the last generation Leaf (just prior to the current re-design) has battery issues that have forced people to do lemon-law buy backs, the Ford Mach E has a Tesla-style iPad center display that can't be turned off at night so it's a distraction (among other issues with the poor concept), but it has OTA so awesome!

I used Sailfish OS and so did several of my family members for many years. The "vanilla" Linux OS aspect (besides using rpm) makes it trivial to set up things like dnsmasq-adblocking, firewall rules, etc.

Unfortunately, the Sailfish UI itself feels "different for the sake of different" and not because it's functionally more useful. I think the UI is pretty ugly and difficult to navigate. Anyone who "loved" Win8 tiles and/or Windows Mobile flat monochrome UI always praises the SailfishOS UI but outside of that small group I don't think the UI is that functional. It's definitely eschewed it's MeeGo / Nokia N9 UI heritage.

What always surprised me about SFOS is despite running on some pretty decent hardware, the UI always felt sluggish, especially given it's kind of reversed-big-text UI paradigm which shouldn't take much work to render.

I'm glad there's an alternative, but sad it's hasn't seen a reasonable set of UI improvements despite its age.