90% of the programming I've done over my 30+ year career has been for various flavors of embedded systems. Mainly Medical Devices for the last 20 years. Although there was an interesting detour into Group Fitness (managing data from connected gym equipment) for a few years.
They varied in complexity from little 8-bit microcontrollers to 64-bit server-class blade PC's orchestrating dozens of smaller controllers over serial networks. Written a lot of C++ to the point where I'm just about sick of it.
I've also done the odd webapp, desktop or mobile app from time to time (C# is fun!), but it's been mostly embedded stuff paying my bills.
yes, this entire discussion is about a policy which might be good for communities but not necessarily for real estate speculators who keep storefronts in those communities empty
Still doesn't matter to you unless you're trying to sell it.
Or you think the best way to deal with people getting scammed, is to make sure everyone gets scammed, to avoid being unfair to the initial victims of the scam. For example if Billy put $200 in a Ponzi scheme we should tax everyone else $200 to make it fair.
If I have a problem with a USB datastream, the last place I'm going to look is the official USB spec. I'll be buried for weeks. The information may be there, but it will take me so long to find it that it might as well not.
The first place to look is a high quality source that has digested the official spec and regurgitated it into something more comprehensible.
[shudder] the amount of life that I've wasted discussing the meaning of some random phrase in IEC-62304 is time I will never get back!
I remember in the late 80's/early 90s reading a Car & Driver special publication on "affordable used sports cars" (I ended up with a 1975 280Z for $2,000 in great condition). They made a point that "the sports cars of the 60's are easily beaten, at least in a straight line, by today's average family sedans."
I remember this every time something like a Cadillac Escalade leaves my 21-year-old 350Z in its dust...
What are examples of these "new applications" that are needed every day? Do consumers really want them? Or are software and other companies just creating them because it benefits those companies?
Most of the software written worldwide is created for internal company usage. Consumers don't even know that it exists.
I've worked (still do!) for engineering services companies. Other businesses pay us to build systems for them to either use in-house or resell downstream. I have to assume that if they're paying for it, they see profit potential.
> while you sit in your coffeehouse reading a freshly-printed news sheet
A PhD student once mentioned to me that when people envisage themselves in history, they always assume they'd be upper class. No one ever thinks that they'll be poor :-)
(Clairvoyant) Ah yes I am seeing your past life, you were an utterly unremarkable person, doing the same things people around you did, saying the same things people around you said, neither especially kind or cruel, but making sure that you stayed alive as much as you could help it.
That's interesting. As the article says, ANT's main use case is in commercial gym equipment. What the article doesn't say is the reason: it excels at gathering data for "group fitness". ANT is a connectionless protocol so in a situation where you have two dozen transmitters and you need to get data from all of them, your receiver simply has to listen and record whatever devices it sees and let the user software (possibly managing a gym leaderboard for a spin class) decide which ones to track.
Contrast with BLE where you would have to make a connection to each device. The overhead of connecting and disconnecting, in addition to being power-prohibitive, takes too long. Some manufacturers have workarounds to enable use of their BLE products in a group fitness environment, but they are pretty much lacking.
It'll be interesting to see how the problem is solved if indeed ANT+ does go away.
BLE could do that too via advertising packets. I don't know if any devices actually do though.
Also the connection process isn't power-prohibitive for BLE, and it doesn't have to take a long time. It's just that most Bluetooth software stacks suck balls. Basically only Apple's is good.
As I recall BLE only supports hosts connecting to 7 peripherals simultaneously which is a bit rubbish, but if you're a gym with some custom ANT+ receiver you can definitely get a custom BLE receiver that can connect to more devices (assuming someone makes such a thing).
Many devices put the data into the Manufacturer-specific part of the advertising packet. It's a workaround. The problem is that it's non-standard so if you're a provider of data management for group fitness you have to have custom code for each manufacturer (and sometimes different devices from the same manufacturer). And it's especially fun when the manufacturer's published data spec doesn't match what the device actually puts out!
I don't know how difficult it would be to connect, grab a bunch of data and disconnect from 24 BLE devices in a one-second period, which is pretty much what you'd need to be an effective workaround for ANT+. In a competitive environment, data from each device changes very rapidly.
They varied in complexity from little 8-bit microcontrollers to 64-bit server-class blade PC's orchestrating dozens of smaller controllers over serial networks. Written a lot of C++ to the point where I'm just about sick of it.
I've also done the odd webapp, desktop or mobile app from time to time (C# is fun!), but it's been mostly embedded stuff paying my bills.
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