easp

"Most home users" are never going to install OpenWRT on anything, RPi, or otherwise. Of those that do, it seems likely that they will max out the throughput of a RPi, especially now that >100Mbps internet is common place is some countries, and is becoming increasingly available in others (like the US).

There are some RPi like boards with a single GigE, but they suffer from having smaller developer communities, and still come up short on IO when compared to a networking platform, which will typically have 1-2GigE lanes to the SoC, integrated 2 or 3 stream 2.4 GHz WiFi and a 1-2x miniPCIe interfaces.

Right now, probably the cheapest most capable router is the Ubiqti EdgeRouterX for $50 (no wifi though). It has a 2 core/4 thread MIPS CPU that can do ~1Gbps NAT/ROuting with hardware offloads and ~500Mbps just using the CPU and DMA hardware.

The RPi is tied to the 12-24 month product cycles of consumer electronics devices.

That's great in that it means relatively frequent upgrades. Though at this point, the RPi3 is a very unbalanced system. Particlarly, as others have noted, with regards to network I/O.

Router platforms are tied to the lifecycles of networking standards. The underlying standards change much more slowly, roughly ~5-10 years for major changes. The router SoCs and WiFi chips change somewhat more quickly, but not as quickly as consumer electronics SoCs.

This slow rate of change is probably a good thing for OpenWRT/LEDE, because it means that there is more time for software support to mature for each hardware generation.

Your point about the diversity of the router hardware ecosystem is an important one, and from what I can tell, makes up a significant portion of the OpenWRT project.

I think though that the "industry" work on QoS and rate control has been pretty dismal and counter-productive. The major improvements in QoS in OpenWRT didn't come from the router industry, and the router industry hasn't been speedy about incorporating it. Fixes for queuing and rate control in the WiFi stack are also coming from outside (when they come), and who knows how long they will take to get mainstreamed.

Loading even more functionality into the kernel is at odds with security, stability and maintainability. Its also not going to save much/any in the way of resources.

A big part of the OpenWRT project is hardware support for wireless chipsets and SoCs.

Sure, they could move all that to BSD, but then if they wanted to do that, why didn't they do that in the first place, rather than working on Linux?

Your analysis seems predicated on your own ignorance of the OpenWRT project, and human nature.

How many system-level developers do you know who'd throw themselves into creating a new project, hashing out the governance, etc unless the alternative was even worse? I know, roughly, none.

I'm an OpenWRT user, not a developer, and it seemed pretty clear, even from that distance, that there was something broken given the way infrastructure problems were (or weren't) dealt with earlier this year.

I recognize many of the developers committed to the new project, and my understanding from others is that the new project includes many of the most active OpenWRT developers.

Clearly it would be better if they didn't feel this fork was necessary, but for now, I think this fork is promising.

As others have said, it sounds like you are burned out and depressed.

There are various ways to recover, but there is a good chance it will happen again unless you make some changes.

A good start would be revisiting your dream.

How old were you when your dream took hold? It sounds like the seeds were planted when you were a kid and probably in full bloom by the time you got to college, and was in hand what, within 5 years of graduating?

And then what happened? You got an inkling that your dream and reality weren't well aligned. Still, you held on to the dream, blamed circumstances, and tried a new project, but that didn't do the trick.

It doesn't seem though like you've considered the obvious: of course reality doesn't match your dream, your dream was conceived by a teenager! Of course you were off the mark!

Forgive yourself for not having it all figured out. Realize that the stuff that you thought was so important and interesting was only part of the picture. Realize that your previous enthusiasm wasn't wasted, that many of the things you invested in still matter, but that you have gaps to fill.

Realize too that missing the mark with your dream is actually a huge opportunity, because that old dream was limited by your narrow experience. You now know more about the world. You now realize that there are whole aspects of the world that you are ignorant of.

Think of how much you have to learn, how much you have to discover! Realize that this takes a huge burden off you, off your work, your career. Work doesn't have to be the source of all the meaning in your life. Realize that its Ok if some days, weeks, or even months, you are just working for the paycheck, just working so you can find meaning in something else.

Once you've changed the place your work occupies in your life, don't be surprised if you find yourself looking forward to it again.

As for how to get there? Start changing things in your life, anything at all, but particularly things that bring you into contact with new people. Every little change you make shifts your perspective. With enough shifts, you'll suddenly realize that you see new horizons where before you only saw a blank wall.

Oh, and you are right, a lot of things in software are unnecessarily complex, the result of people not learning from the mistakes of the past, of people adding abstraction to hide complexity, only to produce more complexity, of people who don't know what they don't know ignorantly, arrogantly forging ahead, and, of course, the detritus of shifting business strategies in a shifting landscape. Some of this is inevitable, but that doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities to clean up some messes and avoid making new ones.

Good luck, you've got time to figure things out, until you don't, at which point, you aren't.

For a given generation of lithium battery cell and management technology, there is the option of trading off between capacity and durability.

Field-replaceable laptop batteries are engineered as a consumable, and runtime, weight and charging speed are given priority over long life. Laptops with integrated batteries make a somewhat different tradeoff, but still assume that battery replacement will be a maintenance expense for some users. In both cases, the expected average lifetime of the laptop itself is also a factor, which I'd guess would be about 5 years, max.

Packs for laptops make different tradeoffs vs packs for a car, or home power storage. From memory, based on some back of envelope calculations, tesla trades 15-20% of nominial capacity of the cells in their auto packs for >=4x or greater durability. Packs for home energy storage would probably make similar tradeoffs, and might get more life with less aggressive charging rates.

The idea that some people fetishize disruption and heads-you-loose, tails-I-win situations baffles me. The utility has expenses beyond the cost of power generation. They don't exist to provide a subsidy to cool upstarts. They provide critical infrastructure for those cool upstarts and everyone else.

There are certainly a lot of perverse incentives and inefficiencies in the current model. Even so, its either ignorant, childish, or intellectually dishonest to act like it is outrageous that a utility has a simplified pricing model that doesn't accommodate the outliers among the outliers (residential customers with large solar and battery installations), or that their overall pricing allows margin for cost recovery and profit on power they deliver, whatever the source.

Dismal.

Btw, is there a way o view this that doesn't require a google login? I'd like to share it more widely.

Do you actually know what you pretend to know, or are you holding a grudge against Apple for an old transgression with KHTML that they've since done did a great deal of work to put right?

Sometimes I have the feeling that most of the namespace is already clogged with spammy parking pages, and even spammier sites. I think I'd rather stumble into monuments.

And I would expect thee preparedness of the average concealed carry permit holder to decline if we do more to reshape the US around the notion that an armed society is a polite society.

You are relying on anecdotes. However, given that shooters of this sort are quite rare, is there even enough data to reach statistically significant conclusions about the risks from people returning fire?

In any case, if we were to follow this argument further, we would expect that many more citizens would be armed, which would likely change things. Given the inherent confusion of such a situation, I would expect we would start seeing armed citizens accidentally shooting other armed citizens because they misread the situation.

Even trained, battle seasoned soldiers make mistakes.

I'm much more concerned about the impact higher carry rates would have in relatively more common situations, like disagreements between motorists, etc.

Many people with guns feel empowered to double down in situations they would otherwise walk away from, and the involvement of a gun adds to the opportunities for a deadly outcome. Some gun advocates argue that an armed society is a polite society. I have my doubts about that, but I don't doubt that the consequences of impoliteness would be much more extreme.

Yeah, but Guru VPs can help attract and retain those other people.

Well then, you really aren't getting the best of both worlds, are you. Might as well by an iPad.

Hmmm. This seems to leave out part of the picture. Apple is also using its substantial cash pile to lock up supplies of key components. Some supplies get paid well past delivery, others may get money well before.

Par for the course for the opinion/editorial pages of the WSJ. If they are this sloppy and dishonest on subjects one knows about, how can they be trusted on any subject.

Please provide citations for your assertion that solar panels require vast amounts of energy to produce.

When I looked into the question a few years ago, the best sourced estimates I could find put the EROI at less than two years.

Yeah, I expect so, but I think the real payoff for Valve will be facilitating monetization of the finished films.

You are wrong about Apple, they have one huge datacenter in the US where people suspect the Siri backend runs. They also have a smaller data center in California. We don't actually know what runs where, and we don't know what they are running in leased space in 3rd party datacenters. And, they are building other datacenters in the US.

In any case, wherever Siri runs, I don't think that Internet latency comes close to explaining the latency, and, I think, Siri can actually hide a lot of latency.

My friend Beth is starting a US company that focuses on thes e kinds of low-cost solutions for the developing world with an eye to doing a disruption from the base of the pyramid.

I'd include a link, but I don't think they have a public face yet. I do know they are looking for hardware and software engineers.

I increacingly question the notion that there are any just wars, but I don't really see how such a clause is practical or enforceable.

Even if it were practical and enforceable at keeping "evil" from co-opting code contributed by "good," it would also reduce opportunities for "good" to co-opt code contributed by "evil."

I'll point out that the technology we are using to have this discussion was underwritten by the military. The military dumped a lot of money into integrated circuits before commercial applications could fund Moore's Law, and the Internet was also the outcome of a military project. You can argue that there should be other means to fund such advancements, and I'd agree, but this is where we are now.

Sure, the GPL allows it, but the GPL doesnt allow Bob to dictate what Alice does with the source once she has it (GPL v2, term #4). If she decides to distribute it, his recourse is to not do further business with Alice. That could be enough, but if Alice sees sufficient short-term benefit, that may be a risk she is willing to take.

You should read the GPL more closely and expose yourself to some of the legal commentary on interpretations of the word "distribution," as used in the GPL.

Your right to keep your changes to yourself end when you distribute your derivative work to a third-third party. The question is: what constitutes distribution? Some have argued that some hosting and outsourced management operations may constitute distribution for the purposes of the GPL.

Your approximation of the implications of the GPL are probably sufficient for most startups, but your understanding is insufficient if you are so eager to insist that your approximation is still applicable for an organization of the scope and complexity of the DoD.

That said, the article doesn't really seem to get it either.

Yes, because heterosexuals in such positions never had affairs, or if they did, it was never with the wrong sort of woman.

Whether or not the ruling class was "used to homosexuals," their attitudes towards them were far from universally accepting or enlightened.

Well, he was a man who had taken female hormones as an alternative to going to prison, and who had indicated that the hormones had given him breasts.

Do you think a dead man with breasts would have gone unnoticed by the coroner? Do you think he might have wondered why Turing had breasts?

It's quite reasonable to think that the coroner would have known that he was homosexual, and it is quite reasonable to think that would have been viewed as a flaw, since, you know, the whole state-sanctioned "choice" between prison and chemical castration thing.

I don't think that this is actually anything new. I recall similar language when I looked at their maps licensing terms ~four years ago.

When I dug deeper, it appeared, at the time, that this only applied to features of the app that required payment. So, we were free to offer maps features on our site as part of our free offering. We could still have premium features without paying for a premier license, so long as those premium features didn't rely on Google maps.

But there are also plenty of applications where Google's higher quality doesn't offer a significant advantage.

At my last job I started to negotiate with Google about their (old) new maps pricing. They kept pointing to features that made no difference for our application. We needed Ok maps and decent forward and reverse geocoding. We were in their free tier, but needeed to find a solution for when we outgrew it, because their pricing was way way too high for our business model.

I left that company, bust if nothing else, this new pricing will further delay the day that they consider replacing Google maps. For new projects though, I'd probably skip google maps altogether, or at least use them in such a way that the client-side code would be totally provider independent.