Are you calling it slanted because of a technicality in the article?

Here's an idea: just go and create a language that does everything right. Then release it, and you'll be worshiped until long after you die. Oh wait, no you won't, you will be flabbergasted by the sheer amount of rotten tomatoes thrown at you for doing things wrong. No matter what you do, other people have different needs and preferences, and they will tear your work to pieces.

Yes, Python has a legacy. It's slow. But it's really fast to write a python program that can do something you'll need much more time to write in another language. It's an extremely powerful language. For me the most annoying part is packaging/distribution. That's a real mess at the moment.

I have played a bit with real-time programming in Python, and in my experience there is no sane way to do it in Windows (I expect you were running it in that OS since you start from VB6). If anyone has any tips & tricks to add here, please feel free. I have a feeling that the problem was in the Windows scheduler. Possibly there are Windows specific API's to have more fine-grained control over execution, but by default if you e.g. sleep for 1 ms you return 15+ms later.

Under Linux, the performance was much more predictable, and things really work very well if you start running with the SCHED_FIFO scheduler. You can also take control of (disable) your garbage collection if you know what you're doing.

Exactly. I don't believe for a second that the wording is accidental. Oh yeah, we forgot to mention the word "temporary", let's add that towards the end. It's just a small detail, not important. Articles these days always need to cause outrage.

I'm getting a lot of code smells from what you describe as your problems. About commenting out big blocks of code: How often do you realistically have to do that? Also, if that's a common pattern, or how you like to work, try looking into advanced IDE's like PyCharm and don't do stupid grunt work that a computer can do for you. Invest some time into learning how to use the debugger, and just skip blocks of code at runtime without having to comment it out (jump to cursor will skip intermediate statements). You will definitely benefit from it if what you describe is a common issue for you. With that skill you can also re-run statements etc, so your productivity in figuring out how thing work will increase a lot.

Mercedes was also a girl name. It was even the name of the designer's daughter if I remember correctly.

You can't be depressed when you're dead...

And assuming you can just pop out the battery. I remember those days :).

I was developing a pan/tilt system. I was ready to do a first test, to check if the motor moved at all, so I issued a tilt command. And it worked! I saw the thing tilt, and then I noticed the screwdriver I left on top. I saw everything happen in slow motion... the screwdriver rolled off the plate, fell down, and plunged itself straight into the motor controller. There, it caused a short circuit that destroyed our only prototype. It took a couple of weeks to repair, as we were using a COTS driver module that had to be sent off for repair.

(It's the volts that cause the arcs).

But this is already done! Look up the term "maximum torque per ampere" for example, and you'll find plenty of information on how to achieve this. There are closed loop solutions that don't even require feedback from the rotor shaft! You can measure the current and from that calculate how the rotor is moving. So if they want to boast about their awesome tech, you would expect them to compare themselves to the current best way to drive a motor, not the 200 year old way. The fact that they choose to compare themselves to that is in itself a big red flag to me.

Very crudely put, reluctance motors are like internal permanent magnet motors, but with the magnets removed from the rotor. You get a rotor with holes in it. When the magnetic flux wants to flow from N to S, it wants to find a way through the metal of the rotor(high permeability), avoiding the holes(low permeability). This is what makes the rotor want to snap into an optimal position, producing the torque.

Let's make an attempt to reverse engineer the sales talk to engineering talk.

That's called PWM.

Field oriented control or direct drive already do that.

Let's add something buzzword-sounding, even though we don't understand what it even means.

That's directed at investors.

They are comparing their technology - and let's assume it is new technology even though they don't prove it - to dumb AC motors that run directly from the grid. Meanwhile, I've been working for years on software to drive motors using field oriented control. The software continuously calculates how to apply the currents to get maximum torque per ampere. I'm not making any claim that this is innovative. This is well known and exists for quite a while. If they want to compare their technology to FOC, then it would be fair. But please don't compare your brilliant new technology to the dumbest way to control a motor.

That's really a wonderful thing about the bible. Whatever you claim, you can always find a passage in the holy book to support it. Very handy.

I think it's great that they are speculating with these virtual currencies. It does much less harm than speculating at the stock exchange, where it causes real damage to real people.