HP did the exact same thing, but rather than using H1B people here in the US, they just completely outsourced everything to Foxconn, Lite-on, etc. Many of us in the PC/software industry have been training replacements since the end of the 20th century. Interestingly enough, it's the small shops where our skills are still valued. I suspect that's because small shops are still dynamic environments where the ability to think outside of the box and make qualitative judgements on a daily basis is valued, as opposed to entrenched organizations that have well-documented tools and processes that anyone with sufficient reading comprehension skills can follow step-by-step and get some work done.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled outrage.

Typical Anti Ayn Rand rant.

The problem isn't Ayn Rand's viewpoint, it is that reality is skewed by Corporations creating laws to benefit themselves. Thus proving that Government should not be involved in economics, since the moment it is, it is corrupted by its own involvement.

In this case, government protection racket (dressed up as IP law) has created a case where nobody knows anything. I would suggest that Any Rand would say that the three (two now) companies should sue themselves into mutually assured destruction over IP rights that are tenuous at best, letting better, more agile companies to come in and save the customers.

As far as I can see, Apple, Beats and Monster are three of a kind over priced status symbols. let them market themselves that way. And all the Sheeple will come and pay way too much for crappy products. The smart people will pay less for better products.

The CPU is also fast because it's made of small components close together. It's built using current large-chip fabrication technology. re-optimized for low leakage, of course.

When a substantial fraction of the target applications are intended to run for years on a fractional amp-hour lithium button or harvested ambient energy, power saving is critical.

If the CPU in the IoT Device is powerful enough to make offloading actually worthwhile, isn't that CPU way overkill for the IoT Device's primary function?

Not at all. The CPU is fast to reduce latency. This not only meets response targets, but it also means the CPU can shut down after a very short time, saving power.

This is especially important on battery powered devices. If the CPU is off except for a couple of milliseconds every few seconds, a battery can last for years.

The CPU is also fast because it's made of small components close together. It's built using current large-chip fabrication technology. Making it physically small means many chips per die, which means low cost per chip. If that makes it fast, so much the better .

As long as you're not using extra power to increase the speed further, there's no problem with a processor being "too fast". That just means it can go to sleep sooner. In fact, slowing it down can be expensive: Slower means not only that the power is on longer, but it also usually means bigger components which require more electrons to change their voltage. The more electrons delivered by the battery, the more if it is used up. Oops!

Granted that the processors are powerful and cheap, and have a lot of computation potential. But there are other downsides to trying to use IoT devices for a computing resource.

One is that the volatile memory, which uses scarce power just holding its state is very small, and the permanent memory, though it may be moderately large, is flash: VERY slow, VERY power consuming to do a write (and the processor stops while you're writing flash, screwing things up for its primary purpose).

Much of the current generation IoT devices run on either the Texas Instruments CC2541 (8051 processor, 8kB RAM, 256kB flash) and its relatives, or the Nordic nRF51822 (32-bit ARM® Cortexâ M0 CPU, 32kB/16kB RAM, 256kB/128kB flash) and its family, and the next generation is an incremental improvement rather than a breakthrough. You can do a lot in a quarter megabyte of code space (if you're willing to work at it a bit like we did in the early days of computing). But there's not a lot of elbow room there.

The tiny memories mean you don't have a lot of resource to throw at operating systems and extra work. In fact, though the communication stacks are pretty substantial (and use up a LOT of the flash!), the OSes are pretty rudimentary: Mostly custom event loop abstraction layers, talking to applications that are mostly event and callback handlers. Development environments encourage custom loads that don't have any pieces of libraries or system services that aren't actually used by the applications.

Another downside is the lack of bandwidth for communicating between them. (Bluetooth Low Energy, for example, runs at one megaBIT per second, has a lot of overhead and tiny packets, and divides three "advertising" (connection establishment) channels, in the cracks between 2.4GHz WiFI chnnels, among ALL the machines in radio "earshot".) Maybe they can do a lot of deep thought - but getting the work to, and the results from, all those little guys will be a bottleneck.

Maybe Moore's Law and the economic advantage of saving programmer time may make this change in the future. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for "smart" lightbulbs to have large, standardized, OSes making that "wasted" CPU power available to parasitic worms.

Deciding what is allowed to be sold was. I remember those days. Central Planning at its best.

Name calling is a trait reserved to those that have no other recourse.

You can't stop stupid. Common Sense doesn't apply here. Try again.

Nope, we know the definitions. The fact that Socialism has and indeed almost requires and uses the "authoritarian" model to coerce people is not lost on us. Tell me, by what means is it not allowable to sell 64OZ soda's in NYC?

My guess, you'll use some euphemism for "authority" (law, regulation, dictate, code ... etc.) to describe this mechanism.

Absolutely false. The claims were substantiated, the problem with it was, the claims that Omega-3 Fatty Acids cross over into claims ONLY drugs can make. Therein lies the rub.

If you look at the research on Omega-3 Fatty Acids, the claims are true, the problem is no drug company can make a profit selling something that occurs in nature, without modification.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nu...

The problem wasn't the claims, the problem was that the claims are only allowed by the FDA for "Drugs" See the following link for details the FDA is lying about ...

http://articles.mercola.com/si...

Please make sure you follow all the references at the bottom of this article.

Here is the quote, From the FDA, which makes clear that it is the CLAIMS they have a problem with, not the science behind the claims ..

If eating healthy "prevents, mitigates and treats" disease, then any claims that eating healthy would classify it as a drug. THAT is the problem.

I wonder: would the same people that advocated the "calling females 'bossy' = sexist" view use consistent logic and assert that calling males "aggressive" is code for "I'm basically unable to defend my own position, am losing the argument, and therefore must apply guile and ad hominem attacks to stand my ground?" Be honest, now.

Is how someone interprets your criticism of their work defined by how much face they stand to lose if they're wrong, regardless of whether the criticism is grounded in facts and experience?

We're going with Political Theory of Social Organization, and the creation of laws to force people into collective thinking/actions (Community), including "exchange" (Not allow to buy a 64OZ Cola!).

I know the definition. The problem is, you don't like the application of the definition to the cases I suggested. In this case, regulating the exchange for 64 OZ colas and Sodium usage in restaurants.

FDA has decided a lot of things, many of which turned out not to be true. According to the FDA, Walnuts are a drug (yes it is true).

ObamaCare / Universal Health Care and Socialism in general tells me I am entitled, regardless of how I eat. Otherwise, we'd ban all the crap food found in our fast food and supermarkets. Have you seen the ingredients on a Twinkie? On the other hand, socialism is trying to ban large sodas and sodium (salt) in NYC so there is that to consider.

Fuck freedom, SAFETY FOR ALL!

I'm convinced that committees are the death of real leadership. A real leader takes advice and makes decisions decisively. Best leaders always have detractors, usually weak people who want a committee to decide things, after all who wants to follow a dictator? It is much easier to put the blame on a good leader than it is to blame a committee.

And Committees tend to make "safe" decisions, but are just as wrong (if not more so) than a strong leader. A real leader can see when things aren't going well, and make adjustments, where a committee only takes up time while everyone is discussing what the best move is.

I have a great disdain for committees, mainly because they are formed to avoid leadership responsibility.