I'm far from the only one talking about realities. Sucks to be you, volunteering no specifics that work.

So OK, oh wise one. What are you going to use if not carboniferous fuel? Nuclear? The sole place I can see where that is advancing is China and India. The Luddites elsewhere will never allow it, even if safety and waste disposal are ever adequately addressed, which they never have been to date. Fusion? Snort. See you in 1,000 years. Maybe. Solar and wind? They are extremely unsteady and require topping from - wait for it - carboniferous sources. And they cost vastly more. That's going to put the lower part of the 99% into energy poverty because they can't afford it. Oh, you're going to socialize and subsidize energy costs? That's going to hammer the economy into a depression.

In the real world, as in the game of Hammurabi, you have only so many resources and you can either spend them wisely and effectively, or unwisely and with sad effect..

What makes it so?

Embedded X86? Many have done this before Intel. Few still are around because X86 isn't a compelling instruction set for this sort of thing. It's very much NOT efficient- and you don't need Windows these days on most of the stuff (which is the reason you did X86, you had a DOS/OS2/Windows application you were just simply insisting had to be embedded...).

Quite simply put, it might be dour, but the parent poster's closer to the truth than you're probably ever willing to admit. Is it better than the AVR solution Arduino's fielding? Yes. Is it better than much of any of the ARM solutions in the space? Depends. If you're talking an RPi in a non-display context, it's a push. The ecosystem's more "there" with RPi. The Edison's more powerful at the price of much higher power consumption (which, folks, CAN nuke your use of the Edison from orbit...) It isn't really in the same space as the BBB, BananaPI, pcDuino, and others- and they trounce the Edison in many of the applications in the space.

I consider it a bit of a coup for SparkFun, yes. But I think they're not going to be having the grand time of things that you're claiming they will. It's a niche within what is honestly a niche market to begin with. If you don't "need" X86 instruction set support, you're going to find a better answer with any of a number of ARM (and with Imagination Tech pushing MIPS again, MIPS...) boards out there that will be cheaper, at the same performance with a better envelope, etc.

This isn't a win for many. It's only really a win for SparkFun since I'm sure Intel showered them with MONEY and they moved to the new location on the north side of town as opposed to being over by Spine in Boulder to accomodate the new fabrication capabilities they needed to do this stuff in the first place.

You appear to have taken no trouble to acquire any knowledge at all of the subject, but are nevertheless willing to spout nonsense. Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone are both gigantic compared to Edison. They are not addressing the same segment. Arduino is absolutely collossal compared to Edison, but again it is in still a third completely different segment. At present there are zero modules that are comparable to Edison. It has its segment all to itself. That will certaimly change, but what can never change is that Intel's Edison got there first, and in stellar fashion.

Edison has a bit more processing power than Raspberry Pi and is quite close to Beaglebone, but that is not the point. The point is that it is far tinier. The fact that you can get the processing power, plus ample RAM and flash, plus WiFi, plus Bluetooth, all in the size of a GODDAM POSTAGE STAMP is a freaking amazing breakthrough.

Obviously this has nothing whatsoever to do with the x86 instruction set, and everything to do with basic capabilities vs size and cost. Don't you get it? You program in C or C++. It doesn't matter a damn what the instruction set is. What matters is the power drain, and that is entirely competitive with ARM. You're completely full of bull about the power consumption.

All Edison is doing is leveraging Intel's expertise and process technology, and it is doing a capital job of that.

How long it takes to boot depends on what software it runs. If you choose to code in straight C or C++, it will "boot" in the blink of an eye. If you boot suitably pared-down embedded linux, I suppose it might take a second or so. There is no BIOS, which is the usual time-waster.

Odds are, Edison will sink without trace. I'd rather it didn't take one of my favorite suppliers with it.

That is a peculiarly dour way of looking at it. For my own part, I am impressed as hell that Sparkfun landed this coup. I happen to think Edison will be one of the standout innovations of the decade.

I think Intel really missed the boat with this thing. Originally it was just "look guise we put a x86 computer in an SD card" but now they actually want to try to sell it to people. They got too wrapped up in keeping it small when they should've made it BB/RPi sized, with equivalent features. The tiny connectors are totally hobbyist unfriendly, you will be forced to buy 3rd party boards to do anything at all with this platform.

It must suck to be utterly unimaginative. Instead of just making nothing more than a dreary me-too, copying an already excellent product that doesn't need to be copied (the Beaglebone, not the Raspberry Pi), Intel has surprised a lot of people by proving they can fundamentally innovate. Everybody else is looking pretty stupid right now, because ARM is the obvious choice for something this tiny, but not a single one did a goddam thing to make it happen. Intel proved ARM is not the only way for tiny and power-sipping.

The breakout board's still missing Ethernet though, which puts a bit of a hamper on our plans (we require an Ethernet link as we ban internal WiFi use as it's a secure facility). Perhaps an Arduino shield would work but it wouldn't be elegant.

I too was bummed that there was no ethernet (I freaking HATE WiFi), but I understand why.

There could, and I'm sure there will, be a stackable ethernet block, and damned if I can see why that is an inelegant solution. There already is a dot-matrix OLED block. Just the RJ-45 connector alone would far outweigh the whole rest of the module. It's actually pretty amusing to contemplate a tiny weightless stamp waving around on the end of a gigantic stiff RJ-45 anyway. It's high time for a new micro cable and connector option spec for ethernet.

It's also missing video output.

[Places head in hands, moaning] Not this shit again. This product is not a toy for snotty-nose video game zombies. It is a serious embedded building block. My biggest gripe with the Beaglebone is that it wastes all those transistors and current drain on the video coprocessor and HDMI connector.

Why would a remote sensor or drone component, for example, need a freaking VIDEO OUTPUT?

The real whole-world study has no control. You have to have a control to draw conclusions from a study. You don't know whether the ozone hole would have shrunk in the absence of curtailing CFCs. The real world is a very complex system.

I sneezed and an hour later the sun rose. I guess I better sneeze every morning or we are all in trouble.

P.S. - I'm not actually criticizing the curtailment of CFCs. I am much, much closer to agreeing that CFC curtailment is a Good Idea than I am that CO2 reduction, entailing energy starvation, is a Good Idea.

Whatever mystical crap floats your boat, sparky. The likelihood that you are a voter is chilling.

Judging from STTOS on TV, the original model was almost toy-like crude. The STTNG model was much more convincing, and that one already looks pretty crude compared to a good movie. The modelwork in 2001: A Space Odyssey stll impresses.

Nice cherry-picking of material to support an insupportable postulate.

From your own goddam citation: "The approximately 2 million people around TMI-2 during the accident are estimated to have received an average radiation dose of only about 1 millirem above the usual background dose. To put this into context, exposure from a chest X-ray is about 6 millirem and the area's natural radioactive background dose is about 100-125 millirem per year for the area. The accident's maximum dose to a person at the site boundary would have been less than 100 millirem above background."

That is NOT SIGNIFICANT compared to normal variation in natural background radiation. It so happens the area around TMI has an unusually low NBR. The average NBR in the US is 300 mrem/y. The area with the highest NBR in the inhabited world is Ramsar, Iran, with 600 mrem/y. But you don't see anyone evacuating there do you?

Give up the hysterical exaggeration.

Just to be clear, when that airbag fills explosively, nobody's arms are going to do squat to stop it from filling, not even Sylvester Stallone's. But you're right, if they are anywhere near the bag they are going to flail like hell and almost certainly hit stuff with devastating impact. From ten-and-two you have a pretty decent chance of smashing your eyeglasses into your eyes with your flying hands/arms.

It's 9 and 3 if you have an airbag, according to the NHTSA.

Well, they're close, anyway. In the real world, around 8 and 4, or even 7:30 and 4:30 is a better choice when you're using two hands. It's been a LONG time since power steering obviated the need to ever use both hands to apply torque. Any but the most violent left turn can be easily accomplished solely with the right hand starting at 4 or 4:30, and any but the most violent right turn can easily be accomplished solely with the left hand starting at 7:30 or 8. With the hands starting low, there is much more available motion before you have to do hand-over-hand, and additionally it is safer in case the airbag goes off and tries to do you violent injury.

The unused hand only comes into play for extremely violent maneuvering; huge hand-over-hand steering inputs.

Most of the time on the highway, one hand at 12 or 1 is perfectly capable of making any required maneuvers. You can't apply huge inputs at highway speed without spinning out anyway.

For anybody who uses the seatbelt, the airbag is his worst enemy anyway. You don't want your arms anywhere near that damn thing when it goes off. Most definitely not above the center of the wheel, but better nowhere near it. Drivers who crash cars for a living always cross their arms over their chest just before impact so flailing arms won't shatter bones and gouge wounds if when they hit objects.

An airbag is not some kind of balloon that blows up fast, like in the cartoons. It has a goddam pyrotechnic inflator. That means explosive. Quicker than the blink of an eye. An airbag is a devastating weapon. If it saves the life of an imbecile who can't trouble to buckle up it MAY be worthwhile, but for anyone of normal intelligence it is a liability.

So, I guess the melt downs in 1959, 1960, 1966, and 1979 were on purpose?

You're getting really closed to being ignored by me because you are not paying attention; not reading for comprehension. I specifically said zero UNCONTAINED meltdowns for nuclear electric power generation. Two of those incidents were test or research reactors, so they have nothing to do with the point. The others released no significant uncontained radiation.

Repeating falsehoods does not make them true. ZFS does not mysteriously "require" ECC RAM, end of goddam story. Plenty of people are using ZFS without ECC RAM.