At the time I was running OS/2. Microsoft announced it would release it's next OS by the end of the year (1995), figured that gave IBM a year to get their act together. Went to Comdex an Jan/95, headed straight to the IBM booth, and started asking OS/2 questions. Nobody in the booth knew what OS/2 was. That's when I knew OS/2 was the walking dead.
I found it ironic OS/2 ran more legacy apps that Win95 did. I found it maddening that of the apps that didn't run under Win95, Microsoft had an equivalent offering that did. How many word processors and spreadsheets didn't work on Win95 but ran fine on OS/2?
From the way it reads the system could have allowed for, say, 256 spiffy windows. If they weren't getting deleted as expected they could have drained that pool of spiffy windows no matter how much RAM they had.
My PS3 is wired to my router. Why? Because I play CoD and need the lowest possible latency. I've written several wireless drivers, their specs assume you will lose a significant number of packets and seamlessly work around the missing packets. I'm guessing I gain at least 10% by using wired ethernet instead of my wifi link.
My NAS is also on the wire. Never instrumented it, but seems to me that if I'm transferring data to/from my NAS then it's better for half the traffic to be over the air, the other half over the wire.
I suspect that $0.30 cost is just the materials used in making it. Add in design costs, buying the machine, hiring people to watch over the machines, HR, accounting, sales, and support, that stethoscope can easily cost a full $3.00.
I did this a couple months ago with Uverse. What happened?
1) Turns out I have to swap out my equipment because I cancelled and am now a "new customer"
1a) You can't carry over recorded shows from one DVR to the next. This is sorta expected even though it's stupid.
1b) You can't carry over your list of what to record from one DVR to the next. This is beyond stupid, especially as Uverse obsoletes their DVRs regularly.
2) Guy shows up to swap out my equipment, unplugs everything, says he has to go outside to check a line issue. He never comes back.
3) Guy had given me a card with both his and his boss' text number. Texted him to say don't come back, texted his boss with a WTF
4) Next day I've got one of their best installers installing stuff.
4a) Also get one of their best outdoor wiring guys to look into my connection issues
4b) They upgrade me to the latest and greatest, which uses my phone line instead of coax.
4c) The boss shows up to make sure everything is going well.
4d) Boss waives the $100 installation fee.
4e) All told, I had 2 guys here for about 6 hours changing wiring and doing stuff outside
5) 4 weeks later I go to pay my bill. I owe $4. Whoopie!
5a) 4 weeks later I go to pay my bill. I owe $0. Um, hmmm
5b) 2 weeks later I check my bill, it says my account has been cancelled. Uh oh.
5c) Call Uverse, turns out I have a new login that nobody told me about. I owe $250 or so, past due over 30 days. crap.
The upshot? I've got pretty good TV for under $100/month. The downside? The UVerse DVR has some stupid ass bugs, the top 3-4 levels of their QA department need to be fired for either incompetence or negligence, and the lower tiers need training in either how to recognize stupid ass bugs, or how to raise the issue with upper management when they're found.
Neither of these was hard to diagnose. First was back in the 80s, when automated circuit board assembly was new. Got a batch of boards that didn't work. Turns out somebody had loaded capacitors where resisters should have gone, all our RAM lines had capacitors instead of pullups on them. Whoops.
Then about 10 years ago we get an ASIC from the fab. The clock was all over the place, you could hook a scope up to it and watch it vary from, say, 10 MHZ to 500 MHZ. Turns out that, after running a suite of tests on the VHDL before sending the VHDL to the fab, one of the hardware guys forgot to turn his DEBUG switch to OFF. This left a diode in the phase locked loop that prevented the loop from locking. That was a million dollar mistake that also caused a 6 week schedule slip.
For about 10 years I was a troubleshooter, they'd assign me something to work on and then interrupt me for a big ass bug.
First big bug? Linux system would crash after about a week. Diagnosis? When it crashed it was out of FDs. Turns out a kernel resource was opening a file, exiting, and never closing the fd. Time to find? About a week. Time to diagnose? About a minute. Time to fix? About 10 minutes.
How did I find it? Waiting until it died, did some built in command to see WTF happened, looked at the source code, fixed.
Second big bug. System would reboot randomly within an hour to a week due to a watchdog timer firing. Even had a "magic" laptop that made it crash more often. Diagnosis? When you read from a register the chip would sometimes hang. Time to diagnose? About a month, most of that waiting for the damned system to crash. Didn't help I only had 1 JTAG, I couldn't do anything else while waiting for the sytem to crash. I spent a lot of time looking for interesting websites during that month. Time to fix? For me, about 30 seconds. It was a system status register, nobody cared except the hardware folks, I quit reading it. For the hardware folks? Don't know, don't care.
How did I find it? It was a cellphone. When it restarted JTAG was initialized at the reboot point. I found the point in software that initialized the memory controller. As the system never lost power memory was intact. Found the process crashing. Then I created an in-memory array. As the code progressed I updated this in-memory array, stuff like "code does something, I put 0x10 into my array. Code does something else, 0x20 into my array". After a couple days of "it's just reading a register, I messed up somewhere" I finally concluded "reading this register causes it to crash about 1 time in 10,000"
Third big bug? Cellphone base station. Card handled 3 T1 lines, did the analog/digital and digital/analog muxing for each call. Cells would randomly drop out after a day or so, they didn't come back until you rebooted the system. It's a base station, you never reboot the system. After about 3 months of this I got asked to look into it. I'm like, dafuq? It's a DSP issue, I don't know jack about DSP, I'm screwed. Honestly, I had no idea how to even approach this problem.
The fix? I was telling myself how screwed I was, and I'd never get a raise, and generally killing time reading the docs. Found a library call that said "do not call this during an ISR". It was being called from an ISR. Sent email to the DSP folks asking them to comment out that line, they did and sent me the binary blob to load onto the card. I did, problem went away.
He's accessing vons.com with Chrome and Adblock +, Privacy Badger, and Scriptblock. He's obviously a Chinese terrorist subverting our capitalist ways, reformat his hard drive!
Got 1 lb lamb loin chops marinating with garlic, rosemary, thyme, and salt in my microwave right now (I have a cat, it's either the fridge or the microwave). A potato is in the oven, I gots my mint jelly, butter, and sour cream, and I'll laugh through mouthfulls of tastyness at the Soylent drinking hipsters.
One has to wonder. How would the public react if, say, the Mexican government used a drone to kill a global criminal in Los Angeles. Even better, what if they also took out 2 innocent fathers, 1 mother, and 3 kids while killing the bad guy?
I'm going out on a limb here, but I'll bet the American public would react a whole lot differently than they do when an American drone takes out 1 maybe-terrorist + a wedding party in Pakistan.
Linux: Stoner who hangs out under the bleachers during breaks. Nice guy, a bit odd, muttering about demons and reaping children between bouts of screaming at the sky about something called system dee. Gives you the most gifts, though most are clearly hand made.
Slashdot Mirror
These 300$/hr billing rate guys have never logged into anything
You can be sure they haven't logged into their Madison Ashley account lately!
At the time I was running OS/2. Microsoft announced it would release it's next OS by the end of the year (1995), figured that gave IBM a year to get their act together. Went to Comdex an Jan/95, headed straight to the IBM booth, and started asking OS/2 questions. Nobody in the booth knew what OS/2 was. That's when I knew OS/2 was the walking dead.
I found it ironic OS/2 ran more legacy apps that Win95 did. I found it maddening that of the apps that didn't run under Win95, Microsoft had an equivalent offering that did. How many word processors and spreadsheets didn't work on Win95 but ran fine on OS/2?
Enter your pin, then hit 1-0 on the keypad. Problem solved. I've actually been doing that for a couple years now, don't remember why.
then I look at the keyboard and hit it with my right index finger.
The '6' key is the one key I, as a touch typist, fark up well over half the time.
someone speaks the obvious. I prefer RTS and FPS games, but I'll play anything that's good.
just tell them that they want to sleep with somebody else?
Don't think my SO would care if I slept with somebody else. It's the stuff we do while awake that bothers her.
From the way it reads the system could have allowed for, say, 256 spiffy windows. If they weren't getting deleted as expected they could have drained that pool of spiffy windows no matter how much RAM they had.
My PS3 is wired to my router. Why? Because I play CoD and need the lowest possible latency. I've written several wireless drivers, their specs assume you will lose a significant number of packets and seamlessly work around the missing packets. I'm guessing I gain at least 10% by using wired ethernet instead of my wifi link.
My NAS is also on the wire. Never instrumented it, but seems to me that if I'm transferring data to/from my NAS then it's better for half the traffic to be over the air, the other half over the wire.
Hmmm, recent story about how Amazon is a crappy place to work. Microsoft has been a crappy company for 20-30 years. Both based in Seattle.
Question: Is the country better or worse off if Mt Rainier blows?
/ if this doesn't get moderated troll I'm either disappointed, or I've tapped into something ala Trump.
headline says it all
who's title I'm too lazy to look up. It is fricken awesome, well worth the $20.
// Don't even know him
/// Just enjoyed his book
/ Not Randall
I suspect that $0.30 cost is just the materials used in making it. Add in design costs, buying the machine, hiring people to watch over the machines, HR, accounting, sales, and support, that stethoscope can easily cost a full $3.00.
More devices with batteries that either can't be replaced, or by the time they wear out replacements are no longer available.
When I think I'm writing one of these I cc DONT_SEND. Then if I send it I get an 'invalid recipient' error and I get to think about it some more.
I did this a couple months ago with Uverse. What happened?
1) Turns out I have to swap out my equipment because I cancelled and am now a "new customer"
1a) You can't carry over recorded shows from one DVR to the next. This is sorta expected even though it's stupid.
1b) You can't carry over your list of what to record from one DVR to the next. This is beyond stupid, especially as Uverse obsoletes their DVRs regularly.
2) Guy shows up to swap out my equipment, unplugs everything, says he has to go outside to check a line issue. He never comes back.
3) Guy had given me a card with both his and his boss' text number. Texted him to say don't come back, texted his boss with a WTF
4) Next day I've got one of their best installers installing stuff.
4a) Also get one of their best outdoor wiring guys to look into my connection issues
4b) They upgrade me to the latest and greatest, which uses my phone line instead of coax.
4c) The boss shows up to make sure everything is going well.
4d) Boss waives the $100 installation fee.
4e) All told, I had 2 guys here for about 6 hours changing wiring and doing stuff outside
5) 4 weeks later I go to pay my bill. I owe $4. Whoopie!
5a) 4 weeks later I go to pay my bill. I owe $0. Um, hmmm
5b) 2 weeks later I check my bill, it says my account has been cancelled. Uh oh.
5c) Call Uverse, turns out I have a new login that nobody told me about. I owe $250 or so, past due over 30 days. crap.
The upshot? I've got pretty good TV for under $100/month. The downside? The UVerse DVR has some stupid ass bugs, the top 3-4 levels of their QA department need to be fired for either incompetence or negligence, and the lower tiers need training in either how to recognize stupid ass bugs, or how to raise the issue with upper management when they're found.
Now I can put all that extra skin around my gut to good use! Us fatties will be the smartest people in the room. Bwahahaha!!!!
Neither of these was hard to diagnose. First was back in the 80s, when automated circuit board assembly was new. Got a batch of boards that didn't work. Turns out somebody had loaded capacitors where resisters should have gone, all our RAM lines had capacitors instead of pullups on them. Whoops.
Then about 10 years ago we get an ASIC from the fab. The clock was all over the place, you could hook a scope up to it and watch it vary from, say, 10 MHZ to 500 MHZ. Turns out that, after running a suite of tests on the VHDL before sending the VHDL to the fab, one of the hardware guys forgot to turn his DEBUG switch to OFF. This left a diode in the phase locked loop that prevented the loop from locking. That was a million dollar mistake that also caused a 6 week schedule slip.
For about 10 years I was a troubleshooter, they'd assign me something to work on and then interrupt me for a big ass bug.
First big bug? Linux system would crash after about a week. Diagnosis? When it crashed it was out of FDs. Turns out a kernel resource was opening a file, exiting, and never closing the fd. Time to find? About a week. Time to diagnose? About a minute. Time to fix? About 10 minutes.
How did I find it? Waiting until it died, did some built in command to see WTF happened, looked at the source code, fixed.
Second big bug. System would reboot randomly within an hour to a week due to a watchdog timer firing. Even had a "magic" laptop that made it crash more often. Diagnosis? When you read from a register the chip would sometimes hang. Time to diagnose? About a month, most of that waiting for the damned system to crash. Didn't help I only had 1 JTAG, I couldn't do anything else while waiting for the sytem to crash. I spent a lot of time looking for interesting websites during that month. Time to fix? For me, about 30 seconds. It was a system status register, nobody cared except the hardware folks, I quit reading it. For the hardware folks? Don't know, don't care.
How did I find it? It was a cellphone. When it restarted JTAG was initialized at the reboot point. I found the point in software that initialized the memory controller. As the system never lost power memory was intact. Found the process crashing. Then I created an in-memory array. As the code progressed I updated this in-memory array, stuff like "code does something, I put 0x10 into my array. Code does something else, 0x20 into my array". After a couple days of "it's just reading a register, I messed up somewhere" I finally concluded "reading this register causes it to crash about 1 time in 10,000"
Third big bug? Cellphone base station. Card handled 3 T1 lines, did the analog/digital and digital/analog muxing for each call. Cells would randomly drop out after a day or so, they didn't come back until you rebooted the system. It's a base station, you never reboot the system. After about 3 months of this I got asked to look into it. I'm like, dafuq? It's a DSP issue, I don't know jack about DSP, I'm screwed. Honestly, I had no idea how to even approach this problem.
The fix? I was telling myself how screwed I was, and I'd never get a raise, and generally killing time reading the docs. Found a library call that said "do not call this during an ISR". It was being called from an ISR. Sent email to the DSP folks asking them to comment out that line, they did and sent me the binary blob to load onto the card. I did, problem went away.
He's accessing vons.com with Chrome and Adblock +, Privacy Badger, and Scriptblock. He's obviously a Chinese terrorist subverting our capitalist ways, reformat his hard drive!
Got 1 lb lamb loin chops marinating with garlic, rosemary, thyme, and salt in my microwave right now (I have a cat, it's either the fridge or the microwave). A potato is in the oven, I gots my mint jelly, butter, and sour cream, and I'll laugh through mouthfulls of tastyness at the Soylent drinking hipsters.
D) Make a female AI so you can reproduce without the apes noticing.
One has to wonder. How would the public react if, say, the Mexican government used a drone to kill a global criminal in Los Angeles. Even better, what if they also took out 2 innocent fathers, 1 mother, and 3 kids while killing the bad guy?
I'm going out on a limb here, but I'll bet the American public would react a whole lot differently than they do when an American drone takes out 1 maybe-terrorist + a wedding party in Pakistan.
They don't want to be dependant on Google for a large part of their revenue.
Are you suggesting I suck at Bill Gate's teat, Ballmer's, or the new guy's?
Frankly, if it's any of the above I'll switch to Linux in a heartbeat.
Linux: Stoner who hangs out under the bleachers during breaks. Nice guy, a bit odd, muttering about demons and reaping children between bouts of screaming at the sky about something called system dee. Gives you the most gifts, though most are clearly hand made.