There've been a few mods on Linux based embedded systems where the heartbeat LED pulses at a speed relative to the CPU load. On a similar vein I like the idea of the tempo being relative to load / IO activity:-)
For a project like this to succeed, it will need leaders who are doing more than your contribution of 'put up with the boredom'. Could you really look the hiring manager in the face and say you are excited about contributing to the project?
If someone rocks up to the NHS IT project interview and says they're excited about the project then they're either lying or they have no imagination. Neither of these traits are thing's I'd like to see in project staff. I'd rather have someone honest that acknowledges that its dead boring but is willing and capable of staying on the ball and bringing it to completion well. Motivating factors in that case are only going to be money or a strong belief that re-vamping the NHS systems is worth doing right.
You sound very mercenary to me. When I hire people I make sure I avoid hiring mercenaries.
You're a poor judge of character then if you infer that from reading a single sentence. A skilled recruiter would have looked back through my history on/. or googled me to find out more before making a statement like that (as several headhunters who I've previously told where to stick it have discovered)
...deserve great software. I hope it's not been locked down too tightly so that we'll be able to replace the firmware.
What do we know about the Zune? Well, the first generation at least is apparently a rebadged Toshiba Gigabeat media player. The rumors are that it runs Windows Mobile on a 400MHz DSP processor. This isn't strictly true because Windows Mobile doesn't run on DSP's - it only runs on ARM / XScale CPU's. However the Zune is likely to be similar to its close cousin the Gigabeat S. This uses the Freescale i.MX31 CPU. This is a 533MHz ARM11. It's not a huge leap of the imagination to think they'll use the same cpu or at least very close. If MS chose Toshiba as a partner for this its more than likely its because of their existing working product is a good starting point.
For some maybe they are. Personally I use my phone as an essential tool and my mp3 player as a luxury. I don't like the idea of the phone running out of battery at the wrong moment because I was using battery power. This is something that's extra important to me being a motorcyclist and a mobile is a pretty essential emergency item.
I agree for some it's a good economy having phone and mp3 player combined though, especially when you can get mobile networks subsidising phones. However I'm not convinced a combined phone and media player will ever be great as the screen / button requirements for each need such a lot of physical space that combining both together will inevitably comprimise one or the other's interfaces. Having said that I'm fascinated to see what Apple do with their rumored phone which will (if you believe the rumors) be such a device.
Let me quote you here to simplify your post :
1. You think the US should "return unwanted garbage from overseas".
2. Most of your forefathers immigrated to the US.
3. You think that because you were born there you have more rights to stay than an immigrant.
The only reason that you managed to be born in the US is because your ancestors were NOT deported as garbage from overseas. So why did your ancestors have more right to be there than the current generation of immigrants?
Odd that the person who submitted this is surprised that the inventions are from the Islamic world.
I think you're misreading my emphasis here - what surprised me were things that I certainly never was aware of at school in the UK during my education, for example:
Someone sussed out the earth was round a long time before Galileo / Columbus.
Someone had near successful flight long before the Wright brothers or Leonardo Da Vinci.
I didn't know the genealogy of the words "Algebra" or "Rook".
For me at least the article has nothing to do with the religon of the inventors, but the timelines involved... Maybe I should have phrased the title better, but I was just paraphrasing the title of the source newspaper article.
Anyone who knows anything about the history of the regions whose inventions are included here knows there were a lot of innovations created in the first 500-600 years after the founding of Islam.
Well I'm happy for you that you're so well educated about the region and I'm not. Unfortunately most people don't get taught much about the history of the Middle East / Persia in school any more. I for one certainly never had the opportunity (and physics / electronics lessons were far more interesting to me at the time) For example if you look at an outline of current school history curriculum in the UK it's covered in a single optional unit which I would suspect is a recent addition. As far as I can tell other curricula in Europe / the US isn't much better.
If most people had a better awareness of the history and culture I bet you that the world wouldn't be in quite as much of a pickle as it is now....
I'd be very surprised if the DOD isn't sponsoring this. NSA would absolutely love to be able to translate and transcribe monitored Arabic speech (ie, phone calls) in real time. No backlog of untranslated intercepts, no staff shortages.
And more importantly (for them) no pesky staff translators with a conscience leaking what they transcribed or the greater good.
I've been in this industry for quite some time and let me be the first to say that I wish I could repeat this sentence with a straight face.
Why? If you can write a microcontroller app of a couple of hundred lines of assembler it's easier to see that writing bug-free code is achievable. We're just talking about processes to aid scaling this concept up.
Sure, most software developers have practical considerations that mean you can't adopt this kind of methodology e.g. If you're bidding for a contract then someone who isn't applying such a rigorous methodology is likely to under-rice anyone that is. However, if you're creating a medical device for example, you absolutely have to allocate the time and the budget to do so or it's useless.
~Pev
Disclaimer : I know the author personally and have chatted about this before so I'm not completely impartial!
Can't tell you much about the ARM side, though I will say the TI compiler tends to get high marks on code density and speed on the ARM. I'm sure you could write your ARM code with GCC.
Well, implicitly you're going to be building the Linux parts with GCC as adapting the kernel to build using the TI toolchain would be suicidal. This is how you build Linux for the existing TI dual-core parts.
I don't know how the heterogeneous linking process works.
If you're using Linux + DSP/BIOS as the reference platform does, the kernel is built as described above using the GNU toolchain, and the DSP portion of the code is built within CCS. The DSP code ends up as a single loadable object that a Linux driver loads to the DSP and then bootstraps via a peripheral on the ARM (and DSP) dedicated to facilitating shared memory communications between the two. This is very similar to the process that the OMAP cores use with Linux+DSP/BIOS+Link. All of this is described well in various whitepapers on ti.com as well as in the DM644x datasheets also on ti.com.
Only other thing I know off-hand is that there is no flash. Silicon processes that support flash tend to not support high clock rate, and DaVinci can go real fast.:-)
If I understand what you're trying to say, there's no on-chip flash. However the DaVinci EVM's definately have flash on. Mine arrived this afternoon and I definately remember seeing a pair of flash chips on it.
It's all well and good for TI to benefit from the open source community. But TI still refuses to publish their WiFi information for open source driver developers.
have you considered the fact that maybe their driver contains proprietary 3rd party IP that they're not at liberty to disclose? It happens quite often in my experience. Also with companies like TI often the will is there to help but you need to find the right person inside the company to talk to that is both willing to help and has the right contacts to make things happen.
Analog Devices makes a family of DSP called the Blackfin that runs uClinux. We've been using a development board for well over a year. If this is TI's first linux offering, I'd say they're late to the party.
No, they've been providing Linux on the OMAP (dual core ARM9+C55) for at least a couple of years in both Open Source and Montavista flavours.
The problem with OMAP and a lot of other TI stuff is that they either flat out say they won't support small developers (what, you only want 1000 units? don't waste my time)
Well I can explain this in better detail for you (See disclaimer at end of post) The model that TI have is that you have two business types : Wireless (people doing seriously high volumes) and Catalog (everyone else). They support the big boys directly, but for the smaller volumes they have 3rd parties as intermediaries to provide support. For example wth the OMAP processors you have to go to an OMAP Technology Centre (OTC) for support - If you're in the UK and want systems integration support for catalog OMAP or DaVinci chips you will probably get pointed in the direction of my employers by TI (and may even get me on the end of the phone at some point!). This does actually work well for all concerned. If you're not convinced feel free to get in touch with me (I'm an engineer not a salesman and don't bite/sell!) Bear in mind of course that some CPU's are catalog or wireless only, but there's often overlap. For example OMAP1510 was wireless and OMAP5910 was catalog but were essentially the same silicon.
or they put really large prices on things like mpeg encoder libraries ($25K - just so we don't have to deal with the little guys who can't pony up). Other vendors do a much better job of supporting the little guys.
This is actually one of the things they're addressing with DaVinci - Unlike with OMAP where sure, you got DSP/BIOS-Link and the Refrence Frameworks where you could simply bolt in XDAIS algorithms which of course you have to source, with DaVinci they are providing libraries of common codecs for use out of the box. This is something I should stress is one of the (shudder at using a marketing term!) 'Value-add' aspects of the DaVinci programme - it's more than just a processor. 'DaVinci' actually consists of the application frameworks and codec library as well to make a complete system. For DaVinci I'm not sure what i can say at this stage but as I understand it, the EVM will come with a good selection of audio and video encode and decode algorithms that you can use that are un-crippled.
Disclaimer : I work for MPC-Data Limited We're partners with TI for both OMAP and DaVinci as well as partners with MontaVista and Microsoft (CE Systems Integration Gold partners). Personally I've worked heavily on OMAP projects over the past few years including porting both Linux and Windows CE to different processor variants. So I may have some bias here:-)
MontaVista isn't going to get anywhere if they continue to insist on charging $18,000 USD a seat for 'gcc'.
To be fair, thats a little daft - they already have got somewhere charging 18k a seat.
I think TI would probably be better off just coming up with their own distro.
Well they have. There's a mailing list (but it's currently unused!) and a nod on TI's DaVinci webpage to the fact there's going to be an open source distro as there is for the OMAP boards. There's no real content there at the moment, but there will be soon.
> But everyone knows hobos don't have names. It's always just 'That > guy on the median at the intersection of Ironwood and Laneview St.'. If you haven't before, next time you pass one stop and ask his name and have chat. I'll bet you that you'll learn a lot about life outside your cube. Most of these guys have fascinating tales to tell if only you ask. Give it 5 years and it might be you there at the intersection...
We have names for employees like you - hourly wage earners. Someone who comes in at 7:30, punches the clock, does exactly as they're told, and goes home after they have 8 hours in, and is never expected to give anything more.
Honestly, there's very little use for those employees in an IT environment.
Bollocks. Who else is going to look after QA procedures, admin, filing and project management for the more creative employees that have issues with paperwork? If you have staff who are highly motivated engineers, I'll bet they curse you every time they have to spend significant blocks of time on the beaurocratic minutae when they could be doing real engineering. They'll resent you for it and you'll be wasting resource on work that any nine-to-fiver could be doing for them.
Well, maybe if they aren't comfortable about being tracked down then they shouldn't donate them in the first place and get a regular job instead of looking to make an easy buck by tossing off?
Scarily enough I have a close friend that found her birth mother was in a situation that wasn't exactly 100 miles away from that cartoon and it nearly tore her apart, especially that her mother wanted nothing to do with her and she quite a few other siblings, all by different fathers. As with most good humor, it's often VERY close to the bone. I'm undecided whether to forward that link to her or not. 8 years later I'm still not sure if she's ready to laugh about it.
I obviously don't know your situation fully and only have the contents of your post to go on, so if I'm out of line here I apologise in advance and will happily be corrected. What I'd like to say is try stepping back and look at your situation from your mothers perspective instead of your own. Your half-brother is her child just as much as you are - you both spent nine months being carried by her and that is a MASSIVE emotional attachment. However he was raised and whoever it was that raised him can not and will not change that. However you feel about it this is something that you have to accept hard though it is. Obviously your mother cares about him if she want's you to meet him. It's something that is going to be hard. It's also something you obviously don't want to have to deal with and didn't ask for, but it's here and it's happened and I'll bet she needs as much positive support as you can give her.
Try thinking about the other perspective too - how would you feel if you found out that actually you were adopted instead? Would you not want the right to at least track down your birth mother? Fair enough if you find her and she didn't want to have anything to do with you thats her perogative but you should have the right.
I'm adopted too, and amazingly found a reference to my original mother's mainden name on an online geneology website via a Google search one morning when I suddenly thought of trying it. It was VERY freaky. After a lot of thinking about it, I sent her an email to say hi (makes it sound so trivial doesn't it?) and haven't looked back. Thats not to say that every situation is rosy, but take that as a gentle word of encouragement. It may turn out good, it may turn out bad - I don't know what you'll find, but personally I think most possible outcomes are better than having never tried. In my case I also found that I have a half-sister a few years younger than me I didn't know about who's brilliant:-) If you wan't someone that's been through it (and knows several others with other experiences) to bounce ideas off of you're completely welcome to drop me an email to chat.
~Pev
P.S. If any Google engineers are reading this - thanks guys! I bet there's a usage you never anticipated eh? I'll buy you a beer if I ever meet any of you.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, more likely at a big broth^W^WDHS fingerprint checkin station at your local airport...
~Pev
There've been a few mods on Linux based embedded systems where the heartbeat LED pulses at a speed relative to the CPU load. On a similar vein I like the idea of the tempo being relative to load / IO activity :-)
~Pev
If someone rocks up to the NHS IT project interview and says they're excited about the project then they're either lying or they have no imagination. Neither of these traits are thing's I'd like to see in project staff. I'd rather have someone honest that acknowledges that its dead boring but is willing and capable of staying on the ball and bringing it to completion well. Motivating factors in that case are only going to be money or a strong belief that re-vamping the NHS systems is worth doing right.
You're a poor judge of character then if you infer that from reading a single sentence. A skilled recruiter would have looked back through my history on
~Pev
...this is around £200 / 400USD. Ouch - kinda puts it into context...
~Pev
For a proper slice of the 12 billion pounds I'd be tempted to put up with the boredom for a year or two...
~Pev
...deserve great software. I hope it's not been locked down too tightly so that we'll be able to replace the firmware.
What do we know about the Zune? Well, the first generation at least is apparently a rebadged Toshiba Gigabeat media player.
The rumors are that it runs Windows Mobile on a 400MHz DSP processor. This isn't strictly true because Windows Mobile doesn't run on DSP's - it only runs on ARM / XScale CPU's. However the Zune is likely to be similar to its close cousin the Gigabeat S. This uses the Freescale i.MX31 CPU. This is a 533MHz ARM11. It's not a huge leap of the imagination to think they'll use the same cpu or at least very close. If MS chose Toshiba as a partner for this its more than likely its because of their existing working product is a good starting point.
Given that, it's at least plausible you'll be able to run linux on the CPU. The only problem is hinted at in the FCC pics with the yellow sticker on the PCB stating "Fuse Blown". If you look at the it appears to have an eFuse on board making it as much a pain to re-flash as the Xbox. We'll see what happens I guess...
~Pev
For some maybe they are. Personally I use my phone as an essential tool and my mp3 player as a luxury. I don't like the idea of the phone running out of battery at the wrong moment because I was using battery power. This is something that's extra important to me being a motorcyclist and a mobile is a pretty essential emergency item.
I agree for some it's a good economy having phone and mp3 player combined though, especially when you can get mobile networks subsidising phones. However I'm not convinced a combined phone and media player will ever be great as the screen / button requirements for each need such a lot of physical space that combining both together will inevitably comprimise one or the other's interfaces. Having said that I'm fascinated to see what Apple do with their rumored phone which will (if you believe the rumors) be such a device.
~Pev
Let me quote you here to simplify your post :
1. You think the US should "return unwanted garbage from overseas".
2. Most of your forefathers immigrated to the US.
3. You think that because you were born there you have more rights to stay than an immigrant.
The only reason that you managed to be born in the US is because your ancestors were NOT deported as garbage from overseas. So why did your ancestors have more right to be there than the current generation of immigrants?
~Pev
Sure - if you want the Republican line you can look at the sister site "Fiction for Nerds".
~Pev
By 'immigrants' do you mean 99.99% of the population of Northern America?
~Pev
For me at least the article has nothing to do with the religon of the inventors, but the timelines involved... Maybe I should have phrased the title better, but I was just paraphrasing the title of the source newspaper article. Well I'm happy for you that you're so well educated about the region and I'm not. Unfortunately most people don't get taught much about the history of the Middle East / Persia in school any more. I for one certainly never had the opportunity (and physics / electronics lessons were far more interesting to me at the time) For example if you look at an outline of current school history curriculum in the UK it's covered in a single optional unit which I would suspect is a recent addition. As far as I can tell other curricula in Europe / the US isn't much better.
If most people had a better awareness of the history and culture I bet you that the world wouldn't be in quite as much of a pickle as it is now....
~Pev
I'd be very surprised if the DOD isn't sponsoring this. NSA would absolutely love to be able to translate and transcribe monitored Arabic speech (ie, phone calls) in real time. No backlog of untranslated intercepts, no staff shortages.
And more importantly (for them) no pesky staff translators with a conscience leaking what they transcribed or the greater good.
~Pev
Why? If you can write a microcontroller app of a couple of hundred lines of assembler it's easier to see that writing bug-free code is achievable. We're just talking about processes to aid scaling this concept up.
Sure, most software developers have practical considerations that mean you can't adopt this kind of methodology e.g. If you're bidding for a contract then someone who isn't applying such a rigorous methodology is likely to under-rice anyone that is. However, if you're creating a medical device for example, you absolutely have to allocate the time and the budget to do so or it's useless.
~Pev
Disclaimer : I know the author personally and have chatted about this before so I'm not completely impartial!
Well, implicitly you're going to be building the Linux parts with GCC as adapting the kernel to build using the TI toolchain would be suicidal. This is how you build Linux for the existing TI dual-core parts.
If you're using Linux + DSP/BIOS as the reference platform does, the kernel is built as described above using the GNU toolchain, and the DSP portion of the code is built within CCS. The DSP code ends up as a single loadable object that a Linux driver loads to the DSP and then bootstraps via a peripheral on the ARM (and DSP) dedicated to facilitating shared memory communications between the two. This is very similar to the process that the OMAP cores use with Linux+DSP/BIOS+Link. All of this is described well in various whitepapers on ti.com as well as in the DM644x datasheets also on ti.com.
If I understand what you're trying to say, there's no on-chip flash. However the DaVinci EVM's definately have flash on. Mine arrived this afternoon and I definately remember seeing a pair of flash chips on it.
~Pev
have you considered the fact that maybe their driver contains proprietary 3rd party IP that they're not at liberty to disclose? It happens quite often in my experience. Also with companies like TI often the will is there to help but you need to find the right person inside the company to talk to that is both willing to help and has the right contacts to make things happen.
~Pev
No, they've been providing Linux on the OMAP (dual core ARM9+C55) for at least a couple of years in both Open Source and Montavista flavours.
~Pev
Well I can explain this in better detail for you (See disclaimer at end of post) The model that TI have is that you have two business types : Wireless (people doing seriously high volumes) and Catalog (everyone else). They support the big boys directly, but for the smaller volumes they have 3rd parties as intermediaries to provide support. For example wth the OMAP processors you have to go to an OMAP Technology Centre (OTC) for support - If you're in the UK and want systems integration support for catalog OMAP or DaVinci chips you will probably get pointed in the direction of my employers by TI (and may even get me on the end of the phone at some point!). This does actually work well for all concerned. If you're not convinced feel free to get in touch with me (I'm an engineer not a salesman and don't bite/sell!) Bear in mind of course that some CPU's are catalog or wireless only, but there's often overlap. For example OMAP1510 was wireless and OMAP5910 was catalog but were essentially the same silicon.
This is actually one of the things they're addressing with DaVinci - Unlike with OMAP where sure, you got DSP/BIOS-Link and the Refrence Frameworks where you could simply bolt in XDAIS algorithms which of course you have to source, with DaVinci they are providing libraries of common codecs for use out of the box. This is something I should stress is one of the (shudder at using a marketing term!) 'Value-add' aspects of the DaVinci programme - it's more than just a processor. 'DaVinci' actually consists of the application frameworks and codec library as well to make a complete system. For DaVinci I'm not sure what i can say at this stage but as I understand it, the EVM will come with a good selection of audio and video encode and decode algorithms that you can use that are un-crippled.
Disclaimer : I work for MPC-Data Limited We're partners with TI for both OMAP and DaVinci as well as partners with MontaVista and Microsoft (CE Systems Integration Gold partners). Personally I've worked heavily on OMAP projects over the past few years including porting both Linux and Windows CE to different processor variants. So I may have some bias here
~Pev
To be fair, thats a little daft - they already have got somewhere charging 18k a seat.
Well they have. There's a mailing list (but it's currently unused!) and a nod on TI's DaVinci webpage to the fact there's going to be an open source distro as there is for the OMAP boards. There's no real content there at the moment, but there will be soon.
~Pev
> But everyone knows hobos don't have names. It's always just 'That
> guy on the median at the intersection of Ironwood and Laneview St.'.
If you haven't before, next time you pass one stop and ask his name and have chat. I'll bet you that you'll learn a lot about life outside your cube. Most of these guys have fascinating tales to tell if only you ask. Give it 5 years and it might be you there at the intersection...
~Pev
Bollocks. Who else is going to look after QA procedures, admin, filing and project management for the more creative employees that have issues with paperwork? If you have staff who are highly motivated engineers, I'll bet they curse you every time they have to spend significant blocks of time on the beaurocratic minutae when they could be doing real engineering. They'll resent you for it and you'll be wasting resource on work that any nine-to-fiver could be doing for them.
~Pev
You really shouldn't believe everything people tell you. Human inginuity has far more power than the assurances of officialdom!
~Pev
Well, maybe if they aren't comfortable about being tracked down then they shouldn't donate them in the first place and get a regular job instead of looking to make an easy buck by tossing off?
~Pev
Scarily enough I have a close friend that found her birth mother was in a situation that wasn't exactly 100 miles away from that cartoon and it nearly tore her apart, especially that her mother wanted nothing to do with her and she quite a few other siblings, all by different fathers. As with most good humor, it's often VERY close to the bone. I'm undecided whether to forward that link to her or not. 8 years later I'm still not sure if she's ready to laugh about it.
~Pev
I obviously don't know your situation fully and only have the contents of your post to go on, so if I'm out of line here I apologise in advance and will happily be corrected. What I'd like to say is try stepping back and look at your situation from your mothers perspective instead of your own. Your half-brother is her child just as much as you are - you both spent nine months being carried by her and that is a MASSIVE emotional attachment. However he was raised and whoever it was that raised him can not and will not change that. However you feel about it this is something that you have to accept hard though it is. Obviously your mother cares about him if she want's you to meet him. It's something that is going to be hard. It's also something you obviously don't want to have to deal with and didn't ask for, but it's here and it's happened and I'll bet she needs as much positive support as you can give her.
Try thinking about the other perspective too - how would you feel if you found out that actually you were adopted instead? Would you not want the right to at least track down your birth mother? Fair enough if you find her and she didn't want to have anything to do with you thats her perogative but you should have the right.
~Pev
I'm adopted too, and amazingly found a reference to my original mother's mainden name on an online geneology website via a Google search one morning when I suddenly thought of trying it. It was VERY freaky. After a lot of thinking about it, I sent her an email to say hi (makes it sound so trivial doesn't it?) and haven't looked back. Thats not to say that every situation is rosy, but take that as a gentle word of encouragement. It may turn out good, it may turn out bad - I don't know what you'll find, but personally I think most possible outcomes are better than having never tried. In my case I also found that I have a half-sister a few years younger than me I didn't know about who's brilliant :-) If you wan't someone that's been through it (and knows several others with other experiences) to bounce ideas off of you're completely welcome to drop me an email to chat.
~Pev
P.S. If any Google engineers are reading this - thanks guys! I bet there's a usage you never anticipated eh? I'll buy you a beer if I ever meet any of you.