No, Chavez has aspirations of dictatorship. You can now go to jail for over 3 years for simply saying 'Chavez is a crank' in Venezuela. He's cracking down on freedom of speech, and his hobby of trying to provoke the United States has turned from an amusing hobby to a bogeyman to blame everything on. When he silences a political opponent, he simply says the opponent was an agent of the United States and throws them out of the country or jails them.
Chavez might once have had promise for doing something great for Venezuela. However, sadly, he's now sliding towards dictatorship with all that implies (i.e. doing only things that will keep him in power).
I must be much better at soldering than you, then, because everything I've designed I have soldered myself.
I made my own breakout board for the first W5100 that I had (etched the board myself, no soldermask or anything fancy like that - just copper clad and toner transfer, printing on cheap glossy paper using a normal office laser printer at work - iron the design onto the copper clad with a clothes iron, etch, drill, solder).
For more than one offs I get the PCBs made by a PCB factory, but not assembled commercially. It's quite cheap to get small volumes of PCBs made, even 4 layer boards, if you know the right board house. Soldering LQFP-80 isn't really that hard. I use a syringe of solder paste (I have some which is designed for prototyping and has a very long shelf life, and cost less than £10) and a hot air gun to do reflow. The hot air gun is just a paint stripping gun with a nozzle that I made myself. You can also use a toaster oven for reflow soldering. I've also soldered this chip with a normal soldering iron with a pointy tip. SMD soldering isn't that hard. If you can solder pin through hole neatly, then you can solder insanely fine pitch SMD. The secret is don't worry about bridging pins, and use solder wick to pick up any excess. There is no need for fancy, high priced reflow ovens and there's no need to have someone else do the assembly for you - soldering even lead-less QFN is easily within the reach of the electronics hobbyist who's willing to try.
I would say start out simpler than you did. I started a self-directed Learn Electronics course - i.e what I did is get a pile of components and some breadboard, and do stuff with them to learn.
I started with transistors, resistors, diodes etc. - building logic gates and latches with bipolar transistors, building LED flashers from discrete components rather than a uC and code, then building simple switch mode power supplies to investigate inductors. I then started doing things with 74 series and 4000 series logic. I then combined this knowledge to design and build a 7 tube nixie display of my own design, that took its data via RS232 - all implemented in 'little logic' with not a microcontroller in sight. I didn't do it because it was the BEST way to do it, but because it would provide lots of learning. I had to build an SMPS to make the 170 volts. I had to, with 4000 series logic and a 555, make a UART (it's bidirectional), with all that implies. The nixie display has buttons I can push to send stuff back. (My second nixie project did use a microcontroller, an Atmel ATtiny2313).
I found doing it this way (not jumping straight in with microcontrollers) extremely valuable. The nixie project in particular taught me about all sorts of things, including glitches, timing issues, fan out and all the rest, as well as resulting in a really cool looking piece of strip board encrusted in chips. (The display now happily sits showing NTP synchronized time on top of my computer desk and has been in continuous use for about 18 months). The trouble with jumping straight in with microcontrollers is (from what I've seen on electronics forums) is quite a few hobbyists get into quite a complex software design and get confused by the electronics issues, and end up spending ages debugging the software when it was a hardware problem all along - a hardware problem that would have been more obvious if they'd played around a bit with discrete MOSFETs and 74 series logic.
My extensive experimentation with making stuff from 74-series and 4000-series also helped me a lot when I got into using programmable logic.
There's plenty of use for wired embedded devices, such as for sensors, where you may have many of them and don't want to be continously changing batteries. Add power-over-ethernet and this class of device is very useful for all sorts of embedded things where you don't want to have the device battery powered.
There's quite a bit of small scale ethernet stuff available - my favorite chip at the moment for handling ethernet is Wiznet's tiny W5100 (or its bigger brother the W5300). These contain not only an ethernet MAC/PHY but a TCP offload engine, so your microcontroller can get on with whatever job it needs to and only deal with the higher levels of the protocol - meaning the software on your microcontroller can be simpler and spend more of its time dealing with whatever task you're using it for. The W5100 is in a 0.4mm pitch LQFP-80. I've been having great fun with this little chip: http://spectrum.alioth.net/doc
The W5100 also can act as a true memory mapped device (you can either talk to it with SPI, or via an indirect parallel bus, or through direct addressing) so it's a great chip for 8 bit CPUs which have a full address/data bus because you can transfer data to and from the chip many times faster than you can with SPI.
There are also other ethernet MAC/PHY (with no TCP offload) chips other than Microchip's offering - SiLabs have one in several packages (including a terribly hard to solder by hand leadless QFN).
The real point is an embedded webserver can be used to provide easy, simple access to some embedded device using software that is shipped as standard on any PC or any smart phone. There are other uses for things that can speak HTTP than serving huge content-rich web pages. This particular device might not be terribly useful on its own but that's not to say similar devices aren't. There are lots and lots of applications for embedded devices that can host a tiny server of some kind.
Our entire retail network PCs - every single one of them had bad caps and failed within 6 months. All the motherboards were replaced under warranty. 3.5 years later, the capacitors began to fail in the power supplies. 100% failure rate of the power supplies, now out of warranty. All of the machines where the capacitors hadn't physically started spewing their contents, were still showing signs of incipient capacitor failure - excessive ripple on the supply voltage rails, and random crashes.
When software moves between each seamlessly requiring the same steps and instructions exactly on each distro that uses that package format, with no extra effort from end users or developers, then what you say will be true
One word: Autopackage.
http://www.autopackage.org/ . We've been using it for Oolite since 2005. The game installs in exactly the same way on every distro that we've tested.
The market will take Apple to task for it. The phone market isn't anything like the PC desktop market. In the PC desktop market, there is one hugely dominant player who can easily crush anyone they don't like merely by the act of bundling (see IE vs Netscape). The phone market is much more healthy: at the moment, you've got Symbian, Windows Mobile, the iPhone and now Android platforms - 4 major platforms. Call it 5 if you count J2ME for smaller devices. If you don't like one of them, there are lively markets in the others that you can make applications for. The iPhone has nothing even approaching a monopoly.
I don't own an iPhone and I won't because of the way development is being handled. But if I want to make mobile apps, that's hardly an impediment because I have other platforms to choose from with much better terms for developers.
Because the amount of money they have is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to those things. It would have little measurable threat.
To put it in perspective, the insurance derivatives that people are panicking about at the moment - at the end of 2007, the face value of these derivatives was US$60,000 billion. That's over *five times* the size of the entire US economy. $40B won't even scratch it. Even the $700B rescue plan seems to have the air of King Canute about it, if the shit hits the fan with that lot.
It does? I've observed quite the opposite: most of Slashdot is very gung-ho about meaningful manned exploration. The only animosity I've seen regularly expressed is towards the Shuttle and ISS.
One thing I noticed, and this is just pure anecdote, it may just be the people I knew -- all the people who were really good at what I call "hard maths" (things like differential calculus and the like) had a real hard time with discrete mathematics. And conversely the people who had a hard time with calculus found all the other stuff quite easy to learn. Which is good for me because I have a hard time with differential calculus.
The Zilog Z80 User Manual is very well written, and is a complete reference for all documented Z80 instructions, and even contains a simple reference design for a Z80 based computer.
Motorcycles are about 100x more fun than a 50mpg car, though. Many people will take fun over safety, any day. People obsessed with safety often aren't really living, they are just waiting to die.
Broken WPA is depressingly common. We use 'enterprise' WPA (i.e. where you have a user id and password - PEAP + MSCHAPv2). Windows XP works fine with this (although it's a 19 step process to configure with XP's supplicant). WinCE and Windows Mobile 6 devices need a third party supplicant to work at all even though the authentication protocol was designed by Microsoft! (OS X and Ubuntu just work, on the other hand).
It's not just the 555 either, although I suppose that's the one still in production in its purest form (the bipolar 555 is still made in quantities of hundreds of millions per year). 74 series is still in wide production (although in CMOS rather than TTL, with versions now capable of handling signals >!GHz), so is 4000 series CMOS (a handy family, while slow, it has a very wide voltage range), and so are more complex things like the Z80 CPU and 6502 - the 'classic' Z80 is still produced in 40 pin DIL (although these days they are all CMOS).
Since those days my outfit has started filtering our Web access using http://www.websense.com/ [websense.com]. I recently found a way around the filter, but don't want to report this hole in case the management decide to stop me using this way around the filter.
But SSH *is* installed by default in Ubuntu. And you can even mount a volume over sftp as if it was just any other filesystem with a couple of clicks of the mouse. On the default install. Places -> Network, and a network browser shows up and double click on the icon of the computer you want to conenct with SSH.
Slashdot Mirror
I fill the void* in my life by casting it to char*
No, Chavez has aspirations of dictatorship. You can now go to jail for over 3 years for simply saying 'Chavez is a crank' in Venezuela. He's cracking down on freedom of speech, and his hobby of trying to provoke the United States has turned from an amusing hobby to a bogeyman to blame everything on. When he silences a political opponent, he simply says the opponent was an agent of the United States and throws them out of the country or jails them.
Chavez might once have had promise for doing something great for Venezuela. However, sadly, he's now sliding towards dictatorship with all that implies (i.e. doing only things that will keep him in power).
You have to hand it to him though, he's the only national leader I've ever seen say 'shit' on live TV. (Specifically, 'yanquis de mierda')
I must be much better at soldering than you, then, because everything I've designed I have soldered myself.
I made my own breakout board for the first W5100 that I had (etched the board myself, no soldermask or anything fancy like that - just copper clad and toner transfer, printing on cheap glossy paper using a normal office laser printer at work - iron the design onto the copper clad with a clothes iron, etch, drill, solder).
For more than one offs I get the PCBs made by a PCB factory, but not assembled commercially. It's quite cheap to get small volumes of PCBs made, even 4 layer boards, if you know the right board house. Soldering LQFP-80 isn't really that hard. I use a syringe of solder paste (I have some which is designed for prototyping and has a very long shelf life, and cost less than £10) and a hot air gun to do reflow. The hot air gun is just a paint stripping gun with a nozzle that I made myself. You can also use a toaster oven for reflow soldering. I've also soldered this chip with a normal soldering iron with a pointy tip. SMD soldering isn't that hard. If you can solder pin through hole neatly, then you can solder insanely fine pitch SMD. The secret is don't worry about bridging pins, and use solder wick to pick up any excess. There is no need for fancy, high priced reflow ovens and there's no need to have someone else do the assembly for you - soldering even lead-less QFN is easily within the reach of the electronics hobbyist who's willing to try.
I would say start out simpler than you did. I started a self-directed Learn Electronics course - i.e what I did is get a pile of components and some breadboard, and do stuff with them to learn.
I started with transistors, resistors, diodes etc. - building logic gates and latches with bipolar transistors, building LED flashers from discrete components rather than a uC and code, then building simple switch mode power supplies to investigate inductors. I then started doing things with 74 series and 4000 series logic. I then combined this knowledge to design and build a 7 tube nixie display of my own design, that took its data via RS232 - all implemented in 'little logic' with not a microcontroller in sight. I didn't do it because it was the BEST way to do it, but because it would provide lots of learning. I had to build an SMPS to make the 170 volts. I had to, with 4000 series logic and a 555, make a UART (it's bidirectional), with all that implies. The nixie display has buttons I can push to send stuff back. (My second nixie project did use a microcontroller, an Atmel ATtiny2313).
I found doing it this way (not jumping straight in with microcontrollers) extremely valuable. The nixie project in particular taught me about all sorts of things, including glitches, timing issues, fan out and all the rest, as well as resulting in a really cool looking piece of strip board encrusted in chips. (The display now happily sits showing NTP synchronized time on top of my computer desk and has been in continuous use for about 18 months). The trouble with jumping straight in with microcontrollers is (from what I've seen on electronics forums) is quite a few hobbyists get into quite a complex software design and get confused by the electronics issues, and end up spending ages debugging the software when it was a hardware problem all along - a hardware problem that would have been more obvious if they'd played around a bit with discrete MOSFETs and 74 series logic.
My extensive experimentation with making stuff from 74-series and 4000-series also helped me a lot when I got into using programmable logic.
There's plenty of use for wired embedded devices, such as for sensors, where you may have many of them and don't want to be continously changing batteries. Add power-over-ethernet and this class of device is very useful for all sorts of embedded things where you don't want to have the device battery powered.
There's quite a bit of small scale ethernet stuff available - my favorite chip at the moment for handling ethernet is Wiznet's tiny W5100 (or its bigger brother the W5300). These contain not only an ethernet MAC/PHY but a TCP offload engine, so your microcontroller can get on with whatever job it needs to and only deal with the higher levels of the protocol - meaning the software on your microcontroller can be simpler and spend more of its time dealing with whatever task you're using it for. The W5100 is in a 0.4mm pitch LQFP-80. I've been having great fun with this little chip: http://spectrum.alioth.net/doc
The W5100 also can act as a true memory mapped device (you can either talk to it with SPI, or via an indirect parallel bus, or through direct addressing) so it's a great chip for 8 bit CPUs which have a full address/data bus because you can transfer data to and from the chip many times faster than you can with SPI.
There are also other ethernet MAC/PHY (with no TCP offload) chips other than Microchip's offering - SiLabs have one in several packages (including a terribly hard to solder by hand leadless QFN).
The real point is an embedded webserver can be used to provide easy, simple access to some embedded device using software that is shipped as standard on any PC or any smart phone. There are other uses for things that can speak HTTP than serving huge content-rich web pages. This particular device might not be terribly useful on its own but that's not to say similar devices aren't. There are lots and lots of applications for embedded devices that can host a tiny server of some kind.
I'll second:
140 failures in 70 machines.
Our entire retail network PCs - every single one of them had bad caps and failed within 6 months. All the motherboards were replaced under warranty. 3.5 years later, the capacitors began to fail in the power supplies. 100% failure rate of the power supplies, now out of warranty. All of the machines where the capacitors hadn't physically started spewing their contents, were still showing signs of incipient capacitor failure - excessive ripple on the supply voltage rails, and random crashes.
These are premium HP desktops.
One word: Autopackage.
http://www.autopackage.org/ . We've been using it for Oolite since 2005. The game installs in exactly the same way on every distro that we've tested.
The market will take Apple to task for it. The phone market isn't anything like the PC desktop market. In the PC desktop market, there is one hugely dominant player who can easily crush anyone they don't like merely by the act of bundling (see IE vs Netscape). The phone market is much more healthy: at the moment, you've got Symbian, Windows Mobile, the iPhone and now Android platforms - 4 major platforms. Call it 5 if you count J2ME for smaller devices. If you don't like one of them, there are lively markets in the others that you can make applications for. The iPhone has nothing even approaching a monopoly.
I don't own an iPhone and I won't because of the way development is being handled. But if I want to make mobile apps, that's hardly an impediment because I have other platforms to choose from with much better terms for developers.
Who says it doesn't end up as native code? Java has had JIT compilers for years now. They even only compile the code to native once, too.
Because the amount of money they have is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to those things. It would have little measurable threat.
To put it in perspective, the insurance derivatives that people are panicking about at the moment - at the end of 2007, the face value of these derivatives was US$60,000 billion. That's over *five times* the size of the entire US economy. $40B won't even scratch it. Even the $700B rescue plan seems to have the air of King Canute about it, if the shit hits the fan with that lot.
It does? I've observed quite the opposite: most of Slashdot is very gung-ho about meaningful manned exploration. The only animosity I've seen regularly expressed is towards the Shuttle and ISS.
One thing I noticed, and this is just pure anecdote, it may just be the people I knew -- all the people who were really good at what I call "hard maths" (things like differential calculus and the like) had a real hard time with discrete mathematics. And conversely the people who had a hard time with calculus found all the other stuff quite easy to learn. Which is good for me because I have a hard time with differential calculus.
The Zilog Z80 User Manual is very well written, and is a complete reference for all documented Z80 instructions, and even contains a simple reference design for a Z80 based computer.
You can find it at http://www.zilog.com/products/partdetails.asp?id=Z84C00
ETOPS? You mean Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim?
(Disclaimer: I am a pilot, sometimes I fly over water...with only one engine - I live on a small island)
My 4 year old PowerBook still gets 3 hours, unplugged.
Motorcycles are about 100x more fun than a 50mpg car, though. Many people will take fun over safety, any day. People obsessed with safety often aren't really living, they are just waiting to die.
Oil men DON'T want cheap fuel, they want the most expensive fuel the market will bear. That's how they make most money.
Broken WPA is depressingly common. We use 'enterprise' WPA (i.e. where you have a user id and password - PEAP + MSCHAPv2). Windows XP works fine with this (although it's a 19 step process to configure with XP's supplicant). WinCE and Windows Mobile 6 devices need a third party supplicant to work at all even though the authentication protocol was designed by Microsoft! (OS X and Ubuntu just work, on the other hand).
It's not just the 555 either, although I suppose that's the one still in production in its purest form (the bipolar 555 is still made in quantities of hundreds of millions per year). 74 series is still in wide production (although in CMOS rather than TTL, with versions now capable of handling signals >!GHz), so is 4000 series CMOS (a handy family, while slow, it has a very wide voltage range), and so are more complex things like the Z80 CPU and 6502 - the 'classic' Z80 is still produced in 40 pin DIL (although these days they are all CMOS).
And not forgetting the good 'ol 741 op amp.
The manufacturers of the PIC must really irritate you, they call their entire firm (which makes microcontrollers) Microchip!
Since those days my outfit has started filtering our Web access using http://www.websense.com/ [websense.com]. I recently found a way around the filter, but don't want to report this hole in case the management decide to stop me using this way around the filter.
There! Fixed that for ya.
But SSH *is* installed by default in Ubuntu. And you can even mount a volume over sftp as if it was just any other filesystem with a couple of clicks of the mouse. On the default install. Places -> Network, and a network browser shows up and double click on the icon of the computer you want to conenct with SSH.