Seriously. I wish they'd make the hams fall under part 15 (ie THEY can't interfere with everything else) with a provision that they can crank it up in emergency situations or periodic emergency tests.
I remember when I was a kid we lived near a ham with a rig that was powerful enough that if the amp was turned on to our stereo speakers we'd pick him up. Didn't even need to turn on a tuner. He was just an ass about it and the FCC didn't give a damn (all they care about is fining Howard Stern when he swears).
And while there are some real uses for hams (emergencies, etc.) I don't think I've ever heard a ham on any of my scanners or shortwaves that wasn't talking about 1) the weather or 2) their radio equipment.
Too bad Verizon CDMA has far and away the best coverage. T-M can't touch them in that regard. The worst is that I'll have to cough up my $200 "termination fee" unless I can beg the powers that be to let me out of it since I'm about halfway thru a 2 year contract.
There and Arizona. And at least AZ has a sign on the border (on the CA side anyway) helpfully telling you that they switch between pacific and mountain time. No such luck in Indiana. I was driving thru and had no idea till I hit Indianapolis and all the clocks by the road were wrong ("I *know* you don't hit Eastern Time till Ohio! WTF?")
But I defintiely agree. I can *never* remember the terminology (ie are we currently daylight savings or standard? I'd have no idea without looking it up.)
We should just officially rename them to "Eastern Spring-Forward Time" and "Eastern Fall-Back Time".
In which case I know that right now I'd be in PFT.
The problem is that verizon cripples most of their phones such that you cannot download files via the web. Additionally, verizon phones don't speak j2me, they speak Brew. Brew apps require an expensive proprietary SDK and then can only officially be installed via their GetItNow interface (i.e. Verizon gets to bill you a few bucks per download).
There are ways to install brew apps via a data cable, but you still need a generated license file from Qualcomm for the thing to run. Getting this file runs upwards of $1000.
This actually reminded me that I had called and bitched to the Verizon Wireless executive offices and talked to a VP there who *assured me* that a program was in the works to upload these progs and ringtones, etc. for free via the data cable. A good year ago. Damn, wish I wrote her name down...
Oh well. I'm thinking I'll switch to T-Mobile anyway. The data rates on VZW are just ridiculous and they're far and away the worst when it comes to BS like this.
Nah you wouldn't need lawyers. Just bitch a bit and usually they'll cave to shut you up. Find the company's executive office phone number and they'll usually hook you up if the customer service guys say it's "against policy".
That goes doubly when you pull out the phrase "false advertising" when you talk to them...
Remember: what costs them more? Letting you out of the deal or the time spent by their million dollar lawyers? Sometimes a business looking only at the bottom line works in your favor.
I think the real issue with using a soundcard *is* the sampling frequency (44kHz? 96kHz maybe?) and you'll probably let out the magic smoke if you plug more than a few volts into it so you need some sort of voltage divider there for many signals. Plus I don't know how much filtering is done on the line-in side.
That said I'd say it may be more cost effective to get some used stuff. I spent about $100 on ebay for an old Tek 465. 100MHz, good condition. And I can jam the probes into a wall socket with no worries. Good enough for most of my purposes. In college we had nice digital storage scopes (and at work we've got the fancy color ones) so now I've been spoiled. But I think if you're gonna teach kids how to use a scope it's best to use the real thing. I like the nice clicky knobs on the old Teks.
Don't feel bad. I've spent a lot of time running linux boxes (started back in 96 or so) and my share of HP-UX and Solaris boxes as well. And I'm a software engineer who does firmware and drivers. I know my Unix pretty well. And I'll be damned if I could ever get CUPS to work with my old USB DeskJet 895CSe in anything but the most horrible, chunky, layered-colors-as-black print quality I've ever seen.
It was litereally so bad that I wasn't comfortable turning in papers (I was in college then) that were printed with it. No, instead I had to print my output to PDF and take it over to my roommate's Windows machine and print it there.
The drivers and print settings were just horribly archaic. Fine, keep all the crazy stuff, but hide it in an "advanced" tab. All I want is to select my printer type and then "draft", "medium", and "best" print quality and paper type/size. I always had to fight it to convince it that I also didn't want it to default to A4 paper. I don't have A4 paper, I don't want A4 paper, I've never even *seen* A4 paper. It would've been nice if it had noticed I was on an en-US system and figured I probably would want "US Letter"...
Maybe things have gotten better recently (this was a couple years ago), but I'm pretty jaded about trying to use an inkjet on Linux now. I haven't even tried since.
That said, I've never had a problem with a LaserJet. As long as it speaks PostScript I've done ok.
Interesting read. I agree though. I've had good luck a couple times "turboing" (never heard that phrase before)
Once when my mom was getting DSL and it sat for MONTHS with the request bouncing between several parts of the organization. Call up the executive offices and BAM dsl went live within a few days as I recall.
Then a while back I tried to get out of my Cingular contract. Constant "System Busy" errors when making calls (less than 50% would go thru). Support wouldn't budge on the termination fee (I argued that they were in breech as they weren't providing a serivce but still taking my money). Rep just said that it was just something I had to accept from a wireless service. Called the Cingular exec offices and explained my problem to the senior secretary type. Who interrupted me off halfway and she forwarded me to tier 1 support before I could say anything. Called SBC exec offices (the mega-entity that owns Cingular). Explained that 1) The Cingular rep essentially hung up on me, 2) the tier 1 rep said I should expect crappy service (I named names with both of them...) and 3) my problem. Got forwarded to a VP and got a credit on my next bill.
If you get to the right people, you'll typically get good results (they'd rather loose the $200 termination fee than have be tell my cell phone-buying friends how much cingular customer service sucks I guess...)
And yes, same with bluetooth now. And although I blame MS a little for not releasing a MS-blessed bluetooth stack (isn't there one coming in XP SP2 or did that get cut?), I *really* blame Widcomm. Those are the no-talent ass clowns that release those god-awful drivers we have now. I don't know what kind of QA people let those things out of the CVS repository, but I wish they could put them back. And I also blame the OEMs (Are you listening IOGEAR) who don't release updated versions of those crappy drivers for their USB dongles.
I'll try to mate my USB bluetooth dongle and my iPaq. I'll pick a PIN on 1234. And I can't, for the life of me, get it to let me in. That's right, I'm locked out of my own PDA. Now, if I take that same dongle and plug it into another machine it works.
Seriously. If any WIDCOMM programmer is reading/. allow me to say: you suck. If my drivers were that unreliable I'd be out on the streets now.
I sympathize. A couple things to keep in mind, though.
First, not many end users have been investing in bluetooth. Yes, you and I have, but I've had to explain what it was to most people. It's mostly a mac thing at this point.
Second, upgrading is inevitable. Remember, it wasn't long ago that all our video cards were ISA and and our printers used parallel ports. The addition of a USB port didn't immediately make all the legacy devices disappear. Hell we're still stuck with PS/2 and parallel ports.
An thirdly (and probably most importantly), WUSB is quite aways off. Nobody has silicon ready (on the device side anyway, can't speak for Intel and NEC host-side stuff). NEC did a demo at IDF (which was unfortunately not working when I came by). But the radio was the size of a mid-tower PC. We're not looking at the market getting flooded in a couple months. We're talking a couple years before we start to see any real number of devices using this stuff. Same as USB 1. We got USB ports in what, '95? And we started seeing devices in what, '98? '99? You've got plenty of time to outgrow that cell phone and PDA...
yeah they will. It might take a couple years for it to catch on, but why on earth would anyone use a 760kbps connection which has (on windows anyway) the worst drivers ever written when wireless USB runs at 480Mbps? Power may be an issue. Didn't have a chance to talk to many people about that at IDF (too busy doing booth duty myself)
I've got a bluetooth PDA and bluetooth on my PC. And we have a bluetooth barcode scanner at work. None of the devices can ever link to each other reliably.
Now, as a disclaimer I work in the USB industry. I've still yet to see a WUSB spec (soon I hope, lots of questions about how things work, particularly about whether the existing single host/multi device model will remain the same). Guess time will tell. Bluetooth is great when it works (and I *do* think it's mostly a driver issue), but we can do better...
That's true. I've never driven drunk and don't intend to. But from what I've heard cops say, they don't go after the speeders for the DUIs. They go after the guys doing 50-60 in the 65 zone. The guys driving too slow and very cautiously.
Drunks always try their damndest to drive legally so they don't get pulled over. And many (maybe most?) tend to overdo it.
Well...if I get to a guy who knows english well enough to swear as well as I do, then that's a major step up. I understand the subtle variations of "fuck". I *don't* understand heavy Indian accents.
Hell, it'd be like talking to my college friends:)
The only thing I'd like to add also is to *NEVER* trust an employer (or anyone else) that says "sure it's in the contract, but we never really apply it".
Yup, those are the same retards that go off on "the spirit" of the contract and whine when things go badly for them. "Sure, that's the *letter* of the contract, but it goes against the spirit of the agreement!" Bah. It's either in the text or it's not.
I haven't played a FPS since freshman year of college (dorms were ideal - it just seemed much less fun playing on the internet after moving out). But back then I was pretty good (and I was pretty damn good at the Quake TF before that). At the times when I was dominating it was fun to either 1) bring in another kickass guy I knew so we could *both* wreak havoc or 2) Go on a pistol or knife spree.
The only thing more discouraging to a newbie than getting killed repeatedly is getting killed repeatedly with a knife:)
I don't think a judge would buy that one. IANAL, but as I understand it you can't be bound by the terms of a contract if you aren't aware you've agreed...
It actually is great for a double major, since adding a CS or EE degree to an CE degree only requires about an extra semester or two of classes.
Hmm, I guess...I can't imagine why you'd want to do that though. At my school, we were actively discouraged from doing that, just cuz it's already assumed that you'll be "cross-platform". They did, however, encourage us to go for a double major with business or math or something. Something different enough from degree #1 to make an employer care.
Frankly I think the extra two years would be far better spent working or getting a masters...
Yeah, what you can *do* is a lot more important than what you know.
Firstly, I had about a 3.1 GPA. Decent, but nothing fantastic, so that wasn't a big issue.
I got my job offer over spring break (3mo before graduation). I was talking to the guys that hired me and there were several reasons I got the job out of a pool of about 300 resumes.
First off, I interned. A lot. Since I was a junior in HS and up till the previous summer, I'd been working each summer without fail. This was doing IT work. Totally unrelated to what I do now, but it meant that I already had an understanding of how things were organized on the outside.
But also, be sure to pick *USEFUL* classes and a good senior project. This is a firmware job in a chip house. And they said damn near every applicant emphasized in compilers or AI. Most of my classes centered around VLSI or embedded systems (boards and firmware). Good match there.
And for a senior project my group decided to build a portable MP3 player (128x64 graphical LCD, 20GB laptop hard drive, one of those VLSI Logic MP3 decoder chips, USB 1.1). It came out the size of a lunchbox due to some poor design decisions (remeber kids, DON'T FORGET TO INCLUDE MOUNTING HOLES ON YOUR BOARD DESIGNS!) So I got my first real engineering experience on that (we had to do the board design, layout, testing, firmware, more testing). That thing (while being loads of fun as well as horribly stressful at the same time) got me my job. It showed I knew hardware. I knew firmware. And, when asked, I could walk up to the whiteboard and explain how all of its subsystems (even the ones I didn't design) worked.
Or the opposite. Mine was practically a major in EE (emphasis in digital circuits, VLSI, and HDLs) with a minor in CS. Really the major had enough flexibility that you could go either way.
That's part of what was so cool about it. We had way more choices than the other engineers. If I decided I didn't like hardware, while I'd still need the core digital circuits, etc., I could have taken, say, compilers, AI, etc. instead of VLSI and system design stuff.
That said, I emphasized in hardware and am now a software engineer. Go figure. But I do firmware, so it ain't so bad. And the hw background is a major help.
Ok, maybe not, but close enough. The Intel 4004 came out in '71. And there were *certainly* processors (ok maybe not MICROprocessors) back into the 30's (Mark I anyone?) I'm not sure when the idea of writing "mov ax, bx" came to be, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was in the 60's.
There was no more satisfying moment in college than getting the MP3 player board I'd designed back from the fab, powering it up and being able to use the bootloader in the flash to load on its first test app (a basic shell running over the serial port). Except maybe when we finally got all the firmware working...
After doing that I really felt prepared to dive into the real world. And so far I can say that my UCSB education that everyone loves to make fun of is serving me quite well.
Is that really legal in the US either? Contracts say a lot of things, doesn't mean a judge will buy it. My cell phone contract has probably been changed to take my first born son if I leave, but I don't think that'd stand up...
I find it *really* hard to believe that any court would find someone to be bound by a change when there was no reasonable attempt to notify people of the updates. And I'm pretty sure they need to allow you to break the contract with no penalty if new terms are imposed that you disagree with.
That said, IANAL. Is there an American one hanging around who knows about this stuff?
Yeah, I'm in a pre-war in the Bay Area (mid-30's). It never occured to me that it wasn't drywall until I went to hammer a nail in the wall for a picture and *boing* the hammer and nail just bounced right off and left a little plume of plaster. Anything going in there is gonna take a drill and a screw.
The stuff's great sound insulation (my friend above me's always stomping around but I can barely hear it) and it's built to last. But it's a *bitch* to work with. I'd have liked to run some speaker cables and stuff thru it (I know the guy who owns it, he wouldn't care if I knock holes in the wall as long as I patch them). But it's just so much work to cut thru it and fix it back up to look decent it's just not worth the trouble.
That said I split 802.11b with the guy upstairs and I get a good signal in my unit. It fades fast if I keep walking though.
Heh i had a roommate that used to think that. Whenever he'd get sick he'd pound a couple shots of vodka. Sure enough, the next day he was fine. Every time.
Of course then 2 days later, the bug would be back, stronger than ever and looking for revenge....
That said, during college I could drink >250mL of vodka in a sitting without any problem and still got sick just once in the 4 years I was there.
And no, I don't do that anymore. One bad experience at the end of freshman year and I can't even be in the room with the stuff anymore. Switched to beer for the last 3 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. I wish they'd make the hams fall under part 15 (ie THEY can't interfere with everything else) with a provision that they can crank it up in emergency situations or periodic emergency tests.
I remember when I was a kid we lived near a ham with a rig that was powerful enough that if the amp was turned on to our stereo speakers we'd pick him up. Didn't even need to turn on a tuner. He was just an ass about it and the FCC didn't give a damn (all they care about is fining Howard Stern when he swears).
And while there are some real uses for hams (emergencies, etc.) I don't think I've ever heard a ham on any of my scanners or shortwaves that wasn't talking about 1) the weather or 2) their radio equipment.
*sob*
:(
Why oh why is the US so unenlightened
Too bad Verizon CDMA has far and away the best coverage. T-M can't touch them in that regard. The worst is that I'll have to cough up my $200 "termination fee" unless I can beg the powers that be to let me out of it since I'm about halfway thru a 2 year contract.
There and Arizona. And at least AZ has a sign on the border (on the CA side anyway) helpfully telling you that they switch between pacific and mountain time. No such luck in Indiana. I was driving thru and had no idea till I hit Indianapolis and all the clocks by the road were wrong ("I *know* you don't hit Eastern Time till Ohio! WTF?")
But I defintiely agree. I can *never* remember the terminology (ie are we currently daylight savings or standard? I'd have no idea without looking it up.)
We should just officially rename them to "Eastern Spring-Forward Time" and "Eastern Fall-Back Time".
In which case I know that right now I'd be in PFT.
The problem is that verizon cripples most of their phones such that you cannot download files via the web. Additionally, verizon phones don't speak j2me, they speak Brew. Brew apps require an expensive proprietary SDK and then can only officially be installed via their GetItNow interface (i.e. Verizon gets to bill you a few bucks per download).
There are ways to install brew apps via a data cable, but you still need a generated license file from Qualcomm for the thing to run. Getting this file runs upwards of $1000.
This actually reminded me that I had called and bitched to the Verizon Wireless executive offices and talked to a VP there who *assured me* that a program was in the works to upload these progs and ringtones, etc. for free via the data cable. A good year ago. Damn, wish I wrote her name down...
Oh well. I'm thinking I'll switch to T-Mobile anyway. The data rates on VZW are just ridiculous and they're far and away the worst when it comes to BS like this.
Nah you wouldn't need lawyers. Just bitch a bit and usually they'll cave to shut you up. Find the company's executive office phone number and they'll usually hook you up if the customer service guys say it's "against policy".
That goes doubly when you pull out the phrase "false advertising" when you talk to them...
Remember: what costs them more? Letting you out of the deal or the time spent by their million dollar lawyers? Sometimes a business looking only at the bottom line works in your favor.
106dB isn't a sample rate, that's gain...
I think the real issue with using a soundcard *is* the sampling frequency (44kHz? 96kHz maybe?) and you'll probably let out the magic smoke if you plug more than a few volts into it so you need some sort of voltage divider there for many signals. Plus I don't know how much filtering is done on the line-in side.
That said I'd say it may be more cost effective to get some used stuff. I spent about $100 on ebay for an old Tek 465. 100MHz, good condition. And I can jam the probes into a wall socket with no worries. Good enough for most of my purposes. In college we had nice digital storage scopes (and at work we've got the fancy color ones) so now I've been spoiled. But I think if you're gonna teach kids how to use a scope it's best to use the real thing. I like the nice clicky knobs on the old Teks.
Don't feel bad. I've spent a lot of time running linux boxes (started back in 96 or so) and my share of HP-UX and Solaris boxes as well. And I'm a software engineer who does firmware and drivers. I know my Unix pretty well. And I'll be damned if I could ever get CUPS to work with my old USB DeskJet 895CSe in anything but the most horrible, chunky, layered-colors-as-black print quality I've ever seen.
It was litereally so bad that I wasn't comfortable turning in papers (I was in college then) that were printed with it. No, instead I had to print my output to PDF and take it over to my roommate's Windows machine and print it there.
The drivers and print settings were just horribly archaic. Fine, keep all the crazy stuff, but hide it in an "advanced" tab. All I want is to select my printer type and then "draft", "medium", and "best" print quality and paper type/size. I always had to fight it to convince it that I also didn't want it to default to A4 paper. I don't have A4 paper, I don't want A4 paper, I've never even *seen* A4 paper. It would've been nice if it had noticed I was on an en-US system and figured I probably would want "US Letter"...
Maybe things have gotten better recently (this was a couple years ago), but I'm pretty jaded about trying to use an inkjet on Linux now. I haven't even tried since.
That said, I've never had a problem with a LaserJet. As long as it speaks PostScript I've done ok.
Interesting read. I agree though. I've had good luck a couple times "turboing" (never heard that phrase before)
Once when my mom was getting DSL and it sat for MONTHS with the request bouncing between several parts of the organization. Call up the executive offices and BAM dsl went live within a few days as I recall.
Then a while back I tried to get out of my Cingular contract. Constant "System Busy" errors when making calls (less than 50% would go thru). Support wouldn't budge on the termination fee (I argued that they were in breech as they weren't providing a serivce but still taking my money). Rep just said that it was just something I had to accept from a wireless service. Called the Cingular exec offices and explained my problem to the senior secretary type. Who interrupted me off halfway and she forwarded me to tier 1 support before I could say anything. Called SBC exec offices (the mega-entity that owns Cingular). Explained that 1) The Cingular rep essentially hung up on me, 2) the tier 1 rep said I should expect crappy service (I named names with both of them...) and 3) my problem. Got forwarded to a VP and got a credit on my next bill.
If you get to the right people, you'll typically get good results (they'd rather loose the $200 termination fee than have be tell my cell phone-buying friends how much cingular customer service sucks I guess...)
"Armed CITIZENS are NOT terrorists."
How quickly we forget the Oklahoma City bombing...
It doesn't matter who you are or if you've got guns or nukes or what. It matters what you do with them.
Yeah USB pre-98 sucked big floppy donkey dick.
/. allow me to say: you suck. If my drivers were that unreliable I'd be out on the streets now.
And yes, same with bluetooth now. And although I blame MS a little for not releasing a MS-blessed bluetooth stack (isn't there one coming in XP SP2 or did that get cut?), I *really* blame Widcomm. Those are the no-talent ass clowns that release those god-awful drivers we have now. I don't know what kind of QA people let those things out of the CVS repository, but I wish they could put them back. And I also blame the OEMs (Are you listening IOGEAR) who don't release updated versions of those crappy drivers for their USB dongles.
I'll try to mate my USB bluetooth dongle and my iPaq. I'll pick a PIN on 1234. And I can't, for the life of me, get it to let me in. That's right, I'm locked out of my own PDA. Now, if I take that same dongle and plug it into another machine it works.
Seriously. If any WIDCOMM programmer is reading
I sympathize. A couple things to keep in mind, though.
First, not many end users have been investing in bluetooth. Yes, you and I have, but I've had to explain what it was to most people. It's mostly a mac thing at this point.
Second, upgrading is inevitable. Remember, it wasn't long ago that all our video cards were ISA and and our printers used parallel ports. The addition of a USB port didn't immediately make all the legacy devices disappear. Hell we're still stuck with PS/2 and parallel ports.
An thirdly (and probably most importantly), WUSB is quite aways off. Nobody has silicon ready (on the device side anyway, can't speak for Intel and NEC host-side stuff). NEC did a demo at IDF (which was unfortunately not working when I came by). But the radio was the size of a mid-tower PC. We're not looking at the market getting flooded in a couple months. We're talking a couple years before we start to see any real number of devices using this stuff. Same as USB 1. We got USB ports in what, '95? And we started seeing devices in what, '98? '99? You've got plenty of time to outgrow that cell phone and PDA...
yeah they will. It might take a couple years for it to catch on, but why on earth would anyone use a 760kbps connection which has (on windows anyway) the worst drivers ever written when wireless USB runs at 480Mbps? Power may be an issue. Didn't have a chance to talk to many people about that at IDF (too busy doing booth duty myself)
I've got a bluetooth PDA and bluetooth on my PC. And we have a bluetooth barcode scanner at work. None of the devices can ever link to each other reliably.
Now, as a disclaimer I work in the USB industry. I've still yet to see a WUSB spec (soon I hope, lots of questions about how things work, particularly about whether the existing single host/multi device model will remain the same). Guess time will tell. Bluetooth is great when it works (and I *do* think it's mostly a driver issue), but we can do better...
That's true. I've never driven drunk and don't intend to. But from what I've heard cops say, they don't go after the speeders for the DUIs. They go after the guys doing 50-60 in the 65 zone. The guys driving too slow and very cautiously.
Drunks always try their damndest to drive legally so they don't get pulled over. And many (maybe most?) tend to overdo it.
Well...if I get to a guy who knows english well enough to swear as well as I do, then that's a major step up. I understand the subtle variations of "fuck". I *don't* understand heavy Indian accents.
:)
Hell, it'd be like talking to my college friends
The only thing I'd like to add also is to *NEVER* trust an employer (or anyone else) that says "sure it's in the contract, but we never really apply it".
Yup, those are the same retards that go off on "the spirit" of the contract and whine when things go badly for them. "Sure, that's the *letter* of the contract, but it goes against the spirit of the agreement!" Bah. It's either in the text or it's not.
True - good stress relief.
:)
I haven't played a FPS since freshman year of college (dorms were ideal - it just seemed much less fun playing on the internet after moving out). But back then I was pretty good (and I was pretty damn good at the Quake TF before that). At the times when I was dominating it was fun to either 1) bring in another kickass guy I knew so we could *both* wreak havoc or 2) Go on a pistol or knife spree.
The only thing more discouraging to a newbie than getting killed repeatedly is getting killed repeatedly with a knife
I don't think a judge would buy that one. IANAL, but as I understand it you can't be bound by the terms of a contract if you aren't aware you've agreed...
It actually is great for a double major, since adding a CS or EE degree to an CE degree only requires about an extra semester or two of classes.
Hmm, I guess...I can't imagine why you'd want to do that though. At my school, we were actively discouraged from doing that, just cuz it's already assumed that you'll be "cross-platform". They did, however, encourage us to go for a double major with business or math or something. Something different enough from degree #1 to make an employer care.
Frankly I think the extra two years would be far better spent working or getting a masters...
Yeah, what you can *do* is a lot more important than what you know.
Firstly, I had about a 3.1 GPA. Decent, but nothing fantastic, so that wasn't a big issue.
I got my job offer over spring break (3mo before graduation). I was talking to the guys that hired me and there were several reasons I got the job out of a pool of about 300 resumes.
First off, I interned. A lot. Since I was a junior in HS and up till the previous summer, I'd been working each summer without fail. This was doing IT work. Totally unrelated to what I do now, but it meant that I already had an understanding of how things were organized on the outside.
But also, be sure to pick *USEFUL* classes and a good senior project. This is a firmware job in a chip house. And they said damn near every applicant emphasized in compilers or AI. Most of my classes centered around VLSI or embedded systems (boards and firmware). Good match there.
And for a senior project my group decided to build a portable MP3 player (128x64 graphical LCD, 20GB laptop hard drive, one of those VLSI Logic MP3 decoder chips, USB 1.1). It came out the size of a lunchbox due to some poor design decisions (remeber kids, DON'T FORGET TO INCLUDE MOUNTING HOLES ON YOUR BOARD DESIGNS!) So I got my first real engineering experience on that (we had to do the board design, layout, testing, firmware, more testing). That thing (while being loads of fun as well as horribly stressful at the same time) got me my job. It showed I knew hardware. I knew firmware. And, when asked, I could walk up to the whiteboard and explain how all of its subsystems (even the ones I didn't design) worked.
Or the opposite. Mine was practically a major in EE (emphasis in digital circuits, VLSI, and HDLs) with a minor in CS. Really the major had enough flexibility that you could go either way.
That's part of what was so cool about it. We had way more choices than the other engineers. If I decided I didn't like hardware, while I'd still need the core digital circuits, etc., I could have taken, say, compilers, AI, etc. instead of VLSI and system design stuff.
That said, I emphasized in hardware and am now a software engineer. Go figure. But I do firmware, so it ain't so bad. And the hw background is a major help.
There were no microprocessors in the '60s.
Ok, maybe not, but close enough. The Intel 4004 came out in '71. And there were *certainly* processors (ok maybe not MICROprocessors) back into the 30's (Mark I anyone?) I'm not sure when the idea of writing "mov ax, bx" came to be, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was in the 60's.
Yes yes yes! CEs represent.
There was no more satisfying moment in college than getting the MP3 player board I'd designed back from the fab, powering it up and being able to use the bootloader in the flash to load on its first test app (a basic shell running over the serial port). Except maybe when we finally got all the firmware working...
After doing that I really felt prepared to dive into the real world. And so far I can say that my UCSB education that everyone loves to make fun of is serving me quite well.
Is that really legal in the US either? Contracts say a lot of things, doesn't mean a judge will buy it. My cell phone contract has probably been changed to take my first born son if I leave, but I don't think that'd stand up...
I find it *really* hard to believe that any court would find someone to be bound by a change when there was no reasonable attempt to notify people of the updates. And I'm pretty sure they need to allow you to break the contract with no penalty if new terms are imposed that you disagree with.
That said, IANAL. Is there an American one hanging around who knows about this stuff?
Yeah, I'm in a pre-war in the Bay Area (mid-30's). It never occured to me that it wasn't drywall until I went to hammer a nail in the wall for a picture and *boing* the hammer and nail just bounced right off and left a little plume of plaster. Anything going in there is gonna take a drill and a screw.
The stuff's great sound insulation (my friend above me's always stomping around but I can barely hear it) and it's built to last. But it's a *bitch* to work with. I'd have liked to run some speaker cables and stuff thru it (I know the guy who owns it, he wouldn't care if I knock holes in the wall as long as I patch them). But it's just so much work to cut thru it and fix it back up to look decent it's just not worth the trouble.
That said I split 802.11b with the guy upstairs and I get a good signal in my unit. It fades fast if I keep walking though.
Heh i had a roommate that used to think that. Whenever he'd get sick he'd pound a couple shots of vodka. Sure enough, the next day he was fine. Every time.
Of course then 2 days later, the bug would be back, stronger than ever and looking for revenge....
That said, during college I could drink >250mL of vodka in a sitting without any problem and still got sick just once in the 4 years I was there.
And no, I don't do that anymore. One bad experience at the end of freshman year and I can't even be in the room with the stuff anymore. Switched to beer for the last 3 years.