The lack of an option for MS Remote Desktop is a big reason to look at a move to XP.. but other than that, I can't see a whole lot of other compelling reasons. The organizations I deal with are not planning a move from 2000 in the near future.
Right now, whoever releases a device that does this will not sell any more phones to the cellular providers. The reason it's the holy grail for you, is the reason it's the black plague to cellular companies. I don't like the business practices of cell companies, and I absolutely HATE I am stuck in the dark ages here in North America.
Once the market for cell phones levels off, companies like Nokia will have all those engineers, and all those production setups.. and not much to produce anymore. That's when someone will say F it all and break ranks going after the potentially HUGE consumer market.
FWIW; I'm an embedded firmware and hardware developer amoung other things, and HAVE worked with their hardware:
I evaluated transmeta's chips in 2003, I think.. it was for a target product that needed a low power consumption. When we got their development kit and the heatsink was huge, I knew they were in trouble. I KNEW they were in trouble when we tried to return the multi-thousand-dollar kit to look at some other options they had.. and they wouldn't listen.
If you're working in the embedded world, you're probably in a well defined area:
- Low power, low speed micros. These are usually under 20mhz, sometimes faster. Cost a couple bucks and have everything under the sun integrated. Some have micro RTOS's developed for them, most don't. This market is mature and owned by people like Atmel, Microchip, Zilog, and a hoarde of other people making variants of chips like the 8051. Transmeta didn't stand a chance there. Those chips consume almost no power at all and cost nothing.
- Midrange micros for pdas and other appliances. This is where I thought transmeta had a chance, but then along came Intel with the XScale architecture and they made it work and work very well. This, not the pentium M, is what killed them I think. XScale is cheap, well supported, and very low power.
- Above-midrange; Transmeta might have had a shot here, but their power consumption and support was much worse than the x86 compatible Nat Semi Geode (now owned by AMD?), and offerings from Via (C3 MiniITX). Price? No competition.
- Notebooks. Pentium M ended this one. So did the G4 chip from Motorola.
- Desktop high end CPUS. Nobody ever expected them to be competitive.
Looking back, it seems like their market ran away from them whereever they looked. Unfortunate, but not unforseeable IMO.
Ironically enough, because it wasn't SAFE ENOUGH to run a large SUV at those speeds for any kind of extended period. Ha-ha!
70-80mph is a standard cruising speed on the freeway here, and it IS more efficient to use the AC than open the windows there. Drag is not a linear effect.
Call me when we can actually write code for this thing. At least the GBA has been broken and documented to the point where you can actually develop nifty third party applications.
but then what CFO in his right mind would get locked into a single vendor for the OS and hardware
IBM and Sun don't seem to have a horrible time of it. If the benefits outweigh any (percieved) risks, then it'll take care of itself. That's what's happening now. You think having a whole company 0wn3d by spyware is cheap?
I attribute my lack of any wrist problems to never having learned to type "correctly".. I can manage a very respectable speed, even with my poison of choice {} mixed in.
Interestingly enough I honestly have no idea where or what keys are where. I don't even think about it anymore. Do you think about how you speak? I've been using a keyboard since I was 9, maybe even sooner than that - it's almost an extension of my arms. Fingers go to the keyboard and words appear. What's interesting is that I seem to relocate my hands left or right of the home keys to increase speed.. but thinking about it too much messes me all up.
All I ask is good tactile feedback. My SO has long sense banished my IBM monster.:(
Assuming that I have a replacement number of people - 2, and the odd person has 3 - then the population of intelligently gifted people should remain about common. Also, I would purpose that the intelligent people would be AWARE of this problem, and if a legitimate increase in the number of less-intelligent people was causing a problem, it could easily be fixed.
My father was a genetist and warned us all from an early age that picking a spouse isn't just about pretty looks, although that certainly helps. My SO is an attractive (female) mechanical engineer. I am a EE, and I would expect our children to have an intellectual and social advantage. (We can teach them advanced mathematics, for example)
University pools smart people together. So I would argue for the viability of subpopulations of intellectuals in this "marching morons" scenario. Indeed; you would expect the intellectuals to gain even more power and influence as they would be the ones who keep society running.
I've been able to do very well for myself by being able to apply classic engineering and IT things - you know, searches that aren't linear brute force, some of the more useful design patterns, knowing what a code profiler is. How many programmers out there have even tried to read the Art of Computer Programming, by the man your God, Knuth?
How many people who call themselves C and C++ programmers do you know, who haven't read the C Programming Language, or the C++ Programming Language?..for that matter, how many have studied the documentation that came with their compiler? understand the operation at a general level of the OS they work with? have a knowledge of security problems? care about any of that?..becoming more cynical, know what the stack and heap are?
My experience is that a large segment of the IT world is ignorant or dismissive of the classical stuff, so to hope for them to be aware of current developments that may or may not be useful to anything being done now is probably a far reach at best.
There are many incarnations of these.. perhaps they've fallen out of favor, but it's how I learned C a long time ago.
There's a graphical shell that displays the output of your program in a controlled space.
There's a bunch of real c (tm) functions that let your "robot" program do things.
There's constraints on how big you can make the robot, or tradeoffs with speed, etc etc.
I absolutelyfuckingloved this kind of thing when I was younger, and in university, wrote my own little simulator environments for it. I haven't seen anything like it in years though, although I'd bet there are several in freshmeat. This sort of thing is how you teach programming, not boring old crap about simulating cannonballs.
Hybrid benefits are overrated because of the weight of the vehicles. This decreases much of the benefit.
Take a 1992 honda civic chassis. Look for one of the efficient models (Vx, others). You want a 5spd. They are very easy to work on, and very common. Engine reliabilty is great.
These cars were commonly available with no power steering, and no AC. Power locks and windows? Ha!
Strip the car bare. Gut it. Install some lightweight racing seats. You just saved a lot of weight. And gained a lot of cargo room!
Have the engine reworked. Lots of manuals for this; it can be done in a weekend, with a weekend of preparation. You'll need to clean all the fuel filters, injectors, and install all new ignition components.
Install a wideband o2 sensor with a car monitor. Consider an EGT meter as well. This will let you track your mixture inside the car to see if you're running rich and/or overheating your exhaust valves.
Install a VAFC, a small computer that tweaks the fuel settings. Most of the time these are used for power, but you're going to use it to dial out as much gas as you can without running too lean.
It's the same as breaking up with a signifigant other - when it comes right down to the marbles, you're leaving because there's something you don't like, and by collary, you think that you can find something better. In this case, you already have something better. The person on the other side of the equation is going to have a tough time with that.
It's worse if you're leaving a business on shakey ground - because it's the ultimate vote of non-confidence. I think it's worse in tech, because a lot of the time, the people ARE the company.
Don't worry about what your boss thinks. Do what you said you would, always, but at the end of the day the decision has already been made. Concentrate on making a good impression with your new employers.
I own a GBA purely because it's been thoroughly hacked, although that's more because it's a simple device and a known processor than nintendo not being evil.
There's some near third party addons, eCos, and a bunch of other goodies available for the GBA. I even own a couple games..
I'd buy a PSP tomorrow if there were available programming libraries for it. I might even buy two. The days of paying for a SDK for hardware are over, there's no reason to keep it so locked away. Until Sony gets this message, I won't be buying one, but I know I'm also in the minority.
What I'd really like is an updated HP100LX or 200LX. I wore mine out. It was the perfect PDA; 2AA batteries, ran DOS (5? 3? forget), you could get Borland Turbo C++ to run on it no problem. Lotus 1-2-3 was in ROM. Even had a seperate numeric keypad, so it was actually useful as a calculator, too.
One of my favorite memories of this calculator was using the wonderful symbolic math package, Derive! in my engineering classes - While the prof was sketching out crude appoximations, I could fire up and get a really nice picture. Symbolic step-by-step reductions were handy for checking homework too.
Had a real keyboard with the beautiful HP signature tactile response. Grey transflective screen didn't need a backlight. I hacked an LED to run off the serial port on mine for night use.
It would be very interesting to see what could be put in the same forum factor and weight these days. I really miss the clamshell design with a real keyboard.
This was "kinda" the form factor that the first WinCE devices had, but they were much bigger and heavier, and worst of all, they only ran WinCE which made them more or less useless for any real work. None had seperate numeric keypads that would make them useful for engineering and scientific work.
A pox on those short-sighted MBA's at HP who ruined a real gem of engineering and turned it into a fond memory.
Saddest of all; my hp48 is starting to die, and the palm T3 emulation is nice, but not the same.
You would still need to have some sort of simultion package if you were doing analog or mixed signal designs.
Hey, it's not like the math isn't understood, and a copy of matlab isn't expensive, either. Bored? Start doing integrals.
My point is if you're motivated and dedicated to your craft then it is quite possible to stay on top of what you are doing - at least from a proficiency standpoint - with a minor investment relative to income.
Ok, this is not accurate, at least any more. Please do not perpetuate this myth. I work in this industry and switch between embedded systems design, analog design, and FPGA implementations (VHDL).
Yes, Cadence and it's mega-stupid tools are expensive. This is targeted at projects where you've got lots of resources and people, often looking at a ASIC as the end project - not a FPGA.
It is extremely easy for you to stay on top of your design skills for a VERY limited investment in home tools. You can beg, borrow, and build your own hardware lab capable of working with switching logic up to ~100mhz with under $3000. Spend a little more and you can do a lot more. Ebay is GREAT.
For EDA tools, you need a nice fast FPGA, the FREE tools provided by Xilinx or Altera - alright, not GNU Hippy Free, but free Beer Free. You can spend as little as $200 or as much as $1000 here. That's HARDLY what I would call a major investment in keeping your implementation skills sharp! How much did I invest in my EE degree? One HELL of a lot more. I probably have more than that in books!
Need IP cores to work with? Check out OpenCores.org, and even the big boys like Cadence have been pushing Open Source as in GNU Hippy open for some time.
One of the questions I ask people is what kind of tools they use to keep up their skills when I'm hiring. Those who have a null response are immediately suspect.
Around these parts, you're basically SOL if you want to do hardware development without an EE degree. There's always exceptions, but doing a "hardware" concentration on a non-EE degree from what I can see is a waste of time. Even things like driver writing, you would be better served by studying EE with a concentration on computer hardware.
I have seen people fall into this trap before with the "hardware option" as a component of a CS degree. If you want to do hardware development, do it right.
Believe me, they're not happy with the current state of affairs with respect to the H1-B program in the USA. It's not too hard to see a collapse in domestic born electrical engineers in North America. I'd guess it's over 50/50 when you get to the hardcore EE stuff, based on my experience with FPGAs. Is this a good long term strategic position to take? You tell me.
One thing that is always in demand is good people though. The inconsistant piece is the location of the work FOR good people.
Doesn't affect me either way, I'm Canadian. We've got our own problems here.:shrug:
Slashdot Mirror
FYI. Still sold last I checked.
I use one connected to a microcontroller to monitor my case temps, using custom software I wrote. Does that count as "open" yet?
I'll buy two of them the same day I can compile an application - but not before. (looks around at GBAs that seem to be breeding..)
The lack of an option for MS Remote Desktop is a big reason to look at a move to XP.. but other than that, I can't see a whole lot of other compelling reasons. The organizations I deal with are not planning a move from 2000 in the near future.
Right now, whoever releases a device that does this will not sell any more phones to the cellular providers. The reason it's the holy grail for you, is the reason it's the black plague to cellular companies. I don't like the business practices of cell companies, and I absolutely HATE I am stuck in the dark ages here in North America.
Once the market for cell phones levels off, companies like Nokia will have all those engineers, and all those production setups.. and not much to produce anymore. That's when someone will say F it all and break ranks going after the potentially HUGE consumer market.
Perhaps this is the beginning.
Honestly? That's it. You've never wondered why MS showers game developers with praise, runs cons, and reacts?
It's games. Why does my mom not want me to get her a mac? Her favorite games will become a PITA to run.
The powerbooks weren't cutting it and there was NO WAY to get a G5 in there.
Maybe I can get back to a 4-5hr runtime like the first generation Tibook had..
FWIW; I'm an embedded firmware and hardware developer amoung other things, and HAVE worked with their hardware:
I evaluated transmeta's chips in 2003, I think.. it was for a target product that needed a low power consumption. When we got their development kit and the heatsink was huge, I knew they were in trouble. I KNEW they were in trouble when we tried to return the multi-thousand-dollar kit to look at some other options they had.. and they wouldn't listen.
If you're working in the embedded world, you're probably in a well defined area:
- Low power, low speed micros. These are usually under 20mhz, sometimes faster. Cost a couple bucks and have everything under the sun integrated. Some have micro RTOS's developed for them, most don't. This market is mature and owned by people like Atmel, Microchip, Zilog, and a hoarde of other people making variants of chips like the 8051. Transmeta didn't stand a chance there. Those chips consume almost no power at all and cost nothing.
- Midrange micros for pdas and other appliances. This is where I thought transmeta had a chance, but then along came Intel with the XScale architecture and they made it work and work very well. This, not the pentium M, is what killed them I think. XScale is cheap, well supported, and very low power.
- Above-midrange; Transmeta might have had a shot here, but their power consumption and support was much worse than the x86 compatible Nat Semi Geode (now owned by AMD?), and offerings from Via (C3 MiniITX). Price? No competition.
- Notebooks. Pentium M ended this one. So did the G4 chip from Motorola.
- Desktop high end CPUS. Nobody ever expected them to be competitive.
Looking back, it seems like their market ran away from them whereever they looked. Unfortunate, but not unforseeable IMO.
Ironically enough, because it wasn't SAFE ENOUGH to run a large SUV at those speeds for any kind of extended period. Ha-ha!
70-80mph is a standard cruising speed on the freeway here, and it IS more efficient to use the AC than open the windows there. Drag is not a linear effect.
Whatever.
Call me when we can actually write code for this thing. At least the GBA has been broken and documented to the point where you can actually develop nifty third party applications.
but then what CFO in his right mind would get locked into a single vendor for the OS and hardware
IBM and Sun don't seem to have a horrible time of it. If the benefits outweigh any (percieved) risks, then it'll take care of itself. That's what's happening now. You think having a whole company 0wn3d by spyware is cheap?
I attribute my lack of any wrist problems to never having learned to type "correctly" .. I can manage a very respectable speed, even with my poison of choice {} mixed in.
:(
Interestingly enough I honestly have no idea where or what keys are where. I don't even think about it anymore. Do you think about how you speak? I've been using a keyboard since I was 9, maybe even sooner than that - it's almost an extension of my arms. Fingers go to the keyboard and words appear. What's interesting is that I seem to relocate my hands left or right of the home keys to increase speed.. but thinking about it too much messes me all up.
All I ask is good tactile feedback. My SO has long sense banished my IBM monster.
Assuming that I have a replacement number of people - 2, and the odd person has 3 - then the population of intelligently gifted people should remain about common. Also, I would purpose that the intelligent people would be AWARE of this problem, and if a legitimate increase in the number of less-intelligent people was causing a problem, it could easily be fixed.
My father was a genetist and warned us all from an early age that picking a spouse isn't just about pretty looks, although that certainly helps. My SO is an attractive (female) mechanical engineer. I am a EE, and I would expect our children to have an intellectual and social advantage. (We can teach them advanced mathematics, for example)
University pools smart people together. So I would argue for the viability of subpopulations of intellectuals in this "marching morons" scenario. Indeed; you would expect the intellectuals to gain even more power and influence as they would be the ones who keep society running.
You're kidding, right?
..for that matter, how many have studied the documentation that came with their compiler? understand the operation at a general level of the OS they work with? have a knowledge of security problems? care about any of that? ..becoming more cynical, know what the stack and heap are?
I've been able to do very well for myself by being able to apply classic engineering and IT things - you know, searches that aren't linear brute force, some of the more useful design patterns, knowing what a code profiler is. How many programmers out there have even tried to read the Art of Computer Programming, by the man your God, Knuth?
How many people who call themselves C and C++ programmers do you know, who haven't read the C Programming Language, or the C++ Programming Language?
My experience is that a large segment of the IT world is ignorant or dismissive of the classical stuff, so to hope for them to be aware of current developments that may or may not be useful to anything being done now is probably a far reach at best.
Microsoft strikes again.
Damn, I must be getting old.
There are many incarnations of these.. perhaps they've fallen out of favor, but it's how I learned C a long time ago.
There's a graphical shell that displays the output of your program in a controlled space.
There's a bunch of real c (tm) functions that let your "robot" program do things.
There's constraints on how big you can make the robot, or tradeoffs with speed, etc etc.
I absolutelyfuckingloved this kind of thing when I was younger, and in university, wrote my own little simulator environments for it. I haven't seen anything like it in years though, although I'd bet there are several in freshmeat. This sort of thing is how you teach programming, not boring old crap about simulating cannonballs.
This is the number one reason that I don't own one yet.. unlike the GBA, I am unaware of any open non-$$$$.$$ compiler chains.
Has someone gotten gcc linking PSP programs yet?
Here's how to build a cheap, 50mpg+ car.
Hybrid benefits are overrated because of the weight of the vehicles. This decreases much of the benefit.
Take a 1992 honda civic chassis. Look for one of the efficient models (Vx, others). You want a 5spd. They are very easy to work on, and very common. Engine reliabilty is great.
These cars were commonly available with no power steering, and no AC. Power locks and windows? Ha!
Strip the car bare. Gut it. Install some lightweight racing seats. You just saved a lot of weight. And gained a lot of cargo room!
Have the engine reworked. Lots of manuals for this; it can be done in a weekend, with a weekend of preparation. You'll need to clean all the fuel filters, injectors, and install all new ignition components.
Install a wideband o2 sensor with a car monitor. Consider an EGT meter as well. This will let you track your mixture inside the car to see if you're running rich and/or overheating your exhaust valves.
Install a VAFC, a small computer that tweaks the fuel settings. Most of the time these are used for power, but you're going to use it to dial out as much gas as you can without running too lean.
Voila. Plus it's cheap to insure.
Sigh.. visio.
It's the same as breaking up with a signifigant other - when it comes right down to the marbles, you're leaving because there's something you don't like, and by collary, you think that you can find something better. In this case, you already have something better. The person on the other side of the equation is going to have a tough time with that.
It's worse if you're leaving a business on shakey ground - because it's the ultimate vote of non-confidence. I think it's worse in tech, because a lot of the time, the people ARE the company.
Don't worry about what your boss thinks. Do what you said you would, always, but at the end of the day the decision has already been made. Concentrate on making a good impression with your new employers.
I own a GBA purely because it's been thoroughly hacked, although that's more because it's a simple device and a known processor than nintendo not being evil.
There's some near third party addons, eCos, and a bunch of other goodies available for the GBA. I even own a couple games..
I'd buy a PSP tomorrow if there were available programming libraries for it. I might even buy two. The days of paying for a SDK for hardware are over, there's no reason to keep it so locked away. Until Sony gets this message, I won't be buying one, but I know I'm also in the minority.
What I'd really like is an updated HP100LX or 200LX. I wore mine out. It was the perfect PDA; 2AA batteries, ran DOS (5? 3? forget), you could get Borland Turbo C++ to run on it no problem. Lotus 1-2-3 was in ROM. Even had a seperate numeric keypad, so it was actually useful as a calculator, too.
One of my favorite memories of this calculator was using the wonderful symbolic math package, Derive! in my engineering classes - While the prof was sketching out crude appoximations, I could fire up and get a really nice picture. Symbolic step-by-step reductions were handy for checking homework too.
Had a real keyboard with the beautiful HP signature tactile response. Grey transflective screen didn't need a backlight. I hacked an LED to run off the serial port on mine for night use.
It would be very interesting to see what could be put in the same forum factor and weight these days. I really miss the clamshell design with a real keyboard.
This was "kinda" the form factor that the first WinCE devices had, but they were much bigger and heavier, and worst of all, they only ran WinCE which made them more or less useless for any real work. None had seperate numeric keypads that would make them useful for engineering and scientific work.
A pox on those short-sighted MBA's at HP who ruined a real gem of engineering and turned it into a fond memory.
Saddest of all; my hp48 is starting to die, and the palm T3 emulation is nice, but not the same.
You would still need to have some sort of simultion package if you were doing analog or mixed signal designs.
Hey, it's not like the math isn't understood, and a copy of matlab isn't expensive, either. Bored? Start doing integrals.
My point is if you're motivated and dedicated to your craft then it is quite possible to stay on top of what you are doing - at least from a proficiency standpoint - with a minor investment relative to income.
Ok, this is not accurate, at least any more. Please do not perpetuate this myth. I work in this industry and switch between embedded systems design, analog design, and FPGA implementations (VHDL).
Yes, Cadence and it's mega-stupid tools are expensive. This is targeted at projects where you've got lots of resources and people, often looking at a ASIC as the end project - not a FPGA.
It is extremely easy for you to stay on top of your design skills for a VERY limited investment in home tools. You can beg, borrow, and build your own hardware lab capable of working with switching logic up to ~100mhz with under $3000. Spend a little more and you can do a lot more. Ebay is GREAT.
For EDA tools, you need a nice fast FPGA, the FREE tools provided by Xilinx or Altera - alright, not GNU Hippy Free, but free Beer Free. You can spend as little as $200 or as much as $1000 here. That's HARDLY what I would call a major investment in keeping your implementation skills sharp! How much did I invest in my EE degree? One HELL of a lot more. I probably have more than that in books!
Need IP cores to work with? Check out OpenCores.org, and even the big boys like Cadence have been pushing Open Source as in GNU Hippy open for some time.
One of the questions I ask people is what kind of tools they use to keep up their skills when I'm hiring. Those who have a null response are immediately suspect.
YMMV.
Around these parts, you're basically SOL if you want to do hardware development without an EE degree. There's always exceptions, but doing a "hardware" concentration on a non-EE degree from what I can see is a waste of time. Even things like driver writing, you would be better served by studying EE with a concentration on computer hardware.
I have seen people fall into this trap before with the "hardware option" as a component of a CS degree. If you want to do hardware development, do it right.
Believe me, they're not happy with the current state of affairs with respect to the H1-B program in the USA. It's not too hard to see a collapse in domestic born electrical engineers in North America. I'd guess it's over 50/50 when you get to the hardcore EE stuff, based on my experience with FPGAs. Is this a good long term strategic position to take? You tell me.
:shrug:
One thing that is always in demand is good people though. The inconsistant piece is the location of the work FOR good people.
Doesn't affect me either way, I'm Canadian. We've got our own problems here.