I can't believe no one's mentioned this, even after the RS-232 thread above...
After 40 years of screwing around with RS-232 (different combinations of Male, Female, 9, 25, DTR, DSR), a committee has a chance to define a new computer-to-peripheral interface...
And they design one with two different connectors ( A and B), with male and female ends, and with a master-slave physical and logical architecture. And, the connectors do not work if you try to plug them in upside down.
So, I have to have (again!) an entire zoo of USB cables and adapters to connect things. I own:
0. Standard A-B cables
1. An A-A USB cable for connecting my Archos MP3 player
2. An A(Female) to A(Male) extension cable
3. An A to mini-B cable to connect my Camera
About the only thing I don't have is a B-B cable.
Would it have been so hard to create a hermaphroditic, small connector that autonegotiated master/slave at connection time? That connected no matter what orientation the connector was in (think headphone jack)?
I think all the children who posted "Gee, but 4 digits for the year isn't that much more memory than 2" in the Y2K story really ought to look at this guy's notebook page to get an understanding of the environment in those days. 4K (or 18K) for the OS. I love the notation:
"40K code, 50K data for huge applications"/frank
Sure it's different - as long as I leave my driver's license in my pocket, no one can read that mag stripe off the back. And, frankly, I don't give my driver's license to anyone who doesn't have the legal authority to compel me to give it to them.
Cashiers get to look at it. They don't get to touch.
With RFID, anyone and everyone can read my driver's license number (or a number that corresponds to my driver's license number). There have been times in my life when anonymity was important to me; there will be times in the future when it will be also./frank
CircuitCellar just happens to have one part of a multi-part article on implementing a USB device up on their website here (Page 7, with other references).
You'll probably have to check out your local university library or order backissues to get all the parts. They've had 3 or 4 similar articles over the last 5 years.
One really cheap option is to subscribe to a few of the Engineering rags (or read someone else's copy), and sign-up for their Design Contests.
For example, Circuit Cellar ( http://www.circuitcellar.com/ ) is an excellent magazine for anyone wanting to do small projects with microprocessors; every issue has one or two complete project write-ups. It's worth every penny of it's subscription fee.
They also have two or three sponsored Design Contests a year. You submit an application when they announce the contest, giving an overview of what you'd like to build with the kits that are part of the contest, and for very little money (or occasionally, for free!) you get evaluation boards, parts, software, etc in the mail!
Last year, they were running a contest sponsored by Renesas (used to be Hitachi) for Renesas microprocessors. Three weeks after I submitted my request, I got a Renesas H8S/2329 Evaluation board (33 Mhz / 16 MIP microprocessor with internal 384KB FLASH and 32KB RAM) and development software for free!. Can't get much cheaper than that for some pretty serious embedded hardware. The Software timed out after 3 months, but the part is supported by the GCC toolchain, so that isn't such a problem.
We've already gotten to the state that "WWW." is superfluous on most addresses now. Make the TLD superfluous.
Let Sony addresses all end in.sony. If Sony in Chile wants it's own address, it becomes sony.cl, or sony.us in the United states. Trademark problems can be handled in the local countries courts - if Sony isn't doing business in Chile, certainly another company can do business as "Sony" in that country. What happens today in the B&M world when Sony, as a global corp, decides to do business in Chile? How do they reclaim their trademark from the local company? These issues have been hashed out in the courts, and there are well-defined rules for dealing with them. Why should the web be different?
There will be conflicts, sure, but as someone who tried to register a "Schwab.dom" on all of the likely TLDs, and found Charles Schwab already parked on them, I can't imagine the conflicts being any worse than they are now, and it eliminates one more superfluous piece of information that I have to type in.
Well, OK, I'll just toss my Archos out the door and go buy an iPod. How much are those again?
Actually, I'm glad to hear that the iPod implemented that feature. Maybe now I can get those Rockbox guys to do so..../frank
OK, so I'm an old fart...
Why don't any of the MP3 devices/programs/whatever that I use allow a "random album shuffle", that plays albums completely through, then chooses another album?/frank
You forgot the little checkbox that says "Always trust content from Macromedia, Inc"
I'm waiting for the browser that includes the checkbox "Never trust content from..." instead.
I don't have the answer to this. Scenarios I consider:
1. An asteroid whose path through space is essentially tangent to the Earth's orbit, and is coming head on. How many days warning might we have? How could we get anything to it an appreciable distance from Earth?
2. An Asteroid whose path is perpendicular to the plane of Earth's orbit. Same questions.
In either of these two scenarios, unless you could get a year or more's worth of warning you could never position a defender. Accelerating to high speed to get into position kinda prevents landing on one of these bodies- you'd have to decelerate, then reverse direction and accelerate up to the body's speed.
Even worse, you're coming from a bad angle - if the body is going to hit you in three months, you have to launch a defender to essentially where the earth will be in three months - that's a lot of distance. Given a few minutes with google, you could work out the distance the defender would have to cover (thus it's speed), and the acceleration it would have to accomplish to match it's speed and path to that of the incoming asteroid.
Seems to me the only scenario this works with is asteroids more-or-less in earth's orbit that get bumped into a collision course, or comet-like bodies with a predictable period where we can pre-position defenders.
It really doesn't.
There are enough shipped DVD-R and DVD+R drives out there in the world now that you'll be able to buy media for the foreseeable computing future for either.
There are enough of each out there now that your current burned DVD's will be readable forever, or at least as long at 5 inch polycarbonate disks are in use.
Even the VHS/Beta battle that started 30 years ago and was, for all intents and purposes, over 20 years ago (see http://www.urbanlegends.com/products/beta_vs_vhs.h tml ) doesn't keep me from buying new blank Beta videotapes. They aren't available at Walgreen's, but can be had at larger electronics stores still. The same will be true of DVD-R and DVD+R.
Can you imagine the computing landscape 30 years from now? VHS hasn't changed in that many years, but 30 years ago in the computing field is ancient, ancient history - punched cards, hard-sectored 8 inch 256KB floppies, removable disk packs, and memory capacities that didn't need to be abbreviated to be readable. The likelihood that you'll care about your DVD?Rs at that point is pretty darned low./frank
Rather than making my great Aunt pay if her computer gets infected with a virus... Make the computer maker, and and Operating system vendor pay. Their the ones that told her she could run her own system, and who sold her overpriced, out-of-date, insecure software and hardware.
Wouldn't that be a big kick in the butt to make commercially-available Operating systems more secure!
Forgot one thing...
You simply don't have to program any of these chips in assembler any more, free software will get you where you need to be. Most, if not all, are supported by GCC, and most (if not all) have a port of the remote side of GDB available. Write in C++, debug in GDB over a serial link, and you're doing pretty good.
You can also get free operating system software for them, ranging from simple multi-tasking kernels (uCos, eCos, etc) to full-blown desktop style OSs with filesystems (e.g.e uCLinux).
Good Luck/frank
What ya wanna do is subscribe to
Circuit Cellar the magazine that is today what BYTE magazine was back in the z80 days. Full of articles on using modern, small processors to do "stuff". They also run some great Design Contests supported by various manufacturers that get you a development board and software (and generally extra chips!) for free.
These days, at the low end (less than 100 MHz), there is seldom a need to wire a processor up to much of any peripherals. For example, the motorola
Coldfire
processors are basically 200+ Mhz 68000 (e.g. 66Mhz with single-cycle instruction execution compared to the 68000's 4-10 cycle instructions) with just about any peripherals you might ever want onboard. Not really sufficient for a JRE, but not bad for just about anything else. Also, they're roughly $10 each in quantity. Many other manufacturers are making similar types of chips these days: Hitachi processors Rabbit Semiconductors Zilog
One of the problems you'll have to deal with if you want to build your own systems is that Wire Wrap is simply unusable in this day and age. Not only is it impossible to find a socket for somthing like the 256-ball BGA that the coldfire comes in, or the more standard 144-pin QFP packages, the speeds make it unlikely you'll be able to use that technology successfully. I've built fine-pitch boards in my garage using photosensitive PCBs, but the best solution is something like PCBExpress or
ExpressPCB
and get 2 or 3 3"x3" double-sided boards for $60-$80.
Even so, building high-speed systems is not for the amateur; laying out a system using PC-133 SDRAM is not something you want to do without a bit of up-to-date layout knowledge.
Good luck, hope this gives you some pointers to get started with!/frank
Sigh..
If I could just get IWill to release an updated BIOS for my KK266+R that supports the TBred/Barton, I'd do it in a second to upgrade my XP 1600+. A nice $85 TBred-B 2400+ would give a good boost to the old system. I suppose I could find an old 2000+ Palomino, but that doesn't seem quite worth the effort.
Sure, I could buy a $100 motherboard and double my expenditure, then buy $150 of memory (nearly doubling again) to replace the 1GB of SDRAM on my old board, then spend two days reinstalling windows and all of my applications (figure $60 / hour * 16 hours), but that gets a bit expensive compared to a simple processor swap at about 30 minutes.
All for lack of a processor in the lookup table in the BIOS.
Damned IWill./frank
Ahh, but the question is, are they stealing momentum from the earth as it orbits the sun, or from the earth's rotation?
One would spiral us into the sun. The other would lock one face of the earth towards the sun. (Wasn't there a SciFi novel with that theme? The beings lived in the twilight ring between the scorching desert hemisphere and the frozen dark hemisphere).
Not sure either is a good deal./frank
I rue the day I moved into a house with no over-the-air reception (there's a big hill between me and all the TV transmitters here in Phoenix).
The picture quality on Cable sux compared to the over-the-air picture quality. Even though our cable plant has been upgraded with fiber to the neighborhood, digital cable, high-speed internet, all of the analog channels (2-70) are quite grainy compared with normal over-the-air broadcasts. Digital channels? THEY were pretty good, but none of the local broadcast stations were carried digitally!
Satellite TV? fuhgeddaboutit. It provided me a crystal-clear image of a grossly over-compressed picture. The compression artifacts drove me nuts on many movies (try watching "The Hunt for Red October" on Satellite. There are a lot of shots of submarines under water, and the background breaks up into bands and just looks like hell).
Both Satellite and Cable operators keep customers happy by maximizing the number of channels available, not by maximizing the quality of the picture. So, they compress the hell out of the channels they broadcast in order to maximize the number of channels they can fit into their channel.
Saying that cable is better than over-the-air is similar to saying that Cell phones are better than wired phones. Sure, there are advantages (more channels for Cable, carry your phone with you for Cell), but there is a painful tradeoff (picture quality, cost for cable/satellite, voice quality for cell phones).
Give me a full-bandwidth analog picture any day./frank
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I can't believe no one's mentioned this, even after the RS-232 thread above...
After 40 years of screwing around with RS-232 (different combinations of Male, Female, 9, 25, DTR, DSR), a committee has a chance to define a new computer-to-peripheral interface...
And they design one with two different connectors ( A and B), with male and female ends, and with a master-slave physical and logical architecture. And, the connectors do not work if you try to plug them in upside down.
So, I have to have (again!) an entire zoo of USB cables and adapters to connect things. I own: 0. Standard A-B cables
1. An A-A USB cable for connecting my Archos MP3 player
2. An A(Female) to A(Male) extension cable
3. An A to mini-B cable to connect my Camera
About the only thing I don't have is a B-B cable.
Would it have been so hard to create a hermaphroditic, small connector that autonegotiated master/slave at connection time? That connected no matter what orientation the connector was in (think headphone jack)?
will New Jersey mandate a wireless link into this smart weapon that allows an officer to remotely disable it?
I think all the children who posted "Gee, but 4 digits for the year isn't that much more memory than 2" in the Y2K story really ought to look at this guy's notebook page to get an understanding of the environment in those days. 4K (or 18K) for the OS. I love the notation: "40K code, 50K data for huge applications" /frank
Ehh, minor problem... It also nicely solves the looming Social Security insolvency, predicted to occur sometime between 2018 and 2034... /frank
Win98SE with Firefox 1.0 here. Exploit worked as advertised with PopUp blocking on.
Sure it's different - as long as I leave my driver's license in my pocket, no one can read that mag stripe off the back. And, frankly, I don't give my driver's license to anyone who doesn't have the legal authority to compel me to give it to them. Cashiers get to look at it. They don't get to touch. With RFID, anyone and everyone can read my driver's license number (or a number that corresponds to my driver's license number). There have been times in my life when anonymity was important to me; there will be times in the future when it will be also. /frank
One really cheap option is to subscribe to a few of the Engineering rags (or read someone else's copy), and sign-up for their Design Contests.
/frank
For example, Circuit Cellar ( http://www.circuitcellar.com/ ) is an excellent magazine for anyone wanting to do small projects with microprocessors; every issue has one or two complete project write-ups. It's worth every penny of it's subscription fee.
They also have two or three sponsored Design Contests a year. You submit an application when they announce the contest, giving an overview of what you'd like to build with the kits that are part of the contest, and for very little money (or occasionally, for free!) you get evaluation boards, parts, software, etc in the mail!
Last year, they were running a contest sponsored by Renesas (used to be Hitachi) for Renesas microprocessors. Three weeks after I submitted my request, I got a Renesas H8S/2329 Evaluation board (33 Mhz / 16 MIP microprocessor with internal 384KB FLASH and 32KB RAM) and development software for free!. Can't get much cheaper than that for some pretty serious embedded hardware. The Software timed out after 3 months, but the part is supported by the GCC toolchain, so that isn't such a problem.
Anyway, that's my suggestion for a start.
We've already gotten to the state that "WWW." is superfluous on most addresses now. Make the TLD superfluous. Let Sony addresses all end in .sony. If Sony in Chile wants it's own address, it becomes sony.cl, or sony.us in the United states. Trademark problems can be handled in the local countries courts - if Sony isn't doing business in Chile, certainly another company can do business as "Sony" in that country. What happens today in the B&M world when Sony, as a global corp, decides to do business in Chile? How do they reclaim their trademark from the local company? These issues have been hashed out in the courts, and there are well-defined rules for dealing with them. Why should the web be different?
There will be conflicts, sure, but as someone who tried to register a "Schwab.dom" on all of the likely TLDs, and found Charles Schwab already parked on them, I can't imagine the conflicts being any worse than they are now, and it eliminates one more superfluous piece of information that I have to type in.
Well, OK, I'll just toss my Archos out the door and go buy an iPod. How much are those again? Actually, I'm glad to hear that the iPod implemented that feature. Maybe now I can get those Rockbox guys to do so.... /frank
OK, so I'm an old fart... Why don't any of the MP3 devices/programs/whatever that I use allow a "random album shuffle", that plays albums completely through, then chooses another album? /frank
You forgot the little checkbox that says "Always trust content from Macromedia, Inc" I'm waiting for the browser that includes the checkbox "Never trust content from..." instead.
I don't have the answer to this. Scenarios I consider: 1. An asteroid whose path through space is essentially tangent to the Earth's orbit, and is coming head on. How many days warning might we have? How could we get anything to it an appreciable distance from Earth? 2. An Asteroid whose path is perpendicular to the plane of Earth's orbit. Same questions. In either of these two scenarios, unless you could get a year or more's worth of warning you could never position a defender. Accelerating to high speed to get into position kinda prevents landing on one of these bodies- you'd have to decelerate, then reverse direction and accelerate up to the body's speed. Even worse, you're coming from a bad angle - if the body is going to hit you in three months, you have to launch a defender to essentially where the earth will be in three months - that's a lot of distance. Given a few minutes with google, you could work out the distance the defender would have to cover (thus it's speed), and the acceleration it would have to accomplish to match it's speed and path to that of the incoming asteroid. Seems to me the only scenario this works with is asteroids more-or-less in earth's orbit that get bumped into a collision course, or comet-like bodies with a predictable period where we can pre-position defenders.
It really doesn't. There are enough shipped DVD-R and DVD+R drives out there in the world now that you'll be able to buy media for the foreseeable computing future for either. There are enough of each out there now that your current burned DVD's will be readable forever, or at least as long at 5 inch polycarbonate disks are in use. Even the VHS/Beta battle that started 30 years ago and was, for all intents and purposes, over 20 years ago (see http://www.urbanlegends.com/products/beta_vs_vhs.h tml ) doesn't keep me from buying new blank Beta videotapes. They aren't available at Walgreen's, but can be had at larger electronics stores still. The same will be true of DVD-R and DVD+R.
Can you imagine the computing landscape 30 years from now? VHS hasn't changed in that many years, but 30 years ago in the computing field is ancient, ancient history - punched cards, hard-sectored 8 inch 256KB floppies, removable disk packs, and memory capacities that didn't need to be abbreviated to be readable. The likelihood that you'll care about your DVD?Rs at that point is pretty darned low. /frank
Rather than making my great Aunt pay if her computer gets infected with a virus...
Make the computer maker, and and Operating system vendor pay. Their the ones that told her she could run her own system, and who sold her overpriced, out-of-date, insecure software and hardware.
Wouldn't that be a big kick in the butt to make commercially-available Operating systems more secure!
Forgot one thing... You simply don't have to program any of these chips in assembler any more, free software will get you where you need to be. Most, if not all, are supported by GCC, and most (if not all) have a port of the remote side of GDB available. Write in C++, debug in GDB over a serial link, and you're doing pretty good. You can also get free operating system software for them, ranging from simple multi-tasking kernels (uCos, eCos, etc) to full-blown desktop style OSs with filesystems (e.g.e uCLinux). Good Luck /frank
What ya wanna do is subscribe to Circuit Cellar the magazine that is today what BYTE magazine was back in the z80 days. Full of articles on using modern, small processors to do "stuff". They also run some great Design Contests supported by various manufacturers that get you a development board and software (and generally extra chips!) for free.
/frank
These days, at the low end (less than 100 MHz), there is seldom a need to wire a processor up to much of any peripherals. For example, the motorola Coldfire processors are basically 200+ Mhz 68000 (e.g. 66Mhz with single-cycle instruction execution compared to the 68000's 4-10 cycle instructions) with just about any peripherals you might ever want onboard. Not really sufficient for a JRE, but not bad for just about anything else. Also, they're roughly $10 each in quantity. Many other manufacturers are making similar types of chips these days:
Hitachi processors
Rabbit Semiconductors
Zilog
One of the problems you'll have to deal with if you want to build your own systems is that Wire Wrap is simply unusable in this day and age. Not only is it impossible to find a socket for somthing like the 256-ball BGA that the coldfire comes in, or the more standard 144-pin QFP packages, the speeds make it unlikely you'll be able to use that technology successfully. I've built fine-pitch boards in my garage using photosensitive PCBs, but the best solution is something like PCBExpress or ExpressPCB and get 2 or 3 3"x3" double-sided boards for $60-$80. Even so, building high-speed systems is not for the amateur; laying out a system using PC-133 SDRAM is not something you want to do without a bit of up-to-date layout knowledge. Good luck, hope this gives you some pointers to get started with!
Sigh.. If I could just get IWill to release an updated BIOS for my KK266+R that supports the TBred/Barton, I'd do it in a second to upgrade my XP 1600+. A nice $85 TBred-B 2400+ would give a good boost to the old system. I suppose I could find an old 2000+ Palomino, but that doesn't seem quite worth the effort. Sure, I could buy a $100 motherboard and double my expenditure, then buy $150 of memory (nearly doubling again) to replace the 1GB of SDRAM on my old board, then spend two days reinstalling windows and all of my applications (figure $60 / hour * 16 hours), but that gets a bit expensive compared to a simple processor swap at about 30 minutes. All for lack of a processor in the lookup table in the BIOS. Damned IWill. /frank
Ahh, but the question is, are they stealing momentum from the earth as it orbits the sun, or from the earth's rotation? One would spiral us into the sun. The other would lock one face of the earth towards the sun. (Wasn't there a SciFi novel with that theme? The beings lived in the twilight ring between the scorching desert hemisphere and the frozen dark hemisphere). Not sure either is a good deal. /frank
I rue the day I moved into a house with no over-the-air reception (there's a big hill between me and all the TV transmitters here in Phoenix). The picture quality on Cable sux compared to the over-the-air picture quality. Even though our cable plant has been upgraded with fiber to the neighborhood, digital cable, high-speed internet, all of the analog channels (2-70) are quite grainy compared with normal over-the-air broadcasts. Digital channels? THEY were pretty good, but none of the local broadcast stations were carried digitally! Satellite TV? fuhgeddaboutit. It provided me a crystal-clear image of a grossly over-compressed picture. The compression artifacts drove me nuts on many movies (try watching "The Hunt for Red October" on Satellite. There are a lot of shots of submarines under water, and the background breaks up into bands and just looks like hell). Both Satellite and Cable operators keep customers happy by maximizing the number of channels available, not by maximizing the quality of the picture. So, they compress the hell out of the channels they broadcast in order to maximize the number of channels they can fit into their channel. Saying that cable is better than over-the-air is similar to saying that Cell phones are better than wired phones. Sure, there are advantages (more channels for Cable, carry your phone with you for Cell), but there is a painful tradeoff (picture quality, cost for cable/satellite, voice quality for cell phones). Give me a full-bandwidth analog picture any day. /frank