Hardware designers generally start with an eval-board of some sort so they can hack up their add-on hardware and get something running on the bench before drawing schematics on napkins and starting to do a layout. As such, they need a 'board support package'. You generally buy that from an embedded systems vendor. You generally don't just download the latest linux kernel and start porting drivers and vm maps. Your management will likely want you to get a BSP from a commercial vendor to whom they pay maintenance so your engineers can hassle them about bugs in the bootloader, etc... Your choices are limited. Generally something like Montavista, Windriver, QNX. In my experience, Montavista makes it hard to do business with them. You practically have to bribe them to talk to you in the first place; even when you're waving around PO's. You've already bought the hardware from Intel or RadiSys and now you need support for the BSP. When you finally get a price, it's $18k per seat for a GCC license, and support is $5k/year; maximum of 5 incidents.
QNX on the other hand, will practically send an engineer on site to hold your hand while you get your BSP running. Support is cheap and the runtime licenses are down in the noise threshold.
Sure, QNX has a few issues. So does VxWorks. But Linux is a real lose, and I've tried.
Frankly, if I was starting from scratch and rolling my own BSP, I'd choose NetBSD. Embedded friendly license, code purity, and it probably already has your processor arch.
Nope. No way. Trust me, I was there. Besides, NetBSD isn't interested in running security audits using awk scripts only to accidentally re-introduce security holes that were fixed in the early 80's by CSRG. (yes, happened in OpenBSD).
Re:Stories are old. PayPal got better.
on
PayPal Goes Mobile
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· Score: 1
Wow. a whole _one_ datapoint!
Look at the number on the website. Area code (402)? Doesn't look toll-free to me. Of course they make you wait on the phone. It's not costing _them_ anything to leave you on the phone for 20 minutes.
Until they provide a 1-800 number that works from Canada; then they're still scumbags.
I think it was a John Cusack film from 10+ years ago. Students were taping lectures by putting tape recorders on the desks in the auditorium and leaving. After a while the auditorium was full of tape recorders on desks plus John Cusack taking notes. The teacher revolted by broadcasting the lecture from a boombox to a room full of tape recorders.
This is a modern day version of this. The next optimization will be that the teacher will put the entire lecture up on the projector as a powerpoint; scheduled to start at 13:01.
The problem is that the banks have no financial incentive to replace magstripe cards with smartcards... The cost to doing so is enormous but if the banks had to absorb the loss due to fraud (skimming, etc), the cost of the initial investment would be covered in about 2 years (for Canada).. Unfortunately for us, the banks and credit card companies just pass the cost of fraud on to the consumer in the form of service charges and higher interest rates.. As a result, there's no incentive for them to secure the system. Since banks and credit card companies have a lock on the market, the consumer is powerless to 'take their business elsewhere' in protest...
Who cares if they block 5051 (and they don't, I just tried it, udp/tcp from shaw in calgary to somewhere off-shaw) since SIP is generally port 5060 anyway.
It _was_ a French scientist who discovered it but then he immediately surrendered to it and it took the arrival of an American scientist to capture it and haul it back for interrogation whereupon it was immediately killed. Rumsfeld disavows all knowledge of this but promises to launch a full investigation.
Was Usenix SandyEggo about 1996 or 1998. He was passing out RedHat Alpha CD's claiming that Linux was the first free OS to support Alpha. When it was pointed out that NetBSD had come first by almost 6 months, his reply was "You BSD zealots should give up and start working on Linux."
So first you write some 'bitchin' code, license it so anyone can use it, even in a commercial product. Then when it gets popular, you decide to make some money off of it by offering consulting services. Then you become successful so someone bit wants to buy you.
Now you're complaining? Millions of poets, the world over, would kill prose for such an opportunity.
We just need something really big that we can send up to hover around it for a couple decades to suck it into our orbit where it can hang out with the moon to temper our tides a little bit... Then next time one of these rocks threatens us, we can just send our big pet-rock out for some more orbit modification therapy.... We don't need no steenking bombs when we can just use our friend Gravity.
I don't want you spending my tax money on medical bills related to your smoking, or alcohol, or poor driving. Didn't I see you jaywalk last week? If you'd been hit by a car who didn't expect you to be in the intersection, you wouldn't have paid your own hospital bills. You'd have used my tax dollars to fix your legs.
Thank you for sending my kid to school. I love you.
If your provider comes to you and says "we have new pricing. The rate you're currently paying gives you 10GB/month of data transfer." you say "fine"; and from that moment on, ensure you use exactly 10GB - 1byte every month. Write an application that takes care of this auditing for you; managing your usage so that you use right up to your threshold. Then give this application to everyone you know using the same provider. If they give you a 95th percentile throughput limit, then run traffic shaping software. If everyone starts to consume every last bit per second they're paying for, the providers will suddenly decide to back off.
I run my own servers. I have one somewhere in europe and I have one elsewhere in this city. I also have another backup on the same continent but in another country Granted, not an option for everyone; but I've had my setup across 2 jobs and have lost no data. The boxes update one another so with a little DNS updating, I can switch over to any one of them in the event that I lose one of the others.
My employer is flexible with their internet connectivity and has setup an 'employee lan' that is outside their firewall. They provide a rack where employees can put their own machines. The rack is not anywhere near any other internal network resources so these machines are topologically fully exposed to the internet and treated just like any other random host on the internet. A number of employees have their mail/web servers in that rack. The understanding is that it is for low-volume personal hosting; on the honor system.
This has always been something of sheer amazement to me. I've always been personally keen on ASL and have taken an ASL course. It hasn't done me much good because unless you practice and use it; it just goes away... But the deaf community has really lost an opportunity here. If, in retrospect, the community had developed a common sign language across cultures around the world, then I believe this USL (Universal Sign Language) would have become the lowest common denominator for communication among the non-hearing impaired. As a consequence, more people would know sign language and there would be fewer barriers for the hearing impaired as a result. Currently, when I travel to a place like Stockholm, I often see situations where a non-swedish speaking tourist, say German, will walk into a restaurant and will use very broken english to speak to the swedish waiter (who is actually Japanese and was just minutes prior speaking Japanese to his wife in the kitchen). English is the common denominator in these situations. Imagine what the world would be like if that common denominator were USL?
We tought our child sign language when he was 6mos old. By 8 mos, he was asking for 'more milk'. By 1 year, he had about 45 words in his vocabulary; long before he was able to use oral speech; he was able to tell us what he wanted for lunch; or that he was looking for a specific toy... I urge all of you geeks to look into this should you be lucky enough to have children some day.
...don't cripple the OS so that I have to subscribe to.mac in order to extract the obvious ability to sync my addressbook between my home-Mac and my work-Mac.
My cellphone and 2 liters of diesel should not be the conduit for addressbook information between two Macs. Dinks.
Yup. Encrypting your RTP and your signalling (which carries the credentials required to encrypt/decrypt your RTP) is a good way to prevent wire-tapping; as long as you also don't use a VOIP provider/carrier, or an ISP.
google must have changed their policy.
on
Webhost Sues Google
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· Score: 2, Informative
I run a special interest automotive portal that gets quite a lot of traffic and has a fairly tight community. About 18 months ago, we decided, instead of asking our users for cash donations to pay for bandwidth, we'd try to sign up with Google. Shortly after doing so, we announced to our community that we were going to rely on ad revenue to pay for the bandwidth; and to do us a favor by turning off any ad-blocking mechanisms they had, for our site. Well, one of our well-meaning but none-too-bright users decided to write a script to 'click on' ads in order to get us more money. After about 20 minutes of this activity, Google shut us down and sent us a note claiming we were engaged in fraudulent activity.
Well, the fallout from this was pretty severe. First, no one at google would speak to us. It was a black-hole. As soon as they determine you're defrauding them, you have no mechanism for appeal. After exhausting that path, we tried to sign up with other advertisers but discovered that there is a "black list" shared among the various web-advertisers and Google had placed us on it so none of the other advertising 'agencies' would speak to us.
At this point, we're still begging our users for money to pay for the bandwidth. There's about 6 years worth of email archives, plus scans of out-of-print manuals, hundreds of links to tech sites, and lots of invaluable information that our users value, but it's always the same 50 people who contribute monetarily... We occasionally try to sign up with ad companies but they still won't talk to us.
I'm sure it's just ignorance on the part of the salesidiot... In another matter, I asked a simple "yes/no" question which resulted in a 3 day scheduling negotiation to speak with one of their lead engineers. Once we got the conference call going, I was asked to pose my question. I posed it and the lead engineer said "err, Yes" with a barely detectable tone that said "I'm going to kill this salesperson".
In the end; MV was far more expensive. $18k USD a seat for GCC plus $5k/year for business-hours support, maximum 5 'incidents'.
2 days of effort produced for me a fully functional cross-compile toolchain on which I was able to develop a prototype of our production product as proof of concept. So we punted on MV. We're not idiots. We can support our own toolchain. I suspect most embedded software shops have people who possess reasonable clue and don't need someone like MV to hoover money out of their wallets to answer gcc questions. Non-clueful people are probably not doing embedded software. So just who is MV's target audience? PHB's.
MontaVista isn't going to get anywhere if they continue to insist on charging $18,000 USD a seat for 'gcc'. An embedded project I'm on comes with a Montavista runtime license. When I asked for the kernel source, the hardware vendor said they were legally bound by MontaVista not to give out the kernel source and to talk to MV. When I asked MV for the source, the salesperson tried to tell me that required a special source license that I had to pay for. I think someone in 'sales' doesn't understand the concept of a license. We've since chosen to just dump MV. I think TI would probably be better off just coming up with their own distro.
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QNX on the other hand, will practically send an engineer on site to hold your hand while you get your BSP running. Support is cheap and the runtime licenses are down in the noise threshold.
Sure, QNX has a few issues. So does VxWorks. But Linux is a real lose, and I've tried.
Frankly, if I was starting from scratch and rolling my own BSP, I'd choose NetBSD. Embedded friendly license, code purity, and it probably already has your processor arch.
Nope. No way. Trust me, I was there. Besides, NetBSD isn't interested in running security audits using awk scripts only to accidentally re-introduce security holes that were fixed in the early 80's by CSRG. (yes, happened in OpenBSD).
Look at the number on the website. Area code (402)? Doesn't look toll-free to me. Of course they make you wait on the phone. It's not costing _them_ anything to leave you on the phone for 20 minutes.
Until they provide a 1-800 number that works from Canada; then they're still scumbags.
This is a modern day version of this. The next optimization will be that the teacher will put the entire lecture up on the projector as a powerpoint; scheduled to start at 13:01.
What is this "going to the movies" thing? Is that where you go to someone's house and watch a movie?
The problem is that the banks have no financial incentive to replace magstripe cards with smartcards... The cost to doing so is enormous but if the banks had to absorb the loss due to fraud (skimming, etc), the cost of the initial investment would be covered in about 2 years (for Canada).. Unfortunately for us, the banks and credit card companies just pass the cost of fraud on to the consumer in the form of service charges and higher interest rates.. As a result, there's no incentive for them to secure the system. Since banks and credit card companies have a lock on the market, the consumer is powerless to 'take their business elsewhere' in protest...
Go tell your conspiracies to someone else.
It _was_ a French scientist who discovered it but then he immediately surrendered to it and it took the arrival of an American scientist to capture it and haul it back for interrogation whereupon it was immediately killed. Rumsfeld disavows all knowledge of this but promises to launch a full investigation.
"zealots" indeed. Blow me Maddog.
Now you're complaining? Millions of poets, the world over, would kill prose for such an opportunity.
We just need something really big that we can send up to hover around it for a couple decades to suck it into our orbit where it can hang out with the moon to temper our tides a little bit... Then next time one of these rocks threatens us, we can just send our big pet-rock out for some more orbit modification therapy.... We don't need no steenking bombs when we can just use our friend Gravity.
Just like 'cat /dev/null' on a busy multi-user system. Amazing what some people throw away.
(yes, I'm only kidding and no, I know that doesn't work.)
Laid.
Why is this so hard to understand? AOL has 1.2 million subscribers, of which 50,000 received this spam.
Thank you for sending my kid to school. I love you.
Torrent needed for Ebola vaccine! Please hurry!
First Sleepycat and now MySQL?
If your provider comes to you and says "we have new pricing. The rate you're currently paying gives you 10GB/month of data transfer." you say "fine"; and from that moment on, ensure you use exactly 10GB - 1byte every month. Write an application that takes care of this auditing for you; managing your usage so that you use right up to your threshold. Then give this application to everyone you know using the same provider. If they give you a 95th percentile throughput limit, then run traffic shaping software. If everyone starts to consume every last bit per second they're paying for, the providers will suddenly decide to back off.
I run my own servers. I have one somewhere in europe and I have one elsewhere in this city. I also have another backup on the same continent but in another country Granted, not an option for everyone; but I've had my setup across 2 jobs and have lost no data. The boxes update one another so with a little DNS updating, I can switch over to any one of them in the event that I lose one of the others. My employer is flexible with their internet connectivity and has setup an 'employee lan' that is outside their firewall. They provide a rack where employees can put their own machines. The rack is not anywhere near any other internal network resources so these machines are topologically fully exposed to the internet and treated just like any other random host on the internet. A number of employees have their mail/web servers in that rack. The understanding is that it is for low-volume personal hosting; on the honor system.
We tought our child sign language when he was 6mos old. By 8 mos, he was asking for 'more milk'. By 1 year, he had about 45 words in his vocabulary; long before he was able to use oral speech; he was able to tell us what he wanted for lunch; or that he was looking for a specific toy... I urge all of you geeks to look into this should you be lucky enough to have children some day.
This book is what got us started. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0966836774/sr=1-1 /qid=1137518491/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-4440407-6915304?_ encoding=UTF8
...don't cripple the OS so that I have to subscribe to .mac in order to extract the obvious ability to sync my addressbook between my home-Mac and my work-Mac.
My cellphone and 2 liters of diesel should not be the conduit for addressbook information between two Macs. Dinks.
Yup. Encrypting your RTP and your signalling (which carries the credentials required to encrypt/decrypt your RTP) is a good way to prevent wire-tapping; as long as you also don't use a VOIP provider/carrier, or an ISP.
Well, the fallout from this was pretty severe. First, no one at google would speak to us. It was a black-hole. As soon as they determine you're defrauding them, you have no mechanism for appeal. After exhausting that path, we tried to sign up with other advertisers but discovered that there is a "black list" shared among the various web-advertisers and Google had placed us on it so none of the other advertising 'agencies' would speak to us.
At this point, we're still begging our users for money to pay for the bandwidth. There's about 6 years worth of email archives, plus scans of out-of-print manuals, hundreds of links to tech sites, and lots of invaluable information that our users value, but it's always the same 50 people who contribute monetarily... We occasionally try to sign up with ad companies but they still won't talk to us.
I'm sure it's just ignorance on the part of the salesidiot... In another matter, I asked a simple "yes/no" question which resulted in a 3 day scheduling negotiation to speak with one of their lead engineers. Once we got the conference call going, I was asked to pose my question. I posed it and the lead engineer said "err, Yes" with a barely detectable tone that said "I'm going to kill this salesperson". In the end; MV was far more expensive. $18k USD a seat for GCC plus $5k/year for business-hours support, maximum 5 'incidents'. 2 days of effort produced for me a fully functional cross-compile toolchain on which I was able to develop a prototype of our production product as proof of concept. So we punted on MV. We're not idiots. We can support our own toolchain. I suspect most embedded software shops have people who possess reasonable clue and don't need someone like MV to hoover money out of their wallets to answer gcc questions. Non-clueful people are probably not doing embedded software. So just who is MV's target audience? PHB's.
MontaVista isn't going to get anywhere if they continue to insist on charging $18,000 USD a seat for 'gcc'. An embedded project I'm on comes with a Montavista runtime license. When I asked for the kernel source, the hardware vendor said they were legally bound by MontaVista not to give out the kernel source and to talk to MV. When I asked MV for the source, the salesperson tried to tell me that required a special source license that I had to pay for. I think someone in 'sales' doesn't understand the concept of a license. We've since chosen to just dump MV. I think TI would probably be better off just coming up with their own distro.