Society seems to be really down on people who don't have a TV. In the UK we have a TV licence(£80 or $130 p/a) which is great because this pays for the BBC which is pretty good. It also means we don't get 100% commercially driven c***. But...
There are a heck of a lot of incidents where people have been harassed by the TV detection people becuase they didn't have a TV. Folk have had their doors broken down...even though the TV detecto people have zero right by law to enter your house!!!
It used to be even worse when these people had older monitors that had an RF profile that looks like a TV...even though is was just a plain olde PC or Mac. Thanks to new monitors I think it is probably safe to not have a TV and have a PC instead....just watch those TV capture cards;)
I'm not going to judge (I can't) especially as I live in Scotland where a "madman" walked into a school in Dunblane and killed 19 kids...but. What is going to change in the US? In the UK we looked at what had happened and didn't just sit there and say "isn't that bad" we collectively, as a nation, and said "Guns are bad...handguns are really bad - lets just ban them"
Yes. It was a knee-jerk reaction...but I think that it has probably done a lot to make things *potentially* safe here. You cannot ever legislate against psycopaths...but you can send a clear message that "violence is bad".
Given that... it's pretty easy to then disconnect fantasy games like Quake from reality. I hope.
My Dad has just finished a similar contract for Renishaw who make both the probes and the servo control systems for most CMMs. Very fun occupation....the ruby tipped ceramic probes are quite expenisve when the control software is buggy;)
What about Borland taking over linux development...and releasing a version of *Delphi* for Linux. That would be cool.
I guess there would be a lot of people who would stick to C++ though...which would be good because my development costs would be 3 times less than theirs;)
If you have a read at the gcc documentation included with EGCS you'll find details of the machine configs and stuff.
It really isn't that tough though...I've been modifying EGCS to support some new instructions on the Motorola ColdFire(a m68k derivative). My changes which include a couple of new target switches were restricted to 4 files. m68k.h, m68k.md, m68k.c and m68k-none.h in gcc/config/m68k
When you start digging into it it isn't that bad....I'm a Windows Pascal/Delphi programmer and I figured it out;)
Yep. It sould appear that the network interfaces are fairly well defined to the upper layers( html parser, mail&news, etc).
One thing I like (a lot) about their design is how quick it looks to get the core API in place with a basic protocol library(http: ftp: and file:) with minimal optimisation.... Later on we can put together much much more optimised Linux, win32, Mac specific transport layer to take advantage of any platform specific stuff. Cool.
The IE guys spent a long time doing network profiling with IE5 which (AFAICS) seems to make a fair bit of difference.
If anyone is looking for decent justification for working on Mozilla... Fixing the Mozilla netlib will affect more of the operation of the net that almost anything else.....
Degrees are useful - just the right ones
on
Generations
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· Score: 1
I don't agree. Although you may be right about Computer Science degrees which seem way way to specific or just plain "far out"....but as I'm just a jaded engineer that's probably just prejudice;)
The thing with a good degree is not the specifics but the basic techniques and methods of working. The things that don't change... What it takes to be a good engineer now, 50 years ago or 50 years from now will still be the same...the names will have changed and the boxes will do different things but basically it will be the same job.
My BEng(Hons) degree was in Mechanical Engineering. When I graduated I couldn't find a sufficiently interesting job as a mech so I decided to become a softy. Apart from the narrow minded nature of some "trained" software people its proved to be pretty similar...
Ah yes...but they were running Win95/98... if you machines crash twice a day then you aint going to get many blocks done.
Had they been running NT4 workstation or Linux it would be a pretty cool setup. My employer has a similarly large number of PCs running NT... and they spend all of their time in the idle loop.arrggh!
Given their network configuration surely they would have to have all the network cards running in order to get more than 1/4 of their machines running....and the performance figures would seem to indicate that they did have it all running.
Of course it's not *all* MS's fault. Many many many people turned off the security features in Word.... AFAIK you have to skip through several dialogs before Melissa can get into your system. It is the users who are dumb morons...
Of course if everyone stuck to plain text none of these things would happen regardless of what email program or OS you use... apart from the odd buffer overflow;)
Weanies one and all. My first true home computer(as opposed to the many development systems that my Dad brought home from work) was a TRS-80 Model I...not colour nothing... sheesh.
My first computer memory was of playing with a teletype when I was 3...which was only 22 years ago... so perhaps I'm a weanie too.
For the uninitiated a teletype was what we used before VDUs....(printer + keyboard + paper tape reader/writer) I only remember the fast 300 baud ones... 75baud and lower was before my time...
Probably when they upgrade the processor to something less brain dead than a 68000. As 3COM just use a plain ole 68322 dragonball processor they are tied to what Motorola produce. I'd image that Mot will be bringing out a ColdFire based chip at some point but don't hold your breath... A V3 CF core with the performance of a P100 and power consumption less that the current m68k device...nice.
Then you can do MP3s
"it's a joke" - I don't think so
on
OSI vs Taco Bell
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· Score: 1
"Get a grip. IT'S A FREAKING JOKE!!!"
Hmm. So taking pot shots at other parts of the globe is amusing... I'll have to remember that.
FYI. There are probably more Pascal developers than Linux developers full stop... Borland Delphi for one has over 1 million developers...and unlike VB and C++ it doesn't suck.
Not that I want to sounds too nationalstic but our system of law(which is different from England and the rest of the UK) is designed to be easy to use and understandable to the man in the street. For example we can draw up perfectly legally binding and enforcable contracts without requiring legal eagles(or should that be vultures) to pour over the documents...the same goes for things like wills.
The system is, mostly, fair...
Candence seem to like it...that's one of the reasons they setup an System On a Chip design centre here so that their IP could be protected in a rational fashion(unlike the US).
Have a look at http://efi332.eng.ohio-state.edu/ for details of a Do-It-Yourself Electronic Fuel Injection system. Not exactly a PC in your car but it could be usefull if your looking for a partially sorted car computer... I'm personally going to be building an EFI system but you could use it for more general things.
PCs in general suck for cars and embedded systems... too heavy, too much power, too fragile. Things based on Motorola chips are good... Hitachi SH1 is another good, powerful thing to look at.
Use RTEMS as your Real Time OS. Linux is OK in PCs but is the wrong shape to fit in embedded systems.
Yep. My esteemed institution also has a heap of NT Workstations(600+) tied with Workstation Manager to a huge array of Netware 4.11/5.0 boxes and a bunch of unix boxes for mail, etc. It all works quite nicely most of the time. The NT boxes certainly don't crash or bluescreen and they usually run for 2-3 months without a reboot.
The unix workstations crash frequently(what do you expect from a Sun box)...have lousy performance considering they have had £20k spent on them...and the people who use them and "promote" their use are total stuck up snobs.
I don't think anyone likes Microsoft's OS but when you bolt enough addons from Novell and have strategicly placed Linux based servers and have knowledgable support/config staff it does have an extremely high degree of utility.
...or so it would seem from some of these comments.
Oh goody. To be honest the amount of total trash that comes from Linux users and hack programmers is unreal. Only really rivalled by the amount that spews from VB/MS-SQL/Access people.
The opportunity to cheese you people off by writing quality apps for "your" platform as well as Windows really appeals.
It's quite a simple unit to build but why do it if you can buy it off the shelf?
Here's how I would do it. I figure that you could achieve the same effect by using a Philips I2C teletext chip (I think the new ones have onboard framebuffer ram - 8k don't get excited) and they can handle incoming video to overlay on. The small 8 pin chip on the module looks like one of the natty 8 pin PICs to do the RS-232 to I2C bit bashing which should be dead easy to program. The rest of the components should be straight off the standard Philips app note as I remember.
A bit of smart programming would allow you to build something that could suck Teletext info off onto a serial line....although I think that Linux do that already with a parallel port and a few gates.
Hmm. An embedded PC running linux is the best we can do for a tiny web server. I don't think so.
How about a Motorola ColdFire(or 68360 or MPC82x) hooked up to an SMSC LAN91C96 ethernet chip and say 32MB of SDRAM. Total system cost $75 approx.
CPU is much much more powerful and wouldn't be saddled with a lame OS(for the job) like linux. A far better system to use would be RTEMS-4.0.0 with a nice select() based web server like thttpd. And there'd be plenty of power left to do something useful like run a control system.
Sounds like a pipe dream? Well I've got most of it already... just need to build a custom PCB.
The guy's at NetBurner(http://www.netburner.com) have it already.
I spend a lot of my spare time programming embedded systems in C...and some of it is a real grind compared to the day job programming in Delphi/Object Pascal. What language would allow this!
if ( Finished = TRUE ) { PerhapsIllNeverGetRun(); }
It is my experience that C zealots rarely know many other languages
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Society seems to be really down on people who don't have a TV. In the UK we have a TV licence(£80 or $130 p/a) which is great because this pays for the BBC which is pretty good. It also means we don't get 100% commercially driven c***. But...
;)
There are a heck of a lot of incidents where people have been harassed by the TV detection people becuase they didn't have a TV. Folk have had their doors broken down...even though the TV detecto people have zero right by law to enter your house!!!
It used to be even worse when these people had older monitors that had an RF profile that looks like a TV...even though is was just a plain olde PC or Mac. Thanks to new monitors I think it is probably safe to not have a TV and have a PC instead....just watch those TV capture cards
True... It does reduce the likelyhood that McJoe public goes shooting people. You can't stop anyone who is determined...unless you know they are.
;)
What I found scary about Dunblane (and other similar events) was that many people knew the guy was a nutcase...but nobody did anything.
Look after your fellow man...that way they can't sneek up on you and stab you in the back
...another massacre in a US school.
I'm not going to judge (I can't) especially as I live in Scotland where a "madman" walked into a school in Dunblane and killed 19 kids...but. What is going to change in the US? In the UK we looked at what had happened and didn't just sit there and say "isn't that bad" we collectively, as a nation, and said "Guns are bad...handguns are really bad - lets just ban them"
Yes. It was a knee-jerk reaction...but I think that it has probably done a lot to make things *potentially* safe here. You cannot ever legislate against psycopaths...but you can send a clear message that "violence is bad".
Given that... it's pretty easy to then disconnect fantasy games like Quake from reality. I hope.
Hmmm...
;)
My Dad has just finished a similar contract for Renishaw who make both the probes and the servo control systems for most CMMs. Very fun occupation....the ruby tipped ceramic probes are quite expenisve when the control software is buggy
Java is coffee right??
;)
What about Borland taking over linux development...and releasing a version of *Delphi* for Linux. That would be cool.
I guess there would be a lot of people who would stick to C++ though...which would be good because my development costs would be 3 times less than theirs
If you have a read at the gcc documentation included with EGCS you'll find details of the machine configs and stuff.
;)
It really isn't that tough though...I've been modifying EGCS to support some new instructions on the Motorola ColdFire(a m68k derivative). My changes which include a couple of new target switches were restricted to 4 files. m68k.h, m68k.md, m68k.c and m68k-none.h in gcc/config/m68k
When you start digging into it it isn't that bad....I'm a Windows Pascal/Delphi programmer and I figured it out
Yep. It sould appear that the network interfaces are fairly well defined to the upper layers( html parser, mail&news, etc).
One thing I like (a lot) about their design is how quick it looks to get the core API in place with a basic protocol library(http: ftp: and file:) with minimal optimisation.... Later on we can put together much much more optimised Linux, win32, Mac specific transport layer to take advantage of any platform specific stuff. Cool.
The IE guys spent a long time doing network profiling with IE5 which (AFAICS) seems to make a fair bit of difference.
If anyone is looking for decent justification for working on Mozilla... Fixing the Mozilla netlib will affect more of the operation of the net that almost anything else.....
I don't agree. Although you may be right about Computer Science degrees which seem way way to specific or just plain "far out"....but as I'm just a jaded engineer that's probably just prejudice ;)
The thing with a good degree is not the specifics but the basic techniques and methods of working. The things that don't change... What it takes to be a good engineer now, 50 years ago or 50 years from now will still be the same...the names will have changed and the boxes will do different things but basically it will be the same job.
My BEng(Hons) degree was in Mechanical Engineering. When I graduated I couldn't find a sufficiently interesting job as a mech so I decided to become a softy. Apart from the narrow minded nature of some "trained" software people its proved to be pretty similar...
Ah yes...but they were running Win95/98... if you machines crash twice a day then you aint going to get many blocks done.
Had they been running NT4 workstation or Linux it would be a pretty cool setup. My employer has a similarly large number of PCs running NT... and they spend all of their time in the idle loop.arrggh!
Given their network configuration surely they would have to have all the network cards running in order to get more than 1/4 of their machines running....and the performance figures would seem to indicate that they did have it all running.
I don't think these people are stupid...
Of course it's not *all* MS's fault. Many many many people turned off the security features in Word.... AFAIK you have to skip through several dialogs before Melissa can get into your system. It is the users who are dumb morons...
;)
Of course if everyone stuck to plain text none of these things would happen regardless of what email program or OS you use... apart from the odd buffer overflow
Actually this was done a while ago. If you are after a more real-time solution than linux can give then have a look at RTEMS.
http://www.oarcorp.com has the scoop on getting RTEMS
a Board Support Package(i.e. drivers, startup code, etc) can be found at my web page
http://www.calm.hw.ac.uk/davidf/coldfire/
A CCII and your calling him a young pup!
Weanies one and all. My first true home computer(as opposed to the many development systems that my Dad brought home from work) was a TRS-80 Model I...not colour nothing... sheesh.
My first computer memory was of playing with a teletype when I was 3...which was only 22 years ago... so perhaps I'm a weanie too.
For the uninitiated a teletype was what we used before VDUs....(printer + keyboard + paper tape reader/writer) I only remember the fast 300 baud ones... 75baud and lower was before my time...
Probably when they upgrade the processor to something less brain dead than a 68000. As 3COM just use a plain ole 68322 dragonball processor they are tied to what Motorola produce. I'd image that Mot will be bringing out a ColdFire based chip at some point but don't hold your breath... A V3 CF core with the performance of a P100 and power consumption less that the current m68k device...nice.
Then you can do MP3s
"Get a grip. IT'S A FREAKING JOKE!!!"
Hmm. So taking pot shots at other parts of the globe is amusing... I'll have to remember that.
FYI. There are probably more Pascal developers than Linux developers full stop... Borland Delphi for one has over 1 million developers...and unlike VB and C++ it doesn't suck.
Please say it isn't so... I'm sick fed up with buggy 95/98 machines.... at least NT based machines offered the promise of being nominally stable.
Well at least Linux & friends has been handed yet another stepping stone to world domination. The sooner the better.
Not that I want to sounds too nationalstic but our system of law(which is different from England and the rest of the UK) is designed to be easy to use and understandable to the man in the street. For example we can draw up perfectly legally binding and enforcable contracts without requiring legal eagles(or should that be vultures) to pour over the documents...the same goes for things like wills.
The system is, mostly, fair...
Candence seem to like it...that's one of the reasons they setup an System On a Chip design centre here so that their IP could be protected in a rational fashion(unlike the US).
Lawyers still stink though.
Have a look at http://efi332.eng.ohio-state.edu/ for details of a Do-It-Yourself Electronic Fuel Injection system. Not exactly a PC in your car but it could be usefull if your looking for a partially sorted car computer... I'm personally going to be building an EFI system but you could use it for more general things.
PCs in general suck for cars and embedded systems... too heavy, too much power, too fragile. Things based on Motorola chips are good... Hitachi SH1 is another good, powerful thing to look at.
Use RTEMS as your Real Time OS. Linux is OK in PCs but is the wrong shape to fit in embedded systems.
Yep. My esteemed institution also has a heap of NT Workstations(600+) tied with Workstation Manager to a huge array of Netware 4.11/5.0 boxes and a bunch of unix boxes for mail, etc. It all works quite nicely most of the time. The NT boxes certainly don't crash or bluescreen and they usually run for 2-3 months without a reboot.
The unix workstations crash frequently(what do you expect from a Sun box)...have lousy performance considering they have had £20k spent on them...and the people who use them and "promote" their use are total stuck up snobs.
I don't think anyone likes Microsoft's OS but when you bolt enough addons from Novell and have strategicly placed Linux based servers and have knowledgable support/config staff it does have an extremely high degree of utility.
Yep. This is how it works for me.
NT Workstation, okay.
NT Server sucks.
Linux server great (_when_ you get it setup)
Linux workstation/desktop.....perhaps in a year or two.
Horses for courses.
...or so it would seem from some of these comments.
Oh goody. To be honest the amount of total trash that comes from Linux users and hack programmers is unreal. Only really rivalled by the amount that spews from VB/MS-SQL/Access people.
The opportunity to cheese you people off by writing quality apps for "your" platform as well as Windows really appeals.
Me goes back to being an evil Delphi programmer.
And we love our high speed - highly type safe language...
Delphi is of course written in Delphi...and a little bit of assembler for the RTL.
It does all of the things you mention...and one more.
IT ACTUALLY BLOODY WORKS!
Bummer.
It's quite a simple unit to build but why do it if you can buy it off the shelf?
Here's how I would do it. I figure that you could achieve the same effect by using a Philips I2C teletext chip (I think the new ones have onboard framebuffer ram - 8k don't get excited) and they can handle incoming video to overlay on. The small 8 pin chip on the module looks like one of the natty 8 pin PICs to do the RS-232 to I2C bit bashing which should be dead easy to program. The rest of the components should be straight off the standard Philips app note as I remember.
A bit of smart programming would allow you to build something that could suck Teletext info off onto a serial line....although I think that Linux do that already with a parallel port and a few gates.
Hmm. An embedded PC running linux is the best we can do for a tiny web server. I don't think so.
How about a Motorola ColdFire(or 68360 or MPC82x) hooked up to an SMSC LAN91C96 ethernet chip and say 32MB of SDRAM. Total system cost $75 approx.
CPU is much much more powerful and wouldn't be saddled with a lame OS(for the job) like linux. A far better system to use would be RTEMS-4.0.0 with a nice select() based web server like thttpd. And there'd be plenty of power left to do something useful like run a control system.
Sounds like a pipe dream? Well I've got most of it already... just need to build a custom PCB.
The guy's at NetBurner(http://www.netburner.com) have it already.
Or ada or any other strongly typed language...
I spend a lot of my spare time programming embedded systems in C...and some of it is a real grind compared to the day job programming in Delphi/Object Pascal. What language would allow this!
if ( Finished = TRUE )
{
PerhapsIllNeverGetRun();
}
It is my experience that C zealots rarely know many other languages