622 karma · joined November 14, 2013
I get to the office between 6 and 6:30 in the morning and take a 30 minute lunch, so I'm out by 3 PM. This gives me several daylight hours in the afternoon before heading to bed around 8 PM to start the cycle over again.
My employer would prefer I not walk out the building with the rather expensive test equipment necessary to debug our latest prototypes (which they would also prefer to keep in the building). Some of us software developers work on actual physical products, those which involve using a logic analyzer, oscilloscope, and JTAG pod for debugging. This equipment is too expensive to replicate for every engineer and has to be configured hands-on.
Different folks have different ideas of what is interesting to work on.
> Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, name it. The unicorn billions are all things that never needed face-to-face spitting.
All terribly boring to me. That's why I'm an embedded software engineer. Somebody has to write the code that keeps your airplane in the air.
"Because Apple’s SoCs have always used GPUs from the same vendor, certain vendor-specific features like PowerVR Texture Compress (PVRTC) are widely used in iOS app development"
[0] http://www.anandtech.com/show/11243/apple-developing-custom-...
Maybe if they provided some kind of itemized receipt? "You paid $x in taxes. This was distributed as $y to infrastructure, $z to education, $w to defense" etc.
The ACARS[0] protocol I work with every day starts each transmission with an SOH, then some header data, then an STX to start the payload, then ends with either an ETX or an ETB depending on whether the original payload had to be fragmented into multiple transmissions or fits entirely into one.
These codes aren't archaic and obsolete in the embedded avionics world.
[0] ACARS: "Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System" - see ARINC specification 618[1]
http://coderjames.bitbucket.org/
The website has a bunch of broken links to missing material, as I haven't gotten around to writing it yet. All the schematics, gerbers, and firmware source code are up though, so it should be reproducible.
Global access to niche knowledge doesn't seem like an effective use of the world's time to me. Let's look at this same idea, but replace "develop software" with "perform brain surgery."
> To fix this, we need to increase the currently tiny number of people who are able to perform brain surgery. We need a tool that makes performing brain surgery easy and fun, and accessible to everyone. A tool that enables neurosurgical literacy.
Just like Software Engineers don't need to know how to perform neurosurgery, accountants, marketers, burger flippers, and salespeople don't need to know how to write software. I'd rather the CEO of the company I work for spend time on growing the business, not learning how to write a "Hello, world!" program.
Note also that I don't especially consider Classic Shell to be an odd program given that when I briefly worked at Microsoft a few years ago (Win 8.1 was current), my manager actually recommended I install it on my second day there on the company-provided computer in order to retain the classic UI because that group found the Win8 touch UI to be unusable on the desktop.
I ran into this when the Windows 10 Anniversary Update rolled out. In my case the program Microsoft uninstalled was a Start Menu replacement, so I didn't actually have a functional start menu for several hours after the upgrade until I got the updated version of the 3rd-party program installed.
This left me shocked, dumbfounded, speechless, and furious. Everything I've observed over the last 20 years says Microsoft honours backwards compatibility above all else. Raymond Chen has great blog posts about the huge efforts they used to go through. My understanding is that's why businesses have stuck with Windows; it'll keep running their 10, 15 ,20 year old legacy VB line-of-business apps even on their newest OS. Apparently Microsoft has now decided to throw out backwards compatibility? I don't understand this decision.
Which is a bummer. When I interviewed at Amazon a few years ago, it was a day of coding on the whiteboard. Turned out I didn't have the Java experience that group wanted, and I'm allergic to pager duty so that was a non-starter for me.
I'm an embedded C++ programmer by day so I've almost certainly done many of the things on the OP's list. It wasn't until I set C++ aside after 15 years or so and gave Lua a chance that I finally started making real headway on my Secret Agent Sam remake.
[0] http://love2d.org/ [1] https://github.com/kikito/bump.lua [2] https://github.com/kikito/anim8 [3] https://github.com/kikito/gamera
(Note: I'm not kikito, just an appreciative user of his work)
Reading over the NHTSA's requests, I don't see anything unreasonable or that should be hard for them to answer. Maybe this is really just another Theranos fraud and they figured they better give up before they get found out.
[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special...
Well there's your problem :-). Google isn't an unbiased search engine, they're a commercial entity with a financial interest in feeding you particular search results. They're absolutely going to be biased in the results they provide you.
[1] http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-ultr...
[edit: Thunderbolt, not lightning. See, I never use it.]
If I'm sick and out of sick days I can either go in to work (infecting everyone else), burn a vacation day, or (presumably) not get paid. I've never been willing to risk trying the third option, and since I don't have a ton of vacations days, I'm most likely to pick the first one.
http://coderjames.bitbucket.org
Thanks for sharing your work! This is awesome.
Who also should have known better. If someone doesn't understand how a company they invest in makes a profit, or what the risks to that company are, they have no business investing in it. For example, I hold agency-MBS REITs in my portfolio, but only because I'm willing to read the quarterly filings and keep an eye on news relevant to interest rates. They are absolutely not an investment I would recommend to most people who want something simple they can "set and forget."
On the BF-538 that we were using, there are three of them and we needed them all. Since each one can only buffer a single incoming or outgoing byte at a time, there's a lot of interrupt-handling overhead with all of the RISC-style registers that need to be saved on each incoming byte.
We were already using two of the SPORTs and both DMA engines for hard real-time transmit and receive signal processing with microsecond-scale deadlines, so they weren't available to offload the UARTs. But since the UARTs have such tiny hardware buffers, their interrupts have to be very high priority in order to avoid dropping characters.
On a different project we were trying to build a very-low-power system around one of their new (at the time) BF52X parts, which had new low-power states for extended sleep. Except in the 0.0 version of the chips, those low-power states simply didn't work. An updated errata sheet was published a week or two later documenting that the processor couldn't be woken up once put to sleep.