robinsonb5

For teaching / learning it's hard to beat Quartus Prime Lite - the virtual JTAG infrastructure (for SignalTap logic analyzer) is much better than the other options. (It's easy to create custom virtual JTAG modules to control and read data from a running design, and these will happily coexist with the logic analyzer.)

Dev board wise QMTech on AliExpress have some really nice entry-level dev boards - the Cyclone 10CL025 board, the daughter board and a clone USB-Blaster cable for programming would weigh in at well under £100.

Terasic have a bunch of different Intel/Altera dev boards, the cheapest being the DE0-Nano - personally I like the DE10-lite, but there are more modern options for those with deeper pockets.

The Tang Nano 20k is a solid and affordable choice for a Gowin chip (though be aware that this particular chip's PLLs are a bit limited and its block RAMs don't have byte enables). The JTAG stuff works but isn't anywhere near as advanced as Intel's.

For Lattice ECP5 there are several options - and these chips are well-supported by yosys/nextpnr and oss-cad-suite in general.

I quite like the IceSugar-Pro ECP5-based board and associated breakout board - but it has a quirky built-in JTAG adapter which isn't supported by the Lattice toolchain, so you'll have to use OpenOCD or OpenFPGALoader to program it, and you can't use the vendor-supplied internal logic analyzer. Its FPGA is well supported by oss-cad-suite, though, which is a big plus.

IcePi-Zero is also well worth considering, available from CrowdSupply.

ULX3S is very nice, too - but as far as I can see it's only available for pre-order on the next production run.

The notion of being expected to pay for software that was formerly free - when Windows users aren't expected to bear those same costs - does indeed piss me off.

If I were actually using Xilinx FPGAs I'd be more pissed off. Luckily the projects that interest me currently are based around Intel, Lattice and Gowin devices.

> In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway

I suspect they're massively underestimating how many hobbyists and students are on Linux. We're not talking about a typical demographic here, we're talking about people interested in computers and technology at precisely the level that Windows and MacOS aim to isolate from the user.

So does Quartus Prime Pro - and for specific Agilex 5 devices it's also free. (Presumably it was too much trouble to backport support for Agilex to the Lite version.)

There are also free Linux versions of Lattice Diamond, Gowin EDA and Efinix's Efinity software.

> I see no problem with monetizing Linux users. If I am monetizing Windows and macOS users, there should be no exceptions towards Linux

Here I agree with you - Linux users shouldn't expect any special privileges here. But we're not asking for special treatment, we're asking that we continue to be given the same options as Windows users, just as we were for all previous versions of the software.

What people are objecting to is that for the latest version (and future versions) of the software an existing free tier has been withdrawn from Linux users - and only from Linux users.

When did we stop spelling it "nybble"?

Inkscape is awesome - I use it regularly for extracting design elements from PDFs and vectorising bitmaps.

It works surprisingly well for simple CAD tasks, too - I've used it in combination with TinkerCAD to produce some 3D-printed parts.

I just wish its CMYK handling was better. When I need CMYK or spot colour / overprint output I generally save as EPS, open in a text editor and adjust the source accordingly, but it would be nice if CMYK and Spot were first class citizens. (A friendlier workaround is to import the SVG into Scribus and modify the colours there.)

Indeed. Trusting that it will only be processing the user's queries - as opposed to, say, becoming part of a distributed grid of AI processing nodes - isn't a bet I'd be willing to place much money on.

In the small town where I live we have a small cinema with three screens. They always start the movie at the advertised time - no adverts, just a few trailers in the preceding 10 minutes. You can book online, but I usually just walk in and buy a ticket at the desk. The seats aren't assigned, so you can pick whichever you like.

Occasionally I have a "private screening" where I'm the only one in the auditorium. The most recent example was "The Mummy". I hadn't fully thought throught the implications of watching a horror movie alone in the middle of a darkened 65-seat auditorium!

There's another town a few miles away where a similar cinema has both assigned seating and 20 minutes of adverts before the movie.

> But the point is that FPGAs are that accessible today.

They've been accessible for a lot longer than most people think. The original Minimig project (an FPGA recreation of the Amiga chipset, coupled with a real 68000 CPU) started in 2005 - more than 20 years ago! And 15 years ago there was already a complete Amiga core (chipset and CPU) running on the Terasic DE1 development board, the C-One FPGA computer, and the Turbo Chameleon 64 cartridge.

Today's FPGAs are certainly more affordable and more capacious (especially in terms of DSP and RAM blocks) but the biggest shift is that, as you say, it's now possible and affordable to have the complete PCB assembled in short runs, which is a real blessing given that so many FPGAs come in BGA packages.

Those would be the Pork Futures Warehouse from Discworld.

> I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk

In the near future I need to lash up a windows utility to generate a bunch of PDF files from a CSV (in concert with GhostScript), with specific filenames. I was trying to figure out the best approach and hadn't even considered Tcl and Tk - with Itcl you might have just given me a new rabbithole to explore! Thanks! (...I think!)

My memory wasn't playing tricks on me after all - Suse Linux 6.3 had KDE 1.1.2 with several nice themes [1] - I'm pretty sure the version I used back in the day was SuSE 7 (a boxed copy, bought from Staples!)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageunix/comments/1m3vkba/kde_th...

I'm sure it was version 1.something that had the Bryce theme - I remember being annoyed that the scrolling title feature had disappeared when KDE2 came out.

But it's always possible that my memory's playing tricks on me.

This brings back memories of Chunky-to-Planar conversion on the Amiga, where the Xor trick was combined with bitshifts and masking to rearrange the bits in 8 32-bit words in reasonable time.

KDE1 had some very nice themes! I remember using one that drew inspiration from the visuals of Bryce on the Mac. Dark mode theme - and animated window titles which would scroll gently if the window title was too long to fit.

It's a delicious irony that E is now a super-lightweight system compared with the mainstream environments that plauge our RAM chips today.

> If someone else uses your exact same prompt to generate the exact same code, can you claim copyright infringement against them?

No, because they've independently obtained it from the same source that you did, so their copy is "upstream" of your imposing of a new license.

Realistically, adding a license to public domain work is only really meaningful when you've used it as a starting point for something else, and want to apply your license to the derivative work.

Copyright law forbids the creation of derivative works (excepting any region-specific fair-use rules) so you're only allowed to create them under the rights granted to you in the terms of the license - thus under this particular license you can't make commercial use of derivative works.

> Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing so, but are they doing anything wrong?

You're perfectly at liberty to relicense public domain code if you wish.

The only thing you can't do is enforce the new license against people who obtain the code independently - either from the same source you did, or from a different source that doesn't carry your license.

Not a lawyer either, but:

> What if I take the design, print it, include the thing in a staged photo, and sell prints of the photo?

Probably fair use, provided the design wasn't the main focus of the photo, but merely part of the "set dressing."

> What if I skip the printing and use the design files as a basis for a rendered photo or animation?

> What if I print the design, then use a 3D scanner to recreate a file from the physical artifact?

Those questions are simpler - both scenarios would be derivative works of the original files, so covered by the license.

I actually hope it doesn't!

The results are impressive, but for the vast, vast majority of applications the actual speedup achieved is basically meaningless since it only applies to a tiny fraction of memory accesses.

For the use case Laurie mentioned - i.e. high-frequency trading - then yes, absolutely, it's valuable (if you accept that a technology which doesn't actually achieve anything beyond transmuting energy into money is truly valuable).

For the rest of us, the last thing the world needs is a new way to waste memory, especially given its current availability!

> A QR (or barcode) library is exactly the type of thing I’d assume would still work fine, since there’s nothing new to do, the parsing rules don’t change, it’s a static, known, solved problem.

I agree with you - and yet the barcode library I used recently for a variable-data-printing project was last updated 13 hours ago, despite having been around since 2008!

> And people throw out things instead of repairing them because they don't know how.

Part of it is the materials used now, though - many things get thrown out because the plastic bodyshell got old and brittle, and broke. (Plastic is particularly difficult to repair because the break usually presents very little surface area for glueing.)

PostScript is awesome - I still use it to do this day for hacking together Variable Data Printing projects, with the aid of GhostScript.

Just like Doom-in-a-PDF, this is in equal measure incredibly impressive and utterly horrifying that it's possible.

I have an eMachines-branded PS/2 keyboard within easy reach, which I rescued when a colleague was throwing out an old PC. It's only a rubber dome board, but it's one of the best feeling rubber dome boards I've ever encountered!

This year's average phone is already going to have less RAM than last year's average phone - so anything that reduces the footprint of the apps (and even more importantly, websites) we're using can only be a good thing. Plus it extends the usable life of current hardware.

...or worse, the libraries do get written, but multiple times in mutually-incompatible forms that are tightly coupled to specific compositors / desktop environments. (Screengrabbing, anyone?)

Yes, they did eventually. If I'm understanding correctly, the original design used a simple funnel shape with 45 degree sides (suitable for the resource-limited systems of the day), and when they eventually re-implemented it they used a funnel defined by the left hand corners of the submenu, as per the Amazon design. (See the large animgif halfway down https://thomaspark.co/2011/10/making-menus-escapable/ )