Posts by DugEBug 55 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2014
I've been 100% remote for 4-years with two separate companies. Love it. However, I've got 40+ years of experience and can get right to work without delay. If I were a recent college grad, I think it would be quite difficult to integrate with the company and to be mentored remotely. It will be interesting to see how the newest generation of engineers are going to develop. I suspect it will be the subject of several PhD studies in the next couple of years...
Did you ever bother to right-click on the file/directory and select "Always keep on this device"? Then OneDrive is simply a backup/mirror. This feature is to allow you to have the same data on multiple computers/phones and only use drive space on the ones you want to have a local copy.
Not true. Today's emulation products are not the stuff you dabbled with in the 90s.
If you are emulating a large SoC/ASIC, you buy a board with these monster FPGAs already on it from Synopsys/etc. They are very expensive, but not as expensive as taping out a buggy chip. Those boards already have the RAM/peripherals that you may need to fully emulate the chip. Setting it all up and getting it to work is a PITA, but you are rewarded with emulation that is many orders of magnitude faster than simulation - and the software integration/test can be done before you commit to silicon.
Intel/AMD/etc. wouldn't dream of taping out a monster chip without emulation.
For those who want to re-live the experience, check out https://apolloinrealtime.org/
The site is incredible as it gives you the ability to experience the mission through synchronized audio and video as it unfolded. The Apollo 11 and 17 missions are available too.
For the folks who put this website together, thank you.
This must have taken an incredible amount of time to do, so it must have been a labor of love. Again, thank you.
The flash chips in the SSDs wear out due to writing. To mitigate this, the firmware tries to spread out writes such that all of the pages in the flash get roughly the same number of writes over time. This means that there is a lot of data movement in the SSD even when it isn't actively being read from/written to. A flash page that was written once and never deleted could be moved to a different location so that new writes can use the relatively youthful page. Similarly, pages that are deleted are eventually placed in a sorted 'free list' according to the number of writes that have already taken place.
As you can imagine, there is a heck of a lot of housekeeping going on inside that SSD - all executed according to the active firmware. If we imagine that the 'hour counter' is an integral part of the wear-leveling algorithm, havoc will be wreaked once the counter goes negative. The once properly organized lists/tables/etc. will suddenly be corrupted beyond repair. When the SSD driver asks for block XYZ, the SSD returns block WTF. There goes your file system, and your otherwise nice day.
There's another lawsuit going on concerning region coding. I had (past tense) an HP printer for which I bought some genuine HP replacement inks from a reputable retailer (Amazon). Turns out, those cartridges were region coded for the EU. No problem - my printer continued to function happily until my next resupply. These ones were region coded for the US. Switching regions twice apparently triggered some firmware that bricked the printer. After hours on the phone with HP support, and after installing new firmware and entering numerous magic codes into the front panel, the printer remained bricked. The support person said I'd have to buy a new printer.
I did, and it wasn't (and never will be) an HP.
Two years later, my new Brother MFC printer is working great and I'm only on my second set of (significantly lower priced) cartridges.
I'm not sure if I should upvote or downvote your post - so I'll just comment. It is unlikely that FB impacted the outcome of the election, but I'd be surprised if there weren't some people who went to the polls instead of staying home, or who changed their vote due to some fake news posted by a 'friend'.
When there are enough airheads out there who can't think for themselves - and our schools are producing them in mass quantities, then fake news from the platform of-the-day will impact the outcome.
Democracy isn't something that is deserved, it is something that is earned and must be protected. Sadly, the boomers have done a piss-poor job of protecting it.
Reading some older articles concerning this project, it seems to me that this is about Amazon/Microsoft/etc. defining and building the HW/SW infrastructure for a private cloud that has 'technical parity' with the commercial cloud. It would be deployed in DoD datacenters and be maintained by the contract winner(s).
If this is the case, then it may make sense to have a single winner. It also makes sense for the finalists to be Amazon or Microsoft because they have the most mature infrastructure for this sort of thing.
Just like a fighter/drone/ship project, there will be many winners. Intel, Dell, Samsung, Cisco, Mellanox, Nvidia come to mind, not to mention the software providers whose applications and operating systems will be run on this private cloud.
A friend of mine has a beautiful swimming pool with a car-sized boulder in the center. When they were excavating for the pool and they encountered this beast they had to make a decision - dynamite it, fill the hole back in and forget the whole thing, or build the pool around it. They chose the latter, and now have a very unique design with a nice centerpiece from which to dive.
Of course it is "plugged into" some things. You can't grow any living tissue without a supply of nutrients and oxygen. The way to do it is with a supply of blood that is somehow sustained via all the sensors, cleansing machines and the like. I suspect that maybe the skin donor is also the blood donor. The article leaves all of this to the imagination, unfortunately.
There is little point in putting this new NVM technology on an SSD or any other I/O device. I/Os are too slow and too high latency to take advantage of this technology. Instead, it should be put on the memory bus and treated as slow memory. Intel will need to build a new memory bus, or Micron will need to make DIMMs with hybrid DRAM/NVM.
The 'revolution' that this technology enables will only be realized when the programming paradigm changes. Is there an OS out there that can handle non-uniform memory access efficiently? Is there a programming language out there that can begin to help engineers write code with multiple classes of memory, including NVM?
A LOT of stuff needs to be re-thought/rewritten. Better get started - big bucks await those who succeed.
Let's not scream climate change quite so quickly.
The Western states have been experiencing wet/dought/fire cycles for a very long time. One reason that recent fires have been so out of control is due to human-caused fire suppresion. This leads to an unnatural vegetation build-up - leading to bigger/badder fires. Realizing the mistakes of the past, the forest services frequently conduct controlled burns to mitigate this. Norther Mexico has pretty much the same climate and does not experience fires of the same sort is because they tend to let them burn until they run out of fuel.
The article begins by saying that Cleo is a graduate student. Later, there is a quote: "As an undergraduate student with no prior background in this, that is an impressive achievement.”
It is impressive either way, but it would be good to know whether Cleo is working on her Ph.D thesis, or her senior project.
Yes, it does take a lot of faith to believe in a sefl-existent person who creating something amazingly complex out of nothing. It also takes a lot of faith to believe that nothing became something for no apparent reason other than sheer accident - and that sheer accidents continued to happen for billions of years, ultimately resulting in the most complex object in the known universe (the human brain).
Neither can be explained or proven using the scientific method, so faith is involved in either case.
""Resource conservation? Recycling? What's the point of that, God is going to end the world soon."
Funny how the people most likely to pick up their trash and to avoid wasting money/resources are those who believe in God. They also use those resources without guilt because they don't worship the creation. Its here for us to use - but they (me inclusive) want to be good stewards of what He created.
Yes, I'm one of them-thar Right-Wing Bible Thumpin' nut-jobs that most El Reg reader loathe and love to ridicule...
My God is a God of Truth. Since He invented gravity and everything else, He's not afraid to have us take a good look at His creation. In fact, He gave us a creative mind that wants to discover and try to understand everthing around us. I don't see any reason He would make a 4000 year-old fossil appear to be millions of years old. If it is a million years old, He'd make it look a million years old! He's not trying to deceive us, because that is not in His nature.
So let's keep trying to discover how it all works and where it all came from - without bias. I believe that the more we know, the more we will realize how amazing He is and how small we are.
This is of course, my humble opinion, and I can't prove my point any more than you can prove that “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be." (Rest in Peace, Carl).
OK - I'm braced for the barrage of hate-speech that will come from all you folks who think that my belief that there is such a thing as Truth is in itself, hate-speech. Let 'er rip!
...and by the time we find out that these planets are completely sterile, the heads of NASA will be fully retired, enjoying their nice beach-front mansions at taxpayer's expense. Then the next generation of NASA leaders will say "But if we spend even more, we are certain that we'll find something interesting".
When was the last time any government regulations on private businesses resulted in more freedom for the people? As soon as you get regulators trying to 'save the middle class', you get big companies willing to help them with their regulations. When the big companies are really helpful (with unrelated contributions, of course), the regulations tend to favor them. Net neutrality is no different. It sounds good... "Neutrality is goood, favioritism is baaaad. We need the government to protect us from those evil corporations". So, politician A gets together with CEO B, and they meet with Bureaucrat C, and so the process begins...
I beg the government to STOP trying to help me!
"But it's a bit premature to omit "possible" from the title, dontcha think?"
Indeed. I smell a general bias that says, "There MUST be life somewhere else, so let's go spend a lot of money finding it". The unbiased approach would be "There is a LOT we don't know about the universe, so let's go spend a lot of money learning more about it".
Agree. As they say, there's lies, damned lies, and statistics...
How much of the increase in productivity is due to software applications rather than the internet?
In my line of work (digital design), my productivity has increased immensely from my early days of drawing NAND gates on a sheet of paper. Most of that increase has to do with offline software and more powerful computers, not the Internet.
I'll give the Internet a little credit for 'allowing' me to take my work home with me and for allowing me to stay up late at night to have WebEx meetings with co-workers and angry customers overseas.
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