There’s dirty copyright abuses and lawsuits left and right, but the one that really puts you off is a legitimate case where a little guy actually created something?
I wish lobste.rs would be a tiny bit easier to get access to. Some of my blog posts have been discussed there and every time I try to get access, I can’t get past their IRC stuff.
The thing that truly changed my life was the Commodore Reference Guide, with schematic, and a book from Data Becker that described the schematic in low level detail. Address decoders, chip selects, tri-state data busses…
I had been reading Elektuur (Elektor for English readers) for years, but never quite understood how computers worked.
That book changed everything, like a giant light bulb switching on. Suddenly I could read all those digital schematics. Digital design was what I wanted to do in life. And I did and still do.
I started my C64 assembler adventures by manually converting opcodes to hex. Got tired of that real quick. I never had a real assembler, but DISMON was a pretty decent interactive disassembler that even supported code relocation.
> But surely, latency is all about "placebo" and "vibes" and "feel" is it not?
In the case matters most, it's not a placebo.
Imagine 2 FPS players with identical ability who play against each other. If one has a system with 4ms latency and the other has one with 5 ms latency, the former will statistically have the upper hand, even if the players can't, in isolation, notice a difference between the 2 systems.
There's a difference between "optimized for" and "it's the only thing you need".
I could in theory get by with + and - buttons to zoom in and out of a map, but it's way more convenient to use pinch to zoom. But even for the browser, I use pinch to zoom all the time.
Propaganda or not, I still remember the sense of wonder when first experiencing the smooth zooming and panning with two fingers on the first iPhone. Adding multi-touch to the 2007 MacBook trackpad was one of the reasons why I switched to OSX too.
(I still have that phone and when I try it today, smooth is not what I’d call it.)
> I don't classify thin skinned snowflakes who do stupid things that get them screamed at by Linus, and then are butthurt about it for years, as being "extremely competent."
There is no reason to believe that there is a causation between being a “thin skinned snowflake” and being incompetent. That said, it doesn’t surprise me at all that some kind of people would make that assumption.
There are many extremely competent engineers who can’t deal with the idea of exposing themselves to public humiliation. That’s especially true in today’s environment where these kind of bully rants have become a spectacle for outsiders. Just google the name of the person who was the subject to one of Linus’ rants about a year ago. Despite being a very accomplished figure in the RISC-V world, top results for his name are links to Linus calling him an idiot. That’s a mark he will have for life. I would die of embarrassment.
It’s perfectly possible to critique without being a bully.
What Theo and Linus are doing wrong is scaring away a large pool of potential contributors who don’t want to take that risk.
Are you concerned about the issue that KrakenRF ran into with their passive radar demo project violating ITAR rules, or is that something that can easily be avoided by just not doing that specific kind of application?
But this is a really interesting use case as well, and something that could be used for a 16 channel logic analyzer with analog recording support like the Saleae Logic 16 Pro, but without expensive ADC from Analog Devices.
Yeah, I used to work for a large-ish company that participated in projects like this.
The company has a project manager with a large spreadsheet to keep track of everything so that no employee would accidentally be officially double booked because that could be detected as fraud.
Some real work was done, but the meetings with other partners were a farce. You had these tiny companies whose only existence was to feed off the European money.
One day our manager asked if the architecture document of a 100kbps modem that I had worked on could be repurposed for a 1 Mbps modem project that was European funded…
I work for Nvidia but don't speak for them.