Viewing profile — blackguardx

I've only read Into Thin Air, but that book makes Boukreev (author of The Climb) seem like an unreliable narrator. I have zero interest in high altitude mountaineering (I prefer lo…

To drain the Salton Sea or replenish it? The Salton Sea was created in its present form from a man-made environmental disaster.

Xilinx is/was an FPGA company until AMD bought them. Their primary revenue stream is selling chips. This is the equivalent of going back to the days of paid C/C++ compilers (anybod…

The "free" version of Vivado is used to develop for Xilinx/AMD's lower tier FPGAs. While offering what I assume are lower profit margins, these lower tier FPGAs make up a large por…

NORAD relies on radar stations in Canada.

It is probably a good idea to review some instructions before jump starting a car because even though it is simple, if you do it wrong (connect the battery terminal last) you can b…

The iPhone 4 was easily disassembled with screwdrivers...

You don't need rivers for nuclear reactor cooling, they are just very convenient.

It is almost like the flip-flopping policy was never meant to boost US manufacturing, but to secure kickbacks and deals from big companies and countries to get favored treatment.

555 timers were everywhere back in the day. It was one of the most mass produced chips at the time with over 1 billion made per year.

Altium isn't great, but you must not have tried the others...

My minivan has more 50% weight capacity than a Toyota Tacoma. I can haul more construction debris and load/unload them easier because my tailgate is lower. I wouldn't want to try t…

Loading drywall into my minivan is a lot easier than a truck. I can fit whole sheets and close the back gate so I don't need to strap them down and they are protected from the elem…

mm/hr is more useful for areas that get lots of rain. When I was living in Seattle, chance of rain was meaningless but mm/hr made the difference between being able to do an outside…

Jobs was actually a technician at Atari, assembling circuit boards during the night shift. Jobs was later paid by Atari to make Breakout, but basically subcontracted it to Wozniak …

VHDL is based on Ada, so it also inherits from sequential programming models.

I think this can just be summarized to "write any HDL like you are modeling real hardware." Both VHDL and Systemverilog were primarily intended for validation and synthesis is a se…

You can pretty much do everything in Vivado from the command line as long as you know Tcl... Also, modern Verilog (AKA Systemverilog) fixes a bunch of the issues you might have had…

I live near both wind turbines and oil/gas fracking sites in Colorado. The wind turbines are far less obtrusive. Fracking sites produce a lot of noise and they try to hide them wit…

They have plenty of mines for iron amd otber metals in western countries as well. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte,_Montana

TouchID doesn't really for me on my Macbook or iPad. It has about a 25% success rate. I think one issue is that I work with my hands a lot.

Who was president when Microsoft introduced D&I (Diversity and Inclusion) initiatives in 2019? AFAIK, they never called it DEI internally.

You say smaller political entity, but the city of Washington D.C has 100k more people than the entire state of Wyoming...

We'll probably end up with the doors from Philip K. Dick's Ubik that charge you money to open and threaten to sue you if you try to force it open without paying.