Viewing profile — speleo_engr

30 year mortgage rates are around 3.65% this week. So if a buyer puts down 20%, that will be around $259k in interest over the life of the $400k loan, putting the total interest at…

Yeah I guess that explains the fond memories part. Some 32-bit parts are totally flat. Like low-end ARM parts with SRAM and no MMU. Compare that to a 8-bit or 16-bit PIC microcontr…

Totally agree. I've been making the same argument elsewhere on this thread. People are disagreeing with saying things were simpler back then. I don't know how anyone can have fond …

It does though, if you mix near and far pointers, you are going to be getting crashes. Pointer equality and comparison are non-trivial. Whereas on a modern 32-bit CPU you don't hav…

A 16-bit space is not at all simplified, it's far more complex. Because of that, it is a terrible choice. It's a much more difficult memory model to learn in. In a flat 32-bit addr…

I remember hearing about these around 2008 and then the application being pushed was no cables to your fancy flat screen TV. Blu-ray player uses UWB RF so no cables are necessary. …

That sounds like a great idea, but you today we can't even synthesize arbitrary VHDL/Verilog code efficiently. The author needs an understanding of hardware architecture to write s…

Sure you can learn a lot but I have no idea why you would choose Turbo C in 2020 over say a Raspberry Pi with GCC. Turbo C (discontinued in 1990) is going to expose a bunch of irre…

Definitely true. People also seem to forget the Red River basin (e.g., North Dakota, Minnesota, Manitoba) that flows north to Hudson Bay was a massive lake about 10,000 years ago c…

...I've done it and it was nothing like that.

Some things are much easier with ODB electronics though. Like if a cylinder is misfiring, you pull out a code scanner and see exactly which spark plug needs to get replaced.

I mean that sounds more like "It's a pain in the ass to change a headlight in my girlfriend's car, so I have her bring it to a shop" than a right to repair issue. Or are you saying…

> Can you quickly preserve the food in your fridge/freezer without electricity? What do you even mean by this? "The power is out kids! Start a bonfire in the front yard, we're maki…

Yes this and it is also much harder to switch off a heavy DC load than an AC one. Once current starts flowing in DC and you try to open a switch, an arc will form that never gets e…

If it's publically traded, yeah, nothing nefarious happened. But if it's private, all bets are off. Often, options there are nothing more than a couple of pages of paper tracked by…

I have relatives in the Dakotas who get pissed at traffic lights in general. As in, they live in a county without a single traffic light. There unfortunately is a very bad habit of…

Right this minute you could find very fast internet (fiber) in rural areas with very inexpensive housing. I have a relatives in the Dakotas & Nebraska with better internet than I h…

Turbo codes are typically soft decision codes, which don't make a ton of sense at the filesystem level, since there has already been a hard decision made. They are useful in storag…

Curious - what are your complaints on these programs? My main one is that they are slow to create archives and rsbep only does error decoding, not erasure. I'm working on an altern…

This is not true. I have encountered several times on systems with ECC memory where MD5 values for large archives change on magnetic discs. No read errors or SMART errors. I have a…

Wow! 100g acceleration, Mach 10 in 5 seconds. I can't imagine the level of noise from that.

Reminds me of the classic "EE versus CS" by Philip Greenspun: https://philip.greenspun.com/humor/eecs-difference-explained

This same problem also led to the loss of the Deep Impact spacecraft on its extended mission: "On September 20, 2013, NASA abandoned further attempts to contact the craft.[77] Acco…

I've worked with hardware accelerated vector graphics engines (2D GPUs). It sounds like a good idea to do everything vector, because some things are very simple while retaining qua…

The tools aren't much fun on Windows, either.