81–90 of 191 posts
Once upon a time, on USENET, someone had a .sig that predicted one day computers would be cheap enough they'd come in cereal boxes and we'd throw them away. That day appears to have arrived.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many cars does one smoke in a year though?
Hopefully zero! Still, if you replace your car (or its battery) every 10 years (pretty long IMO) and smoke one vape a day (yikes), you'll use more cells on your car than your vapes.
For one, 10 years is a perfectly good used car for somebody, and for two with large EV battery packs we’d expect some lithium recycling effort
Disposable vapes don’t have either of those going for them, batteries go straight in the trash after one charge cycle
I hope there is a follow up where the LED is ground down and a PICKIT2 is used to read out the code :)
Edit: The site only exists on the wayback machine now, but there was a hate page [1] for the PicKit3 posted on Dave Jones' twitter some time ago
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180423225612/http://www.fuckit...
It might be a myth, but I seem to remember the ASICs used to flicker older LED designs were often repurposed from audio greeting cards. The light was actually just Happy Birthday playing through an LED or bulb rather than a speaker.
I love it. I have noted this article for my talk about how CPUs are free. To appreciate that, you have to understand that when the first microcomputers came out engineers were still in "compute" mode[1], we were lectured that you wouldn't use a hard coded loop to check for a switch closure, you had to use interrupts because otherwise you were wasting all those CPU clocks . And computing at the time was often billed i…
Very small controllers in a high-power device, like on a motor or a LED, don't have this limitations.
Once upon a time, on USENET, someone had a .sig that predicted one day computers would be cheap enough they'd come in cereal boxes and we'd throw them away. That day appears to have arrived.
I got a server blade with a Xeon processor and 96 gigabytes of RAM for free last week... Granted, it is a ten year old device, but still. Another friend will give me a 180 gigabyte RAM device next week, cause it would go to the container otherwise...
I never ended up buying one, because it'd consume way more power than made sense, and they're kinda shitty for gaming/workstation use due to low single-core performance and NUMA issues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At a certain point it's more about the semantics of what a "computer" is. I don't know if I'd count an ASIC from a musical greeting card, though; and even within general purpose devices, microcontrollers vs microprocessors are typically delineated by the presence of an MMU.
If I can program it to execute a sequence of arithmetic and logical operations that approximate a Turing machine (with a finite band), and reprogram it at a later date to execute a different sequence of such operations, that's a computer to me. I wouldn't count ASICs, but the PIC12F508 or the 3-cent microcontroller referenced in the post definitely count. Though by my definition of requiring reprogrammability and Tur…
Is the actual make and model of the MCU just a guess? Doesn’t seem to be anything to corroborate the PIC12 besides a pinout the author has seen before. Just mention because there are likely a zillion eight pin MCUs with this pinout/ballout pattern.
Once upon a time, on USENET, someone had a .sig that predicted one day computers would be cheap enough they'd come in cereal boxes and we'd throw them away. That day appears to have arrived.
We've been there for about a decade now. Single-use paper transit tickets equipped with an RFID-capable microcontroller are quite common now.
I hope there is a follow up where the LED is ground down and a PICKIT2 is used to read out the code :)
I don't buy the PIC chip theory since that means it's either programmed in-situ which seems imposible, or they're ordered with premasked or preprogrammed ROM which is hellishly expensive.
It'd be a bit comparable to the test and assembly process of the WS2812B, see [0] @ 2:30 or 6:10.