Wow! Said like a true Open Source fundamentalist. I'm hoping you wrote that on an OpenRISC based computer, not a PC with a closed source CPU, closed source BIOS, closed source chipset, closed source video adapter...
I like my hardware Open, however I don't mind shelling out $35 for board to do stuff with. Download and write an image SD card, plug it in.
Up and running in 15 minutes, with no 'wasted' time or money..
Call James Bond as an Evil Cat-Patting Genius has taken control of it. We must recover it before they get our launch codes!
Oh, so this isn't the plot for a movie?
(I am the original poster) - Yeah, been there, done that - can debug a partation table from a hex dump. I know all about MBRs, PBRs, Initrd images, compressed kernel images, and once wrote a 386 DOS extender in assembler so I could use more than 640kB.
But would like to reiterate - working witth the Linux kernel is not fun anymore - that is why few people want to do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Or perhaps my apathy has grown with age. However my desire to twiddle bits definately hasn't - I've moved on to FPGAs.
Maybe I just program/design for fun - my replacement for doing Suduko. I'ld much rather: hook a camera upto an FPGA or work my way thorugh Project Euler maths problems than bother writing anything for the Linux kernel.
I'm sure I could if I had a good reason to - in fact I hacked mixer support for a Brooktree PCI video card into the kernel some time back (way back!) after attacking the board with a multimeter. The Linux kernel has matured to the point where there is very little fun left in developing for it - why would I give up my spare time for no fun?
And bare metal ARM builds are not starting from nothing - most dev boards have a base system with device drivers and libraries for most stuff. Why the heck would I want a full OS to drive a few stepper motors, or act as a USB HID device?
Do you own any low-end dev boards? If not, get some. They are fun. I've got a
- CubieBoard - used as a media player
- a Raspberry Pi (in case I want to do high altitude ballooing) - used as a host for a 100MHz Logic Analyser
- a PcDuino (Android or Linux+ a bit of GPIO),
- a few Arduinos (one for controlling a reflow toaster overn)
- a few TI Launchpads(well they were $5...)
- a ChipKit Uno - 80MHz of microcontroller fun
- a MicroZed - gifted to me by Xilinx, the FPGA maker
- a Zedboard - gifted to me by Avnet to blog about
- TI Chronos watch - you can upgrade the firmware and make it run Mars time if you need to!
- A lot of FPGA boards
- My wiki-based FPGA VHDL programming course with 100K+ hits.
They are all much more interesting and 'fun' then writing a an obscure corner of the Linux kernel could ever be.
It is just too damn big, hard and complex. Why would I want to learn the ins and outs of such a large codebase unless somebody is paying me to?
It is not like the old days when you could pick up a "... in a nutshell" book, start hacking up a driver, then get it accepted into the kernel. I don't want a three year unpaid intership while I get up to speed and gain respect in the comunity.
I'll spend my time working on my project on either a microcontroller (AVR, PIC...) or a bare-metal build on ARM.
Not quite - hardware is only good at petrifying O(1) algorithms. They have to be tightly bounded in space and time.
I've taken the high tech way to designing hardware - FPGAs. So far I've built quite a few bits and bobs - 200MHz GPS referenced frequency counters, a 60 stage Mandelbrot pipeline (12B Ops per second @ 200MHz), SDRAM controllers, my own processors, video adapters, and implemented the DVI-D protocol. I've even worked out how to make a chip with 1Gb/s outputs work at 1.5Gb/s - yay! 1080p! Everything is in a HDL (Hardware Description Language) so can be used by others on their own projects. It isn't that expensive - dev boards start less than $100.
As Quinn points out it takes a very long time to get everything working correctly - you software guys don't know how lucky you have it!
I've put some of my projects on my wiki at http://hamsterworks.co.nz/mediawiki/index.php/FPGA_Projects if anybody wants to take a look.
Paper-clips float on water, if you place them in flat and very carefully.
I just had to raid the office supplies cabinet and try it...
It is a shame that you posted as an anonymous coward here. I'ld love to understand your thinking on this. As far as I see it, this is a win as the source code for the FPGA logic will be open, making this much like using Visual Studio to build an other Open Source project - hardly an Open Source fail.
I would also like to know if you run on Sparc CPUs as they are "open" (with published HDL source), rather than on Intel or ARM? If not, how can you defend that your favourite Open Source project (say Apache) running on Linux on an Intel system board is more "Open Source" than this? Do you have the source code for your MoBo's chipset?
You will with the Parallella...
... I guess you can always use weedkiller for artistic purposes, and photograph it from space.
Only in very specific areas. Someone more gifted in social skills might think she's quite naive and uneducated. I used to be like her, but now I think people like her are overgrown children.
And we would judge somebody more gifted in social skills as "perfect for management as they can't make sh*t work, but know which ass to lick to get ahead".
I know who's bookcase I'ld rather spend time reading from.
I assume this is the same Jeri Ellisworth that designed the Commodore 64 Direct to TV unit?
Yes, uber-hacker-maker. Has a collection of self-restored electron microscopes.
Much smarter & more creative than your average person.
Spoken like somebody who was born in the plug and play PC age...
The MFM controller actually controlled the disk positioning, and so you need to know the physicals of the device to access it, hopefully avoiding trashing the disk.
He is making a valid point.
Soon IDE will be a thing of the past, and maybe SATA will be replaced with something better... maybe native USB3.0 to the disk?
When I cleaned out my garage I found some old floppies (5.25" and 3.5", including compilers and OSs that cost me quite a lot), some DAT tapes, some Jaz disks, some zip disks, some audio cassettes and some MFM disks too.
All of which are pretty much junk.
An interesting aside - when I looked up the specs for a 20Meg MFM disk I found I was surprised that a then current PC was able to read the entire contents in less than half a minute. If only we could do that with today's 3TB drives...
I didn't read that from TFA - just that object level restores have been improved, as has some compression features.
Just so everybody is aware Oracle has always had kick-ass restore and recovery features, way ahead of other database - such things as Flashback, it has been shipping transaction logs since Noah was a boy, and the good ol' "ALERT TABLESPACE BEGIN BACKUP" to allow you to copy files online. It can perform change block tracking on database datafiles to allow increment backups "ALTER DATABASE ENABLE BLOCK CHANGE TRACKING USING FILE
Recovery is also awesome. "ALTER DATABASE RECOVER UNTIL [timestamp]", "ALTER DATABASE RECOVERY UNTIL CANCEL", "ALTER DATABASE UNTIL CHANGE [transaction number]" and so on. If you accidentally loose you control files (somewhat like your MS-SQL master database being trashed) you can recreate them using SQL.
The big problem is that you have to be doing a lot of it to be good at it, many very think books have been written on Oracle backup and restore. So tools like Oracle's RMAN have been created to manage the process for DBAs...
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -- Niels Bohr
