What makes you think that the new system won't be prone to the same issues?

yeah... i love the concept of git.. just not the confusing implementation. I'm never sure if I should use a top-level command or a confusing set of switches to do something basic. I hear mercurial is better in this regard, but I've never used it on a project so I can't say.

Are you kidding?

Yes, some, usually large, companies have very competent engineering teams doing embedded work. Often, they're some of the smartest guys around(although IMHO the Verilog guys are smarter on average...YMMV). Then there are hoardes of engineers around them who do most of the integration, grunt work, bug fixing, etc. Their work is usually not thoroughly inspected by the smart guys.

Then you have the thousands of small companies doing embedded development. They usually have one guy who is somewhat competent but needs to be fluent in everything from hardware bringup to adding a web configuration dialog. These are the guys that do things like try to stick ubuntu on their ARM board. These guys usually do not have a very comprehensive view of security, and even if they did they don't have the time or the budget to do it right.

If I had a nickle for every company I've worked for who just wanted to integrate off the shelf(usually FOSS) components together and ship it as soon as it was barely functional...

Most embedded guys are batting out of their league and don't have a clue when it comes to security... and I say that as an embedded guy who often has to do exactly that to get the product out.

Most embedded development I've done is far from 'software engineering' - it's whack and hack until the tests pass(often because you loosened the testing requirements).

this is old news and we've known about it for years. There are also commercial companies that run similar networks.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, but where were you guys 4-5 years ago when we first found out about this shit? Not enough people cared then and not enough people care now.

Like we talked about the last time this was in the news, the data is public and there isn't anything you can do about it. The best response is to set up your own network to monitor the government and see how they like it. Imagine how fast they'd try to ban you(like the cops are trying to do with Waze now).

Seems like it would be easy(given a military budget anyway) to take one out once you detect it. Lasers should be safe in an urban environment given a tracking system that is robust enough. If you still wanted to use a projectile, you could go with something like dry ice and just send a projectile sized appropriately for the distance you need to shoot. If you miss, it melts before it causes too much collateral damage. Hell, even a 'net gun' or something like it could take out a modern drone.

If the smart folks in the US military industrial complex can't figure this out then I'm more worried about that than any terrorist conspiracy. I'm sure they can, however, they just need a few billion thrown at them first.

Wow, you're right!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pa...

No, that's not desert. CA has deserts, but most of the state is not a desert and certainly coastal southern california and the southern san jaquin valley are not deserts. They may be dry, but they ain't deserts.

I always cringe when I see stories about CA water conditions because they bring out comments like yours that try to redefine the meanings of words like desert and drought.

Well if you anchor the pumping stations to the ocean floor you can probably use tidal action and some one-way valves(like you have in the blood vessels in your legs) to have a distributed pump. Freshwater is lighter than salt water, right? I'd try to use that desity difference to drive the flow.

I wonder how feasible it would be to grab freshwater from the mouth of the columbia river and transport it via flexible, non-rigid tubing laid on the seafloor through the SF bay and up to the CA aqeduct? I bet you could lay it fairly cheaply and you wouldn't need to worry about real estate prices.

No, CA is not "mostly desert". Not even close.

I always hate these kinds of discussions when there are too many engineers in the room. Of course, digital is better. You can prove it with Nyquist's theorem. In the long run, digital will win.

That said, there are numerous implicit signal-changing steps which tend to happen with analog equipment that people often find pleasing and which are not/haven't been sucessfully emulated in most digital audio equipment.

Take guitar amps. I've got a couple of decent Roland digital amps. They do an OK job of modelling a few different old tube amps. Do they sound like my friend's old blackface quad reverb? Oh god no. There is some magic going on there that the digital guys haven't figured out how to reproduce. Even vs. odd harmonics? Yeah I think we get that now, but there's more in there and we're not successfully modelling it. I can enumerate a lot of factors we're probably missing(power supply brownout at high volume, capacitive and inductive feedback loops, tube nonlinearities, transformer nonlinearities, temperature fluctuations, microphonic components... etc etc etc) but there are still more we haven't really considered yet.

That said, there are still people who prefer solid-state guitar and HiFi sound to analog colored sound. A lot of it is what you're used to. People hear different things, sometimes due to culture, sometimes due to physiology... it's complicated.

Back to vinyl records - they do have a nicer sound in many cases, clicks and pops aside. It's probably a result of the RIAA EQ and the physics of a needle riding over vinyl, but I don't really know. One thing I do think has value is the act of listening to a complete record. Not only are you appreciating the artists' complete work as they intended it, the ritual of listening to a record often entails setting aside time and space to solely enjoy that record. You can't compare listening to, say, Dark Side of the Moon, while lying on your couch in a dark room to listening to a few out-of-context songs on your headphones while riding a bus.

Whatever... we aren't going to solve this battle on /.

you're probably autistic... haha...

ok, seriously, if you like this and you live in San Diego, why not check out something similar(albeit with a mechanical bent): http://www.craftsmanshipmuseum...

Good point about the socket strips.

The point? Well, it gives you an appreciation for digital layout(crosstalk, trace capacitance, etc). You also understand intimately how the pieces fit together, so when you encounter them in an integrated package you have a better feeling for what's going on. I get you though - I wouldn't try to use a wirewrapped 68k for anything I need to rely on.

Getting it working on a breadboard is no small feat. Kudos. I'm sure it helps to only run at 2MHz.

Rather than, as has been suggested, spin a PCB for it, why not try wire-wrapping next time? Less capacitance than a breadboard and a bit more permanent.

Back at DeVry(haha) we built 7MHz 68k systems using wirewrap. Great times. I freaking love 68k assembly. We(well, the smart ones) also used 22V10 PALs for address decoding to save on 74 series logic chips.

Another next step - find a chip with an MMU so you can run real linux. I think a 68020 or '030 has one. Much higher clock speed too. The pin density is still low enough(I think it's 0.1 but in a grid) that you can work with it. Check old electronic stores' back shelves for sockets.