Did you actually have the console, or just the HogPC software?

Because while it might be great for live shows, I've truly come to despise the hog when it comes to programming anything more complicated than a single scene. Seriously, I think I liked the lighting console that I had to use floppies and a VGA cable with better. At least that one was clear on exactly which scene I was working on, so I know exactly what happens when I press the next button. (that's without getting into overrides :/)

Seriously, the console/software is pretty good if you want colors on the fly with someone basically DJing the lights, but It would be a pita to run something like a play.

But, But you can just put Linux on there. Then you can use Java for all those fancy things you mentioned. That will solve all your problems.
https://xkcd.com/801/
Seriously, I'm pretty sure I've seen this on an old Vonage box I was playing around with.

For many of the smaller microcontrollers we're lucky to have a full libc. It's always a wonderful day when I have to choose between rewriting an algorithm to use integers or taking a chance with new hardware with a built in floating point unit when the ship date is fast approaching.

This is the next big one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Honestly I wonder how many devices it will affect. I know anything which isn't patched and relies on security certificates is hosed, but what about the network printer that nobody cares about and is running completely unsecured?

With triangulation, and Doppler shift calculations it doesn't matter. Though it's much harder to do those things with everyone vs just have them send their position data. Not that ISPs don't already know everything about you.

In other words, this thing is going to be really slow if you try to use it for serious work. Why? Because HP is cheap and doesn't want to shell out for decent components. That and/or they like their locked down bootloader.

Want to bet on whether or not SpaceX convinces NASA to let them transition to sending up the DragonV2 on the supply runs as part of the testing? It would give the new capsule valuable flight data, and wouldn't cost NASA another cent contract wise.

They say "randomly" generated coefficients, but I'll bet you can use a psudo random number generator and pass in the same seed value to both the sender and reciever. Bam, now both sides have the same set of semi random coefficients to use when doing the fancy linear algebra.

That's a part of it. Without looking into the details, Cape Canaveral doesn't seem to want to deal with more than one rocket launch within a week of each other. Wile the US Gov launches from Vandenberg, they also launch from Cape Canaveral. Plus the Orbital Sciences launches, other commercial launches, and everything else that happens there. The current story is often launch attempt one aborts, launch attempt two has a delay to make sure they fixed the problem, then it's a several week delay because Cape Canaveral had another launch planned.

The other reason is the idea of recovering the Falcon 9 rocket. It could be easier to launch from Texas and recover at Cape Canaveral.

The problem with ASLR is that it involves Position Independent Code. The absolute addresses may change, but functions are called by their relative addresses to each other. When you know were one function is you know were all the others are as well. A mild example of this new randomization technique is to randomize the file order being fed into the linker. Different file order means different function layout. Then even if you know where one function is you don't know where all the others are without looking at that individual binary.

Like I said, cost is king.

Heck, I've been trying to redesign something to use the ATTiny and bitbang USB. Thinking about it, that's where the 4k number came from. Boards with more memory and more features are getting cheaper and that's awesome. I can't wait for when integrated USB becomes as common as integrated SPI and TTL.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to get out of my cave and yell at some kids on my lawn.

I was just talking in general. When someone says "simple microcontroller" I think of an ATMicro/Mega or something like the MSP430 most of which cap out somewhere between 2 and 16k. Anything more than that is a full ARM soc and normally is expensive and has finicky power and i/o requirements compared to the "simple microcontrollers" I normally work with. They're the lap of luxury since, like I said, you normally spend large amounts of time to make the code work with the 4k device instead of the 16k just to save a few cents per unit.

Good for voting machines, bad for anyone who doesn't need any fancy features but needs more than 4k Bytes of code. Since that's your entire program space with those small microcontrollers. You find weird bugs and limitations in many of those since they have to use a stripped down libc. When you hit that code cap most of the time your only option is to redesign the entire board or start using hacks to cut down on code size. The Arduino might have popularized them, but microcontrollers are still a game where you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars up front just to save ten cents per unit.

Also, since it's much more of a pain to update code don't expect things to be patched unless they're critical. Even then it would be really expensive. Worse, since these things still use a stack you can still get them via Return Oriented Programming.

SD cards are actually even easier since you can talk to them over SPI. You can get a fifty cent microcontroller to read and write from those with no problem. The annoying thing is that those microcontrollers use a Harvard architecture. Instruction and data code use entirely different memory. So you can read and write to an SD card, you just can't run code off it.

FBI... Policing.... That's good, tell me another. J. Edgar Hoover pretty much set the tone for the FBI. Which organization do you think is actually prosecuting most whisleblowers and anyone the gov doesn't like?

The thing is that the FCC (US government agency that regulates telecoms) can do that. It's what the whole Title II reclassification thing is all about. http://www.washingtonpost.com/... Which is why the lobbyists and congress are freaking out. https://www.techdirt.com/artic...