Dying old beats dying young I guess, but dying sucks overall. The only ones "ready to die" are those where age or illness has already sucked the life out of them. I'm not going to chase the singularity or cryogenics or any other mumbo-jumbo promising eternal life, but heck I hope I'll be like this when I'm 89.

Living in Norway + artificial light + student life with no real commitments I found that my natural cycle is more like 24/12 = 36 hour days than 24. In fact, without alarm clocks I'd have a helluva time staying on the same page as everyone else. The problem is that that sooner or later that clashes with real life and you must get up in the "middle of the night" for a family dinner or you get up in the "morning" and start drinking at a party which messes you up. On Mars making it another 40 mins would be the least of my worries.

Sounds like you've never seen what passes for production code in the bowels of a major corporation. Look at the questions on experts-exchange or stackoverflow. You can safely assume most of them are for paid work. After that, you shouldn't have self esteem issues anymore.

Nothing is better than your own code. But given the choice between my predecessor's hairy ball of custom code and a hairy ball of clue between documented frameworks, I'm not so sure anymore. Because the other side to being generic is "will probably continue to function in a sane fashion if I tweak it a little" while one-off code tends to make a lot of assumptions that may have been true when it was written but falls apart in surprising ways when you try to change it. Unless your predecessor actually made clean, documented code but I know with myself that if you're in a hurry that won't happen. I had to walk a colleague through some systems we use once a year to update various coding schemes and such and to be honest it's an ugly mess. But we do it once a year and we're busy fixing the stuff we use often, so....

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Government debt is only one part of it..

then I'll care about what "prominent members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate" think about climate change.

Take a look at what James Inhofe (R-OK) who is chairman of the fucking Senate Committee on the Environmentthinks of global warming. TRIGGER WARNING: IF STUPIDITY UPSETS YOU DO NOT CLICK.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...

Test equipment is allowed to transmit and receive on those frequencies. If it looks like a radio, it can't. I have a number of cellular testers hanging around here that can act like base stations, mostly because I buy them used as spectrum analyzers and never use the (obsolete) cellular facilities. Government has different rules regarding what it can and can't do in the name of law enforcement, although FCC has been very reluctant to allow them to use cellular jammers.

If you can afford it, something from Ettus would better suit your application.

That's not it, CRLF was a feature. How do you make strike-through text on a type-wheel printer? It automatically advances to the next position and it only has a fixed number of characters, you don't double it with strikethrough-a in addition to regular a. So you send a CR - carriage return - to return to first position, space your way over to the text to be striked out and make a ------- over it before you CRLF to the next line. And you have no idea how old knowing that makes me feel.

Unfortunately most of the projects I've been on are of the "We want to replace old system A and make a new system B that also has features X, Y, Z" variety. What they want from the new system is usually okay, it's somewhat documented already, you've identified some stakeholders, you can show them prototypes, you can ask for clarifications and their testing validates the feature. Developing new code for genuinely new features is actually quite easy and fun.

The old system on the other hand is more like software archaeology, nobody really seems to have the specs - or maybe a spec 1.0 from 10 years ago that's got nothing to do with reality - and if you're replacing it it's probably because it's crap, uncommented code in an arcane language with poor frameworks and third party components. So you dig and keep digging and try to implement something similar without knowing what's a feature and what's a bug, who'll come yelling if you break something or features nobody told you about and you weren't aware anyone was using disappear.

I had a bit of an epiphany today at work when i finally found out how structure a major piece of the redo I'm working on and I've so far spent ~2 months digging through that code. From a similar job I was doing in another area I thought maybe 2-3 months total, now I'm guessing it'll be 6-12 because of all the rework I have to make and every apparently simple thing has exceptions and special cases. It's wasn't my bad estimation, it's that the conditions are entirely different. Like comparing travel speed for a walk in the park to chopping your way through a dense jungle.

Good managers get my best guess.
Bad managers get my worst case.
Horrible managers get my resignation.

Tag: WORKS4ME

We think after we build this new PCB we can go for the croudfunded manufacturing run. It's mostly surface-mount, and we expect to sell assembled boards in this run, and then the next version will be fully-packaged radios.

Hi AC,

Matt Ettus has a story about a Chinese cloner of the USRP. The guy tells Chinese customers that it is illegal for them to buy from Ettus, they must buy from the cloner instead. Then, when they have problems and require serivce, he tells them to get it from Ettus. Who of course made nothing from their device sales and can not afford to service them.

This is not following the rules of Open anything. It's counterfeiting.

So, sometimes it is necessary to change the license a little so that you will not be a chump. I discussed the fact that the hardware is fully disclosed but not Open Hardware licensed with RMS, the software is 100% Free Software, and there is a regulatory chip you can't write. We can go for Respects Your Freedom certification that way..

I've paid my dues as far as "Open" is concerned, and Chris has too. This is all we can give you this time.

The case selection was so that we'd have at least one case that would work. We did not take much time on it. We'd be happy to have other people designing and selling cases.

The version after this one requires cases that look like real radios. That is going to be a bigger problem. We don't yet have a mold-design partner, etc.

We implement it as a chip that intercepts the serial bus to the VFO chip, and disallows certain frequencies. On FCC-certified equipment we might have to make that chip and the VFO chip physically difficult to get at by potting them or something. This first unit is test-equipment and does not have the limitation.