You should see Atmel's bootloader process, and what a mess it is to make it work for a custom board with eg. a different type of RAM or flash. The only hardware vendor (in the embedded space) that I actually trust to make stuff that 'just works' these days is TI.

We ran into this on another vendor's hardware as well, and also ended up with a bitbanged solution (the wikipedia I2C page pseudocode, actually). I wonder if our vendor is also using Broadcom internally.

Maybe it is your terrible working conditions that makes people uninterested in working with you? And anyway, after 40h/w on a regular basis you aren't actually getting any extra productivity out of people, only more hours and resentment.

And if I want to uninstall?

He converted their reputation into money, which worked great until they didn't have any reputation left.

"Jack of all trades, master of none" is the correct saying, it is just missing the ending: "still better than a master of one."

And pray tell, what would you do with the custom language that the BIOS/GPU microcode is written in? There is no compiler for it or published hardware targets to even write a compiler for. For it to have any value at all they would also have to release an in-house compiler and publish API specs for internal components of hardware designs which they probably don't even own publishing rights to.

Most of what PayPal is used for doesn't have any physical customer interaction. For example, it's one of the few payment services I trust enough to make payments to small manufacturers in China. For that kind of transaction, One Touch is useless unless 1) I'm willing to pay several hundred dollars in down-payment on an Apple device, 2) fly out to China each time I need to pay for something. While One Touch might work for your local shopping mall, IMO Apple is getting into that market just as the market is trending towards the way Paypal operates, with purchases made online.

Assuming Google is a halfway competent tech company and is using at least a SHA1 hash, if you manage to create any file with an accidental hash collision you'll be the first person in history to do so, never mind a valid image file. And if they use a longer hash, well, the chances just become more astronomical.

An MSP430 has idle currents measured in uA, and a chip costs in the region of $1.50, with no external components required. BBB isn't useful in applications that require running off of a watch battery for a year, and isn't cheap enough to consider adding as an additional component in consumer electronics.

Try developing for an MSP430 on the MSP430... hence the distinction between 'target' and 'host'. When you can develop on the target, great. But a lot of these MCUs don't have the IOPS/RAM to run a generic scripting language, never mind a compiler.

Because "Segfault: 0xFCDA83B40" is *soooo* much better.

Volume loss of sea ice doesn't affect sea levels, since it was displacing sea water to begin with. Volume of land ice on the other hand, even if it migrates to an equal volume of sea ice, will cause rising sea levels.

Negative feedback cycles can still end up stabilizing at a different set-point, if the negative feedback is in the rate of change rather than the absolute value.

They're just larger and more expensive to process with a pick-and-place machine, so all the manufacturers go with SMD.