Re: Do one thing. Do it right.
On Friday 14 February 2020 07:50:01 Richard Owlett wrote:
> Youngsters have two foibles:
> More is always better.
> Glitz for its own sake.
> <smile ;>
> For perspective:
> 1. although only in mid-70's, my parents would be in their 12th
> decade.
> 2. my father took a M.E. degree rather than E.E. as it gave him
> more of what today would be considered a minimal BSEE degree.
> 3. my first computers ran on 1 MHz 6502's. 2nd even had 8k ram.
Whereas my first was a cosmac super elf. With 256 bytes of ram.
Eventually expanded to 4k of static ram for $400 plus an s-100
backplane. By then I had an interface to Sony 2850 u-matic machines, and
a vision of doing a production job with it at the tv station where I was
the A.C.E. at the time. For all I know its still being used, that was
1980 and the last time I checked, in '97, it was still used many times a
day. In a tv station control room that eons. And in writing that system
to make it all fit in 4k of ram, I did something that today would be
highly frowned upon, because so much if it was repetitious, I made
liberal use of self-modifying code, so the last thing I did was to
restore all the locations I had modified to their default values. Solid
as a rock, I was at that station for another year, and had added an old
burglar alarm battery, a 6 volt pb right across the 5 volt line as a
backup, and while I had borrowed forever an audio cart machine and made
several tape backups, and we had the usually undependable CA power, I
never had to reload it.
Do one job, do it right. I needed a clock for frame code, so I wrote one,
more accurate that either std frame or drop frame.
> On 02/13/2020 09:17 PM, David Wright wrote in another thread:
> [ https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2020/02/msg00611.html ]
>
> > If a device is small, it has to appeal to a mass market.
>
> *NO*! It's only required that engineering appeal to market.
> E.G. In the last year there have been multiple amazing prosthetics for
> children and small animals in the news. They were possible due to
> advances in 3D printing.
Agreed.
> > To do that, it has to be packed with features, whether
> > or not these are "detrimental" to *your* intended use.
>
> No! The inclusion of cell modem and WiFi would drive per unit cost of
> FCC approval through the roof.
Agreed again. Folks have zero clue about the complexity of dealing with
the regulatory agencies.
> > I was surprised how much of the pinephone's functionality
> > could be switched off, once I'd decoded the jargon in
> > their specifications (with help). But I don't see how you
> > can avoid having to compromise over the inclusion of those
> > (redundant to you) functions, particularly in view of the
> > extra cost of providing the flexibility to turn them off.
>
> If not there then *NO* need to turn off. ROFL
Chuckle.
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
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