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.