My accountant told me he had clients break down and cry in his office this year. On one hand I totally understand. On the other, I'm not sure I do. Did people actually think that money existed? What if everyone had tried to sell their CSCO or Redback shares at the height of the market? The price would have dropped. There would have been no market for the market makers to manipulate.
Sorry, I just had to say that.
A friend warned me when I said I was going to work on a USB controller. He said it was a huge spec and it would take me months to figure it all out.
I didn't believe him. I went off to write a host controller for the PowerPC 8xx chip. Six month passed. Turns out he was right. Still, it was fun to learn the entire spec from top to bottom.
Who ever claimed that USB was going to make anyone's life easier was a liar. There are days when I am amazed it works at all. While I like many things about it it seems way too complex for the job it need to do. Maybe I'm just too simplistic.
It's been interesting to track the Linux USB project for the last year. They have been slowly adding devices while struggling with controller driver issues and (mostly) software interface issues. The first generation of USB stack was simple and worked for keyboards and mice but didn't help more complex devices. This was scrapped for the 2.3.x/2.4.x kernels. The new API is better but has some synchronization holes in it which are both poorly specified and poorly understood. But, as with most things linux it will get sorted out and the problems will get solved.
Most of the linux code is pretty good. The UHCI and OHCI drivers are, well, while working they still have some bugs and problems.
Have you tried to run any applications on a PC with onl 32mb of memory lately? It's pretty much impossible. It seems all of the application writers in the world have gotten together and decided that their apps must have a working set of at least 32mb and take at least 64Mb of total memory.
I recently tried to get away with running Linux on a laptop, with the idea of using some 'other' word processor to look at Microsoft Word documents. Hah. Near as I can tell this can't be done. And, while there are some interesting word processors out there for linux, they are generally pretty large. Here's a sample:
Staroffice is pretty, but also pretty huge. I'd say 128Mb is a minimum. It does import work docs better than most. WordPerfect is pretty also and does not include a huge frame work around it. It won't import some of my word docs, however. AbiWord is the smallest. It actually seemed to have a reasonable footprint but also would not import some of my word documents.
As a wildcard I tried "Wine", the windows emulator. It actually ran WINWORD.EXE and EXCEL.EXE from my hard disk. A rather amazing feat. But they both needed about 64MB more memory than I had so my little machine paged itself within an inch of it's harddisk's life. (I later upgraded to 80mb and wine worked better. I may actually use word under wine if I find it's stable)
During this process I found I was running Netscape 4.72 and decided to upgrade to 6.0. Again, major bloatware. 32mb was suddenly way too small a machine for Netscape.
Personally I think it is a C++ conspiracy formed by people who don't realize that an automatic C++ object declared inside a function will call about 8 zillion constructors and allocate 12.5mb of memory each time the function is called, only to dump that 12.5mb of memory back on the heap when the function is exited...
If you really want to make a full time job out of this, you might check out http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Office/"
Virtual circuits, point-to-point links and distributed phone switches.
Looking at the phone poles around my house I'm begining to wonder if running copper pairs back to a central office makes sense anymore. I'm dreaming of a distributed phone system.
If bandwidth is essentially free, or very cheap, why not dedicate bandwidth to each house?
Born 3/14/98 12:08pm 7lbs, 7oz 19 1/2"
Not much else going on this month, sorry... See you next month!
Born 3/14/98 12:08pm 7lbs, 7oz 19 1/2"
Not much else going on this month, sorry... See you next month!