emcrazyone

ha, you don't sound like you have kids. My kids love Roblox... You're birthday is coming up, what do you want? Roblox gift card. Grandma wants to get you a birthday, xmas, ____ gift, what do you want? Get me a roblox gift card or robucks as they are called. My kids now design shrits and sell them online and take the money and spend it on roblocks. Roblocks is also a way for kids to connect online. For example, mine talk to their cousins that live in another state and their friends from a neighborhood we moved away from.

just to complete the story, SCSI does have ATA command pass through. That is ATA commands over SCSI interface. In Linux, the libata library provides this implementation.

There are SATA drives that understand SCSI over ATAPI albeit in a limited way just to be clear.

another screen saver was Johnny Castaway. Was an IT guy at a company in the late 90s and this screen saver was on many workstations where I worked. Was always intriguing to see what Johnny would be into next...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r10WuRo7c50

If anyone is interested in the 6502 and its history, this YouTuber does a fantastic job covering the history. Some of his videos include past employees of MOS & Commodore employees.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP9y_7it3ZM

I have this toaster and LOVE it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=crc8n7D4kYg

you forgot 9 weeks off every summer, paid holidays, no contributions into social security, and some get classroom aids, they don't design curriculum (it's purchased), throw in common core for good measure....

why stop with YC? There are other VCs that might pull the trigger, no?

I'm a senior software develop & architect with two degrees. Does that make me over qualified for Apple software jobs?

funny that they have power down to the milli-watt and it's so stable. Anyone know what the update rate is? Is it with every second?

Cool looking web site

just out of curiosity...

if it's an eval board, then do they provide schematics which are typical of other eval board producers?

Having the schematic might aid in getting things working assuming the MAC <-> PHY circuitry supports what you want to do.

hmm, sounds suspicious, in that the seat sensor was disabled? Even our vehicles won't move, when in gear if no one is in the seat. Seat senors cut the drive train. Even my 15 year old el-cheap-o Sears garden tractor does the same thing: cuts the engine off if I stand up out of the seat while in gear.

"Someone has to do it. What makes John Deere's embedded software engineers more qualified..."

Simple, John Deere, probably like us, has spent more testing the software than you could ever do on your own.

You can't judge complex software just by looking at it. It must be tested. People who fail to understand this wind up making these uneducated comments. Go study ISO26262 and the MTB calculations required to pass it and maybe you'll change your tune.

Tested software runs on real vehicles and simulators at large companies, as I stated, running into the multi-million dollar price range. There is zero amount of code inspection the general public can do that would give the same assurances you get through testing.

Bottom line: just looking at code is not enough. You must test it. This is unit tests, simulations, field tests, harsh temperature, vibration, power cycle, high side/low side power distribution, code coverage, etc... None of this is possible by you inspecting code.

I actually agree with this statement and to your credit, a lot of the design work I do follows some of this.

Keep in mind that these are factories on wheels which means not only do we consume a tremendous amount of data, we also generate it. For example, 3D maps are built on the fly to show the customer where product has been sprayed, seeds planted, etc... On these vehicles, it's quite typical to see 1GB Data/hour generated which for an embedded device with no traditional hard drive, that's a lot. Flash memory is susceptible to extreme heat/cold so we have to be creative in this regard too (I can't talk much about this but suffice to say it's challenging).

That being a case of many, there is always a trade-off between performance and what you can reasonable keep separated either within the same PCB or between separate modules.

Thus, as much as I would like to keep separated, you simply can't sometimes. Current state of the art only allows for so much.

The non-computer people comment refers to the folks in the video; not this forum.

You also seem to be conflating right to repair vs. right to inspect code because you feel you have the right to do so for some reason (safety, don't like how it works, etc...). You don't have that right just like you don't have the right to walk into an assembly plant to see how your vehicle is assembled.

"The code, safety critical code especially, should be clear and should itself document the quirks of whatever it interacts with"

Agree and it does and we are audited by a 3rd party trained to looked at code written according to functional safety guidelines (ISO26262). Companies, like mine, don't have resources to respond to folks untrained on such matters. And for the non-safety aspects of the code, that's our intellectual property and our competitive advantage.

"Embedded has a culture of punting on abstractions due to the pervasiveness of cross cutting and global concerns"

You have data or proof of this or are you just talking from your personal experience? I assure you we take safety very seriously. Multiple millions are spent, as I said above, on testing to make sure code performs as expected; especially when a 3rd party audit and billions are on the line and, more importantly, the safety of our customers. You're inspection of the same code simply can't compete with the level of testing & auditing. You're really kidding yourself if you think otherwise.

"but 32-bit devices with dynamic allocation performing high level logical processing" Certain ASIL ratings dictate thou shall not perform dynamic allocations. You don't appear to be up to speed on functional safety matters.

"unreasonable is to force purchasers and users of heavy equipment to blindly trust the software controlling those devices."

Not true, disagree. It's unreasonable to assume we don't take safety seriously and demand to see our code when you can look at any company's functional safety audit records (they are public). To presume a right to change the code because you're not happy with some aspect of some functionality or you're concerned about safety is not your right and no company has the resources to support these requests from the general customer or public base. Moreover, as I already pointed out, it's our IP.

IP type code in this field is heavily guarded. Swath generation, swath acquisition, path planning are all very interesting algorithms that represent a company's IP.

perhaps, but if you sold the equipment without telling the new owner they were running your code and they got hurt or killed, as I said above, companies don't want tie up their resources fighting these claims or dealing with it in the first place.

not if the modified code also modified the boot loader.

Too bad that's not stated in the article. The way the article reads seems to imply a kernel OS.

Calling the commodore's firmware a kernel is a bit of a stretch in my opinion because it did not schedule anything. The 6502 had no MMU and therefore no virtual memory or running of more than one app.

One clever idea I learned when I was a kid tinkering with C64 was how the ROM resided at the same memory address as RAM. By toggling a bit, you can switch between the two. Applications back in the day would toggle this bit really fast to give the capability of having an assembly language program running in the background while your basic program interacted with it.

I learned this and it stuck with me over the years. C-Net BBS by a company called Perspective Software, if I recall correctly, did just this.

Cool article!

it's not and you're right. The right to repair effects agricultural equipment. Hacking the software to add features or disable things is not repairing it!

Tractors & Combines are way more expensive than cars so it's not a fair comparison. You can't use a cherry picker to replace a tractor engine... At least the large kind.

Tractors and Combines use DEF and I hear reports of people defeating it. Our software has checks to look for such activity.

"Safety is exactly one of the reasons why you'd want the complexity of software laid bare out in the open"

No, disagree. If I laid out our source code for you, there is no way you would have any way to understand it without all the internal documentation from which the software was architected and developed from. Non computer people always have this misconception that if they see the code, they see everything it's doing. To a degree you can see what code is doing but understanding why certain logic exists is not always clear without supporting documentations.

Additionally, some of our code is 3rd party licensed and that adds an entire new wrinkle to things.

For an over simplified example, our CAN buses have thousands of signals. A single CAN frame may have 20 to 30 internal signals and several signals across many CAN buses are examined to make decisions and I've only scratched the surface here. There is no amount of code study you can do to understand this without some coaching or review of associated internal specifications.

For me or any company to support someone's quest to understand the code would be a very costly endeavor that you're simply not entitled too or nor would it be a reasonable request.

" It's quite clear that if certain changes result in different behavior, then whomever made those specific changes is responsible for the resulting behavior."

Umm, well people lie. Or you make the change for yourself and your fellow farmer. Your fellow farmer is killed and his wife sues the tractor company. Do you need more examples or is it clear now?

This is just my opinion. Customers are not entitled to source code or what I call the work product. You're entitled to the end product you purchased, the binary, which the source code is compiled to produce.

Companies generally don't want you in the software for safety reasons. While true there is intellectual property around the guidance and swath generating algorithms, companies hate lawsuits. Lawsuits tie up resources, can cause stop shipments, generally lost profits, and tarnish the brand. Look at the Chrysler Jeep news...

You hack or change software on a vehicle and cause the auto-guidance to run over and kill someone or you circumvent a safety check in software unbeknownst to you due to your software changes and a spinny sharp thing that should have stopped doesn't and hurts or mames you or calibration changes cause engine to to over-heat and burn up and generally the company is held responsible for it.

As much time is spent testing software as is writing software. All our testing is there to make sure the software works as expected. Millions are spent on test equipment and millions of hours and man hours are spent making sure software works as expected.

I happen to work for a major agricultural company and I'm a lead software architect for their guidance + autonomous vehicles + precision farming embedded devices. We are one of John Deere's major competitors.

You should have a look at 4Coder: https://4coder.handmade.network/

Currently targeting the C++ language. The guy is writing it in C++ and is targeting Windows & Linux. I think he's using openGL.

The article mentions firmware version 2.30.165 where as mine is running 2.11.168 and when checking for updates, reports back I have the latest. I have the EX4 models.

I only run mine on private/home networks with no remote access in to them.

Curious about the version difference...

same here, I have a 4500 sqft home and I use 3 Ubiquiti AC-Pros (one per floor) and I have excellent performance and coverage. In fact, in my case, two of the APs are on the same floor just that one of them is in my foyer area that is open to the upstairs and this covers the upstairs floors. And before I installed a 3rd one in my basement, I had good basement coverage there and now that I have added one to the basement, the hand offs work seamlessly. I checked and rechecked - I have roughly 15-20 wifi devices from TVs, tablets, phones, kids tablets, chrome cast, fire sticks, and probably some others I can't recall and all my devices appear localized to the nearest AP and roaming, typically with my phone and tablet, works pretty well.

Skimming it, unless I missed it, under Linux there is no mention of epoll, edge vs level triggering. Things you should familiarize yourself with if you care about performance.

a few years back in Michigan, governor Snyder signed into law the right-to-work legislation. Indiana did the same earlier that same year (2012 I think). Giving employees to opt out of any unions

Exactly, I thought the very same thing. In fact, I read it with a critical eye at first and as I got through I was quite pleased. I thought it was really cool to mention the 8b/10b encoding near the end. yes, well done indeed!

sure. The guy in the video is a popular youtube personality; his name is Jerry Berg. He is an ex-Microsoft employee who worked on Windows and had access to Microsoft's internal SQL servers used to collect problem reports. He makes a few points in the video.

1. In the Terms & Conditions, Microsoft claims they get your IMEI number from mobile connect devices as part of their telemetry and then go on to say it's not PII (Personally Identifiable). Jerry explains how this is not true and explains how Microsoft through corporate partnerships can eventually link your IMEI data back to logs previously collected.

2. Jerry explains that there are two levels in the new Windows Creator program: A basic level and another, I forget what he called it, more verbose level. Jerry explains that 90% of the telementry data you might think is in the more verbose level is collected at the basic level. Kind of a moot point.

3. If you have turned off telemetry collecting features such as cortana and edge, by upgrading to Windows10 creator, these features are re-enabled and Microsoft says this is a bug but Jerry claims it's intentional.

These were the salient points I recall from the video. If you get a chance to view, I suggest giving it a watch. It's interesting.