Ontopic Random Computer-Electronics Thread

Just had a $3K Keysight data acquisition box show up for a project I'm doing. Install the software/drivers/"license manager"/blah blah blah, plug the thing in, nada. Download the driver package for it off the Keysight website, read through the readme files, the model # for my particular DAQ isn't on there.

E-mailed them, now I'm on an e-mail conversation with them and apparently there's some "formerly HP" models that a driver literally doesn't exist for, and they're gonna be refunding me. Asked if I could "uptrade" it for a similar model with better specs that appears to actually have fucking drivers, we'll see how that goes...

How about haul the damn thing off the website in the meantime? fuck.
 
starlink.com

Sign-ups available. I wonder if it will be available for me this year. The website is quite nebulous as to what they mean by "Northern US and Canada". I saw Starlink 6 and another constellation last Saturday with some friends while we had telescopes out on my driveway. The Starlink satellites are not in a long train like they were first launched; they have quite a bit of separation now.

edit: Not sign-ups, I mean early notification of service availability.
 
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starlink.com

Sign-ups available. I wonder if it will be available for me this year. The website is quite nebulous as to what they mean by "Northern US and Canada". I saw Starlink 6 and another constellation last Saturday with some friends while we had telescopes out on my driveway. The Starlink satellites are not in a long train like they were first launched; they have quite a bit of separation now.
They're launched into a very low orbit (which I think is why they are initially so bright), then use ion engines to migrate up into their final orbit.
 
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Apple announced a move to ARM chips of their own design for Macs starting in the fall.

I wonder if Adobe will drag its ass again on recompiling their shit.
ARM market is a lot bigger than the POWER market was back in the day. Easier to compile to as well, no big-endian little-endian bullshit that breaks everything on recompile
 
ARM market is a lot bigger than the POWER market was back in the day. Easier to compile to as well, no big-endian little-endian bullshit that breaks everything on recompile


If an app is developed with Apples dev tools, it's likely a checkbox to tick when you compile.

But Adobe has always done it's own "our shit doesn't stink" thing with its Apple apps.
 
I designed a PowerPC 405e into an embedded Linux platform years ago. Fucking hated that thing.

Datasheets and design manuals showing peripheral registers reading bit 0 on the left to bit 31 on the right. FUCK.
 
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I designed a PowerPC 405e into an embedded Linux platform years ago. Fucking hated that thing.

Datasheets and design manuals showing peripheral registers reading bit 0 on the left to bit 31 on the right. FUCK.
yep

Big Endian Byte Order: The most significant byte (the "big end") of the data is placed at the byte with the lowest address. The rest of the data is placed in order in the next three bytes in memory.

Little Endian Byte Order: The least significant byte (the "little end") of the data is placed at the byte with the lowest address. The rest of the data is placed in order in the next three bytes in memory.
 
My Dads company got one, from DEC I think. I think it was Itanium, or that other RISC deal that NT 4.0 supported.

Was supposed to be a big badass DB server.

Sucked balls. Total waste of $10k they didn't really have.

EDIT: ALPHA

They bought a DEC ALPHA and it was a horrendous turd.
 
Figured.

For the new macOS 11 Big Sur, all of the included apps are adding native ARM binaries. Xcode developers can "just open their apps and recompile" to get an ARM binary. Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop were demoed as native ARM apps. Final Cut Pro has an ARM version too, along with features that run on the "Neural Engine" in the Apple SoC.
 
oh, itanium was arguably a bigger fuckup than power.
I wouldn't call power a fuckup, it was around for a long time and still is, though not so much in the server/desktop/embedded space anymore.

It had piles of design wins - the PS3/Xbox360/Wii all ran Power CPUs.