TIL: the "command unit" of a javelin missile is a capable night-vision system, even after the missile is fired.
32 karma · joined March 15, 2022
Systemctl restart
mysqld
(Or mariadb, if you pronounce "SQL" as "sequel")
You could download every NDS game ever made, in every region, in a few days.
Small indie ROMs might be 2-16MiB, but the big Pokemon/etc games went up to 128MiB. With 8-64GiB microSD cards, you could fit a library of games into one cartridge.
Personally, I think that most of the people who pirated NDS games would never have paid for them, so there may not have been many lost sales. But I also can't deny that the small game developers got royally screwed, and IMO the 3DS may have suffered from a dearth of creative small devs.
It was a fantastic console, and fairly open. It had two ARM CPUs (one per screen), and there was a terrific homebrew scene. Some of my first embedded C programs were for the NDS lite. It had ebook readers, paint programs, a toy Linux port, the whole 9 yards.
But, that openness also made it open to piracy. The way you loaded code onto the system was through "flashcarts". They were shaped like game cartridges, but they had a microSD slot on the top and an internal MCU which often ran a firmware that could load game ROMs from the filesystem, and even add features like cheats and save-states.
The widespread availability of those devices dramatically shrank the market for NDS games. Developers were dropping off the platform well before the 3DS came out, and Nintendo started to pay much more attention to DRM.
It was sort of a sad situation. The ability to write your own software for a handheld game console was amazing in the 2000s, but that openness ended up suffocating the platform.
My 1990s car has an ECU that only has one job, and runs fully-characterized code. I'd trust it to run another 25 years with no problems, firmware updates, or security patches.
I do not trust something running a full-fledged OS to drive something safety-critical; I cannot imagine that the whole system is fully vetted, and I don't want bugs in the chip that is in charge of my engine.
And now they're planning to run ML algorithms on the ECU to use all the extra compute that they never needed in the first place? That sounds like an absolute nightmare.
Based on what you've written, I am very glad that I'll probably never buy a new ICE car ever again.
Having been pulled over a few times, and received a few mail tickets, the latter make a lot more sense.
When I get pulled over, there's always a bit of menace. I've had K-9s sniff around my car while the officer admires toys attached to it. In the US, there are swaths where any roads off the interstates are basically bandit territory if you have out-of-state plates and/or the wrong colored skin.
When I get a ticket in the mail, I can choose to pay or contest it with a level head. Often the mail tickets include links to a video, which can be hilarious if you register your vehicle to a family address.
But modern traffic stops are an embarrassing blight on the nation, especially considering our civil forfeiture laws. If you're in the US, pray that you get a state trooper.
My experience writing C for RISC-V MCUs is about the same as doing so for Cortex-M platforms. They're a bit low-volume/expensive atm, but the core is very appealing to chip makers because it has solid software support and no royalties.
I also wouldn't write ARM off, though. Their 'coming-soon' MCU neural accelerators could open a lot of doors if it works well on a low power budget.
For example, GigaDevices makes an STM32F1 clone which comes in two flavors with the same peripheral memory map: ARM Cortex-M3, or RV32IMAC.
Some things are good to have, even though they don't make money. There's a fun novella that parodies the opera mindset, called Maskerade:
“Who does the accounts?”
“All of us, really,” said Salzella.
“All of you?”
“Money gets put in, money gets taken out...” said Salzella vaguely. “Is it important?”
Bucket’s jaw dropped. “Is it important?”
“Because,” Salzella went on, smoothly, “opera doesn’t make money. Opera never makes money.”
“Good grief, man! Important? What’d I ever have achieved in the cheese business, I’d like to know, if I’d said that money wasn’t important?”
Salzella smiled humorlessly. “There are people out on the stage right now, sir,” he said, “who’d say that you would probably have made better cheeses.” He sighed, and leaned over the desk. “You see,” he said, “cheese does make money. And opera doesn’t. Opera’s what you spend money on.”
“But...what do you get out of it?”
“You get opera. You put money in, you see, and opera comes out,” said Salzella wearily.