linuxlizard

Thank you for such a great blog post that even years later, I could catch up and understand!

(We never did turn on the blue noise block. Even today, it sits idle. Sad.)

The great thing ("great") was we did the lower end laser printer niche for HP. We were able to make ASICs cheaper than HP could make them for themselves. So we had the (cough) less impressive hardware (scan sensors, laser engines, motors) to work with. So image quality was so-so at even the best of times.

We were able to bury a lot of bodies under the sensor noise and engine output. But we made a super reliable, super cheap laser printer -- VW Bug of Laser Printers, if I may brag a bit. Twelve years later, the M1005 is still selling like hotcakes I hear.

We had to generate values in firmware then populate a LUT. IIRC we just used a simple pseudo-random number generator from the C library. Non-crypto so it didn't matter too much.

Back when I worked at Marvell Semiconductor (circa 2005), we made laser printer ASICs for HP. We did a lot of dithering in hardware. We had a hardware block that did error diffusion, we had a hardware block that did regular diffusion. We also had a hardware block that did Blue Noise. I was responsible for implementing the firmware that drove those printers' scan/copy path: scan an image in monochrome, run through the dither hardware to create the bit pattern fed to the laser engine.

No one could explain to me how to use the blue noise block. I couldn't understand what the blue noise block was doing. This is the first article that explained, in terms I could understand, how blue noise dithering works.

I can die happy. Thank you.

Finally a way I can store all those family photos I swear I'm going to sort through someday!

Many years ago, someone asked this same question on HN and recommended runbox.com I started using them then and still subscribe. Good IMAP support. New web ui (v7) is quite nice but I still hit the older config pages.

tl;dr. runbox.com

Oh lordy, jumper IRQs. I'm so grateful for PCI. The PS/2 and parallel connectors couldn't die fast enough when USB came out.

(American here.) No, no. You have a point.

I wish Rust's non-x86 support was a bit better. I wish I had time to jump in and help on the MIPs target. I wish I could figure out how to cross-compile to ARM/ARM64+uClibC. I wish I had a pony, too.

Very exciting to see a language tuned toward reliability taking off like this.

> If something bad happens there, it's not a major problem.

Well, unless you're in Idaho like some of us. ;-)

Pascal is one of Ada's parents, definitely. I did Pascal then transitioned to Ada quite easily in university.

Cradlepoint | Boise, ID and Los Gatos, CA USA | Embedded Linux, Web Development, SaaS, DevOps | https://cradlepoint.com/about-us/careers/

At Cradlepoint we build embedded Linux routers which highly integrated carrier network support as a failover solution. We use a large web software stack to manage thousands of routers in the field. Retail location will use our routers as a failover to cellular if their primary DSL/Cable goes down. We also build vehicle mounted routers. City buses use our routers to provide customer Wi-Fi. FEMA uses our routers in the field to provide Internet in disaster areas. We're also investing heavily in the new 5G and FirstNet rollout.

Disclaimer: I'm not involved in hiring. I'm just a firmware engineer who really enjoys working here. On the firmware side, we're a lot of C and Python.

Works. Thank you!

Is the paper available elsewhere? https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8663043/file/8663044.pdf

Seems like now is a perfect opportunity!

I have some insider information I can offer. DM me.

Update: I should delete this because it doesn't offer anything useful to the discussion.

I just finished reading _The Ghost Map_, the story of John Snow's study of London's cholera epidemic. There's a good section of the book about his studious study of ether and chloroform. Good book, highly recommended in our current pandemic timeline.

What kind of production systems are a good fit with Haskell? I've wanted to learn Haskell but keep getting distracted by other shiny things that are more directly applicable to my job.

"Even Omni Group had layoffs a couple months ago."

Aw. I love their software. Omnigraffle is my platonic ideal of great software.

Dug around until I could find a suggestion that I would recommend highly. As suggested above, taking a compilers course and an operating systems course will give you a view into how computers work (not the electrical parts, but the general software parts).

In addition, I'd recommend taking any programming language course offered: C, C++, Java, Python, Lisp, Prolog, (Ada, Cobol, Fortran, Basic, and on and on). Learning the other languages gives one a view into programming in general, not just in your favorite language.

My 2c.

I have the same issue. I try to remember a quote, origin I can't remember, "If we want to do anything, we must not try to do everything."

If you're interested, want to help me work on my web project? :-) I'm not a front end web dev and am having a slow go at it.

""As an American citizen" - buddy we are not known for our intelligence or our honor so I don't know what relevance you think that has."

Speaking as an American citizen, that cracks me up.

Cradlepoint | Boise, ID, USA | Full Time | ONSITE

Business continuity and networking products.

https://cradlepoint.com/company/careers

SaaS Python AWS Embedded Linux IoT

Disclaimer: I am just an engineer here at Cradlepoint, not responsible for hiring. But I enjoy working here and wanted to spread the word.

That sounds marvelous. Is Europe hiring?

And what we have can disappear in a moment. One bad medical diagnosis or a layoff and my savings will be wiped out.

I have plenty of space in my basement. Call me. Low rates!

I'd like to have a keyboard with a 0 (zero) to the left of the 1 (one) digit.

Yeah, EDA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation) is way behind.

There are VHDL and some Verilog but from what (little) I understand, the industry has moved to SystemVerilog and there Free (as in Speech) tools haven't caught up.

Sounds like you rolled your own RTOS. Dang. Very nice!

Checking that out now! Reminds me a little of the Python library Hypothesis. https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/