xradionut

Wirth also created successors to Pascal and co-created an operating system and the hardware it ran/runs on.

It's currently unobtainium, it can't be purchased.

Here's a suggestion I haven't seen: Unless you have full management support, a skilled team, valid business reasons for this conversion, and expectations of succeeding, consider moving to another company/job.

You've been given the task of digital archeology/septic cleanup. Unless you like the tedium and stank, it's not going to bode well...

MIPS hasn't gone anywhere. You can get PIC32 chips and boards based on them for various projects include the Open Source TenTec 506 Rebel radio.

While there's more tools and chips for ARM on small systems, I still prefer MIPS due to lower complexity/insanity of the tool chain.

It's hard to get any of the large system boards and multiprocessor chips without being an OEM.

I comment them at the time of creation and add them to my snippets file with the comment.

There's a lot of open data available, depending on what you are looking for. If I had time, I could probably spend it on this SE and earn points, count coup, or whatever. Instead I'm working with a couple of user groups helping local programmers analysts learn how to dig into it. We have a few specific data sets that we use for different types of analysis, demographic, mapping and financial.

The first hit/dose is free.

On the other hand you do have companies that do make millions that are bailing on certain aspects of Microsoft tools and servers due licensing costs and increases. I've been involved in IT budgeting for almost two decades and the CFOs don't always sign the check just because it's an IBM/Microsoft/Oracle solution.

Software cost for my side projects: $0

Lua 1994 Icon 1977

I recommends Zed's to the absolute beginners. If they can handle LPTHW, they are on a good track for the future.

The OP has "dabbled", he hasn't committed himself to a single language nor a good regimen/project to succeed. Let's look at this quote:

"On top of that, there’s a constant din of “Python’s not for you, it’s for them ({scientists, academics, hackers, statisticians, someone else})” out there if you look up stuff about Python."

Really? Sounds like a bad excuse to me. There's a fuck-ton of tutorials and books for Python beginners of all ages and backgrounds. It's one of the few languages I recommend to newbies for that reason, beside the fact it's easy to be productive in. We have a full spectrum of users at local meetups and I chat with the scientist and tutor the beginners. Python users are diverse as a crowd at a state fair.

And coding isn't programming. There's a lot more to know than the syntax of a few languages and APIs. It's a whole universe to explore and learn how to control and leverage. You can find a cool project, then drop down the rabbit hole the rest of your life, enjoying the beauty...

Having been "online" since the '80s, I respectfully disagree. Relative anonymity in "real" life leads to antisocial activity and rudeness since there's little chance of identity or recourse. Consider the behavior of automobile drivers.

Anonymity online can't fully be achieved except by a small few, but the positive benefits can be simulated for many by careful operators of BBS or internet forums.

This is similar to what I would do in the same situation. If I didn't need the income of my day job, I'd spend the time on public service or charity of some sort. I can't see myself spending money like a trust fund dilettante nor funding yet another startup.

It's not debugging as much as what us old timers call troubleshooting. At the university I had an insane advantage over those folks that had never seen a Simpson multimeter nor soldered a component nor seen a schematic. I had spent my teenage years building radios and computers followed by formal training in the military. And the Navy taught us how to troubleshoot large systems down to the component level. So college was mostly easy and extra beer money was earned fixing other students electronic devices and tutoring.

If the organizers really want to make a difference, the site should replace the words "call and email" with "buy and pay".

I refused to install Skype for work, pointing out that it's not as secure as it's alternatives. Plus the fact it's disrupting, crappy software and you still can reach me by email, phone, VPN or walk down the hall to my office.

I agree with the author in regards to coding web sites. It's not enough to know a just a few languages, there's a whole frickin' vocabulary of crap piled on layers of services and frameworks frosted by the JS flavor of the week.

Or just configuration. Everybody wants to reinvent Make and they all do it wrong...

While I love the blog and the very clear explanations, none of this is new nor amazing to the experienced RF engineer, enthusiast, or practitioner. What's awesome is that the hardware and software are currently cheap enough that more people can discover and enjoy the larger spectrum around them. Welcome!

Now go build some antennas! :)

I used to repair KLA wafer steppers and loaders back in the day as ppart of my job. Not something you would find outside a fab, lab or test facility.

No. "brow" is short for browse. Cookie if you know what language.

I chose my laptop mainly on the quality and layout of the keyboard. Unlike the OP, I don't travel as much so I had more choices due to the fact I have 17.3" laptop.

It's not stupidity for everyone, it's just that every recourse outside of violence has been captured or gamed by those truly in power in the US. Plus the media has been captured 99.9999 percent.

And it's not bad enough for the US public to support violence, plus violence would be futile anyway against the military, no matter the number of private firearms. The elite are just waiting for enough automation in society so they can "cull" the masses they consider worthless.

Have you met the author? Peter is opinionated, but most of the time he has a valid reason for it. As a writer and a programmer, a good keyboard is a necessity for his work. (I'd bet he's typed as many or more lines of code than a good number of folks here at HN.)

At work we have have folks that order and try out several different keyboards before settling on one that meets their needs. When a programmer makes 80K, a few extra hundred dollars at the extreme to make them efficient and happy is noise in the budget. Even our interns get their choice.

I was given a bunch of DG gear around Y2K. Kept a couple of Aviion boards to hang on the office wall after having to purge the system collection before moving.

As much as I love old gear, my interests are currently more modern. Still I'd like to put an OS on a smaller system, either ARM or MIPS. ST has a nice new Discovery kit that as a 2.4" QVGA TFT LCD and would serve has a radio controller prototype.

VAXen to play with? What type of hardware you running on? I vaguely remember VMS and DCL from the late 80's and early 90's, we had terminals everywhere on the floor and in the fab.

How's availability outside of China? I'm not finding many of these systems in the US.

Good, experienced EEs are worth 10 or more recent grads. Especially those that know RF and/or embedded programming. But then again I'm in a area that has a large number of EE's.

I've scrapped most of these systems years ago. Still have a aviion dual cpu board somewhere in the shed, probably doesn't work.

There's probably a few hobbyists that still use SGIs. Octeon is mostly commercial vendors, who could pay for all of OpenBSDs needs out of their fancy executive toilet paper budget. And there's one OpenBSD hacker who uses Loongson, even GNU cult leaders use GNU/Linux on Loongson instead.

Who still uses an 88K machine? I have the CPU board from a DG/UX machine, but the latest chips are from 93/94.

They could probably kill support and power for some of the "dead silicon" platforms they support. If the CPU hasn't been manufactured in the last decade or two, why support it?