Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. The switch was in the ‘more magic' position.
"Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space.
There are a few real problems with the audio quality and 'experience' of digitally distributed music today. 24/192 solves none of them. While everyone fixates on 24/192 as a magic bullet, we're not going to see any actual improvement."
All of this is presented in a way that you don't need to learn all the math behind it. It's a great read.
Wadler's Law states that:
In any language design, the total time spent discussing a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to the power of its position.
0. Semantics
1. Syntax
2. Lexical syntax
3. Lexical syntax of comments
ARM licensing and how their business model works, courtesy of Anandtech. I really enjoyed this back when it was written.
How is GNU grep so fast?
I stumbled upon this post by the author recently. Here's an excerpt:
#1 trick: GNU grep is fast because it AVOIDS LOOKING AT EVERY INPUT BYTE.
#2 trick: GNU grep is fast because it EXECUTES VERY FEW INSTRUCTIONS FOR EACH BYTE that it *does* look at.
Since we're doing toasters - Jack Ganssle, EDN magazine, 1997.
Day 1. My boss, an engineer from the old pre-CAD days, has successfully brought a generation of products from Acme Toaster Corporation’s engineering labs to market. Bob is a wonder of mechanical ingenuity. All of us in the design department have the utmost respect for him, so I was honored today when he appointed me the lead designer on the new Acme 2000 Toaster.
Finally, after 4 years of undergrad work in mechanical engineering at MIT, and almost a decade working in the appliance group here at Acme, they’ve recognized my talents and have given me the responsibility I’ve yearned for. I’m excited about this challenge.
Day 6. We met with the president, head of sales, and the marketing VP today to hammer out the project’s requirements and specifications. We agreed to meet a cost of goods of $9.50 in quantities of 100,000. I’ve identified the critical issue in the new design: a replacement for the timing spring we’ve used since the original 1922 model. Research with focus groups shows that consumers set high expectations for their breakfast foods. Café Late from Starbucks goes best with a precise level of toastal browning. The Acme 2000 will give our customers the breakfast experience they desire.
I estimated a design budget of $21,590 for this project, and final delivery in 7 weeks. I’ll need one assistant designer to help with the drawing packages. This is my first chance to supervise! I’m looking forward to making the hire and mentoring this person.
Like all Acme meetings we reached these decisions by consensus. The company is family owned and is operated, well, I guess the best word is “gently”. The little friction that occurs is always resolved fairly. We work hard but in harmony. It’s a place I hope to retire from in 30 years, as my father did.
Day 23. We’ve found the ideal spring material. Best of all, it’s a well-proven technology. Our projected cost of goods is almost a buck-fifty under goal.
The rough prototype (completed in just 12 days from the go-ahead!) has been servicing the employee cafeteria for the last week without a single hiccup. Toastal quality exceeds projections. There’s still a lot of work ahead, as we do the production engineering that is so important to producing a reliable product.
Day 24. That block of Acme stock sold to the Mackenzie family in the 50s was just snapped up by a major aerospace company which had run out of defense contractors to acquire. At a company-wide meeting we were assured that this was an investment only, and that nothing will change. They will send in a couple of auditors, but this is just to help us find ways to do things more efficiently.
Not entirely sure who wrote this - originally found at http://www.danielsen.com/jokes/objecttoaster.txt.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an Electrical Engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The advisor: "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantifies its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
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