jgw

12 ms·

61.
by jgw 14y ago
While I admire your moxy, you need to understand that a full suite of tools we use to get ASICs designed, verified, laid out and ready for fab cost 5 or 6 figures per license , depending on what you're doing. The very use of the tools the
62.
by jgw 14y ago
It's quite curious how hardware design lost its cachet. When I was in Computer Engineering at Waterloo (class of '98), many of my classmates were vying for coop jobs in FPGA, ASIC or board-level design. I happened to be one of the lucky on
63.
by jgw 14y ago
I'm quite curious about how sexism affects the broader tech industry as a whole, as it seems to not affect my niche area much at all. I work in ASIC design, and we have probably even fewer women than software development. In general, I hav
64.
by jgw 14y ago
I'd be curious to know that, too. I'd be very surprised, as the capital outlay to start even a small ASIC team is not small. A single simulator license costs considerably more than what the fine folks at YC invest in the companies they hav
65.
by jgw 14y ago
Yes, and not just a little. Our ability to distinguish between what's real and what's not is diminishing at an astonishing rate. Simultaneously, our technology is grossly outpacing our ability as a society to develop social mores and approp
66.
by jgw 15y ago
Very cool, Munyuki. Maybe it needs a "Translate to Shona" feature :) I lived in Harare from 1986-90, long before I'd heard the term "Internet". It's really great to see Zimbabweans making their mark on the net. Best wishes and luck, mate!
67.
by jgw 15y ago
Chipworks are in the business of all manner of reverse-engineering silicon. It's a pretty interesting process. Sadly, it's one of the few semiconductor segments in which Ottawa, where I live, is still something of a leader. And, weirdly, t
68.
by jgw 15y ago
This is reminiscent of the Intel 486 processor and 487 co-processor. Intel sold 486SX and 486DX parts - the latter had a built-in floating point unit, whereas the former did not. Or at least that's how they were sold. If you had the SX, y
69.
by jgw 15y ago
I've enjoyed 1920x1200 on my laptops since 2003 , and I lament this demise, too. I can't match the resolution I had nine years ago. I'm a hardware engineer, and the more pixels I can pack into my display, the more I can see in my wavefo
70.
by jgw 15y ago
Sort of related - a funny observation that might amuse Americans about us wacky Canucks: An awful lot of Canadians, myself included, avoid drive-through ATMs, and instead park and walk into the bank. And sometimes, when the bank's busy, we
71.
by jgw 15y ago
Linux, UNIX variants, all their drivers, tons of embedded software & firmware in tiny devices like wireless chipsets, all the way up to the "real" IOS that runs Cisco switches. It's a good option for low-level work.
72.
by jgw 15y ago
It's inevitable and unsurprising. I do hope that it remains feasible to shoot on film for those that want to. It's a fun medium to work in, and there's a romanticism about shooting on film that I think is lost in using digital cameras. Abo
73.
by jgw 15y ago
As someone who is really, really new to Lisp (worked through the Little Schemer, now in Seibel's "PCL", just started learning about this QuickLisp thing that you might have heard about... ;)), I've been wondering about the whys and wherefor
74.
by jgw 15y ago
Never used OS/2, so maybe you can clarify this for me: I thought that one of the limitations of OS/2 was that while it could run DOS programs, it could only run one DOS program at a time (in addition to a number of native ones). Is that co
75.
by jgw 15y ago
Probably would have been 3rd generation, had my father's father not died in the second world war. He was a physicist, which was pretty unique for a Welshman of very modest background at the time. War - what a catastrophic waste of young mi
76.
by jgw 15y ago
It saddens me to see RIM's declines, having watched it grow out of the single building just off the University of Waterloo campus while I was an undergraduate there. I remember in 1998, before their Mobitex device was publicly available, a
77.
by jgw 15y ago
I actually found myself disappointed that it turned out to be something as pedestrian as C on Visual Studio - I thought (hoped?) it would be something really obscure and exotic. I confess that I'm tickled silly by the whole mystery of Stuxn
78.
by jgw 15y ago
I've been wondering about why people do this sort of thing, so thanks for answering that. I found it curious that Startupbus, which I believe is going on right now, seems to never have had much traction on HN, and when it did, it appeared t
79.
by jgw 15y ago
I think that depending on one's perspective, one might consider this more analogous to claiming to ride a bike, but as it transpires, you only learned how to ride a bike with training wheels. You can write the analogy however you like to m
80.
by jgw 15y ago
No, I'm saying that knowing C and Scheme is a great foundation for future computer scientists and engineers! They lay a solid foundation upon which much can be built. But probably not a good place to start if, like the original author, y
81.
by jgw 15y ago
Well, consider all of the things that have to be in place for the web app to get from where it is served, to where you're reading it. The web app itself is typically going to be running on a framework, written in another language - for exam
82.
by jgw 15y ago
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0806/ http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199... "The unexpected revelation by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in a keynote speech at MacWorld prompted gasps of disbe
83.
by jgw 15y ago
I'd agree with that, but I imagine not for the reasons I presume you mean. Microsoft's small investment ($150M) in Apple was really to prop them up just enough to avoid Apple's bankruptcy. Apple may very well have died had they not receive
84.
by jgw 15y ago
No, 1 billion seconds would be (around) π decades ...
85.
by jgw 15y ago
I had never heard that term before you introduced me to it a couple of weeks ago, but that was the first word that popped into my mind when I opened the article.
86.
by jgw 15y ago
Thanks for the insight. I guess what I was really getting at is the folks who know Rails, but not Ruby. If you don't know the language underlying your own framework, it seems unlikely that you'll know much else, language-wise (like C, for
87.
by jgw 15y ago
I was a bit perplexed by this, too. I live on the other side of the hardware-software divide (I'm an ASIC guy), so I don't really know in-depth about Ruby or Rails. My impression , though, is that Ruby is a great, expressive language, whi
88.
by jgw 15y ago
Interesting data point: I know a good guy who's a lead developer on one of MSFT's very large and visible projects. I was stunned to learn that he uses vim - in his words, "the best development environment on earth." Very recently, he gave i
89.
by jgw 15y ago
Very cool. I still have the old Osborne 1 on which I learned to program. Interesting historical point - the BBC Micro was designed by Acorn Computers, who are the parent of the ARM processors that are so ubiquitous today.
90.
by jgw 15y ago
Although to further nitpick, your proposed substitution doesn't quite do the same thing, since it searches every directory below the pwd, rather than what's in the pwd. Agreed on quoting. for file in *.java; do javac "$file"; done

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