WTF Bites
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4 bytes? Luxury. How about an architecture with no RAM at all, just registers?
Use cases for RAM-less microcontrollers
In a different question around a specific microcontroller (ATtiny12 - datasheet) I came to ask myself: What are the intended use cases for such devices? Does it target the segment: Too "comple...
(
: technically, those registers are also accessible thru the memory space, so you could claim they're kinda RAM)
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@ixvedeusi said in WTF Bites:
I hate all these programs "automagically" trying to be "helpful" instead of just allowing me to clearly tell them what I want.
On that note: I bought a new iPad recently, because my old one was getting rather long in the tooth. This time, I also bought a hardware keyboard with it, as I’ve found myself doing a lot more typing on the iPad in recent years than I did before.
Now, iPadOS automatically turns on capital letters if it thinks you’re starting a sentence. Fine for most people, I guess, but if I want to type something like “This, that, the other, etc. are all words.” it will want to capitalise the first letter after
etc.. With the on-screen keyboard, all you need to do is hit the caps key to turn it off before typing theainare, which is a minor nuisance but not something you can't get used to. With the hardware keyboard, though, there is no bloody way to do that! The caps lock light doesn't come on, so pressing that physical key doesn’t work, and holding Shift pressed just means you will be guaranteed to type a capital letter. (Unlike Windows, both iPadOS and macOS do the right thing and don’t toggle the case when Shift is pressed.)The obvious fix, going back with the cursor keys and deleting the
A, turns caps back on so that typing anaat this point means you get anAagain. The only way I found so far is to typeetc.aand then go back and insert a space after the..Maybe I should instead dive into the system prefs and disable this automatic capitalisation and other forms of autocorrect entirely, like I have it set on my desktop computer.
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Munich suburbs get gigabit alright
Heard of a company in a suburb of Munich: 10 Mb download...
While a different company in Wiesbaden said they get 2 Gb (!) symmetric.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
4 bytes? Luxury. How about an architecture with no RAM at all, just registers?
Use cases for RAM-less microcontrollers
In a different question around a specific microcontroller (ATtiny12 - datasheet) I came to ask myself: What are the intended use cases for such devices? Does it target the segment: Too "comple...
(
: technically, those registers are also accessible thru the memory space, so you could claim they're kinda RAM)If you’re going to preempt the pendants, you’re just going to suck the joy out of some people’s lives.
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@Zerosquare But, alas, the instruction address space is separate from the register address space, so you can't execute the contents of the registers directly. Way to make things more boring.
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If you’re going to preempt the pendants, you’re just going to suck the joy out of some people’s lives.
Thank you. I do my best
But, alas, the instruction address space is separate from the register register address space, so you can't execute the contents of the registers directly. Way to make things more boring.
Even on the models with RAM, it's a Harvard architecture, so you can't run code from RAM.
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A crazy experience — I lost my earbuds in a remote town in Chile, so tried buying a new pair at the airport before flying out. But the new wired, iPhone, lightning-cable headphones didn't work. Strange.
So I went back and swapped them for another pair, from a different brand. But those headphones didn't work either. We tried a third brand, which also didn't work.
By now the gift shop people and their manager and all the people in line behind me are super annoyed, until one of the girls says in Spanish, "You need to have bluetooth on." Oh yes, everyone else nods in agreement. Wired headphones for iPhones definitely need bluetooth.
What? That makes no sense. The entire point of wired headphones is to not need bluetooth.
So I turn Bluetooth on with the headphones plugged into the lightning port and sure enough my phone offers to "pair" my wired headphones. "See," they all say in Spanish, like I must be the dumbest person in the world.
With a little back and forth I realize that they don't even conceptually know what bluetooth is, while I have actually programmed for the bluetooth stack before. I was submitting low-level bugs to Ericsson back in the early 2000's! Yet somehow, I with my computer science degree, am wrong, and they, having no idea what bluetooth even is, are right.
My mind is boggled, I'm outnumbered, and my plane is boarding. I don't want wireless headphones. And especially not wired/wireless headphones or whatever the hell these things are. So I convince them, with my last ounce of sanity, to let me try one last thing, a full-proof solution:
I buy a normal wired, old-school pair of mini-stereo headphones and a lightning adapter. We plug it all in. It doesn't work.
"Bluetooth on", they tell me.
NO! By all that is sacred my wired lightning adapter cannot require Bluetooth. "It does," they assure me.
So I turn my Bluetooth on and sure enough my phone offers to pair my new wired, lightning adapter with my phone.
Unbelievable.
I return it all, run to catch my plane, and spend half the flight wondering what planet I'm on. Until finally back home, I do some research and figure out what's going on:
A scourge of cheap "lightning" headphones and lightning accessories is flooding certain markets, unleashed by unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers who have discovered an unholy recipe:
True Apple lightning devices are more expensive to make. So instead of conforming to the Apple standard, these companies have made headphones that receive audio via bluetooth — avoiding the Apple specification — while powering the bluetooth chip via a wired cable, thereby avoiding any need for a battery.
They have even made lightning adapters using the same recipe: plug-in power a fake lightning dongle that uses bluetooth to transmit the audio signal literally 1.5 inches from the phone to the other end of the adapter.
In these remote markets, these manufacturers have no qualms with slapping a Lightning / iPhone logo on the box while never mentioning bluetooth, knowing that Apple will never do anything.
From a moral or even engineering perspective, this strikes me as a kind of evil. These companies have made the cheapest iPhone earbuds known to humankind, while still charging $12 or $15 per set, pocketing the profits, while preying on the technical ignorance of people in remote towns.
Perhaps worst of all, there are now thousands or even millions of people in the world who simply believe that wired iPhone headphones use bluetooth (whatever that is), leaving them with an utterly incoherent understanding of the technologies involved.
I wish @Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this. And I wish humanity would use its engineering prowess for good, and not opportunistic deception.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
the DSL is only 16mbit (
)16 millibit?
indeed.You joke, but... Kubernetes use proper SI prefixes, so when I accidentally set memory limit to
4000minstead of4000M, it dutifully set the memory limit to 4000 millibytes
That's the way to teach them lusers. You let them get away with using
mfor "mega" and next thing you know they'll come asking for their mileobytes and gallonbits and troy bytes of 12 bits or 20 bits depending on which state and which century. It's a slippery slope of bullshit that needs to be nipped in the butt.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
And I wish humanity would use its engineering prowess for good, and not opportunistic deception.
What color is the sky in your world?
Evident by the story itself, the people involved do not even believe they are complicit in evil or being deceptive. It does not register to them, they are incapable of this kind of self-reflection (or any, for that matter). And if it's pointed out, at best they will rationalize it to something that ranges from "it's just being done this way" to "it's actually a gewd thing".
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And as a friend of mine pointed out elsewhere: "None of that would exist without Apple's bullshit DRMs, and it's telling that it costs less to add Bluetooth hardware than to comply with them."
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Apple's bullshit DRM is bullshit. We're not going to sell that crap.
Yeah, but even people who earn 100 pesos per month want to give their last for assorted plastic iGizmos to get their circuses on TikToks. Who are we to deny them that opportunity of civilization's greatest invention?
Then we're the good guys for solving that problem!?
Indeed we are.
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I'm not saying that whichever Chinese company came up with that abominable hack did so out of the kindness of their heart. I'm saying that it's a
solution to a problem that's not even technical in nature.
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Your friend's comment seemed to imply that it's Apple's fault alone. Although I must admit that
s are being very shouty today. Regardless, I will point how your friend is patently, naively to a narrow-minded degree wrong that it would not exist without Apple's DRM, bullshit or otherwise. Counterfeit products, of various ingenuity levels, have existed since products themselves were invented.What I'm saying is that the blame does not fall on Apple alone, nor the Chinese company. Whoever sells counterfeit products, knowingly or otherwise, is complicit. Whoever knowingly buys them, is complicit. There are no good guys in this.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
I'm not saying that whichever Chinese company came up with that abominable hack did so out of the kindness of their heart. I'm saying that it's a
solution to a problem.Is it a
problem to have certification for a standard though?
Apple's MFI certification means that complying devices just work in the same way that HDMI certification does for HDMI, Thunderbolt certification does for Thunderbolt, etc.I've never bought a set of the Apple Lightning earpods - I've still got a set from whatever my last iPhone to include them was. They still just work with whatever Lightning device they're plugged into.
However here's one of the alternative products - almost every single recent review is dogshit.
The knockoff bluetooth-requiring alternatives aren't solving anything, they're just suckering consumers even more than the actual companies involved are if (outside of an airport) the consumer is paying half the price for not even half quality?
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@loopback0 Apple‘s certification may on the surface be to ensure correctly working appliances. And it probably achieves that tangentially.
But it really is about selling expensive asbloodprinter ink first party appliances and milking the fuck out of expensive-by-proxy third party appliances.
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Exactly. If it was an optional certification that manufacturers could, at their discretion, decide to pay for (and get the right to display "this is an approved Apple accessory" on the box), I'd have no objection.
But that's not what it is. Apple go out of their way to make sure non-certified products don't work on their devices. And they collect royalties on sales. And they impose conditions on manufacturers as well (the details of which are under NDA).
It is a rent-seeking scheme first. If you're not convinced, consider that when iPhones first got support for USB 3, they said non-approved devices would be limited to USB 2 "for safety reasons" - yeah, right. (They may have changed their minds later ; I didn't follow further developments.)
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(Unlike Windows, both iPadOS and macOS do the right thing and don’t toggle the case when Shift is pressed.)
The right thing meaning forcing you to type in caps and look for a shitty workaround?
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
What I'm saying is that the blame does not fall on Apple alone, nor the Chinese company. Whoever sells counterfeit products, knowingly or otherwise, is complicit. Whoever knowingly buys them, is complicit. There are no good guys in this.
4chan fine and dandy, but none of these boys can match the Buddha level
skills of the guys who manage to be known as the "Chicoms" while outcapitalisting everybody and making the biggest fans of their own craft foam at the mouth.
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(Unlike Windows, both iPadOS and macOS do the right thing and don’t toggle the case when Shift is pressed.)
The right thing meaning forcing you to type in caps and look for a shitty workaround?The Right Thing would be to get rid of the caps lock key in the first place.
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@LaoC Chicoms didn't invent that either. Exploitation of shithole places has been going on ever since that kind of divide between regions was understood. It's just run rampant in the past 30 years, because civilization collectively has become hellbent on cutting corners so much that the block has become a discus with holes, and further aerodynamic properties are being explored by getting rid of it altogether and just selling an NFT of it.
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(Unlike Windows, both iPadOS and macOS do the right thing and don’t toggle the case when Shift is pressed.)
The right thing meaning forcing you to type in caps and look for a shitty workaround?The Right Thing would be to get rid of the
caps lock keyiGizmo in the first place.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
(Unlike Windows, both iPadOS and macOS do the right thing and don’t toggle the case when Shift is pressed.)
The right thing meaning forcing you to type in caps and look for a shitty workaround?The Right Thing would be to get rid of the
caps lock keyiGizmo in the first place.If you want me to stop posting you can just say so.
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@topspin Use Desktop Linux at home (and grow that unkempt neckbeard) already. You're alright chap all in all, but that's just embarrassing for the rest of us technologically advanced computer professionals.
Filed under: Wilhelm :troooooooo....
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@loopback0 Apple‘s certification may on the surface be to ensure correctly working appliances. And it probably achieves that tangentially.
But it really is about selling expensive asbloodprinter ink first party appliances and milking the fuck out of expensive-by-proxy third party appliances.Of course it's about making money, but the result is still that stuff just works rather than it might work, or it will work but with a workaround (see wired Bluetooth devices), or even worse it only might work even with a workaround. Same as HMDI, Thunderbolt etc certification makes the respective organisations money.
Maybe the consumer saves a few quid and everything's great, but based on the Amazon reviews linked above, maybe the consumer saved a few quid and then pays more than that in time dealing with a shitty product.
Neither option is designed with the consumer's best interests in mind.
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
Of course it's about making money, but the result is still that stuff just works rather than it might work
You know what else "just works" for wired headphones?
A 3.5mm audio jack.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
Of course it's about making money, but the result is still that stuff just works rather than it might work
You know what else "just works" for wired headphones?
A 3.5mm audio jack.Unless you buy cheap shit and then it's still in might work territory.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
it's a Harvard architecture
Everything from B****n ...
That architecture is actually pretty nice to develop for, even in assembly. Can't say the same about the one from their main competitor (who ended up acquiring it).
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
Unless you buy cheap shit and then it's still in might work territory.
Even the cheapest wired headphones almost always work. Sure, they may have mediocre sound quality, and fall apart after 6 months. But they're not going to be incompatible with your device.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
A 3.5mm audio jack.
Or 2.5mm if you're concerned with size.
As far as engineering decisions go, moving the DAC out of the phone and into the headphones was stupid to begin with, regardless of lighting or bluetooth.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:
the DSL is only 16mbit (
)16 millibit?
indeed.You joke, but... Kubernetes use proper SI prefixes, so when I accidentally set memory limit to
4000minstead of4000M, it dutifully set the memory limit to 4000 millibytesThat's the way to teach them lusers. You let them get away with using
mfor "mega" and next thing you know they'll come asking for their mileobytes and gallonbits and troy bytes of 12 bits or 20 bits depending on which state and which century. It's a slippery slope of bullshit that needs to be nipped in the butt.Meanwhile in SPICE land, even
Mdoesn’t suffice for 1e6…
I don’t know if it’s wise to taint the innocent, but: while every other prefix is a single (case-insensitive) letter, SPICE uses ‘meg’ for mega. Nobody has ever inadvertently entered values off by 9 orders of magnitude due to this genius design decision.
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Meanwhile in SPICE land
I'm trying to remember how many decades ago I last used SPICE. Probably 3 decades, or close to it. Fortunately, I don't have to do that any more.
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I'm surprised that @kazitor has used SPICE, and that @HardwareGeek hasn't used it for so long. I'd have expected the opposite.
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@Zerosquare We had SPICE in the Late Devonian, you know!
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@Zerosquare I do digital logic. SPICE is used for analog circuit simulations. Even for people who design clocks and other circuits that may exhibit analog-adjacent behavior, there are alternatives that are much faster, simpler, and accurate enough. (The last time I used SPICE was for a clock generator where the alternative tool that was available at that time was not accurate enough; it was very overly pessimistic.)
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(Unlike Windows, both iPadOS and macOS do the right thing and don’t toggle the case when Shift is pressed.)
What version of Windows are you using? I've never had the Shift key act as a toggle (aka Caps Lock) without fucking around with the settings into non-defaults....
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@Tsaukpaetra I assume that what he means is that if the key is already shifted (i.e., Caps Lock), Shift gives you the non-shifted key.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra I assume that what he means is that if the key is already shifted (i.e., Caps Lock), Shift gives you the non-shifted key.
Huh. Yeah that is bizarre. But, I never use Caps Lock in normal circumstances so it's never come up.
Next you're going to tell me that Caps Lock normally enters the symbols in the numeric row when enabled!
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@Tsaukpaetra It might be more accurate to say that Shift inverts (rather than toggles) the shiftedness of the keys. Caps Lock, of course, does act as a toggle — but only for the alphabetic keys, not numbers or symbols. So if Caps Lock is on, it inverts the shiftedness of the letters, and if Shift is also pressed, it inverts it again, resulting in the unshifted state. However, since Caps Lock has no effect on the numeric or symbol keys, Shift always shifts them.
At least on en-us keyboards, and I assume en-uk works the same. I have no idea how modifier keys work on other keyboards.
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Meanwhile in SPICE land, even
Mdoesn’t suffice for 1e6…I don’t know if it’s wise to taint the innocent, but: while every other prefix is a single (case-insensitive) letter, SPICE uses ‘meg’ for mega. Nobody has ever inadvertently entered values off by 9 orders of magnitude due to this genius design decision.
I've wondered about this particular EE weirdness before, the insistence to say "megohm" to save a single vowel. Surely it's not phonaestethical pendantry …
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra It might be more accurate to say that Shift inverts (rather than toggles) the shiftedness of the keys. Caps Lock, of course, does act as a toggle — but only for the alphabetic keys, not numbers or symbols. So if Caps Lock is on, it inverts the shiftedness of the letters, and if Shift is also pressed, it inverts it again, resulting in the unshifted state. However, since Caps Lock has no effect on the numeric or symbol keys, Shift always shifts them.
At least on en-us keyboards, and I assume en-uk works the same. I have no idea how modifier keys work on other keyboards.
It had better work on numbers on the French keyboard. Not that it was redeemable but that would at least make it slightly less retarded.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra I assume that what he means is that if the key is already shifted (i.e., Caps Lock), Shift gives you the non-shifted key.
iF i'M TYPING — oops — If I'm typing a long run of upper case with shorter runs of lower case letters within, I expect to be able to use Caps Lock and Shift efficiently. So in my opinion, that's the correct behaviour.
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra I assume that what he means is that if the key is already shifted (i.e., Caps Lock), Shift gives you the non-shifted key.
iF i'M TYPING — oops — If I'm typing a long run of upper case with shorter runs of lower case letters within, I expect to be able to use Caps Lock and Shift efficiently. So in my opinion, that's the correct behaviour.
I applaud your mental elasticity to be able to do that efficiently.
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@Tsaukpaetra I don't think it's that hard a mental model.
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@Tsaukpaetra I don't think it's that hard a mental model.
Predicting the wrong branch is usually the harder path.
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Meanwhile in SPICE land, even
Mdoesn’t suffice for 1e6…I don’t know if it’s wise to taint the innocent, but: while every other prefix is a single (case-insensitive) letter, SPICE uses ‘meg’ for mega. Nobody has ever inadvertently entered values off by 9 orders of magnitude due to this genius design decision.
I've wondered about this particular EE weirdness before, the insistence to say "megohm" to save a single vowel. Surely it's not phonaestethical pendantry …
The a-o phoneme sequence in mega-ohm is awkward to speak fluently. One of those vowels is going to get elided in pretty much any similar word.
Also, real EEs don't usually say megohm. If we're talking about a resistor, the ohm is implied; it's simply a 1 meg resistor. If the value is in kΩ, it's a 1 "k" resistor. For capacitors, the Farad is implied; it's a mike (microfarad) or a puff (pF — picofarad). (A Farad is not generally a useful unit; it's too big. Nanofarads and millifarads are units of useful size, but for some reason they're not used; values that might be expressed in nanofarads or millifarads are instead expressed in microfarads, such as .01μF or 10000μF.)
x.com
Amazon.co.uk
