Path: ...!feeds.phibee-telecom.net!3.eu.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Don Y Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design Subject: Re: Why Bloat Is Still Software's Biggest Vulnerability Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2024 12:43:05 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 77 Message-ID: References: <1a39efe9-6e05-47ea-9dbc-8d9089bd15can@googlegroups.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2024 19:43:11 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="cd61f5e18330181594e65cc325aef3d5"; logging-data="506941"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19Sx4AiKaaKFXyhmAAmkbqL" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.2.2 Cancel-Lock: sha1:IcbfyDZEpkU2JAZE8SOY4CgX41I= In-Reply-To: Content-Language: en-US Bytes: 4753 On 3/12/2024 6:05 AM, Peter wrote: >> I trust all is well, remodel long completed, kids now grown >> (which of them was first to make you "Gramps"? and wasn't your >> youngest looking for his pilot's license?), thus PBfH having >> less of an impact on your life, etc. > > Divorced the witch in 1999, Yes. But, IIRC, there was still a lot of "interaction" as a result of the boys. Now that they are grown, presumably that is less of an issue, limiting the intensity of any such interactions? > then the next one (2003-2023) sadly ended in 2023. (sigh) Sorry to hear that. I recall you had high hopes and, hopefully, some of those were realized. "One can't get divorced TWICE; the first takes HALF of everything, the second would take the OTHER half!" > Youngest has a PPL (UK and FAA) and flies, both mine and his RV6. But, is his interest purely recreational? Or, might he pursue that "commercially"? > Chases females on Tinder and Hinge, like everybody else :) Thankfully, I've never been down that road. >>> I had a customer many years ago who did write a ton of code in hex. To >>> enable modifications they had a bit of space after each function, so >>> edits to a function did not need shifting everything after it :) >> >> But what was their *reason* for this? I had an employer (*had* been >> an engineer and deluded himself into thinking he could still *do* >> engineering) who was stuck in the past -- as if the tools and >> techniques he had used were still relavent, even a few years later! > > Stupidity - assemblers have always been around. I think a lot has to do with wanting to THINK that an imagined skillset is still valuable. With UV/OTP EPROM, that tactic *might* make sense (as a rebuild could be time consuming vs. patching an image, on-the-fly. But, with FLASH and RAM-based solutions, there's no time to be saved (to outweigh the potential for screwing up "manually") >> When it took hours to assemble, link, burn images, it made sense to >> have mechanisms to support minor tweeks to the code (overwriting >> instructions with NOPs and filling in a "0xFF" postamble with new >> code). But, nowadays, make world on even large projects is just >> a coffee break -- and, you can dump your code into RAM to watch >> it run (assuming you have to run on a target and not in a >> simulator). >> >> [Nowadays, I netboot images just for the savings that one step >> makes possible!] > > Indeed. It's delightful to see what can now be done on-the-cheap! No more playing games with hardware (and its costs/reliability) when you can just emulate any functionality you want! (I have a design where a '7180 acted as an EPROM emulator in a production design to give me debugging support via a serial console that it provided; i.e., let the 7180 "fetch" bytes over the serial console instead of having to store them *in* its EPROM -- a predecessor to netbooting! :> ) I've been tempted to try reimplementing some early designs just to see how quickly the development would proceed AND how much faster the code would execute... big change from a ~700KHz i4004 to an 800MHz quad-core (costing a tenth as much!). It would be depressing to discover that a man-year effort can be reduced to a long weekend! :<