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From: Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Why Bloat Is Still Software's Biggest Vulnerability
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2024 12:43:05 -0700
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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!  :<