• 0 Posts
  • 58 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 9th, 2023
  • Treczoks@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's your list of banned brands?
    2·
    1 month ago

    Canon printers. Back in the time, I bought a large canon printer - for 60cm wide paper, with large ink tanks on the side. It cost a rather substantial amount, but printing under Linux was meh, as there was no special driver for this model. I asked for a manual so I could write such a driver myself, but their position (back then, I never bothered to recheck) that Linux and open source in general was theft of intellectual property.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Experience with IONOS?English
    1·
    1 month ago

    I’m using IONOS for more than a decade now, and it works fine. I’m not into too much of web design, though, the personal web site is just a storage facility to move files around. I think they have quite some tools to develop professional web sites. Also allows for SSH access, which was helpful when I could not delete some files with filezilla.

    Mail is good, too (Domain + 10 email accounts + catchall).

  • Treczoks@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What bizarre misconceptions do people have about your field?
    2·
    1 month ago

    Whenever you are looking for a supplier for something, keep in mind that there are advantages and disadvantages when choosing one.

    If you are in a small niece company, and your supplier is THE BIG OLD COMPANY, you are completely at their mercy. On the other hand, they usually have vast resources you can tap, like training capabilities and software you won’t get elsewhere, or at least nor for the price.

    That was our relationship with Xilinx. Yes, you get trainings and tutorials for everything, and they have a “light” version of ModelSim thrown in for free in their IDE, but on the other hand, they basically cut us off from one day to the next. And that was not even our fault.

    So we went looking and found Efinix. Small, but growing, their IDE has a few edges that need to be rounded off, and they can’t afford to throw in a free simulator, so we had to spend quite a few bucks to buy that (and it was not even ModelSim we bought, so I had to re-train). But at least they are open and helpful. You ask a question in their forum, and they come back to you to help. I’ve been talking to real people who are directly in contact with the dev team. When I had a strange compiler problem, I had a fix within 48 hours. THAT is gold in a supplier.

    I’m finding out that it’s a lot to take in

    Yes, indeed. The step from CPU-based programming languages to Hardware definition languages is hard for most programmers, and for some, it is even insurmountable. Once you get the hang of it, it gets way easier.

    I met a student once in a Reddit sub once who had issues with her code. I helped her and gave her a few tips how to improve it, and at the end, she asked me of my opinion of the project. I told her that it was a nice little beginner project, something to pass a boring Friday afternoon. Her reply: “Thats my Bachelor Thesis!*”. What looks big and difficult to master will one day look simple and meek when you look back, so don’t let it drag you down if things don’t work on the first try.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What bizarre misconceptions do people have about your field?
    3·
    1 month ago

    I started with programming about anything that is programmable and not up on a tree at the count of three. I did industrial control units, and I worked on a Cray X-MP, and about anything between. I wrote computer games, compilers, an OS, database engines, and loads of applications. I’ve probably forgotten more programming languages than todays students have heard of. One day I ended up in embedded systems.

    As our company had only one FPGA developer, I got sent on a three day course to learn VHDL from the source (Eugen Krassin, one of the original key developers of ISE). Right after that, I started developing FPGA firmware for our company. Luckily, I had some hardware experience from my work on the C64 and earlier, so I had a good understanding of clocks and signals. I know that even seasoned programmers really hit a wall when entering the world of HDLs.

    I started with ISE back then on Spartan S3 and S6, then Xilinx f-ed us up so hard that the boss slammed the phone down after the last call with those guys and told me to find a more reliable company STAT. We now use Efinix FPGAs which has the big advantage that people there actually listen and help when I ask a question.

    My field is isosynchronous low-latency networks for audio applications.