nascentmind

Zomato and Flipkart are not successful. They are just surviving. Most of the startups are "me too" kind just copying what has already been done but just localizing it to the Indian market. It just takes a foreign entity entering the Indian market and competing with these companies to start its collapse.

Also software engineering is not a nascent field. It was nascent in the 70's and 80's. All the low hanging fruits are gone. It is very hard to be a the next Sun, or Microsoft or Oracle. In fact India should start looking at more nascent and upcoming fields and try to be leaders in it.

Keeping cash under mattress is risky. Why not buy gold(or precious metals)? Movement and hiding it is way easier than $100 bills and transport too is easier. Just wear it as jewellery.

Just curious, did you fund your FU fund living in the current place?

Renters will increase the price knowing full well that people will double up. Also if the renters are ruthless they would directly tell you to have more people packed in an apartment to pay their price and if people are helpless they would have to cough up or find some other job in another state where you can live decently with lesser pay. Also a lot of shitty apartments will increase their rents which puts more pressure. This I feel is simple price discovery at work. This is why it is better for the company to spread itself in different places rather than hole up in a single place and pay very salaries which are not sustainable. I really don't understand start ups which are supposed to be tight on cash sitting on one of the costliest real estate and expect to be profitable.

Opening up bit streams would be really great. I am still hoping that someday we have completely open source FPGA tools.

How long can the circus keep going? It might collapse at any moment yet I don't think anyone knows for sure.

This statement is fundamental. It is very very hard to time the market. In fact there is a famous saying by John M Keynes "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

Fountain pens. I have some fountain pens come down to me from my mother's student era.

As a person who bought these ads I think you would be the right person to answer some of my curiosity.

Do people really click ads and buy? Is there data of the whole from click to the buy revenue? Are your products US centric? If yes what part of the US do people click on your ads and buy the most?

The idea to write a tiny modular driver came to me because of need. Sometimes developers do not need a write and simply need to read a file. Sometimes they want a very minimal read and then would like to write. This would be in case of storing ADC samples and then transferring it via a wireless interface or if a USB is connected they would want to mount the space as a drive.

I have been writing a FAT32 driver to understand the FAT32 file system. It is very exciting as this is my first time I am dabbling with file systems. I will be porting this to my baremetal firmware for the MINI2440 SBC.

Thanks! I also have a blog ( http://thesoulofamachine.blogspot.in/ ) where I go in detail explaining parts of the code of the various subsystems to get things up and running. I have developed without any costly JTAG tools and the code is compiled using free GNU tools keeping learners in mind who cannot afford costly development tools although a good scope would be great to debug clocks.

I see a lot of people having problems with the BSP. Excuse me for the shameless plug but I am developing an open source baremetal firmware for the Samsung SoC S3C2440 ( https://github.com/mindentropy/s3c2440-mdk ) and planning to port this to S3C2451. These are found in HP IPaq etc. It will be basically a tutorial for people trying to develop their own firmware or as reference code for bringing the SoC and the controller's up i.e. Drivers for the controllers and also the ARM board bring up code. It can also be used to test the board by testing individual IP's.

I am planning on supporting Samsung SoC's and will start of with TI AM335x Sitara series and FriendlyARM's NanoPi2 which contains the Samsung SoC S5P4418

I am running behind OEM/ODM's for funding me for development of their SoC's and nobody seems to be interested except FriendlyARM. What do you think I should be doing to get some funding for this?

Sometimes people use a RTOS in the SoC. Some people run baremetal OS or NoOS in these SoC's. I myself and developing a baremetal OS for the Samsung S3C2440 and I find it hard to get documents from Samsung. I have to rely on the SBC manufacturer for the documents.

It is mixed. On the one hand there are quite a bit of honest people and there are quite a lot of corrupt people. The problem is the amount of variables which are huge and how it has become a way of life.

Yes it is. Such smart people should be working on these things and should be encouraged. Of course his system is still a lot rough and a lot of work has to go into it but he is just one person doing a lot of thinking. In the interview he has a lot of enthusiasm which is really nice.

I personally use xubuntu. What myztic meant was using "plain ubuntu" instead of alternatives like xubuntu, lubuntu or kubuntu.

Xubuntu is medium light for me and is fast. Previously I had only fluxbox on Kubuntu for the KDE apps which was extremely fast but with bugs in fluxbox I switched.

Congrats geohot. Come up with a good development framework for people to build on and it would be awesome. This is good innovation and engineering.

Like the article said it sure beats writing code to make people click ads or fixing some obscure deadbeat bug in some useless software which nobody uses.

No I don't. It is just an observation. Now in for e.g. India there are a lot of people going into engineering or medicine as a way out of poverty. So you are right but now it is the profession through which to get out of poverty and there will be a lot of people from poor and troubled families in it.

>But if you come from a poor family, then sports is one of the ways to get out of poverty, because even if you can't go pro, there's still the chance of college athlete funding or becoming a coach for a school.

This is true. In India for example engineering and medicine are the ways to get out of poverty. Hence there is an over representation.

I have seen that most of kids who have struggled in their childhood because of say low income from their parents or bad family have a kind of a fighting spirit. Most of the people who you see achieve greatness either say in sports or in engineering come from really poor and troubled backgrounds. Now compare that to the upper middle class and the rich whose kids have been given all the resources and you don't see much of them at the top. Even if you see them it would be because their parents would have set up artificial constraints on their resources which they would have to fight to get it.

So finally it all depends on parenting and the values they instil on their kids which require no money. It just needs some thinking and common sense which is available to both the rich and the poor.

What will be the impact of this on jobs? I see a lot of layoffs in the semiconductor industry. I don't know what is the impact on jobs for a firmware engineer. I don't see anything new coming soon in the embedded space and IoT looks like more of a hype than anything else.

This is the problem here.

As an embedded developer where every cycle counts I have come up with the same question as the poster above why bother with such languages. If a switch processes packets at line rate with the use of ASIC's why not have some similar development in the world of big data.

xobs, What was your experience working with the CPU vendors to open up the ROM or atleast provide a method to by pass the ROM and use an external ROM?

You can always go for the Samsung S3C SoC which loads 4kB of code from NAND flash. Now if you ask me whether the loading is software in a certain boot rom internal to the chip or hardware logic I don't know.

You can also try Texas Instruments chips too but I think the initial bootup starts from a ROM.

There are very good TI Cortex M3 and M4 Tiva Launchpad boards (for $12.99) and for the ultra low power applications the MSP432 cortex M4 launchpad boards (for $12.99) with very good documentation and support.

Apart from this there are other issues to consider when you have to go through different certifications required for different domains. When you have MCU's in automotive,industrial,medical and millitary (invasive instruments) it is better to go through safety critical MCU's with built in core protection to pass through different certifications. Apart from this thermal considerations play a big factor when you go through different qualification tests.

Isn't USB data lines differential?

Free GCC tool chains are present for the TI MSP430, TI Tiva Series C (Cortex M4) and also TI Hercules (Cortex M3) series. Apart from that I have tried STM32F4 series with GCC tool chains.

I have personally developed Bluetooth stack using the GCC tools for the MSP430 using the CC246x Bluetooth modules and it was a blast.

So you have a lot of options with free tool chains. I personally use only free toolchains on linux. It is the best development setup and you have a lot of options for debugging and tool development.

I too find myself in the same conundrum. People and contacts just disappear if I don't put effort in it. It is always me who have to follow up for some reason. How did you get over this?

I don't understand why there is such a disdain for blue collar jobs. Isn't it honest living? The good are tangible and benefits the society.

Boys in the developed world are 50% more likely to flunk basic maths, reading and science entirely.

Then why is the media crying out that STEM fields are dominated by men and more women should be encouraged?

The problem in the US is that they cry that manufacturing jobs are going away. Why don't they attract some? Manufacturing complements with engineering. They develop society. The only reason that education and healthcare where supposedly most of the women are present as per the article is still present in the US is because it has not been outsourced. It has nothing to do with high skills.