Well.. DAMIT I saw that last line and scratched me head over it a moment or two, but I've been *SOOoooooo* nose buried in a mutliprocessor bootloader that's due.. uhm.. tomorrow morning that I didn't spend a lot of cycles parsing it. Heee..

Re: the philosphic thingy wha do.. I'm a firm beleiver that we have not come to know alot of what there is to know. More annoyingly, there are some phenomena that, while they can be easily dismissed, can not always be easily explained. And because of that there's a LOT of scientists who deride studies into the 'supernatural' (read, currently not understood natural) phenoma that goes on around us. And hence, very very little time put into studying these phenomena. No matter though, the world keeps going round, and the IRS keeps demanding their money. :)

mutliprocessor bootloader

This interests me (I did a CS major). Care to elaborate a bit?

More annoyingly, there are some phenomena that, while they can be easily dismissed, can not always be easily explained. And because of that there's a LOT of scientists who deride studies into the 'supernatural' (read, currently not understood natural) phenoma that goes on around us.

I'd disagree with the reasoning underlying this statement. There are indeed things that cannot be easily explained - the accelerating expansion of the universe is one example that comes to mind. But claims of supernatural effects have thus far generally, if not exclusively, been subject to rather easy explanation. That is, they have been explained by the effects of human physiology and psychology, confirmation bias, ordinary statistical anomaly, mistakes, fraud, etc. etc. This is not dismissal, and scientists who deride frivolous studies into such things have good reason to. (Not all studies are frivolous, mind you. Studies of social psychological effects of beliefs in supernatural phenomena, for example, could be quite informative about human nature.)

Plenty of time has already been put into studying these phenomena, with no positive outcome to confirm they even exist as anything beyond the aforementioned natural effects. At some point, an intelligent person stops tyring, and instead spends time on something that might be more useful. As you rightly mentioned, there's still plenty of things we legitimately don't know.

Well, let's see, there is this phenomenon that happens sometimes. People speaking fluently with no accent in a language they did not know nor had ever studied, or speaking in the voices of relatives, in a language they don't know. It's things like that that I think of when I say easily dismissed but not easily explained. There are many who would say, "The phrases were studied and practiced incessantly ." so, it's easy to explain, and there for easy to dismiss as a fraud, or a con. And *MANY ARE*, sadly, but I think another way to phrase it would be. "Not explained sufficiently to satisfy my notions of what the universe is." :) WHich tends to be crackpotish, so I tend to keep my views, often time, to myself. though I have.. uhhhmm. theories. I've decided to try and collect my thoughts into a book.. which perhaps is what I should be doing.


Annny ways.. yeah. THE BOOTLOADER.. oh em ef gee.. It's a story, dude, a LONG story best told over a beer, honestly. ;) but, there are three cpu's. their major function is to provide serial communications control of a panning scanning tilting camera.
It was declared, a few weeks before they shipped, that they HAD to be field upgradeable.
SOoooo.. one cpu talks to the outside world, and sadly, it only has one extra uart, so since it had to talk to two other cpu's, we took it's uart tx line, ran it to the second cpu's, uart RX line, and the second cpu's uart tx, to the next one's uart rx and then from there back to the first cpu. a little token ring, or daisy chain.

So, one cpu has spi memory to store incoming data, so we store the initial program there, and the cpu has a bootloader now that listens for af ew seconds to the outside world, if it's not commanded into a mode to upload data to it's spi rom, it then goes into a boot mode where everyone starts talking on the ring to find out who has what revisions and if a new one is loaded into the spi rom, it sucks it out of there and into it's own eeprom program memory space.

if they are up to date, they just boot up. You can update any one cpu or all three if you want. the only one that updates it's own program memory space is the one that is not at the 'current' rev..

Clearly I'm leaving out a LOT of detail, such as space considerations (one cpu has 86 bytes of program memory space left. :P ) and what hapens when .......

sadly I was not afforded the time I needed to design it and implement it and debug it fully and kind of got, saddled with some code a consultant wrote... *GAawwwddd..*

The task itself is not particularly difficult, and is actually quite interesting, there are many components to it, I was jut not really afforded enough time to make sure all the paths are correct and overall i feel the thing to be.. ehhhhh.. not my best peice of work to date.

Heh. That does sound like a challenge. Gotta love changing requirements, eh?

Gotta love consultants, too...

Yeah.. it's all a mess. Overall I can deal okay with consultants as long as I have a solidly defined task to assign them. In this particular case, the requirements were there, but then when it was time to implement the task needed parts were not there and it was rush rush rush to the finish line so the requirements changed and then AWwwwwww, they don't match up at the end.. BUMMMmmerrrrr. :)

and yeah! it *IS* challenging.. I like it. overall, just don't like the time away from home so much is all.
and dang.. it DID get posted, I didn't know if it got through or not. looks like it did. :)

Oh! I knew it was out of place, but thought it was a generic non-sequitur for comedic effect. Didn't connect everything!

Maybe I was just in the wrong mood?

The universe was created by a high school science fair experiment performed by a kid named God.

I'd give it a B-. I mean, good effort and all, but some parts need work...

Yes, all those unstable elements - to say nothing of proton decay...

Yeah. There's the whole "life" thing, too. A neat idea in concept, and while the critters are very cute and all (those hairless monkeys are ugly buggers, though), do they really have to feed on each other like that? (It's just screams "psychological issues"...)

They need to spend more time yiffing and less time fighting. A bit of a bug in the limbic system design.