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What is Your Operating System of Choice?
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You will be Told about it Tomorrow. Go Home and Prepare Thyself.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 26, @01:09AM (2 children)
Is it a bit of a black art? Yes. Sadly, like audio, that is a bit by design because complexity slowly increased over time by without actually doing a clean redesign. Starting with the fact that you have multiple hardware manufacturers doing multiple (and often incompatible) things even between their own products. Next is the assemblers that put those components together in different combinations with different designs. Then there are OSes that do different things with the same settings. Additionally, you have users that want different things from identical platforms. Finally, most people don't have to actively do anything because it usually just works but when it doesn't, you need serious options.
So how does one learn these things? I'm not really sure. I've had the benefit of being in the industry as these things cropped up. Adding a new piece into the picture you've already assembled is easy. Another benefit is that you really only need to do thermal design when you are designing a platform helps too because you usually have someone else's work to start with. I think the best way to learn is by looking at an OEM install or other professional design. Or you could look at what sort of things a distro like Debian or Fedora do on default hardware. Examine the power management profiles and tables, check their daemon configuration, look at udev rules, and browse the applicable sysfs entries for things like thermal and hwmon. See how they handle it and you can get a picture of what works and how it fits together.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday May 01, @04:24PM (1 child)
Looked up modem cards one time to see if my card was working: EVERY card manufacturer blinks their lights differently even in their own products.
The card is blinking: one light green the other a steady yellow? I figured it might be receiving but not transmitting... but no: it was fine. Another card? It might mean there was a problem, it might not.
Steady green or yellow? Blinking green or yellow? Some random combination of the two? Not blinking at all?
You have to look up EVERY SINGLE CARD to look at it's specs to see what is going on.
F*ck it... it wasn't working so i replaced it. Teh new one blinked or not in some combination... dunno...but this one worked, so....
SHEEEEESH!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 11, @01:56AM
We had a switch where a green LED was normal and red was an error. Except for one hardware version. There, red was normal and green was an error. Next version they switched the colors back. The story told to us by our support rep was that they changed two-color LEDs and no one realized that it had the opposite pin out. Rather than eat the cost or get into a huge fight, the OEM just changed their documentation for the bad units as a new revision. It was a pain to scan the lights because you had to remember which switch was which revision. Finally we figured out how many "red LEDs" we would have and our redundancy needs, we started putting them in specific places and marking cabinets in with red painter's tape so the mental load was lower. Ended up saving a ton of money because they had a hard time selling that revision to other customers.
Moral of the story. Sometimes double checking your design can save your company hundreds of thousands of dollars down the road.