Hardware guys tend to like firm dates because those dates can have an impact on the overall development cost. Parts availability, scheduling time with a manufacturing group (easier when it's not outsourced), having resources available to do design, schematics, layout, signal integrity, and, when prototypes become available, device verification testing (DVT). If a date is too early, an integral part may not be ready in time, forcing the choice of a more expensive or substandard part from another vendor (which may require pre-qualification to meet your company's standards). If the date is too late, hardware may be ready early, but that's wasted cycles that could've been spent working on another project.
In situations like these, it can be helpful to contact the hardware vendors and ask them if they can supply reference samples. For example, you can get reference evaluation boards from CPU vendors. It may not match the target hardware, but it may be enough to allow you to do early code bring-up before prototypes become available. Emulation tools can also be very handy for early coding and simple functional verification.
Another possibility, though it may difficult, depending on your company's standards, vendor agreements, etc, is to go with a vendor that has already done some of the software legwork by providing an SDK. This will be more true of chipset vendors than it will be for discrete parts, but it never hurts to ask.
Hardware Binder
Attempting to convince our IT department at work that Citadel is a better replacement for M$Exchange than using Google Business e-mail solutions.....
Are any of you other software folks using Scrum for your development
process?
I think they make a topical cream for that.
Are any of you other software folks using Scrum for your development
Sorry unrelated but everytime somebody says "scrum" I have to say "sounds like something you scrape off the bottom of your balls."
My attempts at convincing our IT department to switch to Citadel were futile. They've decided to go ahead with Google solutions because of their wider range of colorful apps.
sorry folks, tried to get Citadel into a larger corporation, but didn't happen.
We're going after the smaller orgs that they're leaving behind.
which is exactly why I use citadel for Blurred Vizion Studios' email and groupware.
I appear to be working with voodoo code.
The vendor helpfully provides these nice example sources so you can play with their hardware and figure out how to make it do what you need it to do.
In their example code, I see something like this (where the variables are 'int' variable types):
FrameWidth = 1920;
FrameHeight = 1080;
When I stream the values of these variables to std::cout, FrameWidth shows as 780, and FrameHeight shows as 430... even after they were set immediately before streaming the values to std::cout, with no intervening commands that could change those values.
I have to believe there's a logical explaination for this, but at the moment, I'm at a loss. It looks like voodoo code.
I found my logical explaination.
1080 is 0x483. The stream was still displaying numbers as hexidecimal from an earlier setting. So the number wasn't different after all, just the display of it.
I have to believe there's a logical explaination for this, but at the
moment, I'm at a loss. It looks like voodoo code.
Another thread is playing with it?
No, something dumber.
std::cout << "Display this as hex: " << std::hex << variable_with_some_huge_number << std::endl;
std::cout << "Display this as dec: " << 1080 << std::endl;
The second line will display as hex unless you do:
std::cout << "Display this as dec: " << std::dec << 1080 << std::endl;
By 'dumber', I mean I was stupid. I should have remembered that the std::hex thing would stick to the thread until I cancelled it with std::dec.
I have to believe there's a logical explaination for this, but at the
moment, I'm at a loss. It looks like voodoo code.
Since when is "voodoo" not a logical explanation for something?
After all the nonsense that goes on in the workplace, why not throw voodoo on the pile?
You would NOT want me to write up a test plan for voodoo. It would not be pretty.