{"id":6195,"date":"2014-08-26T20:00:45","date_gmt":"2014-08-27T00:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6195"},"modified":"2014-08-26T20:22:25","modified_gmt":"2014-08-27T00:22:25","slug":"master-foo-and-the-hardware-designer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6195","title":{"rendered":"Master Foo and the Hardware Designer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The newest addition to <a href=\"http:\/\/catb.org\/esr\/writings\/unix-koans\/index.html\">Rootless Root<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>On one occasion, as Master Foo was traveling to a conference with a few of his senior disciples, he was accosted by a hardware designer.<\/p>\n<p>The hardware designer said: &#8220;It is rumored that you are a great programmer. How many lines of code do you write per year?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Master Foo replied with a question: &#8220;How many square inches of silicon\u00a0 do you lay out per year?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Why&#8230;we hardware designers never measure our work in that way,&#8221; the man said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;And why not?&#8221; Master Foo inquired.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If we did so,&#8221; the hardware designer replied, &#8220;we would be tempted to design chips so large that they cannot be fabricated &#8211; and, if they were fabricated, their overwhelming complexity would make it be impossible to generate proper test vectors for them.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Master Foo smiled, and bowed to the hardware designer.<\/p>\n<p>In that moment, the hardware designer achieved enlightenment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The newest addition to Rootless Root:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hacker-culture","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6195"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6203,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6195\/revisions\/6203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}