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Toyota had a runaway throttle caused by recursive software. People died as a result.

Toyota's response - replace the floormats!

Someone should have gone to prison over this.

Where are you getting this mistaken information? Do you have any experience with MacBook parts? Check out this video of an Apple battery teardown and note the packs of generic cells inside. You can even compare it to an aftermarket, non-recycled battery and see the exact same internal configuration.

Years ago I was a certified technician at an AASP (Apple Authorized Service Provider). I don't work as a tech anymore, but I still do everything from battery replacements to logic board repairs for friends and family. Since just about every one of my friends has had a unibody MacBook Pro that needed a battery at some point, I did a fair amount of research on ideal replacement parts. Everything I've commented in this thread has come from my personal experience.

TL:DR; Cross Licensing

Intel cross licensed the x86 stuff (32-bit) to AMD.
AMD cross licensed the AMD64 stuff (64-bit) to Intel.

The longer version:

Intel and AMD got tired of suing each other over patents. They have a LONG history of cross licensing agreements. They renewed it in 2001 and again in 2009.; AMD clarifyied the deal in 2015

It is only natural AMD would use Intel's docs as part of the verification process for the 32-bit stuff.

You can search intel amd cross license agreement for more info. but the agreement are (usually?) confidential.

Mobile phone interference with plane instruments: Myth or reality?
https://www.edn.com/electronic...
or
http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh...
Finding: BUSTED

The summary states, "it's clear engineers at the company care more about getting things right than they do about being first."

So, basically what you're saying is, Toyota is the anti-Tesla.

Perhaps what's being said is that Toyota has had issues in the past with software and is trying to be careful about that.

See: Toyota's killer firmware: Bad design and its consequences

Barr's ultimate conclusions were that:

• Toyota’s electronic throttle control system (ETCS) source code is of unreasonable quality.
• Toyota’s source code is defective and contains bugs, including bugs that can cause unintended acceleration (UA).
• Code-quality metrics predict presence of additional bugs.
• Toyota’s fail safes are defective and inadequate (referring to them as a “house of cards” safety architecture).
• Misbehaviors of Toyota’s ETCS are a cause of UA.

I would have thought the best tech company in the world (tm) would have no problem copying the many successful designs already on the market. Or maybe the yield that they are talking about is interoperability. Can't have a device accidentally get charged by any old generic charging station.

I dunno. I would prefer to have a plug in charger than a wireless one. Not tor the almost irrelevant earphone jack reason, but because wireless charging is inefficient, and places the second half of the transformer and the power suply inside the phone.

While this isn't the reason for the Samsung catastrophe. That will have an impact on interior space, making for less space for the battery, leading to more shaky schemes to extract more power out of a smaller battery.

As well, I'm expecting that the wireless units will be running at fairly high frequency for transformer size reduction. I'm wondering if a lot of these wireless chargers will make for a lot of RFI. http://www.edn.com/design/comm....

Power factor correction for electronics is old news, here's an article from 2010 - http://www.edn.com/electronics...

Forget autonomous car development, Toyota is woefully behind in computer-controlled car development. Random relevant article: Toyota's killer firmware: Bad design and its consequences.

Read the court documents on Toyota's ECU software sometime, to see what 'researchers' found when they were allowed to look at it.

Summary:
Mirroring (where key data is written to redundant variables) was not always done. This gains extra significance in light of
Stack overflow. Toyota claimed only 41% of the allocated stack space was being used. Barr's investigation showed that 94% was closer to the truth. On top of that, stack-killing, MISRA-C rule-violating recursion was found in the code, and the CPU doesn't incorporate memory protection to guard against stack overflow.
Two key items were not mirrored: The RTOS' critical internal data structures; and—the most important bytes of all, the final result of all this firmware—the TargetThrottleAngle global variable.
Although Toyota had performed a stack analysis, Barr concluded the automaker had completely botched it. Toyota missed some of the calls made via pointer, missed stack usage by library and assembly functions (about 350 in total), and missed RTOS use during task switching. They also failed to perform run-time stack monitoring.
Toyota's ETCS used a version of OSEK, which is an automotive standard RTOS API. For some reason, though, the CPU vendor-supplied version was not certified compliant.
Unintentional RTOS task shutdown was heavily investigated as a potential source of the UA. As single bits in memory control each task, corruption due to HW or SW faults will suspend needed tasks or start unwanted ones. Vehicle tests confirmed that one particular dead task would result in loss of throttle control, and that the driver might have to fully remove their foot from the brake during an unintended acceleration event before being able to end the unwanted acceleration.
A litany of other faults were found in the code, including buffer overflow, unsafe casting, and race conditions between tasks.

Source Link: http://www.edn.com/design/auto...

I'd be willing to wager that intelligence monitoring of international phone calls started right about the time international phone calls were first available.

This article says the first trans-Atlantic calls was in 1927.

This article says government wiretaps started in the 1860s.

Having cars reflashed at a dealership is something different - the mechanic will usually do at least some basic sanity tests that everything works before handing it over to the client.

Anyway, my point wasn't that reflashing firmware is bad - it may be even required and I am fine with that. It needs to be done safely and securely, though!

And yes, Toyota had a big software problem too, even though it wasn't why they have lost that accelerator pedal lawsuit:

http://www.edn.com/design/auto...

In particular, BMW has a history of similar cockups - just search youtube for various "iDrive problems", "Check engine reset" issues, "Engine stalling" issues, etc. Those software problems go back years. The first iDrive implementation from 2002 using Windows CE was a legendary lemon.

It isn't just BMW, though - http://www.edn.com/design/auto...

I had a Renault Clio and Renault's unreliable electronics is legendary too, even though there it was more a poor design than necessarily bad code. But you will never know - nobody has seen the source code of the firmware in many of the control units. Often not even the manufacturer has it - it is outsourced and subcontracted, even for critical systems like ABS or ECU.

And I am pretty sure that this is industry-wide problem - the same control units are in many cars, especially today with all those shared platforms and alliances between manufacturers.

If someone is thinking about drive-by-wire cars (Nissan, uses a safety clutch to be legal atm, but they have publicly announced a push to go fully by wire http://www.caranddriver.com/fe...) or the recent idea about the OTA updates in this sort of cesspit of horrid and unaccountable code, they must be insane.

They had a lot of interesting items, for example their math clock. I kept seeing items that I would have bought if they were half the price. But they weren't, so I didn't.

The article at this website seems to suggest that TRIM and overprovisioning do work well hand in hand. It suggests that overprosioning works well alone, but much better with TRIM. http://www.edn.com/design/syst... So if I'm understanding you correctly, you are saying the real world gains claimed are not equal to the bugginess of TRIM?

The newest Prius doesn't look bad at all. However, it's made by Toyota, which has been shown to be incompetent at developing safety-critical firmware.

The SmartCars are butt-ugly, however. And it too little cargo space. The Prius at least seats 4 and has a nice hatchback layout with tons of cargo space.

[...]They used-to have a dominant lead over ARM, selling something like 2/3rds of all embedded CPUs, but they simply fell apart and ceded the market to the competition. [...]

Through 2013, Cypress has shipped over 1.7 billion cumulative units of its PSoC 1 Programmable System-on-Chip, which I am fairly certain dwarfs anything MIPS has ever done. I don't have good numbers, but I am quite certain the Motorola 8-bitters shipped on the order of those numbers as well (or will, if you count the ARM variants in the Kinetis catalog as true 6800 descendents). If your intent is to talk about embedded CPUs, not MCUs, Motorola's 68K (and embedded derivatives) still have far surpassed MIPS numbers.

If that doesn't impress you, Microchip claims to have sold more than 7 Billion units of the PIC16 MCU series.

MIPS, while an interesting architecture that I have admired from afar, and which has had solid design wins in the past and will have more in the future, is at best an honorable mention in the embedded systems world for either volume or sales figures.

Did you perhaps mean that 2/3rds of the devices using MIPS architecture were embedded?

It's not the CPU, it's ceramic capacitors that make the noise. You can actually buy special quiet capacitors.

Just in case that wasn't enough:

Vehicle tests confirmed that one particular dead task would result in loss of throttle control, and that the driver might have to fully remove their foot from the brake during an unintended acceleration event before being able to end the unwanted acceleration. A litany of other faults were found in the code, including buffer overflow, unsafe casting, and race conditions between tasks.

Reverse polarity protection always involves a component which is destroyed to protect the rest of the device.

Wrong.

From an (understandably) anonymous posting on http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/readerschoice/4311611/When-kids-really-had-fun-with-science

To quote Forest Gump, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Weren’t we all back in the day? Well, at least those of us old enough to have survived the perils of un-government regulated childhood will remember things we did that should only be spoken about in secret circles.
If necessity is the ‘mother of invention’, then surely boredom is the father of ‘OH MY GOD, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!’
In the mid 60’s, in a world dominated by black & white TV and a couple of rock and roll AM radio stations, a few of us played with amateur radiobut daylight conditions were often poor, forcing us to seek entertainment outdoors.
DID YOU KNOW that a plastic paint drip cloth ~9ft x 12ft can be converted into a hot air balloon? Simply lay it on the ground, bring the long edges together in the center and seal them with a continuous length of Scotch Tapemaking a deflated cylinder. Bundle one end together tightly with rubber bands to seal it. Wrap the other end around your mom’s car exhaust and start the engine. The bag will fill with warm air Then remove and seal it with more rubber bands and release it and watch this awkward bubble float about.
BUT DID YOU KNOW that this balloon will rise much more rapidly and far higher, when filled with natural gas? We disconnected the main gas line to the home heating system, jury-rigged a garden hose to the outdoors and presto a balloon that is now aviation worthy. But hard to see as it rose out of sight.
BUT, DID YOU KNOW that if you take your mom’s roll of tin foil ( yes, tin back then) and secured it to the tail of the balloon, that your could track it for a much greater distance?
BUT, DID YOU KNOW that the radar at the Alameda Naval Air Station could detect a 20 foot long piece of tin foil floating above the Oakland Hills?
AND, DO YOU KNOW how it feels to see two jets get scrambled from the Air Base to do a reconnaissance on your new created UFO? Talk about positive feedback !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It doesn't matter. The only difference is how the tv or radio station will notice signal weakening compared to the electricity company.

Electricity company:
Voltage will go down as amperage will go up.

For TV stations they transmit at a constant power rate so they will notice signal weakening by taking test at various distance from the transmitting antenna.

The energy one device "steal" is not available for the device behind it so there is a limit to how many device a transmitter can sustain.

Proof? If what I say isn't true then, congratulations! You have just defined an infinite energy supply. Set up a transmitter with a number of devices large enough to produce more energy then it took to power the transmitter.

http://www.edn.com/design/sensors/4342455/Understanding-electromagnetic-fields-and-antenna-radiation-takes-almost-no-math

And Samsung still wouldn't care, evidenced by past behavior (otherwise known as the best predictor of future behavior):

Samsung could face 15B Euro fine
Samsung, LG fined for LCD price fixing
Tax evasion, bribery, and price fixing: how Samsung became the giant that ate Korea
Samsung agrees to plead guilty to DRAM price fixing, pay $300M fine
6 Samsung executives headed to jail for price fixing
Samsung, LG fined for mobile price fixing scheme

Everyone is holding these guys up to be some kind of saints in their battle against the evil Apple Empire, when they are thrice-convicted price fixers that screw their customers over at every opportunity, legal or otherwise; and try to screw the competition by suing over standards-essential patents that they don't license for FRAND terms (allegedly).

Samsung is not a friendly company, but I'll likely be modded down for saying so. Whatever, I've got the karma to burn.

Do you compose music? A pad of five-line stave can be bought cheaply at music shops or some news/magazine vendors, and a pen/pencil. There are some simple notation rules, that are easily looked up. A few notes at a time.... You never know when you'll write the next big hit.

Electrical circuit design takes some understanding, but it can be taken up and put down. It takes a blank sheet of paper, and a pen/pencil. Again, there are some simple notation rules, that are easily looked up. Try a simple one-transistor audio amplifier... Soon, you could be doodling a whole multi-input guitar amplifier with effects, or a super-het receiver.

The best programmer?

I say best business guy. I'm sure he never cared if his code sucked or not. It got his job done obviously.

If his code sucked, just ask Synopsis. Im sure they may have well scraped it, most companies that get acquired it typically happens.

Examples include a pacemaker that can be tuned remotely, ...

Fear your pacemaker!!! People with heart problems will now have an increased risk of death!!!

Uh. Well you know what I mean. Fear!!!

I think "death by wifi enabled pacemaker" is most likely. It was covered previously, so now it's just a matter of time and effort for someone actually do it. Well, it's also required that someone with a pacemaker is hated enough by someone else who has access to get the serial number, etc. and then go through with murdering him/her or find someone else with the skills and inclination. That reduces your population of potential perpetrators.

Is it possible this will happen? Yes.
In the next 24 months? Yes.
Will it be found or proved? Probably not.

A nice primer: http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4322431/Mind-boggling-math-BCD-binary-coded-decimal-

Unfortunately, "less than 0.05% of power related events that damage electronics are caused by voltage surges and spikes"

Source:

http://www.edn.com/article/520399-Circuit_protection_basics_Part_1_Issues_and_design_solutions.php

The entire article is worth reading. Can't say the same thing for part 2 of the article, which is basically just marketing hype for the supposed "solution" to these problems.

Wow, we're on Slashdot......almost like being On The Cover of the Rolling Stone.

Answers to various questions and comments:
- We support the Linux toolchain; compilers, debuggers, etc., fortunate to have some of the original gcc team. Ported pieces of various kernels to TOMI Aurora to make certain we had not left anything out and to test the memory manager. Aurora was for use in a tablet type device.
- TOMI Borealis was optimized for Big Data and unstructured data apps like MapReduce that choke at the Memory Wall. Linux could probably be ported without too much difficulty. Most massively parallel installations will use something really light weight instead.
- Potential users said give them more integer cores instead of adding FPU. We gladly cede the FP world to Itanium.
- For raw FP horsepower within a reasonable power budget, its tough to beat Nvidia's GPU approach. That is probably why 3 of the top 10 supercomputers are GPU accelerated. http://www.top500.org/ GPU-type architectures will likely be the future of scientific computing. Venray is focused on Memory Wall limited areas such as Big Data.
- From the computer architecture perspective, the distinction between Big Data and Small Data is whether the datasets will primarily fit within the onboard caches. Video compression, graphics acceleration, encryption, and much of LINPAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINPACK) would be classed as Small Data since most of the computing can be done without leaving the caches (high locality). Legacy architectures choke on Big Data since the datasets overflow the caches and there is much much less data reuse.
- MapReduce is important because it is currently the most visible Big Data application thanks to Google. http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html
- Venray believes Big Data applications are the future of computing. So does McKinsey Consulting. http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation We leave it to others to accelerate MS Office and Call of Duty.
- The future of Big Data appears to be RAM resident, not disk, not even flash. (See Fred Ho's work at IBM.) https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/fredho66/?lang=en_us
- re: Mitsubish 3DRAM and other similar ventures, iRAM, Exacute, Gilgamesh, etc....they embedded DRAM into logic. Contrast with TOMI that embeds CPU cores into DRAMs.....our benefits are performance and particularly cost: http://www.edn.com/photo/294/294788-microprocessor_vs_memory_transistors_graph.jpg
- We chose a modified RISC architecture rather than a special purpose one such as Gilgamesh in order to make programming simpler with well understood Linux tools such as gcc. Submit your gcc C, C++, or Fortran to http://www.venraytechnology.com./ Statistics are returned in standard dGen format.
- TSV (through silicon vias) and HMC (hybrid memory cube) are valid attempts to push back the Memory Wall. Discussed in Part 1 for EDN. http://www.edn.com/article/520059-The_future_of_computers_Part_1_Multicore_and_the_Memory_Wall.php Decision may be determined by cost.
- Would love to dispense with caches because they add transistors. 4K data and 4K instruction caches sped us up about 10x. Unlike legacy architectures, TOMI cache lines load in a single DRAM cycle.
- Yes love Raspberry Pi. http://www.raspberrypi.org/
- Quad-

Wow, we're on Slashdot......almost like being On The Cover of the Rolling Stone.

Answers to various questions and comments:
- We support the Linux toolchain; compilers, debuggers, etc., fortunate to have some of the original gcc team. Ported pieces of various kernels to TOMI Aurora to make certain we had not left anything out and to test the memory manager. Aurora was for use in a tablet type device.
- TOMI Borealis was optimized for Big Data and unstructured data apps like MapReduce that choke at the Memory Wall. Linux could probably be ported without too much difficulty. Most massively parallel installations will use something really light weight instead.
- Potential users said give them more integer cores instead of adding FPU. We gladly cede the FP world to Itanium.
- For raw FP horsepower within a reasonable power budget, its tough to beat Nvidia's GPU approach. That is probably why 3 of the top 10 supercomputers are GPU accelerated. http://www.top500.org/ GPU-type architectures will likely be the future of scientific computing. Venray is focused on Memory Wall limited areas such as Big Data.
- From the computer architecture perspective, the distinction between Big Data and Small Data is whether the datasets will primarily fit within the onboard caches. Video compression, graphics acceleration, encryption, and much of LINPAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINPACK) would be classed as Small Data since most of the computing can be done without leaving the caches (high locality). Legacy architectures choke on Big Data since the datasets overflow the caches and there is much much less data reuse.
- MapReduce is important because it is currently the most visible Big Data application thanks to Google. http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html
- Venray believes Big Data applications are the future of computing. So does McKinsey Consulting. http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation We leave it to others to accelerate MS Office and Call of Duty.
- The future of Big Data appears to be RAM resident, not disk, not even flash. (See Fred Ho's work at IBM.) https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/fredho66/?lang=en_us
- re: Mitsubish 3DRAM and other similar ventures, iRAM, Exacute, Gilgamesh, etc....they embedded DRAM into logic. Contrast with TOMI that embeds CPU cores into DRAMs.....our benefits are performance and particularly cost: http://www.edn.com/photo/294/294788-microprocessor_vs_memory_transistors_graph.jpg
- We chose a modified RISC architecture rather than a special purpose one such as Gilgamesh in order to make programming simpler with well understood Linux tools such as gcc. Submit your gcc C, C++, or Fortran to http://www.venraytechnology.com./ Statistics are returned in standard dGen format.
- TSV (through silicon vias) and HMC (hybrid memory cube) are valid attempts to push back the Memory Wall. Discussed in Part 1 for EDN. http://www.edn.com/article/520059-The_future_of_computers_Part_1_Multicore_and_the_Memory_Wall.php Decision may be determined by cost.
- Would love to dispense with caches because they add transistors. 4K data and 4K instruction caches sped us up about 10x. Unlike legacy architectures, TOMI cache lines load in a single DRAM cycle.
- Yes love Raspberry Pi. http://www.raspberrypi.org/
- Quad-

This. I had a lucky chance to meet Bob Pease in the 1980's and to converse with him several times over the years.
Another was Jim Williams at Linear Technologies. Jim died after attending Bob's funeral.
http://www.edn.com/article/518496-Analog_guru_Jim_Williams_dies_after_stroke.php

They became 'famous' -- within the world of EE's -- and their only response
was pure delight that they got to talk with more people about analog design. Jim helped me with some digital analog
interplay noise issues that did not mean sales for LT, he just loved design and troubleshooting.

Good people.

More interesting news is that Nvidia's next high end card will probably arrive in late 2012, or even 2013 - while AMD's high end card Tahiti is expected in January 2012.

http://www.edn.com/article/520175-Nvidia_Kepler_GPUs_to_trail_AMD_s_next_generation.php

This is a bit offtopic, but I came across this article on EDN that does a bit of technical analysis on Solyndra's product itself, and what were some of the benefits and shortcomings of their tubular solar collector design:
http://www.edn.com/article/520093-Solyndra_Its_technology_and_why_it_failed.php

It was easy to tout the latter's unique panel design composed of multiple cylindrical modules to a non-technical audience. They seemed Apple-like in their sophisticated industrial design. Solyndra assembly and installation were elegant and slick. Perhaps these qualities played better at dinner parties than discussion of efficiency ratings, production costs or manufacturing scalability.

Thanks dude. That's pretty cool. I also found this link:

http://www.edn.com/article/457681-IC_reverse_engineering_a_design_team_perspective.php

Apparently it's standard for big firms to strip each layer and SEM it. Sounds immensely complicated to me. And even when you have the design, how the heck do you work out what it can do? Instruction set and all that? This might be particularly hard to do if it wasn't something that had a manual, like a missile.

For those interested, here's a link to an EDN article, written by an engineer who worked with him:

http://www.edn.com/article/518568-Analog_engineering_legend_Bob_Pease_killed_in_car_crash.php

Good. Now, noticing that 6.3g is too much for the pilot, someone should figure out that the article has 240mph, when it should say 240km/h. So, it is closer to 3g. This pdf has quite a bit more info. http://www.edn.com/contents/images/207108.pdf

What's worried me for some time are the various "remote maintenance" schemes built into network controllers. See, for example, Intel's "Active Management Technology". This is Intel's successor to the Intelligent Platform Management Interface. These have a protocol stack built into the network board, with connections to other parts of the system strong enough to power the machine on and off, patch the disk, and do other drastic system changes. AMT is easier to attack from a distance than IPMI; it uses SOAP, HTTP, and TCP (on ports 16992 through 16995, which had better be blocked at your firewall), while IPMI used its own specialized protocol over UDP.

All that prevents taking over a machine with this mechanism is that the network controller is supposed to ship with no keys loaded. A "backdoor" would simply consist of pre-loading some crypto keys at the factory, or somewhere else in the supply chain. Considering the amount of hostile junk that routinely shows up on new USB sticks, that probably wouldn't be hard to accomplish.

A true "hardware level" attack for IPMI or AMT would be to ship a network controller which had keys pre-installed and enabled, but reported that remote management was disabled. There would be no way to find such a "backdoor", short of grinding open the network controller chip and reverse engineering it with a scanning electron microscope. There are special purpose systems for doing exactly that, used for reverse engineering IC designs, but this is e difficult and expensive process.

Note that the transmission is not loseless.
“It appears that WHDI is manipulating the color-space conversion by dropping some of the pixels’ LSBs and maybe even sending some pixels as monochrome interspersed with color pixels that change from frame to frame".

EDN Annual Microprocessor directory

Yeah but the whole CPU core including those tricks is a small percentage of die area. Look at any CPU and it will be mostly cache. As someone puts it here

http://www.edn.com/blog/920000692/post/370042437.html
1. The claim that the instruction decoder on the Atom is huge is nothing more than a straw man. While this sort of claim might have been somewhat accurate 20 years ago, instruction decoders are tiny compared to the rest of a processor with today's designs. Atom's decoder is almost nothing compared to other parts of the processor, which mostly consists of caches by this point (like all modern processors used as CPUs). I have no special knowledge because I don't work for Intel, but there's a die photo of Intel’s Atom processor in the April 7, 2008 article on the Atom by Tom Halfhill ("Intel’s Tiny Atom") in The Microprocessor Report. The die photo outlines the processor’s main blocks, including the FEC (front-end cluster), which includes the instruction decoder, branch predictor, I cache, prefetch buffers, and instruction TLB. The entire FEC consumes about 10% of the die (that’s a quick eyeball estimate) and the instruction decoder is a small portion of that 10%. The very visible, regular features of the I cache, prefetch buffers, and TLB constitute most of the area devoted to the FEC. Put the instruction decoder down as consuming a mere 1-2% of the Atom's real estate.

You mention self modifying code. SMP machines need to bus snoop anyway - handling x86 code semantics means you need to snoop on data writes from the processor into its own instruction scheme.

Still it has to be correct but it doesn't need to be fast. Basically the CPU has to catch any hint of this and flush caches. So in practice self modifying code will run very slowly and thus be rather uncommon.

It's like all x86-isms. Yes some nasty stuff is legal and a CPU must support it. However it is not common and performance critical code won't do it. Which explains why only a few percent of the die is used. Most of the die is used for cache, and that is not wasted by any reasonable definition.

• $25 for component
• $60 for HDMI
• Unchecked licensing authority

What we have is a perfect recipe for greed!

We are already far into this situation, the corporation to blame is Silicon Image: http://www.edn.com/blog/400000040/post/1850046185.html

Oddly enough, it is actually significantly more difficult to get decent signal quality out of HDMI as than analog VGA or DisplayPort. I suppose it would be bad to mention that the only major difference between HDMI and VGA is that in HDMI the three color signals are encoded in a crappy digital encoding along with an additional clock signal in the previously mentioned encoding scheme. Note that clock signal in HDMI is not used for the vertical and horizontal sync pulses, those work the same as they do in VGA. I would think that if this goes through, Silicon Image and friends will have questions to answer from the US FTC, the EC, and maybe even the Japanese JFTC. It isn't like a market structured like this can last very long without governmental inquiry or a situation where the entire set of 40-bit encryption keys used in HDMI are uncovered after being brute forced in a trivially easy fashion.

Then again, it isn't even like HDMI does any good for that matter, the issues with the wide open hole of BD-J authentication and encryption make recording a file from even a decrypted HDMI output port pointlessly difficult.

I think some of this stuff started in good faith, but got to the crazy "Audiophoole" level of today through good, old-fashioned greed.

When you're talking strictly analog signals, there's at least a decent notion that you can do something to somehow improve the quality of the signal, since there's always some loss. So, start with the coat hanger speaker wire, and work up from there... you just MIGHT make something that really, honestly, sounds better. The problem becomes that, next week, you competitor produces a better-still one, complete with full explanation as to why it's better, and they're selling it for more than yours. So you must escalate, and so on.

That, sadly enough, has lead to this fictional world of $10,000 per 10ft speaker cables, with all kinds of science-fiction written up about their special properties (eg, "Any significantly advanced scientific explanation is indistinguishable from a scam"... some of these guys ought to be writing "Star Trek" screen plays... they'd never come up with something as silly as "red matter"). There's so much obvious BS, any lingering truth is hidden.

You know they're intentionally hiding it, to keep their house of cards intact, for the simple reason that none of these guys do double-blind A/B testing. There are, finally, actual Engineering resources showing up to put the Amazing Randi on some of these guys: see http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm and http://www.edn.com/blog/980000298/post/830048683.html.

On a more practical point, there's the original recording. Yes, some recordings are made using guitars that cost several thousands, pianos that cost more than your car, mics that run into the thousands, etc. Others, less so. Either way, the wires being used... not so expensive. You might pay $50-$100 for a mic cable, but that's not to get some magical property in the wire other than "copper", but to get a cable that's going to last through the typical abuse of studio or stage. It's hard to believe anyone telling me you need to spend 100x more on wire to play back music than you needed to create it. Plus, you don't find musicians arguing about the "color imparted" by the mic cable, as if discussing a fine wine. Any sound engineer overhead discussing the subtle harmonics or enhanced tonal clarity from the wires between his console and his monitor is either a poser, or he's been in to the brown acid again.

Here you go. I've got a dozen more where that came from, and they're not "best case full sun cell output" numbers. Your "real world" claim wasn't even true in the mid 1980s; I saw a study from 1986 a while back that quoted 7.6 years payback.

As for "battery backed", if you want power at night (which is off peak, by the way), that's what molten salt solar thermal is for. Or HVDC to link areas in different timezones and/or other generating types (EGS, wind, etc) and/or hydro offsetting and/or pumped storage (air or water) and/or flow cells. Not that people should ever fall for the "100%" fallacy in the first place, which is what you're pushing. That is, the notion that if something doesn't address an issue 100%, it's worthless -- when the reality is that, say, cutting our carbon dioxide emissions by the 70% that solar without any kind of energy storage or offsetting whatsoever is capable of would be *way* more than anyone thinks we're actually going to achieve in the next several decades.

Sorry. Those numbers do NOT include energy costs of producing solar cells.

Nor do the costs of farming include of building all of that farm machinery and fuel refineries/storage tanks

Let me know when your panel exceeds 768KWh of output

*Huh*? What are you doing linking to the cost of a hot water panel? If you want to talk photovoltaics, payback times for silicon cells are generally in the 1-3 year range (ranging from amorphous thin film to polycrystaline), and non-silicon thin films are a matter of months (Nanosolar's is under a month).

A fairly simple estimation would favor the panel. It would be a very fine 3' x 5' solar panel that could produce that amount of energy in 25 years. Likely it wouldn't produce that much energy in 35 years.

Again, *huh*? Even if that was the number for photovoltaics -- which it's not (it's for a 2 square meter solar water heating panel) -- that's anything but the numbers you give. 3'x5' is 1.4 square meters. In perfect conditions on the surface, the sun bombards a panel with about 1,000 Wh/m^2. Perfect conditions don't exist 24/7. Because of night, angles, clouds, etc, a non-heliostat panel in a fairly good location will get about a 15% capacity factor, while one on a heliostat, about 25%. Particularly good locations can do better, but never mind that. Let's go with only 15%. Polycrystaline silicon panels are now about 20% efficient, and thin films over 10%. Let's go with 10%. 24 hours * 365.24 hours/day * 0.15 capacity factor * 0.10 efficiency * 1kW/m^2 * 1.4 m^2 = 184kWh/year.

Power harvesting from phone lines is actually perfectly doable(after all, all classic corded phones were powered directly by the telephone system). If you just go about it naively, the FCC can smack you down and/or your phone company can give you the "Your residence's ringer equivalence number is outrageous, goodbye" speech; but there are rather more polite methods.

Seriously. With Ubuntu now in a "just works" state on most hardware, and Android tested by commercial entities to work out-of-the-box fro specific hardware, there is real choice. The lower cost of slick Linux devices and PCs compared to OS X premium hardware from Apple will start to take hold this year.

Ubuntu 9.04 had a serious regression on Intel integrated graphics, as did Fedora 10. The sad part is this used to "just work" - Intel's drivers are fully open source.

Intel holds nearly 50% of the PC graphics market share. It's tough to say that it "just works" when nearly half of the latest hardware has broken graphics support - including the nearly all of the netbooks that Linux is supposed to be so great for. I find it troubling that they shipped an OS that broke graphics performance on so many systems - why did this happen now, and what prevents it from happening again?

... but what's even more troubling is that the court somehow ruled that such an editor was worth $98 in the copies of Microsoft Word where it was used. An XML editor. $98. And people say patent awards aren't out of sync with reality?

Well--and I stress that I am not defending this ruling--you could look at it like raising the stakes involved since there are so many patent cases.

Example: You steal a piece of fruit. You are convicted in front of a jury and slapped on the wrist. So you and everyone else does it again tomorrow. To combat this they increase the penalty to a $70 fine and 4 days in jail. In an ideal world, people stop stealing fruit.

Of course, I'm told hands get chopped off for stealing in some countries (could be wrong on that one though). I do know in Texas they're not opposed to electrocutin' ya for certain offenses though ... maybe they are just on their way to try to get all these patent cases prevented?

Doesn't make a lick of sense at all considering you can't throw a goddamn progress bar on your application without risking litigation.

Cosmic rays can cause bit flips, but in my experience it is more likely to happen to electrostatic discharge or other electromagnetic interference of terrestrial origin. The odds of cosmic rays hitting your device is partially dependent on altitude.

There was a study done by IBM that indicated that a semiconductor based device could expect one such event every year. Other studies have shown that as the number of transistors in a device goes up, the chances increase. Just because an event occurs does not mean it will be visible. It could happen in unused memory, not affect a calculation significantly, etc.

I dug up an article written by some guys at Cyprus Semiconductor(complete article at http://www.edn.com/article/CA454636.html);

The interesting bit is this: "The potential impact on typical memory applications illustrates the importance of considering soft errors. A cell phone with one 4-Mbit, low-power memory with an SER of 1000 FITs per megabit will likely have a soft error every 28 years. A high-end router with 10 Gbits of SRAM and an SER of 600 FITs per megabit can experience an error every 170 hours. For a router farm that uses 100 Gbits of memory, a potential networking error interrupting its proper operation could occur every 17 hours. Finally, consider a person on an airplane over the Atlantic at 35,000 ft working on a laptop with 256 Mbytes (2 Gbits) of memory. At this altitude, the SER of 600 FITs per megabit becomes 100,000 FITs per megabit, resulting in a potential error every five hours. The FIT rate of soft errors is more than 10 times the typical FIT rate for a hard reliability failure. Soft errors are not the same concern for cell phones as they can be for systems using a large amount of memory."

There's a brief discussion of Cell's "Design for Manufacturing" feature redundancy's effect on higher yields at the link from one of the Inquirer links you just included. But of course that redundancy isn't all that's required for high yields. They improved the rest of the process which increased the base yield.

What I'd accomplish with a Cell with 1 SPE would be a 3.4GHz PPC, a 20GFLOPS DSP, and a superfast bus, using a part that would be extremely cheap because its inclusion in the yields mean it would otherwise have been thrown out. The fact that a chip uses an onchip coprocessor as the MMX/SSE chips did, and indeed every x86 chip since the 80486 did, does not mean that it's a bad architecture. In fact, that demonstrates that it's a good architecture.

One advantage other than the CPU's native features would be the common development platform, as Linux runs on Cell and SPEs. Indeed, lots of the same SW would run on both the "desktop" (ie. PS3) Cell machine and a 1 SPE device, because most of the SW doesn't use the SPEs at all, but rather just the PPC. That cheaper and generic, even open, development platform, was one reason why Sony designed the Cell into the PS3. The PITA programming the Cell lies in its multiprocessor SPE architecture, which is unfamiliar and needs new techniques. A single SPE is not multiprocessor in that application tier, so doesn't present those problems.

Though indeed the Cell was not designed specifically for the PS3. It was designed as a whole class of new CPUs, the highest end ones for IBM workstations and servers (where they are also used today), but the lower ones in the increased yields ready to go into cheaper and less powerful equipment, like DVDs, big TVs, etc.

Not all the power supplied to a CPU is emitted as heat. Much, sometimes most, of the energy moves the chips electrons in an orderly fashion through the chip and out to the ground, not the disorderly motion that is dissipated heat.

See, there are reasonable answers to even the bad questions and wrong responses that you posed. I'm not defensive, I'm just correcting you. But since you haven't acknowledged even a single point you got wrong, though you got them all wrong, and you're getting even more insulting than your original obnoxious response, I'm not giving you any more free clues. It's obvious that you are interested in being aggressively wrong and obnoxious, and burrowing into your ignorance. I'm not wasting any more time depriving you of your sad little hobby.

Don't forget to multiply any result by at least 2 because of the poor load factor of current CFLs. Your bill might go down, but the power plant wastes almost as much energy as with an incandescent. Couple that with the mostly-poor light quality (so you end up using twice as many to get the "equivalent light"), and the current crop of cheap CFLs are not green by any stretch of the imagination.

I always wanted a desktop cellphone.

Cell phones designed for home use are sort of the 'next big thing,' at least to the cell companies. Each of the 3 major carriers seems to either have one out already, or in the works.

It makes sense -- right now, they've pretty much saturated the market for cell phones: I don't know a man, woman, or child in the U.S. that wants a cell phone that doesn't have one (people who truly can't afford them excepted, although the barrier to entry is getting lower by the month; there are some prepaid phones that verge on being disposable they're so cheap). Once you've put a device in everybody's pocket in the country, where can you go? The logical step is to start chipping away at the other places where they still use non-cell phones. Offices are tough (you have PBXes and complex switching requirements), so instead the carriers are going for the remaining home phones.

To me it seems a bit ironic that the "smart home phone" -- a mythical central-hub unit that does voice, video, and text communication, plus provides news and other information feeds -- which has been a broken promise from wireline phone companies for literally decades, is finally going to be delivered ... only the network behind it will be a wireless one, not POTS, and far from being the local telcos' salvation, it may be the final nail in their coffin. (That is, unless they really get over their reluctance and embrace a future of being bit-pushing broadband ISPs.)