This was about the same time as the large theaters started splitting up their screens into smaller sizes. For one I went to the split vertically for the bottom level with a new wall, then horizontally so that the balcony had it's own separate screen. The movies just weren't pulling in the big crowds anymore, there was more to watch on TV, VHS rentals were just starting to take off, and so forth.
There's also Brazil. With the ending completely changed for American television against Terry Gilliams wishes, essentially given the Blade Runner treatment.
I don't remember Jar-Jar himself. However there is a scene that seems to show Gungans dancing on a roof near the end as the camera flies over the city and everyone is celebrating. They're not up close so it's easy to miss but it's an obvious change to the original if you know when to look.
No, they are not asking just for this one phone. That is what they claim, but once Apple is pushed to the breaking point and gives in there is nothing to stop the government from coming back and asking "ok, just one more, we have precedent now that we know you can do it". There is ample historical evidence that the government will break treaties when it suits them despite having the full force of law, and even the mafia has a stronger code of conduct than the US government.
Besides the government doesn't need what's on that phone. It's not important. They know who the killers are. They're just hoping to find more leads on other crimes, a pure fishing expedition. Which means the next time there's a locked phone that actually has useful information to solve an existing crime it will be more important than this case and they'll use that as justification to ask Apple a second time, and a third time, and so on.
Warrants are not all powerful though. And this one was granted under a somewhat dubious legal theory, in that if congress has not explicitly created laws covering the situation that the courts can make a writ. Which was probably important in the early days of the republic but it's a bit of a stretch to think that congress has not already dealt with the issue of privacy, searches, evidence discovery, the limits of law enforcement, and so forth. It seems unlikely to be upheld as it gets to higher courts.
And as well a warrant is about searching in the 4th amendment, not in compelling others to assist in investigations. If the evidence was in Albanian the courts could not compel a a random third party person who speaks both Albanian and English to make a translation.
Sorry, it is "recharge" so I mispoke. And it is low leakage SRAM. The periodic recharge is not necessarily only for the SRAM but for all the components that are not completely powered down during a low power sleep mode (that is, voltage has not been cut). At least on the systems I've used, low power may be handled different on others.
Yup, FreeRTOS is a bit odd. It's also very large, which it makes up for with a bag full of #ifdefs to trim it back down. It's very difficult to read and follows one particular programmers personal coding style.
I think a lot of the portable RTOSes out there have a fundamental drawback that by trying to cater to so many chips portably that they end up being lower performance. Ie, in uC/OS they put a critical section around reading and returning a 32-bit value just because this isn't atomic on an 8 and 16-bit system. So you either put up with it or hack away to improve the OS at the expense of being able to merge in later releases easily.
The customer that you just shipped ten thousand of your products to, who just spend several months installing them all over the place. That phone call where you say "oops" can get pretty heated.
Demo boards oftne use the higher end of the product line that has more RAM because it's more convenient for experimenting or evaluating. In actual production it's common to use the lower end of the line to save money or power.
True in terms of IoT where the system needs to run with minimal power, possibly on non-rechargeable batteries for a decade or two. But in the broader embedded world where devices are constantly the 1MB-4MB size range is pretty common. Though if you drop down to things like AVR or PIC then you're looking at less than 1K of RAM.
Fast is sort of relative. The amount of state transitions in the chip determines most of the power, so running at a slower clock rate does not necessarily reduce power usage. All of the ultra low power chips I've seen have ways to turn off the clock to various modules or even power down entirely which solves a lot of that problem.
Cortex-M0 also has less die space overall compared to a Cortex-M3/M4, fewer transistors, smaller pipeline, and so on. So what it loses slightly in speed it makes up for in power usage. Of course it cuts back enough that M0 is too limited for some applications.
At times we were considering using parts of Flash for temporary storage but that sucks up power too. 20-40mA while writing.
The scrimping is done for several reasons. It's all internal memory on the same chip as the CPU and that in itself limits the amount due to physical space of cramming everything in. External memory has it's own extra power needs with no capability of being put into low power standby, plus requires a lot more pins for interconnectivity, and adds to cost which is very important if you eventually want to sell a few million of them.
RAM takes power! When the device is in very deep sleep mode, any RAM that is retained has to be periodically refreshed and more RAM means more current to do that.
And this is just the OS remember, not a full system. The less that the OS uses the more the system and application can use. It is common for Cortex-M series processors to provide 16 or 32K RAM, where even taking up 10K for the OS use is sucking up a large amount.
However the modern low power ARMs are Cortex-M series, which are very different from the more power hungry ARM from the 80s. Even the commonly used ARM7 is very high power in comparison to what is needed for an unattended battery powered sensor monitor.
The companies are jumping on the bandwagon. A couple years ago there were no good chips out there that met the needs of being battery powered for over a decade with low power wireless capabilities. Today there are a handful all in pre-release stages. There was a gap in the market and it's staring to be filled. The biggest snag for most is being low power, as in 1 microAmp or less sleep current, as that has not been a common feature request by customers until recently.
15K RAM is too small in my view if you also want to have reasonable security. Networking too requires a chunk of RAM if it's wireless and not just a leaf node, and some wireless standards require supporting 2KB packet size, plus IPv6 with increased packet header size (anyone using IPv4 is not taking IoT seriously).
They're basically on a fishing expedition. Find our who the terrorists friends were, who did their dry cleaning, and so forth. They're convinced there is a wider conspiracy that they haven't uncovered.
It's doable. But doable does not mean it's easy or that it is not an undue burden on Apple. A court order can't say "keep trying to comply until you die trying." Apple could show the projected loss in sales if it does comply, show how much manpower is required to comply, how much manpower is required to prevent future abuse by the DOJ, and so forth.
It depends on what it means to decrypt. If all that is needed is a relatively short PIN then there is certainly a way to do this and the only thing standing in the way are features to limit and nullify brute force attacks (is it really limited to 4 digits on iPhone?). So FBI is asking for help to subvert this feature. They say it's just this one time, but that's not to trusted and once the door is open to allow a very simple warrant compel a company to crack a phone then it will be used in the very next case where the FBI feels stumped.
Apple *could* help with this presumably, at least with the older iPhone 5c (though how do you upgrade firmware without unlocking the phone, can Apple forcibly upgrade a phone remotely?). However Apple should be able to respond to the court order by showing that it is unreasonably burdensome.
Slashdot Mirror
This was about the same time as the large theaters started splitting up their screens into smaller sizes. For one I went to the split vertically for the bottom level with a new wall, then horizontally so that the balcony had it's own separate screen. The movies just weren't pulling in the big crowds anymore, there was more to watch on TV, VHS rentals were just starting to take off, and so forth.
Gen Why?
There's also Brazil. With the ending completely changed for American television against Terry Gilliams wishes, essentially given the Blade Runner treatment.
I don't remember Jar-Jar himself. However there is a scene that seems to show Gungans dancing on a roof near the end as the camera flies over the city and everyone is celebrating. They're not up close so it's easy to miss but it's an obvious change to the original if you know when to look.
Damn, I just made the same post, and here I am without a delete button.
He's using social engineering on the FBI though. They hand over the phone, he types in the wrong PIN ten times in a row, then says "oops".
They're standing on encryption, jumping up and down hoping it will crack.
Proof that Rubio is politically naive and not following the direction that the mob is going.
Can Slashdot help me decrypt the stealth bar?
No, they are not asking just for this one phone. That is what they claim, but once Apple is pushed to the breaking point and gives in there is nothing to stop the government from coming back and asking "ok, just one more, we have precedent now that we know you can do it". There is ample historical evidence that the government will break treaties when it suits them despite having the full force of law, and even the mafia has a stronger code of conduct than the US government.
Besides the government doesn't need what's on that phone. It's not important. They know who the killers are. They're just hoping to find more leads on other crimes, a pure fishing expedition. Which means the next time there's a locked phone that actually has useful information to solve an existing crime it will be more important than this case and they'll use that as justification to ask Apple a second time, and a third time, and so on.
Warrants are not all powerful though. And this one was granted under a somewhat dubious legal theory, in that if congress has not explicitly created laws covering the situation that the courts can make a writ. Which was probably important in the early days of the republic but it's a bit of a stretch to think that congress has not already dealt with the issue of privacy, searches, evidence discovery, the limits of law enforcement, and so forth. It seems unlikely to be upheld as it gets to higher courts.
And as well a warrant is about searching in the 4th amendment, not in compelling others to assist in investigations. If the evidence was in Albanian the courts could not compel a a random third party person who speaks both Albanian and English to make a translation.
Sorry, it is "recharge" so I mispoke. And it is low leakage SRAM. The periodic recharge is not necessarily only for the SRAM but for all the components that are not completely powered down during a low power sleep mode (that is, voltage has not been cut). At least on the systems I've used, low power may be handled different on others.
Yup, FreeRTOS is a bit odd. It's also very large, which it makes up for with a bag full of #ifdefs to trim it back down. It's very difficult to read and follows one particular programmers personal coding style.
I think a lot of the portable RTOSes out there have a fundamental drawback that by trying to cater to so many chips portably that they end up being lower performance. Ie, in uC/OS they put a critical section around reading and returning a 32-bit value just because this isn't atomic on an 8 and 16-bit system. So you either put up with it or hack away to improve the OS at the expense of being able to merge in later releases easily.
The customer that you just shipped ten thousand of your products to, who just spend several months installing them all over the place. That phone call where you say "oops" can get pretty heated.
Demo boards oftne use the higher end of the product line that has more RAM because it's more convenient for experimenting or evaluating. In actual production it's common to use the lower end of the line to save money or power.
True in terms of IoT where the system needs to run with minimal power, possibly on non-rechargeable batteries for a decade or two. But in the broader embedded world where devices are constantly the 1MB-4MB size range is pretty common. Though if you drop down to things like AVR or PIC then you're looking at less than 1K of RAM.
Fast is sort of relative. The amount of state transitions in the chip determines most of the power, so running at a slower clock rate does not necessarily reduce power usage. All of the ultra low power chips I've seen have ways to turn off the clock to various modules or even power down entirely which solves a lot of that problem.
Cortex-M0 also has less die space overall compared to a Cortex-M3/M4, fewer transistors, smaller pipeline, and so on. So what it loses slightly in speed it makes up for in power usage. Of course it cuts back enough that M0 is too limited for some applications.
At times we were considering using parts of Flash for temporary storage but that sucks up power too. 20-40mA while writing.
The scrimping is done for several reasons. It's all internal memory on the same chip as the CPU and that in itself limits the amount due to physical space of cramming everything in. External memory has it's own extra power needs with no capability of being put into low power standby, plus requires a lot more pins for interconnectivity, and adds to cost which is very important if you eventually want to sell a few million of them.
RAM takes power! When the device is in very deep sleep mode, any RAM that is retained has to be periodically refreshed and more RAM means more current to do that.
And this is just the OS remember, not a full system. The less that the OS uses the more the system and application can use. It is common for Cortex-M series processors to provide 16 or 32K RAM, where even taking up 10K for the OS use is sucking up a large amount.
However the modern low power ARMs are Cortex-M series, which are very different from the more power hungry ARM from the 80s. Even the commonly used ARM7 is very high power in comparison to what is needed for an unattended battery powered sensor monitor.
The companies are jumping on the bandwagon. A couple years ago there were no good chips out there that met the needs of being battery powered for over a decade with low power wireless capabilities. Today there are a handful all in pre-release stages. There was a gap in the market and it's staring to be filled. The biggest snag for most is being low power, as in 1 microAmp or less sleep current, as that has not been a common feature request by customers until recently.
15K RAM is too small in my view if you also want to have reasonable security. Networking too requires a chunk of RAM if it's wireless and not just a leaf node, and some wireless standards require supporting 2KB packet size, plus IPv6 with increased packet header size (anyone using IPv4 is not taking IoT seriously).
The perps are most likely under the personal protection of Putin. Good luck extraditing them.
They're basically on a fishing expedition. Find our who the terrorists friends were, who did their dry cleaning, and so forth. They're convinced there is a wider conspiracy that they haven't uncovered.
It's doable. But doable does not mean it's easy or that it is not an undue burden on Apple. A court order can't say "keep trying to comply until you die trying." Apple could show the projected loss in sales if it does comply, show how much manpower is required to comply, how much manpower is required to prevent future abuse by the DOJ, and so forth.
It depends on what it means to decrypt. If all that is needed is a relatively short PIN then there is certainly a way to do this and the only thing standing in the way are features to limit and nullify brute force attacks (is it really limited to 4 digits on iPhone?). So FBI is asking for help to subvert this feature. They say it's just this one time, but that's not to trusted and once the door is open to allow a very simple warrant compel a company to crack a phone then it will be used in the very next case where the FBI feels stumped.
Apple *could* help with this presumably, at least with the older iPhone 5c (though how do you upgrade firmware without unlocking the phone, can Apple forcibly upgrade a phone remotely?). However Apple should be able to respond to the court order by showing that it is unreasonably burdensome.