I'm not an expert by any means; but I get the impression that there are a few different camps behind the idea:
You have the optimists and the true believers(frequently identifiable by the PNAC affiliation on their CV, and/or the ability to use "hyperpower" and "Full Spectrum Dominance" with a straight face, or the belief that the 'uni-polar world' was a permanent condition), who seem to actually think that we can build a fully functional SDI system, at which point we can finally tell the commies to suck it down.
You then have the 'middle ground' types, who operate under the theory that if we can just build a really sucky SDI system, that won't piss off anybody who can afford lots of missiles; but will protect us from 'rogue states' who can only afford a few(and don't think of the dastardly 'just rent a U-Haul' plan).
There could also just be the fact that hiring a defense contractor to work on something open-ended and expensive is usually a pretty safe move, from an electoral standpoint.
This just in: China still operates under non-trivially mercantilist policies; US continues to cede moral high ground on issue as fast as possible at behest of entertainment industries.
As much as the "You can understand macroeconomics just by multiplying your household budget by a few hundred billion" school constantly goes on to the contrary, it doesn't really work that way.
Little people debt is heavily asymmetric. Big Serious Debt(much of it owed in the currency of the debtor, and with happy thoughts and optimism as collateral, no less) opens up a number of interesting little twists...
I don't see how my side having the capability to make "surprise, asymmetric attacks" could be considered a bad thing on its own.
It's a cold war thing: The theory is that, as long as you have two or more nuclear powers who potentially would like to see the others enjoy a dose of thermonuclear holocaust; but definitely don't want one themselves, the situation is stable so long as two rules hold:
1. Launching a nuclear delivery vehicle is visible and attributable.
2. It is not possible to neutralize(either through surprise strike on launch sites, or through anti-missile defenses that actually work) another party's nuclear delivery capability.
If those two hold, everybody just announces that they are far to nice to perform a first strike; but they will second-strike like a crazy motherfucker if anybody tries anything funny. You then keep your finger on the button and stare nervously at one another for the indefinite future, which is expensive and hard on the nerves; but has so far kept global thermonuclear war to a minimum.
Any time somebody starts working on a system that upsets these two conditions, people start to get a touch twitchy.
While I suspect that you are joking, 'surprise' is really more 'first-strike' than mere 'first-strike' is.
Nobody, as yet, has any anti-ICBM interception capabilities that aren't wildly overpriced, oversold, toys; but detecting their approach and performing whatever melodramatic Big Red Button sequence your own launch systems require before they arrive is pretty doable. It's sort of the whole point of 'deterrence' and people keeping their second strike systems nice and shiny.
To the degree that this device manages to avoid pissing people off, it won't be because it's not an ICBM; but because neither this thing nor an ICBM is much use for knocking out the submarines on which the people who can afford it prefer to store at least a portion of their missiles...
The chronic problem is that, no matter how good your technology gets, you can always find a way to produce "almost as good and a lot cheaper". If nobody is looking too closely, you can probably go with "not actually almost as good; but cheaper still".
There are engineering problems that are simply at the outer bounds of present technology and inherently risky. For most everything else, though, the heart of the problem has more to do with some combination of lousy risk assessment, active dishonesty, or the fact that it isn't hard to take risks so that the rewards accrue to you and the consequences to somebody else.
This is why I'm somewhat pessimistic about our ability to innovate our way into safety: team science, and their applied brethren in engineering, have enormously expanded the scope of what we can do; but have had relatively little effect on the fact that we basically want it fast and cheap and the 'we' doing the choosing frequently aren't the 'we' doing the living next to it...
Intel's period of dismissive attitude toward advanced features(multiple cores, 64-bit support on x86, something that sucked less than FSB) was never really serious. Back when they still thought that they had a chance of making IA64 the 'serious' platform and gradually letting x86(and AMD) sink into the bargain bin, they did some tactical rubbishing of what "normal users" needed in order to justify restricting those features to the high-end SKUs; but they worked on them.
Once it became clear that that particular plan wasn't a happening thing, and that AMD was delivering serious server parts and knockdown prices, and Nvidia was doing interesting things with GPUs, and ARM licensees were pumping out increasingly zippy low-end chips, they stopped fucking around. These days they'll still charge as hard as they can for the features provided; but their hopes of sandbagging x86s in order to sell IA64s are dead
If it makes you feel any better, the holder of this patent isn't strictly a patent troll; but Creative, world renowned for having not done a damn thing worth mentioning since the SoundBlaster, and somehow continuing to ship alarmingly priced cards in the face of shit that has the decency to be priced as such, from outfits like realtek, and genuinely decent hardware from companies that actually know something about audio...
As much as I'm not terribly impressed with many of Microsoft's products, their sense of taste, or anything resembling a semblance of strategy; the whining of 'zOMG why aren't the numbers getting bigger???!!?!?!' investors annoys me far more.
C'mon, fucktards, Microsoft has been dead flat(but dividend bearing) for years now. Quit. Fucking. Whining.
If you want to go bubble chasing, sell the boring stuff and invest the proceeds in something wildly volatile. You've got plenty of choices. If you just want your pet stock to go up and up and up, go see if the magic pony you will shortly be receiving for Christmas can take you back a decade or so so you can make smarter buying choices; but, FFS, don't just sit there, holding on to a stock with predictable behavior, and demanding that it make you rich immediately.
If I didn't know otherwise, I'd be inclined to believe that the world's major monotheisms (used to) condemn usury just because people like them were so damn annoying...
If memory serves, protocol for maximizing survival after a nuclear 'event' requires feeding the most contaminated food materials to elderly people, or people without useful skills, as the former are likely to die of natural causes before radiation-induced cancers get them and the latter do not enhance group survival chances.
Jetway offers this one. Not nearly as cheap as a vanilla Atom board with its single PCI slot stuffed full of storage controller; but it isn't a crowded field...
Incidentally, the French secret service of which the Kargus consulting creep was an alumnus was the same entity responsible for sinking one of Greenpeace's ships with limpet mines in order to avoid being inconvenienced by a protest they were going to lead... Keep it classy.
Not only does this extraordinarily slippery substance have a wide variety of possible uses, it can only be created by grinding and distilling PR flacks and advertising executives!
If you look at the top surface of an aircraft's wings(large airliners anyway) there are a variety of marked walkways with various messages to the effect of "ONLY WALK INSIDE THE LINES. NO, NOT THERE YOU MORON!" in large print, presumably to keep somebody from putting a foot through something delicate or falling off and cracking on the tarmac.
I assume that, in this use case, they'd coat the rest of the wing and either ignore or otherwise deal with the service walkways.
Any surface that vibrates can, if you can measure the vibration, serve as a mic(take a look at the hilariously sneaky story of the Soviets using radar to observe the vibrations of some metal plaque they had "politely" donated to the American embassy on some occasion, or the contemporary bouncing-IR-lasers-off-windows devices that achieve the same ends). Similarly, any surface that can be vibrated can be coaxed into being a (on average terrible) speaker.
It would be unlikely to do as well as a conventional mic and speakers, and would cost more; but you could implement a 100% sealed chassis and still get audio in and out.
It would certainly carry a premium over standard boring USB(and essentially zero power); but I'd be interested to see how fast an optical link you could (economically) achieve under 'near optoisolator' conditions: emitter/receiver pair in the phone, behind the little window, matching emitter/receiver pair in the dock/dongle/whatever.
Given that the RONJA-link guys manage to get 10Mb/s out of an LED over multiple KM of free air, I suspect that you could get a decent slice of USB throughput through a liquid-impermeable chassis with a fairly cheap optical mechanism...
... InB4 : no, not all iPhone user are that stupid.
(anticipating cunning remarks from self-declared "superior" android users)
It's true, though: No android user would call the cops while drunk and belligerent. We all leave such mundane tasks to unique hardware and software that we are free to develop in the open android ecosystem, unlike the pitiful iSerfs.
When I want to get my ass kicked by the cops, my BeagleBoard-based(runs linux, of course) automated kegerator sends me a text message when it hits a threshold deltaBeer/deltaT value. The IOIO attached to my phone uses its breathalyser sensor and firmware to verify my state of inebriation and then sends a GET to the local server that my custom libpigs interface provides. Libpigs dials 911 and uses the Google text-to-speech mechanism to read Markov-chain generated pseudorandom rants based on mashups of obscure punk that you wouldn't have heard of and the lesser known speeches of 19th century radicals until they show up.
Once the accelerometers verify that I'm getting beaten down, my phone automatically uploads to youtube and starts Googling for personal injury lawyers!
Break resistance does cost more than the very lowest of the "Does it boot? Most of the time? Ship that fucker!" school of engineering; but the reasons for the vulnerability of contemporary iDevices and their ilk pretty much come down to what people want, however dubious their priorities.
They want very slim, they want shiny, they don't want bezels, they want max battery life without increasing thickness. Boom: You have a phone whose case and chassis are a mixture of glass and metal practically calculated to crack and/or transmit shock to circuit boards(at least the Android units tend to only be entirely glass on one side...). Absolutely nothing to give you an elastic collision, no replaceable exterior sacrificial components(remember those now-traumatically-retro Nokia units, whose entire outer casing was a slightly loosely fitting ABS+Polycarbonate replaceable shell with a bit of crumple space between it and anything important? That design probably added more mm to the phone than certain modern devices have; but it meant you could drop the thing, crack the fuck out of it, pick it up, and get a new shell for $5 at the nearest seedy kiosk.)
The people who care primarily about durability are, unfortunately for them, not quite large enough a market to get the really good stuff. They do pull Real Serious Cases for iPhones, and reasonably ruggedized variants of some of the more widely model-numbered Android designs; but the ones done from the ground up to be rugged tend to be a bit retro.
What surprised me is that the list of problematic boards included a fair number of what are usually boring-but-respectable Intel retail boards. Those are usually the ones you go for if you don't mind mediocre features for the price class; but don't want any exciting personality quirks...
The electronic music/DAW/DJ crowd has been all over this sort of stuff for some years.
Something like the Aurora is an open source hardware example; but there are a large number of devices at various price points and levels of openness that boil down to a whole bunch of knobs, buttons, and sliders, with some sort of computer-compatible interface(often MIDI or USB-MIDI device, sometimes with a driver or plugin for Ableton or Max specific to the device).
The audio guys may not map 100% to your requirements; but they have the advantage of being a reasonably large, reasonably active, community with a fair amount of existing hardware available off the shelf.
As an alternative, many contemporary microcontrollers are capable of serving as USB slaves. Something like a teensy is pretty cheap and makes it dead easy to turn inputs from buttons and sliders and rotary encoders and things into USB HID keycodes.
More specifically, the power management mechanism in question(PCIe ASPM) requires, broadly speaking, two different components:
1. You need to detect boards that are capable of it, so that you don't try to shut down idle links in a system where that could cause crashes, losing touch with peripherals, or other havoc.
2. You need the actual logic for detecting idle PCIe links, and the appropriate driver support and so on for instructing the PCIe controller(s) to change link power states.
Part two is the bulk of the matter, and it already worked for some time now, if your board declared ASPM support or if you used ASPM force. Part one is comparatively simple; but the approach that Linux previously used was hobbled by the fact that boards frequently don't declare ASPM support even when they have it; but enough boards don't that just defaulting to force would be risky. To deal with this, the latest patch adds the heuristics that Windows uses to detect ASPM, since the method that is supposed to work frequently doesn't, but vendors aren't going to ship gear that doesn't support Windows...
It's funny they had to fix it by copying the method from Windows though.
Unfortunately (as is too often the case) the "bug" was an interaction between the linux kernel and the absolutely fucked state of the BIOS in general, and ACPI in particular.
Because not all boards support PCIe Active State Power Management(a part of the PCIe spec that provides for powering down an unused link to save power), and bad things can happen if you try to use it on a board that doesn't, a board that does support it is supposed to advertise that fact. In practice, a large swath of boards where it works just fine were failing to declare that. The Linux Kernel obligingly didn't try to use it(unless ASPM=force was used). Since what is supposed to happen apparently usually doesn't, they've had to examine the mechanism used by Windows systems to infer whether or no ASPM is good to go, reasoning that vendors are unlikely to ship BIOSes where the Windows default behavior causes horrible things to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not an expert by any means; but I get the impression that there are a few different camps behind the idea:
You have the optimists and the true believers(frequently identifiable by the PNAC affiliation on their CV, and/or the ability to use "hyperpower" and "Full Spectrum Dominance" with a straight face, or the belief that the 'uni-polar world' was a permanent condition), who seem to actually think that we can build a fully functional SDI system, at which point we can finally tell the commies to suck it down.
You then have the 'middle ground' types, who operate under the theory that if we can just build a really sucky SDI system, that won't piss off anybody who can afford lots of missiles; but will protect us from 'rogue states' who can only afford a few(and don't think of the dastardly 'just rent a U-Haul' plan).
There could also just be the fact that hiring a defense contractor to work on something open-ended and expensive is usually a pretty safe move, from an electoral standpoint.
This just in: China still operates under non-trivially mercantilist policies; US continues to cede moral high ground on issue as fast as possible at behest of entertainment industries.
News. At. 11.
As much as the "You can understand macroeconomics just by multiplying your household budget by a few hundred billion" school constantly goes on to the contrary, it doesn't really work that way.
Little people debt is heavily asymmetric. Big Serious Debt(much of it owed in the currency of the debtor, and with happy thoughts and optimism as collateral, no less) opens up a number of interesting little twists...
I don't see how my side having the capability to make "surprise, asymmetric attacks" could be considered a bad thing on its own.
It's a cold war thing: The theory is that, as long as you have two or more nuclear powers who potentially would like to see the others enjoy a dose of thermonuclear holocaust; but definitely don't want one themselves, the situation is stable so long as two rules hold:
1. Launching a nuclear delivery vehicle is visible and attributable.
2. It is not possible to neutralize(either through surprise strike on launch sites, or through anti-missile defenses that actually work) another party's nuclear delivery capability.
If those two hold, everybody just announces that they are far to nice to perform a first strike; but they will second-strike like a crazy motherfucker if anybody tries anything funny. You then keep your finger on the button and stare nervously at one another for the indefinite future, which is expensive and hard on the nerves; but has so far kept global thermonuclear war to a minimum.
Any time somebody starts working on a system that upsets these two conditions, people start to get a touch twitchy.
As long as people are willing to lend you money, you have funds...
While I suspect that you are joking, 'surprise' is really more 'first-strike' than mere 'first-strike' is.
Nobody, as yet, has any anti-ICBM interception capabilities that aren't wildly overpriced, oversold, toys; but detecting their approach and performing whatever melodramatic Big Red Button sequence your own launch systems require before they arrive is pretty doable. It's sort of the whole point of 'deterrence' and people keeping their second strike systems nice and shiny.
To the degree that this device manages to avoid pissing people off, it won't be because it's not an ICBM; but because neither this thing nor an ICBM is much use for knocking out the submarines on which the people who can afford it prefer to store at least a portion of their missiles...
The chronic problem is that, no matter how good your technology gets, you can always find a way to produce "almost as good and a lot cheaper". If nobody is looking too closely, you can probably go with "not actually almost as good; but cheaper still".
There are engineering problems that are simply at the outer bounds of present technology and inherently risky. For most everything else, though, the heart of the problem has more to do with some combination of lousy risk assessment, active dishonesty, or the fact that it isn't hard to take risks so that the rewards accrue to you and the consequences to somebody else.
This is why I'm somewhat pessimistic about our ability to innovate our way into safety: team science, and their applied brethren in engineering, have enormously expanded the scope of what we can do; but have had relatively little effect on the fact that we basically want it fast and cheap and the 'we' doing the choosing frequently aren't the 'we' doing the living next to it...
Intel's period of dismissive attitude toward advanced features(multiple cores, 64-bit support on x86, something that sucked less than FSB) was never really serious. Back when they still thought that they had a chance of making IA64 the 'serious' platform and gradually letting x86(and AMD) sink into the bargain bin, they did some tactical rubbishing of what "normal users" needed in order to justify restricting those features to the high-end SKUs; but they worked on them.
Once it became clear that that particular plan wasn't a happening thing, and that AMD was delivering serious server parts and knockdown prices, and Nvidia was doing interesting things with GPUs, and ARM licensees were pumping out increasingly zippy low-end chips, they stopped fucking around. These days they'll still charge as hard as they can for the features provided; but their hopes of sandbagging x86s in order to sell IA64s are dead
If it makes you feel any better, the holder of this patent isn't strictly a patent troll; but Creative, world renowned for having not done a damn thing worth mentioning since the SoundBlaster, and somehow continuing to ship alarmingly priced cards in the face of shit that has the decency to be priced as such, from outfits like realtek, and genuinely decent hardware from companies that actually know something about audio...
Other than the fact that somebody attached it to a Notion Ink Adam, not really...
As much as I'm not terribly impressed with many of Microsoft's products, their sense of taste, or anything resembling a semblance of strategy; the whining of 'zOMG why aren't the numbers getting bigger???!!?!?!' investors annoys me far more.
C'mon, fucktards, Microsoft has been dead flat(but dividend bearing) for years now. Quit. Fucking. Whining.
If you want to go bubble chasing, sell the boring stuff and invest the proceeds in something wildly volatile. You've got plenty of choices. If you just want your pet stock to go up and up and up, go see if the magic pony you will shortly be receiving for Christmas can take you back a decade or so so you can make smarter buying choices; but, FFS, don't just sit there, holding on to a stock with predictable behavior, and demanding that it make you rich immediately.
If I didn't know otherwise, I'd be inclined to believe that the world's major monotheisms (used to) condemn usury just because people like them were so damn annoying...
If memory serves, protocol for maximizing survival after a nuclear 'event' requires feeding the most contaminated food materials to elderly people, or people without useful skills, as the former are likely to die of natural causes before radiation-induced cancers get them and the latter do not enhance group survival chances.
Jetway offers this one. Not nearly as cheap as a vanilla Atom board with its single PCI slot stuffed full of storage controller; but it isn't a crowded field...
Incidentally, the French secret service of which the Kargus consulting creep was an alumnus was the same entity responsible for sinking one of Greenpeace's ships with limpet mines in order to avoid being inconvenienced by a protest they were going to lead... Keep it classy.
Oooh, a 10,000 euro fine... Greenpeace needs to start salting their secure systems with MP3s from RIAA labels...
Not only does this extraordinarily slippery substance have a wide variety of possible uses, it can only be created by grinding and distilling PR flacks and advertising executives!
If you look at the top surface of an aircraft's wings(large airliners anyway) there are a variety of marked walkways with various messages to the effect of "ONLY WALK INSIDE THE LINES. NO, NOT THERE YOU MORON!" in large print, presumably to keep somebody from putting a foot through something delicate or falling off and cracking on the tarmac.
I assume that, in this use case, they'd coat the rest of the wing and either ignore or otherwise deal with the service walkways.
Any surface that vibrates can, if you can measure the vibration, serve as a mic(take a look at the hilariously sneaky story of the Soviets using radar to observe the vibrations of some metal plaque they had "politely" donated to the American embassy on some occasion, or the contemporary bouncing-IR-lasers-off-windows devices that achieve the same ends). Similarly, any surface that can be vibrated can be coaxed into being a (on average terrible) speaker.
It would be unlikely to do as well as a conventional mic and speakers, and would cost more; but you could implement a 100% sealed chassis and still get audio in and out.
It would certainly carry a premium over standard boring USB(and essentially zero power); but I'd be interested to see how fast an optical link you could (economically) achieve under 'near optoisolator' conditions: emitter/receiver pair in the phone, behind the little window, matching emitter/receiver pair in the dock/dongle/whatever.
Given that the RONJA-link guys manage to get 10Mb/s out of an LED over multiple KM of free air, I suspect that you could get a decent slice of USB throughput through a liquid-impermeable chassis with a fairly cheap optical mechanism...
... InB4 : no, not all iPhone user are that stupid. (anticipating cunning remarks from self-declared "superior" android users)
It's true, though: No android user would call the cops while drunk and belligerent. We all leave such mundane tasks to unique hardware and software that we are free to develop in the open android ecosystem, unlike the pitiful iSerfs.
When I want to get my ass kicked by the cops, my BeagleBoard-based(runs linux, of course) automated kegerator sends me a text message when it hits a threshold deltaBeer/deltaT value. The IOIO attached to my phone uses its breathalyser sensor and firmware to verify my state of inebriation and then sends a GET to the local server that my custom libpigs interface provides. Libpigs dials 911 and uses the Google text-to-speech mechanism to read Markov-chain generated pseudorandom rants based on mashups of obscure punk that you wouldn't have heard of and the lesser known speeches of 19th century radicals until they show up.
Once the accelerometers verify that I'm getting beaten down, my phone automatically uploads to youtube and starts Googling for personal injury lawyers!
Break resistance does cost more than the very lowest of the "Does it boot? Most of the time? Ship that fucker!" school of engineering; but the reasons for the vulnerability of contemporary iDevices and their ilk pretty much come down to what people want, however dubious their priorities.
They want very slim, they want shiny, they don't want bezels, they want max battery life without increasing thickness. Boom: You have a phone whose case and chassis are a mixture of glass and metal practically calculated to crack and/or transmit shock to circuit boards(at least the Android units tend to only be entirely glass on one side...). Absolutely nothing to give you an elastic collision, no replaceable exterior sacrificial components(remember those now-traumatically-retro Nokia units, whose entire outer casing was a slightly loosely fitting ABS+Polycarbonate replaceable shell with a bit of crumple space between it and anything important? That design probably added more mm to the phone than certain modern devices have; but it meant you could drop the thing, crack the fuck out of it, pick it up, and get a new shell for $5 at the nearest seedy kiosk.)
The people who care primarily about durability are, unfortunately for them, not quite large enough a market to get the really good stuff. They do pull Real Serious Cases for iPhones, and reasonably ruggedized variants of some of the more widely model-numbered Android designs; but the ones done from the ground up to be rugged tend to be a bit retro.
What surprised me is that the list of problematic boards included a fair number of what are usually boring-but-respectable Intel retail boards. Those are usually the ones you go for if you don't mind mediocre features for the price class; but don't want any exciting personality quirks...
The electronic music/DAW/DJ crowd has been all over this sort of stuff for some years.
Something like the Aurora is an open source hardware example; but there are a large number of devices at various price points and levels of openness that boil down to a whole bunch of knobs, buttons, and sliders, with some sort of computer-compatible interface(often MIDI or USB-MIDI device, sometimes with a driver or plugin for Ableton or Max specific to the device).
The audio guys may not map 100% to your requirements; but they have the advantage of being a reasonably large, reasonably active, community with a fair amount of existing hardware available off the shelf.
As an alternative, many contemporary microcontrollers are capable of serving as USB slaves. Something like a teensy is pretty cheap and makes it dead easy to turn inputs from buttons and sliders and rotary encoders and things into USB HID keycodes.
More specifically, the power management mechanism in question(PCIe ASPM) requires, broadly speaking, two different components:
1. You need to detect boards that are capable of it, so that you don't try to shut down idle links in a system where that could cause crashes, losing touch with peripherals, or other havoc.
2. You need the actual logic for detecting idle PCIe links, and the appropriate driver support and so on for instructing the PCIe controller(s) to change link power states.
Part two is the bulk of the matter, and it already worked for some time now, if your board declared ASPM support or if you used ASPM force. Part one is comparatively simple; but the approach that Linux previously used was hobbled by the fact that boards frequently don't declare ASPM support even when they have it; but enough boards don't that just defaulting to force would be risky. To deal with this, the latest patch adds the heuristics that Windows uses to detect ASPM, since the method that is supposed to work frequently doesn't, but vendors aren't going to ship gear that doesn't support Windows...
It's funny they had to fix it by copying the method from Windows though.
Unfortunately (as is too often the case) the "bug" was an interaction between the linux kernel and the absolutely fucked state of the BIOS in general, and ACPI in particular.
Because not all boards support PCIe Active State Power Management(a part of the PCIe spec that provides for powering down an unused link to save power), and bad things can happen if you try to use it on a board that doesn't, a board that does support it is supposed to advertise that fact. In practice, a large swath of boards where it works just fine were failing to declare that. The Linux Kernel obligingly didn't try to use it(unless ASPM=force was used). Since what is supposed to happen apparently usually doesn't, they've had to examine the mechanism used by Windows systems to infer whether or no ASPM is good to go, reasoning that vendors are unlikely to ship BIOSes where the Windows default behavior causes horrible things to happen.
ACPI is a bit of a problem child...