But generally in the past, it took at least a modicum of skill to work on a car. Letting any douchebag with a computer plug in and play with any aspect of his car's functions is a little more scaring than a grease monkey putting in new headers on his 66 Mustang.
I don't see a difference. The modicum of skill has just moved disciplines.
A Chimpanzee with a torque wrench could render a car unsafe to drive, but I'd like to see him upload a new firmware.
Regardless, I don't see why it's felt that people employed by the car company are infallible. As a freelance engineer I move from company to company. There's a large proportion of engineers out there that have their hands tied because of office politics, are buried under red tape, are brow-beaten because of unrealistic deadlines or just aren't very good. These guys make mistakes, and often have to live with the bugs because the cost to fix them (financial or political, as deemed by their boss) is too great.
Customers are trusting their lives to this code. They should be allowed to see how good it is. Open it up and let people review and improve the code.
Yep, this is the right attitude. Use the language that has the type checking and strict structure, and then when the shackles come off people have already formed good habits.
I've done about 8 years of VHDL and so prefer it to Verilog, mainly because I'm more familiar with it, but I've had lots of conversations with Verilog engineers over the years saying "You can't do X with VHDL because it's too strict" and it's never true. Learning VHDL was tough, but doing it (and I've got a similar tale with Haskell for software) was what advanced my skills of RTL coding the most.
The key is not to fight the restrictions, but to understand why they are there and to see what they allow you to forget about. It's sounds almost zen, but sometimes restrictions let you flow....but never forget. The aim is to describe hardware, so you need to have in mind what hardware you want to synth at the end of the day. As such the language is always second to good hardware design.
I disagree with the statement that everybody has switched to System Verilog. I've worked with a few companies introducing it, and System Verilog is exactly the reason I want to go back to working with VHDL. It's horrible.
My take on it it is that a load of C++ engineers looked at Verilog and thought "What this needs is object orientation!" completely ignoring the fact that hardware description languages are OO by nature. After all, what is a module if not a method of encapsulating design leaving just a public interface.
The result is a horrible mess of a bi-polar language that can't decide if it's a software language or a hardware one, and the two sides don't really want to talk to each other. Add to that the fact that all of the design patterns that are being used with it are software patterns that don't map well to hardware, that most hardware engineers don't know, and you just get a big steaming pile when you try to introduce it to a company.
The EDA vendors love it because it's giving them a new set of tick boxes they can sell their wares on, but I've yet to see it do anything that I couldn't do in straight verilog / VHDL + a little PLI/FLI, and I've been working as a system verilog application engineer for one of the EDA companies....oh and it's really slow (as in orders of magnitude).
Now that they are ready to offer the hardware, I find myself seriously considering purchasing one.
Don't! and I'd say that to anyone. What they are offering is a FPGA dev kit, with nothing to put on the FPGA. Yes, they've done a board design, but that's really one of the easiest bits, especially as most firms that sell the chips give you sample designs that you can stitch together.
The HDL is the key to this project, and as far as I can see they haven't produced anything beyond very basic PCI and Memory Controllers (which I'd expect to be very low performance). I looked at the same code about 2 years ago (maybe more) and it's in exactly the same state now as it was then. I say this as someone who writes VHDL / Verilog for a living and was wondering if I should contribute, but I'm not interested in carrying the whole thing myself.
If this projects manages to get a framebuffer device up and running within 5 years I'll be impressed. I think the whole project is incredibly naive, and doesn't understand the scale of the project they're trying to do
Couriers and encryption are all good ideas if you trust the person at the other end, but in your case the data you're dealing with is too sensitive. You could be responsible (yes, YOU!) for divulging all of your colleagues SSNs, bank account details, etc.
Any company that will not send an employee on-site to do the transfer - under supervision, or at least having accepted, under contract, responsibility for any data loss - shouldn't be doing the work.
Give your HR director a good slap for having agreed to this, and not respecting the security of all the employees.
But what if my need is to modify the software, and not redistribute the modified source code? Whoops, there goes the GPLv3, restricting my freedoms. ...and that is exactly what is intended. The same intention as GPLv2. Write it yourself if that's your intention.
I'm amazed there are people out there thinking this kind of behaviour is fair game. Just because somebody makes their source available, doesn't mean they want you to pass off their work as your own.
It really is very simple:
BSD says "Do what you want. I don't care." GPLv2 says "You got the source, so should your customers." GPLv3 says "Stop jumping through loopholes! You got the source, so should your customers." Commercial licenses say "You want the source?!?! Go f*%$ yourself."
Personally I would never BSD license any of my code. There are too many people in the world that will happily rip it off.
I saw a story recently that seemed like SGI was considering OpenGL to be one of it's few remaining pieces of IP that it could sell off. I'm not sure how true that was (centainly they own various patents which are licensed to OpenGL implementors), but I expect this is a move to try to get it out of the car wreck that is going to be SGI soon.
A shame it has to be done, but probably a good thing.
My money is on nVidia buying up the IP once SGI is gone (ala 3Dfx)
It used to be that Microsoft could never be considered for "enterprise" (I HATE that word) type instalations becuase there was no way that software could be centrally managed.
Now we have questions asking how you do it on a unix. You do it the same way it's been done for decades, and that's to have a central reposistory which is mounted by all workstations. You install and run your software to/from here.
Main problem is no package manager that I know of is able to cope with such a concept:rolleyes:, so you have to get your hands dirty.
The fact is that I think this is a fairly important debate. Was Linus wrong for using a propietry tool for the development of the kernel and essentially forcing all kernel developers to follow him? Could this situation been forseen? Is Linus angry with Tridge because it actually shows up his previous bad decision and the only way for him to save face is to badger Tridge? Is McVoy behaving like a spoilt kid and taking his ball home because somebody didn't want to play his game?
I'm personally with Tridge and Perens all the way on this one (not that anybody will care). Reverse Engineering is legal. McVoy needs to deal with that.
If we get a schism, then so be it. It's an important line to be divided by in the development of a Open Source / Free OS.
"I used to like installing PVC drainage pipes but now, well when I get home and find a leak under the sink it's just too much like work to get under there and fix it."
When I was back at Uni (Showing my age here) we all used to use 'talk' or 'ytalk' to have realtime chats over the network.
It worked great. People would be logged-in in their rooms, and it was good for 'Just going for a drink. U coming?' type messages, or asking problems on work stuff or whatever.
Nobody ever seemed to use it in the real world though, although it's still in the distros.
I'm forever getting a modal dialog box come up on a windows box, asking me a question, and I think 'Oh, let me check'. It's at that point I realise I can't do anything else with the application. I personally find these things really annoying.
You're probably going to see a lot of this
on
Eazel On The Ropes
·
· Score: 1
The sad truth is, now that the internet bubble has burst, all the venture capital companies are looking over their portfolios for what hey can cut back on. This is leaving start-ups that have even the fainest whiff of 'internet' about them high and dry once there current money runs out.
Count in the fact that most tech companies are feeling very poor because their share price is so low, therefore buy-outs are going to be unlikley, and you've got a situation where there's going to be a lot of dead animals by the side of the road.
Anything which is patented is, by definition, not a trade secret. The notion of a patent is that it promotes information sharing, but gives the owner of the patent protection from having their idea commercially exploited by some bigger faster company.
This has been rather perverted in recent history, but the fact is if you want to keep something secret you can't patent it. The process requires openess.
Anyway I think this would come under copyright, but I'm not sure.
3. [...]The drive serial number is on the magnetic media somewhere. How long before a "utility" is developed to overwrite/change this?
From what I hear programs already exist to do this. The Hard-drive serial numbers are often used as the seed for licence keys. Crackers often just change the number by a few and watch how the resulting licence changes. Once they've worked it out they'll write a key generator.
I'll readilly admit that I haven't used it, but can anybody answer me why I would want to?
As far as I can make out IM systems are just like e-mail systems except I can see if the person at the other end is around at the time.
If I want to chat I'll use talk or IRC (depending on their/my location), and e-mail is perfectly fine for messages.
If people are around at the time then they'll normally answer an e-mail in a couple of minutes. It's not as if e-mail is based on dial-up UUCP connections anymore (as a rule).
From the artical it sounds like it's just sitting off our doorstep. It's orbitting the sun at a distance of 0.8AU (1 AU = distance between the earth and the sun).
Nothing ike going round in circles for 35 years:-)
Slashdot Mirror
But generally in the past, it took at least a modicum of skill to work on a car. Letting any douchebag with a computer plug in and play with any aspect of his car's functions is a little more scaring than a grease monkey putting in new headers on his 66 Mustang.
I don't see a difference. The modicum of skill has just moved disciplines.
A Chimpanzee with a torque wrench could render a car unsafe to drive, but I'd like to see him upload a new firmware.
Regardless, I don't see why it's felt that people employed by the car company are infallible. As a freelance engineer I move from company to company. There's a large proportion of engineers out there that have their hands tied because of office politics, are buried under red tape, are brow-beaten because of unrealistic deadlines or just aren't very good. These guys make mistakes, and often have to live with the bugs because the cost to fix them (financial or political, as deemed by their boss) is too great.
Customers are trusting their lives to this code. They should be allowed to see how good it is. Open it up and let people review and improve the code.
Yep, this is the right attitude. Use the language that has the type checking and strict structure, and then when the shackles come off people have already formed good habits.
I've done about 8 years of VHDL and so prefer it to Verilog, mainly because I'm more familiar with it, but I've had lots of conversations with Verilog engineers over the years saying "You can't do X with VHDL because it's too strict" and it's never true. Learning VHDL was tough, but doing it (and I've got a similar tale with Haskell for software) was what advanced my skills of RTL coding the most.
The key is not to fight the restrictions, but to understand why they are there and to see what they allow you to forget about. It's sounds almost zen, but sometimes restrictions let you flow. ...but never forget. The aim is to describe hardware, so you need to have in mind what hardware you want to synth at the end of the day. As such the language is always second to good hardware design.
I disagree with the statement that everybody has switched to System Verilog. I've worked with a few companies introducing it, and System Verilog is exactly the reason I want to go back to working with VHDL. It's horrible.
My take on it it is that a load of C++ engineers looked at Verilog and thought "What this needs is object orientation!" completely ignoring the fact that hardware description languages are OO by nature. After all, what is a module if not a method of encapsulating design leaving just a public interface.
The result is a horrible mess of a bi-polar language that can't decide if it's a software language or a hardware one, and the two sides don't really want to talk to each other. Add to that the fact that all of the design patterns that are being used with it are software patterns that don't map well to hardware, that most hardware engineers don't know, and you just get a big steaming pile when you try to introduce it to a company.
The EDA vendors love it because it's giving them a new set of tick boxes they can sell their wares on, but I've yet to see it do anything that I couldn't do in straight verilog / VHDL + a little PLI/FLI, and I've been working as a system verilog application engineer for one of the EDA companies. ...oh and it's really slow (as in orders of magnitude).
Have they improved branching in hg?
Bookmarks are what your after and they came in a couple of versions ago.
Don't! and I'd say that to anyone. What they are offering is a FPGA dev kit, with nothing to put on the FPGA. Yes, they've done a board design, but that's really one of the easiest bits, especially as most firms that sell the chips give you sample designs that you can stitch together.
The HDL is the key to this project, and as far as I can see they haven't produced anything beyond very basic PCI and Memory Controllers (which I'd expect to be very low performance). I looked at the same code about 2 years ago (maybe more) and it's in exactly the same state now as it was then. I say this as someone who writes VHDL / Verilog for a living and was wondering if I should contribute, but I'm not interested in carrying the whole thing myself.
If this projects manages to get a framebuffer device up and running within 5 years I'll be impressed. I think the whole project is incredibly naive, and doesn't understand the scale of the project they're trying to do
Couriers and encryption are all good ideas if you trust the person at the other end, but in your case the data you're dealing with is too sensitive. You could be responsible (yes, YOU!) for divulging all of your colleagues SSNs, bank account details, etc.
Any company that will not send an employee on-site to do the transfer - under supervision, or at least having accepted, under contract, responsibility for any data loss - shouldn't be doing the work.
Give your HR director a good slap for having agreed to this, and not respecting the security of all the employees.
I'm amazed there are people out there thinking this kind of behaviour is fair game. Just because somebody makes their source available, doesn't mean they want you to pass off their work as your own.
It really is very simple:
BSD says "Do what you want. I don't care."
GPLv2 says "You got the source, so should your customers."
GPLv3 says "Stop jumping through loopholes! You got the source, so should your customers."
Commercial licenses say "You want the source?!?! Go f*%$ yourself."
Personally I would never BSD license any of my code. There are too many people in the world that will happily rip it off.
I saw a story recently that seemed like SGI was considering OpenGL to be one of it's few remaining pieces of IP that it could sell off. I'm not sure how true that was (centainly they own various patents which are licensed to OpenGL implementors), but I expect this is a move to try to get it out of the car wreck that is going to be SGI soon.
A shame it has to be done, but probably a good thing.
My money is on nVidia buying up the IP once SGI is gone (ala 3Dfx)
Are you saying that Big Ben is actually a huge death ray?
(And yes, for the pedants, I mean the clock tower and not the bell.)
To quote Michael Collins, how did you people ever get an empire?
To quote Eddie Izzard, "Through the cunning use of flags."
You people are overcomplicating things.
If you manage to go back in time and kill your grandfather, it means that your gransmother was doing the guy next door.
Simple.
It used to be that Microsoft could never be considered for "enterprise" (I HATE that word) type instalations becuase there was no way that software could be centrally managed.
:rolleyes:, so you have to get your hands dirty.
Now we have questions asking how you do it on a unix. You do it the same way it's been done for decades, and that's to have a central reposistory which is mounted by all workstations. You install and run your software to/from here.
Main problem is no package manager that I know of is able to cope with such a concept
Considering that the Apple ][ came with full schematics, it's difficult to see how they could have been more open.
I remember diagnosing failures on the motherboard with my father in order to fix our Apple ][ several times.
The lack of such information was why we didn't bother with the macintosh.
errr... Yes. High end digital exceeds film for resolution. Stop being a grey bread.
Well.... I think so, yes.
The fact is that I think this is a fairly important debate.
Was Linus wrong for using a propietry tool for the development of the kernel and essentially forcing all kernel developers to follow him?
Could this situation been forseen?
Is Linus angry with Tridge because it actually shows up his previous bad decision and the only way for him to save face is to badger Tridge?
Is McVoy behaving like a spoilt kid and taking his ball home because somebody didn't want to play his game?
I'm personally with Tridge and Perens all the way on this one (not that anybody will care). Reverse Engineering is legal. McVoy needs to deal with that.
If we get a schism, then so be it. It's an important line to be divided by in the development of a Open Source / Free OS.
Barbara Streisand has a smooth, sophisticated sheen of coolness about her!
Oh Dear!
"I used to like installing PVC drainage pipes but now, well when I get home and find a leak under the sink it's just too much like work to get under there and fix it."
Just be glad you're not a gynacologist
When I was back at Uni (Showing my age here) we all used to use 'talk' or 'ytalk' to have realtime chats over the network.
It worked great. People would be logged-in in their rooms, and it was good for 'Just going for a drink. U coming?' type messages, or asking problems on work stuff or whatever.
Nobody ever seemed to use it in the real world though, although it's still in the distros.
Using Modelsim for Linux now. You can't get the PE (Personal Edition) though. That's only on Windows.
DON'T HAVE MODAL DIALOG BOXES.
I'm forever getting a modal dialog box come up on a windows box, asking me a question, and I think 'Oh, let me check'. It's at that point I realise I can't do anything else with the application. I personally find these things really annoying.
The sad truth is, now that the internet bubble has burst, all the venture capital companies are looking over their portfolios for what hey can cut back on. This is leaving start-ups that have even the fainest whiff of 'internet' about them high and dry once there current money runs out.
Count in the fact that most tech companies are feeling very poor because their share price is so low, therefore buy-outs are going to be unlikley, and you've got a situation where there's going to be a lot of dead animals by the side of the road.
Paul
Anything which is patented is, by definition, not a trade secret. The notion of a patent is that it promotes information sharing, but gives the owner of the patent protection from having their idea commercially exploited by some bigger faster company.
This has been rather perverted in recent history, but the fact is if you want to keep something secret you can't patent it. The process requires openess.
Anyway I think this would come under copyright, but I'm not sure.
From what I hear programs already exist to do this. The Hard-drive serial numbers are often used as the seed for licence keys. Crackers often just change the number by a few and watch how the resulting licence changes. Once they've worked it out they'll write a key generator.
At least that's what I hear.
I'll readilly admit that I haven't used it, but can anybody answer me why I would want to?
As far as I can make out IM systems are just like e-mail systems except I can see if the person at the other end is around at the time.
If I want to chat I'll use talk or IRC (depending on their/my location), and e-mail is perfectly fine for messages.
If people are around at the time then they'll normally answer an e-mail in a couple of minutes. It's not as if e-mail is based on dial-up UUCP connections anymore (as a rule).
So what's so great about IM?
Paul
From the artical it sounds like it's just sitting off our doorstep. It's orbitting the sun at a distance of 0.8AU (1 AU = distance between the earth and the sun).
:-)
Nothing ike going round in circles for 35 years