If this is true and android had non-replacable parts with GPL3 licensing no device manufacturer would have touched it with a ten foot pole.
Being able to lock down devices is for better and for worse a requirement from the device vendors, if android through it's licensing prevented this no commercial android phones would exist and no software developer would bother developing for it (as there would be no customers)
That is a crap description. efuses are just nonvolatile bits that can be read by the software. Once the software reads these bits it may make some decision such as refusing to boot from an unauthenticated boot image. Efuse bits may also have some hardware implications like disabling debug/test from boot to prevent a debugger from interrupting the boot process.
Poly fuses are commonly deployed in embedded processors and systems.They are not designed specifically to brick a device, but this can be a side effect of some security fuse bits which commonly disable JTAG interfaces and enable secured bootloader. If you corrupt the boot image such that the bootloader no longer works, and you have no way of getting a new image on the storage element the device will indeed be effectively bricked.
efuse is actually used as a general term for small banks of one time (or few time) programmable structures that have a known state (either through structure or through procedure) after manufacture.
IBM may have labeled one such technique but this does not in any way make such a structure unique to IBM.
efuses are commonly used for device configuration which include security, feature configuration and calibration. They are normally not reversible, and they do not imply programmability or even the presence of JTAG (Though it would be natural to use JTAG)
The wikipedia article is wrong. Most efuses are actually metal/Si antifuses or plain metal fuses These are not reversible. Flash MCUs may use flash bits as efuse bits, and occationally you se other floating gate designs used as efuses.
You will never see 'tiny amounts of flash' embedded in CMOS logic as embedded flash requires a very significant one-off expense in Si area to enable.
Furthermore floating gate designs have an unknown state after manufacture so the device must have a method to clear the fuse in test, which implies it may be cleared later (It might not be easy though)
The wikipedia article is inaccurate. There are efuse technologies that are reversible (Typically OTP floating gate design that may be reprogrammed a few times before the oxide become too contaminated and fuses the gate), there are also most certanly efuses that are not realistically reversible (Metal or poly fuse or antifuse elements).
In addition, even if the technology may permit reversing a efuse burn, the logic may not permit it. It is a simple matter to dessign logic that checks the fuse state and prevents resetting it.In fact it is common to disable the all JTAG access to to internal TAP/DAPs based on efuse settings.
If the efuse is based on a floating gate, then in principle there must be a way to clear it after manufacture as a floating gate may have an unknown state. Devices with such efuses that also have embedded NVRAM (This is quite common as you may want to use embedded NVRAM for your efuses, if you do not have embedded NVRAM real fuses are often cheaper) will typically clear off any embedded bootloader/software when you clear the fuse forcing you to flash it from scratch from JTAG. This class of device does however not encompass your typical mobile application processor as they are invariably built on high performance CMOS that does not have embedded NVRAM.
If a floating gate design is used on a high performance process for efuse it will therefore normally not include the erase support circuitry. Erasing the fuse in then done on probe test and the used pads may be left unbonded. Unless you have expertise in etching the package and probing the device you will not be able to clear such fuses after the device have ben placed in a capsule.
I checked the cheapest 1TB drive vs. the cheapest 2TB drive. In my area this is a samsung ecogreen F2 1TB for NOK 539,- (Though it was not in stock at that price) vs. a Western Digital Caviar Green 2 TB for NOK 990.
The samsung is listed as a 5600 rpm drive and the wd as a 7200, but I think it as actually a 5600 rpm as well (WD doesn't list RPM for their green drives)
You specified quiet and hidden (small), not cheap, so I'd go for a NAS device the synology DS1010 can do 5x2TB (8TB with redundancy), and if you need more it can be expanded with 5 bays more. A cheaper option would be to take some old hardware and toss a NAS distro on it, but I'd expect more hassle and noise from that solution
Maybe both HP and MS marketeers figures the market for tablets is pretty much saturated? Apple will sell boatloads at least right away because of the hype and fanbois, the question for other tablet manufacturers would be if there are actually any more market or if apple will pretty much sell all the tablets that ever will be sold in the foreseeable future in the next 12 months.
The history of tablets do not inspire faith that they will become large sellers, and keep in mind that unlike previous successes of apple the ipad is an additional device that will need to justify it's existence. So can apple prove that the pad can do things that advanced phones or laptops can't? If so they might just have made a new market. If not it is the apple newton all over again.
If they do not have a complete buy-in from their employees on this policy they will most likely experience data leaks that enable the crackers to make unauthorized servers. Unhappy employees and data security is a bad combination.
The problem is to respond quickly in face of a changing load when your power generation can ramp up fast. Generally only hydro power can change output quickly as a response to load. Thermal power plants is pretty much limited to adjusting power output timescales of hours or days. Wind and solar is even worse, they can change their generation quickly but uncorrelated to load (Maybe they even drop output when loud goes up)
To have reliable power supply you therefore either have large hydropower reserves or you must keep your thermal power plant at a much higher setting than you mostly need in order to deal with peaks (Thus wasting energy). Some places have built hydro plants as batteries (Using pumps to charge the dam) in order to have some sort of peak load handling, but this is expensive and inefficient. If you add a lot of wind and solar power to the mix you will need to increase your peak handling capability as not only may load peak, put production may also dip at inopportune times.
Automatic control of major power loads from the utility can attack this problem from the other end by reducing the load peaks. This makes wind and solar more viable power sources.
limiting power draw of non-critical appliances like AC is only the first step, long term it is also planned to permit electric cars or plug-in hybrids to release power back to the grid to absorb surges.
Currently there is a standardization effort called smart energy to design the protocols to connect all your appliances. Right now it looks like zigbee smart energy will become dominant in the US (which is built upon ipv6 unlike previous zigbee standards that used it's own network layer)
The way this works is that your electricity meter have one or two low cost RF or PLC trancievers RF based systems will mostly use 802.15.4 (b or g). These can communicate with the utility on it's backhaul linkage (Often sub 1GHz RF) and with your appliances (2.4GHz).
This is one of major enablers to be able to utilize unreliable power generation like wind or solar as it permits the grid to function (i.e. no brown-outs) without grossly overcommisioning thermal power. Note that if you have significant hydro power available it is also possible to use those as fast response regulators, but most places do not.
I wouldn't bee too suprised if googles iphone support plans were based on automatic translation from their android apps. With apples recent change SDK/app store terms this might no longer be feasible making iphone support a costlier and slower project.
I don't think google will want to drop iphone support given it's installed base, but it might very well become a second class platform for google meanng delays in support of new features.
1. They scaled down the process geometry. Even though your raw gate density goes up by a factor 2 your effective routed gate density does not because you spend more gates on buffering signals. 2. They run a larger display which will need a beefier GPU 3. The main CPU is faster 4. They might have been in a hurry when PGing the device and didn't achieve the best possible density.
These factors can easily explain the die size, no need to resort to secret architecture switch theories.
You need to get out into the sun more. Seriously, get out into the sun and tell me a glossy backlit LCD is better than a matted e-ink screen! backlit LCDs are ok in dimly lit environments, but they fail miserably outdoors.
"The Socialist Left even have the minister of finance" Not anymore they haven't. After the last election the socialist left had to make do with education.
As far as labor goes, they may use the word socialist here and there, but mostly that stems from the post war years when they did have socialist sympathies.
After they lost power to the conservatives in the 80'ies because people were tired from the constant shortages in public services back then (It took 3-9 months to get a phone installed, hosing shortages were critical) they reformed themselves and became proponents for a capitalist economy. (The current labor prime minister led some of the largest privatizations of publicly held corporations in 2000-2001: Statoil and Telenor)
They still persist in buying popularity through expensive welfare reforms and they still can't stand up to the labor unions, so they will not be able to reform norway's economy into something that can survive when the oil runs out.
Fortunately Scandinavian countries aren't socialist. Socialist parties make up 4-8% of the voting public. (They still manage to make a mess whenever they get a sliver of power though) Scandinavian economies are generally quite liberal and are in some cases more deregulated than in the US (Real estate is one example).
We do have an enormous welfare burden though built by well meaning but ultimately dumb politicians that will likely force a major reorganization of society in the next 30 years. Even though through the oil windfall Norway own something like 1% of the world stock markets it is not enough to pay for the committed welfare burdens above and beyond what the productive part of society can bring for the large part of the population born after WW2 that now is going into retirement.
The other Scandinavian countries have already started reforming their societies since they do not have oil.
So while the socialists make some politics here, society as a whole is not socialist.
That would require quite a breakthrough, either in battery or processor tech.
Apparently we have that. The new ARM processors when put with the new hardware decoders are capable of this, as we'll see. Apparently Apple was waiting for just this breakthrough to enable this platform and as soon as it was able, made it.
Realize that the display will draw a lot more power than the CPU. It is not processor tech that must advance it is displays.
Bluetooth as it is is not well suited. Bluetooth low energy or RF4CE is very well suited to replace IR. It uses less energy (IR diodes suck down quite a bit of juice), can do two way communication so it permits guaranteed response of button presses, kan have the TV page the remote, can display information on the remote etc.
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If this is true and android had non-replacable parts with GPL3 licensing no device manufacturer would have touched it with a ten foot pole.
Being able to lock down devices is for better and for worse a requirement from the device vendors, if android through it's licensing prevented this no commercial android phones would exist and no software developer would bother developing for it (as there would be no customers)
That is a crap description.
efuses are just nonvolatile bits that can be read by the software. Once the software reads these bits it may make some decision such as refusing to boot from an unauthenticated boot image. Efuse bits may also have some hardware implications like disabling debug/test from boot to prevent a debugger from interrupting the boot process.
Poly fuses are commonly deployed in embedded processors and systems.They are not designed specifically to brick a device, but this can be a side effect of some security fuse bits which commonly disable JTAG interfaces and enable secured bootloader. If you corrupt the boot image such that the bootloader no longer works, and you have no way of getting a new image on the storage element the device will indeed be effectively bricked.
efuse is actually used as a general term for small banks of one time (or few time) programmable structures that have a known state (either through structure or through procedure) after manufacture.
IBM may have labeled one such technique but this does not in any way make such a structure unique to IBM.
efuses are commonly used for device configuration which include security, feature configuration and calibration. They are normally not reversible, and they do not imply programmability or even the presence of JTAG (Though it would be natural to use JTAG)
The wikipedia article is wrong. Most efuses are actually metal/Si antifuses or plain metal fuses These are not reversible. Flash MCUs may use flash bits as efuse bits, and occationally you se other floating gate designs used as efuses.
You will never see 'tiny amounts of flash' embedded in CMOS logic as embedded flash requires a very significant one-off expense in Si area to enable.
Furthermore floating gate designs have an unknown state after manufacture so the device must have a method to clear the fuse in test, which implies it may be cleared later (It might not be easy though)
The wikipedia article is inaccurate. There are efuse technologies that are reversible (Typically OTP floating gate design that may be reprogrammed a few times before the oxide become too contaminated and fuses the gate), there are also most certanly efuses that are not realistically reversible (Metal or poly fuse or antifuse elements).
In addition, even if the technology may permit reversing a efuse burn, the logic may not permit it. It is a simple matter to dessign logic that checks the fuse state and prevents resetting it.In fact it is common to disable the all JTAG access to to internal TAP/DAPs based on efuse settings.
If the efuse is based on a floating gate, then in principle there must be a way to clear it after manufacture as a floating gate may have an unknown state. Devices with such efuses that also have embedded NVRAM (This is quite common as you may want to use embedded NVRAM for your efuses, if you do not have embedded NVRAM real fuses are often cheaper) will typically clear off any embedded bootloader/software when you clear the fuse forcing you to flash it from scratch from JTAG.
This class of device does however not encompass your typical mobile application processor as they are invariably built on high performance CMOS that does not have embedded NVRAM.
If a floating gate design is used on a high performance process for efuse it will therefore normally not include the erase support circuitry. Erasing the fuse in then done on probe test and the used pads may be left unbonded. Unless you have expertise in etching the package and probing the device you will not be able to clear such fuses after the device have ben placed in a capsule.
I checked the cheapest 1TB drive vs. the cheapest 2TB drive. In my area this is a samsung ecogreen F2 1TB for NOK 539,- (Though it was not in stock at that price) vs. a Western Digital Caviar Green 2 TB for NOK 990.
The samsung is listed as a 5600 rpm drive and the wd as a 7200, but I think it as actually a 5600 rpm as well (WD doesn't list RPM for their green drives)
You specified quiet and hidden (small), not cheap, so I'd go for a NAS device the synology DS1010 can do 5x2TB (8TB with redundancy), and if you need more it can be expanded with 5 bays more.
A cheaper option would be to take some old hardware and toss a NAS distro on it, but I'd expect more hassle and noise from that solution
My pricing indicate 2TB disks are slightly cheaper/GB than 1TB
Maybe both HP and MS marketeers figures the market for tablets is pretty much saturated? Apple will sell boatloads at least right away because of the hype and fanbois, the question for other tablet manufacturers would be if there are actually any more market or if apple will pretty much sell all the tablets that ever will be sold in the foreseeable future in the next 12 months.
The history of tablets do not inspire faith that they will become large sellers, and keep in mind that unlike previous successes of apple the ipad is an additional device that will need to justify it's existence. So can apple prove that the pad can do things that advanced phones or laptops can't? If so they might just have made a new market. If not it is the apple newton all over again.
If they do not have a complete buy-in from their employees on this policy they will most likely experience data leaks that enable the crackers to make unauthorized servers. Unhappy employees and data security is a bad combination.
That sounds about right.
Dumpster diving and insider leaks is a major form of cracking after all.
Solar power won't solve the issue.
The problem is to respond quickly in face of a changing load when your power generation can ramp up fast. Generally only hydro power can change output quickly as a response to load. Thermal power plants is pretty much limited to adjusting power output timescales of hours or days. Wind and solar is even worse, they can change their generation quickly but uncorrelated to load (Maybe they even drop output when loud goes up)
To have reliable power supply you therefore either have large hydropower reserves or you must keep your thermal power plant at a much higher setting than you mostly need in order to deal with peaks (Thus wasting energy). Some places have built hydro plants as batteries (Using pumps to charge the dam) in order to have some sort of peak load handling, but this is expensive and inefficient. If you add a lot of wind and solar power to the mix you will need to increase your peak handling capability as not only may load peak, put production may also dip at inopportune times.
Automatic control of major power loads from the utility can attack this problem from the other end by reducing the load peaks. This makes wind and solar more viable power sources.
limiting power draw of non-critical appliances like AC is only the first step, long term it is also planned to permit electric cars or plug-in hybrids to release power back to the grid to absorb surges.
Currently there is a standardization effort called smart energy to design the protocols to connect all your appliances. Right now it looks like zigbee smart energy will become dominant in the US (which is built upon ipv6 unlike previous zigbee standards that used it's own network layer)
The way this works is that your electricity meter have one or two low cost RF or PLC trancievers RF based systems will mostly use 802.15.4 (b or g). These can communicate with the utility on it's backhaul linkage (Often sub 1GHz RF) and with your appliances (2.4GHz).
This is one of major enablers to be able to utilize unreliable power generation like wind or solar as it permits the grid to function (i.e. no brown-outs) without grossly overcommisioning thermal power. Note that if you have significant hydro power available it is also possible to use those as fast response regulators, but most places do not.
I wouldn't bee too suprised if googles iphone support plans were based on automatic translation from their android apps. With apples recent change SDK/app store terms this might no longer be feasible making iphone support a costlier and slower project.
I don't think google will want to drop iphone support given it's installed base, but it might very well become a second class platform for google meanng delays in support of new features.
1. They scaled down the process geometry. Even though your raw gate density goes up by a factor 2 your effective routed gate density does not because you spend more gates on buffering signals.
2. They run a larger display which will need a beefier GPU
3. The main CPU is faster
4. They might have been in a hurry when PGing the device and didn't achieve the best possible density.
These factors can easily explain the die size, no need to resort to secret architecture switch theories.
Driver cells may still be broken so yeah.
IEEE spectrum had a good article in march on display technologies:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/the-electronic-display-of-the-future/0
You need to get out into the sun more.
Seriously, get out into the sun and tell me a glossy backlit LCD is better than a matted e-ink screen! backlit LCDs are ok in dimly lit environments, but they fail miserably outdoors.
Automotive electronics will normally run real-time ram and flash checks. I.e it checks each read instruction and piece of data before it is used.
"The Socialist Left even have the minister of finance"
Not anymore they haven't. After the last election the socialist left had to make do with education.
As far as labor goes, they may use the word socialist here and there, but mostly that stems from the post war years when they did have socialist sympathies.
After they lost power to the conservatives in the 80'ies because people were tired from the constant shortages in public services back then (It took 3-9 months to get a phone installed, hosing shortages were critical) they reformed themselves and became proponents for a capitalist economy. (The current labor prime minister led some of the largest privatizations of publicly held corporations in 2000-2001: Statoil and Telenor)
They still persist in buying popularity through expensive welfare reforms and they still can't stand up to the labor unions, so they will not be able to reform norway's economy into something that can survive when the oil runs out.
Fortunately Scandinavian countries aren't socialist.
Socialist parties make up 4-8% of the voting public. (They still manage to make a mess whenever they get a sliver of power though)
Scandinavian economies are generally quite liberal and are in some cases more deregulated than in the US (Real estate is one example).
We do have an enormous welfare burden though built by well meaning but ultimately dumb politicians that will likely force a major reorganization of society in the next 30 years. Even though through the oil windfall Norway own something like 1% of the world stock markets it is not enough to pay for the committed welfare burdens above and beyond what the productive part of society can bring for the large part of the population born after WW2 that now is going into retirement.
The other Scandinavian countries have already started reforming their societies since they do not have oil.
So while the socialists make some politics here, society as a whole is not socialist.
That would require quite a breakthrough, either in battery or processor tech.
Apparently we have that. The new ARM processors when put with the new hardware decoders are capable of this, as we'll see. Apparently Apple was waiting for just this breakthrough to enable this platform and as soon as it was able, made it.
Realize that the display will draw a lot more power than the CPU. It is not processor tech that must advance it is displays.
Bluetooth as it is is not well suited. Bluetooth low energy or RF4CE is very well suited to replace IR. It uses less energy (IR diodes suck down quite a bit of juice), can do two way communication so it permits guaranteed response of button presses, kan have the TV page the remote, can display information on the remote etc.
A two way RF remote can make sure that every key press is registered, istead of the push-button-until-tv-reacts method we use with IR remotes.