Awesome effort by the THG folks!
The equipment used by Sun and Intel for engineering characterization of these die
is similar, but uses 3M Floronet and only goes to -40C.
If they go use Liquid Helium, they would get
closer to absolute zero, but Liquid Helium is
more expensive (Helium is a rarer gas than N2).
If only we had some Bose Einstein Condensate
from Boulder Colorado (The Nobel Prize winner
is there), we could cool the processor down to
a few nano-Kelvin.
-- Ross
In response to China's 4 Moon goals, president
Bush has recommended Outsourcing NASA.
The current 4 goals of NASA administrators:
1) Qualify JB weld for in-space repair of
foam damaged wing leading edges.
2) Talk to Halliburton about constructing up
ground based communications station and
alternate shuttle landing site in IRAQ.
3) Do a google search, find out what this MARS
thingy is all about.
4) Upload Resume's to monster.com see if China
is hiring for space development work.
The last cool thing I saw on the X desktop
was the work done by rasterman on Enlightenment.
I have been using this WM for many years now
in Sunos/Solaris and Linux environments. It's
not really ready for prime time (I'm using rev
16.5), but it's really pretty. Using Eterm
and now gnome-terminal, you get transparent
xterms, and that to me is really cool.
With a nice background and the ripple/waves
effect turned on... you get the feeling you
are looking at waves and that your monitor
is a real "window" to some nice parklike setting,
and that those "nfs: server not responding" messages really are not so important after all.
IMHO, the gnome/KDE desktop realy need the
ability to customize the window decorations,
and support the ripple/wave effect that were
pioneered in Enlightenment. But until then,
I'll use enlightenment.
This is a terrific idea. At my work, we lost our
file servers, and the Unix home directories of about 200-500 people were missing for about 10 days while our IT department scrambled to reload
from tape backup.
Having the home directory synced with my home
PC, would be in violation of some corporate policy, but would have allowed me to continue
without impact.
Unfortunatly, I need about 200Gb of storage at
home for some of the large IC test patterns that
I work on at work. So CVSing my entire home
wouldn't be practical... but a all the . files
would.
There have been some interesting developments
in "home" directories and file management.
There was some Discover/NOVA show about a
file system that is basicly a stream of data
in time... in that data should be orginized
not by a tree structure (or file cabinet like
setup), but as a serial stream orginized
by access date or arrival date.
Also I had heard that some next gen disk filesystems would be database driven, so the
CVS setup might make more sense. Certainly
if the database/compression algorithms are
in hardware, it would be fast, but you would
need some firmware to allow for changes.
--- OK babbling off.
The JTAG (IEEE1149.1) standard was designed
for on board and in-circuit testability. As
such, there is the ability to access internal
registers on and IC equiped with a 4 wire JTAG
tap port (TDI/TDO/TCK/TMS).
If there is documentation available, the JTAG
port is a terrific way to access internal registers on an IC. If there is no documentation
then it is a tremendious reverse engineering effort, but with a PC, and lots of time, one
could couple a 4 wire JTAG port, write data to
registers, and potentially reverse engineer
an IC.
My first thought on reading this article is
that many IC vendors may wish to crypto lock the
JTAG port to prevent hackers from getting access
to the internal registers... another option would
be not to bond out the JTAG pins, but that would
defeat the purpose of having JTAG on the PCB.
Hackers would have a difficult time to learn
the scan chain length, and number of internal
scan chains, but it may be possible to do, given
the right tools and time. When I retire (in 20
years)... this might be a great hobby. Sort of
like mapping the human Genome, but with an IC.
-- Ross
Applications Engineer
Credence Systems Corp
This guy might be interested to know that many
high end Microprocessors are debugged using
test equipment that runs Linux.
Of course, developing and simulating complex
high-end microprocessors and graphics chips
must be a "hobby" type activity, because I don't
know of any IC simulation or test vector translation packages written in VB.
Most are written in 'C', or C++... but I forget
that's OLD technology.
Actually... BASIC is much OLDER than 'C' and
it was developed as a training language so that
students could be introduced to programming
techniques. Once they had BASIC under their
belts, they could go on to learn more challenging
hobby languages such as C and assembly language.
Certainly, we have a MS expert, here. Stick with
what works for you. (Blue Screen of Death)
This is interesting. I was shopping at Fry's to
upgrade my Daughters PC a few weeks ago, and
ran into somone who thought I knew somthing about
PC's, and wanted to add a second monitor to
his PC. I thought back to the days I was introduced to MIT X-Windows days in '89. The
environment DISPLAY = machine:0.0 was machine,
videocard:monitor... meaning you could in theory support multiple monitors on each display card.
My reaction was that the card wasn't going to be
the problem, but that software was. When I
got home, it occured to me that most PC's have
only 1 AGP slot, and most video cards are AGP.
With Flat panel monitors being all the rage these
days... and video monitors being almost "free",
this means you could have a REALLY COOL gaming
setup with three monitors crunching away to give
you three perspectives... what if you could
look behind you while you shot bad guys!
Looks like I need to spend some $$ on new hardware... cool! I guess the upturn in the
economy will be driven by flat panel monitors.
-- Ross
Definition of pragmatic
1: concerned with practical matters;
2: of or concerning the theory of pragmatism
3: guided by practical experience and observation rather than theory;
extern int work();
extern int go_home();
main (argc,argv[]) {
int employed;
int not_dead;
while ( employed && not_dead ) {
employed = work();
not_dead = go_home();
}
Well you see, this Wi-Fi stuff is invisible... that is, you can't really "see" those bits.
And anyway, if you could "see" them, they certainly don't look recognizable.
Now, if you had a stack of papers with this stuff
sitting in front of the school with a sign on it,
well, THAT we could fix.
Maybe we can fund a study to get someone to print out all of this insecure data so we could see if we really have a problem or not? Surly there is
some consultant we could hire to investigate the
feasablity of this?
Teacher:
So as you can see, young Mr Kopeikin, the ability to measure gravity waves is dependant on your frame of reference. As Stuart (Look at what I can do)
Samual points out, when you take into account the position of Jupiter and rotate your frame of reference, you cannot accurately measure the propigation effects of gravity with todays measurement instruments.
Mr Kopeikin:
Why do we have to learn this? We aren't really
going to need this stuff outside school right? Like I'm really going to go to Jupiter in my lifetime! I don't live in China!
Hmmm, Art Imitates Life
Referring to the book: NOIR
By K.W. Jeter
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue85/books.html
In this book protoganist hunts down, and captures copyright infringers. (Using cool technology
I might add.)
Their brain stem and spine are excised, and they
are put into a carrying case. Then back at
the office, technicians can convert the Copyright
Infringers brain and spinal cord into one or
more nice parting gifts for the Copyright owner.
The brain is cut down, so only the personality
of the infringer is left.
Seems like this is what Sen Hatch has in mind
for our future.
The upside is that you will finally get all your
bills paid. If you die before your bills are
paid, you are reanimated... the dead walk the
earth paying off their debts before they are
allowed to finally die. Dead people are those
with large cartoon "X"'s in there eyes.
Yep, I'm sure this is what Sen Hatch would have
in mind...except for those in Utah I suspect.
A real depressing read...but very interesting
My guess is that China would have a long term
goal to get to the high ground while the rest
of us are watching it on reality TV.
The good news is that they will save on shipping
costs for all their components, as most high
tech stuff comes from Asia these days anyway.
The offshoots of this technology will eventually
allow us to more accurately measure signal timing
in PC's and other electronic equipment.
Currently it is very expensive to get accurate
time measurements with electronic systems. Optical
systems are already used in the lab for femtosecond
measurements.
In commercial applications, we must be satisfied
with a $20-30K system to measure path lengths in
time with sub 100ps accuracy. If you have a
PC with > 2Ghz internal CPU clock frequency you
are looking at internal signals that switch
every 500ps.
What I want is to see more optical stuff become
cheap enough for mass useage... this was another
brick in the wall.
-- Ross
Thanks for the post... Tax Cut had sent me
a CD-ROM and I was going to go on-line and
pay for it... turns out Tax Act was cheaper
in the long run... I have to get three different
states this year. (I moved from AZ to OR, and my
wife was working in San-Diego, CA)... so I saved
about $20, plus my dual boot MBR has not been
meesed with.
This data is old, but I have real time data
that showed a Win98 400Mhz Celeron PC runs HOTTER
in Win98 than under Linux.
This appeared to be due to WinDoze not suspending
the processor in idle state where Linux did.
You could see a jump in the junction temperature
when you moved the mouse.
I gathered a lot of cool graphs, but they belong
to my former employer so I'd have to get permission to post them...
One of these days perhaps... I will compare WINXP
with Linux to see if the Windows OS has fixed this yet.
I just imagined two big firms in Phoenix... one
running Windows OS, and another Open software.
One pays higher utility bills to run all those
computers overnight, as they are consuming more
power in the idle state... plus all the heat
they generate needs air-conditioning.
I think an argument could be made that Linux
pays for itself in lower air conditioning bills... of course we need new thermal diode data
now don't we.
-- Ross
Starfleet intelegence sources tell us the movie tanked because the movie was as they say...
not so good (aka Sucked).
Not quite as bad as Star Trek II (The mistake),
but worse than Star Trek III (The Apology).
-- Ross
Hear Hear!
I think the fear is that software race
conditions will be a problem. I've worked
with "LOTS" of GUI apps that can't keep
up with my typing speed. In an earlier
life I found that the X-windows distribution
was limiting the xterm baud rate to 9600
baud! (Upping the rate made stuff scroll
by faster in SUNOS).
I hate it if I have to wait more than 3
seconds for ANY screen repaint, and if
ever the APP can't keep up with my typing
speed. Someday I would hope that with
2Ghz clock cycles of 500ps, I can get a couple
of characters fed into the CPU!
I don't think the real problem is processor
speed, or CPU/MEMORY bandwitdh. In most
cases, it is priorities. We all want to be
listened to. I think that multi-threading
has to be the answer to this problem...
a software agent and GUI signalling setup
that tells you that the CPU has the info, and
is working on it.
Proliferation of Internet radio will be one
possible way to fund the "lighting" of all
the unlit fiber the telecom companies laid
under the ground in the last boom.
I'm not looking forward to the bandwith
crunch or increased rates which may occur
prior to the next expansion, but internet
radio, could be a small contributor to
the next wave of bandwith improvements.
I consider all the stations but the ones
I'm listening to to be bandwidth hogs.
The implications to the semiconductor industry
are significant. To provide new television receivers to all of america from 2003-2006 so
that we can all continue to watch "leave it to beaver", will create lots of jobs. Even set
top "receiver converter" boxes will need to be
manufactured. If it passes, buy stock in
capacitor companies.
Also, digitally limiting copying will impact
the "infotainment" industry boxes such as TIVO,
which allow digital recording. These industries
would have to get on-line with the credit card
companies so that we can all be conviently drained of funds to watch our daily fix of
television.
Does anyone remember when CABLE-TV meant channels
that had NO commercials? (This is 8-track vintage thinking).
-- Ross
A valid argument! However, I find it interesting
to note that free speech is not free web hosting.
Can the University limit access to its internet hosting equipment, and also can the university
limit what is printed in it's school paper?
Are these the same thing?
Thanks for reminding me that as an American,
one of the rights I have is to question the
LAWS that I am regulated by, this is a refreshing
concept, although I'm still uncomfortable with the idea of students rallying behind a supposed
'terrorist' site.
John Belushi: "OK guys, we are the first bee
bomb disposal unit, it's important that we
make a good impression."
2nd Bee: "Do you think these bee suits and
little ping pong balls will fool the mines?"
Slashdot Mirror
Awesome effort by the THG folks! The equipment used by Sun and Intel for engineering characterization of these die is similar, but uses 3M Floronet and only goes to -40C. If they go use Liquid Helium, they would get closer to absolute zero, but Liquid Helium is more expensive (Helium is a rarer gas than N2). If only we had some Bose Einstein Condensate from Boulder Colorado (The Nobel Prize winner is there), we could cool the processor down to a few nano-Kelvin. -- Ross
In response to China's 4 Moon goals, president Bush has recommended Outsourcing NASA. The current 4 goals of NASA administrators: 1) Qualify JB weld for in-space repair of foam damaged wing leading edges. 2) Talk to Halliburton about constructing up ground based communications station and alternate shuttle landing site in IRAQ. 3) Do a google search, find out what this MARS thingy is all about. 4) Upload Resume's to monster.com see if China is hiring for space development work.
The last cool thing I saw on the X desktop was the work done by rasterman on Enlightenment. I have been using this WM for many years now in Sunos/Solaris and Linux environments. It's not really ready for prime time (I'm using rev 16.5), but it's really pretty. Using Eterm and now gnome-terminal, you get transparent xterms, and that to me is really cool.
With a nice background and the ripple/waves effect turned on... you get the feeling you are looking at waves and that your monitor is a real "window" to some nice parklike setting, and that those "nfs: server not responding" messages really are not so important after all.
IMHO, the gnome/KDE desktop realy need the ability to customize the window decorations, and support the ripple/wave effect that were pioneered in Enlightenment. But until then, I'll use enlightenment.
Having the home directory synced with my home PC, would be in violation of some corporate policy, but would have allowed me to continue without impact.
Unfortunatly, I need about 200Gb of storage at home for some of the large IC test patterns that I work on at work. So CVSing my entire home wouldn't be practical... but a all the . files would.
There have been some interesting developments in "home" directories and file management. There was some Discover/NOVA show about a file system that is basicly a stream of data in time... in that data should be orginized not by a tree structure (or file cabinet like setup), but as a serial stream orginized by access date or arrival date.
Also I had heard that some next gen disk filesystems would be database driven, so the CVS setup might make more sense. Certainly if the database/compression algorithms are in hardware, it would be fast, but you would need some firmware to allow for changes. --- OK babbling off.
The JTAG (IEEE1149.1) standard was designed for on board and in-circuit testability. As such, there is the ability to access internal registers on and IC equiped with a 4 wire JTAG tap port (TDI/TDO/TCK/TMS).
If there is documentation available, the JTAG port is a terrific way to access internal registers on an IC. If there is no documentation then it is a tremendious reverse engineering effort, but with a PC, and lots of time, one could couple a 4 wire JTAG port, write data to registers, and potentially reverse engineer an IC.
My first thought on reading this article is that many IC vendors may wish to crypto lock the JTAG port to prevent hackers from getting access to the internal registers... another option would be not to bond out the JTAG pins, but that would defeat the purpose of having JTAG on the PCB.
Hackers would have a difficult time to learn the scan chain length, and number of internal scan chains, but it may be possible to do, given the right tools and time. When I retire (in 20 years)... this might be a great hobby. Sort of like mapping the human Genome, but with an IC. -- Ross Applications Engineer Credence Systems Corp
You know, I think if I use Linux, I can sync my clock without pop ups... but I'm still stupid.
Of course, developing and simulating complex high-end microprocessors and graphics chips must be a "hobby" type activity, because I don't know of any IC simulation or test vector translation packages written in VB.
Most are written in 'C', or C++... but I forget that's OLD technology.
Actually... BASIC is much OLDER than 'C' and it was developed as a training language so that students could be introduced to programming techniques. Once they had BASIC under their belts, they could go on to learn more challenging hobby languages such as C and assembly language.
Certainly, we have a MS expert, here. Stick with what works for you. (Blue Screen of Death)
This is interesting. I was shopping at Fry's to upgrade my Daughters PC a few weeks ago, and ran into somone who thought I knew somthing about PC's, and wanted to add a second monitor to his PC. I thought back to the days I was introduced to MIT X-Windows days in '89. The environment DISPLAY = machine:0.0 was machine, videocard:monitor... meaning you could in theory support multiple monitors on each display card.
My reaction was that the card wasn't going to be the problem, but that software was. When I got home, it occured to me that most PC's have only 1 AGP slot, and most video cards are AGP.
With Flat panel monitors being all the rage these days... and video monitors being almost "free", this means you could have a REALLY COOL gaming setup with three monitors crunching away to give you three perspectives... what if you could look behind you while you shot bad guys!
Looks like I need to spend some $$ on new hardware... cool! I guess the upturn in the economy will be driven by flat panel monitors. -- Ross
Great, this means that if you can't find a room in a hotel in the bay area. You can write a script to do a night of jail time.
Just clicking a link to go to jail might be faster than the normal check-in process at many San-Jose bay area hotels.
If you coded it correctly, you could download some MP3's to listen to, and go to jail at the same time!
Advanced hackers could arrange longer stays if they couldn't pay their rent due to all the open source free work they have done.
In fact, with wearable computer clothes, you could push the button, and call 911 to get a free pickup right at the airport! -- Ross
Definition of pragmatic
1: concerned with practical matters;
2: of or concerning the theory of pragmatism
3: guided by practical experience and observation rather than theory;
extern int work(); extern int go_home(); main (argc,argv[]) { int employed; int not_dead; while ( employed && not_dead ) { employed = work(); not_dead = go_home(); }
Well you see, this Wi-Fi stuff is invisible... that is, you can't really "see" those bits. And anyway, if you could "see" them, they certainly don't look recognizable. Now, if you had a stack of papers with this stuff sitting in front of the school with a sign on it, well, THAT we could fix. Maybe we can fund a study to get someone to print out all of this insecure data so we could see if we really have a problem or not? Surly there is some consultant we could hire to investigate the feasablity of this?
Now we know what type of performance we can get when we get all of these penguins to swim in the same direction all day.
So as you can see, young Mr Kopeikin, the ability to measure gravity waves is dependant on your frame of reference. As Stuart (Look at what I can do) Samual points out, when you take into account the position of Jupiter and rotate your frame of reference, you cannot accurately measure the propigation effects of gravity with todays measurement instruments.
Mr Kopeikin:
Why do we have to learn this? We aren't really going to need this stuff outside school right? Like I'm really going to go to Jupiter in my lifetime! I don't live in China!
I don't think the inefficient overhead will be a problem. The new Intel IC's and frontside bus speeds need somthing to do.
What I wonder is, how will the Linux community respond to this.. will Wintel machines take over?
Referring to the book:
NOIR
By K.W. Jeter
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue85/books.html
In this book protoganist hunts down, and captures copyright infringers. (Using cool technology I might add.)
Their brain stem and spine are excised, and they are put into a carrying case. Then back at the office, technicians can convert the Copyright Infringers brain and spinal cord into one or more nice parting gifts for the Copyright owner. The brain is cut down, so only the personality of the infringer is left.
Seems like this is what Sen Hatch has in mind for our future.
The upside is that you will finally get all your bills paid. If you die before your bills are paid, you are reanimated... the dead walk the earth paying off their debts before they are allowed to finally die. Dead people are those with large cartoon "X"'s in there eyes.
Yep, I'm sure this is what Sen Hatch would have in mind...except for those in Utah I suspect.
A real depressing read...but very interesting
My guess is that China would have a long term goal to get to the high ground while the rest of us are watching it on reality TV.
The good news is that they will save on shipping costs for all their components, as most high tech stuff comes from Asia these days anyway.
The offshoots of this technology will eventually allow us to more accurately measure signal timing in PC's and other electronic equipment. Currently it is very expensive to get accurate time measurements with electronic systems. Optical systems are already used in the lab for femtosecond measurements. In commercial applications, we must be satisfied with a $20-30K system to measure path lengths in time with sub 100ps accuracy. If you have a PC with > 2Ghz internal CPU clock frequency you are looking at internal signals that switch every 500ps. What I want is to see more optical stuff become cheap enough for mass useage... this was another brick in the wall. -- Ross
Thanks for the post... Tax Cut had sent me a CD-ROM and I was going to go on-line and pay for it... turns out Tax Act was cheaper in the long run... I have to get three different states this year. (I moved from AZ to OR, and my wife was working in San-Diego, CA)... so I saved about $20, plus my dual boot MBR has not been meesed with.
Thanks to the slashdotters for this heads up!
This data is old, but I have real time data that showed a Win98 400Mhz Celeron PC runs HOTTER in Win98 than under Linux. This appeared to be due to WinDoze not suspending the processor in idle state where Linux did. You could see a jump in the junction temperature when you moved the mouse. I gathered a lot of cool graphs, but they belong to my former employer so I'd have to get permission to post them... One of these days perhaps... I will compare WINXP with Linux to see if the Windows OS has fixed this yet. I just imagined two big firms in Phoenix... one running Windows OS, and another Open software. One pays higher utility bills to run all those computers overnight, as they are consuming more power in the idle state... plus all the heat they generate needs air-conditioning. I think an argument could be made that Linux pays for itself in lower air conditioning bills... of course we need new thermal diode data now don't we. -- Ross
Starfleet intelegence sources tell us the movie tanked because the movie was as they say... not so good (aka Sucked). Not quite as bad as Star Trek II (The mistake), but worse than Star Trek III (The Apology). -- Ross
Hear Hear! I think the fear is that software race conditions will be a problem. I've worked with "LOTS" of GUI apps that can't keep up with my typing speed. In an earlier life I found that the X-windows distribution was limiting the xterm baud rate to 9600 baud! (Upping the rate made stuff scroll by faster in SUNOS). I hate it if I have to wait more than 3 seconds for ANY screen repaint, and if ever the APP can't keep up with my typing speed. Someday I would hope that with 2Ghz clock cycles of 500ps, I can get a couple of characters fed into the CPU! I don't think the real problem is processor speed, or CPU/MEMORY bandwitdh. In most cases, it is priorities. We all want to be listened to. I think that multi-threading has to be the answer to this problem... a software agent and GUI signalling setup that tells you that the CPU has the info, and is working on it.
Proliferation of Internet radio will be one possible way to fund the "lighting" of all the unlit fiber the telecom companies laid under the ground in the last boom. I'm not looking forward to the bandwith crunch or increased rates which may occur prior to the next expansion, but internet radio, could be a small contributor to the next wave of bandwith improvements. I consider all the stations but the ones I'm listening to to be bandwidth hogs.
The implications to the semiconductor industry are significant. To provide new television receivers to all of america from 2003-2006 so that we can all continue to watch "leave it to beaver", will create lots of jobs. Even set top "receiver converter" boxes will need to be manufactured. If it passes, buy stock in capacitor companies. Also, digitally limiting copying will impact the "infotainment" industry boxes such as TIVO, which allow digital recording. These industries would have to get on-line with the credit card companies so that we can all be conviently drained of funds to watch our daily fix of television. Does anyone remember when CABLE-TV meant channels that had NO commercials? (This is 8-track vintage thinking). -- Ross
A valid argument! However, I find it interesting to note that free speech is not free web hosting. Can the University limit access to its internet hosting equipment, and also can the university limit what is printed in it's school paper? Are these the same thing? Thanks for reminding me that as an American, one of the rights I have is to question the LAWS that I am regulated by, this is a refreshing concept, although I'm still uncomfortable with the idea of students rallying behind a supposed 'terrorist' site.
John Belushi: "OK guys, we are the first bee bomb disposal unit, it's important that we make a good impression." 2nd Bee: "Do you think these bee suits and little ping pong balls will fool the mines?"