Actually I think they probably are - DTV was bought by Sky a while back, DTV's signal is just about the most non-standard satellite/cable signal there is out there (everyone else uses relatively standard transport streams, DTV use something of their own design). Sky on the other hand uses DVB (what just everyone else in the world but the US cable/TV guys use - including DiSH).
While I work in the biz (but none of sky/dtv/tivo) I'd guess that Sky are making DTV switch to DVB so all their gear is interoperable
Having known a bunch of people abused in Scientology, I have to say that this sounds like par for the course - again www.xenu.net has a bunch of similar stories of families torn apart by Scientology
(I'm a sometimes chip architect, so some background) - there's two sorts of tests that go on when you fab chips - functionality (do they do the right thing, are all the gates working, are all the wires connected) and speed (does it go fast enough).
For most chips, except ones like CPUs where you can charge a premium you don't speed bin (it costs lots of money), you pick a speed you think it should go at and toss the rest. Shipping chips that almost work is bad business - think about it, I make a $5 chip it gets put in a $100 product, if 10% of my chips don't work my customer loses $100 for every $50 he pays me, I have to get my failure rate down so it's in the noise as far as the customers are concerned, otherwise they'll go to the competition.
I think that the number of applications the original article's talking about where chip errors are tollerable are pretty small, suppose my CPU has a bit error in the LSB of the integer adder, the IRS may not care if my taxes are off by 1c, but the MSB is a different matter ("sir you appear to owe us 40M$"). On the other hand an LSB error is a big deal if the value you are dealing with is a memory pointer and breaks a program just as badly as if it is the MSB.
Finally a word about "metastability" - all chips with more than one clock (video cards are great examples" have to move signals between clock domains - this means that signals can be sampled wrongly (well designed logic should handle this) or in rare cases suffer metastability where the result causes unstable logic values to be latched into flops (usually these look like a value that swings wildly between 0 and 1 at a freq much higher the normal clock, a flop in a metastable state can 'pollute' other flops downstream from it turning a chip into a gibbering wreck. Now well designed logic doesn't do this very often, the flops chosen for crossing clock domains are often special anti-metastability flops used not for their speed or their size but their robustness - but the physics of the situation means that it's simply not possible to avoid - just possible to make it not happen very often. What you do need to do is figure out how often something will fail and pick a MTBF that is appropriate for your device... I once found myself discussing this issue around a video chip we were designing and basically what it came down to was comparing the theoretical worst case failure rate (chip people tend to be very conservative, keeps us on the right side of Murphy) of our chip with Windows - our chip might fail once a year (and even then there was a pretty good chance you wouldn't notice it) while back then windows blue screen every day - would anyone notice? nope
well of course it negates a decrease... the whole point of stuffing the pipe from a different PC when one thead pipe-stalls is to use up unused micro-cycles that otherwise would go to waste. It's something that's hard to do on a traditionally piped machine (because the pipe bubbles tend to be large) but easier on a super-scalar machine because implementation is just a few extra bits of tag in the right place
What Sun have done is pretty amazing... not particularly new though, the SMT stuff has been done in a bunch of places before, so has the multi-core stuff (think Alpha maybe 5 years ago). (I helped build a core that had both 5-6 years back). If you do CPU design it's pretty state of the art these days -
both make sense from a best-way-to-use-silicon point of view (in a world where cross chip delays preclude doing big-fast anymore, small-decoupled makes so much sense), it's taken Intel's marketting people a while to come round but their engineers have finally got them talking sense.
the next one will be "hyper" and the one after "ultra", or is it the other way around, they always are... don't know what comes after those companies that use those names always implode before they go any further
umm - the answer of course is "yes", everything should be taxed equally... and if you're math is up to scratch you too can figure out why 8% (or what ever the tax is) of 0 is not really an issue
Well I think the answer is simple.... remember all those jokes from the 50's... they guys in the patent office waiting room.... let's change it back - if you want a patent you have to provide a 1/10 scale wooden working model of your invention.... after the 10th guy comes through with the till with just one button the patent office may start to wise up and anull all the 1-click patents
most americans don't realise it but their form of democracy is considered a bit corrupt by residents of other western democracies - basically it's the issue of political appointments - positions that would normally be assigned only to elected members of the ruling party (the equivalent of members of congress) such as cabinet ministers (heads of govt departments) or lower positions that would normally be career govt employees (ambassadors, high ranking people in depts that provide continuity in organisations) are in the US appointed by the president - often as favors to people who have supported him. For example here in NZ a while back the Republicans appointed a Portland travel agent who'd raised a lot of money for them as US ambassador - she was publically ridiculed in the press as basically being an insult to the country.
well as mentioned here the mini-PCI spec isn't designed to produce cards that can just be dropped into any mini-PCI slot - it's intended for OEMs - ie people who can determine that a particular card (or combination of cards) can be plugged into a particular platform safely - that there's enough cooling, enough power, the wifi antenna isn't close enough to some trace where it will cause interference to the memory subsystem etc etc
Is it really trusted computing platform that's the reason for this? (could well be but let me play devil's advocate for a moment) - if I put my hardware designer's hat I'd worry about all sorts of issues around people installing random miniPCI cards in a laptop, esp one I was responsible for the RMAs for (power, heat, physical form factor [shorting components], RF interference to internal components, FCC etc)
I'd want to make sure that customers weren't trashing laptops by putting in things that destroy them then quietly removing the offending card and returning them for repair.
well yes and no... everything's IP these days.... while they do license their patents they also design and implement (and then license) the cells that chips need to talk to RamBuses with - they're difficult, somewhat evil analog/multi clock domain designs that live in a die's pad ring and tend to run on the hairy edges of the current processes - something you'd rather have someone else design for you (I've used a few over the years). [disclaimer - don't work for Rambus, don't own any stock, I'm a mostly happy past customer]
looks like they've licensed the latest RAC from Rambus... they won't be being charged that much for it - I bet Rambus expects to make money on the DRAM side if they end up using it.
For all their (business) faults Rambus makes cool technology - in particular stuff that allows parallelism in the CPU to be exposed to the memory hierarchy (or vice-versa) - but their hardware hasn't worked well with existing CPUs (x86 for examples) because of the bottleneck that the FSB in traditional designs presents. To use the real power of these sorts of memory subsystems can give you need to be able to attach the memory system to the CPU directly so you can retire transactions out of order
Slashdot Mirror
yes the video data running in the streams is the same - but they use a non standard multiplex (different sized TS packets) and their own SI data
While I work in the biz (but none of sky/dtv/tivo) I'd guess that Sky are making DTV switch to DVB so all their gear is interoperable
This is a US article - they have smaller gallons than you do .... you have to convert their MPG numbers to Imperial before comparing
with a good tan I could power my laptop? sounds like a perfect with my boss "but I have to work outside lying in the sun"
I used Vonage while living in the US and set up 911, recently I moved to New Zealand and for the life of me I can't get Vonage to turn 911 off
Having known a bunch of people abused in Scientology, I have to say that this sounds like par for the course - again www.xenu.net has a bunch of similar stories of families torn apart by Scientology
um, I think maybe all the countries that have always used '.' in place of ',' when mentioning numbers?
As always xenu.net has the dope on the ongoing $scientology vs. the 'net battle
For most chips, except ones like CPUs where you can charge a premium you don't speed bin (it costs lots of money), you pick a speed you think it should go at and toss the rest. Shipping chips that almost work is bad business - think about it, I make a $5 chip it gets put in a $100 product, if 10% of my chips don't work my customer loses $100 for every $50 he pays me, I have to get my failure rate down so it's in the noise as far as the customers are concerned, otherwise they'll go to the competition.
I think that the number of applications the original article's talking about where chip errors are tollerable are pretty small, suppose my CPU has a bit error in the LSB of the integer adder, the IRS may not care if my taxes are off by 1c, but the MSB is a different matter ("sir you appear to owe us 40M$"). On the other hand an LSB error is a big deal if the value you are dealing with is a memory pointer and breaks a program just as badly as if it is the MSB.
Finally a word about "metastability" - all chips with more than one clock (video cards are great examples" have to move signals between clock domains - this means that signals can be sampled wrongly (well designed logic should handle this) or in rare cases suffer metastability where the result causes unstable logic values to be latched into flops (usually these look like a value that swings wildly between 0 and 1 at a freq much higher the normal clock, a flop in a metastable state can 'pollute' other flops downstream from it turning a chip into a gibbering wreck. Now well designed logic doesn't do this very often, the flops chosen for crossing clock domains are often special anti-metastability flops used not for their speed or their size but their robustness - but the physics of the situation means that it's simply not possible to avoid - just possible to make it not happen very often. What you do need to do is figure out how often something will fail and pick a MTBF that is appropriate for your device ... I once found myself discussing this issue around a video chip we were designing and basically what it came down to was comparing the theoretical worst case failure rate (chip people tend to be very conservative, keeps us on the right side of Murphy) of our chip with Windows - our chip might fail once a year (and even then there was a pretty good chance you wouldn't notice it) while back then windows blue screen every day - would anyone notice? nope
What Sun have done is pretty amazing ... not particularly new though, the SMT stuff has been done in a bunch of places before, so has the multi-core stuff (think Alpha maybe 5 years ago). (I helped build a core that had both 5-6 years back). If you do CPU design it's pretty state of the art these days -
both make sense from a best-way-to-use-silicon point of view (in a world where cross chip delays preclude doing big-fast anymore, small-decoupled makes so much sense), it's taken Intel's marketting people a while to come round but their engineers have finally got them talking sense.
the next one will be "hyper" and the one after "ultra", or is it the other way around, they always are ... don't know what comes after those companies that use those names always implode before they go any further
umm - the answer of course is "yes", everything should be taxed equally ... and if you're math is up to scratch you too can figure out why 8% (or what ever the tax is) of 0 is not really an issue
hell - they invented the iPod (the first hard drive based portable mp3 jukebox) ... by 'they' of course I really mean DEC WRL/Compaq Research ....
And don't forget we have real penguins
Well I think the answer is simple .... remember all those jokes from the 50's ... they guys in the patent office waiting room .... let's change it back - if you want a patent you have to provide a 1/10 scale wooden working model of your invention .... after the 10th guy comes through with the till with just one button the patent office may start to wise up and anull all the 1-click patents
we never hear about the evil uses of solar power?
"But your honor I didn't reproduce all 1 minute 3 seconds of 'Tune' I simply played a fair-use sample - the first 3 seconds - 21 times"
most americans don't realise it but their form of democracy is considered a bit corrupt by residents of other western democracies - basically it's the issue of political appointments - positions that would normally be assigned only to elected members of the ruling party (the equivalent of members of congress) such as cabinet ministers (heads of govt departments) or lower positions that would normally be career govt employees (ambassadors, high ranking people in depts that provide continuity in organisations) are in the US appointed by the president - often as favors to people who have supported him. For example here in NZ a while back the Republicans appointed a Portland travel agent who'd raised a lot of money for them as US ambassador - she was publically ridiculed in the press as basically being an insult to the country.
The "greatest gadget of all time" ... batteries not included (they were lead-acid and didn't last) .....
well as mentioned here the mini-PCI spec isn't designed to produce cards that can just be dropped into any mini-PCI slot - it's intended for OEMs - ie people who can determine that a particular card (or combination of cards) can be plugged into a particular platform safely - that there's enough cooling, enough power, the wifi antenna isn't close enough to some trace where it will cause interference to the memory subsystem etc etc
I'd want to make sure that customers weren't trashing laptops by putting in things that destroy them then quietly removing the offending card and returning them for repair.
well yes and no ... everything's IP these days .... while they do license their patents they also design and implement (and then license) the cells that chips need to talk to RamBuses with - they're difficult, somewhat evil analog/multi clock domain designs that live in a die's pad ring and tend to run on the hairy edges of the current processes - something you'd rather have someone else design for you (I've used a few over the years). [disclaimer - don't work for Rambus, don't own any stock, I'm a mostly happy past customer]
you can - you just need a Sky box :-)
For all their (business) faults Rambus makes cool technology - in particular stuff that allows parallelism in the CPU to be exposed to the memory hierarchy (or vice-versa) - but their hardware hasn't worked well with existing CPUs (x86 for examples) because of the bottleneck that the FSB in traditional designs presents. To use the real power of these sorts of memory subsystems can give you need to be able to attach the memory system to the CPU directly so you can retire transactions out of order
Yeah stuff like "fix this it might be a security problem" that might leave them open to class action suits