well I was talking about Dunedin (~120,000 at the time) and you can bet that every lawyer in town knows every other one by sight - and certainly knows every law firm - when a 'new' one showed up staffed by people no one knew, who weren't admitted to the bar, and didn't actually do any legal work it was a bit of a give away - as I said - a bunch of bozos....
Friends of mine sat outside their offices and took photos of everyone entering and leaving.... someone came out and destroyed their camera.... of course any 'real' lawyer would know that to be an assault for which they could be disbarred
rank amateurs - they keep getting caught for god-sake (breaking into people's homes, faking bomb threats to cover themselves up etc etc)... do you really want them breaking in to random computers....they're going to do more damage than your average cracker... because they are soooo inept.... and they are acting under the colour of the law.
I bet they're not going to be very good at it.... you wait - pretty soon they'll be licensing private firewalls... and demanding their own backdoors...
I remember them at a political demonstration in the early 80s - they stood out like sore thumbs - they were all ex-military and still looked it.... they opened a 'secret' office in my home town to watch the russian fishing boats.... disguised as a 'law office' of course all the local lawyers figured it out right away.... and they had their phone number in the phone book.... if you stood outside and called them you could hear the phone ring inside:-)
that they'd 'stolen' the source code so that people could laugh at it.... (of course it wasn't stolen like a car is stolen - it was copied - information works differently than physical things...)
'Steppings' is a chip design term refering to mask changes (ie changes in the underlying logic). Microcode upgrades are there for a different reason - so you can fix stuff in the field. What they may do is see which mask stepping's being used in order to analyse which bugs are present then load the appropriate uCode fix (the fix might then fake out the 'stepping' id that's returned to the OS so that it in turn can behave differently).
As a weak athiest/empirical agnostic, I'd have to say that the jury is out, and probably will be for a long time. There is a gap between perception and absolute reality, and we can only form a characature of reality through theorems that try to logically relate our perceptions
heh - this sort of close to the god-in-the-cracks argument that really pisses off a lot of real fundie thinkers... basicly as science explains more and more of the world the mysterious things in life get smaller and smaller (or further and further away) and harder to see in everyday life - they actually want a more mysterious world so that their vision of 'god' is right there in their face - not stuck between quantum foam, or in obtuse math, rolled in 10 dimensions, or billions and billions years in the past.
In many ways this cosmological world view of a mostly clockwork universe is as threatening to the modern fundamentalist as Gallileo's vision of Jupiter's moons were to a previous age's popes
If it impairs the quality of your product, it sucks for you.
But it didn't (at least in our case) and the added cost per board was in the pennies/board range (back when things cost $1000+ each).
The optical semiconductor tricks (which I never had anything to do with) were designed as traps for people who were copying masks, the features worked correctly on the original because they were carefully designed with tight tollerances - remember there used to be NO legal copyright for masks so people could (and did) take photos of someone's chips, lift the layers out and make masks then run the results through their own fab and start selling competing chips - little more than photocopying someone's hard work.
On the other hand I did once visit a site where they has a whole-room photo-micrograph of the original IBM VGA chip on the floor and had a whole bunch of college summer hires doing manual pattern recognition to a cell library looking for hidden functionality that IBM hadn't documented (extra registers etc etc). I think that that sort of reverse engineering is completely OK - you're after the architecture in order to make a functionally equivalent part, not the circuit or original logic (gates) - it's the difference between disassembling a DVD implementation to get a spec for how it works so that you can write your own (DeCSS for example) - and just stealing the code and including it in your app.
This sort of thing has been done for years ...
on
Obfuscated Circuitry?
·
· Score: 3
I've worked on projects where we added bogus parts to a board to catch cloners (we bought some obsoleted batch of the bogus parts cheapsomewhere and put them on - and we caught a copier too:-).
On another project we built such a cheap graphics accelerator we didn't want our competition to realize how easy it was - so we had all the off-the-shelf PALs and SRAMs screen-printed with our own part numbers to hide the design.
Also back before congress passed the law to make masks copyrightable people would regularly put in design features into chips that were designed to not be easily copied optically - for example a poly that was just a little bit narrow so that it became very unreliable if you cloned the chip without carefully hunting down in the masks and touching it up (that could make a chip work - but not reliably enough to make a sellable product - and could be really hard to find if all you have is masks and no idea of how the die's internals are supposed to work).
I used them for my latest bunch-o cards, made a quick'n'dirty logo in gimp (make sure you do it at 3-600dpi) uploaded it, text gets typed directly into netscape, paid the extra for expensive paper and raised ink - the results look as good as many 'professional' cards I've seen and certainly don't cry out 'cheap' (now if only I was an artist:-). I'm sure there are cheaper ways to do this but from my experience they get my seal of approval
First thing the damned trillion-dollar insurance business gets access to this database of yours, then they promptly start red-lining all the people with an identifiable genetic disposition to certain diseases.
Which is why we need strong laws against any discrimination because of one's genetic code - forget racial discrimination, forget discrimination because of sex, much of the stuff covered in the ADA, etc etc.... they are all types of discrimination because of one's genetic code - they are also symptoms of the thin end of the wedge - we're all subject to discrimination - some insurance companies already wont carry people with family histories of certain diseases. The right thing to do is to make any sort of discrimination illegal
As a chip designer I've often found myself whipping out an opened die and showing off - "look I did that little square there" - luckily as
feature sizes shrink tools have kept pace and we've
become much more productive - so "that little square there" has stayed roughly the same size
over the past decade or so.
Nanotech will change all this - features will be way too small to show off.... instead we'll probably be bragging about "do you remember that cold you had last summer..."
while the memory bus is different the cache coherency is supposedly equivalent so that shouldn't be such a big deal.
Of more interest is tha APIC (SMP interrupt controller) implementation - rumor has it that the AMD one is different - mostly to avoid Intel IP/patent issues (think of AMD as playing space invaders with Intel lawyers dropping from the sky...) - can anyone confirm this?
I was an early adopter of PacBell's DSL in Oakland and apart from installation glitches I've had no problems (I replaced a rather expensive 56k frame-relay connection into my home that was a little less reliable). My house is close to the limit from the exchange (my next door neighbors have a different exchange) but I seem to get full speed.
The only problem I had was at installation when the phone-tech who did it didn't clip out the automatic test equipment in the box outside my house (there's some piece of electronics hidden in the back of that model of box that does loopback testing to the exchange for traditional copper lines).
well that was kind of one of my points about TM - they've gone down a particluar path (synchronous but gate everything in sight) - there are other paths that might do even better at the niche they are carving out.
Personally I'm not so enthused about the TM-like software tricks (though their conditional store-buffer to allow them to translate code without having to worry about exceptions is decidedly cool) - I suspect they're buying themselves a support nightmare for the lots of incompatable architectures they plan on building.
Intel in particlular must have some internal group working feverishly on x86 translation for IA64 - and they've been doing it for at least 5 yrs.... and at some (pretty simplistic) level IA64 and TM are both somewhat similar VLIWish architectures
or dissasembler or packet sniffer or compiler or..... a computer, or your brain - doh! - gotta ban those 'tools for hacking' - we wouldn't want any one thinking outside their box (er cell) around here....
Um.... yeah the pentium in my computer is full of it.... while the bulk of modern x86 instructions are executed risc-like both Pentium and AMD chips still contain large amounts of uCode to handle the hokey x86 interrupt/tasking/exceptions/etc model (they even have special hardware to load uCode patches at reset time from the BIOS)
They're stuck using other people's fabs so they definitely are behind the ball there (both in cost/profitability/yield and silicon performance - they have to use standard processes they can't tweak too much).
On the other hand they have a chip design with a billion gated clocks - not something you can do to an existing design overnight (except at a very gross level) - so in the sense that it will take one design cycle for the big guys to be doing what they are
On the other hand all it takes is another small startup to get an async logic x86 clone to market - for those who don't know asynchronous logic has held a promise or lower power, faster design for years - but the CAD tools don't support it - a number of async designs have been done including Amulet (an async ARM).
Async CPUs are in effect clockless - everything internal is self timed, nets only switch when they need to saving power and, in effect self-clock-chipping:-)
The original hacker-cyberpunk novel ....
on
The Shockwave Rider
·
· Score: 2
When I originally read this book 20 years ago now it became instantly one of those books I consider a classic - it was probably the first book I read (maybe the first good SF book written) with the hacker-as-hero protagonist
but we're going to have to use something smaller than atoms if it's going to keep getting smaller - we already have features chip features that are now measurable in numbers of atoms wide - eventually we have to use something other than the existing technologies (wires and transistors) to move stuff around - quantum dots/wires - bucky-balls - nanotech etc all that current pie-in-the-sky stuff will eventually be the only game in town
And then poof!.... nothing smaller than atoms... Moore's law breaks down.
Slashdot Mirror
Friends of mine sat outside their offices and took photos of everyone entering and leaving .... someone came out and destroyed their camera .... of course any 'real' lawyer would know that to be an assault for which they could be disbarred
I bet they're not going to be very good at it .... you wait - pretty soon they'll be licensing private firewalls ... and demanding their own backdoors ...
I remember them at a political demonstration in the early 80s - they stood out like sore thumbs - they were all ex-military and still looked it .... they opened a 'secret' office in my home town to watch the russian fishing boats .... disguised as a 'law office' of course all the local lawyers figured it out right away .... and they had their phone number in the phone book .... if you stood outside and called them you could hear the phone ring inside :-)
that they'd 'stolen' the source code so that people could laugh at it .... (of course it wasn't stolen like a car is stolen - it was copied - information works differently than physical things ...)
sounds like they're archiving the web and news .... they do have signed copyright releases from all the authors right?
heh - this sort of close to the god-in-the-cracks argument that really pisses off a lot of real fundie thinkers ... basicly as science explains more and more of the world the mysterious things in life get smaller and smaller (or further and further away) and harder to see in everyday life - they actually want a more mysterious world so that their vision of 'god' is right there in their face - not stuck between quantum foam, or in obtuse math, rolled in 10 dimensions, or billions and billions years in the past.
In many ways this cosmological world view of a mostly clockwork universe is as threatening to the modern fundamentalist as Gallileo's vision of Jupiter's moons were to a previous age's popes
My '93 Explorer is still going strong has 130k miles on it and the tires have only exploded once .... (seriously)
For example look for small alleys in city maps that don't really exist - there's a technical term for these that I forget ....
But it didn't (at least in our case) and the added cost per board was in the pennies/board range (back when things cost $1000+ each).
The optical semiconductor tricks (which I never had anything to do with) were designed as traps for people who were copying masks, the features worked correctly on the original because they were carefully designed with tight tollerances - remember there used to be NO legal copyright for masks so people could (and did) take photos of someone's chips, lift the layers out and make masks then run the results through their own fab and start selling competing chips - little more than photocopying someone's hard work.
On the other hand I did once visit a site where they has a whole-room photo-micrograph of the original IBM VGA chip on the floor and had a whole bunch of college summer hires doing manual pattern recognition to a cell library looking for hidden functionality that IBM hadn't documented (extra registers etc etc). I think that that sort of reverse engineering is completely OK - you're after the architecture in order to make a functionally equivalent part, not the circuit or original logic (gates) - it's the difference between disassembling a DVD implementation to get a spec for how it works so that you can write your own (DeCSS for example) - and just stealing the code and including it in your app.
On another project we built such a cheap graphics accelerator we didn't want our competition to realize how easy it was - so we had all the off-the-shelf PALs and SRAMs screen-printed with our own part numbers to hide the design.
Also back before congress passed the law to make masks copyrightable people would regularly put in design features into chips that were designed to not be easily copied optically - for example a poly that was just a little bit narrow so that it became very unreliable if you cloned the chip without carefully hunting down in the masks and touching it up (that could make a chip work - but not reliably enough to make a sellable product - and could be really hard to find if all you have is masks and no idea of how the die's internals are supposed to work).
I used them for my latest bunch-o cards, made a quick'n'dirty logo in gimp (make sure you do it at 3-600dpi) uploaded it, text gets typed directly into netscape, paid the extra for expensive paper and raised ink - the results look as good as many 'professional' cards I've seen and certainly don't cry out 'cheap' (now if only I was an artist :-). I'm sure there are cheaper ways to do this but from my experience they get my seal of approval
Which is why we need strong laws against any discrimination because of one's genetic code - forget racial discrimination, forget discrimination because of sex, much of the stuff covered in the ADA, etc etc .... they are all types of discrimination because of one's genetic code - they are also symptoms of the thin end of the wedge - we're all subject to discrimination - some insurance companies already wont carry people with family histories of certain diseases. The right thing to do is to make any sort of discrimination illegal
Haa-ha
Nanotech will change all this - features will be way too small to show off .... instead we'll probably be bragging about "do you remember that cold you had last summer ..."
"Honest, I'm not picking my nose ...."
Of more interest is tha APIC (SMP interrupt controller) implementation - rumor has it that the AMD one is different - mostly to avoid Intel IP/patent issues (think of AMD as playing space invaders with Intel lawyers dropping from the sky ...) - can anyone confirm this?
yeah but that's a country code - and not available as a TLD (which is why you can already get a .tm domain)
The only problem I had was at installation when the phone-tech who did it didn't clip out the automatic test equipment in the box outside my house (there's some piece of electronics hidden in the back of that model of box that does loopback testing to the exchange for traditional copper lines).
Personally I'm not so enthused about the TM-like software tricks (though their conditional store-buffer to allow them to translate code without having to worry about exceptions is decidedly cool) - I suspect they're buying themselves a support nightmare for the lots of incompatable architectures they plan on building.
Intel in particlular must have some internal group working feverishly on x86 translation for IA64 - and they've been doing it for at least 5 yrs .... and at some (pretty simplistic) level IA64 and TM are both somewhat similar VLIWish architectures
or dissasembler or packet sniffer or compiler or ..... a computer, or your brain - doh! - gotta ban those 'tools for hacking' - we wouldn't want any one thinking outside their box (er cell) around here ....
Um .... yeah the pentium in my computer is full of it .... while the bulk of modern x86 instructions are executed risc-like both Pentium and AMD chips still contain large amounts of uCode to handle the hokey x86 interrupt/tasking/exceptions/etc model (they even have special hardware to load uCode patches at reset time from the BIOS)
On the other hand they have a chip design with a billion gated clocks - not something you can do to an existing design overnight (except at a very gross level) - so in the sense that it will take one design cycle for the big guys to be doing what they are
On the other hand all it takes is another small startup to get an async logic x86 clone to market - for those who don't know asynchronous logic has held a promise or lower power, faster design for years - but the CAD tools don't support it - a number of async designs have been done including Amulet (an async ARM).
Async CPUs are in effect clockless - everything internal is self timed, nets only switch when they need to saving power and, in effect self-clock-chipping :-)
When I originally read this book 20 years ago now it became instantly one of those books I consider a classic - it was probably the first book I read (maybe the first good SF book written) with the hacker-as-hero protagonist
push for dual-track career paths in your company - if you're really good and your company is worth working for they will do this.
And then poof! .... nothing smaller than atoms ... Moore's law breaks down.