Now that Xilinx has released new chips, the old ones are pretty cheap. A Spartan-3A evaluation board is less than US $200. These have VGA, PS/2, RS-232, a character LCD, a rotary encoder, LEDs, switches, and a bunch of extra connectors. The main problems are that the DDR2 RAM is *difficult* to use without a proprietary core, and the FPGA doesn't have access to the USB link.
Digilent Inc sells Spartan-3E boards for less than US $100. These have an easier-to-use DRAM and provide access to the USB port (though I think the official driver is windows-only, there seem to be solutions for using it on Linux).
Xilinx's ISE runs natively on Linux (RHEL, last time I checked). With a little searching, it was easy to figure out how to get it to work on Ubuntu, including the USB JTAG interface on the eval boards.
I haven't found a great book for learning this stuff. Pedroni's _Circuit Design with VHDL_ is okay, but it's not particularly deep and doesn't cover the FPGA development process at all. I had to study the Xilinx tutorials to get things working.
Writing HDL code superficially seems like normal programming, but it's not. Think of it as a way to translate your already-completed design into a form the computer understands. If you don't do the up-front design, it will be hard to fix through refactoring. The simulators just aren't up to the task. Restrict yourself to a single edge of a single clock, and things will be much easier.
The video is a bit slow, but worse, it tries to convince the viewer that banking is a giant conspiracy. For example, near the end, it gives anti-bank quotes from presidents who have been assassinated. Bankers provide a useful service. Are they the right people to do it? Well, that's a good question to debate.
I posted this as an AC, but then remembered my password a few minutes later...
I don't have much to say about math or science, but I do know how engineering works. You spend four years at a big state college and then find yourself making $50k. Very few other majors offer that. I don't think there's a problem with the financial incentives.
But in high school, a very small group of people went off to engineering school. Most people said, "I hate math and science. I can't do that." Even in college, people switched from engineering to other majors for various reasons (nobody seemed to switch to engineering). I doubt most were financial.
This suggests that the reason we don't have more engineers is that engineering is hard. I suspect this problem lies more in the teaching than in the students. I remember having a friend who was really smart, but for some reason he just didn't understand multivariable calculus. He couldn't do partial derivatives. This confused me, because if you really understand how single-variable derivatives work, partial derivatives are a straightforward extension. So maybe nobody ever taught him how derivatives actually work. I don't think it has anything to do with the level of abstraction or inherent brain wiring issues.
To graduate, engineering students have to apply all the math, chemistry, and physics knowledge they ever learned, so missing a crucial piece of understanding early on due to poor instruction makes it difficult to proceed.
If the problem is so obvious, you might wonder, why don't schools do anything about it? The fact is, they do. Tutoring services are almost always available. Some departments try to put their best instructors in the introductory classes. Most high schools do their part to make sure students actually understand stuff too (though universities have accepted their position filling in gaps in this understanding). It's difficult to catch everyone who needs help, but they certainly try to.
So even with high starting salaries and people trying to make sure students understand the basics pretty well, it's still difficult to get more engineering majors. And this leads to the more fundamental cause. The fact is, we live such comfortable lives that making more money isn't that enticing. As a kid, you see many successful adults who don't have engineering degrees, so you assume that there are many paths to financial stability, and engineering seems like one of the more difficult ones. So there's no reason to work that hard.
In societies where life sucks for normal people, engineering and science are paths up. But in our society, they're just two paths of many (you don't see many engineering students from inner cities because the kids there don't have any successful engineers around as role models).
Anyway, all of this is to say that getting more scientists and engineers is going to require more than free tuition (at that point, it's too late anyway). It's going to require people to see engineers and scientists as people to be like, and from an early age.
Pretend the VM is just a really CISC-y microprocessor. Many of the microprocessors out there are particularly good at running C code simply because C maps very neatly into most processor's assembly languages. When you start talking about more academic languages, they would map less obviously into machine code on a typical processor. However, a processor could be designed with an instruction set optimized for that sort of language, if the hardware engineers really thought it was necessary.
This is not the only processor designed specifically for a language that is slow on other CPUs. Several specialized LISP processors, such as the Scheme-79 lisp processor, were created, but this chip is unique in its object oriented features at a time when the concept wasn't well-known (actually, I hadn't the foggiest idea of what object-oriented programming was when I first learned about it - obvious from reading unrevised versions of this description). It also manages to support objects without the slowness of the Intel 432.
Creating an optimal processor for running any language would involve too many trade-offs to be useful.
Consider that, while a patent grants you a time-limited monopoly, you may not get to enjoy these rights if you are already a monopoly and use the patent in an anticompetitive fashion.
Imagine holding a de facto monopoly on, say, automobiles. You use a special type of bolt that's patented so nobody else can sell replacement parts without licensing your bolt. You refuse to license the patent to anyone else, and happily set your own price on replacement parts.
Then the Justice Department launches an investigation into your activities. You're a de facto (if not de jure) monopoly, so the normal rules don't apply, and you're forced to stop being anticompetitive.
Open Source projects don't really have the money even for compulsory licensing now, but I doubt that'll be such a huge deal in the future. Projects large enough to pose a threat to the established monopoly will have significant funding from would-be competitors, allowing such licensing fees to be paid. But just like Joe Programmer can't build and distribute an invention someone else patented, he won't be able to use patented algorithms either and will have to figure out an alternative way to do it.
The guys at Intel aren't stupid. They invested millions into marketing themselves as a consumer brand before it was cool to do so, and it's been the best move they ever made. AMD, for all its trying, hasn't even registered on the radar of most consumers. Intel uses this to its advantage to charge a hefty price premium. After all, they're the Coca-cola while AMD is just the RC.
So Intel _is_ winning the price battle, since the winner of the price battle is the guy that gets to charge more money and still sell 80% of the processors, not the guy that sells them for half as much to push enough volume to break even. After all, Intel could sell their parts for much less than they do without actually losing money, but they don't have to.
And, as AMD's recent relabeling of their XP line has shown, clock speed is still king. Nobody has ever successfully dethroned it as the single number consumers care about above all others. Which is why Intel has won that battle as well.
P4's with DDR aren't in any way related to RAMBUS's performance as much as keeping low-margin systems affordable and still fast. That's why you'll see P4 Rambus and DDR boards out there, fighting it out for the price/performance sweet spot.
At this point, Intel is more worried about Sun than AMD, since Sun is the lone vendor not committed to Itanium/McKinley. They've also got the high-margin Xeon processors competing with Sun's mid-range offerings. This is where the interesting things are going to start happening, but you won't be hearing about it on Tom's Hardware.
Mouser - My favorite catalog right now. A whole lot of stuff, good prices. Look in the Jameco catalog to find what you want (nice color pictures help), and actually order it from Mouser (which has a boring catalog).
Digikey - order anything here you can't get from Mouser.
Radio Shack - if you don't mind paying a 400% markup ($1.50 for a quad NAND gate??!) or if you need it at 6pm on a Saturday night, suck it up and go here
Fry's - last I was in the valley, they had a pretty low selection compared to a real distributor. Prices were better than Radio Shack though.
If you want ideas for a project, hanging around in the back of Radio Shack might get you started, but I'd encourage you to read manufacturer app notes. Phillips has all sorts of consumer audio/video stuff you could build all laid out in their app notes.
Check out things like the PIC or SX microcontrollers. For ~$10 you and the price of a cheap ROM programmer kit, you can have incredible design flexibility
Yeah, there's a certain appeal to using lots of 74xx chips, but there's really no reason to when it's smaller, cheaper, and much more flexible when you put it on a microcontroller. And VHDL/Verilog may both suck at first compared to the beauty of _real_ hardware, but their potential for semi-intelligent glue logic between your microcontrollers, memory, system busses, etc cannot be overlooked. And, unlike 74xx's, you can rewire without laying out your entire circuit again.
I thought about this after my digital design class. I'd built a "single board" computer before with a whopping 2K of RAM and another 2K of EEPROM, so I wanted to make an expanded version with real I/O. Character LCD displays are really cheap, as in $7-$15 for small ones. Graphics displays might cost you $50-$100 for a small monochrome one. Check out Marlin P Jones for okay deals on surplus stuff.
For my own project, I decided that the display portion alone was difficult enough to merit an A in my lab, so I built a PIC microcontroller-based NTSC video game (Breakout -- check out the links at the bottom of the page for PIC Tetris!). Looking at Altera's UP1 FPGA evaluation board, displaying VGA at 640x480x60Hz with 16 colors isn't even very difficult (Altera UP1 at GA Tech). Try using a standard method of output like this, and you'll have a lot more fun and be able to do a lot more than with a $7 20x2 LCD module.
Input is pretty much the same. Sure, you could use a custom keypad, but why bother when you can interface with a PS/2 mouse or keyboard? Specs are widely available, and this will impress people much more than a row of DIP switches. This can be done on a relatively small FPGA (~20K gates) which Altera's university program sells on full development boards for $150.
For even more fun, try interfacing with compact flash for storage (Circuit Cellar Article). Then realize that you've just implemented a basic IDE interface, and expand it to do hard drives. Design a character generator for your NTSC or VGA output, write a simple filesystem, and have a whole computer with standard parts that you built yourself!
If that's still too intimidating, just look at company Application notes for ideas. You can find some strange ideas and take them all the way.
I fail to see what's so revolutionary about their hardware. They're basically building huge DSP-style chips where much of the operation is hardcoded for better optimization. If chips continue to do this, of course you're going to see games struggle to catch up. The 3D graphics market seems to be doing very little that's revolutionary--just bringing the chips up to the process limitations of transistor size and speed.
The problem with the current model is that the graphics card itself isn't expected to have any intelligence of its own. It's simply expected to render as much as possible in as little time as it can. Right now, we're expected to pass millions of triangles to the card to render, as well megabytes of textures to slap on them as fast as possible. Imagine if instead, the developer handed the graphics card a mathematical description of the model, and the chip did the rest, filling in details based on fractal algorithms. Instead of applying a bumpy looking texture to a wall, you could make the wall itself bumpy with potentially infinite detail. That would be revolutionary, and would require incredible engineering to design.
Saying the current crop of graphics chips are revolutionary is like denying that SGI ever designed a Reality Engine in the first place. Just because greater integration allows it to be insanely fast doesn't mean it's anything really that new. NVidia's going to have to do something pretty amazing to keep from getting blown away when something truly revolutionary comes around.
I've got a cable modem, and every night when the traffic starts to get high, service totally stops. This isn't too bad, because I live close enough to campus to run to a computer lab when I really need to, but it's annoying nonetheless. The solution: we called the cable company to complain about their horrible service, and they credited our bill for the month's worth of broadband. I won't argue with free broadband, even if it doesn't work from 6-12pm most nights.
If you're having trouble with your broadband service, try complaining. The worst that could happen is you'll have to leave a message, but you might be surprised what happens.
Actually, I believe the way this works around here is that the University aggressively patents things, and then licenses them to the startup companies (which they also fund). Remember that a good deal of the public research group's money comes from such things as licensing their IP, since they're not in a position to make products.
When not abused, this is actually a pretty decent system. Companies can use licensing to get the benefit of research without all of its costs. With the costs of research skyrocketing in many fields due to the need for high-tech equipment, this actually makes more sense than requiring many small companies trying to do little bits of research.
Unfortunately, the cases that you hear about are the abuses like Fraunhofer's rethinking of MP3 licensing after it became a standard--not the many examples of IP licensing working well.
The end result is simple: the people (via the government) grant a time-limited monopoly to a company or institution, and then that entity is responsible for using their right to benefit the people. Unfortunately, trusting corporations to remember that people _gave_ them all the rights they enjoy is asking entirely too much these days.
Remember that it's not patents themselves that are bad. They allow you to ensure that you'll get a return on the huge amount of money you spend doing research on algorithms, processes, etc. Then, unlike copyright, they ensure that your invention is released into the public domain before several generations of people have come and gone.
Patents are only bad when abused. By abuse I mean obtaining overly broad patents purposely, forming companies whose sole purpose is to sue everyone that does anything remotely related to patents they purchased from others, or similar. It's perfectly fine to use a patent to charge people to use your legitimate invention, however.
Also remember that Free Software, no matter how obscure, can cut into your profits if people use it instead of your own software. Why should someone pay lots of money for your product that implements an amazing new encoding algorithm that you payed a million dollars to develop when they could use Free Software that does the same thing just because you were too nice to demand a licensing fee from "free" projects?
Don't worry, if the technology is that good, someone will find a way around it. Look at Ogg Vorbis, for example, which implements an intelligent audio codec without anyone else's IP.
1) MS has a fairly large and profitable peripheral division. Imagine "The driver for your Logitech Optical Mouse has not been certified for use with Windows. Please purchase a compatible device, such as the Intellimouse (TM) Explorer."
2) MS can now officially "certify" hardware as PC compatible. Remember how many early computers were sold as loss leaders and would make up with inflated peripheral prices. This could effectively do the same thing for PCs, where we may end up paying a Microsoft tax on all of our "certified" peripherals.
The Register has a great point. Even if you can install whatever drivers you want to anyway, most PC users will be a little scared that their device hasn't been certified to work with Windows. And MS has power to dictate which products are PC compatible.
I've been getting into DIY electronics for school projects lately, and have run into a similar problem to what he's describing. Years ago, computer enthusiasts actually designed and built their own custom computers, with homemade printed circuit boards and off-the-shelf components. Yet today, it would be nearly impossible for a simple hobbiest to build a modern computer equivalent from the bare essentials. Pitch sizes on semiconductor leads have dropped to 0.025 inches, and modern computer motherboards require at least four layers due to the integration of components. BGA chips, like the chipset on a motherboard, require expensive reflow soldering ovens just to mount (though a few expensive clamp-down sockets for these can be had).
This isn't necessarily a bad thing--computers are faster, cheaper, and smaller today than ever before. Yet the barrier of entry to the market has risen significantly. Chip fabs, for example, are so expensive to build that only established players in the market can even afford to build them, effectively making market penetration all but impossible for any new company wanting to fab ICs.
This isn't a new thing--companies constantly try to raise the barrier of entry to various markets to eliminate competition. You could fix a Model T Ford with only a few simple tools, or it couldn't be fixed. Today, you need an incredible array of tools to service a car beyond simple oil changes and such, effectively cutting the little guys out of the market in favor of large automotive dealer shops.
So it's bound to happen, and hard core people will find ways around it, while everyone else will find some new toy to play with.
Rarely, if ever, do you watch the 6 o'clock news and hear "Scientists report that the status quo is a-okay." Telling us that everything is fine tends to lose ratings to more shocking, if less credible, news. Researchers looking to make names for themselves can release controversial findings to catapult themselves into the spotlight. In the case of global warming, researchers will get funding because they're siding with the enormously powerful environmental lobbies. Corporations like the PR they get from giving grants to research the environmental groups that release many of these findings.
Just a few weekends ago John Stossel on ABC did a "gimmee a break" report on how the environmental lobbies have basically succeeded in convincing many American public school children that Man is destroying the planet. Children were interviewed, saying things about how cities were going to flood and pollution would be so bad that no one will be able to breathe. Did anyone else see this report? Environmental lobbies know that if they can create this sort of mentality, they will receive funding and power for their pet causes in the future.
People have been constantly told that everything man creates is horrible, while everything natural is inherently good. Yet it's only because Man has tamed nature somewhat that people don't fear being attacked by wild animals on their way to work. While everyone _could_ forgo modern convenience for a more primitive lifestyle, mortality rates would shoot through the roof. While many environmentalists wish we could be as in tune with nature as Native Americans once were, Stossel's aforementioned report pointed out that the life expectancy for these environmentally friendly people was only 30 years.
Like every other issue, you should never blindly trust what you hear. The extreme right-wing would say exactly the opposite as environmentalists--using fossil fuels is good for the air, carbon dioxide emissions are making life better for people--for the same reasons: greed and lust for power. Jon Katz probably knows all of this, but is more concerned with creating debate than presenting the facts. After all, it's better for his career.
A CD key is ideally a random piece of data (numbers, digits, etc) that includes some hard-to-compute checksum information. For a good key, it would be extremely difficult to determine the algorithm used to find this cheksum. Note that these keys have become progressively more complex over the years, getting longer and using more digits/letters. Note that all the keys will work on any copy of that specific release of the software, so they only add a minor annoyance to pirates.
Starting with Office 2k, MS required actual activation of the product in much the same way as Win XP. Office generates a hardware ID for your system and submits it to Microsoft. MS then gives you another product key specifically for that hardware ID. They allows you to register online once, and you're required to call an 800 number each time after that to get your key.
Office required a new key on a hard drive upgrade and on a motherboard upgrade. The fourth time I installed it (on my laptop), I also had to submit my serial number (generated from the CD Key I assume) to receive my activation key.
Though this might be new for MS, other companies have been doing it for years. Much of the engineering software we use here for classes (Mentor Graphics, Orcad, etc) has much more intrusive licensing, since a license for the software can cost several times the price of a low-end workstation. This software can often get away with tough licensing restrictions because of the small market served. Because windows is so widespread, however, Microsoft will have a hard time keeping their progressively more complex protection schemes from being thwarted.
I took the class you're talking about a few years ago, and was really upset at myself for taking a class whose first assignment wasn't much more difficult than "Hello, World." Because the first assignment was so ridiculously easy, I made sure to GPL my entire submission just for the irony. When the instructor sent me back my program with his comments, he simply said "The GPL??" and called me a Linux Geek.
As for more serious projects, there seems to be a large precedent of University-funded works being GPL'd. The University of Illinois (as I'm sure many other schools do) has a rather clear policy about who owns the copyright for anything made on campus, using campus equipment, for a class, etc--the university, of course. The main purpose of this, however, is to avoid people that use campus resources to make money for themselves. So in short, the University won't care until someone tries to use the code in a commercial product.
With all the obvious opposition to laws such as the UCITA and the DMCA so evident in places like Slashdot, it's a wonder to me that people haven't stormed the Washington Mall demanding that their rights cease to be trampled on. Perhaps the reason for it is the same that made the Clinton Impeachment trial so much of a non-issue. America's economy is better than it's ever been, and no law maker wants to take responsibility for a crash by making the wrong decision.
In this case, Maryland wants to keep software companies happy and ensure that their economic success continues even more. Consumers are apathetic to a blatant loss of their rights because they too are blinded by economic boom. Americans have become content with the status quo, and see little reason to protest "business as usual" in their state capitals when everything has so far been working out so well.
The only way the American people will become concerned enough about this and other loss of rights will be for them to lose their contentment and realize what's actually going on. Until then, these grevious errors in our lawmakers' judgement will continue to go relatively unopposed by the general public.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that Xilinx has released new chips, the old ones are pretty cheap. A Spartan-3A evaluation board is less than US $200. These have VGA, PS/2, RS-232, a character LCD, a rotary encoder, LEDs, switches, and a bunch of extra connectors. The main problems are that the DDR2 RAM is *difficult* to use without a proprietary core, and the FPGA doesn't have access to the USB link.
Digilent Inc sells Spartan-3E boards for less than US $100. These have an easier-to-use DRAM and provide access to the USB port (though I think the official driver is windows-only, there seem to be solutions for using it on Linux).
Xilinx's ISE runs natively on Linux (RHEL, last time I checked). With a little searching, it was easy to figure out how to get it to work on Ubuntu, including the USB JTAG interface on the eval boards.
I haven't found a great book for learning this stuff. Pedroni's _Circuit Design with VHDL_ is okay, but it's not particularly deep and doesn't cover the FPGA development process at all. I had to study the Xilinx tutorials to get things working.
Writing HDL code superficially seems like normal programming, but it's not. Think of it as a way to translate your already-completed design into a form the computer understands. If you don't do the up-front design, it will be hard to fix through refactoring. The simulators just aren't up to the task. Restrict yourself to a single edge of a single clock, and things will be much easier.
The video is a bit slow, but worse, it tries to convince the viewer that banking is a giant conspiracy. For example, near the end, it gives anti-bank quotes from presidents who have been assassinated.
Bankers provide a useful service. Are they the right people to do it? Well, that's a good question to debate.
I don't have much to say about math or science, but I do know how engineering works. You spend four years at a big state college and then find yourself making $50k. Very few other majors offer that. I don't think there's a problem with the financial incentives.
But in high school, a very small group of people went off to engineering school. Most people said, "I hate math and science. I can't do that." Even in college, people switched from engineering to other majors for various reasons (nobody seemed to switch to engineering). I doubt most were financial.
This suggests that the reason we don't have more engineers is that engineering is hard. I suspect this problem lies more in the teaching than in the students. I remember having a friend who was really smart, but for some reason he just didn't understand multivariable calculus. He couldn't do partial derivatives. This confused me, because if you really understand how single-variable derivatives work, partial derivatives are a straightforward extension. So maybe nobody ever taught him how derivatives actually work. I don't think it has anything to do with the level of abstraction or inherent brain wiring issues.
To graduate, engineering students have to apply all the math, chemistry, and physics knowledge they ever learned, so missing a crucial piece of understanding early on due to poor instruction makes it difficult to proceed.
If the problem is so obvious, you might wonder, why don't schools do anything about it? The fact is, they do. Tutoring services are almost always available. Some departments try to put their best instructors in the introductory classes. Most high schools do their part to make sure students actually understand stuff too (though universities have accepted their position filling in gaps in this understanding). It's difficult to catch everyone who needs help, but they certainly try to.
So even with high starting salaries and people trying to make sure students understand the basics pretty well, it's still difficult to get more engineering majors. And this leads to the more fundamental cause. The fact is, we live such comfortable lives that making more money isn't that enticing. As a kid, you see many successful adults who don't have engineering degrees, so you assume that there are many paths to financial stability, and engineering seems like one of the more difficult ones. So there's no reason to work that hard.
In societies where life sucks for normal people, engineering and science are paths up. But in our society, they're just two paths of many (you don't see many engineering students from inner cities because the kids there don't have any successful engineers around as role models).
Anyway, all of this is to say that getting more scientists and engineers is going to require more than free tuition (at that point, it's too late anyway). It's going to require people to see engineers and scientists as people to be like, and from an early age.
Pretend the VM is just a really CISC-y microprocessor. Many of the microprocessors out there are particularly good at running C code simply because C maps very neatly into most processor's assembly languages. When you start talking about more academic languages, they would map less obviously into machine code on a typical processor. However, a processor could be designed with an instruction set optimized for that sort of language, if the hardware engineers really thought it was necessary.
From "Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present:"
Creating an optimal processor for running any language would involve too many trade-offs to be useful.
Consider that, while a patent grants you a time-limited monopoly, you may not get to enjoy these rights if you are already a monopoly and use the patent in an anticompetitive fashion.
Imagine holding a de facto monopoly on, say, automobiles. You use a special type of bolt that's patented so nobody else can sell replacement parts without licensing your bolt. You refuse to license the patent to anyone else, and happily set your own price on replacement parts.
Then the Justice Department launches an investigation into your activities. You're a de facto (if not de jure) monopoly, so the normal rules don't apply, and you're forced to stop being anticompetitive.
Open Source projects don't really have the money even for compulsory licensing now, but I doubt that'll be such a huge deal in the future. Projects large enough to pose a threat to the established monopoly will have significant funding from would-be competitors, allowing such licensing fees to be paid. But just like Joe Programmer can't build and distribute an invention someone else patented, he won't be able to use patented algorithms either and will have to figure out an alternative way to do it.
The guys at Intel aren't stupid. They invested millions into marketing themselves as a consumer brand before it was cool to do so, and it's been the best move they ever made. AMD, for all its trying, hasn't even registered on the radar of most consumers. Intel uses this to its advantage to charge a hefty price premium. After all, they're the Coca-cola while AMD is just the RC.
So Intel _is_ winning the price battle, since the winner of the price battle is the guy that gets to charge more money and still sell 80% of the processors, not the guy that sells them for half as much to push enough volume to break even. After all, Intel could sell their parts for much less than they do without actually losing money, but they don't have to.
And, as AMD's recent relabeling of their XP line has shown, clock speed is still king. Nobody has ever successfully dethroned it as the single number consumers care about above all others. Which is why Intel has won that battle as well.
P4's with DDR aren't in any way related to RAMBUS's performance as much as keeping low-margin systems affordable and still fast. That's why you'll see P4 Rambus and DDR boards out there, fighting it out for the price/performance sweet spot.
At this point, Intel is more worried about Sun than AMD, since Sun is the lone vendor not committed to Itanium/McKinley. They've also got the high-margin Xeon processors competing with Sun's mid-range offerings. This is where the interesting things are going to start happening, but you won't be hearing about it on Tom's Hardware.
If you want ideas for a project, hanging around in the back of Radio Shack might get you started, but I'd encourage you to read manufacturer app notes. Phillips has all sorts of consumer audio/video stuff you could build all laid out in their app notes.
Check out things like the PIC or SX microcontrollers. For ~$10 you and the price of a cheap ROM programmer kit, you can have incredible design flexibility
Yeah, there's a certain appeal to using lots of 74xx chips, but there's really no reason to when it's smaller, cheaper, and much more flexible when you put it on a microcontroller. And VHDL/Verilog may both suck at first compared to the beauty of _real_ hardware, but their potential for semi-intelligent glue logic between your microcontrollers, memory, system busses, etc cannot be overlooked. And, unlike 74xx's, you can rewire without laying out your entire circuit again.
I thought about this after my digital design class. I'd built a "single board" computer before with a whopping 2K of RAM and another 2K of EEPROM, so I wanted to make an expanded version with real I/O. Character LCD displays are really cheap, as in $7-$15 for small ones. Graphics displays might cost you $50-$100 for a small monochrome one. Check out Marlin P Jones for okay deals on surplus stuff.
For my own project, I decided that the display portion alone was difficult enough to merit an A in my lab, so I built a PIC microcontroller-based NTSC video game (Breakout -- check out the links at the bottom of the page for PIC Tetris!). Looking at Altera's UP1 FPGA evaluation board, displaying VGA at 640x480x60Hz with 16 colors isn't even very difficult (Altera UP1 at GA Tech). Try using a standard method of output like this, and you'll have a lot more fun and be able to do a lot more than with a $7 20x2 LCD module.
Input is pretty much the same. Sure, you could use a custom keypad, but why bother when you can interface with a PS/2 mouse or keyboard? Specs are widely available, and this will impress people much more than a row of DIP switches. This can be done on a relatively small FPGA (~20K gates) which Altera's university program sells on full development boards for $150.
For even more fun, try interfacing with compact flash for storage (Circuit Cellar Article). Then realize that you've just implemented a basic IDE interface, and expand it to do hard drives. Design a character generator for your NTSC or VGA output, write a simple filesystem, and have a whole computer with standard parts that you built yourself!
If that's still too intimidating, just look at company Application notes for ideas. You can find some strange ideas and take them all the way.
I fail to see what's so revolutionary about their hardware. They're basically building huge DSP-style chips where much of the operation is hardcoded for better optimization. If chips continue to do this, of course you're going to see games struggle to catch up. The 3D graphics market seems to be doing very little that's revolutionary--just bringing the chips up to the process limitations of transistor size and speed.
The problem with the current model is that the graphics card itself isn't expected to have any intelligence of its own. It's simply expected to render as much as possible in as little time as it can. Right now, we're expected to pass millions of triangles to the card to render, as well megabytes of textures to slap on them as fast as possible. Imagine if instead, the developer handed the graphics card a mathematical description of the model, and the chip did the rest, filling in details based on fractal algorithms. Instead of applying a bumpy looking texture to a wall, you could make the wall itself bumpy with potentially infinite detail. That would be revolutionary, and would require incredible engineering to design.
Saying the current crop of graphics chips are revolutionary is like denying that SGI ever designed a Reality Engine in the first place. Just because greater integration allows it to be insanely fast doesn't mean it's anything really that new. NVidia's going to have to do something pretty amazing to keep from getting blown away when something truly revolutionary comes around.
I've got a cable modem, and every night when the traffic starts to get high, service totally stops. This isn't too bad, because I live close enough to campus to run to a computer lab when I really need to, but it's annoying nonetheless. The solution: we called the cable company to complain about their horrible service, and they credited our bill for the month's worth of broadband. I won't argue with free broadband, even if it doesn't work from 6-12pm most nights.
If you're having trouble with your broadband service, try complaining. The worst that could happen is you'll have to leave a message, but you might be surprised what happens.
Actually, I believe the way this works around here is that the University aggressively patents things, and then licenses them to the startup companies (which they also fund). Remember that a good deal of the public research group's money comes from such things as licensing their IP, since they're not in a position to make products.
When not abused, this is actually a pretty decent system. Companies can use licensing to get the benefit of research without all of its costs. With the costs of research skyrocketing in many fields due to the need for high-tech equipment, this actually makes more sense than requiring many small companies trying to do little bits of research.
Unfortunately, the cases that you hear about are the abuses like Fraunhofer's rethinking of MP3 licensing after it became a standard--not the many examples of IP licensing working well.
The end result is simple: the people (via the government) grant a time-limited monopoly to a company or institution, and then that entity is responsible for using their right to benefit the people. Unfortunately, trusting corporations to remember that people _gave_ them all the rights they enjoy is asking entirely too much these days.
Remember that it's not patents themselves that are bad. They allow you to ensure that you'll get a return on the huge amount of money you spend doing research on algorithms, processes, etc. Then, unlike copyright, they ensure that your invention is released into the public domain before several generations of people have come and gone.
Patents are only bad when abused. By abuse I mean obtaining overly broad patents purposely, forming companies whose sole purpose is to sue everyone that does anything remotely related to patents they purchased from others, or similar. It's perfectly fine to use a patent to charge people to use your legitimate invention, however.
Also remember that Free Software, no matter how obscure, can cut into your profits if people use it instead of your own software. Why should someone pay lots of money for your product that implements an amazing new encoding algorithm that you payed a million dollars to develop when they could use Free Software that does the same thing just because you were too nice to demand a licensing fee from "free" projects?
Don't worry, if the technology is that good, someone will find a way around it. Look at Ogg Vorbis, for example, which implements an intelligent audio codec without anyone else's IP.
Two concerns here:
1) MS has a fairly large and profitable peripheral division. Imagine "The driver for your Logitech Optical Mouse has not been certified for use with Windows. Please purchase a compatible device, such as the Intellimouse (TM) Explorer."
2) MS can now officially "certify" hardware as PC compatible. Remember how many early computers were sold as loss leaders and would make up with inflated peripheral prices. This could effectively do the same thing for PCs, where we may end up paying a Microsoft tax on all of our "certified" peripherals.
The Register has a great point. Even if you can install whatever drivers you want to anyway, most PC users will be a little scared that their device hasn't been certified to work with Windows. And MS has power to dictate which products are PC compatible.
I've been getting into DIY electronics for school projects lately, and have run into a similar problem to what he's describing. Years ago, computer enthusiasts actually designed and built their own custom computers, with homemade printed circuit boards and off-the-shelf components. Yet today, it would be nearly impossible for a simple hobbiest to build a modern computer equivalent from the bare essentials. Pitch sizes on semiconductor leads have dropped to 0.025 inches, and modern computer motherboards require at least four layers due to the integration of components. BGA chips, like the chipset on a motherboard, require expensive reflow soldering ovens just to mount (though a few expensive clamp-down sockets for these can be had).
This isn't necessarily a bad thing--computers are faster, cheaper, and smaller today than ever before. Yet the barrier of entry to the market has risen significantly. Chip fabs, for example, are so expensive to build that only established players in the market can even afford to build them, effectively making market penetration all but impossible for any new company wanting to fab ICs.
This isn't a new thing--companies constantly try to raise the barrier of entry to various markets to eliminate competition. You could fix a Model T Ford with only a few simple tools, or it couldn't be fixed. Today, you need an incredible array of tools to service a car beyond simple oil changes and such, effectively cutting the little guys out of the market in favor of large automotive dealer shops.
So it's bound to happen, and hard core people will find ways around it, while everyone else will find some new toy to play with.
Rarely, if ever, do you watch the 6 o'clock news and hear "Scientists report that the status quo is a-okay." Telling us that everything is fine tends to lose ratings to more shocking, if less credible, news. Researchers looking to make names for themselves can release controversial findings to catapult themselves into the spotlight. In the case of global warming, researchers will get funding because they're siding with the enormously powerful environmental lobbies. Corporations like the PR they get from giving grants to research the environmental groups that release many of these findings.
Just a few weekends ago John Stossel on ABC did a "gimmee a break" report on how the environmental lobbies have basically succeeded in convincing many American public school children that Man is destroying the planet. Children were interviewed, saying things about how cities were going to flood and pollution would be so bad that no one will be able to breathe. Did anyone else see this report? Environmental lobbies know that if they can create this sort of mentality, they will receive funding and power for their pet causes in the future.
People have been constantly told that everything man creates is horrible, while everything natural is inherently good. Yet it's only because Man has tamed nature somewhat that people don't fear being attacked by wild animals on their way to work. While everyone _could_ forgo modern convenience for a more primitive lifestyle, mortality rates would shoot through the roof. While many environmentalists wish we could be as in tune with nature as Native Americans once were, Stossel's aforementioned report pointed out that the life expectancy for these environmentally friendly people was only 30 years.
Like every other issue, you should never blindly trust what you hear. The extreme right-wing would say exactly the opposite as environmentalists--using fossil fuels is good for the air, carbon dioxide emissions are making life better for people--for the same reasons: greed and lust for power. Jon Katz probably knows all of this, but is more concerned with creating debate than presenting the facts. After all, it's better for his career.
A CD key is ideally a random piece of data (numbers, digits, etc) that includes some hard-to-compute checksum information. For a good key, it would be extremely difficult to determine the algorithm used to find this cheksum. Note that these keys have become progressively more complex over the years, getting longer and using more digits/letters. Note that all the keys will work on any copy of that specific release of the software, so they only add a minor annoyance to pirates.
Starting with Office 2k, MS required actual activation of the product in much the same way as Win XP. Office generates a hardware ID for your system and submits it to Microsoft. MS then gives you another product key specifically for that hardware ID. They allows you to register online once, and you're required to call an 800 number each time after that to get your key.
Office required a new key on a hard drive upgrade and on a motherboard upgrade. The fourth time I installed it (on my laptop), I also had to submit my serial number (generated from the CD Key I assume) to receive my activation key.
Though this might be new for MS, other companies have been doing it for years. Much of the engineering software we use here for classes (Mentor Graphics, Orcad, etc) has much more intrusive licensing, since a license for the software can cost several times the price of a low-end workstation. This software can often get away with tough licensing restrictions because of the small market served. Because windows is so widespread, however, Microsoft will have a hard time keeping their progressively more complex protection schemes from being thwarted.
Whoops, meant to post this is myself, but didn't type the password right...
I took the class you're talking about a few years ago, and was really upset at myself for taking a class whose first assignment wasn't much more difficult than "Hello, World." Because the first assignment was so ridiculously easy, I made sure to GPL my entire submission just for the irony. When the instructor sent me back my program with his comments, he simply said "The GPL??" and called me a Linux Geek. As for more serious projects, there seems to be a large precedent of University-funded works being GPL'd. The University of Illinois (as I'm sure many other schools do) has a rather clear policy about who owns the copyright for anything made on campus, using campus equipment, for a class, etc--the university, of course. The main purpose of this, however, is to avoid people that use campus resources to make money for themselves. So in short, the University won't care until someone tries to use the code in a commercial product.
With all the obvious opposition to laws such as the UCITA and the DMCA so evident in places like Slashdot, it's a wonder to me that people haven't stormed the Washington Mall demanding that their rights cease to be trampled on. Perhaps the reason for it is the same that made the Clinton Impeachment trial so much of a non-issue. America's economy is better than it's ever been, and no law maker wants to take responsibility for a crash by making the wrong decision.
In this case, Maryland wants to keep software companies happy and ensure that their economic success continues even more. Consumers are apathetic to a blatant loss of their rights because they too are blinded by economic boom. Americans have become content with the status quo, and see little reason to protest "business as usual" in their state capitals when everything has so far been working out so well.
The only way the American people will become concerned enough about this and other loss of rights will be for them to lose their contentment and realize what's actually going on. Until then, these grevious errors in our lawmakers' judgement will continue to go relatively unopposed by the general public.
Netcraft: usvms.gpo.gov is running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP2 on DIGITAL UNIX
If that had even said IIS on NT4.0SP5 ....