Posts by Steve Todd

Re: Ah, the precious IP

You need to learn the difference between a normal and a design patent. Then you need to learn about the meaning of the acronym FRAND.

Like Coca-Cola, who have a design patent on the shape of their bottle, Apple didn’t want other companies producing phones that looked too close to theirs (just like Coca-Cola don’t want other companies selling cola in bottles that can be mistaken for Coke). It’s not a wildly unreasonable position, and it didn’t stop anyone else making smart phones.

FRAND is a legal commitment made by companies who contribute their IP to a standard like LTE. It means that they promise to licence their tech to anyone on a Fair, Reasonable And Non-Descriminatory basis. Anyone should be able to use it at fixed and published rates. Qualcomm did this for LTE. Apple have rather a lot of their IP in FRAND patent pools (like LTE and h264 as for-instances), so it’s not something they don’t know anything about or have no involvement with. Qualcomm have been found guilty of breaching FRAND rules in more than one jurisdiction, and stand accused in many others.

Re: Still not competitive with flash storage @joerg

You have an overly pessimistic view of flash, and an overlay optimist view of 3D Xpoint. The quoted Samsung drive can handle 1.2TB of writes PER DAY for 3 years before it hits its specification, and a fair bit longer than that before it fails. Conversely the current version of Optane (3D Xpoint) is only good for about 100GB/day on a 32GB Drive. Scaling this up to 480GB drives you still only get roughly comparable endurance as the Samsung.

Re: What did you expect? @ibmalome

Not that big a difference. Yes, the eye is less sensitive to other frequencies, but only by a factor of 5 in the worst case (for blue spectrum light). Assuming a pure blue image we’re still only talking about 0.015 watts of light for a 700 nit display. At a 10% efficiency that’s still only 0.15 watts of power needed. We’re a long way short of significant heating here.

Re: Who wants this?

I think you’ll find you’re in the minority. Most folks just want to commute to work or get from A to B with their family and/or shopping. Just looking at the cars they buy tells you this.

Re: Why the emphasis on software mitigations?

@bazza - "AFAIK there's no real hardware fix for this"

Nonsense. The fix is already implemented by Xeon CPUs with pTRR compliant memory at no speed penalty, or by simply doubling the refresh speed at a 2-4% cost.

The issue is the memory controller logic on the CPU. Adding some extra logic at the CPU or RAM side of the equation can spot the potential for rowhammer and increase the refresh rate accordingly.

Re: I seem to recall the GPS sats have a dither error parttern

You're thinking of the SA (selective availability) code. This was a deliberate random wobble introduced into the civilian (C/A) signal, while military receivers used the more accurate P signal. SA was disabled in 2000 by presidential order, and the latest block III satellites aren't capable of transmitting it.

All evidence so far

Is that, when presented with all the facts and evidence in the world, if it doesn’t fit with his ideas or agenda it will get dismissed as “fake news”. Trump just doesn’t listen to anything that says he’s incorrect. Period.

Re: The UK mostly powered by coal?

@AC - You need to understand the difference between dispatch and dispatch on request.

Steam power has been used for centuries, but in that time no-one has solved the problem of the time it takes to build a head of steam (yes, there have been improvements, but it's still far from instant).

If you know some time in advance that it will be needed then you can prepare for the eventuality. If you need to deliver power on short notice then it is a poor solution. If you need to run the boilers on standby ready for when there is demand then it's a wasteful and inefficient solution.

Your steam train needed hours of work before it set off in order to prepare for a journey. Your coal based power plant throws away vast amounts of heat (have you never wondered what those large towers are next to one?), and it just dumps more heat when it's not generating power rather than converting it to electricity and then dumping it.

The idiocracy does indeed seem to have arrived.

Re: Why is this so hard?

For Apple it's not the money, it's the terms of the deal that they're haggling over.

For Bain, they are also short of the money that they are supposed to be raising via financiers.

I'm assuming that both of the above are quite solvable, but WD will be doing their best to block things so the deal may take a while to complete.

Re: Passing is temporary

@Charlie, not so much, no. The Core i7 in the mid-2017 13" MBP produces a single-threaded Geekbench score of 4590. The A11 comes back with a score of 4204. Less than a 10% advantage in single threaded applications isn't something users will notice.

Re: What about Gill the ARM ?

Erm, Gil the ARM was a Larry Niven character.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Hamilton

Re: Well you cannot make this secure

"There is a thing called Focussed Ion Beam microscope"

You expect them to attach 30+ wires somewhere in the middle of a billion+ transistor chip running at hundreds of megahertz, without effecting timings or state? You also expect the metal layers in the Enclave area to make that easy (there are typically 6 plus layers in a modern chip)

I think you overestimate the capabilities of these folks, especially given that YouTube video targeted a PIC32, which is fabbed on a 250 or 130nm process, more than an order of magnitude larger than the latest silicon processes.

Re: The study's authors could not find a way to launch a 4-kilogram drone against an aircraft...

The problem is in getting a drone up to the speeds which it is expected to impact an aircraft screen at. Don't forget that, in real life, the aircraft is travelling at 200+mph, to which you have to add the airspeed of the drone (somewhere around 50-60mph), so the combined impact velocity is going to be somewhere north of 250mph.

Re: hmmm...

I don't think Intel have anything as low tech as a 40nm plant left in production (or if they have, it's there to produce legacy parts they have to provide under contract). Everything they have seems to be either producing specialised parts (e.g. Fab 68 in China producing RAM chips), producing 22nm or better parts or being decommissioned/upgraded. They sell the old kit off when they shut a plant down, so they can't restart an older process with any degree of ease.

Re: It is all Apple's Fault

@Steve Davies - Its a good job that Apple don't sell any of their models for as much as $1000 then.

Re: Elsewhere reported flight aborted one hour after launch...

It depends on what was one hour after launch, the report or the abort. If the latter then you'd expect it to be comfortably in orbit. The former could have been an abort within minutes of launch, and the Chinese government only grudgingly admitting to the mistake somewhat later.

It was however

unable to cope with moderately tight turns (hence the Paris Airshow breakup) and was vastly thirsty (not having stolen Concorde's secret to optimising fuel flow across the operating speed range, but they did "borrow" most of the rest of the design).

Re: Hardly unexpected

@daniel - thank you for proving my point. The Pi is far from the only SBC, and even it is available with better than a Cortex A7, thus proving your assertion on performance limits wrong. The ODROID UX4 uses the A15 paired with A7s in big.LITTLE, but the A53 uses the newer ARMv8-A instruction set so is faster at a given clock speed.

Not having source for the GPU driver doesn't stop most IoT developers (no SoC that I'm aware of has open GPU drivers, and x86 systems with open GPU drivers normally significantly underperform the OEM BLOB). Not having source or correct details to make it talk to external devices through the likes of GPIO, SPI, I2C etc does.

Re: Fun with Glonass

@david - I think you need to check out your history there. GPS (formerly NAVSTAR) was developed by the US Department of Defense, and it was only after the shooting down of Korean Airlines flight 007 by the USSR when it drifted off course into its airspace that Ronald Reagan mandated that the system be made available for civilian use.

@Dan

Screen sizes are quoted as the diagonal measurement, corner to corner, not edge to edge. In the days of CRTs they were quoted as outside edge to outside edge (so non-visible parts of the screen) to make things even harder.

Re: What a complete waste of time that was. @MrRimmerSIR

So you MIGHT get it for £300, but chances are customs won't buy the $20 declared value and you'll be stung for import charges and VAT at a minimum. It's still an expensive solution in comparison to the Vega+

Re: Uber faces massive punitive damages.

If your pension fund is involved in Venture Captial to any significant degree then you should sack them and move elsewhere. It's far too volatile an area for them to be involved with, and shouldn't be used by anyone or any company that can't afford to write off an investment completely and move on.

Re: I first met him at Stanford ...

Probably because of the poster (Jake), who is known for his wild claims.

Re: Total travel time? @Pete 2

The problem with your 1h15m flight is that (1) you first have to travel out to the airport, (2) you have to negotiate your way through checkin/security, (3) you and your fellow passengers all need to board while your luggage is placed in the hold. (4) your aircraft needs to push back from the stand, start its engine and taxy (slowly) to the runway, (5) fly the route, (6) land and taxy to the stand, (7) you need to walk from the aircraft to the baggage claim area. (8) you need to wait for your luggage to turn up, (9) you need to walk from the baggage area to public transport and (10) you need to travel in to your destination.

if you have any change from 3 hours when making that 1h15m flight then I'd be surprised. Trains let you load and unload your own baggage, have stations close to the centre of cities and don't require the same elaborate security. A 50 minute journey shouldn't take you much more than an hour.

Re: errr

@nuked have you even the slightest idea what it costs per hour to fly a helicopter, on top of the cost of buying it that is. You'd be able to afford the return train ticket out of just the cost of the jet fuel, and have change left over.

Re: Not really heavy is it?

Heavy is defined as 20,000 - 50,000 kg to LEO. Medium is 2,000 - 20,000 kg, Super Heavy is over 50,000 kg. So the Indian rocket is a Medium, as is the Soyuz. The Falcon 9 FT is a Heavy and the Falcon Heavy is actually a Super Heavy (at least according to the NASA classification system).