He didn't say "may not transfer at all", he said "may not transfer well". Also remember that an algorithm isn't just running on any old bit of hardware it's running on a modern CPU with lots of special instructions with a gigantic RAM attached to it and potentially some other peripherals for special functions. Hardware RNG, etc. It might very well not be reasonable to try to convert all this to a custom FPGA/ASIC for the cost involved.

Yep. Although sub-optimal is like the understatement of the year. I've seen not just inefficient but inefficient by an order of magnitude at times.

They have a tool that can do this, I don't know if I'd call it a 'solution' just yet though. We've just finished ripping out all the 'solution' for our project because we wanted a device that was actually small enough (and thus cheap enough) to be able to sell.

It takes input designed to be hardware and makes good hardware. It takes input designed to be software and makes shit hardware. It also doesn't handle version control very well, you need proprietary tools to even VIEW the design files... and the output which actually describes the hardware (vhdl) is so obfuscated as to be nearly illegible. The build times are also 4-5 times longer than they need to be, so it takes a whole day to place and route the designs output by this tool. Unless you're building something trivial I wouldn't advise depending on mathworks/simulink tools for a solution.

Sure, the same way software is basically just english and letters and numbers and if you understand those you can do most any software yourself! /sarc.
VHDL is code, but after cleaning up after software people who think they can write VHDL, it's not the same thing at all. The key statement is

This is by no means a light or trivial task. There's even entire university degrees dedicated to it. ;) But if you have all THAT, then sure writing hardware code is a snap! In all seriousness the above statement basically says it's easy if you have the skill set already.

Just don't make the mistake of thinking that if you understand BOTH hardware and software that they are equivalent, or that everyone else shares in your expanded understanding. I've seen programs fail because people try to treat hardware like software simply because they're both captured with some text. It's a dangerous viewpoint if you want your project to succeed.

There's been several people who suggested using a high-level synthesis tool to convert your software (c/c++) directly to HDL (verilog/VHDL) of some kind. This can work and I've been on this task and seen it's output before. The catch is; unless that software was expressly and purpose written to describe hardware (by someone who understands that hardware and it's limitations and how that particular converter works), it almost always makes awful and extraordinarily inefficient hardware.

Case in point - we had one algorithm developed in Simulink/Matlab that needed to end up in an FPGA. After 'pushing the button' and letting the tool generate the HDL, it consumed not just 1 but about 4 FPGAs worth of logic gates, RAMs, and registers. Needless to say the hardware platform only had one FPGA and a good portion of it was already dedicated to platform tasks so only about 20% was available for the algorithm. We got it working after basically re-implementing the algorithm with the goal of hardware in mind. The generation tool's output was 20 times worse than what was even feasible. If you're doing an ASIC you can just throw a crap-load of extra silicon at it, but that gets expensive very quickly. Plus closing timing on that will be a nightmare.

My job recently has been to go through and take algorithms written by very smart people (but oriented to software) and re-implement them so they can fit on reasonably sized FPGAs. It can be a long task sometimes and there's no push-button solution for getting something good, fast, cheap. Techies usually say you can pick two during the design process, but when converting from software to hardware you usually only get one.

Granted this all varies a lot and depends heavily on the specifics of the algorithm in question. But the most likely way to get a reasonable estimate is going to be to explain the algorithm in detail to an ASIC/FPGA engineer and let them work up a prelim architecture and estimate. The high-level synthesis push-button tools will give you a number but it probably won't be something people actually want to build/sell or buy.

Pretty much correct:

Here's a comment I made a while back about this same situation:

Kodak's management has always been married to consumables and services as encapsulated by the mantra "You push the button, we do the rest." It's like some creepy love affair with George Eastman. Most of the outright wrong directions Kodak has taken can be traced back to trying to that philosophy. Being from the Rochester area made Kodak's fall a bit sad to watch, but it was still very predictable.

To those people saying Kodak wasn't a camera company; Kodak made the first and best professional digital cameras, as well as medium/large format digital camera backs and other digital sensors. It was management decisions not to aggressively pursue that tech in the consumer space with gear that didn't treat the consumer like a moron. Not to mention all the custom designed software/drivers using non-standard GUI interfaces which were expensive to build from scratch and horrendous to use. Every Kodak made product or service was focused on consumables and draining the customer of as much cash as possible and not about providing as much value as possible.

Incidentally Eastman Chemical (spun off several years ago) seems to be doing just fine.

IF that's all it is, then that means sufficiently many of their customers care about privacy to noticeably affect their profits. How is THAT not at least a little bit of good news? Up till now I assumed nobody but a few hardcore geeks/techs cared at all. Maybe all this public discussion is bearing some fruit after all?

Elite Dangerous may have raised 2.5 million on the kickstarter, but Star Citizen was 6 million during the kick starter campaign. Funding has continued and Star Citizen is now up to 34 million dollars at the time of this writing and climbing fast. I'm sure you've heard of Wing Commander? Freelancer? Privateer? All Chris Roberts games, who is leading Star Citizen. Might be time to pay a little attention.

Think carefully about those statements. Here are some possible consequences of SteamMachine:

Failure - Status quo is maintained.

Success (even moderate success) - LINUX Gains a huge user base dedicated to gaming. The calculus of game developers and publishers with regards to LINUX development and Linux ports does a complete 180. Native support for LINUX games becomes something publishers might actually consider as worthwhile instead of "WTF is LINUX?".

Success and Valve turns evil - Games will be made to natively support LINUX so they run on the Steam console hardware platform of the day. DRM can and will be circumvented as always, but now they'll run on LINUX instead of Windows.

It's not wholly about return on investment. Even if you don't get the proposed 'thing' that money was spent and paid people to work. People learn from failures, maybe next time they'll be better prepared. There are worse places to put your money (e.g. Walmart), even if you didn't get anything out of it directly, your society and economy does which comes around eventually.

Order of operations makes those additional parenthesis unnecessary. They don't hurt anything, but there's no error.

It would give the location of a trivially removable communicator, which was worn voluntarily.

I'll take two of those such stereos!

Not to mention the speakers and amplifiers can't reproduce those frequency components anyway. A sawtooth is awfully sine-like when you hear it. Your ear being a physical system with a limited frequency response can't detect them either so why reproduce them?