Can't comfortably type standing up (for some specific reason), or just have never tried to type standing up with the keyboard at a proper ergonomic height?

Dan Aris

This is why I got my department to buy me a GeekDesk a couple of years ago. I don't stand all day every day, but it lets me stand quite a lot of the time.

Since then, my chronic low-grade upper-back stiffness has decreased a lot—but I find that on weekends, when I tend to sit on the couch with my laptop a lot, it frequently comes back. My legs still sometimes get tired from standing for a few hours at a time, but overall, I think it was a really, really good decision.

If you can't afford a GeekDesk, and think you can handle losing the chair cold turkey, there are much cheaper standing desks that can get you off your butt and on your feet—for your health! :-)

Dan Aris

Which photo?

I have not been at HP for a long time, of course.

HP has a very long history of buying companies only to unload them for cents on the dollar a few years later. Remember Palm and WebOS? Take a look at the HP Acquisition List on Wikipedia. Not many of those companies were good buys.

This was another of many issues that contributed to staff depression while I was there and continues to this day. We could see it was wrong, but could do nothing about it.

They used to be the company engineers wanted to work for. When I got to Pixar in '81, the engineers that had been at HP were still proud of having worked there. It's really sad what's happened.

Think of it as evolution in action. You can stay on one planet while some disaster takes it out. We have lots of choices of disaster, don't we? The human race can continue via those "space nutters".

Sure, we should try to avoid the disaster, etc., but planets are not forever.

Hopefully we'll find out eventually.

I think you are missing the application for an Open gate array.

It is not really for you and your company. You don't have any particular interest in the open part, and thus you and your company don't fit the demographic of the sort of user we would want. We don't need your money. I can do the first runs of this using Mosis and its ilk for chump change, and go from there.

It simply doesn't matter if it's 32 nm or 15 nm or 50 nm. What matters is that the user can completely understand the bitstream and produce their own tools for it. We have no shortage of users who want that.

It doesn't matter if it is on the leading edge in terms of cost, speed, power, thermal efficiency, or size. It matters that it's open.

And maybe we can do something that you can't do with any integrated circuit available to you, which is verify from first principles that the manufactured device is without deliberately hidden security back-doors. Because we don't have intellectual property to hide and thus we don't mind producing it in a way that would make it capable of being examined.

So, I am not particularly worried about what foundry I'll use and whether I can compete on the same playing field as Xylinx and Altera. I have my own playing field, with radically different rules from the ones they are using. I have my own customers to satisfy.

One well-known market would be immediately available and very eager to embrace an open FPGA, namely EE education.

Yes. EE education and academic research.

There is also the security problem. How can you determine from first principles that the chip really contains what it says it does? Insoluble with any commercial component. Maybe we could make ours sufficiently visible.

So, my feeling is that we could get a grant for this.

No...you may have inferred that, but that's not what I was implying. What I was implying was that, since the app is designed to help people help the EFF achieve some of its goals, if the app were in the app store of one of the most breakout popular devices in the history of the entire world, it would thus make it possible for a significant number of additional people to help the EFF achieve the goals aimed at with this particular app.

But because they have decided that some of the principles behind what they want to achieve are utterly inviolable, and the Apple dev agreement conflicts with some of those inviolable principles, they clearly feel that they are therefore obligated to prevent anyone who owns an Apple device from using their app.

This is the kind of cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face behaviour that really hamstrings a lot of efforts to improve the world. I'm not saying the ends justify the means—far from it. Just that when you're living in a badly imperfect world, insisting that you, yourself be perfect at all times while trying to make the rest of the world better is very, very often going to prevent you from doing more good than it actually does in itself.

Dan Aris

Well, I'm sorry for the EFF, then, but everyone knows what the terms are to get an app in the iOS App Store.

This sounds, to me, like the EFF allowing slavish adherence to their principles to prevent them from doing something that might actually help real people in the real world advance those principles in meaningful ways.

Either that, or they just realized they could use it as a publicity stunt.

Dan Aris

There's a partial list of fabs at Wikipedia. There are more than just those three.

Sure, process optimization per fab is an issue. We would probably need to start on the very conservative side.

A lot of the time, building a custom ASIC rather than using an FPGA just isn't an option. Most of the products I'm concerned with need to be programmable.

David Rowe makes a point about echo cancellers and voice codecs, which he's written in Open Source, working alone. They were supposed to be magic. They were supposed to take big expensive research labs to make. When he actually got down to the work, he found there wasn't really magic there. Codec2 can get clear speech into 1200 Baud, and OSLEC (the echo canceler) is part of every Asterisk system and other digital telephony platforms.

Steve Jobs also told me this when I was leaving Pixar. He didn't believe that the Linux guys could make a decent window system, because it had taken a Billion dollar research lab at Apple. Two years later he unveiled Safari, which was derivative of KDE.

There is no question that we can make a good gate array. The technology is very well known. Can we make one that is on the absolute leading edge of the technology? We don't really have to. Making a good one that was open would be enough. But maybe we can make a great one. That depends upon what makes it great. We have a collaborative advantage as far as the software tools are concerned, the same as with compilers. Can we design a really good logic element and fabric? Probably. Can we prototype a gate-array in a gate-array? Sure! Can we use the various devices that OpenCores has developed? I don't think there would be a problem. So we could have on-chip peripherals, CPUs, etc. Once we're sure of it, can it be well-tuned to a fab? Probably, but even if we are conservative about using the fab's capabilities it would work.

Yes. And looking at the way things have gone previously in JEDEC, we would have to be very aware of manufacturers desire to embed their patents in standards.

An Open gate-array is one of those "if you build it, they will come" sort of things. Chinese fabs would compete with each other to drive the price down. It would become the standard low-end part and gate-array manufacturers would have to compete on high-end only.

So I am really interested in doing it, and so is Chris. We just can't ignore our current business in order to do it.

Yes, we feel your pain. Indeed, it's our pain. Proprietary tools, and you get told how to load the bitstream but it's an opaque blob. We would like to work on this problem next. How far off that is I can't say, if we can establish a profitable land-mobile radio business (we don't expect to make much off of hams alone) it would help to fund such an effort.