Same thing happened here. I bought a "used" iPod Nano off eBay for a good price, which had normal looking pictures of a genuine model taken out of the box. When it came in the mail... it was a different color, quite a bit larger, and when I turned it on a horribly pixelated screen showed the Apple logo and the text "HELLO" below it. Right.

I disputed the payment and got my refund from Paypal, and they asked that I destroy the iPod clone and take pictures. I proceeded to clamp it in my bench vise and saw it in half with a hacksaw, while my girlfriend took pictures of the process. Well, I struck the battery with the hacksaw - smoke and fire ensued. Once it died down and I had aired the smoke out of my basement, I finished sawing the now burnt and discolored iPod clone in half.

I'm pretty sure those pictures are thumbtacked to someone's cubicle wall at Paypal now.

Actually, voltage matters substantially.

The gate of a FET is effectively a capacitor. Even with the FET in the on state, if you keep increasing the gate voltage it'll still keep taking electrons. And like a capacitor, energy stored in a FET gate = 1/2*C*V^2. You also have source/drain and gate/drain (miller) capacitance - source/drain has to be discharged (another 1/2CV^2 loss) and the miller capacitance has to be discharged and then charged at the opposite polarity (a CV^2 loss).

Overall, neglecting leakage current, power loss is proportional to frequency, but it's also proportional to voltage squared.

Power loss is also proportional to transistor count, which is why ARM is such a low power processor.

A GPU will spank a dedicated DSP chip at just about everything, even the highest end TI's and TigerSHARCs. Both DSPs and GPUs are designed to haul data out of memory and do vector multiplication on it, but the GPU has a heck of a lot more of both memory bandwidth and processing grunt.

A big FPGA card, or FPGA array system like a Copacobana, might be quicker assuming I/O limitations aren't a problem for the algorithm to be run. But FPGA hardware for HPC isn't really a commodity so it's awfully expensive - you're looking at $5K+ for a big Virtex on a PCIe card. Plus buying FPGA tools and IP blocks, and getting the VHDL/Verilog written, will eat up a budget really quick.

But if this is being done in an academic environment and there's no looming deadline for this project, the FPGA method might be something you can get a grant for and throw a computer engineering grad student or co-op student at.

Other than, "it's new and people don't fully understand it" ? Or, ?

If people had that same mindset/fear of the unknown that they did when penicillin and vaccines came out, I think we'd be seriously fucked as a human race.

I seem to remember the potato blight being a terrible thing that killed millions of people in the Irish/Scottish/European famines. And I personally know a family in Newfoundland who were farmers - several years back their potato crop contracted late blight, antifungals didn't help, they lost the crop and ended up bankrupt at the end of it. A blight resistant strain of potatoes seems like a pretty fantastic idea to me.

Besides, the more food that we grow that doesn't need antifungals, pesticides and other "of course they're toxic, they wouldn't work otherwise" chemicals sprayed on it for it to grow, the better. I'd eat a GM vegetable any day over that.

(Mind you, I'm personally against engineering salmon to be 10 times bigger and growing them in offshore fish farms. Grow that shit in an inland fish farm where it's guaranteed that they won't take over and fuck up an ecosystem.)

I still have the 486DX2/66 that I bought with my first summer job. 8 megs of RAM, SB16 and GUS side-by-side, 540 meg hard drive, and 2X Panasonic CDROM with a proprietary interface. It has a cheesy yellow 7-segment LED dispay on the front that displays the computer MHz and switches between 33 and 66 when you push the TURBO button. And I love the thing - the computer came from one of my favorite times in the computer scene, the demoscene was thriving as well as the MOD/S3M/IT community, games were a ton of fun, and the computer's loaded up with all of that good stuff.

Despite all of that, I haven't turned it on in over a year. It's a heck of a lot easier to start up DOSBox than drag the old computer out.

Here's the thing people don't seem to realize: FPGAs *are* cheap.

Case in point: Xilinx XC3S50A. $5.75 at Avnet. Comes in a hobby-solderable VQFP and you can make it work on a 2-layer board. Add a SPI flash to boot from (or a nearby micro with ~50K of spare flash), an oscillator, and +3.3V/1.2V regulators for power and you're still under 10 bucks parts cost - in low quantity.

This chip is only bottom of the line, but it's full of awesome stuff - "DCM" clock multipliers that can let you run FPGA designs at 250+ MHz by multiplying up slow external clocks, three 18x18 multipliers that run at almost the same speed, three 2Kbyte SRAM blocks that you can use as instruction/data memory for processors (eg, a Picoblaze, which can run at 100+ MHz).

These are great little things to play with as a hobbyist. I've contemplated making an Arduino shield with a small, cheap FPGA for people to experiment with, but I never really could figure out any good way to get data and signals in and out of the chip in a way that shows off what FPGAs are really good at.

I'm 100% in favor of detecting and banning hacked consoles from PSN. It's Sony's network and they have the fundamental right anyway, and secondly, if it keeps cheaters/hacks/aimbots/etc off the PSN, I'm 110% in favor of that.

And I'll just buy another PS3. It will remain unmodified, and I'll use that for playing games online. And my current PS3 will remain as my "hacker's delight" that runs homebrew. If Sony detects that it's modified and bans it from the PSN, that's fine.

As for everyone else, if they want a PS3 to hack I'm sure it won't take long before Sony starts detecting modified PS3s and banning them from PSN, and $100 PS3s start appearing on Kijiji/Craigslist next to the Xbox360's that are banned from XBL.

That being said, I wish Sony was more accepting of the hacker community, perhaps even facilitating it somewhat. I actually thing it'd be awesome if Sony added a feature to the PS3 where you could 100% unlock the console hardware, banning the console from PSN in the process. It'd be a lot better, and probably even cheaper for them in the long run, than continuing their current bullshit of legally shafting people like Geohot. Hey, if people want to figure out how to program your game system, you should be helping them!

Sort of like the Maxwell House "brew some good" ads. Which don't really advertise coffee, they just show a can of coffee with a backdrop of some charitable work that the company donated to going on in the background. I'm sure the cost of airing the ad exceeds the cost of the charitable work by a huge amount, but at least they're doing something. There's plenty of other ads like that airing on TV right now with the same theme.

I'd say let companies do the same sort of thing with Wikipedia. If a company donates above a certain minimum amount, let them have an unobtrusive ad display every so often where they can brag about donating to the site. Let them show a cup of coffee, box of KD, a server rack or whatever the company's product is, let them make a small reference to their product, etc... but the main theme of the ad has to be "We donated to this place.". Clicking on their ad wouldn't bring them to their site, it'll bring them to a page within Wikipedia which has more information about the donation(s) they've made.

If I logged in and saw a small "Wikipedia runs on Dunkin' - Proud supporter of this site." image in the upper right corner of the screen, I'd honestly be pleased to see that - while I've never donated to Wikipedia, and feel somewhat ashamed about it because I do spend a fair bit of time on there, I've got huge respect for people and companies that do. And unlike the aforementioned Maxwell House ad, 100% of their advertising cost goes to Wikipedia. Can't knock that.

But if I saw a "Announcing the new MochaLatteChocoChino from Dunkin Donuts!" image in the middle of the screen, halfway through an article, I'd be seriously pissed off at that.

I don't have a hunting cabin. Does that make me LEED Platinum?

I'm an embedded designer, and I recently created a system which has a raw NAND flash memory chip installed on it. We've manufactured a few hundred of these already, and the majority NAND chips come from the factory with half a dozen bad blocks marked, but I've personally seen a few NAND chips which have *no* bad blocks.

And devices which do have bad blocks have the blocks marked as bad by programming them, so you can mark any good block as bad if you want. So there's nothing stopping me from buying a few trays of NAND, reading the bad blocks and picking out the few error-free ones, and cloning the NAND chip from one of these supposedly "unclonable because of its bad blocks" devices referred to in the original post - copying bad blocks and all.

But you don't even have to do that.

Even devices which *do* have bad blocks may not have hard failures in those blocks, where a bit is completely unable to be programmed or erased. And if you successfully erase a bad block, you've just marked that block as good again. So with enough program/erase cycles, you may be able to successfully make a bad block good again and hold the data you want. If not, move onto the next chip from your tray of NAND and try again.

And you might not even have to get that 100% right, provided you don't have more than 1 bit of error per sector between the original device and the clone. The ECC will correct that bit error, and the now-cloned device (assuming it uses a proper NAND filesystem) should just encounter the bad sector, move the block and mark the previously-bad block as bad again. At this point, you may only need to buy a few NAND chips instead of a few trays in order to clone any given NAND chip.

Now as a protection against this last idea, the device could fsck its NAND on boot and set a maximum # of new bad blocks as a tripwire for cloning protection. But if you know what that threshold is, just throw more NAND chips at the problem until you successfully program one below that threshold.

Marvell OpenRD-client:

http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-openrdcdetails.aspx

Has an ARM9 at 1.2GHz, half a gig of RAM, sound, VGA video, lots of USB, SD card reader, 2 GbE ports, eSATA and a spot for a 2.5" hard drive in it. Mine draws 10W from the wall. And it happily runs Debian.

My only beef is the video (XGI Z11) has absolutely horrible driver support, so don't expect the thing to play Blu-ray.

http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-32-guruplug-server-plus.aspx

$129 gets you a Guruplug Server Plus. It doesn't have a dual core CPU, but a 1.2GHz ARM9 gives plenty of grunt. Has half a gig of DDR2, half a gig of NAND, 2 gigabit ethernet jacks, USB, eSATA and a SD slot. And it happily runs Debian.

And latency is a bad thing, depending on algorithm.

Doesn't matter how fast the CPU or GPU is, if the implementation spends 90% of its time stalled waiting for data to arrive to/from the GPU.

I'm an EE who does electronics design for a living, and I've done audio, SMPS, digital, FPGA, you name it. And in each case, the "best scope to use" was different:

- For analog work, or for simple microcontroller debugging, something like a USBee will work great.

- If you're doing higher speed analog, lower-frequency RF or switching power supply design, I'm a huge fan of the Tektronix DPO series. I use a TDS3032.

- For digital work (debugging serial/parallel interfaces and whatnot) I use an old 100MHz "Mega Zoom" HP logic analyzer.

- If I'm doing a design with a big FPGA, bringing lots of extra signals to the FPGA during layout time and using something like Chipscope Pro (on Xilinx FPGAs) to watch what's going on has been extremely handy. No test equipment required!

Replace "variance" with "length". Every line on a high speed parallel bus on a circuit board has to be almost exactly the same length, otherwise the delay you get in the longer lines can make the bits on those lines arrive too late. Likewise, valid data can arrive too early on a couple of lines if they're too short.

If you look at the memory bus on a modern motherboard, you'll see lots of "squiggly" traces, traces which loop back on themselves, etc. This is done to make the short lines longer so that the length of all the lines match up.

About the only "massively parallel" bus that you'll still find on a computer is the SDRAM bus, everything else (SATA, USB, PCI Express, HyperTransport, etc) is all serialized. But I fully expect "parallel" DRAM technology to hit a wall soon, and DDRx memory to be replaced with a something that uses multiple high-speed serial interfaces instead of single wide parallel bus. I'm also expecting Rambus to rear its ugly head again, when that happens..