Ah! RoHS completely skipped my mind. Why would the US have even complained about that?

It does remind me of something I heard once though. Apparently an American ordered colored plastic rulers from China. The rulers that arrived had lead in the plastic. Because of the lead content they couldn't be sold [to children], so the American freaked out at the Chinese suppler and asked "what if children were to stick these in their mouths and suck on them". The Chinese supplier, confused, asked "why would children smart enough to use rulers be stupid enough to stick them in their mouths and suck on them?".

Very well put. The only catch is politicians from China will freak out if the US tries to put in such restrictions, and politicians from the US will freak out once the EU tries to put in such restrictions. It's a shame governments tend to look out for national profit rather than global welfare.

Actually, what ever happened to the Kyoto Protocol? That seemed like something that could work and I remember hearing it did have a positive effect, but you don't seem to hear about it or anything like it lately.

Yeah but you took ASM too and I seriously doubt you would call yourself a capable ASM developer unless you happen to be doing a lot of embedded code. Just because you've done some labs doesn't make you a pro. I've done FPGA dev using Verilog as well, and I've done enough to understand what it is and how to do it. I've also done enough to know if I wanted to make an efficient ASIC for a production application I'd shell out some cash to hire a pro rather than just assuming I could do it well myself without any professional experience or analysis.

The electronics manufacturer must have assumed they had some concept of how to design ASICs if they were even calling. This is the equivilent of somebody painting a picture of a house, then calling a carpenter and saying "I've designed a house, I'd like you to build it". Both a painting and drafted design documents are images of a house, just one gives you technical information like how much wood and how many nails you will need and the other does not.

I imagine the electronics manufacturer must have asked the question and was dumbfounded when they couldn't give any sort of answer.

Absolutely agreed. Just the fact the author didn't mention anything about an FPGA surprised me. I imagine the chip manufacturer must have been taken aback when they couldn't even give him a ballpark range.

dryriver, you are doing it wrong. I question your motives for this if you haven't done it on a GPU or DSP as mentioned above, and compared to your current base implementation to that. If you are so convinced this absolutely needs to be done in hardware start looking for someone who knows what they are doing. I've only done enough FPGA development to know it's something that takes experience to do well and quite a bit of knowlege just to set up properly. Verilog and the like may look simple but consider how much time you spend valgrinding - you'll be doing that in hardware using a language which does not compile to something in any way you are used to, with no real conception or grasp of what to do to make things run better or even how to gauge performance. Save money by saving time by hiring a pro.

Interesting!

I wouldn't consider setting up the SSH reverse proxy difficult either. I forget what I used to mask the traffic as HTTP but it was something that was bundled with SSH to begin with.

How do you do this VPN setup? I've never used VPN extensively so I'm acutally not sure where one would start. If you have a link to a howto on the tools you are using I'd be quite interested.

Something something forget Dropbox if you have SSH access something something or if you need DropBox like syncing and have SSH access make a git repo and use SparkleShare.

As much as I would love to disagree with that I honestly can't. TeamViewer has a lot of advantages over VNC. Though I'm not sure it would be easier if you had a really restricted network like in a locked down office. I've run VNC over an SSH reverse tunnel disguised as HTTP traffic on a closed network with a proxy server that only allowed HTTP and only outgoing connections. Since the tunnel was already established VNC was trivial to run. But as long as you don't have any super-locked-down proxy setups designed specifically to defeat remote access *cough* TeamViewer is just dead easy and surprisingly reliable.

So for me the answer is no. The whole thing reminds me of doing ARM assembler with thumb code mixed in. If you have a very specific usage for it then yes, it would certianly be useful - but it's going to be up to the people who need it to actually use and improve it. Everyone else has no need to care and the average developer shouldn't *need* to care or even be aware of it.

Oh! There was a miscommunication my dear pastafarian friend! Please accept my appologies.

You are absolutely correct in that the S660 is an MR, and in stylish compact package! I don't actually know of a good resource in English but there is plenty of informatino available in Japanese. Basically it's a re-birth of the Beat with some S series touches. The car itself is a compact, just like the Beat. I haven't seen any info on the actual engine but the "S" series naming hints at something nice. What worries me about it from the concept is the center console:
http://o.aolcdn.com/dims-global/dims3/GLOB/resize/600x400/http://www.blogcdn.com/slideshows/images/slides/159/441/3/S1594413/slug/l/p1160526-1.jpg
This looks dangerously like there may be no real manual option and, even if there is, there isn't much space to shift without feeling up your passenger.

For the love of god man learn to use google. The Carrera GT is in fact an RR layout; you know, kind of like how most (every?) Porsche is. I even found a picture using this awesome thing called "image search": http://www.automild.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Porsche-Carrera-GTS-White-Engine-Diagram.jpg

Most forklifts are RR or at least RMR. This way the engine itself works as part of the counterweight. Having a true MR layout on a forklift would probably not be the best engineering idea unless you had something heavier that needed to be part of the machine anyway.

Accel turns are standard and basic manuvers for technical driving. The rev point at which you pop the clutch will be different by car based on balance and weight but if you were to actually blow a dif at 5k RPM just by popping the clutch you must have a really really poorly made diff or a very heavy and unbalanced vehicle.

Clutch discs are disposable items, like break pads and tires. You should be checking these things like you check your oil and coolant. If you're performing manuvers which put a lot of stress on your components and not checking them regularly you're asking for trouble. In a car like a Porsche you'd better be checking them even if you are just using it on a daily commute.

In the case of our dead celebrity friend there were apparent mechanical issues with the car before they went on their joy ride. Let it be a lesson; keep your machine in check and don't ignore warning signs.

Look it up, it is in fact RR. Forklifts are also RR, and I would not call them "itty" :P

The car can't see the road or predict where you want to go or what direction you want to be facing at any point in a turn. Traction control assumes you want to make safe and mild turns and will steal energy from your wheels to stop you doing manuvers you may intentionally be trying to perform.

As a practical example let's say you enter an intersection in the turning lane such that you will cut across traffic (to the left in the US, the right in Japan). If you are in an FR or an MR and you turn the wheel enough that you would make the turn normally, then depress the clutch, rev up to say 5 or 6 thousand RPM, then pop the clutch, one of the following things will happen:
A. If you have traction control ON you will make the turn normally.
B. If you have traction control OFF the rear wheels will slip and escape to the side and you will perform a "spin turn", wich will result in a very tight U-turn.
If you intended to do a spin turn and you left traction control ON you would not end up makign that U-Turn you wanted to and would end up making a normal turn, also looking like a douchebag as your car sloppily jitters through the intersection.

Don't mean to nitpick but Honda makes MidShips including the upcoming S660. Also even though the above quote states "middle of the car" I'm pretty sure it's RR, not MR.

Side note: Our office car is a Toyota MR-S and it is a blast. Mind you it only has 140~ish BHP, but it's really made me love MR layouts and I am definitely checking out the S660.