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.

I came here to moderate, but unfortunately slashdot's bug initiation team has made it so I either have to have teeny tiny print or a side scroll. Hey, slashdot, we aren't all using thirty inch monitors! Jesus, even the newspapers (most are the worst sites on the web) don't fuck up this bad.

Really, slashdot, is Dice trying to get rid of you? This is really lame. You really should hang your heads in shame.

See you at Soylent News.

Now, someone else with points please mod me offtopic. Thanks.

ASCII is fine if it's only going to be published at slashdot, but conversion is a pain in the ass I shouldn't put up with.

It seems that slashdot no longer fixes bugs, but are trying to introduce more. Today I have a choice between a tiny font and a side scroll. LAME!

I think the writing was on the wall over a year ago when they tried to shove Beta down our throats.

I miss Taco, the place worked when he was here.

No, but he DID speak. This theory is the dumbest theory I've seen coming from someone who should know better for years; it's already been disproven before the dumbass thought of it.

Other apes have language. Prairie dogs have language. Even dogs have language, even though the only three things they say are "I'm hurt", "I'm lonely" and "get off my property before I eat you!" Previous STUDIES have shown this.

Why do these educated morons think vocal cords evolved for in the first place??

Also, the summary is likewise retarded: "If there's one thing that distinguishes humans from other animals, it's our ability to use language."

We may use it better than other species, but this is unproven; whales and dolphins may have more sophisticated language than us, but we can't tell because we can't understand them. It may well be that we're the only species to have abstractions, but that's not proven, either.

Tools aren't even human-only; birds and other animals have been spotted using tools. So what makes us different?

Music, art, and humor. No other species laughs (Hyenas' "laughs" aren't from humor); no other species make art (the elephant doesn't count; do you really think he knows what's going on?), and no other species makes music -- and no, bird "song" isn't music, it's speech (that the idiots coming up with this absurd theory don't understand).

Google's spider hadn't yet hit it that day according to site stats, while everyone else's had. Strange, since Google spiders more than anybody. After it was spidered I got the same results as you.

SSHHH! Damn it, Rula!

Hopefully we'll find out eventually.

This has been the case for years. For ages and ages I've seen home routers with crappy firmware that results in bad connectivity. NAT table entries timing out too soon, inability to handle VPN traffic, crashes, lock-ups, performance slowdowns, the works.

This is why for years I've been running a full blown Linux machine as a router. Plenty of performance and memory, never any issues. It makes me wonder why more router manufacturers don't use Linux or BSD derivatives for their firmware instead of writing garbage in-house.

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.

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.