It's not just that the color is pink. "Pink slime" is an meat by-product sometimes added to ground beef. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P....

I agree.

Existing customers will already know about bugs as they're using the software. They'll want to know what's being done to fix it and will get some comfort if they can see the process (e.g. fix isn't yet out, but the problem is being diagnosed, test vectors generated, etc.).

In this particular case since some of the customers are 3rd party developers [programmers], their livelihood [selling their addons] depends on the core product being reliable. They absolutely want access. And, they can usually speed up the bug fix process with their [knowledgable] feedback.

Adding an NDA as a prereq to access to the issue tracker might be an idea. This prevents the info there from being used as ammo by a competitor.

Even if competitor buys the product [merely] to get access, they can't use it as marketing/sales weapon as that would violate the NDA.

If the competitor does not go for direct access [does not buy the product and is not subject to the NDA] but gets info leaked by an employee of a legit customer, then the competitor would be getting proprietary information [which might be considered industrial espionage, theft of trade secrets, etc.]

In either case, it weakens the competitor's incentive to try to use the information from the issue tracker.

Further, the issue tracker being accessible can be a marketing/sales selling point: "We stand behind what we sell and we're confident enough to have our bug tracker in the open to prove it. Why doesn't our competitor? What are they trying to hide?"

Eve Online might be to your liking ... YMMV

It already does, but even that can be abused.

In the "Oracle v. Google" trial [regarding Java APIs], Judge Alsup ruled for Google. Google had recreated their software from scratch using the API documents as a reference. That is, they did not use any Oracle/Sun code [except for a rangeCheck function that was less that 10 lines]. Alsup took great pains to write an informed opinion [even learning how to code a little].

However, the 9th circuit appeals court overturned this. One of the worst decisions ever. It's tantamount to saying that a copyright confers patent-like protections.

While the reason given may the true motive of the BBC, it certainly plays into the hands of GCHQ. Either way, it makes the BBC a shill [witting or unwitting] for the surveilance state being fostered by GCHQ.

I can just imagine a goodly fellow from GCHQ going over to the BBC: "You know these VPNs are difficult to spy on. But, the GCHQ can't just say that. Maybe you could help us. Just use some rubbish about copyright piracy. That'll do it"

ShanghaiBill is correct. Power is the first thing to check/suspect. In our case, the other engineering team members assumed the lead engineer had checked this--because it is so fundamental. He hadn't. He was almost fired for this.

We had no problem generating test vectors that caused the problem to occur once per hour.

We were quite confident that it was a hardware problem because both boards were 100% compatible software [device driver]-wise. My device drivers also would log all access to the board in realtime, so this would be dumped post-mortem and jointly analyzed by myself and the given logic designer for correctness against the hardware spec.

If this didn't match up, either my driver was wrong or the compiler had a bug. In this particular case, if we weren't tracking an intermittant, a hard fail error usually resulted in the logic designer fixing his logic. That is, before involving the designer, I prechecked the post-mortem dump and corrected the driver logic errors [if any] first.

One of my specialties is finding a way to add a stress mode to a driver or the driving application (e.g. diagnostic program) that reduces a "once a month" intermittant to "once an hour" or, in many cases, force the same fail in 10 seconds.

I've never had a problem writing device drivers that autodetect and work on any and all current and previous generations of hardware. If you had a driver routine that was "perform_xop" and what that had to do changes from v1 to v2 of the hardware, you just create a vtable and call vtable->perform_xop where this is populated with "v1_perform_xop" or "v2_perform_xop". Really, it's not that magical.

In our particular case, we had a hardware "capabilities" register [which I had the logic designers add]. So, our driver would also do things like:
    if (capreg & CAP_HAS_FEATURE_A) ...

Thanks for what you just said. Dead on and I couldn't agree more.

In our case, we were a small [startup] company, so we didn't have the resources to be second guessing each other. I was doing the device drivers, but I'm also 50% EE. When we found out what had happened, we were struck speechless that the first thing to check [IMO, yours, and the opinion of some of the other engineers] wasn't checked. Sigh.

That question was posed at the time. And not calmly or so politely ;-)

You're quite right about all that you mentioned. My example was from a 2004 timeframe.

I can't recall if the faulty design cut back on bypassing/deglitching as well as the VRMs, but my guess would be yes.

Afterwards the engineer [that caused the problem in the first place] added back all bypassing/deglitching, shorter leads, VRMs, etc. that got elided from the [then] new design. The engineer was definitely in the dog house for this: for creating the problem and taking so long to diagnose it.

Personally, based on experiences over the years, it should have taken about two months. The extra time took a great deal of momentum out of the product launch.

To add insult to injury, the same type problem happened two more times. The second time was caused by the same engineer. The third time this engineer got it right, but the PCB layout specialist changed things without telling the engineer. Fortunately, the first engineer, having been burned twice, rechecked the design immediately upon receiving the first PCB sample.

Does Intel have a reference design board for this? Also, how close are the VRMs to the chips they're regulating?

I once worked at a company that had a reference board with 3 FPGAs with 3 VRMs near the FPGAs. When designing their own board, the company reduced this to one VRM for all 3 FPGAs and put the VRM on the opposite side of the board. It took nine months to realize that this caused the FPGAs to reset during heavy logic switching because the single VRM + the greater length of the traces meant that the VRM couldn't keep up with the demand.

... We've had a main B bus undervolt

The argument gets weaker.

After the "Alice Corp vs. CLS Bank" supreme court ruling which states that "let's do it on an computer", where it is something that is well known, prior art, common practice, etc. is no longer patentable. The court stressed that the ruling was limited to the case at hand, but that hasn't stopped [at least] two lower courts from applying it in new rulings.

Samsung recently tried to apply the ruling retroactively towards the [infamous] slide-to-unlock patent, but was shut down by Koh merely because Samsung didn't raise the argument at trial [they were too late].

But, with the Alice decision, slide-to-unlock is completely invalid, and Samsung [and others] will be able to use this in future proceedings.

Glad you're getting 6Mb/s. A friend of mine has Verizon [east coast] and barely gets 3Mb/s.

I'm guessing that when you say DSL2 and expect 20Mb/s down, you're meaning ADSL2+ [max is 24Mb/s vs. ADSL2 which is 12Mb/s]. I don't know how long 2+ has been out, but you might give 2+ a try if you're not already on it. Even with the bad wiring, it may help with some extra speed. Normally, if you're too far away, the extra 2+ frequencies don't help because they get dampened out, but your case may be an exception.

A couple of other things to try [with building owner's cooperation/blessing]:
- You can pay to have a telco tech string new inside wiring
- There are bidirectional DSL amplifiers that can go inline [~$100]. Normally, they're used to boost a DSL signal long haul (e.g. if a subscriber is [say] 20 miles to the CO, these are inserted every mile or so]. Putting one of these "in the cabinet" [where the telco wiring enters the building] might boost the signal enough to overpower the bad internal wiring.
- I suspect that sonic already thought of this, but if you've got four wires entering your place, trying the "other" pair [inside vs. outside] might be better. I actually had this happen to me, and the tech changed things (e.g. one pair was bad, but the other was clean).

We both forgot to mention that because of the no datacap, sonic also lets you run a server from home 24x7 [which is a TOS violation for AT&T]

sonic.net has no datacaps and no "artificial" speed limits. [Note: I'm not affiliated with them--just a very happy customer since I switched in March].

Of course, I'm assuming that when you said "CPUC" that means California PUC. If so, go to http://www.sonic.net/ and enter your AT&T landline number. They will tell you how many feet you are from the sonic CO. Then, go to http://www.dslreports.com/foru... to see what your likely speed with sonic will be.

I'm 5000 feet to the sonic CO, so I got 1.3 megabytes/second [2x AT&T's elite service]. sonic is also cheaper. And, tech support couldn't be more pleasant or helpful.

In fact, when you post a tech question to a sonic tech forum, you might just get a response from Dane [Jasper]--the sonic.net CEO

I'm in Sunnyvale and I was awake at the time. I could feel it [for 3-4 seconds], but nothing fell. Dining room light hanging from ceiling swayed. Feeling here was less than a 4.3 in Carmel when I was in Cupertino. I've felt worse before. I was shocked to learn it was a 6.0 up north [And I hope the severely injured people recover quickly].