Interesting idea, but the hardware spec for that device is so lacking in basic facilities that it will probably be a non-starter for a lot of people.

Sure, as long as the batteries last and you have useful reception in your current location (and the base station isn't affected by the outage). These are relevant concerns with a cell phone, while they matter little with a traditional land line.

That's a matter of opinion. Do they crash every five minutes? Of course not. Do they crash often enough to be annoying and potentially dangerous? Yes, every major mobile OS platform has had this problem at various points in recent years. Given this is a device you might need to call an ambulance one day, none of the major platforms has a great record on stability.

As for doing their jobs, there have been a few antennagate-style stories over the years, where some fundamental design flaw has undermined the basic functionality of the device as a phone. It seems popular to make thinner smartphones with larger screens that then bend or break in your pocket lately.

Modern smartphones seem to be about on par with PVRs and so-called Smart TVs. They do their job up to a point, and they do offer some advantages over the devices we used before. On the other hand, they are also trying to do too many different things to do any of them really well, they often try to be a bit too clever about how they do them too, and at some point these things affect the reliability of the system and/or raise security and privacy concerns.

I often have a feature phone in my pocket and a tablet in my case/bag, and I have yet to find anything I want to do while I'm out and about where a typical modern smartphone would be better at it than one or other of the devices I actually use. YMMV, but I'd be genuinely interested to hear of any common tasks that a modern smartphone really is better at than other widely used but more specialised devices, because I can't think of any myself.

Indeed -- the last thing I want are shards of something with a hardness of 7.7 and razor sharp edges flying around. Think obsidian arrowheads, and then think of something that'll hold an edge even better.

What I'd like to know about is how flexible the stuff is. Usually, the harder a material is, the more rigid it is -- which means that it is super hard right up to the point where it can't take the stress, at which point it fractures all over the place.

Safety glass gets around this by 1) being pretty flexible and 2) being a laminate of hard and soft materials, so that when the hard material shatters, it is still bonded to enough of the soft material to avoid (many) sharp edges.

I wonder what the behavioral properties of a laminate of spinel and lexan would be....

I'm familiar with the Microchip implementation. This is a 300-MHz-class 32-bit processor. Not particularly modern and not really fertile ground for R&D.

We did have two or three suggestions from commenters of open MIPS processor implementations, some of which are more modern. One uses a proprietary high-level HDL, which I haven't investigated.

Sounds like it's using some sort of inertial ballistic compensation inside; not sure how they managed this for something traveling at those speeds. But that doesn't account for "or movement of the target" -- do they mean that if you're tracking a target along a specific path, the bullet will continue to track that path as it moves through the air (allowing it to potentially curve behind obstructions to continue that trajectory)? This almost makes sense.

Of course, the other issue here is that these "silver bullets" will probably cost a few thousand dollars each. I'd also be interested to know if they've tested them with snipers, as it seems to me many of them would be put off by technology that compensates when they've already done so. This seems like ammunition that would have very limited use, as you wouldn't want to use it during a melee, nor from a sniping location (except in very specific situations -- and it would be useful in obscuring the location of the sniper), but mostly it would be useful for close range urban warfare so that you can fire selectively at a moving target without leaving temporary cover.

And then of course there's Kb vs KiB -- the second is the SI standard, but the first is commonly used in its place (even though it really means something slightly different).

Ah, but metres are used all over the place in the US. They're not the measure used by trade, but they ARE the measure used by science. This is why NASA ran into trouble: they're an organisation where science meets trade.

I found the commenter who posed this as a response to RISC-V interesting. The University of California at Berkeley has a completely public implementation, under the BSD license, without patents filed, which your effort appears to be positioned against.

It is a time-limit on damages, which is not the same thing as a time limit on lawsuits. There is still the potential to restrain an infringer who started 6 or more years ago from further infringement through the courts - and totally kill their business - even though damages for the infringement can not be recovered. And you can sue any other infringer.

A whitelist is less susceptible to abuse than a cop, in that the whitelist is a file that can be examined and is not susceptible to bribery.

Check out My Gate Array Project if you haven't already done so. The EE work is done by Chris Testa KD2BMH, I mostly do systems programming and business but do a lot of design checks, etc.

Repeating the AC because he's posted at karma 0. That's "University of California at Berkeley", AC, but the rest of this is spot on:

Berkeley University is pushing really hard to get universities to adopt RISC-V (an Open ISA and set of cores) as a basis for future processor and architecture research. The motivation behind RISC-V was to have a stable ISA that isn't patent encumbered, isn't owned by one company, and is easily extensible (OpenRISC didn't fit the bill here).

I can see that ARM and MIPS would have a problem with this, especially as there is nothing particularly innovative or performance gaining about either ISA, and some recent RISC-V cores have demonstrated similar performance to some recent ARM cores in half the area. This is there way of fighting back against something open that stands to lose them significant marketshare.

Cool. Someone found us the agenda!

I get paid to train EEs within large companies on intellectual property issues, and to help the companies and their attorneys navigate those issues. Infringement is rife within software companies. Not because anyone wants to infringe, but because of a total lack of due diligence driven by ignorance.