Only 10 years old? My first edition copy of the book is from 1998! The toolchains may have improved in the intervening years, but the advice on HDL coding style is still relevant. There may be more recent books around that are a better introduction, but I've never had cause to read them and so can't comment.

Both VHDL and Verilog provide you with 1001 ways of designing crappy circuits which don't work. This book tells you precisely which language constructs to use to get good synthesis results which will work equally well with FPGA and ASIC. For most experienced designers this is considered 'obvious' stuff, but if you're new to HDL design, this is a must read on the way to becoming an expert.

No mod points, so I'll second this. The 2.0 release of JavaFX is a huge step forward from Swing. A few of the things that would be useful in this context are:
* Declarative approach to UI construction using FXML so you can rapidly prototype the UI without needing to implement any of the application code.
* CSS support so you can easily 'skin' the UI.
* Uses underlying hardware acceleration for 3G.
* It's now a standard Java library, so you can also use it with other supported JVM based languages like Groovy.

The fact that you can make a payment via Square without any form of authentication is the biggest failure here. At least with the RFID payment you've got a cryptographically strong authentication method which is pretty hard to fake. The sooner the credit card companies get rid of the magstripe the better...

I think you're missing one of the main points of Jigsaw - which is modularizing the platform, not the application. This is especially important if Java is to get back into the embedded space, where JavaME and CDC are so antiquated it's just not funny any more. Having a range of well defined platform profiles which span everything from headless embedded devices up to a full enterprise stack (while using the same underlying codebase) would be a major step forward. Personally, I don't care what the implementation details are - the changes aren't going to stop anyone from using OSGi to modularize their applications if they want to.

The kids can teach themselves. That may seem like a rather flippant comment, but I was impressed that Gove was aware of and referenced Scratch. One of the nice things about Scratch is that it comes with a whole bunch of 'self directed' learning materials which encourage hands on learning. It means you don't need a teacher with a C.S. degree to run an introductory programming course, just one who is sufficiently technically literate to get to grips with Scratch themselves.

I'd have thought that Eastern Europe would also have been a viable option. For example, Olimex are already a big player in the 'cheap dev board' space and they do their manufacturing in Bulgaria.

I agree with this 100% - to the extent that it's the approach I've decided to take with my own startup. If your 'secret sauce' would benefit from real-time performance or hardware acceleration (FPGA or DSP), then proprietary firmware plus an open source host application stack is a great combination. The open source benefits wouldn't come from other people hacking on the core algorithms anyway - the main justification is to make it as easy as possible for other people to adapt and extend the technology to meet their own needs.

When I read this article I had flashbacks to the spurious crap that people used in ye olde Internet bubble. Or maybe the CDO credit bubble. In short, making arbitrary valuations by looking at second or third order artifacts and completely ignoring the value of the underlying thing.

What makes a good patent is the exact opposite of what these guys suggest. The membership of a patent 'thicket' that they regard as indicating patent quality is really an artifact of the way in which a single potential invention now gets salimi sliced into the maximum number of applications. This allows the corporation which owns the patents to brag about the size of its patent pile, it allows the employees who wrote the patents to maximize the number of patent bonuses they get and it obviously results in the greatest number of billable hours for the patent lawyers. In short, it's a win-win-win!

In reality, the most valuable patents should be ones that are as unrelated as possible to anything that went before and which stand completely on their own merits. Patents where any expert would look at and say 'I've never seen anything quite like that before'. However, making that judgment call requires that you actually analyze every patent in the portfolio in detail. Just as I'm sure the bankers carried out a detailed analysis of every underlying debt when they were trading CDOs...

Spot on - I wonder how many developers they lost to Apple/Android just because they couldn't get their act together with the development environment.

I wouldn't really class Maemo/Meego as low footprint - more like a full Linux workstation in your pocket. There is a big gap in capabilities between the deeply embedded open source OS platforms like eCos and something like Linux. There are proprietary solutions which fill this gap, but Symbian was probably the most promising open source option - especially if SymbeOSE had taken off.

Historically that has been true, but I'm not confident that's a reliable predictor of the future! On the upside, I've just found the Sourceforge dump of the last EPL Symbian release, so as an open source project it's not quite dead yet...

Thanks for pointing that out - my post was a bit ambiguous. I meant to say 'Migrating to Symbian is still a much better option', which is what a lot of people pre-Elop assumed was the obvious upgrade path.

I think we can safely say that any new hardware will be adapted to the OS, rather than the other way round. I'm also coming round to the idea of Nokia spending a whole bunch of cash on building a commercial quality, low footprint Linux distribution with proper real time support. I could use one of those myself - and thanks to the GPL, the source code will have to remain open this time.

Short answer - because Nokia senior management have now completely lost the plot. Symbian is still a much better option at the low end because underneath all the shiny stuff is an RTOS designed specifically to run on resource constrained devices. Proper real time capabilities were baked into the current Symbian kernel specifically so that a single processor could be used for both the protocol stack and the applications. As someone pointed out earlier, other vendors pay good money to use proprietary RTOS platforms like Nucleus for their low end phones because they deliver the same benefits.

Putting a full Linux workstation in your pocket in the form of the N950 is cool - and I wish they'd let me buy one. But this is a different market, and it's not one where using Linux makes a hell of a lot of sense.

So they've ported Android to the Commodore 64? That deserves some serious respect - their 6502 assembly skills must be awesome!

I guess they must have been marching on Scotland Yard to protest at the lack of policing in their area and that the police were taking too much of a 'softly softly' approach on gun and gang crime, then. Because the net effect of the riots and the media coverage is going to be an increased police presence, possible increases in police powers and wide support in the general population for the 'robust' use of those powers. I'm sure that's what he and his fellow 'demonstrators' would have wanted.

Maybe nobody complained about Apple because there wasn't much advantage in it, whereas now there just happens to be review of UK IP law on the cards, in order to promote UK technology innovation. And maybe we can all now point to a UK technology company which is being put at a disadvantage by the arse-backwards UK copyright laws. And maybe somebody has been playing the ASA in order to highlight this stupid situation at just the right time. Just a thought...