The ~50 engineers at my workplace switched to NX 2 years ago. There have been many complaints about the instability of NX ever since. Sometimes engineers lose a handle on a simulation that has been running for more than 24 hours and have to start over. I stayed with VNC and lately people are asking me how to switch back.

For me, (Ultra)VNC has been rock-solid. If Google can make NX reliable, maybe I'll make the move, too.

Anyone else have complaints about NX stability?

This isn't hackable but it's awesome:

http://www.waze.com/faq/

Works in Israel so far and they say that it will roll out to the USA soon. Doesn't require special hardware and the software is free (as in beer).

I admit no knowledge of Blackberry phones or their apps. Your detailed account of development was super-interesting and I wish you the best of luck. Just one comment:

You've been trying to contact Audible but they're not returning your calls. Reminds me of this:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/06/10c.html

Maybe Audible doesn't want to help you because they want to implement what you've already done?

Two years ago one of my hard drives started making strange noises like a grinding motor. When trying to read some of the bits on the disk, the hard drive would fail for a minute or two before giving up.

I used Handy Recovery. It scans the drive and gives a file explorer similar to the one in WindowsXP. Recovery is easy. I've also been able to recover files from an old file system even after formating a disk and putting files on the new filesystem.

I realize that many tools exist. Are most able to recover files from disks with PHYSICAL malfunctions? That seems important.

Also agree. VHDL is the dinosaur. Verilog is the way to go. SystemVerilog is also a bonus. It's now a standard and while not as powerful as Vera or SpecMan, it's getting better and still much less expensive. Many companies are switching to SystemVerilog for cost. Recent graduates will probably write more SystemVerilog than Verilog in their first years at work.

In the USA, reselling a book is totally legal. I imagine that renting one is, too. Which part of the copyright law are they accused of breaking?

When you reward a company with money per traffic violation, obviously it will be in their interest for there to be more traffic violations. And the traffic laws are there to protect lives. Basically, governments are rewarding companies for killing people.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/06/602.asp

How about giving the companies a bonus relative to the decrease in the number of traffic accidents in an intersection? Now that seems smarter.

It seems like it would be trivial to implement a system to make gift cards. Having thought about it for just five minutes:

On each gift card you print a serial number and then the HMAC of thatserial number using a super-secret key. (Maybe as simple as concatenating the super-secret key and the serial number then hashing with SHA-1 or whatever is strongest today.) The iTunes store takes serial number and hash result as input.

That's it. To break the algorithm you either have to discover the secret key, which means that you've broken SHA-1. Good luck breaking SHA-1.

The point is, if hacking Apple's algorithm involved anything less than breaking a cryptographic algorithm that is believed unbreakable then Apple screwed up.

This sounds familiar. Like when there are too many insects in some farmer's field so he brings in some frog from a far-away country to eat all the insects. But then the frog becomes a nuisance and has side effects of his own so they bring in some cats that eat this frog, but the cats...

I wouldn't want to be the first to try out this new bacterium.

I think that he and other futurists need to be judged on two scales: Accuracy and relevance. Accuracy is easy. Wait 10 years and see what has come true and what hasn't. For relevance, the idea is to measure the implication of the prediction. To somehow give a grade to how radical it is. That should be done as soon as the prediction is written down. Hell, I can predict the time of day and season 10-years from now but who cares?

So he was wrong about the voice-recognition but he was right about the notebooks. You might say that the notebooks seem obvious. *Now* they seem obvious. Did they seem obvious back then?

In all, I'm unimpressed. I definitely wouldn't pay him $25,000 for dinner.

http://money.cnn.com/2007/05/01/magazines/fortune/kurzweil.fortune/index.htm

"Your usage of the infrastructure" should include the air and water infrastructure that is polluted when you burn the gasoline and the army infrastructure that is busy battling around the world because of the money funneled into terrorist hands.

Gas isn't expensive but it should be. It's time that Americans paid the true cost of what they are receiving.

If what you want is to travel abroad, then do that. You want to fly to a foreign country and spend your time in front of a computer? The computers there look just like the computers here!

Instead: Finish your degree or skip a semester, pack a backpack, and fly to Argentina. Though unpopular among Americans, there are tons of Israelis (like me), British, Australians, and some other Europeans backpacking through South and Central America.

Travel in South America cost me about $700/month (~6 months), living reasonably, seeing all the sights, and taking buses from place to place. This is probably less than you're currently spending on rent. Starting your career a few months or a year late will have no long-term effect on your career. You could do it all on loans and have it paid back within months of work.

Don't go to Europe. Your money won't go nearly as far. And if you're looking for culture, leaving one westernized country of wealthy inhabitants for another westernized country of wealthy inhabitants seems bland. "Oh gee, here they say tea instead of dinner. How totally worldly I am now!" Bah!

A neat feature of the pssword manager is that you can use a master password. Without a master password, a trojan horse running on your system can steal all your passwords.

How come there is no master password to protect the cookies? Nowadays as most sites remember who I am in a cookie, a cookie seems just as useful as a password. Did no one else figure this out or did I get it wrong?

There's a time and place for each project. The Tetris game and most video games are not good FPGA projects. Tetris is something you could write just as well or better using a general purpose processor. No one would ever turn to an FPGA to write a video game nowadays. Implementing a CPU and searching DES space seem reasonable, though. When I took a similar course I remembering thinking, "What a waste," back then, too. We only had 10k gate-equivalents on our Xilinx FPGAs, though.