bhb916's comments

I find it interesting that Synopsys would attempt to compete directly with Xilinx's System Generator product. The latter is to my knowledge completely endorsed and supported by The Mathworks. Something to investigate ...

I agree with your assessment. PR is important to designers and system engineers and architects. C-to-Gates is important to business types.

That's a good question. It's almost impossible to tell objectively. I would say that the Altera tools felt more like circa 2007 Xilinx Tools. They lacked quality control AND maturity. This is all very subjective, though.

I moved one of our smaller projects over to Altera because they were first to 28nm plus the local Altera team was willing to help out with porting any device-specific code.

I was very disappointed with the tools. It's worth a write-up all on it's own, but my staff struggled through the tooling which consumed most of their time.

It being "hard" shouldn't give them a pass on quality control. From the early Project Navigator to ISE to Vivado, Xilinx tools are buggy, poorly documented, and completely unintuitive. Yet, they're still better than Altera's.

This is a solid article. I'm continually surprised by how few software engineers in industry spend the time to pick up HDL and FPGA programming in general. In my mind, it is an easy way to expand your breadth of knowledge and make you a touch more valuable to future employers. They say that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail and I'm certainly inflicted with that same disease as I see the utility of FPGAs everywhere I look. Prices have plummeted while densities have skyrocketed. A simple $25 part gets you quite a bit of fabric and some $90 eval hardware will give you a sweet little platform. [1]

With that said, since I began working with them there have been two "Holy Grails" of FPGA design: (1) Partial Reconfiguration and (2) High Level Synthesis.

The first, Partial Reconfiguration, has been more-or-less solved although the tools have a long way to go. One current design I'm working on loads it's PCIe endpoint and DDR3 controller first, establishes communication with the application running on the host PC, then based on user input loads the rest of the FPGA.

The second, High Level Synthesis, isn't here yet. The goal is to turn a company's vast army of software engineers into FPGA programmers overnight. A worthy cause. Every foray into this field has failed (although the jury is still out on Xilinx's purchase of autoESL) Honestly, I'm not sure it will ever get there. The point of optimized, custom hardware is to make use of it. Abstracting it all away seems counterproductive, not to mention very hard.

[1] http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/AES-S6MB-LX9....

"...it's rather frustrating to know that this guy doesn't actually give a shit about the matter like we do, he just wants to score points in this BS game."

Wait. How do you know that? Isn't it possible and actually likely that he gives a shit AND wants to score political points? After all, what good is supporting a cause if you don't use it to score political points?

I'm not a Cato Foundation supporter, but I can't seem to find a single article on their website advocating fossil fuel subsidies. To the contrary, I found four articles articulating opposition (one even congratulated the President!) to them.

Am I missing something?

More ex post reasoning. And it's not being a cynic that makes me believe this -- it's an honest look at the empirical evidence.

There is really vibrant underground restaurant industry in Seattle. I don't think people are getting sick/dying in massive numbers. Also, I would favor a solution where a restaurant is held legally (and perhaps criminally) liable if they make a diner sick or die. As it stands now, they can hide behind the health code.

I think it's a shame that most people are too cynical to understand that there are solutions to problems that don't require the use of force.

The only difference that matters between friendly exchanges (cooking and room/board) and AirBnB or underground restaurants is that one set of actions threaten the existing power brokers who have the ear of City Hall. No one blinks when you disrupt file sharing or social networking, but disrupt automotive, taxis, or hotels (for example) and you're in a world of legal hurt. I fully understand that these zoning laws that AirBNB is running afoul of have existed for some time, but, as others pointed out, there are plenty of private, non-coercive ways to solve this same problem. They were codified into law because some powerful incumbent business sought to benefit financially from it.

The other differences between these different transactions, while perfectly valid distinctions, are simply ex post rationalizations made by those who support the entity in power (in this case city hall).

If true, why veil it at all? Why not just defund it alone? The government reserves the right to not fund whatever it wants to. This will have an awful lot of collateral damage. So much so that I doubt the primary motivation was simply defunding climate science.

I agree with the trend you're describing although I slightly disagree with the absolutism (i.e. "every incremental discovery" and "no longer possible"). Still, regardless of this increasing demand for funds, there are other ways to procure funding other than taxation.

There are a lot of reasons, as other commenters have pointed out, including all the existing capital that would have to be retooled or scraped.

However, I don't think you can overlook the damage the bailouts did. The Chrystler bailout in 1980 and the more recent GM bailout preserved the existing Detroit power structure. All of that talented labor pool and capital that would have been set free via liquidation instead was allowed to stay together. These companies didn't innovate because they didn't have to.

I think they were. Speaking as someone who is generally pro-austerity, I think R&R concluded that after 90% debt/GDP there was major drop-off in GDP growth. The corrections all but destroy this assertion. That's not to say that debt and GDP growth aren't inversely proportional/correlated -- just that there is no magic level that changes the relationship substantially.

Honestly, there are so many variables and dimensions in this system and so little data I'm not sure we should ever be drawing sweeping conclusions like this.

Doubtful. The World Bank cites [1] extreme poverty statistics for 1981, 1990, and 2008 as 52%, 43%, and 22% respectively. Using world population statistics that would equal extreme poverty populations of 2.31B, 2.27B, and 1.29B. I imagine a huge percentage of that drop is China.

[1] http://go.worldbank.org/4K0EJIDFA0

So far I've already seen two comments dismissing this as an evil plot to drive down labor costs. I hear this argument a lot and I can't over emphasize my absolute disgust for it. It seems to cross both class and party lines.

There are human beings who are willing to risk life and limb, to separate themselves permanently from their families, to endure unspeakable hardship and constant fear of being deported simply for the opportunity to work -- and the only thing us middle-class, educated, privileged people can think about is that these people might dare compete with us! Excluding them from opportunity simply because they were born on the other side of some arbitrary, imaginary line is cruelty and selfishness beyond belief.

(This is not condoning the original link above or whatever it might stand for. It seems a little impossible to tell.)

That seems more like a failure with "regulating" organized crime than a call for regulating taxi cabs.

Although I admit that you could use the arguments you put forth to make a case for regulation of the taxi industry I think you'd have a hard time justifying the existing medallion system based solely on those reasons.

The medallion system (like the car dealership system) is made to protect the incumbents. Period. There was no a priori argument that this was going to be good for the people of the city or that every citizen could expect a predictable rate and level of service. In fact, the complete opposite was true -- these regulations were born out of period with a glut of taxi labor and falling rates.

Actually, that line turned me off to the whole plight. She clearly has a case, why would her first though be complete hopelessness?

Eh. Is everything in my house (i.e. my subnet 192.168..) going to run out of IPV4 addresses? Right now cost is a far more important factor.