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phaet0n's comments

phaet0n | 7 years ago | on: Silicon die analysis: inside an op amp with interesting “butterfly” transistors

Thanks for pointing out your article about the 76477. Fascinating stuff.

As for my second paragraph about "digital-analog", this reference on VCO-based quantizers [1] is not the one I remember but I think is related. Not that I really understand the intricacies, but it's a way of doing analog at low-voltages and finer geometries.

[1] http://ewh.ieee.org/r5/central_texas/cas_ssc/meetings/2012/1...

phaet0n | 7 years ago | on: Silicon die analysis: inside an op amp with interesting “butterfly” transistors

Does anyone have a good reference on how analog is done on logic processes, specifically the bits that have to interface off the chip, like gpio, lvds, and serdes. I'd much appreciate it.

There's something I once encountered, but can't find the reference to, that suggested a kind of "digital-analog" process whereby voltage levels were replaced by timing measurement (?) due to the limits of feature size in analog design. I'm not in the field so forgive my ignorance.

phaet0n | 9 years ago | on: Samsung Acquires Joyent

Congratulations. I hope Samsung nurtures the technical excellence at Joyent.

Please, please continue to develop your public cloud offerings. Having options other that the myopic, me-too, feature-matching, monoculture that is AWS/GCE/Azure is incredibly important.

That said, for my use profile, you guys need to work on your price competitiveness. Hopefully Samsung will inject the necessary cash for economies-of-scale.

phaet0n | 10 years ago | on: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

Bitcoin is simply going through a discontinuity brought on by a fixed blocksize. Personally, I feel uncertainty is the real issue. The "community" should either accept this, or opt for a potentially unlimited ceiling (limited by physics and network size and topology).

If you choose to remain with the fixed blocksize, then you're betting the system will reach another equilibrium (which may be total collapse). This equilibrium will revolve a natural evolution in the pricing of transactions.

Either way, at some other point in the future another source of discontinuity will be the circulation limit. Again, which may or may not kill the system.

Bitcoin is simply evolving, as it necessarily needs to.

It's definitely interesting to watch as an outsider.

phaet0n | 11 years ago | on: Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart

There is a sort of analogue to this: parents praising their children as beautiful/pretty or brave/strong. Both vacuously reduce the childs ability to reflect genuinely on their strengths and their source of self-worth. Beauty (or the appreciation of) becomes solely reduced to the physical (and external), and courage reduced to dare-devilism/ego-centrism instead of the appreciation of fear and acting to overcome it.

phaet0n | 11 years ago | on: The Post Office Should Just Become a Bank

Okay, so how does the "free market" address a growing underclass that can't afford to live outside poverty? How does the "free market" address social issues caused as a result of this poverty? Inconveniently, for the "free market", these people will not go quietly, and when things get really bad, violence will become an issue. So the "free market" incarcerates them, hoping they don't reproduce, unless they accept their slavery. Then afterwards, everyone is happy, living in paradise.

phaet0n | 12 years ago | on: HackRF, an open source SDR platform

For people interested in other SDR options, I believe these guys were YC funded: Per Vices, http://www.pervices.com/

Their hardware is significantly meatier, supporting frequencies from 100kHz to 4GHz with a bandwith of 250MHz. The HackRF only has a bandwith of 20MHz, and bottoms out at 30MHz.

I haven't heard much from them, or discussion about them, but they are out there.

phaet0n | 12 years ago | on: SSL Certificate summer sale has just started

> SSL is as save as the CA list used by the browser is. It really doesn't matter which CA you actually choose then.

Which is why a _comprehensive_ history of when, how, and why CA root certs were added to various browsers, and the politicking behind it, would be quite illuminating.

Recall it was only around 2000 when the US relaxed export restrictions somewhat on cryptographic software. [1] So given that sensitive fact, the policy, and architecture of systems such as browser security should be questioned, especially because a select few are making essentially free money selling green address bars.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size#Symmetric_algorithm_ke...

phaet0n | 12 years ago | on: SSL Certificate summer sale has just started

You are absolutely right that I didn't have to reveal my "prejudice" here.

For that I apologize.

However, you are mistaken that I don't have to trust StartSSL, or any CA at all. In requesting a certificate, I am siginalling that I require a method by which an unknown party can reasonably verify that they are indeed dealing with me. If I am already well known, and a target of attack, it doesn't matter which CA I deal with, every one is potential source of vulnerability. However, if I am not broadly known, and seeking out deals on certificates, and not investing in an EV certificate (why just get a padlock, get the snazzy green bar!), what exactly is the purpose of me investing in a certificate? Well, you're paying for your customers to have faith that whatever faith they have in you is not misplaced, or more precisely no bad guys will get their credit card number which they are sending to you, along with their personal details.

This whole idea behind SSL, https, and ultimately DNS is a broken. And yes, my response was naive enough to be read naively. For that I'm sorry. But this particular post is probably not the place to discuss these shortcomings...

phaet0n | 12 years ago | on: SSL Certificate summer sale has just started

Despite all the hubbub about spying by the NSA and Huawei, an Israeli company would be the absolute last* one that I would trust with my company's security.

Alas, SSL, along with the DNS system, is just a massive internet racket.

(*) Of course I exaggerate, but only slightly.

phaet0n | 12 years ago | on: Manta: Unix Meets Map Reduce

Wow! I've spent a hour or so looking at the Manta docs and I think Joyent has found the sweet spot as far as abstraction is concerned. Kudos to the Joyent team!

The api [1] is so simple it's absurd. Looking at the design I just keep on asking myself, "but how will it perform?" And the answer is, I don't know. But what I do know is that because of the simplicity of the design, if this compute model catches on, it'll be the start of a new computing paradigm—probably the first genuine attempt at something we can agree is cloud.

The essence of the model is that "caching", in whatever form, is abstracted away. It is up to the architects of the system to ensure that the system performs well on a wide variety of compute scenarios. Let me explain. Usually, in a model like App Engine, you worry about how you'll represent your data in the Datastore, how you'll shard, how you'll use Memcache, and what type of batch jobs you'll run to reduce the amount of dynamic computation that is done on a request. On Manta, you just store your data to their object store and process it as needed. You let the system figure out data locality, what to cache, on which node to perform the compute, etc.

As I said, I have no idea how, or if, this will perform, but as far as abstraction level goes, it's perfect. This is where pricing becomes an issue. At 40µ$/GB/s it works out to 14.4¢/GB/hr with no mention or guarantee of the performance of the system. If the compute is slow, or the node is overloaded for tasks, what can a customer do? What if the compute is not limited by cpu but access to the underlying object store. Sure they say the compute is done at the edge, but what if they stick 4TB of data on a node that's the compute equivalent of an Intel Atom? So many questions about performance!

All that said, congratulations to the Joyent team. The HN response so far has been muted, but I think time will reveal Manta to be an important step towards true cloud computing.

Hopefully, Manta will mature enough to get a chance to kiss a girl.

[1] http://apidocs.joyent.com/manta/api.html

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