PhaseLockk

It's not surprising that the system was using an unpatched OS. Many of these tools are not connected to the external internet, and they are qualified using the exact version of the software that is installed during delivery. I don't really know the details of foundry operations, but it seems like there are more incentives against installing windows updates than for it. Looking at your article it seems to say the same thing:

> patching is not always an easy endeavor in manufacturing environments because any code changes must be rigorously tested to ensure they don't have a real-world impact - for example on industrial control systems or supervisory control and data acquisition systems, which control the software and hardware that runs manufacturing processes. Indeed, ICS and SCADA systems may have a lifespan of 20 to 30 years. Many were never designed to be internet connected.

Or you could optimize for happiness-truth product. This would lead you to lifestyles, philosophies, and religions which remove any negative correlation between happiness and truth (which I would argue have no inherent, unavoidable relationship with each other).

> What's the most widespread fundamental gate in the latest fab processes nowadays? Is it NAND?

Typical standard cell libraries have hundreds of cells, including cells representing logic such as muxes, full adders, and other frequently occurring clusters of gates. Logic is mapped to these in the way the tool finds most optimal. So I don't think it's right to say that there is a fundamental gate in modern processes.

Unless you are looking at it from the electrical perspective in which case the fundamental gate is the inverter.

> Switching FPGAs are incredibly power hungry since they run on much larger processes.

I don't think the comment about process is really true, from what I can tell, Xilinx is only a few months behind the biggest SoC makers in terms of its process adoption, and is shipping 14nm parts currently. Not sure about Altera, but they are on Intel's process, which is bit ahead of the competitors anyway.

In terms of switching power, you definitely pay a penalty to have the reconfigurability in hardware, but on the other hand you don't have all the unused logic that you would on a GPU. I'd guess the comparative efficiency depends on the specific problem and specific implementation, but I don't have any numbers to back that up.

I'm not exactly clear on what the post is advocating. If it's saying that there should be an open source implementation of an FPGA, then I just have to say that I think there's no way that's happening anytime soon. There are way too many hurdles.

If the argument is just that the open source community should leverage FPGAs more as a means of creating more powerful "open source" hardware, and that there should be more resources for people to learn how to write hardware, then I guess I agree with that. But I don't think FPGAs will be the panacea the author seems to think they will. FPGA implementations will always entail a performance and/or efficiency hit compared to ASIC implementations, and I think many people won't want to take that hit, limiting the number of users who are willing to adopt the open source solutions.

FPGAs are a useful means of accelerating any algorithm where you want more performance than you would get from executing it on a CPU, but can't afford to create your own ASIC because the volume is relatively low. For example, it may be used in DSP applications for things like radar. This use as a reprogrammable accelerator is also why Amazon has introduced instances with on-board FPGAs to AWS.

I can anecdotally confirm this to be true in my experience as well.

Maybe there's a correlation for a reason? Namely that functional governments which keep the peace and provide services to their citizens need income in order to operate.

> Worse, the gains-from-trade that economists say ought to occur are allocated entirely to the owners of firms and equities, rather than being redistributed to the former workers to help smooth out economic transitions.

I think that this statement ignores the savings that consumers get as a result of this process.The use of international labor has absolutely reduced the prices of goods in the US.

I agree with most of the rest of what you said.

I'm not an expert, but I thought safe rust had guaranteed thread safety?

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/concurrency.html

This is true, but on the whole immigrant college graduates are typically a boon to an economy, not a drag. It's in our best interest to keep these people here, rather than shipping them back home.

> Two seconds of Googling reveals your bullshit.

All of these people announced support for same-sex marriage after being elected, or after leaving public service. It seems unlikely that the republican party would run a new candidate that included support of gay marriage as part of their platform. Maybe I'm wrong though.