Ours is a networked world. Anything that’s anything is connected to the Internet. No matter how unrelated, things somehow manage to get from here to somewhere completely different. Like the way your bank account password can magically appear in some server in an obscure corner of Russia. Or how some exalted prince in an exotic distant land like, say, Nigeria, actually knows who you are and trusts you enough to handle his money!

But it wasn’t ever so, and the infrastructure for hooking things onto the internet was once meticulously created from scratch … Read More → "A Measure of Respect"

A lot of press releases that drop into my email in-box are often, to be totally objective, pretty run of the mill. Naturally, I know that, for the guys building it, selling it and using it, the new release of software, the smallest widget, the fastest gizmo, or whatever, is important. But unless you are running product pages, as a journalist you just make a mental note and then consign the release to the delete file. But occasionally a release comes along that causes you to stop in your tracks. A little earlier this year there was a real … Read More → "Modular Linux"

This week, MIPS Technologies announced that it’s scored another TV set-top box design win. Specifically, the company proudly bragged that NXP (formerly Philips Semiconductors) is using the MIPS 24K processor core in its PNX85500 HDTV chip. It’s the first TV chip to be fabricated in 45-nm technology, a significant if short-lived distinction.

With all appropriate kudos to MIPS and NXP, the more interesting story here is why NXP chose to use a MIPS processor. The short answer is, because they had used MIPS before. In a word, inertia.

Inertia … Read More → "MIPS, Mario, TV, and Trends"

Eric Raymond, prominent voice in the open-source movement and author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, stated it well: “Any security software design that doesn’t assume the enemy possesses the source code is already untrustworthy.” Decades earlier, Claude Shannon was even more succinct: “The enemy knows the system.” Security experts call this Kerckhoffs’ Principle, in honor of a 19th century mathematician who first formulated it for cryptosystems. The underlying assumption is that any security-critical flaw will be found and exploited sooner or later, so at best, secrecy buys you only some delay.</ … Read More → "Obscurity and the Illusion of Security"

I’m always suspicious when a PowerPoint slide says we’re at a turning point in history. It strikes me as egotistical to think that today is somehow qualitatively different from yesterday. Sure, chips always get faster and software always gets more complex – how is that an inflection point? You’re just trying to sell me something, aren’t you?

The exception to this self-imposed rule is multicore microprocessors. I really do think that multicore is a game-changer. It makes hardware design different, it makes software design different, it makes EDA and … Read More → "What Do We Do About Multicore?"