There has been a startling rise in a class of Android auto-rooting malware which is believed to affect over a quarter of a million phones in the US and well over a million in each of India and China. The attack has primarily infected older versions of Android (so far) – KitKat, JellyBean and Lolipop primarily.
The malware, known as Shedun… Read More
In the back-and-forth competition between Samsung and Apple, the Galaxy S7 certainly seems to have notched a few wins over the iPhone 6S. Most reviewers feel the Samsung camera is noticeably superior and the overall look and feel is on a par with or better than the Apple product. I want to focus on just one area where Samsung differs… Read More
The best things in life may not always be free, but they don’t have to be incredibly difficult to get to. A challenge for IoT designers has been that their bubbling excitement over the potential of their new gizmo is quickly tempered by the complexities of actually building the hardware. Not exactly what they have come to expect in … Read More
Finding a way to optimally parallelize linear code for multi-processor platforms has been a holy grail of computer science for many years. The challenge is that we think linearly and design algorithms in the same way, but then want to speed up our analysis by adding parallelism to the algorithms we have already designed.
But the … Read More
Many years ago I read a great little book by Rudy Rucker called “Infinity and the Mind”. This book attempts to explain the many classes of mathematical infinity (cardinals) to non-specialists. As he gets to the more abstract levels of infinity, the author has to resort to an analogy to give a feel for extendible and other cardinal … Read More
Mentor hosted a panel on emulation in their booth at DAC this year. One thing I really liked about this panel is that it didn’t include anyone from Mentor. Not that I have anything against Mentor employees, who are a fine bunch of people from those I know, but I find panels most interesting when the discussion is purely among customers.… Read More
Neural nets as described in many recent articles are very capable at recognizing objects and written and spoken text. But like anything we can build, or even imagine, they have limitations. One problem is that after training, the neural nets we usually encounter are essentially stateless. They can recognize static patterns but… Read More
Understanding natural language is considered a hard problem in artificial intelligence. You could be forgiven for thinking this can’t be right – surely language recognition systems already have this problem mostly solved? If so, you might be confusing recognition with understanding – loosely, recognition is the phonology… Read More
In the 35 years since commercial EDA went mainstream a lot of advances have been made but the fundamental architecture and even the philosophy of tooling have really not advanced at all. Tools are designed around individual tasks – analysis and optimization within a specific domain – under the assumption that variability within… Read More
Markets work when consumers of a widget don’t feel there is significant differentiated value in making their own and would rather get lowest possible cost from experienced widget makers who can amortize their investment over high-volume sales to many customers. But that changes when a large consumer finds they can increase differentiated… Read More
