Password Arms Race

The overly paranoid Synopsys Solvnet's insane new password rules highlights what I also found to be ridiculous new password requirements for SolvNet.

I get the feeling that companies with customer web sites are viewing "password ridiculousness" as a measure of how valuable their site content is. Come on, it's just a knowledge base! If the user gets the password wrong after three tries, lock them out. Other than that, why make the password like a nuclear launch code?

Remote Software Debug?

Here's a query for all you software professionals out there: Are there tools or techniques that allow programmers to debug a program remotely? That is, can the executable and its data be on one server, and the source code and the engineer driving the debugger be on another server? This could be two servers in the same farm, or, more interestingly, the program could be running at the customer site, while the debugging is driven from the vendor's site.

I'm not a professional software engineer (just another Perl hacker), but this seems that it ought to be possible. I just don't know how to pull it off.

Two Strategies You Don't Want in Your Business Plan

1. We going to take on Intel head-on
2. Our technology is based on emulation

Novafora to buy once-highflying Transmeta for $256 Million

Transmeta, R.I.P.

Update: The Transmeta Deal: Why? summarizes the head-scratching financial aspect of this deal. Although $256 Million may sound like a lot, it turns out that Transmeta had almost that much cash in the bank! Therefore,

Excluding cash, the company is receiving just over $11 million for its entire portfolio of valuable technology that has been developed over ten years at a cost in excess of $400 million ...

ICCAD Presents Bloggers

We had a great "Birds of a Feather" meeting after ICCAD last evening. Sean Murphy did a superb job organizing and running the meeting. We had a good turnout of bloggers, wannabee bloggers, journalists, consultants, PR folks. Two of the topics that generated a spirited discussion were

1. Are individual bloggers and "corporate" bloggers in different categories? Some in the audience felt that corporate bloggers must feel constraints from their corporate sponsor. Most of the corporate bloggers asserted that they were in fact independent, and could write what they wanted.
2. What's the difference between a journalist and a blogger? This can be debated from many directions. It was even part of a Supreme Court case! From my perspective, they are different. Although journalists can also blog, independent (and part-time) bloggers such as myself find great benefit in dedicated, professional journalism. Many of my posts riff on articles from EETimes or EDN, for example.

   A typical blogger is more like a columnist than a reporter. It's essential to recognize and respect the difference between objective reporting (fair and balanced!) and the offering of opinions.

For the record, here's the "lightning talk" presentation that I gave. I thought I'd share it with my readers, and it's also a chance to try out this slick new Slideshare widget for embedding presentations.

ICCAD Blogging Birds of a Feather

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cad eda)

Bloggers Flock to ICCAD

Fellow blogger Sean Murphy has organized an EDA Bloggers' Birds of a Feather meeting at the ICCAD conference in San Jose. The conference is going on right now, and the BOF meeting is Wednesday, November 12, 4-6pm.

Whether you write or read blogs or are just interested in EDA, please come join us! It's free, and in this economy, who can pass that up? I'll be one of about eight speakers giving a short talk before the open discussion. I plan to comment on my blogging experience, give tips on finding & following blogs, and share ideas for how to get involved. Hope to see you there.