Darkling Wood

The Dangers of Gratuitous Unalienability

Suppose there was a bill passed tomorrow, creating a law that made the minimum hourly pay rate for engineers in the US $10,000/hr. As of tomorrow, paying a US engineer anything less than that minimum rate would become illegal.

Would you care?

Well, if you're a US engineer, I hope your answer is, "Hell, yes I'd care. What a stupid law". And, contrariwise, if you're an engineer anywhere else, you could be forgiven for rubbing your hands in glee at the thought of all that formerly US work coming your way.

But suppose, now, that the same law was created, but with an "Only If You Want To" exception. In other words, suppose the law said that your clients could pay you no less than $10,000/hr, unless you and your client made a prior arrangement for a lower rate. Let's call that prior arrangement an ... oh, I dunno ... how about "a contract".

Now would you care?

    

Verification Planning

David Robinson, another Verilab dude, has started a blog over here. Coincidentally, David also just uploaded his recent DAC presentation, made in association with Springsoft. The document is simply the PowerPoint slides, so it'll be of primary use to anyone who attended one of David's sessions and wants the slides as a reminder. Verilab does however provide intensive consulting on requirements-based verification, so if you'd like to discuss that in more detail, give us a call. Our emails take the usual canonical form: firstname dot lastname at verilab dot com.

Give us your tired, your poor, your thoroughly confused ...

More on immigration and tech. business by Tets Maniwa over at SCDsource. Tets notes:

"In addition to the H-1B issue, the process for quickly and easily converting a student visa to a permanent resident (green card) visa needs reform, panelists said. There are some efforts in Congress to address some of the immigration issues for technical workers, but this legislation is stalled in committees and is unlikely to be passed in an election year."

Verilab colleague and fellow Scot-in-exile, Gordon, pointed me at this lighter-hearted look (well, lighter-hearted unless you're the poor sod whose visa has expired unexpectedly) at the very same thing. (You'll need to click on that and the subsequent four or five comics to get the full story).

What does business need from "The Government"

That - specifically about EDA, but it applies more widely - was the thorny issue tackled by some brave souls at one of the numerous panels at DAC last week. It's good I wasn't on that panel. My answer to the question tends to be a more or less (usually less) polite version of "To have them get out of my face and let me get on with running a business." In particular, the visa issue they discussed is always a raw nerve for me. It's not just that I myself am an immigrant. It's the fact that my US clients, owned by US shareholders, with lots of US employees, paying US taxes, are crying out for good technical people to make more money for those shareholders, employ more of those US folks, and pay more US taxes, but can't find enough of them because the immigration policies of their own of-the-people-by-the-people-for-the-people government are:

1. Blocking foreign talent who want to come here from doing that and, as a result
2. Scaring the local talent away from engineering (because they think all the jobs are going to India)

Cadence, bla, Mentor, bla, acquisition, yada ...

So now we, 60 and climbing EDA bloggers, have something to blogstorm about. JL's on it already, scooping me by five minutes. And John, at his Semi-Blog, is even gathering comments. Daniel Payne, over at Chip Design Mag, has a take too, and none too complimentary.

Daniel's general sense of underwhelmedness is understandable. But he misses one semi-important verification issue when he says, of a merger, "it really wouldn’t bring the EDA industry anything new". One thing it could do is reduce the number of SystemVerilog methodologies out there, from three to two. The three being the VMM, and let's call them: OVM_m (Mentor's OVM) and OVM_c (Cadence's OVM).

Twittering and Tumbling

Interesting comments on Twittering. And now I'm wondering where, if anywhere, Tumbling fits in.

On Write-Only Code and SystemVerilog Implicit Port Connections

At the iDesign II session, Cliff Cummings gave a great overview of SystemVerilog implicit port connections. Cliff was, as always, an excellent and enjoyable presenter. And the material was spot on, and current. But at several points during his talk, I felt like someone was scratching fingernails down a blackboard. It wasn't so much Cliff and his presentation. I'd have to say his was one of the best in DAC. Rather it was those subtle wee implications you can pick up if you listen really carefully to a presenter's ad hoc sidebars. Here then are Three Important Things I learned from Cliff (other than the undoubtedly useful details of how implicit port connections work).

Panning for Gold in California

I'm not sure I actually attended DAC. That root canal flared up and I needed a visit to an emergency dentist the day before flying out in order to pick up some antibiotics to kill off the nascent abscess. That, and heavy doses of Vicodin and ibuprofen left me a bit dazed as I wandered around the exhibits.

Or maybe that was just the exhibits.

Because as the pain, abscess, and Vicodin wore off (and yes, it was just those things - I didn't even make it to the Denali party), I realized just what DAC is (apart from being a Cortical Homunculus). It's another California Gold Rush. True, we're a bit further south than Coloma, but it feels the same. Excited people, from all corners of the globe, descending on an unsuspecting town in the hope of finding a particularly large nugget of value. And, as with the actual Gold Rush, much of the hope is forlorn. It's not that there's no value to be found. Far from it. But the really big nuggets? Like the one found by Spider Conway in "Pale Rider"? Those are rare events.

How lawyers govern their own corporate blogs

Sitting for two hours in the dentist's chair this morning for part 3 of 4 of a root canal treatment, I took the opportunity of various pauses (wait five minutes for the local anaesthetic to take effect; wait for six minutes for the post to set; wait for six minutes for the crown impression mould to set; and so on) to catch up on some blog and email reading using my new iPhone. (Aside: I've used iPaqs, Blackberries, and Treos. The iPhone simply buries them all.)

Some interesting blogging stuff over at Real Lawyers Have Blogs. In particular, this sample blog policy could be useful. And, the "Related Posts" at the bottom of that article are good starting points for further browsing.

Ow. Have to go. Local is now wearing off. Where did I put those painkillers...

But will it get anyone laid?

Just got a press release email from www.design-reuse.com. They're appearing at DAC with "a major release of [their] IP Reuse Enterprise Platform". I wish them well; I really do. But I couldn't help recall a story by Jamie Zawinski in which he infamously (or maybe just famously) said, of Groupware:

"Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?"

Well, for "Groupware" read "IP Reuse Platforms".