SV23: Nonblocking assignment across a task ref port

Following up to “SystemVerilog — always blocks are needed less and less“, which had an example of an assignment that should have been legal, but wasn’t.

Until now it hasn’t been legal to make a nonblocking assignment (NBA) to a static module variable across a reference port of a function or task. But in the 2023 revision of the standard that restriction has been lifted as long as the reference port has been annotated with the new static qualifier. Thanks to Steven Sharp for driving that enhancement. His enhancement also lifted the restriction against referring to such ports from within a forkjoin_any or forkjoin_none block, again given the new static qualifier.

So here’s the earlier example modified to be legal in SystemVerilog 2023

virtual class C#(type T);
  static task ff(const ref logic clk,
                 const ref T in,
                 ref static T out);
    forever @(posedge clk) out <= in;
  endtask
endclass

module test#(type T) (input logic clk, 
                      input T in,
                      output T out);
  initial C#(T)::ff(clk, in, out);
endmodule

“All of the codes matched.”

Blog Brut

According to Masakatsu Ota , regarding the 1962 Cuban missile crisis

“Oh, my God!,” Bordne recalled his colleagues as saying as they turned white with shock and surprise when they received a launch order before dawn on Oct. 28. The order was issued from Kadena to all four Mace B sites in Okinawa including Bolo Point, he said.

According to him, the three-level confirmation process was taken step-by-step in accordance with a manual by comparing codes in the launch order and codes given to his crew team in advance. All of the codes matched.

“So, we read the targets out loud. Out of the four missiles, we had only one headed toward Russia. The other three were not going to Russia. That, right away, gave us a start to wonder. Because the launch directive said you launch all the missiles,” Bordne said. His crew team was in charge of four…

View original post 228 more words

Slavery, capitalism, and the origins of the modern world

Brad Pierce's Blog

(Following up to “Slavery and the rise of the West — US Civil War was necessary for ending slavery“.) According to Sven Beckert

Slavery did not die because it was unproductive or unprofitable, as some earlier historians have argued. Slavery was not some feudal remnant on the way to extinction. It died because of violent struggle, because enslaved workers continually challenged the people who held them in bondage—nowhere more successfully than in the 1790s in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti, site of the first free nation of color in the New World), and because a courageous group of abolitionists struggled against some of the dominant economic interests of their time.

View original post

“What’s the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

Brad Pierce's Blog

According to Dean Bokhari’s summary of the book “The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

Start with “The Focusing Question.”

“What’s the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

You’ll want to write that down… because the whole entire book is based around that single question, and the power of organizing every area of your life around ONE Thing (per area).

The Domino Effect

The key to success is figuring out your ONE most important thing in your business/career/life over the long-run. Think of this as your “someday” goal.  Once you’ve figured that out, you need to identify how many dominoes you need to line up – and then knock down – in order to achieve it. Simple right? … actually, yeah. It is. But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy.

View original post

What characteristic do you try hardest to project?

Brad Pierce's Blog

In The Anatomy of a Great Executive John Wareham quotes Lucretius that

So it is more useful to watch a man in times of peril, and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off, reality remains.

Wareham continues

As a practical matter, however, we seldom have the opportunity to see a person in times of peril. Thus a more useful technique is to apply what I call the principle of the opposite image.

and

A person will often present a facade founded upon the aspect of his or her personality that he/she most fears — or knows — to be missing.

So he recommends analyzing a person by asking

What is the impression that this individual takes the greatest trouble to convey to me?

and then assuming…

View original post 188 more words

Hire the stars you’ve already got

Brad Pierce's Blog

According to Aaron Shapiro

Performance evaluations for managers should include assessment of the volume and quality of new ideas they brought to the table.

But instead there is usually no significant reward for teaching the wider organization new and better ways. And no employee smart enough to have a “secret sauce” is stupid enough to give a company the recipe for free. If the only way to profit from an idea or insight is to keep it a personal trade secret, then that’s what smart people will do.

If CEOs really want their companies to be innovative, they need to pay for it, and translate the spreading of great ideas into significant cold hard cash.

Why not approach your most effective people, who are getting the most measurable results, and offer them a 100% bonus for the year if they teach their methods to everybody?

Would you hire one person…

View original post 23 more words

The “bridge” personality: a key to success for multidisciplinary projects

Brad Pierce's Blog

According to Bruce L. Tow and David A. Gilliam

In the 1970s, SRI International (then called Stanford Research) asked some of its brightest researchers to explore a question vital to their success as a think tank and provider of innovative solutions: Why did some of their multidisciplinary projects succeed while others failed? This was a key question because, up until then, nobody at SRI could find a pattern. After careful study, researchers led by Joseph McPherson […] came up with a theory, which SRI subsequently put into successful practice: They identified a type of individual whom they called a Bridge. The Bridge (as it happened, quite accidentally) combined the focused knowledge of a specialist with an intense, innate curiosity about the other disciplines in any multidisciplinary project in which that person was involved.

Typically, a Bridge was a specialist assigned to a given multidisciplinary project, who at some point–without project-management…

View original post 300 more words

Al Gross and the difference between invention and innovation

Brad Pierce's Blog

According to Peter Denning

An innovation is a transformation of practice in a community. It is not the same as the invention of a new idea or object. The real work of innovation is in the transformation of practice.

Consider the case of Al Gross

The pioneer nonpareil of wireless telecommunications is Al Gross. In 1938, he invented the walkie-talkie. In 1948, he pioneered Citizens’ Band (CB) radio. In 1949, he invented the telephone pager. His other inventions include the basics of cordless and cellular telephony.

Gross was too far ahead of his time to cash in on his inventions: his patents expired long before the public was ready for CB radio, cell phones and pagers. But his love of the work outweighs any regrets: he always smiles when he says, “If I still had the patents on my inventions, Bill Gates would have to stand aside for me.”

According…

View original post 73 more words

Here’s The Settlement—Getting The License Back Was Rossi’s Top Priority

AN IMPOSSIBLE INVENTION

In the settlement between Rossi and his US licensee IH, Rossi got the license back together with all E-Cat equipment and materials, while none of the parties will have to pay damages to the other. Getting the license back was his top priority all the time, Rossi explains in this interview.

[Here’s the document defining the terms of the settlement(un-disclosed source)].

“To us, the most important thing was to regain complete ownership of the IP and of all the rights that were conceded through the license. At this point, it had become very clear that a continued collaboration had become impossible because of the choices IH made and because of other reasons. The development, the finalization, and the distribution of the technology—any agreement regarding this would have been impossible,” Rossi told me during an interview via Skype on July 15.

The settlement was drafted on July 5, 2017…

View original post 3,375 more words

Are you a productive member of society?

Blog Brut

An unintentionally amusing opinion piece here by “German philosopher” Peter Sloterdijk.

As translated by Alexis Cornel

we have become accustomed to the fact that a handful of productive citizens provide more than half of national income-tax revenues

Yet the philosopher doesn’t define his terms. What does it mean for a citizen to be “productive”? (As opposed, perhaps, to be being a “nutzlose Fresser”?) Is the philosopher himself productive? How about a stripper? Or the CEO of a too-big-to-fail bank? Or an arms merchant? Or a tobacco farmer?

According to Bob Black

Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done — presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now — would satisfy our minimal…

View original post 350 more words