[Announcement] Avalon ASIC Development Status [Batch #1]

[kaerf]

What "China" does is irrelevent. The Avalon team has a known history of releasing Open Source stuff. That's what matters.

+1. Such broad sterotyping of chinese people/groups is getting close to racism. Like Syke said, Avalon should be judged by their past actions.

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[PuertoLibre]

How is that "flailing against an adversary" exactly?  Either it applies to the Avalon team and there's jack all anyone can/will do about it or it does not apply to the Avalon team so it doesn't matter.  Or are you seriously trying to deny the fact that China has a piss poor record of honoring IP protection laws?  Or... are you just being an apologist for the poor adherence to IP laws?

The USA has large community of people not honoring IP protection laws, despite many laws on the books. You can't search Google without tripping over these English sites.

The rate of convictions is very tiny compared to the size of the offenders.

Take a look at three links that you can find on Google.

http://www.slyck.com/ <--- One community hub found on google.com
http://torrentfreak.com/ <--- Another community hub found on google.com
http://forum.doom9.org/ <-- I am actually a member here. Great technical discussion(s) of all kinds. Some of the forum members here cracked Bluray encryption when it first came out. (Publicly!)

Doom9 forums is also where that particular community pushed for Google Server operators to upgrade their use of Vp6 and Vp7 (Flash) and H.263/H.264 open source code software. Resulting in Googles upgrade of their YouTube platform to "Youtube HD". (Just because they asked an operator why they were still using an old buggy version).

So if you use Youtube, the encoding software was designed and discussed on those forums.

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I do not know if Youtube publishes their various components that make use of open software in their services. I believe they only provide the link to the source code if you request it. (Per the GPL rules)

That is just one tiny example.

[Inaba]

What "China" does is irrelevent. The Avalon team has a known history of releasing Open Source stuff. That's what matters.

+1. Such broad sterotyping of chinese people/groups is getting close to racism. Like Syke said, Avalon should be judged by their past actions.

Yes, because commenting on well established facts about a country is stereotyping of Chinese people... That makes perfect sense.  Fucking idiot.

The whole point is that even if Avalon decided to release a binary only version of CGMiner, what are the developers going to do about it?  Nothing.. zip.  Nada.  There's nothing they can do realistically.  That is the point, besides the one on the top of your and PuertoIdiot's head.

[Carlton Banks]

What "China" does is irrelevent. The Avalon team has a known history of releasing Open Source stuff. That's what matters.

+1. Such broad sterotyping of chinese people/groups is getting close to racism. Like Syke said, Avalon should be judged by their past actions.

Be fair on him, he probably forgot which trolling account he was logged into and accidentally went into super offensive mode. Must be difficult having to juggle so many different personas without them leaking into each other, even for an outright professional troll. I applaude you for your commitment Josh, you're the most hard working troll I've seen in the wild. Don't take this the wrong way either, you really are very good a being an absolute dick.

[kaerf]

What "China" does is irrelevent. The Avalon team has a known history of releasing Open Source stuff. That's what matters.

+1. Such broad sterotyping of chinese people/groups is getting close to racism. Like Syke said, Avalon should be judged by their past actions.

Yes, because commenting on well established facts about a country is stereotyping of Chinese people... That makes perfect sense.  Fucking idiot.

whoa...there. calling your customer of multiple orders a fucking idiot is not good business practice. i made a point (even took your name out of the quote) of not outright calling your statement racist to give you the benefit of the doubt and give you the opportunity to clarify your statement.

josh, we're not talking about China. We're talking about the Avalon team (who happen to be chinese). Are you a 300 lb american that reeks of BO?

[DirtAddsHP]

looking forward to seeing these in use.

[Inaba]

What "China" does is irrelevent. The Avalon team has a known history of releasing Open Source stuff. That's what matters.

+1. Such broad sterotyping of chinese people/groups is getting close to racism. Like Syke said, Avalon should be judged by their past actions.

Yes, because commenting on well established facts about a country is stereotyping of Chinese people... That makes perfect sense.  Fucking idiot.

whoa...there. calling your customer of multiple orders a fucking idiot is not good business practice. i made a point of not outright calling your statement racist to give you the benefit of the doubt and give you the opportunity to clarify your statement.

josh, we're not talking about China. We're talking about the Avalon team (who happen to be chinese). Are you a 300 lb american that reeks of BO?

Then don't write stupid shit and try to paint me as a racist and I won't call you a fucking idiot.  Pretty simple, huh? 

There is no clarification of my statement needed.  If you're not capable understanding the basic written word, I can't help you.  Trying to couch what I wrote, which is an established and acknowledged fact about the laws in a given country as somehow racist, then you are far beyond help and hope.  How the hell you got from talking about the laws of China to racism, I can not fathom, but it's probably some deep seated latent racism on your part, since typically the most racist people tend to see racism everywhere.

To answer your question, no I'm not a 300 lb American that reeks of BO, are you?  I'm not sure what that has to do with anything that's being discussed, but perhaps, again, it's something you have a deep seated, latent fear of or trouble with?
 

[PuertoLibre]

What "China" does is irrelevent. The Avalon team has a known history of releasing Open Source stuff. That's what matters.

+1. Such broad sterotyping of chinese people/groups is getting close to racism. Like Syke said, Avalon should be judged by their past actions.

Yes, because commenting on well established facts about a country is stereotyping of Chinese people... That makes perfect sense.  Fucking idiot.

The whole point is that even if Avalon decided to release a binary only version of CGMiner, what are the developers going to do about it?  Nothing.. zip.  Nada.  There's nothing they can do realistically.  That is the point, besides the one on the top of your and PuertoIdiot's head.

Focusing in on one nationality does look racist.

The reality is Human beings misappropriate IP or simply don't adhere to the philosophy of Intellectual Property. Beyond the fact that there are 1.2 or 1.1 Billion Chinese and only 300 Million-ish Americans probably throws those statistics out of proportion. I have no clue how many European or Eurasians there are...but they also do pirate and steal IP. (Even at a corporate level)

All I can tell you for certain is that focusing in on Chinese people is improper as Humanity as a whole does it. Most of the software being misappropriated is coming from a ton of different regions and nationalities.

The Chinese people have no more propensity to steal IP (Intellectual Property) than the rest of Humanity.

[kaerf]

josh, you're too funny. i'll elect to discontinue this particular conversation with you since it does not appear it will get anywhere. i myself am not a fan of minority activist groups for the same reason you said (people that are minority activists are often racist themselves). however, we must agree to disagree here. you don't see your statement as a sterotype, i do. we do not need to fling profanities at each other in an attempt to change our minds.

[Syke]

The whole point is that even if Avalon decided to release a binary only version of CGMiner, what are the developers going to do about it?  Nothing.. zip.  Nada.  There's nothing they can do realistically.  That is the point, besides the one on the top of your and PuertoIdiot's head.

What are people going to do when BFL declares bankrupcy after having spent all the pre-order funds? Nada. There's nothing they can do realistically.

[PuertoLibre]

Here is a good example:

There was once a company called CoreCodec who had designed the fastest H.264 decoder. They opened some of the code if I recall correctly. Then they stopped and closed sourced it.

The open source folks used their designs to incorporate some of the techniques and to gather ideas as to how it was done. The Open Source folks progressive efforts eventually paid off (through hard work) and eventually designed better decoders with higher efficiency.

That lead to widespread adoption of H.264 which until then was very near impossible to play on a normal PC without serious stuttering in the picture and playback. That spawned off dedicated "encoders" who worked with the pirates to rip thousands and thousands of movies into a highly compressed and efficient formats using the [open source] H.264 encoders and decoders.

That spawned alot of the big companies use of Online Video.

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The Closed Source company tried to sue the open source people a few times under the allegations of stealing IP. The Open Source folks laughed at them (some of the time) because they found out through reverse engineering of the software that they cut many corners to achieve their incredible performance. (Lots of allegations abound)

The closed source company CoreCodec eventually went on to sell their codec software and (I think) they were sufficiently successful. But what did they find when they went CES? (You know, where BFL is demoing non-existent ASICs)

They found that quite a few demo'ing companies in the other booths were using derivatives of their software. How did they know this? They figured it out because they put in easter eggs in their own software. While playing with the demonstration software, several companies were found to be using their IP....without payment...at CES.

They first asked and later persued some of them for misappropriation of their IP.

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Big or small, corporate or individual, some people do not honor IP. It's not a Chinese issue. It is all over the world.

Last I recall the Chinese Government was working pretty hard to crack down on IP violations and piracy in their hopeful admittance to the WTO (World Trade Organization) and becoming a member of something...which I do not recall what it was anymore.

Edit: Forgot what the WTO was called. It's been years!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTO

[Inaba]

Kaerf and PuertoLibre, you two are the only ones focusing in on people.  I made mention of Chinese IP laws (or lack thereof, or lack of enforcement, take your pick) and made absolutely no mention of people.

How the two of you go from this:

but it's not like China has a great track record when it comes to IP and copyrights.  If they did release it without the source, realistically, what is the recourse?  Pretty much zip.

to

OMG RACISM!  is truly a mystery, and one best left unplumbed I would wager.  I'm frightened as to what I might find in the minds of people who can't connect two simple dots sitting right next to each other.

PS -

Last I recall the Chinese Government was working pretty hard to crack down on IP violations and piracy in their hopeful admittance to the WTO (World Trade Organization) and becoming a member of something...which I do not recall what it was anymore.

Why would they be doing this if it's not a huge problem in China?  If it was just as rampant all over the world, how could they be rejected from the WTO on those grounds and why would they need to curb it?  Logic fail.

[mem]

josh, we're not talking about China. We're talking about the Avalon team (who happen to be chinese). Are you a 300 lb american that reeks of BO?

Josh is typing an angry reply right now.

Then don't write stupid shit and try to paint me as a racist and I won't call you a fucking idiot.  Pretty simple, huh? 

You are the twerp making broad sweeping generalizations against a nation.

[nathanrees19]

The Chinese people have no more propensity to steal IP (Intellectual Property) than the rest of Humanity.

I think his point is that the GPL has held up well in some courts (such as in the US and Europe) but some quick Googling shows that this may not be the case in China.

[nathanrees19]

Is it more clear now? It sounds like you were saying that if and only if you or ckolivas were involved a vendor could release a cgminer based product without source.

How on earth did you manage to interpret it that way?

The prior probability of an open source developer and long term community member offering a closed source version for a hardware vendor seems to be very low...low enough that an ambiguous forum post should not be sufficient evidence to believe that this may be the case. It is significantly more probable, before even reading the post, that he wants to make sure the source is available, quite possibly so that it can be merged into the main branch.

[greyhawk]

This is the best Avalon thread.

[ewibit]

I hope this clock is true:
http://www.avalon-asics.com/
and here we see what was and is:
http://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/to?iso=20121126T10&p0=405&fg1=ea0606&fg2=808080&msg=BFL+|+ASIC+-+FIRST+SHIPMENT
...

[repentance]

Seriously can people stop posting non Avalon crap in here so that others don't have to reply to the crap.

Others don't have to reply to the crap and it would probably be a good idea for each of the vendors to start a locked update thread so that people don't need to hunt around in the discussion threads to find the latest information.

[nathanrees19]

I think the next official update is us shipping out a device. needless to say, we are at the end and is pretty busy at the moment, soon major team members are actually going to stay and live in the factory housing for a few days to make sure everything works out smoothly.

I do not think we will be providing any power consumption/final hashrate prior to shipping the units because we will be tweaking the numbers until we feel it's ready. Soon as we ship everything will become clear.

Can we get confirmation that this means no demo?

[Raize]

In fact, it is within our schedule to release the controller ( openWRT ) image.iso before the end of the year to give eager developers a head start to spin your own custom mining setups. Embrace open source!

Does anyone know if the ISO for OpenWRT has been released? I can't find it in this thread.