Time to start work on 400 Gigabit Ethernet    John D'Ambrosia
John shares some thoughts about the rapid growth of the Web and social networking as he gears up for the first working meeting on 400G Ethernet.
  post comment   2 comments    last comment  Neo1
Are they out of really useful work at IEEE? 400G, you bet!

Are you my third cousin twice removed?    Clive Maxfield
Have you ever heard the terms "second cousin" and "third cousin" and wondered what they meant?
  post comment   21 comments    last comment  Max the Magnificent
Cool Beans -- thanks for sharing

London Calling: Do advisory boards work?    Peter Clarke
Do advisory boards [do any] work or are they just there to add a bit of marketing gloss to a startup that might otherwise find it harder to gain share of mind?
  post comment   6 comments    last comment  peter.clarke
@TheMicroMan Yes. The purpose is that in answering readers -- from their own experience -- may ...

Learning electronics with the Arduino    Clive Maxfield
There's always something unexpected going on here in the Pleasure Dome (my office). Just a few days ago, for example, I received an email from Don Wilcher…
  post comment   4 comments    last comment  Max the Magnificent
Cool Beans -- thanks for sharing

The "Top 10" worst computers of all time    Clive Maxfield
Have you ever owned a computer that made you want to pull your hair out?
  post comment   26 comments    last comment  ghfarmer
Amen! I learned to program on a Commodore PET so the VIC20 was limited in comparison but I could ...

Book: Analog Design and Simulation using OrCAD Capture and PSpice    Brian Bailey
This blog post is a condensation of a series of posting on EDN about the book Analog Design and Simulation using OrCAD Capture and PSpice, written by Dennis Fitzpatrick…
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Your March captions raised my spirits    Rick Merritt
Some might think our March winner went over like a lead balloon, but it raised my spirits.
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The April Caption Contest is calling for you    Rick Merritt
If you hear a real loud ringtone it might be the call of the the April Caption Contest waiting for you to take the call.
  post comment   52 comments    last comment  jkdrum
Yeah, But it only has 32GB memory.

Party down with the March caption contest    Rick Merritt
Balloons in the boardroom? What could it mean? That's for you to decide in the EE Life March caption contest.
  post comment   62 comments    last comment  Flukee
Must be weigh-in day for the company's "Biggest Loser" contest.

What do Bob Dylan, Woodstock, and Wavy Gravy have to do with Design West?    Clive Maxfield
Sometimes the way the world works leaves me gasping with astonishment and delight.
  post comment   7 comments    last comment  Max the Magnificent
You are correct about the Oakland A's -- Stacy also told me how this all came about -- I could have ...

Blast from the past – Practical Wireless mags circa 1972    Clive Maxfield
Ooooh, this takes me back. I just opened the first one from January 1972. There's no way to artificially replicate that 41-year-old magazine smell.
  post comment   9 comments    last comment  Asad.Asif
Agreed! Wish there were digital copies (scanned or otherwise) of old electronics related magazines.

In space no one can hear you scream… or can they?    Clive Maxfield
An experiment that will change the scientific world forever – a plan so audacious that not even NASA has attempted it!
  post comment   8 comments    last comment  Max the Magnificent
LOL

When is IP theft OK?    Brian Fuller
That the Chinese are hacking North American networks should surprise no one, especially in the electronics industry. We're all doing it.
  post comment   23 comments    last comment  DarkMatter
"Designing around" can sometimes just be a search for loopholes, but sometimes it can result in real ...

Will cuts slam military electronics supply chain?    Brian Fuller
Doomsday scenarios are everywhere with sequestration cuts in the U.S. federal budget set to take effect Friday, March 1.
  post comment   2 comments    last comment  don3605
That and their retirement program, put them on Social Security like the rest of us.

Do people matter anymore?    Brian Fuller
In a recent post in The Atlantic, a capital- and derivatives-markets lawyer concludes that people are becoming less valuable to companies.
  post comment   16 comments    last comment  seaEE
I've never seen a robot take home a paycheck (er, I mean have one autodposited in their bank ...

IP Nightmares    Brian Bailey
While we accept the necessity of IP, everyone seems to have plenty of grips as well. What are your biggest complaints about IP developers or users?
  post comment   6 comments    last comment  M_S
I've been using some IP from Altera for a DDR2 SDRAM memory controller. I have not been able to get ...

What were they thinking: no transparency    Brian Bailey
I am getting on my soapbox today to complain about the way tickets are sold for large concerts. This may not be true where you are but this is the way it is done in Portland…
  post comment   2 comments    last comment  WKetel
In the Detroit area the original problem was that scalpers would purchase all of the good seats at ...

My MP3 player won't shut up    Bill Schweber
Thanks to some type of hardware/software glitch, my inexpensive MP3 player just won't shut down.
  post comment   13 comments    last comment  MarvA
I've had to use the 7-second rule on the power button on every computer that I've dealt with in the ...

Do you deserve a Christmas bonus?    Sylvie Barak
Did you slave the year away and not get a bonus? Did you expect one?
  post comment   9 comments    last comment  David Ashton
The (very) difficult part is getting your boss to offer them...

Asian-Americans dominating tech?    Sylvie Barak
After some dubious number crunching, the San Jose Mercury News claims Silicon Valley has been taken over by an Asian-American invasion.
  post comment   30 comments    last comment  chanj
One of the key statistics is the Asian population growth in Bay Area. It will tell us whether the ...

An eBay for engineering talent    Sylvie Barak
UK initiative offers something of a cross between an online matchmaker and an engineering careers site.
  post comment   1 comment    last comment  yuzz3n
Your site provided us with valuable information to work with. Each & every tips of your post are ...

Telecom's messiest wiring?    Sylvie Barak
It's hard to make wiring look tidy, but it's also fairly difficult to make it look quite this complicated!
  post comment   9 comments    last comment  WKetel
There was a photo published a few years back that showed a similar mess of wires in a city in India, ...

Engineering horror at Disney    Dave Riness
When roller coasters go wrong...very, very wrong.
  post comment   3 comments    last comment  MVD
Unfortunately, Lucky never lets you pick.

Engineering Horror: Shock of a lifetime    Stephen Taylor
As we approach Halloween, EE Life brings you tales of horror, extreme current and severed body parts, as engineers tell us their real life horror stories.
  post comment   10 comments    last comment  DaStargzer
"Shocking! Positively shocking!" -- James Bond (Goldfinger) I remember as a pre-teen using two ...

Technology Insight Report: Fiber Optic Sensors    Robin Luniya
This report takes a look into the patenting activity around fiber optic sensors uncovering the companies, inventors, intellectual property trends and other key indicators. Fiber optic sensor is a sensor that uses optical fiber either as the sensing element ("intrinsic sensors"), or as a means of relaying signals from a remote sensor to the electronics that process the signals ("extrinsic sensors"). This report graphically analyzes fiber optic sensor markets from many perspectives, categorizes and highlights the key companies involved, defines unique keywords. This report also covers the global fiber optic sensors marketplace. It focuses particularly on the markets and opportunities for fiber optic sensors in defense, oil and gas exploration and drilling, medical, and industrial markets. The study considers future opportunities for new application markets. This report was prepared by mining patent data using Patent iNSIGHT Pro, a comprehensive patent analysis platform that helps one accelerate time-to-decision from patent analysis activities. Read More on http://www.patentinsightpro.com/techreports.html
  post comment   1 comment    last comment  hm
Conceptually, Fibre optic sensors have immense potentail in real world applications. However, they ...

Market Barriers to entry in commodity capacitor market?    David Warwick
I do consulting research for the Global Commercialization Group at the University of Texas, and I have been assigned research on the commodity capacitor market to assess the difficulty of a foreign capacitor entering the US market. They make an iterative improvement on an aluminum polymer capacitor, and I was looking to see if there was anyone that understood the process of getting commodity components to distributors and the best places to network, like trade shows. Any thoughts, advice or referrals is appreciated.
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I only know Assembly Language ... Am I already Extinct??    Norman Washington
Hello All .. I am due to graduate this year from university with a degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering. (British University). One of the first things I noticed is that some of my friends who attended other universities studied either C or Java as the programming language of choice for thier electronics degrees. (which seems to be a resonable thing to do as almost ALL jobs going in the embedded in the industry require C/C++ or Java programming experience). However, our course administrators felt that their students "should be able 'know' the underlying machine and from this be able to 'think at the level of the hardware' which will not only make the very low level aspects of hardware more visible to the student but force them to consider the hardware implications of each program statement written" - in other words, we were taught Assembly Language and no other language throughout the degree course!! Now, I really enjoyed assembly langauge programming .. so much so that my final year project was based on an analogue/digital/embedded control system and the firmware was hand-written assembly code - with high efficiency/optimization as the driving goal..For which I achieved a distinction grade. But now I am about to graduate and I am looking around the various vacancies for electronics engineers and I do not see any requirement for assembly language anywhere!! ... It is almost all C/C++ and even C# (as well as Java). Have I (or rather my lecturers) made a catastrophic mistake ??? Thanks. Bewildered Graduate
  post comment   20 comments    last comment  adipdutt
Well I started with 8085 micro and had to program in hex code in 1983,in 1986 I got my hands on ...