acquisitionZONE Archive of engeniusBLOG
Apr 07, 2008 at 00:00
I don’t remember when I received my first Nigerian scam letter – it certainly wasn’t while I was living there – but once the first had arrived, they flew by air mail fast and furious. Now, of course, you don’t get to collect new Nigerian stamps as the method of delivery has gotten so much faster: by e-mail. As the scam, and all its wonderful lottery derivatives, is basically a numbers game, e-mail could not be a more perfect delivery scheme. That people still fall for them is quite unbelievable to me: it shows that there is an innate greed in humans. How do I know people still fall for it? Because the e-mails would stop coming if they were failing to work on some tiny percentage of returns. There is even a site listing 542 different scam letters that have been found over the years! It doesn’t seem to matter which country the hostaged millions of dollars are supposed to be i... -- Click Here to Read More >>Posted in acquisitionZONE
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Feb 11, 2008 at 00:00
The first organic LED (OLED) was in Sony’s research laboratory in Japan many years ago, before I transitioned from engineering manager to journalist. I was sworn to secrecy (but not with a NDA) and was told, rather gushingly, that this would be the future of television displays. Considering that what I was looking at was only a few millimeters square, I had to accept the intensity of their belief. Most of us now have an OLED on their person, in the form of the tiny display on the front window of our cell phones. But it is a huge jump to go from there to a watchable color display. I was fortunate to be shown a non-working prototype at NAB in Las Vegas in 2007 and now, after all these years, the TV has become a reality. On February 29th Sony will release the XEL-1 OLED television in Canada (it was earlier announced at CES in Las Vegas). The 11-inch screen TV will be priced at an astoun... -- Click Here to Read More >>Posted in acquisitionZONE
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Dec 17, 2007 at 00:00
When I lectured at a college in the UK we did a lot of hands-on broadcast engineering. In my lab I had a couple of high-power TV transmitters -- one VHF and one UHF -- while in another building we had a complete TV studio with associated telecine and recording equipment. I normally had no involvement with the baseband equipment operation but some of the research that went on there fell into my lap for tutoring when it involved mathematics. One of the pieces of work (which I cannot now find online) dealt with the effect of violence in TV content on the mind of the young. For an early 1970s project it was ambitious, and the research and the statistics bogged down the work for quite a while. But the pattern that emerged quite clearly showed that there were links to viewing violence and acting on it later in life. Hundreds of offenders, convicted of violent behavior, indicated that again and again in their answers to questionnaires. That research has been duplicated i... -- Click Here to Read More >>Posted in acquisitionZONE
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Oct 29, 2007 at 00:00
Politicians are usually believed to be the most likely to cover up problems, lies, errors, illegal activities, breaches of The Constitution. Although the first fingers always point at Richard Nixon, it would be really hard to argue that there aren't a lot more cover ups going on today: domestic and international. Bad news, too, whether it is about the real circumstances in Iraq, or the state of the economy being created by a government that has let the US Dollar spiral down -- creating problems in other countries -- also needs to be hidden, or a story spun about the fact that a gullible public can/will buy.
In 2005, NASA (still believing that the "Aeronautics" in its name is relevant, although a lot of us believe this is an agency that is merely cover for what is essentially a division of the military) finished a survey of thousands of commercial pilots -- airlines and general aviation -- about safety in the skies of America. It has continued to decli... -- Click Here to Read More >> Posted in acquisitionZONE
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Sep 24, 2007 at 00:00
On the very first edition of The Colbert Report (pronounced as "Col-BEAR Re-PORE"), on October 17, 2005 (Oh, my word, nearly two years of genius!) on Comedy Central, Stephen introduced the world to truthiness. He coined the word only minutes before the taping started and it featured in the segment he calls The Wørd, where his statements are comedically criticized by on-screen text that is reality for most of us.
Truthiness, which has been hailed as a wonderful new word, was defined by Stephen as "what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer, as opposed to what reality will support."
A superb example is the kind of statement that comes from the White House, almost on a daily basis. "The surge is working and we can bring back 5000 troops at the end of this month." Sure fe... -- Click Here to Read More >> Posted in acquisitionZONE
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Aug 20, 2007 at 00:00
When I was a child in England, my uncle - a Catholic priest in Oregon - would often send my brothers and myself each a Dollar bill as a Christmas present (together with salmon he had caught, canned in nearby Winchester Bay). We would take our bills to the bank and receive, in exchange, 5 Shillings, which was the fixed rate of exchange set up to help Britain repay the huge loans of military materiel made by the US during WWII. Even the slang for 5 Shillings was a "dollar." With 20 Shillings to the Pound, that was a USD4 to GBP1 exchange rate.
Then the gloves came off exchange rates -- allowing the marketplace to determine what they should be -- and when Nigeria punished the UK by, overnight, pulling all its Sterling holdings and converting them into US Dollars, there were major economic problems in the UK and the difference between a Pound and a Dollar was su... -- Click Here to Read More >>Posted in acquisitionZONE
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Jun 04, 2007 at 00:00
The time of Spring growth in the garden is a happy one: the roses are budding -- trying to burst forth their colors and aromas; the first strawberry was harvested yesterday and some of the seeds of beans, corn, peas and radishes have germinated, waiting for the moment I have time to transplant them, so another batch can then be started.
But while we help nature on its way, and wonder whether the apple trees have done their own thing and properly pollinated, how often do we sit back and ponder how our own professional growth is doing?
I remember it as being a very natural process when I was much younger; you leave college with your bit(s) of swankily-embossed paper, having been measured and measured over the previous years. And then you are in a world where someone will still be measuring you to see what pay raises you might get; what promotions you might be offered. But the people doing that job, you find, are rather perfunctory at their duties and you cannot be sure... -- Click Here to Read More >> Posted in acquisitionZONE
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Apr 16, 2007 at 00:00
When you read this I will be, once more, in Las Vegas for Spring NAB 2007. It is not the show it was when I first went, with a BBC badge on, so many years ago. It is bigger, of course; it is now always in Las Vegas (where else could you get the kW-h needed?); and it shouldn't have the word "broadcasting" in the title anymore.
The not-for-profit lobbyist organizers of this handsomely profitable gathering tried, for a few years, to alter the perception of the conference and exhibits in terms of it all being a multimedia gathering. But that does not work any more, either. Go into any modern television studio's equipment areas and it is all about servers, microprocessors and software. Sure, the signal path starts with an analog pick-up on a camera and ends with an analog display but those digital guys have taken over the rest of the chain.
But, again and again, it seems to me that the designers who put these grand digital boxes together don't understand anythin... -- Click Here to Read More >> Posted in acquisitionZONE
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Feb 12, 2007 at 00:00
Whenever someone says something is foolproof, totally secure, impregnable, etc, most engineers would just smile politely and move on to something real. So it is with Chip and PIN, a technology that is now virtually universal in Europe.
The process is supposed to take all the anxiety out of credit or debit card transactions in public places. The consumer's card is fitted with an RFID chip; when the time comes to pay the bill, the card can be inserted into a reader and the purchase is confirmed by the entry of the ubiquitous four-digit PIN. The double ID ensures that the card is real and that the user is real. In places like restaurants your card doesn't leave your hands: a portable, wireless reader can be taken directly to your table. All credit/debit cards issued in the last couple of years in Europe are chip-equipped. There has been some confusion with retail establishments occasionally refusing cards not so equipped, although on my last trip to Europe I had no problem with my Nor... -- Click Here to Read More >> Posted in acquisitionZONE
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Dec 18, 2006 at 00:00
A Weird Year Draws To A Close
by Paul McGoldrick
Most of the US population is unaware of the current value of the US Dollar because it "doesn't concern them day-to-day." Think again. Over the last months the Dollar has slipped to a position where the Euro is 30% more valuable, and for a single British Pound you will today get just about USD $2. You think gas prices went out of control, but it is more that the US Dollar is out of control.
The weak Dollar is filling transatlantic airplanes -- even with extra flights being added to the routes -- and the voices next to you in Times Square in the weeks before Christmas are more likely to have British than New York accents. Even carrying bags of loot back into the UK worth way over the permitted allowances, one's paid duties and flight costs are totally recoverable after spending more than about $1500. And people are buying a lot, lot more than that.<... -- Click Here to Read More >> Posted in acquisitionZONE
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Oct 23, 2006 at 00:00
If you believe that having the latest thing, the upgrade, the newest widget in consumer electronics is of no consequence to the public, think again. The Consumer Electronics Association reports in its 13th Annual CE Holiday Purchase Patterns study that consumers in the US will spend $21 billion in the holiday season of 2006, an increase of 21% over 2005. With a US population just passing 300 million this week that represents $70 for every human.
This indicates a consumer belief in the economy -- I guess they believe what they are told, again and again -- and is a happy outcome for the consumer electronics industry and, by extension, all the semiconductor vendors involved in supplying parts. But that is a little stretch, maybe: this week is the first that I have ever included a PRC URL in a news item for, of all things, an RF part. That product ingenuity should be of considerab... -- Click Here to Read More >> Posted in acquisitionZONE
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