December 2006 Archive of engeniusBLOG

It's not unusual in this industry to see manufacturers making overly-optimistic claims about their products, and using subtle, often pointless, distinctions in their feature sets to declare their chip, box, or board an industry first. While we don't encourage such practices at EN-Genius Network, it is our policy to publish the manufacturer's press release in its entirety as part of our product reviews and then pick apart any questionable claims they make in our commentary. In fact, taking regular jabs at those inflated claims has become one of our favorite sports. Of course, this also means that we expect to be held accountable for the statements we make.

This was exactly what happened in the case of my December 4, 2006 review of AMCC's new framer/pointer processors in networkZONE, where I'd cited Agere as an e...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

"They looked for dung but found gold, which is just opposite of the experience of most of us." Describing Wilson and Penzias' Bell Labs discovery of the Big Bang radiation.

Claude Shannon would ride his unicycle through the halls of Bell Labs, but when he stopped he invented communications theory. Applying that theory suggested megabit speeds over copper were possible, and DSL is the practical application. Crucial early work came directly and indirectly from the Bell Labs and Telcordia. Today, 160 million homes have DSL connections. Dozens of the engineers whose work has been reported by DSL Prime were deeply influenced by their time at the Labs.

Another great moment came when Wilson and Penzias couldn't get rid of some noise in their radio telescope, even after shoveling off the bat guano. No matter which way they pointed, that three degrees above absolute zero noise wouldn't go away. Eventually, they found an explanat...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

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 >>

The process of delivering news has always been changing over hundreds of years. At first the only news service was restricted to royalty, and noble houses, with the very filtered news being carried by horseback, certainly dating from the times of Ancient Egypt. The first coded messages also date from those times -- with both sender and recipient wary of strategic information falling into wrong hands, especially those messages carried back from scouts during times of conflict.

The rôle of messenger was not an entirely safe occupation...as the hapless herald who brought Brian Blessed's King Richard IV information in the original Blackadder series discovered when met with the bellowed order, "I like not this news! Bring me some other news!"

The public -- those who had any interest ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Hopefully Emma Thompson is heading towards at least an Oscar nomination for her performance as novelist Karen Eiffel in the romance/comedy/tragedy (?) movie Stranger Than Fiction, in which Will Ferrell plays an IRS auditor whose life Eiffel appears to be narrating in a voice he alone can hear: "This is a story about a man named Harold Crick and his wristwatch." Harold is in a major rut and one of the awful things he does in his boring life is to count the number of toothbrush strokes he makes -- in every direction -- during his morning ablutions.

Well, glory be, in these days of product placement in movies (reportedly $55 million in Casino Royale with Ford coughing up $25 million of it), the producers of Harold's movie missed out by not involving Oral-B…

The latest sm...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

It's been about a year and a half since one of our readers offered up a very insightful reality check to my overly-optimistic editorial on the future of solid-state lighting (Blinded by the Light, February 2005) which put the commercial availability of ac-LED room lights just over the horizon. Back then, he pointed out several technical issues that he believed would likely delay the arrival of solid-state area lighting for the masses by at least a couple of years - a prediction that apparently was quite accurate. But with the predicted delays nearly past, and the chatter I'm picking up from my usual sources (and a few kind readers), it looks like we may start to see the first practical ac-LEDs hitting the market some time in 2007.

The most public indicator that ac-LEDs may be hitting the market in a big way is Seoul Semicond...  -- Click Here to Read More >>