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Something weird happened after I posted TranSwitch’s announcement of its Taurus configurable communication platform in last week’s networkZONE news. Sometime between the time I put the news section to bed (around Midnight on Thursday) and when I checked on it Monday morning, the announcement disappeared. At first I figured that I’d somehow copied the wrong link from their web site when I spotted it during my weekly news scan, but when I went back to check I found that the announcement for Taurus had vanished without a trace. If you checked the link I posted, you’ll fhave found an announcement for a 10 Gbit/s HDMI core in its place.A chill went up my spine as I wondered if fourteen years of tech journalism had finally taken its toll and I’d started hallucinating the news. Fortunately, a bit of sleuthing around the Internet (thanks for the suggestion, Paul!) revealed that TranSwitch had indeed made the announcement and that copies of it were still available in other locations (see ...

Few people have gone into a police station to say to the dispatcher, “I need to report a mouse.” I suspect that when I did, the dispatcher had her foot near the floor panic button, but she did calm down a little when told the details.I had just come down from an escarpment where a number of the city transmitters were located. In one particular building (QTH) were a couple of FM transmitters (that I looked after) plus an analog cellular basestation (with alarms always going off), a pager transmitter, and the City’s communication racks. I had seen the mouse scarper into the police racks as I came in the door.The dispatcher still didn’t really get it. The mouse was healthy looking and rather well fed, I told her. “What do you think it’s eating?” I asked. A shake of the head from her. “Cable insulation,” I told her. “Your cable insulation!”Anybody who has worked on transmitter stations has encountered the odd rodent. Usually, it is by smell. Not be...

Old habits die hard. I admit to subscribing to print publications. With decades of editorial experience, I scrutinize these journals closely, looking for technical accuracy, nuances of page layout, typefaces, the use of catchy headlines and subheads, art elements and color.The way a magazine's art director manages editorial photographs is sometimes amusing. The goal of a good photo of a department editor, for example, is to make the reader feel he or she is in a warm and friendly word-for-word relationship with an expert. Ideally, the editor's countenance hops from the page into the reader's imagination, creating the notion of discourse.%IMG_left_full_466%The traditional photo is a block image in a corner of the page. The editor is neatly attired and smiling, of course. The tiny block may be black-and-white or color, appearing either at the beginning of a column, or perhaps at the conclusion of a story.In the mid-1970s heyday of print, every top-tier art director tried to outdo its competitors. Innovation was...

It seems like aeons since the decision came from the FCC to set a date for the cessation of analog terrestrial TV. At the time, it felt like it was just a date chosen at random (it was) and that the majority of stations would have a hard job funding the conversion to digital. And it is now only nine months until when it is all supposed to happen.Digital TV isn’t actually digital, of course; from my perspective you cannot get any more analog than an RF signal – whatever the modulation used…And the FCC didn’t actually decide that all terrestrial TV would have digital modulation by February 17, 2009: only the high-power ones. They excluded low-power TV (LPTV) and translators. And in any one State those run into hundreds of transmitters. Have a look at Oregon, for example. The latest number that I could find for the number of stations that are now simultaneously broadcasting digital modulation is 1624, out of a total of 1760, that is a 92.3% compliance. Sounds like a good number until you...

Last weekend my town held a Smart Energy Expo, rolling it out with the fanfare of an old time circus. Naturally, I couldn't resist attending, and was glad I did. There were a number of innovative automotive products on display. One 2008 model that caught my eye was a diminutive car called the Miles ZX40S. Another petite auto was a 2007 ZENN 2.22LX.Now, I'm no stranger to very small cars. My first sports car was a 1275-cc MG Midget, and I've driven an early Honda Civic and a 3-cylinder SAAB, as well as a number of Austin-Healeys.  All of these cars would be dwarfed by today's SUVs.From a size point of view, the Miles ZX40S is appealing. It has over 40 cubic feet of cargo space, and can seat four. The interior actually looked reasonably spacious.%IMG_left_full_460%Its engine is a Chinese-made 3-phase ac induction motor that Miles claims will deliver at least 100,000 miles of service. The motor uses US-made Curtis-Albright electronics for power conversion and control. The remainder of the car is fabricated ...

My December 2007 Editorial praising the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program (see Negroponte’s Miss is a Hit)  raised some very important questions from readers about whether pushing computers and Wi-Fi networks on people who don’t even have enough to eat at home was the most appropriate use of scarce aid funds. Given the hard facts that 1.2 billion of our fellow passengers on Spaceship Earth live on $1 a day or less, and 800 million people are going hungry, what level of priority should we place on getting these folks access to computers, the Internet, and the services that they deliver? I don’t have any definite answers to offer, but a talk I attended this week may provide a few of the pieces to this complex puzzle.Dr. Marc Fiuczynski, a computer science researcher at Princeton University, didn’t set out to look at how developing nations can use the technologies he works with to lift themselves out of poverty. In fact, his interest in the intricacies of extremely large distribute...

Texting has taken a long time to become fashionable in North America. (Do fashionable and long time create an oxymoron?) It has to be eight years since I saw my nephews and nieces texting in the UK, furiously clicking away at a much lower cost than using voice circuits. When their phones did run out of coverage time, they would have to run down to the corner shop to buy a time-refreshed card.Whether the “language” of texting originated across the Atlantic – and I presume it did – it has caused considerable apprehension to the teachers of English. As long as five years ago a Scottish newspaper reported concerns by teachers about essays being submitted by pupils in the only written language that some of them understood: texting. Other teachers were just happy to get assignments back, whatever their format of submission.That is a sad, sad compromise.Law enforcement in North America has become very dependent on hot lines where concerned citizens – or some people just looking for rewa...

When it comes to motor sports, contemporary kids think of NASCAR and Dale Earnhardt, but I come from a generation where Formula One open-wheel racing was king, and Jim Clark and Tazio Nuvolari were racing icons. Ah, those were the days. Gasoline at 18 cents a gallon fueled our dreams.I digress. Though I haven't followed F1 racing since my youthful treks to Watkins Glen every autumn for the genre's US venue, I am aware that technology's impact on racing cars today is every bit as pervasive as its effect on consumer electronics, medical electronics, or just about anything that packs an embedded controller these days.Mechanical EngineeringForward-looking F1 car designers are summoning revolutionary changes, but not all innovation relies heavily on electronics. Significant is the development of an energy recovery gearbox, which may very well speed around the world's F1 race tracks sometime next year.The energy recovery gearbox recovers energy wasted during a vehicle's braking. Unlike regenerative systems that cha...