November 2008 Archive of engeniusBLOG

Greetings from New York City, home of Ground Zero, some of the quirkiest high-fashion restaurants on the planet, and, at least for this week, Greentech Media’s Energy Innovations conference. The conference’s unusual blending of renewable energy and energy conservation technologies with savvy venture capital strategies is a clear indicator that green power is finally beginning to infect the mainstream business community. Interactive 2-way power grids, ocean wave and tidal generating systems, and other technologies that had seemed too radical (or had not even existed) a couple of years ago are now being seriously considered as key ingredients of a strategy to repair the global economy and guidepo...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Everyone surfs the Web these days when looking for suppliers of components and devices. In fact, it makes me wonder why major distributors such as Arrow, Digi-Key, and Mouser send out those monstrously expensive telephone book size paper catalogs.

When I peruse supplier Web sites, I’m often astonished at the policies companies have with respect to sampling. Some firms, such as Analog Devices and CoilCraft, eagerly send you samples. CoilCraft even ships them by Federal Express. Other outfits, such as Fairchild Semiconductor, seem less than enthusiastic about sending samples, erecting all sorts of obstacles, making it tough to test and evaluate products hands-on.

A lot of companies will not send samples to technicians or students. Worse, most will not sample to hobbyists or Radio Amateurs. Don't companies realize that ham radio enthusiasts and hobbyists are often engineers? Moreover, today's student may be tomorrow’s engineer or purchasing agent.
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The 2008 Federal Election cycle has clearly shown that the way things are run in the US needs to change, and change before 2012.

Ideally, of course, the whole set-up should be changed to a parliamentary system, so that the day after elections the removal trucks are lined up on Pennsylvania Avenue and the exiting Presidential family drives off at 11:59 AM as the new President is being sworn in outside The Capitol. The timing should change too: the notion that the Oval Office is a secure job for four years for its incumbent no matter what he/she does is not democracy. They should be subject to public opinion. I realize that kind of change is never going to happen, but things sure could be improved over what happens today by moving closer to parliamentary thinking.

I made the point last week – when I was dissing our industry yet again for its general behavior when an ec...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Now that the US elections are over, it’s time for everyone to pull together as a single nation to face the economic, social and environmental challenges that our differences have distracted us from for so long. Fortunately, there are so many things that even the most steadfast Blue-Stater and Red-Stater have in common that we will be able to find the common ground we need to help make the country strong, proud and a beacon of hope again. For my money, one of the best common touchstones we have is science fiction. While not everyone’s cup of tea, my experiences back in 1989 when I was building Mars Observer, an unmanned interplanetary space probe, taught me that a love for stories that predict an exciting, hopeful future can transcend much bigger differences than the ones we face today.

As the payload accommodations officer on the Mars Observer program, I was invited to ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Every time that I go into a meeting with an analog vendor it is inevitable that I will be told things about their product direction, their roadmap – things that they will not talk about with most other journalists. They know, historically, that I do not share their confidential information with their competitors or anybody else – nor do I write about it until the time has come.

Why then, do employers not share the same trust with employees when they decide to move on, to improve their career, to gain new experiences and skills?

The State of California is fortunate that it has a Supreme Court that believes non-compete agreements are, basically, unenforceable and unnecessary – that they are against the whole spirit of allowing someone to chose their own path. I would go further and say that non-compete agreements are slavery.

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The adage there's nothing new under the sun may be true, but sometimes that which we know can take on new shape and meaning. Such is the case with graphene, a material comprised of a single plane of atoms “pulled” from conventional graphite. The inverse way of conceptualizing this is that common graphite is made up of layers of graphene.

Jointly discovered by Dr. Kostya Novoselov and Professor Andre Geim at the School of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Manchester in England, graphene can actually form molecule-sized transistors. This breakthrough is so important that Novoselov and Geim were awarded the Europhysics Prize for Condensed Matter Physics for discovering graphene and its electronic properties.

Especially intriguing is that as you make graphene transistors smaller, they will likely tend to outperform silicon devices. Researchers are Click Here to Read More >>

When I first started publishing our Green Holiday Gift Guide in 2002, the pickings were pretty slim. Back then, buying an environmentally-responsible gift usually involved a trip to the health food store for some cruelty-free soap or buying a pair of sandals made from recycled tires at your local hip boutique. About the closest thing to green technology I could find were some early LED flashlights and a small folding solar panel that could be used to charge up those new-fangled NiMH batteries. Happily, this has changed radically in the past year or two, with hundreds of mainstream high-tech and low-tech manufacturers getting into the act.

Last year’s Green Holiday Gift Guide overflowed with exciting choices that put a smile on your face without punching a hole in the Ozone Layer. In fact, there was so much green tech on the market ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

As I write this the Federal Elections will be underway in exactly a week, choosing a new President for the US. There is another vote planned for the same day...not as important for the world, perhaps, but extremely important to US connectivity. On November 4, 2008, the FCC will meet to vote on the future of so-called White Space, the parts of the RF spectrum that are empty of TV broadcasting – spaces that will dramatically increase on February 17, 2009 when 1754 full-power TV transmitting stations shut down their analog services and free the power grid from a lot of mostly-wasted energy use.

For a couple of years the FCC has been testing wireless devices to use on these white space channels, mostly satisfactorily. Not everyone agrees with the opening of these channels for commercial license-free wireless use,...  -- Click Here to Read More >>