October 2008 Archive of engeniusBLOG

There’s nothing like a trip abroad to remind you about all the things you love about the place you call home. My recent trip to Guatemala with a couple of old friends was no exception. As much as I enjoyed the lush jungles, awesome Mayan temples, and sleepy mountain villages, it was a pleasant shock to return to the United States where you can drink the tap water, people don’t treat traffic signs as rough guidelines, and a much smaller percentage of our population suffers under the grinding poverty that I saw in many parts of that otherwise-enchanting country. Spending time in a beautiful nation that’s still recovering from a military dictatorship also helped me savor the freedoms we take for granted here. It also reminded me how quickly those precious rights can be swept away.

Hopefully, whoever wins our Presidential election this November will keep this in mind as they set their administration’s priorities for the next four years.

Earlier...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

People’s belief in technology is amazing. They bank on the Internet; trust ATMs; think debit cards are the best things since money was invented; trust their vote to a machine (built by the ATM guys…); use simple passwords; download trouble; leave their credit card data permanently on some company’s server; allow their shopping habits to be recorded by their loyalty discount card; allow DoubleClick daily access to their computers… People do it without thinking.

Perhaps the most menacing demand made by one human to another is “Papers!” It smells of Nazis, Stalin, repression in general, and when we allow it to become the norm it means that we are accepting the lowest common denominator of human life. It suggests a governance by fear, that we don’t know what the result of being unable to provide satisfactory papers will be. It is totalitarian.

And it is how we have been living for at least the last years. With a government s...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Charley, our two-year-old grandson, spends a lot of time with my wife and me. He's a pal, and we have lots of fun together. He’s bright, too. He has a set of wooden blocks of various shapes, and he knows their names well. I ask him for a rhombus and he gets it. Ditto for the trapezoid, rectangle, triangle, square, circle, and octagon.

It's quite amazing to me see him comprehend these multi-syllable nouns, in spite of the fact that his spoken vocabulary hasn't gone beyond a half dozen words. He doesn't even utter sentences yet.

Entertain and Educate

In my quest to entertain and educate Charley, I'm always on the lookout for action toys and scientific toys, especially ones that don't require batteries. You see, his mom buys him all sorts of plastic toys, many equipped with embedded controllers, lots of flashing LEDs, and speech and sound effects chips. In contrast, I seek action toys that don't require batteri...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

It may seem obvious to many of us – and for quite a while – that lending a family 100% of the appraised value of their home, or 120%(!), or allowing for a lower initial interest rate (or zero interest rate) with changes at fixed time intervals in the future, might not be that stellar an idea. Indeed, it may even be thought of as economic stupidity for both lender and borrower.

The notion that home prices will always increase invites a little mathematic scrutiny. Looking over a long period of time you can infer that this is the case. Simply because of land, a commodity that is only increasing in unusable form by volcanic action, long-term investment in real estate has to be a profitable thing. Short-term, however, anyone who has lived in the San Francisco Bay area, or in Texas, for example, can tell you very different stories.

Now we are in a pickle. The sale of these sub-prime loans (prime used as in condition rather than interest rate) mixed up with d...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Microsoft Vista cannot be regarded as the most successful operating system ever produced. Its launch, since 2001, has been controlled not by Microsoft but by the most incredibly savvy advertising by Apple. “I’m a Mac,” and “I’m a PC” will probably go down in marketing history as one of the most influential, and profitable, campaigns ever to be run. If anyone ever tells you that advertising doesn’t work, this is a prize example to deflate that notion. (It certainly worked here at EN-Genius where needed hardware changes last year scared us off Vista and into the clutches of Steve Jobs products – without changing my opinion of the man’s use of “adult” language.)

That it has taken its toll is now confirmed by the fact that Microsoft is giving computer OEMs another six month extension (t...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Back in the days when 10BASE-T Ethernet was considered to be screaming-fast, gasoline was not much more than a buck-a-gallon and electricity was a few cents per kW-hr. Even when 100BASE-T came on the scene in the early nineties, energy was relatively cheap so nobody really gave much thought about how much power it took to shove a bit across a network. But somewhere around the turn of this new century considerable thermal issues involved with early Gigabit Ethernet technologies aroused the interest of technologists and the seeds for the 802.3az Energy-Efficient Ethernet were planted A recent conversation with Solarflare Communication CTO George Zimmerman provided a good overview on the current status of Energy-Efficient Ethernet (EEE) technologies and standards.

When I talked with Zimmerman a couple of weeks ago, he said that the 802.3az task force was still in the process of defining its requirements but he was hopeful...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

By the time you read this our Congress will probably have rammed some version or another of Treasury Secretary Paulson’s Great Bank Bail-Out Scheme (now being peddled as the “Economic Rescue Plan”) down our collective throat and there’s a good chance that our economy’s ragged ass has been pulled out of the fire – at least for the moment. I’m still stunned at the way Paulson (aided by Bernanke and Cox) managed to ignore the clear warning signs of the imminent financial Tsunami for close to a year and then demand that we drop everything and put him in absolute control of cleaning up the mess he helped create. Somehow this amazing piece of slight-of-hand reminds me of the scene in the movi...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

In the days of the run-up to the Iraq war, I wrote an Editorial decrying the vulnerability of the US GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) system. I argued that GPS jammers, homemade and commercial, might be a threat to military systems that depend on the satellite system for precision timing signals and geographic location data. To underscore my point, I outlined some circuit details for home-constructed jammer transmitters.

At the time, others were more sanguine. In an article in the October 2001 issue of Global Positioning and Navigation News, the author stated US aerospace and defense spokesmen were confident the US arsenal of anti-jamming technology, coupled with the ability to knock out brute-force relatively high-power GPS jammers, would ultimately prevail in a conflict.

Nonetheless, the Global Positioning article's author argued that the cost/benefit calculation needed to fix the ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

My beloved Sony home theater receiver succumbed to PA failure some weeks ago. It was quick and it didn’t suffer. I did. It wasn’t time for it to go - it was too young; too ready to live; too ready to serve and speak. Its siblings are still alive around the world, although they haven’t been in touch, and my premature death experience is unfair, so unfair.

Life must go on.

But what to do? What technology jump to make? In a household where cable TV is something that is unspeakable, we have satellite service, a line input and output VHS recorder/player, a 29 inch JVC TV receiver with one of the earliest S-Video inputs to be available, and a 5.1 loudspeaker system with a pair of EPI Magnus units for front left and right (so non-PC, but superb) plus miniature Sony center and rear surrounds, and a Sony sub-woofer. No terrestrial inputs are used.

It would have been easy to just replace the receiver for less than $200 and keep the system going ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>