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With the economy still circling the drain and any engineer lucky enough to still have a job usually doing the work of at least two laid-off colleagues, it’s tougher than ever to justify taking time off to attend a conference. Even as a journalist, I’ve had to carefully consider the cost/benefit ratio of any event I attend these days. That’s why if you’re involved with networking, comms, or wireless, you should consider making the trek to Santa Clara on November 9 where you can pick up a double-dose of critical information on ATCA/MicroTCA technologies at the upcoming ATCA Summit and its companion event, the COM Express Summit. With some notable exceptions, I’ve found that my time is better spent at smaller, more focused events like these where the material is more technical and the signal-to-noise ratio is much better than the humongous free-for-alls like Interop. This year’s ATCA Summit promises to be even more lively and informative than the ones I’ve attended befo...

From day one on the Internet I was a Netscape user. Navigator was my friend. Now, like many old friends, it is no more. On March 1, 2008 the official support for Navigator ended, only a few months after I had abandoned Windows, PCs, and Navigator. I’m sure that I didn’t cause the demise of the application – that was surely unfair business practices from Microsoft – but my changeover to a Mac system made it necessary. Choosing to go to a Mac instead of another PC at that time? No brainer… From day one with the Mac there are a few things I missed, and still miss, about the PC: the additional delete key; a Microsoft Excel package that is not dumbed down, as it is in the Mac version; the availability of many more standard symbols in Word for the PC. But the move to Firefox, rather than Apple’s Safari, has been mostly a positive one, probably mentally primed by the fact that Netscape itself favored a move in that direction rather than any kind of move to its famed arch-rival f...

It’s a familiar story, even to those with only a passing acquaintance with Classical literature and lore – how the Roman Emperor Nero, oblivious to the plight of the masses he appeased with bread and circuses while indulging in his own chosen debaucheries (some of which outdid Caligula, which is saying something), famously fiddled, as the streets of Rome blazed below his palace. This week, another fire has been in the news, at least in the United States. It is, famously, the case of one rural homeowner in Tennessee. Because his dwelling was outside the boundary line of the nearest city’s fire department, and because he had failed to pay the annual $75 “subscription” fee demanded by that fire department, the firefighters who responded to a 911 call reporting the fire refused to take action, other than to protect the property of neighbors who, presumably, had paid the fee. Instead, despite the homeowner’s entreaties and declaration that he would happily pay “whatever i...

For those of us who were introduced to the brave new world of the Internet and e-mail, in the early days, things for the average non-academic user seemed to be dominated by AOL and CompuServe. My first e-mail address, with the strange formatting that was needed to access anybody else not on CompuServe, worked well enough for me in those first couple of years. To be rid of CompuServe at a later date, however, I was forced to actually cancel the credit card that their charges were being made to...and it was not an operation that allowed for easy termination of services. I now only know one professional user who, inexplicably, retains a CompuServe account, and I have no contacts at all with any AOL addresses. Quite frankly, I distrust anybody who uses such services these days, almost as much as I assume that users of Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and the like are somehow trying to hide their real identities and are not serious about what they are doing. The greatest mistake that was ever made in business acquisitions ...