audiovideoZONE Archive of engeniusBLOG
Apr 14, 2008 at 00:00
Back in the days when the city of Sunnyvale (in the Bay area) was full of defense contractors in hundreds of specialty buildings - some with hidden rooms, some with strangely equipped basements, others with tunnels that connected buildings together and also led on to military base areas - there were also lots of Soviet spies. They hung around the area’s lounges, in particular, and they must have garnered a lot of after-work chatter because their bosses kept paying their bar bills. It was always amazing to me how many state secrets were out in the open, but these guys didn’t have the technical background to recognize them for what they were. Today it is no different, except that the majority of the baddies are from China. The Chinese-Americans who are in positions of influence in the US are regarded by the FBI as easy targets for the industrial spy, and can be fairly carefully vetted. One of my past bosses, of Chinese origin, was actually visited by the FBI and qu... -- Click Here to Read More >>Posted in audio/videoZONE
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Feb 18, 2008 at 00:00
There have been stories over recent years about Defense Department research into portable power, getting the military to develop their own power through body movement. When you are out on patrol and, maybe, pinned down, that power might just give you the edge to radio for help instead of ending up with a discharged battery. It would also help with night goggle power, and for the other battery powered toys that the Marine grunts now have to wear, some of which, I am sure, we are unaware of. Now there is a civilian breakthrough from the Simon Fraser University, on the doorstep of PMC-Sierra in Burnaby, British Columbia. Remember the flywheel car toys you played with as a kid? Pull them backwards on a level, hard floor and then let them go as they travel a fair distance forward. (They make a great cat tease as well.) This power producing technology is rather akin to tha... -- Click Here to Read More >>Posted in audio/videoZONE
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Jan 07, 2008 at 00:00
On the afternoon of Christmas Eve I went to the store for some items, accompanied by my daughter. Up here in BC there are so many food products with absolutely no preservatives that you have to shop rather more often than in the US. That’s hardly a negative problem – reminds me of my childhood, actually – but with the stores closed on both Christmas Day and Boxing Day (December 26) there are always some last-minute things that come up. On the way home my spouse called (about the only time I leave my cell phone on – when the family is separated) with the need for one last item: paper towels. We diverted to another store – not as popular and with nothing like the same quality of wares, but much easier parking! – and I sent my daughter in with the smallest bill I had in my pocket: $50. I don’t think she has had a banknote bigger than a 20 in her hands before so I urged her not to flash it around and to ensure “you get the right ch... -- Click Here to Read More >>Posted in audio/videoZONE
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Nov 05, 2007 at 00:00
Since humanity's early days, there have been spies. Some generations were more effective than others, and survived longer. The standouts prior to the Twentieth Century were in the days of Queen Elizabeth I. The spymaster's assets included the unlikely -- who simply fitted into their adopted life, role playing with certainty -- but they were in the right place, at the right time, listening carefully.
We have a lot less true spying than that nowadays. There is such a reliance on technology that human intelligence gathering (humint) has been less effective in the last twenty years and, in some cases, has dramatically altered and fixated the causes of a nation. If there had been enough honest humint on the ground in Iraq it would have been difficult for the Bush White House to come up with any cause for invasion. With, apparently, no decent humint on the ground in Iran, history now seems set to tragically repeat itself.
In Britain there has been, since 1911 (and mod... -- Click Here to Read More >> Posted in audio/videoZONE
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Oct 01, 2007 at 00:00
2007 September 29 -- Victoria, BC: Today, my family and I had tea with Al Gore. Not exactly at his table, but pretty close to it.
People in this neck of the woods love the outdoors, and all the wonders of nature that go with it. It's not unusual to see a bald eagle circle above you; a number of whale pods live year round in the pristine waters that surround Vancouver Island; and we recycle like you've never seen before. The Capital Regional District (CRD) is comprised of 13 municipalities in 3 electoral districts that are Greater Victoria plus a bit at the southern tip of the Island. Every second Tuesday your blue bin and blue bag (paper) are picked up curbside, and anything that is recyclable can be tossed in. So our community is a friendly audience for a man who is impassioned about climate change.
But he wouldn't have been here today sa... -- Click Here to Read More >> Posted in audio/videoZONE
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Aug 27, 2007 at 00:00
Summers in our business are usually quiet. This year you could have put the industry in an anechoic chamber and shut the door and not notice that anything had happened.
But those days are nearly at an end. Come the beginning of September the trade shows and conferences start rolling again, and all the news releases associated with them will pour into our e-mail inboxes.
It has always been a mystery why this happens. Most marketing departments seem to think that they absolutely have to have a certain number of releases primed and ready to go for day one - and no earlier - of a trade show. With X number of exhibitors releasing N number of announcements you actually end up with NO coverage. Someone explain noise levels to them, please?
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Jun 11, 2007 at 00:00
Allowing politicians to make choices for us is generically stupid of us. Allowing them to make engineering decisions makes me, at least, want to scream.
A whole swath of politicians, around the world, are offering their sage advice on green issues, and then legislate only those that seem to pan out well when responses from the public show understanding -- and acceptance. When it comes to the really important green issues our elected representatives back off, probably because one or more of their donating financial base complains.
In general there seems to be a total lack of understanding that there are other issues than the simple in-your-face statements that are offered. An electric car, for example, sounds like a wonderfully green choice until you sit down and do the complete energy budget. Where does the electricity come from, using what natural resources? What resources did the manufacture of the battery cost us? It's never a simple line, there is always a total ... -- Click Here to Read More >> Posted in audio/videoZONE
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Apr 30, 2007 at 00:00
I expect we all have things in our wardrobe that would appear to be bizarre to just about anybody else.
Being both a journalist -- to some extent or another -- and an engineer (also, arguably, to some extent or another seeing as I am so totally analog) I have a large number of corporate shirts in my closet donated during visits to the offices of the companies whose products I track. But some years ago my spouse gave me a T-shirt that had a circuit on it: which I would probably not allow myself to be publicly seen in.
Nice little circuit and the immediate thought is that, "this is obviously an FM ratio detector!"
Wrong…
The additional secondary on the input transformer (if it is a winding, and not an RF choke -- á la Foster-Seeley discriminator) has no dc path to ground and what's that series resistor all about? There is also no capacitor... -- Click Here to Read More >> Posted in audio/videoZONE
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Feb 19, 2007 at 00:00
A court in Belgium has decided this week that Google is breaking that country's copyright laws by posting headlines and the first paragraph of items in newspapers published in Belgium.
The case was started by an umbrella copyright protection company, Copiepresse, whose tasks include protecting the country's French and Dutch language newspapers content. The court has decided that the extracts -- which a lot of us look at every day from one country or another -- is not fair use of copyright material and has set a fine of €25,000 (about USD32,500) per day for every day that the materials remain posted on Google's Belgian site.
It is highly unlikely that very many other countries would interpret their own copyright laws in the same way, but there is a general story here about the law and the Internet that needs to be explo... -- Click Here to Read More >> Posted in audio/videoZONE
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Jan 01, 2007 at 00:00
Poor Microsoft. It seems that most of the world secretly hates them and it takes little for that world to heap stuff on them. But sometimes they simply just ask for it. Microsoft Vista is now available as a download on Microsoft's web site and various professional groups have been offering the product at major discounts for a couple of months. But just as surely as a Microsoft product is released you can be sure that it is followed by reports of vulnerabilities. Whether these first weaknesses are significant, or not, there will surely be more. None of us who has some understanding of the progress of a major engineering project will believe that the pieces will always come together cleanly -- however well you think you have designed and specified the interface requirements and limitations. With software, with al... -- Click Here to Read More >> Posted in audio/videoZONE
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Nov 06, 2006 at 00:00
Just a couple of weeks ago (October 2006) we wrote in these pages: "Living in a household with a near-teenager, who has a lot of school peers who seem to be rather more spoiled than the norm, we are in a position to assure the world that portable CD players are no longer "cool." The fact that they are a more sensible and long-term medium for music storage is completely immaterial, as is the CEA forecast's emphasis on generic MP3 players -- whose prices today (and profits) far exceed the introduction prices of portable CD players 10 years ago. It is, once again, down to branding. It is all iPod, iPod, iPod, all the iTime."
Did we get slapped in the face with the Microsoft Zune coming out much better in a thoroughly professional Click Here to Read More >> Posted in audio/videoZONE
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