When I was last night again fixing old Nokia N73 cellular phone (needed a touch of soldering iron to make volume button to work again) I remember this article I saw few days ago. Are engineers early adopters? article claims that engineers aren’t early adopters of the latest technology. They are more like past the →
Watch out for well-made (counterfeit) chips. Counterfeit parts are big headache. Saelae tells that they noticed first that many more boards than normal were failing the functional test. The USB chip was running hot. It turned out that every last part was an old revision corresponding to a different (obsolete) part number – the parts →
How to present mathematical expressions using a language that has so little markup for them? Sometimes you can use MathML, but often you need to resort to images. Useful tools and tricks article mentions a nice on-line LaTeX equation writing tool at CodeCogs.com: You type in LaTex or MathML and it creates an image of →
Ethernet switches are the ubiquitous building block of any intelligent network. Ethernet technology is deployed in virtually every organization’s data center. Wide Area Networking (WAN) and Metropolitan Area Networking (MAN) providers need to provide their customers with Ethernet services. Ethernet has also become the de facto networking technology in industrial automation even in mission-critical local →
HackerThings web site is a list of products programmers and hardware hackers would want to own. HackerThings tries to aggregate the coolest products for the extremely tech-minded individual and discerning hacker. Products are posted to HackerThings on a purely is-this-awesome basis. Updates are posted daily. This is an interesting service to follow. →
Eureka! Ditching DRM Decreases Piracy article tells that new paper to be published in the upcoming issue of Marketing Science shows that removing DRM from music leads to a decrease in piracy. Or phrased differently, DRM appears to be an incentive for people to pirate music instead of buying it. The researchers from Rice and →
EMC Basics #5: I/O as critical circuits article gives some useful tips on the EMC issues related to inputs and outputs. Digital inputs/outputs — The key concern for digital interfaces is ESD. A secondary concern is radiated emissions. Radiated susceptibility is rare with digital I/O, although possible at very high RF levels. The solutions for →
The idea if replacing fluorescent light bulbs with LEDs seems to become popular. There are different kind of products made for that purpose, some are good and some not so good. So I felt it was now good time to test this technology. LED technology promises to reduce power consumption about 50% of fluorescent bulbs →
LED retrofit lamps have started to show up on retail shelves. Many players in the LED industry are giddy about the anticipated growth over the next few years. Nevertheless, the road to success for LED lighting will not be completely smooth, as there are a number of pitfalls to navigate. Bumps in the road ahead →
The growing importance of cloud computing along with the increasing utilization of unified data/storage connectivity and the advent of server virtualization have elevated the popularity of 10Gbps Ethernet.There are several connectivity options are available for 10Gbps Ethernet, both over optical fiber and copper cables. 10GBase-T Technology Revisited article tells that the lack of economical cabling →