Mostly IBM-developed schematic capture, simulation, and physical design tools. I also did some work on test structure verification using an IBM-designed tool.
Tools available in the current ASIC methodology are on the IBM website. Some of these would have been used back then, too.
I worked on the RS64III ("Pulsar") from June 1997 until March 1998, as a designer of the on-chip bus clock multiplier circuits. This part of the processor was hard-core, full-custom, transistor-level circuit design!:)
I would bet that the Marketing Head has more influence with the CEO than the Engineering Head.
Again, this varies.
In my company, our business unit (only about 2% of employees) has its own marketing group. Exactly which products/feature sets we design is determined by this group, not a corporate "Marketing Head." The CEO cares that we make money and satisfy customers more than he cares whether we have feature x.
My point is: in some cases, engineers have some room to deliver all the features that marketing has dictated while still making the product easy and enjoyable to use.
Then the engineering dept gets the WORD FROM ABOVE, and creates the product. Instant plethora of features.
While the influence of the marketing department varies (i.e., to what extent is their word "from above"), the engineers and programmers usually have some influence on how the features are implemented. (See one of my other comments.)
Re:Well they could...
on
KISS
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The engineers do deserve some of the blame, too.
In my business unit (major networking-component supplier), marketing delivers a "requirements document," enumerating the feature-set that they believe customers want. Some of this is gratuitous "feature-bloat," sometimes to target a specific customer. However, there often aren't restrictions on how the designers implement these requirements.
Engineers will often design what's easy and fulfills the requirements. Or deliver a design that makes sense to them, because they designed it.
This is where understanding the users' goals, performing usability testing, etc., are important.
Activity-Centered Consumer Electronics Design
on
KISS
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· Score: 1
Don Norman, a colleague of usability expert Jakob Nielsen (who is quoted in the article), has a great essay about "activity-centered design" and the highly-usable Harmony Remote Control.
Toss out one claim, and the whole patent is invalid.
While IANAL, I don't believe this is--in general--true. A good patent lawyer or agent will construct the claims in a hierarchical fashion. In this way a very general claim may be tossed out in court, leaving the more specific claims to stand.
Look at recently bemoaned patent6,671,714. It only has two claims. One (#1) is that is very general and less likely to stand up in court, and another (#2) in which the method of claim 1 is used specifically for members of a licensed profession (perhaps less likely to have prior art).
Such commercials . . . show how companies must explain the value of complex technology to consumers who may be unaware of the capabilities of their personal computers or mobile phones.
You mean I can make a phone call . . . from my car?!
1. Give an estimate of how long (in man-hours) it'll take to do project D.
Be careful about using "man-hours" (or "person-hours," "person-weeks," etc.), though. As they say, it takes a woman nine months to have a baby, but nine women cannot have a baby in one month.
Take care to consider what can be accomplished faster by applying more bodies to the task, and what will take one week no matter who (or how many) work on it.
Currently, 10 Gigabit Ethernet only runs over fiber and InfiniBand cables
IEEE Std. 802.3ae doesn't even specify running over InfiniBand cables. Per the standard, your choices are:
10GBASE-S: 62.5 micron or 50 micron multi-mode fiber (MMF)
10GBASE-L/E: Types B1.1 and B1.3 single-mode fiber (SMF)
I believe that--in order to leverage 10 GbE electronics and optics--the InfiniBand Trade Association specified a 10.000 Gbd serial attachment option that works much like 10 GbE (Four lower-rate 8B/10B-encoded lanes serialized and 64B/66B encoded. However, this is not part of the IEEE standard.
is it realistic to suppose . . . 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 1 Terabit Ethernet, and 10 Terabit Ethernet will be seperated by merely two years each?
I think not. 10 GbE hasn't exactly taken the world by storm and it's been around for over a year now.
I agree wholeheartedly. Not only is demand for 10 GbE optics (here, here, and here) weak -- it took approximately 2 years for IEEE to ratify the standard (802.3ae).
Only a protocol name change is needed. And the name change is merely the acknowledgment that Ethernet protocols can tunnel through other protocols (such as DWDM) (and vice versa).
It's even simpler than this, in a way. "Ethernet" denotes a protocol. But in Ethernet parlance, "DWDM" is a Physical Medium Dependent (PMD) sublayer. 10 Gb/s Ethernet (802.3ae) already includes a WDM PMD, 10GBASE-LX4.
What bothers me about these layoffs is that executive pay continues to RISE! If you drop a ceo's pay by a million, you save 20 or so 50k a year jobs.
Point well taken. For whatever it's worth, though, in the large corporations I've work for, the burden rate for software/engineering/IT-types is usually considered to be $100k - $150k per year, regardless of salary. So, if you cut the CEO's salary by $1 000 000, you could save 6 - 10 $50k jobs, not 20.
If your hard drive has started to show garbled characters in the BIOS at boot, or just does not pick up. You may be victim to what could be the biggest hard drive manufacturer failure rate yet!
Excellent use of a period as a comma.
a failure rate of %90
Unit labels should appear after the quantity. A quantity expressed as a percentage is not a rate but a ratio.
Sometime you have to put extra text within tables that seeing person does not need, however to make the screen reader make sense you need this extra text.
Yes, write valid HTML and use alt properties that are meaningful. Even better, use the right tag for the job. Don't use tables for layout. Use CSS, which has been a W3C recommendation since 1996. Mark up the content according to it's purpose (striving for a more semantic web). Support web standards, including standards-compliant browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . as opposed to the UNIX influence, where everything is defined as a file.
Mostly IBM-developed schematic capture, simulation, and physical design tools. I also did some work on test structure verification using an IBM-designed tool.
Tools available in the current ASIC methodology are on the IBM website. Some of these would have been used back then, too.
I worked on the RS64III ("Pulsar") from June 1997 until March 1998, as a designer of the on-chip bus clock multiplier circuits. This part of the processor was hard-core, full-custom, transistor-level circuit design! :)
Not sure, but . . .
10Gbs seems faster than copper can go to me.. . . it likely won't be on a single cable. For example, Gigabit Ethernet on Cat5 uses four pairs and PAM5 signalling to acheive 1 Gb/s.
Most of this so-called plentiful dark fiber is long-haul stuff, though (cross-country, major-city-to-major-city).
Again, this varies.
In my company, our business unit (only about 2% of employees) has its own marketing group. Exactly which products/feature sets we design is determined by this group, not a corporate "Marketing Head." The CEO cares that we make money and satisfy customers more than he cares whether we have feature x.
My point is: in some cases, engineers have some room to deliver all the features that marketing has dictated while still making the product easy and enjoyable to use.
Try this.
While the influence of the marketing department varies (i.e., to what extent is their word "from above"), the engineers and programmers usually have some influence on how the features are implemented. (See one of my other comments.)
In my business unit (major networking-component supplier), marketing delivers a "requirements document," enumerating the feature-set that they believe customers want. Some of this is gratuitous "feature-bloat," sometimes to target a specific customer. However, there often aren't restrictions on how the designers implement these requirements.
Engineers will often design what's easy and fulfills the requirements. Or deliver a design that makes sense to them, because they designed it.
This is where understanding the users' goals, performing usability testing, etc., are important.
Don Norman, a colleague of usability expert Jakob Nielsen (who is quoted in the article), has a great essay about "activity-centered design" and the highly-usable Harmony Remote Control.
While IANAL, I don't believe this is--in general--true. A good patent lawyer or agent will construct the claims in a hierarchical fashion. In this way a very general claim may be tossed out in court, leaving the more specific claims to stand.
Look at recently bemoaned patent 6,671,714. It only has two claims. One (#1) is that is very general and less likely to stand up in court, and another (#2) in which the method of claim 1 is used specifically for members of a licensed profession (perhaps less likely to have prior art).
While this may be a worthy point, you may want to check a dictionary.
You mean I can make a phone call . . . from my car?!
Except when using a spell-checker.
Be careful about using "man-hours" (or "person-hours," "person-weeks," etc.), though. As they say, it takes a woman nine months to have a baby, but nine women cannot have a baby in one month.
Take care to consider what can be accomplished faster by applying more bodies to the task, and what will take one week no matter who (or how many) work on it.
IEEE Std. 802.3ae doesn't even specify running over InfiniBand cables. Per the standard, your choices are:
I believe that--in order to leverage 10 GbE electronics and optics--the InfiniBand Trade Association specified a 10.000 Gbd serial attachment option that works much like 10 GbE (Four lower-rate 8B/10B-encoded lanes serialized and 64B/66B encoded. However, this is not part of the IEEE standard.
I agree wholeheartedly. Not only is demand for 10 GbE optics (here, here, and here) weak -- it took approximately 2 years for IEEE to ratify the standard (802.3ae).
It's even simpler than this, in a way. "Ethernet" denotes a protocol. But in Ethernet parlance, "DWDM" is a Physical Medium Dependent (PMD) sublayer. 10 Gb/s Ethernet (802.3ae) already includes a WDM PMD, 10GBASE-LX4.
Wheat Chex - "Contains wheat."
A PDA watch also poses a problem for those odd folks like me who wear their watch on the same wrist as the hand with which they write . . .
Nobody ever told me that was not the "right" way to wear a watch!
Point well taken. For whatever it's worth, though, in the large corporations I've work for, the burden rate for software/engineering/IT-types is usually considered to be $100k - $150k per year, regardless of salary. So, if you cut the CEO's salary by $1 000 000, you could save 6 - 10 $50k jobs, not 20.
There's no question here.
Excellent use of a period as a comma.
Unit labels should appear after the quantity. A quantity expressed as a percentage is not a rate but a ratio.
"It's?" I'm so ashamed.
Yes, write valid HTML and use alt properties that are meaningful. Even better, use the right tag for the job. Don't use tables for layout. Use CSS, which has been a W3C recommendation since 1996. Mark up the content according to it's purpose (striving for a more semantic web). Support web standards, including standards-compliant browsers.
How about, "OK! You're anal."