Folks - sad to say, but there is little bit of a disconnect between the IEEE and industry.
The organization is largely dominated by academics, and students. Industry participation is a bit mixed, to say the least.
The Special Interest Groups (SIG) are more effective at getting things done (WiFI alliance, WiMax, ZigBee, Bluetooth, etc)
What happens and gets adopted inside the SIG generally is what happens in the real world. The blessing of the IEEE standard is generally after the fact. If the SIG blesses it, HW and SW move ahead, and you get a timely product development where everyone's stuff plugs and plays together.
Even inside a SIG, the politics and bickering is a tug of war, but the members are motivated to get it done because their companies want to ship products.
As for the IEEE, due to the academic orientation, there is a lack of impetus to produce standards quickly, and practical information is often not welcome in IEEE journal publications. As a reviewer for 2 IEEE journals, I want the practical, but my reviews go against 3-5 others, and its a consensus decision. Often other reviewers want the math analysis pretty, and don't care much that the publication has nothing for real world application or validity.
Go figure -
Oh, and yeah, I truly am a member of the IEEE, Senior Grade, Chapter chair for several societies, and journal reviewer as well. However my efforts are generally swimming against the flow. Because of that, when I publish, I do it in the electronics trade magazines where real world issues are a lot more welcome.
Hey! I got a great deal on penis enlargement, breast enhancement, and this greasy stuff you rub all over your body to increase your sexual desirability scent! Works great! Now if I could only get the dog to stop sniffing me, all the women would be barking at my door!
Sad to say, one of the places that I buy "generic viagra" from would not return my money when it did not work as well as the "super size me" products... I will just have to wait for my money from the deal I made in Nigeria to counter that loss.
There are many examples of electronics devices being dropped into power save mode for one reason or another. This one can be walked over using prior art examples.
Move on everyone, nothing exciting going on here.....
As an ex IBM'er this is pretty typical - IBM blankets technology with patents and many of them are not too terribly good or valid. Others are truly emerging things worthy of patent.
Several of my patents while working for them I said "well this really isn't a new thing" but they had me file anyway. Go figure.
Rule 1 of Professional Survival: Never burn your bridges. Everybody knows everybody in this day and age, and if you make somebody look stupid or get them in trouble, odds are they will cross paths with you sometime in the future and kick you in the cojones for it.
A couple other suggestions:
Get your ducks in a row before giving notice - Get your personal stuff out of the office, gather your contacts/email/phone lists, and remove any property that's yours but might be debated beforehand. Work on the premise that the day you give notice, you will get walked out the front door under supervision.
Worry about the future, not the past - Get the new job, give notice and get out. All the suggestions here about contracting for the old place and similar are utter nonsense. A couple weeks of extra money don't mean anything when you are going to spend the next several years working for the new place. Give priority to that.
HR departments are actually pretty powerless - For the most part HR answers to management, and if your boss wants to make life tough for you, that's whats going to happen. No matter what gets said, the back room policy is the reality, not whats on the front door. Sorry! I have been in jobs where the manager did not want to lose me and blocked me from internal transfers. I was locked in and had to quit the place in order to move on. (HR stated: We have an open transfer policy for employees..... blah, blah, bs...)
You get the idea. In extreme cases, you can get a labor attorney to help with certain issues, (but don't expect to survive in the place after that) but the reality of the matter is a little different. If you are in conflict with those above you, its time to "Hit the Road Jack...."
One of the reasons I work as a contractor is because it keeps you out of office politics.
Its interesting that no matter how much knowledge, data, statistics, etc, are gathered, there will always be those that are never convinced. Be the subject, evolution, global warming, or that the earth is round.
I can find people that will vehemently deny the validity of all three of the above. Sometimes you just want to throw your hands up in the air and quit trying.
My favorite one in the right here and now is "Clean Coal" - Well, if you want to convince us that coal is clean energy, then why don't you build a clean coal plant, and let people come in and measure and analyze your work? If they can demonstrate just one "Clean Coal" plant, then that would be worth more than the tens of millions of dollars put into advertising for clean coal. Sorry, but when this OCO gets running its going to be interesting to see the patterns and observations received on the coal plants spewing CO2, NOx, trace Mercury, Sulfur, and other goodies into the air.
But that doesn't mean it will convince some people...
The Ugly here was a bit more specific than impedance match. The channel BW was 250ish MHz, and modulation was OFDM, with those two things you got to create a 500MHz ADC to convert to get into a DSP system to sort the OFDM signal out. Add a mixer and down converter and the thing sucks so much power its got to have a power cord. Dead in the water, and most RF IC designers predicted that 5 years back.
I designed an UWB receiver for one of the UWB startups 3-4 years back. UWB has a few problems from the start that make it a POS --
1. The wideband nature of the beast and the fact that it uses a roughly 250MHz wide channel. (Its OFDM modulation on a a multichannel structure with 200+ parallel channels) - When You get to the practical nature of the beast, the receiver structures require huge huge amounts of power. UWB's radiated at the antenna power is low, but the amount of juice sucked in to power the beast is huge.
2. Due to (1) its never going to be battery powered. Power cord is a must have. So much for "wireless" duh....
The UWB proponents tried to sell UWB as a way to kill off the interconnect cords for TV-DVR-DVD-BlewRay;) systems. Well, you still got to power plug them so whats the big deal??? Besides, most of that stuff is a "plug once and forget" thing, so its really not that big a deal.
In theory - if you can use a medium to create a NAND gate, then anything and everything needed to create a computer can be defined from that. Again "in theory" is the important catch phrase. You can do that using relays, transistors, vacuum tubes, thermal storage, mechanical logic, and water valves. All have been demonstrated. The practical realization of a big scale machine is another issue.
This, IMHO is an academic concept at best. State definition by thermal state has been done in research before but it is slow, and trying to collect the waste energy in the form of heat and re-use it as the byproduct in another state machine sounds a bit questionable.
Mechanical computers are viable as well, but not too terribly practical.
Yep, I am a total idiot. Glad you told me here publicly, I need to be reminded frequently! Thank You!:)
As an aside, may I suggest "How To Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, I think you might find that it supplements your semiconductor physics knowledge.
boron magically electromigrates or keeps on diffusing? Um, I have been doing ultra high reliability electronics for over 25 years and this is total news to me. Don't think so. I know of electronics in geostationary satellites still humming along over 20 years and still going strong. There probably is even older out there, but I wasn't involved, so I cant say.
Suggest: I would put any and all data storage in multiple formats and multiple copies. Cover your bases. Find a way to seal the system against moisture. (Airtight containers and Silica Gel packets inside.) Provide lots of text based paper documenting the system, and all its hardware and software. (information printed on high quality paper) Multiple disk drives that can be booted from would also be good.
As a side note, the 6800 microprocessor still gets made and used today and thats about 30 years old right now. I have both an Atwater Kent and a Crosley radio from 1928 and 1932 and both of them still run just fine. Not too shabby for 70 year old electronics!
Just to clarify - OFDM is the modulation method used to convery data. Modulation methodology doesnt really tell you much about bandwidth and data rate, since a communication channel design can trade these properties off in an interactive manner when the design standard is defined.
The good news is that WiMax is designed to do data over long distance (measured in Km's) rather than the the duct tape installations of WiFi, which was never supposed to be used for distance data communication. Some of the crazy WiFi installations that are out there are 5 star silly, trying to do things that WiFi systems were never designed to do.
If you want to get into the nitty gritty of the details, the IEEE has the 802.16 standards for all the details as well. The good news is that this time around it actualy seems to be happening. It's out there in a big way (read some of the deployments in the above links) but not widespread yet.
Does this make sense? As a HW person, I dont have a clue, but I would be curious to know what the conventional wisdom is here. Should this stuff be used in an obsolete language, using code constructs that were dictated by HW limitations (Y2K and 2 digit nonsnense) OR Should this be done in something that is HW independent (Java - if I can show my ignorance here) or something like C++?
Reed Solomon codes are a first generation ECC (Error Correcting Code) HDD's used to use RS codes about 30 (yikes! closer to 40 now!) years ago. Since then they have evolved into much more powerful ECC's that are designed to correct the types of errors run into in magnetic storage, which is burst errors. (Due to media defects)
All mass storage has a defined acceptable BER (Bit Error Rate) - and that BER is defined two ways, without ECC application and with. The industry standard for audio and data are different, but the whole idea is get to an acceptable BER after applying an ECC.
This is not news, this is ancient history. The article is applying an ECC method on top of another ECC method inherent to the media. Better BER? Sure, but whats the big deal? Also if you look at classic RS codes they are pretty inefficient, and coding theory is light years beyond that point now.
A set of barbell weights in the office - launch a program and lift a weight or two while waiting for results.
A set of roller blades in the back of the car ready for grabbing and going on a skate.
Sex, with a friendly and willing partner, great cardio!:)
Walks (briskly!) along the beach boardwalk.
Biking.... (need to get more time for that)
Floor exercises, crunches and push ups.
Sometimes to the gym, for cardio on a treadmill or elliptic trainer.
Trying to find time for tennis!
If you enjoy doing it, then you are more likely to stick with it. I was a total blubberball who used to sit at a computer all the time until one day I realized that my inactivity was slowly killing me. Decided to get fit and stay that way.
The lubrication issue was in older drives agreed. I am talking drives post 1992 and newer.
IBM had their collection of problems, as well as Quantum (remember them?) -- I don't have to ask in either case, because I was there so to speak. Quantum would not allow us to properly size the power drive chip and there were lots of failures due to the power driver frying. The thing was designed on the edge of failure to save 5 cents, and the designers inside the place (guilty as charged) kept saying that we needed a better power drive chip.
Save 5 cents in the design, and the net result were gobs of field failures. The finger pointing after the fact was interesting to say the least. I saw that stuff happen at Quantum, Seagate, WD, Conner, Maxtor, and Toshiba now.
The stiction effect has been an issue for many years in the disk drive world. The heads in a HDD are planar against a disk that is also a polished planar surface. The net effect is to require amps of current (briefly) when spinning a disk drive up.
After coming up to speed, there is an air bearing between the two, as the head float on a cushion of air. This effect has been an issue in the HDD world for over 30 years.
Modern media methods that provide interactive feedback on a student progress are a good thing IMHO. Like any other tool however, it can be utilized in a fruitful fashion, or it can be abused.
A lot of the education interaction can be automated, but I still see a need for evaluation and special needs scenarios. Some kids which need either specialized guidance to make headway, or gifted kids that could deal with an accelerated program. Seriously, some kids want to take on calculus and differential equations in the 7th grade! Rare, but true. Last year I was a judge in a local science fair and one of the kids had presented a proof for a mathematical hypothesis, gotten it published in a peer reviewed journal and was getting out of high school early to go attend Harvard on scholarship. They exist on both ends of the 6 sigma curve.
"The supernova explosion occurred about 140 years ago, making it the most recent supernova in the Milky Way as measured in Earth's time frame. Previously, the last known galactic supernova occurred around 1680, based on studying the expansion of its remnant Cassiopeia A."
What that statement means is from the observational perspective of the earth. If it is a 1000 light years away, and we see the event here and now, then it occurred now "as measured in Earth's Time Frame" but actually from the distance, we know the event occurred a 1000 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Folks - sad to say, but there is little bit of a disconnect between the IEEE and industry.
The organization is largely dominated by academics, and students. Industry participation is a bit mixed, to say the least.
The Special Interest Groups (SIG) are more effective at getting things done (WiFI alliance, WiMax, ZigBee, Bluetooth, etc)
What happens and gets adopted inside the SIG generally is what happens in the real world. The blessing of the IEEE standard is generally after the fact.
If the SIG blesses it, HW and SW move ahead, and you get a timely product development where everyone's stuff plugs and plays together.
Even inside a SIG, the politics and bickering is a tug of war, but the members are motivated to get it done because their companies want to ship products.
As for the IEEE, due to the academic orientation, there is a lack of impetus to produce standards quickly, and practical information is often not welcome in IEEE journal publications. As a reviewer for 2 IEEE journals, I want the practical, but my reviews go against 3-5 others, and its a consensus decision. Often other reviewers want the math analysis pretty, and don't care much that the publication has nothing for real world application or validity.
Go figure -
Oh, and yeah, I truly am a member of the IEEE, Senior Grade, Chapter chair for several societies, and journal reviewer as well. However my efforts are generally swimming against the flow. Because of that, when I publish, I do it in the electronics trade magazines where real world issues are a lot more welcome.
Hey! I got a great deal on penis enlargement, breast enhancement, and this greasy stuff you rub all over your body to increase your sexual desirability scent! Works great! Now if I could only get the dog to stop sniffing me, all the women would be barking at my door!
Sad to say, one of the places that I buy "generic viagra" from would not return my money when it did not work as well as the "super size me" products... I will just have to wait for my money from the deal I made in Nigeria to counter that loss.
There are a heap of independents out there doing low cost marketing and can do things on the cheap.
Two possibles:
http://www.fullycaffeinated.com/main.htm
http://shoestringmktg.com/About_ShoeString.html
Two independent marketing people that do it on the cheap.
There are others as well.
Its a starting point!
There are many examples of electronics devices being dropped into power save mode for one reason or another. This one can be walked over using prior art examples.
Move on everyone, nothing exciting going on here.....
As an ex IBM'er this is pretty typical - IBM blankets technology with patents and many of them are not too terribly good or valid. Others are truly emerging things worthy of patent.
Several of my patents while working for them I said "well this really isn't a new thing" but they had me file anyway. Go figure.
I see lots of malicious comments here.
Rule 1 of Professional Survival: Never burn your bridges.
Everybody knows everybody in this day and age, and if you make somebody look stupid or get them in trouble, odds are they will cross paths with you sometime in the future and kick you in the cojones for it.
A couple other suggestions:
Get your ducks in a row before giving notice - Get your personal stuff out of the office, gather your contacts/email/phone lists, and remove any property that's yours but might be debated beforehand. Work on the premise that the day you give notice, you will get walked out the front door under supervision.
Worry about the future, not the past - Get the new job, give notice and get out. All the suggestions here about contracting for the old place and similar are utter nonsense. A couple weeks of extra money don't mean anything when you are going to spend the next several years working for the new place. Give priority to that.
HR departments are actually pretty powerless - For the most part HR answers to management, and if your boss wants to make life tough for you, that's whats going to happen. No matter what gets said, the back room policy is the reality, not whats on the front door. Sorry! I have been in jobs where the manager did not want to lose me and blocked me from internal transfers. I was locked in and had to quit the place in order to move on. (HR stated: We have an open transfer policy for employees..... blah, blah, bs...)
You get the idea. In extreme cases, you can get a labor attorney to help with certain issues, (but don't expect to survive in the place after that) but the reality of the matter is a little different. If you are in conflict with those above you, its time to "Hit the Road Jack...."
One of the reasons I work as a contractor is because it keeps you out of office politics.
Launch Failed this morning. Fairing around satellite failed to separate and it went into the ocean down near the Antarctic.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/02/24/nasa.launch/index.html
Its interesting that no matter how much knowledge, data, statistics, etc, are gathered, there will always be those that are never convinced. Be the subject, evolution, global warming, or that the earth is round.
I can find people that will vehemently deny the validity of all three of the above. Sometimes you just want to throw your hands up in the air and quit trying.
My favorite one in the right here and now is "Clean Coal" - Well, if you want to convince us that coal is clean energy, then why don't you build a clean coal plant, and let people come in and measure and analyze your work? If they can demonstrate just one "Clean Coal" plant, then that would be worth more than the tens of millions of dollars put into advertising for clean coal. Sorry, but when this OCO gets running its going to be interesting to see the patterns and observations received on the coal plants spewing CO2, NOx, trace Mercury, Sulfur, and other goodies into the air.
But that doesn't mean it will convince some people...
The Ugly here was a bit more specific than impedance match. The channel BW was 250ish MHz, and modulation was OFDM, with those two things you got to create a 500MHz ADC to convert to get into a DSP system to sort the OFDM signal out. Add a mixer and down converter and the thing sucks so much power its got to have a power cord. Dead in the water, and most RF IC designers predicted that 5 years back.
I designed an UWB receiver for one of the UWB startups 3-4 years back. UWB has a few problems from the start that make it a POS --
1. The wideband nature of the beast and the fact that it uses a roughly 250MHz wide channel. (Its OFDM modulation on a a multichannel structure with 200+ parallel channels) - When You get to the practical nature of the beast, the receiver structures require huge huge amounts of power. UWB's radiated at the antenna power is low, but the amount of juice sucked in to power the beast is huge.
2. Due to (1) its never going to be battery powered. Power cord is a must have. So much for "wireless" duh....
The UWB proponents tried to sell UWB as a way to kill off the interconnect cords for TV-DVR-DVD-BlewRay ;) systems. Well, you still got to power plug them so whats the big deal??? Besides, most of that stuff is a "plug once and forget" thing, so its really not that big a deal.
In theory - if you can use a medium to create a NAND gate, then anything and everything needed to create a computer can be defined from that. Again "in theory" is the important catch phrase. You can do that using relays, transistors, vacuum tubes, thermal storage, mechanical logic, and water valves. All have been demonstrated. The practical realization of a big scale machine is another issue.
This, IMHO is an academic concept at best. State definition by thermal state has been done in research before but it is slow, and trying to collect the waste energy in the form of heat and re-use it as the byproduct in another state machine sounds a bit questionable.
Mechanical computers are viable as well, but not too terribly practical.
Yep, I am a total idiot. Glad you told me here publicly, I need to be reminded frequently! Thank You! :)
As an aside, may I suggest "How To Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, I think you might find that it supplements your semiconductor physics knowledge.
boron magically electromigrates or keeps on diffusing? Um, I have been doing ultra high reliability electronics for over 25 years and this is total news to me. Don't think so. I know of electronics in geostationary satellites still humming along over 20 years and still going strong. There probably is even older out there, but I wasn't involved, so I cant say.
Suggest:
I would put any and all data storage in multiple formats and multiple copies. Cover your bases.
Find a way to seal the system against moisture. (Airtight containers and Silica Gel packets inside.)
Provide lots of text based paper documenting the system, and all its hardware and software. (information printed on high quality paper)
Multiple disk drives that can be booted from would also be good.
As a side note, the 6800 microprocessor still gets made and used today and thats about 30 years old right now. I have both an Atwater Kent and a Crosley radio from 1928 and 1932 and both of them still run just fine. Not too shabby for 70 year old electronics!
Hmmm.... Maybe some other species could make a better go of it! Now who do we hand the baton off to?
Just to clarify - OFDM is the modulation method used to convery data. Modulation methodology doesnt really tell you much about bandwidth and data rate, since a communication channel design can trade these properties off in an interactive manner when the design standard is defined.
The good news is that WiMax is designed to do data over long distance (measured in Km's) rather than the the duct tape installations of WiFi, which was never supposed to be used for distance data communication. Some of the crazy WiFi installations that are out there are 5 star silly, trying to do things that WiFi systems were never designed to do.
Some useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wimax
http://www.wimaxforum.org/
http://www.wimax.com/
http://www.networkworld.com/topics/wimax.html
If you want to get into the nitty gritty of the details, the IEEE has the 802.16 standards for all the details as well.
The good news is that this time around it actualy seems to be happening. It's out there in a big way (read some of the deployments in the above links) but not widespread yet.
Does this make sense? As a HW person, I dont have a clue, but I would be curious to know what the conventional wisdom is here. Should this stuff be used in an obsolete language, using code constructs that were dictated by HW limitations (Y2K and 2 digit nonsnense) OR Should this be done in something that is HW independent (Java - if I can show my ignorance here) or something like C++?
Teach me here folks!
Reed Solomon codes are a first generation ECC (Error Correcting Code) HDD's used to use RS codes about 30 (yikes! closer to 40 now!) years ago. Since then they have evolved into much more powerful ECC's that are designed to correct the types of errors run into in magnetic storage, which is burst errors. (Due to media defects)
All mass storage has a defined acceptable BER (Bit Error Rate) - and that BER is defined two ways, without ECC application and with. The industry standard for audio and data are different, but the whole idea is get to an acceptable BER after applying an ECC.
This is not news, this is ancient history. The article is applying an ECC method on top of another ECC method inherent to the media. Better BER? Sure, but whats the big deal? Also if you look at classic RS codes they are pretty inefficient, and coding theory is light years beyond that point now.
Lets see:
A set of barbell weights in the office - launch a program and lift a weight or two while waiting for results.
A set of roller blades in the back of the car ready for grabbing and going on a skate.
Sex, with a friendly and willing partner, great cardio! :)
Walks (briskly!) along the beach boardwalk.
Biking.... (need to get more time for that)
Floor exercises, crunches and push ups.
Sometimes to the gym, for cardio on a treadmill or elliptic trainer.
Trying to find time for tennis!
If you enjoy doing it, then you are more likely to stick with it. I was a total blubberball who used to sit at a computer all the time until one day I realized that my inactivity was slowly killing me. Decided to get fit and stay that way.
The lubrication issue was in older drives agreed. I am talking drives post 1992 and newer.
IBM had their collection of problems, as well as Quantum (remember them?) -- I don't have to ask in either case, because I was there so to speak. Quantum would not allow us to properly size the power drive chip and there were lots of failures due to the power driver frying. The thing was designed on the edge of failure to save 5 cents, and the designers inside the place (guilty as charged) kept saying that we needed a better power drive chip.
Save 5 cents in the design, and the net result were gobs of field failures. The finger pointing after the fact was interesting to say the least. I saw that stuff happen at Quantum, Seagate, WD, Conner, Maxtor, and Toshiba now.
The stiction effect has been an issue for many years in the disk drive world. The heads in a HDD are planar against a disk that is also a polished planar surface. The net effect is to require amps of current (briefly) when spinning a disk drive up.
After coming up to speed, there is an air bearing between the two, as the head float on a cushion of air. This effect has been an issue in the HDD world for over 30 years.
Modern media methods that provide interactive feedback on a student progress are a good thing IMHO. Like any other tool however, it can be utilized in a fruitful fashion, or it can be abused.
A lot of the education interaction can be automated, but I still see a need for evaluation and special needs scenarios. Some kids which need either specialized guidance to make headway, or gifted kids that could deal with an accelerated program. Seriously, some kids want to take on calculus and differential equations in the 7th grade! Rare, but true. Last year I was a judge in a local science fair and one of the kids had presented a proof for a mathematical hypothesis, gotten it published in a peer reviewed journal and was getting out of high school early to go attend Harvard on scholarship. They exist on both ends of the 6 sigma curve.
If you are not using it for something useful, why don't you shut it down, go to minimal power consumption and stop wasting energy?
Electromagnetic compatability is a huge undertaking in the hardware world.
As an example, IEEE EMC society:
http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/emcs/
I would be very curious to know if any EMC work was done between all of theses devices? Nothing indicated of substance in the article.
my 20 cents (adjusted for inflation and to account for the energy costs per post) :)
jerry
"The supernova explosion occurred about 140 years ago, making it the most recent supernova in the Milky Way as measured in Earth's time frame. Previously, the last known galactic supernova occurred around 1680, based on studying the expansion of its remnant Cassiopeia A."
What that statement means is from the observational perspective of the earth. If it is a 1000 light years away, and we see the event here and now, then it occurred now "as measured in Earth's Time Frame" but actually from the distance, we know the event occurred a 1000 years ago.