Man, I am so bummed right now. These guys were some of the greatest in the field. Both were very well known in industry and had done a lot in their time to advance the state of the art. I always figured that if I ever got back into the semiconductor industry I'd try to work wherever they were - of course, I don't want to move to California very much, and Pease had sort of retired, but still.

I had no idea Jim Williams had died either. Williams' app notes were both clever and clear, just masterpieces of design and communications. One of my favorites was his AN45, which he worked on while up late with a baby; each circuit was preceded by a number of baby bottles indicating how many bottles he fed his son while working on the circuit. One of them - a CCFL supply built around a Royer oscillator - took more than 30 bottles, drawn lined up three rows deep, convinced me not to use that design in a related project. Just a few months ago Electronic Design or EDN published a paper by Williams describing how to build an ultrasonic thermometer - a technique for measuring temperature using the speed of sound in an olive jar full of dry air. Just neat stuff.

Pease was an interesting guy who I felt I knew better. You could call him up when he was at National and ask him questions - if you had a hard enough question. He had some crafty designs for VFC's and references, but I really remember him for his magazine articles. He once described a proposed highway as a mistake and showed a circuit model for traffic to describe how its construction would make things worse overall. Pease was a neat guy who I knew only through his articles and app notes, and boy would I have liked to go for a ride with him in his old VW. Course, I would have worn a seatbelt (did his car even have them?).

Man am I bummed right now! What a loss.

One of the commenters on the FF extension suggested that the extension introduces a serious vulnerability into your browser - by downloading the XML file containing the list of sites to be redirected, you are basically offering that website the ability to redirect "youtube.com" to "nastysexxxxxychix.com" or whatever. Certainly this would be unpleasant on a work computer, but it could also be used to send you to a malicious site. He also pointed out that every 15 times the extension is actually called you are sent to a "Help Us" page where they probably ask for donations.

The same commenter forked the extension to another called FireIce which has a hardcoded list of sites. I think the ideal way would be with a user-configurable list which the user can easily update from a website as desired, rather than automatically downloading an XML file without user input.

This other extension - which I haven't tried and cannot endorse - is at https://addons.mozilla.org/da/firefox/addon/fireice/

I think your tin foil hat is too thick.

What you are saying is that you shouldn't trust people who know the field best. Certainly it makes sense to keep in mind that the people on there may have hidden agendas, and you should use your brain. A forum populated by people informed on the topic because they actually work in the field is the place I want to go to become informed. These are guys who will present or point you towards raw data and help you learn to interpret it yourself. It is possible to work in a field yet retain integrity and ethics.

I agree with your final point - anything you read on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt.

I don't think the point is quite so simple as that. The marketing people are increasing the perceived value of a product by bundling things together and selling for a higher price. The inherent value of the goods is only what consumers are willing to pay. In this case, consumers (at least one consumer, the parent poster) want to buy the unbundled product without all the extra fixings. Normally the invisible hand of the free market will serve up the product I actually desire, but since we're not dealing with fungible goods here like gasoline or apples, only one vendor sells the product and he can sell it however he wants to. And so the parent poster does not purchase the product.

I find this quite frustrating as well. Sometimes I only want two peppers but they come in a pack of three. Dang.

Well, at least when I got out of the semi business a few years ago you could still do a lot with old 5" and 6" wafers. There's a lot to be said for having your own process line, despite the fabless trend, especially in the analog world. An in-house analog process enables a semi manufacturer to build unique parts that a competitor can't as easily replicate. If you can get a higher voltage or current in a similar sized driver IC you can outsell on features, or you can shrink the die and match features and outsell on price. But if you're both buying the same process from the foundry, what advantage do you have that the competition can't get by offering your engineers more money?

You shouldn't be. You can't do digital without analog, despite what every pointy-headed manager puts in his powerpoint slides. Power is analog and that's a sizeable fraction of your computer budget. Motor control (hard drives), sensors (you name it), a lot of user interface, are all analog. Even signal transmission is analog, although if you set your thresholds just right you can pretend it's digital. In fact this is where a lot of semi companies make their money, by encapsulating the messy analog into the chip so all you have to do is put down two capacitors and hook up the digital interface, because people are escared of analog.

Can you tell I'm an analog guy? I sure hope so.

It's not EMP. It's high energy particles affecting the operation of the ICs inside an electronics box. You get soft errors like what happens when you are probing a chip with the lights on. Or you can get permanent damage from particles stressing the lattice, and there's no Faraday cage that can shield a robot from gammas or neutrons. It's tough to build a complicated system (with numerous chips) which is rad hard.

Modern digital ICs with very small feature sizes are highly susceptible to this damage, so you're talking about older technology. I've heard of paralleling functions (computers, reset circuits, etc.) up and making them vote on each decision, which might be why they did that on the moon missions.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rad-hard for more info.

I will make the same comment I make every time we debate technology's superiority to paper:

I cannot remember the last time my map crashed. It may be inaccurate (but so may GPS), it may be out of date (but so may GPS), it may not be intuitive (but so may GPS). But when I turn too fast and pull the plug out of the lighter socket, my paper map will still work. When some jerk is driving next to me with non-FCC licensed equipment drowning out the GPS band, my paper map will still work. It doesn't call out turns a mile ahead, it doesn't show up-to-the-thirty-minutes-ago traffic, all it does is show me where I am and I can use my brain to figure out where I'm going.

A GPS is superior to a map but does not replace it, and becoming reliant on a GPS to the point where I do not consult or bring a paper map is foolhardy.

In contrast to what the summary suggests, there's a big difference between an Arduino and a 555. The 555 was a barebones timer chip which could be misapplied to accomplish a lot, but required a decent understanding of basic electronics to use in any way other than its basic concept allowed (a timer/multivibrator). The Arduino is a toy, mostly for non-engineers, who are interested in learning more. I don't think there is a real analogue (oh, I'm so punny) to the 555 in the microcontroller world except, perhaps, the $5 TI Launchpad as so many other posters have suggested. The Launchpad is a cheap and nearly barebones micro which can be used to do a wide range of simple tasks and can be misapplied to very complicated things given a sufficiently capable user.

I think this is the real root of why most EEs "hate" the Arduino - it's overkill for most of what it is used for. "Proper" engineering implies designing the right solution to a problem, whereas Arduino "engineering" applies an Arduino to a problem. In both cases a solution is achieved, but the Arduino solution is so often needlessly complicated: a microcontroller is not needed to blink an LED when a 555 will suffice.

Based on what gizmag presents I'm not terribly impressed. There are several reasons to put the VR offboard. First is space, second is heat. A VR consumes a lot of both (relative to a microprocessor). You can easily see >5" square of space and >10W of power dissipation next to the processor (and everyone cries about it because of its location).

Since I don't see any resonant components included in the design it appears to me that this is a linear regulator, which will put out a lot of heat. In addition as it stands both Intel and AMD have the ability to dynamically scale the voltage they are being powered from. They can request a higher or lower voltage as well as (of course) draw more or less current, instantly, through their VID pins. So this sure doesn't sound like a great discovery, especially when you consider that the basic concept, as presented in the summary, is widely used and quite well known. But summaries by their definition don't tell the whole story, so perhaps there's more to it. I'll pull up the paper if it's available when I get to work.

As chip-on-chip technology becomes more widespread I will be interested to see what happens. It seems like there may be a place for "on chip" (as far as the enduser is concerned) voltage regulation with some of these all-in-one converter MCMs.

actually in his case it refers to CounterIntelligence as he wrote. This is one of two types of polygraphs used by the US for granting and retaining certain types of defense security clearances.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._security_clearance_terms

I bought the Sheevaplug and the Guruplug for some engineering applications, and was sorely disappointed. The Sheevaplug was a decent box, just needed more native IO. The Guruplug was a piece of crap. I had more issues with that box than any embedded box I've ever worked on, including some I've designed (which is saying something when you factor in initial debug time). The Guruplug had major heat issues, even when run from an external 5V supply. I removed the heat spreader (a thin piece of steel) and replaced it with a thicker copper spreader, and that made a big difference, but the unit was never completely stable and could not handle running two GigE interfaces at the same time. And they also had the niggling little problem of selling something different from what they advertised - the sale product did not have an I2C port (I think they finally changed the block diagram to reflect the truth).

By sticking with the same form factor I fear that the Globalscale product will continue to be plagued with heat issues. And based on the history of Globalscale's products, if you need a stable platform that does what the specs say they'll do - look elsewhere.

I'll probably get one to evaluate it, but this time I'm waiting. Someone else can be the early adopter.

I've long had a theory about that. Suppose you include polling information as well. If the polls say that 60% are voting for candidate A, with a 5% margin of error - why vote for either of the big two candidates? Then you certainly ARE wasting your vote, by piling on unnecessarily where your vote is not needed. Eventually, if enough people adopt this strategy, the marginal vote will again make a difference, but by then many more people will be voting (and used to voting) for a 3rd party.

Really though, there's hardly any difference between any two candidates A and B, as long as the government isn't controlled by one party. At least it certainly seems that way, except for the relatively petty issues intended to divide up the electorate.

Never posted one of these before but it is the most insightful comment in the thread and deserves to be seen.

The NDA is definitely required as one of the three components necessary for access to classified information.

http://www.archives.gov/isoo/training/standard-form-312.html

This particular reference led me to an interesting section of US law I was unaware existed - Title 18, Section 793(e):

Whoever, having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document... relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates... or causes to be communicated... the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it... [s]hall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
(take the widest possible definition of "communicate" because I deleted all the other similar words for clarity)

It's something of a corollary to the UK Official Secrets Act. I've no idea whether this is applicable to anyone subject to US law or just clearance holders (as I am too lazy to read the entire section of code). It would seem to me that all of the US newspaper editors collaborating with Wikileaks are in violation of this section. I'll reserve my personal opinions on that particular idea.