5 star! - enough said!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia

Its a little scary but I dated a lady for a while who thought the government was using here for non lethal weapons testing, by hitting her with EM waves.

Pity... Good looking with a very nice body... Such a waste...

he only resonates at certain frequencies....

you must have flunked calculus, right? Or is this a joke?

Depending on the foundry process, typical CMOS has between 8 masks and 16 masks (aka reticles) for the base layer fabrication of transistors. Metal interconnect layers on top of that vary between 1 (very rare) and 20 (also pretty rare) - commonly between 4 and 8 metal layers

LMAO! I pre-date computers in the classroom. High school class of 1974

http://www.innovationsforlearning.org/about_teachermate.php

The latest and greatest techno-glitter is often not what's needed. The simple rugged device shown can get the interactive teaching job done, and probably endure getting dropped, kicked, and getting dumped in Cheerios.

Would you give an iPhone to a kid who is constantly throwing things around and having temper tantrums?

Often, simpler is better.

The subject of ECC's and the unique aspects associated with magnetic storage can fill multiple books. (start googling run length limited codes, reed-solomon, convolutional and cyclic codes, and your eyes will glaze over PDQ.)Most of whats been posted here is either wrong or pretty oversimplified (mostly just wrong) - The quick and dirty on whats unique about ECC's in disk drives is that the errors tend to be bursts rather than individualized - so getting a long string of bad data at one place is the norm, rather than the exception. (simple way of thinking about it - think of a scratch, and thats a supersimplified analogy)

Bigger sectors make sense - the 512KB standard has been around since before I designed drives (got to go back 30 years, argh!) but in the grand scheme of things it doesnt matter a whole heck of a lot. Access time is alway going to be dominated by rotational latency and there is no way around that, short of redundancy locations of data (at a heavy cost on storage density) and total storage capacity needs vs. capability are generally dominated by the areal density improvements. (Who cares about 10% of overhead for formatting, sector size, ECC placement etc. when the total storage doubles every 6 months anyhow?)

Oh, and the death of the HDD due to SSD has been greatly exaggerated, IMHO, because the need for total storage keeps going up, and the cost for $$ per GByte needs to keep that competitive. The SSD drive will be sweet for things like laptops/netbooks, thats for sure, but nobody wants to pay the serious money for terabytes of movies on a SSD, when a HDD will get it done at less cost.

Oh - and if anyone wants to say the price of SSD storage will come down and surpass that of HDD storage? Well, maybe, but the problem there is that Moore's law is running up against the limits of Physics right now. THe state of the art transistor has a gate oxide thickness of 4 atoms, and a channel length of 13 atoms. Good luck with doing fractions of atoms, there might just be a few problems with that.... :)

For the most part - Newer digital designs are language driven, not schematic driven. The advent of Verilog & VHDL lead to purely digital designs done up in code.

Some of the special devices are done using transistor level design, but synchronous logic these days is a HDL (hardware description language) followed by gate level synthesis, and then autoplace and auto routing.

A lot of fine tuning along the way for high performance items does get tweaked a lot but for the most part, digital chips are created as a coding exercise.

Gee.. That's nice....

I wish NASA would do one of several things:
1. Concentrate on robotic missions and other non-manned science.
2. Put together a serious push for a Mars mission.

Things that I feel are an utter waste of time and money:
1. Going back to the moon purely to go back.
2. LEO (Low earth orbit) projects and questionable ISS science fair projects.

Put together a real push for Mars and get people excited about science and technology again. Or make a real effort in exo-planet research and searching for life around other star systems. (I did not say "intelligent life, or infer anything about aliens and flyingf saucers there!) The tools are available for both.

Also, manned missions to Mars are not "cost effective" but you can't beat the sizzle effect that you get from the "boots on the ground" of a live mission. Best bang for the buck there comes from the unmanned and robotic research.

Sad to say, NASA, for the most part has become another government bureaucracy. I would like to be proven wrong and see them return to what the did from 1960-1970, but the congressional money path probably won't happen again.

From 1963 to 1970 was a great time to be a kid watching all this stuff happen. Too bad there were a lot of other ugly things going on at the time, (Vietnam, Watergate, etc.) but history allows us to remember the great and suppress the ugly.

How about a space elevator project? Arthur C Clarke said we would build one roughly 50 years after we stopped laughing at teh concept. Well, the laughing seems to have died down.

frequency hopping, redundancy, default routines and a multitude of other techniques get used to keep the signals (and planes) secure. They are not RC model planes.

Oh boy... A sailing friend of mine introduced me to one of these pilots - these guys have as much skill and training as the guys in the F-18 Hornets, and they are under similar stress. If they F-up they can kill some of their own, or lose a bird that costs millions to build.

The one advantage they have is that they can go home to their own bed at night (or day, or..), and if they do mess up, they can live after the fact.

This is the future of modern warfare, and having seen these things get assembled (I do some defense contracting) the technology is pretty dammed impressive.

If you think this is MS flight simulator, you are utterly clueless.

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.

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