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Power

Student Invention May Significantly Extend Mobile Device Battery Life 160

imamac writes with this excerpt from news out of Carleton University: "Atif Shamim, an electronics PhD student at Carleton University, has built a prototype that extends the battery life of portable gadgets such as the iPhone and BlackBerry, by getting rid of all the wires used to connect the electronic circuits with the antenna. ... The invention involves a packaging technique to connect the antenna with the circuits via a wireless connection between a micro-antenna embedded within the circuits on the chip. 'This has not been tried before — that the circuits are connected to the antenna wirelessly. They've been connected through wires and a bunch of other components. That's where the power gets lost,' Mr. Shamim said." The story's headline claims the breakthrough can extend battery life by up to 12 times, but that seems to be a misinterpretation of Shamim's claim that his method reduces the power required to operate the antenna by a factor of about 12; 3.3 mW down from 38 mW. The research paper (PDF) is available at the Microwave Journal. imamac adds, "Unlike many of the breakthroughs we read about here and elsewhere, this seems like it has a very high probability of market acceptance and actual implementation."

Comment 2 anecdotes (Score 1) 497

I recently had to take an elective in my CS graduate program. Being a seasoned Java professional, I figured a 500-level JAVA class would be a breeze. Boy was I wrong. The instructor was one of these old-school CS purists who HATED Java and loved C++. Each lecture was about how to do some low-level task in Java, and why C++ was so much better for that task (duh). He broke just about every standard Java coding convention that the compiler would allow. Multiple classes per file, ignoring the package structure. Each class was named like: "Class_ptr_adptr" (a class for a pointer adapter [wha???]), methods were named: "func_crt_inst()" (function create instance). And he REFUSED to call them "methods", in favor of "functions". I have no idea why some would deliberately choose to teach an entire course on Java if they hate it so much. Also, when i was an undergrad (c1996), I had a MIS course where the prof was trying to exmplain the meaning of a URL, say "www.company.com". She drew on the board a venn-like diagram, three circles, each one enclosing the next smaller, resembling a bull's eye. In the outermost, she wrote "www", then "company" and "com" in each of the inner 2 and explained "So www stands for th entire world wide web, "company" is for the company you are trying to reach, and "com" means "communicate".

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