Taking the Measure

What features do you look for in a battery, and do you know which battery technologies to choose to get the features you want? The folks at Nexergy (which merged with ElectriTek AVT in January) wanted to know how their current and prospective customers might answer such questions, so they conducted a survey called “Mind of the Market 2008,” which they sent to design engineers and marketers.

John Costa, executive VP at Nexergy, visited our headquarters yesterday to discuss the survey results. Note that Nexergy provides batteries, chargers, and custom design services for military and aerospace, safety and security, appliances and tools, test-and-measurement, data-acquisition, and medical markets. It does not, however, focus on laptop batteries or batteries for high-volume consumer electronics, so specifiers of such batteries may have different priorities than th...Read More

Forbes magazine has discovered that Silicon Valley isn’t all “slick marketing pitches, shiny gadgets, and magical lines of code.” In an article titled “E-Trash into Cash,” writer Brian Caulfield notes that Jim Williams, frequent EDN contributor and Linear Technology staff scientist, “…knows where to find the real gears that make technology work.”

Caulfield continues, “When Williams needs inspiration, spare parts, or a good giggle, he knows where to find it: the badly lit recesses of a bland building not far from the Mineta San Jose International Airport” where he searches through “12-foot high stacks of old oscilloscop...Read More

Electronics makes consumers stupid—that’s a position I suggested in an earlier post, and now the New York Times has recognized the trend. Lawrence Downes, writing in an Editorial Observer column titled “Mister Jalopy Wants to Make a Better World,” starts off noting, “The word is out that technology makes us stupid. I am in no position to argue, having recently spent a week blundering around Southern California in a rented SUV, surrendering my brain to a sultry-voiced GPS unit. ‘When possible,’ she kept telling me, ‘make a legal U-turn.’”

He writes, “Mental atrophy is all around us. It’s a big theme of ‘...Read More

Should presidential candidates be computer-literate? I addressed this topic earlier in a response to a Wall Street Journal column on the subject. A commenter to that earlier post, DaveW, noted that the Internet is the new media, just as TV was the (relatively) new media during the Kennedy-Nixon campaign of 1960. DaveW alludes to the fact that Kennedy was able to exploit TV for political purposes without being an electrical engineer.

Certainly, the Internet is a medium that any serious campaign must master. (Obama's campaign may have the edge, here—Obama promises to announce his VP pick by e-mail or text message as a way to obtain contact information&nbs...Read More

What should Nvidia do about suspect graphics processing units, which might fail because of a potentially weak die/packaging material set? For Dell computers containing a suspect Nvidea GPU, Dell recommends flashing the BIOS to provide improved fan control that will smooth out the temperature fluctuations that can exacerbate chip failures. HP makes a similar recommendation.

But the Wall Street Journal reports today that “...the way the chip maker and two computer manufacturers are handling a product defect hasn't pleased some critics, ...Read More

What do you do in your spare time? Watch the Olympics? You might consider building your own nuclear fusion device. That, reports the Wall Street Journal, is the focus of “a small subculture of gearheads, amateur physicists, and science-fiction fans who are trying to build fusion reactors in their basements, backyards, and home laboratories.” Such hobbyists, the Journal notes, “call themselves "fusioneers," and have formed a loosely knit community that numbers more than 100 worldwide.” Only 42 have successfully built tabletop reactors—called fusors—thereby qualifying them for membership in the elite "Neutron Club."

Fusors are based on a ...Read More

Credence and LTX executives remain mum on long-term plans to rationalize product lines in light of the two firms’ plan to merge, but on the Credence side, development continues apace on instrumentation for the Diamond platform. The latest entry is the 72-channel HDVI (high density voltage/current) instrument, which is targeted at reducing the cost of test by enabling large numbers of sites to be tested in parallel. (See related article, “Credence debuts Diamond V/I instrument.”)

In a phone interview with Arun Kancharla, product marketing manager at Credence, and Thomas Vana, marketing director for the Diamond platform, Kancharla said that the new instrument—and in fact the entire diamond platform—targets high-volu...Read More

Probably not. According to Tech Lab columnist Hiawatha Bray writing at Boston.com today, “…only 24 percent of consumers have heard of HD radio.” That, he says, is because no one is forcing us to care about digital radio, as there are no government mandates to end analog radio broadcasts (in contrast to the situation in over-the-air television).

But, Bray notes, HD radio may begin to get more attention, as HD radio prices fall from $500 and up to under $200. He reviews the $90 iLuv i168, the $150 Jensen JiMS-525i, and the $165 ...Read More

In the post “Computer literacy overrated?” I link to a Wall Street Journal columnist’s recommendation that the next US president spend 20 minutes per day at a computer—no more, no less. Now this from the UK TimesOnline, regarding the prime minister: “Gordon Brown should be strolling down the pier to show his children the rude water-clock, sitting outside the Lord Nelson or the Red Lion with a pint of Adnams in his hand or rambling with his family across the common to follow the old Southwold railway trackbed. Sadly, he has signalled that even in shorts it will be work as usual: the BlackBerry switched on, the early morning call to ministers, the briefing papers brought up from London and plotting sessions to outwit the Labour plotters.”

Th...Read More

Our publisher Russ Pratt and editorial director Karen Field just returned from China and report that the pollution in Beijing is pretty intense. They might be mistaken, according to a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal Asia titled “The Beijing Sky Is Blue.” The article quotes Du Shaozhong, the deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Environment Protection Bureau, as saying pollution levels should be based on measurements, not the color of the sky. Be that as it may, the article says that “according to its own statistics, Beijing has missed its pollution targets for four of the past seven days.”

Here are a couple of other recent China-related posts. Paul Rako in "Anablog...Read More

Should a US president be able to use a computer? Lee Gomes at the Wall Street Journal turns this question around: “Or, are there jobs that are too important for the office holder to be spending the day deleting spam or closing pop-up windows in a browser?”

Gomes notes the contrasting styles of the two candidates: “Sen. Barack Obama lives the life of every modern road warrior, checking a BlackBerry as easily as he checks his wristwatch, and decompressing in his downtime with an iPod…. Sen. John McCain, by contrast, represents the last generation that will be able to claim imperviousness to the machines.”

Gomes continues, “Can someone who never touc...Read More

The UFOs are coming, and we are totally unprepared! You might expect to find such a message pervasive on the Internet (check here, here, and here, for example), but on the Website of the New York Times? Nevertheless, today in the opinion section of the Times, Nick Pope, author of Open Skies, Closed Minds, advises that “The United States Air Force or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should reopen investi...Read More

Americans have clung proudly and stubbornly to the USA measurement system, resisting a switch to the metric system, despite the occasional catastrophe that might be avoided by getting onboard with the rest of the world. Now, the metric system has become an issue in the US presidential election.

Bringing the issue to the forefront was an article in the German tabloid Bild titled “I worked out with Obama!” In the article, Bild reporter Judith Bonesky writes of observing the candidate working out in the gym of the ...Read More

On July 1, useless laws went into effect in California and Washington, adding to useless laws already in effect in Connecticut, the District of Columbia, New Jersey, New York, and Utah. I’m talking about laws that ban holding a phone to your ear while driving. These laws will possibly soon be complemented by ones that ban talking and texting while walking.

Now don’t get me wrong. I think people talking on cell phones while driving can be a menace. And I’m not going quite as libertarian as my colleague Paul Rako.

But unfortunately, the laws taking effect don’t address the real problem. (Of course, these laws do spur on the purchase of hands-free Bluetooth headsets, and I’m in favor of anything that encourages the...Read More

Why are landlines disappearing? Daniel Gross writing in Slate has some ideas, complementing what I wrote Wednesday about cell phones displacing landlines, citing the New York Times, among other sources.

Gross cites an FCC report as showing that initially, the arrival of the Internet and wireless communications proved a boon to wirelines: “In the mid-to-late-1990s, even as the number of wireless subscribers exploded…the number of access lines provided by incumbent local exchange carriers rose at a rate greater than that of the overall economy, with the number of lines rising nearly 24 percent from 142.4 million in 1992 to 186.6 million in 1999. Growth was d...Read More