At some level, the business of running any big international corporation is largely the same. In high technology, however, the mundanity of macromanaging a large organization often insulates executives from the actual technology challenges faced by both their customers and their own engineers. At Altium, they do things a little differently. Nick is an electronics engineer at heart, and his company provides design automation software aimed at helping the average working engineer get his job done better and faster. In order to accomplish that goal, Nick feels that everyone working to deliver that capability, himself included, needs to walk … Read More → "A Mile in Their Shoes"

Somewhere, possibly thousands of miles away and maybe dead by now, there is an engineer for whom the design of this particular scope was a major project – someone who fought with colleagues over issues like the choice of materials in the image sensor, the scheme for light amplification, and the design of the power supply. Perhaps the project was some cold-war-era Soviet skunkworks design. Unlike me, this engineer understands (or understood) almost instinctively why this device continues to operate for several minutes after it is powered down. His story, however, is probably long forgotten.

It was the … Read More → "Forgotten Battles"

With HDTV now making the transition from exotic to ordinary, consumers naturally expect the audio portion of their experience to keep pace with the vast improvement in video quality. While stereo, lower-fidelity sound might have been perfectly acceptable with standard definition television and movie programming, the consumer’s standard for acceptable audio performance is elevated considerably by the act of plunking down a few thousand for the latest-generation plasma or DLP monitors with HDTV tuners and DVRs. Chances are, they’ve got a similarly expensive sound system with way more than two channels eagerly awaiting top-quality content … Read More → "MIPS for your Media Room"

This time, Wind River is touting a new release of their “Commercial Grade Linux” product line. WR’s Linux offering is always based on an unmodified version of Linux (in this case 2.6.14 replacing the company’s previously-supported 2.6.10). As such, each new Wind River release gains the benefits of the new Linux release in addition to the new features and patches that WR has included in its add-ons. According to the company’s announcement, 2.6.14 includes ” …hardware-specific drivers for additional processors and boards, updates to development tools, real-time performance and scheduling-related patches, high resolution timer patches, security, networking updates to … Read More → "Wind River Zooms In"