The convenience of an untethered world of mobile phones, personal wearable devices, and the many wireless sensors and controllers in our homes comes at a price: constant attention to and management of the rechargeable batteries that power them.   There have been recent proposals for pro......

All of us are susceptible to attention lapses, and they can range from minor annoyances like losing your focus on a book you are reading to making mistakes in figures you are adding or forgetting that you left a pot boiling on the stove until you smell something burning.   But attention......

In courses on fiction and literature in college, my teachers emphasized the difference between implicit and explicit meanings and the importance of understanding the difference in order to derive the full meaning from what I was reading. In technical documentation about specifications and standard......

As a technology journalist, I get the equivalent of a postgraduate education reading good, detailed papers and reports, though some are mind-numbingly difficult. Knowing my interest in such papers, several software developers and tool vendors have independently referred me to "Quantitative Ev......

The emergence of low cost and easy to use do-it-yourself boards such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi have paved the way for an unprecedented boom in creativity among technology and application enthusiasts. Most of these enthusiasts are would-be developers and undergraduate students with an idea for cr......

In comparison to reliable plain old telephone service (POTS), IP-based telephony is still a bad idea.   I see that another attempt is being made to drive a stake through the heart of the two-wire POTS, also known as the Public Switched Telephone Network (PTSN). This time it is by Alcate......

One gauge of whether a high technology company has the ability to survive in a fast changing market is its ability to march to a different drummer occasionally; that is, to devise strategies that run counter to the accepted wisdom.   One such company is Silicon Labs, which this week introdu......

For as long as there have been computers, companies have employed networks to monitor, update and fix the software that runs on them. Witness desktop and laptop PCs where Microsoft Corp. and vendors of a hundred or so software programs invest heavily in software and services that allow them to con......

At the recent Embedded World, embedded tool startup Argosim introduced its STIMULUS verification tool for modeling and simulation of a design's software requirements before system design begins.   The company chose the perfect venue for the announcement. As almost any experienced softwa......

The Universal Serial Bus (USB), an industry standard developed in the mid-1990s, certainly lays to rest the stereotype that almost anything designed by a committee is doomed to disaster.   Originally designed as an 1.5 to 12 Megabits/second standard for connection of computer peripherals t......