Anyone hear anything recently from that Nigerian guy (or was it gal), the one who needs to park $20,000 (or a little more, or somewhat less) in an American bank account for just a day (maybe an hour) and give you ten percent (or 50 percent or maybe just $1000) in consideration of your assistance (or assistence)? I haven't. But I have been hearing (two or three times a day) from the good folks at PayPal and St. Francis Bank, who are very concerned because there is unusual activity on my account or because my account has been flagged and from the East-West Australia (or is it Astralia) lotteries, the Staatsloterij.nl/International, and the Loteria Primitiva International because they want to know where to deposit my winnings of one million euros, 500,000 euros, and 550,000 euros, respectively.

With a little luck, AOL and Microsoft are about to take the phun out of phishing once and for all. AOL has filed three law suits (total damages sought: $18 million) against three phishing gangs. Anyone in a betting mood? Actually, these ones have teeth: Virginia, not coincidentally AOL's corporate home, has a new anti-phishing law. Moreover, AOL has won similar suits in the past. And Microsoft has filed its own host of suits.

Kind of makes you nostalgic for the wild West, where at least if someone was trying to rustle your cattle you had the option of shooting his horse out from under him. Not that I'd be anything but against shooting horses. - zander

The New York Times this morning has an article on Wednesday's hearing before the House subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations, during which Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all will discuss the adaptations they make in their offerings when selling/operating in China. Put aside the fact that we're hardly the ones to be criticizing another country's definition of human rights these days.

Let's just think about this. Obviously, China is a huge and lucrative market as well as a no-fly zone when it comes to free dissemination of information and a sometime ally (at least where North Korea is concerned - we hope). So do you sacrifice the market and in doing so let the good citizens lose even a compromised version of good old American freedom of expression? Or vice versa? But if you do go ahead, at what point do you draw the line? Was it OK for Yahoo to help send a Chinese citizen to prison for eight years - by providing records that showed him bad-mouthing the Chinese government online - in exchange for the right to provide online services all those other, more discreet users? Or should users there understand the rules of the game - that when you live in a country that abridges the most basic freedoms, you better remember that Big Brother always is listening in. - zander

The news out of CES was full of the wonders of digital video, but these wonders will be dependent on a decent home networking setup. There were several announcements along that line in terms of UWB, HomePNA, and others, but it is still recognized as a problem that needs to be solved. The sweet spot they seem to be aiming for is 400 Mbps, which should be able to support uncompressed HD signals.

Personally, I am quite happy with the Gigabit Ethernet backbone I am using to transport video. My total investment in this network is under $200, thanks primarily to watching the sale ads at Fry’s and taking advantage of construction to place Cat6 wiring. It is not as flashy as the new wired and wireless networking technologies, but it more than handles moving the bits around. Granted, it doesn’t put the DRM locks around the data that many would like to have in place, but quite frankly I am not too concerned about that.

The absence of these locks is a situation that most likely will not last much longer, though. The technology to manipulate digital media has been around for quite a while, but it has been impeded by the lack of consumer-level devices to make it easy to manipulate and view this media. That level of devices has been held back by pressure from the media industry, which has made it difficult to obtain digitized programming. The recent surge of news around the capability to download this media has been primarily enabled by new DRM capabilities from Microsoft, Apple, and others that has raised (somewhat) the comfort level of the media guys. The question now is whether they will choke it off by tightening the locks too tight or making DRM too difficult to use.

Larry Mittag

There has been considerable momentum lately behind the consumer electronics industry with flat panels and HD leading the charge. Meanwhile, it seems like PCs have been getting pretty boring. A key example of that is the set of announcements that came out over the last week or so. I previously reported on the Hana consortium, which is attempting to standardize 1394 and other smart interfaces. Within days of that announcement word came out about the Unified Display Interface (UDI) consortium that has the grand vision of creating (well, that is a pretty strong word) a single display definition that can allow PCs to display on both monitors and HD screens.

In other words, the Hana group of CE companies is going to finally get their act together and standardize smart closed-loop remote controls and video streams while the PC guys are going to make a few tweaks to existing standards to finally replace the decades-old VGA video port.

Granted, neither of these groups is creating any new significant technology. Both 1394 and the DVI/HDMI interfaces already exist in shipped products. The key difference is that the Hana group is audaciously promising to make their stuff finally work together around a networked connection, while the UDI interface is really just a one-way video hose with a content-protection padlock on it. It can be argued that the CE guys are just trying to catch up with PCs, which have been capable of interoperation for years, but it also seems like the PC is regressing into the closed-box mentality that infected CE for so long. If UDI is the best they can come up with maybe it’s time for another revolution.

Larry Mittag

There is a place on the Hawaiian island of Maui named Hana. I visited this beautiful spot many years ago, and it was characterized as much by how hard it was to get to as it was by its beauty. Now I am seeing the name Hana in the context of a new consortium being formed to create consumer electronics standards that are network-aware, unlike the brain-dead interfaces like IR, DVI, and HDMI.

This is a drum I have been beating for quite a while now. IR remote controls are open-loop control, which makes them famously unreliable. Add to that the fact that every manufacturer does theirs a little differently and none of them are standard and it’s no wonder that coffee tables are littered (and wives frustrated) with piles of remote controls. I have seriously considered programming a PDA to send commands across my home wireless network, but it is always frustrated by the fact that there is no way to get status back from most consumer devices. This consortium plans to use 1394 and other standards to standardize and update those interfaces.

More power to them. I have tried to get the 1394 interface on my Mitsubishi TV to talk to the one on my Scientific-Atlanta cable box with no real luck. I believe I have a way to do it, but it involves inserting a PC into the mix to intermediate. At one point I figured I must be the only one on the planet that was trying to do this, but it turns out that the AV discussion boards have many people trying to get this to work. It shouldn’t be that hard.

If this consortium can get off the ground and make some headway I am all for it. I have heard that they have since put in a much better road to Hana (the island location) since I have been there – maybe that is a sign that this destination can now be made reachable by ordinary people.

Larry Mittag

There’s a lot of serious news happening in the world of embedded systems. Deals are being made, consortiums are being formed, and products are being released. But, just for the moment, set all that aside. Instead, look at what people are doing with smart Christmas light displays.

I have included a link to the Engadget site talking about the display rather than the display itself, because it has already maxed out the first server it was put on. While writing this story I got it to play once and then couldn’t get it going again. I still haven’t been able to get the details link to work, and I’d really like to see that. If you haven’t seen this already (there has to be someone who hasn’t) then take a little time to see what electronics, music, lights, and way too much spare time can create. I’ll get back to the serious stuff in the next entry.

Larry Mittag

Robotics is in the news lately with the latest instantiation of the DARPA Grand Challenge, as pictured on C/Net. This is a 150-mile race that will take place somewhere in the southwest US – the course will be announced two hours before the race begins – and that consists entirely of autonomous robotic vehicles. Last year was something of a bust, given that no car managed to finish the grueling cross-country course, but the whole idea of this is to give the technology a chance to improve. Maybe this year someone will actually make it to the finish line.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world they are doing their own versions of robotic races. It seems the sport of camel racing was suffering under the newly-enforced child labor laws in the United Arab Emirates. The best jockeys for these camels are children that weigh under 60 pounds or so, and “recruitment� of these jockeys sometimes consisted of kidnapping them from poorer areas of Asia.

The solution (as reported by the BBC) was the creation of a robotic remote-controlled jockey that fits the weight requirements, doesn’t spook the camels, and can work in the heat. It’s an interesting application, but this is one of those stories that really makes you wonder whether some people just simply have too much money.

Larry Mittag

Back when networking was new and exciting (i.e. before it worked very well) there was a perennial question as to when the “Year of the Network� was going to be. It seemed we were always on the cusp of networks breaking out all over and becoming commonplace in both businesses and homes. Nobody did quite figure out exactly when it happened, but at some point networks crossed the line between the exotic and the commonplace.

This same process is happening in the great convergence of digital technology and living-room entertainment. This has been talked about for so long that most people don’t seem to get excited about it anymore, but there are real things happening here. Philips has identified a growth market for TV tuners on PCs, albeit PCs that are very different from the classic beige box. Meanwhile, Verizon is actually rolling out IPTV service, although I hear it is rolling on a very bumpy road. Meanwhile, flat panels of the plasma variety and their LCD cousins promise to be very prominent in electronics stores this Christmas. These panels provide an excellent excuse to upgrade and computerize the electronics that feed them content.

I am still undecided whether the support electronics will ultimately be PC-based or in a traditional CE form, but their presence is definitely being established in the living room. In retrospect this may actually be seen as the year that happened.

Larry Mittag

Intel is taking yet another shot at becoming the de facto home media device with their recently-announced Viiv campaign. This has gained new importance for them with all of the attention on the Xbox 360 / Playstation 3 contest to define the next home game machine, which is widely seen as the new generation of the home PC. The fact that both of these contenders are based on PowerPC architectures is surely not lost on Intel.

The press releases are predictably upbeat, but there is a fairly insightful analysis on the Register. They bring up Intel’s dependence on Microsoft’s Media Center Edition, which personally I haven’t been that impressed with. This leaves Intel dependent on a partner that is also betting on another hand – a weak position at best.

It is possible that the Viiv architecture will allow the creation of a series of creative PC-based embedded devices. The emphasis on lower power will certainly make it more attractive than it currently is, but the question is whether the profit margins will be at the levels that Intel demands. The x86 architecture is not as special as it once was. Is Intel thrashing here or are they really defining the future?

Larry Mittag

I remarked in a recent post on the fact that LEDs are appearing in a number of applications such as traffic lights and automotive signal lights. This was interesting enough, but it turns out that there are possibilities for communications using those same devices. Specifically, a traffic light and headlights could communicate via pulses invisible to human eyes to better manage traffic at intersections. The same communications could allow network access between a reading light and a laptop computer, although it would seem that shadows would be a problem there.

Research on these and other possibilities are being researched at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and was reported in a recent AP report on CNN.

Granted, some of the applications seem a bit contrived. I can see a few applications for communications systems that are stopped by walls, but it seems likely that these would be the exception rather than the rule. The automotive applications seem like the ones that make the most sense. They obviously are dependent on some significant infrastructure investment, but I can see them working. What do you think?

Larry Mittag

The news on the breathless wait for the new Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 hasn’t been all that interesting for those of us that don’t partake much of game machines, but we can finally get some solid information on the new multicore Cell processor as promised from IBM. The release consists of a ton of information on the operation of the processor, as well as an instruction-level simulator and a compiler.

I have just started to dig into this, but it shows a lot of promise. There are some C++ extensions, although parallelization of code is going to be a manual process in this release of the tools. I’ve found myself wondering if the tools will be applicable to the multicore PowerPC architecture of the upcoming Xbox 360 as well, although I suspect they will not. They may create single-threaded code for that CPU, but the unique architecture of the Cell is more than likely the only target that can really take advantage of these extensions.

The degree of customization that can be supported with variants of the Cell could make this a very interesting architecture for relatively high-volume applications. The question is whether the pricing will be attractive for lower-price applications like consumer devices. Given that the first application is a home game machine, it might be possible, but that could be an anomaly.

Larry Mittag

The CPUs and other high-end components in embedded systems get most of the attention, but sometimes the story is in the simpler components. One of the simplest is the humble LED, but this versatile element of most systems is moving to a more prominent position in a number of applications.

A story on the website of Technology Review details the advances in LED and OLED technology that are in the process of finally burying the incandescent bulb. Anyone who drives a car has probably notices either the new traffic light bulbs or the stoplights on the back end of newer high-end cars. Before long LEDs will also show up on the front end of those same cars in the form of headlights. The technology will also provide much more efficient lighting in our homes in the form of lighting panels that are as cool as fluorescents but not as harsh in terms of light. In fact, the white panels will include small embedded systems that will account for the uneven wear of the colored components that sum to white light, keeping a consistent color to the light.

This change will not get the press that Intel got this week with their new CPU designs, but it will almost certainly save more energy and impact more people. Sometimes it’s the small changes that make the most difference.

Larry Mittag

As developers we are all used to interacting very closely with the devices we are creating, but it seems that this mode of operation is spreading to the real world as well. It is almost the norm anymore to see drivers talking on cell phones. Any fast-food restaurant at lunch will have an assortment of iPods and laptops in evidence, even among groups of people. Our devices are becoming more and more a part of us.

That trend seems sure to continue. The MIT-sponsored Cyber Fashion Show was reported on by Xeni Jardin for Wired and featured a number of beautiful people with devices that ranged from the head-mounted virtual display worn by the hostess (Windows-based, it crashed several times during the show) to a trenchcoat jacket that incorporated ten television cameras. Several of the items were more fashionable than functional, incorporating lightshows and video into jewelry.

Even more personal than these devices are the new generations of hearing aids, as also also reported by Wired. These devices are going to be more common as we baby boomers start paying for our rock-and-roll sins, but they will do more than just boost volume. Smart devices can also prompt with names, rewind conversations, and otherwise enhance memory as well as hearing.

Even deeper connections are envisioned for the next generation of prosthetics. These devices, as reported in CNET, will have direct nervous system connections to enhance the natural feel and operation of the devices. One has to wonder at what point these will cross over from the replacement of missing limbs to the enhancement of normal ones.

Larry Mittag

The latest round of spectrum allocations from the FCC seems to have an air of unreality about it. For example, what is the point of allocating space at 60 GHz for wireless LAN applications? Isn’t it obvious that the prime real estate is much closer to the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands that are currently in use?

Well, maybe not. A recent advance from IBM brings RF chips into the realm of commercial possibility that can handle those frequencies. These are not high-end, expensive chips, either. These are chips that can be produced in commercial quantities at consumer price points. Rather than silicon, these are based around silicon germanium and can handle frequencies well above 100 GHz, according to the EE Times article.

Granted, these are support chips, not CPUs. Maybe you could build a 100 GHz CPU out of SiGe, but there is no way you could build a memory subsystem to keep up with it. These chips will enable radar systems for automobiles and build networks with short enough wavelengths to communicate with nanotechnological devices that were described in another EE Times article as one of five deep R&D projects that must succeed. Other projects in the list will tie these devices even tighter into a global computer network that will handle projects we can only dream about now.

Maybe innovation and basic R&D isn’t in quite as bad a shape as we thought…

Larry Mittag

Those who track such things are telling us that the PDA is pretty much a done deal these days. Somehow that figures, since I have been using mine more lately than I have for a long time. Just today I was contemplating writing a control program to replace the stack of remotes that have developed beside the chair I use to watch TV.

The PDA as an organizer is rapidly being subsumed into other devices such as the new breed of smart phones. Motorola just announced a slew of new products that leverage off the Razr, but the Microsoft-based smartphones still trail the Symbian ones. Maybe some cool new models from Moto will change that.

Meanwhile, in the real world people are finding interesting uses for the technology castoffs. A friend of mine told me about an application he found to keep score in a softball game. It only runs on Palm devices, and he was loath to pay the price of a new PDA for single app like that (I have a lot of cheap embedded-developer friends). He discovered that eBay was a rich source of suitable devices in the form of Treo phones with broken covers. It seems that breaking the cover makes them pretty much useless as phones, but they are still perfectly serviceable Palm-based PDAs. He is picking them up for $20 - $40 apiece. At that price he can take it to the ball field and not care if it gets dirty.

Larry Mittag

Most of the attention of those who follow the wireless standards is on the high end, where 802.11n is closing in on the finish line. The standards bodies have the application space neatly subdivided, with the 802.11 standards at the high end and Bluetooth and Zigbee handling the low-end devices.

It seems there are those who have other ideas, though. A recent EE Times report regarding Marvell placed Wifi-based networking squarely in the consumer application space, including several devices that one would normally expect to see using the lower-end standards. I guess they didn't get the memo.

In retrospect this is not surprising. There have always been places where odd technology selections have been made by those unfamiliar with the span of choices available. I can imagine an engineer at a toy manufacturer selecting 802.11 as the wireless network of choice because he finally got it up and running at home. He is much more comfortable with it than he is with Bluetooth or Zigbee.

It's very easy for us to sneer at such choices and point out power profiles or interference problems, but the bottom line is that this stuff is being used. They will need help figuring this stuff out, and that is what we do. This is a good thing.

Larry Mittag

Embedded systems have always been about putting compute power where the application needs it, whether that is on a factory floor, in a car, or in your hand. There have been many predictions of complex, high-minded applications for the next generation of these devices, but there is a refreshingly down-to-earth treatment of the current state of the art and near future in an M.I.T. Technology Review article on Social Computing.

The pertinent difference in this next generation of the Internet is that it is not a highly-structured set of vertically integrated applications. Instead, it is a fairly cobbled together set of loosely-coupled services. These are built much like the command-line utilities in a Linux system, where a set of simple applications can be coupled by a set of simple rules to do powerful things. This does not force computers to interface with us in a human way, but instead provides a simplified and consistent technical interface that can be manipulated at a slightly higher level of abstraction. In other words, the code is easier to write.

No, this is not the Jetsons, but it is still pretty cool.

Larry Mittag

I am not normally a fan of legislation that "protects" us from new technology, but I had to think hard about a recent article posted on CNet. The article discusses supposedly hasty laws to control privacy issues around RFID. The thrust of the article is that such laws are knee-jerk reactions to technology drafted by Luddite legislators.

These issues were in the news recently with the Federal attempt to insert RFID tags into US passports, but they have been around for a while. With tags in the products we buy someone will be able to snoop and find out what brand of jeans we are wearing and what cereal we are eating for breakfast, or something like that. Some people get excited about things like that.

On the other hand, I have seen marketing types salivating over what they could do with technology like RFID. I consulted with one of the major Las Vegas resort outfits where a consultant was full of interesting ideas. For example, a couple walks up to the hotel restaurant. The RFID tag in the guy's player card ID's him to the maitre'd, who welcomes them by name. "Good evening, Mr. Smith. Would you and your wife like the same table you had last time?" Very cool, except maybe last time he was with a different Mrs. Smith...

New technology does have to be examined through the lens of common sense. Stores do collect more information about us then I am comfortable with, but poorly thought out laws against useful technologies like RFID don't really help.

Larry Mittag

It seems that robotically-controlled cars may come along just in time to save us from a worldwide accident caused by drivers doing anything but driving. The old standby distraction, the cellular phone, is becoming more integrated into the car through the addition of Bluetooth interfaces, as discussed in a recent posting in Digitimes. That should keep our ears and at least part of our brains off of our driving.

So far we are keeping our eyes on the road, except for the occasional illegally-configured video device (they are not supposed to be visible to the driver while the car is moving). That may change with new video options like the wearable Microdisplays described by EE Times. This article actually suggests that the devices could be used "... to walk or even drive while simultaneously viewing the display". Hmmm...

Bad ideas like this aside, interfaces like Bluetooth present some interesting possibilities to interface with cars. They could be used to pipe music in digital form from an MP3 player, for example, avoiding the clunky RF interface or wiring mess that is currently required. It could also provide data updates to traffic-aware GPS systems. The access to diagnostic information within the car could also be as available to consumers as it is to mechanics.

This type of open interface has any number of possibilities while avoiding the excuse the car manufacturers have used of the dangers of plugging third-party equipment into the electrical systems. It is just vaguely possible that we might be able to relatively easily add on third-party devices.

Larry Mittag

Robotics is one of those fields that seem perpetually on the verge of becoming the next big thing. They have become a common fixture on most factory floors, in spite of the backlash created by labor unions. They have more recently begun to become fixtures in the house in the form of the Roomba, which is the current market leader according to an article posted on CNET.

In fact, there has been a flurry of announcements recently about robotics. They are doing everything from watching over RFID-tagged children to helping stroke patients recover. They have even taken on driving across the desert much better than they did in this event last year.

The real sleeper is the Lego Mindstorms kits, which allow kids to build and program mobile robots out of snap-together parts. Competitions are springing up at a number of grass-roots events to see who can build the best robots with these kits.

Are we on the verge of a "year of the robot"? Just like the year of the LAN it was predicted ad nauseum but no one could really determine when it happened. Did it happen behind our backs while we were watching something else?

Larry Mittag

As we shift into a modern online society more and more of the responsibilities of that society will be expected to be available online. This includes voting, one of the obligations of life in America. There has been a move to automate the tremendously manual process of collecting and counting votes, but that move has been significantly slowed by a series of objections to the first wave of voting devices. The poster child for these objections has been Diebold, which has been roundly demonized for their efforts.

Wired magazine recently reported on the standards that have been published regarding voting machines. Judge for yourself, but some of the problems they described seem pretty trivial. Complaining that the code does not have enough comments is pretty silly. I've never seen code that had 'enough' comments. Complaining that the manufacturer used COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) operating systems is very strange, since that is a recognized and common way of building systems efficiently. Worries that the machines are networked shows ignorance of the fact that these are single-purpose devices, not PCs. It is quite possible to create effective firewalls on these devices, since they require few holes to be drilled through them. Industrial-strength encryption and verification can be used on the data passing through those holes.

Yes, there are challenges, but I am getting the feeling that many of the complaints are driven by simple fear of change. Publishing requirements are a good start, but we need to keep moving on this. Hanging chads are a symbol of why.

Larry Mittag

Whether the device is supposed to be used for nefarious purposes or not, consumers are getting very good at doing what they want with their media. A report from Wired magazine's site combines several stories, including one on the new Slingbox. This clever device republishes media out of your home in streaming format to a number of portable devices that can be wherever you are. This new threat to the profit margins of the content producers is causing problems because it removes their control of where content can be viewed.

Another piece out of that story talks about how the encryption for the new Playstation Portable got cracked and then fixed by Sony via a downloaded update. It's awfully nice of the pirates to shake out Sony's content protection code before too many games get published, since the media can't be updated to the new protection level once it is shipped. When DVD content protection got cracked there were already way too many non-updateable players in the field and too much media that had already been published to allow them to fix the protection.

Meanwhile, the chips to support the next level of devices are beginning to roll out. EE Times reported on a very cool dual MPEG encoder from LSI Logic that not only will encode two streams at once, but will encode them in MPEG-4 format. This is just the kind of compression that will drive the next generation of Slingboxes and other media recorders, assuming the manufacturers survive the lawsuits.

These are the cases that will clarify the murky ruling recently handed down from the Supreme Court on content protection. Meanwhile, some content producers get it. Several sources reported on a new venture by Morgan Freeman to simultaneously distribute movies over the Internet. Using new technology instead of hiding from it... What a concept!

Larry Mittag

We talk a lot about the number of devices that are being built around relatively high-end embedded operating systems, but until you actually put together the list it's hard to really appreciate it. The people at www.windowsfordevices.com have been doing a series of Windows versus Linux smackdowns that provide such a list and even break it down in scoreboard form. Linux squeaked out a win in this third-round edition, by the way.

Granted, there are vested interests involved in the us versus them format and there is certainly a universe of embedded systems outside of the devices in these lists, but it is truly surprising to see just how many devices are on these lists. The cost of entry to create devices like this has come down significantly over the years, and interest in doing so has gone up commensurately.

Larry Mittag

Every few years the next round of game consoles appear. The manufacturers breathlessly list the graphics specifications and brag about realism; the press harps on declining morals and violence. It's a well-worn path.

But this round of upgrades is different. There is a very real opportunity—and a commensurate risk—this time around, because the new game consoles that will soon hit the market have enough processing power to double as home computers.

All of us know people who own a computer because they think they should but haven't learned how to do anything useful with it. More often than not, they either leave it to collect dust in the corner or recruit it for the ongoing zombie warfare on the Internet. Either way, it is a waste of resources.

The game console as home computer can change that. There has always been a computer hiding in these devices, but this generation will be the first that could participate fully on a network and run real software. As a result, it is quite possible that they will become the new personal computer.

Now the risk is that the game console business model depends on losing money on the hardware but making it up on the software by inflating game prices. To succeed as a general-purpose computer, the console must have enough applications, but the console manufacturer must be able to make money. The question becomes whether the manufacturers can control the software flow and set a sufficiently high price point without strangling the market. This is going to be an interesting next couple of years. . . .

According to their website, ARCHOS has released a software development kit (SDK) for the PMA400/PMA430 multimedia player/recorder device (http://www.archos.com/). This device was first introduced at CES in January, and runs Linux and Qtopia (http://www.trolltech.com/).

This announcement represents a long-overdue convergence between Free Software and the world of embedded and multimedia devices (the Sharp Zaurus tested the waters, but wasn't a dedicated multimedia device). ARCHOS has released a perfectly usable product for the masses, along with enough additional material to let developers tailor the device for applications that ARCHOS themselves never imagined. ARCHOS gets huge benefits by getting 90% of their system software for Free, plus the additional hardware sales from early-adopters who like the "nifty factor" of a reconfigurable system, PLUS the additional sales from developers tailoring the PMA400/PMA430 devices for niches too small for ARCHOS to reach directly.

Oh, and the spit-and-polish ARCHOS themselves provided to their "Linux distribution" for the the device--- including their customizations to Qtopia and other software--- are returned to the Free Software community for further refinement.

Anyone see the downside here? I sure don't.

[Posted for Bill Gatliff]

The media push around IBM and the Cell processor is still continuing. There was an EE Times article reporting essentially that:

A) IBM was going to release specifications and systems code to open source

B) They had already reported that a month ago.

This is in addition to articles throughout the business press talking about the new Cell architecture that will be coming to light in the Playstation 3. It is interesting reading - once - but it does get a bit redundant after a while. The reality, of course, is that the whole deal is much more about stealing the limelight from the Xbox 360 than a real change in computing architectures, but at the center there is some technical meat for us to chew on.

Personally, I will be very interested in seeing what is actually released. This can either be an important new design choice for very high-end consumer devices or just another architecture in the dustbin of history. Any bets one way or another?

It's nice to see the FCC is still pushing the switch to digital. A recent news article detailed the fact that the FCC has moved up the deadline for digital tuners in mid-sized TVs to March of next year, four months earlier than originally planned. This is a nice thought, but the reality is that it doesn't make that much difference in terms of the capabilities of the sets.

Digital tuners are very important for terrestrial broadcast reception, but that market is hardly the mainstream of America. The vast majority (especially of high-end users) get their TV signals from cable operators, and those digital signals pass through a STB first. The closest thing to a direct-to-TV connections there is through CableCard, which has hardly been popular among cable companies. They reluctantly offer it because they are required to do so, but they really would prefer you use a full box because it gives them more control of the viewer.

One way or another, digital tuners are a transitional technology. Either the TV will become a dumb display monitor or it will subsume the STB, DVR, etc. and become the uber appliance. Either way, a digital tuner is pretty much irrelevant.

UWB-based consumer electronics are getting closer. A report on windowsfordevices.com talks about Haier Corporation's use of Freescale Semiconductor chipsets to create a TV/Media Server combination connected wirelessly through UWB.

This wave is going to be a little different than most CE technology rollouts, which tend to show up in Japan first and the U.S. a year or so later. This one will appear in China by the end of the year and the U.S. next year. The difference here is the small number of countries that have ratified UWB. For once, we are ahead of the curve.

That being said, this is still going to be a rocky rollout. The article declares UWB to now be a proven technology, which has yet to be seen. It also says that UWB is the only technology capable of the 110 Mbps necessary to broadcast an HD signal. That number is very convenient, since it is just slightly above the 108 Mbps number claimed by current enhanced 802.11g systems. This may be a confusion between marketing and reality, though, since actual data throughputs are usually half or so of the signaling rate. UWB should be capable of 250 Mbps of the latter, giving an actual throughput in the declared range. I'm just not used to companies advertising reality instead of hype...

One way or another, we are beginning to see another option for wireless connectivity in CE devices. This one does RF very differently than your typical garage door opener, however. There is going to be a learning curve here.

Larry Mittag

Multimedia has officially graduated from a niche technology that a few geeks were experimenting with into a full-fledged industry. The gargantuan size of disk storage on PC systems adapts well to this application, but embedded systems usually have to be a bit more cost-conscious. An important tool in this quest is the proper selection of media encoders.

Video is the ultimate disk hog, especially if you use formats like MPEG-2. This standard format is very easy to render, but eats disk space at a prodigious rate. A very real alternative is the newer MPEG-4 format, which does a much better job of compressing the video. This format has been much more limited in terms of interactive features, but at least one vendor of encoder software has added that to the mix. The new Divx 6 interpretation of MPEG-4 offers one of the few alternatives to the Windows Media Format for encoded video that must live within sane disk space limits.

There is a tradeoff, however (Isn’t that always the case?). MPEG-4 requires a lot more CPU power to decode, and the format is subject to the same kind of variations within the standard that plagues versions of MPEG-2 to this day. Even so, the formats are a lot more mature and accessible than they have been. And again, there is always the default Microsoft option.

Larry Mittag