Responding to an article about vacuum tubes reader Phil Matthews suggested the book “Empire of the Air” by Tom Lewis. It’s out of print but a used copy cost a whopping $0.21 (plus shipping). Though ...

CAMBRIDGE, UK – Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) and Thomson of France have signed into a two-year joint research and development programme to develop and evaluate technologies relative to full ...

With the advent of a new year, it’s not a bad time to step back and think about first principles. After 40 years of being an engineer I’ve come to view this as a truly noble profession, one in which ...

There’s a huge distance between hype and reality in many industries, but in the computer business that gap asymptotically approaches infinity. Remember Y2K? The world as we knew it was doomed. All ...

I gave a talk at the recent Embedded Systems Conference which covered, among other subjects, code inspections. Inspections are sure to get developers riled up. We all hate them. They go against our ...

If you are a professional programmer but are unfamiliar with the Ada language, a good hands-on way to gain familiarity is to go to Ada Barebones which is a back to the basics informational site that ...

For the embedded systems developer, stereotypes abound. The image of young, specialized high-tech workers toiling in a computer-filled lab, sipping Jolt cola late into the night is popular with the ...

Capers Jones’ “Software Quality in 2011: A Survey of the State of the Art ” is chock full of interesting data. One can only despair at some of it. Like most researchers, Mr. Jones prefers to use ...

This series delves into all aspects of real time operating systems (RTOS) and is intended for any developer who is curious about how to use an RTOS and how they work.

In the two decades or so that I've been writing this column, we've covered a lot of topics, ranging from the best implementation of abs(x) to CRC algorithms to logic theory, Karnaugh maps, and ...