Today the world is obsessed with the IoT, as if this is a new concept. We've been building the IoT for decades, but it was only recently some marketing "genius" came up with the new buzz-acronym.
Before there was an IoT, before there was an…
In a recent issue of IEEE Spectrum, Mikhail Dyakonov makes a pretty compelling argument that quantum computing (QC) isn't going to fly anytime soon. Now, I'm no expert on QC, and there sure is a lot of money being thrown at the problem by some very…
Scott Rosenthal and I go back about a thousand years; we've worked together, helped midwife the embedded field into being, had some amazing sailing adventures, and recently took a jaunt to the Azores just for the heck of it. Our sons are both big…
Does anyone remember in-circuit emulators (ICEs)?Around 1975 Intel came out with the 8080 microprocessor. This was a big step up from the 8008, for the 8080 had a 64k address space, a reasonable ISA, and an honest stack pointer (the 8008 had a…
In the comments section of my 2020 embedded salary survey, quite a few respondents felt that much of the embedded world is being subsumed by canned solutions. Will OSes like Linux and cheap, powerful boards like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino replace…
By Jack Ganssle
As Good As It Gets
How good does firmware have to be? How good can it be? Is our search for perfection, or near-perfection an exercise in futility?
Complex systems are a new thing in this world. Many of us remember the early…
by Jack [email protected] our electric toothbrush started acting oddly – differently from before. I complained to Marybeth who said, “I think it’s in the wrong mode.”Really? A toothbrush has modes?We in the embedded industry have…