Brian's Brain

Much discourse is regularly made in the tech press regarding the single-chip integration effects of Moore's Law, and the associated extinction of companies and their products whose functions are now absorbed into competitors' hardware and software. Less commonly discussed, however, for reasons I frankly don't understand, is the effect this silicon consolidation has on the systems comprised of the ICs. Perhaps the most common all-in-one tech devices are smartphones and PCs (including low-cost netbook variants), and last week's news clearly demonstrated their 'black hole' effects on technologies in their orbit that sooner or later get sucked in. Check out this graph...Read More

One of my meal meetings at the Intel Developer Forum back in late September was with Steve Roux, Senior Strategic Business Development Manager for USB technologies at NEC Electronics. As any of you who've followed Ron Wilson's extensive technology, circuit design, IP and product coverage of recent months already knows, 'SuperSpeed' version 3 of the USB specification is looming on the horizon. And judging from both company announcements and ...Read More

Plenty of companies pitch me on new products, armed with nothing but a pile of PowerPoint foils. Inevitably, many of the promised chips never appear, which is why I make it a rule to not bother telling all of you about any IC that doesn't have accompanying pricing and sample-and-production availability statistics. And that's why I didn't write up Zenverge's ZN100 and ZN200 audio-plus-video-plus-DRM transcoders last November, when the company first gave me an over-dinner presentation on them.

Many of the other promised chips arrive late, accompanied by performance, power consumption and other specifications that drastically undershoot the supplier's preliminary promises. And that's why I was so pleasantly surprised when Zenverge invited me to meet with them again a month ago, this time at their Cupertino facilities. Here's a ...Read More

A week ago, I shared with you my experiences two nights earlier watching the live stream of a U2 concert on YouTube. Although the band's performance at the Rose Bowl broke records with a sellout crowd of 97,014, the Akamai-aided attendance was even more mpressive...an estimated 10 million streams served.

Friday night, as a follow-up, I tuned in to a Livestream-served and Facebook-sponsored Foo Fighters live jam session. At 7PM, there were around 13,000 folks online; by 7:30PM when...Read More

Following up on yesterday's disappointing re-test of Gigle Semiconductor's HomePlug AV-plus powerline networking adapters, today's evaluation focuses on NETGEAR's XAV1004 HomePlug AV unit. Whereas the XAV101s I'm currently using are based on Intellon's (now Atheros') second-generation INT6300 chipset, the XAV1004 employs the third-generation INT6400. According to Chris Geiser, NETGEAR's powerline product line manager:

Remember Google's Linux-based Chrome O/S, which I wrote about back in early July? Well surprise surprise...the company just released a beta build, in both standalone and virtual appliance (for VMware Player or VirtualBox virtualization purposes). Hit this link and download away; share your impressions in the comments section of this blog post. Enjoy!

Followup: It was a clever ruse. Move along, folks, nothing to see here...

Back in late July, I shared my initial (and underwhelming) testing results on Belkin's Gigabit Powerline Adapters based on Gigle Semiconductor's GGL541 devices (PDF), which I also mentioned in my late August cover story.

Not only did the 'Gigabit' adapters not exhibit the higher-than-HomePlug AV speeds promised by Gigle's Mediaxtreme technology, they delivered slower bandwidth than conventional HomePlug AV adapter equivalents (...Read More

I'm a pretty big U2 fan, so Sunday night I caught the live streaming performance of the band's Los Angeles concert on YouTube. As I've written before, live-streamed video is a far more technically challenging endeavor than traditional server-to-client Internet-delivered content, predominantly due to two factors:

• Its multicast (one source to many destinations) topology nature,
• The unknown number of destinations at any point in time, along with the variability of viewer numbers across time, thereby requiring constant re-balancing of capability versus cost, and
• The variability of the bandwidth between th

My friend's DSL service was activated on Monday, and all in all it was a pretty good setup experience. Speakeasy reports that downstream speeds on AT&T's 'Pro' tier average 2.5 Mbps downstream and 430 Kbps upstream (versus up to 3 Mbps downstream and up to 512 Kbps upstream in the promotional materials). AT&T sent a modem cosmetically idential to the Siemens SpeedStream 4100 B unit I have up in Truckee, although this one's labeled as coming from Westell. And after 30 days of service, it'll be free-after-rebate-eligible.

AT&T sent out a technician to do the installation instead of just remotely attempting activation, which ended up being a good thing. The technician (who ended up being onsite for a good chunk of...Read More

Hopefully by now at least some of you have gotten a chance to peruse my Prying Eyes teardown of Microsoft's new Zune HD portable multimedia player, published yesterday. And some of you might have seen my hands-on observations on the device from a month ago. Reviews of the Zune HD have been quite positive, albeit with a few grumbles:

1. No Mac OS X support for device management (although it's possible for subscribers to stream content from zune.net via any browser, running on any operating system)
2. A touchscreen-centric user interface, eschewing good ol' fashioned navigation buttons and even the previous generations' slick touchpad (a complaint which I noted in my writeup)
3. An OLED display that washes ou

Yesterday afternoon, I endured a half hour of pure frustration. The day before, I'd started getting grumble-email messages from my company's IT department, with the subject line 'Your mailbox is over its size limit', and containing the following content:

Your mailbox has exceeded one or more size limits set by your administrator.
Your mailbox size is 2xxxxx KB.
Mailbox size limits:
        You will receive a warning when your mailbox reaches 200000 KB.You may not be able to send or receive new mail until you reduce your mailbox size.
To make more space available, delete any items that you are no longer using or move them to your personal folder file (.pst).
Items in all of your mailb...Read More

This blog post references my feature article 'Transporting High-Def Video Broadcasts: Are Wireless Networks Up To The Task?' in EDN's August 20, 2009 edition. It's one of a series of web addendums to the print writeup.

Those of you who read my hands-on missive of two months back hopefully discerned that my difficulty in streaming high-def MPEG-2 video over 802.11n was in no small part due to the fact that I was in actuality attempting to simultaneously transport two streams through the same Wi-Fi link; one going from my Windows Media Center-based laptop to the router, and the other sourced at that same router and ending up at the Xbox 360. This cumbersome man-in-the-middle approach is...Read More

My friend's broadband Internet aspirations unfortunately haven't been solved by the booster recently installed at her residence. Although she now has a solid signal throughout the house, her router still regularly experiences dropped cellular data connections that I'm convinced originate at Verizon's tower. Supporting this conclusion are her in-parallel problems with cellular voice service; dropped calls, un-reported incoming calls, substantially delayed voicemail notifications and SMS deliveries, etc.

All of these woes point, in my mind, to an over-subscribed service area. And although Verizon hopes to build another cell tower in the area, it's currently mired in land and permit application processes and best-case won't ...Read More

Subsequent to my slide-and-roll accident debacle of two Sundays ago, AAA has thankfully provided me with a gratis Hertz rental car for use until the insurance company's adjusters determine whether or not the vehicle is totaled (and if so, how much to reimburse me). I recently decided to visit a Southern California-based friend, among other reasons because there's a much larger crop of replacement vehicle candidates available down there versus back home, so my dog and I struck out on a lengthy commute.

AAA's temporary rental policy provides for a vehicle of comparable class to the one which was involved in the accident, and as such I ended up with a Kia Sportage compact SUV:

...Read More

Lest there be any doubt as to the extent of my independent thinking, even when it conflicts with the opinions of my management, here's what I emailed Editor in Chief Rick Nelson subsequent to the publication of his efficiency-focused anti-wireless power diatribe a month back:

While the green-bleeder in me appreciates your message, I'm far more cynical than you. Since when has a notable percentage of the population (excluding upper-class Prius owners, for example) done ANYTHING that prioritized power savings over convenience? The only reasons why the SUV market has collapsed are that:

1. gas is expensive and
2. folks are out of work.

I could go on...

In his reply, Rick begrudgingly ad...Read More