标签: Data

Typically, microwave ovens are known for being useful for warming things up rather than cooking food. In fact, even the traditional TV dinner either ends up with a cold centre or overcooked at the edges. Now imagine a microwave oven that can cook a whole meal heating the different parts at different rates and intensities so that vegetables, meat and pasta and rice are cooked exactly right — but leaving the ice-cream ice cold!   Not only that, such an oven could be connected to the Internet or IoT, or read a smart RFID tag on a prepared dinner and know exactly how to cook the meal in a minimal amount of time. Freescale Semiconductor recently introduced its vision for a radically innovative appliance concept that leverages solid-state radio frequency technology to revolutionize cooking. Developed in partnership with global product strategy and design firm frog, this breakthrough proof of concept will help enable fresh, chef-quality meals available at home with virtually no effort or prep time. With the convenience of a microwave and quality of a traditional oven, this smart, connected RF cooking concept can control where, when and how much heating energy is directed into food – enabling more precise cooking for dramatically improved consistency, taste and nutrition. This fine-tuned heating capability helps prevent overcooking, which can destroy nutritional content, reduce moisture and waste energy. Solid state RF cooking technology can also enable appliance OEMs to create products capable of cooking multiple dishes and items at the same time within the same appliance, significantly simplifying meal preparation. By precisely controlling the location, cycles, and levels of cooking energy, the appliance will bring food from a raw or frozen state to a cooked temperature rapidly and without intervention. With the addition of convection heating to enable browning and crisping, the oven concept can also support a wide array of cooking types and qualities, from searing to browning to baking to poaching. “Consumers worldwide are strapped for time but still want nutrient-rich, high quality meals at home,” said Paul Hart, senior vice president and general manager for Freescale’s RF business. “They will no longer need to choose between quality and convenience. Imagine not only having ready-to cook, gourmet meals delivered to your door, but achieving restaurant-quality results in mere minutes.”   With the emerging IoT, the era of the smart homes and smart cooking is beginning to take shape. This breakthrough paves the way for a host of new business models and opportunities, including internet-driven home delivery of freshly prepared meals from a variety of sources — including restaurants, grocery stores and farm-to-table cooperatives — all quickly and easily cooked in the appliance. The concept also holds the broader potential of improving food supply chain efficiency by collecting and transmitting Big Data sets which can contribute to more efficient food distribution, targeted services and enhanced products.   Jean-Pierre Joosting  

A blow of serious proportions hits you when you least expect it. You can't escape. It's you and only you. The collective experience of your lifetime searches for the approach within you. Sure, it was easy to give advice to others when they faced difficulty. It seemed so clear and straightforward. But that was then, and now this is you. There is no place to turn. Sure, there are others with advice, but there is no downside for others. They are simply free to go on without any retribution. It's not the same. You are all alone.   That was then, and now this is you.   This is responsibility. This is using all you have within you -- all you have been trained and taught. But inside, you know that you are alone, searching for the right path and using everything that has only been tested briefly before but now is under full assault.   Leadership knows this setting, but not well. It seldom occurs. Sure, numerous decisions flow in any enterprise. These are usually "rubber stamped" outcomes that have been vetted up the chain. No, this is a major blow -- a vital flare-up that won't go away and potentially threatens you and everything. It can't be modeled. It can only be addressed with your judgment and yours alone.     There is no place to turn -- only to turn within oneself. Each of us has the capability, but do we have the judgment? We are all filled with answers, some learned, some emotional, and some political. This is much different. This is your personal test. This will define you.   As the president of a company for 40 years, I have faced just such a tumultuous time twice. No, it wasn't products, people, or anything tangible. But it meant the pure existence of my enterprise.   In 1992 (OK, it was 22 years ago, but still highly relevant), we were informed by the GSA, the government agency that buys items from hammers to electronics, that it was going to sue Data Translation. The charge was that we had offered a product for sale to a government agency at a higher price than what was offered to our best customer, which bought in very high volumes.   Now, the lab that bought the product purchased just one unit through the GSA. Our best customer bought units in hundreds, and these units were specially manufactured and tested under another part number. Even so, the GSA insisted that it should get the very low price of a volume user.   We were confounded, and we tried to explain differences to the government's attorney. This was all to no avail. The only avenue the US attorney gave was for Data Translation to settle, admit guilt, and pay the treble damages of $15 million. The problem was that we were innocent, and we didn't have $15 million.   Larger companies faced similar suits from the government over GSA pricing. These firms quickly settled with the government and wrote it off. We couldn't do that. It would have killed us as a company.       So we did what we had to do. We fought in court. It was an all-or-nothing decision. Luckily, the jury unanimously found in our favor. We were cleared of any wrongdoing. Whew.   But those are the times when you summon all you have and make a big decision. There is no one else responsible but you. As Rudyard Kipling said in the poem, " If- ," known to many youngsters for more than 100 years:   If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'   Fred Molinari President CEO Data Translation    

In his article Preserving Data Books From Yesteryear, Aubrey Kagan related how he painstakingly scanned data books and made the information searchable. That's great, as long as he has the hardware and software to read the files. If someone finds his designs 200 years on and wonders how they worked, will his digitized data books and schematics be of any help? In 1998, I wrote an article for Test Measurement World called "Arrange Test Benches More Efficiently" in which Kagan sent me a photo of how he used a computer monitor arm to hold an oscilloscope. You can read the PDF of the article in the link above because I still have my print copy to scan, as does Kagan. In fact, I have every print edition of TMW from August 1992 through to the end in 2011. Those print copies could outlast all of the electronic versions that are now on EDN. In 200 years, someone will know how electronic products were tested, because reading them won't require machine intervention.   Aubrey Kagan used this computer monitor arm to hold his oscilloscope in 1998. Last week, I read an article in IEEE Spectrum about the movies and how they've been stored for the last century—on film. The beauty of film is that it can last 100 years. All you need is a film projector. But, movies are going digital, at least in the short term. For the long term the article says that film is still the best option. On Saturday, March 8, The Boston Globe posted an article about how people are giving up on safe-deposit boxes for storing documents and valuables. They're scanning documents and storing them in the cloud. Valuables such as jewellery are going in home safes. A local bank reported that safe-deposit boxes are in less demand. But the article noted that when a cloud service went out of business, the company gave just 24-hours notice for people to download their documents. Many were gone forever unless other copies remain. These instances of storage made me think about how test and calibration data are stored. Granted, you probably don't need to keep test data for 100 years, but you may need a way to gain access to it many years after your company started (or stopped) producing a product. The big problem with storing any kind of data for the long haul is "Will there be a machine that can read the data?" Systems and file formats change over time, and you may find yourself transferring data from an old format to another. I've done that more than once. For example, I once converted documents from Multimate to MS Word. Both formats use .doc file extensions, but they are incompatible. If you have engineering or manufacturing records that are more than perhaps 10 years old, can you still read the data? If yes, then for how much longer? What about documents that were originally stored as hard copies? Do you scan them and upload them to the company network? If you destroyed the paper records, you'd better make sure that you'll be able to read them on some machine and have them stored in more than one place. Hard drives are disasters waiting to happen. Therein is the beauty of hard-copy records. Remember, portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls survived in a cave for centuries. Once they were recovered, people were able to read them because the language had survived. They required no machine to see the words, though having digital images means we can see the artifacts from anywhere. Will the original scolls outlast their digital copies?   The Dead Sea Scrolls survived for centuries in a cave, and they just may outlive their digital images. Of course, digitized test data is, at least in the near term, far more valuable than paper records. You can analyse digital data and discover things about designs and their manufacture that are impossible to achieve with paper copies. You can also easily keep copies of the data in more than one place in case of a disaster.   How long will it take for this iPad to become nothing more than a lighted serving tray?   Martin Rowe is Senior Technical Editor at EETimes.  

You would have it half right if you assume it is easy (fun?) to run a company for 40 years. The other half is akin to skating on thin ice almost every day. In fact, who would want to do such a thing? Just keeping a job that long is remarkable. Some things just happen. After college, I had two rather substantial positions, but I didn't last in either one. Essentially, I got fired from both. So how does one have that record and then keep a long-term job for many years? The short answer is that, in the other jobs, I thought my ideas for products were better than those the company was pursuing. I wasn't the boss, so I went packing. You know the old story about companies like HP getting started in a garage? We didn't do that at Data Translation. We started in my basement in New England (where nearly every house has a basement). But we didn't stay there long—maybe three weeks. We found an old office building about four miles away in downtown Framingham, Mass., and we (all three of us) grabbed it.     An early Data Translation product, the DT2762 data acquisition card for the QBus. Its acquisition hardware is built from discrete components housed in a module on the board. Even though this was an office building—housing insurance agents and paper pushers of some kind—it had some unique character. On the third floor (the top floor) was an old bowling alley with six or eight lanes. On the ground floor was a restaurant. I never ate there, because it was grungy. We did everything in our office, which was one small room. We designed and assembled circuit boards, met the UPS truck each day with deliveries, and on and on. Of course, we started on a shoestring—no salaries. Each of us mortgaged a house to get $10K from a bank. That was our capital. We surmounted some large hurdles, including legal ones. (A former employer said we stole trade secrets, but it never said what they were.) One of the three founders left; he was concerned about the legal matter, but really he didn't think a one-room company was going anywhere. But we just kept digging. We'd sell some modules, run some ads with the money, and then sell some more. Sales kept growing enough for us to get a more realistic office, hire two more people, and finally shake the legal morass, and away we went. After several years, we took the company public. We were listed on Nasdaq and were ready to begin a new phase of growth. Of course, there were some very notable occurrences. Let me mention a couple. First large order Orders for the first two years of our endeavor went along haltingly, with ups and downs, until we attracted a possible order from Western Electric. The company was building a Navy ship-based system that could use one of our modules in each system. Western Electric wanted to visit us. Imagine a large company sending an inspector to see four people in two rooms of an old office building. Our visitor was Bob Servilio, who was taken aback by our size but quickly warmed to us. He saw that we were determined, technically smart, and capable. What we didn't know then was that, as a large company, Western Electric needed and benefited from buying from a small company. So the first check (cheque for banks) for $75,000 as a pre-payment for this order was a big win. Visit by big French distributor We received a note that our newly appointed French distributor would be visiting in a week. Two top executives were making a US tour of suppliers. These executives had no idea our company was just four folks in a two-room office. Our reaction was to set up more soldering stations and ask two friends to come in as production employees. This boosted our employee count by 50%. They came in dressed in beautiful business suits, which was in sharp contrast with the jeans and T-shirts that reflected our small, hands-on approach. Somehow, the distributor stuck with us and kept buying and selling our products. We were honest and straightforward. It worked. Many other surprises followed, but suffice it say that there was never a dull moment. I think a Cheers -type situation comedy would be needed to give it justice. The one good thing going for any new business is the goodwill of customers, suppliers, and press folks, but not bankers, lawyers, and large companies. Fred Molinari President CEO Data Translation

You may think it is easy (fun?) to run a company for 40 years. You have it half right. The other half is akin to skating on thin ice almost every day. In fact, who would want to do such a thing? Just keeping a job that long is remarkable. Some things just happen. After college, I had two rather substantial positions, but I didn't last in either one. Essentially, I got fired from both. So how does one have that record and then keep a long-term job for many years? The short answer is that, in the other jobs, I thought my ideas for products were better than those the company was pursuing. I wasn't the boss, so I went packing. You know the old story about companies like HP getting started in a garage? We didn't do that at Data Translation. We started in my basement in New England (where nearly every house has a basement). But we didn't stay there long—maybe three weeks. We found an old office building about four miles away in downtown Framingham, Mass., and we (all three of us) grabbed it.     An early Data Translation product, the DT2762 data acquisition card for the QBus. Its acquisition hardware is built from discrete components housed in a module on the board. Even though this was an office building—housing insurance agents and paper pushers of some kind—it had some unique character. On the third floor (the top floor) was an old bowling alley with six or eight lanes. On the ground floor was a restaurant. I never ate there, because it was grungy. We did everything in our office, which was one small room. We designed and assembled circuit boards, met the UPS truck each day with deliveries, and on and on. Of course, we started on a shoestring—no salaries. Each of us mortgaged a house to get $10K from a bank. That was our capital. We surmounted some large hurdles, including legal ones. (A former employer said we stole trade secrets, but it never said what they were.) One of the three founders left; he was concerned about the legal matter, but really he didn't think a one-room company was going anywhere. But we just kept digging. We'd sell some modules, run some ads with the money, and then sell some more. Sales kept growing enough for us to get a more realistic office, hire two more people, and finally shake the legal morass, and away we went. After several years, we took the company public. We were listed on Nasdaq and were ready to begin a new phase of growth. Of course, there were some very notable occurrences. Let me mention a couple. First large order Orders for the first two years of our endeavor went along haltingly, with ups and downs, until we attracted a possible order from Western Electric. The company was building a Navy ship-based system that could use one of our modules in each system. Western Electric wanted to visit us. Imagine a large company sending an inspector to see four people in two rooms of an old office building. Our visitor was Bob Servilio, who was taken aback by our size but quickly warmed to us. He saw that we were determined, technically smart, and capable. What we didn't know then was that, as a large company, Western Electric needed and benefited from buying from a small company. So the first check (cheque for banks) for $75,000 as a pre-payment for this order was a big win. Visit by big French distributor We received a note that our newly appointed French distributor would be visiting in a week. Two top executives were making a US tour of suppliers. These executives had no idea our company was just four folks in a two-room office. Our reaction was to set up more soldering stations and ask two friends to come in as production employees. This boosted our employee count by 50%. They came in dressed in beautiful business suits, which was in sharp contrast with the jeans and T-shirts that reflected our small, hands-on approach. Somehow, the distributor stuck with us and kept buying and selling our products. We were honest and straightforward. It worked. Many other surprises followed, but suffice it say that there was never a dull moment. I think a Cheers -type situation comedy would be needed to give it justice. The one good thing going for any new business is the goodwill of customers, suppliers, and press folks, but not bankers, lawyers, and large companies. Fred Molinari President CEO Data Translation