[TechView: Analog & Power]
New Power Approaches May Fuel Analog Job Opportunities In Security And Health Applications
Power-over-Ethernet (PoE, or IEEE 802.2af/IEEE802.3at) is one new approach to security power, but shipping container monitoring may benefit from advances in energy harvesting.
Don Tuite
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ED Online ID #20370 |
December 18, 2008
Zune-Day Memories
On a different note, the recent Microsoft Zune music-player debacle replicates a global technology event less widely heralded but just as embarrassing that happened back in 1981. May I be forgiven for bringing it up.
Evidently, the Zune players stopped working because their code couldn’t accommodate the new year’s leap-second. I got my link to the actual code from MSNBC’s Will Femia's “Clicked” blog). The code link is http://pastie.org/349916. (Analyzing the algorithm is left as an exercise for the reader.)
In 1981, a famous test and measurement company, bringing out the world’s first logic analyzer with a color display, chose to play up its announcement with concurrent demonstrations at all of its major field offices around the world on Monday, the twelfth of October.
This was a wonderful logic analyzer, and it would prove a big seller. Alas, in this release of the firmware, there was a date function, and it used a decimal year-month-day representation that was one digit short of what it ought to be. Saturday, October 10, was the first day of 1981 that mattered. The extra digit created an overflow. At the stroke of midnight, the demo unit in Tokyo bricked. An hour later, it happened in Taipei. On went the global cascade of blackouts.
Actually, I’m told that, thanks to the timing of the phone calls coming in to Walker Road, the root of the problem was quickly uncovered back home, although it took a little longer to get the new ROMs out to the field.
And 28 years later, the problem repeats, but the size of the bug has shrunk from a whole day to one leap-second. I guess that’s progress.
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