ieee

Candidate for the Robot Hall of Fame?

Matthew T. Mason, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has won an award for his "pioneering contributions to the fundamental understanding of the mechanics of robotic manipulation and to graduate education in robotics."

The Robotics and Automation Society, which bestowed Mason with its annual Pioneer Award, is part of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE). So while the monetary prize for the lifetime achievement award is only $2,000, a lot of prestige comes with the plaque he was given over the weekend.

Mason's body of work includes robotic juggling, legless robotic … Read more

IBM, Microsoft, others align on open clouds

IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, the IEEE/ISTO, and key members of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum met recently to address how they could work with the community to drive cloud computing markets and technologies forward. Jesse Silver, one of the CCIF's four co-creators, spoke to me after the meeting, and Reuven Cohen released a single paragraph of minutes on his blog Tuesday morning:

Yesterday representatives of CCIF, CloudCamp, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and the IEEE-ISTO met while attending the Cloud Computing Expo in New York. Other companies were invited but were unable to attend, generally due to the short … Read more

IEEE 1667: One standard worth watching

I've grown rather cynical about industry standards, but I am pretty bullish on IEEE 1667 (aka: "Standard Protocol for Authentication in Host Attachments of Transient Storage Devices"). This standard should improve security and may have other benefits as well.

Here's the thing: We all have a plethora of flash drives, MP3 players, and USB disk drives. Yes, these may be a great way to replicate music or transport files, but they also create a huge security vulnerability. When you plug in the 250GB drive you bought at Fry's Electronics at lunch, you can steal a … Read more

Faster FireWire on way for gigabit generation

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has approved a new specification that gives support for bandwidth of up to 3.2Gbps--the standard that is used by Apple's FireWire and Sony's iLink, among others.

Most commonly called FireWire, it was initially intended as a general-use fast serial bus, but has found niches in attached storage and multimedia applications, primarily because of its guaranteed latency.

Like many standards, the issue for this specification--IEEE 1394-2008--is maintaining compatibility across different generations, and ensuring that the protocol keeps up with advances in hardware technique. Many implementations are still using the 400Mbps S400 … Read more

eSATA to shed the power plug

If your power strips are as overloaded as mine with cords and bulky transformers, you'll be glad to hear that eSATA--a standard that gives external hard drives the data transfer speeds of internal drives--is untethering itself from its power cord.

eSATA is an external version of the Serial ATA technology used to hook up internal PCs, but today external eSATA drives need their own power supply. But on Monday, the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) announced it's working on a version that will let external drives draw power over the cable that connects the drive to a computer. … Read more

Introducing OpenSEA Alliance

Sometimes we analysts have an "all sizzle and no steak" reputation. We come up with high falootin' concepts, write reports and columns, and get quoted in the media, but we don't really "do" anything.

Former executive vice president of marketing for EMC, Bob Ano, once put it to me this way: "If I make a bet on your latest 'vision' and you turn out to be wrong, I lose my job and reputation. You simply change a few PowerPoint slides and move on."

With this as background, I am proud to say that … Read more