Engineers Voice

that the 100 millionth iPod® has been sold, making the iPod the fastest selling music player in history. The first iPod was sold five and a half years ago, in November 2001, and since then Apple has introduced more than 10 new iPod models, including five generations of iPod, two generations of iPod mini, two generations of iPod nano and two generations of iPod shuffle. Along with iTunes® and the iTunes online music store, the iPod has transformed how tens of millions of music lovers acquire, manage and listen to their music. Read more »

Security vendor Kaspersky Labs claims to have detected the first virus designed to infect iPod media players. But the security vendor was quick to point out that malware only affects iPods where the user has replaced Apple’s custom iPod operating system with Linux. One could therefore argue that the malware is a Linux virus rather than an iPod threat. Read more »

When it comes to overnight success stories, Michael Dell’s is certainly one for the books. After all, how many 19-year-old college kids manage to rack up nearly $6 million in first-year sales by storming the walls of an industry giant like IBM? The answer is not many. Add to the story that he started with a mere $1,000 and was working from his college dorm room, and the story becomes one of legend. Not bad for a college dropout. Read more »

As technology continues to evolve, there are increasingly blurred lines about the various subfields of engineering having to do with electricity, computers, computer software and several other engineering fields. Computer engineering has many of the same classification difficulties as software engineering and other technologically modern subfields of engineering.

To further complicate matters, there are differing schools of thought about classification and terminology whether you’re talking to computer engineers, corporate and other business managers who interview and hire computer engineers, or professionals of more traditional types of engineering. It seems like everyone has an opinion about the designation and classification of this area of engineering. Read more »

The battle between processor powerhouses Intel and Advanced Micro Devices is one of the fiercest in the tech industry. After Intel dominated for many years with its x86 line of PC and server chips, AMD upped the stakes in the server market in 2003 with its Opteron line. It caught Intel off guard by overhauling its memory design, pushing out combo 32-bit/64-bit processors when Intel was advocating a 64-bit approach with Itanium that required rewriting applications. Then AMD hit its stride with a powerful dual-core processor. It also undercut the industry leader on price. The result: AMD’s server and workstation market share rose from 2.8% in 2003 to 27% in 2006, according to the company. Read more »

Intel has unveiled an improved wireless card that will allow notebook PC users to share five times the data at twice the range of their current 802.11a/g cards, improving PCs’ ability to download music and stream high-definition video. Read more »

Microsoft has poached IBM’s chief architect Donald Ferguson as part of a recruitment drive to bring more web expertise into the company. While at IBM, Donald Ferguson led teams that were involved in developing applications such as WebSphere, Tivoli and the Lotus range. Read more »

I’ve just come across a interesting news report from CNN which discusses the probability of Oracle winning the database market share war with IBM due to its wide adoptation in Linux Servers. Read more »

With its demonstrated superiority in density, cost, performance and power, MoSys 1T-SRAM is the memory technology of choice for market-leading system-on-chip (SoC) applications. 1T-SRAM has been used successfully in over 100 million devices, powering dozens of electronic products from leading manufacturers, from cell phones and game consoles to portable MP3 players and high-performance network switches. Read more »

In order to further solidify its positions of the market of high-performance microprocessors and popularize quad-core chips, Intel Corp. will sell its highly-anticipated central processing units (CPUs) with four processing engines at significantly lower price-points than it so far has been expected. Read more »