The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#51 – Vafrous Video Vaniloquence

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Our initial try of Google Plus “Hangouts”! Hopefully all the interuptions and the concentration on a new medium didn’t interrupt our usual shabby quality of podcast (thereby downgrading our rating to “godawful”). We had fun and hopefully will be able to use it to pull in guests in an easier way and somehow get back to the shabby quality everyone is used to!

  • This Week in Nerd History:
    • Nikola Tesla was born and reddit was celebrating. There’s a video explaining him to anyone who’s never heard of him. Alternately, stick your finger in your electrical outlet, he’s to thank!

The YouTube video of our show should be up shortly but can be found over at Dave’s YouTube channel for EEVBlog.

Comments

  1. I will listen today and tell you. Google plus, FB, all the same essentially.

    BTW, you have production values??

    Just kidding, it is actually a nice show, no fancy frills, just good entertainment, and a lot of info thrown in as well.

    • Hi,
      It was a great show once more.

      About the videos. The company i work (ASML) recently released a video about our wafer metrology device. They seem to do this every quarter. At least it’s accessible to the general puclic.
      But Bell labs unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore.

      YieldStar: A steady stream of data to optimize chip manufacturing
      http://youtu.be/NY3WWp0ewlg

  2. As far as the power-meter systems being killed, it seem the electricity companies wanted to keep all the monitoring data for themselves and pretty much refused to deal with either Google or Microsoft.

  3. That was one of the funniest things I’ve ever watched, not because of the content (although that was funny too) but because I turned on the Transcribe audio feature (just cos I could) and on the whole it is a major fail with an Oss accent.
    Try it. Even Chris’s accent tricks it but Dave’s is a complete hoot. Please Google do NOT change anything! You may be on to a winner here. Priceless.(still laughing!!)

  5. it is “war of the currents” as chris mentioned it. I just finished my second year and I’ve read about that war in more than one book.

  7. It was great fun to watch the video. You should probably continue to do it (to increase your programs reach) but I’ll stick with the audio version of your show. I also switched most of the TWiT shows I follow to audio as well. Preserves my productivity.

    (Disable your autofocus!)

  8. As a strong supporter of fundamental science, I wanted to point out that CERN has contributed open source software in the past. http://acs.lbl.gov/software/colt/
    It is good to see them doing the same with hardware.

    The video format is interesting. I would do both audio and video if it isn’t too much extra work. Both formats have their merits.

  9. I enjoyed your experiment with Google Plus video. It seems like you guys had a good time with it. I look forward to your learning curve with video. You seem to have nailed the audio show. Please keep the shows coming.

  11. I like the part about the space program. At this rate, we are around 40 years from not being able to break the sound barrier. We stopped having commercial supersonic flights around 10 years ago, so we’re right on track: 70 years from having no aircraft at all.
    I’ve known other foreigners who say they’ve spent time in the US and the average American is a lot like the Jerry Springer Show. This was from a Dutch person who probably lives in a windmill and wears wooden shoes.
    Regarding the lack of jobs and foreign trade, this is not my impression of the macro-economic situation, esp as baby boomers retire. A personal anecdote: I trained a Chinese person who when by “Charles” to do my job eight years ago. He and his colleagues were so excited for the opportunity to travel to US and learn the type of jobs that are transforming his country from an agricultural economy to a high-tech industrial one. I lost my job a few months later and received some minimal Trade Readjustment Allowance benefits that provided a few thousand dollars while I was finishing my masters. (The program was designed for skilled trades, so I told them on the forms I was getting my “DSP certification” instead of masters in EE.) Eight years later I earn about three times what I earned at the job I lost, and I bet my Chinese doppelganger has tripled his income too. I recognize this is just one anecdote, and people’s mileage with globalization will vary.
    I wish there were a link to the 1982 article. I thought we’d have people living on Mars by now back then. Ten years ago, though, I thought MIMO would never work outside a MATLAB simulation. They really got a lot of thigns right in that article.

    • Also love the show, but some electronics would have been good on that one. Sort of felt I lost an hour I am never getting back. Have you ever been to one of those training sessions that takes all day but you get about 20 minutes of real content…. Keep up the good work and I look forward to next week.

  13. Great show again
    I usually play the podcast whilst I am working so I sort of multitask, though the wife reckons thats not possible for a guy
    ‘Now that there is video, I am going to have to figure how to see the video as I work. Maybe I have to drag another computer up

  14. CERN have contributed a lot to open:

    Here’s a little reminder from Wikipedia:

    “In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: “I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and—ta-da! — the World Wide Web.”[13] He wrote his initial proposal in March 1989, and in 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau, produced a revision which was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall.[14] He used similar ideas to those underlying the ENQUIRE system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first Web browser, which also functioned as an editor (WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon). The first web site built was at CERN, and was first put on line on 6 August 1991.”

    Regards
    Al

  15. Ok, my take on Huawei, after having spent a few years in the telecommunications industry. You won’t like it.

    Huawei is a very special company. Links to the Chinese military, its founder hides from public, and since a few years Huawei is on a massive expansion strategy. But not in a nice way. Although the company is held in high regard in China.

    They are a cornerstone in China’s plan to advance seven key industries, one being telecommunication. Being that important for China they have a breathtaking $30 billion credit line from the China Development Bank. Their internal rival ZTE “just” has $15 billion. The credit line is not only important for expansion but also, because the worldwide telecommunications industry has the interesting business model that the equipment supplier is supposed to also arrange for customer’s credit, so the customer can buy the equipment (don’t ask).

    They have no qualms to blatantly copy stuff. They started relatively small with copying Cisco equipment. In 2003 Cisco sued them for almost 1:1 copying Cisco’s OS, including verbatim copies of Cisco documentation. Cisco later dropped the lawsuit in exchange for Huawei doing a few changes to their products. By the way, these days, Cisco is a main supplier of equipment used to build China’s Great Firewall for censorship. Draw your own conclusion how Cisco managed to become and stay a supplier. Hint, you don’t become such a supplier if you have lawsuit with Chinese companies.

    Many companies since then have found remarkable similarities between their equipment and Huawei equipment. In recent years all telecommunication manufacturers had to up their counter-intelligence measures.

    They are on a massive technology fishing and copying expedition. They open R&D centers all over the world. However, their core development happens in a rather huge and secretive campus in Shenzhen in China, and the local R&D centers mainly have to deal with local customer relations and “help” the development activities in China. Maybe help out with technology?

    Like almost all large, aggressively expanding Chinese companies they had their usual string of Chinese worker suicides a few years ago. They had a “mattress culture”, meaning employees were supposed to sleep on a mattress in their office if needed. They are now regularly increasing the salaries in China, following the example of Foxconn, who also had a series of suicides.

    They are willing to do every dirty trick in the book. Doesn’t matter if it is for development or for sales. Therefore they are universally hated in the telecommunications industry. Huawei was part of the reason India blocked local phone companies from just buying Chinese telecommunications equipment for fear the equipment comes with spyware. US and British agencies are also worried.

    Huawei coming to the Valley is in my opinion not a sign that doing work in the US is becoming viable again, because China is becoming to expensive. It is part of Huawei’s hunt for technology.

  16. Not so sure about the video guys. I couldn’t watch much of it. Still enjoyed the audio as I usually do in Sydney gridlock.

    The Google+ thing is all bad though, I think it could have a place from time to time on eevblog. Certainly has some plus(sad) points when you guys hae some thing to show.

    Audio doesn’t require 100% attention like video does, I’d hate to see the convenience of audio only Amphour superceded by a cos-we-can video format.