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I've been doing some PIC programming lately. I really love Microchip's parts. Simple, cheap, effective. The 18F series is my current love. The 18F458 has lots of flash, a CAN controller, serial an a little RAM. I wired one up to a Cirrus 8900 ethernet chip and write a simple TCP stack for it. Amazing huh? Other have done this before me, but

My vote for the cool SOC of the year (2003) is the Xilinx Virtex II Pro. It's a PPC 405 with a giant fpga. It's also a lot of IP which does all of the normal things like ethernet, serial, etc... Maybe everyone knows this but looking over the interface docs I was having some major deja-vu from some work I did for IBM a few years back. It

"The day the music died..." What hath venture capital wrought? dateline 2000: Way too much money chasing to many bad deals. Way too much money put into marginal or even bad ideas. Insane valuations. Insane investments. dateline 2002: many, many, many failed startups. everyone is running scared. M&A has slowed or stopped. IPO's have

System-on-chip cpu's are coming like a train. The first one I spent time with with Motorola's 8xx line, the 860, 850 and 823. These chips had all the peripherals on the chip on one big melange. Static memory interface for flash, SDRAM interface for memory, an MMU, serial ports and built in ethernet. Needless to say it ran linux well, thanks

"Metricom to close Ricochet" This is sad. I thought that this idea was strong enough to live in some metropolitan areas at least. The problem (IMHO) is that VC's often kill the idea by pushing the "big score/massive expansion" rather than the "slow but sure wins the race" strategy. I can't tell you how many CEO's I've talked to recently

Would you wear a computer? I'm not sure I would. Except for maybe my wrist watch, cell phone, pager, oh, and the keys to my car. How about one which had a 600x800 eyepiece? or one that had an audio earpiece/microphone? Seen anyone with a phone and ear microphone lately? (they really work well - I tried one). There are research folks all

My accountant told me he had clients break down and cry in his office this year. On one hand I totally understand. On the other, I'm not sure I do. Did people actually think that money existed? What if everyone had tried to sell their CSCO or Redback shares at the height of the market? The price would have dropped. There would have been

A friend warned me when I said I was going to work on a USB controller. He said it was a huge spec and it would take me months to figure it all out. I didn't believe him. I went off to write a host controller for the PowerPC 8xx chip. Six month passed. Turns out he was right. Still, it was fun to learn the entire spec from top to