Embedded Now Blog

I was surfing some boards looking for inspiration and found this gem of a visitor comment on Fast Company a bit back, discussing the impacts of rising fuel costs on business:

"Within five years, technology will obliterate the need for business travel."

When I got done laughing hysterically after reading that, I thought: seriously, somebody believes that?

This idea has been launched several times, pretty much starting when the telephone was invented and continuing through each progressive step of technology improvement. Radio. Television. Videoconferencing. Internet.

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Sure, the big show starts in a couple of weeks, but there's another important world sports event that just took place in China - the RoboCup 2008. The goal of the RoboCup competition is developing a team of autonomous humanoid robot soccer players by 2050 that will be able to defeat the World Cup champions.

And our friends from Virginia Tech were there with DARwIn III in the kid-size humanoid soccer division, powered by a PC/104 platform.

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My family doctor - you might have heard of him, Dr. Vinnie Boombatz III - is a pretty practical guy. He's got some quick advice to avoid pain on a lot of topics.

• If your shoulder hurts when you raise your arm and then twist it behind your head while trying to scratch the opposite armpit, then don't do that (for at least two reasons).
• If you drive through the Starbucks, drink it while driving and spill the hot coffee in your lap when you hit a pothole, you're gonna be burned worse than a Visigoth storming a castle and catching the hot oil downpour. Don't do that.
• If you stick your head out at the train station to see if the train is coming, and the train is just arriving and hits you, it's gonna hurt. Don't do that.
• If you take that ball point pen on your desk and jam it in your eye, it's not only gonna hurt, but you're not gonna be able to see real well. Don't ever do that.

You get the point. There are a lot of ways to misuse anything - like RFID - and possibly have bad things happen.

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I'm worried about this winter. A lot. It's about 97 in Phoenix right now and we're hoping for a thunderstorm soon, today or tomorrow. California has been in the grip of a heatwave, relentless fires, and the possibility of a new wave of rolling blackouts. The rest of the US is hot, too. So it's a funny time to think about winter.

But the next President of the United States is almost certainly going to face a crisis on the day he takes office next January. People in the Northeast will likely be freezing - literally.

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Apparently the US Army does. How on earth do you lose 4 helicopter engines worth $13M?

Real-time location systems only work if you're actually on a network, and most I've seen work with Wi-Fi which suits them for campus-type environments but not the expanse of the great outdoors. But an RTLS working on a military comm network shouldn't be that hard, right? Blue Sky Network does it on Iridium with GPS.

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