Signals

If you are of a certain age, you might recall the phrase "duck and cover!" You might also recall your fifth-grade teacher, Miss Boswick, stopwatch in hand, urging you to immediately take shelter under your desk. And there you were, clutching your #2 Ticonderoga, wondering, WTF? If certain potentially atomic events in Eastern Europe have recently rekindled that unfortunate childhood memory, allow me to rekindle two more.

With all due respects to all the great analog engineers out there, it is my opinion that anything an analog circuit can do, software can do better. You don't agree? Fight me. Case in point: software-defined radio.

Spider-Man is a comic-book character that was created in 1962. The inaugural issue sold for 12 cents. Sony Pictures, which now owns the screen rights to the character, decided not to release the latest Spider-Man movie in the world’s biggest movie market. That decision might cost Sony as much as $340 million.

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["of hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

You've just caught Covid, for the third time. Last year, your 401(k) was poised to lavishly finance your early retirement. Yesterday, you spent what was left of it on a tank of gas. Regular, none of that fancy premium stuff. The good news is that you've found a nice quiet corner in Concourse E. It even has a wall outlet. The airline assures you that you might get home by Labor Day. Today is July 11.

I’d like to tell you about Thomas Yuen, former chairman and CEO of SRS Labs, who died earlier this year at the age of 70. I didn’t know him well, but he made a tremendous impression on me.

One minute you are the Shiny Object that everyone is clamoring for. Then the next minute you are Yesterday's News, thrown onto the trash heap of history, in favor of the next Shiny Object. Alas, the iPod.