On 11/4/13 6:51 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Hi John,
well, I think he must have meant a new car back in 1971 :) That would be
about right. It's not quite THAT expensive.
Ford Pinto sold for $1999 in the early 70s. Not that I want to compare
a CSAC to a Pinto, but...
Symmetricom seized to exist as an independent company a couple of days ago,
they were bought out by MicroSemi..
They do make great products, for sure. Please note that I do not think that
the NIST CSAC effort had much to do with the commercialized Symmetricom
product. Same funding, but competing groups I think. NIST never took it to
commercial grade.
We who work at National research labs and Federally Funded Research and
Development Centers always face the "thou shalt not compete with
industry" laws and regulations. Each and every job or project we do, we
have to prepare an analysis to show why we are uniquely suited to doing
whatever it is and why the government shouldn't buy it from industry.
This, in general, is a good thing, but it also does mean that sometimes
the technologists are a bit separated from the customer experience
(because developing the customer experience is something you only get
by, uh, working with customers of a product).
So we get a lot of things to TRL 4 or 5, and it kind of languishes
there, unless it's something unique (e.g. if you want to communicate to
deep space probes, there aren't any industry sources with 70 meter
antennas, cryogenic receivers, and 400kW transmitters).
Ideally, you work with some industry partner(s) who can take it to
commercial reality. And, hopefully, you stay in contact with industry,
who can provide feedback on what is needed in the way of fundamental
research.
A lot of the development of error correcting codes works this way, for
instance. Some government agency or FFRDC does the basic work, and
comes up with a reference implementation, then the actual commercial
implementations are done by someone else. Guys like Viterbi did their
basic work at JPL. Turbo codes were invented at France Telecom.
_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.
