Jay R. Jeffreys

Bioterrorism: Technology, Legislation, and Our Food Supply

Processors and the federal agencies involved in supplying food to the public work hard to protect our food supply from pathogens, contaminants, and outright mischief. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) have adopted and enacted a technique for ensuring food safety that, interestingly enough, was first developed by the National Aeronautics and S...

Structured programming tools for embedded systems

Sometimes it's fun to imagine what the world might have been like if John von Neumann had a room full of Crays or if Galileo had the Hubble telescope. On a somewhat smaller scale I wonder what my own career might have been like if I'd had something besides machine code back in the days of designing embedded control systems for microwave ovens, simple RTUs, and steam-driven chiller packages.

No, that’s not a PC, it’s a PLC

There is much to be written, and much to be done, in the quest for a solid, reliable, real-time control engine to run in the Windows NT environment. Quite a few good people in quite a few good companies are hard at work on the problem—and some may actually have solved it. I'll be exploring some of their work in this column over the coming months.