Asian investors give Tijuana a thumbs up for business?

An official with a Japanese manufacturing trade group gave a ringing endorsement to doing business in the Mexican border city of Tijuana last week. Joji Hiraiwa, secretary of the San Diego-based Japanese Maquiladora Association, thanked local authorities for supporting his industry during tough times, when deteriorating infrastructure and public insecurity proved challenging obstacles.

"It was a headache for the maquiladora industry to travel on deteriorated streets, but things are good with the hydraulic concrete program, and we will remember this public work in the coming years," Hiraiwa said. The Japanese business leader added that investors will seek to sink more money into Tijuana.

That, from a report by Frontera NorteSur (FNS - Center for Latin American and Border Studies;

New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM), posted this month at Mexidata.info. The report continues:

Pleased with the recognition, Tijuana Mayor Jorge Ramos pledged to give greater support to foreign investors. Although property taxes for foreign-owned maquiladora plants have increased 200 percent, plant owners now have access to much better roads, green areas and monuments in the Otay Industrial Zone, Ramos said. According to the mayor, the maquiladora industry will be offered new properties in the Las Palmas Valley as an incentive to expand.

Investors from other Pacific Rim nations are also showing greater interest in Tijuana. A government delegation from the People's Republic of China visited Tijuana in recent days, greasing the wheels for a tour of Chinese businessmen who are expected to arrive in the border city [this] week.

Chinese attention on Tijuana is another example of the Asian giant's growing business in Mexico and Latin America. China's bilateral trade with Latin America exploded from $200 million in 1975 to $47 billion by 2005.

Given the high level of criminal violence and subsequent negative publicity which have swirled around Tijuana in the past few years, the enthusiasm of foreign investors in expanding their business dealings in the city is noteworthy.

While Tijuana is far less violent than another important border maquiladora center, Ciudad Juarez, it nonetheless continues to suffer significant spates of bloodletting — despite repeated claims from security forces that government crackdowns have largely neutralized organized criminal gangs in the city.

At least 15 men were reported slain in gangland-style incidents between Sunday, October 10, and Tuesday evening, October 12. In one incident, two headless bodies were discovered hanging from a bridge on the Tijuana-Rosarito Highway. On another road, the shaved head of a young man was found stuffed into a plastic bag. In both instances, written threats typical of narco bands were left at the scenes.

Fermin Gomez Gomez, deputy state prosecutor for organized crime, blamed the outbreak of violence on a gang conflict for control of Tijuana's retail illegal drug market.

We've covered the turbulent Maquiladora space on this blog before. Always a fascinating -- and frightening -- subject.

Boeing 787 Dreamliner: Still dreaming

The Wall Street Journal reports that Boeing has again halted factory deliveries of components for the much anticipated 787 Dreamliner owing to workmanship issues with a major Italian supplier. The problem involves delivery of the jet's horizontal stabilizers (small wings at the rear of the aircraft that help control the up-and-down pitch of the aircraft). The parts are built by Alenia Aeronautica in Foggia, Italy, and have been a source of consternation for Boeing much of this year. The Seattle Times says that as a result Boeing is considering building 787-9 horizontal tails in-house. Meanwhile, the planes are stacking up!

Guest Blog: Converging, colliding and collapsing IO standards and interconnect

By ED CADY, Strategic Marketing Director, Siemon Interconnect Solutions --

As with organic life forms, the nodes and links of the worldwide web seem to have a varying rhythmic process of differentiation and then integration. At certain inflection points in the process, one can see an intended integration of effort cause some differential effects, which in turn meld together after another natural cycle. More than any other IO interface, Ethernet has expanded well beyond the original LAN section of the web that it has dominated for many years since it overcame the rival Token Ring and VG AnyLAN interfaces.

Responding to Ethernet's expansion and absorption of rivals, champions and evangelists of other IO interfaces like Fibre Channel have created newer standard interface versions using a convergent tunneling method that preserves the native protocol but uses Ethernet physical transport system. Think of protocols tunneling through any other faster physical transport layer as a packet spaceship traveling through wormholes in space, from one data center galaxy to another.

Recently the Ethernet community has evolved its technology to converge LAN with SAN into one physical network. This was partially accomplished with the implementation of the recent Ethernet standard 10GBaseCR. This two-pair, serial single-lane link was expedited without a detailed connector IEEE standard specification clause, but achieved compliance and interoperability through an Ethernet Alliance Plugfest process.

This has caused the Fibre Channel community to create a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) specification that helps to preserve the native protocol and its installed base. The InfiniBand community has similarly created its RoCE, or RDMA over Converged Ethernet, standard specification. RDMA is Remote Direct Memory Access, a low-latency and low-power technology used with InfiniBand architecture. So now these four interface, 10GBaseCR, 10GFCoE, 10GFC and 10GRoCE are implemented using the same SFP+ single-lane passive copper cabling. 10G SFP+ usage has grown dramatically because active copper and active optical SFP+ have enabled increased market segments and longer-length applications like digital signage and AV systems.

Besides Fibre Channel, other storage interfaces like NAS, iSCSI, iSATA and ATAoE are tunneled over Ethernet 10GBaseCR. These other storage interfaces are also tunneled over Ethernet 10GBaseT using Category 6a and Category 7a cabling. There are open and closed Consortia de facto standards using these multi-protocols on so-called collapsed architectural fabrics like the Unified Computing System, which also use the SFP+ cabling.

Besides UCS, there are several other de facto standard unified style networks, which also use the SFP+ but with different encryption in memory mapping of the embedded plug EPROMs. One wonders if all of these IO interfaces will expand and use the newly developing 25/26/28Gbit/sec QSFP++ module and cabling system, which is being standardized through the SFF-8661/2/3 specification. See www.sffcommittee.org, www.t11.org and www.fibrechannel.org to learn more, or contact me.

Ethernet 40GBaseCR4, 40GFCoE and InfiniBand 40G QDR standards are using the same four-lane QSFP+ SFF-8436 connector, module and cabling. the SAS storage interface uses QSFP+ AOC (active optical cables) for longer-reach applications as does the CameraLink-2 video networking standard. Will these various interface communities stay converged using the new SFF-8661 QSFP++ connector system for next-generation 100GBaseCR4, 100GFCoE, 100GFC SAN and InfiniBand 100G EDR?

There are many other convergent IO interfaces like FCoIB Fibre Channel over InfiniBand, UAS USB attached SCSI, UoSATA USB over SATA, and of course SoU SATA over USB, which is 3G SATA over 4.8G USB implementation. Watching Ethernet, the other very high volume IO standard, HDMI, has recently released its new revision-1.4 spec. This spec has 1G Ethernet running through the new microHDMI cabling system. However HDMI and DVI video IO signaling is run through Ethernet category cabling systems, as does the HDBaseT signaling and HomePlug Alliance's cabling adapters. So one could say that the shielded Cat 6a, Cat 7a, SFP+and QSFP+ are the three primary multi-protocol interconnects for now and several years.

Lo, looming ahead is a potential round of interface collisions, convergence and collapsed interconnect. It is starting at the desktop level with DisplayPort, USB, SATA, HDMI and PCI-E converged and transformed to the new multi-protocol LightPeak optical-only single fiber interface. It is rumored that LightPeak would replace short-reach SAS as well. It seems that there is a 10G and 28G version of LightPeak.

At the 25/26/28/40G-per-lane data rate, electrical signaling has very limited copper-cable length reach, like 1 to 3 meters. Active optical cabling seems at this range to have an equal portion of the forecasted TAM volume versus copper. So it is no wonder that there is also looming another generation beyond, a new optical interface that can be supported by developing chips that currently work in labs at 50G per lane and supporting up to 2-km distances. Its next generation of 100G per lane is being co-developed. This optical technology interface is beyond the LightPeak interface and could supplant even Ethernet, InfiniBand, Fibre Channel and other IO interfaces within new data centers within five years.

Coinciding with this new optical interface's emergence is a very new generation of internal active optical cables that connect from either printed circuit boards or nascent fiber circuit boards to other boards/modules and to optical backplanes. These internal AOCs also are being driven by the continual port densification evolution as the internal AOCs connect to the bulkhead with MPO-type connectors and achieved double port density versus either SFP+ or QSFP+ AOCconnector/cabling ports. But there will be a large part of the market and systems that stay longer using the various small form-factor pluggable media types, causing the use of many different hybrid cables like QSFP+ SFF-8436 to QSFP++ SFF-8661, and hydra cables like three SFP++ SFF-xxxx (number to be assigned) cable legs going into one QSFP++ SFF-8661. Seewww.sffcommittee.org.

These internal AOCs and other new CMOS photonic chips may evolve beyond using the QuickPath, HyperTransport and other chip-to-chip IO interfaces. As the highest performance and largest size data center system end-users look at using many thousands of mobile phone processor chips like Intel's Atom, the ARM chip or SmoothStone's new chip to save on power consumption and cooling needs, they are considering a further collapsed optical interface and interconnect that absorbs the LightPeak interface.

You can have fun trying to overlay all these IO roadmaps into one chart. In a parallel universe, voice communication interfaces are melding into Ethernet. Consider that telephony IO interfaces like SS7, TDMS, Utopia, Frame Relay, ATM, PBT and MPLS are merging into a VoIP and Ethernet network. Even IB-WAN, EoS Ethernet over SONET, SONET and SDN are being replaced by enhanced Carrier Ethernet. The same is true for all the old 6-8 Industrial IO interfaces converging into Industrial Ethernet cabling. Within commercial infrastructures various IO interfaces are also quickly melding into a ConvergeIT interconnect network.

Just think if these dozens of interfaces converged into one optical interface in the fuzzy future, we will have many fewer acronyms to keep track of! But will this nascent Camelot interface be called something cryptic like the existing IPoDWDM (Internet Protocol over Dense Wave Division Multilexing) interface?

In the past ten years, the SFF-8470, a primarily dedicated twinaxial copper cabling system was selected and/or implemented in many industry and de facto standards like InfiniBand, Ethernet, SAS, RapidIO, Myrinet and in the very many separate NICs and homogenous switch boxes. Then heterogeneous switches and NICs appeared with the common SFF-8470 cabling handling the different interfaces in one box or rack. Then there were high-port-count multi-protocol chips. Now the protocols run through one slimmer QSFP+ or SFP+ cable assembly using one transport layer. In some SSD (solid state drive) devices the FC and SAS or SATA and USB interfaces are integrated into one chip. I have heard the many wireless interface people are working on their Camelot next-generation convergent interface as well.

How fast will the new data center power and cooling requirements as well as disruptive CMOS photonic technologies impact further convergence and wide market acceptance? So what is your convergence view or vision of interfaces and interconnects over this coming decade?

Ed Cady is senior marketing director with Siemon Interconnect Solutions (Siemon, Siemon Interconnect Solutions). You can reach him at Ed_Cady@siemon.com or 503-359-4556.

Is EMF-induced 'electropollution' from cell phones, Wi-Fi a serious public health hazard?

Author Ann Louise Gittleman has thrown down the proverbial glove when it comes to a form of environmental pollution that industry, government and wireless consumers alike may be loath to acknowledge. Gittleman contends, "You may not be able to see electropollution, but your body responds to it as though it were a cloud of toxic chemicals. Electropollution is continually disturbing your sympathetic nervous system."

The quote is from Gittleman's recent book, Zapped: Why Your Cell Phone Shouldn't Be Your Alarm Clock and 1,268 Ways to Outsmart the Hazards of Electronic Pollution. The risk from electromagnetic fields (EMFs) generated by widespread deployment and usage of celluar phone and Wi-Fi technolgies may be, it appears, a matter of more than just passing concern. And medical professionals from both the M.D. and integrative medicine communities are standing up and taking note.

At least, that's the tack taken by Hyla Cass, M.D., writing in Huffington Post, when she reveals:

"A few years ago, I was so concerned that I took a certification course in the detection and harmful effects of EMFs. What it taught me, above all, was how much what the scientific community is learning daily, and how little we in the medical profession knew. This area was both frightening and daunting in its scope."

How frightening? How daunting? Hess goes on to report:

The UK's BioInitiative Report of July, 2007 (updated in 2009) describes hundreds of studies that link EMF exposure to Alzheimer's disease, ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), brain fog, cardiovascular disease, birth defects, infertility, insomnia, learning impairment, as well as anxiety and depression. Wireless technologies--like cell and cordless phones--produce microwaves that increase the permeability of the blood-brain barrier, leading to changes in brain chemistry. Even low-level EMFs can cause brain cells to leak...

...Most disturbing of all, the Swedish National Institute for Working Life found that people using cell phones for 2,000 hours--a total most of us could easily rack up over the years--had a 240 percent increased risk for malignant brain tumors on the side of the head where they usually held their phone...

...Some of this radiation -- extremely low frequency (ELF) radiation in power lines, the radio frequency (RF)/microwave range where all things wireless live, intermediate frequencies ("dirty electricity" or freaky frequencies linked to sick building syndrome), and the highest frequencies (gamma and X-rays) -- is more damaging than natural frequencies to which humans (and animals) have adapted over millennia. Today, most Americans are constantly exposed to artificial frequencies, given the rapidly escalating pace of microwave and wireless expansion...

...The bottom line is that electropollution--from cell towers, computers, cordless and mobile phones, PDAs, WiFi, even the electrical appliances and wiring in our homes, offices and public buildings--continually disturbs the sympathetic nervous system...

Yikes.

Full disclosure alert: Hess states in her article that author Gittleman is a friend of hers, so the reporting -- which enumerates a list of helpful tips for avoiding electropollution zappage (as it were) conveniently drawn from Gittleman's book -- could be written off as nothing more than a glorified book review -- or, worse, advertorial.

Still...use of mobile and wireless electronic devices their effects on our health is a topic we've all wondered about, and one that the World Health Organization has acknowledged. Do you really think it's all myths?

The feelings herewith inspired may indeed be (ahem) warm...but probably not too fuzzy...

iPad, iPhone may soon sprout magnetic connectors for fast disengage

Patently Apple is reporting that a recent -- and apparently rather hastily published -- continuation patent application seems to tip the company's intention to integrate its MagSafe power connector into future versions of portables such as the iPhone and iPad.

The MagSafe connector is held in place magnetically so that if tugged on, it disengages from the socket easily and safely, without damaging it or the computer. Thus alleviating the dreaded laptop-hits-floor scenario when someone accidentally pulls or trips on the power cord!

Wikipedia notes that the MagSafe is similar to the magnetic power connectors that many deep fryers and Japanese countertop cooking appliances have in order to avoid spilling their dangerously hot contents.

I like what Darius Chang commenting at CNET Asia has to say on all this:

The MagSafe connector is one of those features which makes so much sense that one wonders why it has not become a universal standard...Still, not all patents actually take on physical form, take this with a pinch of salt for now.

It would be interesting to know what factors might serve to preclude Apple's moving the MagSafe connector into these portable designs. Might it have something to do with concerns surrounding physical footprint and size, in light of recent reports of these rapidly-becoming-ubiquitous devices already being on deck to sprout additional interfaces?