Automation World has a brief article on the confusion with “Ethernet” at “TCP/IP-Ethernet Tower of Babel Breeds Confusion.” Because the article is short I’m afraid it reinforces the confusion. For a comprehensive look at Ethernet for industrial uses, download the PTO brochure on PROFINET and other Industrial Ethernets.
The company behind one of the Industrial Ethernet also-rans recently trumpeted its usability on gigabit Ethernet: 10 times faster than 100Mbit Ethernet. I guess they’ve abandoned the appearance that it’s an open standard since the announcement was from a company instead of a standards organization. The step up to gigabit is one all the Industrial Ethernets will take, but it’s not as important a step as you might think. Back at the Industrial Ethernet Symposium, the University of Michigan presentation included a pie chart showing that only a tiny sliver of time is spent on the Ethernet network. Most of the time is spent in the TCP/IP stack and the application. The U of M lab analysis showed only 6% of the time on Ethernet and half of that was switch latency. So a 10x improvement on the remaining 3% sliver will yield some benefit, but it far from dramatic. In other words, the improvement is a couple percent not 1,000%!
Arizona’s Valley of the Sun hosted its third bowl game in 11 days as the Florida Gators embarrassed the Ohio State Buckeyes 41 – 14. (This was probably cheered at the OSU-rival, University of Michigan, too. But I don’t want to see those charts!) How then can I say “Buckeyes are great”? I’m not talking about the football team. I’m talking about the buckeye cookies that have been a staple of the Ohio-native, Henning-family Christmas tradition for many years. They’re called buckeyes because they look like the nut of Ohio’s state tree – the Buckeye. The cookies are basically peanut butter and sugar rolled into a ball and dipped in chocolate leaving part of the brown exposed. File this recipe away for next Christmas.