Larkin, Here's mine...

[Jim Thompson]

Larkin, Here's mine...

http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/Diplomas.jpg

http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/WifesFavorite.jpg

Now show us yours.

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 14:37:43 -0700, Jim Thompson
<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

>Larkin, Here's mine...
>
>http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/Diplomas.jpg
>
>http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/WifesFavorite.jpg
>
>Now show us yours.
>
> ...Jim Thompson

Haven't seen mine in decades. I think my mother wound up with it. I
never cared about that sort of stuff, framing sheepskins and all that
nonsense, like some dental hygienist. They wanted me to join the
Freshman Honor Society (big hideously ugly ring, deadly boring dinner)
and I declined. Nobody had ever done that before, and it became a very
big public deal. The Dean of Students called me in, railed at me, and
told me to never do that again. I thought about that for some
milliseconds and agreed.

I cut the graduation ceremony, too. Who wants to stand in the New
Orleans sun, in a previously-worn black robe with rediculous hat,
listening to fatheads talk for hours?

Call Nick:

http://tulane.edu/sse/about/nicholas-altiero-dean.cfm

He buys me lunch when he's in SF.

Still killfiling me? Hilarious. Even assholes can be fun.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom laser drivers and controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation

[Bill Sloman]

On 8 Apr, 08:24, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 14:37:43 -0700, Jim Thompson
>

> <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-I...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
> >Larkin, Here's mine...
>
> >http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/Diplomas.jpg
>
> >http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/WifesFavorite.jpg
>
> >Now show us yours.
>
> >                                        ...Jim Thompson
>
> Haven't seen mine in decades. I think my mother wound up with it. I
> never cared about that sort of stuff, framing sheepskins and all that
> nonsense, like some dental hygienist. They wanted me to join the
> Freshman Honor Society (big hideously ugly ring, deadly boring dinner)
> and I declined. Nobody had ever done that before, and it became a very
> big public deal. The Dean of Students called me in, railed at me, and
> told me to never do that again. I thought about that for some
> milliseconds and agreed.
>
> I cut the graduation ceremony, too. Who wants to stand in the New
> Orleans sun, in a previously-worn black robe with rediculous hat,
> listening to fatheads talk for hours?
>
> Call Nick:
>
> http://tulane.edu/sse/about/nicholas-altiero-dean.cfm
>
> He buys me lunch when he's in SF.
>
> Still killfiling me? Hilarious. Even assholes can be fun.

Why don't you two grow up? What you did - or didn't do - at university
forty years ago isn't interesting. What you built on the - rather
restricted - knowledge you acquired there is rather more relevant.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 16:46:32 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill....@ieee.org> wrote:

>Why don't you two grow up? What you did - or didn't do - at university
>forty years ago isn't interesting. What you built on the - rather
>restricted - knowledge you acquired there is rather more relevant.

What inspires corporate employers to hire engineering skool graduates
is that the graduate has demonstrated that they are willing and able
to survive a 4+ year nonsensical ordeal process. If the graduate has
learned something useful during the process, so much the better. The
ability to tolerate such nonsense remains for life, is directly
transferable to a corporate environment, and is apparently incurable.
Incidentally, the most useful classes I took in three colleges were:
- Engineering Economics, where I learned the basics of putting a
price tag on everything.
- Psychology, where I learned that knowing why is just as important
as knowing how.
- Tractor Driving and Mechanics, where I made a huge mess and held
the record for maximum damage to equipment in a single semester.
- Rose Float, where I learned how to actually get something built
and working, even if I didn't agree with the methodology.
Somewhere along the line, I learned a few things about engineering and
electronics design, but most of the useful design stuff was learned on
the job.


--
Jeff Liebermann je...@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

[hamilton]

On 4/7/2013 8:19 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 16:46:32 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
> <bill....@ieee.org> wrote:
>
>> Why don't you two grow up? What you did - or didn't do - at university
>> forty years ago isn't interesting. What you built on the - rather
>> restricted - knowledge you acquired there is rather more relevant.
>
> What inspires corporate employers to hire engineering skool graduates
> is that the graduate has demonstrated that they are willing and able
> to survive a 4+ year nonsensical ordeal process. If the graduate has
> learned something useful during the process, so much the better. The
> ability to tolerate such nonsense remains for life, is directly
> transferable to a corporate environment, and is apparently incurable.
> Incidentally, the most useful classes I took in three colleges were:
> - Engineering Economics, where I learned the basics of putting a
> price tag on everything.
> - Psychology, where I learned that knowing why is just as important
> as knowing how.
> - Tractor Driving and Mechanics, where I made a huge mess and held
> the record for maximum damage to equipment in a single semester.
> - Rose Float, where I learned how to actually get something built
> and working, even if I didn't agree with the methodology.
> Somewhere along the line, I learned a few things about engineering and
> electronics design, but most of the useful design stuff was learned on
> the job.
>
>

LOL,

There is currently a discussion about software engineers on LinkedIn.

They want to blame the (not in order), the schools, the software
(Coders, Engineers, Monkeys), or management for having poor quality of
software in products today.

But, here is Jeff stating that he was responsible for his own learning
and becoming useful.

Good Job Jeff.

hamilton

[miso]

Engineering economics is pretty useful, but I don't believe it is on the
curriculum in most universities these days. What I liked about
engineering economics is it is mostly a course on logical decision
making. If you need to kill a project, you need to make the decision
logically. I've seen boneheads kill projects with little logic, or worse
yet, deem a project not profitable and never start it.

[Tim Williams]

"hamilton" <hami...@nothere.com> wrote in message
news:kjtans$gl4$1...@dont-email.me...

> But, here is Jeff stating that he was responsible for his own learning
> and becoming useful.

I was home schooled from the beginning through high school (college was
the first time I was a full-time student*). What this really means, for
the most part, is "self directed study", i.e., I tinkered with electronics
(among other things) and learned about it.

*Although one might prefer to say I've always been a full time student of
the world. If learning is fun, why ever stop?

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:14:28 -0700, miso <mi...@sushi.com> wrote:

>Engineering economics is pretty useful, but I don't believe it is on the
>curriculum in most universities these days.

Quite the contrary. It is required in most.

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 19:19:19 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:

>On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 16:46:32 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
><bill....@ieee.org> wrote:
>
>>Why don't you two grow up? What you did - or didn't do - at university
>>forty years ago isn't interesting. What you built on the - rather
>>restricted - knowledge you acquired there is rather more relevant.
>
>What inspires corporate employers to hire engineering skool graduates
>is that the graduate has demonstrated that they are willing and able
>to survive a 4+ year nonsensical ordeal process. If the graduate has
>learned something useful during the process, so much the better. The
>ability to tolerate such nonsense remains for life, is directly
>transferable to a corporate environment, and is apparently incurable.
>Incidentally, the most useful classes I took in three colleges were:
>- Engineering Economics, where I learned the basics of putting a
> price tag on everything.
>- Psychology, where I learned that knowing why is just as important
> as knowing how.
>- Tractor Driving and Mechanics, where I made a huge mess and held
> the record for maximum damage to equipment in a single semester.
>- Rose Float, where I learned how to actually get something built
> and working, even if I didn't agree with the methodology.
>Somewhere along the line, I learned a few things about engineering and
>electronics design, but most of the useful design stuff was learned on
>the job.

The EE basics are important. Quantitative circuit theory, Signals and Systems,
domensional analysis, control theory, field theory are all valuable, and
something that non-college types aren't usually forced to learn. Ditto physics.

On the job stuff is good, but is mainly qualitative.

Computer Science is useless, or sometimes less.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators

Custom timing and laser controllers

Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links

VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:34:01 -0700, John Larkin
<jjla...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

>
>Computer Science is useless, or sometimes less.
>

A true idiot, who obviously got too far, and that totally by accident.

You know less than nothing. You cannot even get the proper operation
of a degreaser right.

[John Larkin]

I've written three RTOSs, a few compilers, a couple hundred or so hard embedded
apps, and a zillion lines of various PC-type apps. I just wrote a PowerBasic
utility a few minutes ago, to help me edit a manual I'm working on. Without the
benefit of ever taking a programming class. Most people learn very bad habits in
college computer courses. "State machine? What's that?"

I did this last month, in PowerBasic, to graph the dynamics of a temperature
controller. PBCC makes Windows apps really easy. The compiled EXE is 68Kbytes,
not that that really matters any more.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/53724080/Software/RTD_Step.jpg


Do you have a CompSci degree?

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:34:01 -0700, John Larkin
<jjla...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

>The EE basics are important. Quantitative circuit theory, Signals and Systems,
>domensional analysis, control theory, field theory are all valuable, and
>something that non-college types aren't usually forced to learn. Ditto physics.

One of my first engineering jobs was with a company where the chief
engineer was self taught. He was extremely good within his area of
expertise, but also had many gaping holes in the fundamentals. This
caused some odd problems, where simple and obvious solutions and
analysis were lacking. I was far from an expert in any of these
areas, but my knowledge of the basics was usually sufficient to at
least inspire some frantic reading. We worked well as a team.

I was graduated from Cal Poly, Pomona in 1971. At the time, the
philosophy of the skool of engineering was "Learn by Doing" which
meant maximum lab work. Hands on experience with everything
electronic, mechanical, and chemical was part of the exercise. It was
important to learn the theory, but much better to have hands on
experience. In order to graduate, one had to design, calculate,
build, and demonstrate a non-trivial electronic product. What
suffered were the general education classes, which was fine with me.
However, a few years after I graduated, the college became accredited
which meant that many of the great lab courses were replaced by boring
general education classes in an effort to contrive "well rounded"
graduates. Retch.

>On the job stuff is good, but is mainly qualitative.

I wouldn't know. In almost every engineering position I've ever held,
I was expected to function be able to perform everything from
assembler to project manager. When I started, it was 90% engineering
and 10% the other stuff. When I escaped engineering, it was the other
way around. At one point, I needed to determine why production was
unable to wind a simple inductor. I sat on the assembly line for
much of a day, where I discovered that just about everything else was
also being done inefficiently and often badly. I later did much the
same with production test, QA, shipping, and field service. I think I
made every mistake possible, but that didn't matter because I could
make far more mistakes per day than anyone else, and by brute force
would eventually contrive something that worked. I'm not sure I could
do all that today. Probably not.

Along the way, I learned a few useful techniques and tricks. Far more
important was learning what motivates people, what is important, what
can be ignored, and how to get things done. My basic litmus test is
to judge people by their willingness and abilities to learn new
things, not by what they know, or have accomplished in the past. This
is where the skools tend to fail. The colleges claim to teach
students "how to learn" but more often just teach them how to pass
exams. I've found that those engineers and techs that have electronic
interests outside of skool do much better at the learning part than
those with a pure academic background.

>Computer Science is useless, or sometimes less.

Chuckle. Many years ago, I got overloaded and needed a programmist to
clean up a simple name, address, and phone number database for a
customer. I hired a computah science student from the local
university, who was allegedly skilled in the programming arts. He
could probably write his own compiler, but cleaning up someone elses
code was somehow an insurmountable obstacle. After several blown
deadlines, I paid him off, and finished the job myself. Apparently
the transition between theory and practice was a problem him.

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:58:54 -0700, John Larkin
<jjla...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

>"State machine? What's that?"

The term is "machine state", idiot.

[Bill Sloman]

On 8 Apr, 16:18, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

<D...@DecadentLinuxUser.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:58:54 -0700, John Larkin
>

> <jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
> >"State machine? What's that?"
>
>   The term is "machine state", idiot.

Wrong. The correct term is "finite state machine" but it's only used
by pretentious academics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine

--
Bil Sloman, Sydney

[tm]

"DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno" <DL...@DecadentLinuxUser.org> wrote in message
news:48o4m856kbdvne3hq...@4ax.com...

No, the correct term is State machine. Idiot^2

[Bill Sloman]

On 8 Apr, 12:19, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 16:46:32 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
>

> <bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
> >Why don't you two grow up? What you did - or didn't do - at university
> >forty years ago isn't interesting. What you built on the - rather
> >restricted - knowledge you acquired there is rather more relevant.
>
> What inspires corporate employers to hire engineering skool graduates
> is that the graduate has demonstrated that they are willing and able
> to survive a 4+ year nonsensical ordeal process.

I've dignified this as the Obstacle Course theory of education. My
supervisor wasn't best pleased when I described my graduate education
as a process of demonstrating that one could produce useful results
with the bare minimum of support.

> If the graduate has learned something useful during the process, so much the better.  The
> ability to tolerate such nonsense remains for life, is directly
> transferable to a corporate environment, and is apparently incurable.
> Incidentally, the most useful classes I took in three colleges were:
> - Engineering Economics, where I learned the basics of putting a
>   price tag on everything.

You don't need a college course to learn that. You can't sell it for
less than it cost you to build it, and you can't sell it for more than
the customer can make out of it,

> - Psychology, where I learned that knowing why is just as important
>   as knowing how.

You don't need a college course to learn that either. If you don't
know why something is going to be used, you don't know how it is going
to be used.

> - Tractor Driving and Mechanics, where I made a huge mess and held
>   the record for maximum damage to equipment in a single semester.

Graduate students are good at that. If you haven't broken something in
the course of your experimental work, you are too cautious to be of
much use.

> - Rose Float, where I learned how to actually get something built
>   and working, even if I didn't agree with the methodology.

> Somewhere along the line, I learned a few things about engineering and
> electronics design, but most of the useful design stuff was learned on
> the job.

There's nothing to stop you buying or borrowing a text-book, or
borrowing a colleagues lecture notes, when you need access to academic
information. The advantage of doing it when you need the information
is that you've got the motivation to plow through the text, and a
ready-made experiment in which to test the information you've
acquired.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[John Devereux]

Surely by now you must be aware that when you say something like that,
you are going to be wrong?

Why not take 3 seconds to type it into google or wiki first.

<http://xkcd.com/903/>

Look, it will raise your apparent IQ by 30 points!

The "state machine" is an extremely useful ideom in programming,
especially real time programming. The basic type is very simple, but
there are whole fields of study dedicated to elaborations of the
concept.

--

John Devereux

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

You're an idiot, Devoidereux.
"State machine" should bear a prefix, as in "Finite State Machine".

"Machine state", is a register, providing one with the status of
a specific processor register, as in "Machine State Register".

So, now it goes, "We were BOTH wrong, and NOW, *I* am the only one who
is right."

Maybe your IQ will go up, jackass. I have serious doubts, however.

[Gib Bogle]

Oh dear!

[John Devereux]

DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno <DL...@DecadentLinuxUser.org> writes:

> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:16:24 +0100, John Devoidereux
> <jo...@devoidereux.me.uk> wrote:
>
>>DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno <DL...@DecadentLinuxUser.org> writes:
>>
>>> On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:58:54 -0700, John Larkin
>>> <jjla...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>"State machine? What's that?"
>>>
>>>
>>> The term is "machine state", idiot.
>>
>>Surely by now you must be aware that when you say something like that,
>>you are going to be wrong?
>>
>>Why not take 3 seconds to type it into google or wiki first.
>>
>><http://xkcd.com/903/>
>>
>>Look, it will raise your apparent IQ by 30 points!
>>
>>The "state machine" is an extremely useful ideom in programming,
>>especially real time programming. The basic type is very simple, but
>>there are whole fields of study dedicated to elaborations of the
>>concept.
>
>
> You're an idiot, Devoidereux.
> "State machine" should bear a prefix, as in "Finite State Machine".

As Bill pointed out, it is needlessly pendantic to insist on that. State
machine is the well known, generic term that is actually used.

"A finite-state machine (FSM) or finite-state automaton (plural:
automata), or simply a state machine"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine>

> "Machine state", is a register, providing one with the status of
> a specific processor register, as in "Machine State Register".

Not really, although congratulations for actually looking it up this
time.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=machine+state>

I see you clicked on the second link there. That article is overly
specific to the power PC IMO, but most processors have similar
registers.

A "Machine state register" usually describes the state of the CPU core
(what mode it is in, condition code flags for example).

Just plain "machine state" would be a far more generic term,
encompassing all of RAM or all of the variables in a program perhaps.

Of course these are all "just words", and there is little more pointless
than debating definitions of words on usenet. But these *are* all well
known terms, and the state machine is an invaluable thing to know about
if you do any programming. Most communication protocols are *defined* in
terms of them.

> So, now it goes, "We were BOTH wrong, and NOW, *I* am the only one who
> is right."
>
> Maybe your IQ will go up, jackass. I have serious doubts, however.

I do try to look things up before posting nonsense. Although sometimes I
do it after.

"it ain't what you don't know, it's what you think you know that just
ain't so".

Or something like that.


--

John Devereux

[amdx]

Oh dear! is right.
I bought a machine from the state once, 10 cents on the dollar.
Mikek

[Bill Sloman]

On 8 Apr, 18:00, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

<D...@DecadentLinuxUser.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:16:24 +0100, John Devoidereux
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

> <j...@devoidereux.me.uk> wrote:

Who cares what you think?

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[k...@attt.bizz]

It certainly wasn't required when I went to college. I took the
course because several profs recommended it to me.

Engineering economics may give you the tools to make logical
decisions, which is great in your personal life but in most businesses
it's the bonehead that still makes the decisions. The numbers can
always be manipulated to get the desired results no matter how sound
the arithmetic is in between the assumptions and the results.

[k...@attt.bizz]

On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:58:54 -0700, John Larkin

<jjla...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

>On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:30:42 -0700, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno
><DL...@DecadentLinuxUser.org> wrote:
>
>>On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:34:01 -0700, John Larkin
>><jjla...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>Computer Science is useless, or sometimes less.
>>>
>> A true idiot, who obviously got too far, and that totally by accident.
>>
>> You know less than nothing. You cannot even get the proper operation
>>of a degreaser right.
>
>I've written three RTOSs, a few compilers, a couple hundred or so hard embedded
>apps, and a zillion lines of various PC-type apps. I just wrote a PowerBasic
>utility a few minutes ago, to help me edit a manual I'm working on. Without the
>benefit of ever taking a programming class. Most people learn very bad habits in
>college computer courses. "State machine? What's that?"
>
>I did this last month, in PowerBasic, to graph the dynamics of a temperature
>controller. PBCC makes Windows apps really easy. The compiled EXE is 68Kbytes,
>not that that really matters any more.
>
>https://dl.dropbox.com/u/53724080/Software/RTD_Step.jpg
>
>
>Do you have a CompSci degree?

AlwaysWrong? Degree? You're funny, John.

[k...@attt.bizz]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:11:54 -0500, amdx <am...@knologynotthis.net>
wrote:

If you vote for the state machine they'll even pay you. ...many
times.

[Nico Coesel]

Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com>
wrote:

>Larkin, Here's mine...
>
>http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/Diplomas.jpg

Hmm, I wouldn't value a diploma very high :-) When I need to interview
people part of the interview is taking a test. I've come across
'engineers' which could only engineer on (diploma) paper.

>http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/WifesFavorite.jpg

Good one!

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
--------------------------------------------------------------

[John Fields]

On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 15:24:27 -0700, John Larkin
<jla...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

Even assholes can be fun.

---
Well, yes.

Even _you_ can be amusing.

--
JF

[Phil Hobbs]

And, unfortunately, things like deadlines and children that make it much
harder to spend enough time doing the exercises to get really good at it.

I agree in general, though I'm far less cynical about the value of
course work than seems to be general here. I see that I've been lucky
in that essentially every course I ever took has been directly useful at
some point in my career, even my orbital mechanics and galactic dynamics
classes. (They used a bunch of really useful sleazy approximations.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 USA
+1 845 480 2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

[John Larkin]

A spreadsheet is a wonderful tool for composing works of fiction.

[Jim Thompson]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:33:05 GMT, ni...@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel)
wrote:

>Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com>
>wrote:
>
>>Larkin, Here's mine...
>>
>>http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/Diplomas.jpg
>
>Hmm, I wouldn't value a diploma very high :-)

Indeed. MIT only gave me the _tools_, not the knowledge and
experience... you learn to design circuits on-the-job.

>When I need to interview
>people part of the interview is taking a test. I've come across
>'engineers' which could only engineer on (diploma) paper.

Back in the days when I had to hire people I used a simple
3-transistor bias circuit as a "test". In all my years, only ONE
person attacked the problem properly... all the rest were laughable.

I also posted it here... no one got it exactly right. I'll try and
find it, if not, I'll redraw it... it's pretty simple-minded.

>
>>http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/WifesFavorite.jpg
>
>Good one!

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

[John Larkin]

I've always wondered how people compute multiple rocket burns to move a
satellite in orbit, or correct a Mars probe.

[Spehro Pefhany]

Interesting question. With difficulty, apparently. The optimization
problem for continuous (eg. ion) thrusters is seriously challenging,
some folks have been working on it for years. Two part burns tend to
be used with conventional thrusters because they're not impossibly
complex to calculate. Or so I'm told.

[Phil Hobbs]

There are classical analytic solutions, e.g. the Hohmann transfer and
the bielliptic transfer, that minimize the required delta-V.

I don't know how NASA, ESA, and those folks do it, but if I had to
reinvent the celestial sphere, I'd probably start with the osculating
orbit, which is the heliocentric or geocentric ellipse that 'kisses' the
true perturbed orbit at the moment of the burn ('osculare' is Latin for
'to kiss'). From there, I'd compute the burn required for the Hohmann
transfer, and then take that as a starting guess for an iterative
improvement scheme using the best available numerical model for the
relevant parts of the solar system. (That was probably how it was done
circa 1975, at a guess.)

Bielliptic transfers sometimes require less delta-V than Hohmann
transfers, but can take a lot longer to execute--ISTR that the optimal
bielliptic transfer from Earth to Mercury winds up going out past
Jupiter in the process. You save a lot of delta-V by doing all your
burns at perihelion, because that's where a given change in momentum
gives you the biggest change in kinetic energy.

Being able to execute multiple-flyby slingshot orbits as accurately as
they usually do is pretty amazing.

[Phil Hobbs]

Should have added: the other reason for the long transfer ellipses is
that adjusting the angular momentum of the orbit is cheapest at
aphelion, the further out the better. So you want to do orbital energy
adjustments at perihelion and angular momentum adjustments at aphelion.

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:03:38 -0400, Phil Hobbs

I'd expect that there is some amount of simulation with successive approximation
involved.

If you have a uP with multiply but no divide, you can do a nice integer square
root by bitwise successive approximation.

[Phil Hobbs]

Awhile back there was a guy who built an approximate N-body code that
ran in Nlog(N) time. As you'd expect, it did vaguely the FFT thing,
i.e. it ran the nearest neighbours one by one, then lumped them into a
single centre-of-mass to calculate the resulting perturbations further
away. I forget his name, but it was an interesting approach--it works
pretty well in a lot of cases, because it's second-order accurate.
Tidal effects are completely wrong in general, though, because those are
third-order.

N-body orbits are usually (maybe almost always) chaotic, so since
accuracy is going to decline badly with time anyway, it's a win for lots
of purposes to be able to get a general idea say 100 times farther into
the future, which is what the Nlog(N) algorithm gives you.

I saw the integer square root algorithm in Knuth iirc, but I've
completely forgotten the details. (Even ARM Cortex M3s have hardware
divide now!)

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Mon, 8 Apr 2013 00:02:17 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill....@ieee.org> wrote:

>On 8 Apr, 12:19, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 16:46:32 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
>>
>> <bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
>> >Why don't you two grow up? What you did - or didn't do - at university
>> >forty years ago isn't interesting. What you built on the - rather
>> >restricted - knowledge you acquired there is rather more relevant.
>>
>> What inspires corporate employers to hire engineering skool graduates
>> is that the graduate has demonstrated that they are willing and able
>> to survive a 4+ year nonsensical ordeal process.
>
>I've dignified this as the Obstacle Course theory of education.

It's not a theory. It was the reality of the late 1960's, when the
real motivation for getting an education was closely tied to getting a
student deferment and avoiding a one way ticket to Viet Nam. There
were far too many college age students that wanted to get into the low
cost state subsidized colleges. In order to thin the ranks, the
colleges literally turned the education process into an obstacle
course. For example, the courses and curriculum necessary to graduate
with an engineering degree were impossible to complete in 4 years. It
took me 3 colleges and 6 years to graduate.

>My
>supervisor wasn't best pleased when I described my graduate education
>as a process of demonstrating that one could produce useful results
>with the bare minimum of support.

That's fair. Collaborative efforts were deemed little better than
cheating at the time. Today, group efforts are encouraged as part of
learning how to work on a "team". Times have changed.

>>�If the graduate has learned something useful during the process, so much the better. �The

>> ability to tolerate such nonsense remains for life, is directly
>> transferable to a corporate environment, and is apparently incurable.
>> Incidentally, the most useful classes I took in three colleges were:
>> - Engineering Economics, where I learned the basics of putting a
>> � price tag on everything.
>
>You don't need a college course to learn that. You can't sell it for
>less than it cost you to build it, and you can't sell it for more than
>the customer can make out of it,

It might be possible to sell such a generality to trusting managers. I
never had the credibility, so it was necessary to justify my
assertions with hard numbers, calculated estimates, and sane
projections. I put what I learned to good use with a summer job
working for an insurance actuary, where I participated in such
exercises as putting price tags on missing body parts. The lessons
learned in this class, which I still consider to be the most important
things I learned in college, were also applied when I temporarily took
over my fathers lingerie business. What I managed to learn in
Engineering Economics was very superficial, but provided the basic
concepts necessary to do further study, and to make the all important
financial mistakes that are part of the learning process.

Incidentally, your statement of selling below cost is rather amusing.
During the dot com boom of the 1990's, I heard "Yes, it's a net loss,
but we'll make it up in volume". At first, I thought it was a joke,
but then realized that the manager offering that line actually
believed it.

>> - Psychology, where I learned that knowing why is just as important
>> � as knowing how.
>
>You don't need a college course to learn that either. If you don't
>know why something is going to be used, you don't know how it is going
>to be used.

That's not what I meant by "why". The problem is what motivates
people, what inspires people to go beyond 8am to 5pm, what makes
buyers purchase one product, and not another, etc. Little things,
like color, weight, shape, rounded corners versus sharp corners, and
even smell, have a huge effect on product design. While most of this
fits better into "industrial design", with a small company, the
designer tends to do everything. If you fail to understand and
appreciate the value of understanding what motivates people, you're
going to be making quite a few marketing mistakes. If you don't
understand what motivates engineers, techs, and managers, you're going
to step on a few toes trying to make things happen.

>> - Tractor Driving and Mechanics, where I made a huge mess and held
>> � the record for maximum damage to equipment in a single semester.
>
>Graduate students are good at that. If you haven't broken something in
>the course of your experimental work, you are too cautious to be of
>much use.

I was never a graduate student, so I wouldn't know. Mostly, I have an
incurable desire to test the limits of things. How fast can it go?
How big a hole can it dig? What happens if I go over the red line?
It's all part of "Learn By Destroying" where one learns far more by
breaking and then fixing a device, than by studying it in a book.

>> - Rose Float, where I learned how to actually get something built
>> � and working, even if I didn't agree with the methodology.
>
>> Somewhere along the line, I learned a few things about engineering and
>> electronics design, but most of the useful design stuff was learned on
>> the job.
>
>There's nothing to stop you buying or borrowing a text-book,

Not possible. In order to make more money for the textbook monopolies
of the 1960's, the required text books were rotated every few years.
The source and supply of used current text books was very limited.
Somehow, I have difficulties believing that basic concepts go obsolete
every few years, but that's the way the textbook game was played.

>or
>borrowing a colleagues lecture notes, when you need access to academic
>information.

We had Shaum's to help decode the textbooks.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schaum%27s_Outlines>
The fraternities shared the class notes. Sharing note was commonly
done in the 1960's, but was considered borderline cheating at the
time. I probably should have borrowed class notes, because I also had
various part time jobs in order to pay for skool, but I didn't.

>The advantage of doing it when you need the information
>is that you've got the motivation to plow through the text, and a
>ready-made experiment in which to test the information you've
>acquired.

Good plan, but it didn't fit well with my study style. I had a fairly
good short term memory. By trial and error, I determined that an all
night cram session, which usually meant speed reading the books, was
the most effective for me. Not the best way to learn anything, but
good enough for surviving the ordeal process.

[Jim Thompson]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:43:54 -0700, Jim Thompson
<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

>On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:33:05 GMT, ni...@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel)
>wrote:
>
>>Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com>
>>wrote:
>>
>>>Larkin, Here's mine...
>>>
>>>http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/Diplomas.jpg
>>
>>Hmm, I wouldn't value a diploma very high :-)
>
>Indeed. MIT only gave me the _tools_, not the knowledge and
>experience... you learn to design circuits on-the-job.
>
>>When I need to interview
>>people part of the interview is taking a test. I've come across
>>'engineers' which could only engineer on (diploma) paper.
>
>Back in the days when I had to hire people I used a simple
>3-transistor bias circuit as a "test". In all my years, only ONE
>person attacked the problem properly... all the rest were laughable.
>
>I also posted it here... no one got it exactly right. I'll try and
>find it, if not, I'll redraw it... it's pretty simple-minded.
>
>>
>>>http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/WifesFavorite.jpg
>>
>>Good one!
>
> ...Jim Thompson

A variation of my employment exam schematic...

http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/EmploymentExam.pdf

[Mr Stonebeach]

On Apr 8, 7:33 pm, Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net>
wrote:

> On 4/8/2013 12:15 PM, John Larkin wrote:
> > I'd expect that there is some amount of simulation with successive approximation
> > involved.
>

> Awhile back there was a guy who built an approximate N-body code that
> ran in Nlog(N) time.  As you'd expect, it did vaguely the FFT thing,
> i.e. it ran the nearest neighbours one by one, then lumped them into a
> single centre-of-mass to calculate the resulting perturbations further
> away.  I forget his name, but it was an interesting approach--it works

Sounds a bit like the Fast Multipole algorithm, which the AIP
Computers in Science journal included in its year 2000 issue within
the list of "top ten algorithms of the century".

Regards,
Mikko

[Phil Hobbs]

That was probably it--the name sounds familiar. Cute idea, anyway.

[Phil Hobbs]

I find it a bit hard to believe that almost all the interviewees were
really that clueless.

Are you sure it wasn't something a little less perfectly symmetrical?
Maybe you asked for Rout, or beta wasn't quite infinite, or something
like that? Or maybe they got psyched out, thinking it couldn't be quite
that easy? Or you moved the goal posts by saying that the array was
fast enough that it oscillated? Or pulled the fire alarm?

Inquiring minds want to know. ;)

(My brother's first year physics final had a question like that, worth
something like a quarter of the credit: "A 200 lb man pushed against a
slippery rock, with his body inclined at 30 degrees from vertical, but
was unable to move it. How much work was done on the rock?")

[Jon Kirwan]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:08:55 -0700, Jim Thompson
<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>A variation of my employment exam schematic...
>
>http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/EmploymentExam.pdf

I compute out Vdd/2, with no temp dependence.

Numbering BJTs on the left, top to bottom, as Q1 and Q2; on
the right as Q3 and Q4 (bottom pair are Q2 and Q4, top pair
are Q1 and Q3):

1. Vdd - R*Ic1 - Vbe1 - R*Ic2 - Vbe2 = 0

But Ic1=Ic2=Ie1=Ie2 (beta is infinite.) Also, since the
bottom pair of Q2 and Q4 are a perfect mirror, then
Ic3=Ic4=Ic2=Ic1.... nice as this means all the Vbe's are
equal to each other. So:

2. Vdd - R*I - Vbe - R*I - Vbe = 0
3. Vdd - 2*Vbe = 2*R*I
4. I = (Vdd - 2*Vbe) / (2*R)

But the shared base node of Q1 and Q3 must be:

5. Vb = Vdd - I*R

And Vout, then:

6. Vout = Vdd - I*R - Vbe

So,

7. Vout = Vdd - [(Vdd - 2*Vbe) / (2*R)]*R - Vbe
8. Vout = Vdd - [(Vdd - 2*Vbe) / (2)] - Vbe
9. Vout = Vdd/2 + Vbe - Vbe
10. Vout = Vdd/2

Which is pretty nice. Is does depend upon T, but all the BJTs
use the same Is and are ideal. And the Vbe's cancel, anyway.

So I think (10) is it. Hobbyist, thought. So I'm interested.

Jon

[Jim Thompson]

The original was slightly less "symmetrical", but of third order
effect.

And you're not the typical interviewee ;-)

But, at the same time, you imply a level of understanding that I don't
see on these newsgroups as a majority talent... observe my simple
bootstrap math example, and the puzzled responses.

>
>Inquiring minds want to know. ;)
>
>(My brother's first year physics final had a question like that, worth
>something like a quarter of the credit: "A 200 lb man pushed against a
>slippery rock, with his body inclined at 30 degrees from vertical, but
>was unable to move it. How much work was done on the rock?")
>
>Cheers
>
>Phil Hobbs
>

That's a good one... I'll have to come up with a circuit analog and
see who I can entrap >:-}

[Jim Thompson]

Yes. But you can get there in two steps if you observe (as Hobbs took
note) of the symmetry.

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:35:03 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamM...@electrooptical.net> wrote:

That's way overkill for culling most EE applicants.

This is quicker:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/53724080/Circuits/EE_Test.JPG

What is the base voltage?
What is the collector voltage?
What is the emitter voltage?

What is the base current?
What is the emitter current?
What is the collector current?

Any comments?

Thanks for coming by. We'll be in touch.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators

Custom laser drivers and controllers

Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links

VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation

[Phil Hobbs]

I've obviously led a very sheltered life.

[Phil Hobbs]

When I interviewed at Tektronix back in 1987 (for that job doing
electro-optic A/Ds that I mentioned a week or so ago), their old
grizzled vertical amp guru, whose name I unfortunately can't remember,
set me a circuit problem that turned out to be a 3-transistor sawtooth
oscillator. I wish I could remember the details--it was the weirdest
thing I'd ever seen.

He explained afterwards that it was done that way to enable it to start
up with very low gain alloy junction transistors with a lot of leakage.

I didn't figure it out, because I naturally assumed it was built out of
decent transistors. (It didn't look like it did anything at all--it
actually depended on the huge leakage to work.)

It turned out that nobody else had ever figured it out either--he just
wanted to hear what the applicants' approach to the problem was.

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:30:08 -0400, Phil Hobbs

The old capacitor-into-the base trick? That used to work, sometimes.

>
>It turned out that nobody else had ever figured it out either--he just
>wanted to hear what the applicants' approach to the problem was.
>
>Cheers
>
>Phil Hobbs

I don't like trick questions. I don't like to use tests at all. What I
like is to go to a whiteboard and ask the person about something they
have done, or better yet actually design something with them.

You don't learn much about a person's personality when they are
head-down working on a test. And some people just don't test well
under pressure.

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:30:42 -0700, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno
<DL...@DecadentLinuxUser.org> wrote:

>On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:34:01 -0700, John Larkin
><jjla...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>Computer Science is useless, or sometimes less.
>>
> A true idiot, who obviously got too far, and that totally by accident.
>
> You know less than nothing. You cannot even get the proper operation
>of a degreaser right.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/08/graduate_jobs_dissatisfaction/

See bootnote.

I read somewhere that English grads actually make better programmers
than CS grads.

[Nico Coesel]

John Larkin <jla...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

>On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:30:08 -0400, Phil Hobbs
><pcdhSpamM...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>
>>On 4/8/2013 4:08 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
>>> On 4/8/2013 3:54 PM, John Larkin wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:35:03 -0400, Phil Hobbs
>>>> <pcdhSpamM...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 4/8/2013 3:08 PM, Jim Thompson wrote:
>>>>>> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:43:54 -0700, Jim Thompson
>>>>>> <To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:33:05 GMT, ni...@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel)
>>>>>>

That is a very good way but time consuming. I got my last two jobs
that way though.

>You don't learn much about a person's personality when they are
>head-down working on a test. And some people just don't test well
>under pressure.

You shouldn't make tests too difficult :-) I once had a weird
situation with an aptitude test. When the interviewer came back with
the score he told me I made 3 errors which usually is bad. The thing
was though that I messed up the first 3 question whichs where actually
the really easy ones.

IMHO you should do both an interview and a test. What I usually did is
take the test results and discuss them with the applicant. It is nice
to use a test where some questions don't have just one good answer so
you have something to talk about. If you're evil you can turn it into
an assesment to see how the applicant deals with a conflict situation
c.q. how well he or she can defend their point of view.

[Nico Coesel]

Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com>

My quick guess was that all currents are equal so the voltages across
the transistors must be equal. Temperature shouldn't make any
difference. But it has been >15 years since I had to analyse these
kind of circuits for my EE study (which was quite swamped with IC
design analysis like we would all be employed by Philips / NXP).

[brent]

On Apr 8, 6:02 pm, n...@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel) wrote:

> John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
> >On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:30:08 -0400, Phil Hobbs
> ><pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>
> >>On 4/8/2013 4:08 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
> >>> On 4/8/2013 3:54 PM, John Larkin wrote:
> >>>> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:35:03 -0400, Phil Hobbs
> >>>> <pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>
> >>>>> On 4/8/2013 3:08 PM, Jim Thompson wrote:
> >>>>>> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:43:54 -0700, Jim Thompson

> >>>>>> <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-I...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>
> >>>>>>> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:33:05 GMT, n...@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel)

If someone told me to take a test after 30 years of experience I would
tell them to pound sand .... unless I really really needed the job :-)

[Jim Thompson]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:08:54 -0400, Phil Hobbs

That's all a Tulane graduate could manage ?:-)

>>
>> Thanks for coming by. We'll be in touch.
>
>I've obviously led a very sheltered life.
>
>Cheers
>
>Phil Hobbs

[Tim Williams]

"Jeff Liebermann" <je...@cruzio.com> wrote in message
news:7ju5m8tgflpap36h5...@4ax.com...

> I was never a graduate student, so I wouldn't know. Mostly, I have an
> incurable desire to test the limits of things. How fast can it go?
> How big a hole can it dig? What happens if I go over the red line?
> It's all part of "Learn By Destroying" where one learns far more by
> breaking and then fixing a device, than by studying it in a book.

I never learn anything by staying within limits.

Actually, that's a lie. I am *always* disappointed when I learn that
something works when operated within stated limits. And if I skew it so
it exceeds the limits, magic smoke comes out.

Maybe after pushing limits here and there, I've gotten a more refined
sense of "limits", and tend to do things more casually or cautiously?
Sucks to be me I guess; I've engineered the engineering process itself to
the point where I rarely even burn out transistors!

Often times, I'll design a subsystem to more-or-less satisfy the
requirements of the overall system. Yes, I could go balls out and make a
precision VCO, but if it's inside a loop, do I really care how accurate it
is? Heck, toss a couple transistors at it, make a cheapass multivibrator
for all that matters!

A big part of engineering is testing to define limits (particularly if the
existing limits look fishy, or the thing you need isn't even specified!),
but the other big part is making useful compromises. In an uncompromising
way. (What?) I think what that's supposed to mean is... if you make a
design that's uncompromisingly *coherent*, so that any given subsystem is
built just to the minimum standards of its neighbors' requirements, you'll
have a complete design which optimizes performance, cost and time all at
once.

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com\

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:51:54 +0100, John Devereux <jo...@devereux.me.uk>
wrote:

>As Bill pointed out, it is needlessly pendantic to insist on that. State
>machine is the well known, generic term that is actually used.

And as *I* pointed out, the term usually has a prefix, jackass.

And it is typically used correctly, as in finite state machine, which
nearly all of them are.

Only lazy fucktards, like you, started half assing the proper usage of
terms, and caused so many of the shortened horseshit to become 'the
norm'.

For an extreme version of your stupidity, watch the show where the
idiots run around with their metal detectors calling the things they find
ANYTHING but what they actually are.

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:51:54 +0100, John Devereux <jo...@devereux.me.uk>
wrote:

>Not really, although congratulations for actually looking it up this
>time.

I was familiar with the term before I did any examination of it.

Get off your high horse, child. Particularly since you don't have one.

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:51:54 +0100, John Devereux <jo...@devereux.me.uk>
wrote:

>

>I see you clicked on

You do not *see* a goddamned thing, fucktard.
>
> the second link there. That article is overly
>specific to the power PC IMO, but most processors have similar
>registers.


Yes and many have or had "machine state" registers.

I had a 286 Everex step that had just such a register and even had a
display for real time machine state indication.

Essentially, you're a goddamned idiot.

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:51:54 +0100, John Devereux <jo...@devereux.me.uk>
wrote:

>A "Machine state register" usually describes the state of the CPU core
>(what mode it is in, condition code flags for example).

I do not need a primer, retard boy.

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:51:54 +0100, John Devereux <jo...@devereux.me.uk>
wrote:

>

>I do try to look things up before posting nonsense. Although sometimes I
>do it after.
>
>"it ain't what you don't know, it's what you think you know that just
>ain't so".
>
>Or something like that.


It isn't that fact that you are full of shit... it is the fact that
you are made of shit.

Your mother should be in prison for failing to flush the piece of shit
you are, the moment the slut shat you.

[Phil Hobbs]

I remember that one of the transistors was used inverted. First time
I'd ever seen that trick.

>
>>
>> It turned out that nobody else had ever figured it out either--he just
>> wanted to hear what the applicants' approach to the problem was.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Phil Hobbs
>
> I don't like trick questions. I don't like to use tests at all. What I
> like is to go to a whiteboard and ask the person about something they
> have done, or better yet actually design something with them.

That's probably the best method--you can gauge a lot about somebody's
ability, confidence, adaptability, and level of suspicion, which are all
important when hiring a colleague.

>
> You don't learn much about a person's personality when they are
> head-down working on a test. And some people just don't test well
> under pressure.

It depends, I think. When I interviewed at HP Labs (also in 1987), they
asked me to derive the Fresnel formulae for transmission and reflection
at a plane dielectric boundary, and I didn't do it.

I said something along the lines of "You don't want to sit there and
watch me go through all that algebra, but here's how the calculation
goes." Then I walked them through the physics of the problem (phase
matching at the boundary gives you the transmitted and reflected k
vectors; splitting the problem into TE and TM cases and requiring
continuity of tangential E and perpendicular D gives you the magnitudes).

I haven't been on either side of an interview table in quite awhile
(except with lawyers, who don't count), but that time the "Kobayashi
Maru" approach went down OK, or if not, they offered me the job, anyway.

[Bill Sloman]

On 9 Apr, 00:19, Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net>
wrote:

> On 4/8/2013 3:02 AM, Bill Sloman wrote:
> > On 8 Apr, 12:19, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:
> >> On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 16:46:32 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
> >> <bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

<snip>

> > There's nothing to stop you buying or borrowing a text-book, or

> > borrowing a colleagues lecture notes, when you need access to academic

> > information. The advantage of doing it when you need the information

> > is that you've got the motivation to plow through the text, and a
> > ready-made experiment in which to test the information you've
> > acquired.
>

> And, unfortunately, things like deadlines and children that make it much
> harder to spend enough time doing the exercises to get really good at it.

There was a UK engineering cliche - we didn't have time to do it
right, so we had to find time to do again. You don't have to spend
enough time to get really good at it, but you do have to spend enough
time to be able to do it well enough to do it right.

> I agree in general, though I'm far less cynical about the value of
> course work than seems to be general here.  I see that I've been lucky
> in that essentially every course I ever took has been directly useful at
> some point in my career, even my orbital mechanics and galactic dynamics
> classes.  (They used a bunch of really useful sleazy approximations.)

I never found a course that got me to the point where I was good
enough to get it right. The better courses got me very close to that
point, and pointed me at the bits of the literature that I had to read
up before I could get it right, and the basic courses did give me the
tools to understand what I was reading.

I'm not cynical about higher education - it's incredibly useful - but
course work is only part of the process, and the examination system
doesn't test a whole lot of the stuff that the system as a whole
should be installing in your head.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[Jim Thompson]

I always look at the applicant's approach rather than the final
solution. Knowing how to attack a new problem tells me a lot about
ultimate capability.

[John Larkin]

You were obviously wrong. You are AlwaysWrong.

[Bill Sloman]

On 9 Apr, 06:44, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:30:42 -0700, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno
>

> <D...@DecadentLinuxUser.org> wrote:
> >On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:34:01 -0700, John Larkin
> ><jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
>
> >>Computer Science is useless, or sometimes less.
>
> >   A true idiot, who obviously got too far, and that totally by accident.
>
> >  You know less than nothing.  You cannot even get the proper operation
> >of a degreaser right.
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/08/graduate_jobs_dissatisfaction/
>
> See bootnote.
>
> I read somewhere that English grads actually make better programmers
> than CS grads.

They can do, but it's not the way you bet. Somebody with a Computer
Science degree would probably be able to get Google to find the
reference that you probably misunderstood or mis-remembered. I did
Theory of Computation 1 as an extra subject while I was getting my
Ph.D. but it clearly didn't boost my search skills far enough.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[Jim Thompson]

Actually, both my oldest daughter and my oldest son are
multi-linguists and are exceptional programmers... the son is the
chief software/network guru for the largest call center system in the
world (support now... not the annoying cold-call people he originally
worked with :)

The daughter, of course, went into politics >:-}

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:51:50 -0700, John Larkin
<jla...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

>
>You were obviously wrong.

No, Johnny, your remark about computer science, however, absolutely was
wrong.

> You are AlwaysWrong.

No, Johnny, I am always the guy that will mash your face if I ever see
you in person.

[Bill Sloman]

On 9 Apr, 03:46, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Apr 2013 00:02:17 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman

>
> <bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
> >On 8 Apr, 12:19, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:
> >> On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 16:46:32 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
>
> >> <bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

<snip>

> >You don't need a college course to learn that. You can't sell it for
> >less than it cost you to build it, and you can't sell it for more than
> >the customer can make out of it,
>
> It might be possible to sell such a generality to trusting managers. I
> never had the credibility, so it was necessary to justify my
> assertions with hard numbers, calculated estimates, and sane
> projections.  I put what I learned to good use with a summer job
> working for an insurance actuary, where I participated in such
> exercises as putting price tags on missing body parts.  The lessons
> learned in this class, which I still consider to be the most important
> things I learned in college, were also applied when I temporarily took
> over my fathers lingerie business.  What I managed to learn in
> Engineering Economics was very superficial, but provided the basic
> concepts necessary to do further study, and to make the all important
> financial mistakes that are part of the learning process.
>
> Incidentally, your statement of selling below cost is rather amusing.
> During the dot com boom of the 1990's, I heard "Yes, it's a net loss,
> but we'll make it up in volume".  At first, I thought it was a joke,
> but then realized that the manager offering that line actually
> believed it.

What he might have believed is that if the product really did take
off, economies of scale might have cut the price enough to make the
product viable.

The rule of thumb is that if you can increase the volume of production
by a factor of ten, you can halve the unit cost of manufacturing the
product. The catch is that you rarely know how you are going to do it
in advance, and if you've established the market, somebody else may
have the bright idea that lets them halve the unit cost of production.

The Germans did it with photovoltaic solar cells, but the Chinese did
it again a few years later, leaving the Germans with a lot of plant
for making solar cells that couldn't build them at a competitive
price.

> >> - Psychology, where I learned that knowing why is just as important
> >> as knowing how.
>
> >You don't need a college course to learn that either. If you don't
> >know why something is going to be used, you don't know how it is going
> >to be used.
>
> That's not what I meant by "why".  The problem is what motivates
> people, what inspires people to go beyond 8am to 5pm, what makes
> buyers purchase one product, and not another, etc.

And you can learn that in psychology 101?

>Little things,
> like color, weight, shape, rounded corners versus sharp corners, and
> even smell, have a huge effect on product design.  While most of this
> fits better into "industrial design", with a small company, the
> designer tends to do everything.  If you fail to understand and
> appreciate the value of understanding what motivates people, you're
> going to be making quite a few marketing mistakes.  If you don't
> understand what motivates engineers, techs, and managers, you're going
> to step on a few toes trying to make things happen.

If you want to make things happen, you are always going to step on a
few toes. The first rule of industrial diplomacy is "don't rock the
boat". Of course, if nobody rocks the boat, your products become over-
price and obsolescent and you go bust

> >> - Tractor Driving and Mechanics, where I made a huge mess and held
> >> the record for maximum damage to equipment in a single semester.
>
> >Graduate students are good at that. If you haven't broken something in
> >the course of your experimental work, you are too cautious to be of
> >much use.

>
> I was never a graduate student, so I wouldn't know.  Mostly, I have an
> incurable desire to test the limits of things.  How fast can it go?
> How big a hole can it dig?  What happens if I go over the red line?
> It's all part of "Learn By Destroying" where one learns far more by
> breaking and then fixing a device, than by studying it in a book.

But reading a book is a lot cheaper, and if you figure in repair time,
much quicker.

> >> - Rose Float, where I learned how to actually get something built
> >> and working, even if I didn't agree with the methodology.
>
> >> Somewhere along the line, I learned a few things about engineering and
> >> electronics design, but most of the useful design stuff was learned on
> >> the job.

>
> >There's nothing to stop you buying or borrowing a text-book,
>

> Not possible.  In order to make more money for the textbook monopolies
> of the 1960's, the required text books were rotated every few years.
> The source and supply of used current text books was very limited.
> Somehow, I have difficulties believing that basic concepts go obsolete
> every few years, but that's the way the textbook game was played.

My first year text-books were mostly American publications in exactly
that style, and they were uniformly useless. The second and third year
texts were thicker, duller and much more useful. I kept most of them.
I didn't consult them more than once per decade, but I knew exactly
where to look in them for the information I needed

> >or borrowing a colleagues lecture notes, when you need access to academic
> >information.
>

> We had Shaum's to help decode the textbooks.
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schaum%27s_Outlines>
> The fraternities shared the class notes.  Sharing note was commonly
> done in the 1960's, but was considered borderline cheating at the
> time.  I probably should have borrowed class notes, because I also had
> various part time jobs in order to pay for skool, but I didn't.

Mine got borrowed by people taking the courses in subsequent years. I
didn't bother borrowing anybody else's. From the questions that they
were asking me, I knew that they wouldn't have been helpful. When I
was working as a demonstrator in undergraduate practical courses as a
graduate student, I got exposed to copied course work - groups of
people all making the same mistake. Curiously, the people who got the
stuff right tended express themselves in different words (one from
another), or at least had enough sense not to copy the text they'd
borrowed word-for-word.

> >The advantage of doing it when you need the information
> >is that you've got the motivation to plow through the text, and a
> >ready-made experiment in which to test the information you've
> >acquired.
>

> Good plan, but it didn't fit well with my study style.  I had a fairly
> good short term memory.  By trial and error, I determined that an all
> night cram session, which usually meant speed reading the books, was
> the most effective for me.  Not the best way to learn anything, but
> good enough for surviving the ordeal process.

I'd call that pre-exam cramming. I'd spend the last day before the
exam doing old exam papers, trying to get a feel for the stuff I might
not have prepared as well as I might, and getting a feel for how much
I'd have time to write. It didn't always work. Once I got mouse-
trapped by a question where I knew way too much, and found myself only
half-way through my answer when time ran out. I had had the sense to
answer all the other questions first.

But it wasn't what I was talking about. I was referring to episodes in
our post-education careers when a problem comes up that needs stuff
that was taught in University courses, but rarely comprehended -
Laplace transforms come to mind. You then have to cram he subject well
enough to be able to use the technique.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[Bill Sloman]

On 9 Apr, 08:36, brent <buleg...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
> On Apr 8, 6:02 pm, n...@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel) wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
> > >On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:30:08 -0400, Phil Hobbs
> > ><pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>
> > >>On 4/8/2013 4:08 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
> > >>> On 4/8/2013 3:54 PM, John Larkin wrote:
> > >>>> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:35:03 -0400, Phil Hobbs
> > >>>> <pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>
> > >>>>> On 4/8/2013 3:08 PM, Jim Thompson wrote:
> > >>>>>> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:43:54 -0700, Jim Thompson
> > >>>>>> <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-I...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>
> > >>>>>>> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:33:05 GMT, n...@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel)

<snip>

> If someone told me to take a test after 30 years of experience I would
> tell them to pound sand ....  unless I really really needed the job :-)

At job interviews at Cambridge UK I'd run into people who'd been
through the - heavily mathematical - Cambridge engineering course, and
get asked questions that presupposed familiarity with particular
mathematical skills. I'd respond that I hadn't - as yet - found the
necessity to master that particular approach, and watch their eyes
glaze over.

The besetting sin of Cambridge graduates of that period was their
conviction that they were very bright and that nobody who hadn't been
accepted by Cambridge to do an undergraduate degree could possibly be
as bright. Cambridge was in a position to be very selective about the
people they selected as undergraduates, but the selection was based
largely on exam results, and certainly didn't get every bright kid in
the UK. The best of the Cambridge and Oxford graduates were very
bright indeed, and some of them were bright enough to be aware that
Oxbridge wasn't the only source of clever people, but there were a lot
who had a less perfect grasp of reality.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[John Larkin]

*You* are the one being an idiot in public. Don't blame me.

Why don't you google things that you don't recognize, and maybe learn something,
instead of saying stuff that everybody laughs at?

http://tinyurl.com/c29q2dn


--

John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators

Custom timing and laser controllers

Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links

VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

[Jon Kirwan]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:45:30 -0700, Jim Thompson

<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

>On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:35:44 -0700, Jon Kirwan

><jo...@infinitefactors.org> wrote:

>
>>On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:08:55 -0700, Jim Thompson
>><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>>>A variation of my employment exam schematic...
>>>
>>>http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/EmploymentExam.pdf
>>

I was intentionally being pedantic, not guessing, so that you
could see the quantitative approach and correct any errors,
if any.

Jon

[Robert Baer]

Phil Hobbs wrote:
> On 4/8/2013 3:08 PM, Jim Thompson wrote:

>> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:43:54 -0700, Jim Thompson
>> <To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:33:05 GMT, ni...@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel)
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Larkin, Here's mine...
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/Diplomas.jpg
>>>>
>>>> Hmm, I wouldn't value a diploma very high :-)
>>>
>>> Indeed. MIT only gave me the _tools_, not the knowledge and
>>> experience... you learn to design circuits on-the-job.
>>>
>>>> When I need to interview
>>>> people part of the interview is taking a test. I've come across
>>>> 'engineers' which could only engineer on (diploma) paper.
>>>
>>> Back in the days when I had to hire people I used a simple
>>> 3-transistor bias circuit as a "test". In all my years, only ONE
>>> person attacked the problem properly... all the rest were laughable.
>>>
>>> I also posted it here... no one got it exactly right. I'll try and
>>> find it, if not, I'll redraw it... it's pretty simple-minded.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>> http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/WifesFavorite.jpg
>>>>
>>>> Good one!
>>>
>>> ...Jim Thompson
>>

>> A variation of my employment exam schematic...
>>
>> http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/EmploymentExam.pdf
>>
>

> I find it a bit hard to believe that almost all the interviewees were
> really that clueless.
>

> Are you sure it wasn't something a little less perfectly symmetrical?
> Maybe you asked for Rout, or beta wasn't quite infinite, or something
> like that? Or maybe they got psyched out, thinking it couldn't be quite
> that easy? Or you moved the goal posts by saying that the array was fast
> enough that it oscillated? Or pulled the fire alarm?
>
> Inquiring minds want to know. ;)
>
> (My brother's first year physics final had a question like that, worth
> something like a quarter of the credit: "A 200 lb man pushed against a
> slippery rock, with his body inclined at 30 degrees from vertical, but
> was unable to move it. How much work was done on the rock?")
>
> Cheers
>
> Phil Hobbs
>
>
>
>
>
Clueless Baer sez: ASS-u-ME-ing silicon, Vout approximately
(Vdd/2+0.6V); i forgot the TC of a silicon transistor.

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:21:42 -0700, Jim Thompson
<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

>I always look at the applicant's approach rather than the final
>solution. Knowing how to attack a new problem tells me a lot about
>ultimate capability.
> ...Jim Thompson

Agreed. You would probably never hire anyone like me.

I had a simple test for the techs and engineers that I hired. I would
excavate a PC board from my desk, and ask the applicant to identify
and describe the purpose of as many parts as possible. No schematics.
The idea was to gauge their experience with the common components.
Since I was usually hiring marginal techs and starting engineers, 50%
recognition was considered quite good. I would then make some
corrections, describe the board in detail, fill in the blanks, and
identify the remaining parts.

Next, I would give the applicant a quick tour of the lab, production
line, test line, QA, shipping, and cafeteria with emphasis on what the
company was doing. We would then return to my office, where I would
dig out the same PCB and ask exactly the same question. If they were
paying attention, their recognition score would improve. If the score
was about the same as before, they were either not paying attention, a
slow learner, or in shock.
Moral: Paying attention pays.

Looking at the applicants approach doesn't always work. I interviewed
at a local company where I was shown a schematic and PCB of one of
their products and asked what I thought of the design. After a
cursory inspection, I declared the product to have too many
adjustments, used too many stages, had some layout problems, and was
lacking in production test and troubleshooting aids. I then proceeded
to outline what changes I would recommend. I was too involved in
scribbling on the schematic to notice the managers reaction. Later,
after personnel asked me what I had done to provoke the anger of the
manager, I discovered that it was his design, and that did not take
kindly to criticism.
Moral: The interview works both ways. In this case, the employer
failed the interview.

I once interviewed at a small company that tested me with their
problem of the day. They showed me an RF power amplifier schematic
that was delivering wildly variable performance in production, and
asked what changes I would make to improve things. I suspected that
if I were hired, this would be my initial project. I asked to see the
PCB on its heat sink. The problem was obvious... lousy layout and
regeneration. I recommended a new PCB layout, but that would bring
production to a halt. So, I suggested some marginal band-aids, such
as additional grounds using finger stock, a change in ferrite
material, and a better choice of bypass caps. This was judged to be
the "wrong approach". They hired a friend, who was presented with the
same problem, played with various band-aids for a few weeks, and gave
up. We spent an evening reworking the power amp layout, which
eventually worked as expected.
Moral: Don't try to 2nd guess what the interviewer wants to hear.

--
Jeff Liebermann je...@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

[Bill Bowden]

On Apr 7, 8:34 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 07 Apr 2013 19:19:19 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:

> >On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 16:46:32 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
> ><bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
>

> >>Why don't you two grow up? What you did - or didn't do - at university
> >>forty years ago isn't interesting. What you built on the - rather
> >>restricted - knowledge you acquired there is rather more relevant.
>
> >What inspires corporate employers to hire engineering skool graduates
> >is that the graduate has demonstrated that they are willing and able
> >to survive a 4+ year nonsensical ordeal process.  If the graduate has
> >learned something useful during the process, so much the better.  The
> >ability to tolerate such nonsense remains for life, is directly
> >transferable to a corporate environment, and is apparently incurable.
> >Incidentally, the most useful classes I took in three colleges were:
> >- Engineering Economics, where I learned the basics of putting a
> >  price tag on everything.

> >- Psychology, where I learned that knowing why is just as important
> >  as knowing how.

> >- Tractor Driving and Mechanics, where I made a huge mess and held
> >  the record for maximum damage to equipment in a single semester.

> >- Rose Float, where I learned how to actually get something built
> >  and working, even if I didn't agree with the methodology.
> >Somewhere along the line, I learned a few things about engineering and
> >electronics design, but most of the useful design stuff was learned on
> >the job.
>

> The EE basics are important. Quantitative circuit theory, Signals and Systems,
> domensional analysis, control theory, field theory are all valuable, and
> something that non-college types aren't usually forced to learn. Ditto physics.
>
> On the job stuff is good, but is mainly qualitative.

>
> Computer Science is useless, or sometimes less.
>

So, how come most of the current engineering jobs are for software
engineers rather than hardware types? There doesn't seem to be much
unemployment for programmers. Eventually, computers and robots will
replace all the jobs, and everybody can retire.

-Bill

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:42:29 -0700, Jim Thompson

> ...Jim Thompson


The reason that Thompson is so obsessed with Tulane is that he *knows* that I
had a whole lot more fun in New Orleans, which was and is a hoot-and-a-half,
than he had in Boston, which he hated.

And he knows that, while he was peeping at the girls' dorm with a telescope at
night, I was sneaking *into* the girls' dorm at night.

Bugs him, it does.

And for the record, the guys who flunked my emitter-follower test were mostly
from Silicon Valley.

[Spehro Pefhany]

On Mon, 8 Apr 2013 20:21:17 -0700 (PDT), the renowned Bill Bowden
<bpe...@bowdenshobbycircuits.info> wrote:

>
>
>So, how come most of the current engineering jobs are for software
>engineers rather than hardware types? There doesn't seem to be much
>unemployment for programmers. Eventually, computers and robots will
>replace all the jobs, and everybody can retire.
>
>-Bill

Well, maybe the owners of the robots will be able to retire. Everyone
else will be SOL.


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
sp...@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com

[John Larkin]

Because

a) Software Engineering is distinctly different from Computer Science

and

b) Lots of "software engineers" don't have degrees in any programming
discipline. Anybody can learn to hack Ruby or F#.

There doesn't seem to be much
>unemployment for programmers.

There soon will be. There are almost 700,000 iPad apps now, and we really don't
need a million. Finite pool of money meets infinity of ratholes.

[Jim Thompson]

Try again >:-}

[Phil Hobbs]

You sort of go round the circuit in a circle starting at the upper left.

The left hand side is perfectly symmetrical, and unloaded
(beta=infinity). Thus the emitter of the upper left transistor is at
exactly VDD/2, always.

Because we have perfect matching and VAF=infinity (no Early effect), the
bottom right transistor's collector current is exactly the same as the
current in the LH string. Because beta=infinity, that means the upper
right transistor's is as well. Therefore the upper right's emitter is
at exactly the same voltage as the upper left's, i.e. VDD/2 with zero
tempco.

[John Devereux]

DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno <DL...@DecadentLinuxUser.org> writes:

> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:51:54 +0100, John Devereux <jo...@devereux.me.uk>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>I do try to look things up before posting nonsense. Although sometimes I
>>do it after.
>>
>>"it ain't what you don't know, it's what you think you know that just
>>ain't so".
>>
>>Or something like that.
>
>
> It isn't that fact that you are full of shit... it is the fact that
> you are made of shit.

Hey, five for one!

Is that a record?


[...]


--

John Devereux

[JW]

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:34:18 +0100 John Devereux <jo...@devereux.me.uk>
wrote in Message id: <877gkck...@devereux.me.uk>:

Pretty good, but not a record! IIRC it was 8 or 9. Might have been Larkin
or KRW that bagged it, but not sure...

[John Larkin]

He muat have a hotkey programmed to macro-out his favorite word, save typing
time.

[Jim Thompson]

Precisely. I use such "tricks" IRL (in real life) all the time to
ensure matching and tracking in custom chip designs. (Matching on a
monolithic chip is very good.)

[Jim Thompson]

On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 19:48:57 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com>
wrote:

>On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:21:42 -0700, Jim Thompson
><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>
>>I always look at the applicant's approach rather than the final
>>solution. Knowing how to attack a new problem tells me a lot about
>>ultimate capability.
>> ...Jim Thompson
>
>Agreed. You would probably never hire anyone like me.

I'm not so sure. Systematic thinking always catches my attention.

I've done that more times than I can count. Now I ask, "Nice looking!
Who did the design?" THEN I put my foot in mouth ;-)

>
>I once interviewed at a small company that tested me with their
>problem of the day. They showed me an RF power amplifier schematic
>that was delivering wildly variable performance in production, and
>asked what changes I would make to improve things. I suspected that
>if I were hired, this would be my initial project. I asked to see the
>PCB on its heat sink. The problem was obvious... lousy layout and
>regeneration. I recommended a new PCB layout, but that would bring
>production to a halt. So, I suggested some marginal band-aids, such
>as additional grounds using finger stock, a change in ferrite
>material, and a better choice of bypass caps. This was judged to be
>the "wrong approach". They hired a friend, who was presented with the
>same problem, played with various band-aids for a few weeks, and gave
>up. We spent an evening reworking the power amp layout, which
>eventually worked as expected.
>Moral: Don't try to 2nd guess what the interviewer wants to hear.

Yep. Happens all the time. I also sometimes get seriously under-bid.
A year or so later I'm called in to fix the mess... now at a premium,
of course >:-}

[Phil Hobbs]

For a medium fast and extremely precise photodiode circuit, I'm using a
four-transistor mirror (the switcheroo version of the Wilson with zero
base current error to leading order), with a loop wrapped around it to
make its input impedance very very low, while preserving accurate
mirroring. (It uses an HFA3128 PNP array, a 9-GHz NPN emitter follower
driving the top, and a SiGe:C NPN sensing the input voltage swing.
Works great.)

It's quite an interesting circuit--it has four nested feedback loops
with a total of six transistors, four of which are matched.

(There are two diode connected PNPs, which are the world's simplest
feedback amp, the current-mirroring loop, and the input nulling loop,
totalling four.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs



--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

[Jim Thompson]

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:21:06 -0400, Phil Hobbs

I've been known to make one-quadrant multipliers from
weirdly-configured mirrors ;-)

[k...@attt.bizz]

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 05:16:32 -0400, JW <no...@dev.null> wrote:

Nah, the record is 9, IIRC, but my personal best is 7.

[k...@attt.bizz]

On Mon, 8 Apr 2013 20:21:17 -0700 (PDT), Bill Bowden
<bpe...@bowdenshobbycircuits.info> wrote:

There are more of them. Schools don't teach much EE anymore. Most EEs
only do software stuff.

>There doesn't seem to be much
>unemployment for programmers.

There doesn't seem to be much unemployment for hardware types, either.
I've never had a problem finding a job. I'm getting calls and emails
constantly, looking for more people.

>Eventually, computers and robots will replace all the jobs, and everybody can retire.

Yeah, like Verilog will make EEs obsolete. That worked out well.

[Jim Thompson]

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:06:50 -0400, k...@attt.bizz wrote:

>On Mon, 8 Apr 2013 20:21:17 -0700 (PDT), Bill Bowden
><bpe...@bowdenshobbycircuits.info> wrote:
>

[snip]

>
>>Eventually, computers and robots will replace all the jobs, and everybody can retire.
>
>Yeah, like Verilog will make EEs obsolete. That worked out well.

Yep! Verilog-A is always good for a laugh.

[k...@attt.bizz]

You probably would have been waiting for my answer for a while, while
I was trying to figure out what the real question was. I had an
interview a few years ago where the engineer asked me the gain of some
simple opamp circuits and then what a couple of transistor thingys
did. He was wondering why I was looking at him funny. Later, he
explained that no one had ever answered all of the questions before,
let alone got them right. It really was *simple* stuff.

When I was on the other side of the table, I generally asked the
candidate about previous projects that *he* did. Then went into them
as deeply as possible to see if *he* really did it. At IBM, we
weren't allowed to give a "test" of any kind (though my first manager
did anyway), but we could ask questions going to experience.

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 08:59:33 -0700, Jim Thompson

<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

>On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 19:48:57 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com>
>wrote:
>
>>On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:21:42 -0700, Jim Thompson
>><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>>
>>>I always look at the applicant's approach rather than the final
>>>solution. Knowing how to attack a new problem tells me a lot about
>>>ultimate capability.
>>> ...Jim Thompson
>>
>>Agreed. You would probably never hire anyone like me.
>
>I'm not so sure. Systematic thinking always catches my attention.

Systematic problem solving is a good thing, but doesn't always
guarantee success. One employer hired an engineer who was far more
organized than I could ever pretend to be. Almost immediately, he
produced a stream of schedules, estimates, organization requirements,
cost breakdowns, progress reports, mockups, user manual outlines, and
test plans. This was a radical change from my usual "Tell me what you
want it to do, what I have to work with, when you want it, and get the
hell out of my way". Management was thrilled that they finally had
someone in engineering that actually spoke the language of management.
Just one small problem. His part of the project didn't work, was
late, and well over budget. This required his paper pile to be
constantly revised, which diverted his attention sufficiently that
little time was left to actually do any useful design work. He quit
just before he was let go and I inherited his mess.

I suspect that you may have misjudged my way of thinking. One of the
unanswered questions from my checkered past is which is the best
approach to a project. My boss usually favored a systematic and
sequential approach, which involved front end planning and reviewed
calculations before building anything. My approach was to throw
together something as close as possible to the final product, test it,
find the problems early in the game, and spend the rest of the project
fighting fires. I've done it both ways and both methods work. I just
can't tell which is best. I suspect that you would not appreciate my
approach, especially since it doesn't fit well with IC design, where
failures are very expensive.

>I've done that more times than I can count. Now I ask, "Nice looking!
>Who did the design?" THEN I put my foot in mouth ;-)

I just keep doing it the wrong way. I have an eye for finding defects
and noticing details, which supplies me with sufficient ammunition to
shoot myself in the foot. I'll look at a finished product, that's
been in production for months, and usually find problems or things
that could be improved. This is often a key part of an interview as a
good engineer can ALWAYS find a better or at least different way of
doing things.

Incidentally, another of my other bad habits was to run a credit
report on a prospective employer or client. Somewhere during the
negotiations, I pull out the Dun and Bradstreet report or SEC
disclosures, and mention that the company financials are insufficient
to support my asking salary and associated decadent and lavish
lifestyle. It has been difficult to predict the reaction, but in all
cases, it was one extreme or the other, with nothing in between.

>I also sometimes get seriously under-bid.
>A year or so later I'm called in to fix the mess... now at a premium,
>of course >:-}

I don't bid on many jobs. The few times that a bid was required, I
found myself consistently underbid by offshore engineers. This
doesn't bother me because a few months later, I sometimes get an email
asking if I'm still available to do the same job, but in half the
time. So, I intentionally bid high on such projects, knowing that
I'll get my asking price on the 2nd time around.

[Jim Thompson]

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:19:32 -0400, k...@attt.bizz wrote:

>On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 20:21:40 -0700, John Larkin
><jjla...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
>

[snip]

>>
>>The reason that Thompson is so obsessed with Tulane

I'm not obsessed with Tulane. I just suspect that John didn't
graduate, buddy with the Dean or not.

>>is that he *knows* that I
>>had a whole lot more fun in New Orleans, which was and is a hoot-and-a-half,
>>than he had in Boston, which he hated.

I didn't hate Boston, loved the restaurants and museums... and the
Pops, but I did find the people quite snotty. In later years I've
noted that, at the time, it was probably due to the extremely poor
economy in that area. On recent visits I've found the people to be
quite nice.

(Likewise, even New Yorker's on Long Island :-)

>>
>>And he knows that, while he was peeping at the girls' dorm with a telescope at
>>night, I was sneaking *into* the girls' dorm at night.

Nope, I simply reported it, because all the frats fronting the Charles
had rooms devoted to it ;-)

Me, I was married, lived on the third floor of a _house_ on Magazine
Street, near Stop & Shop, in Cambridge, no view whatsoever of the BU
"princesses".

>>
>>Bugs him, it does.

Not in the slightest, but it sure bugs Larkin immensely... so I do
admit to enjoying pushing Larkin's buttons periodically, drives him
insane... like anyone needs to >:-}

>>
>>And for the record, the guys who flunked my emitter-follower test were mostly
>>from Silicon Valley.

I'm from the Silicon _Desert_ ;-)

>
>You probably would have been waiting for my answer for a while, while
>I was trying to figure out what the real question was. I had an
>interview a few years ago where the engineer asked me the gain of some
>simple opamp circuits and then what a couple of transistor thingys
>did. He was wondering why I was looking at him funny. Later, he
>explained that no one had ever answered all of the questions before,
>let alone got them right. It really was *simple* stuff.
>
>When I was on the other side of the table, I generally asked the
>candidate about previous projects that *he* did. Then went into them
>as deeply as possible to see if *he* really did it. At IBM, we
>weren't allowed to give a "test" of any kind (though my first manager
>did anyway), but we could ask questions going to experience.

I always enjoyed working with the IBM people in Burlington.

[Jim Thompson]

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:31:53 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com>

I'm systematically messy. Ask my wife ;-)

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:50:38 -0700, Jim Thompson
<To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

>I'm systematically messy. Ask my wife ;-)
> ...Jim Thompson

I believe in the random distribution of debris in order to optimize
available space and minimize the search path length. No organizating
allowed. One nice thing about being the only person in the office is
that things don't move by themselves. I know where everything is
buried. The filing system is basically LIFO (last in, first out)
which means that the most commonly used boxes end up on top of the
pile.

My palatial office workbench (soon to be purged of junk):
<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/office/slides/office-mess-04.html>

[Jim Thompson]

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:48:52 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com>
wrote:

>On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:50:38 -0700, Jim Thompson
><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>
>>I'm systematically messy. Ask my wife ;-)
>> ...Jim Thompson
>
>I believe in the random distribution of debris in order to optimize
>available space and minimize the search path length.

I'll try out that line on my wife. Not sure that it'll work, though
;-)

>No organizating
>allowed. One nice thing about being the only person in the office is
>that things don't move by themselves. I know where everything is
>buried. The filing system is basically LIFO (last in, first out)
>which means that the most commonly used boxes end up on top of the
>pile.
>
>My palatial office workbench (soon to be purged of junk):
><http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/office/slides/office-mess-04.html>

Is that your anti-drone hat ?>:-}

My desk at one of its cleaner moments...

http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/DeskAttack.jpg

Can't show it as it is right now, piled quite high, no wood showing,
but with identifiable client drawings.

The monitor area...

http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/DeskArea_JT_with_Doc_Stand.png

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:48:52 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com>
wrote:

>On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:50:38 -0700, Jim Thompson
><To-Email-Use-Th...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>
>>I'm systematically messy. Ask my wife ;-)
>> ...Jim Thompson
>
>I believe in the random distribution of debris in order to optimize
>available space and minimize the search path length. No organizating
>allowed. One nice thing about being the only person in the office is
>that things don't move by themselves. I know where everything is
>buried. The filing system is basically LIFO (last in, first out)
>which means that the most commonly used boxes end up on top of the
>pile.
>
>My palatial office workbench (soon to be purged of junk):
><http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/office/slides/office-mess-04.html>

Looks like Kaiser meds.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators

Custom laser drivers and controllers

Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links

VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation

[Tim Williams]

"Phil Hobbs" <pcdhSpamM...@electrooptical.net> wrote in message
news:2aqdnToTBtpvovnM...@supernews.com...

> (There are two diode connected PNPs, which are the world's simplest
> feedback amp, the current-mirroring loop, and the input nulling loop,
> totalling four.)

Hmm. Triodes might be simpler -- the feedback arises internally due to
electric field "leaking" through the grid, hence the relatively low plate
resistance (whereas every other three-terminal non-latching amplifying
device exhibits constant-currenty response). Not the world's smallest
though. :)

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

[George Herold]

On Apr 9, 1:31 pm, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 08:59:33 -0700, Jim Thompson
>

I'm firmly in the 'get a prototype working right away' camp.
There always seems to be much more that I didn't know about that will
be revealed in the prototype, than I can dream up ahead of time.
And don't be afraid to scrap the first prototype.. if it's got some
fatal flaw.

>
> >I've done that more times than I can count.  Now I ask, "Nice looking!
> >Who did the design?"  THEN I put my foot in mouth ;-)
>
> I just keep doing it the wrong way.  I have an eye for finding defects
> and noticing details, which supplies me with sufficient ammunition to
> shoot myself in the foot.  I'll look at a finished product, that's
> been in production for months, and usually find problems or things
> that could be improved.  This is often a key part of an interview as a
> good engineer can ALWAYS find a better or at least different way of
> doing things.

Grin, At some level I'm embarrassed by my own designs... Ample room
for improvement.

George H.
(the next time will be better.)

>
> Incidentally, another of my other bad habits was to run a credit
> report on a prospective employer or client.  Somewhere during the
> negotiations, I pull out the Dun and Bradstreet report or SEC
> disclosures, and mention that the company financials are insufficient
> to support my asking salary and associated decadent and lavish
> lifestyle.  It has been difficult to predict the reaction, but in all
> cases, it was one extreme or the other, with nothing in between.
>
> >I also sometimes get seriously under-bid.
> >A year or so later I'm called in to fix the mess... now at a premium,
> >of course >:-}
>
> I don't bid on many jobs.  The few times that a bid was required, I
> found myself consistently underbid by offshore engineers.  This
> doesn't bother me because a few months later, I sometimes get an email
> asking if I'm still available to do the same job, but in half the
> time.  So, I intentionally bid high on such projects, knowing that
> I'll get my asking price on the 2nd time around.
>
> --
> Jeff Liebermann     je...@cruzio.com
> 150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com

> Santa Cruz CA 95060http://802.11junk.com
> Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

[Bill Sloman]

On 10 Apr, 02:41, Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-I...@On-My-

Web-Site.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:21:06 -0400, Phil Hobbs
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> <pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
> >On 04/09/2013 11:54 AM, Jim Thompson wrote:
> >> On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 02:09:16 -0400, Phil Hobbs
> >> <pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>
> >>> On 4/8/2013 11:40 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
> >>>> Phil Hobbs wrote:
> >>>>> On 4/8/2013 3:08 PM, Jim Thompson wrote:
> >>>>>> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:43:54 -0700, Jim Thompson

> >>>>>> <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-I...@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
>
> >>>>>>> On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:33:05 GMT, n...@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel)
> >>>>>>> wrote:
>
> >>>>>>>> Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-I...@On-My-Web-Site.com>

Who hasn't? But compensating for internal emitter resistance is a
nuisance.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:31:53 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <je...@cruzio.com>

Do you assume that the first article will not work?

Our culture expects that the first PCB etch, rev A, will be built by
manufacturing and will work and can be sold. It's sort of a sport to
get it perfect first pass.

Testing is not the best way to find bugs. You'll probably miss, and
ship, some.

[Jim Thompson]

On Tue, 9 Apr 2013 15:31:23 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill....@ieee.org> wrote:

>On 10 Apr, 02:41, Jim Thompson <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-I...@On-My-
>Web-Site.com> wrote:

[snip]

>>
>> I've been known to make one-quadrant multipliers from
>> weirdly-configured mirrors ;-)
>
>Who hasn't? But compensating for internal emitter resistance is a
>nuisance.

Who hasn't? Have you really? How did you do the bulk Re
compensation?

Compensating bulk Re is complex, but us true professionals manage it
nicely...

http://www.analog-innovations.com/SED/LogTemperatureCompensation.pdf

Could you (or Larkin :-) do us all a favor and study this schematic
and then post an explanation of how it works ?>:-}