Did SPICE development cease around the turn of the century?

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Mike

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When you try to run complicated programs is when cygwin breaks down.

I know what you mean about notebooks. That is the one place where you have to put up with dual boots, virtual pcs, etc. I just dual boot.

BTW, win7 sp1 installer rewrites the boot sector. What a fiasco. It needs to be on the active partition. I'm really amazed MS did a goof like that. I had to let it nuke the grub, do the install, the reload grub.

Fair enough, I tried Cygwin last century before deciding to move to the separate Linux box. If you don't expect Cygwin to duplicate all the unix filesystem stuff then it's fine, just a tad confusing when the odd utility not work as expected at the command line.

VMs I'm not so keen on, tried them, prefer the separate box. If I was stuck with one machine, yes, I'd put a VM on it for the other OS :)

Grant.

-->

run

Nothing new for win7.

Windows always owned the MBR, I expect and plan for that ;) Easy enough to pop in the Linux install/rescue disk and reinstall your favourite boot loader. Or, install windows first.

After all, Linux came along after windows and decided to be on disk compatible.

Grant.

Well, large signal models might be nice. I recently tried to simulate avalanche breakdown in a transistor. I ended up etching a board and just try it in the real world.

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

Why Phil... I would have guessed you'd be a GNOME user rather than KDE! Any particular reason?

I used to use WinAxe for that.

---Joel

I have enough footprints lying around without having them all over my computer. The gnome guys have this fetish for making the user interface look cool, i.e. changing it for no good reason. KDE is a bit more stable that way.

Plus there are a bunch of KDE apps I'm fond of, especially kdiff3.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

email: hobbs (atsign) electrooptical (period) net
http://electrooptical.net

Ummm... well, to my eye, the change between KDE 3 and KDE 4 was incredibly huge and thoroughly destabilizing... a striking example of "we've got a better idea" technical zealotism. I switched over to Gnome at that point, solely in the interests of usability.

Now, it looks as if the next version of Gnome is going to toss some more destabilization into the mix... getting rid of Minimize as a fundamental and common operation in desktop management?!? As Dr. McCoy asked, "Whose good idea was that?"

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Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
  I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
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KDE has seen much more drastic changes in the past 5 years that GNOME ever did; there are plenty of people who dislike KDE 4 and keep running KDE 3. (Granted, the same thing might happen later this year when GNOME 3.0 comes out.)

I keep meaning to check out KDE again though -- the last variant I used was

3.something. Having written a few small programs using both Qt (KDE's prefered graphics library) and wxWidgets (GNOME's), I'd have to admit that Qt feels rather more modern, and I suppose adding their own pre-processor for the signal/slot business is no worse than the big ugly #define macros wxWidgets (and MFC) use to build their table structures to connect up events.

---Joel

Yes, the KDE4 thing was a bit of a wrench, but fortunately most of the churn happened during a period when I was only using Linux on a cluster, running Rocks 4.2 (based on CentOS 4.2). CentOS isn't the most fashion-conscious distro, so it was still on KDE 3.

I haven't written a GUI program since about 1995, when I did a pipe-based plot server for OS/2, so toolkit issues don't loom too large for me. (My code is mostly console-based, with HTML and data visualization output.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

email: hobbs (atsign) electrooptical (period) net
http://electrooptical.net

Yabbut you can turn most of that stuff off in KDE 4. My desktop looks a lot like KDE 3, even though it took me awhile to learn where to find stuff.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

email: hobbs (atsign) electrooptical (period) net
http://electrooptical.net

Well, yeah, one is a leaky tank that releases the clarified water from the septic tank into the ground, where it's filtered by Mother Nature and returns from the aquifer. A leach field is just a big network of leaky pipes that spreads the clarified waste water over a larger footprint. It must have been safe, because we had a hand pump on our front porch that we drank from.

It's odd that you would say such a thing - when I was a kid, that's exactly what we had - a septic tank (which needed the sludge pumped out periodically) followed by a cesspool, which is tantamount to a drain field, but takes up less real estate. (the water leached into the ground, was filtered by Mother Earth, and went into the aquifer.)

Then again, we were on a wooded lot; Mom used to let me tag along when she went out into our woods to pick wild asparagus. And stuff _did_ grow wildly, because our toilet waste was very nutritious for the plants!

Hope This Helps! Rich

was

to

Aylward

SuperSpice

suppose

Avalanching is in essence a destructive process. It's like trying to model corona discharges in a tube. SPICE is more for modelling the "ordinary" circuit stuff.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Hi Joel, Sorry, but I didn't see this thread till this morning. As Jim know, I have a bit of 'history' on this topic.

Simply put, PSpice, and most other inexpensive spices did quit adding major features back around the turn of the century. For one thing, PSpice got bought out by Cadence, who didn't want it to compete with its products that were priced 10 to 100 times as much, so new features were anathema! PSpiceHDL was the death knell for the entire development team, as was PSpice on Linux. These products all existed, at least in beta, and scared the Cadence management so much that they laid off the entire PSpice development team, and sent the product to India for any future 'develpment!'

LTSpice is good, but Mike has a very narrow focus on what he wants it to do, and has no interest in adding new features beyond just simulating LT products well. Intusoft doesn't have the money or resoruces to add features, and Altium is not interested in analog simulation. They don't believe there is money in it.

All the real development in Spice is on the high performance chip design packages that exist in the $100K range. That is where the big companies see the money, not in the general purpose $10K spices that most engineers rely on. That is one reason that LTSpice is bad. Since it is free, and does such a good job within its limitations, there is no incentive to compete with it.

Charlie

Grant expounded in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Cygwin was a dog in the very beginning but it has come a _long_ way since then. I especially use it on my corporate laptop as it provides a very convenient and unixy interface on an otherwise hostile (WinXP) hosting environment.

I also use cygwin at home for software development since I still need Windows for the music recording software that I use.

I also tired of trying to manage monitor/keyboard and mouse switching through the octopus I have behind my monitor, for all the different architectures I have at home for porting. So often, when you switch consoles, one of the O/S's lose the mouse and/or keybd. What a pain. Ya, a better console switch is possible but it is hard to get one that covers the old platforms like my Dec Alpha and the new ones that use USB.

It is rarely confusing. If you expect to mount and unmount file systems a la linux, you just know a priori that this isn't going to work under Cygwin. But for most software development activities, cygwin works very well.

I even do Ada development for AVR using cygwin (AVR-Ada builds upon Win-AVR). With some careful planning in your Makefiles, you can build and program your AVR chip in one easy make command (though I usually burn only when I'm ready to commit).

I see no reason to avoid cygwin these days. It works, 'cepting when they occaisionally break it after a cygwin update. :)

VMs are ok, but I hate dealing with the screen resolution issues that so often are associated with it. It can also be temporarily confusing at times WRT to who has the mouse. That just adds to the application switching annoyances. VMs have their place, but for me they tend to be a last resort.

One day though, I'd like to get a plan9 instance to boot successfully in VirtualBox. Mine always hangs.

Warren

Hi Charlie,

Thanks for the additional information; it's quite interesting.

I can just imagine the job interview...

"So why were you laid off from Cadence?" "Well, I was working on PSpice, and my team and I were so good we were about to release for $10k a product that had features comparable to the company's $100k offering, so clearly we had to be let go." "Ah, I see. I trust you've since gotten over such overachieving ways, yes?" "Umm, err, well..."

...and I don't expect Linear Tech is interested in providing him with a few assistants to really expand its scope, since such an act is unlikely to let them sell any more chips, I suppose.

John Warner is still managing to fly his SIMetrix flag still, at least a bit.

What's strange is that there's still a decent number of companies competing in the

In the usual terminology I've heard (here in the U.S.) the difference is somewhat larger.

A "cesspool" is, as you say, a leaky tank or well. It receives sewage

*directly*, and the sewage liquids leach directly from the tank into the soil... it's a one-stage sewage processing system. They are in disfavor here in the U.S., because they are more prone to leak raw sewage into the local water table without adequately bio-processing it (i.e. the risk of E. coli ending up in the ground water is significant). Also, they tend to clog up over time (and can thus overflow or leak) because the solids in the sewage are discharged into the soil, and will eventually plug up the pores in the soil and stop the drainage.

A "leach field" is the second part of a two-stage sewage processing system - it's coupled to a "septic tank". The septic tank is a anaerobic digestion and settline/filtration system, which separates out and biodegrades most of the solid material rather than discharging it into the leach field. The undigested part of the sewage ends up as sediment in the bottom of the tank, and must be pumped out periodically.

The risk of pathogenic bacteria ending up in the water table is greatly reduced, and if a sufficiently large leach field is used the lifetime of the system can be quite a few decades.

I believe that some two-stage systems use a septic tank (anaerobic) and a "leach pit"... the latter being a separate pit which serves the same function as a leach drain field. If I recall correctly, this approach can only be used in areas of high-drainage soil (e.g. very sandy)... in areas of lower soil drainage you must spread the leaching out over a larger field with pipes to avoid saturating the soil and turning it into a nasty swamp. In any case, a "leach pit" in a two-stage system is a very different beast than a "cesspit", as the former receives water that has undergone first-stage treatment in a septic tank, and the latter receives raw nasty sewage.

Some older homes and communities do still have cesspools, but in most parts of the U.S. there are significant restrictions on them... new ones cannot be built/installed, and you sometimes have to replace a cesspool with a good septic-tank system (or a city sewage hookup) in order to sell the property to a new owner.

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Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
  I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
     boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

[...]

That's because the free ones still have serious shortcomings that prevent industrial use. Eagle does, too, mainly in two areas: No hierarchy, no interactive simulator link.

The lack of hierarchy is what really held Eagle back IMHO and for some reason that was put on the back burner. V6 is supposed to have it and then I'll write them a nice check. V5? No thanks, I'll sit that one out even if this means I won't get upgrade pricing.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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No, a "cesspool" is essentially a hole in the ground the raw sewage runs into. There is no septic tank to separate the solids.

That wasn't a "cesspool". A cesspool takes the sewage directly; no septic tank. A leach field can either disperse the liquids into the ground or evaporate it in the air. The key is that the solids have been separated. There is no separation with a cesspool.

Many nutrients are water soluble.

I'm lucky here that most of my Linux interaction is via PuTTY terminals, so I don't need to use KVM switches. Software I write is system stuff and web pages, so I don't need Linux GUI.

Yes, that's my reaction to them.

Never wanted that!

Grant.