Re: Great Movie Line from an Old Bob Hope Movie

I remember just about everything. It keeps people honest, at least once they figure out that they can't get over on me and that's assuming that I let them know that I know rather than pretending to not know... when I really know. You never know :)

BTW. It wasn't your OT mini-rant that got you killfiled and Jim didn't say why, just that he did it some time ago (prior to that OT thing.) IIRC he alluded to thinking you were posing as a female, though I'm not sure that's what landed you in his bozo bin.

At any rate, I'd like to know the answers to those questions.

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Best Regards,
Mike

I think I have a pretty good guess. In my view, its just about certian that the client bought the thing lock, stock and barrel. It would make little sense for them to do otherwise. There are plenty of independent consultancies/companies that will do this, i.e. pretty much all of them. The golden rule, he who has the gold, makes the rules.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

$3840, just a hair under brand S. I'd like to do a cheaper version with a simpler technology, but my marketing people don't want us to kill our own product just when it's getting up to speed. If you want a lot of DDG channels, a rack full of VME modules is the usual way to go. It's more common, actually, for people to want a lot of channels of time measurement, as opposed to many channels of time delay. Exceptions are big laser arrays like NIF, and implosion experiments.

Actually, a huge-number-of-channels delay gadget would be a fun thing to do, but I'd guess you wouldn't sell many.

John

Yup. The "killer ap" for technology is now distributing music, so the world's youth can keep themselves numbed 24 hours a day. Long-haul bandwidth, once so valuable, now transports terabytes/second of p*rn. And the primary use for compute power on Earth is to play mega-violent video games. I'd guess that one good AGP card has more compute power than existed on the entire planet in 1965.

John

[snip]

It was a fixed fee contract, and Kevin is right, the clients owns all ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

The big money has always been in consumer products.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Oops, I meant to add "and lasts a month on 2 D cells".

Oh well, it seems not to be on sale in the UK, so it's not quite so easy to get to play with. Thanks.

At Target last week, 8-digit-LCD-4-bangers were selling for $0.49. They'd been reduced from $0.99.

Tim.

I wish I could figure out a way to put a PIC or an AVR into one of those and make a real calculator out of it -- the keyboard's all there as long as you remember that '=' means 'enter'.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

I would've guessed that too, Kevin. It was a multipart question, though. Settle for partial credit? :)

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Best Regards,
Mike

Yeah, sure....

Not surprising. Such a claim is completely vacuous.

Who just want to appease the antivivisectionists, sure we can tell when the cow doesn't feel pain. Like, shit they can.

Cold comfort indeed for the cows. No chance in hell that this system does as claimed.

Since there is no definition of consciousness, nor anyway to determine if something has consciousness, it is simply impossible to construct a "pain detector". There simply is no way of numerically knowing when a foetus has enough neurons to constitute a feeling of pain within the current understanding of the brain. One can only "reasonable" say that, say prior to 3 months from conception, there are essentially no relevant neural connections, so no pain. However, where a "reasonable" line may be drawn after his point, is completely arbitrary guesswork.

Related stuff at

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

Well, something good still came of it, maybe. An old partner told me that when the slaughter cows, the have a contraption that drive a rod through the brain rapidly so the cow dies fast and can't pump adrenaline into the blood, thereby making the meat tough and gamey.

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Best Regards,
Mike

Just in case Jim doesn't elaborate, IIRC the website is chipcenter, which has a number of forums, one of which discusses consulting, so you might poke around there.

You can find other sites, but of course they're not all related to electronics. I even found a bunch of consulting articles from some gal who IIRC went into management consulting. First time I ever visited a site devoed to women, not that that's relevant.

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Best Regards,
Mike

The most typical example that heard of, around 10 years ago. Sorry but I have no references : A brilliant research study that could result in reliable tools to measure pain of premature babies or autists was made. Cum Laude, et coetera. The only problem is that no research lab, great hospital, or pharmaceutical company hired that researcher. The only employer that he/she found was a food-industrial, who got the technique applied to the slaughtering of cows: using the pain indicators it was possible to strip and streamline the slaughter procedure until the point where pain was detected.

Hi John,

No, I started "consuming" them around the time when I read about a Brazilian who had successfully eaten more than half of his VW Beetle...

Regards, Joerg

Wow, what a lovely piece of engineering - always suspected you were a smart bastard! The big question - how can the rest of us hack it into something useful that wasnt remotely envisioned(SP) in the design brief and subsequent product?

73 de VK3BFA Andrew

For that matter, how long before they come back to you for an internet-enabled air freshener with it's own web page, broadcasting the state of the scent reservoir over 802.11 (for $0.10 a pop, of course).

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

The hardest part is probably the LCD driver. The $0.49 calculator I mentioned has about 40 wires running to the LCD which I figure means that it's half-multiplexed (4 digits at a time). A PIC16C923 could probably be made to fit, although it'd be tight. You'd need more than a single

1.5V cell to run it, I'm pretty sure.

Tim.

Actually that device is one of my most trivial designs.

What is unusual is that a design of mine got publicity in such a way that I can even acknowledge I did it.

Most of my work is quite more complex, yet immersed in things I can say nothing about.

I didn't do the board design so I have no idea of how it ended up being laid out. A friend of mine at Fitch sent me the URL or I wouldn't even yet be aware that the product had been released.

(Consumer products of this sort are usually released to just a single test market until they are sure that the product will sell in large quantities.)

Buy lots of them ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.