A good digital oscilloscope?

Probably :-)

Real estate folks can be very creative when it comes to describing a property. In the ads they can make a dump look like a chateau. Until you get there ...

From August this year:

I think the US is on a longterm downslope of manufacturing employment. It was hidden by the dot-com boom and the recent financial bubble, but it's there. The government hates business and makes it as expensive as possible to have employees, so people who need to build things sensibly react by building them somewhere else.

John

"However, Culp said profit margins were high and the pipeline of new products was strong."

Those high profit margins are one of the things that's killing them. If you're just re-badging Chinese-engineered and manufactured scopes and what-not at the low- to mid-end of equipment, why should the customer hand over high profit margins when, e.g., Instek is perfectly happy to make do with less?

Bingo! Which is why I chose Instek. Plus it had more sample memory and features, for less money. Now clients of mine are buying those as well ...

Last time a client asked me whether they also sold a LabView driver for theirs. "No, they don't sell one, you just download it for free just like the PC control software." ... "Oh, really?"

"Joel Koltner" wrote in news:SMd_m.422289$ snipped-for-privacy@en-nntp-04.dc.easynews.com:

TEK will probably still do the engineering in the US,but production will be shifted to China. No more US-made TEK scopes or TV test equipment. Getting decent SERVICE will be interesting.

What Danaher SHOULD do is get rid of TEK's T&M management and their beancounters,the idiots who sold off TEK's IC/Hybrid manufacturing operation.

FYI,at it's peak,TEK used to employ 24,028 people,in 1981. from Winning with People;The First 40 years of Tektronix,by Marshall M. Lee

Which is why I see people like Allen Bradley, soon to join those like Tek! It's totally ridiculous with their hardware pricing on top of their software pricing and licensing..

What are they? Hardware or Microsoft?

As far as I'm concerned, they are an industrial hardware manufacturer and the software to configure their electronics should be supplied as a free tool or maybe enough to pay for the materials at best.

It seems to me with the lack of any recent advancement in hardware, I think all they want to do is have an office and just sell software that requires no employees, because they can get the code written in India and charge you dearly for the use of it! It's like paying rent on a program which isn't cheap!

It used to be you had a one time payment and they gave you a key or what ever for one computer, now, they make you pay over and over because your license runs out.

Just another fine example of greed! We are now buying Omron electronics because they are worth the money, software is great and reasonable. Also looking into other avenues.

Good bye AB!

Nah! They should string them up by the testicles!

-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)

Or as they say, we vote with our feet :-)

I interviewed with AB (Rockwell) a couple of years ago. They had a firewall between their software, firmware, and hardware groups. The FPGA folks were in the firmware group along with the embedded software types, which turned me off completely (LM was the same). There didn't look to be much communication between the groups, either. It wouldn't surprise me if the hardware and software organizations had their own P&L spreadsheets too. Nuts.

In defense companies you have to do that for security reasons. There will be firewalls even between individual hardware groups. I don't think that they split P&L.

But in a non-defense setting that would make no sense at all.

Sure, different customers, different contracts. This was a firewall between groups working on the same product. The hardware people didn't seem to talk to (or even know much about) the firmware people; "they're over there, somewhere". I can't imagine how one can firewall FPGA designers from the hardware designers, but they did. Crazy.

Even in a defense setting, firmware and hardware sorta go together. I did both but only because the hardware developer mucked it up so bad (I found out when I was going through the design trying to figure out what I had to control). OTOH, the (embedded) firmware people didn't know too much about FPGA stuff, yet may manager was the OS guy.

In defense you must do that, with people working on the very same project. The reason is that the number of people who have access to every detail of a project must be kept low, ideally zero. This reduces the chance of a serious leak, big time.

I had a situation where I got tired and wanted a candy bar. But not this sugary stuff from our machine. So the only way to get a trail mix type of candy bar was to send coins through the internal mail thingie and someone from the other group sent back a candy bar.

Nope. Not at all. I had no security clearance but had access to the hardware and FPGA stuff, though I wasn't supposed to be working on the hardware. ...and my managers were the managers of the software group. All of the FPGA people (in this project, anyway) worked for the software managers.

The AB situation was similar but there was no defense work going on there. Just a screwy (product) management structure.

Did they get a cut? ;-)

Tek!

That doesn't sound like a 100% kosher environment to me if it was a serious big system defense project.

There I agree with you, that just doesn't make sense.

No, that could have been construed as bribery since I was not an employee :-)

Tek!

It was a Navy Destroyer subsystem. There were some classified parameters I wasn't allowed to know, but the ones I needed were easily inferred from those that weren't classified. ;-)

They didn't like my questioning their structure, either. I really wanted to know how the position fit into the structure and what the limits were. I couldn't believe two companies were that screwy. ;-)

Where I am now, I'm not "allowed" to do the (embedded) firmware but am expected to do all of the FPGA stuff and most of the analogs. Go figure.

At LM one of the labs had an under-the-table "canteen service" going in competition with the vending machines. Once every few months they bought pizzas out of the proceeds. I didn't participate much because I didn't have access to the lab. I ate the pizza, though. ;-)

Time to have a friendly chat with the CEO? Maybe a quick lunch together? Seriously, they are usually quite glad if an amployee sees a situation that is harmful to the company and has a suggestion how to fix it. Heck, might mean a free lunch for you :-)

We had a doughnut & bagel kitty. The good thing was you contributed only when you ate one, so I didn't have to eat the doughnuts which are mostly too sugary for my taste.

Just as a point of reference, we're doing COTS contracts for the military indirectly as a sub-contractor, and there's no separation of software and hardware people. The pieces we work on aren't classified, although for the overall projects some other pieces are.

We do have a perhaps-slightly-overzealous IT guy who would *love* to start spending months implementing very fine-grained controls on who can and can't see every file on the server, log in to any given machine, etc. if he was just given the go-ahead by management, though. :-)

---Joel

One nice thing about small companies is that everybody gets to do everything. I think that works better. Our newish software engineer wanted to design and lay out a display board that he was assigned to program, so we let him.

We're furnishing a subassembly for one project that's over a year late. It's pretty obvious that the not-so-big company is compartmentalized unto paralysis.

John