ageing out of tech

It seems they should have a semester on voltage dividers, too.

I prefer breadboarding.

I wouldn't call analogue signal processing "very elementary" anything :)

On Mar 11, 2019, Tom Gardner wrote (in article ):

I was in the POSIX (IEEE std 1003.1) Working Group when they tried to express the C interface to UNIX using Z, this having been mandated by ISO (reportedly at the behest of New Zealand), in search of a "Language Independent Standard". Reportedly, New Zealand favored Modula.

It did *not* go well - C is far too expressive for Z to encompass, and reducing the UNIX interface to the capabilities of Z would be crippling. The Working Group revolted, and told ISO to pound sand.

Yeah. I have a degree in Computer Science. What saved me is the earlier degree in EE. I got the CS degree because I was working as an embedded realtime programmer back in the day, starting before it became possible to get a CS degree - it had not yet been invented. But something like 2/3 of the degree courses were useful, and HR people are impressed by parchment.

Joe Gwinn

s thread is that older people get left behind. I have lived that fear pers onally for the last 10 or 15 years. I have read books and watched videos o nline to stay relevent. And yet the attitude here seems to be... oh that i s easy...I knew everything since I was 15 years old. Don't you realize tha t the "I am brilliant" folks are the ones who get RIFFED? The ones who alr eady have arrived and have nothing left to learn because they knew it all a t age 15 are the very ones that should get their asses laid off?

ally understood it. I know, most here will say how they comprehended linea r algebra at age 16 (because they are so damn smart). I want to use MATLAB . Matlab stands for Matrix algebra. If you do not really understand linea r algebra then how can you be a master of matlab?

am very aware of the fact that I do not know it.

n't know something when you don't know that that something even exists?

t introduces the student to a vast ocean of stuff that you only know exists when you graduate from college. And after 4 years of 65% on college exams , you come out realizing that you have actually not arrived but that you ha ve a lifetime of learning , just to grasp the fundamentals.

John Larkin treating potential employers as idiots by asking them questions that suggest that they can't understand a potential divider is likel;y to generate all kinds of negative reactions.

Instruction on voltage dividers wouldn't help that. Teaching John Larkin no t to act like a patronising twit would work better, but he doesn't seem to learn that kind of stuff.

Spice is quicker, though it can be equally misleading, if for different rea sons.

Posix and formal methods are not two concepts I's expect to see in the same sentence, unless there is also a "not" somewhere in the sentence!

Now that's a *wonderful* euphemism!

Quite. I'm surprised it got that far.

Some of my degree courses were similarly only of /indirect/ relevance, e.g. electromagenetics :) But I wouldn't expect anything else, since EE and computing are both much wider than any single career.

People claim that courses nowadays are much worse, and suspect that's partly right and partly wrong.

Right: there were always crap courses, and far more people from the lower end of the interest/ability curve take degree courses nowadays.

Wrong: having revisited my uni for its open day on the 40th anniversary of graduation, the courses and students quality remained high and relevant, and the theory+practical ethos was delightfully unchanged.

We're just finishing up a fun box. Two channels of i/q modulator. Each has an opamp-based wide range all-pass phase shifter, feeding two AD835 multipliers, optional noise sum, output driver. Transformer isolated in and out. All analog!

The input and output impedance and level specs are probably wrong, so the i/o networks are leaded parts screwed onto a Phoenix plug-in barrier strip that our customers can modify without soldering.

It's nice to do something once in a while that doesn't need any code.

I don't think that's true. I haven't done any genuine complex math (add/mul/div with variables like a+bi) in decades. You can think about reactive components in various ways.

Does anybody regularly use complex math? Sure, phase shifts and filters are "related" to complex math.

It is impressive how many engineers don't understand inductors.

Good book:

Maxwell actually got some basic stuff wrong. Those guys fixed it up and came up with the modern "Maxwells equations."

On Mar 12, 2019, Tom Gardner wrote (in article ):

I eventually did find direct relevance to E&M Field Theory, because I work on radar systems for decades now.

Speaking of low-content courses, I recall that none of the distribution-requirement courses for my MSCS degree were particularly interesting, and that while Servomechanisms was offered, it was not listed as acceptable to satisfy the distribution requirements. So I went to the Dean, and pointed out that Servomechanisms wasn?t exactly Basket Weaving. He commented that he had not generated the distribution rests course list, and approved Servomechanisms. Turned out to be a very useful course.

Joe Gwinn

That's fun too, but I usually Spice a while first to explore possibilities and sensitivities and such. Spice is faster than soldering, and I can do it anywhere. It is educational and trains instincts ahead of breadboarding, or just going to a production board.

I'm waiting for boards plastered with the EPC GaN fets. They are microscopic BGAs that can't be breadboarded by full-size humans. So the process is to Spice carefully and then lay out boards, pick-and-place, and hope it works.

But of course this circuit is driven by digital circuits and DSP further back. The DSP is what drives your market there....right? Without DSP I would guess that you gadget would have no application.

Why do you think people have a harder time understanding inductors? I certainly had to think A LOT harder about inductors than I did about capacitors.

Servos are the most awesome cross of mechanical , electrical and control theory ever. And servos are mostly obsolete so why teach it. Tubes are awesome too.

Just to let you know... I bought a book on Maxwell based on your book recommendation. Your book recommendations are good.

... as was the knowledge and gumption to challenge authority with a good argument :)

Re AD835. 250 MHz! I didn't know there was a multiplier that was that fast. We use the AD734 10 MHz max.

George H.

tirsdag den 12. marts 2019 kl. 15.59.15 UTC+1 skrev snipped-for-privacy@columbus.rr.com:

servos obsolete?

I was addressing analog driven servos. If you are referring to digitally dr iven one's then I agree. In the context of what i was responding to (althou gh my phone is not showing the text i am responding to and it used to a few days ago) i think it was discussing more the analog side of servos.

On Tuesday, March 12, 2019 at 1:22:40 PM UTC-4, snipped-for-privacy@columbus.rr.com wro te:

driven one's then I agree. In the context of what i was responding to (alth ough my phone is not showing the text i am responding to and it used to a f ew days ago) i think it was discussing more the analog side of servos.

Well you still see analog servos in things were speed matters. Laser locking and things like that.

George H.