Biz

On a sunny day (Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:57:39 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

I am seeing this:

Business is picking up a bit at my employer and at a friends manufacturing line.

However are they spending credit or cash?

My guess is a false hope before a bigger storm. I hope I'm wrong.

Gas prices are climbing again, latest prediction from Faux News is

4.00$ per gallon at Xmas.

Steve

Should be our best year ever. But we are selling a lot of stuff to Europe, as US sales have dropped a bit. We sell almost exclusively to Colleges and I expect our sales lag the economy... perhaps we will do worse next year.

George H.

Don't know about elsewhere, but i'm still working at present. Client does HA infrastructure projects and seems to have ridden through the downturn. There's a lot of unemployment elsewhere though and no sign of real recovery, unless you count the current furore over bank bonuses. Thousands of fresh graduates can't find work either, even burger bar work, so even less hope for other young people.

My guess another two to three years for any real progress...

Regards,

Chris

Any bets for when Apple will spin off its computer biz so it can concentrate on consumer electronics?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
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On a sunny day (Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:43:20 -0400) it happened Spehro Pefhany wrote in :

I think not, Mac sales improved too, ipod went down. There are 2 new Macs, and the mac-mini has now a server version. Jobs always was a computer lover, remember how Apple got started?

We've had a good recession so far which has surprised me.

Our biggest customer is in air con, computer cooling and such. We work on a annual kanban order. I expected hard times but their call offs are running out about 4 months early.

The military bits are also doing OK but the odds and sods are down.

My son has just committed to spend his gap year doing CAD - that's why I've been posting about cad software hoping he would agree, good time to change before he's learnt another system.

"John Larkin" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

That?s pretty much what the accountant said. Companies had put off spending until later(now). I guess nobody was sure what to make out of the mess. Credit is still tight.

Cheers

Personally, I don't think my company felt much of anything. A bit more competition from the chinese (and fools will buy their crap--but why do they send it to me for warranty repairs?)

Is it better now? I'd say yes, the last three months have been rather good.

With CAD it's like with rental cars, you've driven one, you can easily adapt to the others. In the end he'll have to eat whatever his first employer uses anyhow. My layouter is quite matter-of-factly about this. Whenever I steer a new client his way he says he'll use their CAD if needed as long as he can have a legit temporary license seat from them.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Considering that banks have succeeded in extorting extraordinary amounts of money from almost all governments of the world, and thus indirectly from you and me, one could reason that they indeed did very well, and that these bonuses are therefore fully justified.

Jeroen Belleman

I took that attitude to programming once. Basic, Fortran, assembler, Pascal, C all interchangeable. So I took on an existing project written in Forth.

Bad mistake. The language is impossible and the integrated development environment was worse. Like using edlin to edit bytes on a hard disk.

Forth is a completely different animal--everything stands or falls by the clarity of the programmer's naming conventions. I did a lot of HP calculator programming back in the day, so Forth was quite natural except that I like floating point!

It used to be good for saving code space, way back when. I had a Forth compiler for the 128k Macintosh that worked fine.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

[snip]

Sno-o-o-o-ort! I don't remember what editor I used now... way the hell back in DOS-only days, but I certainly have done byte-by-byte editing... wasn't there a word used then... "crack" ?:-) ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | 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

| 1962 | Cranky Old Git With Engineering Mind Faster Than a Speeding Prissy

Forth is a rather odd beast anyhow. Probably as mainstream as Swahili.

I used IBM-Easywriter for that, later MS-Works. Fudging around in compiled code. After the first successes I became brazen. Working in ultrasound I thought, heck, those graphics adapters should be able to handle the image data on the fly. Got datasheets, hacked some code, setting registers here, there and yonder. Sent some data, hey, lookee here! ... yeehaw ... PHUT ... graphics card died. This experience pretty much ended my foray into the world of software. Except for uC programming and such.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Back in the "simplistic" days, you could uncompile executables and rework them. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     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     |
             
Cranky Old Git With Engineering Mind Faster Than a Speeding Prissy

I even splurged back then and bought the Microsoft C compiler. About $300-400, came with a three feet (!) stack of books.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Right, by spending hours, sometimes days manually analysing the assembler. Other than disassemblers and call tree generators, none of it was automated in any meaningfull sense.

The dream of generating C from executables is just that, a dream...

Regards,

Chris

You can still do that even with Windows binaries.

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
                     "If it doesn\'t fit, use a bigger hammer!"
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