Chinese EUV

What is Dutch food like? We have all sorts of exotic food here, mostly pacific-asian and some african.

About the only european restaurants here are French. There is a new one just down the block from my office: wood fired, two sittings a day a few days a week, fixed price $140 with no tax or tips.

The only original American cuisines are bbq and cajun-creole.

Enjoy the holidays! Eat too much!

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That is human nature! People want strong leaders to do their thinking for them. Darwin suggested the survival of the fittest critters, but what wins is the fittest tribe.

We helped the brits early on, when they were losing.

Less than that, but sometimes it pays off big.

Duh. We want to win.

America was big on non-tariff

Trump count 6. It's fun to see him drive people insane.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

But lots of other stuff, pizza, French fires, grapes, bananas, butter cookies, mushrooms, kiwies, ketchup, olive oil, pepper, garlic, salt, chili butter.. cashew nuts, almonds, what not... I like to cook. But I am a vegetarian so :-) King Kong is not my tase. And no alcohol here.

From $140, say 120 Euro, I can eat 2 weeks at home.. and with some household stuff included in that price. Takes an hour to make a good meal. No restaurants needed. You can have stuff delivered to your place, but I usually go to the supermarket.

Been coding all morning...

Some people enjoy the process of cooking, but I don't. I cook for the results, so go for low-labor meals.

We have a Saturday morning farmers' market nearby. People from the countryside truck stuff in. It's fun, very seasonal, and we discover stuff that doesn't show up in supermarkets.

I'm working on a plan to research new products, study technologies, competitors specs and pricing, estimate markets, decide if we should design something. I have 15 topics so far and need to find a person to assign each to. I'm planning to offer some EE students a really good deal to do a few.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Getting your amusement from the political version of the wrecking ball does require a pretty complete disconnection from reality.

Before Trump got elected America was a pretty horrible example of a country where the well-off exploited the people who worked for them.

Everything he has actually done since he got into politics has increased American income inequality. The people who voted for him thought - correctly - that the country wasn't doing enough for them - and made the mistake of believing that he was going to change things in way that would make their lives better. Trump will say anything that will get him the deal he wants, and he's good at putting together plausible lies.

His career as businessman fell apart because his deals didn't deliver what he promised. His first term as president wasn't the disaster that it might have been because he was surrounded by people who more or less knew what they were doing. He's got a much more subservient staff this time around, and does seem to be doing a lot more damage.

He has backed off from some of his more hare-brained tariffs so it isn't clear how much damage he will end up doing, but he does seem to be intent on wrecking the American economy, and the side effects on the world economy are going to be nasty.

They'll need to be able to work out how competent your designs might be.

Competitor specifications are one thing, but estimating how much room their design leaves for a cheaper competitive design is a bit more difficult.

People aren't always too forthcoming on how their design works, or how they manufacture their hardware.

The most reliable way of making a competitive product is to tool up to make ten times as many of them as you biggest competitor does - typically you can make your product for half the unit price of theirs, but it only works if the market can buy up the extra production.

Long established products tend to use old-fashioned components, and you can often do well by swapping in more modern parts, if you can be confident that they will work.

I suspect that most EE students would struggle with that sort of problem.

When I joined Cambridge Instruments they'd done that sort of exercise on their bread-and-butter electron microscope, but they'd use their second string engineers to do the detail design, and it hadn't gone well.

I got dragged into a six month clean-up program, but while we did solve all the problems, sometimes we had to use rather more expensive components than we could have got away if we'd been designing from scratch.

That's my problem, not theirs.

We don't compete on price.

If we are curious about that, sometimes we buy one on ebay. Or rent one.

We don't compete on price.

That's my problem, not theirs.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

The big driver of income inequality is immigration, legal and otherwise.

Rich people get maids and dog walkers and lots of cheap employees. Working-class people get underbid and lose their jobs.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Longest link posted!! 297 characters ;-) Just use:

We realy need a 'replicator' and a machine like used to 'beam me up Scotty'

Dream on.

So you imagine that you compete on quality.

But then you have to work out what they actually do. and how they do it. When I got stuck with designing around components that had gone obsolete when I was working at Cambridge Instruments. I got the impression that the original designers frequently hadn't had a clear idea of what they were doing. Sometimes the idea was clear enough, but wrong enoughn to matter.

So you imagine that you compete on quality. This usually involves deluding yourself (and the customer) about the quality of your product. Donald Trump must be your hero.

Your want them to find products where you could compete - it's their problem until you get involved.

Nonsense. Immigrants have enough sense to spend at lot of time and take a big risk to get jobs in countries that pay more for their services than they'd get in their country of origin.

Not so you'd notice. There just aren't enough immigrants to make a big difference.

What drives US inequality is an education system that works a lot better for the children of the wealthy, and a manufacturing sector that prefers to off-shore production so that they can keep on paying subsistence wages to the people that they do hire.

Trade unions have never done well in the US, and it was noticeable in the UK that US-owned firms would go to great lengths to avoid talking to trade union officials.

Germany has a much more sensibly system.

But it brings up so many fun pictures! :-) Ed

Certainly that matters. But we mostly do unusual things that have no obvious competition. About half our business is OEM mixed-function gear.

We pretty much know that already. I'm mostly curious about construction.

Packaging is 50% of electronic design. The other 60% is thermal.

Those "warranty void" stickers are sold by Amazon by the reel, easily replaced on rentals.

One of the boards in that box is signed by a guy that I fired.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Sold to people who haven't got enough sense to buy two special purpose boxes and combine their outputs. When I worked in the science workshop at Nijmegen university, most the requests for instrument development got solved that way. Academics tend to be very well-informed in their areas of interest, but less so about the tools they might use.

Physicist's electronics provides a lot of cautionary examples.

Not being good enough at flattering the boss can get you fired from Trump's clown car too.

Gosh, I never thought of that. It follows that there's no need to ever design anything ever again.

Thanks for the enlightment.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

The US used to make dreadful cheese, like the greasy orange Kraft stuff. It's much better now.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I've restored your snip, which made it clear that I didn't see it as a universal solution - "most of" isn't "all".

You certainly do need enlightenment (as well as a spelling checker), but do seem to be enthusiastic about evading it .

One problem with buying and conecting boxes is the connections. Most any port-port connection will waste microseconds or milliseconds per transaction, and be a huge hassle to program.

And buying a bunch of boxes gets big and expensive.

In many of our products, we can have a 75-cent dual-core ARM processor do things like acquisition, filtering, calibration, control loops, output. That's for slow stuff. The more interesting cases are done in an FPGA, where we can do serious stuff in nanoseconds.

I'm running my 50-cent DDS synthesizer at 220 MHz in a $9 FPGA. It would probably go faster but it test benches at 220M. The test benches are super conservative.

Your spelling isn't perfect either. Being pedantic about the occasional typing error is plain fat-headed.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Enforcing (maybe bogus) patents hinges in the end on military power. Lately the tables are turned.

Groetjes Albert