The first control system I ever designed, at about the age of 19, was for a 32,000 horsepower steamship propulsion system. The system nonlinearities, propeller/hull bahavior, and the boiler dynamics had to be considered. I simulated it in FOCAL on a PDP-8. A sub-loop drove a dc servo motor/pot that positioned the steam valve, which was in turn moved by a hydraulic servo. It all worked first try.
While I was tuning the first system, on a new LASH ship tied up at Avondale shipyards on the Mississippi, I turned one trimpot too far and *almost* ripped the ship off the dock, which could well have killed a couple of shipyard workers but would certainly have attracted notice anyhow.
G > Sloman, Do you see yourself as egotistical, G > smarter, or superior to other people? G >
G > In the US, your arguments and reasoning G > are more typical of the occasional misfit, G > usually 17 or 18 years old and struggling G > for IDENTITY, and going for shock value. G >
G > Generally, these people lack real world G > experience, and so obsess about the G > ACADEMIC. As they get more real G > world experience, they soon realize the G > difference between academia and real world. G >
G > Did you think that the KOOK LEFT was G > populated mostly by PRODUCERS? G >
G > You claim you are over 50, yet you still G > place great stock in academic sources, G > and you claim to be an Aussie ex pat G > living off your wife in Netherlands, yet G > you obsess about economics in the USA. G >
G > Your situation as you've described it G > is a bit like a cartoon! G > A 50+ year old misfit NON-PRODUCER G > who lives off his wife and advocates socialism? G >
G > How amazing is that? G >
G > There are some American retirees who G > were cold hard capitalists but lost almost G > everything in 2008-2009 and now that G > they see themselves as recipients of G > socialistic handouts, they are more G > receptive to ideas of socialism. G >
This is pretty much basic boilerplate stuff. You can spot the cut and paste in the first draft documents from the less skilled places.
But don't you appreciate the skill that clever lawyers demonstrate in their word craft? It isn't really all that different to the creative processes of new software and hardware design. There are a set of rules but they can be constructively tweaked. I have to say that my encounters using solicitors have been about 50:50 good *and* bad.
The key to using solicitors effectively is asking the right question(s).
Taxing liquid assets (including house and saleable effects) of the estate on death seems reasonable to me. You can't take it with you.
Wrecking a business based on some insane valuation does not.
Not exactly. The half-wit claims that because I don't share his economic opinions, I don't have enough understanding of dynamics to design electronics. It's very much an apples and pears comparison, but it's also flat-out wrong, as I've gone to the trouble of pointing out. If usig objective facts to point out that John has made an idot of himself again is "bragging", then I amstuck with bragging - I did get the Ph.D. in that area, and I'm not going to lie about it in a effort tp project a modest persona.
He's more interested in making money than I am, and his expertise does seem to lend itself to lower value systems than I worked on. Setting up your own company to make electron microscope or phased array ultrasound machines probably takes more capital than even John could have got his hands on, and was never one of my ambitions.
We can't all be entrepreneurs, and the personality defects that lead him to pontificate about subject he knows very little about may be advantageous when it comes to setting up your own company and telling people how good your products are going to be.
My opinion exactly. In this case, it was the work I had to do to get the Ph.D. that was relevant, not the degree itself. I've seen enough bad Ph.D. theses to be well aware that getting a Ph.D. is no guarantee of competence, although it does indicate that you are persistent and can write coherently.
Why don't you consider consulting? I have no problem finding work. Of course it is easier here in the US, a lot more potential clients. But Europe also has nice companies that are fun to work with.
How's Australia in that respect? I have met engineers from there who carved themselves a nice consulting niche. Not big projects like here but earns a decent living.
--
Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
I'll bet the FOCAL simulation didn't work first try, or the various control schemes that you tested on the simulation.
The really impreesive part of that story is that you were able to set up a tolerably realistic simulation. The PDP-8 wasn't a large computer. To quote the Wikipedia article on FOCAL
"FOCAL ran on very low-end PDP-8 systems, even systems with only 4K words of memory and lacking mass storage. The FOCAL interpreter was written in very tight assembly language and typically used only 3K 12- bit words, leaving a somewhat limiting 1K words to hold the user program, and variables.
If the system was upgraded by adding one or more extra 4K banks of memory, FOCAL could use that extra memory, either for a single user, or split the extra memory across several time-sharing users. FOCAL made extensive use of interrupt-driven terminal I/O, so it could keep four teletypes busily whirring with nary a pause."
Somehow I suspect that you had access to somebody else's mathematical model of the steamship propulsion system. I wrote my PDP-8 program in assembler, and worked out my own low level signal processing, not to mention the algorithm that simulated my chemical reaction (though I programmed that in FORTRAN 4 and ran it on an IBM 7040/44, a rather larger compute with a memory that offered 32k of 36-bit words.
Most of the stuff I did wasn't all that academic - my colleagues described me as "gadget-happy" - though the results I got were of academic interest. Experimental science can involve a lot of severely practical engineering, and a lot of the stuff I did was ground- breaking work.
Joerg, Are you trying out for funniest post of the year? I doubt Sloman could hold a job for a week before discovery and toss. I'm always pleased to note that I'm the highest standard for Slowman's disdain, but please don't feed the jerk. Let him die that most unpleasant of deaths... alone ;-)
-- ...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
Which is the sort of claim that is easy to make after the fact. Have you got any kind of record of what you actually said at the time? When I've been able to check out my own prophecies, I've always found that what I remember writing was always distinctly more explicit than what I actually wrote at the time.
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No. You can be an advanced industrial country without manufacturing and exporting high-tech products. The Greeks may have found a niche they can dominate, but if they have I don't know about it, and more than you knew about them having the the largest shipping fleet. In any event there are other products they can produce and export in sufficient volume to fund the goods that they have to import. =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 = =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0
Compare them with the ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe, where the GDP is closer to a third of the European average.
The retirement age - 58 or 61 or whatever it is - is roughly the same as the average age of exiting work in Australia - 59 - and the Netherlands and France. In fact the Greeks tend to continue to work after their official retirement age, so the Greeks avtually work longer than the Dutch or the French, making a nonsense of half of your claim. Presumably the mediterranean diet keeps them healthy for longer than their Dutch adn French equivalents.
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The only ones I knew about were flame ionisation spectrometers, which are handy for elemental analysis, and gas chromatography detectors. You might find them in a clinical laboratory.
as a student - until 1970
Dream on. I was in the UK during the three day week, and the subsequent period when Wilson and Callaghan had to reign in domestic spending to get the economy back on the rails. The came to power in
1974,"when a period of economic crisis was beginning to hit most Western countries".
Your memory doesn't seem to be all that reliable.
The money squandering seems to have more to do with corruption and tax evasion - both of which are exceptionally popular under right wing regimes - than with any dramatic expenidture on social security.
Following the American model and cheap-skating on food and education for poor kids is a recipe for long term disaster.
Systems that don't sell have no value. Systems that sell thousands of copies at 4:1 margins have value.
Setting
I started with essentially no capital. I've never believed in raising a lot of money and then developing a complex product; that path has about a 90% failure rate. I developed modest products, sold them, and worked my way up. But designing megabuck instruments doesn't appeal to me; each one will take years of development and support, and I don't have that sort of attention span. Six or eight designs a year is more fun.
Of course I did not put a tape recorder on the table. At banks that is generally frowned upon :-)
I do vividly remember that discussion. It was about a real estate investment fund opportunity which, after that discussion, was shelved. And boy was I glad we did.
Thought so.
The shipping fleet is obviously not able to keep this country afloat, else they wouldn't have gone begging at the IMF, would they?
Greeks have told me the exact opposite of what you claim. And the state of their economy proves it beyond a doubt. So does the per-capita GDP.
So what company/companies? You claimed a billion bucks. That's a lotta bucks and it should show on some balance sheets.
I lived in Germany and other than the energy crisis I don't remember anything remotely close to what they and the neighbor countries are experiencing today. And unfortunately that goes for the US as well although we do have some nice upsides in the area of high-tech that can (hopefully) pull us out. Medical devices, aerospace and so on.
I can read statistics. And I assume you can read as well? Take a look:
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Now read my statement about the 70's again and look at the graphs. Do you see it now? If not get your glasses and try again :-)
This is in no way a US-only phenomenon, except that statistics are more opens and easily located here. Since you live in NL I assume you can read Dutch:
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What exactly is right-wing about Greek government? A brief educational link for ya:
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You obviously do not know much about America.
--
Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
Does any complex software work first try? The initial algorithm (nonlinear function generator feedforward with constrained PID around that) worked as planned. The sim allowed me to tweak the loop for turbine inertia, gearing, steam valve curve, prop coupling, hull mass, water resistance on the hull.
I plotted a simulated run from dead stop to 100 RPM, valve position, RPMs, and hull speed versus time, on a Teletype machine, just one of those
* ** ** * *
sorts of things, then went over the characters with colored pens to make nice graphs. We took it to the ship owners and showed it to them (remember, I was 19 and looked about 16.) We'd never done any control system before. They had an old crusty ex-Chief Engineer at the meeting. He said "that's exactly the way an experienced engineer would work the valve by hand" so we got the job.
Yup. Rick Merrill did a stunning job on FOCAL, especially considering what a barbaric machine the PDP-8 was. His internal constructs changed DECs design of the PDP-11, which pissed off Edson DeCastro so much he left and started Data General. The NOVA was basically the klunky page-oriented PDP-11 initial design... which so influenced Wozniak.
The low-end PICs are essentially PDP-8s. Horrible machines. The
6800/6803 and later the 68K were heavily influenced by the PDP-11. The PDP-11 was a truly beautiful machine. The instruction set was so regular that I can still assemble programs in my head, in octal.
LandMine instruction:
MOV -(PC), -(PC) 014747
I don't recall Focal-8 using interrupts for TTY i/o. I certainly didn't have four TTY interfaces. I did have 4kx12 core memory.
Absolutely not. I coded it myself, based on physics and what data I could get from DeLaval about the turbine and steam valve.
You have so very little faith in men, that one wonders why you so trust in politicians, who are often the worst of the lot.
I just saw a thing on Mao's Great Leap Forward. He wasn't evil, he was just being a good little Marxist. Mao was very vexed and surprised when his new agricultural army--as per Marx--didn't fill their horn-o-plenty. Instead, it turns out people don't work as hard for the socialist utopia when there's no gain in it for them. Production plummeted, and they had famine. Whoops.
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It affects everyone, to say otherwise is absurd. As far as being OK, it's the *only* moral thing to do.
Insisting that all those people keep their jobs, stay on the farm though unneeded, and get the same pay, while working let's say 2 hours a day--that would wipe out all the benefits of mechanizing, all the incentive for the farmer to invest in machines, or for inventors to invent them.
That locks us in the stone ages, to the greatest detriment /most particularly/ of the lowest-paid workers. That's immoral.
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It's impossible, by definition, for someone to work for less than subsistence. Subsistence is the true minimum of wages, for a man cannot work for less than he needs to live. He can''t. (Adam Smith)
In California and across the USA, social subsidies lower the amount of money people need to live, and thereby lower the prevailing wages, and spawning the need for more subsidies (otherwise the non-subsidized people can't live). Subsidies create the need for more subsidies.
Wooden wagon wheels were carbon neutral. Only carbon criminals would consider wrapping wheels with steel to make them last 10x longer. But you're right, it's better just to cut two sticks and drag your stuff around on a skid.
It's a negative (stabilizing) feedback term, not an absolute. I agree that we need some controls, just as the referee separates two boxers before one of them gets killed.
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No, I believe the vast majority of people who get rich, who get there slowly, by working extra hours, won't try as hard if you take all or part of that away.
The leftist propaganda for the masses is that all rich people in America get it dumped on them--unearned--in buckets every year. A few do. But far and away most of the rich people in America get there by earning a decent wage, living modestly, and saving carefully their whole life.
Engineers who live carefully, for example, can easily become millionaires.
It sure sounds like one.
"Poor" people in America live more opulently than I do. Maybe we need is a maximum wage, just to keep other people from doing better. How about a max wage of $80k for movie stars, authors, and sports figures?
I figure i can only semi-retire. Maybe in 10 years. OK pension, medical included. Not as much saving as paying off house. Well over $1000/mo there. I have spreadsheets and can use them. The outlook is not grim but not flush, so i go to about half time as a consultant. The consulting pays for the cake, bread and butter will be taken care of unless the Damnicrats deficit spend everything away.
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