cool book

Here it is. We got it (and a couple of employees) when another company went out of business.

Somebody told me that they got a CAT scanner and don't use their xray much any more.

You can get dental xray stuff cheap these days, very cheap if you are willing to use wet film.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

There's a mismatch between what the owner of some bit of IP thinks is "valuable" and what someone else would find valuable wrt that product. I'd much rather have the mind(s) that were behind the IP (even if only to interview them about that IP) than the IP itself (unless I was tasked with repairing or maintaining it). Having a Workshop Manual for a vehicle is only useful if you want to REPAIR said vehicle to restore it from a failed state to its intended state.

The difference between design and implementation (the latter of limited value).

I designed development systems for a while (when purchasing such systems was on the order of $25K/seat and budgets wouldn't let you buy one per developer). I reached out to colleagues/contacts in industry and had many willing to offer me the schematics for the boxes they had purchased.

Of course, this had no real value to me because I wasn't trying to repair or duplicate any of their selections. Rather, I wanted time with their developers to ascertain what *they* found most valuable about the tools they were "stuck with". As well as the gripes they had with the

E.g., having some small number of "breakpoints" that could be set in the emulators. Or, a trace buffer that was far too shallow to be practical with running code (where interrupts and task switches could cause the buffer to fill with traces unrelated to the problem being observed).

Or, misplaced ideas of the value of color in the software interfaces. Esp if some bozo decided to let the user configure the color choices! If two items are presented in a list, is the BLUE one the selected item or is the YELLOW? If I move to the next item, that toggles the presentation of BOTH items -- the BLUE is now YELLOW and the YELLOW is now BLUE -- so my action doesn't resolve the question! (if there are THREE items, it could!)

So, having the schematic *did* give you value -- even if only as "sample input"?

Ian <${send-direct-email-to-news1021-at-jusme-dot-com-if-you-must}@jusme.com>

wrote: |-----------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"We once received the "schematics" for the SPARC processor our parent company| |was producing (under strict NDA, as this was shiny-new), so we could simulate| |it along with our design. I had a peek - they were incomprehensible. Clearly | |generated mechanically from some HDL compiler output. A simple netlist would | |have been more efficient, as that was all we really needed." | |-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Does anyone remember that Sun (not Gaisler) eventually released HDL gratis SPARC files and did anyone find this release to be easy to comprehend? It sounds as if these schematics are more difficult to comprehend. (S.

It gave us what we wanted, after a little more work than expected. Whether that was ultimately of value I can't say from this distance, as I wasn't directly involved with the simulation part of the project. It all worked in the end though.

Nikon. That's nice. And 160kv with 20micron resolution . Interesting, thanks for the details.

Cheers

I have a little satellite office near home, but we can send things to the Potrero facility to be x-rayed. We can xray small stuff for other people too.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics