Flag desecration?

Great, except that you seem to be claiming that the greenies are "rational".

Feh! They're equally paranoid, just on opposite side of the abyss.

Cheers! Rich

No, you've got that wrong, I know from experience. Sex while sober is better than sex while drunk.

What the alcohol does is smooth over the times _between_ having sex! ;-)

Cheers! Rich

This is another good example of why no one will hire Bill. I can just imagine how short the interview is when they discover what an ass he is. Not every design is a "Money is no object", or "The customer can just build a new building if its too damn big" type job.

We didn't have to worry too much about what our equipment cost our customers, we did have to minimize the power usage. When NASA wanted a custom KU band Telemetry and Video receiver built for the ISS, they accepted the proposed standard "700 series" with a 48 VDC power input, instead of the regular 90 to 260 VAC power supply with no other modifications. It was them shipped to Lockheed Martin to be mounted into one of the custom aluminum rack cages that had a subset of the standard controls on the front panel, since every function could be remote controlled.

If by "professional" you mean "being paid", who is paying for your services at the moment? Nothing personal, but if they are gullible enough to pay you, they might just be gullible enough to pay me too ...

As for the 555 being the_perfect_solution, please produce an example ... just one. My misanthropicly sceptical attitude would just love an example to play with.

Scepticism isn't misanthrophic - and being sceptical about you certainly isn't necessarily misanthropic, since there is some question whether Texans qualify as human any more. It is difficult to explain Dubbya without invoking some measure of devolution back to some barely anthropoid common ancestor

And you want to carry on about my inablitiy to understand posted material!

Most of which was of no importance for a one-off job. How having complementary inputs and outputs makes the 4047 more complex than the

Whereas what I was saying was that you were trying to pose as a "professional" by worrying about parts cost and board space constraints that might have been relevant to somebody wanting to make ten thousand copies of the same part, while ignoring the real constraint for one-off design, which is to keep the design simple and comprehensible.

Typically, you misunderstood my comment that I'd done most of my design work for low-volume production as an admission that I'd never designed for high volume production, which isn't true - for your sake I hope you'd drunk both of your bottles of chardonnay before you posted that little gem.

This is libelllous rubbish. I design around the appropriate constraints.

If you want to mininmise the parts cost, I can design for minimum parts cost. If you want minimum power consumption, I can do that. If you want minimum board space, I can do that too. Designing to minimise parts cost, board space and power consumption is a little more difficult - the customer needs to be very specific about the real requirements, and I'm pretty good at working out what they need from what they say they want.

If you want a design that final test and service enginers can understand and fix, I can do that and have been doing it for a long time. This is the constraint that is most often important in designing high value systems that are only going to sell a few tens of units a year though very few people seem to be aware of it..

John Fields doesn't seem to understand that good design is about providing what the specific customer needs, and you don't seem to be much wiser.

And you always act like you're on the rag.

Not an idiom I recognise - could you post a translation?

Can't you use Google?

I can, and it suggests that you think I suffer from a persistent case of pre-menstrual tension, which would make me one of the few bearded ladies around ... and even stranger in not having gone through the menopause before I turned 63.

A more appropriate symbol string might be "doesn't suffer fools gladly".

Think about it the next time you feel the urge to complain about my irritable attitutude ...

Missing the impication that you hadn't understood. You've been drinking your two bottles of chardonnay a little too often and for rather too long, and you can't understand implications any more, amongst a number of other mildly compliated matters. Sorry about that.

On Fri, 07 Jul 2006 17:33:19 GMT, Rich Grise Gave us:

Yes, but you're an idiot, and incapable of making an assessment, much less a valid one.

For you, dumbass.

That must be why you are drunk 100% of the time. You're not getting any.

On 7 Jul 2006 16:02:58 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org Gave us:

The word "CUSTOMER" is taken from the word CUSTOM.

You have stated the obvious. One MUST design what the customer wants or one will not sell the product to the customer, and one will not be in business very long.

On 7 Jul 2006 20:56:52 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org Gave us:

Liar.

No need to rub it in.

The last time I designed something that came back to haunt me was back around 1984, when I undersized the transformer needed to turn on a contactor - it was fine when the contactor was on, but marginal during turn-on. Happily there was room for a slightly bigger transformer. Since then I can only recall one service return, which turned out to be due to an out-of-spec HP opto-isolator. If you do proper worst-case design, things don't fail very often ...

If you were doing it right, he wouldn't have to come back to get you to do it again. There's a line from the shoe-maker's song in Kismet - "the better my work, the worse my pay, but work can only be done one way".

I'm glad you found your niche. I was doing okay in Cambridge U.K. when my wife got her big chance, and the Netherlands has worked out much better for her than it has for me. Averaged over the two of us, it was the right career move, though I'd quite like to be doing better at the moment.