HEMT

snipped-for-privacy@fonz.dk a écrit :

wrote in 1997

Nah, it all of you that have pretty strange habits...

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When I was working on the teletex project - communicating word- processors to replace telex/TWX - we went a bit beyond upper- and lower-case. The hardware had to encode and display the full alphabet for every European country, with dia-critical marks. There's an ISO standard (whose number I've forgotten) and the characters had to be spread over ten scan lines (and that involved a bit of cheating.

The Teletex system actually ran for a few years in Germany and Sweden before the internet swept it away.

Since you spend most of your time here boasting about your bleeding edge hardware technology, the rest of us find your stone-age BOM/ Database program a rather amusing contrast. John Larkin has feet of clay ... Your vanity may make it difficult for you to appreciate the comic effect created, but it is of a piece with your rather simple- minded approach - let's throw some more bandwidth at the problem - to very high-performance circuit design .

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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You have an uncanny knack for being around failed projects.

You wouldn't find it stone-age if you used it. But then, you wouldn't have any reason to use it.

John Larkin has feet of

Funny, coming from someone who doesn't design electronics. And doesn't write programs.

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Actually, I do, but since we are moving into our flat in Sydney at the moment, electronic design is currently on the back burner.

Not recently. But I wrote quite a few lines of Fortran 4 and Macro-8 assembler (for the original PDP-8) when I was younger, so I'm not completely ignorant about the subject, and know enough so that I would know not to admit that my current BOM/Database program were upper-case only. The one I use - in the gEDA linux circuit design package - doesn't seem to be resricted in that way, though it is written so that everything is stored as human-readable ASCII-coded characters, which is still a touch parochial.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen (but in Sydney at the moment, waiting for our new washing-machine and tumble drier to be delivered).

My recollection is is was "centons" - for *everything* - time, distance etc.

I remember thinking at the time it was stupid. But looking back you could say it is quite clever. It is sort of what physicists seem to do when working in a particular specialised field. It is understood that everything is to be divided by the speed of light or G or plancks constant or whatever and ends up written unitless. So every physical quantity *would* be centons (or microns etc).

If *everyone* uses the same units, you don't really need to specify them.

Not that the writers thought of all that I suspect...

On a sunny day (Fri, 17 Jun 2011 06:44:59 +0100) it happened John Devereux wrote in :

Yes, many elemenst of that series are found in the later SciFi, like Star Wars for example (think of those soldier costumes). It was quite creative.. But as far as units goes, I measure everything in pantels. hehe :_)

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I would have called it very 1950s. Even IBM big boxes had both cases for data and variable names by the mid 1960s.

Why are you guys so upset about uppercase? What matters in a parts database program isn't the font. What matters is whether it provides the design engineer and manufacturing people exactly what they need, with fast and friendly navigation, and that it's always up.

One of my customers, a gigabuck concern, uses the Agile system from Oracle. Often, they ask us to shoot them copies of their own docs, because they can't find them. The system is pitiful at revision control, document association, and managing ECOs. Pitiful. Of course, it was down all last week, which can be looked at as good or bad, I suppose.

If a box has dip switches, they create a part number for each box that has the switches set each way.

Our system never crashes, needs no maintanance beyond backing up some files, is blindingly fast, and is fun to drive. So people whine about fonts.

John

Orcad-SDT would only understand upper-case. Didn't bother me a bit.

Unless Agile has deteriorated over the last years (which I can't imagine but I don't know), maybe they could be doing something wrong? We had Agile in the late 90's early 00's and it worked great. I could instantly load anything I needed onto my PC. This had some serious benefits. Before Agile the only way to obtain QC data was to walk over there. Now they had this huge bowl of chocolate bonbons and ...

My "system" is ... ... MS-Works. It just works :-)

Oracle acquired them in 2007. Maybe that explains it.

In one of their annual reports, this same company said "and we have almost recovered from the Oracle conversion..."

maybe they could be doing something wrong? We had

I like PowerBasic apps because there's one .EXE file and whatever data files are needed, but no installs, no DLLs, no registry mucking. Drag and drop the MAX folder to your PC, create a shortcut to the EXE, and go.

We put each user's setup/path/options in a plain text file with lots of comments.

We also have a PDATA parts data folder, with a subfolder for each part or class of parts. We throw all sorts of stuff into it... data sheets, appnotes, measurements, purchasing notes, warnings, links, schematic snippets, whetever might be useful.

The hardest part of the project was the zillion battles\\\\\\ meetings we had to design a part numbering system, and then re-numbering every part in stock (like, 4000 different parts) to the new system. We wound up with a "telephone number" like 123-4567 for each part, and a set of rules that, for example, puts all 0805 resistors in order by resistance.

John

Yikes. Acquisitions in the software world are often not good for the products of the aquired party. Farnell acquiring Cadsoft has so far not resulted in deterioration, they seem to pretty much leave them alone. Except for adding nonsensical web portals but those can be ignored. However, this was an acquisition by a company that is from a very different market.

That's the way all software should be. But the computer world has been "fluffified" and consumers have accepted it.

Most companies have a xxxx-xxxx system. I found those to work well, and sometimes it's best to just copy a system from a large company where it is pretty much public.

But it does help if the data is presented in the same format that it appears on invoices, data sheets and equipment documentation. For some odd reason, most printed data about parts uses both upper and lower case characters and a BOM/database program that works only in upper- case loses useful distinctions - as in the this case between milliwatts and megawatts.

People who design equipment to be used by other human being should be conscious of this kind of low level human factors question, and it would be odd if you couldn't see that.

They aren't whining, just pointing that your system is less than perfect - as you would acknowledge, if your pride hadn't gotten in the way.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

How? Does a case difference cause you to have difficulty matching the part numbers?

For some

The prime customer for this program is me.

Some of the reports are 120 columns wide, and we sometimes print them on matrix printers, and that's easier to read in uppercase.

The real point here is that I don't have to please anyone but myself. Certainly not you.

I chose to keep the database - now over 20 years old - uppercase. And you don't matter.

The software itself rocks. It has a novel way of navigating between different kinds of pages - parts, search results, where-used, BOMs - that remembers what you are interested in. It's a joy to drive. And most things happen as fast as you can hit keys. And it's really easy to hook up other software to it - Perl, Basic, spreadsheets - to do something special, like a resistor ratio searcher, or a PCB layout crosschecks.

Adding stuff like this is easy:

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/Rugrat.jpg

And all you can do is whine about fonts.

John

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A case difference obviously makes the process more difficult than it might be.

So you feel happy about making life more difficult than it might be for all the sub-prime customers? You aren't the only person in your organisations who has to interact with the program.

More stone age technology?

Actually, the real point is that you are the boss and can get away with making life difficult for everybody else in your organiastion.

Obviously not, but that's totally irrelevant.

Obviously. Your employees do matter, but you won't pay any attention to them either.

So why isn't it easy to extend the raw data format to accomodate upper- case and lower-case characters?

Who - as I seem to have mentioned before - is whining? You've got a BOM/database program that can't distinguish between mW and MW, and you can't see that you've got a feature that most people would recognise as a bug?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

On a sunny day (Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:32:09 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Well, I had to let that question sink in for a while, but then the solution came to me, with much deeper insight into current physics[1]: Of course the star ships travel in the same plane, all this is designed to be displayed on a flat screen, so one heading will do. Then I started thinking what this sort of SciFi does to kids - kids that then later grow up to be 'scientist[1]'. Imagine long time ago kids watching a movie (celluloid film) on a screen, maybe at home. Then after the movie is over, the screen is rolled up. One, who later became a well known mathematician realised that what happened is that the 3 dimensional world projected on the 2 dimensional screen was rolled up into a one dimensional eeehh SORRY "string". The second dimension rolled up so to speak, and now hidden.

That kid figured if you could roll up the rolled up screen again everything would end up as a point. (with 3 hidden dimensions plus a fourth one for time, some for color, some for weight, and some for stupidity^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H something yet to be discovered. So now you need no vector at all, the whole universe is in the same place. With zero size for the whole universe the multiple universe theory was born, an infinite amount would fit in any space.

Copyright (c) Jan Panteltje 2011 Al Rights Reserved.

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When you need a stone, a stone works great.

(I spent a lot of yesterday moving stones, so I know what I'm talking about.)

You call the choice of font a "bug" because it's not the way you would have coded it. Except that you don't code things.

It turns out that we don't stock many megawatt semiconductors. My employees are smart enough to not be distressed by fonts. In fact, the latest invocation of MAX was designed in a number of meetings chaired by my daughter, and where I only got one vote out of 4 or 5. The case thing came up. Since the old database, over 20 years old, was uppercase, we stuck with that, rather than retyping all the fields of existing parts. It wasn't a big decision to make. Everybody here can read uppercase.

There are potentially a bunch of interesting issues around parts/BOM databases, and all you can comment on is font. That's because you don't design electronics.

John

Gee, give me a LOT of what you are smoking! :-) And happy fathers day to all the fathers out there.

It certainly could do mixed case. We chose to keep it uppercase.

But my engineers are smart enough to figure out that we don't stock megawatt PHEMTs.

latest >invocation of MAX was designed in a number of meetings chaired by my daughter, and >where I only got one vote out of 4 or 5.

I never liked being a manager. I just want to do is play with electronics. I'm delighted that she is running engineering now.

If you can't imagine any, then don't.

I also note that in a thread about HEMTs, you have nothing to say about HEMTs. Neither does JT or Dr Sloman.

Just hang around until another 555 thread appears.

John