interesting thing about engineering education

Or at least not when John Larkin was paying attention, which doesn't seem to have been all that often.

Sure there are millions of software engineers but there are also two million positions that need to be filled. The same is not true of analog engineers. Supply and demand, indeed.

Simple equations? Show us.

You need to know some bits about it if you are designing TWT's.

Dan

Do TWTs use electrons at relativistic velocities?

It has been many years since I took a course on " Vacuum Tube Technolony " . But as I remember the electron beam has a velocity of about 1/10 c.

What I learned about vacuum tubes was never very important, but what I lear ned about trouble shooting was. The course was taught by Rene Rogers of Va rian. He was the guy that figured out why production tubes did not perform the same as the development prototypes.

Dan

I can't say there aren't exceptions, but generally the ones that start earlier are a lot better at it than the lates.

NT

Of course, if you start too early, there's a risk that you won't know about anything except electronics. It's always a good idea to know what you are designing is supposed to be doing when it eventually works.

I've never seen a case of that myself.

Does anyone in this universe think otherwise? Should I re-plonk you?

NT

Yes >:-} ...Jim Thompson

I have to admit you're right.

NT

Nah, software engineers have to deal with the laws of physics too.

It's not just an academic curiosity; it's not that uncommon to "accidentally" discover one is trying to closed-form solve a problem which is isomorphic to a problem in a complexity class which is known to have no computationally realizable closed-form solution for any real-world data set. See: traveling salesman problem.

S***ty algorithm design is easy. Good algorithm design is very hard.

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ote:

rote:

ering, and many fall short. Let's face it if you're a very good engineer it 's likely your interaction with the world is not really normal outside of e ngineering.

a bit weird, but loads of regular employees were just as weird or weirder.

drunk, etc. The thought of spending thousands of hours voluntarily doing el ectronics of any sort horrifies them. We OTOH chose the other way round, an d that's really not very normal.

ctronicking in one's teens and often before. Normal kids just don't do that .

and I had a research grant that kept me fed and housed through that period) .

onics isn't like language - there doesn't seem to be a critical period afte r which you can't acquire it.

t earlier are a lot better at it than the lates.

bout anything except electronics.

Or been able to recognise one.

e doing when it eventually works.

The problem is distinguishing between thinking that you know what your toy is supposed to be doing, and actually knowing.

I spent three years building a better - faster - electron beam tester, on t he basis that it was going to be used to test prototype integrated circuits so that the defects in the prototype mask sets could be found as fast as p ossible and corrected in the production mask sets.

What I didn't know was that computer simulation was getting much better whi le this was going on, so that the prototype mask sets were being tested by simulation, and the drop-offs cleaned out before any masks were actually ma de.

There was still a market for electron beam testers after this had happened, but it was purely to validate the simulations. This didn't need to be done urgently, so the added value of a quicker electron beam tester became pret ty much zero.

GPS and CRT just need fudge factors. There is no need to actually understand Relativity, and its unlikely that the software monkeys coding GPS have any idea of the real world anyway.

-- Kevin Aylward

Has talking been replaced by mumbling in links......

very impolite....