Interview Question (your Sunday ruined part 2)

Good point. Do the French use the same compilers as we do? The comma/decimal point thing could get tricky. On web pages too.

The wiggle thing is more obviously a resistor on a whiteboard.

More fun to draw too.

I had a medical event that, for some bizarre reason, wrecked the look of my hand-drawn schematics. It was awful. It fixed itself in a month or two.

Some fast parts, like CPUs and FPGAs, have substantial internal bypass caps. I've measured as much as 1 uF on the core power of an FPGA, and numbers like 100n on aux supplies. It seemed to be on-chip, monolithic.

I wonder if DRAMs chips typically have internal bypass caps. Somebody here could measure a few.

It's worth measuring a chip, to help plan bypassing. Some ugly Intel CPU may need sheer joules of chunky caps for wakeup power surges.

I've done TDR experiments on multilayer boards. A proper power pour looks like a perfect cap, and adding more caps, anywhere on the pour, just makes it look like a bigger perfect cap.

I had that problem, years ago, with an Ethernet card made by Boca. It used one of the AMD "Lance" (PCNet) Ethernet chips, which was normally a really stellar performer. Boca cheaped out and eliminated several of what AMD said were important bypass caps, including the "critically important" bypass near the chip's PHY power pins.

The card ended up being pattern-sensitive - packets with certain data patterns apparently caused some sort of resonant ground- or power-bounce in the PHY circuit, resulting in bit errors and frame-check-sequence-mismatch packet drops. TCP streams which tried to receive packets with those byte patterns would just freeze up forever.

Boca failed to fix the card I sent back to them... their blue-wire kluge didn't work.

I've never bought another Boca product.

That's what happens in organisations like the BBC where capability in a given field comes a poor second to racial and gender recruiting quotas.

I fully agree, Tom. If I saw that thing I'd immediately assume it represented a cocktail sausage.

The British and American dots have always been fine. The German ones used to be very reliable, too - until they pooled their symbols with countries like Ireland, Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal.

Twaddle. The English have never regarded literacy in science as any kind of cultural necessity.

They wouldn't recruit the anybody with explicit scientific training because they had had that training - scientists are on tap, not on top.

You own bizarre ideas about global warming are all too representative of the UK attitude. You know very little about the subject, but still think that you can read the literature and form your own opinion, which you imagine to be quite as valid as the opinions of people who know quite a bit more.

But you also think that atmospheric CO2 levels haven't risen since 1890's.

What can you expect from a country that has a House of Twits?

It's a connector pin on our schematics.

Edible schematics. Sounds good to me. The little rectangles on the lower-right can hold the dippy sauces and toothpicks.

Does good food go with bad electronics?

I guess not. Russia has bad food and bad electronics.

A degree in journalism seems to be the only qualification you need to be a BBC 'expert'. If you have a Scottish accent or have connections with Africa, that guarantees you will be selected.

Well, they have one now, but it was not always thus. The original House of Lords (as constituted for around 700 years) was a genuinely respectable institution. Those who were elevated to the peerage were required to submit to the doctrine of Noblesse oblige and so to put the interests of the lower orders above their own. Sadly, that's all gone by the wayside over the last 150 years or so and now there is but a cohort of grifters who have taken over this once noble House. Sad but true.

I did wonder what they were for, but lacked the confidence to ask about them. Thanks, John.

I just got a pack of this

It doesn't have a grid, but it's translucent so I lay it on top of a sheet of blue-grid paler and I can follow the lines when I draw.

Sad if it were true. In reality the House of Lords is now dominated by life peers, who get promoted after a life-time devoted to exhibiting exceptional competence. There have been scandals about people buying their peerage, but people with that kind of money and power are less interested in becoming life peers than they were in getting a heritable honour. If Boris Johnson hasn't been caught trying to sell one, there clearly isn't the market there used to be.

So somebody has made a grade of paper that works as well as the Mylar drafting film that I used back in the days when we still drew circuit diagram with pencils on a drawing board.

It's kind of tedious to simulate that kind of schematic, and you get transcription errors.

I got very fond of finding my drop-offs by simulating the circuit after I'd made changes.

And getting the computer to pull out the parts list, made making up a bill of material a lot less tedious and a lot less error-prone.

France has great food, as I got to find out when Cambridge Instruments bought Thompson-CSF's shaped-beam electron beam microfabricator, whose electronics were dire.

We were sold it as a pre-production prototype, and it turned out to be a proof of principle machine.