Larkin, Here's mine...

I've been after a VBIC model for a bipolar transistor for years - the Baxandall sine-wave oscillator for which I have a sentimental fondness has the nasty habit of "squegging" when you build it with bipolar transistors and more filter inductance than oscillator inductance. The same configuration is fine with MOSFETs. Spice simulations with Gummel- Poon models of bipolar transistors don't squeg, presumably because the Gummel-Poon model doesn't model inverted transistors very well - it's a well-known failing of that model, and one of the weaknesses the VBIC model is reputed to have been developed to cure.

You ought to be able to cough up a VBIC model of a generic bipolar transistor without breaching any of your confidentiality agreements, but you probably don't have the balls to risk worrying one of your clients.

And the models are only half the story - like I said, it's difficult to make sense of a circuit when you don't know what it's actually supposed to be doing. " Compensating the bulk Re AND temperature AND just about every variable known to man" is in the same catagory as John Larkin's "insanely good" - it doesn't actually mean anything, while incorporating the right sort of buzz-words to impress the gullible.

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Socialists are just as into maximising revenue as capitalists - they just sum over a larger number of revenue collectors. The US economy is in a mess at the moment because the richest 1% are shaping the economy to make themselves even richer. Michael Spence's recent (2011) book "The Next Convergence" ISBN 978-1-74258-250-4 points out that this is at the cost of the growth of the US economy as a whole, and the long term advantage of the 1% themselves.

This isn't the major point of the book, which is mainly about how China and India are on track to match European levels of prosperity and well-being within a few decades, but it does include discussions of how economies fail to develop as fast as they might.

In John Larkin's case, he's probably over-busy supplying what customers know they want, when to maximise his potential revenue he should be taking a leaf out of Steve Jobs' book and developing the stuff that they'd have wanted if they'd realised that it was practical. He's demonstrating the weakness of the purely capitalist approach by maximising current revenue at the expense of future revenue.

Yes, and anybody can learn to hack electronic circuits. I know a guy who never finished high school who holds a patent on a particular circuit design.

-Bill

don't

Of course I can. Will you kiss my hand if I provide it ?>:-}

I don't lack for balls... I'm a Scot after all... want to try hand-to-hand with me? I owe it to my followers to dispose of you once and for all >:-}

Bloviate, bloviate ;-) ...Jim Thompson

I'd express sincere appreciation. Kissing anybody's hand isn't in my repertoire of appreciative gestures, quite apart from the fact that I'm not planning on flying to any part of the US in the foreseeable future.

Actually, you owe it to your followers not to act like a twelve-year old striking postures in a school playground.

Some people can learn to hack electronic circuits without formal training. I certainly did - the nearest thing I got to an electronics course was first year physics as an undergraduate.

Quite a few of the people I've supervised over the years weren't as good at hacking electronic circuits as I was, despite the benefit of three years at university, ostensibly studying the subject. Talent and training aren't interchangeable.

Pray tell what happens when the robots join the union and go on strike?

...and there is the true story of the prospective employee giving constructive advice, being turned down and finding that ALL of the comments were employed to improve the product!

Why the hell am i consistently getting Acrobat error messages: *QUOTE* The Adobe Acrobat/Reader that is running can not be used to view PDF files in a Web Browser. Please exit Adobe Acrobat/Reader and exit your Web Browser and try again.

rike?

Someone wins a Nobel Prize for programming them to appreciate their place in human society? They are going to need some kind of theory of mind to let them predict the actions of their human collaborators and bosses, but it would need to be fairly sophisticated to let them appreciate what "solidarity" meant. The US media has been trying to reverse-educate the US work force out of this level of understanding for the last hundred years or so, but the people who own the media haven't managed to be benevolent enough to make the unions redundant.

Let me guess: They all join the 'International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers"?

In Apollo 13 they did it on paper cards.

The Russians just figured out how to reach the space station in 6 hours instead of 2 days, by calculating a balistic launch trajectory that needs no correction.

Adobe is buggy bloatware. I use Foxit Reader.

I did have to fight Firefox to get it to stop trying to render pdf's itself, which it did very, very badly.

More than once, I've offered to greatly improve a product, for a royalty that was, say, 10% of the amount I'd save them. The common response is "no, but would you like to be a consultant?"

I see that you are paying homage to Annette Funicello. That's nice.

Robotic hunter-killer strikebreaker Predator drones, of course. That and boatloads of robotic scabs.

No square inch is wasted: I tried to extract the bicycle yesterday, so I could do a errand, becasue my car was trapped in the parking lot by construction. I couldn't get the bicycle out of the office. Too much junk in the way.

Incidentally, the office building is managed by an office cleaning service. They won't go into my office to clean, and insist that I keep the curtains closed so that their customers won't panic at the sight of my mess.

GINO. Garbage In, Never Out.

Costco meds. The pill bottle on the shelf is full of toothpicks (used for cleaning dirt out of computahs with sharp corners). There are other pill bottles around, usually containing small parts and magic potions.

What I miss about old fashioned photography is film cans.

My bench is fairly neat. Sometimes. Electronics is just a messy business.

That's a 1 GHz square wave on the big scope.