more EE Times nonsense

Sounds like malpractice, to me.

-old

ut the

otten

up a

Getting far enough into a million dollar instrument to detect where you can raise the s/n by 15dB does take some contact with the users. Regular firms use the marketing department to make this more or less impossible for the engineers who could do it.

If you can get into contact with the people who need the gadget. When I first started posting on sci.electronics.design I hoped that it would provide a forum where this could happen. Pity about that.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

-old

ut the

otten

up a

Sure. I've even done some, but nowhere near enough to live on.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

e.

ml

ll Earth's

or the

out having

t would

have

ies for

nal and

ire

his

t of

Every couple of decades, perhaps

No, that's what you do. You've never exhibited any kowledge of classic literature here, so it was reasonable to imagine that you had only recently discovered it - going with the obvious hypothesis isn't "making up stuff you'd like to be true", it's just conforming to the implications of the discourse

He's certainly not my favourite author. Jane Austen is much better. Dickens novels were mostly originally published as serials in weekly and monthly magazines, and that may explain the slow and ponderous construction.

Trollope also published a lot of his stuff as serials, but he never published a word until the whole story had been written, and his stuff does read better.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

the

either:

Wrong. Marketing usually tries to sell what's already done. Since you don't have a marketing department, they can't get in your way.

Go to a library or online and find some instruments that might need help. Now find some academic or scientific users. Email them and tell them what you have in mind. Most will be interested and helpful. Tell them that if you get something to work, you'll give them one for free.

It's not hard if you try. You have a degree in p.chem, so tell them that. Most people like to talk about what they do and like to help make things better.

Most of your creativity is directed towards making excuses for why you can't get anything done.

But maybe it's too late.

John

Earth's

the

having

would

for

and

I read P&P a bit more often than that. And "A Damsel in Distress", possibly the most perfect book written in the English language.

Umm, this is sci.electronics.design. We don't often discuss classic literature. I admit that I have matured slowly, mentally and physically, with regard to most everything but electronics. I admit I spent my youth getting good at electronics. So what? Is being a sour old fart a virtue at any point in life?

We agree on something!

Henry James puts me off, too. I start his books with the greatest of intentions and can never make it through. I just retried EW's "Age of Innocence", ditto.

I'm reading "The Big Short" about the mortgage meltdown. Cool stuff.

John

inserted).

That's what they are afraid of. Too many people have had things done, then complained.

inserted).

They don't get "complaints" about multi-year infections?

tooth,

inserted).

Not if they won't take you as a patient.

Earth's

the

having

ould

ve

for

and

Since the books I was referring to were the ones that you had previously claimed - in this forum - to have read, which didn't include any of the authors listed above, you aren't entitled to claim that I think that any of the authors listed above are Republicans.

P.G.Wodehouse mght well have voted Republican if he had the chance - when he was stuck in German-occupied France he did collaborate with the Nazi occupiers to the extent of making a radio-broadcast, which made him distinctly unpopular in the UK for the rest of his life.

Jane Austen wasn't interested in politics at all, asdn while Trollope did - once - stand for Parliment, it was as a member of the Liberal Party.

Shakespeare predates political parties, but since his view of the political process is entirely realistic, he obviously wouldn't have voted for the Republicans.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

e:

icle.

.html

t all Earth's

d for the

about having

that would

ers have

tories for

iginal and

ely

equire

as his

't

h I

ign

oint of

n't

ore

all

appy

from

s.

P.G. Wodehouse does have his virtues as a writer, but - like you - his education was restricted, and he didn't have a lot to write about. Terry Pratchett has the same level of comedic literary skill as Wodehouse, and understands a whole lot more of the world. His Discworld novels satirise large chunks of today's society. "Jingo" and "The Truth" aimed at Irak and Murdoch respectively, are well worth reading for the stairical content as well as the comedy.

I really like Terry Pratchett's first and only science-fiction novel "Strata" in which the comdey is a little subdued, but he was still working out what he wanted to do back then.

Not doling out the copious flattery that you feel you deserve doesn't make me a "sour old fart", and more than it makes me a less than competent circuit designer.

Never could stand him - I've read some of his short stories, but I've never been able to plow all the way through any of his novels.

One hopes that you get James Arthur to read and understand it - the reviews suggest that the author puts the blame firmly on the banks, where James Arthur seems to think that the US administration was at fault, somehow compelling the banks to make insanely irresponsible loans before selling them on a "securitised" bonds.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

ng

Not wrong. In fact the problem is that the marketing department tries to control the direction of new instrument development according to their understanding of what the customers want - lower prices, different color schemes and more shapely housings - and they don't want the engineers complicating their existence with innovations that they can't understand and don't want to have to learn how to sell

I'm also short of customers to talk to.

When I could get at acedemic libraries that still subscribed to them, I read Measurement Science and Technology and the Review of Scientific Instruments with exactly that in mind. All that that gave me was the profound impression that physicists don't know much about electronics. Review Scientific Instruments has published a few of my comments to that effect.

As a source of potential customers it was a waste of time.

Actually, it is a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry, but it was conferred in

There's no creativity involved in recognising one's situation and explaining it to other people. There might be some creativity involved in suggesting practical ways in which I might get out of the hole I find myself in, but suggestions that come down to "try harder" aren't actually useful.

It certainly looks that way from where I sit. I clearly need to find another point of view.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

all Earth's

for the

about having

would

have

stories for

unoriginal and

require

his

of

There was plenty of blame to go around. Several forces had to be present to create *and* ignore the dangers of the bubble, and the government was complicit in both. As regulators of the financial system, they had a unique responsibility that no single other party had, and they flubbed it big time. Goldman Sachs was a major player, not coincidentally the biggest corporate donor to Obama's campaign.

John

Earth's

having

As opposed to most of the French, who herded their fellow citizens into boxcars.

His "collaboration" was apparently naiive and innocent. He was pretty much an American anyhow, so his popularity in post-war UK is sort of moot.

John

That's what my neighbor thinks too. He's a banker.

After Barack Obama and ACORN got Clinton to push the Community Reinvestment Act, a gang of Clintonista thugs visited his workplace, recounts he, and explained to the bank rather clearly that "you

It's also true that government-run Freddie and Fannie actively sought, sponsored, bought, securitized, then sold loads and loads of these mortgages and related derivatives. IOW, they made market in them, were part of it, and their executives profited from it. But, then, they were staffed with Clintonistas too--Frank Raines, Rahm Emmanuel, etc. Cronyism--that's part of the magic of government-oversight.

Once it became obvious Barney Frank did his best to point out this problem. Not.

And it seems a number of Wall Street Democrats realized, at some point, they could make big buxs by deliberately buying the bad stuff, and simultaneously betting against it--the Magnetar play.

It still ultimately comes down to bad loans--if the loans were sound, there would be no losses, period. But, with Clinton's Freddie and Fannie teams gobbling them up, life was great, wasn't it?

-- Cheers, James Arthur

And all we get to do is vote on who will f*ck us the best.

As a banker he does have an interest in moving the responsibility away from bankers.

The distinction between loans they did not want to make - to people with low but regular incomes in low-income neighbourhoods - and the "ninja" loans they eventually were making, to people without income or jobs - seems fairly clear to me. Bankers would seem to divide the world up in much more coarsely defined chunks - basically into people like bankers, and the rest, which suggests that they are too stupid to live.

All true. But it misses the crucial point that the banks were supposed to be making loans to selected low-income families in in low income districts; riskier loans than they liked making, but not all that much riskier than their traditional business, while in fact the banks were lending money to almost anybody who asked for it, including an appreciable proportion of ninja - no income, no job - loans, which were never going to be paid back.

Freddie and Fannie had no mechanism to test the quality of the "higher- risk" loans that they were accepting from the banks - if I remember rightly, the Republican majority in congress had torpedoed as proposal to set up such a quality control unit - so they were in fact being defrauded by the banks.

Strictly speaking, they weren't his problem, but a problem with the banks he was supposed to be serving.

Fredie and Fannie didn't have any mechanism for finding out how bad the loans were. The banks who made the bad loans got extra support for making the "risky" loans intended to help them investigate the borrowers more thoroughly then they investigated their preferred borrowers, and reject those without good credit history. That the banks didn't do this means that they were defrauding the government from the start, and makes it all too clear that the bankers were criminally irresponsible.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Read "The Big Short." It's amazing.

John