And a polaroid camera with the little "fixer" container that was so handy for spraying freeze spray into, snapping the top back on, and throwing under someones desk or chair. Then waiting innocently to see how they jumped when it popped the top off. Ahh, those were the days! ;-))
~Dave~
I second that. The new 6000 series mixed signal Agilent scopes are supurb. Plenty of sample memory, very intuitive to use, and no problems with triggering. The LA part is not as powerful triggering wise as a full blown LA, but still very usuable for most work.
I would not touch a Lecroy. The older ones were a nightmare to drive. I've heard the newer Waverunner series is supposed to be a bit better in this respect, but I have not used one so can't comment.
Dave :)
I quite agree with you actually -- and in fact, I hate Windows scopes even more than I hate Windows logic analysers.
--mpa
On Fri, 15 Dec 2006 08:27:58 -0800, John Larkin wrote
Why?
robert
I'm still mad at them for something that happened 15 years ago. One of my customers, from a national lab, was disgusted with their quality and service on some time-to-digital converters, their 4208. Half of them were DOA, it took 6 months to recycle the duds (through Switzerland), and half the reworks were DOA. So I designed a functional equivalent, *not* a copy. Next time Harry went out for bids, LeCroy cut their price in half, just to kill us off.
Bless Harry, he disqualified them on technical grounds and I got into the picosecond electronics business.
Walter thought he'd invented the nanosecond and resented anybody else who tried to do fast stuff.
John
True, although my opinion is that for complicated test instruments such as analyzers & scopes, how well the software works has much more to do with the programmers than with the underlying OS.
That is generally indicative of bad programmers, not bad OS design. Yes, Windows (and every other commercial OS out there) has bugs (tons of 'em), but for every PC that crashes probably only 1 in 1000 if not 10000 does so due to an OS bug rather than an application or 3rd-party driver bug.
If you keep your instrument off the network -- or within a well-firewalled intranet -- realistically the security patches are highly optional. ANY instrument -- regardless of OS -- that's sitting directly on the Internet needs to be kept up-to-date security patch-wise.
This is really only an issue because older instruments didn't *have* TCP/IP connectivity...
In my experience, QNX, Linux, Windows, and VxWorks all take roughly comparable (same order of magnitude) times to boot, although I've seen people pay a lot more attention to getting QNX and VxWorks to boot *quickly*. Of all 4, Linux is probably the slowest, since it doesn't have the fancy background service that Windows does that specifically goes around trying to impove your boot times (but still has just as many services to load).
Umm... have you hung out on any of the groups where people discuss trying to clone old instruments' EEPROMs to try to get a dead one working? Or how to read some proprietary disk imagine format from a 20-year-old instrument? I'd much rather take my chances with a common PC platform -- even if the manufacturer has added proprietary disk cases or something -- than with true fully-custom platforms.
That's naive... I know workmen by their results; I'm not too concerned with what tools they use. I've seen plenty of guys with far better tools produce inferior work to someone with low-end tools just because the later was more experienced, concerned about quality, whatever.
There's a good market for that sort of instrument, and they are quite useful, but there's always going to be demand for an instrument with its own box, its own custom controls (knobs and buttons), etc.
You have done plenty of complaining :-) and made some good points, but let me query you -- what OS would you *prefer* manufacturers of test equipment to use?
---Joel
That's difficult to argue against.
And that's also quite true. NT is rather a good design at the core, and most crashes do indeed come from drivers.
There's still a load of horrible design in the things that go around it: for instance, can there be any reasonable explanation or excuse for the way USB driver installation is handled in Windows XP? And however beautiful the heart, it's wrapped in a pig's skin. It feels to me like it was made by people with no taste and no concern.
You are completely correct. I cower corrected.
Once again, a well-made point.
My life-meter is getting dangerously low ..
Ouch! Ouch! It hurts!
I was really thinking here of the "golden days", which I admittedly don't remember myself, when (so I have heard) scope repair was a routine task in a lab.
But those were fully analog scopes, and at any rate it's rarely wise to talk about how wonderful the old days were, because mostly, they weren't.
Now, on this one, I do not bend. There's wisdom in that saying; I didn't invent it. And it remains that if a craftsman uses cheap, flimsy tools, he will usually not be as good as one who uses good tools, because a good craftsman will tend to choose good tools -- not necessarily fancy and expensive ones, but always the *right* ones.
I agree that results must be the measure of everything (well, to a point). But sometimes I must judge a worker before I've seen results, and if he is unconcerned about his tools, he is either third-rate or (much rarer) a craftsman of unusual skill.
I didn't mean to say there wasn't -- I'm a tremendous fan of knobs and buttons (and flashing lights), and the more the better.
Well, to be honest, I was in a bad mood, and probably shouldn't have been posting. I'm better today. :)
This is where my inexcusable romanticism and personal prejudices come to the fore.
I would prefer that they use any OS at all, even Windows, as long as the instrument itself has a solid feel -- as long as it feels like an instrument. I want it to be something that isn't cheap -- something made by people who think, and who care.
But Windows is a special problem, because I regard it as the triumph of the cheap and second-rate. I don't want my bench infected by its shoddy, amateurish presence (my own presence fills that quota and then some). Perhaps I should relax and be more objective -- but it's hard for an inveterate perfectionist.
Well, sir, if you didn't leave me in a heap on the floor, I at least require a trip to First Aid. Good work, and good points all.
cheers --mpa
Hi Data,
You mean from a programmer's perspective? Or the users?
I'm fairly certain that Windows XP has the capability to perform true "plug and play -- at least after being prompted to insert the driver CD" and that all those bits of hardware that warn, "You MUST run our install program BEFORE connecting the hardware!" are due to programmers who are too lazy/uneducated/whatever to install their drivers "the Windows way" -- although I wouldn't be surprised if, due to some dumb design in Windows, that does take more effort than "just run setup.exe first and you'll be fine."
I think I agree with you there...
Like antique furniture, the stuff that survives often is the really well designed bits that eveyrone *does* want to remember.
OK, I'll give you that.
I wholeheartedly agree and endorse your viewpoint, and I'm completely convinced there's plenty of market share for such designs. However, I'm also not surprised that so much of the equipment we get today is not exactly "inspired." Devivces are so complicated (i.e., no one single person is going to design an 802.11 wireless card -- much less a cell phone, a PlayStation 3, etc. -- starting at the transistor level and finishing with Windows device drivers in any reasonable time frame) that it tends to require large design teams, and my experience is that the Law of Large Numbers holds true in these cases: Once your organization becomes big, even though you can remain quite competitive, a smaller and smaller percentage of your workers will be the real stand-outs, the people who really did *think* and *care* about what they were doing.
As far as I'm aware, about the only way around this problem is to work for (or start) a smaller company or become a consultant.
I see your point!
---Joel
Don't forget about bad hardware. How much of the price of the oscilloscope goes into the PC hardware? I suppose not much. Windows by itself is rock solid if you run it on the proper hardware + drivers and don't connect it to the internet.
-- Reply to nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) Bedrijven en winkels vindt U op www.adresboekje.nl
"Steve" wrote
Joel Kolstad wrote:
Yup.
"Data" wrote: (Re: scopes that run Windoze)
Joel Kolstad wrote:
Ah. Assuming best-case conditions again: http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:YQeQ1FxNO_YJ:
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:YQeQ1FxNO_YJ:
I don't think you quite got my points. They were:
This isn't being blind to a problem, it's prioritizing the problem in the grand scheme of things and taking actions appropriately. Indeed, in reference to your article, it's all about trying to prevent unintended consequences by considering what the "worst case scenario" is before it happens: Having a scope lose its mind is far less "deadly" to your business than having your engineers lose their design files.
---Joel
We had an issue with WinNT that 'Blue Screened' about 5 times during install, required rebooting every day - until we replaced the hardware.
--Rocky
Ha! I have a slave drive connected at all times, so backup of the entire partition is a simple XCOPY32. I keep the partitions at about 2050 megs to stay compatible with DOS, and a complete backup only takes a few seconds. So I do it quite often, and have no problems when Windows decides to trash the drive, or I download something I shouldn't have:).
As far as a scope losing its mind, that is completely unacceptable.
That is another reason for making your own equipment. Then you can run critical applications in DOS on some older computer that won't even run XP:)
Regards,
Mike Monett
Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:
... snip about scopes running under Windoze ...
Microsoft has only itself to blame for much of that. It has encouraged the 'cheap' machine without ECC protection (saving maybe $25 per machine). Note that even the original PC had parity protection for memory errors.
-- Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net) Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
And what prevents windows or the something that you should not have downloaded from trashing your slave drive? And then there's other simple things like failing powersupplies that take out all your drives, fires... Backups should be on removable storage that is kept in a separate place, preferably in another building. And you should have at least
2 backups to prevent from complete dataloss during backup.
Yes, that is completely unacceptable. But what is the damage when it does? You reset it, set it up again and capture the signal again. Mostly only a few minutes work (except when it takes a long time to find the (un)desired signal condition).
On the other hand, a crashing PC seems sort of accepted although the damage is usually much larger (lost files etc.).
-- Stef (remove caps, dashes and .invalid from e-mail address to reply by mail)
I do have multiple backups for just that reason. In fact, I recently did something really stupid and had to go back 3 levels to recover.
I leave the cover off the computer, and set the slave drive on top of the power supply. So it's very easy to change the backup drive, which means it's easy to keep the backups updated.
This is a far cry from times I had to use Laplink on Win 3.11 and spent days recovering from system crashes.
The time lost is not recoverable. The damage is unacceptable when you can make your own system and eliminate the crashes.
The solution is simple. Eliminate the fundamental problem and move to Linux. I have spent time in labs where Windows XP crashed several times per day. Sitting right beside it was another computer running Linux.
It never crashed.
I have had the same experience with my own computers. Windows would crash regularly, but I would have Eagle running on Linux for 6 months continuously, and it never even hiccuped.
Obviously, when you are only used to using Windows, that's the level you accept. When you have seen other systems perform flawlessly, that becomes your standard for performance.
Windows simply doesn't come up to that standard, and it never will.
Regards,
Mike Monett
Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:
You are balancing a hardrive on top of an open case? Fine for testing purposes, but not a long term solution. Even only leaving the case off from your working machine introduces additional risks. There are other solutions out there, like drive sleds and external drives. But I do favour tapes for backup purposes. We also copy our data to other sites through ssh tunnels as additional backup.
Why didn't you uses the extra harddisk on W3.11? This solution does not require any software and is OS independant and fast.
True, but as stated this loss is usually much smaller than what is lost in the average PC crash.
I use Linux exclusively on 2 of my 3 PC's and the 3th is triple-boot W98/W2000/Fedora Core. On this PC I mostly run W2000 and I can't remember the last time it completely crashed. It's on 24/7 but it sometimes needs a reboot. I am not a windows fan, and I would gladly switch to linux only if I could, but windows has improved a lot since W3.1.
But leaving eagle running for 6 months does not sound like good practice either. It doesn't hurt to sometimes close your program or even perform a scheduled reboot of the machine. Leaving it running for 6 months also means you did not update your kernel for that time either, not good if the machine is connected to the internet.
Most people use windows only and indeed accept things from their PC that an engineer would not accept from his analyzer. And that was the point I was trying to make: The average loss from an analyzer crash is smaller than that of a PC crash, but the PC crash is more accepted than the analyzer crash, weird.
-- Stef (remove caps, dashes and .invalid from e-mail address to reply by mail)
... snip ...
Is xnews causing that right justification and indentation? If you can, please inhibit it. It makes further reformatting very awkward.
-- Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net) Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
On a sunny day (Tue, 19 Dec 2006 13:54:21 +0100) it happened Stef wrote in :
Maybe for MS products?
That is strange. 'Kernel upgrade becomes a bit of a religion no? Well I recompiled kernel with new drivers in the weekend, but to upgrade it I have had so much shit, it is the LAST thing I am looking for, maybe when a new system. Security comes from firewall mainly, and all the other strange things one perhaps runs. Yes I know about some security fixes in later kernels then I have. Nevertheless I run a server, and have 562 entries in iptables to keep the bad guys out now, read the server logs every morning! For the rest zero problems
Also, as to backup, I have scripts that only backup to memory stick the last code I wrote, saves space and time. Have used this to port all scripts and apps I wrote to new systems. To back up the whole disk or system may seem smart... but is it really? As to that, I have a full backup system, with an older kernel version, on a second disk. If the server goes off (power failure for example), it will automatically reboot in the backup system (because maybe there is nobody around to fix things in the middle of the night), and it alerts me remotely. As for MS Windows, I dunno, do not use it, do not need it normally, except for some equipment I have here that has no Linux drivers or soft and I am to lazy to write the drivers myself (or no manufacturer data). Over the weekend I installed some other piece of hardware, the soft that came with it for MS Windows did not work, and crashed, I compiled the related modules in Linux and it ran OK first time, no reboots needed... I really have pity for those who must use MS software, on a scope I would burn the thing :-) Yuk, no sources, cannot even add functionality.
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