"Most grads are pretty good at doing VHDL or even ASICs..."
IF DIGITAL
There are damn few analog designers left... and we're all as old as dirt ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Either that or if they can buy analog portions in the can (IP blocks). It's like cooking. Most people can whip up pasta if it comes in a package where a foil is ripped off the top and the microwave minutes are printed on the package. But tell them they should prepare the 2nd recipe out of Joy of Cooking on page xxx from scratch and you get a blank stare.
Yes. Unfortunately some companies seem to have resigned, they simply don't start projects they should because they don't want to depend on outsiders.
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |
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| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
We keep encouraging you and Jim to start writing books, offering seminars, whatever it takes you know; I think the money to pay for it is out there! :-)
Doug Smith
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seems to make a pretty decent semi-retirement for himself offering seminars and having a (quite low cost, really) subscription-based web site (as well as having lots of free information). I took one of his seminars some years back, and besides being informative and pertinent, it was clear that he's a really interesting guy as well.
I have a strong suspicion that for all the ire that Jim raises here on Usenet, he'd be a very lively and memorable speaker that few would not throroughly enjoy and learn something from!
There are good books but the interest isn't there. If every engineer would really concentrate and study "The Art of Electronics" we wouldn't be facing the aging-out of analog folks to the extent we see it today.
I'd be glad to teach, in fact I like it a lot every time I do it. But analog can't be taught via seminars, really. You have to sit down with the engineers and start doing real circuits or diagnose some lousy ones. Hands-on is the only way and that is why analog is so difficult. You cannot learn it in a 4-week class, or in front of a simulator like VHDL is taught.
Then there is the short-term thinking in industry. Someone has to pay for seminars and engineers are typically unwilling to do so. Or unable because the credit cards are maxed out. They expect their employers to pick up the full tab. They, however, are often motivated by short term successes. IOW only what happens from now until the quarter-end report really matters. They usually hire consultants to "make that one problem over there go away". No matter how, but fast. This isn't always the case but it can be seen quite often.
Just tell the audience they shouldn't ask him about things like whether Hillary Clinton should run or not :-)))
It would be helpful is some truly difficult circuits requirements were posted. It's all in the challenge ;-)
Usenet,
I hope Hillary wins. The world deserves her ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
I went to a seminar put on by the head of the US Navy Quality/Reliability program. At the beginning of the lecture, he made us all stand, raise our right hands, and swear to kill all Harvard Business School graduates we met.
As soon as you enter GUI-land you are in trouble. SUN is not incompetent so it must be pure malevolence!!
I got so pissed off on the latest occasion that I wrote the Java application as an command-line-only XML-RPC server and the GUI in Python with WxWidgets.
like the
Perfeckt ;-)
In *my* opinion WxWidgets look and feel 100% native - but then I also never did anything really clever with it.
"Incentives" is the key word here - there being no incenctives for an IT manager to keep the IT budget in single-digit percentages of turnover. Work below a certain percentage of the budget and you become "ressources" or (even worse) "services".
"Upper management" in most organisations will not deal with small-fry parts of the organisation while the people with the heavy budget gets promoted to "strategic areas" and gets to sit on the board so they get even more opportunity to demonstrate their importance.
I was converted by spending two weeks learning LaTeX *and* writing a conference paper that came out perfectly ín A4 and A2 and was accepted while the Word users had a few retries due to Word adopting the printer settings people happened to have and not what the publishers wanted.
That's also what my sister says. But I am not doing too many academic papers and those that I did were no problem in Word. Never really had an acceptance problem.
That certainly does not work in mid-size companies. I ran the division of one for several years. During the yearly budget sessions we sat down with the support departments that were common to all three divisions. There was a darn good incentive for the IT folks to keep it single-digit. Thing is, if they would not have shown proper frugality we would have looked at outsourcing their particular support function. That was never an issue with our folks since they were as careful with budgets and corporate funds as we were. Money in a corporation is not owned by employees, departments or divisions. It is owned by the shareholders.
Many, especially amongst those quoted on the exchange, are mere vehicles for transferring shareholder equity to the management.
They all have a nice inspiring story that inspires confidence, operate in a "hot" area, yet year-on-year they loose money. Usually they go bust after winning some prestigous business award ;-)
Investing is basically the same problem as buying a really nice car from a used car salesman: Of course it's a lemon - the seller knows this and you are about to find out - otherwise this bargain would not be offered to you.
Hence you have to look for the crap car; the one the seller will let you have for little more than plonking a new battery in and driving it away from his sight - that is the one that will yield 2-300% later.
Having said that, there are a few good investments around but presently it takes work to find them; I think in 2003 I found about 40 on the Stockholm Exchange, some of which I still have!
What I see emerging is that the ease with money can be extracted from the growing crowd of ever more stupid "investors" is eroding the moral amongst the issuers of stock certificates: after all, if the "investors" do not care for their money then why should the people they lend it to care more?
For Example:
The latest fad around here (DK) are "property bonds" - bonds issued with security in the last 20% of the property they are used to help finance and sold on the story of exponentially rising property prices forever.
What really happens is that the lender can sell off probably *all* the risk in his property investment while paying hardly any interest - the main incentive is that the bonds are "convertible"; meaning that they can be exchanged for stock in the property developers company on some remote future occasion - like for example the developer (in the role of majority stock holder) decides on the conversion, having grown to like having all that money and not wanting to pay it back, nor pay any interest!!
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