Power Supply Engineer - National Instruments - Austin, Texas

There is a surprising number of people who believe in incremental success, design by committee, collected data by which everything has to be supported, and whatnot. That would bore me sick. I am not saying it won't work, it's just that myriad inventions would have never happened that way.

A client's CEO and friend once said it best: Technology takes a major leap forward if you commit yourself to something where, upon receiving the assignment, you first experience a knot in your stomach.

Yeah, it's a rush when you commit yourself to doing something that you're not 100% sure you can do. And that maybe nobody else has ever done.

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My biggest motivator is if some important folks say "It cannot be done".

Could be a Chinese proverb: "Man saying it cannot be done shall not hold back man doing it".

Make your firm a partnership, which comes under the headings of corporations, partnerships, etc; with a Federal EIN. Every company has the ability to work with a firm who has an EIN.

PS: if you make your firm a corporation; you have to PAY taxes every year. Partnerships are not taxed, except in the form of local licensing.

usually to get at the customer base, obtain foundry facilities WITH licenses in place, etc.People? rarely.

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Yeah go ahead rub it in. We did have 70 degree's here a few days ago.

Sandy was a no-show in Buf. NY. A bit of rain and wind, a few thousand without power. We'll be sending help down to the lower part of the state.

George H.

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The redneck version is, "Bubba, hold my beer and watch this!"

Progress Energy has sent most of their line buckets & crews from Central Florida. They stopped in the Carolinas, overnight. If we get hit with any high winds or other problems, it's doubtful there are enough vehicles & crew left to handle it.

IANAA, but afaict: as an LLC you can elect to be taxed as a partnership or as an S-corporation. The S-corp approach is nearly the same, tax-wise, except that up to a point you can trade off what's salary vs what's business profit.

That gives you some control over the Social Security crapshoot, because self-employment tax is payable only on the salary part. Of course that reduces your eventual tooth fairy ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Social Security payout, and if you go too far, they'll label you an "abusive S-corporation" and crucify you.

So far mine is taxed as a partnership.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Right now I'm saying to a customer (and his customer) "It can't be done".... that way (the final customer way) and he don't want to hear that. S*it will happen...

Another Chinese proverb: "When s*it flies, never be in the front row".

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It turns out that some things _can't_ be done! And some just shouldn't.

I've never interviewed with an HR person. All my contacts, even with big companies like HP and McDonald-Douglas, were with the technical managers that I would have worked for. If I had taked those jobs, HR would have gotten involved later, to do the paperwork.

Some things shouldn't be elected, eiter.

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Last words of a redneck: "Hey y'all, watch me now!"

Yeah, been there as well. The funniest reply from one client (but they always listened to me) was "Isn't there some sort of loophole to get around Kirchhoff's law, like there is with other laws?"

But when it miraculously does work the old American business proverb comes in: "Find the parade and get in front of it".

If that were true, there would be no rednecks.

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Do read what I said more carefully. I didn't say that what John sold wasn't good, I merely said that it wasn't as "insanely good" as he has been known to claim.

The kind where claiming to be "insanely good" is insane.

There are degrees of success.If John's products actually were extraordinarily good, he might have become a second Hewlett Packard. I concede that they might be exceptionally good value for money, but targeted into such a narrow market that John would never have been tempted to expand his production capacity enough to make a lot of money or his management structure enough to widen his product range, but I've not seen any evidence of anything exceptional in the circuit fragments he posts here - its mostly sound stuff, but not exactly surprising.

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EMI was definitely a big company. EMI Central Research was run on the basis that the research engineers might pull something out of the hat as they had done repeatedly in the past. Godfrey Houndsfield invented the brain scanner there

You could have a lot of fun there.

Cambridge Instruments wasn't anything like as big, but they sold more expensive devices than you do - an electron microscope typically cost about $100,000 with the usual add-ons - and the electron beam microfabricators cost a bit over a million dollars.

The innovative electron beam tester that I worked on for my last three years with the company was going to sell for about a quarter of a million dollars apiece. I proposed the basic idea - with the primary intention of illustrating that the boss's 10psec time resolution demand was impractical, if practicable - which meant that I had more control what we ended up building than anybody else, and I certainly had a lot of fun demonstrating that the approach really was practicable.

It was a more serious environment than John Larkin appears to inhabit, but not all that serious. At one point, the walls of the lab around the prototype machine were decorated with words of the T.S. Eliot's "Hollow Men". A high-lighter had been used to pick out the verse

"Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow "

We did get it to work eventually, but it did take a while.