Power Supply Engineer - National Instruments - Austin, Texas

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Replicating somebody else's concept is always a bit tedious, and rarely cost-effective, unless you are re-engineering it for much higher volume production. Happily, they almost always leave you room to improve some aspect or other.

Even if their brothers were in a position to purge the Florida electoral rolls of Democrat voters.

Flamboyant self-display is a device for attracting more sexual partners. Check out the evolutionary significance of the male peacock's tail.

The rednecks who judge it right have a short life, but a fertile one. Human evolution does seem to put more emphasis on pair-bonding and a sustained relationship - kids do seem to do better if they are supported by both parents until they are capable of looking after themselves - but the redneck model works well enough that they aren't yet entirely extinct.

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That was my experience too. HR usually filter's CV's and invites the candidates they find acceptable in for interview. They often got it wrong. On one occasion one of my colleagues found himself talking to a guy who was a window-dresser in a big store who fancied a change of career and didn't realise that you don't usually learn electronics on the job.

One of my more depressing experiences in the Netherlands was with NXP in 2000 where I'd talked to a bunch of the engineers and - apparently

- convinced them that I could do their job, developing a cheap high bandwidth digital optical receiver for an optical fibre receiver for domestic installation. My final conversation was with a guy from HR who pointed out to me that I'd never done anything exactly like this before and that at 58 I was probably too old to learn the necessary additional stuff quickly.

I did point out that I'd been learning additional stuff quickly all my life, and the extra information that this job involved was very limited, but he couldn't be convinced that he was wrong.

So I went off to work in Venlo - NXP was in Nijmegen, which would have been a much shorter commute - and spent a couple of years getting their bizarre conductivity meter working. I'd never worked on measuring the conductivity of aqueous solutions before, but an afternoon in the Nijmegen University chemistry library taught me all that I needed to learn - the most useful book turned out to have been edited by a guy that I'd known at Southampton University nearly thirty years earlier.

Really? I used to watch AMD stock because I could predict the times their new processor would kick Intel butt and bring them from billion dollar losses to billion (or at least 100's of million) dollar profits. There was a lot of money to be made on their stock.

These days I would only sell AMD short. They are more than a process generation behind Intel so that they simply can't compete on price and their processor performance is not able to keep up because they just can't throw as many transistors at the problem (although that is getting to be less of a problem these days as more transistors aren't solving the problems like they used to). Worse, they are far behind on the low power curve and have no viable plans to compete in the *new* processor market (unless they have announced something realistic in the last six months, I've sorta stopped following them). To top it all off, they have sold off fabs, the very lifeblood of processor techology and blown up the working arrangement. Now they have to use outside fabs!

In other words, they may be a good place to work for now, but who will you be working for when they go bankrupt and are split up in the next five years?

I'm not trying to be a jerk, I don't see a way out for AMD. The only way they can survive is if Intel throws them a bone to keep them afloat just so no one can say there isn't competition. But with the new competition becoming the ARM cores, I can't see that happening.

Is there something I've missed? What will keep AMD afloat for the coming half decade?

Rick

You wrote, quote "He's also got exaggerated ideas about the quality of the stuff he designs and manufactures".

That is judging someone's work products without having the foggiest clue about them. Have you ever visited John's company and seen the stuff? I have.

Has it occurred to you that some people may not want that?

Then why aren't you doing the same if it's supposedly so easy?

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No, it's judging John's claims by the claims he posts here. And "insanely good" isn't credible.

It's possible, but not all that likely, granting what John has said about his higher volume products.

No easy access to customers. There's a well known way of building a business from a product that generates enough customers in the first place, but I've yet to find such a product.

There's also the point that some people are better at selling stuff than others, and I'm not one of the natural-born salesmen. I've met - and worked with - quite a few people who are better at it than I am, and I don't actually like the way they work, though I can see how it works for them. There are markets where my kind of approach would make more sense, but since I've not got a product in mind that would work in that kind of market, this is all academic.

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How do you know that?

I doubt he'd ever want to leave his digs. Unless the Zeitgeist pub moves along with them.

Well, you've only got another 25-30 years left to do it :-)

It isn't academic when you seek out companies and partners who can really use your expertise to make and sell such a product. I do that all the time and dont' find it particularly hard. The designs sometimes are but the lining up of biz relationships isn't. If it is for you, there's also people that can help with that.

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Is it? I wouldn't know. I design things, not copy things. Copying isn't much fun.

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Just now I'm working on the main timing controller for an EUV light source. The wafer scanner that it goes in sells for about $1.1e8 per unit.

That's not serious enough for you?

Good grief, who would want to be the boss of HP? I sure wouldn't, for any amount of money.

Circuit fragments are seldom extraordinary... just parts connected together. Most of the magic of a product is the architecture, how all of those fragments work together. Besides, I don't publicly post the really good stuff.

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I can top that. One of my designs goes into a vehicle that sell for about $5e8. But I don't build it so I guess that doesn't count then. However, I bet your wafer scanner doesn't have a champagne cooler 8-)

Which really means, you intentionally mediocrify your posts. Oh John, how humble of you! Or maybe that really is as far as it goes ;-)

Tim

Seems to me that you could dunk an insulated toroidal inductor into a liquid and measure the losses to get conductivity.

As I said, there is some stuff that I won't post. The guts of my digital delay generators, time stampers, laser drivers, resistance simulators, step generators, HV pulsers, gradient drivers, things like that.

Heck, most people here won't even say what they do, and won't post even a picture of a PC board they designed, much less a schematic fragment.

Some morons even encrypt their LT Spice models.

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For Slowman, that would be getting a job.

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Think about it. If he's still in business, he's not irrational about his quality criteria.

Probably closer to 15. I get extra points for being educated, physically active and never having smoked, but none of that buys me a get out of cancer card, or prevents my heart valves from calcifying - the aortic valve got replaced a few years ago. None of the others are anywhere near bad enough to need replacing, but they aren't perfect.

Perhaps, but I'd have to have something they thought they could sell. I can't point to anything wildly exciting a the moment.

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You can do better by dunking two non-progressively wound toroids into the liquid and measuring the coupling between them. It's a well known technique.

Sadly, Haffmans had committed themselves to measuring the conductivity of isolated droplets. The prospect of persuading such a droplet to wrap itself around a pair of toroids wasn't attractive. I settled for a pair of concentric platinum tubes. I'd have preferred a four lead configuration in plated platinum on a printed circuit board, but we already had the platinum tubes by the time it became clear that a four wire configuration would make more sense, and I learned a lot about depositing platinum black instead.

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krw can't do joined up logic. I've got jobs in the past. It's not impossible that I could do it again, but at 69 it's not easy.