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Maybe you aren't anymore? Living in another country for a very long time can dull the senses when it comes to the mother tongue even though one never loses it. Happens with me as well, it's normal.
No, he isn't. It seems to me that pretty much eveyone else understood it.
I have my doubts about that now :-)
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
wrote in
ever
Businesses seldom lock their doors, or turn off their telephones. You can't get through to the President of General Electric, but you can ususally get through to the owner or chief engineer of a small company, the ideal target for someone like you.
You'll never know if you don't try.
Yup. If you're so smart, as you keep telling us, figure out how to make it work. This isn't actually difficult.
A couple of months ago I cold-called a company that makes fiber-pumped lasers, just to show my guys how it might be done. I told them we could make drivers for their butterfly-mount seed lasers. They went wild and wrote us into a proposal for a cool new kind of analytical instrument. We got the first order from them last week. Looks like fun.
It was wild luck that I got a hit on my demo call, but the probabilities aren't all that bad. As I said, pick a non-electronic technology, learn something about it, call or visit a small company that does it, tell them you'd like to design electronics that will enhance their product, offer to do a breadboard cheap or free, to be genuinely helpful. Then do it.
I offered to do a freebie demo driver for that laser company, and they refused. Then I suggested $2000, and they countered with $10,000. So we agreed on $10,000. They want us to show our stuff in their booth at Photonics West in February. Not bad shootin' for a cold call.
Agencies generally suck. We never consider applicants from agencies. You're stuck in the big-business, formal-channel, HR, out-of-your-control-passive model. You're afraid to make yourself responsible. Use your intelligence and get over it.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
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Hey, the water-cooled part is about the size of an SUV, and that doesn't even count the megawatt CO2 laser.
They used to call these things "steppers" because they would move the wafer, burn a pattern, then move on. Now they call them "scanners" because the exposures are done with both the reticule and the wafer in motion.
That did initially boggle my tiny brain. It's not nanometer-precision positioning, but nanometer-precision motion.
I bet *your* electronics can't blow up the machine. Mine can!
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
in
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It's going into, and being seriously processed by, a $14 FPGA with all its logic clocked at 250 MHz. The ADC data will break at less than +-2 ns skew from clock to data. I was impressed that it worked.
The Brat did the board layout. I think it's beautiful.
I think the Altera input macrocells have tweakable delay lines or something. At any rate, one tells the software what the inputs are supposed to look like, and it makes the timing work. Somehow. I didn't do the FPGA design.
On the board above, the FPGA guy initially used the wrong clock edge. It actually worked but was flakey over temperature, so we flipped it. That gives me a lot of confidence, since we were right on the borderline when the clock was backwards; so we should be near dead-center now.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
wrote in
profit
has
clue
have.
Some of our products are insanely good. We do that on purpose.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
and
Ok, you win :-)
The finest precision I've dealt with when it comes to positioning large machine parts was around a micrometer. The machine is about half the size of an SUV and all semiconductor equipment manufacturers waved off when approached by us. "It cannot be done on this scale", was the general opinion. That motivated us greatly and we did it.
No, but if designed wrong they could cause the machine to become compromised and that can cause an event with fatalities. One that makes the evening news.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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Perhaps not, but I certainly wouldn't enjoy it.
But you don't tell us about the ones that got away.
You have gloated about it before, and you will probably gloat about it again.
Agreed. But there are exceptions. This one could be one of them. HR people never seem to be able to get useful information from an engineering CV, but some employment agencies have people who can.
And you complain about not being able to hired skilled help when you need it. Personal acquaintance may get you better-quality candidates, but it doesn't give you access to many of them.
Not exactly. I'm hooking up with people who are in the business of finding employers who want to hire people, and and of finding potential employees who want to be hired. Read up on "small world" social networks sometime.
Some people are good at cultivating a wide range of contacts, and it pays to find them.
A bizarre misconception.
That's what I'm doing. Rather than wasting a lot of time on research, I'm going off to talk to guy who has already done a lot of it. When I was made redundant in Cambridge, I did adopt a more active approach to job hunting, but I'd been working in the area for nine years before I'd been made redundant, and had been applying for occasional jobs - more to keep my hand in than in the expectation that I'd get an attractive offer - for the previous five years, so I had a much better idea of what was available.
The first work I got - which kept me paid and occupied for a few months - was with a firm that I'd interviewed with a year earlier. The next job, which kept me busy until my wife dragged me off to the Netherlands, came up when a small firm that I hadn't previously heard of advertised for a lab technician, so I cold-called them. They'd been getting their electronics design done by an academic who'd just got a tenured job in Manchester, so they had a gap that I could fill - rather better than my predecessor, as it turned out.
I'm simply not as tuned in to the job prospects around Sydney now as I was to the job prospects in Cambridge in 1991. It's going to take a while before I've got any kind of realistic idea about what's available, let alone where I might sensibly start cold-calling.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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So it's a private/business jet aircraft, or possibly a luxury yacht. The joke is in the quality of temperature control required, not the application.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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That's not exactly state of the art. When Cambridge Instruments went over to putting their electron microscope columns together by shrink- fitting hot outer segments onto cold inner segments, the dimensions were being machine to tolerance of 0.1 micron.
You start seeing laser-interferometer-based position-monitoring gear on the machines that do that well.
Laser interferometers start complaining about the change in optical path length in air with atmospheric pressure changes when you are trying to do precision positioning over large-ish distances. Electron beam microfabricators didn't have to deal with that problem - the working area was under vacuum.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney > > > I bet *your* electronics can't blow up the machine. Mine can! > > No, but if designed wrong they could cause the machine to become > compromised and that can cause an event with fatalities. One that makes > the evening news. > > -- > Regards, Joerg > > http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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200MHz clock lines and plugged them back in again the wrong way around. I'd wanted to use co-ax inserts in a mixed D-type socket, but separate SMB sockets had been easier to source and lay out. At least the problem was easy to diagnose and even easier to fix.-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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I've always produced and heard more English than Dutch, and I certainly read a great deal more English than Dutch.
My spoken Dutch got a lot better when I was working full-time in Venlo, from 2000 to 2003. My written Dutch didn't improve at all - they wanted me to write in English. Since 2003, my spoken Dutch has gotten worse.
My grasp of English is actually appreciably better than average - my wife qualifies this as "for an engineer" but her standards are exceptionally high.
.They understood what he meant to say. I'm purporting to understand what he actually said.
Pity about that.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
in
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Under optical control it sure was state-of-the-art in the 90's.
So how come all those fancy semiconductor equipment mfgs turned us down and we had to build it ourselves?
[...]-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
wrote in
in
profit
has
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Can happen easily. I grew up speaking German, I am still totally fluent and practice it every day. But I never really felt very comfortable holding a design review or something like that in German. Even while living there. I can do it but sometimes will have to search for a word or just throw in the English one and assume they'll all understand.
My spoken Dutch is almost gone. Last time it all came back after two beers but I doubt that would work now. Listening and reading somehow never goes away, I can read a Dutch paper without much effort.
Mostly the first is better. Unless you want to play English teacher. Like mine who sometimes scolded me that I shan't use "ain't" or double-negation. "Ok ma'am, I ain't gonna do that never no more" (she almost blew up after that one ...)
[...]-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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My guess would be that they would have had to design too much new stuff from scratch, and didn't see much chance of selling the larger scale stuff to other customers.
One-off's can tie up a lot of your design staff for quite a while. Their salaries are being paid, but most firms want to retain the capacity to take on more than one job at a time.
Cambridge Instruments dumped it's shaped beam electron beam microfabricator project a the point where it became obvious that it was going to soak up all of the design effort for the following 18 months, and marketing rebelled at the prospect of not having a new product to sell for a year or so.
It cost the company pretty much exactly as much to buy itself out of its contract commitments as it would have done to have finish the project, but that's what they chose to do.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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Nah. We dropped a major wad of cash onto the desk and the machine was not something unusual. Essentially a flip-chip bonder. They simply could not do it. Zygo stepped up to the plate, saying that if we did it together they'd be in.
Looks like a rather major blunder in the decision making progress if they had to bow out of contractual obligations. That usually leaves an aftertaste in the marketplace. Can happen but shouldn't, as a former talk show host used to say.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
wrote in
in
profit
sold
has
of
clue
stuff? I have.
Gosh, Bill, you are an authority on *everything*
That's especially impressive in a person who does nothing.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser drivers and controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
I think it is very lucky for you that few if any of your customers read these forums. Your posts here are so unprofessional that I find it amazing. I sometimes worry that some of my posts cast me in less than an optimal light, but compared to you I am a piker in the field of making myself look bad.
Why do you and the few others here who constantly bicker continue to do it? It clearly shows some sort of emotional issues.
Rick
He should get a mailbag & change his name to 'Cliff'.
I'd prefer to talk about electronics. A few people here prefer to lurk and whine. Bill, and some of the other whiners, really ought to get off their butts and *do* some electronics. I've suggested some reasonable ways that he might go about it.
I think my posts are professional when I'm discussing electronics, and related topics like technical management, documentation, things like that. You are mostly right that I should ignore them, but I suspect that not many people pay much attention to newsgroups.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser drivers and controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
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