Sarah Palin - hot or not?

Sometimes you state some very stupid things, John.

If you have been away from spreadsheets for a couple decades, I could see such a near sighted remark.

Modern spreadsheets are very powerful tools.

Some of our stuff is VME - boards, not backplanes - a bit less than half maybe. We like VME; it's still an expanding market, but a lot of the formerly big players (Motorola, VMIC, others) have dropped out or discontinued stuff, or just stopped designing. It's sort of neat to sell a single pc board - no box, no power supply, no drivers - for 5 to 12 kilobucks. Money never goes out of fashion.

A VME board can have a 10-year sales lifetime. Some PC and consumer products have to be redesigned every 6 months, and the margins are tiny.

We've been doing a lot of Ethernet-based products lately, and a fair amount of fast fiberoptics.

You don't like this?

or this?

Show us some of your thoroughly modern stuff.

John

Jeez. Thompson was right. You ARE a leftist weenie!

Then you aren't up to date on specialized instrumentation. The VME/VXI design allows the user to select what is needed to assemble custom systems, without starting from scratch. Microdyne was using them in their top of the line telemetry systems, and some boards were used in multiple products by changing the control firmware. Not every job can be done with off the shelf test equipment, and ATE/SATE is a nightmare when you try to haywire COTS equipment for the job.

Yes, it is. If the feds offer transportation bucks, any governor is going to go get some. And a "nowhere" island wouldn't be "nowhere" for long, once a bridge was built to access it.

John

So is the ability to program. Given a complex problem, I prefer to write a program that's properly commented, has helpful prompts, and is easy to maintain.

Spreadsheets have rotten control structures, and don't make nice reports. But the tools don't matter: the results do.

John

I'm laughing now because I just thought of Skybuck trying to find the fan on a VME single-board computer.

Actually that was mpm ;/ For some reason it didn't quote him properly and I used --- === as seperators but I can see the confusion.

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In all fairness, the bridge to nowhere was actually a bridge to the local airport. (I'm not exactly sure what kind of airport - I'll have to check. Might be private?)

Like I said... You OBVIOUSLY have not worked with a modern spreadsheet. The charting and reporting functions are very powerful.

Barcode scans, etc. get read straight into a cell. There are several applications that can be written in simple tools like spreadsheets and databases. Your specialized "front ends" for your data collection routines are very single use and proprietary.

Spreadsheets can do a lot. Job and time tracking.. all kinds of things where a database application is overkill, but data handling is needed.

Do? About what?

1. It was a bridge to an airport.

1. Alaska kept the money.

She was a studio reporter (script/teleprompter), not play-by-play.

I'm still waiting to hear what the McCain/Palin team plans to do if elected.

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Google maps Ketchikan, Alaska.

The bridge was so expensive because it had to be high enough to allow shipping traffic to pass underneath.

Was the money ever accounted for ??

In other news, a 13,600 year old skeleton was found in the Yucatan. Rumors are that it is McCain's first girlfriend. 8-)

Put all you leftist wusses in concentration camps ;-)

...Jim Thompson

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That too. She was fun to listen to, the whole 37 minutes, which is itself revolutionary in American politics.

Most of the voters in the USA are "rubes." You know, those farmers and workers and parents who live in flyover territory. The ones who cling to their religion and their guns.

John