"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...
I try to be... I actually used to be more conservative, but then I married a democrat. :-)
What does bother me is that the country is so polarized these days; the ability for people to respectfully disagree seems to be waning. I think it's related to a dwindling sense of "community" people seem to have -- Jon & Joerg had a good thread on that topic.
As much as you like to insult liberals, I've generally read a bit of good-natured fun into it as well -- the fact that you and Win can sit down and have a beer together suggests to me that you're still one of the "good guys."
"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...
Well then, in 3-1/2 years he might be willing to admit you were right and offer to buy the first beer. :-)
Or he could have decided there's little point discussing politics here... after all, how many of us are really likely to change our views based on what someone writes on SED anyway? ...My wife's extended family transcends numerous religions and politics, so at their gatherings there's an unofficial rule that neither of those topics are discussed!
I'm convinced that regardless of how much lying politicians do, getting re-elected is still one of their highest priorities, and passing HR 3200 as currently written would get a vast majority of them an express ticket to the unemployment line.
In my mind, the U.S. switching to a Canadian-style, single-payer health care system is about as likely as a bloody coup replacing Obama: Perhaps not 0%, but still about 1,000,000:1...
Try 2000, or better yet Office-97. Like with many SW packages, older is better. I still have Word 2000.
May be small, but in those cases the whole company switched. Or in business speak MS has left money on the table.
Yeah :-(
That blew my mind when evaluating and raised some serious doubts about their competence level. They must be a bit out of touch with real designers in industry. But then I realized that this CAD was nearly perfect in all other aspects so I jumped, mainly because I was p....d about Cadence forcing people to buy the maintenace contract with OrCad (they lost my biz in consequence).
It's sort of ok for me because most of my work is redesign of "not so optimal" client circuitry, parts of existing designs. The occasional Goliath-design I do all on one page which gets split out into several sheets at the end. That's IMHO the only way to keep my head above water with Eagle, otherwise you lose track of what's where.
I wanted to jump ship one last time but could not find any decent CAD that I'd be happier with than with Eagle. Plus they (slightly) hinted that they had (finally!) grok'd the need for hierarchy, meaning there is hope. But I will not upgrade until they've got that done.
If it's a small company forget it. Not going to happen, because the ROI usually ain't there. For our 300-employee company it provided a day-and-night difference. Huge.
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Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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The problem with politics is that the theories are untestable. Which is why some people prefer that subject to electronics, where they might be demonstrably wrong.
Yeah, but not necessarily all that obvious: A lot of poorly-designed electronics is sold every day, and unless the design is so bad that there's a really huge failure rate (e.g., the Microsoft Xbox -- you've read this:
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...or a similar synopsis, right?), few people ever know...
That's a horror story. Microsoft designing their own ASICs? That almost had to go wrong.
But "few people ever know" isn't really the case. For example, automotive electronics often develop a bad reputation. The failures are simply too frequent and most of all too expensive. I am an EE but I always (my whole life) tried to buy cars with the least amount of electronics in there. Looking at cars in the neighborhood I think this strategy of mine will not change in the next decade or two.
"Modern" developments such as DTV haven't exactly helped. There are non-technical folks out here who staunchly insist that all the newfangled flat-screen TVs are junk. It isn't true, other than the fact that their GUI is too dumbed down the mfgs did a pretty good job. But the ATSC standard stinks and that's what makes them fail all the time. However, John and Jane Doe do not know that, they only see that this new TV isn't as good as the old one they had to give away. It cost >3x as much as the old ones did, making them really miffed about technology. I know one guy who is just about ready to trigger a stampede (hey, didn't I predict this was going to happen ...?). His TV selection was reduced to very few worship channels (he isn't overly religious) and a couple of Spanish speaking stations, that's it. No news, no movies, nada, zip. Electronics at their best, in his eyes. At least that's how Joe and Jane Doe feel.
Computers aren't far behind. Case in point: In the early 90's I had email via CompuServe and my wife also used it. Good old DOS, cast-iron robustness, not one failure or hickup in years. Now she has a modern Windows puter, DSL, the works. Every other day it's "Hey, Joerg, there's this warning message on the screen, everything froze, and it doesn't go away. Can you fix that?" or "My computer just sits there and trundles for the last hour or so".
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Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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But often the design folks really bungle it. Not electronic and just an example, but this happened a lot: As a young engineer with fresh degree in pocket I bought a Chrysler Horizon. The alternator performed several unauthorized departures from its workplace, as a guy in a German NG put it (when a brake did that on his van). One day I had it, looked at the structure, did a back of the envelope calc on the stability of an aluminum strut. Turns out it could not possibly survive, replaced with a home-made steel strut of similar weight, never broke again. Then there was the active antenna on the roof of another car that died in almost every thunderstorm until I rolled my own. I could go on ...
That's what those guys are doing.
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Regards, Joerg
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It's not my PC. I use either Frame6 or OO for personal stuff.
The vast majority of businesses are locked into M$, right down to their very existence. The smart ones are few.
I would never use software that was a guaranteed revenue sink, but I have no say. The layout guy isn't stuck on Cadence either (he's used many different packages at PPoE) so I'm not sure why we're using it. We just figured out a back door to back annotate placement information from Allegro into OrCad. Seems Cadence doesn't think this is an important function. FOr some time the placement information in the schematics was from a previous design. ...hardly useful and downright dangerous.
I'm trying to convince the others to clean up their schematics now. THey use C-size paper as a scratch pad of tiny circuits. Some will be a few inches square with I/O wherever they fall. It's impossible to follow[*] and IMO has been the source of several ECOs. I prefer 11x17 (fits in a notebook) with inputs all on the left and outputs on the right (BI-DIs are usually "outputs"). I still have to see how debugging goes with a hierarchical design before I argue the case for all designs. The design I'm doing isn't fully hierarchical either, since I'm not sure how that'll go.
[*] It's OK after you know it well enough to not need the schematic.
I'll pick my battles. So far, OrCad isn't one.
Quite small. A hundred full time employees (give or take), more during the summer and early fall. The engineering department is two hardware engineers, three firmware types, a layout engineer, mechanical engineer, technician, admin, and a manager.
My first project after becoming self-employed in 1989 was a huge board,
3HE full-depth, filled to the brim with SMT. So I pretty much dove right into a hierarchical design and loved it. IMHO it's the only way to make sure others understand large sets of schematics.
It just p....d me off when they wanted to foist a service pack on me.
That's a small engineering group. We were in the high-tech world, production very much automated, so our division of about 100 people alone had more than a dozen design engineers. Cost was critical so when el presidente wanted me to run a division I had very few conditions but integrating engineering into the MRP system was one.
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Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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When you say "hierarchical design" do you mean "turtles all the way down", or do you just break common circuits into hierarchical blocks. So fat, I've just done the circuits with more than one instance. Doing turtles all the way seems like it would explode the schematic sheet count, thus hinder communication.
I understand. I'm not the one who pays that bill. All I do is enter the schematics. If they're happy with the situation, I'm happy.
That's the one thing I don't understand with this company. Every time I mention it I get a "yeah, it would be nice to have" answer. I'm not even asking for real-time numbers. Next time the owner asks for cost reductions (and he will soon) I'll sure have an answer.
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