'standard' NDA

It can be a very fine line between true genius and madness.

Never the less we do not use Edison's DC electric supply today. Edison was incredibly good at self publicity.

Without Tesla there would be no skyscrapers. AC electricity and transformers allow much more effective power transmission.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

In mass-market products the engineer doesn't set the goals. The bean-counters do that, and the engineers have to design to guarantee the business goals by making cost/MTBF calculations. It's still engineering.

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Exactly. Meeting business goals does not always equal guaranteeing the thin g works. It just has to sell and not have too many duds be returned.

NT

Tesla was some of both

Skyscrapers primarily depend on lifts/elevators, which IIRC are a problem solved by Otis.

AC would have taken over without Tesla, though it would have taken longer & cost more to convert.

NT

Martin Brown wrote in news:qn707u $ica$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org:

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He is an abject idiot to have been so easily trapped into his stupidity by my example.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

And you are a lot of neither. You are simply an abject idiot.

You are truly dumber than dogshit.

You are an absolute idiot. An example of how commiting non-vetted 'news' into your brain and mindset as being fact.

You broke yourself, boy. And that was decades ago.

What part of "guarantee that certain outcomes will always be met" was ambiguous to you? I never said that the things would always *work*, those were your words.

CH

Tesla was going to be Tesla, Edison was going to be Edison. George Westing house, I think, is the most important person in AC power. He could have wa lked away and still been rich. In my understanding of him he pursued it be cause he knew it was right , but not obviously profitable to go up against Edison. Westinghouse is regarded as one of the best people in the era of b ig industrialists. (Hershy was pretty good too, something about Pennsylvani a I guess).

What do you mean by "guarantee that certain outcomes will always be met" ? There is always risk, always bugs. We always take chances, and if we try too hard to eliminate risk we'll never get stuff done.

I avoid designing stuff that, if it fails, will blow expensive things up or kill people.

Programming is a lot more than algebra and algorithms. I don't think the average programmer even knows how to do algebra. The real problem in programming is to control procedural flow and synchronize events and avoid idiotic pointer and buffer crashes.

Computer Science doesn't seem to have much interest in computers. Dijkstra famously said that he didn't have regular access to a computer.

I think the average programmer has never heard of a state machine, either.

I don't like compilers in general. All my production code was in assembler.

Python looks OK. I should get into that one day.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Someone maintaining FSMs in a telecom application: "Aren't FSMs something in a compiler's parsers?" Grrr.

The language is key; some make compilation easy and predictable without rolling in the mud with language lawyers. Other languages don't.

Cut and paste some code and get the indentation subtly wrong. In Python there can be no option to "reformat and pretty print this arbitrary blob of code".

Be aware of the consequences of the Global Interpreter Lock.

Apart from that, Python is OK. The main attraction is the wealth of libraries of code that I have no interest in developing.

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Yes they do and it depends what university and who teaches it. I have taken and taught control courses that are basically all "math" and b ecause we taught both classical and modern control theory in the same cours e, there was no time to go into a lot of the different types of devices. W e usually picked one or two types and ran with that through the course. This type of course was at a university where theory and math foundations w ere emphasized over actuality. Most of the labs were based on matlab and s imulink models. I've also seen control courses taught by people who never implemented a sys tem in an industrial setting. Most of their stuff was done in a scaled dow n lab where they may have been exposed to pieces n parts of robots of one s ort or another. My intro to control theory (set wayback machine to 1970s) was taught by a fellow from industry.

At another university the controls course was basically all classical theor y with more of an emphasis on applications and usage of real devices. Whil e we used matlab and simulink models, we applied the controllers to HIL lab s where real devices were used. Students learned the difference between id eal math models, more detailed math models, and realities of real devices.

In one syllabus I was forced to use, a PID controller was never discussed f ormally. I gave it out as extra credit reading and analysis. In another course, after learning about first and second order DE's we taug ht the basics of PID controllers and what happens when controllers are impl emented digitally. I taught the standard root locus, pole placement techniq ues, etc. of classical control.

So the answer to your question is 'it depends'... Unless you take courses in 'embedded systems' one hardly ever sees real dev ices. In my experience, 'software types' out of college have no clue about realit ies and rely on tutoring by someone else - unless it is a stove piped type of org in which case, a spec is thrown over the wall with instructions to ' program this module'....and off they go. I've seen sooo many problems caus e by this over the years and it still continues. J

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Really??? I'll throw my hat in the ring. Successfully eh? I bet they got tripped up by the issues associated with discretization of an analog model . Yes, numbers in digital computers can and do roll over causing amusing r esults when integral windup all of a sudden becomes negative. Then there i s always the sampling time jitter caused by numerous task scheduling and ba dly done scheduling analysis. Oh, we'll just throw a few digital filters at it...that just made it worse....lol yes, Nyquist criteria must be paid at tention to....

There are a few fun corner cases: bumpless transfer, slew windup, various bits saturating, nonlinearities, things like that.

The "d" part of PID is usually bad news.

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ery different world.

evelopment by both politicians and non-politicians, often more than one sou rce & stage of input there.

It is *exactly* that simple because the politicians are selected by the vot ers. So no one has anyone to blame but themselves for voting without think ing.

genie and each one turns out poorly because he didn't think it through. Th en people want to blame the genie.

anigans is beyond silly.

Not just you, all voters. That's what a democracy is, run by the voters. You can say we vote for someone else to do the job, but that's like saying you couldn't do anything about the crappy way your lawn mowing service mows your lawn. YOU selected them and YOU keep selecting the same ones.

Your argument is just a way of avoiding responsibility for being a CRAPPY V OTER and not doing YOUR JOB!

eally understand what they're making policies on.

LOL! But we keep electing the same ignoramuses?

--

  Rick C. 

  ---+ Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  ---+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

Yes, the voters are helpless against the people "who want to be in the publ ic eye". How could we ever resist their charms???

By not being idiots and letting every smooth talking flim-flam man talk us out of our life savings or worse.

If someone complained he didn't like the way his car chewed up tires even t hough there were numerous law suits about it when he bought his car, he wou ld be skewered for not checking into the car before he bought.

But politician are exempt from getting any real scrutiny other than what th e press might dig up which is more about ratings than information.

This isn't about an issue. This is about selecting politicians who have a history of proper guidance. But the same rules apply. Because people don' t want to be bothered with thinking, they let the politicians use advertisi ng to promote "messages" that make us feel good or bad (depending on whethe r they are talking about themselves or others). We govern our governors by our feelings, not our heads.

It's not hard to tell who is who.

Yep, the laws need to be changed, but we have the Supreme Court working aga inst us.

--

  Rick C. 

  --+- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  --+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

Obviously you've never heard of a little company called Westinghouse.

--

  Rick C. 

  --++ Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  --++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

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ing works. It just has to sell and not have too many duds be returned.

Consumer products are always guaranteed to work, or your money back.

--

  Rick C. 

  -+-- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  -+-- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

The indentation thing is really bizarre. What's wrong with END IF and NEXT? I suppose I could add my own as comments.

There are versions of the Forth language where they use color to indicate c ertain types and such. Comments are one color, definition names are anothe r, words compiled into a definition are another and words to be immediately executed are another. Color is added by special buttons/commands, whateve r you want to call them. In essence the keyboard is remapped and many keys are used for commands.

The language as a whole works very differently from procedural languages, b ut is very effective and efficient. Unfortunately most people who even bot her to look at it can't get their heads around it and so never see the adva ntages.

--

  Rick C. 

  -+-+ Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging 
  -+-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209