I thought it was sipping Russian River Ale at Zeitgeist ...
[...]-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
I can burn databooks!
John
Banks still use COBOL. Accounting types can program in COBOL, which is really the point: a language that allows accountants to code applications is a far better idea than trying to get a bored C++ programmer to understand accounting. The three best programmers I know were *not* formally educated as programmers.
It would take a combination of a new language and a new culture to get us past the mess that programming is today. A computing profession that does everything carefully, on time, and bug-free would look completely different from what's happening now.
Good reads:
"Dreaming in Code", about a group of world-class programmers who spent years working on a product that was mostly undefined.
"Showstopper!" about the coding of Windows NT.
John
It's the only biker bar I know of that has Chimay on tap.
John
Joerg! Do you realize that the people like you (and me, too) are the worse disaster to the economy then the dot coms altogether with the toxic mortgages? I doubt you can drink enough of beer to justify your existence as the member of the consumer society.
Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant
Oh, we do our part to keep the economy going. It's just that I'd rather spend my money at the Thai place of the Japanese restaurant or other local places than waste money on products with x1 design margins.
Or as my grandpa used to say, it doesn't pay to buy cheap stuff.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
You need to listen to one of the 'Bluegrass Underground' shows. It is a live performance 333 feet below ground in an natural stone amphitheater.
-- http://improve-usenet.org/index.html aioe.org, Goggle Groups, and Web TV users must request to be white listed, or I will not see your messages. If you have broadband, your ISP may have a NNTP news server included in your account: http://www.usenettools.net/ISP.htm There are two kinds of people on this earth: The crazy, and the insane. The first sign of insanity is denying that you\'re crazy.
You and John are talking past each other.
Me i use what language is needed, if the mandated language is not up to the task i say so.
Issues over pointers are red herrings.
They're concentrating on "low power" (what every laptop needs, right?) so the students naturally gravitate towards high-impedance designs...
Laptop designers seemed to have "un-learned" that as well. Until recently when the Intel Atom came out and (some) laptop designers "re-learned" the art. When Howard here in the NG mentioned the Samsung NC-10 and I saw it gets >6h, like my old Compaq Contura used to, I honored that laptop performance with an order. Seems others have done the same since I initially received a backorder notice despite the fact that "in stock" was mentioned. Should arrive in a few days :-)
I often encounter folks who are quite unfamiliar with the scheme of saving battery power via pulse action instead of high impedance. Students need to re-learn the old art of obtaining some of their wisdom from non-academic sources. I'd venture to say that >50% of the knowledge I use in my practice is from non-academic sources. App notes, Internet, ARRL books and such.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
On a sunny day (Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:39:13 -0800) it happened Joerg wrote in :
It seems the eeePC 701 will do over 5 hours with WiFi off and a 6600 mAh battery pack:
I'm told that the main reason those netbooks have a 1024x600 LCD is that -- unlike the older HP Mini 2133 -- Microsoft will only sell XP for "low end" machines that have no higher resolution nor more than 60? GB of storage and
1GB of RAM; everything with better specs has to run Vista.@#$#@$%#$%
(This is also the reason that most manufacturers advertise their Atom CPU-based netbooks as being available with "up to 1GB of RAM" even though in general they'll all happily accept a 2GB DIMM -- the maximum the hardware supports.)
You know how much we encourage all of you and Jim and John to write books. :-)
---Joel
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battery pack:
At a $100 or so premium AFAIR. In the Samsung that performance is standard and it supposedly reaches >7h. Probably longer with WLAN turned off.
Well, the Samsung clocked in under $500 and has a 160GB drive which comes in handy.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
Guess Samsung found a back road then because the HD on there is 160GB. Resolution probably has to do with the form factor. I am not too thrilled about the 600 vertical pixels either because it might mean I can't easily run Linux in VirtualBox on there. Oh well, can't help it, the netbooks are pretty much all like that.
I found 1GB under XP to be plenty for the typical EE-tasks on the road.
When we retire :-)
But seriously, there won't be much of an audience. I can't cater much to folks that run a uC to perform the job of a one-shot and stuff like that, and somehow that seems to become the majority these days. Those guys won't buy the book because it'll mostly contain non-digital stuff.
So maybe it'll be a web site and self-publication, free to the public. There comes a point where one has to give back to society. And still, this will pale compared to what volunteers at Hospice do. We were at their yearly memorial event yesterday and it amazed me what they do.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
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6hr batter life isn't the only design point for laptops. Many/most are being used as desktop replacements, so battery life is *maybe* a secondary parameter. In my case, two hours is good enough but I need high resolution, external display capability, large disk(s), and all the other stuff that used to be the sole domain of desktops. Sure, I'd like a three day battery, but I'm not going to give up any other aspects of my laptop to get it. In fact, newer laptops *are* better than those of five or six years ago, taking all of the parameters into account.The designers of these devices are well aware of these power-saving schemes, and far more. It's a matter of design (and that necessarily means marketing) priorities.
This stuff is standard design practice. There aren't any secrets here. The processor datasheets lay it all out. Do not, however that a given computation has a minimum power requirement. If you draw that time out (your "pulse action") you only waste more energy.
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Well, for desktop jobs in the office I use ... a desktop.
When I see a fan and hot air coming out of a laptop no matter what you set in the "energy management" tab I do have my doubts here. For example, the old Compaq could throttle the uP down to a few MHz. That's how they got 6h out of a standard old-tech NiCd. For years. Until all the rough flights and nail-it-to-the-runway landings caused the frame of this laptop to fracture :-(
Sometimes it's necessary that engineers question decisions by marketing. Got to be careful here, since I married a marketeer ;-)
That's what I thought as well, that folks know this. But, example: "Don't you have to keep the bridge current running until you are sure the uC code has finished and can read the ADC?" ... "No, the value is being stored." ... "But it can't be, the code may not have gotten to that point." ... "See that 74HC4051 there? It's set up as track-and-hold so the value will be stored in the film cap over there." ... "Oh."
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
That's simple - just get one who's lactating. ;-)
Cheers! Rich
The full story turns out to be, "...it used to be 80GB [not the 60GB I guessed/wrote], and MS recently doubled it to 160GB."
Personally the hard drive size is the least of my worries... I'd be quite happy with 40GB for a netbook; the screen resolution limitation is much more irksome.
Agreed, I just find it annoying that manufacturers go so far as to misrepresent their hardware's capabilities so as to make Microsquish happy.
That's OK... contact Newnes, they'll publish anything. :-)
And at least PDF stick around forever. Hopefully those old books by the likes of Terman and Guillemin will be scanned before all the printed copies are gone!
Yeah, but it doesn't seem like you really need much of a market. Check out, "Intuitive Analog Circuit Design" by Marc Thompson
"...it walks the reader through formulas a circuit designer would hardly ever use, except when in school..." (Well, actually, no, people doing more advanced circuit design still run through those time constant calculations and lots of basic algebra... check out Jim's web site...) "If you need to learn how to design analog circuits, there are many "cook books" out there to get the job done fast." (Ah, now we see what he's really after -- not wanting to learn how to actually *design* at all, but wanting a cookbook...)
(And who the heck is Marc Thompson anyway? Turns out he's a professor at WPI, went to MIT...)
I doubt he's getting rich off of book royalties. :-)
Cool, that's great.
Volunteering to work at a hospice clearly has very direct benefits, which is great... but don't sell yourself short on the good that, e.g., your work on ultrasound machines over the years has done as well: The indirect benefit could easily be plenty of babies' lives saved, tumors discovered early enough for successful treatment, etc.
---Joel
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Don't know about you, but mine is difficult to carry. Trust me, you are the oddity. ;-)
I don't have any doubts. People *use* laptops and demand desktop performance from them. Guess what, that takes power no matter how you (time) slice it.
Question all you want, the answer is the same. Customers demand performance. Laptops aren't toys anymore. Few use both laptops and desktops anymore. They take their work with them. Licensing agreements don't help but data isn't all that portable either.
How much of that is going on inside your laptop?
Don't forget, MS is also seeing some pressure from the industry. Along the lines of "Look, you guys have badly screwed up with Vista and we are simply not buying this piece of #%@&!" I don't think Gates or whoever runs the place now was very enthused last month when the Dell flyer with the rock-bottom priced Mini-9 and Ubuntu on there came out.
It's like minimum advertized prices, there's ways around it :-)
As a last resort there'll always be the Library of Congress, hopefully.
You can see that trend in many appnotes these days. Scant data, swaths of it plain missing, followed by cookbook style layout and part lists. Take this, that and the other thing, hit enter, and voila, there's the complete XYZ gizmo. I find more and more that engineers become really lost the instant they need to deviate from the app note ever so slightly. But oh well, that's part of my income now 8-D
The best was an experimental device (not at liberty to tell, yet) where a guy in Europe signed his life away on the usual waiver because there was nothing else medicine could do for him anymore until imminent death would strike. Pretty much 100% disabled and failing, fast. Afterwards he did something he'd never dream of, dusted off his racing bike and got back into the swing of things.
Still this is nothing compared to personal care for the dying. My wife and I do that as lay caregivers for church (my wife a lot more than me). It is very taxing emotionally. Some of the hospice caregivers yesterday broke into tears when they read out the name of one they had cared for.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
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