That's just a dumb observation resulting from the fact that you don't know about anything else. Those professions could just as easily view your so-called profession as repetitive too: just one little gizmo after another.
Naaaah! Just one little bloviation after another >:-} ...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Dumb story by and for idiots... Dumb people take forever and a day to do anything, so of course they have to work all the time. Let the lifeless damned fools burn themselves out and go to an early grave, good riddance.
On a sunny day (Sun, 03 Nov 2013 10:28:30 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
Well, that may have happened if the C program was written by a power basic fan :-)
BASIC stands for beginner, the C syntax is actually one of the simplest in existence. Much more flexible and extendible than any basic.
Real C programmers do not use BASIC.
I even find asm easier than BASIC, and given the fact that there are a zillion and a half versions of BASIC all with different syntax and extensions, C is a lot simpler.
And portability, Power Basic only on x86 I suppose. Not much help of for example a Raspberry Pi.
And libraries, libraries,, to do anything.
The old BASICs had line numbers, you always ran out of space between line numbers. power dinges probably has no line numbers and tries to imitate a real language. Maybe it even has labels,
The more I hear about it the more I want C, Power thing is not even free, I have gcc and a zillion libs for free and plenty of good open source software to study and link to.
I never design anything twice, and I'm usually learning and designing stuff that I never did before. I don't think that the jobs that I named have a tenth of the variety that electronic design has, many not a hundredth. What sort of change or freedom is there for a Safeway stock clerk or someone assembling doors in a factory? For a truck driver? A waiter?
I'm currently designing, and learning about, bar laser drivers, aircraft sensor simulators, and high-speed UV photodetector amps. On Friday I did a bunch of experiments on conduction cooling, and worked with people on machining some optical stuff. This stuff is fun, especially if you push yourself into new applications.
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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
People who do creative stuff often get a lot done in intense bursts, often short bursts. Those things don't happen on schedules. This "grazing" sort of work/play mix works for lots of people.
I know too many people who work 8 hour days, with almost every minute pre-planned. It takes a week to schedule a call with them. How can they do anything creative if they have no unstructured time?
Early grave? Fun work and fun play keep you young. Lots of people retire and soon die.
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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
No, it was written by a high-power C programmer, with pointers. I did the same math in PB, with subscripts, first try. Eventually he tweaked the compiler options and got to within 20% of the PowerBasic speed, but it took some work.
Of course not. And they write bloatware if they try.
Yes. They have threatened to do a linux version forever. I haven't tried using a Windows emulator to run PB on Linux. I mostly use Windows for engineering, since so many apps are available.
It ahs all the modern block constructs, so you don't even need labels if you want to write c-looking code. I think in state machines, so I like to write flat structures with labels and GOTOs, classic spaghetti code, everything global.
I'm a hardware designed, not a programmer. I want to write engineering apps now and then, with a simple user interface, lots of math [1], some graphics and file i/o, some serial i/o and TCP/IP maybe. That's really easy in PowerBasic. I have people to do big embedded c apps.
I have written maybe a million lines of assembly code, scores of embedded apps and three RTOSs, for PDP-11 and 68K and 8-bitters and one CPU that I designed myself. I'd rather do analog design, draw rather than type.
I was talking to a guy on Friday, a Fellow with United Technologies, who was trying to persuade me to program in c. I explained to him that I don't want to be a serious programmer and that I get depressed if I code for over a week. He said that he gets depressed if he doesn't code for a week.
[1] I've noted that most "serious" programmers know, and do, very little actual mathematics. I have to explain that part to them.
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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
On a sunny day (Sun, 03 Nov 2013 11:39:35 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
Yes, but these days nothing goes without code, a lot of filtering stuff is all done in software or some HDL.
Well I do not care, hardware software, as long as it does what it needs to do. What can be done in software should be, as it is usually cheaper, but time constraints may make one buy a dedicated chip. Programming takes a lot of time.
Sometimes I have thought that programming languages and math are just different ways, maybe even languages, to describe a solution.
Mathematicians write math that is sometimes really difficult to understand in the way of translating into code. I don't if mathematicians can read code....
I think (and I did have quite a bit of math, as I think anybody who studied electronics) the problem is not the math, but to solve some practical problem. I had that last week solving some navigation problem, after 4 sheets of paper with math, and being perfectly able to solve it logically, I realized I should write the code the way I think. Then I spend an hour figuring what was faster, the mathematical way and then code that, or my way, and I still don't know, but I do know my code is more than fast enough so a solution exists. In this case I am sure a mathematician might say: "Hey you can do this and this", but not even sure that would not takes more processor cycles (instructions) to code. Logic Mr Spock, logic,
To steer an airplane, keep speed, altitude, heading, are 3 PID problems all working at once. With all sort of variables and unknowns (think external forces, wind etc).
Maybe a neural net would work too. And yes you can describe a neural net mathematically, but running your mathematical model of it to solve the real time problem may just be way to slow...
I notice I am developing some more interest in math now I am older... I guess when you get very old and cannot move it may be the only thing you can do, like professor Hawkins...
:-) But for now I use math, programming, soldering iron, all as ingredients.
One project that I'm doing now, a photonic thing, has *no* code. It's all analog. The filters are LCs. Refreshing. Of course, I did a bunch of simulation, but that's graphical, too.
Yes. And supporting programming is a hassle. You have to archive all the sources, compilers, scripts, and other tools, so that someone can come along four years from now and be able to understand it, change it, rebuild it.
Most programming is qualitative, and some of the best-paid programmers know basically nothing about physics, math, electronics, or how computers work.
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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
I lasted exactly one day on a production line. Any more and I would probably have gone berserk and started throwing things. I could probably have forced myself to do repetitive work, but not for very long, and certainly not for a lifetime.
That's not for me to judge. By the standard definition of IQ, I'm not particularly intelligent. It's just that I make better use of what I have than most people. I also can't generalize and claim that high IQ people are more easily bored, or that lower IQ people do better at repetitive tasks. I've seen as many exceptions to these generalizations as the rules.
What I'm suggesting is that the concept of finding a single profession, job, job function, career path, or whatever, might not be the best approach. For those that are easily bored, I believe it's better to entertain a variety of professions, jobs, functions, careers, sometimes simultaneously, than to select one and stay with it for the rest of one's life. A clue is the large number of retired seniors, that go into various part time jobs and professions. I've noticed that few of these jobs and professions have anything to do with their previous jobs and professions. Another clue is the common complains about marriage boredom. Whether married to a person or a job, the long term requirements are similar.
That's possible, but I don't have a clue if that's happening. One persons idea of variety might be changing hands while performing some task. Others, including me, might be redesigning the product to make it easier to build. There's quite a large range of variety and creativity available between these extremes.
I've also seen a few accidents on the production line caused by excessive repetition. When something changes, some production line workers don't seem to recognize that something has changed, and will continue their repetitious behavior, even if it's dangerous. In 1989, we had an earthquake in the area. I was inside a shaky building at the time, and had to literally kick people out the door because they were incapable of understanding what was happening and reacting accordingly. I had to drag one lady away from her desk because she insisted on finishing some order entry while the building was shaking.
While playing production engineer on products I helped design, I would sometimes perform production line tasks in order to understand the problems and hopefully contrive better ways to do things. For short periods of time and a little practice, I could outperform most of the production line people, even while making changes as I went along. The difference was that making changes was creative and non-boring. Simply doing the work, was non-creative and probably boring.
That's the first step.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
If you want to try someday, try Wine; it is available in most popular Linux distributions and works fairly well these days. If your Windows application does lots of video or lights up every single piece of .Net, it probably won't work very well under Wine. Otherwise, it will probably work OK. Wine contains its own implementation of the Windows system calls; it doesn't use Microsoft's libraries.
I have a Windows application (written by someone else) running under Wine now; it's a "soft dem" that listens to the soundcard and decodes audio into bits. As far as I can tell, it's in Visual C++ with little or no .Net, and it works fine, running 24x7.
If the executables that Power Basic creates really don't need lots of libraries to run, they would probably run pretty well under Wine.
Understood. Wine is for when you need to be on Linux for whatever reason, but also want to run a Windows program or two. It's not a general solution for moving everything to Linux.
The original hunter gatherers had to work almost every day just to stay alive unless they got a particularly big kill that would feed them for more than one day. It was only when they had agriculture that there were real surpluses and time for more sophisticated cultures to develop.
They are called "zero hours contracts" over here.
The worst case ones the "employee" signs away all their rights and has to be available to work at a moments notice but has no promise of any income whatsoever or employee benefits from the company. Many of the companies using them are abusive of their largely unskilled workforce.
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Basically in a buyers marker the employers can play very hard ball.
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The extent of their use and abuse is a hot topic at the moment.
The good news with regular working hours is that some of your time is your own. I've noticed a tendency for clients to want me to be available 24/7. (I'm not.)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 USA
+1 845 480 2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
I could only dream that were true for me. It doesn't matter what's wrong or broken, my clients want and expect an immediate answer. If I don't respond at any random hour, they'll call someone else for assistance. My choice is to be awakened at odd hours, or lose the business.
The only problem is remembering what I promised after a post-midnight phone call. I've engaged in technical convesations essentially in my sleep, which I don't recall at all in the morning. Sleep working? I now record all my late night phone calls.
For a time, I was operating a tracking transmitter in my vehicle on my Droid-X2 phone using APRS: Customers could check a web page to locate my vehicle. The problem was that as soon as I drove near one of my customers locations, my cell phone would ring with an invitation to "drop in" and discuss a few things. That became sufficiently common and distruptive that I discontinued using the tracker.
One good thing about my interrupt driven work style is that it matches my total lack of organization and planning quite nicely.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Programmers will also use their fingers and toes, and move their lips as they count. Well, the shitty ones will. And they'll usually end up with the wrong count.
Most of them can only count to three anyway. CTRL-ALT-DEL.
I have a fairly low regard for I.T. folks in general, in case you missed that...
In college, a friend of mine sorted beer can lids at a manufacturing plant for extra money. Some bean counter figured out that for every malfunctioni ng pop-top on a can of beer, it cost the company x-dollars in future sales.
So they paid college kids to visually inspect the lids as they came off the production line. Talk about boring and repetitive! Wow. I could do that job for maybe 5 minutes, and probably more like two minutes. Russell was really good at it though - couple hundred lids per minute, at least. I gue ss you get good at it over time?
Nowadays - I'm guessing it's done by high speed cameras and a lot less huma n intervention.
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