cool article, interesting quote

I had just the opposite problem when I bought a new pickup truck in the early '80s. I walked up to the salesman and asked, "Do you have any red pickups in stock" He gave me an odd look and asked, "Do you want air conditioning and power steering?" I said, "I'm looking foe a RED pickup truck, do you have any?" as I sat down. He asked, "Do you want an automatic transmission and the sports package?" I asked him one more time, "Do you have ANY RED pickup trucks in stock? A simple yes or no. If you don't, you are just wasting my time." He gave me a very confused look and asked, "Is the color really that important?" I just stood up and turned to leave. He said "Wait! Yes we've got a couple, but I've never met anyone who was so insistent on getting a color before." He showed me two trucks, and I bought the second one. BTW, red has always been my favorite color, and I've owned more red vehicles than any other color.

Thanks for the links. Only Omega specs current compliance, 2 mA. We are going for all the voltage and current we can pack into it... you never know what people would want to simulate. It's not clear if these gadgets can sweep resistance smoothly, or can handle AC excitation.

Actually, you don't source a voltage as much as you sink one. If you do it the obvious way, the output stage becomes an opamp with voltage swing and current capability equal to the gadget's spec'd compliance range. And if the customer applies +X volts, we have to dump it into our -Y power rail, dissipating I * (X+Y) watts. That compromises the ohms/volts/watts compliance spec, especially for an isolated, multi-channel board. It would be better to just give the customer his own current back, ie use a variable sink to floating ground, not an opamp that works off bipolar rails. Now the trick is to make such a sink fast, bipolar, smooth, and super wide range. We have circuits, but they are too components-rich for our taste.

John

Who says we never learn anything with these off-topic political threads?

Regarding your comments to the links I gave - I'm sure they are not all entirely objective, and I haven't done any extra checking. They were quickly collected to give an overview and some examples and ideas for further thought.

I don't know how to solve America's problems, and I don't know whether it would be best with more government or less. All I can see is that the government you have is not helping with these problems, and has in general made them worse in recent times.

Just for comparison, look at countries like those in Scandinavia. Here we have far more government, higher taxes, and more social programs than in the USA. Sometimes it can be a bit much (Norway has been described as the last Soviet state in reference to its overwhelming bureaucracy), but they are near the top of all surveys of the best places to live.

Of course, this is more a matter of the society and culture of the country, of which the government is only one part.

One of the problems with relays - there are many - is that resistance steps glitch badly. If he's simulating inputs to a system that, say, trips a shutdown at 300C, he'd like to creep up on the trip point to verify its accuracy. He can't do that if the transition from 295 to

And I've never known reed relays to be reliable, despite their claims.

John

I'm here and tend to believe he's not that far off the mark.

Our health-care system is FUBAR ever since the Feds started messing with it, supposedly to improve it. "I'm from the Government and I'm here to help."

Our educational system has deteriorated badly ever since the Feds got involved and started shovelling money at it.

Around here, it's amazing how many cars and trucks are grey or silverish these days. You can see a whole block of vehicles all the same shades of drab. And they're mostly the same color and albedo as asphalt, so they're invisible as they sneak up on you.

John

Because Jim has neocon brain-lock. What a waste! )-;

Cheers! Rich

The French colonial empire existed into the 1960's.

How about this...

"The year before independence in 1956, Southern Sudan embarked upon a civil war. During British rule, it was illegal for people living above the 10th parallel to go further south and people above the 8th parallel further north. The law was enacted to prevent the spread of malaria and other tropical diseases that had ravaged British troops. The resulting isolation between Northeners and Southerners and the conflicts of interest that ensued, among other reasons, sparked 17 years of civil war from 1955 to 1972."

And, from today's SF Chronicle...

"The World Food Program, the U.N. agency responsible for feeding 3 million people affected by the conflict in Darfur, in western Sudan, announced Friday that it would cut in half the amount of food it distributed there because it was short of money.

The food program said it had received just a third of the $746 million it had requested from donor nations for all of its operations in Sudan. As a result, individual rations that include grain, beans, oil, sugar and salt for people in Darfur, where a brutal ethnic and political conflict has raged since 2003, will be reduced from 2,100 calories a day to 1,050 calories -- about half the level the agency recommends.

In recent days, Bush administration officials have repeatedly noted that the United States provides 85 percent of the food aid for the millions of displaced people in Darfur."

It seems to me that Europe is hiding from its past, partly to save money in the present. Europe has always been about money. Europeans hate Bush, among other reasons, because they fear that he has and acts on principles. They lived Clinton.

John

Right. The US is mostly populated by self-selected restless, ambitious, authority-hating rebels. The people who least fit into the prevaling culture are the Native Americans and the former slaves (thanks, England!) who did not self-select in the same manner. Even today, even the illegal immigrants mostly get to work and don't complain about the system.

Scandanivia would bore me to death, and I couldn't possibly start and run a company in the face of all their regulation and taxation. I have friends in Europe, force-retired from the tech industry, who would love to start a small company but can't. It took me a couple of hours and some modest fees to incorporate my business, and the government pretty much leaves us alone. Hell, I'd be in trouble if all the US regulations were actually enforced, which fortunately they aren't.

"Problems" are relative. The USA is healthy, vigorous, adaptive, and a lot of fun, and it's absorbing tens of millions of immigrants and integrating them *very well* into the culture, and adapting the culture to them in return. Sure, it's wilder and more dangerous than Denmark, but that's the way we are. All the really crazy Danes are here now.

Enough politics, time for an oyster and bacon sandwich at the Ferry Building.

John

I'd like for those fundies to show me where in the Bible Jesus says, "Kill your enemies".

Thanks, Rich

The clunky switches in precision resistance boxes have always worked nicely for me, glitch-wise, but they're a little difficult to automate.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Are those old GR boxes monotonic? I'll have to check one.

John

You see some of those gray or silver colored vehicles here in Florida. Most of them have dents because people didn't see them. White is the big color around here. :(

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Putting anything into space is a majority subset of the problems of putting men into space. Besides i like some of the spin offs like, many advances in electronic components, satellite TV, Corelle (TM), and freeze dried foods to mention a directly traceable few.

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Aye, but they recorded lots of data and compared it with the earlier simulations and learned a bunch. They also used the data to improve the simulation software along the way to Apollo 13. the improved simulators were used for the shuttle program and taken with proper skepticism.

You mean immigrants?

I'm a Native American (Burlington, Vt, 1947), and I don'r believe there any any former slaves still living.

Everybody here is an immigrant or descended from one.

Right. And there are probably only a few pure Native Americans here. Interbreeding is another characteristic of US culture.

John

Come on, there was no Burlington VT in 1947. ...at least none with paved streets (they don't exist now! ;-). ...although we haven't ventured down to that hole in a couple of years.