Interesting... You're correct that I haven't read a direct account of the story, I was going off of the mention in John Krauss's book, "Big Ear II." I'll have to take a look at it again to see exactly what he says. Thanks for the clarification.
---Joel
I tend to agree with you here, Kevin. I've worked at companies where they thought that anything and everything we did was highly unique and original and needed to be immediately 'protected' by patented and then being as vague about the workings as possible to the outside world, even to customers who had arguably legitimate reasons to want to know. (Questions like, "Can your system reliably detect a Wonka Bar at ten feet?" were answered either with, "Well, yes, of course I _think_ we can do that!" -- giving the presenter plausible deniability, despite what they actually knew as to the system's capabilities -- or else re-direction, towards, "Well, maybe, but isn't the real problem detecting key lime pie at twelve paces?")
I decided it was a matter of perspective. To you, Widlar doesn't merit much praise yet Einstein does. To all those business school guys running the company, the engineers are God-like and anything they do is magical.
I don't suppose you're picked up any of Ayn Rand's books to read???
---Joel Kolstad
I'm not even subscribed to .schematics, on my NG list as its always same shit, different day.
Like, you really think i'd fall flat on my face.
Tell you what though, if your so f*%^$ing clever, how about explaining to as all how I do this:
in only one spice run. Hint: its truly piss easy and trivial.
Get real.
Look dude, I think your objectivity is being lost because no one likes to think that what they do, don't qualify as outstanding in the big scheme of things. I'm in the same boat you know.
There's no chance in hell that you are goanna convince me that pissing about with a few transistors has a look in with regards to merit in comparison with corresponding attributes in physics. Its just the way it is. Many here should get off their high horse and accept that the only reasonable response to the notion of "a great circuit designer" is:
ROTFLMAO
We're simply not that important.
Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk
Of course it is... nothing you can't do in PSpice (as if it's needed anyway).
[PLONK]...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
So, provide the solution then if its so easy.
You obviously miss the point and don't understand the significance of the method. Its unique. All other methods that do this, to my knowledge are *optimisers*. i.e. require multiple runs to iterate out the result. My method actually designs the values in one go.
So, cut the crap. As I said, if your so clever, how did I do it? Avoiding the issue by pointing out that PSpice has some other method says nothing about *your* ability to solve the problem.
Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk
I just haven't seen much evidence for praising Widlar. Sure, he was probably a very good designer, but "great" is a word I don't use lightly. If I got to shag Heather Locklear, now that *would* be great.
Yep. I know a fair bit about the mans work. For example, his derivation of Brownian motion was amazingly significant. He done so much *really*
*original* stuff.
Not really. I am a little acquainted with her work though. On her site
So, setting the variation of the integral of happinness(t) wrt time to zero is my equation for life.
Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk
Depends on your reference. And therein lays the great US-EU divide.
-- Mike Page BEng(Hons) MIEE www.eclectic-web.co.uk
In principle, yes, everything is based on an arbitrary reference. However, in a practice many references are what most can all agree on. I cant see that any reasonable person would consider someone struggling to knock down a brick wall by bashing his head against it, as a particular good measure of that dudes merit.
Ahmmm..
Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk
That is non-sense, and your main problem is that you lack the intellect to recognize great intellect in others. You are oblivious to the fact that one of the main goals of any engineering science and practice is simplification- the speed of production and the quality of the finished product are directly tied to the simplicity and accuracy of the component tasks. Generally, complexity is equated with things going wrong, products being less reliable, products costing more, long development times, and a host of other problems. Simpler is better- and the best practitioners are those who can work within established constraints and eliminate the need for invention. You seem to be working with the assumption that engineers are people who were cut from a theoretical physics program and had to settle for their lowly jobs. THIS MAY BE YOUR STORY, but it's not the story of most engineers- for the majority of them, engineering was their first choice- and they're damned good at it.
Yes, this would be an ordinary commonplace accomplishment, merely the first one to do it, and certainly not great. :>)
Thanks, - Win
(email: use hill_at_rowland-dot-org for now)
Maybe if he smokes enough weed ?:-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Perhaps you'd care to share one or two of those with us? Or are they limited to Einstein?
-- Mike --
Well, Edison did a lot of work to get a working light bulb. There were many before him that were not unsuccessful (heh), but just couldn't get a light to keep working long enough to be practical. Edison's first attempts were like that, just not quite practical. But persistence paid off.
I gave a small list in another post
Dirac equation Compton scattering de Broglie wavelength Black body radiation law
Obviously, this is only opinion and open to debate, but somewhere along the line one has to be face facts. Some simple things have more merit than others, in the sense that some simple things might only be "invented" potentially by only a few, while millions might have invented say, a pet rock. We cant give weight to an "invention" that any tom dick and harry would have done if the background to that invention had only just become available. i.e. delayed windscreen wipers. Before cars existed, of course no one could invent them.
One of my points of my initial post is that there seems ro be this hero worship for some when the only real basis is that they were first, or maybe just respect for the dead:-)
Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk
Ho hum..
Oh dear...
Oh dear...
I suppose you learned this one this last week. Good for you.
ROTFLMAO.
Those that feel the need to state trivially obvious bits of information, are often those that have just learnt said information and now feel so "great" about repeating what we all know, in order to impress us that the now know such trivialities. It dont work. Trust me.
You are simply clueless on how, I, myself design circuits. If it aint simply, something is usually wrong, so I scrap it. Your simply way out on this one dude.
Don't you F*&^%ing understand I have been doing this for some while now. You think I'm gonna come up with a horrendously, redundant complicated circuit. Jesus wept dude. If I have a fault of irritation, its because I typically point out to how to effect such simplifications to others.
{snip rest of preaching to the converted}
Look mate..Read my lips... are you total incapable of understanding plain English.
First. Einstein. "Things should be as simple as possible...but no simpler"
I have already explained that *yes*, "simple" can indeed be a mark of merit. This is not at issue in the slightest. What is only at issue is what *particular* simple objects actually have reasonable intellectual merit. Most do not. e.g. pet rocks, skipping ropes..., current mirrors with one resister in one leg etc...
You are completely out to lunch. You are claiming and keep insisting, that *all* simply things have merit. You are wrong. This is not debatable.
working
There is no such assumption. The fact that you can make such a daft claim says much. I am not that stupid. Some of us have actually really researched these sorts of issues.
No chance. Ho humm...I never even considered doing physics in the slightest until I was about 25. I have been "designing" and building electronics stuff since I was 11. I started becoming more interested in physics *after* doing engineering and realising that it was same, shit different day.
Concerning the merits of physics, its a no contest that doing original work in physics is way above the league of doing original work in electronics. Those engineers that don't know this, are probably lying to themselves. No one likes to think that some other discipline is intrinsically harder then their own. This is the real world dude, not all disciplines are equal. Its that simple. The only debatable bit is what discipline in actuality, is harder to do than anaother.
Not I am not discussing merit in a human moralistic sense, as in are nurses worthier then engineers. I am discussing the technical ability one needs to excel at a particular discipline.
Get real... Only by default. Look, mate, you talking to someone who has actually been through the system. Most who do an EE degree, essentially picked it out of a hat. I *know*. Been there. For example, in my class of 30, there was litterally only 3 that had picked up a soldering iron prior to string the course, one was me.
- and they're damned
Complete and utter crap. Its nonsense. Its a statistically impossible situation. Its like all drivers honestly believe that they are better than average. Like did you even sit through 101 statistics?
We have a gaussian distribution. *Most* are around the mean. This is
*not* debatable, so you are wrong. That is, most are neither good or bad. They are *normal*. The "good" ones are say, at least 2 or 3 sigmas away from the mean. Ok, the actual sigma ratio is a bit arbitrary, but you should be getting my point, however, you show such a basic lack of understanding on this subject matter, that somehow I doubt it.Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk
Oh. I thought you were talking about simple results in engineering, not physics.
-- Mike --
You are the one who kept characterizing engineering as "simple"- the opposite of "simple" is "complex"- it is only natural then that I should mention "complex"- and remind you that is has little use in engineering.
A "good" engineer is one for whom the work is "simple"- if it's too "complex" for him then he's in over his head and no "good." So by your brain-damaged reasoning "good" engineers are no good, and no good engineers are "good."
This damned non-sense about intellectual merit of the work is a bunch of dumb crap for students, MENSA members, and others with arrested development. There was probably an equally huge number of equally worthless arm chair observers in the early 1960's whining about how simple the invention of the transistor was and at the same time praising Widlar's genius in designing a producible IC opamp as justification for doing nothing noteworthy themselves. Widlar's record is clear: HE WAS A MAJOR CATALYST IN LAUNCHING AN ENTIRE INDUSTRY- the likes of you wouldn't even be employed if people like him had not come along. And I don't give a damn about whether someone else *could have* done the same thing- Widlar did what Widlar did. Q.E.D.
Oh.. well there is Shannon's information theorem (H=BW.log (1+S/N)). Niquists stability plot is another one, as is the pole in rhp as unstable, is another. The butterworth filter also comes to mind, as do the other standard filters. All of these results actually have quite a lot of background to them, yet for example, anyone with with simple math can design and understand a butterworh filter.
Its hard to come up with simple, but *clever* circuits in electronics, because there arnt that many. That's my point. The early developers simply connected a few things up, essentially, at random, an analysed the results. The point here, is that the number of random
Pretty much all of the standard transistor configurations all fell out in the wash as soon as people actually became acquainted with the problems they were designed to solve (e.g. current mirrors, cascodes, diff pairs etc) because they are indeed *intrinsically* simple. This is in sharp contrast to ideas such as the Alcubierre warp drive (e.g. 1994,
As I have said, people often assume that just becuse something was first , it is a mark of "greatness". It isnt. The basic building block circuits of electronics, in my opinion, don't qualify for such greatness. Sure, someone had to come up with them, but just about anyone involved at the start of this field would indeed have come up with them if given the opportunity.
Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk
You're just not getting it, dimwit, and that statement above illustrates exactly what I'm talking about. You arrogant mental midgets who trivialize the work of the giants always say stupid things like that. The "complex things" of today are the "easy things" of tomorrow- and what it takes to make this come about is the first individual with insight to make it so. This will not be you- you are quite mediocre in that respect- as evidenced by your attitude, complacency, and delusions.
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