Re: Smith Chart Amusements

"Joerg" <notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:xQ1%j.2535$N87.591@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
It was not that long ago and it was a high-end ultrasound company. Still is,
just under different ownership. Some have tried but no other company was
ever able to copy our products.

If the company had a decent number of true "design" engineers (as opposed to
"copy and paste the data ***'s example circuit, possibly with some minor
tweaking"), I'm not surprised... such companies are unusual, as far as I can
tell, and difficult to compete with.

A lot of stuff we wrote ourselves. Had to. IIRC MatLab was pretty much the
most expensive program we used.

If you purchase enough toolkits you can readliy push Matlab over the $10k mark
these days.

Matlab is a good tool, although (as you alluded to) if you're looking to avoid
spending Big Bucks and either don't need the toolboxes or can readily program
them yourself, something like Python, NymPy, and Matplotlib make a compelling
alternative. I believe someone posted this link -->
http://vnoel.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/bye-matlab-hello-python-thanks-sage/
....discussing SAGE, which packages up a bunch of the Python libraries to make
it easy to transition.

Well, the MRP cost us a whole lot more than $10k.

Sure seems to me that building your own MRP system is a lot easier than
building a cutting-edge ultrasound machine...

OO is kind of ok but very bloated and not nearly as fast and robust as older
versions of MS-Office.

You're supposed to compare it to the current version of Office. No fair
comparing it to older Microsoft software that was faster, more stable, but
didn't have as many bells and whistles... 99+% of which are never used! :-)
(What are you using, Office '97? I owned a copy of that and it worked pretty
darned well...)

I like the 2nd part of his story best :-)

I figured you would! It's written a little oddly, although I expect he did so
purposely, and the writing style is effective.

That candidate may be happy that I wasn't the interviewer. I'd ask him how
to squeeze a little more bandwidth out of this or that amp and then hand him
my HP-11C.

The bandwidth question is fair game, although hopefully you wouldn't mind if
they pulled out their HP-48GX or newer calculator and crunched numbers a bit
faster than what the 11C allows. :-)

That, plus the Zout of a stage if often much lower than thought. One prof at
our university thought all big radio transmitters had a Zout of 50ohms and
he even taught that. Seriously!

Yikes... that is a bit scary!

---Joel


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