Re: Sarah Palin - hot or not?

On Sat, 06 Sep 2008 01:27:54 -0700, StickThatInYourPipeAndSmokeIt
<Zarathustra@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:59:11 -0700, John Larkin
<jjlarkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:41:05 -0700, StickThatInYourPipeAndSmokeIt
<Zarathustra@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:57:52 -0700, John Larkin
<jjlarkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

are paged and formatted for paper, and I print them on 11x14
fanfold paper to review and tweak them. I read books.

It all works. It's all fun.

John


The "fanfold still in use" remark tells a lot.

I bet I've pushed $40 million worth of firmware through one of my NEC
matrix printers. Lots of ribbons have died for my sins. I go through
about a box of paper per firmware project, maybe more if it's a
biggie. Thing I just finished is about an inch thick; the listing is
137 pages, 7110 lines, including the table of contents. Monolithic
absolute assembly, Thing of Beauty.


It has only been a cut-*** world for about a decade.

Does your firm even have a decent all in one printing station from the
likes of Minolta, etc.?

HP color laser for manuals and mailings, HP B-size laser printer for
schematics, HP plotter for huge mechanical drawings, Sharp digital
copier/scanner/printer/collator/stapler, a couple of label printers
(good enough for short-run vinyl overlays), an NC cutter (for the
overlays), lots of little printers, a couple of NEC 11x14 fanfold
printers, a label maker for eproms and pld's.

I don't think we have any inkjets left. We do still have a blueline
machine for copying D-size vellums.

John

My first job in an engineering group was running fresh blueprints over
to the manufacturing building some 50 yards away. This is in New Jersey
(Northern), and the winters are pretty cold and snowy. I cranked a lot
of prints, and then I drew the updates, and then I began laying out foil
in 4X, and then it was with AutoCAD on a 286.

That was way back...


We are enormously more productive than we used to be. All the
datasheets and appnotes arrive in seconds instead of weeks. Spice and
other software speeds up design 10x or so. PCB cad lets us do stuff
that was incredibly difficult with tape, and a DR and connectivity
check takes 10 seconds instead of two people for two days. FPGAs and
uPs let us do incredibly complex stuff easily.

But the fact that I use paper, like for program listings, isn't
stupid. My embedded code, by the time it's debugged and released,
comes out better and faster than most peoples'. If the criterion is
bug-free and documented, most programmers never finish.

I've been doing this for a long time. I don't use a new tool unless
it's an obvious advantage over an existing one. LT Spice, PADS,
browsers, Appcad, PBCC, macro languages, RPN calculators, lots of
things are efficient, so make the cut. C++, Excel, SQL, Perl, lots of
things don't.

Whiteboards and digital cameras are fantastic... I just snap a sketch
off a board and email it to a customer... instant proposal!

But I can draw a schematic on vellum, and give it to my cad guy to
enter, a lot faster than I could cad it myself, largely because of
library issues and the small-screen thing. So I use still vellum. It
gets me away from the damned screen, too. Remember when engineers
actually used to move around? Most are glued to a screen all day now.

ftp://66.117.156.8/RainyDay.jpg

Tools are tools, not toys. Whatever works is a good tool. That's what
engineering is all about.

John


.

Quantcast