Re: OT: Why welfare doesn't work!

On Sep 11, 6:40 pm, "Michael A. Terrell" <mike.terr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:

On Sep 11, 3:20 am, "Michael A. Terrell" <mike.terr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:

Poor baby, you're just full of excuses.  No one will hire you because
you're incompetent.  Face up to it, go over and sit in the corner and
suck your thumb ;-)

Jim-out-of-touch-reality-Thompson thinks I'm not being hired because
I'm incompetent. When he expresses an opinion outside of electronic
design he's wrong almost all the time, and he's failed to get it right
this time too.

   This is another example of why people give you so much ***. You
can't just say you disagree with Jim, you have to be the biggest ***
on the newsgroup about it.

There's a lot of competition for the that particular honour. Jim's a
leading contender - nobody else admits to having reported one of us to
the FBI for "danagerously anti-American" attitudes.

  I'm sure you America bashing posts had already been detected by more
than one government agency.

Even the dimmest of the US government agencies wouldn't be silly
enough to regard my kind of America-bashing as any kind of threat. You
and Jim can't afford to be a little less realistic.

Your contributions
about my career are pathetic exercises in malicious imaginative
fiction, so you don't really compete. Phil Allison is seriously
obnoxious, but since he doesn't seem to be actively malicious - as Jim
is - he's has to settle for second place.

   Don't sell yourself short.  Phil is only a contender, when compared
to your level of being obnoxious.

You may think so. Your opinion isn't exactly definitive.

Jim is working.

Lucky him.

You aren't.

I've noticed.

   So have we, and all your prospective employers who did a search on
your name.  Then they saw the real you, and didn't hire you.

You do enjoy your little fantasies.

Jim is working state of the art.

Barry Gilbert and Geoff Widlar comes a lot closer to defining the
state of the art. Jim works for people who can't afford to have
someone that good on the staff. I've used a few of Jim's designs, and
dumped them gratefully when someone else did the job right.

   And you use you pink and purple UFO to visit 'Nessie' every day.  One
of Earl Schibe's best paint jobs, BTW.

You do enjoy your little fantasies. You don't find reality nearly as
satisfying.

You barely remember the art.  Every time you post
another attack on someone's skills, it shows how little you are capable
of comprehending, these days.

As if Mike Terrell would know. He does technician's engineer-envy to
perfection, with the obligatory element of not knowing what is
actually going on - as evidenmced by his adulation of Jim's journeyman
skills.

   Yawn. I didn't envy the engineers. In fact, I despised some of them
for releasing half finished designs to the floor. That was why I was
transferred to the engineering department before their first DSP based
design was released to production.  The design worked, but was a
nightmare to build and test.  My job was to fix that, and I did it.  I
pissed off some of the older engineers, but the manufacturing engineers
backed me up, and the production, and test departments were pleased with
the changes.  Some of the engineers were top notch, and others reminded
me of you.  They were the ones let go in the first layoffs.

I'm no fan of sloppy engineers either, and I've done my fair share of
cleaning up after them. Your ever-complaisant imagnation tells you
that I was one of them. Enjoy your little fantasy.

   I knew some of our other products better than the current engineers
did. I wrote so many request for engineering change orders on them that
I was banned from engineering.  It lasted a whole two days before they
needed help on one of those products.

I'm sure that quite a few of your engineering change orders were on
the money when it came to identify that there was a problem. Very few
of the engineering change orders I had to process managed to propose a
change which would have solved the problem identified, but you might
have done better than average.

Rather than ask questions about new technology, you drone on about the antiques you worked
on.  How often do they sell a brand new Electron Microscope built on a 35 year old
design?

I was working at Cambridge Instruments when they revolutionised
scanning electron microscope design by using a computer - eventually a
PC - to do the detailed knob-twiddling. That was around 1985, some 23
years ago now. I am aware that thing have changed since then, as you'd
know if you could understand the technical stuff that I do post.

   Don't flatter yourself, Bill. Your idea of technical 'stuff' is a
sick joke.  Computer controlled instrumentation is the norm, these days..

It was pretty common back then, but electron microscopes are tolerably
complicated beasts with some nasty habits - when the 30kV voltage at
the cathode happens to flash over to ground you get big currents
circulating through the ground connections. Making sure that this was
non-destructive wasn't entirely trivial.

If anyone is out of touch with reality it's you, for thinking
your outdated skills still matter.  You should join one of the European
antique radio newsgroups. There you might find someone who appreciates
your out of date skills.

I got into electronics when planar transistors had become cheap and
widely available, used one of the first MOSFETs to go on the market,
and went on to take advantage of every new development I could lay my
hands on. My most marketable skill has always been finding new ways to
solve problems, and that is a skill that isn't likely to go out of
date.

   I 'got into' electronics when it was mostly tube, but made the
transition to solid state by reading the used EE college textbooks I
picked up at thrift stores. A lot of the engineers I've worked with
wanted to know why I didn't have a degree.  I spotted problems, and
provided the solutions, rather than just whine about something not
working.

The Peltier-junction-based thermostat I put together in 1993 was the
first published design to use a microcontroller to deal with the
control problem posed by the fact that the watt-per-amp efficacy of a
Peltier junction changes with the temperature difference across it.
Jim Williams' subsequent application note for the LTC1923 refers to
the problem, but doesn't include the equation to work out what the
efficacy actually is (as my paper did - and I had to derive it for
myself, not that it was all that complicated to do). I still hope to
get a chance to do something else equally interesting.

Not that you'd have clue about what I'm talking about.

   Yawn.  Tell everything you know me about DSP based diversity
telemetry receivers, the FIR filters, the firmware, or the digital
spectrum display that was mostly software based.  How about the 90 MHz
A/D converters that followed the analog microwave tuners?  Ever design
one?  FWIW, have you ever even seen one?  that receiver had over a dozen
processors doing various jobs.

I've not yet worked on telemety receivers. The multiphase stroboscopic
electron microscope I worked on from 1988 to 1993 did incorporate a
fast 8-bit A/D converter. It was a nominally 100MHz part, though we
didn't run it faster than 50MHz, limited mainly by the ECL-based
digital signal processing hardware that I specified and whose design
and development I supervised. The timing side of the system ran much
faster, with an 800MHz clock for coarse timing and analog
interpolation to get us down to 10psec increments (though the jitter
on the 800MHz clock that actually worked meant that this was never all
that useful on the prototype).

   You played with a simple electronic cooler.  Was it certified for
space applications, or approved by NASA for life critical missions?

No. It just went into hospitals and biology labs. And it wasn't a
cooler, but a thermostat - we needed 0.01 degree (Celcius) stability,
and we got +/-0.001C. And we had to do both heating and cooling to
stabilise the samples at various temperatures from 38C (body
temperature) down to about 10C, though US and European room
temperatures (25C and 20C) were the most popular. That temperature
range made the variation in the efficacy of the Peltier junction an
issue that did have to be dealt with.

Like I said, you haven't got a clue.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen


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