Re: USB microscopes for very small SMT

Joel Koltner wrote:
"Joerg" <notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:C5e%k.7881$as4.5007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Guess Samsung found a back road then because the HD on there is 160GB.

The full story turns out to be, "...it used to be 80GB [not the 60GB I guessed/wrote], and MS recently doubled it to 160GB."


Don't forget, MS is also seeing some pressure from the industry. Along the lines of "Look, you guys have badly screwed up with Vista and we are simply not buying this piece of #%@&!" I don't think Gates or whoever runs the place now was very enthused last month when the Dell flyer with the rock-bottom priced Mini-9 and Ubuntu on there came out.


Personally the hard drive size is the least of my worries... I'd be quite happy with 40GB for a netbook; the screen resolution limitation is much more irksome.

I found 1GB under XP to be plenty for the typical EE-tasks on the road.

Agreed, I just find it annoying that manufacturers go so far as to misrepresent their hardware's capabilities so as to make Microsquish happy.


It's like minimum advertized prices, there's ways around it :-)


But seriously, there won't be much of an audience.

That's OK... contact Newnes, they'll publish anything. :-)

And at least PDF stick around forever. Hopefully those old books by the likes of Terman and Guillemin will be scanned before all the printed copies are gone!


As a last resort there'll always be the Library of Congress, hopefully.


I can't cater much to folks that run a uC to perform the job of a one-shot and stuff like that, and somehow that seems to become the majority these days.

Yeah, but it doesn't seem like you really need much of a market. Check out, "Intuitive Analog Circuit Design" by Marc Thompson (http://www.amazon.com/Intuitive-Analog-Circuit-Design-Thompson/dp/0750677864)... it's been around for two-and-a-half years, and has all of 3 reviews: A good one, one where the guy gripes the title is inaccurate (OK, fine, "intuitive" is a very subjective thing), and another where the guy completely misses the point of the book, saying:

"...it walks the reader through formulas a circuit designer would hardly ever use, except when in school..." (Well, actually, no, people doing more advanced circuit design still run through those time constant calculations and lots of basic algebra... check out Jim's web site...)
"If you need to learn how to design analog circuits, there are many "cook books" out there to get the job done fast." (Ah, now we see what he's really after -- not wanting to learn how to actually *design* at all, but wanting a cookbook...)

(And who the heck is Marc Thompson anyway? Turns out he's a professor at WPI, went to MIT...)

I doubt he's getting rich off of book royalties. :-)


You can see that trend in many appnotes these days. Scant data, swaths of it plain missing, followed by cookbook style layout and part lists. Take this, that and the other thing, hit enter, and voila, there's the complete XYZ gizmo. I find more and more that engineers become really lost the instant they need to deviate from the app note ever so slightly. But oh well, that's part of my income now 8-D


So maybe it'll be a web site and self-publication, free to the public.

Cool, that's great.

There comes a point where one has to give back to society. And still, this will pale compared to what volunteers at Hospice do. We were at their yearly memorial event yesterday and it amazed me what they do.

Volunteering to work at a hospice clearly has very direct benefits, which is great... but don't sell yourself short on the good that, e.g., your work on ultrasound machines over the years has done as well: The indirect benefit could easily be plenty of babies' lives saved, tumors discovered early enough for successful treatment, etc.


The best was an experimental device (not at liberty to tell, yet) where a guy in Europe signed his life away on the usual waiver because there was nothing else medicine could do for him anymore until imminent death would strike. Pretty much 100% disabled and failing, fast. Afterwards he did something he'd never dream of, dusted off his racing bike and got back into the swing of things.

Still this is nothing compared to personal care for the dying. My wife and I do that as lay caregivers for church (my wife a lot more than me). It is very taxing emotionally. Some of the hospice caregivers yesterday broke into tears when they read out the name of one they had cared for.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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