Ping John Larkin: Question on MAX
in [Design]
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From: Joerg on 1 Jun 2010 11:24 krw(a)att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote: > On Sun, 30 May 2010 09:34:02 -0700, Joerg <invalid(a)invalid.invalid> wrote: > >> krw(a)att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote: >>> On Sun, 30 May 2010 08:38:54 -0700, Joerg <invalid(a)invalid.invalid> wrote: >>> >>>> krw(a)att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote: >> [...] >> >>>>> ... Even when I was >>>>> contracting (and paid big-$ overtime), management didn't appreciate my ROI >>>>> calculations on a second monitor (less than a week ;). >>>>> >>>> Sometimes they should look, they'd be surprised how much lower in cost >>>> projects can come in with external engineers. >>> Just add up the cost hiring of employees. The down side is that sometimes >>> contractors with the appropriate experience are hard to find, particularly >>> ones willing to work on-site. >> >> Yes, they are often hard to find. But they can be more loyal than >> employees. If an employee quits after a number of years he's gone. He >> can't be there for you even if he wanted to because he's got a new >> fulltime job, plus a family, and so on.. A consultant or contractor can >> usually be called in again. I had clients from the early 90's who called >> me in on a problem 15 years later. The fact that I have moved across an >> ocean in the meantime didn't matter, if you want to be found you can and >> will be found by them (I gave all of them my new address, just in case). > > Consultants are more loyal because they can be bought. ;-) Employees really > want to be part of the family. They're going to live there, they might as > well be. > Yeah, but when an employee quits that's usually like a divorce. He or she is gone. I just had that happen with a company where one of their key engineers on the project quit and it did cause noticeable project delays. >> On-site, yep, that can be a problem. But when one thinks hard about it, >> how many times is that really really necessary? Most of the time clients >> just send me the whole chebang to diagnose in my own lab. Other times I >> fly out there for a few days. Sometimes it's a long trip, like one to >> Korea but that was necessary because I needed to train their engineers >> so that the EMI problems they had wouldn't happen again on their next >> design. > > Tell that to managers. They like to think they're in control. They like to > think having someone on site puts them in control. I suppose if you don't > trust the person, at least you can make sure they put in the hours. > Conversely, being off-site can have its problems, too. The big-picture can be > missed, or expectations can be completely unrealistic. > That's why consultants must be great communicators and generalists. "What happens if the signal at port B doesn't .." ... "Oh, dang!" -- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
From: Joel Koltner on 1 Jun 2010 13:27 "John Larkin" <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message news:7229069me1jv2t5schs2suda9p3j0trpql(a)4ax.com... > We have standardized on pF, nF, uF, and, sadly, mF. Yeah, mF does seem a little odd to me, but I can't think of any good reason why it should be, so at least when I'm thinking about it that's what I use. Although there aren't that many caess where I have a capacitor that's 1mF or more anyway -- these days switchers are so fast you don't normally need them. I suppose there's still SuperCaps... > Numbers are never > below 1, except 0.5 pF maybe, and never start with a decimal point. I'm happy to label things fF -- probably just due to the IC design class I took in school (effectively "op amp design exactly as been's taught for the past 50+ years, we've just made now the transistors really, really small"), where almost everything was inbetween 1 and 999fF, so it became very commonplace. On occasion I'll get to label something as pH as well (almost always just within a simulator, though -- e.g., shorted or open microstrip stubs; on the schematic these get turned into dimensions). Really old schematics that label things mmF are kinda cute. > Resistors are 12R, 3.01K, 22M, 3G, 1T. I suppose I'd parse 14mR or > just 14m as 14 milliohms. "12" will parse as 12 ohms. That sounds like an entirely agreeable system. "R" perhaps is a bit better than "ohm" (...but if the CAD tools would let you use an Omega, that'd be better still...). >We will NEVER > use the juvenile 4k7 thing. I'll enforce that in my will. :-) I don't blame you -- 4k7 is meant to solve a problem that largely doesn't really exist anymore (lost decimal places on tiny/xeroxed printouts). > All our resistors and caps are... believe it or not... IN ORDER BY > VALUE. Is that because you wrote a smart sorting routine that understands metric suffixes? Or because internally you store the raw value so sorting is trivial (e.g., 100nF is stored internally as 100e-9). ---Joel
From: Joel Koltner on 1 Jun 2010 13:28 "Nial Stewart" <nial*REMOVE_THIS*@nialstewartdevelopments.co.uk> wrote in message news:86k3j4FrsoU1(a)mid.individual.net... >> being tied to the database has the advantage that you can choose >> components you already have > > ...and have double sourced and have confirmed footprints! Your purchasing peoples' lives will surely become way too boring if you don't strive to single-source as many parts as possible. :-) Just kidding, double-sourcing is of course great when it's an option.
From: Joel Koltner on 1 Jun 2010 13:35 "Joerg" <invalid(a)invalid.invalid> wrote in message news:86kn17FktaU1(a)mid.individual.net... > Yeah, but when an employee quits that's usually like a divorce. He or she is > gone. I've seen it both ways... I guess it comes down to both what the engineer and the company expect, and this is often the kind of thing that isn't ever written or formally verbalized: Some companies seem to take an engineer quitting as a form of betrayal and will start bad-mouthing his work and not want any contact and effectively blacklist him from being hired again, whereas other companies figure that if an engineer wants to check out whether or not the grass is greener elsewhere, if he does so during a lull between projects so that there isn't any huge disruption and stresses that he's happy to have people call him to ask for support on some old project he did, there's no need for bad feelings and the perhaps the guy will be invited to come back if the new place doesn't work out. The later might happen more in non-technical businesses, perhaps? -- My wife still does a few little side-projects for several of the places that she's previously worked for. ---Joel
From: Jeroen Belleman on 1 Jun 2010 13:59
On 06/01/2010 07:27 PM, Joel Koltner wrote: > "John Larkin" <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in > message news:7229069me1jv2t5schs2suda9p3j0trpql(a)4ax.com... >> We have standardized on pF, nF, uF, and, sadly, mF. > > Yeah, mF does seem a little odd to me, but I can't think of any good > reason why it should be, so at least when I'm thinking about it that's > what I use. I don't see why mF should be any stranger than mH, mm, mOhm or anything. Although, when I wrote the value of Boltzmann's constant as 13.8 yW/HzK somewhere, the editor found it necessary to change that into 1.38 * 10^-23 J/K. Not everyone is comfortable with the full range of prefixes, I guess. Jeroen Belleman |