Um, I think we are forgetting something here. Throwing hardware at a problem - without understanding the problem - will not be as effective as hoped.
Consider the context first - what is the environment, how much bio-diversity, is there a way to arrange things to increase fertility?
Consider Haiti, a small country, where the dictator "Doc Duvalier" cut down all the trees. He didn't have to be worried about snipers in the tree tops; the unintended consequence was the arable land was washed into the ocean, beginning a cycle of poverty that continues to this day.
Breaking the cycle of poverty takes insight, and small changes - composting, small bushes and shrubs to act as soil anchors, understanding how to make real wealth, and not something that is a photo op - only to rust unused.
Consider it this way, using the electric grid is the most effective use of energy transmission. By using large plants, we can use every trick that an engineer can conceive to wring the last watt out of fuel. So far, so good. But by combining the electrical storage potential of any hybrid, with a tuned engine for maximal efficiency gets the best of both worlds. It's easier to design to, also.
It's an old trick called co-generation, used in pulp and paper plants. Now, if we can store the "waste heat" for our homes... well, we just reduced the total energy demand.
Any takers?
JB
Although it sounds like a cop-out; anyone you'd want. I'm a hardware type, so I only use programming when I have to. I like being close to the metal, so your assembler experience is still valid. I'd kick the tires on smalltalk/squeak squeak.org; the go programming language by Robert Pike; Perl is good for text mungification; Python has its fans; I've used Forth for debugging...
If you use open source software, (or extensible commercial stuff) learn the language where the action is, for you.
I'm not a really good programmer at any one thing, but you learn fast in this game. DSP work and multiple core processors have a lot of growth ahead in them, that's why I mentioned Go. The embedded space is still active, and your skill set should be a nice match.
Someone else can fill in the must reads - I liked the mythical man month, design patterns look interesting, Eiffel has its charms, too. Stonebreaker on databases, other stuff.
This is, IMHO, important to understanding, and perhaps tailoring, smart membranes that mimic the actual membranes found in cells.
As an analogy, in a leaf the transpiration of carbon dioxide and water is controlled by small pores, called stoma. These stoma are less abundant in succulents, like cacti, or aloe vera, then in rain forest vegetation.
The organelles of a cell, like the mitochondria, have similar properties.
This is another piece of the puzzle for nanotechnology, and may find use in batteries and electrochemical fuel cells.
Time will tell.
QRP classics published by the ARRL is probably the reference work.
The book "the electronics of radio" by Rutledge; Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-64645-6 makes understanding and building such a HF radio easy(r).
Other useful works would be the ARRL antenna handbook, and the ARRL radio amateur handbook. Of course packing a mirror, whistle and survival kit are also recommended. Hope this helps
First, APD's have been around for years; their vacuum cousins are called photo-multipliers.
Second, the article states electron pairs; that should be amended to electron-hole pairs. When a photon whacks into a lattice, it ejects an electron, leaving a hole. This absence of an electron can be filled by a nearby electron, so the hole moves, rather like a hole in a crowd.
The important parts (pointed out by other posters, also), are that:
Intel gets bragging rights for significant technology and fabrication advances
It just got way cheaper to put high speed communications on a chip or in a system
Intel is working on optical plumbing (waveguides) for the chip level
The spin-off company may become another publicly traded company
The technology used is incremental, and has less risks to implement
In all, life just got more interesting; we just have to wait about five years for this to be in regular production
A nice summary on the fusion of (written) editorial content and it's (graphical) presentation, by Jan Victor White.
Recommended.
The flow goes like this:
What does the website *do* for customers? Why?
How do we make it easy for people to find stuff?
Can we make the visuals simple, and navigation clean?
Have we avoided clutter? Either visual or cognitive?
Is it readable? Does it pass muster at a Flesch "plain english" level?
The only warning is that "punch it up" may translate into a punch-drunk design. By asking polite n pesky questions of the owner/boss you can reduce the horror. The KISS principle may well be your friend...
You read correctly; the article mentions a glass slide that you fuse the molded part onto. But wait! There's more!
You can make fluidic valves to control the mixing properties, which means you have a chemical reaction vessel with the possibility of feedback control. This opens up whole new avenues of possible research.
Since the system has two parts, you could make electrical circuits on the glass slide, perhaps by using tin oxide, a transparent conductor. I recollect an article, way back when, where a solution of tin chloride and alcohol was burned to make transparent electrodes to control and shape plasma by electric fields.
Making a leap into the unknown, I would bet small amounts of cash that you could silkscreen or deposit material that would be useful as chemical sensors or catalysts. Make it biocompatible, and you have a sensor that might detect either blood glucose levels, or some insulin complex.
The idea of understanding the deep behavior of "stuff" (a technical term) to make things that only look crude appeals to some part of our makeup, I think. I am not sure whether it is the iconoclast part, the bohemian part, or the anarchist part...
I am not sure about the methanol, but if I remember the wikipedia article, you can use a vegetable oil ( like canola) and lye to yank the organic acid off the oil. What you are left with is a fuel ( an ester) that burns clean, and lots and lots of glycerol.
Apparently, the glycerol can be used to make urethane foam, for insulation - I still don't quite know how that is supposed to work.
The reactor that you remember I think I saw on slashdot; by using a huge number of capillary tubes, the reaction area was much larger, and the reaction could take place as the oil was being used.
The fluidic circuits thus formed might be a great topic for a science fair project... Or the usual idea of idle amusement as held by the more hard-core slashdotters...
If you look at this offer as a game of chess, they are sacrificing a small market segment usually served with discounted prices. As a telling example, most sales to the education industry are very inexpensive compared to the prices real companies and people pay. The Microsoft office suite, as an example, is discounted to under 150USD, while the average person can pay much, much more.
The leverage this gives a company is incredible! Educators are always looking for stuff on the cheap, and the idea that a 150 software package translates into hundreds more of sales at the full price doesn't occur to them. So, they merrily specify it, and that generates a tremendous demand for later sales.
Similarly, by "protecting" open source in an educational context, they are able to copy features that would be built in by the community. Now, the market demands are already known, and just need to be branded and productized.
The real payoff for them is business; both as a part of infrastructure, and as a collaberation tool. Here the price for such tools can be quite high (about 10K USD).
OK, I promised to get back to the analog stuff, so here it is...but first...
Digital EE time to mastery 5 yrs
Analog EE time to mastery 7-10 yrs
Radio Frequency EE time to mastery 15 yrs
Video EE time to mastery 20 yrs
Why the difference?
Analog has everything depending on everything else, and it's a constant tradeoff. Finding the sweet spot in the design is iterative. Take good notes...
RF design needs physical understanding of parasitics - a cap might look like an inductor, an inductor like a cap, if the frequency is high enough so the part is outside of its happy place. Or, either could resonate like crazy. And a wire is not a wire, it's a transmission line, with weirdness of its own. Look up Smith Chart. The RF field will happily couple to anything else, unless or until you used buried microstrip, or lots of ground planes for the rf energy to go to. To add to the fun, a transistor or circuit may oscillate at a much higher frequency then you expected, and you might not know its there. Until the part burns up.
You will learn about ferrites, and why, when they are referred to as "magic pixie dust" the RF guy is actually serious.
EMC compliance engineers count as RF guys, too.
Be nice to them, they are usually called in after the s**t hit the fan.
As an aside, count on 10% above the naked system cost for EMC magic. Knowing about the evil reduces it somewhat, and gives you faster time to market.
You also will not find your EMC guy/manager/CEO with a voodoo doll with your name on it
Power engineers, especially at the bleeding edge also can count as RF engineers
Consider designing electronics that sit on 1 MV power lines, and have to survive lightning strokes.
That leaves the video engineer
Don't just think television, think 5 GHz oscilliscopes.
How would you like to design a circuit with flat gain and phase from DC to daylight?
All the horrors you can imagine, and all those that are just waiting for Mr. Murphy to show up.
Well, this will take time, so as long as you keep that in mind...
Resource books:
ARRL Handbook
The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill
App notes from manufacturers in current interest areas
Freebie design software ( I like Altera, Analog Devices, Atmel )
Digikey catalog
Design tools:
In System Programmers's for current part interests
Assemblers, compilers, etc.
Evaluation boards for the multileaded surface mount parts ie DSP's etc.
Some PCB layout package (on linux) or web tool
Prototyping board - which is good for low frequencies
Stock up on full set of resistors 1/4 w 10 pcs per value
Caps and inductors are tricky - so you might want to buy them carefully
Good soldering station - when you get to surface mount you can thank me...
Roadmap:
Transistor diode circuits are easy, and you can analyse them by the ideal diode equation and ohms law.
Your Favorite Micro Family Here I've used Motorola(now freescale), intel, zilog, and atmel
DSP's? I've used Analog Devices, TI, and Freescale. Software tool availability and eval boards are key.
Analog circuitry has a long learning curve so I'll add to this thread later.
The real reason you cannot get driver information is that it isn't just one company you have to deal with. It's several, most of which have legal obligations in a deadlock situation.
You can't get there from here.
Patents are not the major problem, either. They have to be declared in the public space, and are therefore a licencing issue. The real problem, is that IP is such a vague and fuzzy term that using it is worthless.
RMS has correctly identified copyright, patents, and other legal instruments of author protection, each with their own rules as comprising separate realms in the fuzzy world of IP corporatespeak.
The real risk to a player in that market? The proprietary information, once it has escaped is no longer deemed a comparative advantage. Once it is out, it is almost trivial to either reverse engineer, or improve upon, according to conventional wisdom. In fact, the entire folly of software patents is just an public extension of proprietary behaviour - but played out in the legal system.
The real value in a company is not the puff of the "owned" property - it is the web of persons that can turn out that design. Those sorts of teams are not built up overnight, although incompetent or foolish management can rip them up pretty fast.
Even the major vendors have to outsource things like driver development, microcode development, and even chip development. Usually because of time to market or personel limits. They don't own all the bits that make up a complete solution. They don't even have access to how the pieces are put together. And, almost to a man, they have signed legal agreements with each other to hide...err... protect this information.
The entire area of systems on a chip (SOC) needed to take advantage of the reduced silicon geometry requires a huge investment on hardware design, either as verilog, VHDL, or other hardware description language. And it isn't just the hardware design, either, it's the test harnesses to see that the little bits of hardware actually play together.That alone is about half the total man weeks needed in development.
So, what was once a small problem for hardware manufacturers, now is a large problem. To make it worse, the hardware, being software, is now suffering the same scaling problems that the software world sees. I don't think there is an easy way out.
In the design flow, the chip manufacturer (who shall remain fab-less) can either licence chunks of the design from third parties, or use some of the captive designs from the silicon fabs (for some of the manufacturer dependent high speed analog stuff) or roll their own. I think you can see why you cannot get any design information - someone else owns it.
I think an economist might have a nice time comparing the current cost of control to the case of using the GPL, as an example, and sharing.
Perhaps a mixed model, such as that used for USB might work, too.
IIRC, HP had an article in the HP journal ca 1990(?) on office plans. The problem with the private office was it was difficult to find people, wide open spaces in desk farms or cube farms suffered from noise. Their solution was a hybrid cube.
In this construction, private offices were build with glass in the top 1/3 of the wall. Two panes of wire strengthened plate glass were tipped out about 15 degrees. This construction keeps parallax down, permits people to see around the space, and serves as a pretty good noise barrier.
Strictly speaking, this could easily be made into modular cube type construction, the glass panels could be made of plastic, also. The overall lighting could be set into the low V formed by the glass panel, and be directed upwards as a glare free light source, and task lighting would be specific to the individual. Seasonal Affective Disorder could be addressed by localized brightness in the work position.
I am sure that themes and variations can be thought of - like using the upper reaches as semi-sealed planters, etc. Low maintainence, and all that green could act as an air purifier, if the right foliage is chosen.
The van Allen belts are where the ionic flow of the sun intersects the magnetic field of the earth. The charged particles spin around as they would in a cyclotron. This hints at a possible solution.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we use the stray field of the drive mechanism going up the elevator to produce a magnetic bubble to influence those charged particles to go elsewhere in the local vicinity. Now we have the shielding that we might need. Also, they are probably light elements, like hydrogen.
Just blue-skying it here for a minute, those charges look like a potential magento-hydro-dynamic generator -AND- if we collect the hydrogen, we *might* be able to make water along the way.
Clearly, I have made no calculations so this is highly suspect; interesting, but suspect. Still...
My own view is that in any engineering discipline, developing a wary eye for risks and other horrors is essential. Experience has proved this "engineering paranoia" to be my friend.
You can use, with good effect, the basics of project management, the rudiments of business planning, and the various models of development. I tend to favor the spiral model for complex developments, if I can approach the problem that way. The waterfall model works for well defined goals.
I recently looked through portions of the Wikipedia on "project management" so that is a good place to start, if a course is not forthcoming. Recommended.
Friends, lots of them. Seriously. If you have this load as a caregiver, just having people around, helping and having someone to kvetch with is not just a good idea, but critical, if only for your own emotional health. There are other people in the same boat, so perhaps finding or forming a community might be the way to go. Something less collective then a commune, but a structure like http://www.bruderhof.com/ (if christian). Equivalent communities exist in other religious traditions, as well as the religious (monks, nuns and others)associated with a belief structure.
Technolocial measures sound neat, but they have so many points of failure compounded by the people that have to be around to insure that they don't fail, that I would be suspicious of the lot. Not that I feel that way, but I would adopt that attitude by policy.
Consider the call clearing center that an alarm panel calls into: the UL standard calls for redundant systems that fail safe, two levels of backup power generation, duplicated sites, alarm receivers that fail busy so calls can get through, requirement for manual control, full data logging, crisis triage, etc.
A full technology solution is suspect, a hybrid system is probably better, and you have the adventure of searching out the real players from the fakes. Look to the service providers that a hospital might use. And look carefully at response time: under disaster conditions it probably will swing out past your hour requirement.
Oh, you have to concern yourself with the other side: Are your critical systems on backup power? UPS and autostart generators? Tested each week? There is a very good reason why the backup batteries in the telcos are usually glass lined lead-acid submarine batteries that (usually) power diesel boats. I don't think the cable co's are quite there yet. Just a guess.
Feel free to email me if required - there are a lot of details I don't know, and a phone call might be needed. Don't be afraid of the complexity, a few minutes with some brainstorming buddies can cut that down to size. The legwork is a different story! Best of luck!
Isn't this not supposed to happen? I thought that the ISO 900x process was built to flag these issues before they became the nightmare that has since developed?
Designers are not different then anyone else - but I think they are more aware of the internal processes in the act of design. I guess a book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" discusses it best. ( Though "Looking for Spinoza" is a good read, also)
When I start something like an assembler program, I find myself in an iterative, non-verbal mode. Only after I get a feeling of rightness can I wrestle the solution to the verbal level.
I use Tony Buzan's mind maps, and free phrase writing to capture the fleeting associations. After about a day I write, expanding the resultant mess of factors into a chaos of text. A day after that, I edit, and cut about one third or more of the text down.
This works well for me on stuff like specifications, test plans, and design documents, your mileage may vary. I can't comment on how it would work on fictional prose, or poetry. I suspect that the rule, "first write, then edit", would still hold. As usual your mileage may vary...
The actual code is only about one-tenth of the work, figuring how to approach that part, and then verifying it is most of it. The rest of the documentation is to remind me later what the heck was I thinking!
Partly because it isn't a sequential process, partly because it shows up in many different guises, and partly because it just is plain hard! The hardest part is making the design just disappear, so that the program, device or object "just works". Some references are "Design for the real world" by Victor Papanek, and "Critical Path" by Buckminster Fuller.
Getting something to the point of "just working" takes time. The article mentions where a lot of the historical basis of the design elements come in. As an example, the Bauhaus school, which has rectilinear, minimialist lines, could not be confused with the Art Deco period, which has sweeping, organic lines modeled on natural plants. And either would not be confused with the organic shapes in a science fiction show, like Lexx. A designer knows the cultural associations, and cannily manipulates those to frame his message.
Further, they are semi-conscious to the observer. The art of design consists of either fading into the woodwork so that the elements are almost not noticed (save for a feeling of "rightness") or having one element out of place so as to attract attention, but avoiding the over the top kitch. Once these associations are made, they become part of the cultural backdrop, and therefore more grist for the mill. Such is the magic of postmodernism.
As an available example, the book is a cultural artifact; it is 2000 or more years old, and has a standard form that has been finessed for all those years. The design principles of typography are still a fertile area for exploration. O'Reilly has a colophon, how each book was made. For utilitatian subjects, they sure do put a lot of thought into presentation. A reference to typography is "Design Principles for Desktop Publishers" by Tom Lichty. He has a number of cited references inside that are worth checking out. Another one is "Desktop Publishing for Dummies". Your bookshelf has a number of other examples...
And that is just one artifact. When you add electronics...
What I am impressed with is the obsession to detail that carries over not just from the look of the piece, but the ability to manufacture it easily as well. I guess that is what separates stellar performers from hack wanna-be's. But that implies that not only does Apple have great industrial designers, but they have a culture that seems to avoid the "fling it over the cube" mentality.
But the real interest comes in knowing how to make this cultural leap, the business design principles. Rest assured, the design principles that can get you a stellar organization are closely guarded strategic secrets. However, is it just me, but have they not been in the open all along? And perhaps lost in the corporatist instrumentalist model so lovingly rendered in Machiavelli's "the Prince" and "the Discourses"?
Affected is preferred. Effected suggests being brought into being. A database security breach that effects 19000 new customers would not only bring the wrath of the accountants at the Security and Exchange Commission, but also suggests a militant AI broken loose in ATT!
In response to the A/C that suggested we're; you can remember that a comma suggests a contraction of we are.
God is an Iron; Engish was my most hated and worst subject. I leave a glass of Wry for my fellows, but I had to learn this grammer stuff in self-defence. Which I shall maintain in a Court of Law. Oh, Strunk and White, "the Elements of Style" is a fast way to invigorate your writings. Well worth getting.
The patent system was designed to shelter innovation by offering a limited monopoly to develop a business or livelihood around it. Parts of it operate quite well, however, in the intellectual life it has serious shortcomings. Software is one of those parts of the intellectual life where the character of the process is more akin to governance then to making a cunning artifact.
This therefore brings us to three observations: first, software developers move much faster then business processes; Second, the goal of business is adding value (like support and auditing) to generate sales; third, the common wealth is ill served by business turf wars. If business believes in competition, then let them coach their teams better. I'll expand on these points.
The fundamental design of systems is very fluid. As an engineer that has worked on and co-ordinated large projects, I find that I tend to go though about four or five related designs before settling on a particular architecture. I have to think of the cost of the hardware, but also of the system cost. It serves the efforts no good if I design cheap hardware that prevents the software guys from achieving the system goals. And the software guys iterate over several solutions while deciding how to partition their part. When we are very, very lucky, we may have some time to sit down together and try to find the exact right "cut here" line!
Assuming that we all managed to get it right, and we are actually delivering what the customer needs, we get to support it. That is the value of business to me, as a designer. It means that others (The Customer) can benefit from our collective work, that they can continue to do so, and that they will soon find new, interesting things for us to do. Marketing here does the research of what is out there so we can digest it and figure out the better mousetrap. They also do the customer legwork so the people we are talking to know what their system requirements are. (their business can be treated as a system in this conversation) The rest is negotiation, and avoiding the dead ends. A humourous example: The Customer Wants a Car in the Bauhaus Style; that is, the salient marketing features are spare, rectilinear lines. The dead end is delivering Bauhaus Square Wheels. Clearly, intellegent compromise is needed.
Playing around with turf wars, the adult equivalent of King of the Hill, is a gumption trap that will suck the life right out of the organization. I don't think any intellegent executive wants this, but they'll scrap if they have to. Wisdom consists of setting up our affairs so we don't have to.
As a humourous close, why hasn't someone started to patent forms of government? I see a huge market potential in this. Dictatorships could patent Democracy, for example...
Slashdot Mirror
Um, I think we are forgetting something here. Throwing hardware at a problem - without understanding the problem - will not be as effective as hoped. Consider the context first - what is the environment, how much bio-diversity, is there a way to arrange things to increase fertility? Consider Haiti, a small country, where the dictator "Doc Duvalier" cut down all the trees. He didn't have to be worried about snipers in the tree tops; the unintended consequence was the arable land was washed into the ocean, beginning a cycle of poverty that continues to this day. Breaking the cycle of poverty takes insight, and small changes - composting, small bushes and shrubs to act as soil anchors, understanding how to make real wealth, and not something that is a photo op - only to rust unused.
Consider it this way, using the electric grid is the most effective use of energy transmission. By using large plants, we can use every trick that an engineer can conceive to wring the last watt out of fuel. So far, so good. But by combining the electrical storage potential of any hybrid, with a tuned engine for maximal efficiency gets the best of both worlds. It's easier to design to, also. It's an old trick called co-generation, used in pulp and paper plants. Now, if we can store the "waste heat" for our homes ... well, we just reduced the total energy demand.
Any takers?
JB
Although it sounds like a cop-out; anyone you'd want. I'm a hardware type, so I only use programming when I have to. I like being close to the metal, so your assembler experience is still valid. I'd kick the tires on smalltalk/squeak squeak.org; the go programming language by Robert Pike; Perl is good for text mungification; Python has its fans; I've used Forth for debugging ...
If you use open source software, (or extensible commercial stuff) learn the language where the action is, for you.
I'm not a really good programmer at any one thing, but you learn fast in this game. DSP work and multiple core processors have a lot of growth ahead in them, that's why I mentioned Go. The embedded space is still active, and your skill set should be a nice match.
Someone else can fill in the must reads - I liked the mythical man month, design patterns look interesting, Eiffel has its charms, too. Stonebreaker on databases, other stuff.
Now I'm just rambling, hope others can help more
Thanks! Learned something new! JB
This is, IMHO, important to understanding, and perhaps tailoring, smart membranes that mimic the actual membranes found in cells.
As an analogy, in a leaf the transpiration of carbon dioxide and water is controlled by small pores, called stoma. These stoma are less abundant in succulents, like cacti, or aloe vera, then in rain forest vegetation.
The organelles of a cell, like the mitochondria, have similar properties.
This is another piece of the puzzle for nanotechnology, and may find use in batteries and electrochemical fuel cells. Time will tell.
QRP classics published by the ARRL is probably the reference work.
The book "the electronics of radio" by Rutledge; Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-64645-6 makes understanding and building such a HF radio easy(r).
Other useful works would be the ARRL antenna handbook, and the ARRL radio amateur handbook. Of course packing a mirror, whistle and survival kit are also recommended. Hope this helps
First, APD's have been around for years; their vacuum cousins are called photo-multipliers.
Second, the article states electron pairs; that should be amended to electron-hole pairs. When a photon whacks into a lattice, it ejects an electron, leaving a hole. This absence of an electron can be filled by a nearby electron, so the hole moves, rather like a hole in a crowd.
The important parts (pointed out by other posters, also), are that:
In all, life just got more interesting; we just have to wait about five years for this to be in regular production
A nice summary on the fusion of (written) editorial content and it's (graphical) presentation, by Jan Victor White.
Recommended.
The flow goes like this:
The only warning is that "punch it up" may translate into a punch-drunk design. By asking polite n pesky questions of the owner/boss you can reduce the horror. The KISS principle may well be your friend...
I hope.
You read correctly; the article mentions a glass slide that you fuse the molded part onto. But wait! There's more!
You can make fluidic valves to control the mixing properties, which means you have a chemical reaction vessel with the possibility of feedback control. This opens up whole new avenues of possible research.
Since the system has two parts, you could make electrical circuits on the glass slide, perhaps by using tin oxide, a transparent conductor. I recollect an article, way back when, where a solution of tin chloride and alcohol was burned to make transparent electrodes to control and shape plasma by electric fields.
Making a leap into the unknown, I would bet small amounts of cash that you could silkscreen or deposit material that would be useful as chemical sensors or catalysts. Make it biocompatible, and you have a sensor that might detect either blood glucose levels, or some insulin complex.
The idea of understanding the deep behavior of "stuff" (a technical term) to make things that only look crude appeals to some part of our makeup, I think. I am not sure whether it is the iconoclast part, the bohemian part, or the anarchist part ...
I am not sure about the methanol, but if I remember the wikipedia article, you can use a vegetable oil ( like canola) and lye to yank the organic acid off the oil. What you are left with is a fuel ( an ester) that burns clean, and lots and lots of glycerol.
Apparently, the glycerol can be used to make urethane foam, for insulation - I still don't quite know how that is supposed to work.
The reactor that you remember I think I saw on slashdot; by using a huge number of capillary tubes, the reaction area was much larger, and the reaction could take place as the oil was being used.
The fluidic circuits thus formed might be a great topic for a science fair project ... Or the usual idea of idle amusement as held by the more hard-core slashdotters...
If you look at this offer as a game of chess, they are sacrificing a small market segment usually served with discounted prices. As a telling example, most sales to the education industry are very inexpensive compared to the prices real companies and people pay. The Microsoft office suite, as an example, is discounted to under 150USD, while the average person can pay much, much more.
The leverage this gives a company is incredible! Educators are always looking for stuff on the cheap, and the idea that a 150 software package translates into hundreds more of sales at the full price doesn't occur to them. So, they merrily specify it, and that generates a tremendous demand for later sales.
Similarly, by "protecting" open source in an educational context, they are able to copy features that would be built in by the community. Now, the market demands are already known, and just need to be branded and productized.
The real payoff for them is business; both as a part of infrastructure, and as a collaberation tool. Here the price for such tools can be quite high (about 10K USD).
Don't take the cheese, it's on a trap.
OK, I promised to get back to the analog stuff, so here it is ...but first...
Digital EE time to mastery 5 yrs
Analog EE time to mastery 7-10 yrs
Radio Frequency EE time to mastery 15 yrs
Video EE time to mastery 20 yrs
Why the difference?
Analog has everything depending on everything else, and it's a constant tradeoff. Finding the sweet spot in the design is iterative. Take good notes...
RF design needs physical understanding of parasitics - a cap might look like an inductor, an inductor like a cap, if the frequency is high enough so the part is outside of its happy place.
Or, either could resonate like crazy.
And a wire is not a wire, it's a transmission line, with weirdness of its own. Look up Smith Chart.
The RF field will happily couple to anything else, unless or until you used buried microstrip, or lots of ground planes for the rf energy to go to.
To add to the fun, a transistor or circuit may oscillate at a much higher frequency then you expected, and you might not know its there.
Until the part burns up.
You will learn about ferrites, and why, when they are referred to as "magic pixie dust" the RF guy is actually serious.
EMC compliance engineers count as RF guys, too.
Be nice to them, they are usually called in after the s**t hit the fan.
As an aside, count on 10% above the naked system cost for EMC magic. Knowing about the evil reduces it somewhat, and gives you faster time to market.
You also will not find your EMC guy/manager/CEO with a voodoo doll with your name on it
Power engineers, especially at the bleeding edge also can count as RF engineers
Consider designing electronics that sit on 1 MV power lines, and have to survive lightning strokes.
That leaves the video engineer
Don't just think television, think 5 GHz oscilliscopes.
How would you like to design a circuit with flat gain and phase from DC to daylight?
All the horrors you can imagine, and all those that are just waiting for Mr. Murphy to show up.
Well, this will take time, so as long as you keep that in mind...
Resource books:
ARRL Handbook
The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill
App notes from manufacturers in current interest areas
Freebie design software ( I like Altera, Analog Devices, Atmel )
Digikey catalog
Design tools:
In System Programmers's for current part interests
Assemblers, compilers, etc.
Evaluation boards for the multileaded surface mount parts ie DSP's etc.
Some PCB layout package (on linux) or web tool
Prototyping board - which is good for low frequencies
Stock up on full set of resistors 1/4 w 10 pcs per value
Caps and inductors are tricky - so you might want to buy them carefully
Good soldering station - when you get to surface mount you can thank me...
Roadmap:
Transistor diode circuits are easy, and you can analyse them by the ideal diode equation and ohms law.
Your Favorite Micro Family Here I've used Motorola(now freescale), intel, zilog, and atmel
DSP's? I've used Analog Devices, TI, and Freescale. Software tool availability and eval boards are key.
Analog circuitry has a long learning curve so I'll add to this thread later.
The real reason you cannot get driver information is that it isn't just one company you have to deal with. It's several, most of which have legal obligations in a deadlock situation.
You can't get there from here.
Patents are not the major problem, either. They have to be declared in the public space, and are therefore a licencing issue. The real problem, is that IP is such a vague and fuzzy term that using it is worthless.
RMS has correctly identified copyright, patents, and other legal instruments of author protection, each with their own rules as comprising separate realms in the fuzzy world of IP corporatespeak.
The real risk to a player in that market?
The proprietary information, once it has escaped is no longer deemed a comparative advantage. Once it is out, it is almost trivial to either reverse engineer, or improve upon, according to conventional wisdom. In fact, the entire folly of software patents is just an public extension of proprietary behaviour - but played out in the legal system.
The real value in a company is not the puff of the "owned" property - it is the web of persons that can turn out that design. Those sorts of teams are not built up overnight, although incompetent or foolish management can rip them up pretty fast.
Even the major vendors have to outsource things like driver development, microcode development, and even chip development. Usually because of time to market or personel limits. They don't own all the bits that make up a complete solution. They don't even have access to how the pieces are put together. And, almost to a man, they have signed legal agreements with each other to hide ...err... protect this information.
The entire area of systems on a chip (SOC) needed to take advantage of the reduced silicon geometry requires a huge investment on hardware design, either as verilog, VHDL, or other hardware description language. And it isn't just the hardware design, either, it's the test harnesses to see that the little bits of hardware actually play together.That alone is about half the total man weeks needed in development.
So, what was once a small problem for hardware manufacturers, now is a large problem. To make it worse, the hardware, being software, is now suffering the same scaling problems that the software world sees. I don't think there is an easy way out.
In the design flow, the chip manufacturer (who shall remain fab-less) can either licence chunks of the design from third parties, or use some of the captive designs from the silicon fabs (for some of the manufacturer dependent high speed analog stuff) or roll their own.
I think you can see why you cannot get any design information - someone else owns it.
I think an economist might have a nice time comparing the current cost of control to the case of using the GPL, as an example, and sharing.
Perhaps a mixed model, such as that used for USB might work, too.
IIRC, HP had an article in the HP journal ca 1990(?) on office plans. The problem with the private office was it was difficult to find people, wide open spaces in desk farms or cube farms suffered from noise. Their solution was a hybrid cube.
In this construction, private offices were build with glass in the top 1/3 of the wall. Two panes of wire strengthened plate glass were tipped out about 15 degrees. This construction keeps parallax down, permits people to see around the space, and serves as a pretty good noise barrier.
Strictly speaking, this could easily be made into modular cube type construction, the glass panels could be made of plastic, also. The overall lighting could be set into the low V formed by the glass panel, and be directed upwards as a glare free light source, and task lighting would be specific to the individual. Seasonal Affective Disorder could be addressed by localized brightness in the work position.
I am sure that themes and variations can be thought of - like using the upper reaches as semi-sealed planters, etc. Low maintainence, and all that green could act as an air purifier, if the right foliage is chosen.
Which is a fine single malt scotch, AFAIK ...
The van Allen belts are where the ionic flow of the sun intersects the magnetic field of the earth. The charged particles spin around as they would in a cyclotron. This hints at a possible solution.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we use the stray field of the drive mechanism going up the elevator to produce a magnetic bubble to influence those charged particles to go elsewhere in the local vicinity. Now we have the shielding that we might need. Also, they are probably light elements, like hydrogen.
Just blue-skying it here for a minute, those charges look like a potential magento-hydro-dynamic generator -AND- if we collect the hydrogen, we *might* be able to make water along the way.
Clearly, I have made no calculations so this is highly suspect; interesting, but suspect. Still ...
My own view is that in any engineering discipline, developing a wary eye for risks and other horrors is essential. Experience has proved this "engineering paranoia" to be my friend.
You can use, with good effect, the basics of project management, the rudiments of business planning, and the various models of development.
I tend to favor the spiral model for complex developments, if I can approach the problem that way. The waterfall model works for well defined goals.
I recently looked through portions of the Wikipedia on "project management" so that is a good place to start, if a course is not forthcoming. Recommended.
What if it becomes sentient?
We would have:
No, wait, that last item already happened....
Friends, lots of them.
Seriously.
If you have this load as a caregiver, just having people around, helping and having someone to kvetch with is not just a good idea, but critical, if only for your own emotional health.
There are other people in the same boat, so perhaps finding or forming a community might be the way to go. Something less collective then a commune, but a structure like http://www.bruderhof.com/ (if christian). Equivalent communities exist in other religious traditions, as well as the religious (monks, nuns and others)associated with a belief structure.
Technolocial measures sound neat, but they have so many points of failure compounded by the people that have to be around to insure that they don't fail, that I would be suspicious of the lot. Not that I feel that way, but I would adopt that attitude by policy.
Consider the call clearing center that an alarm panel calls into: the UL standard calls for redundant systems that fail safe, two levels of backup power generation, duplicated sites, alarm receivers that fail busy so calls can get through, requirement for manual control, full data logging, crisis triage, etc.
A full technology solution is suspect, a hybrid system is probably better, and you have the adventure of searching out the real players from the fakes. Look to the service providers that a hospital might use.
And look carefully at response time: under disaster conditions it probably will swing out past your hour requirement.
Oh, you have to concern yourself with the other side: Are your critical systems on backup power? UPS and autostart generators? Tested each week?
There is a very good reason why the backup batteries in the telcos are usually glass lined lead-acid submarine batteries that (usually) power diesel boats. I don't think the cable co's are quite there yet. Just a guess.
Feel free to email me if required - there are a lot of details I don't know, and a phone call might be needed.
Don't be afraid of the complexity, a few minutes with some brainstorming buddies can cut that down to size. The legwork is a different story!
Best of luck!
Isn't this not supposed to happen? I thought that the ISO 900x process was built to flag these issues before they became the nightmare that has since developed?
Designers are not different then anyone else - but I think they are more aware of the internal processes in the act of design. I guess a book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" discusses it best. ( Though "Looking for Spinoza" is a good read, also)
When I start something like an assembler program, I find myself in an iterative, non-verbal mode. Only after I get a feeling of rightness can I wrestle the solution to the verbal level.
I use Tony Buzan's mind maps, and free phrase writing to capture the fleeting associations.
After about a day I write, expanding the resultant mess of factors into a chaos of text.
A day after that, I edit, and cut about one third or more of the text down.
This works well for me on stuff like specifications, test plans, and design documents, your mileage may vary. I can't comment on how it would work on fictional prose, or poetry.
I suspect that the rule, "first write, then edit", would still hold. As usual your mileage may vary...
The actual code is only about one-tenth of the work, figuring how to approach that part, and then verifying it is most of it. The rest of the documentation is to remind me later what the heck was I thinking!
Cheers, JB
Thanks!Sgt_doom, I'll go look them up. JB
Partly because it isn't a sequential process, partly because it shows up in many different guises, and partly because it just is plain hard! The hardest part is making the design just disappear, so that the program, device or object "just works". Some references are "Design for the real world" by Victor Papanek, and "Critical Path" by Buckminster Fuller.
Getting something to the point of "just working" takes time. The article mentions where a lot of the historical basis of the design elements come in. As an example, the Bauhaus school, which has rectilinear, minimialist lines, could not be confused with the Art Deco period, which has sweeping, organic lines modeled on natural plants. And either would not be confused with the organic shapes in a science fiction show, like Lexx. A designer knows the cultural associations, and cannily manipulates those to frame his message.
Further, they are semi-conscious to the observer. The art of design consists of either fading into the woodwork so that the elements are almost not noticed (save for a feeling of "rightness") or having one element out of place so as to attract attention, but avoiding the over the top kitch. Once these associations are made, they become part of the cultural backdrop, and therefore more grist for the mill. Such is the magic of postmodernism.
As an available example, the book is a cultural artifact; it is 2000 or more years old, and has a standard form that has been finessed for all those years. The design principles of typography are still a fertile area for exploration. O'Reilly has a colophon, how each book was made. For utilitatian subjects, they sure do put a lot of thought into presentation. A reference to typography is "Design Principles for Desktop Publishers" by Tom Lichty. He has a number of cited references inside that are worth checking out. Another one is "Desktop Publishing for Dummies". Your bookshelf has a number of other examples... ...
And that is just one artifact. When you add electronics
What I am impressed with is the obsession to detail that carries over not just from the look of the piece, but the ability to manufacture it easily as well. I guess that is what separates stellar performers from hack wanna-be's. But that implies that not only does Apple have great industrial designers, but they have a culture that seems to avoid the "fling it over the cube" mentality.
But the real interest comes in knowing how to make this cultural leap, the business design principles. Rest assured, the design principles that can get you a stellar organization are closely guarded strategic secrets. However, is it just me, but have they not been in the open all along? And perhaps lost in the corporatist instrumentalist model so lovingly rendered in Machiavelli's "the Prince" and "the Discourses"?
Affected is preferred.
Effected suggests being brought into being. A database security breach that effects 19000 new customers would not only bring the wrath of the accountants at the Security and Exchange Commission, but also suggests a militant AI broken loose in ATT!
In response to the A/C that suggested we're; you can remember that a comma suggests a contraction of we are.
God is an Iron; Engish was my most hated and worst subject. I leave a glass of Wry for my fellows, but I had to learn this grammer stuff in self-defence. Which I shall maintain in a Court of Law.
Oh, Strunk and White, "the Elements of Style" is a fast way to invigorate your writings. Well worth getting.
The patent system was designed to shelter innovation by offering a limited monopoly to develop a business or livelihood around it. Parts of it operate quite well, however, in the intellectual life it has serious shortcomings. Software is one of those parts of the intellectual life where the character of the process is more akin to governance then to making a cunning artifact.
This therefore brings us to three observations: first, software developers move much faster then business processes; Second, the goal of business is adding value (like support and auditing) to generate sales; third, the common wealth is ill served by business turf wars. If business believes in competition, then let them coach their teams better. I'll expand on these points.
The fundamental design of systems is very fluid. As an engineer that has worked on and co-ordinated large projects, I find that I tend to go though about four or five related designs before settling on a particular architecture. I have to think of the cost of the hardware, but also of the system cost. It serves the efforts no good if I design cheap hardware that prevents the software guys from achieving the system goals. And the software guys iterate over several solutions while deciding how to partition their part. When we are very, very lucky, we may have some time to sit down together and try to find the exact right "cut here" line!
Assuming that we all managed to get it right, and we are actually delivering what the customer needs, we get to support it. That is the value of business to me, as a designer. It means that others (The Customer) can benefit from our collective work, that they can continue to do so, and that they will soon find new, interesting things for us to do. Marketing here does the research of what is out there so we can digest it and figure out the better mousetrap. They also do the customer legwork so the people we are talking to know what their system requirements are. (their business can be treated as a system in this conversation) The rest is negotiation, and avoiding the dead ends.
A humourous example: The Customer Wants a Car in the Bauhaus Style; that is, the salient marketing features are spare, rectilinear lines. The dead end is delivering Bauhaus Square Wheels. Clearly, intellegent compromise is needed.
Playing around with turf wars, the adult equivalent of King of the Hill, is a gumption trap that will suck the life right out of the organization. I don't think any intellegent executive wants this, but they'll scrap if they have to. Wisdom consists of setting up our affairs so we don't have to.
As a humourous close, why hasn't someone started to patent forms of government? I see a huge market potential in this. Dictatorships could patent Democracy, for example...