Bob Pease wrote a detailed refutation of a voltage regulator circuit design which was optimized with the Taguchi method and published in Electronic Design magazine in the late 80s. The resistance values in the circuit just looked fishy and his analysis revealed that the circuit would not work. The input voltage would track the output voltage. The author had made certain the performance was independent of the quality of the parts alright. A fair argument could be made that the author did not properly apply the Taguchi method. Bob's point was the output has to depend on something. In this case, it depended on a zener diode. The author thought he was accomplishing something by making the output independednt of the components. He didn't consider that the circuit wouldn't work then. So be very careful with this Taguchi stuff.
What do the old farts do that ruins the hobby for new/young people?
Too many of them are G.D. knowitalls. Others fancy themselves as some sort of emergency officials. I just wanted to chat on 2 meters while I commuted to and from work. I found that unless I got involved with the clubs, upgraded my license and volunteered to work hamfests, Skywarn/EMS/whatever, my welcome wore thin. I lost interest.
I used Rotosound for mnany years then switched to Ernie Ball about 12 years ago. I like a real bright tone so I change them often. I go through lots of sets of 4 and 5 string regular slinky bass. I've never had a bad string from Ernie Ball. I can't say the same of Rotosound, GHS or D'Addario. Reading a story like this only strenghtens my loyalty.
I once worked for a company whose business cards had a Telex number on them. At a trade show, I gave a young feller my card. He studied it briefly and pointed to the Telex number at the bottom asking what it was. I said, "That's our Telex number." He looked at me and asked, "What's a Telex?" "It's a Teletype that can store messages", I replied. He seemed to nod, acknowledging my answer but then asked, "What's a Teletype."
Overcapacity and overengineering are Communist concepts.
You have that backwards. Soviet engineering was generally characterized by corner-cutting and copycat work, hence the phrase "Russian Engineering" , meaning reverse engineering.
But the knowledge that a power system, large or small, should have over-capacity isn't about politics; it's about physics. Sure, you can buy a cheap 500VA power inverter that can run a TV in a mini-van but don't try running a drill with it or it'll smoke, trip it's breaker (if it was has one) or go into current limiting (if it is designed with such a protective circuit). The drill motor takes 2-3 times as much starting current as it does once it comes up to speed. If you want to run a drill out of a work van, you need one rated to handle the surge. This concept scales directly. The power system must also be able to handle surges. The alternative is to allow the system to overheat or to shut down the overloaded portions.
People may not have given a damn about our power system up until the blackout, but power outages are very persuasive. Cheaping out is not a viable option. Either we beef up the system to handle these surges or we don't. If we don't, people will use generators. They aren't going back to kerosene lanterns.
This is not the first massive northeastern blackout. There were wipespread blackouts like this in the early 1960s. The engineers learned that all sections of the grid must have significant over-capacity designed in so that the entire system could recover from large transients and short duration system oscillation without tripping protection devices. They beefed up the system so it could ride through these events.
The safety margin is gone. Demand has grown but capacity has not. If lightning runs in on a substation, it can trigger a chain of events leading to a couple generator switchyards opening their air breakers. From there, the overload snowballs.
Does deregulation play a part? Yes. Power brokering activities create additional burden on the system. There is less incentive to increase capacity. There is also diffusion of responsibility.
The electric power industry was not broken prior to deregulation and didn't need fixing. It's infrastructure and regulated monopolies suck less than gov't run or private run ventures.
Is there something that these power supplies contribute towards overall system stability that "cheap" ones don't?
The short answer is they give you added margin against worst case power flucuation, load changes and temperature extremes. An old engineer I once worked with used to refer to such margin as "belt and suspenders". He'd explain that nobody ever lost their britches wearing both a belt and suspenders.
The Zalman has superior voltage regulation and ran cooler. If you have a system that is very important to you, you don't want a crappy power supply glitching your motherboard because it's output is on the the low end of the tolerance band, it's load regulation is poor and the system temperature is high. Lets say you're burning a CD. That will cause step load changes in the +12 output due to the disk drive activity. At the same time, a line voltage sag event occurs on the incoming AC power. Now the power supply has to slew that transient as well as the load. This can cause an el-cheapo brand x power supply to dip the +3.3V and/or the +5V dangerously close to the minimum guaranteed high voltage level for some of the chips on the motherboard or other devices. On the motherboard, there may also be considerable voltage drop in the printed wiring before the most remote IC. Whats worse is these kinds of problems tend to be intermittent and they can manifest themselves in seemingly random ways.
"Now the CD replacement cycle has drawn to a close,"
Yep. That pretty well describes my CD buying pattern. I replaced the LPs that were broken, lost, flood damaged or scratched. I also wanted them on CD for convenience. Except that some were never released on CD. I got those via file-swapping. Later, I aquired the means to rip them myself. So, the RIAA thinks I'm a pirate. They are the ones with the eyepatch and the parrot on their shoulder. So, now I've replaced these albums. There ain't much new stuff I want. I know there are people who can play today but you'll probably never hear 'em. They don't fit the mold. That's why I think the music business died a little over 20 years ago. It's been kept alive largely by the replacement market but now that's played out.
I think I agree with their tech support.. if they give you a music file their obligation has been fullfilled. if you can't play it how is it their problem?
It's nearly pointless to debate this any further. It's happening and it's going to continue until the vast majority of jobs are over near the cheap labor. Downward mobility is how most will cope with this. In the not too distant future, most/. posters will only program for a hobby just as some of us now only tinker with electronics as a hobby, whereas it was once the way we made a living. There's no moving to the next big thing if there's no next big thing.
We got TWC because we were too far from the CO for DSL. However, that was 3 years ago. Apparently, some things have changed. DSL has been available for a year.
We experienced 2 big outages in August of 2000 but for the next 2 years had no problems. In summer of 2002, we had signal problems and after a couple weeks, they finally replaced our cable to the curb with RJ6. Since then, we've experienced other more wipespread area outages. This summer we're seeing signal problems again except out at the street. And we're looking at 2 weeks to get these fixed.
The cable TV performance is so-so. There's noise on many of the high numbered channels. TWC can't or won't fix this. So if we go to DSL, we'll go to satelite TV too.
There was one guy with a dot sig that said, "The good news is there's finally competition in the market for high speed access. The bad news is it's between the phone company and the cable company."
We have Time Warner Cable. Their service is so poor, we need a backup. As soon as DSL becomes available, we're moving to that. Until then, we need a cheap backup.
No newsgroups - Well, usenet has become very unimportant to most people I know, and those that do use it (such as myself) will probably use Google-Groups instead.
Most people don't know what newsgroups are anyway. They think the web is the internet.
How many times have I heard that old so-and-so just didn't keep up and that's why old so-and-so got laid off?
It ain't all that easy to "keep up", particularly if you have family responsibilities. But even if you do, you may not be able to avoid all the unilateral job displacement happening now. Through no fault of your own, you may face years of unemployment and/or underemployment. Training is not going to fix all this. The last sentence of the story said it most succintly. "We need to move beyond the idea that individuals can simply cope and retrain,"
I'll repeat what I've been saying for years. All you cocky, young prima donnas who think your skills will spare you from these bouts of joblessness have another thought coming.
This is not necessarily awful, however, for those who hope businesses will start looking toward open source options as the cost effective alternatives..."
It doesn't seem to matter how many people they've laid off or how tight their budgets are. They keep reachin' fer th' M$ brand. They still don't view M$ as extravagant. They will scrimp on office supplies and cutback perks and benefits but M$ spending is like a sacred cow. We're bombarded with one email borne virus after another and they are unfazed. M$ prices remain high and it's license terms onerous, yet they are unmoved. I just can't imagine how much worse the downturn will have to get before they "start looking toward open source".
Re:Do a job you actually WANT to do then.
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
It doesnt matter if you work 5, or 7 days a week if its a job you actually want. I mean really, if I could have the job I wanted I'd do it 7 days a week, a vacation here and there and I'm all set.
Yeah, IF you could have the job you wanted. But these days, that's a mighty big if.
Specifically, I was commenting on the fact that the micro-engine uses lighter fluid to charge the cellphone. I feel uncomfortable enough putting a cellphone up to my ear under normal circumstances. I'd feel quite a bit more apprehensive if I'd just loaded it up with lighter fluid.
"Carl, you see if you can figure out what's wrong with this thang. It won't crank up and ever'thang seems to be put together right."
What can you do when management agrees to a timeline and a workload that may make your job, as a programmer, difficult-to-impossible?
In this economy, you are lucky to have a job. Sure, you can quit, as several posters have suggested. But you may be unemployed for a long time, perhaps permanently.
Unionize? Be my guest. Most people who frequent slashdot bristle at the notion of unions like the teamsters because they restrict entry into the workforce, employ violence against scabs and require large dues.
Sue? Be my guest. You better win big because henceforth, you'll be known as th' suin' kind.
Slashdot Mirror
Bob Pease wrote a detailed refutation of a voltage
regulator circuit design which was optimized with
the Taguchi method and published in Electronic
Design magazine in the late 80s. The resistance
values in the circuit just looked fishy and his
analysis revealed that the circuit would not work.
The input voltage would track the output voltage.
The author had made certain the performance was
independent of the quality of the parts alright. A
fair argument could be made that the author did
not properly apply the Taguchi method. Bob's point was
the output has to depend on something. In this case, it
depended on a zener diode. The author thought he was
accomplishing something by making the output
independednt of the components. He didn't consider
that the circuit wouldn't work then. So be very
careful with this Taguchi stuff.
It's sweet. It doesn't do graphing but it's a well made RPN calculator. Once you get used to RPN, there's no going back.
What do the old farts do that ruins the hobby for new/young people?
Too many of them are G.D. knowitalls. Others fancy themselves as some sort of emergency officials. I just wanted to chat on 2 meters while I commuted to and from work. I found that unless I got involved with the clubs, upgraded my license and volunteered to work hamfests, Skywarn/EMS/whatever, my welcome wore thin. I lost interest.
I use the Ernie Ball strings on a Carvin LB-75. It's a versatile bass. The Low B is real proud.
Also, their basses (Musicman) are sweet.
The active pickups and LOW action make them REALLY nice to play.
I've never had one but they have a killer slap tone.
I used Rotosound for mnany years then switched to Ernie Ball about 12 years ago. I like a real bright tone so I change them often. I go through lots of sets of 4 and 5 string regular slinky bass. I've never had a bad string from Ernie Ball. I can't say the same of Rotosound, GHS or D'Addario. Reading a story like this only strenghtens my loyalty.
I once worked for a company whose business cards had a Telex number on them. At a trade show, I gave a young feller my card. He studied it briefly and pointed to the Telex number at the bottom asking what it was. I said, "That's our Telex number." He looked at me and asked, "What's a Telex?" "It's a Teletype that can store messages", I replied. He seemed to nod, acknowledging my answer but then asked, "What's a Teletype."
Overcapacity and overengineering are Communist concepts.
You have that backwards. Soviet engineering was generally characterized by corner-cutting and copycat work, hence the phrase "Russian Engineering" , meaning reverse engineering.
But the knowledge that a power system, large or small, should have over-capacity isn't about politics; it's about physics. Sure, you can buy a cheap 500VA power inverter that can run a TV in a mini-van but don't try running a drill with it or it'll smoke, trip it's breaker (if it was has one) or go into current limiting (if it is designed with such a protective circuit). The drill motor takes 2-3 times as much starting current as it does once it comes up to speed. If you want to run a drill out of a work van, you need one rated to handle the surge. This concept scales directly. The power system must also be able to handle surges. The alternative is to allow the system to overheat or to shut down the overloaded portions.
People may not have given a damn about our power system up until the blackout, but power outages are very persuasive. Cheaping out is not a viable option. Either we beef up the system to handle these surges or we don't. If we don't, people will use generators. They aren't going back to kerosene lanterns.
This is not the first massive northeastern blackout. There were wipespread blackouts like this in the early 1960s. The engineers learned that all sections of the grid must have significant over-capacity designed in so that the entire system could recover from large transients and short duration system oscillation without tripping protection devices. They beefed up the system so it could ride through these events.
The safety margin is gone. Demand has grown but capacity has not. If lightning runs in on a substation, it can trigger a chain of events leading to a couple generator switchyards opening their air breakers. From there, the overload snowballs.
Does deregulation play a part? Yes. Power brokering activities create additional burden on the system. There is less incentive to increase capacity. There is also diffusion of responsibility.
The electric power industry was not broken prior to deregulation and didn't need fixing. It's infrastructure and regulated monopolies suck less than gov't run or private run ventures.
This is apt to get worse.
yessir
Is there something that these power supplies contribute towards overall system stability that "cheap" ones don't?
The short answer is they give you added margin against worst case power flucuation, load changes and temperature extremes. An old engineer I once worked with used to refer to such margin as "belt and suspenders". He'd explain that nobody ever lost their britches wearing both a belt and suspenders.
The Zalman has superior voltage regulation and ran cooler. If you have a system that is very important to you, you don't want a crappy power supply glitching your motherboard because it's output is on the the low end of the tolerance band, it's load regulation is poor and the system temperature is high. Lets say you're burning a CD. That will cause step load changes in the +12 output due to the disk drive activity. At the same time, a line voltage sag event occurs on the incoming AC power. Now the power supply has to slew that transient as well as the load. This can cause an el-cheapo brand x power supply to dip the +3.3V and/or the +5V dangerously close to the minimum guaranteed high voltage level for some of the chips on the motherboard or other devices. On the motherboard, there may also be considerable voltage drop in the printed wiring before the most remote IC. Whats worse is these kinds of problems tend to be intermittent and they can manifest themselves in seemingly random ways.
"Now the CD replacement cycle has drawn to a close,"
Yep. That pretty well describes my CD buying pattern. I replaced the LPs that were broken, lost, flood damaged or scratched. I also wanted them on CD for convenience. Except that some were never released on CD. I got those via file-swapping. Later, I aquired the means to rip them myself. So, the RIAA thinks I'm a pirate. They are the ones with the eyepatch and the parrot on their shoulder. So, now I've replaced these albums. There ain't much new stuff I want. I know there are people who can play today but you'll probably never hear 'em. They don't fit the mold. That's why I think the music business died a little over 20 years ago. It's been kept alive largely by the replacement market but now that's played out.
I think I agree with their tech support.. if they give you a music file their obligation has been fullfilled. if you can't play it how is it their problem?
Simple. You won't come back.
The next thing you know, these folks will wake up with a horse's head in bed with them.
It's nearly pointless to debate this any further. It's happening and it's going to continue until the vast majority of jobs are over near the cheap labor. Downward mobility is how most will cope with this. In the not too distant future, most
We got TWC because we were too far from the CO for DSL. However, that was 3 years ago. Apparently, some things have changed. DSL has been available for a year.
We experienced 2 big outages in August of 2000 but for the next 2 years had no problems. In summer of 2002, we had signal problems and after a couple weeks, they finally replaced our cable to the curb with RJ6. Since then, we've experienced other more wipespread area outages. This summer we're seeing signal problems again except out at the street. And we're looking at 2 weeks to get these fixed.
The cable TV performance is so-so. There's noise on many of the high numbered channels. TWC can't or won't fix this. So if we go to DSL, we'll go to satelite TV too.
There was one guy with a dot sig that said, "The good news is there's finally competition in the market for high speed access. The bad news is it's between the phone company and the cable company."
We have Time Warner Cable. Their service is so poor, we need a backup. As soon as DSL becomes available, we're moving to that. Until then, we need a cheap backup.
No newsgroups - Well, usenet has become very unimportant to most people I know, and those that do use it (such as myself) will probably use Google-Groups instead.
Most people don't know what newsgroups are anyway. They think the web is the internet.
How many times have I heard that old so-and-so just didn't keep up and that's why old so-and-so got laid off?
It ain't all that easy to "keep up", particularly if you have family responsibilities. But even if you do, you may not be able to avoid all the unilateral job displacement happening now. Through no fault of your own, you may face years of unemployment and/or underemployment. Training is not going to fix all this. The last sentence of the story said it most succintly.
"We need to move beyond the idea that individuals can simply cope and retrain,"
I'll repeat what I've been saying for years. All you cocky, young prima donnas who think your skills will spare you from these bouts of joblessness have another thought coming.
This is not necessarily awful, however, for those who hope businesses will start looking toward open source options as the cost effective alternatives..."
It doesn't seem to matter how many people they've laid off or how tight their budgets are. They keep reachin' fer th' M$ brand. They still don't view M$ as extravagant. They will scrimp on office supplies and cutback perks and benefits but M$ spending is like a sacred cow. We're bombarded with one email borne virus after another and they are unfazed. M$ prices remain high and it's license terms onerous, yet they are unmoved. I just can't imagine how much worse the downturn will have to get before they "start looking toward open source".
It doesnt matter if you work 5, or 7 days a week if its a job you actually want. I mean really, if I could have the job I wanted I'd do it 7 days a week, a vacation here and there and I'm all set.
Yeah, IF you could have the job you wanted. But these days, that's a mighty big if.
... is a piercing. Yessir. I'll rip that out to fare thee well. So, if you're sportin' one, don't pick a fight with me.
When I told them about their problem, they raged at me for causing the problem and demanded that I stop!
;-)
Shoot the messenger
Specifically, I was commenting on the fact that the micro-engine uses lighter fluid to charge the cellphone. I feel uncomfortable enough putting a cellphone up to my ear under normal circumstances. I'd feel quite a bit more apprehensive if I'd just loaded it up with lighter fluid.
"Carl, you see if you can figure out what's wrong with this thang. It won't crank up and ever'thang seems to be put together right."
"It ain't got no gais in it!"
What can you do when management agrees to a timeline and a workload that may make your job, as a programmer, difficult-to-impossible?
In this economy, you are lucky to have a job. Sure, you can quit, as several posters have suggested. But you may be unemployed for a long time, perhaps permanently.
Unionize? Be my guest. Most people who frequent slashdot bristle at the notion of unions like the teamsters because they restrict entry into the workforce, employ violence against scabs and require large dues.
Sue? Be my guest. You better win big because henceforth, you'll be known as th' suin' kind.