Heh. I did that - I went to a research university, worked at a technical job, and dropped out after a couple years because the classes were not teaching me nearly as much (what seemed useful) stuff as the job. The classes were EE and the job was too. Sometimes I wish I had more book learning, but I do have a house full of electronics books that I refer to if needed.
Tee hee. Not quite... I work at a university doing engineering for the astronomers, and recently a couple people in my group were sacked for not getting a project done in a reasonable time. The project was one in which they been handed a pile of random old stuff and told to make it work (a cryogenically cooled 200 GHz receiver). Unfortunately, you often have to deal with such projects in the academic world due to lack of sufficient funds.
There are things called economizers that do this task. We have one in our radiotelescope cooling system. In fact, it's just been converted to proportional control (was on/off) to improve the temperature stability. It works great in the wintertime, but then the mountain has rather dry air to start with; that's why it has telescopes!
I remember that the Next Big Thing in hard drives was going to be perpendicular recording, back in 1982 when it was seen as the only way to get over 10,000 bits per inch. That was over 20 years ago, and *now* it's the wave of the future? What happened?
I have to agree. It's likely that there *isn't* any documentation worthy of being released outside the company! I used to design single-board computers, and our company didn't even attempt to document all the little oddities needed to get the boards working. Writing that documentation would have increased our engineering load significantly.
My experience with graphics chips also led me to the conclusion that many chip vendors that refuse to release documentation don't themselves understand how their parts work fully enough to tell the world. Intel is one notable exception.
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Heh. I did that - I went to a research university, worked at a technical job, and dropped out after a couple years because the classes were not teaching me nearly as much (what seemed useful) stuff as the job. The classes were EE and the job was too. Sometimes I wish I had more book learning, but I do have a house full of electronics books that I refer to if needed.
Hopefully it sucks exactly as much as it blows.
Tee hee. Not quite... I work at a university doing engineering for the astronomers, and recently a couple people in my group were sacked for not getting a project done in a reasonable time. The project was one in which they been handed a pile of random old stuff and told to make it work (a cryogenically cooled 200 GHz receiver). Unfortunately, you often have to deal with such projects in the academic world due to lack of sufficient funds.
There are things called economizers that do this task. We have one in our radiotelescope cooling system. In fact, it's just been converted to proportional control (was on/off) to improve the temperature stability. It works great in the wintertime, but then the mountain has rather dry air to start with; that's why it has telescopes!
I remember that the Next Big Thing in hard drives was going to be perpendicular recording, back in 1982 when it was seen as the only way to get over 10,000 bits per inch. That was over 20 years ago, and *now* it's the wave of the future? What happened?
My experience with graphics chips also led me to the conclusion that many chip vendors that refuse to release documentation don't themselves understand how their parts work fully enough to tell the world. Intel is one notable exception.