What Has Happened To This Group?

>> I guess velocity saturation and other short-channel effects in
enhancement mode MOSFETs are beyond him as well?

...and wouldn't know a MOSFET if it bit him.
Talking cliches of course, but that's where the money is going right now.

I recently managed the impossible to put all the magic words "World of
Warcraft", "mobile gaming" -and- "YouTube" into a research proposal on
radio frequency power amplifier linearization.
It wasn't good enough
Probably that's just the way things are going.

Cheers

Markus

On Sep 13, 9:58 am, "mnentwig" <mnent...@elisanet.fi> wrote:
> Jep...
> The average person doing "cool" software, services, YouTube, you name it
> - knows how to code Flash / PHP / perl / visual basic ... code
> - Has heard about C++
> - knows little about plain old C
> - has no clue about assembly language
> - has a faint idea how the computer works
> - knows that there is a microprocessor and sure it's running hot
> - hasn't seen a transistor in his life
> - semiconductor technology? Quantum physics anybody?
>
> Well, I guess one has to draw the line somewhere, and it's continuously
> moving to "higher levels".
>
> Don't get me wrong, my point is not to promote ignorance. But IMO it's a
> natural evolution, put things into little black boxes and reuse them
> without worrying about what happens inside.
>
[snip]

I agree with Markus. I'm sure plenty of mathematicians cringe
when engineers use integrals dangerously ;-).

Until the day comes that all the analysis, modeling, design,
and optimization that I do can be automated, I'd say that this
is sort of like extra job security ;-). When that day comes,
I'll take my analytical skills elsewhere.

Julius

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:00:07 +0800, Steve Underwood wrote:

> ytregubov@yahoo.com wrote:
>> That's new plug-n-play attitude. Give me exact source and I will put
>> it in my stuff today, so can sell product tomorrow. No any wish to
>> _understand_ the Nature of things. Fast-life, fast-food way, you
>> know ...
>>
>> Kind russian regards,
>> Yuri
>>
>
> There is nothing inherently wrong with what you describe. Its actually a
> good thing. We would never design anything complex if we had to
> understand every building block in great detail.
>
> An example. I was playing with a little ECG gadget today, which I made
> some input to. The designer isn't a DSP person, and every time he tried
> to use cookbook approaches to the digital filtering the compute was too
> much for the MCU involved. I cooked up a C routine giving adequate
> filtering with a lot less compute, he plugged it in, and the device
> worked pretty well. Now, he doesn't understand the filter, but on the
> other hand I have only a weak idea about the kind of signal you get from
> a human heart, and how you can pick that up with an amp. Specialisation
> is good.
>
> The problems come when someone has little or no knowledge of how the
> things in their own field of expertise work - e.g. Matlab junkies in the
> DSP world.
>
>
> Steve

It seems to me that the use of Matlab has increased exponentially in these
past few years. I know a guy who has been working on a project involving
locomotive control systems where they tell Matlab what they want, let it
turn the crank, and dump the results into a C6000 processor and call it
done. While it appears that Matlab is a wonderful tool, and I would
certainly like to have a copy of it, it is no replacement for real
understanding.

Perhaps someday some of these Matlab junkies will come across the book
titled, "Where were you when your dragon broke?"

Noway2 wrote:


> ... While it appears that Matlab is a wonderful tool, and I would
> certainly like to have a copy of it, ...

Scilab and Octave are free nearly-clones.

Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

i just came upon this (been gone for a week or more).

On Sep 14, 12:07 pm, julius <juli...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sep 13, 9:58 am, "mnentwig" <mnent...@elisanet.fi> wrote:
>
....
>
> > Don't get me wrong, my point is not to promote ignorance. But IMO it's a
> > natural evolution, put things into little black boxes and reuse them
> > without worrying about what happens inside.
>
> [snip]
>
> I agree with Markus. I'm sure plenty of mathematicians cringe
> when engineers use integrals dangerously ;-).

but engineers cringe when it makes a difference how the integrals are
used by mathematicians vs. engineers. i particularly like this quote
from Richard Hamming:

"Does anyone believe that the difference between the Lebesgue and
Riemann integrals can have physical significance, and that whether
say, an airplane would or would not fly could depend on this
difference?
If such were claimed, I should not care to fly in that plane."
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming )

i use the same rhetoric when i get into an argument with a
mathematician (or math wannabee) about the nature of the dirac impulse
function.

r b-j

On Sep 13, 7:58 am, "mnentwig" <mnent...@elisanet.fi> wrote:
> Well, I guess one has to draw the line somewhere, and it's continuously
> moving to "higher levels".

In general, the level of abstraction typically used
to solve a given class of problem rises with technology.
Used to be that to solve a processing problem, one had
to be concerned with how to manufacture enough and/or
reliably operate a number of gears, tubes, bipolar
transistors, etc. long enough to solve a typical problem.

Now we can blithely code in matlab, c or assembly without
knowing how to implement a CPU or a multiplier in gates,
FETs, relays or whatnot...


IMHO. YMMV.
--
rhn A.T nicholson d.0.t C-o-M

Hi!

pnachtwey@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sep 12, 5:09 pm, Randy Yates <ya...@ieee.org> wrote:
>> Fellow comp.dsp'ers,
>>
>> I'm worried about this group. The vibrant, fruitful,
>> full-of-good-information group this used to be even just 3 or 4 years
>> ago seems to be fading fast.
>>
>> This group has been around since at least 1993, and has been two
>> orders of magnitude more "interesting" than it is today.
>>
>> What's happened?
> People prefer forums. One can include data other than just text in
> most forums. I use forums most of the time.
>
> Are those $&@*(@ web-based groups taking over in
>> popularity?
> Do you mean $&@*(@ forums taking over? Yes.

Unfortunately.

There are some serious disadvantages.
- The information is lost when the forum is closed for some reason.
- Navigation and searching is often crap compared to a good news reader.
- Searching over different forums is even worse.
- Information in forums is more often manipulated than in the usenet.
Somtimes companies try to control the information this way.
- Forums are much less bandwith efficient. This is important too people
without a broadband internet connection.


>> Are new people ignorant of usenet?
> Yes

It takes about 15 minutes too long to get used to them. Many people
prefer to spend 5 minutes more every day to avoid the 15 minutes to
learn to use the usenet.


>> Do you > have any ideas why it is happening?
> See the above.

Many young people in my surrounding do not even know that something like
the usenet does exist. So they won't miss it, of course.


Marcel

Randy Yates <yates@ieee.org> writes:

> What's happened? Are those $&@*(@ web-based groups taking over in
> popularity? Are new people ignorant of usenet? Is the DSP population
> shrinking?

http://www.google.com/trends?q=digit...cessing&ctab=0

Ciao,

Peter K.

--
"And he sees the vision splendid
of the sunlit plains extended
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars."

On Sep 12, 5:09 pm, Randy Yates <ya...@ieee.org> wrote:
> Fellow comp.dsp'ers,
>
> I'm worried about this group. The vibrant, fruitful,
> full-of-good-information group this used to be even just 3 or 4 years
> ago seems to be fading fast.
>
> This group has been around since at least 1993, and has been two
> orders of magnitude more "interesting" than it is today.
>
> What's happened? Are those $&@*(@ web-based groups taking over in
> popularity? Are new people ignorant of usenet? Is the DSP population
> shrinking?
>
> I'd like to hear from you: Do you agree with my assessment? Do you
> have any ideas why it is happening?
> --
> % Randy Yates % "How's life on earth?
> %% Fuquay-Varina, NC % ... What is it worth?"
> %%% 919-577-9882 % 'Mission (A World Record)',
> %%%% <ya...@ieee.org> % *A New World Record*, ELOhttp://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr

Is it because posters seem to have become more interested in having
said something than in having said something correct, useful, relevant
or interesting?

Dale B. Dalrymple
http://dbdimages.com

dbd <dbd@ieee.org> writes:

> On Sep 12, 5:09 pm, Randy Yates <ya...@ieee.org> wrote:
>> Fellow comp.dsp'ers,
>>
>> I'm worried about this group. The vibrant, fruitful,
>> full-of-good-information group this used to be even just 3 or 4 years
>> ago seems to be fading fast.
>>
>> This group has been around since at least 1993, and has been two
>> orders of magnitude more "interesting" than it is today.
>>
>> What's happened? Are those $&@*(@ web-based groups taking over in
>> popularity? Are new people ignorant of usenet? Is the DSP population
>> shrinking?
>>
>> I'd like to hear from you: Do you agree with my assessment? Do you
>> have any ideas why it is happening?
>> --
>> % Randy Yates % "How's life on earth?
>> %% Fuquay-Varina, NC % ... What is it worth?"
>> %%% 919-577-9882 % 'Mission (A World Record)',
>> %%%% <ya...@ieee.org> % *A New World Record*, ELOhttp://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr
>
> Is it because posters seem to have become more interested in having
> said something than in having said something correct, useful, relevant
> or interesting?



There is that, but also simply the amount of traffic seems to have
decreased If you hop over to dsprelated, you'll find a ton of
good questions/answers on, e.g., things like the TI DSPs.
--
% Randy Yates % "Midnight, on the water...
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC % I saw... the ocean's daughter."
%%% 919-577-9882 % 'Can't Get It Out Of My Head'
%%%% <yates@ieee.org> % *El Dorado*, Electric Light Orchestra
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr