Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Whoa! Some big news this week!
- Chris has a new rig in the mail. Should help future Amp Hour podcasts.
- Dave officially has left his day-job at Altium (never before spoken directly on air before!).
- The company is moving to China, as stated in their official press release.
- In other news, Texas Instruments has bought National Semiconductor!
- Likely due to some of National’s past history and decision making.
- Some companies keep their computers off the internet, similar to the Iran computers that STILL got a virus (here’s a TED talk about that hacking mentioned on here before)
- April Fool’s Jokes!
- Dave pulled a fast one over on everyone about the 555 timer.
- Brian Fuller of EEtimes/EElife about Obama replacing his cabinet
In a stunning policy move, President Barack Obama reshuffled his entire cabinet today, replacing the existing members entirely with engineers from industry and academia.
“This move to change the makeup of my cabinet is long overdue,” Obama said. “For too long Washington has been dominated by insiders who have no notion of things like Planck’s Constant or Moore’s Law, who wouldn’t know an IC chip from a potato chip, who can’t distinguish electronics design from fashion design. This is change we can believe in.”
“Our country’s economy, indeed its future, rests in the hands of engineers, the very professionals who invent the future. It’s time for that to be reflected in the highest circles of power,” Obama said, noting that countries such as China and Egypt have heavy engineering representation among their political cabinets.
<POOF!> And then I woke up and it was April 1st!
- Chris is not sure why this tricked him so well…
- Sparkfun talks about their soldering iron kit (which requires another soldering iron)
- Dave apologizes to Jeri for a mis-speak during last week’s episode
- No more design contests for Chris, Dave or Jeri this year, but listener Gary has a great idea for a 12F629 based contest. If people are interested, tell Microchip their customers are interested in competing!
excited for you Dave. Looking forward to seeing whatever you decide to do next. Is this another loss of a workplace with opportunites for techs and EE’s in OZ?
JD
(@bm : see what you did? :))
Howdy Folks!! First of all I must say thanks for mentioning my fake TI-Nsc Logo (http://twitpic.com/4h3wq3) and I’m glad to have make you guys laugh a bit.
On another note, I’ll say kudos to Dave for embracing the change and I agree on that this opens up new opportunities for his already outstanding EE career.
Anyways, excellent show as allways and good april’s fools joke Dave! allmost got me this time, but I couldn’t suspend my disbelief given the date of its release.
See ya!
SGTECH
Sounds like Altium is playing the “shortage of skilled engineers” card with their move. I read that as “shortage of skilled engineers at the salary we would like to pay them”.
OpenOffice is under Oracle now. They pushed away the community engineers.
Dave, try LibreOffice. Community enabled fork of OpenOffice.
http://www.libreoffice.org/
We want cross platform Altium Designer!!!
poor quality, too much compression
We know, I’m re-uploading in a few minutes
The nanoboard 3000 is great! I wish Atmel/Microsemi’s Smartfusion would have been around when it was being designed so that it could also be plugged in!!
OpenCores is a great resource, but I’ve always wanted to try Altium’s rich list of FPGA IPs. I’ve been hesitant, however, to venture too far from my vendor specific tool, and take the leap of faith of doing everything in Altium.
Do you ever use the Altium IPs and do the synthesize/routing and downloading all from within Altium?
Sorry to hear that Dave lost his gig at Altium, happy that he’s going blogging full time though – that’s awesome on so many levels.
Sorry to hear about the job loss. We use Altium at my day job at Parallax Inc. Trying to decide how this will affect us, long-term, if at all.
Chris, great show this week and thanks for the shout-out on the April Fool’s gag. I can’t wait to hear a show with your new rig, but it’s hard to imagine the quality getting any better!
You guys did a great job on this episode!
Hi Dave/Chris
National Instruments is a uk company and produces (among other things) Labview check it out here http://www.ni.com/labview/
Dho! That should be US company…typo sorry
Regarding Dave’s comment about internet restrictions – I work at a company like that here in the UK!
It’s not quite as bad with us as Dave described – we do have access to internet at our desktops for browsing purposes – but we’re not allowed to download or upload any files at all. If we need to download or upload anything we have to put in a request to our IT department, who will then vet the data and – if they’re satisfied with it – they’ll download it for us and put it onto the network for us.
This may not sound like a big problem but when all you want is a damned datasheet and you know full well that it’s not dangerous and has no security implications whatsoever, you just want to download the thing and view it straight away. Having to request it and wait for someone to have time to download it for you is a real pain in the backside.
But, that’s how we have to work because we have very strict security policies.
To expand on that, we don’t have access to any local drives at all on our desktop computers. The PCs are just dumb terminals that boot via a network connection and then we have access to network drives only.
Because of this, we cannot extract any data at all from the network onto a local drive (such as a CDRW or a flash drive etc). Neither can we put anything on to the network. It’s not allowed.
If we need to put files on to the network we have to upload them via FTP from a special PC that we have set up for the job. The files are then vetted by the aforementioned IT personel and, provided there are no security implications, they are transferred onto the network for you.
Getting data off the network is via the same process but in reverse. Either way, you can’t put data on or get data off without it first being approved.
Even transferring data BETWEEN machines on the same network is subject to a vetting process!!!
There are plus sides to working for a company like this because you get to work on exciting products. But sometimes it can be really frustrating too!
I used to work somewhere similar, amazing how many ways people find to get around these things. Especially the data transfer part. With ours they locked out the USB ports…until you unplugged the network cable and the network didn’t “know” you were trying to transfer files. When I think back to it, people could just as easily have taken advantage of this and stolen info, but there are only so many times you try and email yourself a 50 MB file before you say “screw it” and go ahead with the non-sanctioned way.
I agree.
The funny thing is, security protocols like these do not stop a determined person from stealing information. If you’re motivated to do it, then there are ways and means.
But what it DOES do, is make it very difficult for the honest employees (who have no intention of stealing data) from getting their work done!
It can be quite frustrating at times.
But these kinds of restrictive policies have to be in place in order for us to attract customers. So I do sympathise in that respect.