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#47 – Apple HQ and Vintage Arcade Games – The Mothership Manifesto

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  • Very sad news, Jim Williams of LTC analog fame has suddenly passed away
  • The Art of Electronics 3rd Edition is the Duke Nukem Forever of the electronics industry.
  • Jeff reminisces about his old Commodore Amiga and mentions the Amiga on an FPGA, and Dave talks about Jamma consoles.
  • Agilent impress with their response to the U1272A Multimeter problem.
  • Malcolm Faed took Dave for a ride in the Mitsubishi iMiEV Electric car.
  • Jeff revealed he went for a spin in the new Nissan LEAF a few weeks back.
  • Talk about the excellent documentary Who Killed The Electric Car?
  • Apple are planing a new 12,000 employee “Mothership” Headquarters on the old HP Building campus.
  • Steve Jobs lobbyed for it personally at a Cupertino Council Meeting:
  • Dave hates the “virtual event” promotion UBM Electronics and EEtimes are doing for The Woz’s ESC Fireside chat
    (link not added out of protest)
  • Dave mentioned the 20-30% first year salary fee Headhunters get for new hires. How much do they charge in your country?
  • Are 8bit Micro’s dead? Why not use a 32bit ARM chip instead?
  • Jeff has been playing with the Papilio FPGA Board and the XprotoLab

Comments

  1. As a half-Aussie who suffers from not living in Australia, that part at the end was much appreciated. Great show as always 🙂

  2. Great show! Nice to hear Jeff on here again.

    Headhunters: I have heard figures similar to 20-30% and even more, but that was years ago before the current economic unpleasantness. (in the US)

  3. I was soldering a 74LVC02 onto a prototype the exact moment Jeff suggested the 7400 series was hard to find. I am redundant 🙁 . I love the single and dual gate series. 7400 is alive and well I think. I still see it used in plenty of gear. Maybe not the TTL versions so much anymore. Low voltage & low power CMOS is of most interest to me.
    ——————————–
    I’ve gotten the impression in Australia that EV converters have kind of taught and influenced the engineers as to what things can or should be OK on the electrical side of things.
    —————————–
    Apple mothership self powered by ego? smugness?
    Apple mothership has no Reception?
    Funny things happen at technology companies built on HP burial sites.
    Just jokes,

    JD

  4. Actually, GCC has great support for ARM, including Cortex-M3. Look at the Yagarto toolchain (yagarto.de) if you’re using Windows och OS X. If you’re on Linux, you can probably get packages anyway.

  8. I’m a huge Amiga fan as well. I still use my Amiga today, although unfortunately she’s not my main machine anymore.

    This discussion may interest the Amiga community so I’ve mentioned the podcast over on the forums.

    Perhaps I’ll crash the server and win bragging rights 😉

    Brian

  9. Wow, the last bit was really intense. I sounded like a lot of Australian references super condensed.

    Dave, you should stop pun-ishing us. Pun intended.

  11. As far as TTL goes, it is very alive and well for me… but only because I have a few thousand of the chips at my disposal:

    http://bradthx.blogspot.com/2008/10/best-electronics-find-i-have-ever-had.html

    If you need TTL, search ‘TTL lot’ on eBay and you can get a huge assortment of chips for next to nothing.

    While a microcontroller is the obvious solution for most tasks, often the task at hand can be accomplished with a handful of 7400 series gates. I feel that the high availability and usability of microcontrollers such as the arduino allows people an easy ‘out’ to get a circuit working. Personally I try to build circuits with standard gates if possible. It may not be as efficient for power consumption or have low cost for marketing, but for me, TTL is a lot more fun. 🙂

    ——————-

    8bit microcontrollers are also alive and well in my opinion. Sure, an ARM processor is nearly the same cost as a PIC 18F, and even small FPGAs have come way down in price, but the points Dave and Jeff made are very valid. You also always have to ask yourself for the project at hand, sure 32bit is available, but will 8bit suffice? For most instances the answer will be ‘Yes’.

  13. Re. small ARMs – agree that 8 bit will never die, but as regards size, NXP have a Cortex-M0 part win a 2x2mm 16 pin CSP package – would be nice if they did a QFN or SSOP version.

  14. Years ago I repaired old avionics that used a shed load of TTL, some surface mount, some leaded. Designed in the 1960’s, and were still working well with almost no problems from the TTL side, I changed a shed load of 741 op amps that had suffered parametric shift though, only one TTL that gave problems was a SN5474 used as a input clock generator, they also suffered from input level shift after 40 years of being abused input wise. Aside from that nothing other than odd rare random failures.

    One of the last I had in had a PSU problem, in that somewhere in the PSU either one of the pass transistors, the drivers, the reference or the error amplifier was faulty, as well as the crowbar circuit that was supposed to pop fuses in case of this. Applied the unregulated input of 14V to the whole unit, and ran that way for quite some time before it came my way. Only symptom was that one output was odd, nothing else, passed all other tests until I put the DVM on the rails and it autoranged where it should not have. Nothing faulty aside from one PM5406 that had popped it’s lid. Replaced everything including the resistors in the PSU and all was OK, no other damage from the 2x “Absolute Maximum Voltage 7V”. Passed the ATE tests perfectly.

  15. Agilent could have tested their software better, but I’ve never heard of a microprocessor-based product without firmware bugs. Providing updates that don’t create new problems is par for the course.

    The headhunter percentages you mentioned in Australia are similar to in the US. I agree in having a healthy skepticism of headhunters. OTOH, even if they are clueless about technology, if they spend their days going around talking to people they can be a huge help. My policy is to help them when I can, esp if they help me.

    Regarding all that Australian stuff at end, I couldn’t understand hardly any of it. It’s so radically different from normal English, which is primarily spoken only within 200 miles or so the Great Lakes on the US side.

  16. By the way “Duke Nukem Forever” has been released June 2011. Here a walkthrough video series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkkrFvwgFJ8

    I do not like the graphic, but the vocals and picture phrases are awesome.

    Do not piss before playing Duke Nukem Forever! *hahaha – insider*

    Watch the videos and judge for yourself.

  17. I liked the comedy clip at the end. Being English myself, I understood it all apart from one or two of the more obscure Aussie references. Funny stuff though.

    I’ve only ever heard of Jim Williams via this show (I’m a hobbyist) but from the way you guys revered him it sounds pretty sad that he’s no longer with us. He would have made a great guest on the Amp Hour. Great pity.

  18. Re: Headhunters- I don’t know what the going rate for headhunters is in the US, but I have heard that it can cost a company the equivalent of a year’s salary to fill a position. That’s just to find the right candidate, which seems to make sense- the more a position commands (in terms of salary) the more responsibility it carries, hence the more care placed in filling it.

    Given the expense in finding the right candidate, it might actually make sense to pay the headhunter.