'standard' NDA

[Rick C]

On Thursday, October 3, 2019 at 12:05:29 AM UTC-4, bitrex wrote:

On 10/2/19 8:51 PM, Rick C wrote:

In the 21st century there are online avenues both for contract
work/employment and for just contracting to do tutoring/general
education. If someone seems super-eager to do it themselves then there
is no reason not to just acknowledge that and re-direct to the proper
department, they often accept.

You can charge hourly for just talking, which while perhaps not quite as
well-paid or as emotionally satisfying as designing something, is pretty
easy money. Sometimes they decide they'd rather you do something once
they fully realize it's beyond them so it turns out into being an
elongated pitch session, but you get paid for it.

I kinda lucked out in that regard. I got a contract developing a custom board for a company who didn't want to bother with something that would make so little money. The guy who was head of this product line made the case for farming it out and they sprung for the various testing required to sell it in their product line. Sales are *very* sporadic, but pays well when they order more than a few hundred, very well. Technically they own the rights, but unless it becomes part of a $100 million a year product line they aren't going to worry about taking it back from me. So I mark it up big time and they mark it up even further. It bought me my Tesla and much more.

I think I'd like to have a few products to help even out the flow, but I'm not sure it wouldn't still be very sporadic and possibly worse with everything demanding my attention at once sometimes.

Essentially this is a rather niche product. A nice place to be. Ask JL.

I'd like to tutor math for high school or maybe college. Math concepts were always hard for me to figure out because the teachers didn't speak the right language for me to get it. I like to think I understand what the concepts are that the kids don't get and can be better at teaching it. A friend talked me into pursuing being a sub once. Not only does it not pay beans, they require a lot of background checking and it is all about when they need you with last minute calls, literally. Still, it might be interesting. If I settle down somewhere maybe I'll look into that.


There is a ton of work available for STEM tutors at all levels. you
could probably make a decent living just tutoring ARM assembly all day
to college students, judging by some of the requests I see on contract
tutoring sites.

Prefer adult students if it's on a piecemeal basis. I....I dunno if you
have the patience to tutor high school and college students. My
girlfriend does it for the university as an adjunct and she's one of the
most even-tempered people I know but "the kids these days" are gonna
frustrate and get inside your head, and when you're associated with a
university or brick-and-mortar tutoring company (i.e. getting paid a
decent "regular" salary to do it) you can't just eject the real brats.

"Kids these days" I think was a thought by Plato... no, it has been misattributed for a long time actually sourced by Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. So that only makes your though a bit over 100 years old. Heck, maybe it was you who originally said it?

--

Rick C.

-++ Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
-++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:5a9468aa-26be-43f7-bb00-948156944d82@googlegroups.com:

You are living in the 50s... if you call what you do living.

You are mumbling, because you actually think you know what I do,
much less what I call it.

No pencil, no paper... no work?

Secret labs are not permitted any type of recording devices and
have lockers at the door to place phones, paper, pencil, calculator.
It requires special kaypad access to get in. I am surprised they
allowed one to have a wristwatch.

Plenty of work gets done. Otherwise the feds would not have
defined what a secret lab is to us, and we would not make use of
them.

We had entire conference rooms that were secured and had white
noise generators in the ceiling panels inside and outisde the room.

When ten pilots from three allied nations show up for a seminar on
using a data terminal, one makes sure they are the only ones
receiving the seminar.

Ok, I'm ready for it. Call me a "child". Oh, I'm so hurt... boo,
hoo.

You are worse than a child. You reached an adult physical age.
Your mental age, however, is even farther behind than I had it pegged
at before you spouted this stupid shit. You act like a ten year old
child.

--

 

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in news:5a9468aa-26be-
43f7-bb00-948156944d82@googlegroups.com:

Who has desk phones anymore. Hell, I don't even have a desk!

We had a computer and a phone at each desk. One could look up
documents and then print them, etc. One's timesheet. phone calls
because the firm had hard line phones. EVERY person had a bench or a
desk and a phone and a computer. More doc lookups meant that person
got a better display.

Makes pretty good sense.

 

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:5a9468aa-26be-43f7-bb00-948156944d82@googlegroups.com:

There are many, many reasons why you don't run a lab.

There is only one reason. Money.

> Your BS

Too much of a pussy to write what your shit for brains thinks?

> makes me think of the MaliciousCompliance videos.

Whatever, child. You do not know me or anything about me.

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, October 3, 2019 at 4:55:37 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:5a9468aa-26be-43f7-bb00-948156944d82@googlegroups.com:


There are many, many reasons why you don't run a lab.

There is only one reason. Money.

No, there are plenty of times when even an excess of money won't get people to do what you want.

Your BS

Too much of a pussy to write what your shit for brains thinks?

makes me think of the MaliciousCompliance videos.

Whatever, child. You do not know me or anything about me.

Lol! I knew he would pull out the "child" comment. Of course people here don't know what you dream about, but we sure know what you write about and it's the same tired crap every day.

You can't run a lab because that would mean you'd have to manage people. You have such a great way with people they would all flock to work for you. lol Employees would take your crap for about five minutes before telling you to take a hike.

You know this. But you won't admit it out loud.

--

Rick C.

+-- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
+-- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, October 3, 2019 at 5:05:15 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:5a9468aa-26be-43f7-bb00-948156944d82@googlegroups.com:


You are living in the 50s... if you call what you do living.

You are mumbling, because you actually think you know what I do,
much less what I call it.

No pencil, no paper... no work?

Secret labs are not permitted any type of recording devices and
have lockers at the door to place phones, paper, pencil, calculator.
It requires special kaypad access to get in. I am surprised they
allowed one to have a wristwatch.

Plenty of work gets done. Otherwise the feds would not have
defined what a secret lab is to us, and we would not make use of
them.

We had entire conference rooms that were secured and had white
noise generators in the ceiling panels inside and outisde the room.

When ten pilots from three allied nations show up for a seminar on
using a data terminal, one makes sure they are the only ones
receiving the seminar.

Ok, I'm ready for it. Call me a "child". Oh, I'm so hurt... boo,
hoo.

You are worse than a child. You reached an adult physical age.
Your mental age, however, is even farther behind than I had it pegged
at before you spouted this stupid shit. You act like a ten year old
child.

I seriously doubt you have ever had anything to do with government classified materials. What you describe is pure BS. Fantasy.

I won't continue to discuss this with you since you are in such total denial. You remind me of a kayaker we call "secret squirrel". He tells all sorts of people about his work as a secret agent of some sort. Pure BS because anyone who has worked with intelligence communities knows what really happens in a black lab.

No pencils, no paper and the men in black wipe your memory before you leave.. Great training course.

--

Rick C.

+-+ Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
+-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Martin Brown]

On 02/10/2019 23:55, John Larkin wrote:

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 17:22:50 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 10/2/19 4:57 PM, John Larkin wrote:

In the 21st century there are online avenues both for contract
work/employment and for just contracting to do tutoring/general
education. If someone seems super-eager to do it themselves then there
is no reason not to just acknowledge that and re-direct to the proper
department, they often accept.

You can charge hourly for just talking, which while perhaps not quite as
well-paid or as emotionally satisfying as designing something, is pretty
easy money. Sometimes they decide they'd rather you do something once
they fully realize it's beyond them so it turns out into being an
elongated pitch session, but you get paid for it.

PID controllers are apparently a hot area of interest and there are
software guys who will pay just to talk with someone who seems like
they've successfully implemented one.

Nobody teaches control theory in college any more? I guess the
software guys don't learn things like that. I'm not sure what they do
learn.

I just had to explain to a guy at a biggish aircraft outfit how
synchros and resolvers and LVDTs work. He had no idea.


software engineering and electrical engineering have diverged very far
over time to the point that outside a basic circuits class some students
take.

They should teach EE students the fundamentals, as always. Physics,
electromagnetics, circuit theory, EDA (engineering unit concepts),
signals+systems, control theory. Without that background, anything
more "advanced" is useless.

I have no idea what software engineering is. I should buy a textbook.

I did buy a sociology textbook; it was hilarious.

Can anybody recommend a good (or at least popular) undergrad intro
textbook in software engineering?

If you are serious then although it is a bit dated now Pressman's
"Software Engineering: a practitioners guide" isn't a bad general
introduction. There are some gems in it but you have to skip some boring
or irrelevant bits. Back when I was at university huge chunks of Knuth
were used and we narrowly missed getting his $2^15 prize for an
unreported bug we found. He did send us a nice postcard though.

The problem in software engineering is that there is always some slimy
salesman selling the next silver bullet that will solve all problems
without any effort and management invariably falls for it again!

They're both extremely broad disciplines there's hardly time to
even touch on all the fundamentals of just modern "computer science"
(well, at the undergraduate level this means programming, not what the
term computer science means at the graduate/research level) much less go
into control theory.

I asked the dean of a big CS depertment what sort of programming they
teach nowadays. She handed me my head. "We don't teach programming!"

Oh. Sorry.

That does seem a fairly extreme position - most places have a preferred
language that practicals are done in. Although doing them some other way
was usually tolerated. A friend turned in a project in assembler.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 02/10/2019 21:57, John Larkin wrote:

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 14:02:07 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 10/2/19 1:59 PM, bitrex wrote:

You can charge hourly for just talking, which while perhaps not quite as
well-paid or as emotionally satisfying as designing something, is pretty
easy money. Sometimes they decide they'd rather you do something once
they fully realize it's beyond them so it turns out into being an
elongated pitch session, but you get paid for it.

PID controllers are apparently a hot area of interest and there are
software guys who will pay just to talk with someone who seems like
they've successfully implemented one.

Nobody teaches control theory in college any more? I guess the
software guys don't learn things like that. I'm not sure what they do
learn.

It does seem a bit odd. Though it was an option in final year physics
our linear systems course covered all of the main theory for amplifier
stability and closed loop optimal servo behaviour. It was better than
the EE course because it explained how and why things work rather than a
crib sheet of what is known to work without proper explanation.

Computer science tended to concentrate a lot more on (im)proving the
speed of algorithms, design of computing hardware and compilers rather
than on linear control systems. They built their own hardware including
early token ring based networking and rewrote IBM's TSO/TCAM to work
with PDP11's acting as terminal concentrators so they were no slouches.

Incidentally anyone interested in a full scale practical example of the
classic fire hose instability will love this one from today's news:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-49918971/extinction-rebellion-lose-control-of-fake-blood-hose

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[bitrex]

On 10/3/19 11:46 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

On 02/10/2019 21:57, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 14:02:07 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 10/2/19 1:59 PM, bitrex wrote:

You can charge hourly for just talking, which while perhaps not
quite as
well-paid or as emotionally satisfying as designing something, is
pretty
easy money. Sometimes they decide they'd rather you do something once
they fully realize it's beyond them so it turns out into being an
elongated pitch session, but you get paid for it.

PID controllers are apparently a hot area of interest and there are
software guys who will pay just to talk with someone who seems like
they've successfully implemented one.

Nobody teaches control theory in college any more? I guess the
software guys don't learn things like that. I'm not sure what they do
learn.

It does seem a bit odd. Though it was an option in final year physics
our linear systems course covered all of the main theory for amplifier
stability and closed loop optimal servo behaviour. It was better than
the EE course because it explained how and why things work rather than a
crib sheet of what is known to work without proper explanation.

Computer science tended to concentrate a lot more on (im)proving the
speed of algorithms, design of computing hardware and compilers rather
than on linear control systems. They built their own hardware including
early token ring based networking and rewrote IBM's TSO/TCAM to work
with PDP11's acting as terminal concentrators so they were no slouches.

Incidentally anyone interested in a full scale practical example of the
classic fire hose instability will love this one from today's news:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-49918971/extinction-rebellion-lose-control-of-fake-blood-hose

Hopefully activists elsewhere learn from that experience and dump 10
tons of stinky rotten tomato juice on e.g. the Pentagon by aircraft,
next time. Woo Hoo!

 

[John Larkin]

On Wed, 02 Oct 2019 21:38:58 -0400, Joseph Gwinn
<joegwinn@comcast.net> wrote:

On Oct 2, 2019, John Larkin wrote
(in article<gk3ape1kba2heg35f825r77ch91kckam0t@4ax.com&gt:

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 14:02:07 -0400, bitrex<user@example.net> wrote:

On 10/2/19 1:59 PM, bitrex wrote:
[snip]
PID controllers are apparently a hot area of interest and there are
software guys who will pay just to talk with someone who seems like
they've successfully implemented one.

Nobody teaches control theory in college any more? I guess the
software guys don't learn things like that. I'm not sure what they do
learn.

War story: I´m an EE who went into realtime programming. When I went to add
a degree in Computer Science (this is circa 1980 - the field had just been
invented, and there were things I wanted to learn), there was a
Servomechanisms course offered, but was not listed as an allowed
distribution-requirement course for CS.

So I went to the Dean, and asked him to authorize this course, pointing out
that Servomechanisms was not exactly Basketweaving. He laughed, and signed.
It was a very good, and useful, course.

More seriously, no Computer Science graduate not also having an EE or Physics
background (including Linear Systems) would have survived that
Servomechanisms course.

Joe Gwinn

It's hard to see how any engineer (or politician) can function without
some basic instincts for control theory. I see people having crazy
ideas of causality all the time. They have no notion of what feedback
can do.

Do something. Things get worse. So do more of it.

 

On Thursday, 3 October 2019 20:21:53 UTC+1, John Larkin wrote:

It's hard to see how any engineer (or politician) can function without
some basic instincts for control theory. I see people having crazy
ideas of causality all the time. They have no notion of what feedback
can do.

Do something. Things get worse. So do more of it.

The day politicians understand what they're screwing with will be a very different world.


NT

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, October 3, 2019 at 9:24:19 PM UTC-4, tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

On Thursday, 3 October 2019 20:21:53 UTC+1, John Larkin wrote:

It's hard to see how any engineer (or politician) can function without
some basic instincts for control theory. I see people having crazy
ideas of causality all the time. They have no notion of what feedback
can do.

Do something. Things get worse. So do more of it.

The day politicians understand what they're screwing with will be a very different world.

You do understand that politicians are created by the voters, no?

It's like a twilight story where the person gets three wishes from the genie and each one turns out poorly because he didn't think it through. Then people want to blame the genie.

So when you badmouth politicians, you are badmouthing yourself.

Get real!

--

Rick C.

++- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
++- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:98ca0d46-a893-4ce8-b924-044b09dddef0@googlegroups.com:

I seriously doubt you have ever had anything to do with government
classified materials. What you describe is pure BS. Fantasy.

Looky folks... Rick C has been spouting off ever since he spouted
off before. You have yet to state a single fact, jackass.

I won't continue to discuss this with you since you are in such
total denial.

You did not discuss anything, you retarded twit. YOU declared I
was unable to open a lab, then spouted an entire post full of
bullshit to back your inane stupidity.

You made a retarded crack about pencil and paper only to find out I
was talking about locked down labs, and then you spouted more
horseshit about that.

You are too goddamned stupid to even know what the word discussion
means.

 

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in news:ee230361-575f-
4952-b921-7568e47f02e6@googlegroups.com:

You know this. But you won't admit it out loud.

You are an abject idiot, almost more presumptuous even than Donald J.
Trump.

 

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:ee230361-575f-4952-b921-7568e47f02e6@googlegroups.com:

No, there are plenty of times when even an excess of money won't
get people to do what you want.

You must be very stupid to think that engineers do not perform for
pay.

Ask Nikola Tesla. He worked for Thomas Edison.

 

I do a lot of NDAs, and it's onerous having to remember who owns
what chunk of my brain.

Why?  What is the reason for them releasing their technology after some
period of time?

Because they can't work with me otherwise, I suppose. Obviously some folks have trade secrets that are genuinely too valuable to risk, but probably those folks can afford full-time senior engineers to work on them.

When people complain about protecting their crown jewels, I say, "So don't tell me about them."

IME the secrets are usually a lot less non-obvious than they suppose, but I'm professionally not-curious.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, October 3, 2019 at 11:50:18 PM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:ee230361-575f-4952-b921-7568e47f02e6@googlegroups.com:

No, there are plenty of times when even an excess of money won't
get people to do what you want.


You must be very stupid to think that engineers do not perform for
pay.

Ask Nikola Tesla. He worked for Thomas Edison.

I seem to recall that ended very badly for him, broke and with his greatest projects in ruin. A real nut job by all accounts.

Good example.

--

Rick C.

+++ Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
+++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, October 3, 2019 at 11:51:56 PM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in news:ee230361-575f-
4952-b921-7568e47f02e6@googlegroups.com:


You know this. But you won't admit it out loud.


You are an abject idiot, almost more presumptuous even than Donald J.
Trump.

And then there are your winning ways with people.

LOL!

--

Rick C.

---- Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
---- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 3/10/19 10:09 am, Clifford Heath wrote:

On 3/10/19 8:55 am, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 17:22:50 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:
software engineering and electrical engineering have diverged very far
over time to the point that outside a basic circuits class some students
take.

They should teach EE students the fundamentals, as always. Physics,
electromagnetics, circuit theory, EDA (engineering unit concepts),
signals+systems, control theory. Without that background, anything
more "advanced" is useless.

I have no idea what software engineering is. I should buy a textbook.
I did buy a sociology textbook; it was hilarious.

Can anybody recommend a good (or at least popular) undergrad intro
textbook in software engineering?

Most software is not "engineered" in any real sense (and for that matter
most "engineering" is not engineered either). Most "software engineers"
cannot adequately even define what they mean by "engineering".

My definition: engineering is solving problems by applying known
(measured) properties of available resources in a way that provides a
guarantee that certain outcomes will always be met, despite any natural
variation in the properties of those resources. So when a structural
engineer specifies a certain steel beam to support some load, they take
into account the specified load, the way the beam will be supported, and
the known properties of steel and of the type of beam specified.

The meaning of "properties of resources" in software is the properties
of storage devices, operating systems, databases, data structures and
the algorithms that implement operations on them. These properties are
almost only ever specified in the "happy path", and seldom if ever is
the worst-case behaviour specified. Instead, subsystems and libraries
are designed to avoid catastrophic worst cases (polynomial or
exponential runtimes, for example) - O(N*logN) is the worst that's
allowed without prior warning.

In any case software writers seldom know or consider these properties,
they just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. The same way the
structural engineer doesn't actually calculate the steel beam, they just
look it up in a table.

A former colleague trained first as a mech eng because he loved solving
the mathematical problems. During his first year working, he realised
that never in his career would he get to actually *use* the mathematical
analyses that he loved, so he went back to school and qualified in CS.
That's the kind of guy you want writing software for you (but they're
rare)!

So CS courses do actually teach the required analysis, and in my
experience software writers do have some awareness of it,  but only
enough to avoid using pathological algorithms. For the most part the
difficult algorithms are implemented in infrastructure code, and very
few people are competent to write that. (though many others try, and
they succeed only because spectacular computing power hides the
fundamental weakness of their code).

And then there's *systems* engineering, which is what happens when more
than one organisation works together to produce some system that's
larger than any of them could do by themselves. This brings in a raft of
human factors like clear communication, change management, etc. This too
can be engineered to some extent, but the vast majority of software
people never really find themselves in such a situation - and the Agile
movement is all about avoiding it. The one exceptional case is embedded
software, where you have a hardware team and a software team, and
neither can do what the other can. Our immaturity at systems engineering
explains the parlous state of embedded software.

I asked the dean of a big CS depertment what sort of programming they
teach nowadays. She handed me my head. "We don't teach programming!"

Oh. Sorry.

I *think* I understand that response. Modern CS is about *derivation*,
not about construction of step-by-step algorithms that perform some
derivation. By "derivation" I mean that for every current-state and
event there is an algebraic expression that derives next-state. This is
the basic idea behind functional programming. Every derivation is a
"function" that takes one parameter (current state) and by applying the
function, produces the next state. The compiler is responsible for
finding an algorithm to efficiently compute each function.

"Programming" then becomes the job of the compiler. The coder must find
a way to express their computation algebraically, and the compiler does
the rest. Haskell is perhaps the best examplar of this.

Clifford Heath.

John: You asked, I answered. It would be nice to get some feedback.

CH

 

[Martin Brown]

On 04/10/2019 03:51, Rick C wrote:

On Thursday, October 3, 2019 at 9:24:19 PM UTC-4, tabb...@gmail.com
wrote:
On Thursday, 3 October 2019 20:21:53 UTC+1, John Larkin wrote:

It's hard to see how any engineer (or politician) can function
without some basic instincts for control theory. I see people
having crazy ideas of causality all the time. They have no notion
of what feedback can do.

Do something. Things get worse. So do more of it.

The day politicians understand what they're screwing with will be a
very different world.

You do understand that politicians are created by the voters, no?

The fundamental problem is that politicians are self selected as people
who want to be in the public eye and are very good at getting elected.
That does not qualify them to make sensible decisions.

It's like a twilight story where the person gets three wishes from
the genie and each one turns out poorly because he didn't think it
through. Then people want to blame the genie.

So when you badmouth politicians, you are badmouthing yourself.

The snag with democracy is that it is predicated on people making
*informed* decisions understanding the consequences of their choices.

Brexit is a perfect example of what happens when you hold a referendum
on an issue so complex that only a small proportion of the population
can understand the issues. The result is people vote on gut instinct and
follow populist demagogues like Farage, Trump and now Johnson.

For every complex problem there is an obvious simple *WRONG* answer.

Get real!

Not all politicians are self serving grasping lying toerags but enough
of them are to give the decent ones a bad name. Guilt by association.

America famously has the best politicians that money can buy. They start
fund raising for their next election immediately after getting elected
and spend obscene amounts of money on big political campaigns.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown