danelectro

For me, it's a superior multiboot arrangement so I can choose other Windows or Linux versions painlessly without hesitation to take advantage of inherent productivity differences whenever I want.

I would work for him, but what do I know?

I always wanted to get to be over 30 so I could gain enough respect to do advanced things that were always discouraged for youngsters back home where most people have always been over 65.

Well, in 1982 when the IBM PC was not very popular yet (under 50,000 sold) and non-businesses were still using their Commodores and Ataris, I decided to improve my programming abilities and build a small game for my Atari 400.

Earlier with arcade games I never thought Pac-Man was very interesting, but when Centipede appeared I liked it because of its trackball interface. I guess I'm just what they would nowadays call a natural UI/UX guy.

When the 400 came out it was attractive since it was not just a game console like the earlier 2600, but a full computer that also played some of the same games from its own series of cartridges which were more advanced than the 2600 anyway. BASIC programming was also available in cartridge form.

I wanted my own home computer mainly to continue the machine-learning I had pioneered a year earlier during the Houston oil boom where I had procured expensive Hewlett-Packard benchtop oil & gas analyzers at my employer, but was having more breakthroughs developing "software" than I was on the hardware. It was a petroleum engineering laboratory startup where I was operating the instruments in the lab during the day, then writing code at night by hand on paper, to be typed into the terminals at work once the module was complete.

After the crude oil & gas (exploration & production) boom went bust, I was luckily able to move to a traditional employer, who was in the refined products (fuel & petrochemicals) measurement & testing field. This was a 100-year-old service corporation, not a research place.

Anyway, even Apples and the new IBM PC's were not powerful enough for my former pursuit, but after they came out with a Centipede cartridge for the 400, I decided to get one, plus since I was employed I figured I could afford a trackball in addition to the joysticks that came with the Atari.

To code my first game I did not expect to be able to achieve very fast action, which was dependent on machine language, since I was just using Atari BASIC. So I settled on "MasterMind" which I selected for its pure logic base and its particular two-user operation where only one participant at a time is the actual player, and the "opponent" merely qualifies the player's progress among successive determinations against a hidden pattern. To emulate the "opponent", the computer would select the hidden pattern at random and provide feedback to the player, reducing it to a one-player puzzle.

All I had was the 400, the BASIC & Centipede carts, the trackball & joysticks, plus a fairly good Atari reference book. I had to leave the 400 powered on all the time since I had no data storage, but eventually got the Atari cassette after it became affordable.

Trying to make the most of the hardware I had, I ended up with an intuitive point & click, drag & drop, player scenario using the trackball in a way that years later would be very common once the computer mouse appeared for Apples & PC's, and especially after Windows came out and became popular because of pointing & clicking.

Meanwhile, like most employers, mine was more interested in status quo rather than maximum utilization of resources, but I became informed that they were going to embrace computers first in the tank calibration department. I was in chemical analysis but I knew the ASTM calibration manual fairly well and thought this was an excellent choice, there were geometric calculations based on physical properties & measurements, with a resulting report tabulated into an 11x17 inch chart having entries in fine print for each depth of fluid that was to be inventoried in that tank each time for the following decade. It was text output, looking like a spreadsheet, but these were traditionally reduced from a blueprint master which the cells had been typed in with a manual (non-electric) typewriter having a special wide-carriage.

I was naturally disappointed when I found out the project had already been underway since before I was hired, an established Northern consulting group was doing the work, they were being paid over $100,000 and already delayed well beyond the target date.

You can only imagine my feelings after the project was finally delivered and I found out from the calibration guys how they thought it was quite a time-saver.

They loved the way it printed the final charts in fine print using the new-fangled 17inch wide PC printers without having to go through the typewriting/blueprinting process.

But the raw data entry, calculations, output, and manual typing of final data into each cell was still done by hand.

The consultant had merely provided a replacement for half of what the typewriter was doing, the mechanical printing function of the typewriter, but not even the hand keying :-\

there's more but that's enough for now . . .

As far as I can tell, some of us have ancestors who spent thousands of years above the Arctic circle, where the sun doesn't even go down every day anyway.

And there never were any other primates, or trees either.

In a lab based on extreme experimentation, there is no substitute for perseverance until a breakthrough is achieved. Even if you don't start out trying to emulate Edison, you end up that way.

In chemical research you don't just turn off the terminal when it gets dark outside and call it a day.

I never thought it was the least bit unusual that every grad student's lab had a cot near the desk. You really aren't going to get anything monumental done if you go home from work every single day.

What happens if you have a 36-hour experiment that must be carried to completion, or a client's chemical tanker at the dock for a brief 36-hour stay where they are loading or discharging products that no one else can handle either?

You wait a whole month for your ship to come in, what are you going to do, be too tired to finish the job?

What hurts your productivity more is the chemical toxicity much more than sleep irregularity. In the industrial chemical world, there is more effort to avoid exposure the more toxic a material is, so it ends up being those things which are intentionally ingested that compromise performance.

Caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, and drugs are going to make you much more tired than you would be without them.

dano

How about an augmented form of plain text, where a SMALL MINORITY of special undisplayed characters invoke formatting options which can be utilized by consoles not much more powerful than dumb terminals. We could call it Hypertext . . . Could even give rise to a "markup language", we could call it HTML . . . Once you start going down that road it could be a slippery slope . . .

I like having a multipartitioned USB 3.0 device even when going back & forth between Windows & various Linuxes.

It's been live USB for me for over a decade now, and the hardware for fast boot times has finally arrived with USB 3.0.

It only takes less than a minute to reboot to a different OS using a Bootux Multibootable USB stick.

PC does not even have to contain a HDD.

I've used VM's but there ain't nothing like the real thing baby ;-)

Native BIOS booting to active partitions is so fundamental, and now so potentially disruptive that it had to be replaced by UEFI if nothing else just to put some hurdles in the way.

C, E-flat, and G walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Sorry, but we don't serve minors."

So E-flat leaves, and C and G have an open fifth between them. After a few drinks, the fifth is diminished, and G is out flat.

F comes in and tries to augment the situation, but is not sharp enough. D comes in and heads for the bathroom, saying, "Excuse me; I'll just be a second." Then A comes in, but the bartender is not convinced that this relative of C is not a minor.

Then the bartender notices B-flat hiding at the end of the bar and says, "Get out! You're the seventh minor I've found in this bar tonight."

E-flat comes back the next night in a three-piece suit with nicely shined shoes. The bartender says, "You're looking sharp tonight. Come on in, this could be a major development." Sure enough, E-flat soon takes off his suit and everything else, and is au natural.

Eventually C sobers up and realizes in horror that he's under a rest. C is brought to trial, found guilty of contributing to the diminution of a minor, and is sentenced to 10 years of D.S. without Coda at an upscale correctional facility.

Some excellent advice has been posted already.

to simplify, I would first concentrate on Ohm's law & Kirchoff's laws.

explore the properties & differences between AC & DC.

start becoming very acquainted with schematic drawings, especially the variation that is found among different schools, localities, decades, and plain drawings vs. interactive software schematics. Handle the schematics and spend time studying them. You need to learn the conventions among different industries, especially the way they handle Ground and whether or not all the wiring is even shown on the drawing. Ground is one of the things that is most often assumed to be wired symbolically, which can greatly reduce the drawing's clutter, but you need to be sure you know how to interpret these traditional shortcuts.

Start practically focusing on the difference between a schematic, wiring diagram, assembly drawing, and repair documentation.

start learning about electronic components themselves, you need to recognize what you see on circuit boards, how to cross-reference devices among manufacturers, and understand technical specifications of each part which will end up contributing to the overall performance specification of a complete circuit assembly. Handle the components and spend time studying them. You need to understand the markings & color codes, plus tips & tricks for each type of component. Experiment with them. to the maximum extent possible.

Think about how much you want to be able to assemble circuits (or prototypes) yourself, and what kind of circuits you might want to experiment with most. If you are going to have significant interest in traditional through-hole components, then you will benefit quite a bit from HIGHLY superior hand soldering skills. If you are going to concentrate on through-hole designs then you will need to work on the hand-soldering that much more, you really do benefit from hundreds of hours of refined technique. Use Kester No. 44 solder, it's the last remaining top-performer. You would be wasting your time using any other solder until you are a technical expert at knowing why a different formulation or quality might be occasionally needed for a particular project. Until then develop a baseline using No. 44 so you will be better able to detect the deficiencies resulting from lesser formulations, such as lead-free, in case you do have to go there. Wear your safety glasses and have adequate ventilation, but not enough breeze to affect the cooldown profile of your soldering. To really get good you need to do it every day. You can go really far in analog with only hand-soldering. Pay attention to what you are doing, don't grab the hot end of the stick. Sure is a lot faster and more effective than solderless breadboarding.

For surface-mount assemblies, you will need oven-based soldering. For this it is probably best to join with a makerspace if you can, where they already have a bit of a PCB lab set up. Your're really going to need to work with surface-mount parts to get very far with digital.

Among so many different branches of electrical study & experimentation, one thing that may be most in common is Power Supplies. Knowing about power supplies can not hurt you, the more you know the better, plus add experience to that knowledge. But consider whether you want to concentrate on Power when realistically you may be buying so many kinds of inexpensive power modules (especially surplus) rather than designing your own for most projects.

A scrap CRT monitor or old TV to unsolder parts & wire from, a $10 30W radio shack iron + some special-ordered Kester 44, and you should be able experiment until you have some simple analog circuits under your belt. You can probably best start out powering little projects with a 9v battery.

hope this helps, dano

I like that, what kind of pickups are you going to put on it?

I started my company on my own years ago and now I'm at it again.

In my case I when I go without verbal communication for a while (like doing long days & nights of computer science), my enunciation is compromised during the first few live conversations after that.

When I know an important phone call or personal appearance needs to be accomplished, I will prepare by "warming up". For me, it helps to play some familiar vocal music and sing along distinctly and loudly as a practice session. It warms up the voice for better quality and gets the brain into more of the presentational flow that I know I am capable of.

It always helps the confidence and that flow is more easily carried into remaining conversations for the rest of the day, once the brain has had some preliminary guidance along the path under non-challenging conditions to begin with.

I might imagine you can probably sing along with the radio or your favorite CD without stuttering.

Or maybe read aloud from a familiar book or document. These can help. It may be worthwhile to recite something that has been memorized, it's not essential, but give it a try too.

With pop music or the printed word you do often end up uttering things that will not be part of your regular vocabulary, and that is good. When you are talking to people later on, your conversation actually becomes less of a stretch than the practice session was, which makes it easier.

When I talk about my life's work, I know it's important and sometimes there is a lot at stake, but I don't want to rehearse what I am actually going to say or it may be too "canned", instead I just rehearse some vocals to get in shape, then wing it from there.

It's my life's work, and I do have more answers than anybody else on the subject.

Still I do look forward to having a representative and/or spokesperson once I get to be a CEO again. A highly technical person needs this more than a regular technical person, if nothing else so I can concentrate more on creating the science that no one else is doing. I've already got a few anxious associates who would love for me to get funded so they can come on board. It might be a good idea to start "recruiting" a strong spokesperson yourself, especially a close friend who might make a good partner or associate later when you can afford to bring them on. Until then it would be great to practice 1:1 with them when you can, concentrating on smoothness of conversation yourself while letting them casually learn more about your life's work as you go along.

That way if you don't end up landing an investor on your own before too long, you will might be able to have your "assistant" accompany you to a meeting or two and see how that goes.

hoppe this helps, dano

Most of the FAT patents of the '90's finally expired in November.

Now exFAT is much more recently encumbered.

Here's a short story about Frank Andrea and his 20th Century startups:

http://www.andreaelectronics.com/pdf_files/Distant%20Sparks....

I started my company single-handedly even though people said it couldn't be done.

It's a scientific laboratory where I needed to continue a tradition of building labs, in this case assaying international petro/chemical commodities in a more reliable high-stakes way than well-funded research labs of major multinationals can usually come up with. And they are using teams led by chemists or engineers having advanced degrees which I do not have.

I always took comfort that I was making more scientific progress than I would have been able to make If I had a PhD at Exxon, Shell, DuPont, or places like that. Plus I own my own technology.

I did not want to stay by myself, I started to build a staff but the business was ruined by natural disaster, then I was back on my own like I was the first few years. I decided not to give up completely, only give up on expansion which would have required capital anyway, so I just worked in the ruins ever since, developed techniques to profit far more per job than the competition, and the best years eventually came. That is how I completed the survival process then.

There was no initial sign that it was sustainable, but on my own again I never had any turnover like there was at my employers where my operational advantages occasionally had escaped the lab and been adopted by commercial competitors worldwide. So I have been fearless ever since, eventually inventing something new every day.

Later, what really hurt was a death in the family where I had to leave town for too long a time.

In a one-man business, if you are not there, there is usually no money being made.

Now I plan to make a comeback starting with just me again, but I've seen this coming, and over the last few years have identified members for an awesome team whose trust has now been well established, and can tap them individually as needed.

It's not easy but you can do it, as long as you are capable of outperforming an actual team whenever needed.

By schleps I assume you don't mean people, but tasks. Such as filling hundreds of test tubes or soldering as many connections as you can do, or writing code that is necessarily huge but represents a small concept.

Hustling is one of those tasks surely too. You have to be able to balance the selling and/or delivery in some way to keep the ball rolling.

Not many scientists, especially researchers, are entrepreneurs but those that have lived by their own technology might just be the ones that have the abilities that would be good for investors. Still may not be very "brilliant" compared to working for an institution. Depends on the person.

>most are terrible at making sales pitches. Oh, well.

Given capital, a breakthrough entrepreneur can turn a used car salesman into a technical representative, there will always be a time or place when persuasiveness is critical. Looks like Musk could use a number of car dealers about now. It's supposed to be easier to find sales talent than accomplished scientists.

Bell Labs I always thought was exactly what Bell needed, since they were living on their own technology.

Has anybody here worked for 2Wire? I've got some interesting theories. I think it's no Bell Labs but I could be wrong. That could be another thread.

>The real breakthroughs will require extremely slow, deep thinkers which have the autonomy and time to work on very hard problems without interruption in the form of sales pitches, VC meetings, demo days, and above all a constant scramble for funding. Two ways of doing this are to be really big or be really small.

Janelia does look interesting but who owns the product of your research?

Probably whoever builds the lab.

I druther build my own lab.

How many well-equipped non-institutional researchers are there any more anyway? I thought so.

Odds are pretty slim. If you don't do it your dang self it just might not get done.

But genius, the exceptional individual, "Great Man" or "Great Woman", is not just a theory, Einstein & Curie did appear. And true quantum leaps were made.

On these multi-decade projects, it always seemed to me like investors would be more interested if a few of the decades were accomplished in advance of trying to achieve funding.

If your life's work was geared toward making money for investors someday in case you encounter capital, and you were not going to let a lack of capital keep you from starting your pressing research anyway, a number of decades would be expected to have elapsed before you had the most attractive technology you could offer up for investment into.

For those things that truly require decades before maximum fruition, there is no substitute for decades, just do it.

-Unfortunately, there seems to be far more opportunity out there than ability.... We should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation.

-Pretty much everything will come to him who hustles while he waits.

--TAEdison

I'm a new poster here, I started my company with all recycled equipment.

Here is my stream of consciousness post about this. I could have thousands of words about it so this is intentionally brief. I am always trying to improve my abilities on this subject, and will discuss it more but this is what I've got right now.

Breakthrough technology innovation is fundamentally different.

This could be tough for teams which have been geared to a goal within sight.

In natural science especially, it takes a research laboratory which has to be built in advance, and this means a much further stage of bug-free completion compared to release 1.0 of software (where traction may immediately begin).

And then you get to start the pursuit of a/the breakthrough, over an unknown time-frame, only after which if you succeed, then you can begin to package and monetize it.

When you "pivot", you usually need a new or additional laboratory, and be prepared to set R&D back to square one.

Capital is needed for different things, in different ways, in different amounts, and at different times with differing terms than other high-profit or high-return operations. Compared to software engineering & marketing projects, these differences are so drastic, it's been interesting to me so I've been looking at it when I can.

My interest in capital would be for natural science breakthroughs but to outsiders most available capital only appears on the "map" due to the search for the next facebook.

I guess that's a concept where capital would be on a "map" and entities worth investing in would be good to have on their "radar".

I wouldn't want to be shot down, I would want my technology to be guided in for a safe landing. Aviation fuel, and a wonderful takeoff.

Some of these capital projects are so strong that tech capital is like Hollywood money & connections where the talent does not actually have to be that good any more. They can make a star out of anyone, and the system now tends to exclude the kinds of talent that made it great to begin with.

It would be interesting to see what that type of west coast machine could do with one of my technologies, areas of expertise, or even simple innovative ideas. This has captured my imagination for a while now, but I guess I just have an over-active imagination.

Ideas especially are not supposed to be worth anything on their own without action, but in natural science, if you are successful enough to have an actionable idea or breakthrough, and take action, it will usually be a longer-term committment than a software project, and before you have a chance to complete and/or leverage the development, most likely better ideas will come along which even if recognized as better will have to wait until later on for attention. If you are really advanced at things they don't teach in school, you will also have trouble getting your point across. Either way you end up with better ideas than anyone including yourself has had a chance to take action on or leverage in any way, so the best ideas lie dormant and unappreciated since they are just ideas and can not be worth anything compared to ones that have already been invested in.

If your life's work is geared toward breakthrough innovation in natural science, you end up with a lab like Thos. Edison and not many people can relate to that any more.

This is what has been on my mind for a couple hours now, since I first got the "RFS" in my email. I just subscribed to the Sam Altman blog not that long ago because I ran into some material of his which was inspiring.

I'm not a social networker or a software engineer, and I'm not from a silicon valley industry, so I've been trying to get realistic ideas how these kinds of companies get off to such a good start with their capital. Now all of a sudden horizons here have broadened to include natural science, this is even more inspiring.

I would expect some people would figure I'm too old for this ycombinator type stuff, but here I am now.