Hi Ziggy,

On 10/23/2010 09:05 PM, Ziggy wrote:

I assume you refer to the yellow curve...

Isn't that the average from the temp-sensor, being the modern
coarse-stepped variant as things heats up it looks like the
step-response of a one pole low-pass filter.

Cheers,
Magnus

Hi

If you look at the fine print on the yellow graph, it's running right at the limit of the "bad" temp sensor. What you are seeing is normal stepping / averaging on the low resolution sensor.

Bob

On Oct 23, 2010, at 3:28 PM, Magnus Danielson wrote:

Hi

I've been down that road a couple of times. You get to a point where everyone involved does indeed agree that "it's not a secret" anymore. Going the final step and actually getting permission to hand out the code is often impossible. You get into a "nobody has the authority to approve that" hassle.

Bob

On Oct 23, 2010, at 4:30 PM, Heathkid wrote:

Bob wrote:

Approve it?  I bet most manufacturers can't even FIND the code for
equipment designed more than 25 years ago.  Note that HP has had to
rely on the kindness of strangers for copies of its older manuals.

Best regards,

Charles

Heathkid wrote:

more likely, nobody still working there knows what the original code is,
and they threw it away 10 years ago.

I work in the spacecraft electronics business, and we're positively
compulsive about documentation, but there's plenty of stuff that just
gets lost.  "Oh yeah, we were cleaning out Dave's office after he died,
and we just pitched all those printouts and databooks with the notes on
the pages. Everything is online now, right?"

Or, it's somewhere in the archives, in one of several hundred boxes
labeled "miscellaneous documentation from 1981-1985" and it would cost
literally hundreds of dollars to retrieve the boxes and have someone
hunt through it for something that might or might not be there.

Or, in a cost cutting thing "We have all these boxes of stuff from 1980
that we're paying for storage on.  Do you have a charge number for the
storage fees?  No? Ok, into the trash it goes"

Very true, except it's more like 5-10 years.

-John

==============

True.

I've been in warehouses with hundreds of rows of shelves of Bankers Boxes
filled with records. I doubt the stuff is even indexed.

-John

==============

I did note that it was the temp sensor, but the  behavior was clearly
different. I guess my earlier search terms weren't good enough to reveal
this info about the sensor differences in the T'bolts. I've done some
further digging and now have the scoop on these DS1620 changes, etc.
Other than pretty graphs, it looks like the difference between units
using one vs. the other is a (relatively) minor difference in pps
jitter. Also that for those interested enough, there have been plenty of
folks that have swapped the sensor. Thanks!

Ziggy

On 10/23/2010 3:31 PM, Bob Camp wrote:

J. Forster wrote:

Yep.. You get to the end of your phase of the project. You've got file
cabinets and shelves full of stuff, most junk, but some useful, as do
your co-workers. The managers are anxious to "get those people off the
charge number" and besides YOU want to get working on the next project.
So, into the boxes it goes, "Miscellaneous documentation, Box 1 of
50", "Miscellaneous documentation, Box 2 of 50".

If something goes wrong, and you need to do it, you ask for a big
conference room and have them bring back all 50 boxes, and THEN go
hunting through it for the stuff you need.

We all start out saying, "This time, we're going to archive things in an
orderly way, and do it as we go along, and it's going to be a exemplary
situation" and pretty soon, as schedules get tight and budgets tighter,
that good intention goes by the wayside.

(And besides, nobody ever gets an award or merit pay increase for "good
filing".. you get it for "delivering the product on time", or worse yet
"for finding that nugget in the 100 boxes of documentation")

They are required to keep it by law, and they will get paid to look for stuff, if anyone (most likely the government of a court) wants them to, so I am not sure why they should spend their own money to make that task easy...

Didier

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

-----Original Message-----
From: "J. Forster" jfor@quik.com
Sender: time-nuts-bounces@febo.com
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2010 14:47:33
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurementtime-nuts@febo.com
Reply-To: jfor@quik.com, Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
time-nuts@febo.com
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Maintaining boatanchors (was Capacitor Failures)

True.

I've been in warehouses with hundreds of rows of shelves of Bankers Boxes
filled with records. I doubt the stuff is even indexed.

-John

==============

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shalimr9@gmail.com wrote:

Bankers Box is a brand name for a cardboard file storage box.
Of late, banks and businesses store most records electronically.  Except
in cases like a home mortgage, where there are legal requirements to
keep the originals on file.

Most businesses these days are pretty vigorous on document retention
policies, not saving anything they don't have to, particularly if it
might ever come up as discovery in a lawsuit.  Remember the Enron VP's
comment to her staff "Make sure you're following the retention and
disposal policy"..

I've seen some very nifty machines that will take a box full of paper
documents and with almost no human intervention, take the documents out
of the folders, scan both sides, etc. at amazingly high speeds.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't warehouses full of boxes and
crates of miscellanea out there, ready to be studied by "top men,
top..." should the need arise.

On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 02:44:51PM -0700, J. Forster wrote:

These days John is absolutely right... likely none of the

developers, none of the equipment, perhaps not even the corporate
shell of the division or department that designed the product and
wrote the software survives.  Probably the source code was thrown
out with the old servers that were sold for scrap... or just carted off
to be shredded with all the other paper and electronic records...

Horror stories abound about organizations that need to make some

minor patch or change to source code of a popular product for some
important customer even just a few years after its release and nobody
can find the right source code or the right build environment
(compilers, libraries, OS etc and the hardware they ran on) or if they
can be found it takes many many hours of expensive time and talent to
reconstruct the right stuff to actually make a code image that matches
what is shipping.

--
Dave Emery N1PRE/AE, die@dieconsulting.com  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493
"An empty zombie mind with a forlorn barely readable weatherbeaten
'For Rent' sign still vainly flapping outside on the weed encrusted pole - in
celebration of what could have been, but wasn't and is not to be now either."

On 10/24/2010 05:21 AM, David I. Emery wrote:

Even if you have the source code, you need to keep the compiling
environment in a runable state. This may be problematic since things
like licensees may have gone out (nobody payed for them and you can't
get a new one), the machines setup for running it has dropped out of
service. Maybe some manual work was never automated so some of the magic
is in the hands of someone that doesn't work there anymore... or recall it.

Keeping the source is one thing, being able to actually use it is another.

The RTOS manuals and support files may have been tossed for instance...

With all this... I still want the source thought. Alongside with other
internal documentation. I have never seen any of that surfaced for
boatanchors of any kind.

Cheers,
Magnus

It is even worse than you think.  When I was developing
the HP 5334B counter, the plan was to use the firmware
from the 5334A counter (currently in production) and use
the same legacy microprocessors.  However, we wanted to
replace the expensive HP made divide by 10 prescaler with
an off the shelf divide by 64 (or some power of two, I
don't remember).  At that point in time, we had already,
while still building the 5334A, reached the point described
below.  No source code, and no development system.  Also,
the whole thing had been shoehorned into 2k of memory, with
little or no extra space.

Fortunately, the original software engineer still worked
for the company and I talked him into tweaking the machine
code to change the prescale modulus.  Miraculously, he
was able to pull it off, and the rest is history.

Speaking of important customers, the military wanted some
feature called "MATE" which meant something like Military
Automatic Test Equipment.  It involved translating commands
from HP-IB.  What they had to do to add this was add a board
with its own microprocessor that did the translation and wire
it between the HP-IB hardware and the measurement controller,
because they could not modify the measurement controller for
the reasons given below, and other reasons.

Rick Karlquist N6RK

Magnus Danielson wrote:

Charles P. Steinmetz wrote:

In the old days, the manuals were typeset by some outside service,
and they maintained the manual.  There was nothing maintained at
HP, so when the product was discontinued, the outside service no
longer received orders for manuals, and they threw away their
stuff.  The only documentation at HP itself were actual copies of
manuals, that had to be purchased from the outside service.  It
was no one's job to save obsolete manuals, even at the division
that wrote them.  Some HP libraries collected whatever manuals
were donated and tried to archive them.  But there was no guarantee
any particular manual would get donated.  And then the libraries
ran low on space and had to purge.  Etc.

Rick Karlquist N6RK