The next iteration of technical advance....imo

With very bright people in Russia, china and india offering CAD and
solid modeling, CADAM and similar services off of a pencil
sketch .....then emailed back to you as a 3 D model...... its going to
be a tougher business for todays US based CAD people (who pay a couple
of grand am month rent etc).

However, none of these shops or even co-ops can do your own personal
intellectual advance and product development, especially in ones own
specialty trade or technical area...In other words the CAD shops can
draw up yer new chip circuit but cant come up with the design or make
advances on it... some can... but most can't....thats science and
engineering... and much of that stays at the manufacturer level.

you can though... particularly in smaller nich markets, below the
interest thresholds of the large manufacturers.


You can advance, develop and market your own concepts... that is the
area in which cad skills will be a great advantage to a person in the
future, especially free lancing his own specialties......

freelance in a corporate arena that uses HR to hire the most compliant
if not brain dead folk possible is the only option for some of us.




Phil scott

 

I agree Phil, wholeheartedly.

That is what I have based my work on.

Copying or copy & tweak something is not worth much in & by itself. I
do note that the Asians are turning out more engineers out of colleges
by numbers of individuals than the US, but they are not yet on par
with US & EU engineers from what I see and hear. That doesn't mean
they won't be over time though. I have only a rough 2nd hand touch of
Chinese work through a Chief Engineer friend who has all his short run
tools & products made there and visits over a dozen times a year. The
hand work necessary in his tools & products has dictated that they
find low cost labor to be able to compete in world markets.

His work with Chinese engineers indicates to him that in China,
engineers are taught to "follow the book", "do it by the formula",
"adhere to the rules", and consequently he and his stateside crew have
to make the smallest of decisions about design and tooling. It is
EXTREMELY frustrating for my friend, and he doesn't want to do this
for much longer.

Coming up with new concepts, or converting an obsolete structure or
package into a whole new arena of cost & usability performance is
where the money is to be found.

In spite of complaints about the patent system, it is still a viable
way to get a truly better product to a larger amount of value for an
individual designer or a small firm (as well as large firms who value
non-trivial patents highly). Intellectual property in all its forms
accounts for a super-majority of public company share value.

One of my non-used patents just sold for a 6 figure sum last year to a
Fortune 500 company. It can be done, but I admit, it is never an easy
task to come up with a truly better product, get a great patent
application filed (not a junk application), and then get the product
in production.

Bo

 

I ran into a guy who 'redesigned' sandwich bar servers, with the
little containers for mayonaise and relish etc on top... he switched
from a regular fan like we had been using for 70 years to a muffin
fan, and made the fan case out of razor sharp stainless steel... ran a
loop of copper tube near the condidment pans to help cool
them....called it a an entirely new concept in refrigeration
technology.. a complete new science...different physics and sold it to
for 4 million dollars (forgot name, but sold to a major food service
equipment mfgr)... total piles of crap, compact, a person gets all cut
up working on it... rest of the system off the shelf standard parts
jammed in so tight you could barely work on them.

Those kind of electronics duty fans btw dont hold up well in constant
low temperature use...bearings are too small.

Corporate america just stuns me with its brilliance at times.

***

Re the chinese. I purchased an GQC (great quality computer)..from
Fry's electronics in 1995, made in china, 298 bucks, loaded with
software...thats when desk tops were going for over a grand. It ran
perfectly until I threw it out 8 years later, heavy use. My other
computer had an intel chip, ran hot as hell, memory and hard drive
failure prone..but not the chinese computer. I opened it up one day,
looking for the CPU..couldnt find it..nor the CPU cooling fan...
when I did find it it was about 1/10th the size of the Intel chip and
the cooling fan about 1/2" square. called a 'dragon chip'... far in
advance of anything intel had or has yet in some aspects, cool running
low power.

The chinese are a bit farther advanced than they let on imo... they
are also on a different agenda than the US, pure technical advance...
the Intel/MS cabal is heavily compromized by govt interests in having
backoors to the software.. a wet dream for any intelligence agency..
to mask that it has been necessary to over complicate that entire
fornication.

Its a much longer story, but from personal experience on the
extensively nasty side... following that and much expose, ended with
both German and French intelligence notifying their govts of espionage
by US govt and vested interests, Boeing ... via back doors in the MS,
Oracle software. (loss of an Airbus contract for example). that led
to the EU and most of asia for a time, changing to Linux based systems
and getting rid of MS in its govt operations.. this was the driver for
the rise of SAP... a small german data base firm at the time, now
rivaling Oracle (25% founded btw by cia money, and still on the
masthead.). 1999 to 2002 time frame.

Part of that hose job apparently involves the CPU.. not an issue with
chinese equipment at the time. If its clean and simply you can hide
anything in it.


Phil Scott

 

They make many of their own CPUs in China but not going
back quite that far (1995) I think.

IIRC a middle-aged non-technical woman founded the firm
& many in the village chipped in ....