Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!ttrdc!levy
From: levy@ttrdc.UUCP (Daniel R. Levy)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Where is Seymour's tongue? (was Re: A Recently Heard Story About ...)
Summary: oops, sorry, unvarying load
Message-ID: <3101@ttrdc.UUCP>
Date: 16 Dec 88 19:48:35 GMT
References: <90@stanton.TCC.COM> <813@munmurra.mu.oz> <3093@ttrdc.UUCP> <8342@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: AT&T, Skokie, IL
Lines: 20

In article <8342@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>, aoki@faerie.Berkeley.EDU (Paul M. Aoki) writes:
> Please, I am but a poor semi-literate computer science hack who doesn't 
> know enough of electrical engineering to see the joke, can you explain it 
> to me?  (Really!  Me, I *believed* all that about "presenting a purely 
> resistive load to the power supply".  [ Wait, "to the power supply"? ])

Well, it looks like I've been the butt of my own obtuseness.  When I read
that, I thought "gee whiz, what OTHER kind of load could be presented to a
DC power supply (in steady state)?  Capacitive?  Inductive?  (none of which
would matter to DC, right?)".  So I wrote it off as B.S.  I'm sorry I came
down too hard because (as somebody else explained to me) I now know what he
meant.  But I still insist it was poorly worded.  Had I had to phrase the
description, I would have said "presented an UNVARYING load to the power
supply."  A resistive load could comprise a bank of resistors being switched
on and off; it's still resistive, right?  But it's not unvarying.
-- 
|------------Dan Levy------------|  THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED HEREIN ARE MINE ONLY
| Bell Labs Area 61 (R.I.P., TTY)|  AND ARE NOT TO BE IMPUTED TO AT&T.
|        Skokie, Illinois        | 
|-----Path:  att!ttbcad!levy-----|