Jumpin' Jack is lost no more...
Jumpin--Jack
A-town
Hey guys!! Just wanted to drop in and say hi and let you know I might be in and out of the forums once again. I don't know what happened to me in the past year, but I'm glad to be back! I'm also glad to see some of my machines are still kickin'! Fold on! 
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Fold on!
Glad to see you around again! :bigggrin:
To be on the safe side, maybe you should get one of these.
It's nice to see one of Team 93's Living Legends back in the Fold!
Or a whole lot of
Welcome back JJ!!
~Cyrix
If any of you know where I could find a computer engineering job in either southeast Michigan or the northern half of Ohio, give me a shout!
As far as computer engineering specific stuff, we have a lot of digital electronics like you were talking about flip flops, latches, mux, demux, logic gates (AND, OR, NOR, XOR, NAND, etc) and even the transistor level design of logic gates and transistor behavioral study. We also have a lot of microprocessor and computer architecture background... we designed our own CPU's that could calculate the Fibonacci numbers! We study assembly languages for multiple processors and various high level programming languages like C, C++, Java. Toss a little UNIX system programming in there, some analog and digital filter design and some electrical circuits. On top of that we do some operating systems, networks, and data structures study too. Basically just a big hodge podge of anything you can think of that might be related to computers! Ha ha... hope that made sense!
I got the basic logic down and am finishing up my latches, FF and trisistor stuff. I did the mux/demux and some other medium scale integration stuff last tri. Got an AC/DC class this tri. I know I have a C/C++/Unix class next tri. Later on down the road I will have all the microprocessor stuff. And yep on yop of that there is the general computer stuff such as the networking later in college. Its like a mirror image! I sure do understand it all.
BTW my title will be engineer when I get out and was wondering if thats enough to work at AMD?:D
The only other idea I have, is that with your knowledge you might work remote, a lot of low-level programmers do NOT work onsite these days-- they contract consult remotely. Unix-like O\Ss might have niches for you as far as deving low-level HW drivers to link into kernel and into the console-GUI codings as well. The kind of knowledge sets you have would be useful in those arenas and linking NAS\SAN combos into enterprise networks is one thing to look at.
Look at the market for Unix-like stuff and Enterprise implementations of it, is what I am saying, see if you fit. IBM will be needing low-level kernle and process engineers that make the hardware work with the software at desktop and app levels, and that is the hardest work and most interesting part of Linux and BSD. You need to know hardware, C level stuff, and how upper level apps work to do this.... And the GUI-console level and kernel-console-GUI code interrelations are the hardest to get fixed right now. Folks that can resolve level to level interlinkage incompatibilities are rare on the vine. LOTS of the folks that work with that work remote. Security also has to deal with vulns that at root are mislinkages between levels,passed along vulns.
Botom line, Linux is more a direct-to-hardware interaction at low level, and is much less resource virtualized higher up in the O\S onion than Windows is. Result is that the code for hardware driving and the desktops have to talk more specifically to hardware in Unix-style things than not. Unlike BEOS, Linux has a multitude of driver needs for video and for telecomm stuff. BEOS used a virtual video driver, neever could get the real high quality that the direct piping allows for, but the direct piping needs pipe finders and builders-- at C and higher levels. Curiously, Intel is working more on this aspect than AMD, theyare sinking decent amounts fo funds into the compiler dev and making compilers that tune to thier hardware more than AMD does now.
IT competition for success intensity is forcing folks to be both students and doers these days, and it is becoming more and more what you know and how you can flex than looking for one big huge name and trying to compete with doctoral level folks which is what the biggest IT folks want.
John.