Avery, I too have had a similar career to yours. I cannot but agree with all
that you say. A very apt description.

Regarding newsgroups - "Abandon all rank ye who enter here." (Toc-H, on
the Western Front, 1916.)

To summarise -

To find what a resistor does , measure it.

If you are unable to measure it then model it with lumped components and
then calculate.

If lumps are not accurate enough then model it as a distributed transmission
line, which it actually is, and calculate again.

If you get similar answers for both procedures then you are laughing.

If you don't know how to do these things then you are not qualified to call
yourself an engineer which I'll admit is slightly off-topic. But if the cap
fits then wear it!
----
Regards, Reg.

"Reg Edwards" wrote in message
...
If lumps are not accurate enough then model it as a distributed
transmission
line, which it actually is, and calculate again.

If you don't know how to do these things then you are not qualified to
call
yourself an engineer which I'll admit is slightly off-topic.

Well, Reg, equivalent circuit modelling is not a common topic taught in
colleges, _especially_ in an undergraduate curriculum, and there are one
heck of a lot of EE's out there who work for companies that don't even
_have- the facilities (a network analyzer) to properly measure what their
resistor does... yet plenty of them are fine engineers.

Electrical engineering is quite broad these days. There are guys who sit
around designing communication systems who never touch soldering irons, and
I'm sure plenty of them would claim you're not qualified to be an engineer
because you can't derive some 'trivial' convolutional code off the top of
your head.

BTW, many SPICE simulators do a mediocre job of simulating lossy
transmission lines. Most people who are going to be using components at
frequencies where they care about distributed parasitics are probably
(hopefully) using frequency domain simulators anyway, but that too is an
area where today's undergraduate curriculum tends to be somewhere beween
weak and non-existant. (Using simulators other than SPICE... e.g., harmonic
balancers, periodic steady staters, linear frequency sims, etc.)

---Joel