On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 18:22:39 -0500, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 2/12/2015 6:16 PM, Wayne.B wrote:
On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 17:37:11 -0500, wrote:

On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 15:07:55 -0500, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 2/12/2015 2:33 PM, wrote:
On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 12:23:39 -0500, Wayne.B
wrote:

The biggest problem I have with engineering is they concentrate on how
small they can make something and still have it work.
You end up with things that are barely adequate and any little change
or slight miscalculation results in failure

You only have to look at an old Western Electric phone and compare it
to anything you can buy today.
WE phones will still be working after the apocalypse.



Design goals are not dictated by engineers.



They are just the enablers ;-)

It is simply a challenge of how cheap they can make something.
I knew an IBM engineer who theorized the serial capacitor based power
supply back in the 60s and I finally saw one in some dripping icicle
lights my wife bought. It is sort of scary though. The lights think
they are running on 3vDC but it will light you up if you touch it.
Basically they have the load in series with a capacitor and a diode
(off the line voltage) and another capacitor across the load to
smooth it out a little but there are still spikes that will light you
up.

===

Is the series capacitor acting as a dropping resistor, and if so, why
not use a properly sized resistor instead?


Capacitors in series are like resistors in parallel.

===

Understood but in this case the cap is in series with the AC line
voltage.