19 Jun
2004
19 Jun
'04
10:18 a.m.
That has _nothing_ to do with it. Somebody has to
design
those chips!. It
is possible to understand how they work.
It seems to me self-evident that *someone* does
understand how any one of those chips works -
they just didn't tell the rest of us.
In the "old" days, DEC used to produce technical
manuals for pretty much everything and the manual
was shipped with the product. If you bought a
DSV-11 you got the tech manual and an installation
manual etc. If you go slightly further back, to the
early 1980s, you were almost certain to end up
with schematics too. This meant someone had to pay
to get these items produced and that someone was
the customer. Some time in the mid 1980s, someone
at DEC realised that the customer base had shifted
slightly and most customers had no use for these
manuals. So they were not routinely shipped, but
were available if you paid for them. These days
the number of customers who would order such manuals
is much smaller so producing them is rarely cost-effective.
(They are pretty expensive to produce properly).
This may partially explain the lethal driving I see
around here :-(...
I'm not sure that car mechanics have any better a track
record than the average motorist :-)
It propably won't suprise you that although I
don't drive, I have no
problem repairing cars (old or modern). They're not that complicated.
Heck, I'll have a go at repairing _anything_...
I think modern cars might be a bit more complicated
than those from say twenty years ago, but only because
they have more in them to go wrong. Getting hold of
diagnostics from engine management units seems to
be pretty hard, but it's not often required.
It's the absolute, not relative number that
bothers me. What
I mean is
that <n> years ago (for large n) there were A clueful users and B
clueless ones (with B being fairly small). Now there are C
clueful users
and D cluelss ones. I think everyone agrees that D is larger
than B (the
number of non-knowledgeable users has certainly gone up). But
IMHO C is
less than A -- the number of clueful users has actually gone down in
absolute terms.
I suspect that C has actually gone up (or your standards for
the entry bar into C have). There are many more people around
now (that I know) who can fix their PC or fix their radio
or fix their car. (Maybe the number for "fix the car" is
no greater in my case, since most of the people I knew
n years ago could not afford to take their car to the
local garage for a service or something minor like
changing the brake pads etc).
There is of course the other issue that anyone who
uses
something without
properly understanding it is liable to make a right fool of
themselves or
worse....
"worse" being that they give it away to someone like me :-)
Antonio
--
---------------
Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org