31 Dec
2001
31 Dec
'01
2:09 p.m.
In replay to my moan about engineers not being able to build Christmas
tree lights, Tony Duell writes:
Do you own a suitably large LART?
I've given up with the LART, it just doesn't work - re-education is a better
approach - but then it doesn't work on the brain dead.
I must have told the story of the 362.8 ohm resistor.
In case I haven't,
it goes like this......
I used to own an 8in Shugart drive a long time ago. For
some strange reason
that I couldn't understand it was stuffed with E96 resisors. Perhaps they were
cheaper than E24 ?
I've come to the conclusion that the best
(electronic?) engineers and
programmers are all essentially self-taught. It's probably much the same
in all creative subjects.
I'd agree
......You may argue that much of engineering these
days is not about making
things, and that engineers rarely need these skills (that is a separate
rant)...
I'd argue that engineering is all about making things. OK, perhaps engineers
don't need practical skills so much these days, but an understanding of other
engineering disiplines is essential. You have to be able to understand the
"other guy's" point of view, whether it be hardware, software,
manufacturing
or management.
Lawrence Walker wrote:
Well from what I've heard about the "father
of electricity" and Henry Ford
for
that matter, he would hire a bunch of
"promising" engineers like Tesla,
take what they've already discovered, claim them as products of his own
and become a wold-famous inventor. And of course, like Marconi, become the
"inventor of Radio" which we are now celebrating, despite the fact that
Tesla
won a court decision in US courts to his primacy with
it. History is
written by
the Victors.
I hope you meant Faraday as the "father of electricity" and not Edison.
As for Marconi, I'd say he "pioneered" radio engineering but wouldn't
have
got very far if it hadn't been for Hertz. I'm not sure how Tesla fits into the
picture, he did invent the squirel cage induction motor but I'm not aware
of any major contributions he made to radio engineering.
Chris