23 Mar
2009
23 Mar
'09
8:24 p.m.
Given that I don't think in terms of programming,
and am much happer
with a scheamtic than with a VHDL listing, and that I am much, much,
happier with a 'scope than a simulator, is there any hope for me?
Define "hope" and maybe I can tell you. :-/
Or should i connect myself between the anode and
cathode of an 807
running at full power?
Well, I feel quite certain that I speak for more than just myself when
I say you'd be sorely missed here.
But I know what you mean. More and more often, in recent years, I've
felt severely out of step with the society I'm trying to live in, and
one respect - the one that seems to me to be most relevant here - is
that I strongly believe in understanding things all the way down. (Of
course, nobody can quite achieve that, but the closer the better.)
xkcd #435, kind of - knowing the lower levels makes me better at the
upper levels in so many different ways. I remember once I built a ROM
dumper and it would always read the last byte as FF, even in cases
where I knew it wasn't. Turned out I'd forgotten to connect one of the
power pins (must've been ground), and, provided at least one input was
at each level, they powered the chip through the input clamp diodes.
But when all the address pins were high, there was no ground, so all
outputs were perforce high. (I must have tied chip enable and such to
the ground pin rather than circuit ground....) If I'd chunked the chip
as a logic element in my mind, instead of knowing about - and being
aware of - things like clamping diodes that don't affect its operation
as a logic device but do matter when operated outside those bounds (as,
here, without a normal power supply), this would have been totally
mystifying rather than understandable.
I get the feeling that, especially with high tech, we are running on
autopilot as far as understanding is concerned: we as a society don't
really grok things, but are just using what's already in place and
forgetting we don't know how it works and aren't competent to fix it.
Companies with retired employees who discover there's nobody left who
understands critical machinery enough to deal with unexpected behaviour
are a classic example. (I'm not just talking about computers; it
happens in everything from power plants to assembly lines.) It's one
reason I try to be as much of a generalist as feasible.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B