26 Jan
2012
26 Jan
'12
12:02 p.m.
Um. Thanks for the suggestions, but I have to point
out that I can't
really buy and read half a dozen textbooks in order to finish a 2 or 3
thousand word article. I mean, ideally, I'd be knocking out a couple
of such pieces a day if I were a staffer and at least a few a week as
a freelancer. This simply does not permit such a depth of research!
I am not pointign the finger at you or anybody else, I am sure this is
generally the case. But it confirms something that I've suspected fro
some time -- there are far too many people writing about things that they
themselves do not understand, or at least don;t understnad fully....
I've written a few articles in my time, for user group publications. Of
course I am not paid for them. But I do try to do the research first. If
I describe a repair, you can be sure _I've_ done that repair on my own
workbench (if I am reporting soemthign that was suggested by somebody
else, I acknowledge that of course, but I still do it myself to be sure
it works). If I describe how soemthign works, then I don't skip over the
difficult bits. And yes, I've spent everal weeks buildign and testing
just ot write a 2 or 3 page article.
But I've read far too many articles and books which are either incomplete
or downright wrong. Not just computer books either. I have a book
entitled 'Telephone Porjects for the Evil Genius'. It's a classic. I
think there's a mistake on each and every scheamtic. Certainly 90%+ of
the projects can't work if you build them as shown. Some are 'simple'
errors of drawing (like wirs joining where htey shouldn't be), some are
fundamental design errors. I don't believe the author has built all the
projects in the book and got them to work, if he had, then he'd have
spotted things like totaem pole outputs contending with each other (!).
Ho hum...
-tony