In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Chuck Harris writes: [I split off this topic, it's interesting in its own right I think]
>> It may not be their fault. Have you tried taking modern toys apart >> ? Or a radio ? A TV-set ? There is nothing in there our kids can >> learn anything from :-( > >I must be very unusual, I fix modern TV's, radios, and other consumer >electronics doo-dads. It isn't generally economical to do what I do, but >it does keep me in touch with the bleeding edge of consumer manufacturing >techniques. Right, but if you were a 7 year old kid, would you *learn* from it ? The problem is that microelectronics obscure the basic circuit and prevents you from poking around with anything but a few peripheral capacitors which are mostly there for decoupling anyway... When I took a television apart, there were a schematic pasted on the back panel, and I could trace the circuit and with a book about radio reception in hand, I could follow the signals progress. I could look at the schematic and figure out what happened when I pushed this button and turned that knob. If my kid takes a television apart, he can trace any wire with a signal until it hits an integrated circuit and then what ? Yes, he'll learn that "it's all the black centipedes which do all the stuff" and that is both valuable and precise knowledge, but it is hardly going to make him think electronics is interesting. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list [email protected] https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
