| Products > Test Equipment |
| True analog scopes |
| << < (43/84) > >> |
| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: nctnico on December 19, 2022, 11:42:52 am --- --- Quote from: tggzzz on December 19, 2022, 09:58:59 am ---In contrast a bad education wastes too much time on the current fads which usually have a half-life of <5 years. Too many people have only a surface understanding of the tools and technology they are using. They can still be useful in many circumstances, but often they don't recognise how much they don't know. On the other hand, I'm sure people were saying the same things 50 years ago about the technologies in use then. Certainly I remember doing practice maths exam papers from the early 50s, and thinking the questions were bloody hard! --- End quote --- This is getting off-topic... Old people do tend to get stuck in the past where 'everything was better'. But I have to agree that the quality of education has dropped significantly. A lot of people can get a bachelor's degree nowadays but only because the bar has been set to 50% to what it was -says- 30 years ago. --- End quote --- Any decent engineer will always be looking for the edge cases, thinking how to remove them, and jumping on any way possible to improve things. I'm frustrated where things haven't improved during my career! In the UK in the 70s the "top" 8-10% went to university. The others became productive other ways. Now the "top" 50% go to university. Since people haven't changed significantly in 50 years, if the percentage of 1st class degrees is the same then the boundary must be lower. (And in the UK there is currently angst that too high a proportion of people get 1st class degrees). One of my heroes was Professor Eric Laithwaite at Imperial College. He used to set exams where one question was easy and sufficient get you a pass mark, several were more challenging and could get you a good degree, and one could not be answered adequately in the time available. He expected his undergraduate engineers to be able to determine which questions to avoid. If they couldn't, they wouldn't make good engineers anyway. --- Quote ---My youngest son is studying software engineering at a bachelor's degree level. Much to my surprise they don't get any math lessons. When I bring it up he claims he'll just look it up on internet. Then I counter with: how do you know what to look for? I get no answer... I'm not going to claim I remember everything I was told during math lessons (I have two books covering all topics and those are 5cm thick each printed on really thin paper). --- End quote --- Our 2nd year maths course was taught by someone from the maths faculty. When we showed our course notes to a maths student he said it was pretty much his entire year. I've no doubt that they went into it in more depth. The end of year exam rubric was "full marks may be obtained for answers to about six questions" :) --- Quote ---I also worked on software written by self-thaught programmers. In one case I asked the guy on how he got to a certain formula (partly implemented using ifs for different input ranges). His answer: I just fudged the numbers until the result looks OK. So I asked: and what if the input data is not what you expect, how to raise an error or make sure to show the result is obviously wrong? The guy answered with a shoulder shrug. FFS :palm: Needless to say I replaced his crap with a single -continuous- formula that worked. --- End quote --- Ah yes. "It passes the unit tests therefore it works" belief. What frightened me was that "they" didn't see the flaw in that argument. |
| Njk:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on December 19, 2022, 09:58:59 am ---How can that be minimised? The best technique is a good education that is focussed on the underlying fundamentals of the topics that will remain valid as technology changes. It is only an exception person that can pick up such concepts solely "on the job"; I've come across one. --- End quote --- I think it's typical quality vs. quantity problem. Yes, it was always like this. The billions of population does not mean that the percentage of individuals with autonomous surviving skills is now higher than at the pre-history time. Worse, more smart machinery effectively results in more dumb people. Education is very important but the opportunity to use learned knowledge is decreasing as most people then have to do actually a blue-collar work where little of that knowledge is required. For instance, previously I was designing my own SMPSs from discrete components, and a computer peripheral controllers with tens of LSI logic chips. Now it's no more needed, now it's actually an integration work that requires much less skills (left an FPGA alone). Later, when USB 2.0 just emerged and I was building a USB device, I wrote all the code from scratch. Now it's difficult to explain the reason because everyone knows that a drivers and libraries for all the classes are available. But it was not always like that and again, now much less level of understanding is required to put all the pre-built stuff together. It's something that is less and less of science and more and more of accounting. Add to that the amount of "accounting" documents to read. Now it's typical to see a manuals of several thousand pages, not of hundred pages as before. As the speed of digesting an information remains constant, more time is required just to read that bs. You can't effectively master the HW without having to read the docs with due attention. Meanwhile, less and less time is available, because of increasing pressure from the market. I strongly suspect few developers did read that at all, because it's not necessary for a quick and dirty implementation. Not a good environment for individual's personal skills development. Various "turnkey solutions" that every monkey can use are killing that very efficiently. Few are lucky, but typically - want an interesting work, enjoy a low income. |
| H713:
Not sure how true this story is (came from a prof who was something of a nut), but it does relate to education. There was an old Hitachi analog scope in the lab - something really crusty like 20 MHz. Nobody used it, but it was chained to a cart that was more valuable than the scope itself. One student spent some time with an Arduino and two DACs, and when thanksgiving break came, was the last person to leave the lab. When everyone came back after thanksgiving, there was a dick and balls burned into the CRT. Suffice it to say, the cart it was sitting on was liberated. |
| Njk:
BTW I'd obtained my first scope when I was a high school student. Found it on the local junk yard. It was so big and heavy I was barely able to lift it. With the help of my friend, we moved the treasure to my home. It was of very true analog type, with big CRT, no transistors inside, only the tubes. To my surprise, it was in working condition. I spent more than a year learning how a tube amplifier circuits work and what are the effects from changing the values of res and caps. Excellent learning tool. |
| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: Njk on December 19, 2022, 01:32:20 pm --- --- Quote from: tggzzz on December 19, 2022, 09:58:59 am ---How can that be minimised? The best technique is a good education that is focussed on the underlying fundamentals of the topics that will remain valid as technology changes. It is only an exception person that can pick up such concepts solely "on the job"; I've come across one. --- End quote --- I think it's typical quality vs. quantity problem. Yes, it was always like this. The billions of population does not mean that the percentage of individuals with autonomous surviving skills is now higher than at the pre-history time. Worse, more smart machinery effectively results in more dumb people. --- End quote --- Who knows, but the best back then were just as relatively inventive as the best now. Classic idiocy is "I don't know how to build pyramids, therefore they didn't, therefore it must have been aliens", and many varieties of that theme --- Quote ---... Now it's difficult to explain the reason because everyone knows that a drivers and libraries for all the classes are available. But it was not always like that and again, now much less level of understanding is required to put all the pre-built stuff together. --- End quote --- Problems arise when the libraries are subtly faulty, possibly because the implementer wasn't up to the job or because they didn't document their assumptions about how it should not be used. --- Quote ---Add to that the amount of "accounting" documents to read. Now it's typical to see a manuals of several thousand pages, not of hundred pages as before. As the speed of digesting an information remains constant, more time is required just to read that bs. You can't effectively master the HW without having to read the docs with due attention. Meanwhile, less and less time is available, because of increasing pressure from the market. I strongly suspect few developers did read that at all, because it's not necessary for a quick and dirty implementation. --- End quote --- I recently had a very pleasant surprise in that regard. I started to us a novel multi-core processor (up to 4000MIPSX) which is like an FPGA in that it allows hard real-time guarantees to be made without measuring and hoping. The RTOS is to all intents and purposes implemented in hardware. The language and processor descriptions were notably short and very easy to digest. The subtleties were explained clearly with pseudo-code examples. There were no "here there be dragons" exceptions and errata. All that documentation was <200 pages, and fun to read. I had zero surprises: everything just worked as expected, first time. The first kick-the-tyres speed tests were up and running within a day of receiving the hardware and firing up the tools. Stunning. Then I added other things like a front panel and peeked/poked comms over a USB link, and everything continued to work as expected and at the same speed. Absolutely no unexpected behaviour; everything just "worked as it said on the tin". What more could I want! |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |