[time-nuts] Help - Hope?
Rob Seaman
seaman at noao.edu
Mon Jan 2 12:19:56 EST 2006
¡Felices fiestas y un próspero año nuevo!
Kind of a bummer of a thread to start a new year. Thought I'd
demonstrate that anything remains possible by contributing a message
that doesn't have anything to do with leap seconds :-)
Poul-Henning Kamp makes a good point:
> A major difference for these younger people is that the technology
> of today is reverse engineering resistant. There is practically
> nothing to learn today by taking things apart: you can't see how
> they work
... a good point as far as commercial electronics is concerned, for
instance. Budding home experimenters and hobbiests do now have a
significantly higher hurdle to clear if they seek to understand the
operation of their equipment. The boxes are blacker than they've
ever been.
...on the other hand, no black box can be truly opaque and remain
operational. "Things", of course, come in an ever wider variety of
flavors - many of which rely rather closely (most certainly including
timing issues) on fundamental physics that cannot ultimately be
hidden from view. "Seeing how they work" doesn't have to be
restricted to disassembly and visual inspection. The operation of
inspection may include various "probes" and "scopes". Disassembly
may include physical deconstruction, sure, but may also include
software techniques to understand algorithms - or any other sequence
of operations intended to understand the interrelationship of
subsystems. In fact, several interesting reverse engineering
techniques rely on completely non-invasive techniques. Codes are
cracked by monitoring the power consumption of smart cards - devices
with no moving parts.
Perhaps internet mailing lists are seeing a lull in subscriptions
from new devotees. (Or perhaps the young'ns simply can't get a word
in edgewise :-) I'm unaware of any decrease in enrollment in
technical disciplines in the academic community. Some departments
are growing and some are shrinking as the balance shifts from
hardware to software to bioware - but the overall level of interest
is surely growing. Start a list focused on biological clocks and see
how much interest you get. In fact, one suspects that the natural
lifecycle of a mailing list involves a burst of interest (and
subscriptions) in the beginning followed by a long tail. Mailing
lists in general are most certainly mortal.
On the issue of the world's breadth of technical insight and
enthusiasm, there are no reasons to fret that weren't outlined in
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".
Rob Seaman
National Optical Astronomy Observatory
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