[time-nuts] Help - Hope?

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Tue Jan 3 08:29:34 EST 2006


In message <43BA78B7.8070000 at erols.com>, Chuck Harris writes:

>If a kid wants to work in this arena, he will.  You ought to see the mass of
>equipment my son access to (that he ignores completely).

I don't think the question if there is a barrier as much as to what
the height of it is.

It used to be that you could look at technology and guess how it
worked.  With a bit of skill, you could take it apart, validate
your hypothesis, and put it back together again in working condition.

All of those three steps are significantly harder today as a result
of the push for "intellectual property" as much as the push for
cheaper products.  It's the same reason that so many consumer
products these days are non-repairable.

So yes, there has always been a barrier and now it is higher, and
no, it is not unscalable for the truly determined.

But have we compensated properly for the raised barrier, so that
there will be enough engineers 10-20 years from now ?  Doesn't look
like it over here in Denmark.

Poul-Henning

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.




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