I understand how you feel, but with these particular guys at least...they're very down-to-earth. Every one of them has shown a real willingness to help people, even newbies, whenever possible.
Well that's good. I'll be sure to pay close attention to their suggestions.
I've never been a fan of PC hardware (too slow & "cheap"-feeling for my taste) so I don't mess with Linux very much.
I'm limited to x86 hardware because its cheap, so it doesn't matter much to me if it feels cheap. As for Linux at 13, I can't say I was a very impressive user. My first memory of running Linux is actually of not running it. I got a kernel panic on the first try because I didn't know about boot loaders or about specifying a root= in grub. I know a bit more now, but I still can't write much more than a basic bash script of a few lines of assembly. And the PDP-11? Wow, I've only ever read about that thing. :-)
But I've worked with people who would spend a whole day calculating what I can walk to a bench and measure in seconds. THAT is ridiculous.
Yeah. My experience in lab has been that generally the measurements (if taken properly) are more than accurate enough for troubleshooting and adjustments. I'm clumsy though, so the calculations (at least the simple ones) are often faster for me. Breadboarding a full-wave bridge rectifier takes me 10 to 15 minutes, running the calculations can be done in under 2. :-/
One other thing to keep in mind. Hacking on embedded systems will teach you how to write efficient code, and you can take those skills right back to "big" machines at great benefit. In these days of Windows morons writing simple programs which require hundreds of megabytes of RAM...these guys are not programmers. In the world of embedded systems, in smaller applications one frequently finds oneself writing code to run on a system with a few dozen bytes (yes bytes) of RAM. And they do *real work*.
That's for sure. Right now we are learning how to program basic stamp microcontrollers in class, and while I'm not fond of them (they use PBASIC: a proprietary programming language! Can you believe such a thing?) I can see how they require efficiency. I write an 820 byte program for one of these things that would follow a flow chart for troubleshooting diesel engines. It turned out that by shortening some output messages to the debug terminal and eliminating some stray CASE statements, the code could be squeezed into 70 bytes! The guy next to me actually didn't use the debug terminal (which requires a serial port connection to a PC) and managed to get his program into 20 bytes using dip switches for the simple yes/no questions! I am uncomfortable in hardware though, so I wasn't willing to use switches. :-( -- "Windows [n.] A thirty-two bit extension and GUI shell to a sixteen bit patch to an eight bit operating system originally coded for a four bit microprocessor and sold by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition." (Anonymous) ~*~*~*~*~ * JDP :) * ~*~*~*~*~
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