¡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 _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list time-nuts@febo.com https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts