Prev: convert pinyin to chinese characters?
Next: Clone, mirror, or neither?
From: TaliesinSoft on 3 Mar 2006 10:49
On Fri, 3 Mar 2006 09:08:10 -0600, Warren Oates wrote (in article
<warren.oates-E3FE40.10080903032006(a)news.bellglobal.com>):

> I remember, living in England, you bought appliances (toaster, radio) and
> they never came with a plug; you had to buy one to match the outlets in
> your house. They were still doing it in the early 80s, years after they'd
> standardized those big 3-prong plugs.

It was even worse. I lived in England in the sixties. At that time it was
common for houses to have several different style plugs, each style keyed to
a given amperage. On the somewhat upside, it was also common for each plug to
be appropriately fused for the device to which it was attached. On the
downside, the main "fusebox" used so-called fuse wire instead of fuses, and
it was possible to use wire of any rating for any circuit.

--
James Leo Ryan ..... Austin, Texas ..... taliesinsoft(a)mac.com

From: tacit on 4 Mar 2006 16:14
In article <1hbm23i.eehlxrsc53fN%henry999(a)eircom.net>,
henry999(a)eircom.net (Henry) wrote:

> Or, do you mean that being a certified techician really involves only a
> 40% - 60% command of the material? If so, I think most people would
> agree that your 'certification' process is far too lax.

No, I mean that technicians trained to service machines are very rarely
trained in knowledge of system architectures, electronics, or anything
on a component level, and are generally taught the specific
troubleshooting techniques for a specific set of equipment but can not
(and do not need to) generalize this knowledge.

A person trained to fix G4 "Quicksilver" machines is generally taught
how to run basic diagnostics, how to eliminate certain classes of
problems, and specific troubleshooting points on that machine--but may
be totally baffled if confronted by an old SE30. And for fixing machines
at an Apple store, that's all that's necessary. A technician does not
need to know what an ASIC chip is, or the difference between SRAM and
DRAM, or the characteristics af a particular PCI interface chip. He
needs to know how to measure the output from the power supply, how to
tell what kinds of problems are likely RAM-related, how to run a program
that will tell him "the logic board has failed" or "the video card has
failed." This does not require a huge degree of technical competency; I
believe it is possible to take a person at random from the streets and,
regardless of his level of knowledge about computers, teach him within a
few weeks to be able to do the job of a factory authorized technician in
a computer retail store.

In short, it does not take a "genius." A person who has gone through an
MCSE certification or through Apple's certification is not, by any
stretch of the imagination, an "expert" in computer hardware.

And like I said, that's fine, It's very, very rare that a level of
competency higher than 5 or 6 is needed to fix a broken computer.

--
Art, photography, shareware, polyamory, literature, kink:
all at http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html
Nanohazard, Geek shirts, and more: http://www.villaintees.com
First  |  Prev  | 
Pages: 1 2 3 4
Prev: convert pinyin to chinese characters?
Next: Clone, mirror, or neither?