On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 at 02:57:08PM -0500, Al Davis wrote:
On Tuesday 14 December 2004 01:54 pm, John Eaton wrote:
It always irk's me when someone says that Open Source isn't
"professional caliber" or lacks user support.
But remember who said that. It is just a vendor defending his
own product, It is a vendor of low end cad, that could be
threatened by open source. Although we don't like that, it is
really to be expected.
We really should take that as a challenge. Take a critical look
at our own stuff, and ask what it would take to make it truly
"professional caliber". In particular, look at how the tools
interact.
What really irks me is when educators say that. Too many
schools with EE programs use only proprietary software and
black box proprietary hardware. Often they use the "free"
I would like to ask about certain properties of US EE college education system.
I have been explaining some bits of electronics to a friend who is studying EE
in a recognized school in CZ and what struck me was that he seemed to have been
supplied with various formulae and "dogmata", but not information when to apply
which one.
He asked me to explain logarithmic amplifier which is based on
exponential U/I characteristic of E-B junction in BJT. I told him about
input characteristic, almost constant current gain, and that the BJT was
running in a point that was belonging to forward operation area,
so that E-B voltage was logarithm of collector current.
He was persistently refuting my explanations with "They taught us that between
E and B is *always* 0.7V". When this dogma was backed up by a name of
recognized teacher with various titles, I hadn't sligtest chance :) Also he was
waving with some majority and minority carriers at me, which I didn't
understand much, because what I feel important here is the well-known behaviour
of the device as whole.
This was not the only experience of this type, I had numerous small experiences
in this style, with different people too, which can be characterized by "person
is allowed to build it's knowledge on foundations that are absent".
After that, after an hour peering into the books and lecture notes, he finally
managed to understand the thing I understood almost in a first glance seeing
the schematic.
I would be interested in knowing whether this teaching practice is common
in US too.
Cl<