On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 06:52, -Hammer- <bhmccie@gmail.com> wrote:
Let me simplify that. If you are over 35 you know how to troubleshoot.
Yes, I'm going to get flamed. Yes, there are exceptions in both directions.
"Necessity is the mother of invention" Long before there was a Grainger (and Home Depot) in every city, and you could get parts shipped overnight, one had to "make do", and "making do" meant being able to figure things out to be able to "git r done" with what you had on hand, or could figure out. When working on my Grandfather's farm, I did not look for work to do (actually, I looked for ways not to do any work :-), but if the project required pulling out the oxy-acetylene torch to cut and weld something onto the tractor to get something done, that is what you had to do, so you did it. If the TV went on the blink (they all did then), you opened up the back, looked for fried components, and if one of the resistors was smoking, you soldered in a replacement. Or you took the tubes down to the local drugstore and tested them. Even if you had no idea what you were doing, you were willing (and expected) to give it a shot, and try to fix it. More often than not you learned something along the way, even if it took hours to figure it out (and had to repair your repair a few times :-). For those without the capabilities, you took it to the shop, where someone else did the troubleshooting and repair. Along the line, the costs of technicians to do that type of work started to exceed the cost of simply replacing the entire unit (how many people remember when going to the auto dealer that the cost of the parts far exceeded the cost of the labor? Now it is the other way around). Troubleshooting became a lost art. "Swap 'til you drop" became the mantra. It became the cost effective way to do repairs. There are advantages to the new way of disposable devices, but almost no one knows how they work anymore, and they do not care to know. The members of this list are likely to be sufficiently self selected to be in the minority of actually wanting to know. There is a (small) backlash of people who are trying to get back into the world of actually building things, and understanding how they work (popularized by such things as Make magazine, and Maker Faires). Gary