20 Jan
2009
20 Jan
'09
6:30 a.m.
On Monday 19 January 2009 05:11:27 pm Jim Battle wrote:
Roy J. Tellason wrote:
Well yeah! Old phart working my way toward full curmudgeon status... :-)
On Monday 19 January 2009 03:02:03 pm Tony Duell
wrote:
I would suspect that a younger crop of engineers coming up might have
some bearing on this too. :-)
Roy, I disagree. Your opinion (smiley and all) sounds like the "Why, we
had to walk uphill to school through snowstorms, both ways! Today's
kids are wimps!" > That
depends, a lot, on the PSU design. Certainly SMPSUs can do some
> very odd things if a capacitor goes open-circuit or just high ESR. How
> much damage that does to the rest of the PSU or worse the rest of the
> machine depends on the design.
Do you think that the designers of this stuff have learned which
approaches they might want to stay away from? :-)
Alas my expeerience suggests the reverse. Back when computers were
expensive, and chips were expensive, the manufacutrers took the trouble
to put all sorts of protectinon in their machines to protect said
expensive decices in the event of a failure. Now they don't bother. There have always been both brilliant and stupid
engineers, and everything
in between. People today are not more stupid than those of 40 years ago.
The problems that need to be solved have changed, and so have peoples'
specializations.
No argument there.
Tony has it right. The market demands low prices and
doesn't demand
ruggedness, so that is what gets built.
There are those who would argue that the market demands cheap crap, too, and
that there isn't much of one for quality product that's built to last. I've
been arguing that one for decades. I consider the cheap stuff to be a real
waste of not only my time and money but also resources like the materials
it's made of and the production capability and so forth. And I try to avoid
it whenever possible.
That's why I like a lot of this older gear so much, it's better made.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin