BF2S Forums EE Chats 2142

Dilbert_X wrote:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

In theory. But you could pay $35k, then consider yourself lucky when a recall is issued for a problematic part so you don't have to pay for a replacement. Premium pricing doesn't mean that garbage has been well engineered.

An old car is almost as useful as a new car, apart from the lack of airbags and crash survivability you can still drive it around in traffic no problem with the same level of risk you had when you bought it new.

What do consumers want, to pay $5k for a phone that lasts ten years or $1k each for five phones which each last two years?
An iphone 1 would be unusable now, networks and data content have changed radically in that time.

Consumers want as cheap as possible and a usable life which matches the useful life.
There's really no point in radically over-engineering most consumer products.

Yes there are shitty products out there, as Jay said, blame the MBAs who gut brands and products for short-term profit and put in shitty capacitors or wheel bearings.
Equally companies run by engineers rarely make money, there's no simple answer.

Phone pricing obviously targets different demographics. You can't talk about consumers like one homogeneous blob. People have different preferences and budgets. Someone who would pay $5k for an "over-engineered" titanium chassis phone that can power on at the bottom of the ocean or whatever obviously falls into a different corner of the market than your (even so, still a big spender) $1k every two years example.

Also, I didn't say anything about over-engineering a product. I'm criticizing trash. I don't think a quality power supply with decent capacitors is over-engineered. I do think it's far less likely to pop and leave a grill-shaped smoke mark on your wall.

I'm pretty sure there are cases where an older vehicle may be rated better than a newer one. I'm not sure what you mean by lack of airbags and survivability. Unless you're reaaaally rolling back the years.

Jay wrote:

DesertFox- wrote:

I suspect there also exist engineers who are proponents of planned obsolescence, as it is to their own monetary benefit. It's disingenuous to put all of that on the bean counting suits.

It was included in my senior year design course. They listed the Gillette disposable razor model as one example.

Products are designed to certain criteria. An LED light bulb is designed to last, on average, 30,000 hours. It could be designed to last 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 based on material choices. This is normal. Is it planned obsolescence? Kind of. As I said, you do have to design to some sort of criteria short of infinity. Cost rises as quality increases and at some point you start taking a loss because people won't pay for the increase in quality.

I think when people talk about planned obsolescence in a derisive tone, they're mostly referring to the idea of products designed to reach EOL long before reason, given the parts used and the quality expected from the brand.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Phone pricing obviously targets different demographics. You can't talk about consumers like one homogeneous blob. People have different preferences and budgets. Someone who would pay $5k for an "over-engineered" titanium chassis phone that can power on at the bottom of the ocean or whatever obviously falls into a different corner of the market than your (even so, still a big spender) $1k every two years example.

Also, I didn't say anything about over-engineering a product. I'm criticizing trash. I don't think a quality power supply with decent capacitors is over-engineered. I do think it's far less likely to pop and leave a grill-shaped smoke mark on your wall.

I'm pretty sure there are cases where an older vehicle may be rated better than a newer one. I'm not sure what you mean by lack of airbags and survivability. Unless you're reaaaally rolling back the years.

I think when people talk about planned obsolescence in a derisive tone, they're mostly referring to the idea of products designed to reach EOL long before reason, given the parts used and the quality expected from the brand.

Products are designed and engineered to a quality and price. Marketing and manufacturing are typically two different companies these days, between them they agree on quality (including durability) and price and the engineers work to that.
Marketing companies which don't meet customer expectations will lose sales.

Individual consumers do the cost/benefit in their heads each time they buy a product.

Maybe govt should step in and mandate certain levels of durability, repairability etc, and probably require OEMs to take back and recycle their products at EOL.

At least Australian consumer law is a bit ahead of the curve, and the govt does sue companies whose products are not durable and which are unreasonable with consumers - which is a whole lot more efficient than letting the 'free-market' deal with it.
https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/m … sentations
https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Ne … port_0.pdf

IIRC A new car is expected to last 10 years in normal use with no significant failure.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2019-11-23 19:42:11)

Does the govt sue companies or is it left to the consumer?

While we're on the subject, how many PCs will need to be scrapped and dumped due to Microsoft deciding not to support Win 7?
Seems pretty miserable to only support your product for 10 years, I'm sure a good number of engineers would have been happy to have ticked along doing that for a few more years.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2019-11-24 15:38:28)

Feel free to throw your Macbook into the sea and go back to quill and parchment.

You're complaining about planned obsolescence and blaming engineers.
Its not engineers directing that products should be nerfed through software then physically scrapped.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Does the govt sue companies or is it left to the consumer?

While we're on the subject, how many PCs will need to be scrapped and dumped due to Microsoft deciding not to support Win 7?
Seems pretty miserable to only support your product for 10 years, I'm sure a good number of engineers would have been happy to have ticked along doing that for a few more years.

Except people don't "need" to do anything. Windows 7 reaching EOL doesn't mean computers running it will be bricked. How many people kept XP after its EOL? It's an opportunity for Microsoft to sell more licenses, and by extension licensed systems. But a lot of computers running 7 will be able to run 10. I think that having the support roadmap laid out years in advance for mainstream support and extended support keeps it fair, more or less. People have every opportunity to plan. I do think it's a bit of a ripoff if you buy a computer only a few years from its OS EOL, but unless there's some proprietary laptop nonsense going on, you should be able to update it.

I guess whether or not you think 10 years is reasonable can be subjective. For example, Windows 10 Home OEM is around $100 USD. If you bought it early on (I took the free upgrade path), that $100 is being stretched across a lot of development and support. Windows 10 enters extended support later next year, and EOL in 2025. Would I spend double or more if it meant EOL was around twice what it was? Probably not. I don't see myself using 7 on an office PC to 2030.

Of course, keeping wary of MS pitches and pushes to up their Windows-as-a-service game.

tl;dr There will be ways to keep using Windows 7 safely beyond January. Similar scenario with XP vs. 7.

Example: older patient database software couldn't be installed on 7 and newer patient database software was really expensive. So a lot of clinics took their XP machines off the net, made external backups, and ran them into the ground.

I should add that businesses can purchase security updates through 2023.

perfectly ethical engineers and research scientists

you love 2 see it

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2 … l-security

The UK has been singled out as having unprecedented levels of collaboration with Chinese military companies in the analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) which identifies collaborations with scientists from China’s hypersonic missile programme and on research topics ranging from smart materials to robotics.

Sixteen university labs around the world are identified as being run jointly by Chinese defence companies, or have major investments from them. Ten are based in the UK, with the University of Manchester and Imperial College London hosting six between them. The others are in Australia, Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

let me guess... money is the evil ... no, the paymasters  ... no, the university admin .... no, someone with MBAs .... science has no politics, etc etc

china already has confucius institutes set-up at most of the world's top universities, explicitly trying to influence their humanities departments and to modify the window of 'acceptable' discussion. this has been well publicised and debated in academia for about, i don't know, the last decade? you're only advertising your own ignorance, there. pretty funny that you're talking about the 'uselessness of the humanities' in discussions of a country that has been run on an extremely strict legal-philosophical system for the last few centuries ... yeah, philosophy is so useless to confucian societies!

no ethical problem helping china to develop missiles so long as the funding money comes in?

another 'win' for noble engineers. place it next to the atom bomb, the nazi rocket programme, concentration camps, unit 731 etc.
STEM has an ethics problem!!! all this disinterested 'research', scientists as useful venal idiots. give them some funding and hopes of a prize, and they're off like a spinning top!

i suppose the chinese can at least pardon all the western engineers when they succeed in world war 3, just like the americans did with the japanese and the nazis, in exchange for their research.

Last edited by uziq (2019-11-25 02:47:58)

If you are an American, the biggest threat to your way of life are the wealthy elite of your own country. China is going to have to sink an aircraft carrier before I will start being angry at them for taking the jobs the Republicans sent over to them.

Most technology has dual uses - who knew?
I'm betting they aren't "taking funding to help develop missiles for china" they're doing tidbits of research in the public domain.

“These collaborations support research into fundamental technologies which could help develop lighter, safer and more efficient commercial aircraft worldwide. We are open about this work and conduct no classified research. All of the centres’ scientific outputs are in the public domain and are routinely published in leading international journals.

“Prior to formalising these collaborations, Imperial conducted its own due diligence. We worked with and received support from the Export Control Organisation (ECO), and we continue to work closely with the UK government. All relationships with third parties are subject to prior and continued review.”

Doesn't seem like a big deal. Probably its gone too far, but academia sold its ethical soul long ago on the the instructions of government.
How ethical is it to charge students a fortune and sell them debt for a useless degree which costs nothing to deliver?
We probably shouldn't be engaging with China at any level, but we have no manufacturing base - thanks to the Steve Jobs of the world - any more so we have no choice.

I should think Apple has done more than any other organisation to enable the Chinese military to destroy us - its very likely the same factory which makes the chips for your next Macbook makes the chips which will guide the hypersonic missiles onto us. Certainly the nanometre technology will have been transferred across instead of being kept secret in America.

engineers in a company who act unscrupulously or in the interests of profits

I can't think of an actual provable example and nor can you. These are typically not engineering decisions, they're commercial ones.

Picking an example closer to home:

If your manager instructed you to publish a trash novel to be sold in airports and likely left on a beach or disposed of after a few weeks, absolutely had to be out in two weeks to meet summer holiday sales, paperback and paper which turns yellow after six months will be fine, but instead you spent six months editing and re-editing to perfect the prose and cultural and historical references Tom Clancy didn't get quite right, instructed the printers to supply a hardback with museum quality parchment "because planned obsolescence and profits over quality are bad mmkay" people would ask what was wrong with your head around the time your company went bust.

If you did publish a crap paperback with a spine which wrinkles as soon as you open it and paper which turns yellow after six months could you rightfully be criticised for being unethical, publishing books which don't last a century or enlighten the next generation and fill up landfill dumps?

The market gets exactly what the market wants, blame the consumer for their choices and unscrupulous executives for delivering to them.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2019-11-25 18:41:01)

I dunno, people get hissy when academics decide they don't want to cooperate with Israel, either they should be allowed to decide for themselves or they shouldn't.

I meant academics working in academia. These decisions need to be taken at a higher level, before grad students start turning up dead in suitcases.

We've fought two wars against China, some time ago,  recently fought two wars for Israel and probably about to fight another.

Apart from the obvious suspects, Russia, North Korea, Kazakhstan, it seems China and Israel are two countries we should not be treating as harmless, allowing to access our academic institutions, Eurovision etc.