Re: Apple in danger?

whisky-dave <whisky.dave@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jan 20, 8:57 pm, real-address-in-...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(Rowland McDonnell) wrote:
whisky-dave <whisky.d...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jan 18, 8:08 pm, real-address-in-...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(Rowland McDonnell) wrote:
whisky-dave <whisky.d...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip]

Even today microcontrollers range in price from about a quid to £25 or
more.

You can get 'em less than a quid if you buy in bulk.

yep sure you can but that goes for most things.
I get an extra cheapness educational discount too.
But you can't build a computer out of cheap chips.

But that was *exactly* what the Apple 1 was - a computer centred around
a dirt cheap CPU.

But so what?



Nowadays, they're so cheap you can use 'em to drive your watch.
I brought my first digital LED watch in 1977 IIRC it was only £40
very cheap it only cost me about 10 hours work to buy one,

No, that was quite a pricey watch if you think about it. If you wanted
a cheap watch back then, you bought a clockwork Timex job.

I was expecting you to tell me I could have made one cheaper, you know
the Sinclair one was in kit form.

Your understanding of my psychology is clearly lacking.

[snip]

You use a handful of extra chips to provide your address decoding
and so on - some sort of comms adaptor chip, enough address decoding
for the job in hand, you *can* do that with a handful of gates and
latches added to the IA at the heart of the serial port interface.

And then, once you've implemented your cheap comms solution using your
RS422 (ono) line, then you drive the interesting circuitry.

Do you get my thinking now? It's a handful of extra bits added to the
VIA/PIA chips to give you the comms, then you hang your interesting
circuitry off the end of it.

What is this interesting circuitry.

<shrug> What do you have?

i.e what are you going to connect this all to, it's not interstign
until you do something with it.

Yes, that's right. The point is that this is all for doing whatever job
you have to do - there was a/d/a conversion job mentioned, for example.

You see we do this in my lab but
it's getting more difficult
now that it was in the past because few PCs have serial ports or
parallel ports now everything's
done with USB which is another layer or two of both hardware and
software complications.

Erm yeah, but I don't see what that has to do with it.

It's down to costs. You can't string a few gates together and achieve
USB communication.

Erm yeah, but I don't see what that has to do with it.

Cheap, cheap, cheap - all this stuff: dirt cheap!

cheap as chips. :)
You can say the same about transistors.

But a discrete transistor is very expensive - compared to the price of a
transistor inside (say) the latest Intel CPU.

Yep, but that doesn't make the latest intel processors cheap.
It might make them good value but not cheap.

Not the point. The point is: the cost of each transistor in a modern
CPU is /several/ orders of magnitude less than the cost of *any*
discrete transistor.

yes, so that tells us that buying discrete components works out more
expensive.
Not so bad if all you want to do is very simple circuits, but to do
anything remotely impressive
cost money.

Of course - because if it can be done cheaply, it's unimpressive.

Also most microcontrollers before the end of the 90s were
eprom based, so you needed eprom erasers and programmers,
which most people didn't have.

They were standard kit for everyone who did digital electronics
at home in the 1980s: of course most people didn't have them,
but most people who did digital electronics at home seemed to.

I'm not sure that is true, some obviously did but working in a
university not everyone had an eprom programmer or an eraser.

<shrug> No idea what you're on about - I met the EPROM gear in peoples'
homes before I went to uni.

What exactly was this eprom gear,

Do you really expect me to be able to supply details at this range?

Tell you what, if you want to know, go to a library and look at the
adverts in Wireless World from the 1980s. EPROM programmers advertised
in that were ones I met. I recall the `Softy' brand, but ISTR that there
was cheaper around.

because I in the teaching lab had to
get this sort of stuff
as the students weren't expected to supply their own.

I'm sure that has always been the case.

EPROM gear I'm not sure what that means.

The gear for burning and erasing and using the things - what else?

Then I suggest you check those RS catalogues to find out how much such
a set up costs.

<puzzled> Suggest away - it's irrelevant.

In fact a student has told me today that our programmer can't program
the chip he's brought.

<puzzled> Naturally. Why mention this point?

Why doesn't he buy his own like in the past as you suggest happened.

I never suggested that every impoverished student had his own EPROM
programmer or was going to get one.

So what are you on about?

Your the one saying how cheap things were.

No, I'm just countering your suggestion that it was all hideously,
cripplingly expensive.

Our pinmaster 48 is nearly £700 worth and has been secured to the
bench as one was stolen in 2008.

Oh. I recall adverts for EPROM programmers at a much lower number of
pounds than that, back in the old days.

back in the old days they were pretty limited too.

Indeed, nothing has no limits on it. Why mention the fact?

Because most didn't actually do the job, did you ever get elektor
most of the circuits in there never worked after building them
they were there to sell the magazine and advertising.

Oh.

I used to read Wireless World.

The circuits in there always worked - although sometimes they did
publish errata in the following issue.

Most designs were done on computers which count't evaluate component
tolerances.

No, they were just programmed by idiots.

Sure you could build a programmer for under £10, but it didn't work.

You're still not making any sense - aside from where you're wrong,
because if you've built a device to do a job and it doesn't do the job,
you've not built a device to do the job.

Check this out this is just the HOLDER for some of our devices.

http://onecall.farnell.com/mqp-electronics/ad67/adaptor-dil-28way/dp/...
92?Ntt=121-7294 £52

<shrug> So what?

I see nothing of any relevance here.

you need the carrier, to program it.
The chips themselves are relatively cheap.

I see nothing of any relevance here.

<pained> Quite - which is why I put my cheapness scale in place:
cheaper than a motor driven cam timer, which is how automatic washing
machines /used/ to be driven.

I thought they were driven by the miss's washing on rocks in the
stream ;-)

<sigh> No, bashing it against the washing board and squeezing it out
with a mangle before hanging it on the line.

That is how my mother's mother did her washing into her 90s - yep,
pretty much until she died, did it by hand (although my mum - her
daughter - did start doing the sheets and towels for her when she was
80-something).

It's also how my mother did the washing until my parents could afford a
washing machine - fridge and cooker first, /then/ the washing machine.

Women's liberation in action, that lot. Domestic appliance designers
have done more for feminism than pretty much all of the loud-mouthed
political agitators since women got the vote.

Yep we do have more female electronic eng. & computer science
students
than we had 20 years ago.

That's a totally separate issue.

In fact most events now are targeted at women in science, women in
technology etc.....

Only most events aimed specifically at women, you know.

In those early washing machine worked for much longer than todays.

I've heard that bullshit before.

Some of the Hotpoint designs /used/ to be well-made and reliable.

Yep those metal cogs last longer than plastic ones.

Only when made properly.


But none of them could be relied on to give trouble-free service into
their second decade without repairs, despite the things one hears these
days - my dad kept his Hotpoint automatic running for over 20 years, but
only by repairing it when needed.

Today you're lucky if it lives past it's extended 3 year warranty.

I got a washing machine with a 10 year standard - i.e., non-extended -
warranty.

They are only made to last 3 years or so.
As you say the older ones were made to last.

<shrug> Some were, at some times. Some current washing machines are
too.

The situation's not much changed - only the names of the good firms.

The one I bought - same basic model, but updated controls - didn't last
even five years without needing major repairs. None of the replacement
parts were of decent quality and they all broke shortly after fitting,
if they weren't defective on delivery (and many were). It eventually
died completely after well under a decade: unrepairable due to no more
parts - I think our machine had on its own used up the final stocks.

Quite likely, cheapness of the parts.

Shoddy quality management, actually - the parts were nominally the same
as they'd always been.

Hotpoint had a good design there, but had obviously given up on
manufacturing quality.

I've got a Miele with a ten year maker's guarantee - parts and labour
all covered, for a decade. It's quieter, quicker, cheaper to run, and
will almost certainly prove more reliable than the old Hotpoints.

How about a price comparison that's the only way to give a fair
judgement.

If you can do the full analysis, you go ahead: factor in the full
lifetime costs of two washing machines, including sums to cover the
human time spent operating the machine and waiting for repairs.

I don't have the full data to do such an analysis.

The commercial machines in launderettes are apparently more reliable
than they used to be - in part because it pays the firms that make and
service them to improve reliability.

Cheap domestic washing machine makers make their profit on spares and
repairs, not on the original sale, so *they* have a commercial interest
in making their machines unreliable.

I don;t think they make much on repairs, it's purely on people buying
new products.

Not in the case of cheap washing machines.

[snip]

It's all a matter of profit and how to maximise it. The trick is: don't
buy a cheap washing machine, because it's designed to break down soon.

I think they all are like that, paying more doesn't mean that much.

As I'd already explained, paying more for a Miele got me a 10 year parts
and labour guarantee which is not available from lesser firms making
cheaper washing machines.

I think you'll find that's incontrovertible proof that the extra cash
has made a big difference regardless of your inaccurate opinion.

In any case, this Miele's already run for more than three years which is
more than you think it should run for without a breakdown.

It's also very cheap to run - in part because of the massively efficient
design (due to it being expensive) and in other part because of the fact
that it weighs the washing and tells me exactly how much washing liquid
I need to put in. And the fact it does so is also due to it being
expensive.

And the manual's almost competent, too - I only had to prepare a
2-sides-of-A4-crib-sheet to make the machine usable.

These people seem to have a different attitude:

<http://www.iseappliances.co.uk/ise/>

Pity we don't make cars that don't rust isn't it.
even nappies are made to be disposed of.

Why don't people reuse nappies surely it's cheaper.

Why don't you find the people in question and ask them?

I don't see why you expect me to know.

You have to remember that 30p wasn't cheap in the day, well it took
me
3/4 hr to work for it.

But:

30p was pretty cheap for LEDs - compared to the price they *had* been,
shortly before then.

But before then bulbs were cheaper.

Bulbs were cheaper even when LEDs were 30p in 1970-anything - small
indicator jobs, anyway, although I'm not sure about the tightly spec'd
indicator bulbs.

Even today LED lighting is more expensive than ordinary bulbs.

Actually, it's a lot cheaper. Factor in running costs before replying -
and consider that I got a set of LED bicycle lights the other day for £7
- in Asda. I don't think you'll find non-LED lighting for bikes any
cheaper than that.

Of course gauging the useful life of them is more difficult.

At least ten times the life of normal bulbs - more like 100 times, if
you believe the claims of the makers.

> So because they were cheap at that price in those
days, they got used a lot more - starting in the 1970s, because they'd
got so cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap - so they turned up in consumer
products; you mention buying a digital watch back then. LEDs, yes? Not
a cheap watch, but MUCH cheaper than it'd've been if anyone had been
flogging one 5-10 years before they got common.

yes but still more expensive than a conventional watch at the time,
Pun intented :)
Why don;t you look up how much it would cost to build one yourself.

Because there's no Earthly point? - yes, that'll do.

You don't seem to understand the idea of relative cheapness - seems you
measure value against the single standard of how long it takes you to
earn the money to buy the thing.

You need to learn that `cheaper' is a relative term, not an absolute
term: meaning that something counts as cheaper even if it's a big chunk
of your salary, provided that its price is indeed lower than that which
one is comparing the supposedly cheaper thing to.

I understand that you don't.

Ah - an insult.

And the penny is worth less - so they're *hugely* cheaper now, aren't
they?

(I assume you can get 'em in bulk for a lot less than 3p/ea.)

Yes but not much less unless you order 1000.

<pained> Yes, that's what I was on about.

But few people would buy 1000....

<pained> Your point is too obvious to mention - so why mention it?

Even I don;t and I work at a university supply components to
students.
I buy about 200-300 a year, of each Red, Green, yellow.
Sure 10 years ago I could have brought 5,000 of each at a higher
price.

Oh. So what?

I think a blue LED cost about £30 in 1979 under 20p now and much
brighter and more efficient.

Yeah, that's what you get with technological advancement: things get
better and cheaper. So what?

Things were more expensive in the past electronics wise.
it appeared cheaper as it was cheaper than a similar mechanical device
at the time.

You what?

They used electronic because it was cheaper than the old system.
Or perhaps they just found it more profitable.

Er, yes. So what?

Any automation is cheaper than manual: time is nothing to a
machine; but time is a priceless and irreplaceable commodity to
a human being.

Unless working in china or indai/pakistan and other places I assume.

<puzzled> No, all human beings are of equal worth. I don't think that
a Pakistani is any less human than a German, for example.

They don;t have to be less human, just cheaper to employ.

I don't think you're understanding the point here: I'm not talking about
the economics of employment, I'm talking about the economics of human
living.

Then why do we out source call centres to India.

I never have done. Nor have you. And why ask such a silly question
anyway?

Because it's cheaper.

That is not relevant to my point.

Why do you think the majority of electrical and electronic components
are made in twain/chine etc...

Yes, but that has nothing to do with what I was on about.

That micro-controllers are cheaper than humans.

That is about as far away from my point as you could get.

My point is this: time is of infinite worth to any human, and of zero
worth to any machine.

That's total rubbish, machine time has a cost too which has to be
factored in.
Machines cost money to buy, install, run and maintain.

That's totally missing the point.

Re-read my previous posts and do try to understand that you're utterly
and completely totally thinking about the wrong sort of thing here.

I'm not talking about the cash value of a worker's time to the firm, or
anything like that: I'm talking about the true worth of your time to
you, measured in human terms.

Since you have a finite supply of seconds which will run out, and since
(for you) the universe ceases to exist on death, it is plain that each
second is infinitely valuable to you as a human being.

A machine, on the other hand, doesn't care about anything: to a machine,
nothing has any value, not even time.

Now, I've made that point before, and you ignored it.

Please try to pay a little attention this time.

Rowland.

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