RFC : Which electronics device vendors have the best and worst websites?

[Joerg]

Hello Pete,

Which is a shame. Intersil was a true leader in low power - indeed at
one time they _defined_ low power.

My first experience with them was a chip that would not work at max
nominal VCC, IIRC 5.25V. It would only work at slightly above 6V. Called
them, the guy became apologetic and no, they were unable at that time to
ship me parts that worked at nominal. This was also my last experience
with them.

That was a quarter century ago and it might be better now. However, with
a flash only web site I doubt they'll have a long future. With most of
my designs being in production for more than a decade a long future is
kind of important.

Although I started this thread from a comment by Joerg for fun, I fully
intend to point my vendors at it (maybe others will !) to educate them
into what we (who actually decide what gets designed in) want to see,
and what we _dont_ want to see.

Don't want to burst the bubble but I seriously doubt they would listen.

 

[DJ Delorie]

That's a common problem, also with mfgs. They all seem to assume
that we have those DVD player boxes with the wide screens.

Sigh, I can related to this one. I complain that web sites don't work
in my browser; they're too wide.

me: "your website needs more than 800 pixels across. Please make it
work in narrower windows."

webmaster: "We design our site for modern displays."

me: "My display is a 1600x1200 LCD. Your site is too wide."

webmaster: "Our site should fit in a 1600x1200 window"

me: "I never said your site was the only thing I need to look at."

I put the browser on the left, and my editor on the right. Thus, each
gets only 800 pixels. I hate egotistical webmasters that *assume*
they'll get the whole screen.

The other thing I hate is sites that set the font size to an
*absolute* number of pixels. Not points, not relative to my defaults,
just an absolute number of points. They show up as smudges on my
laptop, which is 130 dpi, when they "assume" 72dpi. I.e. they're
designing for old VGA monitors and television sets.

 

[Clifford Heath]

me: "My display is a 1600x1200 LCD. Your site is too wide."
me: "I never said your site was the only thing I need to look at."
I put the browser on the left, and my editor on the right.

Get a second screen. Ab-so-lootly un-live-without-able!

 

[Frithiof Andreas Jensen]

A few more

Philips : unresponsive javascript everywhere. Great content if you can
wait for it.

You actually got content - all I got was corporate crap about how great
corporate thinks it is!

 

[colin]

Don't get me started.

Some general notes:

(1) I can't speak for everybody, but as a techie, I'm not very
intersted in seeing 1280 x 944 pictures of some cute female of
...snip

(10) If you've gone to the trouble to scan or otherwise put up a
datasheet, splurge and use at least one square inch of screen space to
put up a large button labeled in at least 18 point bold font "VIEW
DATASHEET". Maybe come up with an industry standard for this, so we
don't go crosseyed reading the whole bleepin page trying to find what
to click on to see then dang thing.

Whew!

whew indeed, well said, wouldnt it be nice if they took notice.

Colin =^.^=

 

[Jim Thompson]

Get a second screen. Ab-so-lootly un-live-without-able!

Yep, I just did that a few months ago when my 13+ year old NEC started
fading. Replaced it with two ViewSonic VA912b's, at 1/4 the original
cost of the single NEC monitor ;-)

...Jim Thompson

 

[DJ Delorie]

Get a second screen. Ab-so-lootly un-live-without-able!

My desk is crowded enough with the three I already have.

I have three desktops sharing the big LCD, plus two laptops.
Unfortunately, (1) my kvm doesn't support multiple monitors, and (2)
neither does my desk at the moment.

Of course, this doesn't excuse the webmasters. Next they'll be
designing for 3200x1200 displays.

Plus, my rule is "design for whatever window the user is using". I've
seen plenty of web sites that *won't* grow to fit a 1600x1200 window -
they have a fixed width, so the columns could be too *narrow* to read,
with no way of making them bigger.

 

[Didi]

Hi Joerg,

Hey, EU manufacturers, are you listening?

What EU manufacturers....

Dimiter

 

[Joerg]

Hello Dimiter,

What EU manufacturers....

That's a good one

The sad story is that some products from those manufacturers are truly
excellent. IMHO the R&D part of their operations works great but the
marketing side fails to perform. But the top brass doesn't listen.

 

[Didi]

You are right, of course, but the way things are going there will
really be no manufacturers left soon. ROHS is one of the final
nails in their coffin, I suspect. Europe is too communistic-like
a society - the English excepted, of course, but anyway ask
one of them if they are Europeans . Things follow a path
I really hate to have to see for a second time in my life - I wish
I could change that. Right now, there is almost no other occupation
for humans in the EU but elbowing...

Dimiter

 

[Keith]

Get a second screen. Ab-so-lootly un-live-without-able!

Yep. I've run dual screen since at least 2000. Now 1400x1050 +
1600x1200 at work and 1400x1050 + 1680x1050 at home. Both laptops
with external LCDs.

 

[Joerg]

Hello Dimiter,

You are right, of course, but the way things are going there will
really be no manufacturers left soon. ROHS is one of the final
nails in their coffin, I suspect. Europe is too communistic-like
a society - the English excepted, of course, but anyway ask
one of them if they are Europeans . Things follow a path
I really hate to have to see for a second time in my life - I wish
I could change that. Right now, there is almost no other occupation
for humans in the EU but elbowing...

It's probably not quite this bad yet but yes, the overzealous
regulations that are imposed on them can deal Europe a serious blow. The
first casualties will be small businesses and those are the ones that
truly drive innovation. My impression is that they have allowed a
bloating Eurocrat structure to happen and now many are beginning to
regret it. Having grown up over there this makes me a bit sad.

 

[Tim Shoppa]

(3) When doing a prototype I don't care about items that are either
not in stock or quantity 1000 minimum. Likewise when specing for a
production run, I don't care to see the high prices for quantity one.
How's about an option to choose up fron which to surpress?

You can, AT THE BEGINNING OF A SEARCH, exclude items not in stock.

It would be more useful if this could be done partway thorugh a search.

To see a true parametric search in full (monochrome) glory, go to
www.mcmaster.com and search for "machine screw". The McMaster-Carr
website is like a continuous 24x7 orgasm.

Tim.

 

[Joerg]

Hello Tim,

To see a true parametric search in full (monochrome) glory, go to
www.mcmaster.com and search for "machine screw". The McMaster-Carr
website is like a continuous 24x7 orgasm.

And you can even find salt shakers, toothpicks and whatnot there. Just
in case anyone is planning to open a diner.

 

[John Perry]

Hello Tim,


And you can even find salt shakers, toothpicks and whatnot there. Just
in case anyone is planning to open a diner.

Contrast this with the following:

Thanks, but have you actually looked at that web page? I had already
downloaded the files on the off chance that there might be something
useful there, but hadn't looked at them yet when I asked for help. It's
not obvious that a maintenance and service manual would be useful to an
ordinary user; and it's not obvious that the service information for a
dv5100 would apply to a dv5243 laptop. Once I looked into the pdf, I
could see in the product description the superficial similarity between
the machines, but even now It's not clear to me that the rest of the
manual is applicable.

It would help to see some kind of statement or table showing
applicability of a set of manuals to its set of machines.

By the way, the manual mentions just once the remote control that was
included in the package, but does not describe it, nor tell how to use
it. A search of your web site gave no further information.

Thank you,

John Perry

----------------------------------
A succeeding email from hp said they were addressing the situation
immediately. Take a look .

BTW, I filled in the popup (which popped up despite my instruction to
Firefox) requesting my email address so they could send me a survey on
their performance. I'm still waiting. I hope the spam is just as
prompt .

jp

 

[[email protected]]

me: "your website needs more than 800 pixels across. Please make it

work in narrower windows."

webmaster: "We design our site for modern displays."

Webmasters seems to be a very non-engineer type of breed. Anyway my solution
has been to have a regex proxy that will correct webmaster braindamage.

There's even a plugin feature iirc to firefox that allows the browser to
alter the look of webpages. That made webfuscators scream!

 

[joseph2k]

You actually got content - all I got was corporate crap about how great
corporate thinks it is!

Just tried them (google "phillips semi", item 1), and they want me to login
to before seeing anything useful. Don't these dimbulbs have the concept of
password overload?

 

[redbelly]

(2) Their "flavor" box is mostly misleading and contradicting.
Example for transistors, the choices are like "NPN", "PNP", "NPN/PNP",
"Audio NPN", "General purpose NPN", "NPN-plus-resistor", "Darlington
NPN". Think of all the overlaps there.

I just select all the ones that are relevent to what I'm looking for.
You're not limited to picking just one.

My only beef with Digikey is, when you have a few pages (or more) of
choices to look at, you can't sort the list by price or availability.
Even though you can sort by voltage, current, packaging, etc.

Mark

 

[PeteS]

Just tried them (google "phillips semi", item 1), and they want me to login
to before seeing anything useful. Don't these dimbulbs have the concept of
password overload?

Try one 'L'

http://www.semiconductors.philips.com/

They just sold the semi business, though. Maybe they think they can get
along with the I2C royalties, but it's unresponsive and hard to
navigate sites like this that annoy designers.
I was using a very nice dual uart (very low current) from philips, and
they just got replaced by cores in a FPGA. I was wavering on this, but
tech support from Philips is <understatement >not particularly good
</understatement>.
[In this particular case, I needed to integrate more stuff for space
and power control issues, so it wasn't a simple 'I don't like them'].

This is another company that makes really nice parts, but makes it hard
to find out what they are.

Cheers

PeteS

 

[Ken Smith]

Just tried them (google "phillips semi", item 1), and they want me to login
to before seeing anything useful. Don't these dimbulbs have the concept of
password overload?

Many of the istes will let you create login and go straight to bing logged
in. What I often do is create a new login name etc whenever I go to the
site. I'm sure more than one web site has many records that look like
this:

Login: kashfkuyfh
Password askhgfuwyr
first name ldojowe
second oiufouf
phone 1234567