RANT - Buying online from Maxims Website From Hell

This website from hell does not reflect the rest the company. It has to be most un intuitive HTML construct on Internet.

Small example - I entered quantity of 25 pc for two items in the order basket and submitted it. After some lengthy pondering it came back with the first item quantity reset to 1pc. I tried to change it back to 25 and did not succeed until I changed the delivery date by one day. (the item was in stock) Last time it happened, I missed it and actually got one chip delivered to me. After finally convincing the beast that I really want 25 pc of each I proceeded with the order, submitted my Visa number and got the following message after a lengthy pause:

Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, snipped-for-privacy@maximhq.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

"anything you might have done that may have caused the error" is the part that pisses me off. This happened twice today. It was admitted to me by several of Maxim staff that the online buying server is quirky and that they are working on it. That was more that two years ago.

After informing them of my woes I got an email saying:

"We apologize for the error. Does the credit card billing address and shipping address match? If not, they need to match."

I use only one address but I fail to see why I could not have different billing and shipping address.

Of curse when it all gets resolved they will ship by UPS, but that is another story.

Does anyone else share similar experience?

Regards,

Boris Mohar

Viatrack Printed Circuit Designs

Reply to
Boris Mohar
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Hell, it's a nightmare just trying to get budgetary part pricing from the Maxim site.

But they did give me 2500 samples once. That was nice.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Don't know ... never tried them ... but I am sure they better than Western Digital man ... When it comes to hard drives ... there are not that many choices on the markey :|

Reply to
~~ VerilogMan ~~

Mmmm no clue were on earth I was ... I though the whole post was about Maxtor lol .... Oh my good ... I am tirreeeeedd ! :)

Reply to
~~ VerilogMan ~~

That's a fraud indicator.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

Yeah, I know. But crooks do it too, which screws it up for the rest of us.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

You mean you can order parts that actually exist from the website and have them delivered in a timely fashion?

-- jm

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Reply to
John Miles

Well, I just received some samples from them that were ordered by an engineer who hasn't worked here in over a year as a critical R&D component for some long-forgotten project.

So, not to worry. You'll have those other 24 pieces in no time!

Bob

Reply to
Bob Stephens

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

A lot of us use our personal credit cards, which have our home address as the billing address, for "company" purchases, which get shipped to the company. No fraud there. We have several customers that do that to save the hassle of a COD package.

Jim

Reply to
James Beck

I got through this a few years ago, had to buy a tube of 50 of a tiny charge pump RS232 chip because I had a client that decided to be the engineer on a couple of parts (God I hate that!). The parts got caught in customs as they came in from Malyasia (not that the web site told me that) and then they arrived DHL a week late.

I love Digi Key and worship that place! My only problem with them is that they manage to never have the cheapest part in stock, and that voilates my M.O. as a cheap bastard!

Rocky

Reply to
Rolavine

be

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Yes. Couple of week ago, to pursue an idea, I tried to buy 2 of the newish AD9833 DDS chips. After much buggering about, seemed best solution was to just request as samples from AD. Never requested samples before but guys here seem to get 'em no problem, so gave it a try from the AD website. After a lot of farting about with emails and then secure passwords and secure this that and the other. I finally got to the page. It kept sending me round in circles and resetting the sample quantity to "1" finally got a "2" in and somehow managed to escape No sight nor sound from AD since. Who else makes DDS chips?. regards john

Reply to
john jardine

Are you really sure it doesn't. Some companies were started by a bunch of smart guys who are now all retired leaving the place in the hands of the bosses children or the like. When I see a botched web site I worry about the whole company. It can indicate a rot has set in.

--
--
kensmith@rahul.net   forging knowledge
Reply to
Ken Smith

Interestingly, nobody that I know of. Strange.

There are DDS ip blocks for fpga's, but it's hardly worth it, wasing all those pins and using an external DAC.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Only as a last resort. This time I ordered the parts by sending them an email. They phoned back for the Visa number (shudder).

There is on part that I have been buying for years. MAX412. It is a very good and quiet dual op amp. I cannot just order it but instead I have to submit for quotation. After few days the quotation arrives it the "quote basket" after which I am allowed to place the order.

BTW when I log in my billing and my shipping address is displayed and at that point I am allowed to change either one.

--

    Boris Mohar
Reply to
Boris Mohar

Fraud avoidance. The supplier bears the liability for online credit-card orders, so it's their business what security rules they make. The delivery address at least gives investigators a place to start asking questions.

Reply to
Clifford Heath

I had no problem ordering them from stock at Digikey (US). No evaluation boards available though - even from AD.

BTW I stumbled on someting they don't mention in the data sheet.

They claim that "...NCOs inherently generate continuous phase signals, thus avoiding any output discontinuity when switching between frequencies."

Well, I'm using this chip as a swept sinewave generator, and unless you handle it right it's discontinuous as hell. Merely updating the frequency register does not update the output synchronously. There is a settling time where the output waveform is unstable. The workaround for this is to enable frequency register 0 with the starting frequency, preload frequency register1 with the next value and flip the frequency0/1 enable bit, load the next value into frequency0, toggle the bit etc.

Bob

Reply to
Bob Stephens

to

[clip Boris and me ranting]

thus

time

enable

Thanks Bob. Yep, swept sine (and phase switching) is what I'm after. Digikey are doing some test marketing in the UK. Seems a hefty postage charge but it's worth it just to get hold of the damned things. I'll heed your warning, as usual the AD DDS datasheets seem near worthless. regards john

Reply to
john jardine

Just to make you happy, they weren't going to count it.

They probably thought you were going to vote Kerry, a no-no.

--
 Thanks,
    - Win
Reply to
Winfield Hill

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 15:07:02 GMT, Bob Stephens wrote:

I'm sure this (load one register while the other is active) is the way it's intended to be done, and is the very reason it has two frequency registers, and it's easy to argue that this is a big omission to not describe doing it that way in the data sheet (ESPECIALLY when an eval board comes with software that does it wrong). It's been a while since I looked at the data sheet, and I've never even used or seen the actual chip, but ISTR the data/commands are sent through a serial protocol such as SPI, or something with clock and data lines. The protocol on these things is always eight bit, and every time eight bits is transferred, those bits are loaded into the apropriate bits of the destination register. If it's the currently operating frequency register, the lower (presuming it loads the lower first) eight bits will then have the eight LSB's of your new desired word, where the upper bits will have the original word's bits. If the new word's upper bits are different, then you're going to have a short time where the frequency register contains neither the old frequency, nor the new frequency, and it's going to send out some odd frequency(ies) until the whole register is updated. Go to

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and put in "AD9833 DDS question" (without the quotes), and you'll see a thread(s) from last March about this very thing. I now recall having a similar situation years earlier, that taught me about this. About 20+ years ago I put a General Instrument AY-3-something sound-generator chip (back then it was the common sound/music chip in arcade game machines) onto an Apple ][ expansion card and programmed it to generate tones using "poke" commands in Basic. I got it to do a musical scale by generating the appropriate numbers and putting them into the chip's divide regisister, which was, IIRC, 14 bits. Regardless, it took two 8-bit transfers to load it with the proper bits for a tone. I ran this program (it generated each tone for about 1/2 second, then went to the next in the scale) for a friend who worked with game machines, and he said he heard a glitch every time the pitch changed, and asked why. I said I didn't know, but he was sure the glitch was there, because he heard these chips in game machines all the time and they didn't have any glitch when going from one tone to the next. It wasn't until later that I figured out that during time between the two pokes (in interpreted BASIC, on a 1 MHZ

6502) only one register had been updated, and the pitch generated was, for a short but audible time, neither the old nor the new pitch. If I had written a short assembly routine to load both registers (I see it now, lda hibyte, ldx lobyte, sta ay_3_freqhi, stx ay_3_freqlo rts), the whole register would have been updated within such a short time that no glitch would be heard.

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Reply to
Ben Bradley

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