grrrrr

Vaporware to make competitors envious? Or look good on the stock market?

I have pretty much resorted to ditching prospective vendors the millisecond they want me to fill out some lengthy web form down to my shoe size, on paid time, just to get some simple tech info or a datasheet. It's sick.

gives a little more detail, but they want you to log in if you want even more detail.

I'd suspect the old TI trick of advertising something they are thinking about making in order to assess the potential size of the market.

It's one way of doing market research, but it does reinforce my preference for designing - as much as possible - with parts that I can buy ex-stock from Farnell.

Or vaporware to make competitors develop the product, so they can steal the design!

I've heard it joked that one of the ways the Ruskies got their nukes designed was to leak information that they were doing something, then wait five years and steal the design from the US lab that was trying to play catch-up.

It's definitely a pisser. I can sort of see the business reason for it if you only want to sell to customers who are going to buy 50K/year -- but if you're just doing it so that your sales people can call me up and use up even _more_ of my valuable time, then I'm not interested.

A short-form datasheet sans sign-in is here:

Same here unless it's some really unusual design where I need specialty parts: If Digikey has no stock it's not going into a client design.

Just do the same: Tell them to hang up, go to your web site, fill out a very lengthy form, stating shoe size, date of birth, reason for birth and so on. Then at the end there will be a footnote saying that you will only grant them a telephone chat of 5min max, but only if you deem their credentials adequate, and that they shall address you with "Sir!" in every sentence.

I wholehearted agree with that and what others have said. I've always used a variation of that principle. Digikey is out of reach for me and Farnell is mostly ridiculously expensive compared to physical shops, of which we still have plenty in India. I use only parts that are widely available at those shops.

How DARE you growl! _I_ am the baer here..

But you can't spell, so your spells don't work.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

oh. sorreee.

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/Bear_Box.jpg

John

OK, now you've started it! I have found, over the last couple years, Digi-Key is no longer stocking all sorts of parts that I have been using for years. Not wildly esoteric stuff, but what I consider pretty mainstream chips. Like, recently the 74VHC161 counter is no longer stocked in any variation. This is the 3.3 V CMOS version of the venerable 74161 counter. I use it to generate the startup command to get an SST serial PROM to dump starting at location zero to configure an older FPGA.

Thank goodness Mouser is picking up a lot of the stuff Digi-Key is dropping. I could go on about all the parts that they no longer stock, but it would be a long list!

Jon

About 6 of em were at our office in NorCal showing this. The Q isn't so hot, as I remember it. I suppose it is all relative. I can't remember the details as well as I remember the conclusion.

I do use a lot of Peregrine switches and step attns though. UCMOS is on sapphire.

Just for that, i will have my which granny spell your pun..

Looks comfy. Is that the BN freighter in the background?

Which witch is which?

It's not for baers to be inside; it's to keep'em out!

John

I stayed in Robert's hotel!

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

A cave by any other name..

Fan-See! Looks too rich fur my blood.

The granny which ate the sand-witch.