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

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.

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

"PeteS" skrev i en meddelelse news: snipped-for-privacy@75g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...

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

..snip

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

Colin =^.^=

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

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

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.

Hi Joerg,

What EU manufacturers....

Dimiter

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Joerg wrote:

Hello Dimiter,

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.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

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

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Joerg wrote:

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.

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  Keith

Hello Dimiter,

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.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

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

and search for "machine screw". The McMaster-Carr website is like a continuous 24x7 orgasm.

Tim.

Hello Tim,

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

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

C> > Dear John,

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

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! :-)

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?

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 JosephKK
 Gegen dummheit kampfen die Gotter Selbst, vergebens.  
  --Schiller

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

Try one 'L' :)

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 not particularly good . [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

In article , joseph2k wrote: [....]

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

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