[time-nuts] Problems with Garmin - maybe we should cut them alittle slack

[Horst Schmidt]

Hi,

  first, a happy and hopefully healthy New Year to all of you.

I think, some of you are going slightly overboard, in what you expect a 
$150 Dollar car navigator should do,
I also don't believe some of you   you realise what exactly it was 
designed  to do.

It is not a device to accurately shoot a missile trough somebodies 
toilet window and hit a specified turd in the bowl.

It is designed to get you relatively easy and close to a specified 
designation. preferably when used in a motor car

This it does perfectly well.  It may be a few meters out from an exact 
house number, but it got you there without you having
to look at the map, (or worse get your spouse to read the map and 
navigate you).

It improves the road safety, especially at night time, when you often 
don't see the street names and have to slow down to a crawl
with a lot of cars bunched up behind you.

The mind boggles if some of you think because the GPS is not 100% 
accurate, The Fire brigade gets either lost, or tries to extinguish the
  house next door to the burning one, just because the GPS is 30m out.
  What you're actually are saying is: The Fire brigade is full of idiots.

To sell an item for 150 or so Bucks,  on  can not  reasonably expect it 
to be  as perfect than another item which sells for 100 grand or more 
and nobody
  except a few government institutions can afford it.

Not every instrument is mad by Agilent for a cost which is prohibitive 
to the normal punter.

Just get back down to earth, a few years ago you had to learn how to 
read a map, or follow the often useless instructions somebody else gave you.

Now for hardly any money, you get to your destination  with least amount 
of effort and a lot saver than before.

Regards, Horst








> gonzo-
> "A GPS is a precision device.
>   A Navigator is a consumer device.
>   To confuse the two is to fail to understand either."
>
> A navigator IS a GPS. Surveying GPSs may use carrier phase tracking or
> whatever to get about 2mm accuracy. Just because it is optimized for navigation
> instead
>
> of location accuracy and gets about 3m accuracy doesn't mean that a navigator
> isn't a GPS.
>
>   Note that map accuracy has nothing to do with GPS receiver accuracy. Also
> some mapping data has built in errors or incorrect POIs to identify the data in
> case it is copied. For instance, one company's street mapping software I owned
> had, in the small town I live in, a POI that said: "***** Institute Of
> Technology"
>
> even though there has never been a school there and it was a actually closed gas
>
> station.
>
>                            -Arthur
>
>
>
>
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