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

[J. Forster]

HNY,

I disagree. The reason a high performance GPS costs 100K or more is that
the engineering cost is ammortized over a few hundred units.

Say the thing cost $10M to develop and you make 1000, that's $10,000 NRE
per unit.

However, if you have a successful commercial unit and sell 1,000,000 the
NRE is $10.

I'd doubt any of the hand held GPS units costs even $50 in million
quantities.

Ditto with the SW.

The errors I've seen are map, not position, errors.

YMMV,

-John

==================

> 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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