MIKE ROSS wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 MR> "Roy J. Tellason" bravely wrote to "WILLIAM
KITCHEN" (13 Sep 03 
 MR> 12:05:49)  --- on the heady topic of "VEHICLE LED'S"

 RJT> I'll figure something out.  I haven't played with any of these yet,
 RJT> and am looking forward to getting around to it.
 RJT> One of the nice things is the board they're on,  I can hold it up to
 RJT> light and see traces through it,  which makes it easy to see some
 RJT> aspects of things.  And which pin is which is also marked,  as well as
 RJT> some other stuff.  Should make some aspects of this stuff easier...

 MR> They used to make stuff of much better fiberglass boards. Today
 MR> it's the cheap epoxy painted green to make it look like the
 MR> fiberglass. The traces come off so fast if you even just look at
 MR> them cross when you try to desolder anything. And hardly any
 MR> silkscreened labels, IBM boards are the worst with secret codes for
 MR> everything. I mean they actually go to the trouble of renumbering
 MR> common parts to their own internal numbers. The real cherry on top
 MR> is the damned smt devices which have one or two letter codes or
 MR> none at all. I think they could have used colour dots or stripes
 MR> instead and had more room for it instead of impossible to read
 MR> letters.

Yep,  all these hardware makers are trying endlessly to keep things
"proprietary" even though the technology for all of this stuff is
out there, and has been for years.  There's little real design innovation
either.  And the competition has pushed pricing down to commodity levels, 
which most of the people into making this stuff _still_ haven't adjusted
to.

That kind of crap,  combined with the scarcity of any kind of service
information,  changes in manufacturing techniques,  and a few other things
sure doesn't make this stuff much fun any more,  compared to what it used
to be.

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