George White wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 GW> There are some aweful designs out there.

Yeah,  there sure are...

 GW> A magazine published one once and one of my collegues sent them a 
 GW> letter pointing out all the problems with the design. They wrote 
 GW> back saying the one they built worked OK for them so he (in fact 
 GW> it was we) were in error, there were no problems...

Nope.  No problems...   :-)

 GW> In fact there were very significant problems, but it's too long ago
 GW> for me to remember the details. Things like insufficient gain if 
 GW> the transistors were at the low end of their gain range, poor 
 GW> choice of zener voltage, and more beside...

There's so much poor design out there I wouldn't even know where to begin
to get into it in here.  Maybe start with the way most stuff doesn't seem
to be made to be worked on,  for one example.  As somebody who used to work
on lots of stuff,  that one bothered me a heck of a lot.  I just spent some
time in the past day or so to get into a monitor,  have a look around,  and
put it back together after knowing that there isn't any way I'm going to do
anything with it.

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