Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 03:20:20 +0200 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, "Rahul Siddharthan" <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Mundie, Perens, GPL, BSD etc again Message-ID: <p0510030bb751b0d4db9a@[194.78.241.123]> In-Reply-To: <000001c0f6b2$85e71760$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> References: <000001c0f6b2$85e71760$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
At 3:20 PM -0700 6/16/01, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> No, the majority didn't turn their back on Beige because Apple never gave
> them a choice.
I really don't think so. I have kept up with the various Apple
press magazines pretty well over the last seventeen years, and there
wasn't a single person I ever spoke to, or a single article I ever
read, that didn't rave over how revolutionary and "sexy" the iMac
looked, and how incredibly dowdy and ugly the old beige boxes now
looked.
If you can provide references to the contrary, I'd love to see them.
> This just proves my point. With the new-bug, now your saying that
> VW didn't even _bother_ to design a new vehicle, they just slapped
> different fiberglass on the top of a chassis they were already
> grinding out.
Not entirely true. Whenever you make a significant change like
this, there is a certain amount of redesign that has to go on. There
is a lot that can be used unchanged, but there are some things that
simply won't work. The Seat Leon and the Skoda Fabia share a lot of
parts in common with the Golf and the platform that underlies them
all, but the base platform only gets you 80% of the way there -- you
end up redesigning that other 20%, and as we all know, that last 20%
can make all the difference.
> I'm
> just pointing out that the new-bug _is_ all about marketing - why do you
> think that VW has created an artificial shartage of them?
Certainly, the New Beetle is mostly about shrewd marketing, and
playing on people's rose-colored memories of days gone past.
However, there is no artificial shortage -- remember that they only
share a common platform, and that there is still a certain amount of
redesign that has to go on.
This means that they can't all be built on the same manufacturing
lines, and they simply don't have enough manufacturing capacity right
now devoted to the New Beetle -- but I'm sure that VAG is working on
that.
> The fact
> that this chassis may be highly rated was entirely beside the point,
> if VW didn't have such a chassis on hand they would have just used
> a different one.
There are lots of extremely successful cars that have re-used the
base platform of other cars. Indeed, much of the entire bloody car
industry is built around this fact. If you want to fault VW for
doing this, then you have to damn the entire rest of the world along
with it.
> In any auto sales, your always going to sell more cheap cars than
> more expensive cars. This doesen't prove anything about quality,
> the majority of auto buyers look at price first, quality second.
> All it proves is that this VW platform is designed to allow it to
> be used to churn out vehicles cheaply and rapidly.
No, what it proves is that VW has a good and very well-proven
platform on which they can base a number of the most successful
models of cars in the world, and because of the level of attention
they pay to detail, and the quality of the engineering that they put
into their cars, the end result is that you have an extraordinarily
large number of some of the best value-for-money vehicles that the
world has ever seen.
> If you really want to know if a car is quality, then look at how many
> of them are still on the road 20 years after production.
Indeed, that is a very good criterion.
> VW churned
> out millions and millions of the old bugs but you rarely see one around
> today, whereas there's still plenty of old Japanese manufactured cars
> around and about.
Actually, there are some factories in Mexico that are still
building the original Beetle design! There is no other car design in
the entire history of the business (that I know of) that can make the
same kind of claim.
Show me *ANYTHING* in this modern world where the same basic
design has been built in factories around the world for over sixty
years. Yes, the original VW Beetle design pre-dates WWII, because it
was with going back to building the same basic pre-war Beetle that
Dr. Ferdinand Porsche made his first mark in history, as he helped
re-build Volks Wagen back up from the ashes Allies had created with
the strategic bombing, "de-housing", and incendiary/fire-bombing (the
likes of which has never been seen since, not even in Nagasaki or
Hiroshima), thus leading the new German economy back into Western
Civilization to be the powerhouse that it is today.
> Hell I've got a 20 year old 210 with 250,000 miles on it
> and
> it's still kicking along on the original engine, you could never get
> that kind of mileage out of an old bug engine.
But what about the design? Could it still be useful sixty years
after it was first put to metal?
Why don't you find me in forty years and tell me the answer to
that question then.
> Auto manufacturing literally does need to track every bolt and nut.
> Not that this is that difficult considering how it's so highly
> automated. There's quality reasons of course but the primary one is
> cost - if you are churning out a million cars a year on a line, a
> small mistake is enormously expensive.
True enough, but how many other factories in the US are allowed
to build domestic and export models of their cars on the same line?
None.
Mercedes built the first, and so far only, factory in the world
where the government would allow this sort of thing to be done.
That's because they could prove to the government that they keep
internal controls that meet or exceed the level of control that the
US government itself enforces at its own borders.
> Of course, though, the big reason they are selling is still marketing - the
> idea that the country is full of wide-open spaces and you need a big
> car to get around in them - despite the fact that this isn't true
> anymore and few SUV drivers spend more than 2% of the time driving anywhere
> other than in the city.
No, the real reason is that these things are taxed and regulated
as trucks, which means that companies like Ford can clear $10,000
profit on each and every SUV built -- even on their lowest-end
models, and probably something more like $20,000 profit on the
high-end models.
If that's not motivation for car companies to put murderous and
intentionally lethal vehicles on the road, then I don't know what is.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
/* efdtt.c Author: Charles M. Hannum <root@ihack.net> */
/* Represented as 1045 digit prime number by Phil Carmody */
/* Prime as DNS cname chain by Roy Arends and Walter Belgers */
/* */
/* Usage is: cat title-key scrambled.vob | efdtt >clear.vob */
/* where title-key = "153 2 8 105 225" or other similar 5-byte key */
dig decss.friet.org|perl -ne'if(/^x/){s/[x.]//g;print pack(H124,$_)}'
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?p0510030bb751b0d4db9a>