All, this has drifted way off track and should have stopped many
messages ago. I really hate having to jump in here but I've been
getting well-justified private complaints.
Can we *please* try to keep things on topic???
John
----
J. Forster said the following on 01/01/2011 12:14 AM:
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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