Unnecessary Complexity

[Rerouter]

The most recent example I have come across was gas instant hot water heaters, There is more electronics in the things than metal,

All that it needs is a flow switch and a themostat, possibly a feedback temperature sensor, not 6 servo motors, 4 solenoid valves, 7 temperature sensors, a flow meter, and a circuit board that takes up half the enclosure.

And as the amount and complexity of the electronics increase, the quality and durability of the units go down. More recently I have been seeing a big batch of ~7 year old units turning up at the scrap metal place because there paper thin heat exchanges start leaking (was hoping to use them for a project)

[Zero999]

Good point - I didn't put two and two together there 

Actually mini flashback here. I got some stuff out of a skip back in the late 1980s and in it was a security camera. I was pissing myself with excitement but nope inside it was empty. There was a little board with a CD4001 and a 7805 in it flashing an LED. I think that was the pinnacle of complexity there. Genuinely don't think they knew what the hell they were doing. It was a commercial board as well. Silk screen and everything. That surely cost more than the £0.40 for a flashing LED!?!?!?

I wonder what's inside those ICs, which go into flashing LEDs. I know it's a counter and astable, but I wonder if they use a standard IC such as the CD4060B or CD4521B?

[coppercone2]

The most recent example I have come across was gas instant hot water heaters, There is more electronics in the things than metal,

All that it needs is a flow switch and a themostat, possibly a feedback temperature sensor, not 6 servo motors, 4 solenoid valves, 7 temperature sensors, a flow meter, and a circuit board that takes up half the enclosure.

And as the amount and complexity of the electronics increase, the quality and durability of the units go down. More recently I have been seeing a big batch of ~7 year old units turning up at the scrap metal place because there paper thin heat exchanges start leaking (was hoping to use them for a project)

why is it bad if it has a complicated hydraulic circuit? You just need good parts like stainless swagelok etc. you can make anything bad. their mechanical choices have nothing to do with electronics choice other then their cost decisions.

it seems like a extremely primitive assertion to make... good hydraulics design can be hard you know.. you need good engineers. cost per component is just higher. its like saying we should have never used more then two vacuum tubes??

[Rerouter]

I have been looking into them more and more, need a few to abuse for non standard use., Sadly all the easy to get ones are the more complicated modern ones,

I can make at least the beginning of my assertions because I've been scoping out which ones to try and get for the past few weeks, Downloading the installation manuals which luckily do tend to give the full electronic schematic, As well as the specifications,

The efficiency towards the upper 50% of what these devices are capable of haven't really changed, Its mostly down to the mechanics for how much energy you can recover from the flue gas,
The electronics seem more related to the "fancy" side of things, using in house controllers to customize the hot water temperature on the fly,

It may just be my obscure use case, But it seems odd to me when you have the option of phone apps for a water heater.

[bd139]

I wonder what's inside those ICs, which go into flashing LEDs. I know it's a counter and astable, but I wonder if they use a standard IC such as the CD4060B or CD4521B?

I doubt its a standard IC die as they're quite large, and you'd have to use a hybrid then to get the timing components external to the die plus that would increase the number of wire bonds required and cost. It'd have to use on die RC network for timing so I imagine it'd be a much faster oscillator to keep the timing components and die small and cost down, divided down with a counter and a driver. Probably a standard LED with a flasher die glued next to it and bonded in the package. Probably requires a lot of skill to get a good yield out of something like that as the capacitors and resistors aren't going to be laser trimmed for that money!

[IanMacdonald]

True. Back when I was designing early digital and set-top-boxes and TVs, there was a sudden fuss over demand for products that could support PIP (picture in picture) and POP (picture on picture). This became a major issue in chipset choice and the big impact of h/w changes and s/w stacks. I've yet to meet anyone who has seriously used these functions! The same with 3D TV, a big hassle to support (HDMI specs etc.) but now dropped by all major TV manufacturers and broadcasters.

Too many cases of new technologies looking for an application rather than the other way round.

I support small business IT, and one of the biggest problems here is that managers insist pointblank on having Outlook and Exchange Server for email. This in turn mandates the use of an Active Directory setup for the desktops. They then want things to be set up so that any user can log on to any computer and see the same files. The craziest example of such was a three user office (with one spare seat) in which, crammed in a tiny backroom which hardy had the space for them, were two heavy iron servers with RAID arrays to support this setup. When I took over the client it was costing £7,000 a year in service callouts alone. 

The thing that really worries me about this kind of setup is that it's not really meant to be used unless you have fallback hardware. If your only domain controller goes down you are basically dead in the water. Not a problem for corporates with server farms, but for a small site having to keep spare equipment is a lot of money tied up. Plus the spare equipment is no use unless it's kept patched and updated to the same level as the live box, and tested regularly. So, most of them just hope it never goes down.
 
When I tell them you don't actually NEED all this crap on three-user site, they will reply, "But it's what the Exxon office down the road uses.." 

-Er yes, but that has 1,000 users, and an onsite IT team to manage the stuff. Different ballpark, different methodology. 

[bd139]

TBF that's going out of the window now. Everyone uses Office 365 and Azure AD for that stuff.

If your DC goes down you're fine still usually. Kerberos tokens work offline for a while.

[coppercone2]

I think thats meant as a bootleg countermeasure to long runs of non insulated metal pipes where you crank it a few degrees on cold nights so you dont need to wait a long time to wash your hands at 3am when you go to the bathroom.

The proper solution would be insulation and a extra heater but this is probobly cheaper. Also its so small you dont wanna tune

[Berni]

Long runs of hot water do need circulating flow to keep warm. There is not a whole lot of water volume in a given section of pipe compared to the surface area. So insulating a pipe well enough to stay warm for hours would mean so much insulation that a little water pipe would end up as thick as beer keg.

So it ends up easier to simply run an extra pipe from the faucet back to the hot water tank to flush the cold water back to the tank to heat it up again. You do spend some extra energy heating the pipe run, but you also save water by not having to run the faucet for a long time to flush the cold water out of the pipe. A pipe going to the other end of the house can hold a lot of cold water.

[CatalinaWOW]

Another reason is legislative. Ceiling fans in the US have a mandated power limiter to control an apparently rampant problem of fires due to people plugging high wattage lamps into them.  A fuse would seem to be the answer, but not allowed, apparently because the same nitwits can install a higher value fuse.

[james_s]

Another reason is legislative. Ceiling fans in the US have a mandated power limiter to control an apparently rampant problem of fires due to people plugging high wattage lamps into them.  A fuse would seem to be the answer, but not allowed, apparently because the same nitwits can install a higher value fuse.

That's strange, I hadn't heard that but somehow I'm not surprised. The problem is that the more you try to idiot-proof something, the better the idiots it attracts. If a person can't follow the max wattage warning there's little saving them. The same issue results in modern versions of the classic bedroom and bathroom fixtures having long stems to move the bulbs out further from the wall or ceiling which makes the fixture look awkward. It would take an absurdly high wattage bulb to set sheetrock on fire and these days I wouldn't expect many people to use incandescent bulbs in the first place.

[james_s]

It's also entirely possible that a small OTP microcontroller will actually be cheaper than a 555 or more traditional logic IC. I try to avoid programmable parts when not needed for the inverse of the point above, I want a person to be able to duplicate my projects down the road, and I want to be able to work on them even if I lose the documentation I had made. I remember an article somewhere that was pushing the idea of using 8 pin microcontrollers in place of 555 timers and he had a valid point. The microcontroller he was using was about the same price as a 555, and needed very few if any external components to do the task. No need to keep a selection of timing capacitors and resistors around, just adjust the code accordingly.

[bd139]

Ths is true. If you look at the PIC10F320 for example there is an absolutely insane amount of possibility in a SOT-23 / DFN package. Plus you can buy them preprogrammed.

[Gyro]

Being doubtful of the claims that the same SOT-23 micros were used in greetings cards and flickering LED tealights, I took apart a number of different ones that my wife was throwing out. Attached to a small piezo sounder, most produced a very PWM sounding white noise but one did indeed play a sweet little Chinese tune.

As one of my old managers once told me, there's no credit in designing components in a project to be re-usable. The credit comes for actually re-using something!

[ogden]

As one of my old managers once told me, there's no credit in designing components in a project to be re-usable. The credit comes for actually re-using something!

Reuseability is chicken and egg problem. You may want to reuse something from old project but in case it is trash - you better don't even try. On the other hand if you do not plan reuseability - you will not get it. No wonder somebody is giving credits for actually re-using something

[james_s]

I've reused lots of parts, especially when I was younger and had more free time and less money. I have a small 12V bench power supply I built when I was about 12 that I've rebuilt 2 or 3 times using the same case, transformer and rectifier. I frequently pull interesting parts from old junk and build something around them. It does suck when it's a one-off part though and you manage to kill it after building something to use it.

[Mr. Scram]

TBF that's going out of the window now. Everyone uses Office 365 and Azure AD for that stuff.

If your DC goes down you're fine still usually. Kerberos tokens work offline for a while.

Office 365 and Azure would be another example of adding complexity to save it elsewhere. It looks good on the tin, but people are finding out about the real life drawbacks more and more.

[bd139]

Everything is a trade off. For a business it's about right. Although office 364 is more appropriate.

I don't use either myself for ref.

[Mr. Scram]

Everything is a trade off. For a business it's about right. Although office 364 is more appropriate.

I don't use either myself for ref.

I can be a suitable solution for certain businesses, but unfortunately it's crammed down people's throats as the only solution by Microsoft and friends. The buzzword hungry managerial type is all to keen to latch onto the latest fad for fear of missing out. As long as you go with the flow and occasionally present a shiny new trinket to the C-levels to prove you're doing something your position is safe. Making a well informed decision to not go with buzzword technology is posing a personal risk. Few periode are capable enough to make that assessment and even fewer actually dare to do so. Nobody gets fired for buying IBM, but that doesn't mean IBM is the suitable solution.

[David Hess]

I would include Window 7 and later which deliberately removed some functions to force consumer choice in other directions and have worse human factors engineering for no discernible reason other than poor design.

I see a lot of just dumb interface changes with the recent GMC shifters being a great example.  What did GMC gain by removing haptic feedback of the older simpler design other than lawsuits?  Modern laptop chiclet keyboards are another; do the younger generations even use touch typing or is that an obsolete skill?  Maybe products like this are designed to stifle productivity and encourage passive media consumption.

What I am getting at is that increased complexity should not compromise good human factors engineering.

[bd139]

Everything is a trade off. For a business it's about right. Although office 364 is more appropriate.

I don't use either myself for ref.

I can be a suitable solution for certain businesses, but unfortunately it's crammed down people's throats as the only solution by Microsoft and friends. The buzzword hungry managerial type is all to keen to latch onto the latest fad for fear of missing out. As long as you go with the flow and occasionally present a shiny new trinket to the C-levels to prove you're doing something your position is safe. Making a well informed decision to not go with buzzword technology is posing a personal risk. Few periode are capable enough to make that assessment and even fewer actually dare to do so. Nobody gets fired for buying IBM, but that doesn't mean IBM is the suitable solution.

That's not really how that sort of stuff works though. It's actually pretty much perfect for most businesses. It covers their comms requirements for the lowest TCO and is common enough that staff already know it or training is easy and cost effective to procure. It's not a fad either. Realistically for a 50 seat SME on-site is going to cost you £70k a year when you include human wall clock time, kit, hardware refresh, licenses, DR planning and equipment. O365 is around £20k for the same end game. A two man band it makes sense as wall as that's £20 a month for two users self-admin that a monkey could do.

No one got fired for buying the right tools for the job.

However this is not an argument against complexity. Some problem domains are complex because they need to be and some aren't. When you start looking at centralised or well managed IT infrastructure complexity is absolutely inevitable so subcontracting that complexity out is a good business decision if you know what the trade-offs are.

I would include Window 7 and later which deliberately removed some functions to force consumer choice in other directions and have worse human factors engineering for no discernible reason other than poor design.

I see a lot of just dumb interface changes with the recent GMC shifters being a great example.  What did GMC gain by removing haptic feedback of the older simpler design other than lawsuits?  Modern laptop chiclet keyboards are another; do the younger generations even use touch typing or is that an obsolete skill?  Maybe products like this are designed to stifle productivity and encourage passive media consumption.

What I am getting at is that increased complexity should not compromise good human factors engineering.

To be fair with windows 10 they are sort of going in reverse again now. It's just a window manager for yout applications really. No one gives a shit about the crap they attached to it even if they blog about it ten times a day. It doesn't even get in the way any more.

[tooki]

Another reason is legislative. Ceiling fans in the US have a mandated power limiter to control an apparently rampant problem of fires due to people plugging high wattage lamps into them.  A fuse would seem to be the answer, but not allowed, apparently because the same nitwits can install a higher value fuse.

Not because of fires, simply for energy savings: https://www.modernfanoutlet.com/blog/the-energy-protection-act-and-its-effect-on-todays-ceiling-fans.html

[David Hess]

To be fair with windows 10 they are sort of going in reverse again now. It's just a window manager for yout applications really. No one gives a shit about the crap they attached to it even if they blog about it ten times a day. It doesn't even get in the way any more.

The interface functions they removed are still removed and Microsoft doubled down by giving stupid reasons.

We cannot have a free disk space display because users were suffering from free space anxiety?  Really?

Computers and networks and storage systems gets faster yet APIs are removed to prevent excessive disk thrashing with SSDs and network traffic?  What?

I don't believe it.  I think Microsoft deliberately crippled Windows 7 through 10 to drive users to an alternative Microsoft OS and hardware environment over which they could extract greater rents.  I also think it will fail miserably and ultimately result in the dissolution of Microsoft and likely Intel who should dump them.

[Berni]

In my opinion Windows 7 is the best OS that Microsoft has made so far. Its the OS that made the modernized features of Vista actually work. There have been massive under the hood changes from the aging Win XP that was sitting on a mountain of legacy functionaly. Sure there are a few missteps along the way but most of the new changes are actually good.

However Windows 8 and Windows 10...those are the train wreck. Microsoft was ridding high on the success of Win 7 and decided on the bold move to overhaul the entire UI to be optimized for touch since tablets just became a thing and Microsoft wanted a piece of that pie (And they tried really hard...and failed just as hard). Then Windows 10 was a big backpedal on the UI change but they clearly still haven't fired the graphics designers from 8 so it still looks like oversimplified shit. The UI once again had a major overhaul to make it more win 7 like but simpler and sleek to pick up some of that Apple swag... and telemetry... lots of it(guess they had to make up the financial loss of win 8 by selling your data). The new simplified user interface means all the useful 'power user buttons' are hidden away because the average user can't be trusted with them and could mess up the computer.

The last part is probably the biggest issue with the new versions of windows. Its made for the average PC user, the one that uses a PC to browse facebook and occasionally write a word document and print it, the one that fills up the hard drive and then calls you with "My PC is saying its out space when i try to do X, can you fix it?" only to find a full C drive and a D drive that doesn't even have a single file. Just imagine how stupid an average PC user is....now realize that 50% of PC users are even stupider than that. These are the people Microsoft is making a OS for.

[Mr. Scram]

That's not really how that sort of stuff works though. It's actually pretty much perfect for most businesses. It covers their comms requirements for the lowest TCO and is common enough that staff already know it or training is easy and cost effective to procure. It's not a fad either. Realistically for a 50 seat SME on-site is going to cost you £70k a year when you include human wall clock time, kit, hardware refresh, licenses, DR planning and equipment. O365 is around £20k for the same end game. A two man band it makes sense as wall as that's £20 a month for two users self-admin that a monkey could do.

No one got fired for buying the right tools for the job.

However this is not an argument against complexity. Some problem domains are complex because they need to be and some aren't. When you start looking at centralised or well managed IT infrastructure complexity is absolutely inevitable so subcontracting that complexity out is a good business decision if you know what the trade-offs are.


To be fair with windows 10 they are sort of going in reverse again now. It's just a window manager for yout applications really. No one gives a shit about the crap they attached to it even if they blog about it ten times a day. It doesn't even get in the way any more.

Sure, that's the sales pitch. Then you see real life scenarios where before the move to the cloud two administrators were required and after the move three turn out to be needed to keeps things afloat. Or things continuously breaking in more customized environments due to Microsoft running continuous updates, forcing companies either into more standard environments not always ideal for their purposes or into a more intensive and costly development cycle to continually unbreak things. That's TCO not always taken into account up front. Cloud infrastructure is a wonderful tool to have in the toolbox, but as soon as you start throwing other tools out things start going wrong.