Are You Reading at All?
by Paul McGoldrick
My daughter is one of the millions of kids across the US that are monitoring
and recording their reading time outside of school hours. Their return is
a monthly certificate for a free personal pan pizza at Pizza Hut. If they
get all six certificates they will get a shiny golden medallion in March
of this year. My daughter is a reader: She is averaging over 100 minutes
per day so far this month and her basic pizza requirement level is only
400 minutes for the whole month. But is anyone else reading at all?
Last week was a busy one for analogZONE. We published the winners of the 2003 Product of the Year Awards…Rarely does one have to thank e-mail, but if it didn't exist I have no idea how I could have taken, and answered, even a third of the messages I received on the telephone.
But even during that particularly busy period I also managed to receive some crazy enquiries which had been very clearly pre-addressed in analogZONE's news release about the winners. I was probably a little more than terse when I directed people's attention to that fact.
It also seemed that it was a week of data sheet weirdness. Data sheets with clearly silly, inaccurate or preposterous numbers together with typos, wrong units and such. And there were data sheets with important specifications missing, one has to presume deliberately, in the hope that the designer will not notice that something that should be there is not. It's not my job to proofread vendors' data sheets, and when I find such problems the way in which I think about a vendor changes -- and not positively. Clearly, there needs to be some accountability for those that produce tenuous documents such as I have been seeing. The movement to having the front page of the data sheet also being the blurb for marketing is not going away, either, and some of the adjectives being used are downright out of place in a document that is meant to convey how a product behaves under test, and how to design it into sockets.
Has everybody stopped reading what they produce or is it being written by the wrong people? Does nobody read fully through their messages any more, just responding to the first matter they see? Is there no official policy in place at some vendors for data sheet approvals?
It's very tempting to come up with a Pizza Hut type of scheme to encourage
reading in our industry. Can someone out there suggest a way of doing it?
Or maybe I should just ask my daughter to drop over to help.