My employer, a large, multibillion dollar electronics company, doesn't play the game of outsourcing engineering or manufacturing. We make personal gadgets, and devices for cars, motorcycles, boats, and airplanes. Once we have sourced components, we control the development, manufacturing and distribution ourselves.

For aircraft, all engineering and manufacturing is done in the US in our own facilities. A product goes maybe 1000 ft from the people who come up with the concept, to engineering, to manufacturing, to the warehouse for shipping. And we're the largest and most respected GA avionics manufacturer in the world.

Our automotive electronics are engineered in several offices in the US, Germany, Romania, and Taiwan, with manufacturing in our own plant in Taiwan. These products constantly win awards for their quality.

Marine electronics are engineered in the US and England, manufactured in our plant in Taiwan. Our marine chartplotters are regarded as the most advanced in the world.

Personal gadgets for workouts, hiking, cycling, are all engineered in the US and manufactured in our plant in Taiwan.

I chose to work here because it was an ethical company. I could have made more money somewhere else, but I knew that I wouldn't have as clean of a conscience. However, I have better benefits than everyone else I know in the area and in the industry, and the company has never had an unprofitable quarter in its entire existence (over 20 years). Its perfectly possible to be in the electronics industry, run a clean business, treat your employees well, and be profitable.

Hi, I'm one of the people who was involved in the testing of GPS equipment for PNT EXCOM. GPS is a unique form of radio communication, and you cannot apply the same principles you would for a conventional radio to GPS. I highly suggest reading up on how GPS actually works (its pretty darn impressive) because I think with your background, fully informed, you'll understand the problem.

"GPS signal are so weak they are below the noise floor. I dont know about you, but that just boggles my mind."

Hooray! Someone who gets it!

Big telcoms? They are puny compared to who Lightsquared was really pissing off. Lightsquared was screwing with the primary user of GPS, which is the USAF, which has an arsenal of nuclear weapons. I think they are somewhat scarier (and more important) than Sprint.

You understand radio a bit it seems. Here's what you're ignoring though, so follow me here: a high-precision GPS receiver must pick up signal at -165 dBm. This is right about at the noise floor. Its incredibly easy to cause interference with a receiver that must operate with these conditions, and incredibly difficult to design a filter that would actually be useful. You're talking about transmitters with 10^5 W output interfering with other transmitters in the same class. Its apples and oranges.

Modern nuvis are rocking 300MHz ARM11 based application processors on the low end. The midrange to high-end nuvis have 500-720MHz Cortex-A8 based SoCs. They have more horsepower than meets the eye.

You can do pretty good speech recognition and processing on a PXA272, and a Cortex-A8 can handle it easily. Siri could be integrated into the handset, but that wouldn't give Apple a huge database of queries to analyze.

Good for these kids. I don't agree that this should be big news, as this is becoming a fairly common project for advanced high school students. I mentored a team of high school students in the Kansas City area that sent up balloons last fall. They designed and built the payload, fitting all the instrumentation and cameras. One made it to 97,000 ft. The other managed to fly all the way to Illinois. In both cases the payload was recovered undamaged. They got some *awesome* video and pictures.

I understand your frustration. We get bombarded with calls and emails. Ten years ago, we had a customer base of tens of thousands of people. Today its tens of millions. I do not envy product support.

Like I said, there came a point where software engineering seemed to lose its way. I'm sorry you got caught in that. The 7xx/7x5 series was a huge jump in complexity from what had been developed before. While they are uber-packed with features, I'm not surprised that came at a price.

There have been a lot of changes in how things are done since the 7xx/7x5. The stability of the 12/13xx is very good. My girlfriend has a 1390, and has never had it crash, but sometimes the speedo gets stuck. I haven't seen a 22xx crash in over a year, and my 23xx has been very stable on recent software. For something the same generation as your 765 though, the 8xx/8x5 series was rock solid. Also, the 295W/G60 are absolutely unstoppable. In 4 years, I've never seen a G60 official release crash. The 8xx/8x5/295W/G60 were all Linux based though, so maybe that had something to do with it. ;)

I can't tell you about anything in the bug tracker, sorry. But, everything you mentioned has been passed in from product support. The 765 hasn't been EOL'd yet, expect more releases and bugfixes. I know that there are some crash/reboot bugs that will be fixed. My knowledge of the fitness devices is extremely limited, they're a whole different group. I know there are Edge 705 releases out there to fix Powertap bugs (especially the wheel size computation). You were right before though, there's more focus on the 800.

Thanks for sticking with us. We love the products we make. I'm mostly involved in automotive engineering, and outside of work, I drive everywhere and do rally racing with my girlfriend. Wherever I go, there's a bunch of nuvis on the windshield. Many engineers in the aviation group are pilots. There are lots of employee-owned aircraft and there are probably close to 20 certified flight instructors here. The fitness engineers are almost all running or cycling fanatics. There's always really nice bicycles decked out with instrumentation in the hall or in their offices. We even sponsor a local marathon (and half-marathon and 5K). I guess I'm trying to say we take what we do seriously and have a personal interest in seeing our products work well for others, so we do the best we can.

Kansas City, Kansas, seized entire neighborhoods under eminent domain, paying the residents a laughable fraction of what their property was worth, and then sold the land to developers at a profit. They built an enormous mall and the Kansas Speedway on that land, and are raking in megabucks in property and sales tax.