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Muntzing
Muntzing is the practice and technique of reducing the components inside an electronic appliance to the minimum required for it to function. The term is named after the man who invented it, Earl "Madman" Muntz, a car and electronics salesman who was also a self-taught electrical engineer. In the 1940s and 1950s, television receivers were very complex pieces of equipment, often containing upwards of 30 vacuum tubes, as well as transformers, rheostats, and other heavy electronics. The consequent high price limited their potential for high-volume sales. Muntz determined, through trial and error, that he could remove a significant number of parts and still end up with a monochrome TV that worked very well in urban areas, close to transmission towers. He carried a pair of wire clippers around and when he felt that one of his builders was overengineering a circuit, he would begin snipping components out. When the TV stopped functioning, he would reinsert the last part and leave the TV a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Madman Muntz
Earl William "Madman" Muntz (January 3, 1914 – June 21, 1987) was an American businessman and engineer who sold and promoted cars and consumer electronics in the United States from the 1930s until his death in 1987. He was a pioneer in television commercials with his oddball "Madman" persona; an alter ego who generated publicity with his unusual costumes, stunts, and outrageous claims. Muntz also pioneered car stereos by creating the Muntz Stereo-Pak, better known as the 4-track cartridge, a predecessor to the 8-track cartridge developed by Lear Industries. He invented the practice that came to be known as Muntzing, which involved simplifying otherwise complicated electronic devices. Muntz produced and marketed the first black-and-white television receivers to sell for less than $100, and created one of the earliest functional widescreen projection TVs. He was credited with coining the abbreviation "TV" for ''television'', although the term had earlier been in use in call ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Value Engineering
Value engineering (VE) is a systematic analysis of the functions of various components and materials to lower the cost of goods, products and services with a tolerable loss of performance or functionality. Value, as defined, is the ratio of function to cost. Value can therefore be manipulated by either improving the function or reducing the cost. It is a primary tenet of value engineering that basic functions be preserved and not be reduced as a consequence of pursuing value improvements. The term "value management" is sometimes used as a synonym of "value engineering", and both promote the planning and delivery of projects with improved performance The reasoning behind value engineering is as follows: if marketers expect a product to become practically or stylistically obsolete within a specific length of time, they can design it to only last for that specific lifetime. The products could be built with higher-grade components, but with value engineering th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Design For Lean Manufacturing
Design for lean manufacturing is a process for applying lean concepts to the design phase of a system, such as a complex product or process. The term describes methods of design in lean manufacturing companies as part of the study of Japanese industry by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the time of the study, the Japanese automakers were outperforming the American counterparts in speed, resources used in design, and design quality. Conventional mass-production design focuses primarily on product functions and manufacturing costs; however, design for lean manufacturing systematically widens the design equation to include all factors that will determine a product's success across its entire value stream and life-cycle. One goal is to reduce waste and maximize value, and other goals include improving the quality of the design and the reducing the time to achieve the final solution. The method has been used in architecture, healthcare, product development, processes d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minimalism (computing)
In computing, minimalism refers to the application of minimalist philosophies and principles in the design and use of hardware and software. Minimalism, in this sense, means designing systems that use the least hardware and software resources possible. History In the late 1970s and early 1980s, programmers worked within the confines of relatively expensive and limited resources of common platforms. Eight or sixteen kilobytes of RAM was common; 64 kilobytes was considered a vast amount and was the entire address space accessible to the 8-bit CPUs predominant during the earliest generations of personal computers. The most common storage medium was the 5.25 inch floppy disk holding from 88 to 170 kilobytes. Hard drives with capacities from five to ten megabytes cost thousands of dollars. Over time, personal-computer memory capacities expanded by orders of magnitude and mainstream programmers took advantage of the added storage to increase their software's capabilities a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
KISS Principle
KISS, an acronym for "Keep it simple, stupid!", is a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960. First seen partly in American English by at least 1938, the KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore, simplicity should be a key goal in design, and unnecessary complexity should be avoided. The phrase has been associated with aircraft engineer Kelly Johnson. The term "KISS principle" was in popular use by 1970. Variations on the phrase (usually as some euphemism for the more churlish "stupid") include "keep it super simple", "keep it simple, silly", "keep it short and simple", "keep it short and sweet", "keep it simple and straightforward", "keep it small and simple", "keep it simple, soldier", "keep it simple, sailor", "keep it simple, sweetie", or "keep it sweet and simple". Origin The acronym was reportedly coined by Kelly Johnson, lead engineer at the Lockheed Skunk Works (creators of the Lockheed U-2 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cost Engineering
Cost engineering is "the engineering practice devoted to the management of project cost, involving such activities as estimating, cost control, cost forecasting, investment appraisal and risk analysis". "Cost Engineers budget, plan and monitor investment projects. They seek the optimum balance between cost, quality and time requirements." Skills and knowledge of cost engineers are similar to those of quantity surveyors. In many industries, cost engineering is synonymous with project controls. As the title "engineer" has legal requirements in many jurisdictions (i.e. Texas, Canada), the cost engineering discipline is often renamed to project controls. A cost engineer is "an engineer whose judgment and experience are utilized in the application of scientific principles and techniques to problems of estimation; cost control; business planning and management science; profitability analysis; project management; and planning and scheduling". Overview One key objective of cost en ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Muda (Japanese Term)
is a Japanese word meaning "futility; uselessness; wastefulness", and is a key concept in lean process thinking, like the Toyota Production System (TPS) as one of the three types of deviation from optimal allocation of resources (the others being '' mura'' and '' muri''). Waste in this context refers to the wasting of time or resources rather than wasteful by-products and should not be confused with Waste reduction. From an end-customer's point of view, value-added work is any activity that produces goods or provides a service for which a customer is willing to pay; ''muda'' is any constraint or impediment that causes waste to occur. There are two types of muda: * Muda Type I: non value-adding, but necessary for end-customers. These are usually harder to eliminate because while classified as non-value adding, they may still be necessary. * Muda Type II: non value-adding and unnecessary for end-customers. These contribute to waste, incur hidden costs and should be eliminated ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Just-in-Time Manufacturing
Lean manufacturing is a production method aimed primarily at reducing times within the production system as well as response times from suppliers and to customers. It is closely related to another concept called just-in-time manufacturing (JIT manufacturing in short). Just-in-time manufacturing tries to match production to demand by only supplying goods which have been ordered and focuses on efficiency, productivity (with a commitment to continuous improvement) and reduction of "wastes" for the producer and supplier of goods. Lean manufacturing adopts the just-in-time approach and additionally focuses on reducing cycle, flow and throughput times by further eliminating activities which do not add any value for the customer. Lean manufacturing also involves people who work outside of the manufacturing process, such as in marketing and customer service. Lean manufacturing is particularly related to the operational model implemented in the post-war 1950s and 1960s by the Japan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electronic Engineering
Electronics engineering is a sub-discipline of electrical engineering which emerged in the early 20th century and is distinguished by the additional use of active components such as semiconductor devices to amplify and control electric current flow. Previously electrical engineering only used passive devices such as mechanical switches, resistors, inductors and capacitors. It covers fields such as: analog electronics, digital electronics, consumer electronics, embedded systems and power electronics. It is also involved in many related fields, for example solid-state physics, radio engineering, telecommunications, control systems, signal processing, systems engineering, computer engineering, instrumentation engineering, electric power control, robotics. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is one of the most important professional bodies for electronics engineers in the US; the equivalent body in the UK is the Institution of Engineering and Technolo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copper
Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu (from la, cuprum) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkish-orange color. Copper is used as a conductor of heat and electricity, as a building material, and as a constituent of various metal alloys, such as sterling silver used in jewelry, cupronickel used to make marine hardware and coins, and constantan used in strain gauges and thermocouples for temperature measurement. Copper is one of the few metals that can occur in nature in a directly usable metallic form ( native metals). This led to very early human use in several regions, from circa 8000 BC. Thousands of years later, it was the first metal to be smelted from sulfide ores, circa 5000 BC; the first metal to be cast into a shape in a mold, c. 4000 BC; and the first metal to be purposely alloyed with another metal, tin, to create ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Power Supplies
A power supply is an electrical device that supplies electric power to an electrical load. The main purpose of a power supply is to convert electric current from a source to the correct voltage, current, and frequency to power the load. As a result, power supplies are sometimes referred to as electric power converters. Some power supplies are separate standalone pieces of equipment, while others are built into the load appliances that they power. Examples of the latter include power supplies found in desktop computers and consumer electronics devices. Other functions that power supplies may perform include limiting the current drawn by the load to safe levels, shutting off the current in the event of an electrical fault, power conditioning to prevent electronic noise or voltage surges on the input from reaching the load, power-factor correction, and storing energy so it can continue to power the load in the event of a temporary interruption in the source power (uninterruptible p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electronic Appliance
The field of electronics is a branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the emission, behaviour and effects of electrons using electronic devices. Electronics uses active devices to control electron flow by amplification and rectification, which distinguishes it from classical electrical engineering, which only uses passive effects such as resistance, capacitance and inductance to control electric current flow. Electronics has hugely influenced the development of modern society. The central driving force behind the entire electronics industry is the semiconductor industry sector, which has annual sales of over $481 billion as of 2018. The largest industry sector is e-commerce, which generated over $29 trillion in 2017. History and development Electronics has hugely influenced the development of modern society. The identification of the electron in 1897, along with the subsequent invention of the vacuum tube which could amplify and rectify small e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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