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Decoding the Inscrutable Logos On Your Electronics
jfruhlinger writes "If you've bought a piece of electronic equipment — a computer, a printer, even a lowly power supply — you've no doubt noticed a host of inscrutable logos festooned all over it — UL, CE, FCC, TUV, RoHS, ENERGY STAR, and the like. What do they mean? Each of these compliance marks tell a story about your gadget's operation or lifecycle, and knowing what they mean can let you in on the hidden life of the gizmos you buy."
They're stamped on there legitimately.
For a while there, you couldn't go a week without seeing one story or another about some "UL certified" device blowing up... because the UL stamp was fake.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
I'll just move on, because I can't see anything here. If I wanted to know this I would've gone to Wikipedia.
Somehow I thought this was a news site (maybe it says something about that in the tagline?), but I must have been mistaken. Silly me.
TFA is a convoluted mess of industry jargon and useless information.
A useful article would involve the icons themselves and what they mean.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Was it just me or did the story actually say almost nothing. I was expecting a list of the syllables and what they meant.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
Showing your product key on Slashdot is not a good idea !!!
A series of "standards" designed to keep groups of people employed while producing more "standards" that contributes nothing to human civilization.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
knowing what they mean can let you in on the hidden life of the gizmos you buy
They tell you when you buy them.
Don't feed them after midnight.
Keep them away from water.
Avoid sunlight.
Thought that was common knowledge.
Rodents of Hunusual Size. I don't believe they exist.
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
Does this guy realize that he just published his windows 7 product key?
Crap article. You'd think there would be a picture of all the logos on something, followed by a close-up picture of each logo and its explanation . But no. It's pure did not do the research.
This looks like Demand Media content for a made-for-Adsense page. Probably paid the author about $10.
LIke UL: Overpriced for its safety testing; you can get a CE certification for less. Or Energy Star: Let's you waste energy as long as you don't waste it in certain ways.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Decoding the Inscrutable Logos On Your Electronics
Mine says "Don't forget to drink your ovaltine."
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
Am I the only one who read the title as "Decoding the Inscrutable Legos On Your Electronics"?
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
This article says exactly nothing, wtf. Nothing is decoded. Is it too much to just put each logo on a sheet and what it certifies and ACTUALLY decode the symbols for the rest of us?
Where's the Kosher electronics?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The article is interesting and has a fair point. I have worked at three companies now where compliance was very much an afterthought and was charged at each company to get them over the line before the items went to market. Luckily I have been able to make various combinations of hardware and firmware meet C-Tick (CISPR21/22), A-Tick (S-001/2/3/4), IP-52, EN60950 etc.) with judicious application of capacitors to ground, sticky metal foil, clip on ferrites and firmware corrections. On the other hand, hardware I have designed has considered these things first up an resulted in quick testing and no revisits to the test labs. You software types have no idea! Making sure your SELV and hazardous voltage clearances right first time will save very expensive rework and restesting.
Even Wikipedia has better info than that paid article :P
UL: Underwriters Lab - a safety testing outfit
CE: Conformité Européenne (french) - Europe's equivalent of the UL
TUV: Technischer Überwachungsverein - German safety org like the above two
FCC: Federal Communications Commission - they license, test and certify radio equipment (cell phones, wifi, etc)
RoHS: Restriction of Hazardous Substances - a European law restricting hazardous materials such as lead, mercury, and a few others
ENERGY STAR: A set of energy efficiency standards primarily featured in the US, British Commonwealth nations, and parts of Europe. They are typically much stricter than national requirements.
At the end of the day though, most of these are just marketing stickers. Yes, they require some degree of certification, but it's kind of like getting your MCSE or A+. Not having the cert does not necessarily mean your device will blow up or pop breakers, it just means the mfg didn't pay their fee to get certified. For big mainstream appliances it's kind of dumb to not have it, but on most smaller gadgets it's a non-issue.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Start reading article
No chart
Stop reading article
This is complete garbage. We have to at least assume some sort of level of competency for the readers of this site. What are we trying to do here, be PBS for kids?
Sig: I stole this sig.
I hate those logos, yet they're mandatory due to govt. regulations (not just the US). Sometimes I have to make the product labels larger after convincing with the higher ups I can't print anything smaller than 6p and still be humanly visible.
The *best* part is trying to fit 2 or 3 languages onto the device itself. And they're getting smaller every year....
Merci Canada.
...the article doesn't actually tell you jack about decoding the logos. Instead, the article can mostly be summed up with, "You have lots of logos on your electronic gadgets. They mean things, like meeting safety or RF interference standards! They cost money."
slashdot.org/s/todayilearned
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
As long as we're not talking about Drinking the Kool-Aid.
Okay, so I tried something new and went ahead and read TFA this time. Big mistake. For something supposedly about the icons on electronic you'd expect to see the icons with their meaning printed next to them, right? But not this article! It reads like an SEO meta tag, does nothing to explain what any of those icons mean, and is full of bullshit jargon. Save yourself the trouble and don't read it. As for the slashdot "editors": fuck you guys.
A better article with photos of some of the logos is on Ars Technica at http://arstechnica.com/apple/guides/2011/02/ask-ars-what-do-the-symbols-on-the-back-of-iphones-mean.ars
this thing is three fucking pages of high-level dreck about the labels the author saw and what they mean in general
at the end of page 3 im told not to despair and keep the faith as the industry tunes its testing parameters to top notch standards!
i did however get a nice bombardment of inline advertising for the site, side bar adverts for the sponsors,
and enough fucking namedropping to fill a grocery cart with products tattooed in symbols and codes
that by the end of the article i could only appreciate from afar.
Good people go to bed earlier.
You know it's bulged capacitor time
The next Ask Slashdot article should be "How do we get those ridiculous laptop stickers off our palm rests?" and even from some desktops. 5 at last count: brand/model, cpu, graphics card, windows os and one huge sticker with the CPU, RAM, HDD, OS specs...as if you stole a display piece. /. covered how AMD hates them as much as we do but...what next?
'festooned' is a popular word in articles on /..
You'd expect a chart or something telling you what they were.
You know it means a fucked up election
I always see "NOM" on my electronics, and wonder what that means. An interesting read, but this article did not help me in my quest.
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
Surely Slashdot can find some enterprising Karma whore to write about that.
If your equipment is manufactured in large volumes, or even small volumes if it's large expensive heavy machinery, the cost of testing isn't a problem. But if you're making a small volume of fancy technology, and changing designs a couple of times a year until everything's really stable, UL testing can apparently be annoyingly expensive, so maybe you'll end up using UL-tested power supplies but not certifying the whole design.
And a lot of equipment doesn't bother with NEMA certification, which is a stricter set of rules for use in places like computer hosting centers. Fortunately, more and more network equipment is moving from purpose-built hardware to virtual machine appliances you can run on certified PC server hardware.
I don't understand why all brands have lots of logos whilst Apple has basically no logos on their devices.
For industry those are marketing stickers too... all but one.
For the most part no one ever requests the certificates for the above. TUV on the other hand, when an item I buy has a TUV sticker on it I typically want to know absolutely everything on the certificate.
It's not just the German equivalent of UL or CE. They do incredibly detailed conformance testing of equipment to strict standards. E.g. if one of the logic solvers in the control system fails, TUV are the guys who tell you how quickly you must fix it before it should automatically power down. When you walk in an air bridge out of a plane in Australia, America, Europe, the UAE etc you'll find they have a very big TUV conformance notice printed on them including the date of inspection, the date of next required inspection etc.
A: To the print link, if the site allows it. There's less ads and all other spam and usually the text is on one page.
For example, now the link should've pointed to http://www.itworld.com/print/176647
Slashdot fucking editors, PLEASE do some editing, thank you. This is 101 stuff after all.
This just confirms to me the claim that government regulation is ubiquitous and expensive. According to numerous sources e.g. http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/jhammerton/the-hidden-cost-of-regulation compliance with regulation costs businesses more that corporate taxes, roughly 12% of GDP. IMHO, not only is the U.S. economy dangerously heading down the road of selling far more in services than it does in tangible product, but the government is feeding itself through runaway regulation.
Taking that a step further, curtailing the tort system will go a long way to reducing the cost of everything. Take the latest example of plastering grotesque images on cigarettes. Was this necessary? These days, if you still haven't figured out that cigarettes are dangerous, something's seriously wrong with you. Of course, there are those who promote the nanny state concept who say that everything must be regulated to the nth degree to avoid a future class-action lawsuit. These days, medicine is conducted in a cover-your-ass manner. Order every frigging test in the book just so that no lawyer can sue down the road saying that his client would still be alive if you had performed test XYZ. CYA is what's fueling the meteoric rise of healthcare costs. Nothing in Obamacare has addressed this. Of course, part of the problem is that much of Congress is made up of lawyers so they're well placed to protect their own. Furthermore, elected officials are rarely held accountable for the efficacy of the laws they right. It's all about "I wrote/passed/voted-for a law. Reelect me." Nevermind the unintended consequences.
Linking to that site should be instant -100 karma. I want my three hours back!