I recently bought a Bell Spinfit bike speedometer for $16 at Kmart, a store near my house that I usually loathe for being out of the most common items. The AG12 1.5 volt battery out of the box had about a day's worth of power left so I tried a few stores for a replacement. Best Buy, famous for untrained and unknowledgeable sales people, didn't have it and urged me to go to CVS, which had some batteries that looked close, but did not exactly match the AG12 designation. I later discovered AG12 is a Chinese battery number. A guy at CircuitCity at least had good advice - try RadioShack. In my experience, the sales people at CircuitCity are superior to Best Buy's. I don't go to Besy Buy much anymore.
Being the persistent SOB that I am, I decided to go back to Kmart and get some satisfaction. After all, it sold me the defective battery. The speedometer was installed and working so I was reluctant to put more time in to return it. It's a nifty item and Kmart has for $1 less than Amazon. The Kmart store manager (Kim?) gave me $4 to buy a new battery, a fair settlement. So I strutted down to Radio Shack 400 feet away and the sales person instantly knew that an AG12 was an Energizer 386, the one I refrained from taking a chance on at CVS. I paid $5 for it. So a couple of gallons of gas and an hours later and a buck poorer, I was up and running. I usually use Radio Shack for niggling purchases like this, but maybe should try some big ticket items there, too.
Almost every automaker has had to 'pick a side' when it comes to alternative fuel options and ways to divest from a reliance on gasoline. Fiat is looking to back compressed natural gas or liquid propane as an interim solution.
Plastic may not be the most beloved of materials to the more environmentally minded, but Plasti 2012 aimed to mold a different opinion of the material in people's minds.
The rare earth element market has become steadily more rational, and new sources coming online will continue to reduce costs. Still, it is unlikely that prices will drop to their former lows.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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