Of course, EVs don't really need tachos, do they? But they should have one anyway.
A tachometer doesn't make any sense on an EV. But the equivalent, a kW meter, does. I rather like having one on my Model S. (I also like having a gauge cluster right behind the steering wheel, and the center screen being in an enclosed mount. Worried that the "detached" screen on the Model 3 is going to break too easily.)
So autopilot is actually a combination of two features: TACC (traffic-aware cruise control) and autopilot itself (a.k.a. highway autosteer)
If you step on the break while these are engaged, it turns it all off. If you turn the steering wheel while these are engaged, it turns the autopilot part off (but leaves TACC on) If you press the accelerator while these are engaged, the car will accelerate and automatic-emergency-breaking is temporarily disabled (the car will pop up a warning telling you about this). TACC and autopilot remain engaged.
As one who does drive a Tesla, I find it quite infuriating to constantly have to explain (and re-explain) to people what the autopilot system actually is. They all just casually peruse headlines and assume it must be fully autonomous driving, usable from parking lot to parking lot, able to drive the car with me being asleep.
Now I do absolutely love having the system, especially on long drives. And yes, I'm also quite aware of its limitations and am not stupid enough to assume Elon will take responsibility if it causes my car to hurt someone. (Nor would I be okay with simply shifting the blame, and thus being personally okay with such a screwup even happening.)
Yes, once you play a flight sim game in VR, you do NOT want to EVER go back to non-VR. It really makes that big of a difference. (I now play Elite Dangerous pretty much exclusively in VR, which makes looking up out-of-game reference materials a little annoying, but I'm willing to put up with that.) Realistic head-tracking and UI focus really does make that big of a difference. Plus, games like Elite are able to design their UI to work really well with VR. (Good distance-positioning of HUD elements really helps a lot.)
DCS, unfortunately, really needs VR resolution to increase a bit more. Its kinda hard to read the labels on all those real-world cockpit controls with the current generation.
Non-sim VR games still mostly feel like gimicky tech demos to me, unfortunately. Though that'll eventually change.
This attitude towards planning pretty much requires you to over-commit your resources, otherwise you'll frequently end up bored with nothing to do... Because "spur of the moment" planning fails horribly when the "spurs" of your life don't line up with the "spurs" of everyone else in your social group.
When meeting a new person, one of the first questions asked is what do they do for a living.
And if the person asking you the question doesn't really understand your answer, then they instead ask you "Where do you work?" (Likewise, I've seen plenty of people give the "Where do you work?" answer in lieu of "What do you do?" in other situations.)
This has always made me somewhat uncomfortable, because maybe I don't want to tell someone I just met where I actually do work. (Especially so if you don't work for some large behemoth where you're one of thousands.)
And yet one side of the political idle thinks this sort of waste is completely exempt from any and all discussion on wasteful government spending. While they endlessly crusade to cut everything else the government is spending money on...
And no, I don't agree with companies having a policy of letting you cash out on unused vacation. That's just an excuse to keep you at your job.
I once worked somewhere that went a step further than this... In addition to letting you cash out anything over X hours of accrued vacation time (or roll it over, if you really wanted), they included all the normal "company holidays" in the flexible vacation time balance. So while you did technically get X company holidays a year, plus a reasonable allotment of actual vacation time, it all came out of the same pot. That meant that you actually had to use your vacation time to take those holidays off.
In theory, this was great. You got more vacation time, and could use it however you saw fit to do so. No need to be limited by specific pre-scheduled holidays. In reality, this was extremely annoying. It basically meant that you were discouraged from ever taking any of those normal holidays off, so you didn't ever get a long weekend break. (this all was extra annoying as a junior person who didn't accrue vacation at as high a rate as everyone else, and who didn't have a family to take actual scheduled vacations with.)
One big problem with some of these "embedded" flavors of Java and.NET is that they cut down the libraries by stripping out way too much of the useful bits. So as a result, every application running in these environments has to re-implement everything in their own code.
Probably why the more successful "modern" embedded implementations are trying to use the full versions, or something closer to it.
The problem is that a lot of People who work in "Enterprise" are really deluded and think "Enterprise" is like superior and stuff....
Its more like they think their "Enterprise" realm *is* the entirety of software development. Their entire view of software is the components that fit together inside their enterprise runtime containers.
That actually reminds me... One thing I remember from when I was growing up, is that my parents had whole milk in the refrigerator for the kids, and skim milk for the adults.
Unfortunately, we only have 4 real options in the US. Everyone else is just piggybacking on one of them.
I like to be able to use whatever phone I want, gotten from anywhere, without needing to buy it through my carrier, and which I can keep updated without needing to crack it. That means I refuse to use a carrier with a sufficiently proprietary network technology that enables them to be assholes about devices. This excludes Verizon and Sprint right off the bat.
So my only real options are AT&T or T-Mobile. Since T-Mobile has gone out of their way to be the least-jerk'ish mobile carrier in the US, while AT&T generally hasn't, I've basically stuck with T-Mobile. Sure, their coverage may not always be the best, but it does keep improving. And if I ever actually want to travel, I don't need to worry about having to shut off my phone to not be totally gouged on the bill.
Stuff like this makes me glad I only use unlocked phones I buy from a source other than the carrier. (Often the phone manufacturer, or a mostly-direct reseller.) Unfortunately, that means the only major carriers in the US I can now ever use are AT&T and T-Mobile. But then again, its nice to be able to use any device I want on a carrier that doesn't have the technical means (due to an uncommon network technology) to be a jackass about devices.
When I was growing up, I'd hear big engineering companies loudly say this while simultaneously having constant layoffs of all the STEM people they did employ. (Okay, it was mostly aerospace, but still.)
Now I hear big tech companies also saying this, while seemingly focusing on a handful of universities they actually pay attention to for recruiting efforts. (Didn't go to Stanford? You might as well not have a STEM degree.)
Then again, I can say that there is an extreme shortage of Americans with *graduate* level STEM degrees. Just go into any grad-school area of any major STEM department at any university. Just try and find the Americans there. Good luck if you even get past one hand in counting them. (Undergraduate, on the other hand, has plenty of Americans.)
At the time, I also remember being somewhat irritated that, while IBM did pre-install it as a dual-boot option on many of their consumer PCs, they did not make it the default. As such, they missed a huge opportunity to simply expose people to OS/2.
Its important to never underestimate the power of being the default option. So many people will just use whatever you put in front of them, rarely exploring what other choices they have.
Having used OS/2 through the 2.1 and 3.0 days (back before Windows had its act together), I remember being excited for the release of OS/2 4.0. Unfortunately, at the time, I didn't have a computer with good enough specs to actually run it. Once I finally did, its time had passed and it didn't seem to have a point anymore.
For me, OS/2 always felt like an alternative to DOS/Windows, but never an alternative to Linux. Once Windows became "good enough" and I started to also use Linux for other things, OS/2 just started to feel like a bit of a third wheel. (especially since its Windows compatibility, while excellent for Win 3.1, never quite adapted to the Win9X world soon enough.)
Thinner fonts that look like crap on regular, non-HiDPI monitors?
I know we're getting off topic here, but I absolutely hate how GUI/text rendering looks on MacOS on a non-high-DPI display these days. Its just all weird and fuzzy. (Of course the UI does look great on a high-DPI display, but most of the "big external monitors" I regularly use aren't high-DPI.) When faced with a "normal DPI" display, I greatly prefer the look of Windows or Linux (provided you know how to tweak font rendering).
Elite: Dangerous, with a proper HOTAS setup, is an excellent example of how a flight sim game in VR should work. Because of the nature of the game, they were able to virtually position all the HUD elements quite ideally for VR play. (However, once in a while, you still may need to attempt to touch-type on a keyboard for searching for star systems... Not frequently, though.)
More realistic flight sims are severely harmed by the limited resolution, and lack of comfortable close-focus, because its hard to visually resolve the cockpit controls. But if you don't need to do that, then VR works great.
Seriously, right now about 90% of my Oculus time is spent in Elite, and I really do not want to ever play that game in non-VR again.
For an office in downtown SF, I definitely agree with your point. Encouraging employees to go outside the office for lunch is a good thing.
But Google's Mountain View office is several miles away from downtown Mountain View. Its too far to walk (in a reasonable amount of time), and I really don't think you want any notable percentage of Google's workforce driving between their campus and the downtown area at lunch time. Parking would be a nightmare on both ends, and the roads would clog up enough that walking might end up faster.
Many of these large campuses are in places where it really isn't very convenient to go outside for lunch. Usually because they're a bit outside the main downtown areas, and nothing good is within walking distance. (Parking is usually enough of a hassle that no one wants to leave by car just to get lunch.) This is definitely the case for the Facebook campus, and may also be the case for the main Google campus.
That being said, I've also had the opportunity to work directly in Downtown Mountain View. There were plenty of local restaurants we liked to frequent, and it worked out quite well. Of course as we grew, they did start up with the whole office catering thing, but without the scale of a big campus we tired of it really quickly. So we'd basically find any excuse to still eat outside the office.
Firefox on Linux seems to get progressively more sluggish the longer its been running, and occasionally has unusably sluggish performance on some recently redesigned forum sites. Yet somehow, I never see any performance problems with Firefox on Windows.
I don't pay attention to RAM consumption too often, but maybe that's just because I've got a few too many gobs of it these days.
In years past to use some web based software supplied by vendor you HAD to use IE or it wouldn't work.
Since Google chose to split their code base off from WebKit, my fear is we'll start seeing this with Chrome if it becomes too ubiquitous.
I'm pretty sure its already happening. Chrome is basically becoming the new MSIE. I see plenty of "internal" stuff that doesn't work well in Firefox, and there's a common attitude of looking at you funny for not using Chrome when you complain. I also see plenty of "check out our newly refreshed site design!" that's an unusably broken or sluggish POS if you're not using Chrome.
Another detail that's unclear from the announcement is whether they plan to actually go into lunar orbit, or just put the craft on a free return trajectory.
There are a few games that are *awesome* in VR. The obvious ones are cockpit games - flight sims and the like.
I'd agree that cockpit games do exceptionally well in VR. Likely in no small part because your "real position in the real world" most closely matches your position in the virtual world. I.e. Sitting in a chair with your hands on a joystick/throttle. Also, once you get used to the advantages realistic of head tracking in such games, you'll actually find it difficult to go back to non-VR for such games.
However, until VR resolution (and close focus ability) dramatically improves, there will be an enormous bias towards spaceship-cockpit games that can place their visible controls and displays in optimal virtual locations. The best example of this I can think of is "Elite: Dangerous". Realistic airplane cockpits are difficult because you can't easily visually resolve all the tiny controls due to resolution limits.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, EVs don't really need tachos, do they? But they should have one anyway.
A tachometer doesn't make any sense on an EV. But the equivalent, a kW meter, does. I rather like having one on my Model S. (I also like having a gauge cluster right behind the steering wheel, and the center screen being in an enclosed mount. Worried that the "detached" screen on the Model 3 is going to break too easily.)
So autopilot is actually a combination of two features:
TACC (traffic-aware cruise control) and autopilot itself (a.k.a. highway autosteer)
If you step on the break while these are engaged, it turns it all off.
If you turn the steering wheel while these are engaged, it turns the autopilot part off (but leaves TACC on)
If you press the accelerator while these are engaged, the car will accelerate and automatic-emergency-breaking is temporarily disabled (the car will pop up a warning telling you about this). TACC and autopilot remain engaged.
As one who does drive a Tesla, I find it quite infuriating to constantly have to explain (and re-explain) to people what the autopilot system actually is. They all just casually peruse headlines and assume it must be fully autonomous driving, usable from parking lot to parking lot, able to drive the car with me being asleep.
Now I do absolutely love having the system, especially on long drives. And yes, I'm also quite aware of its limitations and am not stupid enough to assume Elon will take responsibility if it causes my car to hurt someone. (Nor would I be okay with simply shifting the blame, and thus being personally okay with such a screwup even happening.)
Yes, once you play a flight sim game in VR, you do NOT want to EVER go back to non-VR. It really makes that big of a difference. (I now play Elite Dangerous pretty much exclusively in VR, which makes looking up out-of-game reference materials a little annoying, but I'm willing to put up with that.) Realistic head-tracking and UI focus really does make that big of a difference. Plus, games like Elite are able to design their UI to work really well with VR. (Good distance-positioning of HUD elements really helps a lot.)
DCS, unfortunately, really needs VR resolution to increase a bit more. Its kinda hard to read the labels on all those real-world cockpit controls with the current generation.
Non-sim VR games still mostly feel like gimicky tech demos to me, unfortunately. Though that'll eventually change.
This attitude towards planning pretty much requires you to over-commit your resources, otherwise you'll frequently end up bored with nothing to do... Because "spur of the moment" planning fails horribly when the "spurs" of your life don't line up with the "spurs" of everyone else in your social group.
When meeting a new person, one of the first questions asked is what do they do for a living.
And if the person asking you the question doesn't really understand your answer, then they instead ask you "Where do you work?"
(Likewise, I've seen plenty of people give the "Where do you work?" answer in lieu of "What do you do?" in other situations.)
This has always made me somewhat uncomfortable, because maybe I don't want to tell someone I just met where I actually do work. (Especially so if you don't work for some large behemoth where you're one of thousands.)
And yet one side of the political idle thinks this sort of waste is completely exempt from any and all discussion on wasteful government spending. While they endlessly crusade to cut everything else the government is spending money on...
And no, I don't agree with companies having a policy of letting you cash out on unused vacation. That's just an excuse to keep you at your job.
I once worked somewhere that went a step further than this... In addition to letting you cash out anything over X hours of accrued vacation time (or roll it over, if you really wanted), they included all the normal "company holidays" in the flexible vacation time balance. So while you did technically get X company holidays a year, plus a reasonable allotment of actual vacation time, it all came out of the same pot. That meant that you actually had to use your vacation time to take those holidays off.
In theory, this was great. You got more vacation time, and could use it however you saw fit to do so. No need to be limited by specific pre-scheduled holidays.
In reality, this was extremely annoying. It basically meant that you were discouraged from ever taking any of those normal holidays off, so you didn't ever get a long weekend break. (this all was extra annoying as a junior person who didn't accrue vacation at as high a rate as everyone else, and who didn't have a family to take actual scheduled vacations with.)
One big problem with some of these "embedded" flavors of Java and .NET is that they cut down the libraries by stripping out way too much of the useful bits. So as a result, every application running in these environments has to re-implement everything in their own code.
Probably why the more successful "modern" embedded implementations are trying to use the full versions, or something closer to it.
And yet there's plenty of back-end software that's part of the so-called "piece of shit social media" infrastructure that's written in C or C++ too.
The problem is that a lot of People who work in "Enterprise" are really deluded and think "Enterprise" is like superior and stuff....
Its more like they think their "Enterprise" realm *is* the entirety of software development. Their entire view of software is the components that fit together inside their enterprise runtime containers.
That actually reminds me... One thing I remember from when I was growing up, is that my parents had whole milk in the refrigerator for the kids, and skim milk for the adults.
Unfortunately, we only have 4 real options in the US. Everyone else is just piggybacking on one of them.
I like to be able to use whatever phone I want, gotten from anywhere, without needing to buy it through my carrier, and which I can keep updated without needing to crack it.
That means I refuse to use a carrier with a sufficiently proprietary network technology that enables them to be assholes about devices. This excludes Verizon and Sprint right off the bat.
So my only real options are AT&T or T-Mobile. Since T-Mobile has gone out of their way to be the least-jerk'ish mobile carrier in the US, while AT&T generally hasn't, I've basically stuck with T-Mobile. Sure, their coverage may not always be the best, but it does keep improving. And if I ever actually want to travel, I don't need to worry about having to shut off my phone to not be totally gouged on the bill.
Stuff like this makes me glad I only use unlocked phones I buy from a source other than the carrier. (Often the phone manufacturer, or a mostly-direct reseller.) Unfortunately, that means the only major carriers in the US I can now ever use are AT&T and T-Mobile. But then again, its nice to be able to use any device I want on a carrier that doesn't have the technical means (due to an uncommon network technology) to be a jackass about devices.
When I was growing up, I'd hear big engineering companies loudly say this while simultaneously having constant layoffs of all the STEM people they did employ. (Okay, it was mostly aerospace, but still.)
Now I hear big tech companies also saying this, while seemingly focusing on a handful of universities they actually pay attention to for recruiting efforts. (Didn't go to Stanford? You might as well not have a STEM degree.)
Then again, I can say that there is an extreme shortage of Americans with *graduate* level STEM degrees. Just go into any grad-school area of any major STEM department at any university. Just try and find the Americans there. Good luck if you even get past one hand in counting them.
(Undergraduate, on the other hand, has plenty of Americans.)
At the time, I also remember being somewhat irritated that, while IBM did pre-install it as a dual-boot option on many of their consumer PCs, they did not make it the default. As such, they missed a huge opportunity to simply expose people to OS/2.
Its important to never underestimate the power of being the default option. So many people will just use whatever you put in front of them, rarely exploring what other choices they have.
Having used OS/2 through the 2.1 and 3.0 days (back before Windows had its act together), I remember being excited for the release of OS/2 4.0. Unfortunately, at the time, I didn't have a computer with good enough specs to actually run it. Once I finally did, its time had passed and it didn't seem to have a point anymore.
For me, OS/2 always felt like an alternative to DOS/Windows, but never an alternative to Linux. Once Windows became "good enough" and I started to also use Linux for other things, OS/2 just started to feel like a bit of a third wheel. (especially since its Windows compatibility, while excellent for Win 3.1, never quite adapted to the Win9X world soon enough.)
Thinner fonts that look like crap on regular, non-HiDPI monitors?
I know we're getting off topic here, but I absolutely hate how GUI/text rendering looks on MacOS on a non-high-DPI display these days. Its just all weird and fuzzy. (Of course the UI does look great on a high-DPI display, but most of the "big external monitors" I regularly use aren't high-DPI.) When faced with a "normal DPI" display, I greatly prefer the look of Windows or Linux (provided you know how to tweak font rendering).
Elite: Dangerous, with a proper HOTAS setup, is an excellent example of how a flight sim game in VR should work. Because of the nature of the game, they were able to virtually position all the HUD elements quite ideally for VR play. (However, once in a while, you still may need to attempt to touch-type on a keyboard for searching for star systems... Not frequently, though.)
More realistic flight sims are severely harmed by the limited resolution, and lack of comfortable close-focus, because its hard to visually resolve the cockpit controls. But if you don't need to do that, then VR works great.
Seriously, right now about 90% of my Oculus time is spent in Elite, and I really do not want to ever play that game in non-VR again.
For an office in downtown SF, I definitely agree with your point. Encouraging employees to go outside the office for lunch is a good thing.
But Google's Mountain View office is several miles away from downtown Mountain View. Its too far to walk (in a reasonable amount of time), and I really don't think you want any notable percentage of Google's workforce driving between their campus and the downtown area at lunch time. Parking would be a nightmare on both ends, and the roads would clog up enough that walking might end up faster.
Many of these large campuses are in places where it really isn't very convenient to go outside for lunch. Usually because they're a bit outside the main downtown areas, and nothing good is within walking distance. (Parking is usually enough of a hassle that no one wants to leave by car just to get lunch.) This is definitely the case for the Facebook campus, and may also be the case for the main Google campus.
That being said, I've also had the opportunity to work directly in Downtown Mountain View. There were plenty of local restaurants we liked to frequent, and it worked out quite well. Of course as we grew, they did start up with the whole office catering thing, but without the scale of a big campus we tired of it really quickly. So we'd basically find any excuse to still eat outside the office.
Firefox on Linux seems to get progressively more sluggish the longer its been running, and occasionally has unusably sluggish performance on some recently redesigned forum sites. Yet somehow, I never see any performance problems with Firefox on Windows.
I don't pay attention to RAM consumption too often, but maybe that's just because I've got a few too many gobs of it these days.
In years past to use some web based software supplied by vendor you HAD to use IE or it wouldn't work.
Since Google chose to split their code base off from WebKit, my fear is we'll start seeing this with Chrome if it becomes too ubiquitous.
I'm pretty sure its already happening. Chrome is basically becoming the new MSIE. I see plenty of "internal" stuff that doesn't work well in Firefox, and there's a common attitude of looking at you funny for not using Chrome when you complain. I also see plenty of "check out our newly refreshed site design!" that's an unusably broken or sluggish POS if you're not using Chrome.
Another detail that's unclear from the announcement is whether they plan to actually go into lunar orbit, or just put the craft on a free return trajectory.
There are a few games that are *awesome* in VR. The obvious ones are cockpit games - flight sims and the like.
I'd agree that cockpit games do exceptionally well in VR. Likely in no small part because your "real position in the real world" most closely matches your position in the virtual world. I.e. Sitting in a chair with your hands on a joystick/throttle. Also, once you get used to the advantages realistic of head tracking in such games, you'll actually find it difficult to go back to non-VR for such games.
However, until VR resolution (and close focus ability) dramatically improves, there will be an enormous bias towards spaceship-cockpit games that can place their visible controls and displays in optimal virtual locations. The best example of this I can think of is "Elite: Dangerous". Realistic airplane cockpits are difficult because you can't easily visually resolve all the tiny controls due to resolution limits.