It will void your warranty of your car if you install a CB or amateur radio in it.
No it won't, unless you do something stupid like tap into an ignition line for power.
It might. There is a sticker on the upper left of the windshield of my '95 BMW which makes a dizzying number of claims about using phones, CBs, HAM radios, or other electronics in the car, with a specific reference about warranty coverage. A bit of Googling to find the exact verbiage failed, but did result in a strong indication that more recent BMWs are also similarly-labeled.
Would such a claim ever hold up in court, given things like the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act? Who the hell knows.:)
I propose that you be the real asshole, and patent that concept straight away to ensure that nobody ever inflicts a fastener interface like this on humanity.
Or, at least, give part of the royalties to EFF or someone;)
I don't know where you're from, but I do a bit of work related to the Ohio MARCS system. It is a state-wide network of stuff currently residing in the 800MHz band, and will eventually expand into the recently-vacated 700MHz spectrum. It seems like the system you speak of has similar goals, and is very similar in terms of infrastructure.
In your part of the world, it sounds like it's a bit more mountainous, but this part of Ohio is about as flat as a pancake: Around here, we generally get by with one tower site per county, but mobile units (with a paltry 3dBi Maxrad antenna) can often get decent signal from several counties at once. When a site drops (and it has happened), things don't grind to a halt -- they just get a little more complicated.
Your area, if it is indeed very mountainous or prone to geological snafu might have additional needs for redundancy -- and perhaps those needs aren't being met. (It's not as if failure-resistant network topology is rocket surgery these days...*shrug*)
But let me just say this: Nobody ever vacuums the floors. Ever. And the power distribution for the MARCS system itself is arranged in such a way that it would be very difficult to plug a vacuum cleaner into it, anyway: A lay person would find an easier outlet to use, and there's many available in convenient spots which are completely suited to running impromptu motor loads as they are on circuits which do not supply power for critical gear and are not backed by a UPS.
The only folks who are allowed in the shelters that support this system are of the technical sort. It's like the equipment/IT rooms at any other place: The techs try to clean up their own messes and whatever else they find, but dedicated cleaning staff is nonexistant or unauthorized. There's usually a broom and a dustpan nearby, in case tracked-in dirt or installation detritus gets to be a problem, and a rug by the door to try to keep the vinyl floor dry for general safety, but that's it. There's seldom any people, and if the HVAC is working properly there isn't any outside air circulation: The usual stuff that needs cleaning in an occupied space just isn't a problem.
Hell, to even get into the shelters takes a special electronic Medeco key and a phone call, lest the alarms trigger and the state troopers show up to see what the fuss is. I had to sign my soul away in order to be issued such a key -- nobody can just wander in, no matter how well-intentioned their motivation for vacuuming may be.
(And critical power is supplied by a good UPS plus a generator fueled by either natural gas or diesel, and, and, and.)
Battery-operated gear is cool and all, and I'm not trying to knock amateur radio operators, but geez: Public safety infrastructure in the US has come a long way from a crufty old Motorola Micor repeater plugged into an outlet somewhere.
As a coffee snob, I'd say that by ordering anything from Starbucks, you're doing it wrong.
Perhaps this isn't an option for everyone, but where I'm from we don't have a Starbucks or a Dunkin' Donuts. We do have a few small, family-owned coffee houses which serve excellent coffee, and many of which even give you an explicit choice as to what sort of bean you'll be having today. (I'm partial to about anything from Ethiopia and Guatemala, it turns out.)
In terms of consistency: The two of them that I most often frequent will start getting my order ready for me before I've even made it through the front door, as they see me coming through the windows. I don't need to yell over the frothing of the milk or the roaring of a blender, wait in line, or futz around with my phone trying to get some pre-paid money from the device into their till -- I just need to smile, toss some cash on the counter, take my coffee, and leave.
In terms of diversity, one of them is owned and operated by a nice older lady who makes an awesome fried egg sandwich on toast. Another has live music in the evenings. Another doubles as a wonderful cigar shop, with a nice walk-in humidor. And another has so many different coffees, teas, and specialty drinks to pick from, it's unreal.
In terms of geekdom, all of them have free WiFi, and always have since it became a useful item -- and one of them still has Ethernet jacks next to the tables from before the existence of 802.11b.
With so much good stuff around, I don't want to go to Starbucks and pay a giant corporation. Thankfully, I don't have to.
(And McDonald's? Are you fucking serious? When I'm out of town looking for a caffeine fix and all I find is a set of golden arches, I loath to pay them for coffee. Sometimes, it's quite good, but other times it is so unbelievably acrid that I'd rather consume the caffeine from my own piss. Usually it's a neither-happy-nor-sad sort of "meh" that I can tolerate, but do not enjoy.)
I used to work for a large american ISP whom I am not at liberty to name. However I worked in support. We had everything from a call from a guy whose wife was in his bed at the time banging our technician
Customer: your!tech!is!banging!my!wife!in!my!bed!
Support: Sir?
Customer: !!!!!!!
Support: Sir, he's a professional. So please just relax, and let him finish his installation.
I can vouch for the bandwidth part: I frequently see Netflix HD material consuming 6 megabits/second. Some films seem to be less, and the occasional non-HD footage is substantially less, but it's never been higher than that.
I haven't found anything about the male/female ratio of adult mosquitoes in the wild.
Nonetheless, in the summertime, I fairly frequently find females in my house as they creep through open doors and holes in the screens. I very seldom find a male.
Perhaps it is something to do with life expectancy (do males live shorter lives?), or attraction (obviously, males have no reason to be drawn toward mammals as females are).
I didn't get to breed mosquitoes in school, and my day job is quite well-detached from that concept, so I guess further research is in order. But if killing a solitary male does no real harm to the population, then there's no point in actively hunting them -- especially since they can't eat me.
It sure would make summertime parties much less fun if the impromptu male mosquito hunt were excluded, though.:(
Would you want a mechanic who hasn't learned anything new in 20 years to work on your Prius?
Sure.
It's just a car. It's got a bigger electric motor/generator than most, and a larger battery, but otherwise: It's just a car. It still uses spark plugs, still has coolant, still needs oil changes, still has suspension and brake parts that wear out, and a transmission, and headlights, and wipers, and...
A mechanic who hasn't learned anything genuinely new about cars in 20 years is at least knowledgeable enough about ECU and electronic ignition tech and fuel injection to understand how to work with those systems on the Prius, too, given appropriate software and dongles or plain ol' mechanical ability.
When it comes to the "new" bits of the Prius (the aforementioned big electric motor and battery), it's still just wires. A mechanic who stopped learning in 1991 will have enough troubleshooting training/experience with general electricity to make, at least, a good guess at the problem and won't charge you an arm and a leg before sending you off to the Toyota dealer if the fix isn't obvious to them.
I'd absolutely trust a good mechanic with a 20-year-old skillset on my Prius. Especially since the car itself is already about 13 years old. (And no, I don't have a Prius, won't have one, wouldn't even accept one if I won it as a prize, but you get the idea.)
I'd even trust him to work on my Tesla Roadster, for the same reasons. (And no, I don't have a Tesla, won't have one, and though I probably would accept one as a prize, I would strongly prefer the lightweight, gas-fired, cheaper Lotus that it is built upon.)
And my real point is: This is nothing like comparing COBOL-trained programmer to modernisms like Ruby or Perl or whatever. The mechanics of a car stay the same, for the most part, whereas computer programming languages vary wildly.
As I understand it, there is only one male for every [insert huge number here*] females. Female mosquitoes annoy me, and so I kill them, but only when it is convenient to do so or when I find one that is actively eating me. Males, on the other hand: When I spot one of those, I hunt it until it is destroyed, hopefully killing untold thousands of potential offspring.
*: While I've heard different ratios, from 1:100 to 1:1000, I'm unable to find a reference that seems worthwhile.
Spoken like someone who has never played with common motion sensors. They're not all that hard to fool.
Move slow, keep a slim profile, and avoid moving anything big and flat (like doors) and you'll have reasonable freedom of movement for as long as you can stay patient and calm. Keeping your distance from them also helps.
The Chevy Beretta had its windshield wiper controls to the right of the instrument cluster, on the dash. In both variations on that car (and wiper-control arrangement), it took one entire hand away from the wheel to make the wipers wipe. At least they were up high, and visible...
On my '79 Pontiac Firebird, the wiper controls are hidden on the dash just behind the left side of the wheel. May God help the poor unfamiliar soul who finds themselves in the hills of West Virginia while encountering a cloudburst in this car -- it's hidden from both the driver and the passenger by the wheel and the steering column, respectively. (*I* know where it is, but that doesn't exactly mean that it is easy to find without craning around and looking for it for those who are unfamiliar.)
On a GM, it's on the turn-signal stalk (along with the cruise control and a myriad of other things). It's a weird combination of twist and pull and blah that is just...bizarre, even after driving Chevy and other GM products for most of my life. It takes one entire hand to operate it, which can't be attached to the steering wheel at the same time. I didn't realize how wrong it was until I first drove this BMW.
On the BMW, it's a dedicated stalk at the right of the wheel. Tap down with your fingertip, and the wipers operate once. Push up, and they'll operate intermittently. Another notch up is slow. Another notch up after that is fast. The notches are clear and distinct, and it's clear from feel alone what -- exactly -- you've just instructed the car to do. (An option for the E36 BMW was programmable delay, but mine doesn't have that, and I can't say that I've missed even the simple variable delay from a GM.)
Pull the thing toward you, again with a fingertip or two (thumb and other fingers still grasping the wheel), and it sprays monkey piss on the window. Keep it that way for a second, and you get monkey piss with slow wipers. This makes it easy to spray deicer on the window and let it soak in a bit, without operating the wiper blades (which is impossible on a GM), while not making it difficult to wash and wipe the window without applying deicer.
Cruise control is similar. Another dedicated stalk, again to the right. Push forward to set, or accelerate. Pull back to decelerate. Up or down both cancel. And in resumes. Again, using just the fingertips.
On a GM, with the all-in-one widget on the left, these operations all require a whole hand to avoid activating the wipers, modulating the high beams, or setting a turn signal. It does work, but I've learned that there are better ways.....
I'm an American. I drove American cars until I picked up a used E36 BMW a few years ago.
Everything is different. The pedals are still in the right order, of course, but from the window switches to the door locks, to the windshield wiper controls, to even the location of the reverse gear on the manual gearbox, it's all different from anything produced in modern America.
But those changes all make sense.
The window switches are located centrally next to the gearshift, which saves on wiring and switches, while also allowing the passenger to operate the four windows, whereas the typical American car has a weird cluster of them on the driver's side door. There is no separate control for power door locks, because one simply isn't needed: You want the doors locked? Just push down on the lock plunger. The wiper controls are simple, located on a stalk to the right of the wheel, and don't require one to remove their hand from the wheel to operate it (just loosen the grip a bit) -- just shove it in the appropriate direction with one's fingers. The reverse gear on the shift pattern is hard left and up, next to first, so you'll never find it by accident when traveling at speed.
The gas filler door locks. The modern American version I'm familiar with involves a cable assembly, which is often finicky, is usually hard to reach, and never in the same spot on different cars. On the BMW, it's simple: If the doors are locked, so is the filler door. If the doors are unlocked, then it is not*. And the filler itself is on the passenger side of the car, so if I were to happen to run out of gas somewhere, I wouldn't be standing with my back to the road as I poured more gas into it, whereas American cars have them wherever they feel like...
These changes are all purposeful, and make operating the car simpler (safer) than the alternatives that I've used.
Moving the status bar to the top? I'm not sure what is gained by doing so.
You're right: I am perfectly capable of adjusting, but only if the changes make sense.
(*: There's a few variations on this depending on whether the doors are double-locked or single-locked, and those variations also make sense, but this post is already quite long enough for a car analogy that nobody will ever read.)
For that matter, can the PS3 be used in offline mode without agreeing to the PSN ToS?
Yes. It works fine.
One can even get the latest firmware updates over HTTP directly from Sony, in the event that some game or other requires it. The console will gleefully load them from a USB drive of whatever sort, all without ever dealing with anything that might be construed as being PSN.
This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.
Forget easy.
I, for one, would be perfectly pleased if having a functional status bar could be enabled with a difficult-to-find option: Bury it in about:config (using "status" as part of the description, so it can be found with a search), and I'd be pleased as punch.
Call me old and set in my ways, but until the recent Firefox builds I'd been using browsers with the status bar across the bottom for more than 1.5 decades. Even in 1993, when I would borrow a local university VAX dialup account just to use rlogin to connect to a far-away FreeBSD machine where I could run Lynx with my MS-DOS machine running Telemate, I had status at the bottom of the screen, taking up one entire line of screen real estate out of 25.
Rearranging things like this is like rearranging the pedals in a car.
I suspect that you're thinking too much*. That everyone here is, in fact.
A modem's LEDs were commonly driven with the same logic that sent data over RS-232. Why? It was cheap, it was simple, and it worked.
Send a string of zeros, and the LEDs will illuminate intermittently just as RS-232 will change level intermittently, due to stop bits. Sending no data results in no illumination/level changes, but that's not the same as sending binary 0s.
If this sounds far-fetched, I strongly suggest digging out an old external modem and observing it for yourself. Try different serial baud rates, as well -- it's very plain to the trained eye what, approximately, what port speed modem is operating at in common operation and that the perceived level of illumination changes depending on the data being transferred -- even if the data rate is fixed, as in the case of a plain v.22bis 2400bps modem.
Therefore, the flashing of the modem's TXD and RXD LEDs weren't just representative of the datastream, but they were a direct presentation of it.
To record and recreate this stream is a task is impossible for a typical video recorder, for sure. But give a clever person a fistful of transistors and other random components, a set of appropriate optics, a red filter, a photodetector or two and a modem in a darkish room...
(*: And what is all that verbiage you wrote about quadrature modulation? You're looking at it from the wrong end.)
I'm on call 24/7. I don't care, at 3AM, if the mail server is on fire -- that can probably wait until Monday. However, I'll still answer the phone if I can to triage the situation.
In my line of work, a flaming server is not the worst that can happen. Rather, the worst that can happen is that there's a dispatch center down, a building on fire, and nobody has any central communications: Lives are at risk.
If I don't respond to my phone at 3AM, there's a good chance that an armed deputy will come by my house and pound on my door until I do respond.
Am I paid extra for this, as in a line-item on my paystub? No. But it was part of the gig when I was hired by this company, and was a term that I accepted.
I suspect many people who are on call continuously are in the same boat. Is it wrong? No, I don't think so.
Does it happen to me often? Sometimes there are systemic problems which aren't easily resolved, which result in a brief period of frequent late-night interruptions. Typically, though, my phone only rings from about 8AM to 5PM or so, which is fine.
Can such a thing be abused? Certainly. But not always -- in fact, I'd say that continuous on-call duty is very seldom abused in most technical fields.
Many years ago, I got a job that needed a cell phone. And since I had a cell phone, I used my cell phone.
Eventually, I got sick of paying for my cell phone, so I asked my boss to pay for one instead. He agreed, and even said "go ahead and burn minutes."
Amusingly, I just today negotiated a deal with my employer of 7 years where I'd become a contractor, and they'd pay me more money to do stuff, while also paying me no money to do nothing.
Carrying over the company existing cell phone plan, with corporate sponsorship, was the boss's idea.
Agreed on really high sample rates/bit depth being a waste for casual listening.
For non-casual listening (think: intense listening using a highly dynamic, low-distortion horn loudspeaker system), more bits would be good. But proper dithering of high bit-depth material down to 16 bits is likely quite awesome enough for that.
Higher sampling rates would also be handy. There's plenty of sound up around 30KHz in the noise produced by some cymbals, but it's completely lost at a 44.1KHz sampling rate. Allegedly, we don't "hear" these sounds (though I'm quite certain I could hear them when I was 8, I most assuredly can't anymore), but that doesn't mean that we don't experience them at all (bone conduction, the wiggling of the hair on the back of the neck, etc).
For almost every "casual" use with reasonable listening levels and even quite excellent gear: Yep, 16/44.1/2 is fine.
It is also therefore lossless, for almost every application, and an adult set of ears.
Slashdot Mirror
It might. There is a sticker on the upper left of the windshield of my '95 BMW which makes a dizzying number of claims about using phones, CBs, HAM radios, or other electronics in the car, with a specific reference about warranty coverage. A bit of Googling to find the exact verbiage failed, but did result in a strong indication that more recent BMWs are also similarly-labeled.
Would such a claim ever hold up in court, given things like the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act? Who the hell knows. :)
I propose that you be the real asshole, and patent that concept straight away to ensure that nobody ever inflicts a fastener interface like this on humanity.
Or, at least, give part of the royalties to EFF or someone ;)
I don't know where you're from, but I do a bit of work related to the Ohio MARCS system. It is a state-wide network of stuff currently residing in the 800MHz band, and will eventually expand into the recently-vacated 700MHz spectrum. It seems like the system you speak of has similar goals, and is very similar in terms of infrastructure.
In your part of the world, it sounds like it's a bit more mountainous, but this part of Ohio is about as flat as a pancake: Around here, we generally get by with one tower site per county, but mobile units (with a paltry 3dBi Maxrad antenna) can often get decent signal from several counties at once. When a site drops (and it has happened), things don't grind to a halt -- they just get a little more complicated.
Your area, if it is indeed very mountainous or prone to geological snafu might have additional needs for redundancy -- and perhaps those needs aren't being met. (It's not as if failure-resistant network topology is rocket surgery these days...*shrug*)
But let me just say this: Nobody ever vacuums the floors. Ever. And the power distribution for the MARCS system itself is arranged in such a way that it would be very difficult to plug a vacuum cleaner into it, anyway: A lay person would find an easier outlet to use, and there's many available in convenient spots which are completely suited to running impromptu motor loads as they are on circuits which do not supply power for critical gear and are not backed by a UPS.
The only folks who are allowed in the shelters that support this system are of the technical sort. It's like the equipment/IT rooms at any other place: The techs try to clean up their own messes and whatever else they find, but dedicated cleaning staff is nonexistant or unauthorized. There's usually a broom and a dustpan nearby, in case tracked-in dirt or installation detritus gets to be a problem, and a rug by the door to try to keep the vinyl floor dry for general safety, but that's it. There's seldom any people, and if the HVAC is working properly there isn't any outside air circulation: The usual stuff that needs cleaning in an occupied space just isn't a problem.
Hell, to even get into the shelters takes a special electronic Medeco key and a phone call, lest the alarms trigger and the state troopers show up to see what the fuss is. I had to sign my soul away in order to be issued such a key -- nobody can just wander in, no matter how well-intentioned their motivation for vacuuming may be.
(And critical power is supplied by a good UPS plus a generator fueled by either natural gas or diesel, and, and, and.)
Battery-operated gear is cool and all, and I'm not trying to knock amateur radio operators, but geez: Public safety infrastructure in the US has come a long way from a crufty old Motorola Micor repeater plugged into an outlet somewhere.
FWIW.
As a coffee snob, I'd say that by ordering anything from Starbucks, you're doing it wrong.
Perhaps this isn't an option for everyone, but where I'm from we don't have a Starbucks or a Dunkin' Donuts. We do have a few small, family-owned coffee houses which serve excellent coffee, and many of which even give you an explicit choice as to what sort of bean you'll be having today. (I'm partial to about anything from Ethiopia and Guatemala, it turns out.)
In terms of consistency: The two of them that I most often frequent will start getting my order ready for me before I've even made it through the front door, as they see me coming through the windows. I don't need to yell over the frothing of the milk or the roaring of a blender, wait in line, or futz around with my phone trying to get some pre-paid money from the device into their till -- I just need to smile, toss some cash on the counter, take my coffee, and leave.
In terms of diversity, one of them is owned and operated by a nice older lady who makes an awesome fried egg sandwich on toast. Another has live music in the evenings. Another doubles as a wonderful cigar shop, with a nice walk-in humidor. And another has so many different coffees, teas, and specialty drinks to pick from, it's unreal.
In terms of geekdom, all of them have free WiFi, and always have since it became a useful item -- and one of them still has Ethernet jacks next to the tables from before the existence of 802.11b.
With so much good stuff around, I don't want to go to Starbucks and pay a giant corporation. Thankfully, I don't have to.
(And McDonald's? Are you fucking serious? When I'm out of town looking for a caffeine fix and all I find is a set of golden arches, I loath to pay them for coffee. Sometimes, it's quite good, but other times it is so unbelievably acrid that I'd rather consume the caffeine from my own piss. Usually it's a neither-happy-nor-sad sort of "meh" that I can tolerate, but do not enjoy.)
ASCAP/BMI licensing (in the States, at least) has traditionally involved the venue, not the performer.
Customer: your!tech!is!banging!my!wife!in!my!bed!
Support: Sir?
Customer: !!!!!!!
Support: Sir, he's a professional. So please just relax, and let him finish his installation.
I can vouch for the bandwidth part: I frequently see Netflix HD material consuming 6 megabits/second. Some films seem to be less, and the occasional non-HD footage is substantially less, but it's never been higher than that.
Yes. And the one reference I did find (https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/3714/1/V49N05_188.pdf) tends to support your own findings.
I haven't found anything about the male/female ratio of adult mosquitoes in the wild.
Nonetheless, in the summertime, I fairly frequently find females in my house as they creep through open doors and holes in the screens. I very seldom find a male.
Perhaps it is something to do with life expectancy (do males live shorter lives?), or attraction (obviously, males have no reason to be drawn toward mammals as females are).
I didn't get to breed mosquitoes in school, and my day job is quite well-detached from that concept, so I guess further research is in order. But if killing a solitary male does no real harm to the population, then there's no point in actively hunting them -- especially since they can't eat me.
It sure would make summertime parties much less fun if the impromptu male mosquito hunt were excluded, though. :(
Sure.
It's just a car. It's got a bigger electric motor/generator than most, and a larger battery, but otherwise: It's just a car. It still uses spark plugs, still has coolant, still needs oil changes, still has suspension and brake parts that wear out, and a transmission, and headlights, and wipers, and...
A mechanic who hasn't learned anything genuinely new about cars in 20 years is at least knowledgeable enough about ECU and electronic ignition tech and fuel injection to understand how to work with those systems on the Prius, too, given appropriate software and dongles or plain ol' mechanical ability.
When it comes to the "new" bits of the Prius (the aforementioned big electric motor and battery), it's still just wires. A mechanic who stopped learning in 1991 will have enough troubleshooting training/experience with general electricity to make, at least, a good guess at the problem and won't charge you an arm and a leg before sending you off to the Toyota dealer if the fix isn't obvious to them.
I'd absolutely trust a good mechanic with a 20-year-old skillset on my Prius. Especially since the car itself is already about 13 years old. (And no, I don't have a Prius, won't have one, wouldn't even accept one if I won it as a prize, but you get the idea.)
I'd even trust him to work on my Tesla Roadster, for the same reasons. (And no, I don't have a Tesla, won't have one, and though I probably would accept one as a prize, I would strongly prefer the lightweight, gas-fired, cheaper Lotus that it is built upon.)
And my real point is: This is nothing like comparing COBOL-trained programmer to modernisms like Ruby or Perl or whatever. The mechanics of a car stay the same, for the most part, whereas computer programming languages vary wildly.
Your car analogy sucks.
As I understand it, there is only one male for every [insert huge number here*] females. Female mosquitoes annoy me, and so I kill them, but only when it is convenient to do so or when I find one that is actively eating me. Males, on the other hand: When I spot one of those, I hunt it until it is destroyed, hopefully killing untold thousands of potential offspring.
*: While I've heard different ratios, from 1:100 to 1:1000, I'm unable to find a reference that seems worthwhile.
Bleeeaaaaahhhh!
Spoken like someone who has never played with common motion sensors. They're not all that hard to fool.
Move slow, keep a slim profile, and avoid moving anything big and flat (like doors) and you'll have reasonable freedom of movement for as long as you can stay patient and calm. Keeping your distance from them also helps.
Try it sometime. They're not magic.
And since you're curious:
The Chevy Beretta had its windshield wiper controls to the right of the instrument cluster, on the dash. In both variations on that car (and wiper-control arrangement), it took one entire hand away from the wheel to make the wipers wipe. At least they were up high, and visible...
On my '79 Pontiac Firebird, the wiper controls are hidden on the dash just behind the left side of the wheel. May God help the poor unfamiliar soul who finds themselves in the hills of West Virginia while encountering a cloudburst in this car -- it's hidden from both the driver and the passenger by the wheel and the steering column, respectively. (*I* know where it is, but that doesn't exactly mean that it is easy to find without craning around and looking for it for those who are unfamiliar.)
Yes, AC. I found that after I posted my rant, and it does work well.
I still want an option in about:config, though, since it's just dumb. :)
On a GM, it's on the turn-signal stalk (along with the cruise control and a myriad of other things). It's a weird combination of twist and pull and blah that is just...bizarre, even after driving Chevy and other GM products for most of my life. It takes one entire hand to operate it, which can't be attached to the steering wheel at the same time. I didn't realize how wrong it was until I first drove this BMW.
On the BMW, it's a dedicated stalk at the right of the wheel. Tap down with your fingertip, and the wipers operate once. Push up, and they'll operate intermittently. Another notch up is slow. Another notch up after that is fast. The notches are clear and distinct, and it's clear from feel alone what -- exactly -- you've just instructed the car to do. (An option for the E36 BMW was programmable delay, but mine doesn't have that, and I can't say that I've missed even the simple variable delay from a GM.)
Pull the thing toward you, again with a fingertip or two (thumb and other fingers still grasping the wheel), and it sprays monkey piss on the window. Keep it that way for a second, and you get monkey piss with slow wipers. This makes it easy to spray deicer on the window and let it soak in a bit, without operating the wiper blades (which is impossible on a GM), while not making it difficult to wash and wipe the window without applying deicer.
Cruise control is similar. Another dedicated stalk, again to the right. Push forward to set, or accelerate. Pull back to decelerate. Up or down both cancel. And in resumes. Again, using just the fingertips.
On a GM, with the all-in-one widget on the left, these operations all require a whole hand to avoid activating the wipers, modulating the high beams, or setting a turn signal. It does work, but I've learned that there are better ways.....
Want a better car analogy?
I'm an American. I drove American cars until I picked up a used E36 BMW a few years ago.
Everything is different. The pedals are still in the right order, of course, but from the window switches to the door locks, to the windshield wiper controls, to even the location of the reverse gear on the manual gearbox, it's all different from anything produced in modern America.
But those changes all make sense.
The window switches are located centrally next to the gearshift, which saves on wiring and switches, while also allowing the passenger to operate the four windows, whereas the typical American car has a weird cluster of them on the driver's side door. There is no separate control for power door locks, because one simply isn't needed: You want the doors locked? Just push down on the lock plunger. The wiper controls are simple, located on a stalk to the right of the wheel, and don't require one to remove their hand from the wheel to operate it (just loosen the grip a bit) -- just shove it in the appropriate direction with one's fingers. The reverse gear on the shift pattern is hard left and up, next to first, so you'll never find it by accident when traveling at speed.
The gas filler door locks. The modern American version I'm familiar with involves a cable assembly, which is often finicky, is usually hard to reach, and never in the same spot on different cars. On the BMW, it's simple: If the doors are locked, so is the filler door. If the doors are unlocked, then it is not*. And the filler itself is on the passenger side of the car, so if I were to happen to run out of gas somewhere, I wouldn't be standing with my back to the road as I poured more gas into it, whereas American cars have them wherever they feel like...
These changes are all purposeful, and make operating the car simpler (safer) than the alternatives that I've used.
Moving the status bar to the top? I'm not sure what is gained by doing so.
You're right: I am perfectly capable of adjusting, but only if the changes make sense.
(*: There's a few variations on this depending on whether the doors are double-locked or single-locked, and those variations also make sense, but this post is already quite long enough for a car analogy that nobody will ever read.)
Yes. It works fine.
One can even get the latest firmware updates over HTTP directly from Sony, in the event that some game or other requires it. The console will gleefully load them from a USB drive of whatever sort, all without ever dealing with anything that might be construed as being PSN.
You, sir, win one Interwebs for your insight.
Congratulations!
I still use my cursor keys along with page up/page down, especially on machines with badly-configured touchpads.
But even my 6-year-old Dell Inspiron lets me set up part of the Alps Glidepoint touchpad as a scroll surface. It also works fine.
Forget easy.
I, for one, would be perfectly pleased if having a functional status bar could be enabled with a difficult-to-find option: Bury it in about:config (using "status" as part of the description, so it can be found with a search), and I'd be pleased as punch.
Call me old and set in my ways, but until the recent Firefox builds I'd been using browsers with the status bar across the bottom for more than 1.5 decades. Even in 1993, when I would borrow a local university VAX dialup account just to use rlogin to connect to a far-away FreeBSD machine where I could run Lynx with my MS-DOS machine running Telemate, I had status at the bottom of the screen, taking up one entire line of screen real estate out of 25.
Rearranging things like this is like rearranging the pedals in a car.
I suspect that you're thinking too much*. That everyone here is, in fact.
A modem's LEDs were commonly driven with the same logic that sent data over RS-232. Why? It was cheap, it was simple, and it worked.
Send a string of zeros, and the LEDs will illuminate intermittently just as RS-232 will change level intermittently, due to stop bits. Sending no data results in no illumination/level changes, but that's not the same as sending binary 0s.
If this sounds far-fetched, I strongly suggest digging out an old external modem and observing it for yourself. Try different serial baud rates, as well -- it's very plain to the trained eye what, approximately, what port speed modem is operating at in common operation and that the perceived level of illumination changes depending on the data being transferred -- even if the data rate is fixed, as in the case of a plain v.22bis 2400bps modem.
Therefore, the flashing of the modem's TXD and RXD LEDs weren't just representative of the datastream, but they were a direct presentation of it.
To record and recreate this stream is a task is impossible for a typical video recorder, for sure. But give a clever person a fistful of transistors and other random components, a set of appropriate optics, a red filter, a photodetector or two and a modem in a darkish room...
(*: And what is all that verbiage you wrote about quadrature modulation? You're looking at it from the wrong end.)
My Samsung TV has needed a variety of software updates.
FWIW.
*shrug*
I'm on call 24/7. I don't care, at 3AM, if the mail server is on fire -- that can probably wait until Monday. However, I'll still answer the phone if I can to triage the situation.
In my line of work, a flaming server is not the worst that can happen. Rather, the worst that can happen is that there's a dispatch center down, a building on fire, and nobody has any central communications: Lives are at risk.
If I don't respond to my phone at 3AM, there's a good chance that an armed deputy will come by my house and pound on my door until I do respond.
Am I paid extra for this, as in a line-item on my paystub? No. But it was part of the gig when I was hired by this company, and was a term that I accepted.
I suspect many people who are on call continuously are in the same boat. Is it wrong? No, I don't think so.
Does it happen to me often? Sometimes there are systemic problems which aren't easily resolved, which result in a brief period of frequent late-night interruptions. Typically, though, my phone only rings from about 8AM to 5PM or so, which is fine.
Can such a thing be abused? Certainly. But not always -- in fact, I'd say that continuous on-call duty is very seldom abused in most technical fields.
Many years ago, I got a job that needed a cell phone. And since I had a cell phone, I used my cell phone.
Eventually, I got sick of paying for my cell phone, so I asked my boss to pay for one instead. He agreed, and even said "go ahead and burn minutes."
Amusingly, I just today negotiated a deal with my employer of 7 years where I'd become a contractor, and they'd pay me more money to do stuff, while also paying me no money to do nothing.
Carrying over the company existing cell phone plan, with corporate sponsorship, was the boss's idea.
*shrug*
Agreed on really high sample rates/bit depth being a waste for casual listening.
For non-casual listening (think: intense listening using a highly dynamic, low-distortion horn loudspeaker system), more bits would be good. But proper dithering of high bit-depth material down to 16 bits is likely quite awesome enough for that.
Higher sampling rates would also be handy. There's plenty of sound up around 30KHz in the noise produced by some cymbals, but it's completely lost at a 44.1KHz sampling rate. Allegedly, we don't "hear" these sounds (though I'm quite certain I could hear them when I was 8, I most assuredly can't anymore), but that doesn't mean that we don't experience them at all (bone conduction, the wiggling of the hair on the back of the neck, etc).
For almost every "casual" use with reasonable listening levels and even quite excellent gear: Yep, 16/44.1/2 is fine.
It is also therefore lossless, for almost every application, and an adult set of ears.