I've had really good luck with AT&T. My U-Verse line is over 3,000 feet long, which is technically out-of-spec. It took a long, long time to get it to work correctly. This isn't so much AT&T's fault, as it is just a coincidence between the location of my house, the location of the VRAD, and the route of the overhead of the wires, none of which anyone (including me) were inclined to move. It was a weird problem: It'd work just fine, until evening came and then: Blotto. It seemed related to the angle of the sun, tidal activity, phase of the moon, or something along those lines. Intermittent problems with no obvious external cause like that are the worst things to try to fix.
All of the folks who worked on it were very courteous and either on-time or early. All of them gave me their business card, with a cell phone number that they actually would answer when I called. They've probably got over 60 man hours in making my singular home account work, all in taking apart splices, scoping things with a TDR, and other bucket-truck sorts of activity.
When I wanted TCP port 25 opened for SMTP, all I had to do was call and ask for it. It worked in less than a minute.
Nowadays, I can call support when there's an issue (every ISP has issues from time to time) and the conversation goes something like:
"It's broke. Can you fix it?" *clickety-click* "You're right. The RADIUS server is down in your area. Would you like me to give you a call when it's back up?" "Sure."
And then, they offer me a credit for the downtime, without me even asking for it.
It helps that they told me how to call higher-level support directly, instead of filtering through the "Please, do you know where your modem is located? Good. Please to be reset the modem by unplug[.....]" script readers first. This is easy enough at most companies, once you demonstrate that you've got a bit of a clue and are not a raging asshole. (I had a bit of trouble figuring out the latter part of that.)
Hell, even their billing department was happy to issue big refunds for the various service outages I've experienced. They got almost nothing for money until things started working reliably, and it wasn't ever a fight.
I guess the suspension is similar-ish to the second-gen Firebird in the driveway, which shouldn't be far off from your third-gen (they didn't do any huge changes for decades on those cars until 4th gen). I never looked at it from that angle before.
I guess my chief complaint about its handling is body roll and understeer. Does your Astro have any fashion of swaybar in the back?
A buddy of mine has the older style of Astro, from sometime before 1994 (mine is 2002). His door handles are an ugly joke, and he's replaced the ignition switch with basically nothing after that failed. I just figured that was mostly his fault, since he tends to have that sort of effect on mechanical things, but I guess it might just be endemic in the product line...
Come to think of it, I did rebuild the mechanism on the back door on mine awhile back: Instead of using a C clip, GM simply smashed the end of a rod to form a rivet, which was self-destructing due to the softness of the metal and sheared itself off. It has a C clip installed now, amusingly inserted into a groove at the end of that rod which was apparently cut there for that exact purpose.
Either the clip was $0.002 too much on the assembly line, or the groove was added by an engineer who knew that the assembly would fail, and wanted to make sure that his own van would be easy to fix.;)
I guess I didn't think much of it, since I had to re-do the side door on a co-worker's E150 about the same time due to similar design retardation.
Speaking of which, that E150 is a wretched thing to drive. The 302 V8 is, well, meh at getting up to speed, and the thing has the most horrible suspension imaginable. The three-speed transmission is WTF. Big bumps hurt, but seem well damped. Little bumps result in a short series of fast, low-amplitude little bounces that eventually become very bothersome on long trips. And any uneven suspension loading (pulling from the street into a sloped driveway, or over a curb -- anything that loads up a swaybar) produce all kinds of side-to-side slop so that it's scary even at low speeds. I'd like to say that his shocks are just worn out, but it's just not squishy like that; it feels like there's just a shitload of play in every rubber bushing.
Yeah, the Astro/Safari is equipped with a 4.3l Vortec.
It does just fine for speed, and for hauling stuff. I pulled a BMW parts car from NC to OH with it, without any difficulties at all in the mountains maintaining 70-75MPH uphill, and no drama going downhill.
And since it lacks any interior except for at the front (the back is just bare bodywork), and it only has two seats, it weighs approximately nothing for its size.
It's quite fast enough for all practical purposes; if only it'd handle for shit.:)
And it's been stupidly reliable. With 110k miles on it, at least 70k of which I put on myself in road-salt-covered Ohio, it's a long long way from being worn out, and has never really been any trouble (except for the front wheel bearings being fucked after it was in a river for two or three days during a flood), and a front ABS wheel sensor giving up not too long ago.
It's the boss's truck. I just drive it around for him, fill it up with his gas card, and change the oil from time to time. I try to limit my customization and personal use of it, so no roof rack for now. If anything, a trailer that can hold 4x8 something would be cool.
My fathers strategy was two sets of rims. Actually not very expensive. One with wide tires for summer (incidentally, need to worry about hydroplaning in the rain) that ran around 20 psi and one with ultra skinny narrow high pressure tires that must have been upwards of 35 psi. It takes a lot of suspension work to put wide wheels on a car designed for narrow, but the opposite is quite simple. It was like being on railroad rails in the snow, incredible control. You might want to look into this, and might want to run it by a mechanical engineer or two and a mechanic or two, which given my fathers employer was quite easy.
That is what I do, though the pressures are all wrong for my car: About 37PSI in the summer gives good performance and very even tire wear, and works just great in standing water and on dry roads. 28PSI in the winter seems to be ideal for tire wear, but the car works better with higher pressures.
Don't need a mechanical engineer for it, either; the skinny(ish) tires were available as stock in that size from the factory. Certainly skinnier would work even better.
Whatever the case, I'm never, ever going back to "all-season" tires for my daily driver.
Oh my, in the frozen tundra up north, that is what we call "flurries". Our plows fail the logistical task when it gets over a foot in 24 hours. Up to that we're OK. Human nature that everyone thinks where they live is OK, but 100 miles north would be unsurvivable, all the from deep south to Alaska.
We get that sort of snow, too. It's just that folks are very skittish (and rightly so, given the fact that nobody else I've talked to here has even considered "snow tires" since the 70s), and accident prone.
I've considered buying a set of spring rubbers to shove into the coil springs and jack up the rear (and maybe the front) of the car when it gets really deep. For that, though, I might want to actually get some proper engineering advice.:)
I live in NW Ohio, and everyone around here seems to have some manner of truck except for me: I like sports cars, too.
The usual excuse I hear is often just like yours: What about plywood (et cetera)? But we get to add to that: What if it snows? I mean, there's times for a truck*, but that doesn't mean that I need to make monthly payments on one.
I rent (or just borrow from a friend) trucks when needed. It's really no big deal. Home Depot, Menards, and Lowes all have trucks for rent for about $15-20. If I need a bigger truck to move more/bigger things, or if I just need more time to do whatever it is than they allow, U-Haul also offers trucks for cheap (which takes zero planning on any day but Saturday or Sunday).
And for snow, that's actually a half-way legitimate complaint against cars. But I keep a set of proper skinny winter tires (on dedicated wheels). It was a cheap, no-brainer decision once I first drove the car on the wide Z-rated summer tires that it came with (which are only awesome when it's warm outside). The snow tires go on in November when it starts to feel like winter, and come off whenever it seems like winter has stopped for the year.
And armed with snow tires, my low-slung RWD BMW does just fine on fresh snow up to about 6 or 7 inches deep -- deeper than that, and the car tends to float on its floor pan and the going gets slow. (Which is fine: For the past decade or so, the local sheriff has consistently closed the roads when snow gets to those depths, and I thus won't need to go anywhere anyway for a day or so having already stocked up on beer and tobacco before the snow started.)
It has never, ever been stuck. I've driven around 4WD Jeeps that were stuck in the middle of the road spinning their all-season tires.
After the plows have made the first pass, driving on compacted snow (or a sheet of smooth ice) is a breeze. I've driven all manner of vehicles on all manner of surfaces. This is the only car I've ever had modern winter tires on, and it beats them all. It goes, stops, and turns with uncanny reliability. I've even pulled lesser-equipped vehicles out of ditches using it with no drama, with nothing but a snow-covered road and a hundred pounds of ballast weight over the rear axle for traction.
*shrug*
*: I have a friend with a biggish SUV. He uses it to haul stuff on a regular basis, which is fine -- it makes sense for him (he heats his house with wood that he cuts himself, I think as much for the workout as the "cheap" heat, and helps his dad a lot on the farm). We used it the other day to pull a big hunk of granite rock out of the ground that we found almost completely buried in the back yard -- about 2 feet in diameter. Worked great. We drug it up to the corner of the driveway, again with the truck. This is not the sort of abuse that I want to subject my 325i to, but it's infrequent-enough abuse that I have no desire to own a vehicle capable of doing these things.
I also have a service truck, if you can call it that (it's a GMC Safari van). It spends most of its days hauling around tools and equipment for my day job, and occasionally gets filled floor-to-ceiling with things that need delivered (sometimes with a trailer with even more stuff on it). Once upon a time, I used to do most of this sort of work out of the trunk of the BMW, but I don't think the Safari is overkill for the application. It also does not haul plywood, being neither tall enough nor long enough to do an easy job of it with all of the stuff that lives in the back of it, which is fine. Hauling plywood is cheap when it needs to happen.
I used to run a BBS. I remember both when September never ended (at least get your fucking link right, hessian), and when Gopher was useful and current. My first proper exposure to Usenet was a local BBS running Waffle, which pulled news down using dialup UUCP. I remember discussions about the whole of Usenet beginning to exceed the bandwidth of what a v.32bis modem could do in 24 hours.
I have done SLIP connections to ISPs with MS-DOS before there there were local ISPs, while Linux was a wet dream, and experienced the pain of the phone bill that happened after a few nights of falling asleep waiting for an FTP to finish over a v.32, 9600bps dialup to somewhere half-way across the US.
I'm only 31 right now, so I guess I started young.
Meanwhile: I like television, fast food, Coca-Cola, movies like X-men, disco (or at least some modern-ish stuff with disco roots), and corn dogs. I liked these things (as applicable) back then, too.
Please tell me, Grand Pubah: Should I hand in my Geek Card, or should you get off of my lawn?
Same with yard sales -- it's a community event, and a way to clear out your basement and/or garage a little, but when it becomes a way to make money, it starts to feel creepy.
If the point of a yard sale were anything but getting rid of stuff for money, then folks would simply leave the stuff on the curb for a couple of days and then throw it all away.
I've done both.
And I frankly don't care what folks do with the stuff that they buy from me, or that I give away, or the reasons why they wanted it in the first place. If I want it sold for a good price, I invest the time to market it myself on Ebay or Amazon or whatever. If I want it gone easily for a pittance, I'll put it in a yard sale. If I want it gone in a hurry, it goes to the curb.
If someone later decides they want to put time and effort into marketing the item for more money, more power to them. Everyone wins: I win, because my stuff is gone. The reseller wins, because they make a little bit of coin. The buyer wins, because they get the widget that they want.
It's actually pretty common to burn insulation from wire before selling it: It fetches a higher rate.
My dad does some decent business collecting scrap. It's not infrequent that he legitimately ends up with a whole house worth of used romex or copper piping.
("Dealings" like "Sure, I'll haul this old couch and all this shit away for you, if you let me strip the copper out of the vacant house you own across town that you're getting ready to demolish." Or in the case of gut-and-restore remodels, it's cheaper to let him take the copper for free than to pay someone else to remove it. Et cetera.)
Were Google's drones just RC craft piloted by a certified pilot on the ground? I thought automated aircraft (no pilot) and RC craft flown by non-pilots were not allowed in controlled airspace in the USA.
Perhaps.
But then, until quite recently, I thought that driverless cars were not allowed, either.
The funny thing is that I cannot get service this good from any provider at *any* price. I would be willing to pay quite a premium to get truly ad-free TV. But I want my shows to download automatically (or stream), I want it in HD, and I want it to work with a video game console or TV, eliminating a set-top box that would otherwise take up valuable space.
The funny thing is that I cannot get service this good from any provider *even with ads*. I would be willing to watch commercials to get truly free, legitimate TV. But I want my shows to download automatically (not stream), I want it in HD, and I want it to work with a video game console or TV, eliminating a set-top box (and monthly fees for paid TV service) that would otherwise take up valuable space.
Amusingly, nearly all of the channels in question are available for free with an antenna in wonderful, never been re-encoded 720p/1080i HD.
I myself never paid for broadcast TV. But I picked up Time Warner cable when my old 32" Sony HD CRT died a couple of years ago. The reason is simple: I replaced it with a proper 1080p 52" LCD, and wanted to play with it. Later on, I switched to Uverse. (They both sucked equally, though for completely different reasons.)
Lately, it's gone. I cancelled TV service a few months ago, and haven't looked back. (We don't care for professional sports, so live coverage of that is really not very interesting. A football fan might not find the transition to be so easy.)
I currently have a quarter-wave antenna (read: a few inches of wire shoved into the antenna connector on the TV) tuned to the frequency of the local PBS station, which works great for that one station: I get a beautiful 1080i feed, along with two at 480i.
The rest is covered by Hulu, Netflix, and the occasional RSS-fed torrent, all variously fed into a PS3. This lets us get the shows we like from Discovery, TLC and such, usually legally.
But we do get tornados and such here, so having proper access to local TV news is occasionally a Really Important Thing. And for that, we need a more substantial antenna.
Eventually, I'll buy or build a decent rooftop antenna. Cabling is easy in most houses, including my own pre-1900 abode. The only thing I haven't figured out yet is whether to use HDHomeRun+Cat5, 1/2" hardline, or just buy a good preamp and run RG-6 quad-shield. (The costs aren't too dissimilar from each other, but HDHomeRun lends itself to being a MythTV feed.)
And then, I'll be able to watch my usual network programming without torrenting[1], and see things in all of their original splendor.
[1]: I'm very annoyed that the likes of CBS, Fox, ABC and Comedy Central don't simply provide their own torrents. I'd be much happier if I could simply download legitimate feeds of this stuff, with commercials, than I currently am stealing it commercial-free. I'd even be happy help them distribute it, as is the nature of bittorrent. Alas.
I see it as just the same thing as built-in VCRs, and later DVD players, which were somewhat common especially toward the end of the CRT age. Neat, tidy, works (for various definitions of "works"), cannot be changed for something that works better, and is eventually broken or is deprecated for a new format. All it does is give the user a little temporary freedom from having an external player, usually at substantial cost.
And once it breaks/becomes deprecated, the extra componentry which was added to what is otherwise a fairly simple display device becomes excess baggage. Once this happens, someone invariably straps an outboard VCR/DVD/Blu-Ray/Google TV box to it and we're back to square one: A TV with extra stuff sitting next to it in order to make it as useful as it used to be.
I'd rather buy just a TV. And if it needs to do more, I'd prefer my money to go toward external devices that accomplish whatever "more" is.
And while everyone else is fucking around with ugly DLNA-based transcoding hacks like tversity and playon on a separate PC to make their old networked TV turn new tricks over Ethernet, I'll just build/buy an energy-efficient external device that natively understands the format and delivers it over universally-acceptable HDMI, VGA, or component video instead of a highly device-dependent TCP stream.:)
Fast forward a few years. Imagine that it's 2014, and someone has a similar complaint:
"I already bought a Sony TV with Wifi in 2010... It's only too bad Sony discontinued this line, it could have become really great... And yes, the built in PC with LAN and Wifi did run linux (but the default menu is pretty useless, and the software hasn't been updated since 2010 too)."
Didn't we say the same things about phones/consoles and the like?
Dunno if anyone said that or not, but it doesn't matter:
A few months ago, I got the boy a very non-fancy Nokia cell phone. Works fine, battery lasts a long time, and it's impossibly light.
The Wii still is very popular and available. It's a very basic game system.
Printers are another good example: There have been all-in-one printing machines for home use for at least a decade which can do all manner of redundant shit from front panel controls, but these haven't detracted from the availability of less-expensive models which don't do any of that.
I can get a fridge with all manner of gadgetry tied into it. Or I can buy one that just has a simple mechanical thermostat, which also does a fine job of keeping my food cold.
Same with toasters. Or furniture. Or a million other household widgets.
I'd say that simple still works just fine, and isn't headed anywhere as long as people keep buying it.
Luckily enough, the announcement of Sony using Google TV in some of their newest HDTVs did not also include an announcement of the discontinuation of other models which do not include Google TV!
That's right: You'll still be able to buy a TV without all of this gee-wizardry, and it will cost less than than the newfangled kit described in TFA!
If you want to keep things this way, then just keep voting with your wallet and companies will keep making simple TVs that folks like you (and I) like. It's easy, it's fun, and it saves money!
(My own 52" Samsung LCD is nearly as brain-dead as can be. It simply displays video, and occasionally does a little bit of video switching. It doesn't handle audio, it doesn't view Netflix, it doesn't have a built-in Blu-Ray player, and it certainly doesn't fucking run Google TV. And nor will its replacement. It does, however, do a fine job of displaying video. I have other toys for those those other sorts of roles, and want as little co-dependence between them as possible. And I'll keep buying things in such a fashion as to support the ongoing manufacture of stuff that allows doing stuff in this way.)
RF doesn't get blocked by metal and other surfaces. Rather: sometimes it reflects off in some other direction, and sometimes it gets absorbed and turned into (typically a very tiny amount of) heat or electricity, and whatever is left passes through with whatever amount of attenuation.
The ground/asphalt/bitumen/tarmac/concrete under the car is no exception to this: some signal bounces off of them. Reflected signals tend to be less accurate than direct line-of-sight signals, but then fixing a GPS position on a suspect's car doesn't have to be accurate down to one centimeter once every second. Locating them within several tens of meters, every few minutes, is likely quite good enough to figure out what the person (or rather, their car) is up to.
And it doesn't even matter if the car moves or not: The GPS satellites do quite a lot of that, by themselves, being in LEO. Eventually, sufficient signal -will- reach the receiver that it can locate itself with reasonable accuracy, either because the car has moved or the satellites continue to.
I've used GPS receivers in the back of windowless steel cargo vans and achieved reasonable accuracy. I suspect that being under a car, with a clear view of (at least) the ground in at least one direction is even better. I haven't tossed a GPS device under there to be sure, but come on.
Even my Droid can get a decent GPS fix within my own 2-story steel-roofed house with trees all around, and the GPS receiver in there is (at best) an afterthought.
And nevermind other rather common tech like WAAS helps with NLOS location, as well.
Getting useful data from a GPS receiver stuck to the bottom of a car with a magnet or something sounds perfectly plausible to me.
Obviously, much greater power is required to accelerate to 69 mph than to cruise at 71, so the answer is likely more complicated than "because we failed".
We can only speculate as to why the volt now behaves how it is reported to, until someone gets their wrench onto one and writes about it.
I have three vehicles that I drive: A 1979 Pontiac Firebird, a 1995 BMW 325i, and a 2002 GMC Safari. I've driven all of them, at length, at speeds over 100MPH.
It's no great feat.
I also used to compact a daily 20-minute commute into an 8-minute morning jaunt, on narrow country roads. The car in question was electronically limited to 113 MPH, so I kept the sustained speed at around 110. There were enough stop signs and towns in the way to make wide-open acceleration, gear changes, and threshold braking a big part of the trip.
And since I did that 5 days a week, twice a day, the car ate a set of front brake pads every month and went through tires in a hurry. The drivetrain never faltered.
This car was $14,000 new in 1996.
But it's really not very impressive.
100MPH in a $100,000 car that has a consumable $36,000 battery pack? Not impressive, either: I'd rather buy some gas.
But it might also make sense to opportunistically drive the wheels directly whenever doing so would allow the engine to be at or near peak efficiency, as doing so eliminates whole set of electromechanical conversions which might otherwise act to reduce total efficiency.
*shrug*
It's all still postulation. I, for one, am simply upset that the Volt does have mechanical link between the engine and the wheels, since the system described early on did not. Even though I have no intention of buying such a thing in either configuration, I really wanted to see how well a simple (generator/electric motor, with batteries) design like that would have worked in the marketplace and on the road.
It turns out that's not correct. We're now told by Volt's engineering team that when the Volt's lithium-ion battery pack runs down and at speeds near or above 70 mph the Volt's gasoline engine will directly drive the front wheels along with the electric motors.
I like your theory about #1, and considered it myself.
Unfortunately, it'll be awhile before we know who's right.:)
What's particularly ridiculous to me is that the Volt only goes ~40 miles on a 16kWh battery pack (2.5 mi per kWh). The Leaf goes ~100 miles on a 24kWh battery pack (4.2 mi per kWh). That tells me that the Volt is too big and too heavy.
I was going to write something about how the Volt is a proper mid-size sedan, with four doors, a usable cargo area, and plenty of room for 4 people, whereas the Leaf is a tiny little compact.
And then I started looking at the measurements of each one: The Leaf is only slightly narrower and shorter, and a little bit taller. It's likely that they're about equally spacious in practical use. (I'd like to have compared weight, too, but couldn't find numbers for the Leaf. The Volt, meanwhile, is about 3,900 pounds, which is certainly more than the Leaf.)
So, you're right: It is too big, and likely too heavy. But it does include its own generator, whereas the Leaf does not. This distinction is not small, and may be important for some buyers.
Me, for instance. I don't like having absolute range limits on my travels. I also live in the midwest, so currently, driving is often the only way to get from A to B (though I do walk or ride my bike sometimes). I'm the only driver in my family so we could do very well with only one car. Almost all of my personal driving is under 15 miles per day (which is -perfect- for an electric vehicle) but every couple of weeks we do like to disappear for a few hours to some far-away place.
So if I had to choose between the two as my sole mode of transportation, I'd find the Leaf to be completely useless since long trips would be out of the question, whereas the too-heavy Volt might begin to make good sense since it would eliminate buying/renting/borrowing/maintaining a second car just for semi-frequent long trips, even if it is too big, too heavy, and too wasteful.
First, let's start at the beginning. The Volt was promised to be a series hybrid. That is: a gasoline-fired generator, which in turn would power an electric motor and/or charge the batteries. There was to be no mechanical connection between the gasoline engine and the driven wheels.
There is nothing wrong with the original concept which would have prevented the car from moving in the event of having completely dead-flat batteries in the middle of the desert. Systems just like this have been in use for a Really Long Time on diesel-electric locomotives and work just fine without any batteries at all.
And it's improper to think of "charging the batteries" as being somehow different from "powering the motors." Volts is volts, and with 55kW of electrical generation capacity, it can do both at the same time.
I, for one, am willing to assume that the statements about the original concept were true at that time, and that later design revisions changed things up a bit. The question is then: Why was it changed?
And here are some probable answers:
1. It's now stated that the gasoline engine is directly driving the wheels when speeds exceed 70MPH. This may simply be due to the electronics and batteries being unable to keep themselves cool during sustained driving at above 70MPH.
And why 70MPH instead of 50MPH or 90MPH? Probably, and I'm guessing here because nobody who's driven one of these cars seems to actually write about it: Unlike the Prius, I doubt the Volt has a transmission at all -- at most, it's just a mechanical clutch feeding the differential. Which is good, because it's fewer parts to wear out, and one less mechanical system to waste energy with.
In a transmissionless drivetrain, it's completely likely that below 70MPH the engine would be running at an inefficient speed, whereas at 70MPH and up the engine can begin to run within its peak torque (read: most efficient) powerband.
2. It's also now stated that the engine directly drives the wheels at all speeds when the batteries are flat. If this is actually the case, then my above theory about having no transmission is false. However, I'm going to stick to my guns on this one, and assume the reports are simply wrong about this function. After all, the media test-drives occurred only yesterday, and so far we're still in the smoke-and-mirrors level of blogospheric bullshit regarding the whole thing.
And since the car can be so broadly manipulated and fine-tuned by GM in software, it's even possible for them to give the car a last-minute firmware update on launch day.
Therefore, I reckon that my own postulation is as good as anyone else's, and would like to submit that we really won't know much about how the Volt actually operates until they're at the dealerships for sale.
As stated above, I don't have U-Verse TV anymore, but...
The DVR does suck. It does some stupid things. Some of those stupid things that it does, though, could easily be explained by patents held by other folks who also produce DVRs.
My chief complaint about it is that it does a lousy job scaling from 480i to 1080i, and refuses to output 480i natively so I can scale it myself without a diving into the menus every time I switch between watching SD and HD programming.
Regarding internet connections: I abuse my 12Mbps Uverse connection all the time. Some sites are slow while some others are fast, but that's no different than any other provider. I routinely download big things at a sustained ~1.3 megabytes per second with HTTP, and a bit less than that with torrents.
My chief complaint about their Internet connection is that DNS lookups sometimes take forever, and the provided VDSL gateway/router box does not permit the DNS server addresses to be changed.
I can fix this easily enough by various means (ranging from using my own router, manually specifying DNS on each machine on my network, to running my own instance of BIND), but I should not have to, and all of these things come with various tradeoffs that I find variously unacceptable.
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It clearly depends on where you are at.
I've had really good luck with AT&T. My U-Verse line is over 3,000 feet long, which is technically out-of-spec. It took a long, long time to get it to work correctly. This isn't so much AT&T's fault, as it is just a coincidence between the location of my house, the location of the VRAD, and the route of the overhead of the wires, none of which anyone (including me) were inclined to move. It was a weird problem: It'd work just fine, until evening came and then: Blotto. It seemed related to the angle of the sun, tidal activity, phase of the moon, or something along those lines. Intermittent problems with no obvious external cause like that are the worst things to try to fix.
All of the folks who worked on it were very courteous and either on-time or early. All of them gave me their business card, with a cell phone number that they actually would answer when I called. They've probably got over 60 man hours in making my singular home account work, all in taking apart splices, scoping things with a TDR, and other bucket-truck sorts of activity.
When I wanted TCP port 25 opened for SMTP, all I had to do was call and ask for it. It worked in less than a minute.
Nowadays, I can call support when there's an issue (every ISP has issues from time to time) and the conversation goes something like:
"It's broke. Can you fix it?"
*clickety-click* "You're right. The RADIUS server is down in your area. Would you like me to give you a call when it's back up?"
"Sure."
And then, they offer me a credit for the downtime, without me even asking for it.
It helps that they told me how to call higher-level support directly, instead of filtering through the "Please, do you know where your modem is located? Good. Please to be reset the modem by unplug[.....]" script readers first. This is easy enough at most companies, once you demonstrate that you've got a bit of a clue and are not a raging asshole. (I had a bit of trouble figuring out the latter part of that.)
Hell, even their billing department was happy to issue big refunds for the various service outages I've experienced. They got almost nothing for money until things started working reliably, and it wasn't ever a fight.
*shrug*
I guess the suspension is similar-ish to the second-gen Firebird in the driveway, which shouldn't be far off from your third-gen (they didn't do any huge changes for decades on those cars until 4th gen). I never looked at it from that angle before.
I guess my chief complaint about its handling is body roll and understeer. Does your Astro have any fashion of swaybar in the back?
A buddy of mine has the older style of Astro, from sometime before 1994 (mine is 2002). His door handles are an ugly joke, and he's replaced the ignition switch with basically nothing after that failed. I just figured that was mostly his fault, since he tends to have that sort of effect on mechanical things, but I guess it might just be endemic in the product line...
Come to think of it, I did rebuild the mechanism on the back door on mine awhile back: Instead of using a C clip, GM simply smashed the end of a rod to form a rivet, which was self-destructing due to the softness of the metal and sheared itself off. It has a C clip installed now, amusingly inserted into a groove at the end of that rod which was apparently cut there for that exact purpose.
Either the clip was $0.002 too much on the assembly line, or the groove was added by an engineer who knew that the assembly would fail, and wanted to make sure that his own van would be easy to fix. ;)
I guess I didn't think much of it, since I had to re-do the side door on a co-worker's E150 about the same time due to similar design retardation.
Speaking of which, that E150 is a wretched thing to drive. The 302 V8 is, well, meh at getting up to speed, and the thing has the most horrible suspension imaginable. The three-speed transmission is WTF. Big bumps hurt, but seem well damped. Little bumps result in a short series of fast, low-amplitude little bounces that eventually become very bothersome on long trips. And any uneven suspension loading (pulling from the street into a sloped driveway, or over a curb -- anything that loads up a swaybar) produce all kinds of side-to-side slop so that it's scary even at low speeds. I'd like to say that his shocks are just worn out, but it's just not squishy like that; it feels like there's just a shitload of play in every rubber bushing.
Yeah, the Astro/Safari is equipped with a 4.3l Vortec.
It does just fine for speed, and for hauling stuff. I pulled a BMW parts car from NC to OH with it, without any difficulties at all in the mountains maintaining 70-75MPH uphill, and no drama going downhill.
And since it lacks any interior except for at the front (the back is just bare bodywork), and it only has two seats, it weighs approximately nothing for its size.
It's quite fast enough for all practical purposes; if only it'd handle for shit. :)
And it's been stupidly reliable. With 110k miles on it, at least 70k of which I put on myself in road-salt-covered Ohio, it's a long long way from being worn out, and has never really been any trouble (except for the front wheel bearings being fucked after it was in a river for two or three days during a flood), and a front ABS wheel sensor giving up not too long ago.
It's the boss's truck. I just drive it around for him, fill it up with his gas card, and change the oil from time to time. I try to limit my customization and personal use of it, so no roof rack for now. If anything, a trailer that can hold 4x8 something would be cool.
That is what I do, though the pressures are all wrong for my car: About 37PSI in the summer gives good performance and very even tire wear, and works just great in standing water and on dry roads. 28PSI in the winter seems to be ideal for tire wear, but the car works better with higher pressures.
Don't need a mechanical engineer for it, either; the skinny(ish) tires were available as stock in that size from the factory. Certainly skinnier would work even better.
Whatever the case, I'm never, ever going back to "all-season" tires for my daily driver.
We get that sort of snow, too. It's just that folks are very skittish (and rightly so, given the fact that nobody else I've talked to here has even considered "snow tires" since the 70s), and accident prone.
I've considered buying a set of spring rubbers to shove into the coil springs and jack up the rear (and maybe the front) of the car when it gets really deep. For that, though, I might want to actually get some proper engineering advice. :)
Agreed, completely.
I live in NW Ohio, and everyone around here seems to have some manner of truck except for me: I like sports cars, too.
The usual excuse I hear is often just like yours: What about plywood (et cetera)? But we get to add to that: What if it snows? I mean, there's times for a truck*, but that doesn't mean that I need to make monthly payments on one.
I rent (or just borrow from a friend) trucks when needed. It's really no big deal. Home Depot, Menards, and Lowes all have trucks for rent for about $15-20. If I need a bigger truck to move more/bigger things, or if I just need more time to do whatever it is than they allow, U-Haul also offers trucks for cheap (which takes zero planning on any day but Saturday or Sunday).
And for snow, that's actually a half-way legitimate complaint against cars. But I keep a set of proper skinny winter tires (on dedicated wheels). It was a cheap, no-brainer decision once I first drove the car on the wide Z-rated summer tires that it came with (which are only awesome when it's warm outside). The snow tires go on in November when it starts to feel like winter, and come off whenever it seems like winter has stopped for the year.
And armed with snow tires, my low-slung RWD BMW does just fine on fresh snow up to about 6 or 7 inches deep -- deeper than that, and the car tends to float on its floor pan and the going gets slow. (Which is fine: For the past decade or so, the local sheriff has consistently closed the roads when snow gets to those depths, and I thus won't need to go anywhere anyway for a day or so having already stocked up on beer and tobacco before the snow started.)
It has never, ever been stuck. I've driven around 4WD Jeeps that were stuck in the middle of the road spinning their all-season tires.
After the plows have made the first pass, driving on compacted snow (or a sheet of smooth ice) is a breeze. I've driven all manner of vehicles on all manner of surfaces. This is the only car I've ever had modern winter tires on, and it beats them all. It goes, stops, and turns with uncanny reliability. I've even pulled lesser-equipped vehicles out of ditches using it with no drama, with nothing but a snow-covered road and a hundred pounds of ballast weight over the rear axle for traction.
*shrug*
*: I have a friend with a biggish SUV. He uses it to haul stuff on a regular basis, which is fine -- it makes sense for him (he heats his house with wood that he cuts himself, I think as much for the workout as the "cheap" heat, and helps his dad a lot on the farm). We used it the other day to pull a big hunk of granite rock out of the ground that we found almost completely buried in the back yard -- about 2 feet in diameter. Worked great. We drug it up to the corner of the driveway, again with the truck. This is not the sort of abuse that I want to subject my 325i to, but it's infrequent-enough abuse that I have no desire to own a vehicle capable of doing these things.
I also have a service truck, if you can call it that (it's a GMC Safari van). It spends most of its days hauling around tools and equipment for my day job, and occasionally gets filled floor-to-ceiling with things that need delivered (sometimes with a trailer with even more stuff on it). Once upon a time, I used to do most of this sort of work out of the trunk of the BMW, but I don't think the Safari is overkill for the application. It also does not haul plywood, being neither tall enough nor long enough to do an easy job of it with all of the stuff that lives in the back of it, which is fine. Hauling plywood is cheap when it needs to happen.
I used to run a BBS. I remember both when September never ended (at least get your fucking link right, hessian), and when Gopher was useful and current. My first proper exposure to Usenet was a local BBS running Waffle, which pulled news down using dialup UUCP. I remember discussions about the whole of Usenet beginning to exceed the bandwidth of what a v.32bis modem could do in 24 hours.
I have done SLIP connections to ISPs with MS-DOS before there there were local ISPs, while Linux was a wet dream, and experienced the pain of the phone bill that happened after a few nights of falling asleep waiting for an FTP to finish over a v.32, 9600bps dialup to somewhere half-way across the US.
I'm only 31 right now, so I guess I started young.
Meanwhile: I like television, fast food, Coca-Cola, movies like X-men, disco (or at least some modern-ish stuff with disco roots), and corn dogs. I liked these things (as applicable) back then, too.
Please tell me, Grand Pubah: Should I hand in my Geek Card, or should you get off of my lawn?
Same with yard sales -- it's a community event, and a way to clear out your basement and/or garage a little, but when it becomes a way to make money, it starts to feel creepy.
If the point of a yard sale were anything but getting rid of stuff for money, then folks would simply leave the stuff on the curb for a couple of days and then throw it all away.
I've done both.
And I frankly don't care what folks do with the stuff that they buy from me, or that I give away, or the reasons why they wanted it in the first place. If I want it sold for a good price, I invest the time to market it myself on Ebay or Amazon or whatever. If I want it gone easily for a pittance, I'll put it in a yard sale. If I want it gone in a hurry, it goes to the curb.
If someone later decides they want to put time and effort into marketing the item for more money, more power to them. Everyone wins: I win, because my stuff is gone. The reseller wins, because they make a little bit of coin. The buyer wins, because they get the widget that they want.
*shrug*
It's actually pretty common to burn insulation from wire before selling it: It fetches a higher rate.
My dad does some decent business collecting scrap. It's not infrequent that he legitimately ends up with a whole house worth of used romex or copper piping.
("Dealings" like "Sure, I'll haul this old couch and all this shit away for you, if you let me strip the copper out of the vacant house you own across town that you're getting ready to demolish." Or in the case of gut-and-restore remodels, it's cheaper to let him take the copper for free than to pay someone else to remove it. Et cetera.)
Perhaps.
But then, until quite recently, I thought that driverless cars were not allowed, either.
YMMV.
Oh. I guess my understanding of cable TV billing jargon is lacking.
Which is fine. I've got better things to fuck around with than that.
The funny thing is that I cannot get service this good from any provider at *any* price. I would be willing to pay quite a premium to get truly ad-free TV. But I want my shows to download automatically (or stream), I want it in HD, and I want it to work with a video game console or TV, eliminating a set-top box that would otherwise take up valuable space.
The funny thing is that I cannot get service this good from any provider *even with ads*. I would be willing to watch commercials to get truly free, legitimate TV. But I want my shows to download automatically (not stream), I want it in HD, and I want it to work with a video game console or TV, eliminating a set-top box (and monthly fees for paid TV service) that would otherwise take up valuable space.
Amusingly, nearly all of the channels in question are available for free with an antenna in wonderful, never been re-encoded 720p/1080i HD.
I myself never paid for broadcast TV. But I picked up Time Warner cable when my old 32" Sony HD CRT died a couple of years ago. The reason is simple: I replaced it with a proper 1080p 52" LCD, and wanted to play with it. Later on, I switched to Uverse. (They both sucked equally, though for completely different reasons.)
Lately, it's gone. I cancelled TV service a few months ago, and haven't looked back. (We don't care for professional sports, so live coverage of that is really not very interesting. A football fan might not find the transition to be so easy.)
I currently have a quarter-wave antenna (read: a few inches of wire shoved into the antenna connector on the TV) tuned to the frequency of the local PBS station, which works great for that one station: I get a beautiful 1080i feed, along with two at 480i.
The rest is covered by Hulu, Netflix, and the occasional RSS-fed torrent, all variously fed into a PS3. This lets us get the shows we like from Discovery, TLC and such, usually legally.
But we do get tornados and such here, so having proper access to local TV news is occasionally a Really Important Thing. And for that, we need a more substantial antenna.
Eventually, I'll buy or build a decent rooftop antenna. Cabling is easy in most houses, including my own pre-1900 abode. The only thing I haven't figured out yet is whether to use HDHomeRun+Cat5, 1/2" hardline, or just buy a good preamp and run RG-6 quad-shield. (The costs aren't too dissimilar from each other, but HDHomeRun lends itself to being a MythTV feed.)
And then, I'll be able to watch my usual network programming without torrenting[1], and see things in all of their original splendor.
[1]: I'm very annoyed that the likes of CBS, Fox, ABC and Comedy Central don't simply provide their own torrents. I'd be much happier if I could simply download legitimate feeds of this stuff, with commercials, than I currently am stealing it commercial-free. I'd even be happy help them distribute it, as is the nature of bittorrent. Alas.
Maybe...
I see it as just the same thing as built-in VCRs, and later DVD players, which were somewhat common especially toward the end of the CRT age. Neat, tidy, works (for various definitions of "works"), cannot be changed for something that works better, and is eventually broken or is deprecated for a new format. All it does is give the user a little temporary freedom from having an external player, usually at substantial cost.
And once it breaks/becomes deprecated, the extra componentry which was added to what is otherwise a fairly simple display device becomes excess baggage. Once this happens, someone invariably straps an outboard VCR/DVD/Blu-Ray/Google TV box to it and we're back to square one: A TV with extra stuff sitting next to it in order to make it as useful as it used to be.
I'd rather buy just a TV. And if it needs to do more, I'd prefer my money to go toward external devices that accomplish whatever "more" is.
And while everyone else is fucking around with ugly DLNA-based transcoding hacks like tversity and playon on a separate PC to make their old networked TV turn new tricks over Ethernet, I'll just build/buy an energy-efficient external device that natively understands the format and delivers it over universally-acceptable HDMI, VGA, or component video instead of a highly device-dependent TCP stream. :)
Fast forward a few years. Imagine that it's 2014, and someone has a similar complaint:
"I already bought a Sony TV with Wifi in 2010... It's only too bad Sony discontinued this line, it could have become really great... And yes, the built in PC with LAN and Wifi did run linux (but the default menu is pretty useless, and the software hasn't been updated since 2010 too)."
Didn't we say the same things about phones/consoles and the like?
Dunno if anyone said that or not, but it doesn't matter:
A few months ago, I got the boy a very non-fancy Nokia cell phone. Works fine, battery lasts a long time, and it's impossibly light.
The Wii still is very popular and available. It's a very basic game system.
Printers are another good example: There have been all-in-one printing machines for home use for at least a decade which can do all manner of redundant shit from front panel controls, but these haven't detracted from the availability of less-expensive models which don't do any of that.
I can get a fridge with all manner of gadgetry tied into it. Or I can buy one that just has a simple mechanical thermostat, which also does a fine job of keeping my food cold.
Same with toasters. Or furniture. Or a million other household widgets.
I'd say that simple still works just fine, and isn't headed anywhere as long as people keep buying it.
Good news!
Luckily enough, the announcement of Sony using Google TV in some of their newest HDTVs did not also include an announcement of the discontinuation of other models which do not include Google TV!
That's right: You'll still be able to buy a TV without all of this gee-wizardry, and it will cost less than than the newfangled kit described in TFA!
If you want to keep things this way, then just keep voting with your wallet and companies will keep making simple TVs that folks like you (and I) like. It's easy, it's fun, and it saves money!
(My own 52" Samsung LCD is nearly as brain-dead as can be. It simply displays video, and occasionally does a little bit of video switching. It doesn't handle audio, it doesn't view Netflix, it doesn't have a built-in Blu-Ray player, and it certainly doesn't fucking run Google TV. And nor will its replacement. It does, however, do a fine job of displaying video. I have other toys for those those other sorts of roles, and want as little co-dependence between them as possible. And I'll keep buying things in such a fashion as to support the ongoing manufacture of stuff that allows doing stuff in this way.)
RF doesn't get blocked by metal and other surfaces. Rather: sometimes it reflects off in some other direction, and sometimes it gets absorbed and turned into (typically a very tiny amount of) heat or electricity, and whatever is left passes through with whatever amount of attenuation.
The ground/asphalt/bitumen/tarmac/concrete under the car is no exception to this: some signal bounces off of them. Reflected signals tend to be less accurate than direct line-of-sight signals, but then fixing a GPS position on a suspect's car doesn't have to be accurate down to one centimeter once every second. Locating them within several tens of meters, every few minutes, is likely quite good enough to figure out what the person (or rather, their car) is up to.
And it doesn't even matter if the car moves or not: The GPS satellites do quite a lot of that, by themselves, being in LEO. Eventually, sufficient signal -will- reach the receiver that it can locate itself with reasonable accuracy, either because the car has moved or the satellites continue to.
I've used GPS receivers in the back of windowless steel cargo vans and achieved reasonable accuracy. I suspect that being under a car, with a clear view of (at least) the ground in at least one direction is even better. I haven't tossed a GPS device under there to be sure, but come on.
Even my Droid can get a decent GPS fix within my own 2-story steel-roofed house with trees all around, and the GPS receiver in there is (at best) an afterthought.
And nevermind other rather common tech like WAAS helps with NLOS location, as well.
Getting useful data from a GPS receiver stuck to the bottom of a car with a magnet or something sounds perfectly plausible to me.
Obviously, much greater power is required to accelerate to 69 mph than to cruise at 71, so the answer is likely more complicated than "because we failed".
We can only speculate as to why the volt now behaves how it is reported to, until someone gets their wrench onto one and writes about it.
*shrug*
Speed is easy.
I have three vehicles that I drive: A 1979 Pontiac Firebird, a 1995 BMW 325i, and a 2002 GMC Safari. I've driven all of them, at length, at speeds over 100MPH.
It's no great feat.
I also used to compact a daily 20-minute commute into an 8-minute morning jaunt, on narrow country roads. The car in question was electronically limited to 113 MPH, so I kept the sustained speed at around 110. There were enough stop signs and towns in the way to make wide-open acceleration, gear changes, and threshold braking a big part of the trip.
And since I did that 5 days a week, twice a day, the car ate a set of front brake pads every month and went through tires in a hurry. The drivetrain never faltered.
This car was $14,000 new in 1996.
But it's really not very impressive.
100MPH in a $100,000 car that has a consumable $36,000 battery pack? Not impressive, either: I'd rather buy some gas.
That might make sense.
But it might also make sense to opportunistically drive the wheels directly whenever doing so would allow the engine to be at or near peak efficiency, as doing so eliminates whole set of electromechanical conversions which might otherwise act to reduce total efficiency.
*shrug*
It's all still postulation. I, for one, am simply upset that the Volt does have mechanical link between the engine and the wheels, since the system described early on did not. Even though I have no intention of buying such a thing in either configuration, I really wanted to see how well a simple (generator/electric motor, with batteries) design like that would have worked in the marketplace and on the road.
Point #2 was from TFA:
It turns out that's not correct. We're now told by Volt's engineering team that when the Volt's lithium-ion battery pack runs down and at speeds near or above 70 mph the Volt's gasoline engine will directly drive the front wheels along with the electric motors.
I like your theory about #1, and considered it myself.
Unfortunately, it'll be awhile before we know who's right. :)
I was going to write something about how the Volt is a proper mid-size sedan, with four doors, a usable cargo area, and plenty of room for 4 people, whereas the Leaf is a tiny little compact.
And then I started looking at the measurements of each one: The Leaf is only slightly narrower and shorter, and a little bit taller. It's likely that they're about equally spacious in practical use. (I'd like to have compared weight, too, but couldn't find numbers for the Leaf. The Volt, meanwhile, is about 3,900 pounds, which is certainly more than the Leaf.)
So, you're right: It is too big, and likely too heavy. But it does include its own generator, whereas the Leaf does not. This distinction is not small, and may be important for some buyers.
Me, for instance. I don't like having absolute range limits on my travels. I also live in the midwest, so currently, driving is often the only way to get from A to B (though I do walk or ride my bike sometimes). I'm the only driver in my family so we could do very well with only one car. Almost all of my personal driving is under 15 miles per day (which is -perfect- for an electric vehicle) but every couple of weeks we do like to disappear for a few hours to some far-away place.
So if I had to choose between the two as my sole mode of transportation, I'd find the Leaf to be completely useless since long trips would be out of the question, whereas the too-heavy Volt might begin to make good sense since it would eliminate buying/renting/borrowing/maintaining a second car just for semi-frequent long trips, even if it is too big, too heavy, and too wasteful.
Umm...
It's simpler than that.
First, let's start at the beginning. The Volt was promised to be a series hybrid. That is: a gasoline-fired generator, which in turn would power an electric motor and/or charge the batteries. There was to be no mechanical connection between the gasoline engine and the driven wheels.
There is nothing wrong with the original concept which would have prevented the car from moving in the event of having completely dead-flat batteries in the middle of the desert. Systems just like this have been in use for a Really Long Time on diesel-electric locomotives and work just fine without any batteries at all.
And it's improper to think of "charging the batteries" as being somehow different from "powering the motors." Volts is volts, and with 55kW of electrical generation capacity, it can do both at the same time.
I, for one, am willing to assume that the statements about the original concept were true at that time, and that later design revisions changed things up a bit. The question is then: Why was it changed?
And here are some probable answers:
1. It's now stated that the gasoline engine is directly driving the wheels when speeds exceed 70MPH. This may simply be due to the electronics and batteries being unable to keep themselves cool during sustained driving at above 70MPH.
And why 70MPH instead of 50MPH or 90MPH? Probably, and I'm guessing here because nobody who's driven one of these cars seems to actually write about it: Unlike the Prius, I doubt the Volt has a transmission at all -- at most, it's just a mechanical clutch feeding the differential. Which is good, because it's fewer parts to wear out, and one less mechanical system to waste energy with.
In a transmissionless drivetrain, it's completely likely that below 70MPH the engine would be running at an inefficient speed, whereas at 70MPH and up the engine can begin to run within its peak torque (read: most efficient) powerband.
2. It's also now stated that the engine directly drives the wheels at all speeds when the batteries are flat. If this is actually the case, then my above theory about having no transmission is false. However, I'm going to stick to my guns on this one, and assume the reports are simply wrong about this function. After all, the media test-drives occurred only yesterday, and so far we're still in the smoke-and-mirrors level of blogospheric bullshit regarding the whole thing.
And since the car can be so broadly manipulated and fine-tuned by GM in software, it's even possible for them to give the car a last-minute firmware update on launch day.
Therefore, I reckon that my own postulation is as good as anyone else's, and would like to submit that we really won't know much about how the Volt actually operates until they're at the dealerships for sale.
I, for one, am not fully convinced that leaving the iPhone 4 in the pub was completely accidental.
As stated above, I don't have U-Verse TV anymore, but...
The DVR does suck. It does some stupid things. Some of those stupid things that it does, though, could easily be explained by patents held by other folks who also produce DVRs.
My chief complaint about it is that it does a lousy job scaling from 480i to 1080i, and refuses to output 480i natively so I can scale it myself without a diving into the menus every time I switch between watching SD and HD programming.
Regarding internet connections: I abuse my 12Mbps Uverse connection all the time. Some sites are slow while some others are fast, but that's no different than any other provider. I routinely download big things at a sustained ~1.3 megabytes per second with HTTP, and a bit less than that with torrents.
My chief complaint about their Internet connection is that DNS lookups sometimes take forever, and the provided VDSL gateway/router box does not permit the DNS server addresses to be changed.
I can fix this easily enough by various means (ranging from using my own router, manually specifying DNS on each machine on my network, to running my own instance of BIND), but I should not have to, and all of these things come with various tradeoffs that I find variously unacceptable.