English is so long-winded sometimes. It's nice to learn a specific term, and it surprises me none that it happens to be German. Indeed, I might expect that this entire paragraph could be accurately surmised in one or two German words.
I, adolf, 21054, should spend more time studying that fine language.
Yes, it can work remarkably well. I had my car do that on a fast left turn from one road to another after a short rain that left the road greasy: Once I crossed centerline, the crown of the road threw the back end out. The car fixed itself -- all I had to do was stay on the throttle and steer. The magic brakes, engine output reduction, and various sensors handled the rest.
It was awesome, especially so since I wasn't expecting it at the time. I just spun the wheel to opposite lock and then aimed torward progress.
But if you're in a cold climate, please try the Scandinavian flick sometime in an empty, safe, and familiar lot. My money says that with enough idiocy (or enough careful practice), the car won't be able to fix it for you. And that you'll eventually be able to skid the car at least 180 degrees, with all systems on, using nothing but steering and throttle input.
After that, without much creative thought, it should be obvious that these maneuvers/control inputs can happen at any time, given the unpredictable nature of the surrounding world and all of the other idiots/skilled drivers out there.
It's easy in my E36 BMW with ASC+T to put the thing into a ridiculously long drift, or force it to turn completely around, now that I've learned how. But previous to my careful experimentation, it seemed like magic intervention when it worked well, and terrifying when it couldn't and I expected it to.
Please do these parking lots maneuvers, if able, whether or not you'd like to discuss the point. If nothing else you'll learn more about how your car works in less-than-ideal situations, which is always a good thing, and that will help keep you and others alive longer, and your car and other cars out of the body shop.:)
[Note to all, and disclosure: Keeping ASC+T on and fully active has never made any real driving situation involving speed worse, in my experience, than not having such assistance. My point is not that it does not help, but instead that it cannot absolutely prevent an idiot or a skilled operator from making a car misbehave in terminal ways ("spin") as was previously alluded to. My point is not that the system is without merit; but just that there are limits, as there must be in any system governed by physics.
I've modified my car to keep some of the aspects of the system that I like and remove others that I don't like. I did this in a reversible fashion after fully exploring everything that ASC+T has to offer, and have no intention of returning the system to stock form because I like it better this way.
(And yes, I once got stuck in deep mud with ASC+T switched on and the car in stock form: It refused to budge, or even really attempt to budge, even with the throttle fully open. I hit the switch to turn it off, the rear wheels immediately sent up a pair of rooster tails, and I was on my way with two new ruts in my back yard to show for it. But even that's not real driving involving speed...)]
Yeah, RS marketing seemed to be the key to the thing, but it barely worked. I remember the first time I had to give up a name and address at Radio Shack to get one (they sent me lovely, expensively-produced glossy catalogs full of barcodes), while the second time they'd apparently gotten sick of the hassle and were basically handing them out to anyone who asked without getting anything in return.
That said: Meetings. When I was 20 (around the same time), I hadn't yet sat in on any "proper" meeting, my first/only kid was on the way, I had a shitty job making no money, and a slightly younger local entrepreneuresque cocksucker kept asking me for help with *nix stuff (IRIX, Linux) and I foolishly kept feeding it to him despite his continual and empty promises of a real paycheck, some day.
He eventually became a well-paid vice president of a local Internet/advertising company, driving a new car while I had the jolopy, only to eventually move to California for a startup, where he failed and had his house repossessed.
I was bitter about the whole thing for a long time, until I learned the failure part...which made a tiny part of me very happy indeed.
Ah, 20: To inherently trust people to keep their word was either a blessing, a curse, or both.
Aye - the Saab (any Saab, AFAIK) is designed for this.
You remind me of my own 90's car: I drove a base-model Chevy Beretta. Also FWD and extremely front-heavy, and with no rear sway-bar to help balance things: Its natural tendency was severe understeer.
It took years of practice, but I eventually learned how to force that car to behave normally, and even oversteer predictably with late braking and mostly by just paying attention to every little bit of feedback the car offered and resisting the temptation to fuck with the handbrake.
I went through a lot of front tires and brakes on that car while learning to fudge the dynamics of it and properly threshold brake at speed. The ABS was broken and disabled, and until I badly flat-spotted two sets of very new tires within a month, I thought I liked it that way because it was more visceral. (I fixed the ABS not long after that because it was cheaper to live with it, than without it.)
Smoking pads, nonexistent brake pedal from boiling brake fluid, caliper pins' lube turned to glue from heat, breaking steel belts in tires, AND triple-digit speeds on sleepy country roads? Check.
I learned the fuck out of that car. I'm surprised I lived through it, and that fire was never involved, but I did that sort of driving every day for years. (I only really wrecked once: Going backwards through a ditch into a field of corn stubble at 80MPH, all I broke was one tire (broke the bead seal) and one rear wheel bearing. I remember that the quiet sound of the radio was deafening after landing, I didn't stall the motor, and that the deputy who showed up helped me put the spare on and didn't bother charging me with anything.)
And that was great adolescent fun, but now I prefer my much heavier RWD car with 50/50 weight distribution and good ABS brakes. It is, incidentally, exactly the same model year as the Beretta was, but it is so much better at everything that I will never understand its limitations in the same way as that cheap Chevy as long as I constrain myself to public roads.
Whenever I commanded the Beretta to do the impossible, it taught me a lesson and I learned from it.
And whenever I command the BMW to do the same, it pretty much just does it. Lessons are few on the roads we've got around here, with that car: It behaves itself very well.
It is, therefore, much less fun...but also much faster, and much safer. I'd like to think that perhaps I am finally growing old and simply driving more cautiously, but: The Chevy was a bit less than $15k new in 1995 while the BMW was a bit less than $50k in that same year. And if anything my average speed 'round a turn increased significantly when I went from the Beretta to the 325i. It's a much better car, but it just isn't as much fun...
(somehow I rather expected you to respond to this...)
You're right (and I am surprised to learn) about the fact that cars must now include ESC, which (obviously) includes traction control and ABS.
That said, here's another old BMW story: My 1995 E36 has ASC+T, which is an early incarnation of modern ESC.
1. It might be fine with normal driving. The car doesn't go sideways at reasonable speeds, as long as one's foot is nailed to the accelerator -- but who nails their foot to the accelerator when not being pedantic about testing things when those things appear to be going awry? (The system can retard spark, apply brakes individually, and close a secondary throttle body -- but cannot ever add more air since the primary throttle is cable-operated.)
1.1. Remember, "reasonable speeds."
2. It stops working above about 100km/H (I imagine this limitation is improved/eliminated by now), and indeed I have gone unexpectedly (and otherwise uneventfully) sideways 'round a curving exit ramp near my house in cold weather with dry pavement when I was going rather faster than that...with the system on.
3. It's trivial to fool the system even at parking lot speeds on snow or ice with the Scandinavian flick, or obvious variations. The car predictably goes sideways, and all you can do to keep it under control is steer appropriately and/or plan ahead before executing the maneuver. This, even with new stock-size skinny Blizzaks on 15" wheels. I've turned the car more than completely around with the system enabled, using nothing more than throttle and steering inputs.
3.1. I've also unexpectedly lost the tail of the car with changing road camber, the original automatic tranny, and the system fully engaged: Turning left onto a street at a higher-than-advisable speed, crossing the crown of the road really pissed things off. (Countersteering was necessary; if the car were behaving totally neutrally, it would not have been; the radius would simply increase...and I'd have wiped out one or two parked cars.) (See my note about idiots, which I occasionally am myself.)
4. If it behaves this way in winter parking lots at normal speeds, it must also behave the same way in situations with more grip at higher speeds: Indeed, I haven't had much issue getting the tail out with the system fully on with dry pavement, though I do not have a place to safely test it more thoroughly at high-ish speeds. (The car is mighty grippy, in and of itself.)
5. I've since eviscerated the secondary throttle body because I felt it was always way too heavy-handed in its application, hence making it even easier to put the car sideways and while maintaining some aspects of other features that I do like (traction control, for one).
6. Therefore, I've got experience with the car in three different ways: Normal, completely off, and eviscerated. (I also have experience in the same exact car with both an automatic and a manual transmission for the first two cases.)
7. The Scandinavian flick isn't any different between these different modes of operation.
So, those are my observations. Here are my questions:
1. If the tail doesn't come around, what happens instead? If I pilot a car with the most advanced ESC system possible into a turn at a speed at which it is impossible to maintain road adhesion, what happens? Understeer? Oversteer? A combination of both, causing a lovely 4-wheel drift and increased radius? ("Nothing exuberant" is not an option: Momentum, mass, gravity, etc. -- something's got to give.)
2. If I deliberately piss the car off (Scandinavian Flick), what happens?
2.1. (Remember, the Flick is something that requires the vehicle to be approaching the limits of grip to begin with, else one just looks stupid and/or winds up leaving the edge of the road.)
3. Long, protracted exit ramp with a poorly-banked 270-degree turn. Far faster than advisable, car so-far behaving neutrally but near its physical limits. Lift the throttle. What happens ne
I knew about the PS/2 variations (even gathered a couple of them up from the local RadioShack, IIRC along with a variety of free adapters back when the getting was good), and I'd heard about a USB (or was it just RS-232 serial?) incarnation.
But wireless? Really? Neat. Were those freebies as well?
The biggest problem I had with the device was not the software or the tracking (as you pointed out, Slashdot quickly allowed my Slackware box to be equipped with properly-genericized software), but that it was really hard to use. It did a lousy job of reading normal bar codes, and Cue::Cat's own slanted ones were harder yet to capture. And the form factor sucked.
Oh, and IIRC there was some issue with keyboard passthrough that I decided was a bad thing, but someone had hacked together support for it to be used on a PS/2 mouse port instead. (And since I had a serial mouse at the time, I needed no passthrough, and was thus free of its reigns.)
Ah Cue::Cat, or daisy-chained peripherals in general: A tape drive in series with a software dongle in series with a printer, all on one parallel port. The blood of a young goat over an external SCSI bus. The magical twist in a floppy drive cable.
I love pinball. Some day, when I grow up (if this is a thing that will ever occur), I will dedicate a large room in my house to nothing but pinball and perhaps a pool table. I like pinball games because they are tend to be visceral and real, and not at all related to modern video games, and that they're self-paced: I can hold a ball and plan a shot for as long as I want, at least until the machine resets after a half-minute or so of inactivity.
But I don't like many incarnations of modern pinball: Anything with a video display that I have to divert my attention to in order to score detracts (or distracts) from the physics of just getting the shots right.
The more I have to take my eye off of the ball to understand the progress of the game, the more the game tends to suck. I don't want to hit fictitious targets on a display; I want to hit targets that are mechanically interactive with the ball. Bumpers, pop-ups, magnets, traps, ramps, that sort of thing.
If there are cues that enable better scoring with different targets, then those should be plain so that they can be seen at a glance (such as playfield lamps) instead of on a twitchy-feeling, ever-changing video display with zero mechanical interaction.
I really don't want video eyecandy, at all: I just want physics, scoring, and cues. The big orange dot-matrix LED scoreboard display on seeming every pinball game released in the past twenty years is a nuisance that I never even see unless I'm waiting for the next ball to drop. (I'll check my score when the game ends, thanks, and I'll stuff my first quarter(s) in based on how the playfield looks, not based on how fancy the signage is.)
Otherwise, I might as well fire up the PS3 or 360, which I also enjoy, but not enough that I'd be willing to dedicate a room of my house toward gaming with one (or several). So when I grow up, I'm not getting one of these machines described in TFA.
(On the other hand: If there were a video-based pinball with a good basic mechanical layout and a way to bounce the ball around with non-distracting video targets (grids of electromagnets making linear motors of arbitrary orientation?) and predictable fake physics, I might be fully sold on the concept. But nobody seems to be doing that.)
I think folks with ridiculous and useless pickups (useless around here, anyway: this is flat country), with lift kits and silly-huge tires, and exhaust stacks run up through the bed suffer from a different sort of malady: Their equipment might be fine, but they're so obese that they haven't been able to see it for themselves in years.
Assuming that the steering wheel is (eventually) mechanically connected to the tie rods, and that the electronics cannot add unrequested throttle: Any car can suffer from throttle-lift-induced oversteer in a long turn, or the beginning sequence of the Scandinavian Flick, and unexpectedly be flung wildly out of control with an unprepared driver.
I dare say that this is do-able on any surface, even with the most front-heavy FWD car you can get your hands on.
It really has nothing at all to do with being massively-overpowered, and everything to do with the fact that they're still just cars that ride on 4 wheels. Neither fancy automatic braking, nor throttle reduction, nor magic transmissions, nor AWD, nor instantaneously self-adjusting suspensions will fix the two (related) scenarios that I describe above.
In other words: Put an idiot into a car that "can't spin," and he'll do it anyway, same as a decent driver who is putting effort into making it happen. This shouldn't be surprising (and really has nothing to do with the reluctance of the motorcycle press to accept technological change).
16MPG? That sounds fairly excellent for such a beastly machine that can actually generate downforce (which can never happen for free).
Even cooling this thing must be a drag (literally), and the big tires themselves eat huge amounts of energy just in overcoming rolling resistance. Everything about the car (including the hybrid aspect, which seems more about performance than economy) seems to indicate that it should be very, very thirsty.
For a totally unfair comparison: My old straight-6 BMW averages about 20MPG with somewhat-spirited mixed driving, and gets about 26 on the highway (it used to be a bit better on the highway, but the diff gearing is currently "wrong" due to other changes). It's got a reasonable drag coefficient, doesn't generate meaningful downforce, cooling it is fairly easy since there is nowhere near as much waste heat, the tires are not so big nor nearly so sticky, and it has far less than half as many functional moving parts (and around 1/5th the power of the Ferrari).
At 16MPG, if that is indeed the number, it sounds like they've done a wonderful job with efficiency: It is certainly not a concept that was cast to the wind when they designed it.
You've heard that Porsche owners are compensating for something.
Perhaps driving a Ferrari on the freeway turns you into an idiot, just as owning a Porsche makes your dick fall off at the very moment that you finish up the paperwork.
(I would not want to be the person responsible for picking up all of the cast-off penises at the Porsche dealer, but if I were I'd not own anything better than a Chevy, just to be safe.)
Is visiting any relic, site, or exhibit utilitarian?
(The answer is, of course: Perhaps. An architect might study architecture in person while abroad, a painter might find some utility in seeing some works in person, and an embalmer might find utility in viewing a guy who has been dead for decades.)
I could even see an in-flight request for specific logs to be sent, but it isn't like you can change an engine in-flight so I'm not sure how much time that would really save.
They can't change an engine in-flight, but that doesn't mean they can't pressure hammer the valves or perform other creative maintenance during the flight.
I think the Firefox extension is called Greasemonkey, which requires luck, foresight, and ability as a prerequisite.
Myself, I just look at the experts-exchange links, and allow them to bolster my hatred of what some people want the web to become: I've been consuming WWW for at least two decades, and it's not the same as it used to be largely because of folks like that who actively trying to break everything that was once good.
But that just brings the debate to another (also important) point: Is the contract for the service, or the hardware, or both together?
Frankly I think I should be able to use my hardware however I want to, even if it is subsidized by that contract, as long as I keep paying for the contracted monthly service (or the early termination fee).
Who does it harm if I use my phone on dozen different carriers, as long as I keep the money flowing according to contract?
But there is precedent that goes the other way: When I buy a house on a mortgage, the bank makes me agree to keep the house in good shape and properly insure it so that it stays that way. Same as a car with a lien from a lender. And in the case of some local buy-here, pay-here lots, the car has a mechanism to disable the vehicle in the event of non-payment and a GPS receiver so they can find it easily....and if they find out that the only reason I stopped paying for it was because it was totaled in a wreck/race/demolition derby and I didn't bother to insure it against that, lawsuits will happen.
Perhaps the question is this: Does an unlocked, under-contract phone destroy the value of that phone for the carrier in the event of default? I don't think so (because I realize that it's just software), but I'm not in charge.
I use Verizon and live in a semi-populated area (Ohio), and travel to all manner of little podunk town for business, often on back roads to keep the driving interesting. The only time my phone has been "roaming" in recent years has been down at a buddy's farm down in a random Kentucky holler where the nights are quiet, the stars are magnificent, and you have to climb a hill to get any signal at all.
Otherwise: West to Chicago? Verizon. East to Connecticut? Verizon. South to Florida? Verizon. In the depths of rural Indiana? Verizon. Do I see occasional coverage caps on twisty mountain roads in Tennessee? Yes. Roaming? No.
I dare say that roaming surcharges and kickbacks mean very little to the most giant of cell phone giants. And AFAIK, as it stands today, I can pop a European SIM card into my still-on-contract Verizon-sourced Motorola Droid 4, and use it overseas without involving Verizon at all or any particular fuckery.
So again, it's not roaming that is the big deal.
Instead, I offer an alternative theory on why unlocking hurts operators: Second-hand sales and after-contract use. When you bring in an old, used phone and have it activated, AFAICT you don't need a multi-year contract with any US carrier. As these contracts provide the sort of captive market that such companies (including local independently-owned dealers) thrive on, the more lock-in they have the more money they tend to make.
If you can take your old phone to any other carrier and it just works, neither the original carrier nor the alternative carrier makes as much money as they would have if you were forced to buy a new phone.
To use my own anecdote: I'm married to Verizon for service (which is OK - it's good service, though expensive). My family has multiple contracts that all expire at different times, and it's easiest to just keep going with it. But in theory as the contracts expire I can just unlock my phones and use a different carrier. Simple, as long as unlocking is not illegal.
However, if unlocking is illegal, I'd have a choice to make: If I want to switch carriers, I would either have to buy new phones (probably under contract, because phones are all bloody expensive), or commit the illegal act of unlocking phones that I already own.
In other words, my choices would be to spend more money to replace good hardware and sign another contract, or commit a crime, or stay with Verizon.
But with the freedom to unlock, I can just keep the devices and pick any compatible carrier. I, the consumer, win because the market becomes inherently more competitive and I have more choice. The competitors in that market might tend to lose because they don't have as much control over how I use their services, or the sources by which I acquire new/different/used hardware since I'm not locked in forever, but that's no longer my problem.
I see it all the time at Wal-Mart: A giant wall of HDMI-connected displays, many of which have the audio and video out-of-sync with one-another (but which presumably sync well with themselves, if somewhat latent from the original signal.).
It sounds (and looks) like an array of slightly different tape delays.
Maybe it's the distribution system (likely), maybe it's the TV itself (I've at least seen this myself in isolation, if you read what I wrote), but:
I remain unconvinced that this is a problem related to the signalling format. I write this on a DVI monitor which, AFAICT, is presently doing HDCP and all of the other things that HDMI entails. All that differs is the connector. (I can even route audio to it if I want to.)
And when I've plugged in a DVI-HDMI cable instead of DVI-DVI, the monitor works just the same.
As to searching: I can use Google, too. If there is a latency problem with HDMI, then I should be able to Google it up as the same problem with DVI, since they're exactly the same damned thing in this regard. But I don't really find much results for DVI latency, because nobody seems to be talking about that.
So I, again, blame the display: If there really were issues with DVI latency then hordes of hardc0re-ish gamers, with thousands of dollars wrapped up in ridiculous video hardware alone, would be complaining about it. But they're not.
I have no particular love for Samsung (my 52" A550 was simply the best product available for me at the time), but if your more-recent 7 is showing latency issues then perhaps it is simply inherently broken in ways similar to the Sharp TVs that I've experienced recently.
(Just because it sucks, doesn't mean it's not reality.)
Oh, that one's easy. Use a pile of old textbooks. I recommend geology, because they tend to be a large format.
I use ammo boxes, since neither the ballot box nor the jury box did a very good job at holding up the monitor.
(Yes, really. They stack nicely enough, and keep the seldom-used screen that I use for diagnosing other computers and/or my normally-headless Linux box just above the height of the other two monitors on the desk. Cheap, too; these were free.)
They've changed it, then, sometime in the past half-decade or so. That's a good thing.
I used to drink that stuff by the gallon until I started looking at ingredient lists for unnecessary or particularly vile things, of which phosphoric acid is both. Perhaps I'll pick some up again.
...which is an interesting story, but does reinforce my main point: HDMI and latency are two different things in common use.
Glad you got it working acceptably. I had my own latency woes with the original Wii at one point: In addition to all of the bolt-on latency I described earlier, I was using an AVR to scale to 1080i and transmogrify from component to HDMI.
I don't use the Wii much (does anyone?), and it took me a few months to realize that each of these functions in the AVR was adding substantially to the latency of the entire system when the Wii was in use. Things always felt funny with analog inputs ever since I'd first installed the AVR, but wasn't until I decided to play some Super Mario that I was able to pin down exactly why things weren't quite right.
Adding a component cable between the TV and the AVR, and disabling its scaler for the Wii's input fixed it fine: It's just an analog pass-through in this mode.
On computers, I'm sensitive enough to input latency that I can't stand any wireless mouse I've ever used on my desktop. It's good that Dell had at least a partial fix.
Slashdot Mirror
That was 2001, not 2006.
Thank you.
English is so long-winded sometimes. It's nice to learn a specific term, and it surprises me none that it happens to be German. Indeed, I might expect that this entire paragraph could be accurately surmised in one or two German words.
I, adolf, 21054, should spend more time studying that fine language.
Yes, it can work remarkably well. I had my car do that on a fast left turn from one road to another after a short rain that left the road greasy: Once I crossed centerline, the crown of the road threw the back end out. The car fixed itself -- all I had to do was stay on the throttle and steer. The magic brakes, engine output reduction, and various sensors handled the rest.
It was awesome, especially so since I wasn't expecting it at the time. I just spun the wheel to opposite lock and then aimed torward progress.
But if you're in a cold climate, please try the Scandinavian flick sometime in an empty, safe, and familiar lot. My money says that with enough idiocy (or enough careful practice), the car won't be able to fix it for you. And that you'll eventually be able to skid the car at least 180 degrees, with all systems on, using nothing but steering and throttle input.
After that, without much creative thought, it should be obvious that these maneuvers/control inputs can happen at any time, given the unpredictable nature of the surrounding world and all of the other idiots/skilled drivers out there.
It's easy in my E36 BMW with ASC+T to put the thing into a ridiculously long drift, or force it to turn completely around, now that I've learned how. But previous to my careful experimentation, it seemed like magic intervention when it worked well, and terrifying when it couldn't and I expected it to.
Please do these parking lots maneuvers, if able, whether or not you'd like to discuss the point. If nothing else you'll learn more about how your car works in less-than-ideal situations, which is always a good thing, and that will help keep you and others alive longer, and your car and other cars out of the body shop. :)
[Note to all, and disclosure: Keeping ASC+T on and fully active has never made any real driving situation involving speed worse, in my experience, than not having such assistance. My point is not that it does not help, but instead that it cannot absolutely prevent an idiot or a skilled operator from making a car misbehave in terminal ways ("spin") as was previously alluded to. My point is not that the system is without merit; but just that there are limits, as there must be in any system governed by physics.
I've modified my car to keep some of the aspects of the system that I like and remove others that I don't like. I did this in a reversible fashion after fully exploring everything that ASC+T has to offer, and have no intention of returning the system to stock form because I like it better this way.
(And yes, I once got stuck in deep mud with ASC+T switched on and the car in stock form: It refused to budge, or even really attempt to budge, even with the throttle fully open. I hit the switch to turn it off, the rear wheels immediately sent up a pair of rooster tails, and I was on my way with two new ruts in my back yard to show for it. But even that's not real driving involving speed...)]
Cheers.
Yeah, RS marketing seemed to be the key to the thing, but it barely worked. I remember the first time I had to give up a name and address at Radio Shack to get one (they sent me lovely, expensively-produced glossy catalogs full of barcodes), while the second time they'd apparently gotten sick of the hassle and were basically handing them out to anyone who asked without getting anything in return.
That said: Meetings. When I was 20 (around the same time), I hadn't yet sat in on any "proper" meeting, my first/only kid was on the way, I had a shitty job making no money, and a slightly younger local entrepreneuresque cocksucker kept asking me for help with *nix stuff (IRIX, Linux) and I foolishly kept feeding it to him despite his continual and empty promises of a real paycheck, some day.
He eventually became a well-paid vice president of a local Internet/advertising company, driving a new car while I had the jolopy, only to eventually move to California for a startup, where he failed and had his house repossessed.
I was bitter about the whole thing for a long time, until I learned the failure part...which made a tiny part of me very happy indeed.
Ah, 20: To inherently trust people to keep their word was either a blessing, a curse, or both.
Aye - the Saab (any Saab, AFAIK) is designed for this.
You remind me of my own 90's car: I drove a base-model Chevy Beretta. Also FWD and extremely front-heavy, and with no rear sway-bar to help balance things: Its natural tendency was severe understeer.
It took years of practice, but I eventually learned how to force that car to behave normally, and even oversteer predictably with late braking and mostly by just paying attention to every little bit of feedback the car offered and resisting the temptation to fuck with the handbrake.
I went through a lot of front tires and brakes on that car while learning to fudge the dynamics of it and properly threshold brake at speed. The ABS was broken and disabled, and until I badly flat-spotted two sets of very new tires within a month, I thought I liked it that way because it was more visceral. (I fixed the ABS not long after that because it was cheaper to live with it, than without it.)
Smoking pads, nonexistent brake pedal from boiling brake fluid, caliper pins' lube turned to glue from heat, breaking steel belts in tires, AND triple-digit speeds on sleepy country roads? Check.
I learned the fuck out of that car. I'm surprised I lived through it, and that fire was never involved, but I did that sort of driving every day for years. (I only really wrecked once: Going backwards through a ditch into a field of corn stubble at 80MPH, all I broke was one tire (broke the bead seal) and one rear wheel bearing. I remember that the quiet sound of the radio was deafening after landing, I didn't stall the motor, and that the deputy who showed up helped me put the spare on and didn't bother charging me with anything.)
And that was great adolescent fun, but now I prefer my much heavier RWD car with 50/50 weight distribution and good ABS brakes. It is, incidentally, exactly the same model year as the Beretta was, but it is so much better at everything that I will never understand its limitations in the same way as that cheap Chevy as long as I constrain myself to public roads.
Whenever I commanded the Beretta to do the impossible, it taught me a lesson and I learned from it.
And whenever I command the BMW to do the same, it pretty much just does it. Lessons are few on the roads we've got around here, with that car: It behaves itself very well.
It is, therefore, much less fun...but also much faster, and much safer. I'd like to think that perhaps I am finally growing old and simply driving more cautiously, but: The Chevy was a bit less than $15k new in 1995 while the BMW was a bit less than $50k in that same year. And if anything my average speed 'round a turn increased significantly when I went from the Beretta to the 325i. It's a much better car, but it just isn't as much fun...
*shrug*
(somehow I rather expected you to respond to this...)
You're right (and I am surprised to learn) about the fact that cars must now include ESC, which (obviously) includes traction control and ABS.
That said, here's another old BMW story: My 1995 E36 has ASC+T, which is an early incarnation of modern ESC.
1. It might be fine with normal driving. The car doesn't go sideways at reasonable speeds, as long as one's foot is nailed to the accelerator -- but who nails their foot to the accelerator when not being pedantic about testing things when those things appear to be going awry? (The system can retard spark, apply brakes individually, and close a secondary throttle body -- but cannot ever add more air since the primary throttle is cable-operated.)
1.1. Remember, "reasonable speeds."
2. It stops working above about 100km/H (I imagine this limitation is improved/eliminated by now), and indeed I have gone unexpectedly (and otherwise uneventfully) sideways 'round a curving exit ramp near my house in cold weather with dry pavement when I was going rather faster than that...with the system on.
3. It's trivial to fool the system even at parking lot speeds on snow or ice with the Scandinavian flick, or obvious variations. The car predictably goes sideways, and all you can do to keep it under control is steer appropriately and/or plan ahead before executing the maneuver. This, even with new stock-size skinny Blizzaks on 15" wheels. I've turned the car more than completely around with the system enabled, using nothing more than throttle and steering inputs.
3.1. I've also unexpectedly lost the tail of the car with changing road camber, the original automatic tranny, and the system fully engaged: Turning left onto a street at a higher-than-advisable speed, crossing the crown of the road really pissed things off. (Countersteering was necessary; if the car were behaving totally neutrally, it would not have been; the radius would simply increase...and I'd have wiped out one or two parked cars.) (See my note about idiots, which I occasionally am myself.)
4. If it behaves this way in winter parking lots at normal speeds, it must also behave the same way in situations with more grip at higher speeds: Indeed, I haven't had much issue getting the tail out with the system fully on with dry pavement, though I do not have a place to safely test it more thoroughly at high-ish speeds. (The car is mighty grippy, in and of itself.)
5. I've since eviscerated the secondary throttle body because I felt it was always way too heavy-handed in its application, hence making it even easier to put the car sideways and while maintaining some aspects of other features that I do like (traction control, for one).
6. Therefore, I've got experience with the car in three different ways: Normal, completely off, and eviscerated. (I also have experience in the same exact car with both an automatic and a manual transmission for the first two cases.)
7. The Scandinavian flick isn't any different between these different modes of operation.
So, those are my observations. Here are my questions:
1. If the tail doesn't come around, what happens instead? If I pilot a car with the most advanced ESC system possible into a turn at a speed at which it is impossible to maintain road adhesion, what happens? Understeer? Oversteer? A combination of both, causing a lovely 4-wheel drift and increased radius? ("Nothing exuberant" is not an option: Momentum, mass, gravity, etc. -- something's got to give.)
2. If I deliberately piss the car off (Scandinavian Flick), what happens?
2.1. (Remember, the Flick is something that requires the vehicle to be approaching the limits of grip to begin with, else one just looks stupid and/or winds up leaving the edge of the road.)
3. Long, protracted exit ramp with a poorly-banked 270-degree turn. Far faster than advisable, car so-far behaving neutrally but near its physical limits. Lift the throttle. What happens ne
There's no accounting for taste.
I knew about the PS/2 variations (even gathered a couple of them up from the local RadioShack, IIRC along with a variety of free adapters back when the getting was good), and I'd heard about a USB (or was it just RS-232 serial?) incarnation.
But wireless? Really? Neat. Were those freebies as well?
The biggest problem I had with the device was not the software or the tracking (as you pointed out, Slashdot quickly allowed my Slackware box to be equipped with properly-genericized software), but that it was really hard to use. It did a lousy job of reading normal bar codes, and Cue::Cat's own slanted ones were harder yet to capture. And the form factor sucked.
Oh, and IIRC there was some issue with keyboard passthrough that I decided was a bad thing, but someone had hacked together support for it to be used on a PS/2 mouse port instead. (And since I had a serial mouse at the time, I needed no passthrough, and was thus free of its reigns.)
Ah Cue::Cat, or daisy-chained peripherals in general: A tape drive in series with a software dongle in series with a printer, all on one parallel port. The blood of a young goat over an external SCSI bus. The magical twist in a floppy drive cable.
*sob*, etc.
I love pinball. Some day, when I grow up (if this is a thing that will ever occur), I will dedicate a large room in my house to nothing but pinball and perhaps a pool table. I like pinball games because they are tend to be visceral and real, and not at all related to modern video games, and that they're self-paced: I can hold a ball and plan a shot for as long as I want, at least until the machine resets after a half-minute or so of inactivity.
But I don't like many incarnations of modern pinball: Anything with a video display that I have to divert my attention to in order to score detracts (or distracts) from the physics of just getting the shots right.
The more I have to take my eye off of the ball to understand the progress of the game, the more the game tends to suck. I don't want to hit fictitious targets on a display; I want to hit targets that are mechanically interactive with the ball. Bumpers, pop-ups, magnets, traps, ramps, that sort of thing.
If there are cues that enable better scoring with different targets, then those should be plain so that they can be seen at a glance (such as playfield lamps) instead of on a twitchy-feeling, ever-changing video display with zero mechanical interaction.
I really don't want video eyecandy, at all: I just want physics, scoring, and cues. The big orange dot-matrix LED scoreboard display on seeming every pinball game released in the past twenty years is a nuisance that I never even see unless I'm waiting for the next ball to drop. (I'll check my score when the game ends, thanks, and I'll stuff my first quarter(s) in based on how the playfield looks, not based on how fancy the signage is.)
Otherwise, I might as well fire up the PS3 or 360, which I also enjoy, but not enough that I'd be willing to dedicate a room of my house toward gaming with one (or several). So when I grow up, I'm not getting one of these machines described in TFA.
(On the other hand: If there were a video-based pinball with a good basic mechanical layout and a way to bounce the ball around with non-distracting video targets (grids of electromagnets making linear motors of arbitrary orientation?) and predictable fake physics, I might be fully sold on the concept. But nobody seems to be doing that.)
I think folks with ridiculous and useless pickups (useless around here, anyway: this is flat country), with lift kits and silly-huge tires, and exhaust stacks run up through the bed suffer from a different sort of malady: Their equipment might be fine, but they're so obese that they haven't been able to see it for themselves in years.
Assuming that the steering wheel is (eventually) mechanically connected to the tie rods, and that the electronics cannot add unrequested throttle: Any car can suffer from throttle-lift-induced oversteer in a long turn, or the beginning sequence of the Scandinavian Flick, and unexpectedly be flung wildly out of control with an unprepared driver.
I dare say that this is do-able on any surface, even with the most front-heavy FWD car you can get your hands on.
It really has nothing at all to do with being massively-overpowered, and everything to do with the fact that they're still just cars that ride on 4 wheels. Neither fancy automatic braking, nor throttle reduction, nor magic transmissions, nor AWD, nor instantaneously self-adjusting suspensions will fix the two (related) scenarios that I describe above.
In other words: Put an idiot into a car that "can't spin," and he'll do it anyway, same as a decent driver who is putting effort into making it happen. This shouldn't be surprising (and really has nothing to do with the reluctance of the motorcycle press to accept technological change).
Weight transfer FTW.
16MPG? That sounds fairly excellent for such a beastly machine that can actually generate downforce (which can never happen for free).
Even cooling this thing must be a drag (literally), and the big tires themselves eat huge amounts of energy just in overcoming rolling resistance. Everything about the car (including the hybrid aspect, which seems more about performance than economy) seems to indicate that it should be very, very thirsty.
For a totally unfair comparison: My old straight-6 BMW averages about 20MPG with somewhat-spirited mixed driving, and gets about 26 on the highway (it used to be a bit better on the highway, but the diff gearing is currently "wrong" due to other changes). It's got a reasonable drag coefficient, doesn't generate meaningful downforce, cooling it is fairly easy since there is nowhere near as much waste heat, the tires are not so big nor nearly so sticky, and it has far less than half as many functional moving parts (and around 1/5th the power of the Ferrari).
At 16MPG, if that is indeed the number, it sounds like they've done a wonderful job with efficiency: It is certainly not a concept that was cast to the wind when they designed it.
You've heard that Porsche owners are compensating for something.
Perhaps driving a Ferrari on the freeway turns you into an idiot, just as owning a Porsche makes your dick fall off at the very moment that you finish up the paperwork.
(I would not want to be the person responsible for picking up all of the cast-off penises at the Porsche dealer, but if I were I'd not own anything better than a Chevy, just to be safe.)
Is visiting any relic, site, or exhibit utilitarian?
(The answer is, of course: Perhaps. An architect might study architecture in person while abroad, a painter might find some utility in seeing some works in person, and an embalmer might find utility in viewing a guy who has been dead for decades.)
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
They can't change an engine in-flight, but that doesn't mean they can't pressure hammer the valves or perform other creative maintenance during the flight.
There is still advertising on the web? It's been years since I've seen any.
I think the Firefox extension is called Greasemonkey, which requires luck, foresight, and ability as a prerequisite.
Myself, I just look at the experts-exchange links, and allow them to bolster my hatred of what some people want the web to become: I've been consuming WWW for at least two decades, and it's not the same as it used to be largely because of folks like that who actively trying to break everything that was once good.
But that just brings the debate to another (also important) point: Is the contract for the service, or the hardware, or both together?
Frankly I think I should be able to use my hardware however I want to, even if it is subsidized by that contract, as long as I keep paying for the contracted monthly service (or the early termination fee).
Who does it harm if I use my phone on dozen different carriers, as long as I keep the money flowing according to contract?
But there is precedent that goes the other way: When I buy a house on a mortgage, the bank makes me agree to keep the house in good shape and properly insure it so that it stays that way. Same as a car with a lien from a lender. And in the case of some local buy-here, pay-here lots, the car has a mechanism to disable the vehicle in the event of non-payment and a GPS receiver so they can find it easily....and if they find out that the only reason I stopped paying for it was because it was totaled in a wreck/race/demolition derby and I didn't bother to insure it against that, lawsuits will happen.
Perhaps the question is this: Does an unlocked, under-contract phone destroy the value of that phone for the carrier in the event of default? I don't think so (because I realize that it's just software), but I'm not in charge.
Roaming?
I use Verizon and live in a semi-populated area (Ohio), and travel to all manner of little podunk town for business, often on back roads to keep the driving interesting. The only time my phone has been "roaming" in recent years has been down at a buddy's farm down in a random Kentucky holler where the nights are quiet, the stars are magnificent, and you have to climb a hill to get any signal at all.
Otherwise: West to Chicago? Verizon. East to Connecticut? Verizon. South to Florida? Verizon. In the depths of rural Indiana? Verizon. Do I see occasional coverage caps on twisty mountain roads in Tennessee? Yes. Roaming? No.
I dare say that roaming surcharges and kickbacks mean very little to the most giant of cell phone giants. And AFAIK, as it stands today, I can pop a European SIM card into my still-on-contract Verizon-sourced Motorola Droid 4, and use it overseas without involving Verizon at all or any particular fuckery.
So again, it's not roaming that is the big deal.
Instead, I offer an alternative theory on why unlocking hurts operators: Second-hand sales and after-contract use. When you bring in an old, used phone and have it activated, AFAICT you don't need a multi-year contract with any US carrier. As these contracts provide the sort of captive market that such companies (including local independently-owned dealers) thrive on, the more lock-in they have the more money they tend to make.
If you can take your old phone to any other carrier and it just works, neither the original carrier nor the alternative carrier makes as much money as they would have if you were forced to buy a new phone.
To use my own anecdote: I'm married to Verizon for service (which is OK - it's good service, though expensive). My family has multiple contracts that all expire at different times, and it's easiest to just keep going with it. But in theory as the contracts expire I can just unlock my phones and use a different carrier. Simple, as long as unlocking is not illegal.
However, if unlocking is illegal, I'd have a choice to make: If I want to switch carriers, I would either have to buy new phones (probably under contract, because phones are all bloody expensive), or commit the illegal act of unlocking phones that I already own.
In other words, my choices would be to spend more money to replace good hardware and sign another contract, or commit a crime, or stay with Verizon.
But with the freedom to unlock, I can just keep the devices and pick any compatible carrier. I, the consumer, win because the market becomes inherently more competitive and I have more choice. The competitors in that market might tend to lose because they don't have as much control over how I use their services, or the sources by which I acquire new/different/used hardware since I'm not locked in forever, but that's no longer my problem.
I see it all the time at Wal-Mart: A giant wall of HDMI-connected displays, many of which have the audio and video out-of-sync with one-another (but which presumably sync well with themselves, if somewhat latent from the original signal.).
It sounds (and looks) like an array of slightly different tape delays.
Maybe it's the distribution system (likely), maybe it's the TV itself (I've at least seen this myself in isolation, if you read what I wrote), but:
I remain unconvinced that this is a problem related to the signalling format. I write this on a DVI monitor which, AFAICT, is presently doing HDCP and all of the other things that HDMI entails. All that differs is the connector. (I can even route audio to it if I want to.)
And when I've plugged in a DVI-HDMI cable instead of DVI-DVI, the monitor works just the same.
As to searching: I can use Google, too. If there is a latency problem with HDMI, then I should be able to Google it up as the same problem with DVI, since they're exactly the same damned thing in this regard. But I don't really find much results for DVI latency, because nobody seems to be talking about that.
So I, again, blame the display: If there really were issues with DVI latency then hordes of hardc0re-ish gamers, with thousands of dollars wrapped up in ridiculous video hardware alone, would be complaining about it. But they're not.
I have no particular love for Samsung (my 52" A550 was simply the best product available for me at the time), but if your more-recent 7 is showing latency issues then perhaps it is simply inherently broken in ways similar to the Sharp TVs that I've experienced recently.
(Just because it sucks, doesn't mean it's not reality.)
I use ammo boxes, since neither the ballot box nor the jury box did a very good job at holding up the monitor.
(Yes, really. They stack nicely enough, and keep the seldom-used screen that I use for diagnosing other computers and/or my normally-headless Linux box just above the height of the other two monitors on the desk. Cheap, too; these were free.)
They've changed it, then, sometime in the past half-decade or so. That's a good thing.
I used to drink that stuff by the gallon until I started looking at ingredient lists for unnecessary or particularly vile things, of which phosphoric acid is both. Perhaps I'll pick some up again.
Phosphoric acid and corn syrup FTW!
...which is an interesting story, but does reinforce my main point: HDMI and latency are two different things in common use.
Glad you got it working acceptably. I had my own latency woes with the original Wii at one point: In addition to all of the bolt-on latency I described earlier, I was using an AVR to scale to 1080i and transmogrify from component to HDMI.
I don't use the Wii much (does anyone?), and it took me a few months to realize that each of these functions in the AVR was adding substantially to the latency of the entire system when the Wii was in use. Things always felt funny with analog inputs ever since I'd first installed the AVR, but wasn't until I decided to play some Super Mario that I was able to pin down exactly why things weren't quite right.
Adding a component cable between the TV and the AVR, and disabling its scaler for the Wii's input fixed it fine: It's just an analog pass-through in this mode.
On computers, I'm sensitive enough to input latency that I can't stand any wireless mouse I've ever used on my desktop. It's good that Dell had at least a partial fix.