You're a moron if you really think you can see through a metal trunk to see your neighbor's kid (or perhaps an animal) behind you. Thousands of kids get run over every year; that's why rear-view cameras are mandatory on all new cars starting in 2018.
You sound just like the stupid old codgers who thought that turn signals weren't necessary.
Hey, I'm sure there is a great reason why the HVAC controls need to be integrated into the radio and have components of the system put in like tetris blocks all under the dash. I'm guessing it has to do with the $2000 technology package that adds the value of a $200 double din radio.
My new car's technology package cost more like $3k, but the HVAC controls are all self-contained, and are not part of the infotainment system at all. The $3k was for stuff like radar cruise control; the infotainment system is standard.
Makes me glad I got a Mazda instead of a Ford. The infotainment system actually works decently well (and a new firmware update is supposed to fix the problems it does have). There's no "FM1" "FM2" etc., just "FM" with as many "favorites" as you want to save in there, and you can certainly scroll both ways through the sources. It is a bit annoying that the USB drive is near the bottom, but it's actually pretty easy to log in as root on the system and modify this.
The problem with an aftermarket camera is the display: you need something to view the backup camera with. An aftermarket display is probably cheap, but now you have some aftermarket display suction-cupped to your windshield, or hanging from your mirror, with cords dangling. A factory system is built in, doesn't make your car look like an electronics lab, and comes on automatically when you go into reverse and doesn't require taking apart your dashboard to try to make it look decent.
I'm sure that there are car stereo installers who do this
At today's skilled labor rates, that isn't going to be cheap, unless it's a really shitty job. Carmakers have a huge advantage in this stuff because they can install it almost for free while the car is under construction, instead of someone having to take hours and pore through wiring diagrams just to install a single item, when installing it at the factory takes a few seconds.
It seems unlikely to me. As much as people pay for cars, they don't want to see advertisements. They put up with ads from other things usually because they're free.
Of course, this doesn't explain cable TV, but even that's dying; there's a new tech news story every month about "cord cutters".
Finally, the government probably would never allow it.
That doesn't sound as bad as Mississippi. When I was there, the official protocol for blinkers was that when one person signaled a turn, all the people behind him would also signal this turn, even though they weren't actually turning.
The main reasons to buy a newer car are: 1) crash protection. In a new car with top safety ratings, you'll walk away from a crash that will kill you in any 90s car, let alone a 60s car. You may think you're the greatest driver ever, but your driving skills will only do so much to protect you from some bimbo driving a big SUV and yelling at her kids in the back seat. 2) reliability. You can only keep old cars running reliably for so long, unless you want to resort to extreme measures like getting a remanufactured engine. But the cost to do that, and fix various other parts that are going to fall apart after 200,000+ miles, is more than just getting a newer car, unless you do all the work yourself. Most people can't or don't want to do that. I used to like doing work like that when I was younger. Now I'd rather spend my time doing other things and have a nice car that isn't always "under construction".
That's what USB connectors are for: you can plug in flash drives with your music collection on them. USB isn't going anywhere in 20 years, nor are the MP3 and Ogg formats (my car plays both).
Finally, with a lot of these cars, they're just embedded computers running Linux, so it's entirely possible to update the OS, just like people have been doing with smartphones (CyanogenMod) and routers (DD-WRT, OpenWRT). The speed of the computer isn't that important; it's not like you're going to start doing CFD computations on them; they just have to manage the audio and maybe navigation (and there' s nothing forcing you to keep using the nav system anyway). Pretty soon we're going to have screen mirroring with Android so someone will probably figure out how to retrofit various cars with that so you can use your phone for navigation and other things and display it through your car's screen.
You don't need Pandora for that (though it is a good option I'll admit). You just need a USB port which you can plug your own music library into. Most new cars have those these days. It's easily the best thing to happen in cars in the last 20 years. AM/FM have sucked for a long time, and CD players were OK but were a PITA because changing discs while driving is somewhat dangerous. Now with a 32GB USB flash drive, I can keep my whole music library in my car and play anything I want, any time I want, without having to fumble with any kind of removable media.
But Pandora is nice if you want to listen to something new once in a while.
Cops can't give you tickets for stuff on your car that was installed at the factory. No court would ever uphold that, and it'd be front page news if any cops tried it.
And North America is especially bad because most places require a car in order to do anything or get anywhere, instead of other places where there's great public transit and people use them.
Wrong. North America is not "especially bad". It's just not as good as western Europe or Japan. Name any other place in the world which is better at public transit than any random place in the US. I can't think of any. Africa certainly doesn't have any good infrastructure, neither does most of Asia (including Russia), nor Australia, India, Middle East, and certainly not South America; they all suck. Western Europe and Japan put together are a tiny fraction of the total inhabited landmass on the planet. The US certainly isn't as good as those densely-crowded places, but it's better than everywhere else as far as infrastructure and public transit.
It was about freedom more than anything else. I never had much luck with girls as a teenager, even though I had my own car, but having the car let me go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted, go visit friends (who usually wanted me to take them places because they didn't have a car), just get out of the house, etc.
If I had grown up in Manhattan, I wouldn't have cared about having a car because I could have gone anywhere at any time just by walking to the nearest subway station.
I've gotta believe that this concierge service is mostly GM's OnStar. I think the biggest surprise for me in the statistic that 43% of the people never use it is that 57% have. Though I guess just trying it out one time to see how it works would no longer qualify you for the "never used it" category.
That would be my guess too. I got a new car recently with an infotainment system, and while it doesn't have any kind of concierge service (thankfully, what a waste; it's a Mazda BTW, which doesn't seem to have this available unlike the domestic brands), it does have an XM radio built in. I got a 3-month free trial subscription with the car, which of course is to get you hooked. So I went ahead and went through the steps to register (without giving them any credit card info of course; that would be a good way to get billed for something you don't want), and went through the trouble of getting it working on the car, mainly so I could try it out to see how it works, and to say that I have. So I've tried it: it has a bunch of stations, they play a bunch of commercials and have DJs yapping a lot, and when music finally does play, the sound quality is absolutely abysmal. I figured some of this would be the case before setting it up, just based on what I've read about XM, but I had to see for myself. Now that I have, when my 3 months is up, there's no way I'm going to actually pay $10/month or whatever for this crappy service.
And I think the monthly (/yearly) payment is definitely a big turn-off for services like this. It's bad enough we need to pay monthly payments for so many other unending services: ISP, cellular, etc., I sure as hell don't want to pay for radio or concierge.
Luckily, unlike your OnStar, my XM radio doesn't waste any space on useless buttons; it's all built into the infotainment system. It shows up under "AM" and "FM" in the device list. But thanks to some hackers, there's patches out there you can pretty easily use to modify the system to reorder these entries (placing XM at the end instead of near the beginning), or even remove ones you don't want.
This system also has BlueTooth so I can connect a phone for use for data, music, etc. You should have gotten a Mazda instead...:-)
Really? You are comparing Gnome 3/kde 4.x to a modern working start menu?
I'm not comparing Gnome3 to anything; Gnome3 sucks. KDE has a proper "modern" start menu, it's the way the Windows start menu should have been all along. The "menu" (which isn't a menu at all) in Metro is bullshit.
Is it crap because it is inferior?
Yes. It's absolute garbage. It's ugly, it's confusing, it even has two separate control panels for some stupid reason (there's a metro control panel, but it doesn't have much stuff in it, so you have to go find the hidden Win7-style control panel to actually change things). There is nothing good about it. It's obviously designed for tablets, but I'm not using a tablet. And if I were, it'd still be ugly as hell. WTF is with the ugly graphics and colors? It's like the Pontiac Aztek of UIs.
These applets you hate you do not have to use.
You still have to use the Metro interface any time you click on "start", unless you install some 3rd-party workaround software.
Because of these attitudes towards privacy, I think it should be legal for the Windows 10 EULA to specify that your private data (including passwords, all your keystrokes, any and all private data they can find on your system) is subject to being copied to Microsoft's servers, and from there MS is free to do whatever they want with it, including selling it to marketers, Chinese hackers, or the Russian or North Korean government. And MS should be completely legally free to do these things, as long as it's spelled out in the EULA.
Then, when the inevitable happens, I wonder how many people would finally stop using Windows. Probably not many.
And yeah, I hate politically correct bullshit too. I hate it whichever side it comes from. "Oh no, the Hugo voters picked something that offends me--they must be controlled by an evil liberal cabal! We must destroy them!" That's politically correct bullshit, and I despise it.
Uber claims to do background checks. And I have never seen a taxi with a camera in it. That might be certain jurisdictions. The shitty cabs I rode a few times in NJ a year or two ago sure didn't have any cameras; one of them looked like someone's personal (old and shitty) car and had no taximeter (but yes, it was a real taxi since I had to call a taxi company which sent him out to me; this was before I heard about Uber and decided to try it).
No, they're not, not really. People don't have infinite time to work. They're an incentive to move your working hours to the most profitable time blocks. It's just like shift differential (extra pay for working night shifts). Not everyone has the flexibility to work odd hours, but for those that do, they'll take the odd shifts so they can make more money. If they didn't have that incentive, many of them wouldn't bother.
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You're a moron if you really think you can see through a metal trunk to see your neighbor's kid (or perhaps an animal) behind you. Thousands of kids get run over every year; that's why rear-view cameras are mandatory on all new cars starting in 2018.
You sound just like the stupid old codgers who thought that turn signals weren't necessary.
Hey, I'm sure there is a great reason why the HVAC controls need to be integrated into the radio and have components of the system put in like tetris blocks all under the dash. I'm guessing it has to do with the $2000 technology package that adds the value of a $200 double din radio.
My new car's technology package cost more like $3k, but the HVAC controls are all self-contained, and are not part of the infotainment system at all. The $3k was for stuff like radar cruise control; the infotainment system is standard.
Makes me glad I got a Mazda instead of a Ford. The infotainment system actually works decently well (and a new firmware update is supposed to fix the problems it does have). There's no "FM1" "FM2" etc., just "FM" with as many "favorites" as you want to save in there, and you can certainly scroll both ways through the sources. It is a bit annoying that the USB drive is near the bottom, but it's actually pretty easy to log in as root on the system and modify this.
The problem with an aftermarket camera is the display: you need something to view the backup camera with. An aftermarket display is probably cheap, but now you have some aftermarket display suction-cupped to your windshield, or hanging from your mirror, with cords dangling. A factory system is built in, doesn't make your car look like an electronics lab, and comes on automatically when you go into reverse and doesn't require taking apart your dashboard to try to make it look decent.
I'm sure that there are car stereo installers who do this
At today's skilled labor rates, that isn't going to be cheap, unless it's a really shitty job. Carmakers have a huge advantage in this stuff because they can install it almost for free while the car is under construction, instead of someone having to take hours and pore through wiring diagrams just to install a single item, when installing it at the factory takes a few seconds.
It seems unlikely to me. As much as people pay for cars, they don't want to see advertisements. They put up with ads from other things usually because they're free.
Of course, this doesn't explain cable TV, but even that's dying; there's a new tech news story every month about "cord cutters".
Finally, the government probably would never allow it.
My last car had 4/4 of the electric window motors fail, and the remote-open electric locks.
What kind of crappy car was that? I've had several cars that were/are 10-18 years old and never had any trouble with electric motors.
If it's not mounted on the dash (illegal in some states), it's about as distracting as a cell phone if it needs to be looked at or handled.
Which crappy states are those?
That doesn't sound as bad as Mississippi. When I was there, the official protocol for blinkers was that when one person signaled a turn, all the people behind him would also signal this turn, even though they weren't actually turning.
The main reasons to buy a newer car are:
1) crash protection. In a new car with top safety ratings, you'll walk away from a crash that will kill you in any 90s car, let alone a 60s car. You may think you're the greatest driver ever, but your driving skills will only do so much to protect you from some bimbo driving a big SUV and yelling at her kids in the back seat.
2) reliability. You can only keep old cars running reliably for so long, unless you want to resort to extreme measures like getting a remanufactured engine. But the cost to do that, and fix various other parts that are going to fall apart after 200,000+ miles, is more than just getting a newer car, unless you do all the work yourself. Most people can't or don't want to do that. I used to like doing work like that when I was younger. Now I'd rather spend my time doing other things and have a nice car that isn't always "under construction".
That's what USB connectors are for: you can plug in flash drives with your music collection on them. USB isn't going anywhere in 20 years, nor are the MP3 and Ogg formats (my car plays both).
Finally, with a lot of these cars, they're just embedded computers running Linux, so it's entirely possible to update the OS, just like people have been doing with smartphones (CyanogenMod) and routers (DD-WRT, OpenWRT). The speed of the computer isn't that important; it's not like you're going to start doing CFD computations on them; they just have to manage the audio and maybe navigation (and there' s nothing forcing you to keep using the nav system anyway). Pretty soon we're going to have screen mirroring with Android so someone will probably figure out how to retrofit various cars with that so you can use your phone for navigation and other things and display it through your car's screen.
You don't need Pandora for that (though it is a good option I'll admit). You just need a USB port which you can plug your own music library into. Most new cars have those these days. It's easily the best thing to happen in cars in the last 20 years. AM/FM have sucked for a long time, and CD players were OK but were a PITA because changing discs while driving is somewhat dangerous. Now with a 32GB USB flash drive, I can keep my whole music library in my car and play anything I want, any time I want, without having to fumble with any kind of removable media.
But Pandora is nice if you want to listen to something new once in a while.
Cops can't give you tickets for stuff on your car that was installed at the factory. No court would ever uphold that, and it'd be front page news if any cops tried it.
And North America is especially bad because most places require a car in order to do anything or get anywhere, instead of other places where there's great public transit and people use them.
Wrong. North America is not "especially bad". It's just not as good as western Europe or Japan. Name any other place in the world which is better at public transit than any random place in the US. I can't think of any. Africa certainly doesn't have any good infrastructure, neither does most of Asia (including Russia), nor Australia, India, Middle East, and certainly not South America; they all suck. Western Europe and Japan put together are a tiny fraction of the total inhabited landmass on the planet. The US certainly isn't as good as those densely-crowded places, but it's better than everywhere else as far as infrastructure and public transit.
It was about freedom more than anything else. I never had much luck with girls as a teenager, even though I had my own car, but having the car let me go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted, go visit friends (who usually wanted me to take them places because they didn't have a car), just get out of the house, etc.
If I had grown up in Manhattan, I wouldn't have cared about having a car because I could have gone anywhere at any time just by walking to the nearest subway station.
Those idiots will think those are plusses. We're talking about Republican voters here; they have zero understanding of science.
I've gotta believe that this concierge service is mostly GM's OnStar. I think the biggest surprise for me in the statistic that 43% of the people never use it is that 57% have. Though I guess just trying it out one time to see how it works would no longer qualify you for the "never used it" category.
That would be my guess too. I got a new car recently with an infotainment system, and while it doesn't have any kind of concierge service (thankfully, what a waste; it's a Mazda BTW, which doesn't seem to have this available unlike the domestic brands), it does have an XM radio built in. I got a 3-month free trial subscription with the car, which of course is to get you hooked. So I went ahead and went through the steps to register (without giving them any credit card info of course; that would be a good way to get billed for something you don't want), and went through the trouble of getting it working on the car, mainly so I could try it out to see how it works, and to say that I have. So I've tried it: it has a bunch of stations, they play a bunch of commercials and have DJs yapping a lot, and when music finally does play, the sound quality is absolutely abysmal. I figured some of this would be the case before setting it up, just based on what I've read about XM, but I had to see for myself. Now that I have, when my 3 months is up, there's no way I'm going to actually pay $10/month or whatever for this crappy service.
And I think the monthly (/yearly) payment is definitely a big turn-off for services like this. It's bad enough we need to pay monthly payments for so many other unending services: ISP, cellular, etc., I sure as hell don't want to pay for radio or concierge.
Luckily, unlike your OnStar, my XM radio doesn't waste any space on useless buttons; it's all built into the infotainment system. It shows up under "AM" and "FM" in the device list. But thanks to some hackers, there's patches out there you can pretty easily use to modify the system to reorder these entries (placing XM at the end instead of near the beginning), or even remove ones you don't want.
This system also has BlueTooth so I can connect a phone for use for data, music, etc. You should have gotten a Mazda instead... :-)
Really? You are comparing Gnome 3/kde 4.x to a modern working start menu?
I'm not comparing Gnome3 to anything; Gnome3 sucks. KDE has a proper "modern" start menu, it's the way the Windows start menu should have been all along. The "menu" (which isn't a menu at all) in Metro is bullshit.
Is it crap because it is inferior?
Yes. It's absolute garbage. It's ugly, it's confusing, it even has two separate control panels for some stupid reason (there's a metro control panel, but it doesn't have much stuff in it, so you have to go find the hidden Win7-style control panel to actually change things). There is nothing good about it. It's obviously designed for tablets, but I'm not using a tablet. And if I were, it'd still be ugly as hell. WTF is with the ugly graphics and colors? It's like the Pontiac Aztek of UIs.
These applets you hate you do not have to use.
You still have to use the Metro interface any time you click on "start", unless you install some 3rd-party workaround software.
All those under-the-hood features sound nice and all, but the OS is completely and utterly unusable simply because of its shitty Metro UI.
Being flat is the new thing regardless of OS as every OS on the planet is following this new thing of turning it into a cell phone
My Linux systems with KDE don't have this problem at all.
Because of these attitudes towards privacy, I think it should be legal for the Windows 10 EULA to specify that your private data (including passwords, all your keystrokes, any and all private data they can find on your system) is subject to being copied to Microsoft's servers, and from there MS is free to do whatever they want with it, including selling it to marketers, Chinese hackers, or the Russian or North Korean government. And MS should be completely legally free to do these things, as long as it's spelled out in the EULA.
Then, when the inevitable happens, I wonder how many people would finally stop using Windows. Probably not many.
I'd probably raise it to $5k/year though. $2k isn't much these days, and I'd expect a small side job to make a little more money than that.
And yeah, I hate politically correct bullshit too. I hate it whichever side it comes from. "Oh no, the Hugo voters picked something that offends me--they must be controlled by an evil liberal cabal! We must destroy them!" That's politically correct bullshit, and I despise it.
Actually, that's a slightly different form, called "conservative correctness".
He must be a stupid American who doesn't understand voting systems other than first-past-the-post.
Uber claims to do background checks. And I have never seen a taxi with a camera in it. That might be certain jurisdictions. The shitty cabs I rode a few times in NJ a year or two ago sure didn't have any cameras; one of them looked like someone's personal (old and shitty) car and had no taximeter (but yes, it was a real taxi since I had to call a taxi company which sent him out to me; this was before I heard about Uber and decided to try it).
I like your compromise idea.
No, they're not, not really. People don't have infinite time to work. They're an incentive to move your working hours to the most profitable time blocks. It's just like shift differential (extra pay for working night shifts). Not everyone has the flexibility to work odd hours, but for those that do, they'll take the odd shifts so they can make more money. If they didn't have that incentive, many of them wouldn't bother.
we have illegal businesses operating without any oversight or employee protections in a regulated marketplace.
The "regulation" is nothing more than the taxi cartels writing laws to protect them from competition. Why are you OK with this?
I've never had ANY problems getting a cab in any city I've been in. Ever. Not once. Anywhere. Neither have I found their pricing exorbitant.
Then you're a shill. Cabs are massively overpriced. That's what happens when you have "regulation" which limits the number of competitors.