Yep... devices it plays on at our house have no wireless. Kindles and iPod Touch are wifi only. Tick the box for "download this" and it downloads whatever you like. I also had mp3 player(s), but carrying around multiple devices, maintaining multiple playlists and so on got old after a while. I download playlists on my phone all the time, and Spotify doesn't use any data when I play those songs.
They also let you change the quality - you can pick 96, 160 or 320 kbit/s in the quality preferences on your device.
Let's also be clear that original AC doesn't need to resort to privacy... they could actually BUY the recordings to get what they want, and rip them to FLAC using one of the many methods available. Even if Spotify added a FLAC, DRM-free option that worked with a MP3 player from 1997 and came with a free OC3 Internet connection to their house, and a fiber drop to their MP3 player, there would be some other excuse -- "their UI isn't like Winamp, right back to the torrents" or some such.
Spotify's cost can be justified based pretty much on lack of hassle alone. We have the family plan, which is 4 accounts for $15/month. It works on: - My Linux box (you can use a native client, Flash (vomit), or WINE) - Windows machines at home (with no admin privileges required to install/update) - Android phone - Kindle tablet - iOS devices - I could also sign in on my TiVo and Blu Ray player if I really wanted to.
Everyone gets their own playlist, everyone can listen offline, it all just works for four (actually, up to six) people, for $15/month. I remember on Slashdot when people would say "I'll pay when it's a reasonable price, but till then I use Napster/Kazaa/Donkeywhatever/Torrents", or "Until it's on Linux". Now it's people who whine about the free tier having ads, artists not getting paid enough (as if the piracy ever netted the artist a cent), no lossless/FLAC, etc.
I mean, come on people, there's a reasonably priced music service out there that runs on pretty much anything you can think of (including Linux!), it's not tied to Apple or Google, and if you can't swing the $10 for a single subscription or $5 if you are a student, find five friends and make a "family", although you have to go get the cash from your friends every month.
Yes. We had a couple racks of them, they were nice machines. They quit with something like ~30 days notice, too. We hurried up and bought what we could as soon as we heard the announcement.
nVidia still supports cards, but you can't buy an Apple today with an nVidia. The last vestige was in the MBP and one iMac, but those are history, too. The old cheese grater could take them, too -- but they were killed off in favor of the trash can.
The old Mac Pro (4U aluminum chassis) had: - Four drive bays, and you could get an aftermarket tray to add SSDs/ - Easy RAM upgrade - Interchangeable GPU(s) -- it would take nVidia or ATI boards. - Two network drops
The "replacement" Pro garbage can had stuff soldered in place, no upgrade option for GPU and a form factor that didn't allow upgrades, in addition to being abhorrently expensive and never updated. Not to mention having to do simple things like expand hard drive space with daisy chained expensive Thunderbolt stuff strung together like Christmas lights. I remember the mocking Jeff Goldblum Apple ad asking if PC stood for "Perpetually Cabled". In the old system you could keep all that stuff internal and using PCI, which was still faster.
When we retired the old Pros, we replaced them with MacBookPros -- the garbage can just priced itself out of contention, and into the realm of "can we do the same thing Linux or Windows instead, since that garbage can is now more expensive than some really decent servers we bought recently"
As part of my day job we have to support a lot of Macs in server rooms and/or lab spaces. The current product lineup falls flat and makes us do a lot of stupid workarounds and hassle that we don't have to deal with with Linux/Windows/ESX/OpenStack, all of which run happily on standard rackmount hardware.
"Pro" options I'd like to see: - IPMI/out of band management tools. No Apple proprietary crap. Give me an tool that plays nice with the rest of my machines that speak IPMI. - Expansion bays for drives, easily accessible from the front. - Support for modern nVidia GPUs / CUDA. OpenCL doesn't cut the mustard. I should be able to use GeForce, Quadro or Tesla GPUs. Support for two at a minimum, four would be better. Use standard power connections, too. - Dual 10 GB drops, options for more. - Dual power supplies, also hot swappable. - Rack mountable form factor. Look at what Lenovo is doing with their P500/700/900 lines. Host will be happy as a desktop or in a rack. Sure, it's 4U but at least if you need to rack it, you can. I get that Macs in a server room is weird.
Indie shows I've attended sell out fast nowadays. If I don't get tickets quick they are often gone in hours. These aren't for "big" acts, either -- we are talking club shows or small theaters/arenas holding up to say 1000 people tops. Not stadium or arena shows by any means, you can see the musicians sweat from the bad seats and see facial expressions and the whites of their eyes with modestly better seats / showing up a little early.
In contrast to today, I spent my formative years in the middle of the US with my only access to entertainment being
1) television with rabbit ears, then basic cable. MTV was a Big Thing. 2) whatever was on the radio. We didn't live anywhere with a cool college radio station, either. So top 40 drek. It was equally drek back then. 3) local record stores. Most were chains, one was independent. The independent was a 30 minute drive each way.
On visits to my grandmother's house it was in range of a cool college station where they played what nowadays might be called "Classic Alternative" or "Fisrt Wave" -- Violent Femmes, Depeche Mode, New Order, The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, Midnight Oil, etc. I'd stay up really late listening to whatever they played because it was so different and so much better than the regular stuff. Some of those bands, of course, broke into Top 40 eventually, one way or another. I was also a metal and punk fan, but good luck hearing Metallica, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Dead Kennedys or the Ramones on the radio in those days. Tipper Gore was doing her best to keep them away.
That left schlepping to the indie record store where they carried batter music than Target did. This involved begging and pleading with the parents to take me since it was well beyond walking distance and public transit wasn't really an option. Once I got my license it was better. But still I had to come up with twenty bucks to get something, and often it sucked. Twenty bucks wasn't exactly easy to come by.
Nowadays we have a Spotify Family account. For fifteen bucks I can dive deep on whatever the hell I want. I can spend the evening nerding out on seventies punk. I can listen to modern indie acts. My kids listen to anything and everything. My wife has her thing. Or I can find stuff on youtube, soundcloud, band camp or streaming radio.
I've been to more indie act shows lately than I ever had formerly -- the internet lets me track the acts, sends me a notifier when they are coming to my city, and I can then make arrangements to see the shows I want to see. No way in hell anything like that existed pre-Internet, especially for kids growing up in the center of the US where the Bible thumpers would make modest pledges to to censor TV and radio, ban questionable books, and contribute to many other Godly services. Acts that got big enough (e.g. Metallica) could come to a decent sized venue because they had enough draw, although people were happy to show up to remind me my soul was at risk from the devil music. Nowadays a up and coming band can get 10-100K Twitter followers and let everyone of them know when they have tour dates. There's nowhere near the hubub about trying to censor albums anymore, either -- not like when the PMRC was a thing.
My monthly Volt payment is what I used to pay in gas alone for my previous car. My electric bill went up by $40/month and I end up putting $15 worth of gas in every two or three months, unless I take a long trip. Maintenance costs are also far lower. So in my case, yes.
If the range isn't a big issue, Nissan is nearly giving away the Leaf right now. IIRC I saw some people talking about how they got it out the door for $13K (including incentives, so more like $23K without). The Leaf got shot down for our household since there are enough times we needed the extra range on the Volt. I work with plenty of Leaf owners who pretty much use it as a commuter / around town car and have a second vehicle for long trips. Aside from tires and wipers there's pretty much zero maintenance.
I got mine (a 2014) used with less than 10K miles for a really good price. It's probably the nicest car I've owned. The instant torque of the electric drive is fantastic for city driving and commuting. I've had a series of four cylinder commuter cars over the years and the electric drive is by far the best "solution" to the typically gutless four cylinder engine I've found. My last car was turbocharged and while that was fun after the thing spooled up, it was by no means instant response. It was also not all that efficient in the fuel consumption category. I've taken the Volt on long road trips a few times and saw 40ish MPG on those drives. Generally I only needed gas for the long highway drives, and I'd charge at my destination from the 110V charger.
When things like fast charging and range get really figured out, the Volt is going to be a kind of weird chimera, but for the place we are at now where charging is still mostly slow and nowhere near ubiquitous (I have charging at work and a garage at home) it's a really nice compromise. Making EVs work for true urban dwellers who park on the street or in a parking garage of some kind is a different challenge altogether.
1) People using these for machine learning or other GPGPU work. Sure, it may not have the performance with double precision but if you are doing work with single precision math, these things are amazing at under $1K/pop rather than spending $4-5K for a Tesla card. There are even server chassis that can take 8 or 16 of these for this kind of work -- ridiculous amounts of compute power in a single enclosure, flirting with $20K all told depending on how you configure the underlying server.
2) A decent laptop is going to run you probably $1500, give or take. A really good laptop is going to flirt with $3K. I'd even venture to say that a $1500 laptop is the Honda Accord of the laptop world -- a nice machine, but not something you don't see every day. You could include one of these cards in a $1500 desktop build. Why would that be considered so odd?
3) People use computers for video editing, photo editing, etc. You can't do those things on the console.
4) I do most of my game play on a console, I like the simplicity. But if someone wants to be PC Master Race as their hobby, it's not all that weird. It's what they like.
We could always keep an old motherboard and sound blaster card around, and have interview candidates move jumpers around till the correct sounds come out. Probably about as relevant as re-implementing bubble sort, and as relevant to a modern software job.:)
FWIW when I interview candidates I far prefer to get them to whiteboard/pseudocode a solution to a real problem that we have faced recently and how they would have approached it. I stress that I'm not looking for a "correct" answer, I want to simultaneously give them an example of the problems they would actually face on the job they are being hired for (so they know what they are getting into), as well as for me to see how they develop a solution and then have that solution critiqued by someone. The interface of the whiteboard is preferred since it gets passed the "you don't have my OS" and "you don't have my editor/IDE" problems and gets right to the thinking, which is what we are ultimately hiring them to do. In today's polyglot programming environment, the thinking is key.
I also put a high value on asking about how they interact with others, how they document their work, how they interrogate a spec, how they write a spec or make a design given a desired feature and how they write tests. Writing code is one part of the equation. In our organization, unit tests are required and you need to interact with a quality person to get other system tests sussed out. We also have doc, marketing and customer facing technical and marketing people who developers interact with on product teams on regular intervals. Code reviews can be quite rigorous (although not cruel -- there's a difference -- but you must know your code).
It's important to find people who can deal with that environment AND deliver good code, far more important than finding someone who memorized bubble sort.
I wrote bubble sort about 30 years ago... in BASIC. I probably re-implemented it in Pascal when I took that class. It probably came up again in C, FORTRAN and Java courses. I might recall an example in a learning Perl book I worked through ages ago. Even in those days, the instructors/book pointed out that the implementation of bubble sort was being used as a ready example to teach the constructs of the language, and that sort implementations of the respective language were far more sophisticated and optimized, and should be used rather than rolling your own.
Same thing with rolling your own command line argument parser, math functions, date/time functions, etc... don't. Learn how your language does those things and use the provided algorithm. It's far more likely to have less bugs than the thing you just made up, especially for a well-established language.
It's more akin to when I gave up on a lot of television than drug addiction. I made a decision that I was assigning too high a priority (and subsequently spending too much time on) something that was delivering low value for my leisure time, and I was missing out on other activities that could deliver more enjoyment and pleasure than Facebook was giving me. My wife changing the password creates a barrier to entry that's high enough that I'll go find something else to do rather than trying to get the password or do the password reset thing.
For instance, for me to watch television today I have ridiculously high standards. If a show gets boring, I drop it. I give a new show at most three episodes, if it hasn't hooked me by then, it's not worth it. With so many other ways to pass the time and only so much time, I'd rather play a well made video game for an hour than spend that same hour watching lackluster television. Or I'd prefer to watch a good movie I just haven't had time to see but that I've heard was well worth watching. Not to mention books, crosswords, etc. There are plenty of great leisure options out there, why waste time you'll never get back on mediocre entertainment?
Log out, remove it from your device and actually be fully present for your trip. The world's a fascinating place, experiencing it through a four inch screen really doesn't do it justice.
I had my wife log me out of Facebook and change the password. She knows it if I ever want to get back in. It's been a month and it's been generally great. I ended up with time for stuff I "never had time for" -- Crosswords, books, movies, 8+ hours of sleep, time with the kids, home projects, etc. I'm more focused at work and sleep better. This makes me less grumpy, impresses my boss and also makes me eat better and get in regular workouts. The elimination of FB has made it easier to have a virtuous cycle that feeds on itself rather than an endless stream of crappy memes and political crap that doesn't really help my life in any appreciable way. If I ever choose to return to FB I'm going to cull the friends list tremendously, I expect it to drop precipitously to maybe 15-20 people, generally family and friends I legitimately want to keep up with.
My wife and I have also seen Chris Hardwick live, if you like the Nerdist his standup is worth the price of admission.
I agree that some of the celebrities just can't get out of "promo mode", but those that do really come out great. I've enjoyed Mark Hamill's appearances, Max Brooks, Daniel Radcliffe, Patrick Stewart and Bruce Campbell. Even his self-deprecating interview of Harrison Ford wasn't nearly as terrible as Hardwick made it out to be. Ford isn't an easy interview, and it wasn't the best Nerdist ever, but I also didn't feel an hour of my life had been wasted or anything.
In addition, for the grand total of $0 I shelled out for the podcast, it's pretty darn good entertainment. I have no need for stamps dot com or squarespace so I don't mind a few seconds of my time being taken away for what generally turns out to be a pretty consistently good hour during my commute.
My top 3: Nerdist - long format interviews with celebrities. Not one to listen to with the kids. Planet Money - "pop economics". Generally entertainment and informative. Generally OK with the kids in the car. 99 Percent Invisible - Roman Mars has such a smooth radio voice I could listen to him talk about making a bowl of cereal. Podcast concentrates on architecture and design.
Other mentions have already been listed: Mike Duncan's History of Rome and Revolutions podcasts are very good. Dan Carlin's Hardcore HIstory and Common Sense make you think. Gretchen Rubin's Happier has some interesting ideas about happiness. Freakonomics continues where the books leave off. The Way I Heard It by Mike Rowe is a homage to "The Rest of the Story". Another great voice to listen to talk about just about anything.
This is why I got a Volt. According to my stats for January, I did 1214 miles. 972 of those were electric, 242 were on gas, so 80% of my driving was electric. This is kind of low, as we had a long trip tossed in there and the battery has less range when it's cold. In the warmer months I hit the mid 90's percentage pretty regularly.
I've driven my Volt all over New England, the mid-Atlantic and the Midwest -- I'll use gas for the long parts of the journey but when I get there I can charge it on 110V overnight and do local trips on electric.
It's not perfect, but it solves both the "commute on battery" use case as well as "drive to the middle of a mountain range" one.
I got a 2014 Volt used for $18K. I have charging at work and at home, and a 25 mile commute each way. We take occasional long trips to visit family. I really enjoy the car because the lion's share of my commuting happens all on electric so I end up going months on a tank of gas. So I pay about $40/month in electric and probably averages out to about $5-10/month for gas. When we take a trip it's mostly highway and I get about 38 MPG, with myself, wife and two kids plus baggage. It's a very nice compromise -- I never worry about being able to get somewhere, but most of the time I'm getting somewhere I'm using the (pretty much silent) electric. On the highway the engine noise is really not all that different than a comparable compact sedan.
The car also rides, handles and accelerates pretty well. It's not the eyeball melting insanity of the Tesla, but then again the Volt is roughly 1/3 the price of the Tesla, and the instant electric torque puts it in a class of its own versus other compact sedans.
I used them in various automobiles from probably 1994 (with a Discman) till 2014 (using a smartphone). I also still use on in my garage radio. The reason I stopped using it in 2014 was that the cassette player I was using it did die -- but that's likely more a result of 12 years of use of the cassette deck, not the fault of the adapter. Sound quality can be described as "good enough".
I found cassette adapters far more reliable than alternatives like a FM transmitter (which, incidentally would also be a valid way to solve the "how to play my smartphone through my non-Bluetooth, non-Aux radio in my ancient truck) . The only thing I found that worked better was a FM adapter that plugged into the back of the radio, which is something I did when I added a CD changer once. This was, of course, orders of magnitude more difficult than popping the tape in.
Of course, the best thing was the sub-$100 radio I replaced the broken one with that came with Bluetooth. These days a basic Bluetooth enabled head unit is even less expensive. Install was a snap since the car had a standard DIN head unit and Crutchfield sent a harness adapter. A little work with the soldering iron matching colors, slide the old radio out, put the new one in. Far superior to the Bad Old Days of the early 80's when a radio swap was a lot more trial and error.
In which case you can purchase a cassette adapter that makes it an aux in, and still skip the tapes. Heck, they are even making Bluetooth cassette adapters now if you don't want to have the wire hanging out of the cassette jack. You then only carry one cassette and can drop 11 cassettes.
Sandy got to Category 3. You also neglect the Pacific, which has had some significant typhoons recently.
In 2011 there was a typhoon which knocked out a significant amount of hard drive manufacturing capacity. The Phillipines got hit by two typhoons in a week in 2016.
You can keep splitting hairs, but OP's (who is also AC) assertion is demonstratably false, just as the claims of alarmists are. Too bad people can't seem to have rational discussions any longer, or more recently, will just make stuff up and keep repeating it until people believe it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep ... devices it plays on at our house have no wireless. Kindles and iPod Touch are wifi only. Tick the box for "download this" and it downloads whatever you like. I also had mp3 player(s), but carrying around multiple devices, maintaining multiple playlists and so on got old after a while. I download playlists on my phone all the time, and Spotify doesn't use any data when I play those songs.
They also let you change the quality - you can pick 96, 160 or 320 kbit/s in the quality preferences on your device.
Let's also be clear that original AC doesn't need to resort to privacy ... they could actually BUY the recordings to get what they want, and rip them to FLAC using one of the many methods available. Even if Spotify added a FLAC, DRM-free option that worked with a MP3 player from 1997 and came with a free OC3 Internet connection to their house, and a fiber drop to their MP3 player, there would be some other excuse -- "their UI isn't like Winamp, right back to the torrents" or some such.
Spotify's cost can be justified based pretty much on lack of hassle alone. We have the family plan, which is 4 accounts for $15/month. It works on:
- My Linux box (you can use a native client, Flash (vomit), or WINE)
- Windows machines at home (with no admin privileges required to install/update)
- Android phone
- Kindle tablet
- iOS devices
- I could also sign in on my TiVo and Blu Ray player if I really wanted to.
Everyone gets their own playlist, everyone can listen offline, it all just works for four (actually, up to six) people, for $15/month. I remember on Slashdot when people would say "I'll pay when it's a reasonable price, but till then I use Napster/Kazaa/Donkeywhatever/Torrents", or "Until it's on Linux". Now it's people who whine about the free tier having ads, artists not getting paid enough (as if the piracy ever netted the artist a cent), no lossless/FLAC, etc.
I mean, come on people, there's a reasonably priced music service out there that runs on pretty much anything you can think of (including Linux!), it's not tied to Apple or Google, and if you can't swing the $10 for a single subscription or $5 if you are a student, find five friends and make a "family", although you have to go get the cash from your friends every month.
Yes. We had a couple racks of them, they were nice machines. They quit with something like ~30 days notice, too. We hurried up and bought what we could as soon as we heard the announcement.
nVidia still supports cards, but you can't buy an Apple today with an nVidia. The last vestige was in the MBP and one iMac, but those are history, too. The old cheese grater could take them, too -- but they were killed off in favor of the trash can.
The old Mac Pro (4U aluminum chassis) had:
- Four drive bays, and you could get an aftermarket tray to add SSDs/
- Easy RAM upgrade
- Interchangeable GPU(s) -- it would take nVidia or ATI boards.
- Two network drops
The "replacement" Pro garbage can had stuff soldered in place, no upgrade option for GPU and a form factor that didn't allow upgrades, in addition to being abhorrently expensive and never updated. Not to mention having to do simple things like expand hard drive space with daisy chained expensive Thunderbolt stuff strung together like Christmas lights. I remember the mocking Jeff Goldblum Apple ad asking if PC stood for "Perpetually Cabled". In the old system you could keep all that stuff internal and using PCI, which was still faster.
When we retired the old Pros, we replaced them with MacBookPros -- the garbage can just priced itself out of contention, and into the realm of "can we do the same thing Linux or Windows instead, since that garbage can is now more expensive than some really decent servers we bought recently"
As part of my day job we have to support a lot of Macs in server rooms and/or lab spaces. The current product lineup falls flat and makes us do a lot of stupid workarounds and hassle that we don't have to deal with with Linux/Windows/ESX/OpenStack, all of which run happily on standard rackmount hardware.
"Pro" options I'd like to see:
- IPMI/out of band management tools. No Apple proprietary crap. Give me an tool that plays nice with the rest of my machines that speak IPMI.
- Expansion bays for drives, easily accessible from the front.
- Support for modern nVidia GPUs / CUDA. OpenCL doesn't cut the mustard. I should be able to use GeForce, Quadro or Tesla GPUs. Support for two at a minimum, four would be better. Use standard power connections, too.
- Dual 10 GB drops, options for more.
- Dual power supplies, also hot swappable.
- Rack mountable form factor. Look at what Lenovo is doing with their P500/700/900 lines. Host will be happy as a desktop or in a rack. Sure, it's 4U but at least if you need to rack it, you can. I get that Macs in a server room is weird.
Indie shows I've attended sell out fast nowadays. If I don't get tickets quick they are often gone in hours. These aren't for "big" acts, either -- we are talking club shows or small theaters/arenas holding up to say 1000 people tops. Not stadium or arena shows by any means, you can see the musicians sweat from the bad seats and see facial expressions and the whites of their eyes with modestly better seats / showing up a little early.
In contrast to today, I spent my formative years in the middle of the US with my only access to entertainment being
1) television with rabbit ears, then basic cable. MTV was a Big Thing.
2) whatever was on the radio. We didn't live anywhere with a cool college radio station, either. So top 40 drek. It was equally drek back then.
3) local record stores. Most were chains, one was independent. The independent was a 30 minute drive each way.
On visits to my grandmother's house it was in range of a cool college station where they played what nowadays might be called "Classic Alternative" or "Fisrt Wave" -- Violent Femmes, Depeche Mode, New Order, The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, Midnight Oil, etc. I'd stay up really late listening to whatever they played because it was so different and so much better than the regular stuff. Some of those bands, of course, broke into Top 40 eventually, one way or another. I was also a metal and punk fan, but good luck hearing Metallica, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Dead Kennedys or the Ramones on the radio in those days. Tipper Gore was doing her best to keep them away.
That left schlepping to the indie record store where they carried batter music than Target did. This involved begging and pleading with the parents to take me since it was well beyond walking distance and public transit wasn't really an option. Once I got my license it was better. But still I had to come up with twenty bucks to get something, and often it sucked. Twenty bucks wasn't exactly easy to come by.
Nowadays we have a Spotify Family account. For fifteen bucks I can dive deep on whatever the hell I want. I can spend the evening nerding out on seventies punk. I can listen to modern indie acts. My kids listen to anything and everything. My wife has her thing. Or I can find stuff on youtube, soundcloud, band camp or streaming radio.
I've been to more indie act shows lately than I ever had formerly -- the internet lets me track the acts, sends me a notifier when they are coming to my city, and I can then make arrangements to see the shows I want to see. No way in hell anything like that existed pre-Internet, especially for kids growing up in the center of the US where the Bible thumpers would make modest pledges to to censor TV and radio, ban questionable books, and contribute to many other Godly services. Acts that got big enough (e.g. Metallica) could come to a decent sized venue because they had enough draw, although people were happy to show up to remind me my soul was at risk from the devil music. Nowadays a up and coming band can get 10-100K Twitter followers and let everyone of them know when they have tour dates. There's nowhere near the hubub about trying to censor albums anymore, either -- not like when the PMRC was a thing.
My monthly Volt payment is what I used to pay in gas alone for my previous car. My electric bill went up by $40/month and I end up putting $15 worth of gas in every two or three months, unless I take a long trip. Maintenance costs are also far lower. So in my case, yes.
If the range isn't a big issue, Nissan is nearly giving away the Leaf right now. IIRC I saw some people talking about how they got it out the door for $13K (including incentives, so more like $23K without). The Leaf got shot down for our household since there are enough times we needed the extra range on the Volt. I work with plenty of Leaf owners who pretty much use it as a commuter / around town car and have a second vehicle for long trips. Aside from tires and wipers there's pretty much zero maintenance.
I got mine (a 2014) used with less than 10K miles for a really good price. It's probably the nicest car I've owned. The instant torque of the electric drive is fantastic for city driving and commuting. I've had a series of four cylinder commuter cars over the years and the electric drive is by far the best "solution" to the typically gutless four cylinder engine I've found. My last car was turbocharged and while that was fun after the thing spooled up, it was by no means instant response. It was also not all that efficient in the fuel consumption category. I've taken the Volt on long road trips a few times and saw 40ish MPG on those drives. Generally I only needed gas for the long highway drives, and I'd charge at my destination from the 110V charger.
When things like fast charging and range get really figured out, the Volt is going to be a kind of weird chimera, but for the place we are at now where charging is still mostly slow and nowhere near ubiquitous (I have charging at work and a garage at home) it's a really nice compromise. Making EVs work for true urban dwellers who park on the street or in a parking garage of some kind is a different challenge altogether.
No ... agreeing with you
1) People using these for machine learning or other GPGPU work. Sure, it may not have the performance with double precision but if you are doing work with single precision math, these things are amazing at under $1K/pop rather than spending $4-5K for a Tesla card. There are even server chassis that can take 8 or 16 of these for this kind of work -- ridiculous amounts of compute power in a single enclosure, flirting with $20K all told depending on how you configure the underlying server.
2) A decent laptop is going to run you probably $1500, give or take. A really good laptop is going to flirt with $3K. I'd even venture to say that a $1500 laptop is the Honda Accord of the laptop world -- a nice machine, but not something you don't see every day. You could include one of these cards in a $1500 desktop build. Why would that be considered so odd?
3) People use computers for video editing, photo editing, etc. You can't do those things on the console.
4) I do most of my game play on a console, I like the simplicity. But if someone wants to be PC Master Race as their hobby, it's not all that weird. It's what they like.
We could always keep an old motherboard and sound blaster card around, and have interview candidates move jumpers around till the correct sounds come out. Probably about as relevant as re-implementing bubble sort, and as relevant to a modern software job. :)
FWIW when I interview candidates I far prefer to get them to whiteboard/pseudocode a solution to a real problem that we have faced recently and how they would have approached it. I stress that I'm not looking for a "correct" answer, I want to simultaneously give them an example of the problems they would actually face on the job they are being hired for (so they know what they are getting into), as well as for me to see how they develop a solution and then have that solution critiqued by someone. The interface of the whiteboard is preferred since it gets passed the "you don't have my OS" and "you don't have my editor/IDE" problems and gets right to the thinking, which is what we are ultimately hiring them to do. In today's polyglot programming environment, the thinking is key.
I also put a high value on asking about how they interact with others, how they document their work, how they interrogate a spec, how they write a spec or make a design given a desired feature and how they write tests. Writing code is one part of the equation. In our organization, unit tests are required and you need to interact with a quality person to get other system tests sussed out. We also have doc, marketing and customer facing technical and marketing people who developers interact with on product teams on regular intervals. Code reviews can be quite rigorous (although not cruel -- there's a difference -- but you must know your code).
It's important to find people who can deal with that environment AND deliver good code, far more important than finding someone who memorized bubble sort.
I wrote bubble sort about 30 years ago ... in BASIC.
I probably re-implemented it in Pascal when I took that class. It probably came up again in C, FORTRAN and Java courses. I might recall an example in a learning Perl book I worked through ages ago. Even in those days, the instructors/book pointed out that the implementation of bubble sort was being used as a ready example to teach the constructs of the language, and that sort implementations of the respective language were far more sophisticated and optimized, and should be used rather than rolling your own.
Same thing with rolling your own command line argument parser, math functions, date/time functions, etc ... don't. Learn how your language does those things and use the provided algorithm. It's far more likely to have less bugs than the thing you just made up, especially for a well-established language.
It's more akin to when I gave up on a lot of television than drug addiction. I made a decision that I was assigning too high a priority (and subsequently spending too much time on) something that was delivering low value for my leisure time, and I was missing out on other activities that could deliver more enjoyment and pleasure than Facebook was giving me. My wife changing the password creates a barrier to entry that's high enough that I'll go find something else to do rather than trying to get the password or do the password reset thing.
For instance, for me to watch television today I have ridiculously high standards. If a show gets boring, I drop it. I give a new show at most three episodes, if it hasn't hooked me by then, it's not worth it. With so many other ways to pass the time and only so much time, I'd rather play a well made video game for an hour than spend that same hour watching lackluster television. Or I'd prefer to watch a good movie I just haven't had time to see but that I've heard was well worth watching. Not to mention books, crosswords, etc. There are plenty of great leisure options out there, why waste time you'll never get back on mediocre entertainment?
Log out, remove it from your device and actually be fully present for your trip. The world's a fascinating place, experiencing it through a four inch screen really doesn't do it justice.
I had my wife log me out of Facebook and change the password. She knows it if I ever want to get back in. It's been a month and it's been generally great. I ended up with time for stuff I "never had time for" -- Crosswords, books, movies, 8+ hours of sleep, time with the kids, home projects, etc. I'm more focused at work and sleep better. This makes me less grumpy, impresses my boss and also makes me eat better and get in regular workouts. The elimination of FB has made it easier to have a virtuous cycle that feeds on itself rather than an endless stream of crappy memes and political crap that doesn't really help my life in any appreciable way. If I ever choose to return to FB I'm going to cull the friends list tremendously, I expect it to drop precipitously to maybe 15-20 people, generally family and friends I legitimately want to keep up with.
My wife and I have also seen Chris Hardwick live, if you like the Nerdist his standup is worth the price of admission.
I agree that some of the celebrities just can't get out of "promo mode", but those that do really come out great. I've enjoyed Mark Hamill's appearances, Max Brooks, Daniel Radcliffe, Patrick Stewart and Bruce Campbell. Even his self-deprecating interview of Harrison Ford wasn't nearly as terrible as Hardwick made it out to be. Ford isn't an easy interview, and it wasn't the best Nerdist ever, but I also didn't feel an hour of my life had been wasted or anything.
In addition, for the grand total of $0 I shelled out for the podcast, it's pretty darn good entertainment. I have no need for stamps dot com or squarespace so I don't mind a few seconds of my time being taken away for what generally turns out to be a pretty consistently good hour during my commute.
I generally listen to podcasts on my commute.
My top 3:
Nerdist - long format interviews with celebrities. Not one to listen to with the kids.
Planet Money - "pop economics". Generally entertainment and informative. Generally OK with the kids in the car.
99 Percent Invisible - Roman Mars has such a smooth radio voice I could listen to him talk about making a bowl of cereal. Podcast concentrates on architecture and design.
Other mentions have already been listed:
Mike Duncan's History of Rome and Revolutions podcasts are very good.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore HIstory and Common Sense make you think.
Gretchen Rubin's Happier has some interesting ideas about happiness.
Freakonomics continues where the books leave off.
The Way I Heard It by Mike Rowe is a homage to "The Rest of the Story". Another great voice to listen to talk about just about anything.
This is why I got a Volt. According to my stats for January, I did 1214 miles. 972 of those were electric, 242 were on gas, so 80% of my driving was electric. This is kind of low, as we had a long trip tossed in there and the battery has less range when it's cold. In the warmer months I hit the mid 90's percentage pretty regularly.
I've driven my Volt all over New England, the mid-Atlantic and the Midwest -- I'll use gas for the long parts of the journey but when I get there I can charge it on 110V overnight and do local trips on electric.
It's not perfect, but it solves both the "commute on battery" use case as well as "drive to the middle of a mountain range" one.
I got a 2014 Volt used for $18K. I have charging at work and at home, and a 25 mile commute each way. We take occasional long trips to visit family. I really enjoy the car because the lion's share of my commuting happens all on electric so I end up going months on a tank of gas. So I pay about $40/month in electric and probably averages out to about $5-10/month for gas. When we take a trip it's mostly highway and I get about 38 MPG, with myself, wife and two kids plus baggage. It's a very nice compromise -- I never worry about being able to get somewhere, but most of the time I'm getting somewhere I'm using the (pretty much silent) electric. On the highway the engine noise is really not all that different than a comparable compact sedan.
The car also rides, handles and accelerates pretty well. It's not the eyeball melting insanity of the Tesla, but then again the Volt is roughly 1/3 the price of the Tesla, and the instant electric torque puts it in a class of its own versus other compact sedans.
I used them in various automobiles from probably 1994 (with a Discman) till 2014 (using a smartphone). I also still use on in my garage radio. The reason I stopped using it in 2014 was that the cassette player I was using it did die -- but that's likely more a result of 12 years of use of the cassette deck, not the fault of the adapter. Sound quality can be described as "good enough".
I found cassette adapters far more reliable than alternatives like a FM transmitter (which, incidentally would also be a valid way to solve the "how to play my smartphone through my non-Bluetooth, non-Aux radio in my ancient truck) . The only thing I found that worked better was a FM adapter that plugged into the back of the radio, which is something I did when I added a CD changer once. This was, of course, orders of magnitude more difficult than popping the tape in.
Of course, the best thing was the sub-$100 radio I replaced the broken one with that came with Bluetooth. These days a basic Bluetooth enabled head unit is even less expensive. Install was a snap since the car had a standard DIN head unit and Crutchfield sent a harness adapter. A little work with the soldering iron matching colors, slide the old radio out, put the new one in. Far superior to the Bad Old Days of the early 80's when a radio swap was a lot more trial and error.
In which case you can purchase a cassette adapter that makes it an aux in, and still skip the tapes. Heck, they are even making Bluetooth cassette adapters now if you don't want to have the wire hanging out of the cassette jack. You then only carry one cassette and can drop 11 cassettes.
Also a great campaign strategy.
BIGLY
Irrespective of the category of the storm, the financial impact of the storm places it pretty high on the "economic impact" chart.
Sandy got to Category 3.
You also neglect the Pacific, which has had some significant typhoons recently.
In 2011 there was a typhoon which knocked out a significant amount of hard drive manufacturing capacity. The Phillipines got hit by two typhoons in a week in 2016.
You can keep splitting hairs, but OP's (who is also AC) assertion is demonstratably false, just as the claims of alarmists are. Too bad people can't seem to have rational discussions any longer, or more recently, will just make stuff up and keep repeating it until people believe it.