Are you still saying that "performance" could mean towing capacity, or off-road ability, or absolutely anything that a vehicle could be good at? Or just that there are different facets to performance, and one vehicle could excel at one aspect of it but not at another? Because I think the former is obviously false, and the latter obviously true.
On the contrary. Ford themselves will tell you it has excellent towing performance or something like that. It's not always about power, or even handling.
Of course you can modify the word for more specificity - the Scion xB has good audio performance. The Wrangler has good off-road performance. The Odyssey has good passenger-carrying performance. But all on its own with no modifiers, "performance" means something in particular, and it's something pickups do badly and sports cars do well. As for motorcycles, BMW makes (made?) a scooter type thing that was shaped like a hoop - it had a roof panel deal that went all the way around the top. I'm not sure how well it protected the driver, but it at least looked really stupid.:-)
I'm not saying it has to go faster. That's not what performance means. What it means it that it does well the things it's supposed to do.
I don't think that's a standard definition. For example, an F350 does what it's supposed to do very well, but I don't think many people would claim it has excellent performance.
You're more likely to have to change your ass afterward, you mean. It only takes one rock and not a particularly large one in the wrong place to get you dead.
I've seen motorcycle road races where a driver accidentally hangs the back of the back out and then brings it back in without falling off. It can be done, it just takes more skill than most riders have. As for getting dead, it mostly depends on traffic, ie luck. If you high-side, you're likely to get hurt but not dead unless you get hit by a car, or go over a cliff or other really bad luck. If you low-side you'll probably be fine unless you get hit by the aforementioned car. This all assumes you have full protective gear of course, otherwise all bets are off.
Performance is what differentiates cars, whether it's in handling or acceleration. Minivans have relative performance which should be considered. At the end of the day the performance always matters, because the better it is, the less stressful driving will be.
I think you're revealing your bias. Nothing wrong with a bias of course, as long as your recognize it as such. Performance is definitely not the only thing that differentiates cars, and if it were that would be the only thing you would see in car commercials. At the end of the day all that matters is whether the performance is good enough for the customer. For some people that's a Ford Fusion. For others it's a 911 Turbo. And driving a high-performance car will not be any less stressful for someone who never makes use of that performance anyway.
The harder it is to work on, the more it costs to have it worked on, because things take longer. It's like a three or four hour job tops to do a heater core on my Nissan 240SX. It takes about 12 to 16 hours to do the same job on your average 3/4 ton van, because of the design of the vehicle and where they put the thing. At $80/hr that's a pretty major difference, so you should care.
That may be true, but they don't charge you based on how long it takes, but rather how long a book says it takes. Do the books have different rates for different models? I don't know.
What's bad is that most of their cars are stunningly non-ergonomic, and actually their controls are not that hot. Look at Nissan or even Subaru for superior examples of being able to reach everything without stretching.
I own a Subaru and a Honda, and I prefer the secondary controls and layout in the Honda.
I've been going back and forth on that but it's too easy to get killed on a motorcycle even when you're driving paranoid; cars are a hell of a lot safer.
Yeah, it's true. I drove a scooter for a couple of weeks, and never had any kind of incident where I even wanted to honk the horn at someone. Was I just lucky? I don't know, maybe. But it convinced me that if I'm in a situation where I can drive on the right kind of roads it would be worth it.
Besides, I've passed sportbikes aplenty on the twisties in my lowered 240SX (we have this road over Mt. St. Helena that actually has passing lanes while the road is turning) and I've been stuck behind a ton of superbikes in it too - sad thing is, my car weighs several times as much as a bike (~2700lb vs. ~400lb) and has only 155bhp, which is not much more than a superbike, and in some cases, actually less. The difference? I can drift.:)
Well you can drift on a motorcycle too, but you're more likely to have to change your pants afterward.:-) This may be what you're getting at, but on a mountain road the motorcyclist:
must be willing and able to lean the bike way over to go fast in the twisties
there could be sand and other crap on the road
could die if they mess up badly and could go to the hospital for even a small mistake
None of that is a problem for a car, or not as much of a problem. Even if the bike is capable of cornering harder than your car, the driver may not be.
Also, again this does not apply to the above vehicles, but front wheel drive is for people who don't know how to drive. Period.
For a very strange definition of "drive", yes. Clearly your criteria are centered primarily around performance, which is generally not important to American drivers as long as the car accelerates fast enough. I love performance too, but I can also recognize that my minivan has appropriate levels of performance (including handling) for its mission. Physics prevents it from competing with Miatas and RX-8s (forgot to mention Mazda before!) and that's OK.
As far as working on them, I don't care and most other people don't either because we don't work on our cars. Honda is not stupid; they know this and so don't bother trying to make the cars easy for their owners to work on - neither does much of anybody else I'm guessing.
Now for quality. I would be interested if you have sources indicating that Toyota and Honda vehicles have many more problems per vehicle, per mile, or per vehicle mile over a long time period such as ten years, compared to other makes. You seem to indicate that this is the case though I'm not sure who you're holding up as the quality standard. Kia?
Design! You mentioned the word and said Honda's stupid in all respects, but then all you talked about was room under the hood. What about all the other aspects of design? Honda's styling is intentionally bland, which I can understand turning you off, but otherwise I've found them very good at design. Everything inside the vehicle is pleasant to look at, highly intuitive and very easy to use. What's so bad about that?
Nissan. I like Nissan too, and I've been thinking about the Altima ever since the 2002 redesign (which of course you would shun because it's FWD:-) ). The timing and vehicle needs have so far not been right for that car, though. The Infiniti G35 also looks like a great car for a fire sale price compared to the German competition. At this point rather than getting anything like a GT-R or Corvette I would rather have a motorcycle, with a better power-to-weight ratio for 15% of the money (or something like that).
If I left something out that I should have talked about let me know.
Thanks for the info/comments. To be clear, I'm actually not arguing that CD is superior to LP in terms of sound quality. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't - to me it doesn't matter a whit because the obvious superiority of CD in other ways makes any sound inferiority (which I haven't noticed) irrelevant. And he's already mentioned that point as well. What I'm arguing about with the other guy is to try to find the evidence, if any, he's basing his claim on.
Honda makes junk that doesn't handle worth a crap? I don't think I will take your post very seriously, having driven a couple of new Hondas (one of which I own).
the German version of the Jeep instead (later sold under the name "Thing"). I forget the name of those, but the amphibious version was the "Schwimwagen".
It was the Kuebelwagen (where if I'm spelling it right the ue is supposed to be a u with an umlaut. I'm far too lazy to figure out how to get one of those to show up). It means bucket car.
What you have failed to demonstrate is whether that matters. Yes, I understand the difference between digital and analog. If you can show me something that says that the analog sound waves from CD audio differs from LP in a specific and perceptible way, I'm interested. If you want to keep repeating that it's so obvious CD is inferior because it's digital, and how stupid I am, I am not interested.
Digital has many benefits, but quality isn't one of them. As a general rule, anything that's digital is of vastly inferior quality to its analogue counterpart by definition.
Then I don't agree with your definitions.:-) What comes out of the speaker is always analog. Therefore, an analysis of which sound is higher quality should be possible to do double-blind. What you have said is "it's digital, therefore it must be worse." What I would find convincing is some kind of test indicating a specific shortcoming of CD vs LP, such as "CD signal-to-noise ratio was 6000:1 and LP was 7500:1" and preferably in some way that a human could perceive. For example I wouldn't be very impressed if LP frequency response outside the human range of hearing is better than CD. BTW I just made those numbers up. Do you know of any such tests, or are you just making your claim true by the way you define the words?
patient records, lab results, etc, on your machine and 12 months later, when you're confident that you have a stable OS and don't back up every single day,
Well there's your problem. I don't care what OS you run, if you have critical data that must not be lost, you back it up every day. If it's not critical, then by definition losing it all is not that big a deal. Either way, the worst that happens is lost productivity.
Smart money says that MS cooked up the bug to buy themselves an extra week or two of code/debug time.
You think PR from saying "we found this bug that is so severe we have to fix it before release" is better than "we need some more time to test and develop the release so that [we can meet our customers' high expectations | we can give you the truly world-class operating system you demand | other marketing blather]"? Or you just think MS thinks that? Personally I think this announcement is just about as bad as a delay can get, and so is probably nothing but the truth.
It's not because they're Luddites, it's because digital sound is inferior to analogue sound. Period.
By what measurement? Meaning that you should have some scalar value where the number produced when measured CD output is worse than the one from LP. Signal-to-noise, frequency response, etc - how is LP better?
"Firstly, equating a $1000 watch to a $10 razor is... well it's about what I expect here, but it makes no sense at all."
It does very much make sense.
No, it does very much not make sense. It's because of the percentage of your income that the two purchases represent. I can easily afford to blow a few bucks on a razor and have it suck. I cannot afford to blow $1000 on something and then not get $1000 worth of value out of it. Now if I had 10 million dollars in the bank, your example would be fine - a grand would be nothing to me, and I could afford to buy a $1000 watch just to see if I like it. Normal people aren't in that situation.
Then why reply the first time and then why reply again?
Firstly, equating a $1000 watch to a $10 razor is... well it's about what I expect here, but it makes no sense at all. Secondly, if you don't want to try a 3-bladed razor, that's fine by me. It's possible that you are so satisfied with your razors that no matter how good another razor is it couldn't be worth the money. That would be a rational reason not to experiment. Another one would be that you just don't care how good the shave is (where "good" consists of whatever your criteria are) and so it doesn't make sense to spend more money than necessary. Being convinced of a product's inferiority without good evidence is not rational. But I say again, if you don't want to try it, I couldn't care less, and I don't even care why you don't want to.
The idea that a company like GM woudl go bankrupt in any kind of reasonable timeframe is pretty ridiculous.
I don't think it's ridiculous. They (and Ford) are facing enormous personnel-related costs and sagging revenues, the same sort of thing that's forced airlines into bankruptcy over and over. If you mean GM will not go out of business any time soon, I agree - but chapter 11 doesn't seem that far-fetched.
That makes sense! Why even try the product? You know it must be stupid, because a comedy show mocked it 20 years before it was invented. Oh, for anybody who reads this on/. : that was sarcasm.
So yes, over time the players will be cheaper, which would show that no, they don't really cost a grand.
You're both idiots. Over time, the players will be cheaper, which shows that at some point in the future they will not cost hundreds of dollars to manufacture. DVD mfrs didn't start prices high and bring them down because they felt like it. If someone could have sold a DVD player for $50 and made a profit on it 10 years ago, I guarantee they would have. They sold them for the lowest price they could and still make a profit, because that's the highest price you can sell something for in a market with lots of competitors that can easily substitute for your product. DVD players used to cost a lot of money to make, and now they don't. The same thing will happen with every single other piece of consumer electronics, including high def DVD players.
Have to share this little password tidbit even though it's not related to TFA. I recently had to reset my password on our company intranet, and found that the only way to do that was to call the help desk (overseas) and tell them what I wanted my password to be. Telling someone else my password, over the phone. And this is the only way to reset it. I'm still speechless about it. Has anyone else encountered a password system so stupid?
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- must be willing and able to lean the bike way over to go fast in the twisties
- there could be sand and other crap on the road
- could die if they mess up badly and could go to the hospital for even a small mistake
None of that is a problem for a car, or not as much of a problem. Even if the bike is capable of cornering harder than your car, the driver may not be.As far as working on them, I don't care and most other people don't either because we don't work on our cars. Honda is not stupid; they know this and so don't bother trying to make the cars easy for their owners to work on - neither does much of anybody else I'm guessing.
Now for quality. I would be interested if you have sources indicating that Toyota and Honda vehicles have many more problems per vehicle, per mile, or per vehicle mile over a long time period such as ten years, compared to other makes. You seem to indicate that this is the case though I'm not sure who you're holding up as the quality standard. Kia?
Design! You mentioned the word and said Honda's stupid in all respects, but then all you talked about was room under the hood. What about all the other aspects of design? Honda's styling is intentionally bland, which I can understand turning you off, but otherwise I've found them very good at design. Everything inside the vehicle is pleasant to look at, highly intuitive and very easy to use. What's so bad about that?
Nissan. I like Nissan too, and I've been thinking about the Altima ever since the 2002 redesign (which of course you would shun because it's FWD
If I left something out that I should have talked about let me know.
Thanks for the info/comments. To be clear, I'm actually not arguing that CD is superior to LP in terms of sound quality. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't - to me it doesn't matter a whit because the obvious superiority of CD in other ways makes any sound inferiority (which I haven't noticed) irrelevant. And he's already mentioned that point as well. What I'm arguing about with the other guy is to try to find the evidence, if any, he's basing his claim on.
Honda makes junk that doesn't handle worth a crap? I don't think I will take your post very seriously, having driven a couple of new Hondas (one of which I own).
What you have failed to demonstrate is whether that matters. Yes, I understand the difference between digital and analog. If you can show me something that says that the analog sound waves from CD audio differs from LP in a specific and perceptible way, I'm interested. If you want to keep repeating that it's so obvious CD is inferior because it's digital, and how stupid I am, I am not interested.
Because I like to argue.
Let's see, a $1500 razor... this makes the 5-and-a-half-blade-plus-aloe-lotion-lather razors look pretty cheap.
Firstly, equating a $1000 watch to a $10 razor is... well it's about what I expect here, but it makes no sense at all. Secondly, if you don't want to try a 3-bladed razor, that's fine by me. It's possible that you are so satisfied with your razors that no matter how good another razor is it couldn't be worth the money. That would be a rational reason not to experiment. Another one would be that you just don't care how good the shave is (where "good" consists of whatever your criteria are) and so it doesn't make sense to spend more money than necessary. Being convinced of a product's inferiority without good evidence is not rational. But I say again, if you don't want to try it, I couldn't care less, and I don't even care why you don't want to.
Now you just have to convince Americans to spend their $350 on razor blades for a lifetime all at once. Hope you don't lose it...
That makes sense! Why even try the product? You know it must be stupid, because a comedy show mocked it 20 years before it was invented. Oh, for anybody who reads this on /. : that was sarcasm.
Have to share this little password tidbit even though it's not related to TFA. I recently had to reset my password on our company intranet, and found that the only way to do that was to call the help desk (overseas) and tell them what I wanted my password to be. Telling someone else my password, over the phone. And this is the only way to reset it. I'm still speechless about it. Has anyone else encountered a password system so stupid?