Yes indeed, screen controls for the merc. Not much better than a touchscreen in my opinion. The problem is not so much the screen, but that you have to navigate through multiple levels of menu to get anywhere.
The most frustrating issue I had with all these different cars was getting a manual BMW into reverse. No indication of how to do it on the gearstick, so I had to get the manual out. It turned out it was just so stiff that you couldn't tell you were going in the right direction, I had to use both hands to drag it over.
I've recently been moving around quite a bit, and have rented a few cars. As I've been putting rental orders in at short notice I've had the opportunity to drive a few cars that are usually out of my budget range, higher end Mazda, Ford, BMW and Mercedes. I can say without a doubt that the touchscreen controls in all of these cars are terrible, and actually ruin the experience of driving them. If you are unfamiliar with it then forget making any kind of adjustment while driving.
The car I had in the US, a Dodge Dart, was pretty much perfect. No fancy touchscreen, but still a nice enough finish on the interior. Combination of the useful features, without being overly complex. Manual gearbox (although that's a personal preference, I think autos feel crappy no matter how nice the car).
Where are you in Utah? I recently travelled across the USA, including Salt Lake City and Park City, and we tried to visit as many chocolate places ("Chocolatiers", although that's a blatant lie in most cases) as we could. Most were really bad. Quite a few were closed (either for the day, month, or just gone, or moved). Perhaps yours was one of those, I think we pulled up outside 2 places in SLC that were inexplicably closed the day we were there.
Yes indeed. I've interviewed many programmers, and I would say the majority I've interviewed can't actually write a small program effectively. Many of these are senior and have claimed to have held a team lead position. I can only assume they get by by programming only within a framework filling in the blanks, and with much copy and paste as you say.
I interviewed someone just last week for a junior position who had some experience. I gave the task of turning a recursive algorithm that parses a tree, into a non-recursive form. This chap could write executing code just fine, without reference, but he just could not figure out the problem. When I gave a prod I thought he might get it, but then, when stuck again, he proceeded to try solving it by moving lines from one place to another. I let him try for 45 minutes!
So yeah, if you can actually take a problem and write an algorithm to solve it in code then you're one step of ahead of many professional coders. Of course it's not the only important skill, and I've known at least one clever person hired because he was able to solve the tests very quickly, turn out to be not so great at actually producing code. Probably because a lot of programming in a job isn't interesting if it's that type of problem solving that really turns you on.
I don't think this really gets to the problem though. The majority of IT folk aren't actually weighted towards Autism. Women I've known in and out of the industry have no more or less an ability to grasp the concepts than men.
Personally I think the problem is that the majority of people in CS are male. Why don't more women apply... because they see a subject dominated by men. And the reasons they don't get into it or get pushed towards it from a young age are the same. It's a feedback look that seems very hard to get out of.
uh oh. I got married on the beach for $500 with 4 guests and didn't tell any relatives, so that my girlfriend could get on my visa. And we're atheists.
OTOH 2 of the guests were our children, we'd been together for 10 years and we earn more than 125k. And we did go on honeymoon, but we took the kids, so does that count? 39% + 51% + 41% x 12.5 x 2 = ?? Will we get divorced?
1. I left Britain for New Zealand... I love NZ, the weather is perfect for me, neither too hot nor too cold at any time, it rains but doesn't feel miserable like the UK does sometimes. Great coffee, good food everywhere, good people who mostly respect immigrants. But downside, very small tech sector, everyone knows one another which I found a little difficult at times. 2. Once I had my NZ passport went to San Francisco. Hate the weather, California is too sunny. Hate the tech scene, I think the startup thing going on in SF is actually a bit crappy to work near. USA is diverse and interesting, I've loved travelling around. I could settle in New England, Maine is lovely. Americans are lovely people, but deeper friendships take longer for some reason, maybe cultural differences. 3. About to move to Denmark. I doubt the language will be too much a problem, looking forward to the better social support system. Will definitely be commenting on it in the near future. 4. Australia maybe... 5. Back to NZ, build a house.
Dashcams with a record and send to police function might be useful. It might stop dangerous drivers if they knew there was a much higher chance of being recorded and fined.
Perhaps an all-seats-equal type business model might make a better travel experience.
I've wondered the same, I'd certainly pay a bit more for seat equality and this experiment at the premium economy level of comfort.
Ever tried a Bus over the holidays?
It'd work in some places, but not all. America is pretty big, I've been driving around the Western states for 2 months, but getting all the way across was too long and complicated with kids and cats (yeah) so we flew the rest from CO to MA. I'm moving overseas this month to Europe, and we're planning to use the trains instead of flying or driving for our holidays.
That's an actual verifiable reaction to gluten that can cause death. Charliemopps is talking about the now popular gluten intolerance. Funnily enough, I myself feel a bit bloated after stuffing a couple of sandwiches down my gullet.
Indeed, and virtualization is a rapidly evolving part of infrastructure right now. We may no longer be upgrading the hardware as rapidly (although I'm not certain about that either), but the virtual layer and tools are changing, and upgrading those requires just as much upheaval.
Why should people put up with it just because you do? I wouldn't. I'm not exactly thin skinned but I think there is a level of professionalism that should be affected at work. I'm quite happy to have a very different relationship with the same people out of work.
Will people move to an alternative if Google Maps becomes unreliable?
For recommendations and reviews I've always found google unreliable, so I've been using Yelp. It probably suffers the same problems, but it seems a bit more reliable.
I agree but it's a difficult situation. A lot of the interpreted languages (ruby, php, perl, python, node) offer a standalone packager of some kind. Then the linux distros offer *some* integration so that you can install those packages their way, or get access to precompiled versions of ones that require it. In my experience that integration has always been the pain point.
I'm working with some web software at the moment. It's the kludgiest amalgomation of crap that I've seen in quite some time.
It sounds like some poor decisions have led to that situation for you. Ruby and Node both have fairly flexible package management solutions that let you pin dependencies and provide private repos for your specific dependency versions when for some reason you can't use official ones.
However, one thing that has always bothered me is when we say "well we're using ruby xx.xx (or node xx.xx or php xx.xx or whatever) on our development machines, so we must install that version on production" and then the hoops taken to do that. It should be "production can run ruby xx.xx so that's what you have to develop against".
Working 5 days a week for 8 hours at a time doesn't make any sense anymore.
I agree. But it's good to have that structure when you first start out. It's also good to know when to break out of it, and I wish I had done so far earlier than I did. If you are a technology worker you should understand that some days you can work longer, some shorter. Sometimes you feel like you can't work on the major tasks so you do support for a few hours. And I often shift the time around. For some reason I feel way more productive between 11pm and 1am than 11am and 1pm.
My wife often comments that I am not very easy to distract when working. And the day is still delineated with events: children wake us up, time for breakfast then work. Lunch time, walk out for coffee. Dinner time, 5:30, time to stop working. Sure if you had no family then that might break down.
I've seen plenty of people working long hours at the office.
Yes I overplayed it a little there. The best workers work wherever is best for them, be it the office or at home. But the thing I find distracting at the office is the people. I love talking to people and helping them out and so forth (which obviously happens remotely too, but not as much) but for getting some programming or spec work done my own calm space is best. I can work a little long from home without really thinking about it because there's no hassle of "getting ready" or the commute. Although there is often the "shit, video conference in 5 minutes, no trousers" moment.
This is rather anecdotal. I refuse to believe that I'm in a 5% percentage of people more effective working from home than in the office. The office is full of distractions, noise, people to waste time with, toys like pool tables and so forth. I go in every so often because some of those distractions are important.
But home is nice and quiet. Can move between desk, sofa, bed, outside with laptop. I suspect that those who find distractions working at home will find distractions working in the office.
I've noticed that the best workers in my company are the ones who have gone remote. I'm not saying that they are best because they're remote. But they're probably the ones who don't feel they need to be seen in the office to prove their worth.
3) the population is mostly concentrated in a couple of cities, and not of a huge relative geographical area. More folks can do mass transit there, and drive less often.
The USA could really do with more mass transit. There's plenty of concentrated population. I've not spoken to a single American here who disagrees, so it must be down to politics. When you say concentrated... the Wellington region has less than 400k people. And yet you can get around reasonably easily via train and bus. I lived in Waikanae, an hours drive north of Wellington, and getting the train + bus took an 1hr 20 mins.
In the USA I live near Santa Rosa, and it takes 1hr 15mins to drive to where I need to be in SF when there is no traffic (ha). Public transport would take more than 3hours! And North Bay alone has a greater population than the entire Wellington region.
4) an immigration policy that would get us called Nazis if we implemented them here (see also the current immigration woes and their contribution to economic issues here in the US)
Really? I did not know that. I found it way easier and less bureaucratic to get into NZ.
The idea of no God or afterlife doesn't really give me any feelings at all because I don't think of them. They are unrelated and uninvolved in the grief I've felt when a family member died.
As you state, you've always had faith, so how can you conceivably tell someone who does not how they feel about it (smug), and link that to the death of your loved ones in any way?
That the world was flat was not a seriously held belief, and CC did not set out to prove that it was spherical.
Whereas we know the energy requirements of settling outside of the Earth are beyond us at the moment. That's not to say that will always be the case. But putting hope into that without a viable path there is pointless fantasy. Figuring how to cope where we are with what we have is reality.
We have at least two of those, a common language and shared history. The language is English, because as much as the French hate it, it is the lingua franca in the EU. The history is one of fighting one another tooth and nail, but it is a long history and most of those wars were about a small handful of elite too.
Is there enough of a shared culture to convince the French to send their sons and daughters to die for the Latvians?
Yes, absolutely. No different to what happens now with NATO.
My argument against a federal EU is from another direction. The USA is too big, and it's politics have become paralyzed by it's size. It might be better off devolving a lot of power to the states.
Canada and Australia, while not truly British colonies still are subjective to Britain
Sort of but not really. These countries have chosen to retain their links with Britain, but all three (you missed New Zealand) would be able to remove those links by democratic process. And some of them have had referendums on the subject. As has been happening slowly over time, example NZ recently introduced it's own high court and so abolished the law that allowed cases to be taken to the high court in the UK.
And the UK, is a free country, therefore it's "subject" countries are also free. Again example, this year Scotland will vote on independence, and although the UK government is being underhand in its dealing with the subject in a PR sense, if the result was for independence I doubt they won't get it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that does sum it up. Lovely cars to drive when you can just let loose. But day to day, aggravating.
I've seen the same issue with the satnav in my Aunt's Land Rover - we could not switch it off, 5 of us had a turn.
Yes indeed, screen controls for the merc. Not much better than a touchscreen in my opinion. The problem is not so much the screen, but that you have to navigate through multiple levels of menu to get anywhere.
The most frustrating issue I had with all these different cars was getting a manual BMW into reverse. No indication of how to do it on the gearstick, so I had to get the manual out. It turned out it was just so stiff that you couldn't tell you were going in the right direction, I had to use both hands to drag it over.
I've recently been moving around quite a bit, and have rented a few cars. As I've been putting rental orders in at short notice I've had the opportunity to drive a few cars that are usually out of my budget range, higher end Mazda, Ford, BMW and Mercedes. I can say without a doubt that the touchscreen controls in all of these cars are terrible, and actually ruin the experience of driving them. If you are unfamiliar with it then forget making any kind of adjustment while driving.
The car I had in the US, a Dodge Dart, was pretty much perfect. No fancy touchscreen, but still a nice enough finish on the interior. Combination of the useful features, without being overly complex. Manual gearbox (although that's a personal preference, I think autos feel crappy no matter how nice the car).
Where are you in Utah? I recently travelled across the USA, including Salt Lake City and Park City, and we tried to visit as many chocolate places ("Chocolatiers", although that's a blatant lie in most cases) as we could. Most were really bad. Quite a few were closed (either for the day, month, or just gone, or moved). Perhaps yours was one of those, I think we pulled up outside 2 places in SLC that were inexplicably closed the day we were there.
Yes indeed. I've interviewed many programmers, and I would say the majority I've interviewed can't actually write a small program effectively. Many of these are senior and have claimed to have held a team lead position. I can only assume they get by by programming only within a framework filling in the blanks, and with much copy and paste as you say.
I interviewed someone just last week for a junior position who had some experience. I gave the task of turning a recursive algorithm that parses a tree, into a non-recursive form. This chap could write executing code just fine, without reference, but he just could not figure out the problem. When I gave a prod I thought he might get it, but then, when stuck again, he proceeded to try solving it by moving lines from one place to another. I let him try for 45 minutes!
So yeah, if you can actually take a problem and write an algorithm to solve it in code then you're one step of ahead of many professional coders. Of course it's not the only important skill, and I've known at least one clever person hired because he was able to solve the tests very quickly, turn out to be not so great at actually producing code. Probably because a lot of programming in a job isn't interesting if it's that type of problem solving that really turns you on.
I don't think this really gets to the problem though. The majority of IT folk aren't actually weighted towards Autism. Women I've known in and out of the industry have no more or less an ability to grasp the concepts than men.
Personally I think the problem is that the majority of people in CS are male. Why don't more women apply... because they see a subject dominated by men. And the reasons they don't get into it or get pushed towards it from a young age are the same. It's a feedback look that seems very hard to get out of.
uh oh. I got married on the beach for $500 with 4 guests and didn't tell any relatives, so that my girlfriend could get on my visa. And we're atheists.
OTOH 2 of the guests were our children, we'd been together for 10 years and we earn more than 125k. And we did go on honeymoon, but we took the kids, so does that count? 39% + 51% + 41% x 12.5 x 2 = ?? Will we get divorced?
I've gone a different way around.
1. I left Britain for New Zealand... I love NZ, the weather is perfect for me, neither too hot nor too cold at any time, it rains but doesn't feel miserable like the UK does sometimes. Great coffee, good food everywhere, good people who mostly respect immigrants. But downside, very small tech sector, everyone knows one another which I found a little difficult at times.
2. Once I had my NZ passport went to San Francisco. Hate the weather, California is too sunny. Hate the tech scene, I think the startup thing going on in SF is actually a bit crappy to work near. USA is diverse and interesting, I've loved travelling around. I could settle in New England, Maine is lovely. Americans are lovely people, but deeper friendships take longer for some reason, maybe cultural differences.
3. About to move to Denmark. I doubt the language will be too much a problem, looking forward to the better social support system. Will definitely be commenting on it in the near future.
4. Australia maybe...
5. Back to NZ, build a house.
Dashcams with a record and send to police function might be useful. It might stop dangerous drivers if they knew there was a much higher chance of being recorded and fined.
This is a well thought out comment.
Perhaps an all-seats-equal type business model might make a better travel experience.
I've wondered the same, I'd certainly pay a bit more for seat equality and this experiment at the premium economy level of comfort.
Ever tried a Bus over the holidays?
It'd work in some places, but not all. America is pretty big, I've been driving around the Western states for 2 months, but getting all the way across was too long and complicated with kids and cats (yeah) so we flew the rest from CO to MA. I'm moving overseas this month to Europe, and we're planning to use the trains instead of flying or driving for our holidays.
Look up Coeliac DIsease.
That's an actual verifiable reaction to gluten that can cause death. Charliemopps is talking about the now popular gluten intolerance. Funnily enough, I myself feel a bit bloated after stuffing a couple of sandwiches down my gullet.
Indeed, and virtualization is a rapidly evolving part of infrastructure right now. We may no longer be upgrading the hardware as rapidly (although I'm not certain about that either), but the virtual layer and tools are changing, and upgrading those requires just as much upheaval.
Why should people put up with it just because you do? I wouldn't. I'm not exactly thin skinned but I think there is a level of professionalism that should be affected at work. I'm quite happy to have a very different relationship with the same people out of work.
Will people move to an alternative if Google Maps becomes unreliable?
For recommendations and reviews I've always found google unreliable, so I've been using Yelp. It probably suffers the same problems, but it seems a bit more reliable.
I agree but it's a difficult situation. A lot of the interpreted languages (ruby, php, perl, python, node) offer a standalone packager of some kind. Then the linux distros offer *some* integration so that you can install those packages their way, or get access to precompiled versions of ones that require it. In my experience that integration has always been the pain point.
I'm working with some web software at the moment. It's the kludgiest amalgomation of crap that I've seen in quite some time.
It sounds like some poor decisions have led to that situation for you. Ruby and Node both have fairly flexible package management solutions that let you pin dependencies and provide private repos for your specific dependency versions when for some reason you can't use official ones.
However, one thing that has always bothered me is when we say "well we're using ruby xx.xx (or node xx.xx or php xx.xx or whatever) on our development machines, so we must install that version on production" and then the hoops taken to do that. It should be "production can run ruby xx.xx so that's what you have to develop against".
Working 5 days a week for 8 hours at a time doesn't make any sense anymore.
I agree. But it's good to have that structure when you first start out. It's also good to know when to break out of it, and I wish I had done so far earlier than I did. If you are a technology worker you should understand that some days you can work longer, some shorter. Sometimes you feel like you can't work on the major tasks so you do support for a few hours. And I often shift the time around. For some reason I feel way more productive between 11pm and 1am than 11am and 1pm.
My wife often comments that I am not very easy to distract when working. And the day is still delineated with events: children wake us up, time for breakfast then work. Lunch time, walk out for coffee. Dinner time, 5:30, time to stop working. Sure if you had no family then that might break down.
I've seen plenty of people working long hours at the office.
Yes I overplayed it a little there. The best workers work wherever is best for them, be it the office or at home. But the thing I find distracting at the office is the people. I love talking to people and helping them out and so forth (which obviously happens remotely too, but not as much) but for getting some programming or spec work done my own calm space is best. I can work a little long from home without really thinking about it because there's no hassle of "getting ready" or the commute. Although there is often the "shit, video conference in 5 minutes, no trousers" moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This is rather anecdotal. I refuse to believe that I'm in a 5% percentage of people more effective working from home than in the office. The office is full of distractions, noise, people to waste time with, toys like pool tables and so forth. I go in every so often because some of those distractions are important.
But home is nice and quiet. Can move between desk, sofa, bed, outside with laptop. I suspect that those who find distractions working at home will find distractions working in the office.
I've noticed that the best workers in my company are the ones who have gone remote. I'm not saying that they are best because they're remote. But they're probably the ones who don't feel they need to be seen in the office to prove their worth.
I've lived in NZ and California.
3) the population is mostly concentrated in a couple of cities, and not of a huge relative geographical area. More folks can do mass transit there, and drive less often.
The USA could really do with more mass transit. There's plenty of concentrated population. I've not spoken to a single American here who disagrees, so it must be down to politics. When you say concentrated... the Wellington region has less than 400k people. And yet you can get around reasonably easily via train and bus. I lived in Waikanae, an hours drive north of Wellington, and getting the train + bus took an 1hr 20 mins.
In the USA I live near Santa Rosa, and it takes 1hr 15mins to drive to where I need to be in SF when there is no traffic (ha). Public transport would take more than 3hours! And North Bay alone has a greater population than the entire Wellington region.
4) an immigration policy that would get us called Nazis if we implemented them here (see also the current immigration woes and their contribution to economic issues here in the US)
Really? I did not know that. I found it way easier and less bureaucratic to get into NZ.
The idea of no God or afterlife doesn't really give me any feelings at all because I don't think of them. They are unrelated and uninvolved in the grief I've felt when a family member died.
As you state, you've always had faith, so how can you conceivably tell someone who does not how they feel about it (smug), and link that to the death of your loved ones in any way?
That the world was flat was not a seriously held belief, and CC did not set out to prove that it was spherical.
Whereas we know the energy requirements of settling outside of the Earth are beyond us at the moment. That's not to say that will always be the case. But putting hope into that without a viable path there is pointless fantasy. Figuring how to cope where we are with what we have is reality.
We have at least two of those, a common language and shared history. The language is English, because as much as the French hate it, it is the lingua franca in the EU. The history is one of fighting one another tooth and nail, but it is a long history and most of those wars were about a small handful of elite too.
Is there enough of a shared culture to convince the French to send their sons and daughters to die for the Latvians?
Yes, absolutely. No different to what happens now with NATO.
My argument against a federal EU is from another direction. The USA is too big, and it's politics have become paralyzed by it's size. It might be better off devolving a lot of power to the states.
Canada and Australia, while not truly British colonies still are subjective to Britain
Sort of but not really. These countries have chosen to retain their links with Britain, but all three (you missed New Zealand) would be able to remove those links by democratic process. And some of them have had referendums on the subject. As has been happening slowly over time, example NZ recently introduced it's own high court and so abolished the law that allowed cases to be taken to the high court in the UK.
And the UK, is a free country, therefore it's "subject" countries are also free. Again example, this year Scotland will vote on independence, and although the UK government is being underhand in its dealing with the subject in a PR sense, if the result was for independence I doubt they won't get it.