the era of the simple automobile you could fix without specialized tools (you still can yourself, you just made need tools and training) is over.
See my previous comment about tools.
As for the training, I find that these days, your typical mechanic is no better off than you (where YOU is generically a non-mechanic of average intelligence) as to how to fix your car. All they know how to do is hook up the code reader and read the output. From that point, they just guess at what might be wrong and how to fix it. And the best part is, the more parts and labor they throw at it and the longer it takes them to find the ACTUAL issue, the more money they make.
If you have a code reader, which range from pretty cheap to not horribly expensive, and access to google, you can probably fix your car faster than the average auto mechanic, and probably without replacing parts that didn't need replacing and/or breaking things that were working fine before.
Working on engines have always required special tools.
I don't know about that. You can do most tasks with just screwdrivers, some pliers and a good deep socket set. Now, if you're replacing a head gasket or something, you will want a proper torque wrench (note that if you take it the dealer, they are probably NOT going to bother to torque it to spec, just wrench the hell out of it until it won't turn any more). There are a few special tools that I have borrowed from time to time from O'Reilly or Autozone. Spring pullers and the like. But I could have found something to work. There are obnoxious car companies that do have special tools required for certain parts, but I have yet to find one that was even remotely necessary, other than to prevent you from doing the job yourself at a reasonable cost.
By they way, make sure you have both metric and imperial sockets. I find that most cars these days have a healthy mix of both metric and imperial. Oddly, American cars manufacturers use a lot of metric bolts and nuts so they can appear hip, while import manufacturers tend to have more imperial nuts and bolts because they cater to the U.S. market. (I am in the U.S., YMMV).
your timing belt, water pump, other belt replacement is 350$? i just spent 1200 for mine. that's not chump change. most shops end up at 350 for a standard brake pad replacement every couple of years.
Should be $10 and half an hour of your time. if you have the dealer do it, then yes it will be $1200 and half a day of your time.
Always Connected DRM Car, its the wave of the future.
As an added feature, you won't be able to resell your car or let a friend borrow it.
Also, you'd better hope they don't decide to shut down the server, or your car won't start.
OG&E claims that 99% of their customers on their "SmartHours" program saved money last year. I was on the program and saved about $100 a month. I can say that I probably didn't use any less energy, as I already turn lights off an whatnot during the day and most of last summer it was so hot that the AC couldn't keep up even when the smart thermostats turned the temperature up during the day. However, their pricing plan for cheaper evening and weekend hours overcame the jacked up prices during peak hours and I ended up saving a lot of money over the summer.
According to the article the Science teacher denies knowing about the experiment before hand, a suspension for mixing chemicals without authorization is probably justified.
If I was that science teacher, I would probably deny any knowledge too. But then somebody might question why a Science teacher would allow a student to perform an experiment that had not been discussed with the teacher.
If you mean this story, the "victim" shot the unarmed robber once in the head, eliminating the threat. He then went and got a second gun and pumped five more bullets into the robber while he was on the ground. An Oklahoma jury recommended the life sentence.
Do you get all your news from soundbites found on conservative blogs or what?
No, it's just that I happen to be close to the case and know the facts. The fact is that what happened was not visible from a video camera, nor any witnesses. The coroner said that the armed robber was no longer a threat, but was still alive, which he could not possibly have known. There is also the possibility that despite the shot (which was in the side of the neck), the robber was still alive and could have been attempting to shoot back. There is a third possibility that he was already dead, in which case all the defendant did was desecrate a corpse.
Basically, this was a political move by the DA. He needed a case to prove himself and he ruined a guys life to do it. The guy is in jail now, never wanted any of this to happen. Never went in to work that day planning to shoot somebody. All he did was react to yet another robber, the last of which had locked them all in a freezer and left them to die.
Oh, and the kid's mother's boyfriend was driving the getaway car. But that wasn't mentioned in the media. They painted the whole story as if the kid was just on his way back from Bible Study and just decided to pop in and rob a pharmacy. No, his mother's boyfriend was grooming him to be a fine young hoodlum.
You can simply compare punishments for the same crime meted out by our justice system to prove that.
I agree. Down here in Oklahoma, we had a black guy kill an unarmed white guy who complied with his order to hand over his wallet and also forced the white guy's grlfriend to strip in the middle of the street. The murderer got 15 years in prison.
Also, here in Oklahoma, a white guy shot and killed a black guy who was robbing his convenience store at gunpoint. The victim (by which I mean the guy who was getting robbed) is now serving life in prison as punishment for possibly saving the lives of the other people in the store.
For this teen, It probably should have lead to Detention, or perhaps up to a week suspension, because setting off unsupervised explosions (even small ones) is wrong. But being that didn't cause any damage, or was meant to the punishment should face that fact.
No, she didn't do anything wrong at all. If anyone should be in trouble, it is whoever was in charge of vetting the experiments which would be allowed into the fair. If they allowed her to perform the experiment, and she did, then how can she be blamed?
I've personally encountered a lot of bigotry in the south. Am I not allowed to say so, or to notice?
I've encountered bigotry in the north and in the south. I know it can be hard for anyone not a white male to get a job at a small business. It is also difficult for anyone who IS a white male to get a job at a large company. It works both ways. As long as we enforce quotas and give preference to a group, no matter who the group is, that is racism.
You really are out of touch with reality. The Rio Grande no longer gets anywhere near Mexico. It pretty much dries up before it even leaves New Mexico. New Mexico is not in Mexico.
I was about to call BS until I looked at Google maps. And indeed the Rio Grande is dried up from west side of Brownsville to the east side of Brownsville. Probably about a 30 mile stretch. But the rest of it still has water. So still BS.
roaming costs? big plans can have good data rates your own not so much.
My previous company owned the phones and gave them out to individuals. Project Managers, who tended to stay at the office, got 1200 minutes, while technical staff, who tended to have to go out to client sites for two weeks at a stretch, got 500 minutes. I ended up going over a time or two, and was called in to explain myself. On those occasions, I discovered that the corporate plan that the company subscribed to cost about double what an individuals plan would cost with the same minutes. I guess AT&Ts motto is "Buy in bulk and !save".
Anyway, at some point, the company decided to save money by having the employees BYOD and also PAY for said device. No raises were given in coincidence with this change in policy. The company did require that the employee had to have a phone and make the number available, especially when on the road, but did not pay for it in any way shape or form.
I don't want to fund research on gun violence either.
That's silly. If you really believe that guns don't cause the violence, and people just use the tools available to do their violence, than you should believe that a study on gun violence would confirm that.
I thought this was meant to be funny, it's quite scary that it's modded interesting.
You do know that "taking energy" from the sun in the form of solar power doesn't actually cause it to cool down right?
Correct. Solar energy doesn't cause the sun to cool down any more than it was cooling down already. Solar energy merely affects the amount of the sun's energy which gets absorbed by the Earth, the affects of which have not been researched, but affecting weather is probably pretty high up on the list.
So it uses less gas and generates less emmisions if one truck comes from a single point into a area along a planned path and delivers to everyone instead of having all those individuals drive from the area to the single point?
WOW I would of thought it was the other way.
It is good that these people spent all this time and money to prove that common thinking was all wrong.
If this were true wouldn't we be going from having every single parent drop their kid at school and instead have buses that go around and pick them? We used to do that, but apparently somebody decided it is more efficient to have 500 cars cram into a tiny school parking lot, then to have 10 buses go around and pick the kids up.
I can't imagine doing this for bitcoin where the volitility would fuck you over in a heartbeat. Sure I got paid 100$USD in bitcoin on thursday, but by friday it was worth 1$, so do I claim 100$USD income or do I claim 1$ when I convert it to CAD?
Well, luckily enough it has never suffered a 100 fold decrease in the span of a week, nor has it ever suffered a 100 fold decrease over any period of time at any point in it's history.
Yes, because every Bitcoin transaction is someone trying to evade taxes.
Still, it's nice to know that they finished cracking down on all those filthy freeloaders using CAD$ for private untraxed transactions.
Internet-connected. The next Xbox must be Internet-connected to use. This is the source of the “always on”/“always online” rumors and isn’t as Draconian as many seem to believe.
MS, the only people who don't think an always on Internet connection isn't Draconian works for you or game publishing companies. Most of your consumers think it's very Draconian.
So in addition to requiring an always on internet connection, are they still going to charge you $99 for the $5 worth of wireless card which was not included in previous Xboxes?
My dollars didn't vote for mobile gaming. If my dollars could vote, they would vote for just the OPPOSITE of mobile gaming. That's why I didn't buy Simcity 5. I have spent close to $1,000 on Simcity franchise over the years, but they are reducing it to a point and drool game where you have to be online to play. No thanks. I want a single player game where I can play it somewhere where I may not have internet access. Something like an upgraded Simcity.
Even Simcity 4 started to suck, what with all the asinine mini-games, many of which were hard to control and most of which seemed about as engaging and thought provoking as your average $1 phone game. To make matters worse, many of these crappy mini-games were required to open certain options in the main game.
I don't have my entertainment 24/7. WAAAAAA!!!!! WAAAAAAA!!!!
What a jerk you are. More people will die today from lack of food than you'll ever know in your life and you have your panties in a bunch over a single outlet of the dozens you have to choose from for instant entertainment being down for one friggin night?
What a pig.
What a jerk you are. More people will die today from lack of food than you'll ever know in your life and you have your panties in a bunch over a single guy complaining about entertainment options?
This isn't a CAD card meant for workstations and it makes me wonder what the real world benefits of the card are other than bragging rights?
Well, you are correct there. A CAD card would cost five times what this little glorified VGA adapter does.
Well, I have started giving my estimates in man hours instead of elapsed time. Because I find that the estimate of man hours to complete a project is usually about right. Elapsed time is impossible to figure out. One of my developers was in a car accident yesterday and can't work for several days. I can't fit that into an estimate. But the number of man hours stays the same. The only way that man hours can change is if your personnel changes. Like they hire on additional help that is not familiar with the system. If they were brought on to help with this project, the man hours would INCREASE, although it is possible, but unlikely that the elapsed time might decrease. You can never estimate all the interruptions, on-fire issues, meetings, fire drills, what have you that can and will interrupt your timeline, so man hours is the only realistic measurement.
Of course, sales can't sell man hours, and they treat that like it is our problem. But in fact, they are the salespeople, so if they can't sell it, they need to replace the salespeople, not the developers. Unfortunately, salespeople ARE good at one thing, and that is selling the need for Salespeople. Developers aren't as good at selling the need for Developers.
Slashdot Mirror
the era of the simple automobile you could fix without specialized tools (you still can yourself, you just made need tools and training) is over.
See my previous comment about tools.
As for the training, I find that these days, your typical mechanic is no better off than you (where YOU is generically a non-mechanic of average intelligence) as to how to fix your car. All they know how to do is hook up the code reader and read the output. From that point, they just guess at what might be wrong and how to fix it. And the best part is, the more parts and labor they throw at it and the longer it takes them to find the ACTUAL issue, the more money they make.
If you have a code reader, which range from pretty cheap to not horribly expensive, and access to google, you can probably fix your car faster than the average auto mechanic, and probably without replacing parts that didn't need replacing and/or breaking things that were working fine before.
Working on engines have always required special tools.
I don't know about that. You can do most tasks with just screwdrivers, some pliers and a good deep socket set. Now, if you're replacing a head gasket or something, you will want a proper torque wrench (note that if you take it the dealer, they are probably NOT going to bother to torque it to spec, just wrench the hell out of it until it won't turn any more). There are a few special tools that I have borrowed from time to time from O'Reilly or Autozone. Spring pullers and the like. But I could have found something to work. There are obnoxious car companies that do have special tools required for certain parts, but I have yet to find one that was even remotely necessary, other than to prevent you from doing the job yourself at a reasonable cost.
By they way, make sure you have both metric and imperial sockets. I find that most cars these days have a healthy mix of both metric and imperial. Oddly, American cars manufacturers use a lot of metric bolts and nuts so they can appear hip, while import manufacturers tend to have more imperial nuts and bolts because they cater to the U.S. market. (I am in the U.S., YMMV).
your timing belt, water pump, other belt replacement is 350$? i just spent 1200 for mine. that's not chump change. most shops end up at 350 for a standard brake pad replacement every couple of years.
Should be $10 and half an hour of your time. if you have the dealer do it, then yes it will be $1200 and half a day of your time.
Always Connected DRM Car, its the wave of the future.
As an added feature, you won't be able to resell your car or let a friend borrow it.
Also, you'd better hope they don't decide to shut down the server, or your car won't start.
Two things I notice:
1) nobody I work with has a desktop. 2) Apple portables outnumber windows and Linux combined
Where I work Apple has taken over the desktop.
So where you work, there are zero desktops and they are all Apple?
OG&E claims that 99% of their customers on their "SmartHours" program saved money last year. I was on the program and saved about $100 a month. I can say that I probably didn't use any less energy, as I already turn lights off an whatnot during the day and most of last summer it was so hot that the AC couldn't keep up even when the smart thermostats turned the temperature up during the day. However, their pricing plan for cheaper evening and weekend hours overcame the jacked up prices during peak hours and I ended up saving a lot of money over the summer.
OG&E in Oklahoma has had theirs done for well over 6 months. They have 3/4 of a million customers. That sounds plenty large to me.
According to the article the Science teacher denies knowing about the experiment before hand, a suspension for mixing chemicals without authorization is probably justified.
If I was that science teacher, I would probably deny any knowledge too. But then somebody might question why a Science teacher would allow a student to perform an experiment that had not been discussed with the teacher.
If you mean this story, the "victim" shot the unarmed robber once in the head, eliminating the threat. He then went and got a second gun and pumped five more bullets into the robber while he was on the ground. An Oklahoma jury recommended the life sentence.
Do you get all your news from soundbites found on conservative blogs or what?
No, it's just that I happen to be close to the case and know the facts. The fact is that what happened was not visible from a video camera, nor any witnesses. The coroner said that the armed robber was no longer a threat, but was still alive, which he could not possibly have known. There is also the possibility that despite the shot (which was in the side of the neck), the robber was still alive and could have been attempting to shoot back. There is a third possibility that he was already dead, in which case all the defendant did was desecrate a corpse.
Basically, this was a political move by the DA. He needed a case to prove himself and he ruined a guys life to do it. The guy is in jail now, never wanted any of this to happen. Never went in to work that day planning to shoot somebody. All he did was react to yet another robber, the last of which had locked them all in a freezer and left them to die.
Oh, and the kid's mother's boyfriend was driving the getaway car. But that wasn't mentioned in the media. They painted the whole story as if the kid was just on his way back from Bible Study and just decided to pop in and rob a pharmacy. No, his mother's boyfriend was grooming him to be a fine young hoodlum.
You can simply compare punishments for the same crime meted out by our justice system to prove that.
I agree. Down here in Oklahoma, we had a black guy kill an unarmed white guy who complied with his order to hand over his wallet and also forced the white guy's grlfriend to strip in the middle of the street. The murderer got 15 years in prison.
Also, here in Oklahoma, a white guy shot and killed a black guy who was robbing his convenience store at gunpoint. The victim (by which I mean the guy who was getting robbed) is now serving life in prison as punishment for possibly saving the lives of the other people in the store.
For this teen, It probably should have lead to Detention, or perhaps up to a week suspension, because setting off unsupervised explosions (even small ones) is wrong. But being that didn't cause any damage, or was meant to the punishment should face that fact.
No, she didn't do anything wrong at all. If anyone should be in trouble, it is whoever was in charge of vetting the experiments which would be allowed into the fair. If they allowed her to perform the experiment, and she did, then how can she be blamed?
I've personally encountered a lot of bigotry in the south. Am I not allowed to say so, or to notice?
I've encountered bigotry in the north and in the south. I know it can be hard for anyone not a white male to get a job at a small business. It is also difficult for anyone who IS a white male to get a job at a large company. It works both ways. As long as we enforce quotas and give preference to a group, no matter who the group is, that is racism.
You really are out of touch with reality. The Rio Grande no longer gets anywhere near Mexico. It pretty much dries up before it even leaves New Mexico. New Mexico is not in Mexico.
I was about to call BS until I looked at Google maps. And indeed the Rio Grande is dried up from west side of Brownsville to the east side of Brownsville. Probably about a 30 mile stretch. But the rest of it still has water. So still BS.
roaming costs? big plans can have good data rates your own not so much.
My previous company owned the phones and gave them out to individuals. Project Managers, who tended to stay at the office, got 1200 minutes, while technical staff, who tended to have to go out to client sites for two weeks at a stretch, got 500 minutes. I ended up going over a time or two, and was called in to explain myself. On those occasions, I discovered that the corporate plan that the company subscribed to cost about double what an individuals plan would cost with the same minutes. I guess AT&Ts motto is "Buy in bulk and !save".
Anyway, at some point, the company decided to save money by having the employees BYOD and also PAY for said device. No raises were given in coincidence with this change in policy. The company did require that the employee had to have a phone and make the number available, especially when on the road, but did not pay for it in any way shape or form.
I don't want to fund research on gun violence either.
That's silly. If you really believe that guns don't cause the violence, and people just use the tools available to do their violence, than you should believe that a study on gun violence would confirm that.
I thought this was meant to be funny, it's quite scary that it's modded interesting.
You do know that "taking energy" from the sun in the form of solar power doesn't actually cause it to cool down right?
Correct. Solar energy doesn't cause the sun to cool down any more than it was cooling down already. Solar energy merely affects the amount of the sun's energy which gets absorbed by the Earth, the affects of which have not been researched, but affecting weather is probably pretty high up on the list.
So it uses less gas and generates less emmisions if one truck comes from a single point into a area along a planned path and delivers to everyone instead of having all those individuals drive from the area to the single point? WOW I would of thought it was the other way. It is good that these people spent all this time and money to prove that common thinking was all wrong.
If this were true wouldn't we be going from having every single parent drop their kid at school and instead have buses that go around and pick them? We used to do that, but apparently somebody decided it is more efficient to have 500 cars cram into a tiny school parking lot, then to have 10 buses go around and pick the kids up.
We Canucks would love that :)
There are no aliens there. If we go there, then there will be aliens there.
I can't imagine doing this for bitcoin where the volitility would fuck you over in a heartbeat. Sure I got paid 100$USD in bitcoin on thursday, but by friday it was worth 1$, so do I claim 100$USD income or do I claim 1$ when I convert it to CAD?
Well, luckily enough it has never suffered a 100 fold decrease in the span of a week, nor has it ever suffered a 100 fold decrease over any period of time at any point in it's history.
Yes, because every Bitcoin transaction is someone trying to evade taxes.
Still, it's nice to know that they finished cracking down on all those filthy freeloaders using CAD$ for private untraxed transactions.
Internet-connected. The next Xbox must be Internet-connected to use. This is the source of the “always on”/“always online” rumors and isn’t as Draconian as many seem to believe.
MS, the only people who don't think an always on Internet connection isn't Draconian works for you or game publishing companies. Most of your consumers think it's very Draconian.
So in addition to requiring an always on internet connection, are they still going to charge you $99 for the $5 worth of wireless card which was not included in previous Xboxes?
My dollars didn't vote for mobile gaming. If my dollars could vote, they would vote for just the OPPOSITE of mobile gaming. That's why I didn't buy Simcity 5. I have spent close to $1,000 on Simcity franchise over the years, but they are reducing it to a point and drool game where you have to be online to play. No thanks. I want a single player game where I can play it somewhere where I may not have internet access. Something like an upgraded Simcity.
Even Simcity 4 started to suck, what with all the asinine mini-games, many of which were hard to control and most of which seemed about as engaging and thought provoking as your average $1 phone game. To make matters worse, many of these crappy mini-games were required to open certain options in the main game.
I don't have my entertainment 24/7. WAAAAAA!!!!! WAAAAAAA!!!! What a jerk you are. More people will die today from lack of food than you'll ever know in your life and you have your panties in a bunch over a single outlet of the dozens you have to choose from for instant entertainment being down for one friggin night? What a pig.
What a jerk you are. More people will die today from lack of food than you'll ever know in your life and you have your panties in a bunch over a single guy complaining about entertainment options?
What a pig.
This isn't a CAD card meant for workstations and it makes me wonder what the real world benefits of the card are other than bragging rights?
Well, you are correct there. A CAD card would cost five times what this little glorified VGA adapter does.
Well, I have started giving my estimates in man hours instead of elapsed time. Because I find that the estimate of man hours to complete a project is usually about right. Elapsed time is impossible to figure out. One of my developers was in a car accident yesterday and can't work for several days. I can't fit that into an estimate. But the number of man hours stays the same. The only way that man hours can change is if your personnel changes. Like they hire on additional help that is not familiar with the system. If they were brought on to help with this project, the man hours would INCREASE, although it is possible, but unlikely that the elapsed time might decrease. You can never estimate all the interruptions, on-fire issues, meetings, fire drills, what have you that can and will interrupt your timeline, so man hours is the only realistic measurement.
Of course, sales can't sell man hours, and they treat that like it is our problem. But in fact, they are the salespeople, so if they can't sell it, they need to replace the salespeople, not the developers. Unfortunately, salespeople ARE good at one thing, and that is selling the need for Salespeople. Developers aren't as good at selling the need for Developers.