It's seldom that Slashdot takes me on a Wikipedia-like adventure. But once I was there and realized that archive.org is more than a Wayback Machine, I started looking up issues of RUN magazine (C=64 and C=128 centric magazine of the time). I was determined not to stop until I found the two "Magic" articles that they published for me. Issue 65 and Issue 69, long lost in the real world, and now added to my digital trophy case.
I can't believe I was programming 8502 assembly language back then and haven't so much as learned a damned thing about Java these days.
What is "incorrect"? Companies will change parts due to customer satisfaction, too. That's not an admission of wrongdoing. It's an admission that they didn't meet customer satisfaction the first time (and yes, you could jump in and say that not dying is satisfying, but that's not my point).
In the case of the ignition switch, there's very easy plausible deniability. The newer, customer-satisfying version has higher torque. Customers have come to expect resistance when they turn a key, and they identify a too-easy-to-turn key with toy-like "cheapness." If the new key switch module can add less than 1 per unit in manufacturing and also improve customer satisfaction, then it's absolutely justifiable in this situation.
There is a huge emphasis on closing efforts these days. The result of all of this work is that I typically slam car doors closed, because my old-man expectation is that the door is heavy and needs a lot of energy imparted into the action. Most customers, though, appreciate easy-to-close doors. Car makers go through a lot of effort to compete with each other on this detail. It's not at all related to safety, but to customer satisfaction.
Of course "customer satisfaction" leads to increased sales and profitability. It's a downright disservice to spread misinformation that manufacturers (of any product, not just cars) only compare bottom-line price, because the successful ones realize that they cannot compete based *only* on price.
Most companies pay a 13th month salary just before New Year, and that's also when Red Envelopes and bonus payments are made. So in cases where people are going to leave anyway, this is the time they're likely to do it. To be qualified for 13th month and bonus, you have to have been at the company since October. This all causes:
- Lots of people don't return to work after New Year. In my company it's about 11%.
- It's very, very hard to hire people (except fresh graduates) between October and New Year (Jan-Feb, usually).
Internal migrants are also similar to Mexican migrants in the USA. They come, make a lot of money (by their standards for a short time), and return to the family home. And in the case of our engineers, they simply add our prestigious name to their C.V.'s and get a 30% raise at the next company.
All of these menu's are driving me crazy. I's don't need so many menu's. You's should all's agree with me.
I miss the craftsmanship of professional journalists sometimes, and if not the journalists, then at least their attentive copy editors who know basic English pluralization rules.
Didn't Ford do this a year or two ago for some MyFord Touch systems? They sent owners a USB stick, but also gave them the option to bring the car to the dealership if they weren't confident in doing it themselves.
According to some online book weight calculator I randomly tried, a 500 page, common-sized book may weigh 700 grams. So the shelf could hold 170 books before approaching the weight of a 120 kg operator. That's a lot of books for one shelf. In all likelihood the shelves hold fewer than 170 books.
More than likely OSHA and operator safety, too. I didn't read the FA, but I imagine most of the shelves -- even when full -- weigh substantially less than a 120 kg warehouse worker.
I'm an American living in China. I use USGlobalMail. These guys are legitimate and do a good job. They're my personal recommendation, and I won't go into thousands of details you can get from their website directly. Check them out.
Technology aside, there simply wasn't incentive to optimize steel use. There was no foreign competition, all of the steel was made in North America, and the big three all paid the same price for it. Fuel was cheap and so weight wasn't an issue.
Technologically, though, the mass commercially available steels were crap by today's standards. At best they materials that were 150 megapascal ultimate tensile strength (MPa UTS, which is one of the many characteristics that describe metal behaviours). Need a stronger body part? Use thicker steel. These days, though, we have commercially available steels commonly used in car bodies that are up to 1000 MPa UTS. As an aside this is also one of the principle reasons that aluminum never came into wider use (and cost and spot-market requirements, etc.): steel kept getting better and cheaper.
Consider also, back in those days cars were predominantly body-on-frame. Most of what we would call structure today depended solely on the chassis frame. The body essentially had to hold its shape. Unibody changed this, and early unibody cars tended to use thicker gages of steels because all they had were low strength steels. Even today, light trucks tend to have less sheet metal structure and more dependency on the chassis frame.
In the 1950's as well as the 2010's materials testing is highly mechanical. Yes, CAE technologies help greatly to optimize body structures, but it wasn't necessary in the 1950's (and before and after) for the reasons above. However to say that they didn't have budgets for materials testing and development is unfair to them.
A lot of big, western companies — like mine — already provide our own internet infrastructure and have access to the internet at large. All of our employees are free to read the New York Times, American version of Google, or have FaceBook accounts. And if we don't mind going through the company servers for stuff at home, the company VPN works everywhere in China.
The point of this move in the FA, though, is that China will license private ISP's to provide this service to anyone or company in the free trade zones. *This* would be of great convenience, and I wish I were in this zone. I use China Telecom now and have 50 Mbs fiber service. It's fast as hell and dirt cheap (by American standards), but my connection slows to a crawl as soon as I start routing all of my traffic through a single, private VPN pipe to Germany or California or Sweden.
Airports. Those are people commuting between cities.
And in general, comfort. Sure, we mostly fit into small cars. I love having fun in a tricked out Fiesta. But when I spend more than 1/2 hour in a car not having fun, I want it to be spacious, like my house.
Even before all Americans were obese, we loved our space.
I'm not daring enough to suggest that I have all the answers to make things better, but I know enough to know what would make things worse. Before we start improving, we have to stop getting worse.
If I have to pick one thing that might have a chance at breaking the two party system, then I'd suggest holding instant runoff elections for popular contests.
>>In reality, EA is just the worst corporation according to people who read The Consumerist.
I’d argue that this is proof that EA is one of the *best* companies in America according to people who read The Consumerist. Or mot popular if not best. Disclaimer: I read that site. I'm an old man who gets to the articles through an ancient technology called RSS using a service on its death bed called Google Reader.
In 2009 I used my fancy new iPhone instead of the company phone to call in to a meeting while connecting in Dallas. I was surprised that I was charged nearly $20 for that phone call. Then I realized: legacy circa 2001 Cingular regional calling plan, which AT&T allowed me to add my data plan to.
Every time I return to the USA I stop by the T-Mobile store and ask for a couple of Micro SIM's and a few days of air time. There's never any pressure to add data to my Phone or my wife's. When I finally repatriate, T-Mobile will be given very serious consideration, unless they do something stupid between now and then.
My 50 Mbps fiber (in Nanjing) usually gets me about 30 Mbps service, which is still excellent. However, how do you manage to get that throughput through the VPN? I find that unless I open multiple simultaneous connections, I can't get any serious speed outside of China. For example I can use lftp to open 20 parallel transfers to my VPS in France and saturate my connection, but the VPN (whether to my commercial provider in California, my Amazon EC2 instance in California, or my house in Michigan). I'm certain it's not throttling, and the router's CPU doesn't ever get over 15% (OpenVPN running in the router).
Well, you're describing the metes and bounds system. I think metric units aren't likely to impact that too much. No argument against reform there. However most of the country uses PLSS -- the public land survey system. Look it up, it's a good read. For the sake of completeness, we have yet a third system based on old Spanish land grants.
In any case, how many billions will we spend updating old PLSS records for the sake of being metric? Then how many billions fighting lawsuits because of errors? We'll have to demand that schools keep teaching US customary measurements for the good of our economy.
We already get the temperature report in centigrade (and Fahrenheit). Maybe it's because of my proximity to the border with Canada, but I'm used to it. Every weather reporting outfit is free to report in centigrade, too. Are you proposing a law to coerce unfree speech? And worse... to restrict speed by making Fahrenheit reporting illegal? And even if this happens, why does it even matter? How does this improve the USA? Those of us who benefit from Celsius scale already use it.
As for other countries that did the conversion, let me tell you, I've lived in Canada, and nothing rapidly follows the conversion process. I work with lots of Aussies and Brits currently. It's all a mix. And you know what? It doesn't matter! We're smart people; we don't need a government to force us into using certain units instead of others.
Really. What does "going metric" mean for the USA? The only possible thing we can do is change the highway signs. Or seriously over-complicate the Public Land Survey System (even Canada never metric-ized their version).
Or do we take away people's free speech rights and tell them they can't communicate in US standard units? We make it illegal for bank clocks to show degrees F? Force publishers to print metric recipes?
Just WHAT does going metric mean?
In any case, the wording of the petition is full of slop and doesn't actually *propose* any meaningful specific action. "[W]e... still adhere to using the imprecise Imperial Unit." Someone know doesn't understand "precision" doesn't even stand to benefit from metric units!
I travel this route quite frequently myself. And I love it. I still require the use of my car to get to the train station on my end, but the subway infrastructure in Shanghai means that you don't really ever need a taxi unless you're tired, injured, in a hurry, or don't want to get rained upon. (Nanjing's subway system still has a lot to be desired; it's being built, but not yet built in my area).
Yet every time I pay my 220 RMB for a first class ticket, I know I'm stealing from the Chinese because it's so heavily subsidized. This is spurring competition from the airlines, though, so perhaps that's a good thing. It now costs essentially the same to fly to Shanghai or Beijing as to take a first class seat in a high speed train. When you factor in the time to get to the airport, the waiting time, the Chinese queuing system for boarding, waiting for bags, and so on, there's no argument that the train is faster and more convenient than an airline (for home leave and outside-of-China business trips, we often simply go to Shanghai on train as a first step). One could argue that it's probably just as fast to take the train to Beijing as it is to fly, factoring in all of the hassles flying.
But again I'll say, every time I pay my 220 RMB for a first class ticket, I know I'm stealing from the Chinese because it's so heavily subsidized. Despite my affinity for the Chinese trains, I can't possibly see a way to build a system in the USA -- let alone Michigan -- unless we stop other spending and subsidize it like the Chinese. And not care about environmental impacts, like the Chinese.
There's a lot of romance about trains, but no practical solution for the USA -- emphasis on "practical."
Slashdot Mirror
It's seldom that Slashdot takes me on a Wikipedia-like adventure. But once I was there and realized that archive.org is more than a Wayback Machine, I started looking up issues of RUN magazine (C=64 and C=128 centric magazine of the time). I was determined not to stop until I found the two "Magic" articles that they published for me. Issue 65 and Issue 69, long lost in the real world, and now added to my digital trophy case.
I can't believe I was programming 8502 assembly language back then and haven't so much as learned a damned thing about Java these days.
What is "incorrect"? Companies will change parts due to customer satisfaction, too. That's not an admission of wrongdoing. It's an admission that they didn't meet customer satisfaction the first time (and yes, you could jump in and say that not dying is satisfying, but that's not my point).
In the case of the ignition switch, there's very easy plausible deniability. The newer, customer-satisfying version has higher torque. Customers have come to expect resistance when they turn a key, and they identify a too-easy-to-turn key with toy-like "cheapness." If the new key switch module can add less than 1 per unit in manufacturing and also improve customer satisfaction, then it's absolutely justifiable in this situation.
There is a huge emphasis on closing efforts these days. The result of all of this work is that I typically slam car doors closed, because my old-man expectation is that the door is heavy and needs a lot of energy imparted into the action. Most customers, though, appreciate easy-to-close doors. Car makers go through a lot of effort to compete with each other on this detail. It's not at all related to safety, but to customer satisfaction.
Of course "customer satisfaction" leads to increased sales and profitability. It's a downright disservice to spread misinformation that manufacturers (of any product, not just cars) only compare bottom-line price, because the successful ones realize that they cannot compete based *only* on price.
Most companies pay a 13th month salary just before New Year, and that's also when Red Envelopes and bonus payments are made. So in cases where people are going to leave anyway, this is the time they're likely to do it. To be qualified for 13th month and bonus, you have to have been at the company since October. This all causes:
- Lots of people don't return to work after New Year. In my company it's about 11%.
- It's very, very hard to hire people (except fresh graduates) between October and New Year (Jan-Feb, usually).
Internal migrants are also similar to Mexican migrants in the USA. They come, make a lot of money (by their standards for a short time), and return to the family home. And in the case of our engineers, they simply add our prestigious name to their C.V.'s and get a 30% raise at the next company.
All of these menu's are driving me crazy. I's don't need so many menu's. You's should all's agree with me.
I miss the craftsmanship of professional journalists sometimes, and if not the journalists, then at least their attentive copy editors who know basic English pluralization rules.
Didn't Ford do this a year or two ago for some MyFord Touch systems? They sent owners a USB stick, but also gave them the option to bring the car to the dealership if they weren't confident in doing it themselves.
My Zephyr (now MKZ) definitely used dead reconing, back in 2007 or so.
According to some online book weight calculator I randomly tried, a 500 page, common-sized book may weigh 700 grams. So the shelf could hold 170 books before approaching the weight of a 120 kg operator. That's a lot of books for one shelf. In all likelihood the shelves hold fewer than 170 books.
More than likely OSHA and operator safety, too. I didn't read the FA, but I imagine most of the shelves -- even when full -- weigh substantially less than a 120 kg warehouse worker.
What are you guys considering cheap? My cheap $50 meter has a current probe. $50 is dirt cheap by Fluke standards.
I'm an American living in China. I use USGlobalMail. These guys are legitimate and do a good job. They're my personal recommendation, and I won't go into thousands of details you can get from their website directly. Check them out.
Technology aside, there simply wasn't incentive to optimize steel use. There was no foreign competition, all of the steel was made in North America, and the big three all paid the same price for it. Fuel was cheap and so weight wasn't an issue.
Technologically, though, the mass commercially available steels were crap by today's standards. At best they materials that were 150 megapascal ultimate tensile strength (MPa UTS, which is one of the many characteristics that describe metal behaviours). Need a stronger body part? Use thicker steel. These days, though, we have commercially available steels commonly used in car bodies that are up to 1000 MPa UTS. As an aside this is also one of the principle reasons that aluminum never came into wider use (and cost and spot-market requirements, etc.): steel kept getting better and cheaper.
Consider also, back in those days cars were predominantly body-on-frame. Most of what we would call structure today depended solely on the chassis frame. The body essentially had to hold its shape. Unibody changed this, and early unibody cars tended to use thicker gages of steels because all they had were low strength steels. Even today, light trucks tend to have less sheet metal structure and more dependency on the chassis frame.
In the 1950's as well as the 2010's materials testing is highly mechanical. Yes, CAE technologies help greatly to optimize body structures, but it wasn't necessary in the 1950's (and before and after) for the reasons above. However to say that they didn't have budgets for materials testing and development is unfair to them.
A lot of big, western companies — like mine — already provide our own internet infrastructure and have access to the internet at large. All of our employees are free to read the New York Times, American version of Google, or have FaceBook accounts. And if we don't mind going through the company servers for stuff at home, the company VPN works everywhere in China.
The point of this move in the FA, though, is that China will license private ISP's to provide this service to anyone or company in the free trade zones. *This* would be of great convenience, and I wish I were in this zone. I use China Telecom now and have 50 Mbs fiber service. It's fast as hell and dirt cheap (by American standards), but my connection slows to a crawl as soon as I start routing all of my traffic through a single, private VPN pipe to Germany or California or Sweden.
As says the title, Not cousin. Half-brother.
Airports. Those are people commuting between cities.
And in general, comfort. Sure, we mostly fit into small cars. I love having fun in a tricked out Fiesta. But when I spend more than 1/2 hour in a car not having fun, I want it to be spacious, like my house.
Even before all Americans were obese, we loved our space.
I'm not daring enough to suggest that I have all the answers to make things better, but I know enough to know what would make things worse. Before we start improving, we have to stop getting worse.
If I have to pick one thing that might have a chance at breaking the two party system, then I'd suggest holding instant runoff elections for popular contests.
We're in a mess, but direct democracy would screw up the mess that much more. Hello, proposition 8? Mob rule will never accomplish much.
>>In reality, EA is just the worst corporation according to people who read The Consumerist.
I’d argue that this is proof that EA is one of the *best* companies in America according to people who read The Consumerist. Or mot popular if not best. Disclaimer: I read that site. I'm an old man who gets to the articles through an ancient technology called RSS using a service on its death bed called Google Reader.
Look at the original brackets: http://consumerist.com/2013/03/27/meet-your-worst-company-in-america-no-so-sweet-16/ -- it’s a popularity contest.
Chase has more customers than Wells-Fargo, so Chase wins its first round. Apple versus Microsoft: more front-facing customers. Dish vs. DirectTV.
The contest result is bullshit, because the design of the contest is bullshit.
In 2009 I used my fancy new iPhone instead of the company phone to call in to a meeting while connecting in Dallas. I was surprised that I was charged nearly $20 for that phone call. Then I realized: legacy circa 2001 Cingular regional calling plan, which AT&T allowed me to add my data plan to.
Every time I return to the USA I stop by the T-Mobile store and ask for a couple of Micro SIM's and a few days of air time. There's never any pressure to add data to my Phone or my wife's. When I finally repatriate, T-Mobile will be given very serious consideration, unless they do something stupid between now and then.
January 23th is the date of the press release. Just... I guess that's minor compared to alleged encryption issues.
My 50 Mbps fiber (in Nanjing) usually gets me about 30 Mbps service, which is still excellent. However, how do you manage to get that throughput through the VPN? I find that unless I open multiple simultaneous connections, I can't get any serious speed outside of China. For example I can use lftp to open 20 parallel transfers to my VPS in France and saturate my connection, but the VPN (whether to my commercial provider in California, my Amazon EC2 instance in California, or my house in Michigan). I'm certain it's not throttling, and the router's CPU doesn't ever get over 15% (OpenVPN running in the router).
Well, you're describing the metes and bounds system. I think metric units aren't likely to impact that too much. No argument against reform there. However most of the country uses PLSS -- the public land survey system. Look it up, it's a good read. For the sake of completeness, we have yet a third system based on old Spanish land grants.
In any case, how many billions will we spend updating old PLSS records for the sake of being metric? Then how many billions fighting lawsuits because of errors? We'll have to demand that schools keep teaching US customary measurements for the good of our economy.
We already get the temperature report in centigrade (and Fahrenheit). Maybe it's because of my proximity to the border with Canada, but I'm used to it. Every weather reporting outfit is free to report in centigrade, too. Are you proposing a law to coerce unfree speech? And worse... to restrict speed by making Fahrenheit reporting illegal? And even if this happens, why does it even matter? How does this improve the USA? Those of us who benefit from Celsius scale already use it.
As for other countries that did the conversion, let me tell you, I've lived in Canada, and nothing rapidly follows the conversion process. I work with lots of Aussies and Brits currently. It's all a mix. And you know what? It doesn't matter! We're smart people; we don't need a government to force us into using certain units instead of others.
Really. What does "going metric" mean for the USA? The only possible thing we can do is change the highway signs. Or seriously over-complicate the Public Land Survey System (even Canada never metric-ized their version).
Or do we take away people's free speech rights and tell them they can't communicate in US standard units? We make it illegal for bank clocks to show degrees F? Force publishers to print metric recipes?
Just WHAT does going metric mean?
In any case, the wording of the petition is full of slop and doesn't actually *propose* any meaningful specific action. "[W]e ... still adhere to using the imprecise Imperial Unit." Someone know doesn't understand "precision" doesn't even stand to benefit from metric units!
I travel this route quite frequently myself. And I love it. I still require the use of my car to get to the train station on my end, but the subway infrastructure in Shanghai means that you don't really ever need a taxi unless you're tired, injured, in a hurry, or don't want to get rained upon. (Nanjing's subway system still has a lot to be desired; it's being built, but not yet built in my area).
Yet every time I pay my 220 RMB for a first class ticket, I know I'm stealing from the Chinese because it's so heavily subsidized. This is spurring competition from the airlines, though, so perhaps that's a good thing. It now costs essentially the same to fly to Shanghai or Beijing as to take a first class seat in a high speed train. When you factor in the time to get to the airport, the waiting time, the Chinese queuing system for boarding, waiting for bags, and so on, there's no argument that the train is faster and more convenient than an airline (for home leave and outside-of-China business trips, we often simply go to Shanghai on train as a first step). One could argue that it's probably just as fast to take the train to Beijing as it is to fly, factoring in all of the hassles flying.
But again I'll say, every time I pay my 220 RMB for a first class ticket, I know I'm stealing from the Chinese because it's so heavily subsidized. Despite my affinity for the Chinese trains, I can't possibly see a way to build a system in the USA -- let alone Michigan -- unless we stop other spending and subsidize it like the Chinese. And not care about environmental impacts, like the Chinese.
There's a lot of romance about trains, but no practical solution for the USA -- emphasis on "practical."