To me, LinkedIn is an example of horrible bad design and practice for the following reasons:
They've demonstrated bad security practices over the years like no other (surviving) organization
They'll spam your throw-away email identities with connection requests
Most of the people I know of who have used LinkedIn for developing their career could have used other mechanisms and gotten better results for the same effort.
We're not at Peak Cellphone but the only new customers are young people buying their first phone (or having it bought for them by their parents.) There are people who have chosen to NOT have a cell phone - and those people aren't going to change their minds much. And there are people who can't afford a cell phone - and that's not likely to change much. The time of easy growth is long gone.
And the time of easy feature based growth is closing too - because most new features offer only small marginal benefits over a relatively new phone. Vendors are caught between improving their phones interfaces to support some of those marginal benefits and alienating their customers. Smartphone interfaces aren't as terrible as they once were and real improvements are harder to achieve.
It all gets down to what do people use these devices for. And for all the apps and features available - most people don't drift outside of the intrinsic functions of texting, photos, calendaring, web browsing, navigating, and a few other apps like social networking, a few games, and maybe a job related app (if you're a sales-drone.)
Really, do you use your phone any differently (qualitatively or quantitatively) more this season than last season? Are any of your apps lagging behind? The app vendors know better than to drive away their customers.
I think that the big question is whether partial disconnect scales.
Consider what happens when solar batteries become exhausted - and the need for a backup (grid or on-site generator) comes into play - and the cause is widespread due to reasons like:
Long period of inclement weather - such as weeks of grey cloudy days in a northern winter.
Sudden end-of-life of batteries or dimiminishing capacity - because so many were installed in a short period of time.
Hacked systems because the controls are connected to the Internet
Bear in mind that there is no longer one Electric Company anymore. The industry has been broken up into Generation, Transmission Systems, and Retail (or local) delivery. Each are owned by separate corporate interests. None of them are going to want to support maintaining excess capacity, even if they're paid to.
And like the Great Recession, the systems and procedures for dealing with a sudden surge in demand because of a widespread event are not going to be well designed, maintained, or tested.
Consider what'll happen if several counties need to resort to a backup mechanism suddenly. Transmission lines will be overwhelmed. On-site generators will fail - or will operate inefficiently and produce enormous pollution. If they're fed by natural gas, the natural gas system will be overwhelmed too.
Solutions to this would require more invasive government regulation of battery systems, backup generators, etc. than people who classically want to go "off grid" would tolerate.
Actually, the TI-58/TI-59 opcode set. I think earlier Texas Instruments TI calculators in the 5x series shared opcodes - but I'm not sure.
Think of it as an adjustable Harvard machine architecture. Programming in a language that was written like APL (special keyboard) and read like machine language.
Just stand on the edge of the moon and drop the rocks off. Easy peasy.
Silly (and unfair) snark aside, not only would you need to (minimally) reach escape velocity from the moon, you'd have to change the orbit of the rock about the earth such that it wasn't nearly circular (as the moon's is.) Once you start layering on additional rockets (or solar powered ion drives or whatever) onto the rock, it's not a rock anymore.
Seriously... these outages are usually caused by the organization itself, either by an immediate technical mistake, or when a minor glitch cascades into something major due to a design flaw.
I'm sure Amazon is a constant target of hackers, both pimply faced youths and of shady state-sponsored black-hats. But taking out Amazon isn't a very interesting goal.
If you're REALLY obsessed by this, force using IPv6 on your WiFi network.
Not only are IPv6 addresses typically NOT NAT'd (they'll share a prefix that's ISP dependent but not the whole address), but properly configured devices will vary their IPv6 addresses over time.
Of course, this solution will break other parts of your App/Web experience - especially if you disable IPv4 on your WiFi. And it's going to require you to build your own router. But FreeBSD with two ethernet ports does that just fine - and I suppose Linux could be beat into shape to do so too.
Yes, my question sounds elitist and perhaps naive. But I've been driving a vehicle with My Ford Touch for three years. It's only when you think that there is no value to an Infotainment system over a simple AM/FM radio with an aux-input will you be at ease with My Ford Touch.
I don't use My Ford Touch extensively. If anything, I use it very lightly - and it still fails to satisfy purpose. I don't sync my phone contacts with the car - my contacts are precious to me, and they don't belong on a vehicle that gets a few recall service visits a year. The car came with SiriusXM and a 1 year subscription, which I tried twice and was deeply unimpressed by. Most of my driving is local, so the built-in GPS system is useless, and GPS systems in a smart-phone will always be more advanced and useful than whatever gets baked into the frozen technology of an automobile. (And the GPS system refused to recognize a valid postal address in my area.) The GPS system isn't worth $149/year for something that comes free with a smart phone.
Even the AM/FM radio part is seriously flawed. It refuses to restart the FM radio when the car powers up if the FM station is HD.
Being able to play from a USB stick is nice - except that when the car restarts, the Infotainment system looses track of where it is, and when it reaches the end of an album, it will resume playing from the "first" album - where non-alphabetic characters in the album name sort before alphabetic characters. I'm VERY tired of listening to "Cats".
The heat/AC, backup camera, and various plugin-hybrid controls are also integrated with the Infotainment system. Fortunately, they don't seem to be impacted much by the flaws - although they do have flaws of their own.
My Ford Touch is fine as a proof-of-concept done by high school kids. It should have never been released to the public.
Star Wars isn't science fiction. It's not even science fantasy or science fantasy wish fulfillment adventure story. It's a magical fantasy wish fulfillment adventure story.
Pay attention to Episode IV: A New Hope - Obi-Wan Kenobi is a wizard.
And Luke... what kind of moron was he? He's handed a deadly weapon he's never seen before and immediately points it at his head, then opens it and starts swinging it around...
This movie IS from the 1970s after all. Lawn Darts weren't banned yet. We were just a decade or two away from chemistry sets with Uranium.
That's just the way we rolled then. And if some of us shot ourselves in the face, well, that was a different kind of rolling.
I was a snarky teenager when I saw the original Star Wars (no IV: A New Hope), and I was impressed by how much the audience laughed at every campy, over-acted scene and every bit of rote dialogue. Of course, that was basically the whole movie.
Up until recently, whenever I re-watched the movies, I was never able to re-capture that delightful feeling of camp from the first movie (IV: A New Hope), but last night I did - and I noticed (again) all of the Star-Trek sound effects (quietly in the background), the use of Photon Torpedoes (did they ever make it to other movies), and so on.
This isn't an endorsement of the new movie, which I haven't seen - and I'm sure it's not the kind of endorsement anyone who has fallen in love with the movies would care to hear. But it's my experience of re-watching the first movie and how I was able to recapture the magic I felt back then when R2D2 being zapped and falling over had the audience groaning with laughter over the well deserved fate of an annoying character (but all of the characters were annoying to that audience.)
Is 1005 respondents to the poll sufficient for so many conclusions about 50 states and 3 political variations (R, D, and I)? The report offers NO margins of errors. It's just useless buzz.
I can't imagine that this will be more than a way of re-balancing the proportions between cargo and passenger aircraft for airlines serving both markets, and that re-balancing would take place over weeks rather than individual flights or days. (And if it takes place over weeks, then flying the plane to a maintenance location to switch modules would be the practice.)
I've no involvement in aviation, other than curiosity (I fly, on average, once every 10 years.) However, the following thoughts do come to mind:
Do the modular compartments play any part in the structural integrity of the aircraft? If so, does that mean that aviation authorities will have to have some kind of re-certification for the aircraft when modules are replaced?
How long out-of-service will the aircraft be to swap modules (including any necessary inspections and certifications)?
How much extra weight and space will the extra mechanisms, surfaces, etc. require and how will it affect the economic performance of the aircraft?
What might be the (lost opportunity/economic) cost of idle modules? Both the cost of the module, and of properly storing it?
10 years ago (in the US), I got my first cell-phone - a simple feature-phone. No data plan. SMS/texts were $0.20/each. It was a LG flip-phone on a Verizon family contract (I will NEVER buy another LG phone.) These days, I carry around an iPhone4 on an AT&T monthly family plan..
I'm hardly a first adopter of phones.
That said, even I've noticed the changes in the cell-phone networks. And the most used feature of my phone is the calendar & alarms. Actual real-time communication with a smart-phone seems to be an afterthought.
Uber and their lackeys breaking a law intended to safeguard users of taxi services in London
or entrenched legacy taxi services using a legal monopoly to deny users of taxi services the benefits of competetition
Clearly, a modern (?) Thatcherite response would be to remove the monopoly and allow all drivers a tax credit for clubs and other hand weapons that drivers can use against each other and against scum customers who use the competing service.
I would think that if you have sufficiently crazy dedicated lab technicians, some of the lab work could be done by volunteers willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause. It's somewhat like it is for bomb-makers (although much more risky.)
Performing experiments on primates isn't a problem - especially if you don't care much for the scientific method and want results you can compare with controls. Keeping the experiments confined to the infidel sect is a problem though.
Creating a novel organism isn't necessary. Finding a more lethal variant of an existing organism is the goal. Influenza mutates constantly. It still requires a lot of luck, but not an impossible amount of luck.
A lot of early biological research was done with rather crude equipment.
I agree - biohackers aren't comparable with computer hackers. The cost of a mistake for a computer hacker is time and money. Biohackers are more similar to bomb makers - where the bomb makers have to depend on trial-and-error and don't have well developed procedures that can produce reproducible effects.
Yeah. The engineers had a choice from the Project Manager (a Business degree) - Make It So or Get Fired.
It's possible that an engineer suggested cheating as solution. Whether that was a joke solution or an honestly cynical, it had to have been the project manager(s) involved that gave the go ahead.
Floating around at nauseating angles is a reason against going to Mars?
He was doing OK with the argument that it was dangerous, difficult, and expensive - but floating around at nauseating angles just wrecks his arguments and puts him in the class of ready made world, no older than 5000 years people.
In any event, going to Mars (or establishing a colony of people on a one-way trip to Mars) isn't justifiable practically or economically. It is justifiable as an adventure, or for other non-economic reasons. I have faith that going to Mars will lead to great things - but it's the nature of faith that it can't be justified rationally.
I would have thought that X.509 Certificates issued by the conventional Certificate Authorities for ".onion" sites would worse than useless as they'd violate the anonymity of the site.
Drought is relative too. An ecology evolved for wetter conditions can suffer when precipitation falls - even to levels that would be considered "wet" elsewhere. The northern part of the lower peninsula of the State of Michigan has been under fire-watch/no-burn orders over the summer for the past few years, even though Michigan is surrounded by the Great Lakes. A few years back, parts of the south around Georgia were under drought conditions.
There is fraking (hydraulic fracturing) extraction occurring in Michigan - and because of shallow water tables in some areas, the fraking operators are demanding large quantities of water from local water systems because on-site wells can't supply their needs (to make a speculative profit.) These demands on local water systems exceed the capacity of systems designed for residential and light industrial use - and might require local communities to overbuild local water systems for transient gain by non-local companies and investors.
Of course, given the importance Californian agriculture has for the whole of the United States, drought conditions there impact everyone
Two years back, I bought a plugin-hybrid. My first (and probably only) new car. Gas prices were high - but the most important reason was that my introduction to technology was when my father showed me how to repair an electric lamp back when I was in kindergarten, which makes electric cars really cool for me. I didn't care about all the extra features - they just came with the vehicle I bought off the lot.
The thing came with a lots and lots of additional features, like:
Interior lights where the color can be changed.
Sirius Radio
Builtin GPS Navigation
Voice control
App based remote start, door lock/unlock
Cruise control
CD player
USB ports
AM/FM radio
in-Car WiFi (through cell-phone)
Backup camera
Rear gate automatic opening system
The Voice Control lets me get into an argument with my car. It screws up about 5% of the time (and 95% of the time, all I'm doing is asking it to turn the FM radio to my favorite station. When I'm trying to set a navigation destination, it's nearly 95% of the time.)
The AM/FM radio doesn't come back on properly 95% of the time. The Infotainment system claims it's on, but I have to change stations to get it to work, which means changing stations back and forth after I start the car.
The backup camera is a nice feature. I hear a system like it is mandated for new cars in the future. Unfortunately, it's more necessary in this car than my previous car because the sight-lines in this care are so dreadful. It's more of a compensation for bad design (or allows more bad design.) I can see where it'd be very helpful for people with limited mobility.
The one time I really needed the GPS/Navigation system, it couldn't find the address at all (Google maps on my phone worked just fine.)
I have a flash drive plugged into one of the USB ports for music - I haven't played anything from it for a year. I've never used the CD player.
The automatic gate opening system (intended to make it easier to load the back of the car when your arms are full of packages) works about 20% of the time. I've stopped using it, even for entertainment value.
The only part of the Infotainment System I really use (FM radio) - fails to work properly. The rest of the features are largely negative value for me.
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To me, LinkedIn is an example of horrible bad design and practice for the following reasons:
Most of the people I know of who have used LinkedIn for developing their career could have used other mechanisms and gotten better results for the same effort.
We're not at Peak Cellphone but the only new customers are young people buying their first phone (or having it bought for them by their parents.) There are people who have chosen to NOT have a cell phone - and those people aren't going to change their minds much. And there are people who can't afford a cell phone - and that's not likely to change much. The time of easy growth is long gone.
And the time of easy feature based growth is closing too - because most new features offer only small marginal benefits over a relatively new phone. Vendors are caught between improving their phones interfaces to support some of those marginal benefits and alienating their customers. Smartphone interfaces aren't as terrible as they once were and real improvements are harder to achieve.
It all gets down to what do people use these devices for. And for all the apps and features available - most people don't drift outside of the intrinsic functions of texting, photos, calendaring, web browsing, navigating, and a few other apps like social networking, a few games, and maybe a job related app (if you're a sales-drone.)
Really, do you use your phone any differently (qualitatively or quantitatively) more this season than last season? Are any of your apps lagging behind? The app vendors know better than to drive away their customers.
I think that the big question is whether partial disconnect scales.
Consider what happens when solar batteries become exhausted - and the need for a backup (grid or on-site generator) comes into play - and the cause is widespread due to reasons like:
Bear in mind that there is no longer one Electric Company anymore. The industry has been broken up into Generation, Transmission Systems, and Retail (or local) delivery. Each are owned by separate corporate interests. None of them are going to want to support maintaining excess capacity, even if they're paid to.
And like the Great Recession, the systems and procedures for dealing with a sudden surge in demand because of a widespread event are not going to be well designed, maintained, or tested.
Consider what'll happen if several counties need to resort to a backup mechanism suddenly. Transmission lines will be overwhelmed. On-site generators will fail - or will operate inefficiently and produce enormous pollution. If they're fed by natural gas, the natural gas system will be overwhelmed too.
Solutions to this would require more invasive government regulation of battery systems, backup generators, etc. than people who classically want to go "off grid" would tolerate.
Actually, the TI-58/TI-59 opcode set. I think earlier Texas Instruments TI calculators in the 5x series shared opcodes - but I'm not sure.
Think of it as an adjustable Harvard machine architecture. Programming in a language that was written like APL (special keyboard) and read like machine language.
Just stand on the edge of the moon and drop the rocks off. Easy peasy.
Silly (and unfair) snark aside, not only would you need to (minimally) reach escape velocity from the moon, you'd have to change the orbit of the rock about the earth such that it wasn't nearly circular (as the moon's is.) Once you start layering on additional rockets (or solar powered ion drives or whatever) onto the rock, it's not a rock anymore.
Seriously ... these outages are usually caused by the organization itself, either by an immediate technical mistake, or when a minor glitch cascades into something major due to a design flaw.
I'm sure Amazon is a constant target of hackers, both pimply faced youths and of shady state-sponsored black-hats. But taking out Amazon isn't a very interesting goal.
The California law REQUIRES the automobile to USE the bike lane to make the right hand turn.
Michigan law FORBIDS the automobile from using the bike lane (except to cross it.)
I can believe other states are even more complicated..
If you're REALLY obsessed by this, force using IPv6 on your WiFi network.
Not only are IPv6 addresses typically NOT NAT'd (they'll share a prefix that's ISP dependent but not the whole address), but properly configured devices will vary their IPv6 addresses over time.
Of course, this solution will break other parts of your App/Web experience - especially if you disable IPv4 on your WiFi. And it's going to require you to build your own router. But FreeBSD with two ethernet ports does that just fine - and I suppose Linux could be beat into shape to do so too.
Yes, my question sounds elitist and perhaps naive. But I've been driving a vehicle with My Ford Touch for three years. It's only when you think that there is no value to an Infotainment system over a simple AM/FM radio with an aux-input will you be at ease with My Ford Touch.
I don't use My Ford Touch extensively. If anything, I use it very lightly - and it still fails to satisfy purpose. I don't sync my phone contacts with the car - my contacts are precious to me, and they don't belong on a vehicle that gets a few recall service visits a year. The car came with SiriusXM and a 1 year subscription, which I tried twice and was deeply unimpressed by. Most of my driving is local, so the built-in GPS system is useless, and GPS systems in a smart-phone will always be more advanced and useful than whatever gets baked into the frozen technology of an automobile. (And the GPS system refused to recognize a valid postal address in my area.) The GPS system isn't worth $149/year for something that comes free with a smart phone.
Even the AM/FM radio part is seriously flawed. It refuses to restart the FM radio when the car powers up if the FM station is HD.
Being able to play from a USB stick is nice - except that when the car restarts, the Infotainment system looses track of where it is, and when it reaches the end of an album, it will resume playing from the "first" album - where non-alphabetic characters in the album name sort before alphabetic characters. I'm VERY tired of listening to "Cats".
The heat/AC, backup camera, and various plugin-hybrid controls are also integrated with the Infotainment system. Fortunately, they don't seem to be impacted much by the flaws - although they do have flaws of their own.
My Ford Touch is fine as a proof-of-concept done by high school kids. It should have never been released to the public.
I'm trying to recall how many years it's been since I've watched broadcast or cable TV - or how much longer it was for more than an hour a month.
Ratings based TV is dead to me. To misquote a certain virtual muppet:
Star Wars isn't science fiction. It's not even science fantasy or science fantasy wish fulfillment adventure story. It's a magical fantasy wish fulfillment adventure story.
Pay attention to Episode IV: A New Hope - Obi-Wan Kenobi is a wizard.
Look for the Auralnauts Star Wars inspired works on YouTube, but these need to be viewed starting from "EP I: Jedi Party".
Or maybe not, if you can't stand the idea of Jedi Knights being insufferable drug addicted douchebags and androids being deranged psychopaths.
And Luke... what kind of moron was he? He's handed a deadly weapon he's never seen before and immediately points it at his head, then opens it and starts swinging it around...
This movie IS from the 1970s after all. Lawn Darts weren't banned yet. We were just a decade or two away from chemistry sets with Uranium.
That's just the way we rolled then. And if some of us shot ourselves in the face, well, that was a different kind of rolling.
I was a snarky teenager when I saw the original Star Wars (no IV: A New Hope), and I was impressed by how much the audience laughed at every campy, over-acted scene and every bit of rote dialogue. Of course, that was basically the whole movie.
Up until recently, whenever I re-watched the movies, I was never able to re-capture that delightful feeling of camp from the first movie (IV: A New Hope), but last night I did - and I noticed (again) all of the Star-Trek sound effects (quietly in the background), the use of Photon Torpedoes (did they ever make it to other movies), and so on.
This isn't an endorsement of the new movie, which I haven't seen - and I'm sure it's not the kind of endorsement anyone who has fallen in love with the movies would care to hear. But it's my experience of re-watching the first movie and how I was able to recapture the magic I felt back then when R2D2 being zapped and falling over had the audience groaning with laughter over the well deserved fate of an annoying character (but all of the characters were annoying to that audience.)
Is 1005 respondents to the poll sufficient for so many conclusions about 50 states and 3 political variations (R, D, and I)? The report offers NO margins of errors. It's just useless buzz.
I can't imagine that this will be more than a way of re-balancing the proportions between cargo and passenger aircraft for airlines serving both markets, and that re-balancing would take place over weeks rather than individual flights or days. (And if it takes place over weeks, then flying the plane to a maintenance location to switch modules would be the practice.)
I've no involvement in aviation, other than curiosity (I fly, on average, once every 10 years.) However, the following thoughts do come to mind:
Do the modular compartments play any part in the structural integrity of the aircraft? If so, does that mean that aviation authorities will have to have some kind of re-certification for the aircraft when modules are replaced?
How long out-of-service will the aircraft be to swap modules (including any necessary inspections and certifications)?
How much extra weight and space will the extra mechanisms, surfaces, etc. require and how will it affect the economic performance of the aircraft?
What might be the (lost opportunity/economic) cost of idle modules? Both the cost of the module, and of properly storing it?
10 years ago (in the US), I got my first cell-phone - a simple feature-phone. No data plan. SMS/texts were $0.20/each. It was a LG flip-phone on a Verizon family contract (I will NEVER buy another LG phone.) These days, I carry around an iPhone4 on an AT&T monthly family plan..
I'm hardly a first adopter of phones.
That said, even I've noticed the changes in the cell-phone networks. And the most used feature of my phone is the calendar & alarms. Actual real-time communication with a smart-phone seems to be an afterthought.
You can view this as either:
Clearly, a modern (?) Thatcherite response would be to remove the monopoly and allow all drivers a tax credit for clubs and other hand weapons that drivers can use against each other and against scum customers who use the competing service.
I would think that if you have sufficiently crazy dedicated lab technicians, some of the lab work could be done by volunteers willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause. It's somewhat like it is for bomb-makers (although much more risky.)
Performing experiments on primates isn't a problem - especially if you don't care much for the scientific method and want results you can compare with controls. Keeping the experiments confined to the infidel sect is a problem though.
Creating a novel organism isn't necessary. Finding a more lethal variant of an existing organism is the goal. Influenza mutates constantly. It still requires a lot of luck, but not an impossible amount of luck.
A lot of early biological research was done with rather crude equipment.
I agree - biohackers aren't comparable with computer hackers. The cost of a mistake for a computer hacker is time and money. Biohackers are more similar to bomb makers - where the bomb makers have to depend on trial-and-error and don't have well developed procedures that can produce reproducible effects.
Yeah. The engineers had a choice from the Project Manager (a Business degree) - Make It So or Get Fired.
It's possible that an engineer suggested cheating as solution. Whether that was a joke solution or an honestly cynical, it had to have been the project manager(s) involved that gave the go ahead.
OMG! Is this worse than NASCAR driving?
Floating around at nauseating angles is a reason against going to Mars?
He was doing OK with the argument that it was dangerous, difficult, and expensive - but floating around at nauseating angles just wrecks his arguments and puts him in the class of ready made world, no older than 5000 years people.
In any event, going to Mars (or establishing a colony of people on a one-way trip to Mars) isn't justifiable practically or economically. It is justifiable as an adventure, or for other non-economic reasons. I have faith that going to Mars will lead to great things - but it's the nature of faith that it can't be justified rationally.
I would have thought that X.509 Certificates issued by the conventional Certificate Authorities for ".onion" sites would worse than useless as they'd violate the anonymity of the site.
Drought is relative too. An ecology evolved for wetter conditions can suffer when precipitation falls - even to levels that would be considered "wet" elsewhere. The northern part of the lower peninsula of the State of Michigan has been under fire-watch/no-burn orders over the summer for the past few years, even though Michigan is surrounded by the Great Lakes. A few years back, parts of the south around Georgia were under drought conditions.
There is fraking (hydraulic fracturing) extraction occurring in Michigan - and because of shallow water tables in some areas, the fraking operators are demanding large quantities of water from local water systems because on-site wells can't supply their needs (to make a speculative profit.) These demands on local water systems exceed the capacity of systems designed for residential and light industrial use - and might require local communities to overbuild local water systems for transient gain by non-local companies and investors.
Of course, given the importance Californian agriculture has for the whole of the United States, drought conditions there impact everyone
Two years back, I bought a plugin-hybrid. My first (and probably only) new car. Gas prices were high - but the most important reason was that my introduction to technology was when my father showed me how to repair an electric lamp back when I was in kindergarten, which makes electric cars really cool for me. I didn't care about all the extra features - they just came with the vehicle I bought off the lot.
The thing came with a lots and lots of additional features, like:
The Voice Control lets me get into an argument with my car. It screws up about 5% of the time (and 95% of the time, all I'm doing is asking it to turn the FM radio to my favorite station. When I'm trying to set a navigation destination, it's nearly 95% of the time.)
The AM/FM radio doesn't come back on properly 95% of the time. The Infotainment system claims it's on, but I have to change stations to get it to work, which means changing stations back and forth after I start the car.
The backup camera is a nice feature. I hear a system like it is mandated for new cars in the future. Unfortunately, it's more necessary in this car than my previous car because the sight-lines in this care are so dreadful. It's more of a compensation for bad design (or allows more bad design.) I can see where it'd be very helpful for people with limited mobility.
The one time I really needed the GPS/Navigation system, it couldn't find the address at all (Google maps on my phone worked just fine.)
I have a flash drive plugged into one of the USB ports for music - I haven't played anything from it for a year. I've never used the CD player.
The automatic gate opening system (intended to make it easier to load the back of the car when your arms are full of packages) works about 20% of the time. I've stopped using it, even for entertainment value.
The only part of the Infotainment System I really use (FM radio) - fails to work properly. The rest of the features are largely negative value for me.