Wind resistance increases with the square of your speed. The difference between 75 and 65MPH is 75^2/65^2 = 5625/4225. So a 15% increase in speed results in a 33% increase in wind resistance.
Since wind resistance is by far the main component in energy requirement to keep your speed constant, you can expect a similar increase in fuel consumption.
Well, since I do go the speed limit, I'd never see anyone else doing them, since they're marking my speed. I only see people going faster or slower than me. So I don't have any way to know how many people are doing the speed limit.
I do know that when I'm going the speed limit, I feel like a rock in a stream; ALL the traffic is going around me, usually pretty fast.
Try factoring in the gasoline savings of cutting your speed by 10% as well. You can probably save a lot of gas by driving 65 instead of 75. The bigger the car, the more improvement by slowing down.
I agree. I've sometimes thought that it would be cool to have a video camera like the cops have, for evidence in traffic disputes. I drive under or at the speed limit and do not break or even bend any laws. Of course, I haven't been in any traffic dispute for 20+ years for the same reason. The people who need evidence that proves they're in the right, well, they probably aren't. The people who are careful drivers need this very little.
Easy enough. Don't do business with companies that do things you don't like. But don't complain when you have to pay more than your neighbor because he's proved he's a good driver, while you're an unknown risk.
Personally, I'd like to know what kind of research money we're losing because the Hubble isn't working properly.
Are you talking about the spectrograph that broke last week? Hubble was working perfectly up to that point.
Agree with you on the weak-kneed approach to space exploration. If we don't want to risk any more lives, then we should get the hell out of space. And also out of sea exploration, defense, and about 99% of what humans do.
It's a dangerous world; we must decide whether to face it or crawl into a hole. O'Keefe apparently is more interested in public relations than doing what the agency is chartered to do.
Windows, where there's a one true way; and it's an expressway to madness?
Honestly, I use both Windows and Linux. There are things I use one for and not the other, because Windows is really good at some things that Linux is not, and vice versa.
You'd THINK that if Microsoft wanted to keep Linux from growing, they'd identify the things that Linux does well and Windows does not, and work on that.
I think they have this idea that Windows is really the best at everything, and people are just using Linux because it's free. Sorry, wrong. I pick my operating systems based on which one does the job the best.
way to maintain an artificially low upload rate and thereby joining the ranks of the parasites, thank you
I always specify an upload speed limit. If I do not maintain my connection at 1:1 U/D ratio on my torrents, but I do it by leaving the connection open until I've UL'd at least as much as I've DL'd. Sometimes that means leaving it open for a day, or even several days, after I've finished DLing.
I also use the command line client. I actually don't own a Linux box with a GUI on it, they're all running headless, and I use command line and "screen" to get all my stuff done.
There's a LOT of connectedness in equipment, particularly imaging systems. It's used for remote diagnostics, so you can get 2nd opinions from that great knee surgeon 1000 miles away.
Sure, there should be some system where it sits behind a firewall, and if they want to share an image, they push it to a separate machine and have the others visit that to see, but I get the feeling that there are too many vendors and no standards for that sort of thing, so standard web technologies wind up getting used.
I know this paranoid security model has become a necessity, but it's a shame that we can't use the internet as the great tool for the general betterment of mankind, because of bored teenagers and russian mafia fucking up everyone's machines.
That's not just crazy, it SHOULD be a criminal offense for the operator to risk infection on any machine which controls equipment that is potentially lethal, be it a CT scanner, air-traffic control, or a cargo-bay door opener.
No, you should learn about everything you can, because there's so much wonder and joy in things besides what you get paid to do, and you can appreciate it more if you can talk reasonably intelligently with people who specialize in the field, whether computers, biology, physics, astronomy, literature, history...
If you don't know about anything but computers, you're going to run out of stuff to talk about pretty fast.
i'd rather spend two years concentrating on the skillset that i intend to employ professionally, and then, if i feel like it, educate myself on the other stuff.
Well, it's your life. But as someone employed as a sysadmin with a Liberal Arts degree, I would humbly suggest that you might think about reversing that order. Get an education first, then worry about getting job skills. An education will let you figure out what you actually want out of life; you can then decide what if any employment will help you achieve those goals.
Well put. My thought on reading the original comment was "you don't get exposed to other viewpoints by educating yourself." But you CAN learn skills by educating yourself.
You can become a good coder by reading books. You can't really become a well-rounded individual who is able to see things from different perspectives by reading books.
My point is that people shouldn't be going to college just to pile as many saleable skills into their resume as possible.
There are plenty of people who don't give a crap about actually enjoying or remembering stuff they "have to take" ("wasting time" as you say). But many of us actually enjoyed the whole college experience, and did not "forget the stuff as soon as the term was over."
I don't make one dime more because I still remember what adenocene triphospate does in cellular biology, and calculus and physics are just as completely useless to me on the job. But I use trig practically every day personally, and I have friends in so many disciplines that it's a very good idea to have some basic grounding in many areas if you're going to hang at one of our parties. Indeed, though we try to be inclusive, we've had many otherwise smart people scoot off with their tail between their legs from our parties, because they "don't like feeling dumb."
We happen to think that the more things you know about, the more wonderful a place the universe is.
But if you think learning things that do not result in you getting more money in your paycheck is "wasting time," then this sort of degree might be for you.
Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly where higher education is going. The "classical education" is long dead, and it appears that everything except a specialized technical degree is heading that way.
Though I disagree with this being used as a blanket rejection of CS majors, I can see where they're coming from.
When I was in college (early-mid '80's), there were a TON (probably > 50%) of people in there who had NO actual interest in computers, they were just there because their high school councellor told them that it would get them a bunch of money when they got their job. Most of them are now managers, promoted on the peter principle. There were also many of us who absolutely loved what we were doing, and I think are very creative, and I *KNOW* are way, way more productive than those other types.
You won't find someone who's just there for the paycheck going into a trance and cranking out 1500 lines of code in 8 hours, forgetting even to eat, like those of us who REALLY LOVE this stuff do from time to time.
If an employer has had a lot of bad experiences with CS majors of the "there to warm a seat" type, this could really turn them off. Hell, I once worked with someone with a master's degree in CS, and it took us years to clean up the damage that person did.
The point of normal colleges is not entirely to produce a working machine, but to give people exposure to a variety of viewpoints and ideas.
I personally enjoyed my non-major classes every bit as much (in a lot of cases, more) as my CS classes. Hell, the CS classes were largely boring, I already knew a lot of that stuff. The physics, biology, history, etc classes were where I really learned stuff.
Sure, I don't use biology in my job. I do have an actual life though, and friends who sometimes want to talk about things other than computers (believe it or don't on/.).
If all you want is get a piece of paper so you can get someone to pay you to warm a seat, knock yourself out.
That's nice and all, but don't confuse it with a 4-year university, unless they're doubling up everything. A technically intensive degree doesn't produce the same kind of individual that a normal 4 year degree, with a variety of disciplines and experiences, provides. Taken in that light, 2-year technical schools are nothing new. Any university could get you through in 2 years if you took nothing outside your major.
I'm sort of toying with selling my Dell "desktop replacement" laptop, as that didn't work out (I wound up getting a desktop anyway) and instead going for a lightweight. The Sony Picturebooks with 600-800 MHz transmeta processors are commonly available on eBay for $1000. you only need 700 MHz to play DVDs smoothly, and a friend has one of these with a little add-on battery pack that snaps onto the bottom and gives him 6+ hours. It raises the keyboard into a nice typing angle and the whole thing is still well under 2 KG.
A 700 MHz or so machine with a nice screen, that was very small, would be nice. I've got a Dell monster now and I never take it anywhere because it's too damn heavy.
Without knowing your friend I can't say what the problem is. IMHO most people losing stuff are following bad practices or are using buggy devices that are corrupting the cards. Keep on top of firmware updates for your camera.
AFAIK SmartMedia never went past 128M. The standard had built in limitations and had to be continually revised to allow for more space. As a result you couldn't just take any SM card and put it into any SM device and expect it to work.
Basically SM was designed to be as absolutely cheap as possible, by having no intelligence on it at all. This leads to big problems with compatibility (standards have to be followed TO THE LETTER by every single device and card maker or there's trouble), and it meant the standard would never settle down.
More modern standards (and the old, venerable Compact Flash standard) put a controller on the card. This allows a standard interface (usually just one or two companies will build interface chips and sell them to card makers; those chips are very good at implementing the interface), and gives the card manufacturers a huge amount of flexibility in how their cards work internally. This is why Lexar was able to make faster cards than others; they figured out ways to write to the chips inside faster than other companies were, and could hide it all behind the standard CF interface layer, so it worked transparently with no modification to the device.
Manufacturers abandoned SmartMedia because there are now much better standards out there, and chip cost is so low that putting some smarts on the card is pretty much free. Look for SD/MMC devices for your next batch of toys; this standard has the advantage of Compact Flash's standards and no real standards limitations, but is also a very nice size. I have a 512M card in my Palm and it's working great!
Hmm, weird. I *do* treat my cards pretty well, as with all my equipment.
I've always bought the cheapest $/megabyte card I could get that was around $100 when it was time for a new card. Over the years I've gotten the following cards for around $100:
64M, 128M, 256M, 512M, and now 1024M (most expensive at $120). The 1024 has only had 4 week's service, but so far, so good.
I also once owned a 1GB microdrive, but I sold it fast when CF prices started plummeting; I never trusted it.
I'm at somewhere around 15,000 photos in 6 different digital cameras over the last 4 years or so. Never lost a photo except out of stupidity (rm * in wrong dir, etc).
Regardless of these tests, the fact still remains that the vast majority of friends that have had memory cards fail have been using SmartMedia. Practically every person I know with SmartMedia cameras have at least one card that isn't working. I've been using CompactFlash for a long time, and have yet to have a failure. I have everything from 16M cards (used to carry files around) to 1GB cards (hundreds of photos, filled only on vacation). I don't know any of my friends with CF that have ever had a card fail, though a few of them have had filesystem corruption (I blame that mostly on the devices, not the card).
Yeah, the only problem is that you HAVE to work on older cars more. Give me electronic fuel injection and computer-controlled coil pack ignition any day over a carburetor/coil/distributor setup. Carburetors are horrible; they are inefficient, cranky, troubleprone, difficult to adjust, etc. If you want to keep emissions down, you either put in a plumbing system from the late 70's that Rube Goldberg would weep over, or you go to computer control.
Coil-pack ignition is the best thing since sliced bread. Distributors were probably the most troublesome part of a car engine, and they're gone now.
I currently am driving my third car that I've bought new and taken to > 100K miles; none of them required ANY service, except one failed solenoid on our minivan when it was at 22K miles.
Taking a non-computerized car to > 100K miles without so much as pulling out a spark plug would be laughable. I had a couple of older cars (VW Beetle, Plymouth Horizon, 69 Newport) and they were all to varying degrees a pain in the ass, every day, especially in the winter when the temps hit 0F or less. My new cars, even with > 100K, start in 5 seconds on the coldest days.
So yeah, you can get a classic car and be able to work on it, or buy a newer car and not have to.
BTW, I'm convinced that the reason I have so little trouble with cars is that I drive them very lightly. I've known people who were crazy drivers (IMHO) that bought the same cars as I did, and I drove them for years with no problem, but they were in the shop all the time.
For instance, I've taken a manual transmission car to 218,000 miles on the original clutch (the body finally fell apart). My Taurus is at 105,000 with the original brakes (I've looked at them every 20K since 60K, they're still fine). I know people who burn out a set of brake pads every 15K driving the same roads I do.
I've been reading primarily on the Palm for a few years now. It was tough on the III/V series, but now that I have a Tungsten E, the screen is VERY nice, I can read it day or night and in sunlight, I went on vacation with 50 ebooks (mostly heinlein, some other authors), some collections of web pages including geocaches in the places we would be visiting, a few hundred photos, and 10 hours of NPR.RM's in the memory card.
The device is very durable in the hard shell aluminum RhinoSkin case.
The big problem is getting content. I have bought a few books from Peanut Press, but I dislike DRM'd content. I buy what I can from Baen books; I'd buy a whole lot more books if they were available like Baen sells them; $4 for a DRM-free downloaded copy.
I wind up getting most of my content from usenet, then buying a used paperback copy so I'm legal while I read it.
You think Levi jeans are any better made (from a practical point of view) than a no-label pair picked up in a department store?
They USED to be, but not anymore. They used to be serious work wear, made in the US, and would last years. At some point, Levis started to be marketed as fashion. At some point shortly after that (and partly due to pressure from Wal*Mart), they outsourced their production to Asia and cut their standards from "farmer/carpenter wear" to "teenybopper/yuppie wear" - now they tear just looking at them, same as all the other cheap crap. You need to buy Carhartt now to get good work wear.
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Wind resistance increases with the square of your speed. The difference between 75 and 65MPH is 75^2/65^2 = 5625/4225. So a 15% increase in speed results in a 33% increase in wind resistance.
Since wind resistance is by far the main component in energy requirement to keep your speed constant, you can expect a similar increase in fuel consumption.
Well, since I do go the speed limit, I'd never see anyone else doing them, since they're marking my speed. I only see people going faster or slower than me. So I don't have any way to know how many people are doing the speed limit.
I do know that when I'm going the speed limit, I feel like a rock in a stream; ALL the traffic is going around me, usually pretty fast.
Try factoring in the gasoline savings of cutting your speed by 10% as well. You can probably save a lot of gas by driving 65 instead of 75. The bigger the car, the more improvement by slowing down.
I agree. I've sometimes thought that it would be cool to have a video camera like the cops have, for evidence in traffic disputes. I drive under or at the speed limit and do not break or even bend any laws.
Of course, I haven't been in any traffic dispute for 20+ years for the same reason. The people who need evidence that proves they're in the right, well, they probably aren't. The people who are careful drivers need this very little.
Easy enough. Don't do business with companies that do things you don't like. But don't complain when you have to pay more than your neighbor because he's proved he's a good driver, while you're an unknown risk.
Personally, I'd like to know what kind of research money we're losing because the Hubble isn't working properly.
Are you talking about the spectrograph that broke last week? Hubble was working perfectly up to that point.
Agree with you on the weak-kneed approach to space exploration. If we don't want to risk any more lives, then we should get the hell out of space. And also out of sea exploration, defense, and about 99% of what humans do.
It's a dangerous world; we must decide whether to face it or crawl into a hole. O'Keefe apparently is more interested in public relations than doing what the agency is chartered to do.
Windows, where there's a one true way; and it's an expressway to madness?
Honestly, I use both Windows and Linux. There are things I use one for and not the other, because Windows is really good at some things that Linux is not, and vice versa.
You'd THINK that if Microsoft wanted to keep Linux from growing, they'd identify the things that Linux does well and Windows does not, and work on that.
I think they have this idea that Windows is really the best at everything, and people are just using Linux because it's free. Sorry, wrong. I pick my operating systems based on which one does the job the best.
way to maintain an artificially low upload rate and thereby joining the ranks of the parasites, thank you
I always specify an upload speed limit. If I do not maintain my connection at 1:1 U/D ratio on my torrents, but I do it by leaving the connection open until I've UL'd at least as much as I've DL'd. Sometimes that means leaving it open for a day, or even several days, after I've finished DLing.
I also use the command line client. I actually don't own a Linux box with a GUI on it, they're all running headless, and I use command line and "screen" to get all my stuff done.
There's a LOT of connectedness in equipment, particularly imaging systems. It's used for remote diagnostics, so you can get 2nd opinions from that great knee surgeon 1000 miles away.
Sure, there should be some system where it sits behind a firewall, and if they want to share an image, they push it to a separate machine and have the others visit that to see, but I get the feeling that there are too many vendors and no standards for that sort of thing, so standard web technologies wind up getting used.
I know this paranoid security model has become a necessity, but it's a shame that we can't use the internet as the great tool for the general betterment of mankind, because of bored teenagers and russian mafia fucking up everyone's machines.
NAT firewalls don't help when some yahoo uses a vulnerable IE to browse a hostile web site.
That's not just crazy, it SHOULD be a criminal offense for the operator to risk infection on any machine which controls equipment that is potentially lethal, be it a CT scanner, air-traffic control, or a cargo-bay door opener.
No, you should learn about everything you can, because there's so much wonder and joy in things besides what you get paid to do, and you can appreciate it more if you can talk reasonably intelligently with people who specialize in the field, whether computers, biology, physics, astronomy, literature, history...
If you don't know about anything but computers, you're going to run out of stuff to talk about pretty fast.
Well put. My thought on reading the original comment was "you don't get exposed to other viewpoints by educating yourself." But you CAN learn skills by educating yourself.
You can become a good coder by reading books. You can't really become a well-rounded individual who is able to see things from different perspectives by reading books.
My point is that people shouldn't be going to college just to pile as many saleable skills into their resume as possible.
There are plenty of people who don't give a crap about actually enjoying or remembering stuff they "have to take" ("wasting time" as you say). But many of us actually enjoyed the whole college experience, and did not "forget the stuff as soon as the term was over."
I don't make one dime more because I still remember what adenocene triphospate does in cellular biology, and calculus and physics are just as completely useless to me on the job. But I use trig practically every day personally, and I have friends in so many disciplines that it's a very good idea to have some basic grounding in many areas if you're going to hang at one of our parties. Indeed, though we try to be inclusive, we've had many otherwise smart people scoot off with their tail between their legs from our parties, because they "don't like feeling dumb."
We happen to think that the more things you know about, the more wonderful a place the universe is.
But if you think learning things that do not result in you getting more money in your paycheck is "wasting time," then this sort of degree might be for you.
Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly where higher education is going. The "classical education" is long dead, and it appears that everything except a specialized technical degree is heading that way.
Though I disagree with this being used as a blanket rejection of CS majors, I can see where they're coming from.
When I was in college (early-mid '80's), there were a TON (probably > 50%) of people in there who had NO actual interest in computers, they were just there because their high school councellor told them that it would get them a bunch of money when they got their job. Most of them are now managers, promoted on the peter principle. There were also many of us who absolutely loved what we were doing, and I think are very creative, and I *KNOW* are way, way more productive than those other types.
You won't find someone who's just there for the paycheck going into a trance and cranking out 1500 lines of code in 8 hours, forgetting even to eat, like those of us who REALLY LOVE this stuff do from time to time.
If an employer has had a lot of bad experiences with CS majors of the "there to warm a seat" type, this could really turn them off. Hell, I once worked with someone with a master's degree in CS, and it took us years to clean up the damage that person did.
The point of normal colleges is not entirely to produce a working machine, but to give people exposure to a variety of viewpoints and ideas.
/.).
I personally enjoyed my non-major classes every bit as much (in a lot of cases, more) as my CS classes. Hell, the CS classes were largely boring, I already knew a lot of that stuff. The physics, biology, history, etc classes were where I really learned stuff.
Sure, I don't use biology in my job. I do have an actual life though, and friends who sometimes want to talk about things other than computers (believe it or don't on
If all you want is get a piece of paper so you can get someone to pay you to warm a seat, knock yourself out.
That's nice and all, but don't confuse it with a 4-year university, unless they're doubling up everything. A technically intensive degree doesn't produce the same kind of individual that a normal 4 year degree, with a variety of disciplines and experiences, provides.
Taken in that light, 2-year technical schools are nothing new. Any university could get you through in 2 years if you took nothing outside your major.
I'm sort of toying with selling my Dell "desktop replacement" laptop, as that didn't work out (I wound up getting a desktop anyway) and instead going for a lightweight. The Sony Picturebooks with 600-800 MHz transmeta processors are commonly available on eBay for $1000. you only need 700 MHz to play DVDs smoothly, and a friend has one of these with a little add-on battery pack that snaps onto the bottom and gives him 6+ hours. It raises the keyboard into a nice typing angle and the whole thing is still well under 2 KG.
A 700 MHz or so machine with a nice screen, that was very small, would be nice. I've got a Dell monster now and I never take it anywhere because it's too damn heavy.
Gee, somebody made a bad batch of coil packs. I guess this implies that coil packs are a bad idea?
There's bad ham on the market sometimes too, but I still like it on my sandwiches.
Without knowing your friend I can't say what the problem is. IMHO most people losing stuff are following bad practices or are using buggy devices that are corrupting the cards. Keep on top of firmware updates for your camera.
AFAIK SmartMedia never went past 128M. The standard had built in limitations and had to be continually revised to allow for more space. As a result you couldn't just take any SM card and put it into any SM device and expect it to work.
Basically SM was designed to be as absolutely cheap as possible, by having no intelligence on it at all. This leads to big problems with compatibility (standards have to be followed TO THE LETTER by every single device and card maker or there's trouble), and it meant the standard would never settle down.
More modern standards (and the old, venerable Compact Flash standard) put a controller on the card. This allows a standard interface (usually just one or two companies will build interface chips and sell them to card makers; those chips are very good at implementing the interface), and gives the card manufacturers a huge amount of flexibility in how their cards work internally. This is why Lexar was able to make faster cards than others; they figured out ways to write to the chips inside faster than other companies were, and could hide it all behind the standard CF interface layer, so it worked transparently with no modification to the device.
Manufacturers abandoned SmartMedia because there are now much better standards out there, and chip cost is so low that putting some smarts on the card is pretty much free. Look for SD/MMC devices for your next batch of toys; this standard has the advantage of Compact Flash's standards and no real standards limitations, but is also a very nice size. I have a 512M card in my Palm and it's working great!
Hmm, weird. I *do* treat my cards pretty well, as with all my equipment.
I've always bought the cheapest $/megabyte card I could get that was around $100 when it was time for a new card. Over the years I've gotten the following cards for around $100:
64M, 128M, 256M, 512M, and now 1024M (most expensive at $120). The 1024 has only had 4 week's service, but so far, so good.
I also once owned a 1GB microdrive, but I sold it fast when CF prices started plummeting; I never trusted it.
I'm at somewhere around 15,000 photos in 6 different digital cameras over the last 4 years or so. Never lost a photo except out of stupidity (rm * in wrong dir, etc).
Regardless of these tests, the fact still remains that the vast majority of friends that have had memory cards fail have been using SmartMedia. Practically every person I know with SmartMedia cameras have at least one card that isn't working.
I've been using CompactFlash for a long time, and have yet to have a failure. I have everything from 16M cards (used to carry files around) to 1GB cards (hundreds of photos, filled only on vacation). I don't know any of my friends with CF that have ever had a card fail, though a few of them have had filesystem corruption (I blame that mostly on the devices, not the card).
Yeah, the only problem is that you HAVE to work on older cars more. Give me electronic fuel injection and computer-controlled coil pack ignition any day over a carburetor/coil/distributor setup. Carburetors are horrible; they are inefficient, cranky, troubleprone, difficult to adjust, etc. If you want to keep emissions down, you either put in a plumbing system from the late 70's that Rube Goldberg would weep over, or you go to computer control.
Coil-pack ignition is the best thing since sliced bread. Distributors were probably the most troublesome part of a car engine, and they're gone now.
I currently am driving my third car that I've bought new and taken to > 100K miles; none of them required ANY service, except one failed solenoid on our minivan when it was at 22K miles.
Taking a non-computerized car to > 100K miles without so much as pulling out a spark plug would be laughable. I had a couple of older cars (VW Beetle, Plymouth Horizon, 69 Newport) and they were all to varying degrees a pain in the ass, every day, especially in the winter when the temps hit 0F or less. My new cars, even with > 100K, start in 5 seconds on the coldest days.
So yeah, you can get a classic car and be able to work on it, or buy a newer car and not have to.
BTW, I'm convinced that the reason I have so little trouble with cars is that I drive them very lightly. I've known people who were crazy drivers (IMHO) that bought the same cars as I did, and I drove them for years with no problem, but they were in the shop all the time.
For instance, I've taken a manual transmission car to 218,000 miles on the original clutch (the body finally fell apart). My Taurus is at 105,000 with the original brakes (I've looked at them every 20K since 60K, they're still fine). I know people who burn out a set of brake pads every 15K driving the same roads I do.
I've been reading primarily on the Palm for a few years now. It was tough on the III/V series, but now that I have a Tungsten E, the screen is VERY nice, I can read it day or night and in sunlight, I went on vacation with 50 ebooks (mostly heinlein, some other authors), some collections of web pages including geocaches in the places we would be visiting, a few hundred photos, and 10 hours of NPR .RM's in the memory card.
The device is very durable in the hard shell aluminum RhinoSkin case.
The big problem is getting content. I have bought a few books from Peanut Press, but I dislike DRM'd content. I buy what I can from Baen books; I'd buy a whole lot more books if they were available like Baen sells them; $4 for a DRM-free downloaded copy.
I wind up getting most of my content from usenet, then buying a used paperback copy so I'm legal while I read it.
You think Levi jeans are any better made (from a practical point of view) than a no-label pair picked up in a department store?
They USED to be, but not anymore. They used to be serious work wear, made in the US, and would last years. At some point, Levis started to be marketed as fashion. At some point shortly after that (and partly due to pressure from Wal*Mart), they outsourced their production to Asia and cut their standards from "farmer/carpenter wear" to "teenybopper/yuppie wear" - now they tear just looking at them, same as all the other cheap crap. You need to buy Carhartt now to get good work wear.