I had that attitude in college. I went to the MS recruiting presentation at our school. I was going to really show that nice recruiter lady how clever i was. She was going to talk about microsoft and working there. At the appropriate time, i came up with a pretty funny way of asking
"why would i want to work on something that sucks?"
everyone laughed. i thought i was _so_ clever.
her reponse put me in my place:
"so you can make it better"
She got me.
I've spent the last 5 years filing bugs, writing automated tests, writing automation systems, reviewing designs, keeping developers from doing as many dumb things as they're prone to do (i obviously dont catch everything).
Microsoft has a long way to go before they don't suck at all - they'll probably never get there. Infact, every day, i'll come across some random thing where i ask myself (or tell my co-worker, who i'm usually helping troubleshoot something at the time), "man, _who_ writes this shit software?".
But they're getting better. And I'm doing my part.
BTW - my pre MS experience was _exclusively_ in the UNIX ABM camp. 5 years ago when i started, i was talking to people alot about "here's how it is in linux", "here's how it is in solaris". They were interested. We were starting to get beat up in the press and with customers, and mysql, apache, linux, solaris.. they kept coming up.
We're doing better now because we're competing with free software. I used to have to fight really hard to get someone to do something "right". I used to have to explain that security was important.. that real customers expect uptime, etc.
We "get it" a lot more now than we used to. The beating we take in the press and with customers - from our competitors - is pushing us harder and i for one love it. I dont have to convince people anymore that a potential security threat is worth fixing - they just do it. I dont have to tell people about "how the other half lives". We're finally starting to "get it".
we still have a long way to go, and we still do stuff that upsets me (i have _NO_ idea whats going on with the claria situation, but it _looks_ very fishy and lots of employees are _pissed_, and demanding some clear answers and external messaging), but W2k, Wxp, and Server 2003 are really pretty good.. a hell of a lot better than W98 or NT4!. SQL Server 2k is a damn sight better than mySQL for... basically everything. I've written a bunch of perl/php and i'd have to say that i really, really prefer ASP.NET, and i can't even tell you how much better asp.net is than plain old ASP. Or how IIS6 is worlds more secure than IIS5 was.
Yeah. The nice thing about working at MS - you're never out of broken stuff to fix:)
I generally think we suck less than we used to, but there's obviously plenty of room for improvement.
I sold my NeXT color turbo, but i kept 3 of the 68020 cubes i got from the math department and they form the foundation of my clear-glass coffee table:)
I gave my indigo2 to a friend that was interested in irix (it was too noisy/hot), and my Sun machine is turned off (too noisy, too slow). I still run my openBSD box though.. works to darn well to not use it. My wife has 2 OS X laptops that i get to support (blah).
Microsoft will play promotional videos at like job fairs or campus presentations. They're usually about like "what work at MS is like". They typically put a bunch of employees on there saying stuff like "i get to work on something that 200 billion people use, that's pretty cool".
My feedback to my campus recruiter was that "look, no real development job is a bunch of really hot girls hanging out with you in a break room while you all paw on each other on a couch. that video is crap. I am sure working at MS is not like attending a frat party. while i appreciate the effort in targeting the geeky male, this is plainly fraudulent"
my friend had a different response though.. "that video was awesome.. i was totally psyched tow ork for MS after seeing it".
Anyway, in over 5 years of employment with MS, I have never been in a lounge with attractive women being moderately flirtatious. I've spent at least 15 hours though on anti-harassment training.
As far as the "do we think we're hot stuff" - yes and no.
Alot of people are very self critical here and very open about how poor some things are, with the caveat that it was as good as they were able to make it at the time, and there are non-technical, non-expertise forces in play.
I was complaining to a few people about just how lame the shell file routines are (you know, the "preparing to copy" dialog..). I was having a pretty good argument with some folks about how "it isn't good enough, all the clever things you're trying to do don't work and make the common path worse" and so on. Eventually the conversation was one of the guys that has a long history with windows shell saying something along the lines of "look, we know it sucks. every person who has worked on it has quit the company sometime after working on it. its not a fundamentally hard problem, it's all of the stupid requirements that make it ridiculous".
I wasn't happy with it, but i didn't know what avenues were left. It's not like i have anything to do with windows or the shell in the first place, but anybody (even me) has the opportunity to talk tot he guys that made it and make them defend what they did. That's pretty cool, imo. I get a lot of answers and details that the outside world doesn't get, and i play it both ways - when i think something sucks, i grill people here, and when i see something on slashdot which is just plain bs, i call the poster on it and tell it like it is.
finally, the other aspect of "we're the best" is its comparative nature to other organizations. It's hard to do a comparative analysis of Microsoft people to just about anybody else, since nobody does exactly what we do. (nobody else is in the business of supplying software to the majority of companies, governments, grandmothers, etc, for the last 15 some odd years running)
I have, in my 5 years, on occasion, come out of meetings or read emails that made me think "do they really work here? did they pass the same interviews i did?". In Redmond (i'm now at the Fargo campus) i especially often felt like I worked with mouth-breathing idiots when i went into the parking garages. My only hope would be that the parts of the brain that design software and the parts of the brain that park cars have _zero_ shared neurons.
I figure since i did 2 separate interview loops - one for a straight dev job where they no-hired me, and one the following day for a dev/test job that i have now, i am just on the border of the dumbest possible person MS could hire, and so everyone should be clearly smarter than me at all times.
That infact doesn't seem to be the case, so i dont konw what's going on with the people i have to explain things to over and over (maybe i'm too dim to explain things clearly?:)
Anyway, i've only worked int he developer tools org.. first on visual studio servicing.. now in Microsoft Business Framework. Both jobs put me in the position of working on platform/developer tools that other companies would use to do _th
I spent a month in germany this year and did lots of train riding and lots of car driving.. i'm something of a german car fan here in the states (my wife and i currently "share" 3 german cars) and i run a few track events a year with the car clubs in my region of the country.
When i got home to my boring, awful drive from Minneapolis back to Fargo, as i left the cruise control at speed limit + 9, i started thinking to myself, "what would it take to get high speed trains in the states? what would it take to get unrestricted interstate?"
Germany has the transportation problem _licked_.
Coming back to the US was painful by comparison.
I think there are some distance issues and population density issues that make high speed rail less likely in the USA. Finally, there's the issue of how it will get paid for, which given how badly our country has been divided on pretty basic things lately, its hard to imagine national consensus for massive mass transit systems. Ultimately, public transit is USELESS unless it is a fully integrated system so that you can get from NYC to seattle to your neighborhood to about 3 blocks from your house - with luggage, all with a common ticketing/station system.
Germany has that. I can't see it happening in the US.
there are lots of really good jobs in (wherever), but they're all taken or something, and the only thing remaining is factory work at "exploitative" american companies.
My claim is that life is so rotten that forcing an 8 year old to work at walmart is better than forcing an 8 year old prostitute.
Walmart doesn't "force" people to have jobs in other markets. Walmarts pay doesn't drive down pay in other places. Dont you suppose if there were a better way of working / standard of living, thats what people would do ?
If i'm going to artifically pay too much for something, i'll just give the money to people in the US. Then the working children in (wherever) will go back to being child prostitutes, sold as sex slaves by their parents, or any of the other things that go on in countries in abject poverty and without enough basic necessities to worry much about western morality. But hey, i wont be patronizing wal-mart, right ?
you know, i dont get all this anti-wal-mart sentiment. wal-mart is providing acceptable products at an acceptable price.
if nobody cares about the quality of product OR quality of experience at a smaller merchandiser, why does that small business have an instrinsic right to survive ? it doesn't. it must adapt, just like other businesses.
personally, i dont have any problem with claims that wal-mart is exploiting child labor in south-east asian nations. Obivously these kids "need" to work for whatever reason (or they wouldn't be working currently)... what do you suppose a 12 year old girl in thailand is going to do for money if the wal-mart factory closes ? Is that better for children, thailand, or the world ?
For many people, cost of goods is the primary differentiator in what they buy. Specialty shops or places selling a value-added-experience will have to adjust to that reality.
BMW, for instance, does not compete on cost. Neither does apple.
seriously. I despise that organization with such a high degree of contempt that everything they talk about being against, i think about trying to go do, just because of how loathesome they are.
I'm all for being nice to animals and all that, and i happen to really like my cats and dog...but i'm not going to stop eating delcious food, im not going to ever beleive that humans and animals have equal importance, and im not going to lose a lot of sleep over what some people do with THEIR PROPERTY.
Guess what. It takes me longer to remember which fileutils support reading a file (and in what way i specify it) than it does for the f@#4ing computer to do the work for me.
anything is possible, it's all just software right ?:)
i think the unix model fits unix really well right now, because so much of administration in unix is manipulating text.
Windows never had that - everything was locked away in some opaque object (good and bad, depending on your viewpoint).
The brain behind MSH was one of the WMI guys and he (rightfully so, i think) likes WMI but its too hard to use and too hard to author providers for (his thoughts).
But fundamentally, an inquisitive object based administration system is "good", especially when the underlying stuff is all object based anyhow. the key is to make these objects exposable in a generic, "composable" way, and thats what MSH is attempting to do.
Really, the approaches might be similar. Consider a script i might write to give me the usernames and home directories on my unix box
(apologies if i mis-remembered the field numbers for homedir)
my apology sort of makes the point- administrators are required to understand the internal format of UNIX's text files, and to remember/consult them for tool development.
a comparable approach might be
get users | pick name, homedir | tabout
which is more readable? which is more reesilient to changes in the way users are stored? Does the first example work on NIS+ ? LDap ?
So the goal here is to take the good things about OO (hiding of internal implementation) and the good things about a consistent format (flat text, in unix) and somehow merge them. I'd much rather remember that users have a name and a homedir, than what positions those properties have in one type of user database.
It gets uglier when your text data is working with "cut". For instance, something i'll do from time to time is
ls -l | cut -cX-Y |....
where the X-Y range is something i want from the ls -l output. (say filesize). That is hugely problematic - have to tweak the character range until it "seems" right, and what happens when my tty capabilities change (to say, a 20 char tty ?) or, what happens when a file size is larger than the allowed column width? or what happens when ls is an alias to "better ls that auto-sizes columns".
again, something like
get files | pick size | sort
hides this crap from me.
So, actually, i think linux could have a shell that did stuff like this. But what linux lacks is the rich set of objects to hide the implementation details of the things you want to do with linux. when linux has a consistent set of management objects then something like this getspossible.
Of course, windows doesn't have a complete set of management objects either, and besides, we dont have management objects for apps we dont write - you'll surely want to use the same scripts/shellto manage your custom apps. So a important part of msh is the ability for people to author their own object providers that can plug-in to the framework easily.
The make-or-break scenarios for msh, in my opinion are 1) clever ways to promote text,xml, etc into objects for legacy systems
2) objects for a sufficient portion of the management surface to make it worth peoples time to use
i see that some brilliant person modded me as "troll". nice:/
anyway, heres what i thought was cool
- entirely object based. objects are pased via pipeline composition. that means you can do something like
ls | pick name, size | tableout
ls is going to return you a collection of "file" objects. the file object has properties "name" and "size" (and lots of others). the pick command takes each incoming object, and looks for properties called name and size. it then passes down a "new" object that is a bag of the name/size combos (or, it may pass along the original file objects.. i dont remember precisely). finally, tableout is a generic formatter that takes objects and formats them one per row, where each property in the object is displayed in a column.
note that you could replace tableout with say, csvout, or maybe "Excelout"
so the pipe paradigm changes in a way thats pretty cool.
Also, because you're working with.net objects which can be reflected, you get intellisense on the commandline, like working in visual studio. you dont necessarily have to remember properties and what not from object streams - it infers them for you.
(note that a problem i asked them about when i saw the demo - if you have a pipeline where you want tab completion in stage 3, but stage 1 "modifies" state (i.e. in stage 3 you are reporting on what you deleted in stage 1) how do you get the tab complete info without doing the state change in stage one?.. they were aware of this problem and were thinking about it.. but that was years ago:)
finally, what was cool is that across MS people are buying into the idea that a commandline shell that manipulated object representations of data in a generic way was going to be the path forward for adminsterting windows. Consider that the IIS metabase is now xml instead of what it used to be.. and that msh is a shell that works on structured objects... its not coincidental.
i saw an early alpha over 2 years ago. I was blown away.
Note that prior to joining MS, i did admin and development work on linux, solaris, irix, and even hp-ux. i know my way around a unix shell pretty well. I started making noise a few years back about how awful cmd.exe is and how we need a real scriptable admin experience. Some people said "go check this out". I was blown away at what they already had.
There are some things about MSH that are really, really good. I'm looking forward to it. I'm frustrated that a lot of the early momentum it had seems to have fizzled and its now bogged down in "product development":/ The early alphas were releasable, imo. Especially compared to cmd.exe, which is squarely awful:)
I found out this week that a bookmark i had to some site that catalogged.torrent files was now stale - imagine my surprise when i went to that bookmark only to find the page covered with "sponsored links" and no torrents for me to peruse.
I didn't try and find other places for more.torrents. I just stopped looking and did something else.
I haven't looked for any kind of music online in a few years because its too much work. I dont want to install crap, i dont want to uninstall spyware, i dont want to worry abou not getting all of a file, and i dont want to be sued over a couple of songs that aren't any good to begin with. Hell, when i see mp3 files with naming convenitions i disagree with, i get upset and dont want the work of making sure the ID3 data is right and what not.
iTunes is really, really convenient. I haven't bought anything from it, but my wife has when shes looking for some specific song for some reason or another.
I think the value proposition is that paying 99 cents for a known quantity is more convenient than wasting a bunch of time and perhaps needing multiple attempts to get the same thing.
Apparently this value proposition is working for alot of people.
i dont understand the delineations between jury and non jury trials. You have to be accused of something pretty awful to get a jury trial for something you did in a car.
I dont know of anyone that's had a jury trial when protesting a moving violation. They're not even misdemeanor offenses.. i think they're referred to as "infractions" or something like that..
if there's one thing i despise more than drunk drivers, it's cops and judges just saying you're guilty because they can, with no technical accountability.
I recently defended myself in a moving violation case. I sat through the 6 prior cases where people admitted they were guilty but were basically just sad about getting a ticket (the usual crying-on-the-stand trick). One case even had its fine reduced! The girl skidded off the road and ran over a street sign!
Then my case came. When i cross examined the officer i caught him in several logical fallacies and he could not say exactly how i was guilty of violating the statute, as written.
But, none of that really matters. The judge decides what he wants to, and thats that.
I was pulled over, by the way, because last winter, when i pulled away from a stop light, my tires started spinning on my all-wheel-drive-with-snow-tires 130hp winter car. Instead of doing something dramatic like slamming on the brakes or abruptly lifting off, i just rode out the wheelspin, keeping the car in my lane and straight ahead, etc.
Cops dont "like" wheelspin, so i got a ticket. Specifically, my ticket was for "driving too fast for conditions". The other people that were convicted of this offense ran off the road, skidded through intersections, etc. One almost t-boned an officer.
I was particuarly amused with myself when i asked if i was violating the law the second the light turned green, given that my instantanous speed was zero but my tires were spinning. When i was stopped, was i driving too fast for conditions ?:)
Nevermind that last weekend i was teaching _other_ people how to drive safely at a racetrack. Nope, i'm a public driving menace, apparently. So says one agitated officer, and one judge.
Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xbox?
on
Inside the Xbox 360
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You didn't think you were watching real footage of _anything_ from Sony did you? You didn't think that the PS3 they "showed" would be final form of the box, did you ? Do you think the "dualshockboomerang" is the final form of the controller?
You don't actually beleive that giving the 7 SPE's hand coded routines to do (that accomplish nothing, btw) and then proclaiming it is the tflops king makes a better video game machine, do you ?
Which of those 7 SPE's is going to run the IP stack for all the networked games (that wont have an online service comparable to xbox live).
None of them.
Sony made _ridiculous_ claims about the PS2, the fanboys ate them up, and sony way, way underdelivered. "The PS2 will do Toy Story in real time!!". Riiiiight. What part of Toy Story did Sony do, exactly? What do they know about making a Pixar quality film?
For that matter, if the PS2/PS3 are so great, why aren't they _actually_ in the Top500 list? The best supercomputers from Japan aren't made by Sony - they're made by NEC. Where is their supercomputing architectural experience? How is it that a stereo/walkman manufacturer gets by claiming that it is building a faster machine than just about anybody thats been doing it for 30 years, and that they'll sell it for $300 to boot.
The real tragedy here is that Sony fanboys didn't learn from PS2. Sony has the hype cranked up to 11, and people are eating it up, just like they did last time.
I am sure that the PS3 will allow you to have fun playing games.
I am also sure that it will NOT be the hardware equivalent of the return of Christ. Please see through the BS.
that's an interesting way to look at it but im not buying it.
Firstly, i started using linux at home with TAMU and kernel.98. I spent a lot of time back then. I quickly "graduated" to Solaris 2.4 on a sparc ipx, and then shortly thereafter, solaris 2.5.1 on an SS10, with both machines running 2.6 eventually. (2.6 being the last release for sun4c, iirc). I also picked up an Indigo^2 and did a whole bunch of work with irix.
This is all at home mind you. At work i was doing admin and development work on irix 5.3, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, and 6.5. A little NT 4.0. A little Solaris "7" (2.7). I switched jobs and did a bunch of work on linux, freebsd, more solaris, more irix.
I lived and breathed Solaris, IRIX, and Linux for many years. I stopped using Windows at 3.1 and ran unix only at home until Windows 2000 release candidates started coming out, at which point i had a W2k server machine as "the windows box".
My mac experience _does_ go back somewhat.. - my wife got her G3 i 1998 and was running OS8 and OS9. Frankly those both ran "ok" for what they were - (garbage). I was the one that instaslled OS 10 on it (i forgot to mention that at home i ALSO had NextStep 2.x, 3.3, and 4.2 black hardware that i had also invested in heavily, time wise).
Part of the Aironet problem is bad cisco software, but part of it is apple just plain doing a poor job on older hardware support with OS X.
I would say that "At home", i've invested the least amount of time in windows, because it works to straightforwardly for the things i ask it to do.
Now, since i work with windows every day at work in a very low-level way, it's hard to suggest that i dont "succeed by osmosis" at home... but my point remains.. i've got a lot of research and learning time in all of the platforms i've listed above. The continual incremental investment in windows seems to be the least of all of them i keep around.
I like windows because i have _no_ time invested in it, and i dont need to invest time in it.
When i come home from work, the last thing i want to do is spend more time screwing with cantankerous computers. I wave the mouse, the screen lights up, and i am doing whatever i want to be doing with the computer. The web browser renders every page correctly. The email program is perfectly fast even though i have thousands of messages. My terminal emulator running a text-mode irc client hasn't spun out of control consuming all my ram. Visual Studio has been minimized for days and i breifly restore it to see what i was last "working on" at home in my hobbyist coding hours.
This is windows xp for me. I spent about 2 hours assembling this machine from parts that newegg sent me and about another 2 hours getting xp, office 2003, and a few other apps installed on it. I haven't had to do a single thing to it sense.
I'd say my time investment is pretty low. That's precisely how i like it.
I've spent much more time trying to get an Aironet 352 working smoothly on OS X. I've spent a bunch more time trying to help my wife troubleshoot her ibook G4's sleep-of-death problem. (her powerbook G3 had it also, and i've spent a bunch of time on _that_ thing)
I suppose thta i haven't spent much time on my OpenBSD machine.. i put in "the time" on that thing a few years ago and i mostly forget i even have it apart from every few months wanting to do something or other with it. Which requires 2-4 hours of reading and mucking.
Of course, im not a "zealot" for any of these platforms. I use all of them at home, but the machine with me physically sitting at it the most is windows, yet it requires the least "effort" by far.
i've never been drunk or high (and its not due to youth;) but i've spent a reasonable amount of time on race tracks in the triple digit club.
My 'vision' is effected by being tired or upset. Yeah, my eyes still see the same "stuff" but my "vision" is definitely a lot worse.
Driving safely requires looking ahead and "through" the objects ahead of you.. as you continue to go faster your gaze must continue to go further ahead of you, and your mind and body instinctively know how to interpret data in your foreground without you spending any processing power on them.
However, when i am tired i have a lot of trouble focusing down the road and instead am looking 40 feet infront of me. Same thing for being upset or on a phone - my concentration is not down the road where it should be.
I'd suspect that being drunk or high affect you at least as badly as being tired, with respect to your ability to focus and "parse" information sufficiently ahead of the car for proper safety.
i'm certainly no expert, i'm just less ignorant than some people, as i've had some extra education above and beyond what is typical.
in general, on a safe car the _ability_ of the car to brake should be dictated by the tires, not the brakes.
Said another way, at _any_ speed you ought to be able to lock up your brakes (eventually) if you push on them hard enough. Very, very few cars pass that test from the factory. You should find an empty stretch of road and practice maximum braking, and see how long and hard you have to press on the brake before you acheive wheel lockup or ABS engagement. if you're waiting a long time, your brakes are insufficient for your tires.
Once your tires cannot provide any more adhesive force, additional engine braking or pushing of the brake pedal wont help. In the case of engine braking you can actually get yourself in bad shape doing this. Here's an example from a long time ago, before i had taken any driver training:)
i was driving an old 80 BMW 528i (5 speed stick, rear wheel drive). The rear tires were reasonably bad and it was extra slick from a first-rain-in-a-while sort of situation. I was driving straight and downshifted from 2nd to 1st. I was travelling such that my 1st gear rpm would be around 5000 rpm (no problem for this motor) but i didn't do any rev matching or anything of that nature.. i just slammed the car in first and let up on the clutch abruptly.
The force required to spin the engine up to 5000 rpm via reverse-load through the drive train was more than the tires grip. Simply downshifting abruptly broke the rear wheels loose and the rear end came around about 30 degrees before i pushed the clutch back in and counter steered. This was going straight at like 30mph on a city street!
In a racing situation downshifting is only done in conjunction with rev matching, as the problem i experienced is magnified.. as cars are always near the edge of the tires adhesive limits. A downshift that puts more load on the drive wheels (the tire also now must provide force to spin up the engine) will slip and send the car sliding. rev matching ensures that the engine is already at the proper speed for the new lower gear so that no new load is added to the tire as the clutch is disengaged. it also makes the shifts buttery smooth and fast, and doesn't upset the balance of the car.
in a panic braking situation, don't downshift because you wont have time. you should be on the brakes as hard as possible whilst not skidding (or, just mash the pedal if you have ABS) when you get very advanced, you can perform what is called "heel and toe" whereby you operate the clutch and gas pedal whilst maintaining threshhold braking force, by using the clutch as normal with the left foot and using the right edge or heel of your braking foot to "blip" the gas pedal so that your downshift is revmatched and you dont unbalance the car. Experienced drivers in heavy braking zones will get on the brakes fully and then do 2 -3 rev-matched downshifts where they must operate all 3 pedals with 2 feet, all while maintaining 95% or better of the maximum braking force the car will develop.
as far as is it safe for the car...
when you slow down a car, you're converting KE into heat (and sound)
That heat can end up in your brake components, which are designed to be easy to replace cheaply and often have vents and ducts for heat dissapation.
Or, that heat can be disappated in yoru transmission and engine, which are difficult and expensive to replace.
You make the call:)
When i need to really slow down, i use the brakes and rev match my downshifts to keep the engine in its power band, so that if need to rapidly transition from braking to accelerating, i am prepared to do so. I dont think i'm doing any real engine braking while doing this. I will occasionally downshift to "gradually" slow down but again it's more because i want the car in the proper gear if i need to get back o
nobody could change into your lane (without signalling) and _then_ slam on the brakes. So now in addition to a conservative following distance, you also need a conservative following distance behind any cars in lanes adjacent to you.
And thus still doesn't solve the problem of you looking the wrong way when a tree falls in the roadway, or any other variety of problems.
Also, at extremely slow speeds the argument falls apart because following distance is more dominated by human reaction time than vehicle speed, i.e. you could safely stop NO PROBLEM if you were looking where you were supposed to, but continuing to drive at 5-10mph for an additional second would cause you to rear end somebody.
And old people never veer the car to the left as they look left over their shoulder.
It's a bad habit. The driver-car interface has the general property that the car tends to go where the driver is looking. Try looking straight sideways sometime and see where in the lane your car is after a few seconds of that. Now try doing it while the road turns.
Let me say this again: the advice you get for a normal licensing test is insufficient. Just because you couldn't find anything doesn't mean it doesn't exist - read any books on competitive driving or talk to any people that instruct at driving schools - they'll tell you just what i have.
My wife has been in at least one stop-and-go accident that could have been avoided if she'd been looking ahead instead of over her shoulder. It was not an issue of tailgating either, since she (like many people) are very anxious about following distance.
Suppose taht you're in busy traffic and you need to make a lane change. You look over your shoulder and, it looks clear but at the last second someone dives into that lane so you have to abort your lane attempt. Technically you should look forward now, but what many drivers so is continue looking into the lane to see when the next "hole" appears. This takes a quick lane change and turns it into a long one.. the driver has no idea what has happened ahead of them.
I would postulate that the number of accidents that result from someone rear ending a car whilst looking over their shoulder (even with an appropriate following distance) is higher than the number of accidents that result from someone making a lane change with properly adjusted mirrors. the latter situation is entirely more avoidable as well, by the way. Once you realize you're going to rear end someone, it's basically up to adhesion physics and you've become a passenger instead of a driver (unless you have the presence of mind to have an exit strategy and the skills to apply it).
When you make a lane change that you shouldn't have (Because you didn't see a car in your rear 3/4 view or whatever)
a) they know its coming (your signal) b) they're "mostly" behind you (if not all the way behind you), making a braking avoidance more effective on their part c) they're not going rapidly faster than you (because doing so is unsafe and typically illegal) d) they can lane split with you and the shoulder (or a foot or so of the next lane) while doing avoidance.
The potential accident from a shoulder check (rear ending someone) is a) harder to avoid b) more damaging c) always your fault
the potential accident from an improper lane change is a) easier to avoid b) less damaging c) depends on the circumstances.. if i lane change into someone doing 120, im not sure the judge will fault me for not doing a shoulder check (in the USA)
With proper and properly adjusted mirrors you can acheive a zero blind spot configuration.
Your state also thought it was safe to put an exploding device in your steering wheel that releases with the capacity to keep an unbelted occupant in the car in a 30mph crash.
Never mind that if such a device explodes in your face when it shouldn't have, you've now become a much bigger safety problem to others than you previously were to yourself.
And before you ask, YES, i do know of at least one accidental airbag deployment (stiff suspension + pothole == boom), and no, i don't have a link.
Your state also lets people operate a motor vehicle with no fundamental understanding of or experience with controlling understeer, oversteer, or panic braking.
I am not aware of any state in the US that has a driving program sufficiently rigorous to keep people from having accidents unless they never experience an unexpected condition.
In other words: The state laws of Utah are not the oracle of accurcy on all matters of driving. There are plenty of really dumb laws out there. Do you think it's easier to tell people to look over their shoulder, or to explain how to adjust their mirrors on a variety of vehicles? The law suggests a course of action which is an improvement over not even looking, but it's not the ideal scenario.
That's ok, most people are unable to accept criticism of their driving habits. That's unfortunate, because nobody is a faultless driver free of poor habits.
Lane changes can be done with complete confidence and no blind spot with the proper mirror adjustment. If you cant, you either dont know how or don't have a safe vehicle. Augment your mirrors or learn how to adjust them, or, both.
It was nice of you to assume something about my driving habits from a message that explained that looking over the shoulder is an unsafe habit. You're essentially dead wrong, but i see you're not one for factual accuracy to begin with.
It's perhaps premature of you to assume I am NOT a race car driver. In fact, this very month i'll be instructing others on how to improve their driving at a race track. Students are paying hundreds of dollars for this instruction and track time. What are people paying for your driving advice?
(incidentally, no, i am not a race car driver. i don't hold a valid racing license. I attend, and starting this month, instruct at driving events at race tracks put on by car clubs. My current interests are in driving safely, not rubbing paint with people. As it turns out, to drive competitively you need to understand how to drive safely)
In any case, what are your qualifications for being an authority on driving properly?
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I had that attitude in college. I went to the MS recruiting presentation at our school. I was going to really show that nice recruiter lady how clever i was. She was going to talk about microsoft and working there. At the appropriate time, i came up with a pretty funny way of asking
:)
"why would i want to work on something that sucks?"
everyone laughed. i thought i was _so_ clever.
her reponse put me in my place:
"so you can make it better"
She got me.
I've spent the last 5 years filing bugs, writing automated tests, writing automation systems, reviewing designs, keeping developers from doing as many dumb things as they're prone to do (i obviously dont catch everything).
Microsoft has a long way to go before they don't suck at all - they'll probably never get there. Infact, every day, i'll come across some random thing where i ask myself (or tell my co-worker, who i'm usually helping troubleshoot something at the time), "man, _who_ writes this shit software?".
But they're getting better. And I'm doing my part.
BTW - my pre MS experience was _exclusively_ in the UNIX ABM camp. 5 years ago when i started, i was talking to people alot about "here's how it is in linux", "here's how it is in solaris". They were interested. We were starting to get beat up in the press and with customers, and mysql, apache, linux, solaris.. they kept coming up.
We're doing better now because we're competing with free software. I used to have to fight really hard to get someone to do something "right". I used to have to explain that security was important.. that real customers expect uptime, etc.
We "get it" a lot more now than we used to. The beating we take in the press and with customers - from our competitors - is pushing us harder and i for one love it. I dont have to convince people anymore that a potential security threat is worth fixing - they just do it. I dont have to tell people about "how the other half lives". We're finally starting to "get it".
we still have a long way to go, and we still do stuff that upsets me (i have _NO_ idea whats going on with the claria situation, but it _looks_ very fishy and lots of employees are _pissed_, and demanding some clear answers and external messaging), but W2k, Wxp, and Server 2003 are really pretty good.. a hell of a lot better than W98 or NT4!. SQL Server 2k is a damn sight better than mySQL for... basically everything. I've written a bunch of perl/php and i'd have to say that i really, really prefer ASP.NET, and i can't even tell you how much better asp.net is than plain old ASP. Or how IIS6 is worlds more secure than IIS5 was.
Yeah. The nice thing about working at MS - you're never out of broken stuff to fix
I generally think we suck less than we used to, but there's obviously plenty of room for improvement.
:)
I sold my NeXT color turbo, but i kept 3 of the 68020 cubes i got from the math department and they form the foundation of my clear-glass coffee table
I gave my indigo2 to a friend that was interested in irix (it was too noisy/hot), and my Sun machine is turned off (too noisy, too slow). I still run my openBSD box though.. works to darn well to not use it. My wife has 2 OS X laptops that i get to support (blah).
Microsoft will play promotional videos at like job fairs or campus presentations. They're usually about like "what work at MS is like". They typically put a bunch of employees on there saying stuff like "i get to work on something that 200 billion people use, that's pretty cool".
:)
My feedback to my campus recruiter was that "look, no real development job is a bunch of really hot girls hanging out with you in a break room while you all paw on each other on a couch. that video is crap. I am sure working at MS is not like attending a frat party. while i appreciate the effort in targeting the geeky male, this is plainly fraudulent"
my friend had a different response though.. "that video was awesome.. i was totally psyched tow ork for MS after seeing it".
Anyway, in over 5 years of employment with MS, I have never been in a lounge with attractive women being moderately flirtatious. I've spent at least 15 hours though on anti-harassment training.
As far as the "do we think we're hot stuff" - yes and no.
Alot of people are very self critical here and very open about how poor some things are, with the caveat that it was as good as they were able to make it at the time, and there are non-technical, non-expertise forces in play.
I was complaining to a few people about just how lame the shell file routines are (you know, the "preparing to copy" dialog..). I was having a pretty good argument with some folks about how "it isn't good enough, all the clever things you're trying to do don't work and make the common path worse" and so on. Eventually the conversation was one of the guys that has a long history with windows shell saying something along the lines of "look, we know it sucks. every person who has worked on it has quit the company sometime after working on it. its not a fundamentally hard problem, it's all of the stupid requirements that make it ridiculous".
I wasn't happy with it, but i didn't know what avenues were left. It's not like i have anything to do with windows or the shell in the first place, but anybody (even me) has the opportunity to talk tot he guys that made it and make them defend what they did. That's pretty cool, imo. I get a lot of answers and details that the outside world doesn't get, and i play it both ways - when i think something sucks, i grill people here, and when i see something on slashdot which is just plain bs, i call the poster on it and tell it like it is.
finally, the other aspect of "we're the best" is its comparative nature to other organizations. It's hard to do a comparative analysis of Microsoft people to just about anybody else, since nobody does exactly what we do. (nobody else is in the business of supplying software to the majority of companies, governments, grandmothers, etc, for the last 15 some odd years running)
I have, in my 5 years, on occasion, come out of meetings or read emails that made me think "do they really work here? did they pass the same interviews i did?". In Redmond (i'm now at the Fargo campus) i especially often felt like I worked with mouth-breathing idiots when i went into the parking garages. My only hope would be that the parts of the brain that design software and the parts of the brain that park cars have _zero_ shared neurons.
I figure since i did 2 separate interview loops - one for a straight dev job where they no-hired me, and one the following day for a dev/test job that i have now, i am just on the border of the dumbest possible person MS could hire, and so everyone should be clearly smarter than me at all times.
That infact doesn't seem to be the case, so i dont konw what's going on with the people i have to explain things to over and over (maybe i'm too dim to explain things clearly?
Anyway, i've only worked int he developer tools org.. first on visual studio servicing.. now in Microsoft Business Framework. Both jobs put me in the position of working on platform/developer tools that other companies would use to do _th
I spent a month in germany this year and did lots of train riding and lots of car driving.. i'm something of a german car fan here in the states (my wife and i currently "share" 3 german cars) and i run a few track events a year with the car clubs in my region of the country.
When i got home to my boring, awful drive from Minneapolis back to Fargo, as i left the cruise control at speed limit + 9, i started thinking to myself, "what would it take to get high speed trains in the states? what would it take to get unrestricted interstate?"
Germany has the transportation problem _licked_.
Coming back to the US was painful by comparison.
I think there are some distance issues and population density issues that make high speed rail less likely in the USA. Finally, there's the issue of how it will get paid for, which given how badly our country has been divided on pretty basic things lately, its hard to imagine national consensus for massive mass transit systems. Ultimately, public transit is USELESS unless it is a fully integrated system so that you can get from NYC to seattle to your neighborhood to about 3 blocks from your house - with luggage, all with a common ticketing/station system.
Germany has that. I can't see it happening in the US.
so let me get this straight.
there are lots of really good jobs in (wherever), but they're all taken or something, and the only thing remaining is factory work at "exploitative" american companies.
My claim is that life is so rotten that forcing an 8 year old to work at walmart is better than forcing an 8 year old prostitute.
Walmart doesn't "force" people to have jobs in other markets. Walmarts pay doesn't drive down pay in other places. Dont you suppose if there were a better way of working / standard of living, thats what people would do ?
If i'm going to artifically pay too much for something, i'll just give the money to people in the US. Then the working children in (wherever) will go back to being child prostitutes, sold as sex slaves by their parents, or any of the other things that go on in countries in abject poverty and without enough basic necessities to worry much about western morality. But hey, i wont be patronizing wal-mart, right ?
you know, i dont get all this anti-wal-mart sentiment. wal-mart is providing acceptable products at an acceptable price.
if nobody cares about the quality of product OR quality of experience at a smaller merchandiser, why does that small business have an instrinsic right to survive ? it doesn't. it must adapt, just like other businesses.
personally, i dont have any problem with claims that wal-mart is exploiting child labor in south-east asian nations. Obivously these kids "need" to work for whatever reason (or they wouldn't be working currently)... what do you suppose a 12 year old girl in thailand is going to do for money if the wal-mart factory closes ? Is that better for children, thailand, or the world ?
For many people, cost of goods is the primary differentiator in what they buy. Specialty shops or places selling a value-added-experience will have to adjust to that reality.
BMW, for instance, does not compete on cost. Neither does apple.
seriously. I despise that organization with such a high degree of contempt that everything they talk about being against, i think about trying to go do, just because of how loathesome they are.
I'm all for being nice to animals and all that, and i happen to really like my cats and dog...but i'm not going to stop eating delcious food, im not going to ever beleive that humans and animals have equal importance, and im not going to lose a lot of sleep over what some people do with THEIR PROPERTY.
i knew somebody would dock me for that.
:)
Guess what. It takes me longer to remember which fileutils support reading a file (and in what way i specify it) than it does for the f@#4ing computer to do the work for me.
Computers work for _us_, remember ?
anything is possible, it's all just software right ? :)
/etc/passwd | awk -F: '{printf("%s\t%s\n",$1,$5)}'
....
i think the unix model fits unix really well right now, because so much of administration in unix is manipulating text.
Windows never had that - everything was locked away in some opaque object (good and bad, depending on your viewpoint).
The brain behind MSH was one of the WMI guys and he (rightfully so, i think) likes WMI but its too hard to use and too hard to author providers for (his thoughts).
But fundamentally, an inquisitive object based administration system is "good", especially when the underlying stuff is all object based anyhow. the key is to make these objects exposable in a generic, "composable" way, and thats what MSH is attempting to do.
Really, the approaches might be similar. Consider a script i might write to give me the usernames and home directories on my unix box
cat
(apologies if i mis-remembered the field numbers for homedir)
my apology sort of makes the point- administrators are required to understand the internal format of UNIX's text files, and to remember/consult them for tool development.
a comparable approach might be
get users | pick name, homedir | tabout
which is more readable? which is more reesilient to changes in the way users are stored? Does the first example work on NIS+ ? LDap ?
So the goal here is to take the good things about OO (hiding of internal implementation) and the good things about a consistent format (flat text, in unix) and somehow merge them. I'd much rather remember that users have a name and a homedir, than what positions those properties have in one type of user database.
It gets uglier when your text data is working with "cut". For instance, something i'll do from time to time is
ls -l | cut -cX-Y |
where the X-Y range is something i want from the ls -l output. (say filesize). That is hugely problematic - have to tweak the character range until it "seems" right, and what happens when my tty capabilities change (to say, a 20 char tty ?) or, what happens when a file size is larger than the allowed column width? or what happens when ls is an alias to "better ls that auto-sizes columns".
again, something like
get files | pick size | sort
hides this crap from me.
So, actually, i think linux could have a shell that did stuff like this. But what linux lacks is the rich set of objects to hide the implementation details of the things you want to do with linux. when linux has a consistent set of management objects then something like this getspossible.
Of course, windows doesn't have a complete set of management objects either, and besides, we dont have management objects for apps we dont write - you'll surely want to use the same scripts/shellto manage your custom apps. So a important part of msh is the ability for people to author their own object providers that can plug-in to the framework easily.
The make-or-break scenarios for msh, in my opinion are
1) clever ways to promote text,xml, etc into objects for legacy systems
2) objects for a sufficient portion of the management surface to make it worth peoples time to use
i see that some brilliant person modded me as "troll". nice :/
.net objects which can be reflected, you get intellisense on the commandline, like working in visual studio. you dont necessarily have to remember properties and what not from object streams - it infers them for you.
:)
anyway, heres what i thought was cool
- entirely object based. objects are pased via pipeline composition. that means you can do something like
ls | pick name, size | tableout
ls is going to return you a collection of "file" objects. the file object has properties "name" and "size" (and lots of others). the pick command takes each incoming object, and looks for properties called name and size. it then passes down a "new" object that is a bag of the name/size combos (or, it may pass along the original file objects.. i dont remember precisely). finally, tableout is a generic formatter that takes objects and formats them one per row, where each property in the object is displayed in a column.
note that you could replace tableout with say, csvout, or maybe "Excelout"
so the pipe paradigm changes in a way thats pretty cool.
Also, because you're working with
(note that a problem i asked them about when i saw the demo - if you have a pipeline where you want tab completion in stage 3, but stage 1 "modifies" state (i.e. in stage 3 you are reporting on what you deleted in stage 1) how do you get the tab complete info without doing the state change in stage one?.. they were aware of this problem and were thinking about it.. but that was years ago
finally, what was cool is that across MS people are buying into the idea that a commandline shell that manipulated object representations of data in a generic way was going to be the path forward for adminsterting windows. Consider that the IIS metabase is now xml instead of what it used to be.. and that msh is a shell that works on structured objects... its not coincidental.
its based entirely on .net. If it's using COM, its indirectly via .NET interop. It requires the .NET 2.0 framework to run at all.
:)
Why do you think a commandline shell will be exploited by phishers ? Do people get duped into giving their personal info to cmd.exe ?
You should try using it again, becuase you missed some things the first time around
i saw an early alpha over 2 years ago. I was blown away.
:/ The early alphas were releasable, imo. Especially compared to cmd.exe, which is squarely awful :)
Note that prior to joining MS, i did admin and development work on linux, solaris, irix, and even hp-ux. i know my way around a unix shell pretty well. I started making noise a few years back about how awful cmd.exe is and how we need a real scriptable admin experience. Some people said "go check this out". I was blown away at what they already had.
There are some things about MSH that are really, really good. I'm looking forward to it. I'm frustrated that a lot of the early momentum it had seems to have fizzled and its now bogged down in "product development"
I found out this week that a bookmark i had to some site that catalogged .torrent files was now stale - imagine my surprise when i went to that bookmark only to find the page covered with "sponsored links" and no torrents for me to peruse.
.torrents. I just stopped looking and did something else.
I didn't try and find other places for more
I haven't looked for any kind of music online in a few years because its too much work. I dont want to install crap, i dont want to uninstall spyware, i dont want to worry abou not getting all of a file, and i dont want to be sued over a couple of songs that aren't any good to begin with. Hell, when i see mp3 files with naming convenitions i disagree with, i get upset and dont want the work of making sure the ID3 data is right and what not.
iTunes is really, really convenient. I haven't bought anything from it, but my wife has when shes looking for some specific song for some reason or another.
I think the value proposition is that paying 99 cents for a known quantity is more convenient than wasting a bunch of time and perhaps needing multiple attempts to get the same thing.
Apparently this value proposition is working for alot of people.
i dont understand the delineations between jury and non jury trials. You have to be accused of something pretty awful to get a jury trial for something you did in a car.
I dont know of anyone that's had a jury trial when protesting a moving violation. They're not even misdemeanor offenses.. i think they're referred to as "infractions" or something like that..
which is unfortuneate, since cops are just people, and are prone to having biases, making mistakes, etc.
if there's one thing i despise more than drunk drivers, it's cops and judges just saying you're guilty because they can, with no technical accountability.
:)
I recently defended myself in a moving violation case. I sat through the 6 prior cases where people admitted they were guilty but were basically just sad about getting a ticket (the usual crying-on-the-stand trick). One case even had its fine reduced! The girl skidded off the road and ran over a street sign!
Then my case came. When i cross examined the officer i caught him in several logical fallacies and he could not say exactly how i was guilty of violating the statute, as written.
But, none of that really matters. The judge decides what he wants to, and thats that.
I was pulled over, by the way, because last winter, when i pulled away from a stop light, my tires started spinning on my all-wheel-drive-with-snow-tires 130hp winter car. Instead of doing something dramatic like slamming on the brakes or abruptly lifting off, i just rode out the wheelspin, keeping the car in my lane and straight ahead, etc.
Cops dont "like" wheelspin, so i got a ticket. Specifically, my ticket was for "driving too fast for conditions". The other people that were convicted of this offense ran off the road, skidded through intersections, etc. One almost t-boned an officer.
I was particuarly amused with myself when i asked if i was violating the law the second the light turned green, given that my instantanous speed was zero but my tires were spinning. When i was stopped, was i driving too fast for conditions ?
Nevermind that last weekend i was teaching _other_ people how to drive safely at a racetrack. Nope, i'm a public driving menace, apparently. So says one agitated officer, and one judge.
You didn't think you were watching real footage of _anything_ from Sony did you? You didn't think that the PS3 they "showed" would be final form of the box, did you ? Do you think the "dualshockboomerang" is the final form of the controller?
You don't actually beleive that giving the 7 SPE's hand coded routines to do (that accomplish nothing, btw) and then proclaiming it is the tflops king makes a better video game machine, do you ?
Which of those 7 SPE's is going to run the IP stack for all the networked games (that wont have an online service comparable to xbox live).
None of them.
Sony made _ridiculous_ claims about the PS2, the fanboys ate them up, and sony way, way underdelivered. "The PS2 will do Toy Story in real time!!". Riiiiight. What part of Toy Story did Sony do, exactly? What do they know about making a Pixar quality film?
For that matter, if the PS2/PS3 are so great, why aren't they _actually_ in the Top500 list? The best supercomputers from Japan aren't made by Sony - they're made by NEC. Where is their supercomputing architectural experience? How is it that a stereo/walkman manufacturer gets by claiming that it is building a faster machine than just about anybody thats been doing it for 30 years, and that they'll sell it for $300 to boot.
The real tragedy here is that Sony fanboys didn't learn from PS2. Sony has the hype cranked up to 11, and people are eating it up, just like they did last time.
I am sure that the PS3 will allow you to have fun playing games.
I am also sure that it will NOT be the hardware equivalent of the return of Christ. Please see through the BS.
that's an interesting way to look at it but im not buying it.
.98. I spent a lot of time back then. I quickly "graduated" to Solaris 2.4 on a sparc ipx, and then shortly thereafter, solaris 2.5.1 on an SS10, with both machines running 2.6 eventually. (2.6 being the last release for sun4c, iirc). I also picked up an Indigo^2 and did a whole bunch of work with irix.
Firstly, i started using linux at home with TAMU and kernel
This is all at home mind you. At work i was doing admin and development work on irix 5.3, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, and 6.5. A little NT 4.0. A little Solaris "7" (2.7). I switched jobs and did a bunch of work on linux, freebsd, more solaris, more irix.
I lived and breathed Solaris, IRIX, and Linux for many years. I stopped using Windows at 3.1 and ran unix only at home until Windows 2000 release candidates started coming out, at which point i had a W2k server machine as "the windows box".
My mac experience _does_ go back somewhat.. - my wife got her G3 i 1998 and was running OS8 and OS9. Frankly those both ran "ok" for what they were - (garbage). I was the one that instaslled OS 10 on it (i forgot to mention that at home i ALSO had NextStep 2.x, 3.3, and 4.2 black hardware that i had also invested in heavily, time wise).
Part of the Aironet problem is bad cisco software, but part of it is apple just plain doing a poor job on older hardware support with OS X.
I would say that "At home", i've invested the least amount of time in windows, because it works to straightforwardly for the things i ask it to do.
Now, since i work with windows every day at work in a very low-level way, it's hard to suggest that i dont "succeed by osmosis" at home... but my point remains.. i've got a lot of research and learning time in all of the platforms i've listed above. The continual incremental investment in windows seems to be the least of all of them i keep around.
I've got boxed copies of everything I mentioned. My circumstances are probably not typical though :)
[check user info if you're curious]
That's entirely false for me.
I like windows because i have _no_ time invested in it, and i dont need to invest time in it.
When i come home from work, the last thing i want to do is spend more time screwing with cantankerous computers. I wave the mouse, the screen lights up, and i am doing whatever i want to be doing with the computer. The web browser renders every page correctly. The email program is perfectly fast even though i have thousands of messages. My terminal emulator running a text-mode irc client hasn't spun out of control consuming all my ram. Visual Studio has been minimized for days and i breifly restore it to see what i was last "working on" at home in my hobbyist coding hours.
This is windows xp for me. I spent about 2 hours assembling this machine from parts that newegg sent me and about another 2 hours getting xp, office 2003, and a few other apps installed on it. I haven't had to do a single thing to it sense.
I'd say my time investment is pretty low. That's precisely how i like it.
I've spent much more time trying to get an Aironet 352 working smoothly on OS X. I've spent a bunch more time trying to help my wife troubleshoot her ibook G4's sleep-of-death problem. (her powerbook G3 had it also, and i've spent a bunch of time on _that_ thing)
I suppose thta i haven't spent much time on my OpenBSD machine.. i put in "the time" on that thing a few years ago and i mostly forget i even have it apart from every few months wanting to do something or other with it. Which requires 2-4 hours of reading and mucking.
Of course, im not a "zealot" for any of these platforms. I use all of them at home, but the machine with me physically sitting at it the most is windows, yet it requires the least "effort" by far.
i've never been drunk or high (and its not due to youth ;) but i've spent a reasonable amount of time on race tracks in the triple digit club.
My 'vision' is effected by being tired or upset. Yeah, my eyes still see the same "stuff" but my "vision" is definitely a lot worse.
Driving safely requires looking ahead and "through" the objects ahead of you.. as you continue to go faster your gaze must continue to go further ahead of you, and your mind and body instinctively know how to interpret data in your foreground without you spending any processing power on them.
However, when i am tired i have a lot of trouble focusing down the road and instead am looking 40 feet infront of me. Same thing for being upset or on a phone - my concentration is not down the road where it should be.
I'd suspect that being drunk or high affect you at least as badly as being tired, with respect to your ability to focus and "parse" information sufficiently ahead of the car for proper safety.
What are your thoughts ?
i'm certainly no expert, i'm just less ignorant than some people, as i've had some extra education above and beyond what is typical.
:)
:)
in general, on a safe car the _ability_ of the car to brake should be dictated by the tires, not the brakes.
Said another way, at _any_ speed you ought to be able to lock up your brakes (eventually) if you push on them hard enough. Very, very few cars pass that test from the factory. You should find an empty stretch of road and practice maximum braking, and see how long and hard you have to press on the brake before you acheive wheel lockup or ABS engagement. if you're waiting a long time, your brakes are insufficient for your tires.
Once your tires cannot provide any more adhesive force, additional engine braking or pushing of the brake pedal wont help. In the case of engine braking you can actually get yourself in bad shape doing this. Here's an example from a long time ago, before i had taken any driver training
i was driving an old 80 BMW 528i (5 speed stick, rear wheel drive). The rear tires were reasonably bad and it was extra slick from a first-rain-in-a-while sort of situation. I was driving straight and downshifted from 2nd to 1st. I was travelling such that my 1st gear rpm would be around 5000 rpm (no problem for this motor) but i didn't do any rev matching or anything of that nature.. i just slammed the car in first and let up on the clutch abruptly.
The force required to spin the engine up to 5000 rpm via reverse-load through the drive train was more than the tires grip. Simply downshifting abruptly broke the rear wheels loose and the rear end came around about 30 degrees before i pushed the clutch back in and counter steered. This was going straight at like 30mph on a city street!
In a racing situation downshifting is only done in conjunction with rev matching, as the problem i experienced is magnified.. as cars are always near the edge of the tires adhesive limits. A downshift that puts more load on the drive wheels (the tire also now must provide force to spin up the engine) will slip and send the car sliding. rev matching ensures that the engine is already at the proper speed for the new lower gear so that no new load is added to the tire as the clutch is disengaged. it also makes the shifts buttery smooth and fast, and doesn't upset the balance of the car.
in a panic braking situation, don't downshift because you wont have time. you should be on the brakes as hard as possible whilst not skidding (or, just mash the pedal if you have ABS) when you get very advanced, you can perform what is called "heel and toe" whereby you operate the clutch and gas pedal whilst maintaining threshhold braking force, by using the clutch as normal with the left foot and using the right edge or heel of your braking foot to "blip" the gas pedal so that your downshift is revmatched and you dont unbalance the car. Experienced drivers in heavy braking zones will get on the brakes fully and then do 2 -3 rev-matched downshifts where they must operate all 3 pedals with 2 feet, all while maintaining 95% or better of the maximum braking force the car will develop.
as far as is it safe for the car...
when you slow down a car, you're converting KE into heat (and sound)
That heat can end up in your brake components, which are designed to be easy to replace cheaply and often have vents and ducts for heat dissapation.
Or, that heat can be disappated in yoru transmission and engine, which are difficult and expensive to replace.
You make the call
When i need to really slow down, i use the brakes and rev match my downshifts to keep the engine in its power band, so that if need to rapidly transition from braking to accelerating, i am prepared to do so. I dont think i'm doing any real engine braking while doing this. I will occasionally downshift to "gradually" slow down but again it's more because i want the car in the proper gear if i need to get back o
nobody could change into your lane (without signalling) and _then_ slam on the brakes. So now in addition to a conservative following distance, you also need a conservative following distance behind any cars in lanes adjacent to you.
i cleId=104950
And thus still doesn't solve the problem of you looking the wrong way when a tree falls in the roadway, or any other variety of problems.
Also, at extremely slow speeds the argument falls apart because following distance is more dominated by human reaction time than vehicle speed, i.e. you could safely stop NO PROBLEM if you were looking where you were supposed to, but continuing to drive at 5-10mph for an additional second would cause you to rear end somebody.
And old people never veer the car to the left as they look left over their shoulder.
It's a bad habit. The driver-car interface has the general property that the car tends to go where the driver is looking. Try looking straight sideways sometime and see where in the lane your car is after a few seconds of that. Now try doing it while the road turns.
Let me say this again: the advice you get for a normal licensing test is insufficient. Just because you couldn't find anything doesn't mean it doesn't exist - read any books on competitive driving or talk to any people that instruct at driving schools - they'll tell you just what i have.
Also, you didn't look very hard:
http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/Features/art
search for the word "mirror"
My wife has been in at least one stop-and-go accident that could have been avoided if she'd been looking ahead instead of over her shoulder. It was not an issue of tailgating either, since she (like many people) are very anxious about following distance.
Suppose taht you're in busy traffic and you need to make a lane change. You look over your shoulder and, it looks clear but at the last second someone dives into that lane so you have to abort your lane attempt. Technically you should look forward now, but what many drivers so is continue looking into the lane to see when the next "hole" appears. This takes a quick lane change and turns it into a long one.. the driver has no idea what has happened ahead of them.
I would postulate that the number of accidents that result from someone rear ending a car whilst looking over their shoulder (even with an appropriate following distance) is higher than the number of accidents that result from someone making a lane change with properly adjusted mirrors. the latter situation is entirely more avoidable as well, by the way. Once you realize you're going to rear end someone, it's basically up to adhesion physics and you've become a passenger instead of a driver (unless you have the presence of mind to have an exit strategy and the skills to apply it).
When you make a lane change that you shouldn't have (Because you didn't see a car in your rear 3/4 view or whatever)
a) they know its coming (your signal)
b) they're "mostly" behind you (if not all the way behind you), making a braking avoidance more effective on their part
c) they're not going rapidly faster than you (because doing so is unsafe and typically illegal)
d) they can lane split with you and the shoulder (or a foot or so of the next lane) while doing avoidance.
The potential accident from a shoulder check (rear ending someone) is a) harder to avoid b) more damaging c) always your fault
the potential accident from an improper lane change is a) easier to avoid b) less damaging c) depends on the circumstances.. if i lane change into someone doing 120, im not sure the judge will fault me for not doing a shoulder check (in the USA)
With proper and properly adjusted mirrors you can acheive a zero blind spot configuration.
Your state also thought it was safe to put an exploding device in your steering wheel that releases with the capacity to keep an unbelted occupant in the car in a 30mph crash.
Never mind that if such a device explodes in your face when it shouldn't have, you've now become a much bigger safety problem to others than you previously were to yourself.
And before you ask, YES, i do know of at least one accidental airbag deployment (stiff suspension + pothole == boom), and no, i don't have a link.
Your state also lets people operate a motor vehicle with no fundamental understanding of or experience with controlling understeer, oversteer, or panic braking.
I am not aware of any state in the US that has a driving program sufficiently rigorous to keep people from having accidents unless they never experience an unexpected condition.
In other words:
The state laws of Utah are not the oracle of accurcy on all matters of driving. There are plenty of really dumb laws out there. Do you think it's easier to tell people to look over their shoulder, or to explain how to adjust their mirrors on a variety of vehicles? The law suggests a course of action which is an improvement over not even looking, but it's not the ideal scenario.
I can see this is a sensitive issue for you.
That's ok, most people are unable to accept criticism of their driving habits. That's unfortunate, because nobody is a faultless driver free of poor habits.
Lane changes can be done with complete confidence and no blind spot with the proper mirror adjustment. If you cant, you either dont know how or don't have a safe vehicle. Augment your mirrors or learn how to adjust them, or, both.
It was nice of you to assume something about my driving habits from a message that explained that looking over the shoulder is an unsafe habit. You're essentially dead wrong, but i see you're not one for factual accuracy to begin with.
It's perhaps premature of you to assume I am NOT a race car driver. In fact, this very month i'll be instructing others on how to improve their driving at a race track. Students are paying hundreds of dollars for this instruction and track time. What are people paying for your driving advice?
(incidentally, no, i am not a race car driver. i don't hold a valid racing license. I attend, and starting this month, instruct at driving events at race tracks put on by car clubs. My current interests are in driving safely, not rubbing paint with people. As it turns out, to drive competitively you need to understand how to drive safely)
In any case, what are your qualifications for being an authority on driving properly?