True Enough. Bought it used with 50K on it and the price was right. Figured it had most of the problems shaken out, then the dash thing. oy! Other then that the thing has been reliable and has made long road trips a pleasure.
Before that we had a new off the lot VW Jetta GLX. Very Reliable right up to 98.7 K on the odometer and one morning the engine sounded like someone had tossed in a bucket of loose ball bearings. Put it on a flatbed to VW and they discovered the cam chain had started eating itself. They demanded documentation of every service. We produced them and they were NOT happy. After they repaired it I saw the W/O and just reading the R/R time I figured it would have cost in the neighborhood of $10,000.00 for the repair. Drove it to 105K and sold it.
said, "Charge me a buck more and make this part out of metal instead of fucking plastic" or words to that effect?
Pick the product, I mean it doesn't matter what it is anything thing from your car, house, cell phone, kids bicycle, toilet paper, laptop pick the damn product.
THAT is the MBA / Bean Counter Problem.
They don't think in terms of high customer satisfaction they think in terms of "I can shave 0.0001 dollars per unit" and "I can predict that we will only increase our returns and warranty repair by 0.0001% and we will increase profit by.5 %".
Huge pet peeve... I like gauges I like to see actual oil pressure in my car, actual engine temperature but these days those are rare things in cars. I know the cost difference might be 2 dollars per car and frankly I will happily pay 30 times that since 60 bucks on the cost of a new car is nothing.
Plastic gears in assemblies... My wife drives a Mercedes C320 and there is a plastic gear someplace under the dash that is attached to a vacuum servo of some kind that has something to do with the air handling. The damn thing has some teeth missing and it chatters now and the sound is really annoying. The replacement part costs 40.00 bucks. But it will cost close to 1000.00 bucks in labor to get at the damn thing since you have to basically dis-assemble the dash to get at it.
The above reasons are why they need to be yacked out of the chain of command.
The 500.00 was the cost of the software. As long as you stayed up to date, support was free! I looked at your link and it was just "call us". I wonder how much it costs or how big a customer you have to be to get help on that number?
In mid-2009 we had to revive a Windows 2000 server (yes, two-thousand) that had about 2TB of inaccessible production data because of corrupt partition tables. The Indian engineers on the other end of MS support saved our ass by manually rebuilding those tables and they did it very well. Had they failed, several of us would have been refreshing our resumes. I'm personally not a fan of MS but when you've got a job to do, you do it.
Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS. > 500.00 USD ( '80;s vintage dollars ) for a word processor, not an office suite but just word processing software.
Outrageous huh?
Perhaps, but you got a 1-800 number AND when you called it, you got an engineer ( more then likely a programmer on call center rotation ) that really knew the product inside and out and would talk to you for as long as it took to solve the problem and that could be formatting, printing, or their extremely powerful scripting language.
Just try calling Microsoft for help with Office, go ahead I will watch and laugh.
Correct. We don't even understand how the human brain is "cognitive" much less how the information is stored or retrieved. Almost everything we know is an assumption at its base. Yes we have some ideas about which regions of the brain control certain functions but we have not a clue as to how those things work.
PhD candidates? Please! There are two reasons for people to enroll in PhD programs, they either want to be in academia and do pure research or to teach because they have a love of teaching both of which are just fine but you only need so many of those.
Ever looked at the code coming out of India from basic off shoring? It is horrendously bad. It is nothing more then tossed together masses of MS junk that barely works but that makes the MBA's happy, they get a fat bonus and move on. I have seen project after project have to be rebuilt or significantly reworked by quality programmers being paid prevailing wages in this country.
H1B Visa's... Oh yeah MBA's love those guys as well. They are essentially forced to work 12 to 14 hour days 6 days a week because if they don't the company drops their H1B support and back to whatever country they came from for them.
We need to stop treating programming like it is something you need 4 or 6 years of compiler theory and a minor in physics in and understand it for what it is and that is mostly a skill that requires the ability to solve puzzles, think in terms of data structures along with some abstract conceptual thinking.
Do you really think they that the programming behind Facebook required 100 people with PhD's? No, it required someone who understood databases and scaling, not someone who dreamed up the next great programming paradigm.
More hydro, really? We really don't have any more big rivers to damn up. Also the impact of damning up rivers is real ( think fish and majorly screwed up bay ecosystems) not imaginary.
While a nice idea, Solar has some serious drawbacks as well. You needs kilo-hectares of space to build big panel farms and the chemicals used to created those nifty little wafers are toxic as hell.
Wind - Nice where you can get it. Having the wind blow reliably every day, day after day is a pretty big challenge.
Commercial, for profit, Nuclear scares the crap out of me since all you need to do is read most any news source to find where companies have cut corners and built things that blew up. I live in the SF Bay Area and watched the PG&E gas main explode from 30 miles away.
Nuclear power is safe if it is done right and about the only entity in the US that have done it right is the US Navy. They have 1000 and 0 record and that includes two reactors on the bottom of the Atlantic that did not melt or even leak. Both were in submarines. One hit the bottom at around 40 knots and the other had a hole blown in its bow big enough to drive a car through.
A basic submarine nuclear plant generates around 48 thermal megawatts from a reactor the size of a small SUV and it can do that for around 6 years before it needs to be refueled. But these are built to crazy tolerances and thus would need to be manufactured on a cost plus basis to meet or exceed specs and the Marketing Boys and MBA's are NOT invited to the party. Build em like that and you can put one in my backyard.
This is just horseshit and a huge stinking pile of it.
Our programmers can compete with anyone anywhere on skill.
What we cannot compete on are wages and sorry pal that is the bottom line here.
Everyone wants cheaper goods and services.
So there is your problem. Median home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area, arguably the epicenter of tech? Try $400,000.00 not to mention food, utilities etc, and since the mortgage market insanity you better have $100,000.00 to put down. Want to rent in someplace that does not resemble a war zone? Try thinking 2000.00 a month with a 6000.00 move in tab.
In Fresno CA the median home price is around 125,000.00 but there ain't no tech business there and you are 3.5 hours by car from the SF bay Area.
Sorry man, when the fucknut MBA's running the tech industry these days stop saying "I can get this done in India for 6 bucks an hour." then people will see that in THIS COUNTRY they can make enough to live someplace safe with a modicum of culture, pay a mortage, take a vacation and have a kid or two, then they will flock back to the industry. Until then you are stuck with people who do it because they love it, really wouldn't rather do anything else and have managed to find jobs that pay decently, but unfortunately these days MBA's figure if you are paying them decently then they own every waking minute of your life and demand 12 to 14 hour days , electric leashes, answer my idiotic e-mail on Saturday night, etc etc et fucking cetra. Sorry a person who is looking for a career, not a shot at an IPO does not want that life because that ain't a life man.
I find that the annoying thing about HTML/JavaScript are that they are not brittle. Errors that in other languages would provoke an exception are silently ignored.
And even worse cause cause stupid browser behavior that is really inexplicable and it takes you hours to figure out where you left off a ">" symbol.
This is just silly. While I can appreciate it from a point of curiosity and it is probably a fun project, this is really overloading the browser.
I would submit that things like this are actively breaking the browser paradigm. Every PDF viewer allows you to save a local copy of the PDF after they have read it from the temp directory or the download directory. To implement this thing correctly is would require that JS have direct access to the file system, which as I understand it, aint fucking supposed to happen, since that would create untold numbers of security problems in a system already plagued by security problems.
While there may be arguments that this would be ok, they would all be moronic.
The entire notion of the browser needs to be forked out to an application shell with hard as nails security and a presentation shell and never the twain shall meet.
ALL checking is done in the onSubmit() event. In the meantime the user can input whatever garbage they want in whatever field they want and until the submit button is hit the crap just lays there.
I was momentarily overjoyed when I read the spec and then immediately tried some of this and found it to be garbage.
If I have a field that I want a monetary value typed into the filed should refuse to accept ANYTHING but the numbers 0 through 9 and the appropriate decimal indicator for that localization and nothing else.
If I have a date field that I want to the format to be YYYYY/MM/DD then I should be able to say:
The control will then only allow numbers and put them in place and validate the date on exit from the control.
WHY oh GOD why is an "area" not a text control? It certainly takes in text. But if you try and iterate through all the text controls in java script it is not one to be found and you have to kludge in some code to find them... ARGGGGGGGGGG!
and the reason is that with all the utility of HTML / CSS / JavaScript it is still brittle
DOM is getting even more bloated, inefficient and slow. CSS is out of control and when put to the extreme it is like reading RegEx that you didn't write that has 400 expressions in one string. That coupled with differences in even handling the box model between IE and everyone else is enough to drive a sane person over the edge, especialy with the kludges in CSS that were glued on to handle those problems.
JavaScript is supposed to be the language used to manipulate the Document Object but it was so poorly implemented that jQuery was required to make it reasonably useful.
For those reasons people keep writing native apps that work correctly the first time out of the gate.
This is no denying the utility of the various *nix shells but they are extremely quirky and very fussy. One bit of white space or lack thereof will make them explode as they are very brittle in that way.
Those are NOT what you use to teach basic concepts. Computers are about looping and branching and that is what they need to learn in a language that is very forgiving.
Languages that blow up when things are not just perfect will push kids away since the vast majority of 10 year old's don't have the patients for that kind of crap.
The wont. Further more they cant as it is specifically prohibited by law.
The sailors who were in the raid did what they are paid and specifically trained to do, nothing more nothing less.
We can argue about their compensation ( an E-5 "petty officer second class - the middle of the enlisted ranks ( E1 thru E9 ) with 6 years of active service" makes 2620.00 per month plus around 225.00 per month "Hostile Fire and Imminent Danger Pay" ) being way low for risking their lives but that is what they signed up for and the SEAL's are completely voluntary and in fact very difficult to get into since the washout rate for training is about 95%.
Slashdot Mirror
True Enough. Bought it used with 50K on it and the price was right. Figured it had most of the problems shaken out, then the dash thing. oy! Other then that the thing has been reliable and has made long road trips a pleasure.
Before that we had a new off the lot VW Jetta GLX. Very Reliable right up to 98.7 K on the odometer and one morning the engine sounded like someone had tossed in a bucket of loose ball bearings. Put it on a flatbed to VW and they discovered the cam chain had started eating itself. They demanded documentation of every service. We produced them and they were NOT happy. After they repaired it I saw the W/O and just reading the R/R time I figured it would have cost in the neighborhood of $10,000.00 for the repair. Drove it to 105K and sold it.
It is a 2001 and at the time they were being invaded by MBA's from Chrysler!
But yes, I take your point. Older MB's were built to last. I don;t know if the MBA infection has been completely removed from MB at this point.
I don't think that one anecdote is self defeating to my argument, but thanks for the comment
said, "Charge me a buck more and make this part out of metal instead of fucking plastic" or words to that effect?
Pick the product, I mean it doesn't matter what it is anything thing from your car, house, cell phone, kids bicycle, toilet paper, laptop pick the damn product.
THAT is the MBA / Bean Counter Problem.
They don't think in terms of high customer satisfaction they think in terms of "I can shave 0.0001 dollars per unit" and "I can predict that we will only increase our returns and warranty repair by 0.0001% and we will increase profit by .5 %".
Huge pet peeve... I like gauges I like to see actual oil pressure in my car, actual engine temperature but these days those are rare things in cars. I know the cost difference might be 2 dollars per car and frankly I will happily pay 30 times that since 60 bucks on the cost of a new car is nothing.
Plastic gears in assemblies... My wife drives a Mercedes C320 and there is a plastic gear someplace under the dash that is attached to a vacuum servo of some kind that has something to do with the air handling. The damn thing has some teeth missing and it chatters now and the sound is really annoying. The replacement part costs 40.00 bucks. But it will cost close to 1000.00 bucks in labor to get at the damn thing since you have to basically dis-assemble the dash to get at it.
The above reasons are why they need to be yacked out of the chain of command.
Oh My Fucking God! A database that you have to write stored procedures in Java!!!!! Are you fucking kidding me!
The 500.00 was the cost of the software. As long as you stayed up to date, support was free! I looked at your link and it was just "call us". I wonder how much it costs or how big a customer you have to be to get help on that number?
In mid-2009 we had to revive a Windows 2000 server (yes, two-thousand) that had about 2TB of inaccessible production data because of corrupt partition tables. The Indian engineers on the other end of MS support saved our ass by manually rebuilding those tables and they did it very well. Had they failed, several of us would have been refreshing our resumes. I'm personally not a fan of MS but when you've got a job to do, you do it.
Oops someone forgot to run daily backups???
Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS. > 500.00 USD ( '80;s vintage dollars ) for a word processor, not an office suite but just word processing software.
Outrageous huh?
Perhaps, but you got a 1-800 number AND when you called it, you got an engineer ( more then likely a programmer on call center rotation ) that really knew the product inside and out and would talk to you for as long as it took to solve the problem and that could be formatting, printing, or their extremely powerful scripting language.
Just try calling Microsoft for help with Office, go ahead I will watch and laugh.
Correct. We don't even understand how the human brain is "cognitive" much less how the information is stored or retrieved. Almost everything we know is an assumption at its base. Yes we have some ideas about which regions of the brain control certain functions but we have not a clue as to how those things work.
Yes they can as programmers
they sure as hell can.
PhD candidates? Please! There are two reasons for people to enroll in PhD programs, they either want to be in academia and do pure research or to teach because they have a love of teaching both of which are just fine but you only need so many of those.
Ever looked at the code coming out of India from basic off shoring? It is horrendously bad. It is nothing more then tossed together masses of MS junk that barely works but that makes the MBA's happy, they get a fat bonus and move on. I have seen project after project have to be rebuilt or significantly reworked by quality programmers being paid prevailing wages in this country.
H1B Visa's... Oh yeah MBA's love those guys as well. They are essentially forced to work 12 to 14 hour days 6 days a week because if they don't the company drops their H1B support and back to whatever country they came from for them.
We need to stop treating programming like it is something you need 4 or 6 years of compiler theory and a minor in physics in and understand it for what it is and that is mostly a skill that requires the ability to solve puzzles, think in terms of data structures along with some abstract conceptual thinking.
Do you really think they that the programming behind Facebook required 100 people with PhD's? No, it required someone who understood databases and scaling, not someone who dreamed up the next great programming paradigm.
More hydro, really? We really don't have any more big rivers to damn up. Also the impact of damning up rivers is real ( think fish and majorly screwed up bay ecosystems) not imaginary.
While a nice idea, Solar has some serious drawbacks as well. You needs kilo-hectares of space to build big panel farms and the chemicals used to created those nifty little wafers are toxic as hell.
Wind - Nice where you can get it. Having the wind blow reliably every day, day after day is a pretty big challenge.
Commercial, for profit, Nuclear scares the crap out of me since all you need to do is read most any news source to find where companies have cut corners and built things that blew up. I live in the SF Bay Area and watched the PG&E gas main explode from 30 miles away.
Nuclear power is safe if it is done right and about the only entity in the US that have done it right is the US Navy. They have 1000 and 0 record and that includes two reactors on the bottom of the Atlantic that did not melt or even leak. Both were in submarines. One hit the bottom at around 40 knots and the other had a hole blown in its bow big enough to drive a car through.
A basic submarine nuclear plant generates around 48 thermal megawatts from a reactor the size of a small SUV and it can do that for around 6 years before it needs to be refueled. But these are built to crazy tolerances and thus would need to be manufactured on a cost plus basis to meet or exceed specs and the Marketing Boys and MBA's are NOT invited to the party. Build em like that and you can put one in my backyard.
This is just horseshit and a huge stinking pile of it.
Our programmers can compete with anyone anywhere on skill.
What we cannot compete on are wages and sorry pal that is the bottom line here.
Everyone wants cheaper goods and services.
So there is your problem. Median home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area, arguably the epicenter of tech? Try $400,000.00 not to mention food, utilities etc, and since the mortgage market insanity you better have $100,000.00 to put down. Want to rent in someplace that does not resemble a war zone? Try thinking 2000.00 a month with a 6000.00 move in tab.
In Fresno CA the median home price is around 125,000.00 but there ain't no tech business there and you are 3.5 hours by car from the SF bay Area.
Sorry man, when the fucknut MBA's running the tech industry these days stop saying "I can get this done in India for 6 bucks an hour." then people will see that in THIS COUNTRY they can make enough to live someplace safe with a modicum of culture, pay a mortage, take a vacation and have a kid or two, then they will flock back to the industry. Until then you are stuck with people who do it because they love it, really wouldn't rather do anything else and have managed to find jobs that pay decently, but unfortunately these days MBA's figure if you are paying them decently then they own every waking minute of your life and demand 12 to 14 hour days , electric leashes, answer my idiotic e-mail on Saturday night, etc etc et fucking cetra. Sorry a person who is looking for a career, not a shot at an IPO does not want that life because that ain't a life man.
As has been said many many many times before...
A. The percentage of people that think it is "crippled" is very very very VERY small.
B. The percentage of people who find it the handiest thing to have is very very very VERY large.
Apple has produced a device that appeals to B.
Companies love them as well. They can write and install apps for them that the idiot "Road Warriors" can't fuck up.
Kaiser Permanente is currently testing them to replace desktops and laptops in their hospitals and exam rooms.
The "Walled Garden" that you despise, they love. They can put quality apps on them and get work done.
LOL, pretty much less!
I find that the annoying thing about HTML/JavaScript are that they are not brittle. Errors that in other languages would provoke an exception are silently ignored.
And even worse cause cause stupid browser behavior that is really inexplicable and it takes you hours to figure out where you left off a ">" symbol.
This is just silly. While I can appreciate it from a point of curiosity and it is probably a fun project, this is really overloading the browser.
I would submit that things like this are actively breaking the browser paradigm. Every PDF viewer allows you to save a local copy of the PDF after they have read it from the temp directory or the download directory. To implement this thing correctly is would require that JS have direct access to the file system, which as I understand it, aint fucking supposed to happen, since that would create untold numbers of security problems in a system already plagued by security problems.
While there may be arguments that this would be ok, they would all be moronic.
The entire notion of the browser needs to be forked out to an application shell with hard as nails security and a presentation shell and never the twain shall meet.
I think they are referring to things like we used to do. change a crystal, perhaps a cap or two and add a bigger heat sink, not re-engineer the thing.
The only part that is really difficult for home / hobbyists is the through plating.
No, it doesn't.
ALL checking is done in the onSubmit() event. In the meantime the user can input whatever garbage they want in whatever field they want and until the submit button is hit the crap just lays there.
I was momentarily overjoyed when I read the spec and then immediately tried some of this and found it to be garbage.
If I have a field that I want a monetary value typed into the filed should refuse to accept ANYTHING but the numbers 0 through 9 and the appropriate decimal indicator for that localization and nothing else.
If I have a date field that I want to the format to be YYYYY/MM/DD then I should be able to say:
The control will then only allow numbers and put them in place and validate the date on exit from the control.
WHY oh GOD why is an "area" not a text control? It certainly takes in text. But if you try and iterate through all the text controls in java script it is not one to be found and you have to kludge in some code to find them... ARGGGGGGGGGG!
DOM More efficient? Oh please, FF on Windows with 1 tab with /. open it is 100 +/- Megs of Ram ??? You call that efficient?
FF on OpenSuse with my gmail table my /. tab and a search tab ( google ) open and it is using 400 megs of ram? Efficient? Really?
Yes and that syntax is horrible and it is worse then Perl and Perl sucks sweaty donkey balls.
Really then why are we still writing kludges to deal with all the differences?
I guess we have different definitions of what useful means, I mean really different. Quicker and Easier to use = more usable.
Even with HTML-5's "improvements" we still have to:
I can't have vertical centering in a div unless I screw around with line-height? Really?
The list is bigger and bigger but the one that really get to me is the utterly insane CSS hack to do drop down / fly out menus. Really????????
And you wonder why people still will do anything to write native apps instead of this broken kludge of a mashup between DOM / JS / CSS.. Good grief
and the reason is that with all the utility of HTML / CSS / JavaScript it is still brittle
DOM is getting even more bloated, inefficient and slow. CSS is out of control and when put to the extreme it is like reading RegEx that you didn't write that has 400 expressions in one string. That coupled with differences in even handling the box model between IE and everyone else is enough to drive a sane person over the edge, especialy with the kludges in CSS that were glued on to handle those problems.
JavaScript is supposed to be the language used to manipulate the Document Object but it was so poorly implemented that jQuery was required to make it reasonably useful.
For those reasons people keep writing native apps that work correctly the first time out of the gate.
Perl of any flavor is not a beginners language by any stretch of the imagination.
Gahhh I would rather try and teach someone brain surgery then perl. The syntax is horrid and it allows you to write unreadable code,
Python is not a good choice when whitespace can yack the program. Sorry it just isn't.
Uhhg that is a horrible idea.
This is no denying the utility of the various *nix shells but they are extremely quirky and very fussy. One bit of white space or lack thereof will make them explode as they are very brittle in that way.
Those are NOT what you use to teach basic concepts. Computers are about looping and branching and that is what they need to learn in a language that is very forgiving.
Languages that blow up when things are not just perfect will push kids away since the vast majority of 10 year old's don't have the patients for that kind of crap.
The wont. Further more they cant as it is specifically prohibited by law.
The sailors who were in the raid did what they are paid and specifically trained to do, nothing more nothing less.
We can argue about their compensation ( an E-5 "petty officer second class - the middle of the enlisted ranks ( E1 thru E9 ) with 6 years of active service" makes 2620.00 per month plus around 225.00 per month "Hostile Fire and Imminent Danger Pay" ) being way low for risking their lives but that is what they signed up for and the SEAL's are completely voluntary and in fact very difficult to get into since the washout rate for training is about 95%.