= oxymoron.
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It tells you what the received wisdom is. Investigate the outliers for interesting heresies.
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Ballmer was a sales guy, first and foremost. Not really an ideas guy but he was smart enough to surround himself with those. While Microsoft truly stagnated under his leadership and made some terrible decisions (and thank fuck the acquisition of Yahoo fell through) it could have been a hell of a lot worse.
Bill Gates on the other hand had both technical prowess and ruthless business acumen. I could definitely imagine him as a Zuckerberg type if he were coming up in this era. At least now heâs to busy giving away his fortune trying to do some good in the world.
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Normally I would not link to RT, but this reminded me that when I was at school nuclear power was being promoted as the answer to almost everything from free energy to curing cancer, and this is one of the few things left that canât really be done without it. Also, a reminder that Toyota pickup trucks rule.
The video is much closer to a moving icebreaker than I would ever want to be, but the mere fact that the people are there in the first place shows a certain disregard for health and safety.
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Floor mount switch for high beam and low beam.
Sure, every other option is better. But I miss the old floor switch from my popâs old truck.
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None for me, thanks. Buddy of my dadâs had one. My dad expressed concern that it might be too easy to accidentally knock it out of gear while driving. The buddy showed him by pushing a few buttons that it wouldnât shift out of forward gears unless parked⌠but then forgot that the last button he pushed was Reverse. At the next stop sign, they backed into the car behind them.
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Iâve also heard they were a mechanical nightmare â talk about a bad solution to a lack of a problem!
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But they looked so modern and elegant!
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no need to post such an esoteric cul-de-sac of car tech when a manual transmission with a clutch is outdated now. It may be an option on certain 2018 models, but itâs basically not available anymore, from what I understand. an automatic with a screen on the dash is standard now.
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I think the push button thingy was an automatic. But thatâs all I can drive anyway; Iâve never even had a lesson on a manual. I donât know what Iâd do if I had to rent a car in GB, where I hear they are mostly manuals.
But . . . but . . . canât we do cul-de-sacs toooooo?
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It is possible to rent an automatic but they are either very expensive or absolute crap. The British have a depressing tendency to buy the biggest lowest spec car they can afford, which means manual, though taxi drivers have discovered the Prius.
The manual gearbox is something for which I am utterly not nostalgic. Basically in engineering terms it translates as âwe have not got a clue how to match the Otto cycle engine to small road vehicles, so letâs come up with the worst possible solution - a design in which one small mistake can put pieces all over the road.â It is, engaging rant mode, as if in order to use a computer you needed to watch the mains supply voltage and keep disengaging it and waggling a stick to get the correct voltage to the computer. How would that be relevant to computing? But people pride themselves on their ability to use a piece of equipment which should have been relegated to museums by about 1960.
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You could have a single-gear system, gearing everything down to a moderate speed, but enlarging the driving wheels for an immoderate one. The wheels themselves would be complex, heavy, and unreliable, and never really round, and would have immense inertia when in this-makes-the-penny-farthing-look-realistic mode.
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My buddy and I used to cruise around in his parentsâ Plymouth Valiant.
It had the pushbutton shift as seen here at the left side of the dash. I think the little black thing below it is the Park lever that locked up the buttons.
I donât know about the reliability of the pushbuttons themselves, but connected to Chryslerâs Torqueflite transmission and Slant 6 engine, the whole package was pretty bombproof. They drove it for years.
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Yet another weirdness of that era was the vacuum-powered windshield wipers. A friend in college had a Dart with those (and the push button transmission). The wipers would speed up and slow down depending on the load on the engine, but not the way I expected. I guess it was cheaper than an electric motor?
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What my dad always complained about in his days as a Ford mechanic was sequential turn signals and power windows. Nobody ever wanted to repair power windows.
Since switching from a Mitsubishi Lancer to a Prius, I miss two things: the manual transmission (sometimes) and the ability to lock the car door with the remote while the door was open, so you could pocket your keys before getting out of the car. But getting 60+ MPG on my commutes, having Bluetooth audio for streaming music instead of a CD player and no aux input, and not having to have the sway bars repaired every two years have all been nice.
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My Fnord is a manual. It was fine when my commute was 15 minutes of which 10 was Interstate.
Now, 30+ minute commute through the four towns between home and work lets me know that automatics are a good idea.
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