Just after I posted “Erratic cellular settings” I thought about cars and problem solving.
Long ago I learned a little story about car problems that may have been older than me.
A car dealer gave his wife a new car. She was delighted with it, but she complained that it ran erratically. A mechanic checked it out and could find nothing wrong. She brought it in again with the same result. Finally, the head mechanic went out with her.
She started the car, pulled out the choke, and hung her purse from the choke.
Sometimes, you have to just be there to solve a user’s problem. I found this out when a user couldn’t access a document because his computer terms didn’t the same meanings as others did. I had to go to his house to understand the problem. I found out the cause of an error in my own software when I saw a user print a document on his on printer. I had assumed a negative number for a printer line would not get printed. It worked fine on my Apple printer, but it didn’t work on his third party printer.
The problem with computers is that the designers expect their users to be expert car mechanics, masters of intricate analysis of problems. But all the average user wants to do is touch a few buttons or type a few words to get his or her work done. If their cars sputters when it should purr, they take it to a mechanic who often can diagnose the problem within an hour. But if their devices sputter when they should purr, they are expected to put in hours trying to get enough information to get somebody to finally make a correction to the software (or tell them not to hang their purses on the menu bar).
My plaint about all this complexity is whatever happened to the “Computer for the Rest of Us” (The 1984 Apple Macintosh)?
Showing posts with label automobiles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label automobiles. Show all posts
Monday, January 11, 2016
Thursday, August 06, 2015
You thought your grandparents saw a lot of change!
We ain't seen nothing yet!
My maternal grandfather was born in 1890 and died in 1974.
By the time he was an adult, cars were starting to be everywhere, but most people still got around by walking or taking a streetcar.
He managed to stay out of “the war to end all wars”, but one of his brothers died in France during the flu epidemic, less than a month after arriving.
When he was in his forties, airplane travel was available, but most long distance travel was by train.
When he was in his sixties, 25 miles away was a long distance call. I remember him calling us in Cleveland from Chagrin Falls when area codes were introduced for direct dialing.
When he died in his eighties, his grandsons had been flying here and there frequently, including in Europe or to Hawaii.
My own life has seen dramatic changes.
One of the admonitions to get me to clean my plate was that I was taking food from a kid starving in China.
The “starving kid in China”? Well, unfortunately, there are still hungry kids in China and too many other places. On the other hand, the middle class is getting larger in almost every country, with India and China each having as many middle-class citizens as the United States has citizens of all classes. The New York Times just featured a Chinese female billionaire who had to feed pigs as a child; her company makes most of the glass for smart phones.
My first car was a 1940 Chevy coupe, bought from a friend for $20 about 1958. It had manual transmission, no windshield washers, no air-conditioning, crank windows, and no turn signals. I had to stick my arm out the window, no matter the weather.
Now lot of people won’t even consider a car without GPS and a Bluetooth connection.
When I learned to drive, the only freeway I knew of was the Lakeshore Drive in Cleveland. Then came the Ohio Turnpike, a wonder of safe driving built so you would not be blinded by headlights in the other lane. Now entire neighborhoods have been wiped out by freeways. I’m not sure, but I think when I drive one of these freeways in Cleveland that I had a paper route 50 feet above where I am driving.
My first commercial flight was in a DC-3. When I moved to and traveled in Europe I flew in either Boeing 707s or Douglas DC-7s. I remember standing outside an office building in Rome watching a 747 fly over. Do I really want to fly in an aircraft carrying that many people? Now they are even bigger (with far less space per passenger).
I grew up on AM radio and no TV. Now there are so many AM and FM stations, it’s hard to find an empty frequency to use for an iPhone podcast on the car radio. I remember when a TV station filmed me going down a sledding hill; we had to watch the news in the window of a store. Now TVs are ubiquitous conversation killers with large flat-screens in restaurants and fitness centers.
My first computer job was on an IBM 650, about the size of two refrigerators plus a card reader and a card punch, each about the size of an office desk. It had 10,000 characters of memory.
When I left Univac over twenty years later, we were starting to use internal email from cathode-ray-tube monitors: green letters on a black screen. Many programmers were being dragged kicking and screaming into using compilers instead of assemblers. A compiler takes a set of statements and converts them into code the computer understands. An assembler takes a symbolic representation of each individual instruction.
Some will disagree with me, but I find that the languages now used to program computers are more obtuse and overly complicated from the elegant languages I used when I first programmed a Macintosh.
Now we can put the equivalent of a very large mainframe in a pocket, plus we can make wireless telephone calls, take and view photographs, and send those photos and more to people anywhere in the world.
When we first hooked Teletype machines to mainframes, the sending/receiving speed was 110 bits per second. Now we get irritated when our 7 megabits per second service only sends at 4 Mbps.
Some of those early mainframes had a memory capacity of about 3/4 million characters. Now we can buy smart phones with 64 billion characters.
One summer while in high school, I had a job with a surveying crew. I got to hold the rod while the surveyor looked through his transit or I held one end of a steel tape. Now surveyors bounce light beams to get the distance. On one of the construction sites I was told that, by union agreement, the carpenters had to use hand tools. Now almost all commercial carpenters have a huge array of power tools including power saws and nail guns.
As for the “war to end all wars”; it didn’t work. There are still wars to keep people in power who don’t want to give it up, wars to make sure others have the “right” religion, and wars to protect a country’s influence on others. On the bright side, I have read that the number of conflicts are less than ever. Think of Western Europe, no wars since 1945.
Here’s hoping our grandkids can write similar articles about more techno-wonders and about far fewer wars.
Also published in the Reader Weekly 2015-08-06 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/08/05/5741_you_thought_your_grandparents_saw_a_lot_of_change.
My maternal grandfather was born in 1890 and died in 1974.
By the time he was an adult, cars were starting to be everywhere, but most people still got around by walking or taking a streetcar.
He managed to stay out of “the war to end all wars”, but one of his brothers died in France during the flu epidemic, less than a month after arriving.
When he was in his forties, airplane travel was available, but most long distance travel was by train.
When he was in his sixties, 25 miles away was a long distance call. I remember him calling us in Cleveland from Chagrin Falls when area codes were introduced for direct dialing.
When he died in his eighties, his grandsons had been flying here and there frequently, including in Europe or to Hawaii.
My own life has seen dramatic changes.
One of the admonitions to get me to clean my plate was that I was taking food from a kid starving in China.
The “starving kid in China”? Well, unfortunately, there are still hungry kids in China and too many other places. On the other hand, the middle class is getting larger in almost every country, with India and China each having as many middle-class citizens as the United States has citizens of all classes. The New York Times just featured a Chinese female billionaire who had to feed pigs as a child; her company makes most of the glass for smart phones.
My first car was a 1940 Chevy coupe, bought from a friend for $20 about 1958. It had manual transmission, no windshield washers, no air-conditioning, crank windows, and no turn signals. I had to stick my arm out the window, no matter the weather.
Now lot of people won’t even consider a car without GPS and a Bluetooth connection.
When I learned to drive, the only freeway I knew of was the Lakeshore Drive in Cleveland. Then came the Ohio Turnpike, a wonder of safe driving built so you would not be blinded by headlights in the other lane. Now entire neighborhoods have been wiped out by freeways. I’m not sure, but I think when I drive one of these freeways in Cleveland that I had a paper route 50 feet above where I am driving.
My first commercial flight was in a DC-3. When I moved to and traveled in Europe I flew in either Boeing 707s or Douglas DC-7s. I remember standing outside an office building in Rome watching a 747 fly over. Do I really want to fly in an aircraft carrying that many people? Now they are even bigger (with far less space per passenger).
I grew up on AM radio and no TV. Now there are so many AM and FM stations, it’s hard to find an empty frequency to use for an iPhone podcast on the car radio. I remember when a TV station filmed me going down a sledding hill; we had to watch the news in the window of a store. Now TVs are ubiquitous conversation killers with large flat-screens in restaurants and fitness centers.
My first computer job was on an IBM 650, about the size of two refrigerators plus a card reader and a card punch, each about the size of an office desk. It had 10,000 characters of memory.
When I left Univac over twenty years later, we were starting to use internal email from cathode-ray-tube monitors: green letters on a black screen. Many programmers were being dragged kicking and screaming into using compilers instead of assemblers. A compiler takes a set of statements and converts them into code the computer understands. An assembler takes a symbolic representation of each individual instruction.
Some will disagree with me, but I find that the languages now used to program computers are more obtuse and overly complicated from the elegant languages I used when I first programmed a Macintosh.
Now we can put the equivalent of a very large mainframe in a pocket, plus we can make wireless telephone calls, take and view photographs, and send those photos and more to people anywhere in the world.
When we first hooked Teletype machines to mainframes, the sending/receiving speed was 110 bits per second. Now we get irritated when our 7 megabits per second service only sends at 4 Mbps.
Some of those early mainframes had a memory capacity of about 3/4 million characters. Now we can buy smart phones with 64 billion characters.
One summer while in high school, I had a job with a surveying crew. I got to hold the rod while the surveyor looked through his transit or I held one end of a steel tape. Now surveyors bounce light beams to get the distance. On one of the construction sites I was told that, by union agreement, the carpenters had to use hand tools. Now almost all commercial carpenters have a huge array of power tools including power saws and nail guns.
As for the “war to end all wars”; it didn’t work. There are still wars to keep people in power who don’t want to give it up, wars to make sure others have the “right” religion, and wars to protect a country’s influence on others. On the bright side, I have read that the number of conflicts are less than ever. Think of Western Europe, no wars since 1945.
Here’s hoping our grandkids can write similar articles about more techno-wonders and about far fewer wars.
Also published in the Reader Weekly 2015-08-06 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/08/05/5741_you_thought_your_grandparents_saw_a_lot_of_change.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
I'm glad they don't build them like they used to
People often complain about the quality of cars, even before Toyota's fiasco. However, few stop to think how much more reliable and long-lasting cars are. One of the many features that is more reliable is the speedometer. We have had several cars in the last two decades that have had much more accurate speedometers than previous cars.
In the late 70s when the 55mph limit was opposed, many people gamed the system because a few court cases ruled that a driver could not be ticketed for going less than 10mph over the limit. I regularly drove my Fiat 124 Sport Coupe between southeastern Pennsylania and New York City at 70mph. Oops! That's 15mph over the limit. Not really, my actual speed was 63mph. I went right by at least one patrol car parked under a bridge while my CB crackled with a warning that there was a smokey under that bridge. It was also fun to watch those who had previously passed me slow down to less than I had been going.
When we bought our first Ford Escort I couldn't understand why so many people were passing me when I was going 55mph. I took a few measurements and discovered that I was actually going 47mph!! The dealer wouldn't do anything about it, making some noise about tire wear, blah, blah. Tire wear on a new car?? Once I began driving a true 55mph, I passed a lot of Escorts driving much slower than I was. I guess the Escorts were wearing their tires out within a few miles of the dealers.
The 1997 Ford F-150 I bought later had a much more accurate speedometer. I think it was correct within one mph at highway speeds. It did fairly well at lower speeds; I went past many a radar sign registering 30mph just like my speedometer.
Our 2002 Prius is just about as accurate.
On a recent trip we timed our Chevy Trailblazer at 70mph on a six-mile stretch of I-35W. If our speed was exactly 70mph we would have covered the six miles in 308.57 seconds. We covered the distance in 308.9 seconds, and so our speed was 69.926mph.
Of course, our measurements weren't that close because of reaction time, plus it is difficult to set cruise control right on the line on the speedometer. I think I had it slightly under, but I couldn't be positive without reading glasses.
Even that is damn good. If one were to allow a one percent error, the range of time would be slightly outside 306 to 312 seconds. That is a whole lot better than the 17 percent error of the Ford Escort or the 10 percent error of the Fiat 124.
In the late 70s when the 55mph limit was opposed, many people gamed the system because a few court cases ruled that a driver could not be ticketed for going less than 10mph over the limit. I regularly drove my Fiat 124 Sport Coupe between southeastern Pennsylania and New York City at 70mph. Oops! That's 15mph over the limit. Not really, my actual speed was 63mph. I went right by at least one patrol car parked under a bridge while my CB crackled with a warning that there was a smokey under that bridge. It was also fun to watch those who had previously passed me slow down to less than I had been going.
When we bought our first Ford Escort I couldn't understand why so many people were passing me when I was going 55mph. I took a few measurements and discovered that I was actually going 47mph!! The dealer wouldn't do anything about it, making some noise about tire wear, blah, blah. Tire wear on a new car?? Once I began driving a true 55mph, I passed a lot of Escorts driving much slower than I was. I guess the Escorts were wearing their tires out within a few miles of the dealers.
The 1997 Ford F-150 I bought later had a much more accurate speedometer. I think it was correct within one mph at highway speeds. It did fairly well at lower speeds; I went past many a radar sign registering 30mph just like my speedometer.
Our 2002 Prius is just about as accurate.
On a recent trip we timed our Chevy Trailblazer at 70mph on a six-mile stretch of I-35W. If our speed was exactly 70mph we would have covered the six miles in 308.57 seconds. We covered the distance in 308.9 seconds, and so our speed was 69.926mph.
Of course, our measurements weren't that close because of reaction time, plus it is difficult to set cruise control right on the line on the speedometer. I think I had it slightly under, but I couldn't be positive without reading glasses.
Even that is damn good. If one were to allow a one percent error, the range of time would be slightly outside 306 to 312 seconds. That is a whole lot better than the 17 percent error of the Ford Escort or the 10 percent error of the Fiat 124.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
I'm paying "high taxes" again!
I brought my truck into a Ford dealer because it has been squeaking on the right front. Tuesday I could push down on the bumper and the truck sounded like a whimpering puppy. Today I pushed down and heard nothing. On my trip to the dealer, I heard nothing.
The service representative just told me there was something, expensive somethings. A boot on the in the suspension was torn. When it was cold and dry it squeaked. Today it is warm with standing water on the roads. The boot is lubricated with water and doesn't squeak.
Additionally a tie rod is loose and has to be replaced. And, of course, the front end has to be realigned when all the repairs are made.
As of this writing, I don't know the full cost, but it will be over six hundred dollars, eight wouldn't surprise me.
How do front ends get damaged? From potholes. Why are there potholes? Because we won't pay enough taxes to build roads that will stand up to harsh weather, and we won't even pay enough taxes to repair the roads we have in a timely fashion.
So, we have to pay for the condition of our roads in another way. Either way, we are being taxed. Interestingly, this repair will be more than we pay to the City of Duluth in real estate taxes each year.
The service representative just told me there was something, expensive somethings. A boot on the in the suspension was torn. When it was cold and dry it squeaked. Today it is warm with standing water on the roads. The boot is lubricated with water and doesn't squeak.
Additionally a tie rod is loose and has to be replaced. And, of course, the front end has to be realigned when all the repairs are made.
As of this writing, I don't know the full cost, but it will be over six hundred dollars, eight wouldn't surprise me.
How do front ends get damaged? From potholes. Why are there potholes? Because we won't pay enough taxes to build roads that will stand up to harsh weather, and we won't even pay enough taxes to repair the roads we have in a timely fashion.
So, we have to pay for the condition of our roads in another way. Either way, we are being taxed. Interestingly, this repair will be more than we pay to the City of Duluth in real estate taxes each year.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Are Detroit vehicles worse than the competition?
Much is being written about the pay of Detroit auto employees and the quality of the cars they make. The pay is somewhat distorted because it seems to include paying for current retirees. The quality of cars may vary. See "$73 and hour, adding it up", David Leonhardt, New York Times, 2008-12-09.
We have a 1997 Ford F-150 (standard cab) and a 2002 Toyota Prius.
The truck has only let me down once in the sense I couldn't use it right at the moment. It had a flat tire on the way to work.
Both cars have had warning lights come on, almost about the same number. However, the Prius seems to do this at the start of big trips. We have been lucky in that if we didn't get immediate service, we at least got assurance that we could continue our trip.
Because I drive the truck more often on dirt roads and don't wash it as often as I should, I had major hidden rust damage. I did get the damage repaired. Even this year I've had people ask if the truck is new.
I'd say it is a wash on quality.
We have a 1997 Ford F-150 (standard cab) and a 2002 Toyota Prius.
The truck has only let me down once in the sense I couldn't use it right at the moment. It had a flat tire on the way to work.
Both cars have had warning lights come on, almost about the same number. However, the Prius seems to do this at the start of big trips. We have been lucky in that if we didn't get immediate service, we at least got assurance that we could continue our trip.
Because I drive the truck more often on dirt roads and don't wash it as often as I should, I had major hidden rust damage. I did get the damage repaired. Even this year I've had people ask if the truck is new.
I'd say it is a wash on quality.
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