And then the turbo blows, your tuner seduces you into another $2000 of mods, all of a sudden you need a racing clutch and the ride, noise and clutch effort are all intolerable.

Ugh...at least banks still have IBM to bleed them dry support them.

I followed up with the posting (from last October), and it’s been filled internally by someone at JPL. Still, all of their developers are getting older, and they anticipated that there may be another vacancy in a year or two.

2 MPG among the AWD models is a 10% improvement in fuel economy. That same range in midsize sedans brings you from number one (32 mpg) to number fifteen (29 mpg). It also saves you 50% more money in fuel than the aforementioned midsize sedan jump.

My experience in healthcare IT was consulting for a firm that made a big chunk of money still selling and maintaining machines running very old codebases, and they weren’t the only ones- Meditech made their last major codebase revision in 1982, as an example.

Seeing an Espada in the metal at the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix was one of my few “holy shit” moments that I had seeing a car. It’s simultaneously bizarre and perfect.

After consulting on healthcare IT, I can confirm that deprecated hardware is huge business (to tie it back to cars, akin to selling Crown Vics in 2011). But the hardware being new does not make it modern, and the fact that COBOL may arguably still be the best codebase for the job raises more questions about what…

When I was in school, there was an ATM built off of a Windows codebase. By the end of the academic year it was hacked and did nothing but play the sample song in Windows Media Player on repeat.

NASA had a job posting up for not only a FORTRAN programmer, but a 1972-vintage FORTRAN programmer to help work on the codebase for the Voyager space probe. I have a lot more sympathy there, though, because it’s really hard to upgrade the software of a machine that’s left the solar system.

Forget *a* bank, most banks still have mainframes that run COBOL-based programming at some level of their critical systems.

The “tap water catches fire” videos from Pennsylvania had the same issue, the gas in the groundwater was naturally occurring. You know, it’s almost as if a place where there’s so much gas it’s bubbling out of the ground is a good place to drill for it...

The system probably being used is a NOx trap, which literally traps exhaust during lean (high-temperature) running and then periodically flushes it into the exhaust during rich running with additional fuel. Two things: one, it’s pretty awful for gas mileage as it’s basically using excess fuel instead of another…

It’s worse than”not always accepted”, at least one aspect of Gardner’s theory is almost certainly wrong. Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences depends on the notion that the nine intelligences have no correlative relationship. This has been found to be categorically untrue, and has led to advancement of the…

Begone, you with your logic!

Distributed generation in any form right now does little other than make power more expensive. Looking at solar exclusively, central station solar is half the cost of distributed solar on a per-kWh basis, due both to panel tracking capabilities and power distribution efficiencies. Even if someone managed to install…

Even if it’s not entirely your thing I’d highly recommend that all DMs, aspiring and otherwise, take the time to play a game so designed that it doesn’t *allow* you to write a pre-ordained plot. Seeing how these games come together often makes a GM/DM more comfortable with the idea that they do not have complete…

If Mazda announces the Miata hardtop like everyone seems to think they will, 2017 just got really interesting.

If charging is primarily done at night it would actually increase the load factor of the system, broadly increasing efficiency and lowering per-kWh costs.

There’s no way Sapporo is the best ramen in Massachusetts. That’s almost certainly Yume Wo Katare.

Net metering for rooftop solar almost certainly has more of an impact on your tax bill than the investment tax credit for solar does. SunRun, SolarCity and SunPower all make their money by building rooftop panels, leasing them back to the homeowners and pocketing the subsidy checks. In contrast, the investment tax…