Slower and unstable. I spent a lot of my freshman year in college on Bitnet chat and iirc about every 30 minutes there would be a "netsplit" and a bunch of folks in the chat would disappear. Maybe it was our universities connection, which I think was direct to UIUC. I've posted here before that back then I thought Bitnet chat was magical. Things like being in a chat room with students in Berlin while the wall was falling felt so futuristic to me.
that will ensure screenreaders skip all your page "chrome" and make life much easier for a lot of folks. As a bonus mark any navigation elements inside main using <nav> (or role="navigation").
I’m not a blind person but I was curious about once when I tried to make a hyper-optimized website. It seemed like the best way to please screen readers was to have the navigation HTML come last, but style it so it visually comes first (top nav bar on phones, left nav menu on wider screens).
Props to you for taking the time to test with a screen reader, as opposed to simply reading about best practices. Not enough people do this. Each screen reader does things a bit differently, so testing real behavior is important. It's also worth noting that a lot of alternative input/output devices use the same screen reader protocols, so it's not only blind people you are helping, but anyone with a non-traditional setup.
Navigation should come early in document and tab order. Screen readers have shortcuts for quickly jumping around the page and skipping things. It's a normal part of the user experience. Some screen readers and settings de-prioritize navigation elements in favor of reading headings quickly, so if you don't hear the navigation right away, it's not necessarily a bug, and there's a shortcut to get to it. The most important thing to test is whether the screen reader says what you expect it to for dynamic and complex components, such as buttons and forms, e.g. does it communicate progress, errors, and success? It's usually pretty easy to implement, but this is where many apps mess up.
”Each screen reader does things a bit differently, so testing real behavior is important.”
Correction: each screen reader + os + browser combo does things a bit differently, especially on multilanguage React sites. It is a full time job to test web sites on screen readers.
If only there was a tool that would comprehensively test all combos on all navigation styles (mouse, touch, tabbing, screen reader controls, sip and puff joysticks, chin joysticks, eye trackers, Braille terminals, etc)… but there isn’t one.
Wouldn’t that run afoul of other rules like keeping visual order and tab order the same? Screen reader users are used to skip links & other standard navigation techniques.
Just to say, that makes your site more usable in text browsers too, and easier to interact with the keyboard.
I remember HTML has an way to create global shortcuts inside a page, so you press a key combination and the cursor moves directly to a pre-defined place. If I remember that right, it's recommended to add some of those pointing to the menu, the main content, and whatever other relevant area you have.
Not a front end engineer but I imagine this boilerplate allows the JavaScript display engine of choice to be loaded and then rendered into that DIV rather than having any content on the page itself.
It's because "modern" web developers are not writing web pages in standard html, css or js. Instead, they use javascript to render the entire thing inside a root element.
This is now "standard" but breaks any browser that doesn't (or can't) support javascript. It's also a nightmare for SEO, accessibility and many other things (like your memory, cpu and battery usage).
I started around the same time. No unit tests but we did have code reviews because of ISO 9001 requirements. That meant printing out the diffs on the laser printer and corralling 3 people into a meeting room to pour over them and then have them literally sign off on the change. This was for an RTOS that ran big industrial controls in things like steel plants and offshore oil rigs.
Project management was a 40 foot Gantt chart printed out on laser printer paper and taped to the wall. The sweet sound of waterfall.
> You should also remove any students from classrooms whom routinely distract from others' learning.
You can't do this without getting sued (at least in Massachusetts). Source: my wife is a long-time elementary school teacher and my daughter works as a one-on-one aide while she is getting her teaching degree.
I don't want to start of flamewar but the current "push in" model created by educational bureaucrats creates a classroom environment that caters to the "timesinks". When you have a good chunk of the class on IEPs (individual education plans) that must be followed by law the "high flyers" (gifted kids) mostly get ignored due to time pressure.
Add socialization problems caused by COVID and reduced attention spans due to devices and chaos is always eminent. The stories I hear about daily classroom behavior would have blown my mind as a kid growing up in the 70s/80s.
I just wish that gifted kids could get the same access to IEPs that the other tail of the curve gets. However, when you base your educational outcomes on high stakes testing it is just natural to ignore the outliers above the mean and focus on the ones below it.
Again, I don't want to start a flamewar. Everyone has the right to an education.
>I just wish that gifted kids could get the same access to IEPs that the other tail of the curve gets.
It wasn't until I was flunking out of medical school that I realized the truth to your statement. I never learned how to learn (my 90's public school's version of G/T was to let a small group of higher-IQ children do whatever they want, including nothing).
I feel that smaller class sizes would encourage smart-but-bored students to behave better (i.e. not be the class clown I was), out of fear of social isolation. In larger classes, it becomes more difficult for a single teacher (+aides) to impart learning habits upon ALL students.
We found that all the "best in the nation" schools here, with the possible exception of Boston Latin, aren't really all that great. The reason they're measured "best" is because all the parents hire tutors and private instructors on top of the regular school day. Russian math, science tutors, English, music instruction... you name it.
Systemically, this means the educators don't know how to teach. There are standout teachers, but by and large, the expectation from the "good" schools is that the kids are getting all the actual education outside the school system already. We found this to be true in Lexington, in Wellesley, pretty much all of the top schools in Mass. Boston Latin even has this problem, on top of the additional requirement to live within the city limits of Boston proper and hope you fit into one of their quota slots and your kid gets accepted.
Private schools are a little different, but their costs, and the small percentage of acceptance even if you bear the cost, will take your breath away.
All of this, and a host of other unpleasant features of public education, are why we chose homeschooling. It's been a huge sacrifice, but worth it.
The "design for unmaintainability" problem has been around for a while. I remember helping a friend change his plugs on this Ford Ranger in the early 90s. The closest two plugs to the firewall required you to climb into the engine bay and basically hug the engine to get your arm into position to blindly get to the plugs. If you look around on YouTube you'll see some crazy mechanic videos where they show things like bolts located in impossible to loosen locations.
Cars used to be simpler to work on because a) they inherently were simpler and b) the engine bay used to have a lot of room to work in. Both of these things are not coming back.
No, it's because they are designed to be assembled from complete sub-assemblies. Maintenance is not assumed to be done on the sub-assemblies while they are in the final product. Under warranty, workshops are intended to replace entire sub-assemblies with new/rebuilt parts.
It's effectively a deliberate decision from the 80s that enabled faster assembly while warranties were shorter. For cars that are out of warranty, it doesn't matter either way.
The problem in the article occurs when Ford tries to pay someone to repair faults that were not planned to happen during the warranty time. Impossible, because it's completely uneconomical.
For cars that are out of warranty, it is an advantage, as the car will be scrapped sooner, thereby opening up a hole in the market that needs to be filled with a new car.
An advantage to the manufacturer, that is. For the consumer, it leads to never ending car payments for life, or surprise bills that approach the cost of a replacement vehicle.
But if it happens too much the cars will have low value on the secondhand market, and therefore be less desireable to new car purchasers because they will suffer more depreciation. Not all buyers look at that stuff but smart ones do.
I've encountered these headaches helping friends with their vehicles, and every time I'm reminded how much I prefer wrenching on my 80s-90s era mazdas.
My old protege even had an access port in the fender well added specifically to remove the crank bolt with an extension. If it were an Audi the FSM would point you to the engine removal process as step 1.
It's kind of always been that way to varying degrees. In the 70's/80's, changing the Porsche 911 spark plugs required dropping the engine.
Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line. This is why there are some cars that require removing the wheel well to change the oil filter and other that have things completely out-of-order or require absurd tools to service. My grandfather was a 30 year Chrysler dealer mechanic who had a dozen or so custom tools for very specific purposes.
Source: Dad had an A/C & electrical mechanic shop next to a Porsche specialist shop.
>Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line.
Exactly. It's basically fight club math. Spend $10 on a click-fit connector that can't be disassembled but that a $60/hr (though they only see a fraction of that) UAW laborer can plug in in half the time can't easily short-insert that can be visually checked.
The fact that it costs $200 the 1/10000 times it fails under warranty doesn't matter with those numbers. And you don't even care about the 100/100 times it fails at 2-3x the warranty period.
Of course, you're burning credibility doing this. But credibility doesn't have an obvious mapping to a number and stonk go up, KPI go up, bonus get paid, nobody cares.
There is ultimately a feedback cycle in that maintenance and reliability problems reduce used car values, and those drive lease rates. When manufacturers have trouble making the numbers work on cheap leases then that eventually hurts sales volume, but it takes many years for that effect to show up.
Luckily you don't have go drop the engine to change spark plugs on modern water cooled Porsche 911s, but let me tell you about changing plugs on mid-engined Cayman/Boxster platform. The 4 cylinder cars are easier but 6 cylinder cars require 3-4 different combinations of sockets and extensions and tiny European hands to really get in there.
The red block Volvos would also run for literally millions of miles, and outside of the turbo models were pretty thrifty on gas. We've fallen a long ways.
Volvo may have fallen a long way, but US cars of that time were literal trash that 100,000 miles was about the total useful life of the car before far too much needed replaced. I'm old enough to remember how Japanese cars started taking the US by storm because of it. They sipped gas in comparison and drove forever.
I've seen some video comparisons between American cars and Toyotas, and Toyota seemed to have figured out how to make cars a lot easier to maintain than the American companies. I saw one case where changing a simple fuse required several hours of disassembly in the American car but only 30s in the Toyota. It's about priorities. It's about ethics. American companies don't give a fuck, and it shows. And American companies don't give a fuck, because Americans largely don't give a fuck.
I know someone who had an older Chrysler 300, and you had to take a wheel off to change the battery. Baffling. I'm not much of a mechanic, but the Honda's I've owned over the years have all been easy to work on. At least in the engine bay.
BMW can be kinda a pain (its under a liner in the trunk, making you work at weird angles (and part emptying your trunk) but the benefit is your battery isn’t exposed to the elements and probably lasts longer for that reason.
I believe there's a modern (GM?) truck out there that has a belt rated for something like 250K miles...but when you have to replace it, the entire engine needs to be removed.
Don't forget one of the latest automotive mistakes, the "wet timing belt".
This is a rubber timing belt (not a chain) that runs through your engine oil disintegrating and clogging up your oil filters.
If anyone here owns a car with that system I recommend taking it to your trusted mechanic and discussing with them to do additional preventive maintenance on it.
Don't forget one of the latest automotive mistakes, the "wet timing belt". This is a rubber timing belt (not a chain) that runs through your engine oil disintegrating and clogging up your oil filters.
Wow, yeah, it looks like the Duramax engine has a 15-year belt replacement interval that costs $10K at today's rates.
They aren't even trying to hide the whole planned-obsolescence thing at this point. Average age of cars on the road is approaching 13 years now, so someone who buys a Duramax-based vehicle will end up with a metal and plastic brick that costs more to maintain than it's worth, just because of the timing belt alone.
It's 180k miles. It's the 3.0L Duramax because the oil pump is on the backside of the engine using an oil submersed belt rather than a chain or set of gears. So you have to drop the transmission, exhaust, oil pan, and take the back side of the engine cover to replace a belt that should have been a chain. It _may_ be faster, to simply disconnect everything and pull the motor.
Source: I own one of these engines and I dread having to pay ~3k for this maintenance in 3 years. I like the engine, just not this maintenance ticket item.
Sounds like the Colorado. It's a reason they'll pry my S10s, GMT400 and GMT800s from my cold dead hands as they're more reliable, cheaper to service and easier to service.
In the 1955 Citroen, standard French family car of the era, the timing chain sits behind a cover about 1/2" from the firewall, the whole engine has to come out to change it.
If you select drawing mode from the first screen shown and then click the "T" icon you can type some text and it will generate a state diagram for you that you can then "play" and examine the output sequences. If you have states that have multiple exit routes you can click on that state and adjust the probabilities of each option.
Confimed. I live in the tiny bit of "moderate" color that is dipping down from Vermont into Western Mass. We are in a drought and the leaves seem to be just drying up and dropping instead of changing colors. I'm hoping the rain this week doesn't just knock them off the trees.
As someone that grew up partly in Southern Illinois with lots of relatives in Southern Indiana I can tell you they have a great deal in common. Both regions are very "southern" culturally, with very distinct accents.
Illinois is an interesting place as it features large changes in culture from north to south. I was born in Northern Illinois and lived there until I was 10 when I moved 5 hours south. There is an enormous cultural difference. As the map shows Northern Illinois is part of the "Midlands" with a flat/generic accent whereas the Southern Illinois/Southern Indiana accent sounds a lot like Woody Harrelson's (who was born in Texas). The greater Chicagoland area is its own thing, the map shows it part of Yankeedom but I disagree - I lived in Chicago twice in my 20s and I've lived in Yankeedom (Massachusetts) for 25 years now and I don't see much similarity. I'd group far northern Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota in their own group, maybe called the "Opers"
Yeah southern Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, northern Kentucky, and western Tennessee, the Ohio River Valley in essence, are culturally very similar and "appalachia-light".
But IMO that's a very far cry from eastern/south-eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western NC, WV, etc; truly core Appalachia.
Its also a far cry from mid-Indiana, which is culturally identical to northern Indiana, most of Illinois, Iowa, southern Michigan, maybe even as far as southern Wisconsin, Kansas, and Nebraska. That's Corn/Rust belt, very crop-farm oriented, dairy farms, extremely flat, but not as rural as many people think, not nearly as rural as Appalachia or the west.
In the US, the cook and busboys and other support staff normally also receive tips as part of the "tipping out" system where the servers split part of their tips. It is voluntary but not really - if you, as a server, don't tip out your tables start not getting their food as fast and the table isn't turned as fast.
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