Minneapolis is in a river valley (the Mississippi River). From an airplane at cruising altitude the area will look fairly flat, but down at ground level there is a ton of 50-100 foot undulation. The elevation of your antenna is probably far more important than the quality of your antenna.
Fun: if you’ve got Apple Maps (I’m sure Android has this as well), ask for walking directions from Minneapolis to something 35-40 miles away. I chose “Elko New Market” - 36 miles from downtown. Click on the walking details and you can see the elevation change. You’re going from around 800 feet above sea level to 1100 feet above sea level, a difference of ~300 feet. But the total change over the course of the walk is nearly 4000 feet!
“No problem, as a non-employee you are hereby confined to your cabin except to use the head, and you can eat in the galley but you have to pay for your meals, they cost $100 and will be deducted from your final paycheck. If you have a negative balance when we dock at a port in around 3 months, you must pay immediately or we will send the debt to collections. Have a nice day”
Maybe you want to read up on how things work at sea?
There was an article in some source (sorry, I forget which) that interviewed a person somewhere in the Southeast US that has been paid to remove a dozen or two of them. It had some photos of the inside of the machine. You should look for it!
The host locations are pissed off that the machines are sitting there taking up space and using electricity. They certainly aren't going to be happy with someone opening it up and making a mess. Or potentially creating some sort of additional liability for them.
But if you show up with a van or a large truck, they'd probably pay you money to take the whole thing off their hands. And you can tear it apart in your own garage.
> I think honestly the best solution really is to just use a stock PC and forget all of this crap.
I used to do that, with a Linux HTPC and Plex. I eventually switched to the physical AppleTV device, with all the content on a surplus Mac mini connected to the home network. It's just less work to maintain. On the old setup, it always worked perfectly whenever I was around and had plenty of time to tinker with things. It only ever had problems when I was at the office, very busy, and the kids wanted to watch some show I had digitized from our DVD collection. Granted, the problems were always small and easily fixed, but they were disruptive because of the circumstance.
I've never had that happen to me with the Apple setup. Yeah, you've got to at least partially buy into their ecosystem. But they don't force you to go all in if you don't want to.
Is there a legal definition of "development" that needs to be used? In the dictionary, the definition that most fits "software development" is "The application of techniques or technology to the production of new goods or services."
Which means that at the very least, companies should be able to classify at least some portion of salary costs as "not software development". Maintenance, bug fixing, useless meetings, etc?
My neighbor is a FedEx pilot. Based on the stories I've heard the pilots probably used very colorful language in the cockpit but were screaming for the sheer joy of finally getting to do something exciting now that they've retired from the Air Force or Navy. That's what the "Thank you" to ATC was for.
It seems so ludicrous that I want to ask if you’re sure you don’t have them, based on my experience of never having lived in an expensive home or actually buying appliances.
But then again, I’m sure you are right. Perhaps this is an easy tell - check to see if the oven has convection features. If so, the house was built for living, if not it was intended for flipping.
> High quality switches and buttons feel really luxurious.
That's part of why I have an Audi.
It's a 2021 model with a touchscreen. But it also has high-quality buttons and knobs for each of the tests in the article mentioned and would thus pass with a very low distance measured.
There are some weird issues, however. The audio buttons control the current audio source but don't fall back if the current audio source disappears. Like if you are playing music through your passenger's phone via CarPlay. If you drop them off at their house and keep going, the physical audio controls do nothing at all until you select a new audio source on the touchscreen.
A lot of modern cars can be told to tie the presets to the key fob (it's a setting, not usually turned on by default).
If you open the driver's door with your key fob in your pocket, your presets are loaded and the seats and mirrors move to what you want. If your spouse opens the driver's door with their key fob, everything changes to their settings. If you have more than 2 drivers, you can buy extra key fobs at the dealer (expensive!!) and the car will keep track of settings for those too.
Hey, if you’re going to make a trip out of it, when you’re done with the BBQ, head a few blocks south and take in the German bars on Lincoln Ave. There used to be a cool little Karaoke place at Lincoln and Western, too.
I can remember when most wired consumer gear were hubs, not switches. The network would become nearly unusable when you had even a tiny LAN gaming party. Now, I'm not sure that you can even buy an ethernet hub.
> So taking calls over wifi in a room full of people using wifi: you’re going to have a bad time
You aren't wrong [1], but at the same time you are missing that it is entirely possible to provision a wifi setup that can support a large number of devices in a small space. In an office setting, you should be incredulous if they don't have it right. But at home, with consumer networking gear (like the WSJ is talking about)? No way, ethernet is going to outperform it - it will be like night and day.
Fun: if you’ve got Apple Maps (I’m sure Android has this as well), ask for walking directions from Minneapolis to something 35-40 miles away. I chose “Elko New Market” - 36 miles from downtown. Click on the walking details and you can see the elevation change. You’re going from around 800 feet above sea level to 1100 feet above sea level, a difference of ~300 feet. But the total change over the course of the walk is nearly 4000 feet!