Those keyboards don't have the same environmental requirements. Automotive environmental is hard. Temperature extremes, high and low, plus humidity extremes.
There are also reliability expectations. If I need defrost because the windshield just fogged over, it better activate when I turn that knob on my sixteen year old car. And so far, it always has.
My brother works in automotive engineering, it isn't 60+ driving this trend. It is the design team, which skews young, and the marketing team, which also skews young.
Tesla does not skew 60+ anywhere in the company, and they introduced these oversized screen based displays years ago.
So on you four bullets above:
1) True
2) I don't know, perhaps?
3) Maybe a quick 'image' audience, but are they doing usability testing?
4) Completely false.
The big weight is on point #1, for two reasons.
1) Those displays may seem expensive, until you actually price out the panels they are using. Then go and see what those physical buttons cost. They are not cheap. And there are a lot of them. And both technologies have micro processors behind them, so using physical knobs and buttons doesn't save money there.
2) Using modal displays to cover multiple controls saves dashboard real estate, and eases design constraints. Designers love it.
One of the things I hate the most, is that I want a mostly dark interior when I drive at night, and now I'll be stuck staring at an illuminated display that I hate using in any case.
Touch screens suck. My twenty year old son and I were just discussing this a couple days ago. He has been working part time as a valet to make some extra money, so he gets to drive a lot of different cars, just to park them, but has to interact with the transmissions, at the very least, and often has to turn off blaring sound systems (yeah, people drop their cars with the valet with the radios cranked.)
His daily driver is a 2012 Hyundai Elantra GLS. He also occasionally drives my 2007 Ford Fusion. Both have fairly logical physical controls.
He hates how non-intuitive the touch screen controls are, and how you physically have to look (even if briefly) at the screen to see what state it is in, and to find the buttons. You cannot just operate them by feel.
He also does not like electronic shifters. I have never driven a Mercedes, but he says the shifter on the newer Mercedes is frustratingly slow. You have to put you foot on the brake, tap the lever, then wait for the indicator to actually change.
What I find particularly frustrating on all this, I know that the knob driven climate controls are just inputs to a computer that is driving servo motors under the dash. There are no cables. But it is intuitive, it is tactile. I don't have to look to change the fan, or the temperature, or the vent configuration.
Same with the radio. I know where the on/off and the volume is. I know where the AM/FM/CD buttons are. I know where the six preset buttons are. I can run the radio with out looking. And when I move the shift lever on the Elantra, it has a very distinctive 'gate' flow. It is easy to know what gear it is in without looking. Doubly true for the five speed manual in the Fusion.
So this change to glass panels is not for the consumer, it is for the manufacturer. It is for the designer. We have reached the age in electronics where the display is cheaper than physical controls. The manufacturers are trying to sell it as a 'feature'. It is not a feature, it is cheapness. It is crass.
I agree, but schools need to get ahead of this, and plan for a later start to the school day, before this takes effect, because we already have firm data on the fact that the school day already starts to early, and permanent DST is going to make that worse. Personally, I'll just shift my 7:AM to 4:PM day to being 8:AM to 5:PM. But my wife cannot do that. She'll be stuck at 7 to 4.
I have lived my whole adult life with black out shades and curtains. I grew up very rural and was used to a pitch black bedroom. As an adult I moved to the most densely populated state in the country, and immediately discovered black out shades.
Clearly not. I shared a house with a guy that worked rotating shifts. It was hell, and made me really glad I did not do that.
But I worked blue collar job the first ten years of working, so 7 to 5, and for a while 5AM to 6PM (six days a week). I don't think many people on this thread understand what it means to wake up between 5:30 and 6:00 AM every day (depending on your commute) to get to work.
Why don't we leave the clocks aligned with the Sun, so noon occurs at solar noon, and just have everybody agree to shift their work day to 7:00 to 4:00.
Because on a solar basis, that is exactly what you are doing.
"8 to 5" will now be "7 to 4". And people that normally work "7 to 4" will now be working "6 to 3"
That is all you are doing. You are basically just kidding yourselves. It is so extremely stupid, really. You want more sun in your evening? Get up and get to work earlier. It isn't rocket science.
I'll be waiting two years out for everyone pushing the school day to start at 10:AM, and for a lot of businesses to start at 9:AM instead of 8.
You could solve all these problems by just getting the Networks to stream their programming one hour earlier at night. And leave the clocks on standard time year round.
Almost all 'blue collar' work starts at 7:00 AM. It isn't about farmers. I was a farmer once, my day started at 4:30 AM.
But I worked blue collar after that, my job 7:30 to 5:00, or 7:30 to 8:00 on long days.
Even in my current white collar job, that habit has stuck, and I have been working 7:30 AM to 4:30 AM for the last thirty five years, mostly to avoid the bulk of the commute.
So yes, there are millions of jobs across this country where people arrive at work, and punch in on a clock, at 7:00 AM every morning.
I get up everyday at 6:00 AM, with a large segment of the population whose workday starts at 7:00 AM every day. They have no choice. And just as it was getting to be light a little at 6:00 AM, we just 'leaped ahead' back into darkness.
I would prefer that we just run on standard time all the time. You want more light in your evening? Get up earlier. Go to work earlier, so you get home earlier.
I had an old phone that failed, I couldn't wipe it, so I pried it open, yanked the battery, and went after it with a hammer.
I have done the same with old or failed hard drives for decades.
The difference being, I didn't want these devices back. I never intended to use them again. This person obviously wanted an unbootable phone fixed, and the repair drones 'had fun with it'. Someone (Google) is going to have to pay damages, and also chase down and take down copies of those photos forever. What a mess.
I had a friend that worked at an independent film/photo processor back in the early 1970s. The walls in the process area were papered with printed nudes. Floor to ceiling. Of course, in the pre-digital era, those elicit copies never saw wide distribution, but they were there.
From the linked article itself, I can attest to the constant push to move up into 'leadership' roles, particularly in some companies. I have stayed and worked as an engineer for 37 years. I have been 'team lead' a half dozen times, but never a full manager role. Why? Because I would be a poor manager. I have personally experienced managers that where technically brilliant, but not good at managing (or inspiring) the technical staff. They should have remained as engineers/scientists. Some corporations used to have parallel paths for technical staff that had management level pay and benefits, but the suits in the 'C suite' have eliminated that for the most part over the last twenty years. Bell Laboratories (now a shell of its former self) was once one of those places.
So in the current environment, there is constant pressure to move up or move out. Even startups are no longer immune to that. If you want to have enough shares for it to really matter in a liquidity event, you need to have a team of people below you, or at least a director level title. The startup environment in 2000 was completely different, and technically astute engineers (mechanical, electrical, software) could attract strong stock grants as engineers. That has changed. I am fortunate in that after 37 years of doing this, I am at a position where I don't even have to think about these issues any longer. I feel sorry for younger engineers breaking into the field, the management pyramid is such a PITA.
And back to the topic of strong technical engineers that are poor managers? If you get stuck into one of those situations, constant micro management, constant downward pressure of "you don't know what you are doing", get out. Find a new position elsewhere. Good managers will coach you when you need help, but will let you do your own work. Good managers will help identify your deficiencies but also guide you to work that plays to your strengths. Good managers will provide you opportunity for growth. I learned this early in my career, blessed with having an awesome manager. Since then, every job I have had, first thing I did was figure out which managers were good, and which ones were not, and made sure that I never had to work under a bad manager.
So you can make a career in engineering, but it has to be a choice, and you have to learn to manage your managers.
Also note, while I recognize that I would be a poor manager (for various reasons), mentoring is a different skill set. If you are a senior engineer, take every opportunity to mentor a starter in the field.
I agree, 15k BTU is not 80k, but with a little patience on preheating (I don't have waiting customers) I still enjoy working in the wok I own. Also, it is not a restaurant sized wok, but for flash frying chopped food, or getting a nice quick sear, it works great.
Ender 3 Pro. Unmodified other than a BL Touch. Just a bunch of fun.
My first Dutch oven. I cook most the meals in our household, like 95%. I never have owned a Dutch oven. Misen had a Dutch oven on kickstarter and I picked one up. So far, very happy. You have to be careful how you heat them, but they cook stews wonderfully, and I braised a bunch of meatballs, then filled it with spaghetti sauce for dinner one night. In a stainless steel pot, that can be a cleanup nightmare. The Dutch oven just wiped out clean after a soak.
I haven't gone back to re-examine Wayland for a while now, because forever I have used RDP to access my headless servers.
And before you waste time with "Instead of RDP you should..."
Save the effort, I have no interest. RDP works with XFCE exactly the way I want it to. But I understand there is a working GNOME RDP interface now, so maybe I'll give it a shot with Wayland when I bring up a new server.
This is one of the hardest things to explain to people.
Here is a thought experiment. Lets assume that the minimum required to live in a given place is $20K.
So now you have two people, one makes $30K, the other makes $40K. How much more does the second one make compared to the first? Twice as much. At $30K, you have $10K disposable. At $40K, you have $20K disposable. And someone making $60K is making four times the disposable compared to $30K.
Once you get above cost of living, everything gets easier.
There are also reliability expectations. If I need defrost because the windshield just fogged over, it better activate when I turn that knob on my sixteen year old car. And so far, it always has.