Recruitment process must be a two-way street or you're doing your part wrong. You must learn about the place of employment, and the controversies are part of it. The sales clerks aren't there to recruit for the company or to answer such questions. Recruiters - are.

Those satellites will be flying around the world, they won't be geostationary birds parked above India, right? While they may not offer full coverage elsewhere, any receiver will benefit from having signals from more birds available, if there's a sane way to reconcile the time bases used by different systems.

I know and it's lamentable. I still don't see what kind of an easy-to-do-in-a-spreadsheet kind of a business "application" would take months or years to do data storage/management in SQL...

It's only recent that Visio format is supported at all. Give them some time. It's a lot of work. Note that LibreOffice is, at the moment, IIRC the only piece of software that can open the early Visio 1 and 2 format files. Not even Microsoft Visio can open them (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, of course).

You should know basic programming upon exiting high school. Yeah, the sad state of K-12 curricula are something to lament another time.

So, what tool do you use to diff your spreadsheets? How do you ensure that there isn't a bug in a column of otherwise "identical" formulas? How do you ensure that whatever column you've filled with imported data still has this imported data in it? Where's your log that shows that you haven't unlocked some cells by mistake and messed them up "subtly"?

Spreadsheets provide a semblance of productivity and an illusion of efficiency. Once you go from fucking about with it to being serious, spreadsheets are a gift from hell. It takes very little to audit a couple pages of code. Good luck auditing a spreadsheet that has tens of thousands of cells filled with formulas.

Once you use spreadsheets in an auditable and professional way, you end up with a VBA script that starts with a blank slate and does everything you'd otherwise do by hand. At that point you may as well write it in Python and generate the xlsx, ods or maybe just pdf for printing/visualization.

Most people, evidently yourself included, use spreadsheets like if they were a magical object that's guaranteed to read your mind and do exactly what you want. It's all too easy to fuck up if you're not careful, and unfortunately Excel by default doesn't come with policies that prevent you from fucking up. How one earth can anyone be sure that your projections aren't just line noise? Excel promotes development with no process, where there's no assurance about anything. That's one little reason why our financial industry is so fucked up. People trust Excel results, no questions asked.

Months to put together a bit of SQL and some front end for it, using, say, oh horror of horrors, Excel? Next you're going to tell me that it takes a man-month to write a hello world.

I wholly agree.

If so, it probably needs a custom allocator, that's all.

Probably they had some developer mobility betwen Star Division and SAP :/ /me ducks and runs

I just used the 60% figure as given by the parent. Even with a 40% efficient power plant, 5% electrical transmission losses (U.S. ballpark), and a 70% efficient car, we get 27% overall efficiency - worse than an ICE, but then there must be some oil-rig-to-tank inefficiencies in refining and transit that the mere ICE efficiency doesn't take into account.

It really looks like at the moment electric cars are about as efficient as ICE cars, when it comes to the overall amount of waste heat generated in the entire process - from extracting the raw energy source (coal, crude) to pushing the car along the road. The EVs are probably much better when it comes to non-CO2 pollution, though, and can only get better as more efficient power plants get deployed. There's not much you can do to an ICE at the moment.

Um, where, pray tell, did he?

The location of the gearshift is different, and the clutches are hydraulic. Otherwise it drives just like a manual. The mechanical linkage of a manual transmission gear shifter is, as far as I'm concerned, an obsolete artifact belonging in a museum, together with the dry clutch that's used with it.

How does the fact that standard cars don't have it stand contrary to the fact that you can have a regenerative braking system in essentially any vehicle?

Well, let me elaborate a bit. I have modified my Volvo S80 for steering wheel gear shifting. The firmware has access to the serial bus between the shifter handle and the transmission, as well as the CAN bus to which the steering wheel is talking, and the bus on which you get all the common parameters like road speed, engine RPM, etc. During one of the updates when I pulled my contraption from the car, I've added an 8 DOF inertial reference sensor, consisting of a 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis rate gyro, and a 2 axis inclinometer. In the time since I've tweaked the firmware to use that information to estimate the engine power needed to maintain the current acceleration. Shifting is done so as to shift the operating RPMs of the engine up and down as needed so that the car will not change the acceleration (the acceleration may be zero, positive or negative, doesn't matter). The means that if I keep my accelerator depressed just enough to maintain constant speed (a=0), the car will downshift on an incline to get the RPMs up and increase the output power at current throttle command. It also turns out that it downshifts on a decline in order to engine-brake, so as not to let the acceleration rise past zero, but that behavior is optional and I enable it only in the mountains.

The firmware also executes an upshift-hold for 10s whenver the inclination changes sufficiently, so that in the mountains there's no constant gear changing every time the road levels out. I pay for it by having to work more on the accelerator, but it makes it easy on the brakes. The radiator doesn't wear any more simply by dissipating more heat :)

There's this thing called an inclinometer. No GPS needed.