Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Stuff that's just... meh

Two things bugging me right now. Sorta.

Fake programmers and car makers. Those are two things. It's not some guy who pretends to be a car maker who programs.

Fake programmers know the very minimum for whatever they're doing. They use a fake language, like programming cells in Excel. Maybe they use a real language, like HTML, so they've never heard of compilers, assembly or machine code. They will try and solved any problem they encounter with the "knowledge" they already have. Sometimes, that's not enough and they are completely lost. The slightest deviation (I am talking about: "Your toolbars are not in the order I have them, I can't work like this") will have them scaling walls and unable to work. Fake programmers have a very hard time coping with change of any sort, like the update of a program. Moreso, when the update does happen, they run around, complaining of how the new program is stupid and the old one was so much better. They can't do work with the new one, obviously. The toolbars are the wrong order and the buttons are placed strangely. Fake programmers try and apply their experience to everything. Assembly and HTML are all the same to an Excel programmer. Fake programmers haven't developed a real programmer's intuition and reasoning. "I know 'do' and 'while' loops, but have no idea about these crazy 'for' loops." Fake programmers are worse than idiot users: they're still the same kinds of idiots, they just don't know it and think they are computer gods.

Car makers piss me off. I was looking over this pamphlet about the Toyota Camry. It explains how stuff works. It's written to be read by any Camry owner, from the CE to the XLE, so you get to see what you have and what they have.
Here's the differences these goobers decided on:

  • If you hold the window up/down switch all the way down and let go, the window will keep going down automatically. That's standard for everyone. Only the XLE (most expensive one) has the automatic for down and up. Guess there's some real high-tech stuff in that auto-up switch. Either that or they just don't trust the cheapskates to have enough logic not to get their head chopped off by the window.
  • The convenient remote that opens and closes doors is not available on the CE (cheapest one). Guess the reasoning was "Everyone else is making the remote thing standard. Well, we're gonna make it an expensive option. That way the bastards will think they're getting a good deal."
  • The cup-holder has this removeable divider. With the divider, there are two cup-holders. Take the divider out, it's a largish rectangular hole for keeping crap in. Here's the tricky part: the divider isn't available if you're getting manual transmission. WTF?! What kind of a decision went into that choice? What, decided that the people with the manual transmission shouldn't have rectangular holes for crap? Or maybe the divider is a very important thing for the manual transmission to work? I can make my divider non-removable with some super-glue: presto! I have manual transmission, just like that!
Who the hell decides these things? Next, they're gonna make the steering wheel optional. Some of these, you'd just love to be in the room when they rolled that one out.

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