Slashdot Mirror
Sinclair's Answer To The Segway
slumos writes "BBC News Online is reporting on Sir Clive Sinclair's reaction to the Segway. The British inventor thinks it's fine for factories, but not for crowded streets, and he's even planning some competition in the form of a top-secret follow-up to the Sinclair C5."
Between British and US engineering.
Styles are different and I wonder what the differences would be.
I would like to see a followup to the ZX-Spectrum.
I believe the article makes reference to Sinclair's other efforts at transportation: the Zike (a folding electric scooter) and the Zeta (a motor which attaches to a normal bicycle, harnessing energy when you go downhill and using it to propel you uphill at a stately 8mph, as I remember).
These relatively unknown inventions were peddled in the small ads sections of newspapers for a long time. The electric scooter sold for about 500, the bike motor for about 200. But no, I don't know anyone who had one.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
Well, this is some another company bashing it's competition - ooh, what big news.
But while we're on the topic of the Segway: Frankly, I'm surprised at all the negative reaction to the Segway, here (Slashdot) and elsewhere. I mean honestly, it's very innovative, compact, somewhat cheap, enviro-safe, etc. It could really compete with the automobile in many areas. And yet you get the mommy-types bitching about it promoting laziness, dangerous on sidewalks, etc. So nay-sayers, correct my misunderstanding: how exactly will the world be worse if Segways become massively popular? I see nothing but good coming from its adoption.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
A response to a product that is a total flop is REQUIRED. We can't just let the Segway sit around with it's monopoly of 50 units sold, can we??
It didn't have a disk drive or tape deck, so if we wanted to play a game we had to type the program in (in BASIC) from scratch every time the computer was turned off.
My dad used it for his budget at first, but since we had to keep everything on paper and re-enter the data anyway, he soon dropped it.
Oh boy, those were the days.
If it isn't safe, it fails for practical use. The segway circumvents this as being reliable sturdy (heavy) US alteration it seems. Of course I'm merely a young chap[sic] residing in the US who has never heard of it before now.
Before I depart, I was wondering just how dangerous it was. Proceeding to google it, I found an interesting interview that appears to have taken place August 1986.
Of course relational interests are too much so I had to look into the Clive Computer. I came across some interesting information since my inception was the NES ;-]
Even George Bush took a ride on one, although any White House endorsement was somewhat undermined when he was catapulted over the handlebars.
That's what he would call bad driving strategery.
i haven't RTFA, but segways seem like a good way to clog up sidewalks a la traffic jams. i mean, people slowing down and speeding up, the traffic compression effect all over again, just on the sidewalks. and they take up more space than your average human.
the c5 was cool but if you rocked it too much the ram pack fell out so you had to restart the engine and go back to the start of your journey. pisser.
All I Want For Christmas Is My Constitutional Rights
If I were him I'd throw an over-sized muffler on it, a huge wing and some carbon fibre parts. Than offer bigger rims, lowering springs and an enormous stereo as aftermarket add ons.
He'd sell alot more that way.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
When I lived in Oxford, UK one of the members of the local LUG was also a Sinclair C5 fan. He occasionally uses his C5 to travel to work, having kitted it out with two flourescent flags on poles to make the machine a bit more visible. He also does long distance trips for charity once a year - I recall that the last one was an attempt to travel the length of the country. Spares are fairly easy to come by, one good consequence of Sinclair using off the shelf parts. The tyres for instance, are similar to those used on many prams(!).
Chris
Forget the C5 or C6, and Segway.
Clive Sinclair did have a few sharp ideas and one of them was the the wafer chip project:
"What you have is a wafer of silicon a few inches in diameter and instead of chopping that up and putting all the bits that work into packages and then putting them all together again on a circuit board, you keep them on the wafer. The problem is that you've got to have some system to test for the good areas. Essentially we divide the memory up into blocks about the size of an ordinary chip and put a bit of extra logic on which uses a mathematical algorithm to connect up the good chips and not the bad. If one bit fails you can power-down and reconfigure it so it has an extended lifetime."
This was a genuinely good idea. Reduce the cost of chip manufacture and extend the life of computers by many years. Just replace the odd power supply every 3 or 4 years. The reconfigure of faulty chips could even be done on the fly.
Using this proposed method, Memory & Processor chips aren't just "Good" or "Dead", they can last many years in a very slow state of hardly noticable decay.
Heat is a problem I hear you say for processors? Well if you have 20 of them on one wafer you don't need them to all be P4s.
Intel will probably jump onto this idea when Moore's law starts to flatten out.
Cheap slabs of ram and CPU, that don't fail all at once - yeah!!
The major problem with Segways is that they don't fit into any of the current transportation channels that are available. They're too big and too fast for sidewalks, but they're too slow for bike lanes or the street.
Personally, I bike to work every day (~3 miles, 1.5 uphill, 1.5 down) with a 3-day hiking pack on my back full of all kinds of crap (~25 lbs on average).
Now, cycling has the same problem as Segways, to some degree; cycles are too slow for the road and too fast for the sidewalks. I usually end up on sidewalks because there are no bike lanes in my commute (or really anywhere in my city) and it's far too dangerous on the road.
Now, where a bike has an advantage over a segway:
- I can get off the bike and pass people at a walk.There's plenty of room for people to pass.
- No charging (no electricity, no gas, just food+water in and CO2/organic waste out)
- Keeps you healthy
- Costs little to buy
- Almost everything on a bike can be fixed with simple tools
Now... why is there even a market for these things? With busses, taxis, personal cars and motorbikes for motorized vehicles? With bikes and, I dunno, feet for personal transport? Why do we need something completely incompatible with all of the useful pavement we already have down?
As for using it to get around malls/ workplaces/ etc... you know all of the signs that say NO (insert whelled device here)? I'm sure that segways are not going to be allowed in these places before bikes are.
Anyhow, my 2c.
I can't see why this article rates a Slashdot story. Basically it's Sinclair saying he thinks the Segway is OK, but he might have something better in the pipeline. There's nothing about what that might be, it's just a piece to fill out the BBC technology section.
Reporting on what he comes up with when it's actually launched, that's a story. Adding to hype about a product that effectively doesn't exist yet, surely that's just encouraging the sort of disappointment people felt about IT/ginger/the Segway when it was launched.
"What if they're using IE?" "I've dumbed Mozilla down to cope with it." - BOFH
Project Loki was the design for a "Super Spectrum" that Sinclair came up with before Amstrad bought them out. Two ex-Sinclair engineers, John Mathieson and Martin Brennan, left and set up their own company called Flare, drawing on the Loki designs to produce a new multiprocessor games console. Atari brought the console to market as the Jaguar. More info here.
These guys are trying to solve a problem which simply doesn't exist.
There are feet, there are bicycles, there are electric bicycles, there are go-peds, there are electric go-peds, there are electric scooters, there are petrol scooters, there are motorcycles, there are cars.
All of the bases are already covered. Why would I want to spend a small fortune (4,500) on an segway when I can buy an electric go-ped with similar performance characteristics in a much more convenient package for 200?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
and it excels in it.
On a visit to Disney in Orlando last month, the parking lot attendants were whishing up and down the lanes on Segways, directing traffic, scooting over to their colleagues, and so on. This struck me as something the Segway is ideal for. If they had a better cargo carrying capability, I could also see postal workers using them, and maintenance people or anyone who has to cover long distances in factories, campuses, and the like.
But as a means of serious personal A to B transportation? Forget it; bikes and cars beat it hands down.
Add the optional forward ramming scoop for refueling, and you're good-to-go!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Try an eGO Cycle. It's a a battery-powered cycle that looks more or less like a bike but with a step-through design, uses mostly bike components for easy repairs, rides like a bike and uses bike lanes, but goes 25MPH (range 20 miles). With baskets you can easily get to work and go to the grocery. They're $1400, and no, I don't work for them.
It was called a big wheel. WTF?!?!?!
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
The reason that the C5 was called the C5 is because Alan Sinclair is a supergeek.
:)
:)
The Sinclair Spectrum used a Z80 processor, and Mr. Sinclair was a hardcore Z80 coder back in the day...
The instruction numbered 0xC5 is PUSH BC.... So it's really Sinclair C5 = Push Bike
I've been impressed with that geekiness since about 1984
Yours
AnonymouSCOward
Argh.. I wonder what how much money the bastards will want to 'clean' my name
It was used to blow up most of the unsold Sinclair C5's.
The problem is that cities are built wrong and people have funny goals.
As I see it:
IMHO, the ideal would be to all but discard the car as a method of transportation and focus on public transportation, alternative methods of transportation and high speed networking infrastructure to encourage those who can to work from home.
Workplaces should have (or locate near heath clubs with) safe bicycle racks, changerooms and showers, and the roads should have wide lanes so that those who really do need to drive don't try to sqeeze cyclists, inline skaters, slow scooters, segways and other junk off the road.
But, that can't happen overnight... so you need some stupid new technology to inspire people to think about how dumb they all are spending hours transporting a thousand kilograms of metal and glass back and forth across the city on a daily basis.