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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."
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.
it won't be British engineering, it will be Sinclair's engineering, which is always made of cheap standard parts rather than the expensive custom-designed bits and bobs that make up the Segway.
So it will be cheap, but made of plastic and probably won't work very well.
I think the bashing stems to the fact that the Segway was made out to be some marvel of modern technology that was supposed to change the way the world moved around. This was according the the hype from the creators and the press. Do we have this marvelous creation? No. Do we have something that Bush can ride around on and look like a bigger idiot? Yes.
I don't think he bashed it! To the contrary, Sinclair said:
Later in the article, he says it is not suitable for British sidewalks, but has applications elsewhere, and I think that is correct. It is a vehicle comparable to a bike and belongs on the street.Reality or nothing.
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.
Frankly, I'm surprised at all the negative reaction to the Segway... it's very innovative, compact, somewhat cheap, enviro-safe, etc. ... 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?
/.ers.
I actually agree with you about the various merits of the Segway, yet I can say I abso-fucking-lutly hate it. Not because of what it is, but because of what it was made out to be. And I suspect my reaction is the same as many people, especially us
Personally, I only think good can come from the Segway and future rivals going into widespread use. I mean, at the very least it isn't really going to ever hurt anything even if they all fall by the side as a technological curiosity. However, I'm pissed because of the hope I had. I remember in the months before the Segway came out, it was hyped as IT. It was going to more or less revolutionize some major facit of modern life, if not all of it. The inventor, Dean Kamen, is a very intelligent man, and if anyone could live up to his own predictions for a device of his design, it would be him. So when he said stuff like, "It will change the way cities are built. They will be built around IT." (Or something like that, he did say it would forever change city design) I really believed him, and I think so did most of us, hence the hatred for the Segway. I personally was thinking, "Ok, it sounds REALLY far-fetched, but what if this is something really bad ass? What if this is cheap and easy nuclear fusion, teleportation, a viable personal air transport, (or any of a hundred other things I've only dreamed of)." IT really got my hopes up. And then the big day of the unveiling comes up and, anxiously I awaited, only to find out IT_IS_A_FUCKING_SCOOTER!? This had to be, by far, the absolute biggest let down of a product in the (at least recent) history of mankind. After months of hype and hope, we get an advanced toy/novelty that's over priced any damn way.
So really, I think the deep, intense hatred of the Segway is not a product of the product, but rather a product of the crushed dreams brought on by the hype of the product. Had we only known Steve Jobs' initial reaction, I think the let down may have been softer and the backlash much easier.
Request: ECM unit, 1000 km fullerene cable, 1 tactical nuclear weapon. Reason: Birthday party for foreign dignitary.
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.
Well, perhaps Sinclair's products weren't the sturdiest things around but they hit the right price point to allow for large consumer adoption. How many folk in say, West Midlands would have been able to buy a 2 grand Apple Mac for a personal computer? Speccy cost a tiny fraction of that and that's why it was such a hit. It wasn't perfect but for me it was a lot better than having no 'puter at all.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
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.
Flava Flav was right: the hype for anything is almost always wrong, and the bigger it is, the bigger the letdown.
That doesn't mean that the Segway itself isn't a great idea, or that the idle predictions that the widespread adoption of such a machine could reshape the way cities are built.
Look at what another commenter noted about the bike city in Holland, for example. I've been to Amsterdam, and even there the city has evolved into a place where multiple forms of transportation co-exist. Many of the major streets are 100 feet across, with multiple channels for different modes of transportation. The widest streets were laid out something like this (arrows indicate direction that traffic is permitted to flow, which may or may not be bidirectional):
if you add it up, the whole thing ends up taking something like 40 meters, or ~120 feet. (It's been a couple of years since my visit, so the widths are rough estimates, but they seem roughly correct to me -- corrections welcome :-).
Additionally, some streets had wide canals for boats to go back & forth, but most of these streets dropped the rail & bike lanes, and the overall width was generally similar to the non-canal streets. For streets not wide enough for all the lanes above, different lanes would be dropped at random: there's always be sidwwalks, but there might or might not be car lanes, rail tracks, bike lanes, canals, etc.
Also, as an aside, everyone with a bike seemed to be a Pee-Wee Herman fan, which is just fantastic :-)
Anyway, just imagine how much American streets would have to be re-engineered to support such a rich breadth of traffic. If Segways were to catch on in Amsterdam, maybe they could share that bike lane on either side of the street, or that mini sidewalk next to the parked cars could be converted for Segway-only traffic. Either way though, they have the basic framework such that a vehicle like this could find a niche somewhere. That isn't the case in any American city I've been to. If we ever bother to build streets as wide as the ones I saw in Amsterdam, they almost always end up being used for three or four lanes of cars
What's that line about predicting the futur
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL