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Lyft Plans Self-Driving Taxi Fleet By 2017 (bgr.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Lyft hopes to launch a self-driving fleet of taxis as soon as next year, according to reports, arriving in the market years before Apple and Google. "There will still be a human 'driver' in the cars, as mandated by law for the time being," writes BGR, adding that eventually the driver will become obsolete. "But said human will be there solely in the event of a malfunction. Otherwise, Lyft's new vehicles will drive themselves."
Meanwhile, Fortune writes that most analysts believe it will be four years before Apple gets a car on the road, though they're moving in that direction and even hired a Tesla executive last month. They add that both Apple and Google are now eyeing at least 400,000 square feet of Bay Area real estate to use in the development of their self-driving fleets.
Meanwhile, Fortune writes that most analysts believe it will be four years before Apple gets a car on the road, though they're moving in that direction and even hired a Tesla executive last month. They add that both Apple and Google are now eyeing at least 400,000 square feet of Bay Area real estate to use in the development of their self-driving fleets.
"Self-driving" crap is not beyond prototype stage in very specific easy-to-handle road environments where results are reported by the businesses that stand to gain from it.
The moment even one independently performed and reported test is carried out negotiating the streets of New York, London, Manila and a snowy mountain in the north of Madrid, I'll start to take this shit seriously. Until then, it's just another case of the Press Release replacing the Journalist.
Do you seriously think that Lyft would deploy cars that don't video-record every second of interior and exterior activity from multiple angles, indexed against the full contact information of each user?
You figure they will have a camera trained on every passengers crotch?
That is unnecessary. The person renting the car is responsible. That is how it already works with rental cars, and with Zipcars, which are pretty much exactly analogous to this situation. This is already established law.
And if Apple hadn't brought the GUI to the world, we would be arguing this thread over some stupid ass ASCII forum.
Apple didn't invent the GUI. Other companies, including Apollo, had GUIs before Apple. X Windows was available for Unix workstations about the same time the first Mac was sold. What made Apple different was that their computers were affordable, and available to normal people. But that would have happened soon anyway. Amigas with GUIs were available soon after, and were even more affordable. GUIs were an idea whose time had come.
Google copied the entire iOS
Huh? Nope. Google bought a small start-up founded by former Google employee and which back then was already working for a Java-based Phone OS.
(Java was very popular for making software on feature- / smart- phones)
They just happen both to have been unveiled around the same time frame (2007).
Under the hood, they share nearly nothing:
- Android is a new beast, using a Linux kernel, but running an entirely new user-space, mostly based around a Java-like platform, instead of the regular GNU userland.
(again very common on older feature phone. Linux is a nice powerful kernel that comes for free. But most feature-phones didn't have enough power to run a full-blown GNU userland, thus tended to use custom software).
- iOS is a Mac OS X derivative : more or less similar BSD-ish root, but with a different GUI layer.
On the surface, none of them is anything new:
- They look similar to the earlier success Palm OS, which in turn look similar to Apple's own ill-fated commercial flop "Newton", which in turn shared a lot with the even older EPOC system by Psion, etc.
Apple just put the marketing effort to take a concept that is very popular in a smaller market (PDA) and bring it to a wider audiance.
Even if it took them a precedent failed attempt (the above mentioned "Newton"), and other companies were on a similarly successful path at the same time (Palm OS-powered smartphone started to appear around the same time, and at that point Palm OS was already very successful in the business world).
Had Apple not vulgarized smart-phone with the iPhone, palm would have been successful in it any way, and google would be releasing Android all the same.
and Samesung copied the iPhone hardware down to the last detail.
These are smartphones. It's a slab with a big screen and a touch interface. It's been these way all the way back from the dawn of PDAs.
(With the exception of Psion having a touch interface AND a compact clamshell keyboard. Since then it's touch screens everywhere).
Of course they are going to look more or less similar. But nobody is putting a tantrum because iPhone look remotely like Palm and iPAQ.
Windows is a copied version of the Macintosh GUI.
As mentioned by others:
- Xerox PARC actually invented and demoed the first GUI.
- Lots of company have started producing GUI, some with very little resemblance to Mac OS (e.g.: Amiga OS).
If there were a revolution in self-driving cars coming from Apple, you can bet its competitors are going to make billions copying Apple,
Or you can bet that it is going to be a big flop, like Apple Newton was on their first attempt at making pocket computers.
Or it's going to be the "meh" that Apple's iWatch is currently being. (Overpriced, not very interesting feature-wise, with a shitty battery life. Not very useful, looks like just an attempt to jump into the same bandwagon all the other constructors tried to jump in once they noticed the relative popularitime of Pebble's Kickstarted)
Or it's going to be as popular as iMac's original hockey-puck single button mice.
thanks to the pathetic IP laws that are not capable of dealing with the rapid IP innovations of the modern world.
Yeah, because trademarking rounded corner is totally non pathetic.
Apple use their patent portfolio as simply a weapon trying to block potential competitors.
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