The N800's handwriting recognition is too slow and unreliable. The Palm with Tealscript trained to do the original Graffiti is lightning fast.
Even using Graffiti, what sort of writing speeds do you approach? I don't think I'm terribly unusual in typing far faster than I write - to my mind that'd be the biggest reason to use a keyboard rather than any kind of writing system.
Girls are fine at that age, it is when they start dating that their IQ drops to room temperature.
What? In a date, the guy asks the girl out, plans the evening, arranges transport, spends his cash, and tries to make sure she has the most enjoyable time possible. The girl deigns to accept (or turns him down if he's not good enough), takes his offerings, then grades him based on his efforts while her contribution is limited to choosing her clothes and makeup. Who's the one with the high IQ in this exchange?
The problem here is not the VC funders or the companies. The root of the problem is society at large. It's been going on for quite sometime in some societies more than others. Only you as a parent can change it for your offspring. It's a huge societal change that takes at least one generation with a limitless maximum of generations to complete the transition. Politics seems to have made headway and technology can as well.
The root of what problem, may I ask? A million years ago, 80% of the humans that sharpened up some sticks and went out to hunt antelope and the occasional tiger were male. Now, 80% of the humans that take huge personal financial risks in the hope of becoming a commercial success are male. This isn't "the bad mans are oppressing all the poor wimmyns", this is "human beings have evolved this way".
Not all men are risk-taking win-big-or-die-trying types. Not all women are risk-averse consumers dependent upon male support. But if despite all our 'societal change' and 'making headway', there are statistical skews in which gender fills which role, how about we spend some time examining the fundamental nature of the beasts we're talking about, rather than just begging the question that women and men are functionally identical and any statistical differences in preference are imposed by "society".
Also, Flash is a programming language. Apple doesnt allow programming languages onto iPods, iPhones, or iPads.
This, 100%, is what it is about. "Better user experience" is just their bullshit excuse. The entire issue is that Flash allows user-generated content which bypasses the Apple store and destroys a significant percentage of the profitability of these devices.
So having a million knowledgeable users for every one user who just thinks he knows what he's talking about is a problem?
It is if you're in customer service! Fewer people you can just put on hold while they go down to the corner shop for headlight fluid and you go down to the bar for a pint.
Yeah, that would be a logical name for it. It wasn't really the truck's fault since the left lane that it should have been in had only just merged onto the motorway.
The only reason it was at all notable was that the manufacturers decided that the car was equipped to judge, from only the accelerator and brake pedal position sensors, whether we needed to emergency brake or not. Luckily in this case we were going straight and the only hazard was being rear-ended by another car. I can easily see myself double-clutching during a downshift into a corner, and the car misinterpreting it and well-intentionedly throwing itself sideways off the road.
I drive an old Jap car too, so I don't really know what the new models are like, but I'd presume that thanks to crap like this it'll be pretty ubiquitous soon if it's not already. All the more motivation for me to keep my old Supra banging along...
Why is the parent moded funny? It's a very very reasonable approach. It really is informative well, and maybe insightful.
Rubbish. She'll tell him what a great friend he is and then, just when he thinks he's in, she'll say "I don't think of you that way even though you ARE the last man on the face of the earth^H^H^H^H^Hmoon."
When you start bringing in those rocks by the ton, price will drop significantly. Nobody is going to pay $2000 per gram when they know you're sitting on 5 tons of that stuff. They'll just wait until you are forced to sell at a lower price.
That's why you don't do a NASA-scale expedition and bring back a ton. You do a small-scale automated mission to bring back a couple of kilos, and you do it on a shoestring budget, and you sell it 1g-5g at a time on your website.
If a company can bring 200 kilos of moon rocks back from the moon, a mission could pay for itself from sale of the rocks. Easily $2000 a gram, perhaps more if some more interesting specimens could be searched out and returned.
You're saying $2mil per kilogram? Taking inflation into account, that's more valuable than Unobtanium! O.o
Ask yourself how much a kilogram of martian soil would sell for, too.
Depends whether you can convince Chinese businessmen that it'll give more yang to their wang.
Which is the whole point. There is a right way and a wrong way to build a mechanical throttle assembly and cable. There are also right and wrong ways to build electronic throttles. Either system can be perfectly safe if designed and manufactured with proper tolerances.
Exactly. The difference is, a mechanical throttle (or any mechanical assembly) is either right or wrong based on its physical configuration, whereas an electronic system can be mechanically right but still be nigh-undetectably, disastrously wrong in very particular, hard to reproduce circumstances due to a subtle software glitch.
Don't believe me? Ask Mercedes. They added "brake assist" or whatever to their cars for this exact reason.
And now every damn european manufacturer has added it. It nearly got me killed in a rented Peugot 307, I'd just merged onto a motorway outside London and was about to overtake a truck (lorry?:P ) on the outside, which is legal in Western Australia where I live, but not in England. I realised just as I was about to overtake, thought "oh snap, silly me" and tapped the brakes. The car saw me dump the accelerator and hit the brakes fast (albeit very gently), popped up a Clippy window saying "You look like you're trying to emergency brake, WOULD YOU LIKE SOME HELP?!", flipped on the emergency blinkers and boosted the brake sensitivity by about 5x, turning my gentle tap into an emergency stop. Never, EVER buying a car that does that. If I want it to do an emergency brake I'll goddamn tell it to do so myself.
Wrong. It's a design issue not an electronics issue.
Exactly, although that's a bit like Heinlein's statement that "in the end, all forms of death can be described as heart failure."
There IS a major, scary problem with so much electronic gadgetry getting in between the driver and the wheels, but this start-button problem is not it. If I'd only ever used command-line Linux and I switched to KDE, I might be running my shiny new upgraded XCar32 and decide to stop, so I hit Ctrl+C. Nothing happens! It worked in the text version, what's going on? The interface has changed, that's what.
The really scary thing about electronics is that failures can be both instant and silent. With mechanical systems, the physical size of the fault generally corresponds to the severity of the danger involved (yes I know you have a counterexample, shut up, it's a generalisation that's generally right). Also, we have hundreds of years of practice making mechanical systems fail-safe. Compared to things like gears and cables, an electronic sensor can fail in multiple very-hard-to-detect ways. Let's say you're driving along and the accelerometer in the traction control system fails, causing the system to instantly lock up the wheels on the left side of the car - you're through the hedge before you can even react, and the worst thing is that no-one will believe it wasn't just your mistake.
The front brakes on your car do 80% of the braking in normla conditions, simply because of weight transfer to the front wheels when you ht the brakes. Otherwise, the rear wheels would lock up, stop braking entirely, and you'd swap ends.
Mostly right.:) The rear wheels wouldn't stop braking entirely (although they would brake less effectively due to being locked - hence not only at dynamic rather than static coefficient of friction but also rapidly heating up to melting point, leaving nice big black marks and reducing friction further.) The reason the car tries to swap ends is that with the rear wheels locked, they can't give any steering grip and so they just slide straight forwards, while the front wheels still give steering grip and so they push the front of the car to the side. Front goes sideways, back doesn't give a crap and keeps going fowards, and it's happy-go-backwards time. It's the same as when the front wheels lock up and nothing you do with the steering wheel makes any difference. That's why car manufacturers give cars an overly strong (from a racing point of view) front bias on the brakes - because when the moron driving them does something silly, they're far more likely to lock the front brakes and hit something front-on than to lock the back brakes and go sideways. And this is important because the front is protected by lots of crumple zone and airbags and whatnot whereas the sides of a car are protected by a few centimeters and a couple of metal bars. Dead customers can't replace the car they just wrote off.
The 'emergency' brake isn't. It's a parking brake. All car literature today refers to it as such. Pull up on your parking brake with your foot held steady at 70 MPH, you won't be slowing down (You will burn up your brakes).
It's there for parking.
There are two types of hand brake, in my experience. Cheap cars, and shopping-trolley commuter cars, have a "parking break" which seems to be some kind of cable operated friction break on the drive shaft and can barely stop the car rolling if you park on a hill. Higher end cars and sports cars have an "emergency brake" or "handbrake" which is a separate hydraulic system operating the rear brakes, and is more than capable of locking the rear wheels up at any speed. You can drive off after accidentally leaving a parking brake on, but if you try it with a real handbrake then unless you *really* gun the engine hard you will just stall it.
Well, maybe all-electronic cars should be required to have a highly visible button labelled "Emergency Off" - I think I don't have to explain what this should (and shouldn't!) do.
Actually, for many years this was a MAJOR hurdle for electric vehicles. Where a standard internal-combustion car had at least three physical or electrical disconnects (turn off the ignition, push the clutch, yank it out of gear) and required at least a second of very noisy ramp-up for the engine to produce maximum power, electric cars could instantly and silently flick to full power in case of a fault (or even incorrect usage, such as turning the key to 'on' with the pedal floored). Standard procedure was to have an industrial-style emergency kill switch accessible from the driver's seat and in some cases from outside the vehicle. I don't know if it's still required for home-converted cars but a physical kill switch should be required for ALL passenger-carrying vehicles regardless of power source. We haven't made it explicit before because such 'kill switches' were implicit in the design but with the latest wave of everything-by-wire cars, this needs to be formalised.
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The N800's handwriting recognition is too slow and unreliable. The Palm with Tealscript trained to do the original Graffiti is lightning fast.
Even using Graffiti, what sort of writing speeds do you approach? I don't think I'm terribly unusual in typing far faster than I write - to my mind that'd be the biggest reason to use a keyboard rather than any kind of writing system.
Girls are fine at that age, it is when they start dating that their IQ drops to room temperature.
What? In a date, the guy asks the girl out, plans the evening, arranges transport, spends his cash, and tries to make sure she has the most enjoyable time possible. The girl deigns to accept (or turns him down if he's not good enough), takes his offerings, then grades him based on his efforts while her contribution is limited to choosing her clothes and makeup. Who's the one with the high IQ in this exchange?
The problem here is not the VC funders or the companies. The root of the problem is society at large. It's been going on for quite sometime in some societies more than others. Only you as a parent can change it for your offspring. It's a huge societal change that takes at least one generation with a limitless maximum of generations to complete the transition. Politics seems to have made headway and technology can as well.
The root of what problem, may I ask? A million years ago, 80% of the humans that sharpened up some sticks and went out to hunt antelope and the occasional tiger were male. Now, 80% of the humans that take huge personal financial risks in the hope of becoming a commercial success are male. This isn't "the bad mans are oppressing all the poor wimmyns", this is "human beings have evolved this way".
Not all men are risk-taking win-big-or-die-trying types. Not all women are risk-averse consumers dependent upon male support. But if despite all our 'societal change' and 'making headway', there are statistical skews in which gender fills which role, how about we spend some time examining the fundamental nature of the beasts we're talking about, rather than just begging the question that women and men are functionally identical and any statistical differences in preference are imposed by "society".
And the compiled iPhone application must be signed and delivered via the App store as God, erm, I mean Apple, intended.
Also, Flash is a programming language. Apple doesnt allow programming languages onto iPods, iPhones, or iPads.
This, 100%, is what it is about. "Better user experience" is just their bullshit excuse. The entire issue is that Flash allows user-generated content which bypasses the Apple store and destroys a significant percentage of the profitability of these devices.
Exactly. I have a 5800, my friend has an iPhone, I wouldn't swap for anything. I tell my phone what it can and can't do, not the other way round.
Not at all if I'm driving. "Sorry honey, the accelerator seems to be stuck..." *mad highway run ensues*
That chick who dated Woz.
So having a million knowledgeable users for every one user who just thinks he knows what he's talking about is a problem?
It is if you're in customer service! Fewer people you can just put on hold while they go down to the corner shop for headlight fluid and you go down to the bar for a pint.
Yeah, that would be a logical name for it. It wasn't really the truck's fault since the left lane that it should have been in had only just merged onto the motorway.
The only reason it was at all notable was that the manufacturers decided that the car was equipped to judge, from only the accelerator and brake pedal position sensors, whether we needed to emergency brake or not. Luckily in this case we were going straight and the only hazard was being rear-ended by another car. I can easily see myself double-clutching during a downshift into a corner, and the car misinterpreting it and well-intentionedly throwing itself sideways off the road.
I drive an old Jap car too, so I don't really know what the new models are like, but I'd presume that thanks to crap like this it'll be pretty ubiquitous soon if it's not already. All the more motivation for me to keep my old Supra banging along...
Why is the parent moded funny? It's a very very reasonable approach. It really is informative well, and maybe insightful.
Rubbish. She'll tell him what a great friend he is and then, just when he thinks he's in, she'll say "I don't think of you that way even though you ARE the last man on the face of the earth^H^H^H^H^Hmoon."
News flash: the moon has rocks and dust!!
Rubbish! NASA's best kept secret is that the moon is actually comprised of tits.
When you start bringing in those rocks by the ton, price will drop significantly. Nobody is going to pay $2000 per gram when they know you're sitting on 5 tons of that stuff. They'll just wait until you are forced to sell at a lower price.
That's why you don't do a NASA-scale expedition and bring back a ton. You do a small-scale automated mission to bring back a couple of kilos, and you do it on a shoestring budget, and you sell it 1g-5g at a time on your website.
If a company can bring 200 kilos of moon rocks back from the moon, a mission could pay for itself from sale of the rocks. Easily $2000 a gram, perhaps more if some more interesting specimens could be searched out and returned.
You're saying $2mil per kilogram? Taking inflation into account, that's more valuable than Unobtanium! O.o
Ask yourself how much a kilogram of martian soil would sell for, too.
Depends whether you can convince Chinese businessmen that it'll give more yang to their wang.
"This female surgeon can't even cook bacon and eggs, what makes the bitch think she can take out my kidney?
Sounds like she could quite easily do so while trying to make you a ham sammitch. Give her points for trying though! :)
Which is the whole point. There is a right way and a wrong way to build a mechanical throttle assembly and cable. There are also right and wrong ways to build electronic throttles. Either system can be perfectly safe if designed and manufactured with proper tolerances.
Exactly. The difference is, a mechanical throttle (or any mechanical assembly) is either right or wrong based on its physical configuration, whereas an electronic system can be mechanically right but still be nigh-undetectably, disastrously wrong in very particular, hard to reproduce circumstances due to a subtle software glitch.
So you're saying it's an attitude problem? Maybe they need a CAN'T bus to signal emergency shutoffs. ;)
It won't but it's a quick way to close all the windows in the event of rain. ;)
Don't believe me? Ask Mercedes. They added "brake assist" or whatever to their cars for this exact reason.
And now every damn european manufacturer has added it. It nearly got me killed in a rented Peugot 307, I'd just merged onto a motorway outside London and was about to overtake a truck (lorry? :P ) on the outside, which is legal in Western Australia where I live, but not in England. I realised just as I was about to overtake, thought "oh snap, silly me" and tapped the brakes. The car saw me dump the accelerator and hit the brakes fast (albeit very gently), popped up a Clippy window saying "You look like you're trying to emergency brake, WOULD YOU LIKE SOME HELP?!", flipped on the emergency blinkers and boosted the brake sensitivity by about 5x, turning my gentle tap into an emergency stop. Never, EVER buying a car that does that. If I want it to do an emergency brake I'll goddamn tell it to do so myself.
I think that the engine being off would count as a solution to the "car accelerates uncontrollably" problem scenario, wouldn't you?
Engine braking in reverse gear? ;)
Wrong. It's a design issue not an electronics issue.
Exactly, although that's a bit like Heinlein's statement that "in the end, all forms of death can be described as heart failure."
There IS a major, scary problem with so much electronic gadgetry getting in between the driver and the wheels, but this start-button problem is not it. If I'd only ever used command-line Linux and I switched to KDE, I might be running my shiny new upgraded XCar32 and decide to stop, so I hit Ctrl+C. Nothing happens! It worked in the text version, what's going on? The interface has changed, that's what.
The really scary thing about electronics is that failures can be both instant and silent. With mechanical systems, the physical size of the fault generally corresponds to the severity of the danger involved (yes I know you have a counterexample, shut up, it's a generalisation that's generally right). Also, we have hundreds of years of practice making mechanical systems fail-safe. Compared to things like gears and cables, an electronic sensor can fail in multiple very-hard-to-detect ways. Let's say you're driving along and the accelerometer in the traction control system fails, causing the system to instantly lock up the wheels on the left side of the car - you're through the hedge before you can even react, and the worst thing is that no-one will believe it wasn't just your mistake.
The front brakes on your car do 80% of the braking in normla conditions, simply because of weight transfer to the front wheels when you ht the brakes. Otherwise, the rear wheels would lock up, stop braking entirely, and you'd swap ends.
Mostly right. :) The rear wheels wouldn't stop braking entirely (although they would brake less effectively due to being locked - hence not only at dynamic rather than static coefficient of friction but also rapidly heating up to melting point, leaving nice big black marks and reducing friction further.) The reason the car tries to swap ends is that with the rear wheels locked, they can't give any steering grip and so they just slide straight forwards, while the front wheels still give steering grip and so they push the front of the car to the side. Front goes sideways, back doesn't give a crap and keeps going fowards, and it's happy-go-backwards time. It's the same as when the front wheels lock up and nothing you do with the steering wheel makes any difference. That's why car manufacturers give cars an overly strong (from a racing point of view) front bias on the brakes - because when the moron driving them does something silly, they're far more likely to lock the front brakes and hit something front-on than to lock the back brakes and go sideways. And this is important because the front is protected by lots of crumple zone and airbags and whatnot whereas the sides of a car are protected by a few centimeters and a couple of metal bars. Dead customers can't replace the car they just wrote off.
The 'emergency' brake isn't. It's a parking brake. All car literature today refers to it as such. Pull up on your parking brake with your foot held steady at 70 MPH, you won't be slowing down (You will burn up your brakes).
It's there for parking.
There are two types of hand brake, in my experience. Cheap cars, and shopping-trolley commuter cars, have a "parking break" which seems to be some kind of cable operated friction break on the drive shaft and can barely stop the car rolling if you park on a hill. Higher end cars and sports cars have an "emergency brake" or "handbrake" which is a separate hydraulic system operating the rear brakes, and is more than capable of locking the rear wheels up at any speed. You can drive off after accidentally leaving a parking brake on, but if you try it with a real handbrake then unless you *really* gun the engine hard you will just stall it.
Well, maybe all-electronic cars should be required to have a highly visible button labelled "Emergency Off" - I think I don't have to explain what this should (and shouldn't!) do.
Actually, for many years this was a MAJOR hurdle for electric vehicles. Where a standard internal-combustion car had at least three physical or electrical disconnects (turn off the ignition, push the clutch, yank it out of gear) and required at least a second of very noisy ramp-up for the engine to produce maximum power, electric cars could instantly and silently flick to full power in case of a fault (or even incorrect usage, such as turning the key to 'on' with the pedal floored). Standard procedure was to have an industrial-style emergency kill switch accessible from the driver's seat and in some cases from outside the vehicle. I don't know if it's still required for home-converted cars but a physical kill switch should be required for ALL passenger-carrying vehicles regardless of power source. We haven't made it explicit before because such 'kill switches' were implicit in the design but with the latest wave of everything-by-wire cars, this needs to be formalised.