I just don't buy that the computers in these things are as situationally aware as a human driver.
I want proof... but that won't be that hard to provide. Google's car already has a better-than-average driving record. That's not enough data points for me, but with sufficient testing, I'd be more than happy to let the computer drive. I can only see in one direction. I blink. I look at hot chicks. I sneeze. I get tired. There is no reason a computer can't be better than me-- it has a better sensorium, faster reaction, and higher uptime than I ever will. It can actuate more controls than I can-- individual braking pressure on all four wheels, for example. Test it out in more depth, and if it turns out to be better than the average human, it's good enough for me.
> that doesn't mean people who own tablets don't like them.
I'm about done with mine. It was a good compromise for a while... but phones grew up and laptops grew down (and got SSDs and high-PPI touchscreens), and I find myself no longer using my iPad for anything. I'm sure they'll still be useful for other folks, though, and it's good we have lots of choices.
Eh... like a lot of stuff, it may not be true for everybody, but it's true for some. If I was reading slashdot on it, and wanted to reply to your post, I'd set it down and turn on my computer. They're slow for text entry, and most content creation is still just text entry of one sort or another. I'm sure there are other things which they're great for-- but there are an awful lot of people for whom "that old chestnut" is true. If I do anything but read or watch movies on my iPad, I set it down and move to the computer.
"Content Creation" doesn't have to be anything as elaborate as coding or painting or musical composition. Your post and mine are both "content creation," and I don't know about you, but typing more than a couple of sentences in a row on a tablet touchscreen gets old quick.
I don't personally think tablets are going away, but I think the market may shrink going forward for a number of reasons. When the iPad first appeared, they did three amazing things that laptop users immediately noticed: they turned on instantly, they were small and light, and they had high-quality screens. Tablet UI considerations aside, those were areas in which the tablet absolutely trashed existing laptop hardware in user experience. If you just wanted to read or watch a movie, and you had a laptop and a tablet within reach, the tablet would get you there faster.
Fast-forward to now, and laptops have caught up. SSDs killed the boot advantage, and new form factors made possible by the same techniques that worked in the tablets have closed the size gap. If I can get an 11" laptop that does "real computer" stuff, boots instantly, and runs quietly and comfortably in my lap... I don't really have a use-case for the tablet anymore.
In short, it was worth the inconvenience of trying to type on a touchscreen when tablets had so many other advantages-- but those advantages have all either gone away or shrunk considerably. I imagine some folks will probably reconsider their tablet. Not all, but some.
Siri is more comparable to the Google Maps release-- both were beta, and both had no competition with the same features. And in both cases, the launch of Siri and Google Maps did not take away any functionality you already had-- you could go right back to using MapQuest if you wanted, or simply not use Siri. Because of this, nobody's frothing-at-the-mouth mad that Siri is still pretty rough. It's new, it's labelled beta, and we didn't give up something else to get it.
Apple Maps, by comparison, replaces Google Maps. There's no way to switch back if you need missing functionality, and it was launched as a finished product, not a beta that we all understood we were helping work the kinks out of.
To be fair, I have TomTom, and it has many of the exact same issues I have with Apple Maps. The data is outdated in places, and searching produces really wonky results. But more importantly, it produces the same wonkiness. You can blame at least some of the Apple Maps issues directly on the TomTom data.
Great. Now all you have to do is prove your system wasn't at fault in a court of law--against the sweet old lady who's suing, with the driver testifying that it was your system and not him that caused the accident, and a jury that hates big corporations.
And you're a corporation who builds a car with a 360-degree lidar, radar, video, and audio-capture system, GPS data, and a log of vehicle telemetry. It's a hell of a lot harder for a little old lady to cry her way out of something when there's hi-resolution panoramic 3D recordings of the entire event.
Can you be sure the computer will handle all possible inputs correctly?
Of course not. If we get serious about licensing and permitting these vehicles, I suspect the standard will be to compare them with the vast body of statistics we have from human drivers. As long as a company's cars are averaging fewer accidents per mile than humans do, it would be hard to argue that they're not safer, even if they still get in some accidents.
People are terrible in all the ways you mention above and then some. Strokes, seizures, heart attacks, sneezing, blinking, stray eyelashes, muscle cramps, and aural migraines are just a few of the hardware failures that already cause plenty of accidents-- and that's before we get into the self-inflicted things like drinking, fatigue, and distraction. Toss in our limited sensorium, narrow field of view, crap night vision, and sluggish reflex loop, and we're really not looking good compared to hardware-- even if that hardware still has some failures and makes some mistakes. And as you point out, it certainly will. The only really important question is "does it fail less than people?"
So, a $60 job now becomes a $300 job, enough to make most of my customers, with their older machines, say, "Fuck that, I'll just go to Wal-Marx and buy a new one for 100 bucks more!"
Thanks for doing your part to destroy small business, Intel.
I hope you fuckers rot.
Now I've seen everything... a post on slashdot that makes the "save the buggy whips" argument.
I agree-- it would be nice to see a full comparison. I manually spot-checked a couple of the not-founds, and they were all on Google's map-- but a complete comparison would be much, much more informative and useful.
A friend of mine is in the same boat as you. We're constantly looking for co-op games to play online, and there's precious few that have everything we want. Borderlands hit all the right gameplay notes. An FPS/RPG with simple enough gameplay that we can jump in and out of sessions but enough complexity to keep us from wearing it out in two days. After messing around for 30 minutes, he said "as great as this is, I just can't deal with the graphical style." I love it-- but there's no explaining personal tastes-- it just is what it is.
> Not one of them realized it was the old iPhone 4S.
Did that really happen? It isn't mentioned in your link-- I suspect that like a lot of these segments, they canvas for a while until they have enough idiots, and then edit the footage down to just the idiots.
Your R is not C. Carmack put the iPad 2 at roughly half the performance of the 360, which puts the "Retina iPad" right in the ballpark of the 360, although with twice the working RAM.
This is a valid concern-- but until we run out of houses, wal-marts, and parking lots to put them on, it shouldn't be an issue. We have plenty of already-spoiled scenery that can do double duty. ASU is all over this-- their campus parking garages and parking lots are all growing solar covers. Intel's fab on the south side of town has solar panels on top of all their shaded parking.
The problem is that photovoltaics have a limited lifespan.
Well, yes-- everything does. Off-the-shelf consumer photovoltaics typically come with 25-year warranties guaranteeing 80% of original capacity at year 25. They'll gradually degrade at about 0.5%-1% of original capacity per year-- they'll last more than four decades.
What's the energy input to replace a panel?
Depends on the type of panel and how much sun it gets when you hang it up, but construction energy payback is generally 1-2 years. Given the above lifetimes, you'll typically produce somewhere between 10x and 50x the input energy needed to make the panel.
The life span of a solar panel is 15-20 years with a denigration of efficiency of about 25% over that period.
This isn't accurate. The standard warranty for consumer panels is for 25 years, guaranteeing 80% of nameplate capacity at the end of that.
That's under warranty, so it's guaranteed. The panels themselves will likely last more along the lines of four or five decades, with a yearly degradation in performance between 0.5 and 1%.
4x it's weight in toxic waste and greenhouse gasses
That's not very much. Each kWh the panels generate saves roughly half a kilogram of greenhouse gasses based on the average generation mix in the US, for example. On average, a single one of the 15kg, 215-watt panels on our roof makes enough power to offset four times its weight in greenhouse gas every 23 days. Given their 25-year warranty, that's means that the panels will save roughly four hundred times the greenhouse gas that was produced in their construction, if your "four times the weight of the panel" number is correct.
> The only reason you find them superior is because you've been using WADS since 1992, you're used to it.
The mouse is a vastly more precise pointing/aiming device. The analog stick, on the other hand, is a better control for movement. For the most part, though, the games that require the most aiming precision are games in which it doesn't make sense to do anything but run at maximum speed, so the advantage of an analog stick becomes moot.
Ideally, there would be some sort of hybrid approach-- a left-hand controller with a movement stick and enough buttons coupled with a mouse or similarly precise pointing device.
But at least be fair to the original poster here-- anybody who has been playing games since 1992 is comfortable with both gamepads and kb/m arrangements, and we're all well aware of their relative strengths and weaknesses.
> compact enough to comforably fit in most people's pockets?
I think this is what slashdot forgets on account of our demographics... roughly half the potential customer base for a phone manufacturer will be carrying it in their purse. Anecdotally, at our office, women seem to be overwhelmingly moving to "mini tablet" phones. And why not? If it doesn't have to go in your pocket, I'd take the larger screen and battery, too.
I dimly remember an article on/. a while (year?) ago where an athlete complained that he may not compete in the Olympics because he is "handicapped". The reason? He was too "advanced", his artificial limbs were actually BETTER suited to the sport he wanted to compete in than the real limbs.
The decision was reversed. Oscar Pistorius is running in the Olympics this year on a pair of Cheetah Flex-Foot prosthetic legs.
It's a strange call by the committee, though-- I think they let him in because this is not an enhancement he sought out. He was essentially born without shins. It won't be long before they will have to draw the line, though, because if this is more than a one-time exception, you'll see people intentionally hacking their legs off to compete as soon as they're sure the artificial legs are better.
Slashdot Mirror
rare corner-cases
I don't think "stop if there is something in front of the car" is a rare corner case.
I just don't buy that the computers in these things are as situationally aware as a human driver.
I want proof... but that won't be that hard to provide. Google's car already has a better-than-average driving record. That's not enough data points for me, but with sufficient testing, I'd be more than happy to let the computer drive. I can only see in one direction. I blink. I look at hot chicks. I sneeze. I get tired. There is no reason a computer can't be better than me-- it has a better sensorium, faster reaction, and higher uptime than I ever will. It can actuate more controls than I can-- individual braking pressure on all four wheels, for example. Test it out in more depth, and if it turns out to be better than the average human, it's good enough for me.
> that doesn't mean people who own tablets don't like them.
I'm about done with mine. It was a good compromise for a while... but phones grew up and laptops grew down (and got SSDs and high-PPI touchscreens), and I find myself no longer using my iPad for anything. I'm sure they'll still be useful for other folks, though, and it's good we have lots of choices.
Eh... like a lot of stuff, it may not be true for everybody, but it's true for some. If I was reading slashdot on it, and wanted to reply to your post, I'd set it down and turn on my computer. They're slow for text entry, and most content creation is still just text entry of one sort or another. I'm sure there are other things which they're great for-- but there are an awful lot of people for whom "that old chestnut" is true. If I do anything but read or watch movies on my iPad, I set it down and move to the computer.
"Content Creation" doesn't have to be anything as elaborate as coding or painting or musical composition. Your post and mine are both "content creation," and I don't know about you, but typing more than a couple of sentences in a row on a tablet touchscreen gets old quick.
I don't personally think tablets are going away, but I think the market may shrink going forward for a number of reasons. When the iPad first appeared, they did three amazing things that laptop users immediately noticed: they turned on instantly, they were small and light, and they had high-quality screens. Tablet UI considerations aside, those were areas in which the tablet absolutely trashed existing laptop hardware in user experience. If you just wanted to read or watch a movie, and you had a laptop and a tablet within reach, the tablet would get you there faster.
Fast-forward to now, and laptops have caught up. SSDs killed the boot advantage, and new form factors made possible by the same techniques that worked in the tablets have closed the size gap. If I can get an 11" laptop that does "real computer" stuff, boots instantly, and runs quietly and comfortably in my lap... I don't really have a use-case for the tablet anymore.
In short, it was worth the inconvenience of trying to type on a touchscreen when tablets had so many other advantages-- but those advantages have all either gone away or shrunk considerably. I imagine some folks will probably reconsider their tablet. Not all, but some.
Aren't you supposed to have your fine single-malt neat with a small pitcher of room-temperature water to add?
Very different situations.
Siri is more comparable to the Google Maps release-- both were beta, and both had no competition with the same features. And in both cases, the launch of Siri and Google Maps did not take away any functionality you already had-- you could go right back to using MapQuest if you wanted, or simply not use Siri. Because of this, nobody's frothing-at-the-mouth mad that Siri is still pretty rough. It's new, it's labelled beta, and we didn't give up something else to get it.
Apple Maps, by comparison, replaces Google Maps. There's no way to switch back if you need missing functionality, and it was launched as a finished product, not a beta that we all understood we were helping work the kinks out of.
To be fair, I have TomTom, and it has many of the exact same issues I have with Apple Maps. The data is outdated in places, and searching produces really wonky results. But more importantly, it produces the same wonkiness. You can blame at least some of the Apple Maps issues directly on the TomTom data.
Great. Now all you have to do is prove your system wasn't at fault in a court of law--against the sweet old lady who's suing, with the driver testifying that it was your system and not him that caused the accident, and a jury that hates big corporations.
And you're a corporation who builds a car with a 360-degree lidar, radar, video, and audio-capture system, GPS data, and a log of vehicle telemetry. It's a hell of a lot harder for a little old lady to cry her way out of something when there's hi-resolution panoramic 3D recordings of the entire event.
Can you be sure the computer will handle all possible inputs correctly?
Of course not. If we get serious about licensing and permitting these vehicles, I suspect the standard will be to compare them with the vast body of statistics we have from human drivers. As long as a company's cars are averaging fewer accidents per mile than humans do, it would be hard to argue that they're not safer, even if they still get in some accidents.
People are terrible in all the ways you mention above and then some. Strokes, seizures, heart attacks, sneezing, blinking, stray eyelashes, muscle cramps, and aural migraines are just a few of the hardware failures that already cause plenty of accidents-- and that's before we get into the self-inflicted things like drinking, fatigue, and distraction. Toss in our limited sensorium, narrow field of view, crap night vision, and sluggish reflex loop, and we're really not looking good compared to hardware-- even if that hardware still has some failures and makes some mistakes. And as you point out, it certainly will. The only really important question is "does it fail less than people?"
So, a $60 job now becomes a $300 job, enough to make most of my customers, with their older machines, say, "Fuck that, I'll just go to Wal-Marx and buy a new one for 100 bucks more!"
Thanks for doing your part to destroy small business, Intel.
I hope you fuckers rot.
Now I've seen everything... a post on slashdot that makes the "save the buggy whips" argument.
I agree-- it would be nice to see a full comparison. I manually spot-checked a couple of the not-founds, and they were all on Google's map-- but a complete comparison would be much, much more informative and useful.
A friend of mine is in the same boat as you. We're constantly looking for co-op games to play online, and there's precious few that have everything we want. Borderlands hit all the right gameplay notes. An FPS/RPG with simple enough gameplay that we can jump in and out of sessions but enough complexity to keep us from wearing it out in two days. After messing around for 30 minutes, he said "as great as this is, I just can't deal with the graphical style." I love it-- but there's no explaining personal tastes-- it just is what it is.
> Not one of them realized it was the old iPhone 4S.
Did that really happen? It isn't mentioned in your link-- I suspect that like a lot of these segments, they canvas for a while until they have enough idiots, and then edit the footage down to just the idiots.
I'm not saying it's impossible, though.
Nah, I bet the Cray wins. The iPad is probably both denser *and* more aerodynamic.
"Cray Outperforms iPad in Crucial Terminal Speed Tests"
Your R is not C. Carmack put the iPad 2 at roughly half the performance of the 360, which puts the "Retina iPad" right in the ballpark of the 360, although with twice the working RAM.
"This? It's a pool."
This is a valid concern-- but until we run out of houses, wal-marts, and parking lots to put them on, it shouldn't be an issue. We have plenty of already-spoiled scenery that can do double duty. ASU is all over this-- their campus parking garages and parking lots are all growing solar covers. Intel's fab on the south side of town has solar panels on top of all their shaded parking.
The problem is that photovoltaics have a limited lifespan.
Well, yes-- everything does. Off-the-shelf consumer photovoltaics typically come with 25-year warranties guaranteeing 80% of original capacity at year 25. They'll gradually degrade at about 0.5%-1% of original capacity per year-- they'll last more than four decades.
What's the energy input to replace a panel?
Depends on the type of panel and how much sun it gets when you hang it up, but construction energy payback is generally 1-2 years. Given the above lifetimes, you'll typically produce somewhere between 10x and 50x the input energy needed to make the panel.
20-year life.
Standard warranty is 25 years at 80% of original capacity. More likely, they'll last for 40+.
The life span of a solar panel is 15-20 years with a denigration of efficiency of about 25% over that period.
This isn't accurate. The standard warranty for consumer panels is for 25 years, guaranteeing 80% of nameplate capacity at the end of that.
That's under warranty, so it's guaranteed. The panels themselves will likely last more along the lines of four or five decades, with a yearly degradation in performance between 0.5 and 1%.
4x it's weight in toxic waste and greenhouse gasses
That's not very much. Each kWh the panels generate saves roughly half a kilogram of greenhouse gasses based on the average generation mix in the US, for example. On average, a single one of the 15kg, 215-watt panels on our roof makes enough power to offset four times its weight in greenhouse gas every 23 days. Given their 25-year warranty, that's means that the panels will save roughly four hundred times the greenhouse gas that was produced in their construction, if your "four times the weight of the panel" number is correct.
> The only reason you find them superior is because you've been using WADS since 1992, you're used to it.
The mouse is a vastly more precise pointing/aiming device. The analog stick, on the other hand, is a better control for movement. For the most part, though, the games that require the most aiming precision are games in which it doesn't make sense to do anything but run at maximum speed, so the advantage of an analog stick becomes moot.
Ideally, there would be some sort of hybrid approach-- a left-hand controller with a movement stick and enough buttons coupled with a mouse or similarly precise pointing device.
But at least be fair to the original poster here-- anybody who has been playing games since 1992 is comfortable with both gamepads and kb/m arrangements, and we're all well aware of their relative strengths and weaknesses.
> compact enough to comforably fit in most people's pockets?
I think this is what slashdot forgets on account of our demographics... roughly half the potential customer base for a phone manufacturer will be carrying it in their purse. Anecdotally, at our office, women seem to be overwhelmingly moving to "mini tablet" phones. And why not? If it doesn't have to go in your pocket, I'd take the larger screen and battery, too.
I dimly remember an article on /. a while (year?) ago where an athlete complained that he may not compete in the Olympics because he is "handicapped". The reason? He was too "advanced", his artificial limbs were actually BETTER suited to the sport he wanted to compete in than the real limbs.
The decision was reversed. Oscar Pistorius is running in the Olympics this year on a pair of Cheetah Flex-Foot prosthetic legs.
It's a strange call by the committee, though-- I think they let him in because this is not an enhancement he sought out. He was essentially born without shins. It won't be long before they will have to draw the line, though, because if this is more than a one-time exception, you'll see people intentionally hacking their legs off to compete as soon as they're sure the artificial legs are better.