It probably doesn't work that way. With a lot of industrial robotic equipment, the software is supplied along with the equipment, by the vendor. Who wrote the software? Who knows, but it's the equipment vendor that supplied it, as part of a turn-key package. And for some reason, a lot of industrial equipment is stuck on Windows 2000 and sometimes XP, even for brand-new stuff. So you can't just contact the software developers; you can contact the equipment vendor, and they'll try to sell you a new piece of equipment for $500K that uses the up-to-date Windows XP OS () to replace your current equipment that uses Win2000 or Win98 or DOS. Of course, XP is already woefully obsolete and at EOL, but they don't care.
Now why industrial automation equipment is running Windows instead of Linux, I have no idea, but that's the way it is for most of them.
It doesn't matter if the vendors have sane reasons or just pure greed for EOLing products and support: when you buy a product or support for something, there's a risk the vendor will EOL it at some time because they want to move on to something better, or it's obsolete, or they just want more money for something newer. That's what happens when you're reliant on an outside vendor for something. So you either need to make yourself totally self-sufficient so that you don't rely on a vendor for anything critical, or you need to anticipate that at some point, the rug is going to be pulled out from under you, and prepare for it.
If nothing else, at some point equipment stops working due to age. Commodity stuff frequently can't be easily repaired and parts might not be available if it's too old. You can't buy new computers with XP any more (I don't believe). So as long as you're tied to a proprietary vendor, you're tied to its upgrade cycle, more or less. If these companies were all running on Linux they wouldn't have this problem as much since the ABI for Linux hasn't changed in ages and ages (as long as your application is statically-linked, and not relying on some open-source libraries that change over time, although even there it's frequently not that hard to maintain backwards compatibilty), but with Windows, you can't run Office 2003 on Windows 8 for instance.
And for just wanting email and Office 2003 to work, that might be asking too much: luckily, email hasn't changed in ages, and probably won't, but with most other things, you have to keep up with the times to some extent. It might be OK to keep running Office 2003 indefinitely in your organization if you never exchange files with anyone else, but if you have to send, or more importantly, receive files from other companies, your software has to be able to read their files, and Office 2003 can't read the latest Office 2013 (or whatever it's up to now) file formats. It's like this with other application-specific files as well. Same goes for web browsers: if your company refuses to budge from IE6, your employees are going to have a hard time viewing many modern web sites which use HTML5, PNG images, and haven't bothered with any IE6-specific hacks. When you need to be able to communicate with the outside world, you have to run software that lets you do that, and decade-old software many times won't.
You have a point about the crappy ActiveX type software doing its job, and "don't fix it if it ain't broke". However, the problem is that while the IE6-specific software may still do the job fine, the foundations it's sitting on do not work any more: IE6 isn't supported any more, it doesn't work with newer Windows versions, and you can't continue to run commodity PC hardware indefinitely. Even if you could, if it's on a network, there's serious security concerns, and WinXP isn't supported any more. Finally, part of the deal with modern computers is that you frequently want to do different things on them: you don't want a separate PC on your desk for every application you run. VMs can help with this last problem however, to an extent, at the expense of additional complexity.
The fundamental problem here is basing one piece of technology (the custom ActiveX-requiring software) on other pieces of technology that become obsolete and are no longer supported. This is the risk you take when you base your technology on other proprietary technology (in this case, software): you're relying on some other vendor to continue to produce and support that product, so that you can base your product off of it. If these software makers had shunned ActiveX and based their product on some industry or open standard instead, they wouldn't have this problem, and it would have been easy to migrate their product to newer OSes.
It's not just software where this happens. Any time one company bases their product on another company's product, there's a risk that other product may be modified to the point where it becomes necessary for the first company to update their product to fit, or if it's discontinued entirely, they may have to come up with a totally different solution.
Newer PCs had different form factors, internal arrangement of components, or were generally more compact than this particular model of PS/1 (iirc) way back then. It took years to refit the cards, and move off these old PCs.... so much of the business relied on them.
This goes to show why you should never rely on PCs this way. When you're going to design custom hardware for PCs, you have to assume the PC itself will become obsolete in 5 years or so, and you should keep things modular. So instead of making some custom PCI card with a bunch of relays on it, you make a custom PCI card that fits into a standard chassis, and have a cable that goes from this card to an external box that has all your custom circuitry in it. You can make this external box as robust and environment-proof as you like: there's lots of industrial-grade cabinets and boxes available out there that are fully sealed against dust, humidity, etc. Then, years down the road, if you need to upgrade the PC (because the power supply failed and you can't find a replacement, for instance), you can just stick the standard-size PCI card in a new PC, or in the worst case, design a new card for the latest interface (PCI-X, PCIe, USB2/3, FireWire, etc.) that makes sense, and reuse your existing box of custom circuitry.
This isn't unique to PCs: you should never rely on an external vendor to that degree, because products and product lines come and go, and you may not be able to get spare parts later on. If you keep everything as modular as possible, you minimize your risk. Use off-the-shelf stuff as much as possible (to minimize cost, and make it easy to get spare parts: ATX power supplies for instance haven't changed in ages so it's better to go with a whitebox solution than some proprietary chassis and PS if you want longevity), and keep your custom-built stuff separate from it, and connected to it through standard interfaces.
I'm glad for this egotism. I hope MS stays the course and tells the users to fuck right off, and that they're going to get used to Metro whether they like it or not.
I'm enjoying this train wreck and I don't want it to end prematurely. Maybe MS can hire some of the GNOME developers and adopt their attitudes toward users and customization, and hopefully insert new code into this upcoming update to disable "Start8" and other such add-ons, to force users to use Metro.
If you replace your old CRT monitor and TV, you'll probably recoup their cost in power savings within a year. Heck, just get some used LCD models off Craigslist for next-to-nothing.
There's nothing really special about the hard drives used in those kinds of laptops; they just enclose them in a rubber "glove" which fits into a holder that goes into the CD/DVD slot on the normal model.
People here seem to think that Dell has its own hard drive manufacturing facility that makes super-special hard drives just for cop cars. That's not the case; there's only two hard drive makers left in the world now IIRC, and they're all the same.
In software, yes. After all, you can always just push software updates over the internet these days to fix any bugs, and being first-to-market is more important for profitability than having something solid and reliable, unfortunate as that is.
Hardware is another story. Intel for instance has a large army of engineers who exhaustively validate their CPUs with a lot of automated testing. One of the big reasons Intel is so intent on this: remember the old FDIV bug? Replacing millions of buggy CPUs is very expensive.
The whole idea is utterly stupid. It's bad enough that people become hyper-specialized during the course of their careers, but asking 18-year-olds to decide on which exact specialty they want makes no sense at all. That's why university degrees are supposed to give you a broad foundation, with only a certain amount of specialization in an undergrad major (and only in the last two years there usually). Furthermore, as you point out, having EEs get the same degree and specialize later works just fine, and for good reason: you need to understand how stuff works in order to test it properly.
A class on software testing in the CS curriculum would make a lot of sense, but a whole separate degree is ridiculous.
Why would a CS graduate talk about electricity, except maybe that the computer needs to be plugged in. You don't need to know anything about electricity to use a computer, except how to plug it in, which anyone knows these days.
You wouldn't expect auto mechanics to be experts in tribology (the study of oil) or suspension design or ECU programming or the manufacture of auto glass, so why would you expect a CS graduate to know any more about electricity than an average layman?
You have a good point here with all the non-programming questions (visas, language, security clearance, etc.). Not so sure about the preset questions though. Someone will probably complain that a Java programmer doesn't need to know the primitive types, and that's an unfair question.
In my interview example above, one of my questions was to ask them (people who claimed to be C++ experts) what a "class" was. Most couldn't tell me. In previous posts on Slashdot, I was told that's an unfair question.
They're a significant part of American society. They even have churches telling people that poor people are poor because God doesn't like them as much as rich people.
Having HR do any kind of interviewing is a waste of time. I had to participate in some hiring of contractors at one job, where a group of us full-timers would together interview the candidate over the phone and then vote on him/her. The candidates were all pre-screened by HR, who assured us they were good candidates. Many of them, we found, had completely lied on their resumes and didn't know the basic things they claimed to know (like C++).
HR just looks at resumes, compares to some buzzwords, and thinks that's that.
If that joke is actually based on reality (which I seriously doubt), that EE should have his degree revoked. You don't need any practical experience to know that resistors are not polarized circuit elements; they teach this in Circuits 201, the first EE course taught (the freshman year is all general engineering courses).
The usual joke about EEs used to be about a fresh EE going to work and being sent to the parts department of his company by his coworkers to retrieve a 1 farad capacitor, since supposedly EE grads didn't have any practical experience and wouldn't know that capacitors don't come in sizes that large, even though many of his sophomore-year problems dealt with sizes in that range for convenience. Of course, the joke is now obsolete since they really do have such capacitors now, called "supercapacitors", normally used for unpowered memory retention in digital devices. But even before the supercapacitors hit the market, it'd have to be a pretty poor EE to not know about this, because any decent college has EEs building real circuits and working with real components in classes long before graduating.
The problem with this mozumder idiot is that he doesn't even make any logical sense: he's simultaneously arguing for and against the same thing. He argues against mass distribution and centralized control of culture, and then turns around and argues for it by pushing his elitist "professional tastemakers" and arguing how everything was better back in the days of mass distribution and centralized control of culture. It's not like Hollywood made different movies for different regions back before the internet.
There were lots of great movies and music in the 50s-80s; there was also tons of trash. We tend to remember the great stuff and forget about the trash. Has everyone forgotten about Backstreet Boys? They were very popular (among teenage girls) when I was in high school. Or how about disco? Or patent leather (aka vinyl) jackets? I saw an old Vincent Price horror movie from the 50s a while ago (something about a house on a hill), and was shocked at just how bad it was; it was like the Michael Bay movie of its day (but with lame "horror" scenes/effects rather than explosions), yet it was faithfully colorized and treated as some kind of classic with a new DVD release.
The big difference I see now with music is that record companies, and also movie companies, have become extremely risk-averse in comparison to the 60s-80s. No one wants to make a movie unless it's definitely going to make all the money back, so we see a steady stream of remakes of older classics/hits (and some not-so-old, like the recent Spider-Man remake, or worse the Hulk remake that came only a couple years after Ang Lee's version), movies based on comic books, and sequel after sequel (or prequel). Any truly different and inventive movies are either 1) funded by one rich guy willing to take a big risk with his personal cash, like Cameron's Avatar, or 2) low-budget dramas or indie movies that by their nature don't need a big budget for effects or sets, as they're set in modern times and might have non-A-list actors, so they just don't cost much to make.
but does have a grain of truth to it (e.g. large group of people preferring the "fast-food culture").
Large groups of people have preferred the "fast-food culture" since the 50s. The internet only became a public forum around 1995, yet crappy fast-food restaurants and other elements of homogeneous consumer culture were dominant ever since the 50s and 60s.
Trains between cities can be helpful, but you still wind up with the problem of needing to rent a car when you get there if the public transit isn't up to snuff. There aren't many cities where it is. I was planning to attend a trade show in Boston earlier this month, and did a little searching on Google maps to see where I could stay in a nearby hotel and use public transit to get to the convention center, and figured out it was pointless, that I was better off just driving to the convention center and staying at a hotel way out of town. The public transit there isn't cheap or convenient at all.
I haven't been to SanFran yet (only to places like Mountain View and San Jose), but Manhattan is the only place in the US where I've found it's perfectly feasible and sensible to arrive in town by train or air, and then get around using public transit. Even then, the transition totally sucks: if you go by air, there's no subway connection between any of the airports and the regular Manhattan subways, so you either have to take a horrifically expensive cab, or an overpriced train. All the trains going into Manhattan (either NJ Transit or MTA's Long Island Railway) are expensive and slow, and there's no "transfer" discount (discount for using both the train and the subway/bus systems). Worse, the subways have gotten really expensive in the last decade it seems; I remember getting a week-long unlimited ride pass for only $17 when I spent a week in NYC back in 2000. There's nothing remotely that cheap now; you'll pay at least $2.25 per ride now.
Having a higher density of stations or bus stop locations makes things worse, because each stop slows down the overall trip. It's the whole reason no one takes Greyhound buses except felons and illegals: it takes days to get anywhere, because instead of a straight trip between your location and the destination, it takes a meandering route to dozens of out-of-the-way little towns. This is why they have "express" bus routes and subways, but again this only helps if you and your destination happen to be located conveniently so that you can take advantage of this.
With a fully-automated "pod" system like SkyTran, none of these issues would matter. You'd get in a little car, give it a destination address, and it'd take you directly there, with no stops, no stopping to let other people on and off, no traffic lights, etc. Given how much public transit costs (buses don't cost that much, but rail-based systems do, and subways cost an absolute fortune thanks to the tunneling), and how much regular roads and highways cost, it's insane that we aren't investigating higher-tech solutions like this. Even West Virginia U. deployed a system somewhat like this way back in the 70s, and it's still being used now to good effect.
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It probably doesn't work that way. With a lot of industrial robotic equipment, the software is supplied along with the equipment, by the vendor. Who wrote the software? Who knows, but it's the equipment vendor that supplied it, as part of a turn-key package. And for some reason, a lot of industrial equipment is stuck on Windows 2000 and sometimes XP, even for brand-new stuff. So you can't just contact the software developers; you can contact the equipment vendor, and they'll try to sell you a new piece of equipment for $500K that uses the up-to-date Windows XP OS () to replace your current equipment that uses Win2000 or Win98 or DOS. Of course, XP is already woefully obsolete and at EOL, but they don't care.
Now why industrial automation equipment is running Windows instead of Linux, I have no idea, but that's the way it is for most of them.
It doesn't matter if the vendors have sane reasons or just pure greed for EOLing products and support: when you buy a product or support for something, there's a risk the vendor will EOL it at some time because they want to move on to something better, or it's obsolete, or they just want more money for something newer. That's what happens when you're reliant on an outside vendor for something. So you either need to make yourself totally self-sufficient so that you don't rely on a vendor for anything critical, or you need to anticipate that at some point, the rug is going to be pulled out from under you, and prepare for it.
If nothing else, at some point equipment stops working due to age. Commodity stuff frequently can't be easily repaired and parts might not be available if it's too old. You can't buy new computers with XP any more (I don't believe). So as long as you're tied to a proprietary vendor, you're tied to its upgrade cycle, more or less. If these companies were all running on Linux they wouldn't have this problem as much since the ABI for Linux hasn't changed in ages and ages (as long as your application is statically-linked, and not relying on some open-source libraries that change over time, although even there it's frequently not that hard to maintain backwards compatibilty), but with Windows, you can't run Office 2003 on Windows 8 for instance.
And for just wanting email and Office 2003 to work, that might be asking too much: luckily, email hasn't changed in ages, and probably won't, but with most other things, you have to keep up with the times to some extent. It might be OK to keep running Office 2003 indefinitely in your organization if you never exchange files with anyone else, but if you have to send, or more importantly, receive files from other companies, your software has to be able to read their files, and Office 2003 can't read the latest Office 2013 (or whatever it's up to now) file formats. It's like this with other application-specific files as well. Same goes for web browsers: if your company refuses to budge from IE6, your employees are going to have a hard time viewing many modern web sites which use HTML5, PNG images, and haven't bothered with any IE6-specific hacks. When you need to be able to communicate with the outside world, you have to run software that lets you do that, and decade-old software many times won't.
You have a point about the crappy ActiveX type software doing its job, and "don't fix it if it ain't broke". However, the problem is that while the IE6-specific software may still do the job fine, the foundations it's sitting on do not work any more: IE6 isn't supported any more, it doesn't work with newer Windows versions, and you can't continue to run commodity PC hardware indefinitely. Even if you could, if it's on a network, there's serious security concerns, and WinXP isn't supported any more. Finally, part of the deal with modern computers is that you frequently want to do different things on them: you don't want a separate PC on your desk for every application you run. VMs can help with this last problem however, to an extent, at the expense of additional complexity.
The fundamental problem here is basing one piece of technology (the custom ActiveX-requiring software) on other pieces of technology that become obsolete and are no longer supported. This is the risk you take when you base your technology on other proprietary technology (in this case, software): you're relying on some other vendor to continue to produce and support that product, so that you can base your product off of it. If these software makers had shunned ActiveX and based their product on some industry or open standard instead, they wouldn't have this problem, and it would have been easy to migrate their product to newer OSes.
It's not just software where this happens. Any time one company bases their product on another company's product, there's a risk that other product may be modified to the point where it becomes necessary for the first company to update their product to fit, or if it's discontinued entirely, they may have to come up with a totally different solution.
Small and Medium-sized Businesses. Basically all the companies which aren't megacorps.
Did you try WINE for your proprietary apps? They may or may not work in it, but it's worth a shot.
Newer PCs had different form factors, internal arrangement of components, or were generally more compact than this particular model of PS/1 (iirc) way back then. It took years to refit the cards, and move off these old PCs.... so much of the business relied on them.
This goes to show why you should never rely on PCs this way. When you're going to design custom hardware for PCs, you have to assume the PC itself will become obsolete in 5 years or so, and you should keep things modular. So instead of making some custom PCI card with a bunch of relays on it, you make a custom PCI card that fits into a standard chassis, and have a cable that goes from this card to an external box that has all your custom circuitry in it. You can make this external box as robust and environment-proof as you like: there's lots of industrial-grade cabinets and boxes available out there that are fully sealed against dust, humidity, etc. Then, years down the road, if you need to upgrade the PC (because the power supply failed and you can't find a replacement, for instance), you can just stick the standard-size PCI card in a new PC, or in the worst case, design a new card for the latest interface (PCI-X, PCIe, USB2/3, FireWire, etc.) that makes sense, and reuse your existing box of custom circuitry.
This isn't unique to PCs: you should never rely on an external vendor to that degree, because products and product lines come and go, and you may not be able to get spare parts later on. If you keep everything as modular as possible, you minimize your risk. Use off-the-shelf stuff as much as possible (to minimize cost, and make it easy to get spare parts: ATX power supplies for instance haven't changed in ages so it's better to go with a whitebox solution than some proprietary chassis and PS if you want longevity), and keep your custom-built stuff separate from it, and connected to it through standard interfaces.
I'm glad for this egotism. I hope MS stays the course and tells the users to fuck right off, and that they're going to get used to Metro whether they like it or not.
I'm enjoying this train wreck and I don't want it to end prematurely. Maybe MS can hire some of the GNOME developers and adopt their attitudes toward users and customization, and hopefully insert new code into this upcoming update to disable "Start8" and other such add-ons, to force users to use Metro.
If you replace your old CRT monitor and TV, you'll probably recoup their cost in power savings within a year. Heck, just get some used LCD models off Craigslist for next-to-nothing.
no way in hell folks are gonna start paying a grand a pop for a MSFT branded PC, not gonna happen.
They sure are trying to emulate Apple though; just look at their Microsoft mall stores.
Ok, then how do you control your HVAC in an S60 when you replace the stereo? On the Volvos, the stereos and the HVAC controls are one in the same.
There's nothing really special about the hard drives used in those kinds of laptops; they just enclose them in a rubber "glove" which fits into a holder that goes into the CD/DVD slot on the normal model.
People here seem to think that Dell has its own hard drive manufacturing facility that makes super-special hard drives just for cop cars. That's not the case; there's only two hard drive makers left in the world now IIRC, and they're all the same.
In software, yes. After all, you can always just push software updates over the internet these days to fix any bugs, and being first-to-market is more important for profitability than having something solid and reliable, unfortunate as that is.
Hardware is another story. Intel for instance has a large army of engineers who exhaustively validate their CPUs with a lot of automated testing. One of the big reasons Intel is so intent on this: remember the old FDIV bug? Replacing millions of buggy CPUs is very expensive.
The whole idea is utterly stupid. It's bad enough that people become hyper-specialized during the course of their careers, but asking 18-year-olds to decide on which exact specialty they want makes no sense at all. That's why university degrees are supposed to give you a broad foundation, with only a certain amount of specialization in an undergrad major (and only in the last two years there usually). Furthermore, as you point out, having EEs get the same degree and specialize later works just fine, and for good reason: you need to understand how stuff works in order to test it properly.
A class on software testing in the CS curriculum would make a lot of sense, but a whole separate degree is ridiculous.
Exactly. They weren't something a typical engineering company's parts department would have in stock to be used in prototyping.
Why would a CS graduate talk about electricity, except maybe that the computer needs to be plugged in. You don't need to know anything about electricity to use a computer, except how to plug it in, which anyone knows these days.
You wouldn't expect auto mechanics to be experts in tribology (the study of oil) or suspension design or ECU programming or the manufacture of auto glass, so why would you expect a CS graduate to know any more about electricity than an average layman?
You have a good point here with all the non-programming questions (visas, language, security clearance, etc.). Not so sure about the preset questions though. Someone will probably complain that a Java programmer doesn't need to know the primitive types, and that's an unfair question.
In my interview example above, one of my questions was to ask them (people who claimed to be C++ experts) what a "class" was. Most couldn't tell me. In previous posts on Slashdot, I was told that's an unfair question.
They're a significant part of American society. They even have churches telling people that poor people are poor because God doesn't like them as much as rich people.
Having HR do any kind of interviewing is a waste of time. I had to participate in some hiring of contractors at one job, where a group of us full-timers would together interview the candidate over the phone and then vote on him/her. The candidates were all pre-screened by HR, who assured us they were good candidates. Many of them, we found, had completely lied on their resumes and didn't know the basic things they claimed to know (like C++).
HR just looks at resumes, compares to some buzzwords, and thinks that's that.
They don't teach anything about electricity in Computer Science classes. Would you expect a Theater or Mathematics or Business major to know better?
If that joke is actually based on reality (which I seriously doubt), that EE should have his degree revoked. You don't need any practical experience to know that resistors are not polarized circuit elements; they teach this in Circuits 201, the first EE course taught (the freshman year is all general engineering courses).
The usual joke about EEs used to be about a fresh EE going to work and being sent to the parts department of his company by his coworkers to retrieve a 1 farad capacitor, since supposedly EE grads didn't have any practical experience and wouldn't know that capacitors don't come in sizes that large, even though many of his sophomore-year problems dealt with sizes in that range for convenience. Of course, the joke is now obsolete since they really do have such capacitors now, called "supercapacitors", normally used for unpowered memory retention in digital devices. But even before the supercapacitors hit the market, it'd have to be a pretty poor EE to not know about this, because any decent college has EEs building real circuits and working with real components in classes long before graduating.
You attitude is why we have abominations like Unity, Gnome3, and Windows8/Metro now.
The problem with this mozumder idiot is that he doesn't even make any logical sense: he's simultaneously arguing for and against the same thing. He argues against mass distribution and centralized control of culture, and then turns around and argues for it by pushing his elitist "professional tastemakers" and arguing how everything was better back in the days of mass distribution and centralized control of culture. It's not like Hollywood made different movies for different regions back before the internet.
There were lots of great movies and music in the 50s-80s; there was also tons of trash. We tend to remember the great stuff and forget about the trash. Has everyone forgotten about Backstreet Boys? They were very popular (among teenage girls) when I was in high school. Or how about disco? Or patent leather (aka vinyl) jackets? I saw an old Vincent Price horror movie from the 50s a while ago (something about a house on a hill), and was shocked at just how bad it was; it was like the Michael Bay movie of its day (but with lame "horror" scenes/effects rather than explosions), yet it was faithfully colorized and treated as some kind of classic with a new DVD release.
The big difference I see now with music is that record companies, and also movie companies, have become extremely risk-averse in comparison to the 60s-80s. No one wants to make a movie unless it's definitely going to make all the money back, so we see a steady stream of remakes of older classics/hits (and some not-so-old, like the recent Spider-Man remake, or worse the Hulk remake that came only a couple years after Ang Lee's version), movies based on comic books, and sequel after sequel (or prequel). Any truly different and inventive movies are either 1) funded by one rich guy willing to take a big risk with his personal cash, like Cameron's Avatar, or 2) low-budget dramas or indie movies that by their nature don't need a big budget for effects or sets, as they're set in modern times and might have non-A-list actors, so they just don't cost much to make.
but does have a grain of truth to it (e.g. large group of people preferring the "fast-food culture").
Large groups of people have preferred the "fast-food culture" since the 50s. The internet only became a public forum around 1995, yet crappy fast-food restaurants and other elements of homogeneous consumer culture were dominant ever since the 50s and 60s.
Trains between cities can be helpful, but you still wind up with the problem of needing to rent a car when you get there if the public transit isn't up to snuff. There aren't many cities where it is. I was planning to attend a trade show in Boston earlier this month, and did a little searching on Google maps to see where I could stay in a nearby hotel and use public transit to get to the convention center, and figured out it was pointless, that I was better off just driving to the convention center and staying at a hotel way out of town. The public transit there isn't cheap or convenient at all.
I haven't been to SanFran yet (only to places like Mountain View and San Jose), but Manhattan is the only place in the US where I've found it's perfectly feasible and sensible to arrive in town by train or air, and then get around using public transit. Even then, the transition totally sucks: if you go by air, there's no subway connection between any of the airports and the regular Manhattan subways, so you either have to take a horrifically expensive cab, or an overpriced train. All the trains going into Manhattan (either NJ Transit or MTA's Long Island Railway) are expensive and slow, and there's no "transfer" discount (discount for using both the train and the subway/bus systems). Worse, the subways have gotten really expensive in the last decade it seems; I remember getting a week-long unlimited ride pass for only $17 when I spent a week in NYC back in 2000. There's nothing remotely that cheap now; you'll pay at least $2.25 per ride now.
Having a higher density of stations or bus stop locations makes things worse, because each stop slows down the overall trip. It's the whole reason no one takes Greyhound buses except felons and illegals: it takes days to get anywhere, because instead of a straight trip between your location and the destination, it takes a meandering route to dozens of out-of-the-way little towns. This is why they have "express" bus routes and subways, but again this only helps if you and your destination happen to be located conveniently so that you can take advantage of this.
With a fully-automated "pod" system like SkyTran, none of these issues would matter. You'd get in a little car, give it a destination address, and it'd take you directly there, with no stops, no stopping to let other people on and off, no traffic lights, etc. Given how much public transit costs (buses don't cost that much, but rail-based systems do, and subways cost an absolute fortune thanks to the tunneling), and how much regular roads and highways cost, it's insane that we aren't investigating higher-tech solutions like this. Even West Virginia U. deployed a system somewhat like this way back in the 70s, and it's still being used now to good effect.