Funny this should come up, but didn't HP just license production of the iPod from Apple? That doesn't sound like innovation...
To me, it seems like what Dell does IS a form of innovation. Sure, they don't invent new consumer technologies, but they seem to lead the pack in inventing ways to mass-produce them cheaply. In the end, that may be the more important strategy for a busuiness' success- like Microsoft, Dell will continue to take other people's ideas and find a way to be the biggest seller of them. C'est la vie, no?
Free Wi-Fi is ubiquitous here in Austin. You have to pay at chain places like Starbuck's, but independent coffee shops are everywhere, and most of them offer free Wi-Fi. Walk into any coffee shop near campus or central Austin and you'll see loads of glowing Apples (the lids of powerbooks)...
let's hope these make it to market soon, and that they are cheap when they get here. this is a huge leap in efficiency, and if the price is right, it could be quite competitive with other forms of energy. this would reduce our dependence on foreign oil and could stimulate our semiconductor industry if production really took off.
they need to figure out a way to make solar cells in more complex shapes. It even with current solar cells, the efficiency is great enough to make a decent commuter car, so long as it's covered with cells. It's not like it won't be spending most of the day in a parking lot somewhere. But a car covered with PV cells can be pretty ugly- if high efficiency PV's could be formed into body panels, particularly if combined with something like BP Solar's Laser Grooved Buried Grid (LGBG) process which hides the bus bars and allows for different colors, a normal-looking solar-powered car could be possible.
Part 15 of the FCC regulations allow the unlicensed broadcast within the FM band using devices producing less than.01 microwatts (coverage radius around 200 ft) This usually only gets used for devices like those little FM transmitters that let you listen to your portable devices in your car.
What I'm wondering is if anyone has considered using an array of these devices, tuned to the same frequency, scattered across a city or campus, and connected to computers/devices streaming audio from the internet to effectively create a distributed FM radio station. It doesn't seem like it would violate FCC rules.
Say some friends of mine and I collaborate to create an internet radio station and we just happen to want to listen to it on our stereos in our dorm rooms, which happen to be scattered across campus, and we happen to be too lazy to run patch cables from our computers to our stereos, so we use ultra-low power FM transmitters instead. Anything wrong with that?
How about creating small, specialized hardware that just serve this purpose? I imagine little box that use the unlicensed portion of the spectrum (wi-fi) to repeat the digital signal and simultaneously broadcast the FM signal on a fixed frequency.
In fact, one may well decide to exceed the legal limits at this point, as it could be so decentralized as to impede any prosecution anyway...
last time i checked, immortality was a boolean kind of thing- you can't be semi-immortal any more than you can be semi-dead.
...this reminds me of that Seinfeld where Jerry was arguing with George about the possibility of over-drying his clothes-
GEORGE ...Your stuff has to be done by now. Why don't you just see if it's dry? Just--you know--
JERRY
No, no, no! Don't interrupt the cycle. The machine is working! It--it knows what it's doing; just let it finish.
GEORGE
You're gonna over dry it.
JERRY
Ya--Ya can't over dry.
GEORGE
Why not?!
JERRY
Same reason you can't over wet. See, once something is wet, it's Wet. Same thing with Death. Like, once you die, you're dead. Right? Let's say you drop dead an' I shoot you. You're not gonna die again; you're already dead! Ya can't over die, ya can't over dry!
tiny electric motor? with a drivetrain? that wouldn't be my first thought... seems like they could make the sole out of something spongelike containing magnetorheological fluids and some electomagnets to vary the stiffness and sponginess
a nice lot of theory there, but you're wrong anyway. look closely (like with a good magnifying glass) at a color photo in a newspaper or in a book. anything printed offset uses halftones. the colors DON'T overlap.
this technology has a little way to go yet before it really kicks ass. for one, they don't have color yet, and secondly, the contrast ratio isn't that great- it looks more like black on grey than black on white. in another couple years, i bet they'll have this with higher resolution, higher contrast, and full color, and probably fast enough to do any computer activity on it. What will also be really cool would/will be full bleed- no more frames around your screen- image from edge to edge.
This technology is what will hopefully finally make the paperless office a reality. Portable, high resolution reflective displays. Right now, we probably use more paper than ever, because technology allows us to communicate as much as we want, but we hate reading it on the screen...
I think it's just the evolutionary way of the business world, particularly with regard to any new territory. New technology comes out, a large number of competitors enter the market, one or two end up winning and buying out the others, liquidate their assets, and then the unemployed go on to find a new tech to exploit.
Speaking of which, I'm temping right now at Origin's offices here in Austin, cleaning out all the leftovers. Can you say free goodies!? Man, it may be a week at $10/hr, but when you count all the crap I'm getting to take home, this job has been one of the best paying I've had in a long time...
you joke, but the porn industry are often the early adopters. i wouldn't be surprised to see it. although, it had better be something better than stuff made in Poser...
Windows XP is a pale imitation of VMS and MacOS.
MacOS X is a pale imitation of BSD and NeXTStep.
You say that, but MacOS, and even Windows, made their own improvements on what they were imitating. That's not a "pale imitation". I agree that it's all about evolutionary improvements, but all Lindows/Linspire is doing is making inferior knockoffs in order to get publicity by getting sued. Everything they've made has been a step BACKWARD. There are no evolutionary improvements going on here, just pale imitation. Why not come up with a completely novel interface that changes the whole paradigm?
i'm kinda sick of hearing about Lindows/Linspire. why can't these guys come up with their own original ideas instead of stealing others'? there's way too much of this going on in the Linux community, and these guys make it look like that's all Linux is- a pale imitation of the other OSes...
how much does it cost you to watch commercial tv? when you consider wasted hours of mindless channel flipping and being persuaded to buy crap you don't need, i'd say it might be a bargain to get a channel worth of tv that's not encumbered with all that crap for $5/mo...
a la carte would be a good thing, in the end, for the quality of programming- it might get us more commercial-free tv, too. look at the quality of the programming on HBO compared to the rest of TV. now, if we can get a la carte programs. I'd pay a few bucks to subscribe to a season of the Sopranos and not get Sex in The City...
Maybe I'll draw the ire of some people by saying it, but there's no point in going to either of the places at the moment. The first Moon mission served a second person- proving to the USSR that we had ICBM capability and would dominate space. Going to the Moon or Mars does not prove any new strategic capability.
I think the main motivating factor for the Bush administration pushing this (in words, at least, if not with their money) is to give the appearance of having "vision". They think it will give them the same "visionary appeal" that Kennedy got for going to the Moon the first time.
The problem is that visionaries don't COPY others. This makes Bush the visionary equivalent of Bill Gates. I think if he were a true visionary, he'd push a big artificial intelligence or robotics program. I look at the amazing things coming out of Japan and wonder where the US will be in a few more years of not keeping up with Japan's progress. I think it is to the US's advantage that Japan has disavowed military aggression, because who knows what their robots will be capable of soon. Regardless, the US economy will be SCREWED if they develop artificial intelligence or fully automated robotic production before we do.
And Japan is getting to this point because they have the vision to see that this is worth investing in, even though it may not reap rewards in the short-term.
If you are using outlook on our desktop, speed is the least of your concerns...:-)
True- fortunately, security doesn't seem that bad to me. I have used it (microsoft gives away the latest office and other software to students at my university and many others for $5-15) for years now and haven't had a single problem with security. Anyone with half a brain knows how to spot a virus, how to avoid getting sent them in the first place, how to run an av scanner for e-mail, have windows update run itself. It's effortless I really think a lot of y'all OSS'ers make a bigger deal of this than it really is.
What inevitably irritates me whenever I try OSS programs is the design. I'm talking about the user interface, functionality, etc. (There are exceptions to this, of course- for the most part, I have found Firefox to be far more advanced and fun to use than IE) I have to say that Outlook is a lot less bothersome sometimes than the open source alternatives. I've tried Thunderbird- Seems to be lacking in plug-ins right now. No easy way to set up message handling rules. Not nearly as handy as Outlook w/Spambayes Plug-in.
This bugs me about Linux as well, although it's getting better all the time- most of the programs available to Linux are still far behind in functionality and clean, consistent design. I'm sorry, but Gimp ain't no Photoshop, and there isn't anything on the level of Premiere or Illustrator. These are essential programs one has to have- a computer is a tool for storing and manipulating information, and the vast majority of users (unlike the vast majority of programmers) think about it visually. The functioning of an OS should be to present all this information and the users' manipulation of it in a way that visually reflects a consistent information environment in order for them to be able to interact intuitively.
I have to say that right now Windows is, at least for me, still the most intuitively consistent and usable. Apple has some great ideas and always looks beautiful, but often sacrifices usability for gloss. I'm still annoyed at the one-button no-scroll mouse- that's like chopping half of my fingers off! A lot of OSS programs have features that are really cool that the competitors don't have, problem is that so many of the individual programmers have their own unique interface ideas that all the programs are different.
What OSS needs is an open system for democratically debating and defining a single user interface standard that everyone can agree upon. Something sort of like a Slashdot/shared document editing thing where anyone can contribute and moderate eachother in the design process. Then get people to start thinking about stuff from a visual and user-oriented approach- quit playing games and reading sci-fi and start reading Donald Norman, Jakob Nielsen, Edward Tufte, Bruce Tognazzini (although he's the one responsible for the one-button mouse -grr!), Jef Raskin, Robert Bringhurst, etc. The OSS should be a community that discusses what we do with our computers and how it would be best to do it.
What I would like to see, and OSS has the best chance of making it, is an operating system wherein the programs don't exist anymore. I would like to see a single interface for all document manipulation. Where I don't have to start up this program or that depending upon whether I'm messing with an image, sound, video, document, program, or whatever.
How about iconic contextual menus that pop up around the mouse when the user right-clicks or middle-clicks that display ones options within the selected document and within the filesystem on another. In a gesture-like way, after the menu pops up, they drag to choose the tool or function they want from this ring by drawing lines to the icons. Each tool/function has its own icon with a tooltip that appears below the ring. Submenus appear as further concentric rings. The gestures are the same for the same function- the gesture for copy is the same whether one is manipulating a text docu
true, but google seems to be the one company that has managed to really make money with advertising on the internet. consider their constant creativity and innovation in what they provide the users and realize that they do the same thing for their customers- the advertisers, as well as themselves. I'm sure they've worked out how to make advertising profit them as much as possible, just like they've figured out how to do it without pissing users off. The reason gmail will be wildly profitable for them is that they'll have the same non-intrusive AdWords/AdSense ads based on a scan of the words in your e-mail. I'll take that- they'll probably be extremely successful at blocking spam.
I imagine the client interface will also be as fast and powerful as google, too. A lot of the reason why I've hated web-based e-mail in the past is that (at least with a lot of the larger services like yahoo and microsoft) they're f'in SLOW. Google has the server infrastructure to make it fast, and because they'll be using text-based ads and probably a google-esqe lightweight interface it may just be faster than using Outlook on my desktop.
I'm sure their other incentive is that this would give them a lot more information to work with. Consider their creation of Orkut- they want more info to tie together. Having your e-mail means having who you e-mail. Sort of an auto-social-networking tool... I'm sure they'll figure out more cool stuff to do with the information they get from your e-mail.
IANAM (Motorcyclist), but I would like to see a picture or some footage of someone actually driving this thing... it looks like it would be really difficult to balance and steer... maybe it's just me
who said anything about abandoning autonomy? what i'm suggesting is the best of both worlds- an autonomous driverless car that can go anywhere a car that has a driver can go today.
yeah... busses... like in most cities, where you have to find a bus stop, wait for who knows how long for the bus to arrive as it's never on schedule, make sure you get on the right one going the right way, probably have to transfer multiple times, and when it does arrive it is loud, noisy, and uncomfortable, it offers you no privacy and it is often so packed that you have to stand up the whole time, right next to some wino who wants to talk? where it takes five times as long to get where you're going as it does by car, and then it only drops you off at the nearest bus stop, so you better live and want to go somewhere near where a bus runs? No, this is not what I'm talking about at all... Have you ever ridden the bus??
Unless you were going FROM the middle of nowhere TO the heart of the city; most places I'm aware of have an hour of more of travel time between those two locations. At least the hearts of major cities. Perhaps you're talking about Larry Niven's teleport booths?
uh, no- the idea of traffic would be practically non-existent in a world full of self-driving cars. at least, we would be limited by the physical restraints of the roads and not the compounded chaotic result of millions of human interactions. At this same point, speed limits could be raised significantly. So, I can easily live in a place that today might take 2-3 hours for me to get to/from during rush hour because when you can travel at 120 mph w/no traffic, it may only take 15-20 min...
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Funny this should come up, but didn't HP just license production of the iPod from Apple? That doesn't sound like innovation... To me, it seems like what Dell does IS a form of innovation. Sure, they don't invent new consumer technologies, but they seem to lead the pack in inventing ways to mass-produce them cheaply. In the end, that may be the more important strategy for a busuiness' success- like Microsoft, Dell will continue to take other people's ideas and find a way to be the biggest seller of them. C'est la vie, no?
...perhaps it's similar to schnockered?
Free Wi-Fi is ubiquitous here in Austin. You have to pay at chain places like Starbuck's, but independent coffee shops are everywhere, and most of them offer free Wi-Fi. Walk into any coffee shop near campus or central Austin and you'll see loads of glowing Apples (the lids of powerbooks)...
let's hope these make it to market soon, and that they are cheap when they get here. this is a huge leap in efficiency, and if the price is right, it could be quite competitive with other forms of energy. this would reduce our dependence on foreign oil and could stimulate our semiconductor industry if production really took off.
they need to figure out a way to make solar cells in more complex shapes. It even with current solar cells, the efficiency is great enough to make a decent commuter car, so long as it's covered with cells. It's not like it won't be spending most of the day in a parking lot somewhere. But a car covered with PV cells can be pretty ugly- if high efficiency PV's could be formed into body panels, particularly if combined with something like BP Solar's Laser Grooved Buried Grid (LGBG) process which hides the bus bars and allows for different colors, a normal-looking solar-powered car could be possible.
Part 15 of the FCC regulations allow the unlicensed broadcast within the FM band using devices producing less than .01 microwatts (coverage radius around 200 ft) This usually only gets used for devices like those little FM transmitters that let you listen to your portable devices in your car.
What I'm wondering is if anyone has considered using an array of these devices, tuned to the same frequency, scattered across a city or campus, and connected to computers/devices streaming audio from the internet to effectively create a distributed FM radio station. It doesn't seem like it would violate FCC rules.
Say some friends of mine and I collaborate to create an internet radio station and we just happen to want to listen to it on our stereos in our dorm rooms, which happen to be scattered across campus, and we happen to be too lazy to run patch cables from our computers to our stereos, so we use ultra-low power FM transmitters instead. Anything wrong with that?
How about creating small, specialized hardware that just serve this purpose? I imagine little box that use the unlicensed portion of the spectrum (wi-fi) to repeat the digital signal and simultaneously broadcast the FM signal on a fixed frequency.
In fact, one may well decide to exceed the legal limits at this point, as it could be so decentralized as to impede any prosecution anyway...
>Ever wonder about the reason why the fan is sitting there right on top of the processor?
It's like a hat for it, right? So it looks stylish. Otherwise the RAM will laugh at it...
yeah, it's like a beanie with a propeller- since the processor is the "brains" of the computer, it's kind of the nerd of the bunch...
last time i checked, immortality was a boolean kind of thing- you can't be semi-immortal any more than you can be semi-dead.
...this reminds me of that Seinfeld where Jerry was arguing with George about the possibility of over-drying his clothes-
...Your stuff has to be done by now. Why don't you just see if it's dry? Just--you know--
GEORGE
JERRY
No, no, no! Don't interrupt the cycle. The machine is working! It--it knows what it's doing; just let it finish.
GEORGE
You're gonna over dry it.
JERRY
Ya--Ya can't over dry.
GEORGE
Why not?!
JERRY
Same reason you can't over wet. See, once something is wet, it's Wet. Same thing with Death. Like, once you die, you're dead. Right? Let's say you drop dead an' I shoot you. You're not gonna die again; you're already dead! Ya can't over die, ya can't over dry!
tiny electric motor? with a drivetrain? that wouldn't be my first thought... seems like they could make the sole out of something spongelike containing magnetorheological fluids and some electomagnets to vary the stiffness and sponginess
but it looks like all they've got right now is sprite...
a nice lot of theory there, but you're wrong anyway. look closely (like with a good magnifying glass) at a color photo in a newspaper or in a book. anything printed offset uses halftones. the colors DON'T overlap.
this technology has a little way to go yet before it really kicks ass. for one, they don't have color yet, and secondly, the contrast ratio isn't that great- it looks more like black on grey than black on white. in another couple years, i bet they'll have this with higher resolution, higher contrast, and full color, and probably fast enough to do any computer activity on it. What will also be really cool would/will be full bleed- no more frames around your screen- image from edge to edge. This technology is what will hopefully finally make the paperless office a reality. Portable, high resolution reflective displays. Right now, we probably use more paper than ever, because technology allows us to communicate as much as we want, but we hate reading it on the screen...
I think it's just the evolutionary way of the business world, particularly with regard to any new territory. New technology comes out, a large number of competitors enter the market, one or two end up winning and buying out the others, liquidate their assets, and then the unemployed go on to find a new tech to exploit.
Speaking of which, I'm temping right now at Origin's offices here in Austin, cleaning out all the leftovers. Can you say free goodies!? Man, it may be a week at $10/hr, but when you count all the crap I'm getting to take home, this job has been one of the best paying I've had in a long time...
you joke, but the porn industry are often the early adopters. i wouldn't be surprised to see it. although, it had better be something better than stuff made in Poser...
Windows XP is a pale imitation of VMS and MacOS.
MacOS X is a pale imitation of BSD and NeXTStep.
You say that, but MacOS, and even Windows, made their own improvements on what they were imitating. That's not a "pale imitation". I agree that it's all about evolutionary improvements, but all Lindows/Linspire is doing is making inferior knockoffs in order to get publicity by getting sued. Everything they've made has been a step BACKWARD. There are no evolutionary improvements going on here, just pale imitation. Why not come up with a completely novel interface that changes the whole paradigm?
i'm kinda sick of hearing about Lindows/Linspire. why can't these guys come up with their own original ideas instead of stealing others'? there's way too much of this going on in the Linux community, and these guys make it look like that's all Linux is- a pale imitation of the other OSes...
how much does it cost you to watch commercial tv? when you consider wasted hours of mindless channel flipping and being persuaded to buy crap you don't need, i'd say it might be a bargain to get a channel worth of tv that's not encumbered with all that crap for $5/mo...
a la carte would be a good thing, in the end, for the quality of programming- it might get us more commercial-free tv, too. look at the quality of the programming on HBO compared to the rest of TV. now, if we can get a la carte programs. I'd pay a few bucks to subscribe to a season of the Sopranos and not get Sex in The City...
So how many LoC's is the LoC, if we count using the paper in the LoC like this? That's a lot of info...
I like "L i n d o uu s". We do call it a double-u, do we not?
Maybe I'll draw the ire of some people by saying it, but there's no point in going to either of the places at the moment. The first Moon mission served a second person- proving to the USSR that we had ICBM capability and would dominate space. Going to the Moon or Mars does not prove any new strategic capability.
I think the main motivating factor for the Bush administration pushing this (in words, at least, if not with their money) is to give the appearance of having "vision". They think it will give them the same "visionary appeal" that Kennedy got for going to the Moon the first time.
The problem is that visionaries don't COPY others. This makes Bush the visionary equivalent of Bill Gates. I think if he were a true visionary, he'd push a big artificial intelligence or robotics program. I look at the amazing things coming out of Japan and wonder where the US will be in a few more years of not keeping up with Japan's progress. I think it is to the US's advantage that Japan has disavowed military aggression, because who knows what their robots will be capable of soon. Regardless, the US economy will be SCREWED if they develop artificial intelligence or fully automated robotic production before we do.
And Japan is getting to this point because they have the vision to see that this is worth investing in, even though it may not reap rewards in the short-term.
If you are using outlook on our desktop, speed is the least of your concerns... :-)
True- fortunately, security doesn't seem that bad to me. I have used it (microsoft gives away the latest office and other software to students at my university and many others for $5-15) for years now and haven't had a single problem with security. Anyone with half a brain knows how to spot a virus, how to avoid getting sent them in the first place, how to run an av scanner for e-mail, have windows update run itself. It's effortless I really think a lot of y'all OSS'ers make a bigger deal of this than it really is.
What inevitably irritates me whenever I try OSS programs is the design. I'm talking about the user interface, functionality, etc. (There are exceptions to this, of course- for the most part, I have found Firefox to be far more advanced and fun to use than IE) I have to say that Outlook is a lot less bothersome sometimes than the open source alternatives. I've tried Thunderbird- Seems to be lacking in plug-ins right now. No easy way to set up message handling rules. Not nearly as handy as Outlook w/Spambayes Plug-in.
This bugs me about Linux as well, although it's getting better all the time- most of the programs available to Linux are still far behind in functionality and clean, consistent design. I'm sorry, but Gimp ain't no Photoshop, and there isn't anything on the level of Premiere or Illustrator. These are essential programs one has to have- a computer is a tool for storing and manipulating information, and the vast majority of users (unlike the vast majority of programmers) think about it visually. The functioning of an OS should be to present all this information and the users' manipulation of it in a way that visually reflects a consistent information environment in order for them to be able to interact intuitively.
I have to say that right now Windows is, at least for me, still the most intuitively consistent and usable. Apple has some great ideas and always looks beautiful, but often sacrifices usability for gloss. I'm still annoyed at the one-button no-scroll mouse- that's like chopping half of my fingers off! A lot of OSS programs have features that are really cool that the competitors don't have, problem is that so many of the individual programmers have their own unique interface ideas that all the programs are different.
What OSS needs is an open system for democratically debating and defining a single user interface standard that everyone can agree upon. Something sort of like a Slashdot/shared document editing thing where anyone can contribute and moderate eachother in the design process. Then get people to start thinking about stuff from a visual and user-oriented approach- quit playing games and reading sci-fi and start reading Donald Norman, Jakob Nielsen, Edward Tufte, Bruce Tognazzini (although he's the one responsible for the one-button mouse -grr!), Jef Raskin, Robert Bringhurst, etc. The OSS should be a community that discusses what we do with our computers and how it would be best to do it.
What I would like to see, and OSS has the best chance of making it, is an operating system wherein the programs don't exist anymore. I would like to see a single interface for all document manipulation. Where I don't have to start up this program or that depending upon whether I'm messing with an image, sound, video, document, program, or whatever.
How about iconic contextual menus that pop up around the mouse when the user right-clicks or middle-clicks that display ones options within the selected document and within the filesystem on another. In a gesture-like way, after the menu pops up, they drag to choose the tool or function they want from this ring by drawing lines to the icons. Each tool/function has its own icon with a tooltip that appears below the ring. Submenus appear as further concentric rings. The gestures are the same for the same function- the gesture for copy is the same whether one is manipulating a text docu
true, but google seems to be the one company that has managed to really make money with advertising on the internet. consider their constant creativity and innovation in what they provide the users and realize that they do the same thing for their customers- the advertisers, as well as themselves. I'm sure they've worked out how to make advertising profit them as much as possible, just like they've figured out how to do it without pissing users off. The reason gmail will be wildly profitable for them is that they'll have the same non-intrusive AdWords/AdSense ads based on a scan of the words in your e-mail. I'll take that- they'll probably be extremely successful at blocking spam.
I imagine the client interface will also be as fast and powerful as google, too. A lot of the reason why I've hated web-based e-mail in the past is that (at least with a lot of the larger services like yahoo and microsoft) they're f'in SLOW. Google has the server infrastructure to make it fast, and because they'll be using text-based ads and probably a google-esqe lightweight interface it may just be faster than using Outlook on my desktop.
I'm sure their other incentive is that this would give them a lot more information to work with. Consider their creation of Orkut- they want more info to tie together. Having your e-mail means having who you e-mail. Sort of an auto-social-networking tool... I'm sure they'll figure out more cool stuff to do with the information they get from your e-mail.
The only question is- can they be trusted?
IANAM (Motorcyclist), but I would like to see a picture or some footage of someone actually driving this thing... it looks like it would be really difficult to balance and steer... maybe it's just me
who said anything about abandoning autonomy? what i'm suggesting is the best of both worlds- an autonomous driverless car that can go anywhere a car that has a driver can go today.
yeah... busses... like in most cities, where you have to find a bus stop, wait for who knows how long for the bus to arrive as it's never on schedule, make sure you get on the right one going the right way, probably have to transfer multiple times, and when it does arrive it is loud, noisy, and uncomfortable, it offers you no privacy and it is often so packed that you have to stand up the whole time, right next to some wino who wants to talk? where it takes five times as long to get where you're going as it does by car, and then it only drops you off at the nearest bus stop, so you better live and want to go somewhere near where a bus runs? No, this is not what I'm talking about at all... Have you ever ridden the bus??
Unless you were going FROM the middle of nowhere TO the heart of the city; most places I'm aware of have an hour of more of travel time between those two locations. At least the hearts of major cities. Perhaps you're talking about Larry Niven's teleport booths?
uh, no- the idea of traffic would be practically non-existent in a world full of self-driving cars. at least, we would be limited by the physical restraints of the roads and not the compounded chaotic result of millions of human interactions. At this same point, speed limits could be raised significantly. So, I can easily live in a place that today might take 2-3 hours for me to get to/from during rush hour because when you can travel at 120 mph w/no traffic, it may only take 15-20 min...