Cadillac is ALL about trim level. Check out the Cadillac Escalade EXT pickup truck. It's $65,000, and based on the Chevy Avalanche which is $40,000 for what is, on paper, the same level of capability. The Escalade is $70,000, based on the Chevy Tahoe which is $42,000. Yet the Escalade has been hugely profitable.
As for the Tesla comparison, I doubt most Cadillac buyers are ready to make the jump to an all-electric car, let alone by a manufacturer with such a short track record. I would take the Tesla in a second, but then again, I've never bought a Cadillac either. But people do.
Let's say the analyst has to search a huge area for mobile launchers, and the imagery comes from a satellite with finite bandwidth. Would you rather he search good-quality images of the whole area, or fantastic-quality images of a tiny fraction of the area?
Have you ever played with the compression level on jpg? At some point, enough is enough. Now instead of lossy compression, imagine we're talking about how much radiation to shoot into your nads to get a clean xray. There are diminishing returns on image quality for each doubling of the radiation. Are you still so sure you want to turn it up to 11?
Maybe... in benchmarks the Intel HD 5000 is *much* faster than the 4000, let alone 3000. Then again the Air has a very low-wattage chip so maybe you lose some back to older HD 3000 desktop processors?
I had thought the same, but from the first 3 sentences of "Mesa Introduction" on their homepage, mesa3d.org:
Mesa is an open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification - a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics.
A variety of device drivers allows Mesa to be used in many different environments ranging from software emulation to complete hardware acceleration for modern GPUs.
Mesa ties into several other open-source projects: the Direct Rendering Infrastructure and X.org to provide OpenGL support to users of X on Linux, FreeBSD and other operating systems.
and later on the page...
Mesa is the OpenGL implementation for several types of hardware made by Intel, AMD and NVIDIA, plus the VMware virtual GPU. There's also several software-based renderers
That is why Apple Mac sales are not sinking at the rate all other PC vendors are sinking at. Staying level is a remarkable accomplishment when the rest of the industry is in steep decline.
I don't get it, did you not read the quote in my last post, or what?
But you are wrong in placing blame by implying that remembering the past prevents you from having to repeat it. The fact is that secrets have a shelf life. You can lengthen it, but not too much.
According to Gartner's numbers, the U.S. market held up significantly better than the global market, actually registering a 3.5% increase in shipments led by fourth-place Lenovo's 24.6% gain. For its part, Apple was the only one of the top five vendors to see a year-over-year decline in shipments, falling by 2.3% to take 13.4% of the market. Apple was, however, able to show some relative strength over the previous quarter, using its popularity in education to increase its U.S. share from 11.6% in the second quarter to 13.4% in the back-to-school third quarter.
IDC's numbers painted an even worse picture for Apple, with the company's 11.2% year-over-year decline in U.S. Mac shipments trailing the overall U.S. market, which declined just 0.2%. As in the Gartner survey, third-place Apple, which garnered 11.6% of the U.S. market according to IDC, was the only one of the top five PC manufacturers to see a decline in shipments.
Surely Apple's decline is a result of neglecting their PC line, which is understandable since the iPhone is an unstoppable money-printing machine. So I agree they will probably rebound somewhat by finally refreshing their MacBooks with Haswell processors. (The new pro, I think will be a dud. But the Pro hasn't been a big seller for ages.)
Convergence is all about timing. Wintel had a bad time in mobile so far because mobile devices were compute-constrained, so the chips and software that MS and Intel are so good at didn't work so well. Now that is changing rapidly. With Bay Trail, Intel released the first x86 chip that is really good for tablets, and the cellphone version is due soon.
I am not saying there will be total convergence of the UI, since small screens are a big difference, but a lot more of the guts underneath will converge, and it will just be a matter of the device presenting simpler apps when not connected to a large display.
I think more likely that a wireless screen-casting capability will simply be included in televisions (including the ones in hotels). And a bluetooth keyboards will be there for you on the desk if you want it, like the ironing board in the closet. Your smartphone, or "pocket computer" as Bill Gates called it 20 years ago, won't even need to leave your pocket.
Some of the intractable problems you list sound very doable to me, others less so. But I wanted to point out that every single thing you listed as likely that vehicles will gain in the future, are features they already have - not even on research vehicles, but on production cars from mainstream manufacturers as of 2-5 years ago.
For better and/or worse, collecting and aggregating data is becoming so easy (or practically unavoidable) that I doubt there will be much difference in privacy between manual and automated cars (i.e. if there is any, it will only be by virtue of regulation). Already today, at this moment, most drivers are tracked by the cellphones they carry in their pockets, simply by virtue of associating with the nearest cell tower so incoming calls can be routed to them, and this creates a record of where you go and how fast you are going.
Car automation will have a lot of utility to a lot of people long before it is able to handle the worst winter conditions. But sooner or later an automated car with radar, IR, and visible light sensors ought to be able to see better than a person who only has visible light. (People may get IR heads-up-displays and so forth, but those sensors will be usable by AI drivers, too...)
Automated cars will be a big source of revenue for google. The cars will be in constant communication with google's datacenters to provide mapping data - not just GPS street coordinates, but detailed imagery and geometry from lidar captured previously by the Street View cars - plus road conditions gleaned in real time from tens of thousands of cars (down to the level of street light timing a few intersections ahead on your path). Google may or may not produce any cars themselves, but all the automakers will license their data streams. How many other companies have gathered street-level lidar and imagery on practically every street in the world and have the datacenters to process and serve it globally in real-time?
I looked at cnet.com a couple weeks ago and the whole site, almost every image on every story, was just a column of rectangle slabs, "mobile," "mobile," "mobile," and nothing else. All minor variations on the same thing. I'm sick of it.
What does HP even do any more? I just visited their homepage to find out - it lists Laptops, Tablets, Desktops, All-In-Ones... so, reselling stuff made by companies such as Asus and Lenovo, which they increasingly no longer need an American storefront headed by an over-paid CEO to help them market.
Federal, yes. But local / state government seem to me like about the worst deal going - the poor pay still reflects the job security and good benefits the jobs used to have.
The problem is not so much nuclear reactors in general, the problem is that post-disaster Fukushima is, by necessity, flying by the seat of their pants. At some point, duct tape and baling wire will fail to provide the level of surety we expect from highly studied and regulated normal activities.
Probably they are hoping to develop an architecture that does "brain-like" computations more efficiently, without needing so many transistors as if you just scaled up a Von Neumann machine to run a neural simulation. Like how GPUs achieve more speedup for what they do, than using more transistors in a general-purpose CPU would.
That is interesting - horses are faster at those distances than I had been lead to believe. I do still think that legged robots will out-do them fairly soon though.
Surprisingly, horses are not very good at running long distances. In fact, people can run long distances faster than horses. The switchover point in that contest is around the length of a marathon. This robot can run a sub-4-minute-mile, but more importantly, there is every reason to think it could be made to sustain that pace all day.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the Tesla comparison, I doubt most Cadillac buyers are ready to make the jump to an all-electric car, let alone by a manufacturer with such a short track record. I would take the Tesla in a second, but then again, I've never bought a Cadillac either. But people do.
Read the article, it was a randomized study in which people were assigned to read specified books selected beforehand by the experimenters.
Let's say the analyst has to search a huge area for mobile launchers, and the imagery comes from a satellite with finite bandwidth. Would you rather he search good-quality images of the whole area, or fantastic-quality images of a tiny fraction of the area?
Have you ever played with the compression level on jpg? At some point, enough is enough. Now instead of lossy compression, imagine we're talking about how much radiation to shoot into your nads to get a clean xray. There are diminishing returns on image quality for each doubling of the radiation. Are you still so sure you want to turn it up to 11?
Maybe... in benchmarks the Intel HD 5000 is *much* faster than the 4000, let alone 3000. Then again the Air has a very low-wattage chip so maybe you lose some back to older HD 3000 desktop processors?
and later on the page...
I don't get it, did you not read the quote in my last post, or what?
But you are wrong in placing blame by implying that remembering the past prevents you from having to repeat it. The fact is that secrets have a shelf life. You can lengthen it, but not too much.
Surely Apple's decline is a result of neglecting their PC line, which is understandable since the iPhone is an unstoppable money-printing machine. So I agree they will probably rebound somewhat by finally refreshing their MacBooks with Haswell processors. (The new pro, I think will be a dud. But the Pro hasn't been a big seller for ages.)
I am not saying there will be total convergence of the UI, since small screens are a big difference, but a lot more of the guts underneath will converge, and it will just be a matter of the device presenting simpler apps when not connected to a large display.
I think more likely that a wireless screen-casting capability will simply be included in televisions (including the ones in hotels). And a bluetooth keyboards will be there for you on the desk if you want it, like the ironing board in the closet. Your smartphone, or "pocket computer" as Bill Gates called it 20 years ago, won't even need to leave your pocket.
Some of the intractable problems you list sound very doable to me, others less so. But I wanted to point out that every single thing you listed as likely that vehicles will gain in the future, are features they already have - not even on research vehicles, but on production cars from mainstream manufacturers as of 2-5 years ago.
For better and/or worse, collecting and aggregating data is becoming so easy (or practically unavoidable) that I doubt there will be much difference in privacy between manual and automated cars (i.e. if there is any, it will only be by virtue of regulation). Already today, at this moment, most drivers are tracked by the cellphones they carry in their pockets, simply by virtue of associating with the nearest cell tower so incoming calls can be routed to them, and this creates a record of where you go and how fast you are going.
Car automation will have a lot of utility to a lot of people long before it is able to handle the worst winter conditions. But sooner or later an automated car with radar, IR, and visible light sensors ought to be able to see better than a person who only has visible light. (People may get IR heads-up-displays and so forth, but those sensors will be usable by AI drivers, too...)
Automated cars will be a big source of revenue for google. The cars will be in constant communication with google's datacenters to provide mapping data - not just GPS street coordinates, but detailed imagery and geometry from lidar captured previously by the Street View cars - plus road conditions gleaned in real time from tens of thousands of cars (down to the level of street light timing a few intersections ahead on your path). Google may or may not produce any cars themselves, but all the automakers will license their data streams. How many other companies have gathered street-level lidar and imagery on practically every street in the world and have the datacenters to process and serve it globally in real-time?
I looked at cnet.com a couple weeks ago and the whole site, almost every image on every story, was just a column of rectangle slabs, "mobile," "mobile," "mobile," and nothing else. All minor variations on the same thing. I'm sick of it.
What possible reason was there for making them flat instead of curved in the first place? Just limitations in manufacturing?
Actually I am glad to hear that, and was surprised not to see more of that kind of thing at the HP.com homepage.
What does HP even do any more? I just visited their homepage to find out - it lists Laptops, Tablets, Desktops, All-In-Ones... so, reselling stuff made by companies such as Asus and Lenovo, which they increasingly no longer need an American storefront headed by an over-paid CEO to help them market.
Federal, yes. But local / state government seem to me like about the worst deal going - the poor pay still reflects the job security and good benefits the jobs used to have.
The problem is not so much nuclear reactors in general, the problem is that post-disaster Fukushima is, by necessity, flying by the seat of their pants. At some point, duct tape and baling wire will fail to provide the level of surety we expect from highly studied and regulated normal activities.
Probably they are hoping to develop an architecture that does "brain-like" computations more efficiently, without needing so many transistors as if you just scaled up a Von Neumann machine to run a neural simulation. Like how GPUs achieve more speedup for what they do, than using more transistors in a general-purpose CPU would.
That is interesting - horses are faster at those distances than I had been lead to believe. I do still think that legged robots will out-do them fairly soon though.
Surprisingly, horses are not very good at running long distances. In fact, people can run long distances faster than horses. The switchover point in that contest is around the length of a marathon. This robot can run a sub-4-minute-mile, but more importantly, there is every reason to think it could be made to sustain that pace all day.
Congress = House of Representatives + Senate.