Electric cars are not yet a mature product. Just as computers weren't back in the early 1980s, when they either cost a fortune and didn't do much, or cost less and did much less. Electric cars are at that stage now, but whereas some people will be content to sit back and wait for it to mature, then jump on the bandwagon, others will be in the right place at the right time with the money and the vision to be the one to take it from expensive luxury that doesn't do much (in this case, range) to a mature product. Someone has to do it. Tesla are doing it on their own, they almost failed before they got a big injection of cash from investors and the govt., but even better would be for a company like Apple to back them financially while giving them a free rein. If not Apple, then someone else - if GM or Ford had any sense they'd be doing it, but they don't have the vision or the money, and they're to entrenched in the old world.
to develop for Apple I would have to buy a Mac. Then I would have to pay what is it... $100/year the last I checked to get the development environment. (chump change I guess after buying a Mac) Then.. the only way the app could ever get on to more than a fraction of a percent of people's devices is to get it approved by the Apple store which everyone I have talked to claims is a real pain in the ass.
You're looking at it from the point of view of a dabbler; a hobbyist. If you're developing professionally the hardware and developer subscription cost is negligible compared to paying for the actual design, development and coding. Approval for the App Store is not difficult if you conform to the rules, which are there mostly to raise quality and security - as a professional developer you will want that.
The environment is more controlled (yes, that's a good thing), though screen sizes vary quite a bit too. Apple have layout technologies that help you with that and yes, they are somewhat like HTML in intention, where you specify constraints rather than pixel sizes.
But the biggest boon to professional developers is that the platform is really well-designed, has relatively few bugs and annoyances, is fairly secure, gives you an awful lot of good stuff for free, and supports a nice easy-to-use language as well. Obviously non of that matters to you because you're prejudiced - your first statement states that clearly. You're also not a professional developer, because your argument is irrelevant.
Domination isn't good for anybody, on either side. A balance promotes innovation. So whenever one platform starts to dominate, the *right* thing to do especially for nerds like Slashdotees, is to apply negative feedback, and always support the underdog.
Besides, when did popular ever imply best? Look at the number 1 records in the pop charts since forever. I rest my case.
I don't disagree, but it also doesn't invalidate my point that touch screens are the wrong interface choice. People are dumb, we know that, they'll choose shiny over sensible any day. But eventually touch screens will be replaced by something better. I hope it doesn't take a lot of accidents before that happens.
Touch Screen
on
A New Car UI
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Touch screens. There's your problem. They are a very poor choice for an interface in an environment where you can't devote 100% of your eyesight to it.
Auto makers seem to make a virtue out of having touch screens for everything a the moment just for the sake of using a touch screen, whereas what they should be doing is using the most appropriate interface to promote safety and clarity. To my mind that's distinct, physical buttons without too much function overloading. In other words, exactly what we had until the 90s.
In two decades' time, we'll look back on electric cars as a failed experiment.
90% efficiency vs. 25% (merely for starters) says you're wrong.
A battery is one of many possible stores of chemical energy. It's absurd to think that it's the best.
Maybe, as long as what you convert it to is electrical energy. So, might as well call it a "battery", which actually only means "a collection of cells". It says nothing about what those cells must do.
400 out of a 1.5L is within the realm of attainability
The Cosworth GBA is a 1.5 litre turbocharged V6. It develops about 1000bhp (official figures were never released, so it could be higher). That engine is from the mid 1980s, so it may be old hat by now. That figure was good for 600 miles, which by F1 race standards is "reliable".
Rover cars experimented with small turbines back in the 60's, unfortunately the problems they found have not gone away.
Right, but they were coupled directly and mechanically to the wheels. That's just not a good fit for a turbine. (My uncle was one of the designers of the Leyland Gas Turbine truck in the late 1960s - google it, it was pretty cool, if an experimental dead-end). But driving an alternator is a good fit. Use a bank of super capacitors as a buffer and you're good to go. Yes there are problems to be solved but using F1 as a development and proving ground is surely the point of its existence? It's surely not there to provide a very entertaining spectator sport because it isn't.
If you're going to build a series hybrid, why bother with pistons and cranks? Just make the turbo bigger and you have... a gas turbine. Use it to drive a big alternator and viola! The turbine can run at constant speed and be optimised for that one speed - the rest of the drive train is purely electrical. Someone should at least test the concept.
You need both sorts of people. Geeks and engineers that can build cool stuff, solve hard problems, and guys like Steve Jobs to give it a structure, to motivate them and to get the damn thing shipped. Would there have been a Mac without Jobs? Maybe, but it would have never seen the light of day outside a R&D room. Would there have been a Mac without Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, Steve Capps, et. al.? No of course not. It's not one-or-the-other, the Mac came into being because of all of the people involved, and that definitely includes Jobs.
You're right, but only up to a point. By '87 a system add-on called Multifinder ran multiple apps and that was integrated into the OS in system 7. This was co-operative multitasking for sure (same as Windows 3) but it was easy enough to make your app co-operate (actually harder to write it so that it didn't). You could also write system tasks that ran under the 680x0 interrupt if you needed something pre-emptive (though that was fraught with danger if you didn't know the system pretty intimately). I managed to do plenty of productive work on early Macs.
I agree. There's a lot Apple themselves could be doing, by publishing private file formats that were used for early apps such as MacWrite, Claris Works and so on. A lot of people have unusable files in those formats, and many others. It's not really good enough to have to reverse-engineer them (as some are doing), but a published spec would at least make it possible to write converters.
Yes they should do this. Sometimes, you can't fight City Hall - you just have to go with the flow so that your website becomes more useful to people. It's annoying that media files on Wikipedia don't "just work" on most devices, not even desktops.
I appreciate their position and somewhat support it, but they've been holding out for so long now with absolutely no effect. The only losers are the site's users. At least Mp4 is a standard, albeit not as free as idealists would like.
Fell at the first hurdle, so no need to really bother with the rest. Seeing the world through the prism of gaming, it's hardly a surprise that you don't have a clue about how the real world works.
I count that as a weird modification of Godwin's Law.
Maybe, but can I just make a point about Godwin's Law? If the moment somebody mentions Nazis, the STASI, Pol Pot or any other extremist regime and is immediately "Godwinned", how are we to learn anything from these terrible historical precedents? If the actions of a supposedly democratic government really can be compared to Nazism, etc, then "Godwin's" is just a way to shut down debate about that. Just how badly does somebody need to act before the comparisons are apt? How will we know?
Personally, I think with the recent revelations about the NSA et. al., I think it's high time that Godwin's Law was at least reconsidered, if not outright repealed.
Slashdot Mirror
Electric cars are not yet a mature product. Just as computers weren't back in the early 1980s, when they either cost a fortune and didn't do much, or cost less and did much less. Electric cars are at that stage now, but whereas some people will be content to sit back and wait for it to mature, then jump on the bandwagon, others will be in the right place at the right time with the money and the vision to be the one to take it from expensive luxury that doesn't do much (in this case, range) to a mature product. Someone has to do it. Tesla are doing it on their own, they almost failed before they got a big injection of cash from investors and the govt., but even better would be for a company like Apple to back them financially while giving them a free rein. If not Apple, then someone else - if GM or Ford had any sense they'd be doing it, but they don't have the vision or the money, and they're to entrenched in the old world.
to develop for Apple I would have to buy a Mac. Then I would have to pay what is it... $100/year the last I checked to get the development environment. (chump change I guess after buying a Mac) Then.. the only way the app could ever get on to more than a fraction of a percent of people's devices is to get it approved by the Apple store which everyone I have talked to claims is a real pain in the ass.
You're looking at it from the point of view of a dabbler; a hobbyist. If you're developing professionally the hardware and developer subscription cost is negligible compared to paying for the actual design, development and coding. Approval for the App Store is not difficult if you conform to the rules, which are there mostly to raise quality and security - as a professional developer you will want that.
The environment is more controlled (yes, that's a good thing), though screen sizes vary quite a bit too. Apple have layout technologies that help you with that and yes, they are somewhat like HTML in intention, where you specify constraints rather than pixel sizes.
But the biggest boon to professional developers is that the platform is really well-designed, has relatively few bugs and annoyances, is fairly secure, gives you an awful lot of good stuff for free, and supports a nice easy-to-use language as well. Obviously non of that matters to you because you're prejudiced - your first statement states that clearly. You're also not a professional developer, because your argument is irrelevant.
Domination isn't good for anybody, on either side. A balance promotes innovation. So whenever one platform starts to dominate, the *right* thing to do especially for nerds like Slashdotees, is to apply negative feedback, and always support the underdog.
Besides, when did popular ever imply best? Look at the number 1 records in the pop charts since forever. I rest my case.
I don't disagree, but it also doesn't invalidate my point that touch screens are the wrong interface choice. People are dumb, we know that, they'll choose shiny over sensible any day. But eventually touch screens will be replaced by something better. I hope it doesn't take a lot of accidents before that happens.
Touch screens. There's your problem. They are a very poor choice for an interface in an environment where you can't devote 100% of your eyesight to it.
Auto makers seem to make a virtue out of having touch screens for everything a the moment just for the sake of using a touch screen, whereas what they should be doing is using the most appropriate interface to promote safety and clarity. To my mind that's distinct, physical buttons without too much function overloading. In other words, exactly what we had until the 90s.
Well if it's economic efficiency that's important here, then the most sensible thing to do it just forget it.
I know we all live in a police state these days, but this is ridiculous. There has to be more to this.
Even as an attempt at trolling it was lame. And if you were actually serious, well.... words fail me.
You're simply not a customer Tesla is interested in right now. They're quite up-front about that.
That same joke has been made many times already. It was lame the first time.
There was a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jamais_Contente
And in 1899 an electric car set the world land speed record, and was the first car to exceed100km/hr
In two decades' time, we'll look back on electric cars as a failed experiment.
90% efficiency vs. 25% (merely for starters) says you're wrong.
A battery is one of many possible stores of chemical energy. It's absurd to think that it's the best.
Maybe, as long as what you convert it to is electrical energy. So, might as well call it a "battery", which actually only means "a collection of cells". It says nothing about what those cells must do.
You left out 5. second-hand cars.
bearings generally dislike the imposed accelerations when a high performance road car turns hard
Well, since a jet fighter can pull far more G than any car, I'm thinking this is surely a solved problem.
400 out of a 1.5L is within the realm of attainability
The Cosworth GBA is a 1.5 litre turbocharged V6. It develops about 1000bhp (official figures were never released, so it could be higher). That engine is from the mid 1980s, so it may be old hat by now. That figure was good for 600 miles, which by F1 race standards is "reliable".
Rover cars experimented with small turbines back in the 60's, unfortunately the problems they found have not gone away.
Right, but they were coupled directly and mechanically to the wheels. That's just not a good fit for a turbine. (My uncle was one of the designers of the Leyland Gas Turbine truck in the late 1960s - google it, it was pretty cool, if an experimental dead-end). But driving an alternator is a good fit. Use a bank of super capacitors as a buffer and you're good to go. Yes there are problems to be solved but using F1 as a development and proving ground is surely the point of its existence? It's surely not there to provide a very entertaining spectator sport because it isn't.
If you're going to build a series hybrid, why bother with pistons and cranks? Just make the turbo bigger and you have... a gas turbine. Use it to drive a big alternator and viola! The turbine can run at constant speed and be optimised for that one speed - the rest of the drive train is purely electrical. Someone should at least test the concept.
You need both sorts of people. Geeks and engineers that can build cool stuff, solve hard problems, and guys like Steve Jobs to give it a structure, to motivate them and to get the damn thing shipped. Would there have been a Mac without Jobs? Maybe, but it would have never seen the light of day outside a R&D room. Would there have been a Mac without Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, Steve Capps, et. al.? No of course not. It's not one-or-the-other, the Mac came into being because of all of the people involved, and that definitely includes Jobs.
You're right, but only up to a point. By '87 a system add-on called Multifinder ran multiple apps and that was integrated into the OS in system 7. This was co-operative multitasking for sure (same as Windows 3) but it was easy enough to make your app co-operate (actually harder to write it so that it didn't). You could also write system tasks that ran under the 680x0 interrupt if you needed something pre-emptive (though that was fraught with danger if you didn't know the system pretty intimately). I managed to do plenty of productive work on early Macs.
I agree. There's a lot Apple themselves could be doing, by publishing private file formats that were used for early apps such as MacWrite, Claris Works and so on. A lot of people have unusable files in those formats, and many others. It's not really good enough to have to reverse-engineer them (as some are doing), but a published spec would at least make it possible to write converters.
That many? But it's obvious that basically ALL problems are the responsibility of the US, so it may as well be first post.
Yes, I'm kidding, but only a bit.
Yes they should do this. Sometimes, you can't fight City Hall - you just have to go with the flow so that your website becomes more useful to people. It's annoying that media files on Wikipedia don't "just work" on most devices, not even desktops.
I appreciate their position and somewhat support it, but they've been holding out for so long now with absolutely no effect. The only losers are the site's users. At least Mp4 is a standard, albeit not as free as idealists would like.
DOS ran Doom, Mac and Amiga didn't.
Fell at the first hurdle, so no need to really bother with the rest. Seeing the world through the prism of gaming, it's hardly a surprise that you don't have a clue about how the real world works.
Village? Hamlet more like. How about calling it "Shamlet". Sound appropriate.
I count that as a weird modification of Godwin's Law.
Maybe, but can I just make a point about Godwin's Law? If the moment somebody mentions Nazis, the STASI, Pol Pot or any other extremist regime and is immediately "Godwinned", how are we to learn anything from these terrible historical precedents? If the actions of a supposedly democratic government really can be compared to Nazism, etc, then "Godwin's" is just a way to shut down debate about that. Just how badly does somebody need to act before the comparisons are apt? How will we know?
Personally, I think with the recent revelations about the NSA et. al., I think it's high time that Godwin's Law was at least reconsidered, if not outright repealed.