Google X Display Boss: Smartphones, Tablets, Apps Are "Mind-Numbing" 157
curtwoodward writes "Stop drooling over that new iPhone. Put away the fancy tablet. Because the real hardcore nerds find that stuff 'boring' and 'mind-numbing,' says Mary Lou Jepsen, head of the display division at secretive R&D lab Google X. At MIT's EmTech conference, Jepsen said the next generation of 'moonshot' tech is much more exciting and interesting. That includes Google X projects like the driverless car, Project Loon, a stratospheric balloon-based wireless network, and Google Glass."
Reener (Score:2, Insightful)
You had me until Google Glass. Until talking to yourself without a cell phone to your ear is socially acceptable, it's a niche gadget.
Re: Reener (Score:3, Interesting)
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Oh, they've noticed the child...why do you think they are initiating video recording?
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Things like Google Glass actually have potential for significant human augmentation:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3478821&cid=42956909 [slashdot.org]
Computers can do many savant-like tasks quite well.
Add wireless tech plus suitable infra and you have savants with virtual telepathic and telekinetic powers*.
* only in supported locations, YMMV ;).
Re:Reener (Score:4, Insightful)
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TFA's young author and the rest of you kids should read the journal I posted last Saturday, What a wondrous thing I have in my pocket! [slashdot.org]
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Well, slide rules have been around for 500 years. As to my grandparents, they would have been wowed by radio, let alone TV. They would have been in their early 20s when broadcasting started.
I remember my grandma telling me how cool it was when she saw her first airplane fly over when she was eight, she was born 3 months before the Wright Brothers took off at Kitty Hawk. From being amazed at an airplane and radio to seeing a man walk on the moon on TV.
To me, the most wondrous thing I own is inside my eyeball
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McCoy would be in awe of a modern hospital.
I think his reaction to a kidney transplant in ST IV: The Search for Greenpeace belies that. Sure, we've got telemedicine and a plethora of MRI's and some other gadgets, but there's still a long way to go. One trick is that medical research generally has to work pretty well to go forward. Certainly moreso than the 'throw shit at the wall' approach to tech that has given us a dozen iterations of tablets (finally getting a working paradigm now?) and atrocities like Google Glass and that Samsung 'smart' watch.
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I think his reaction to a kidney transplant in ST IV: The Search for Greenpeace belies that.
The 1966 McCoy, not the 1986 McCoy. And even there the 1982 McCoy couldn't cure Kirk's age-related presbyopia without eyedrops that soften aging lenses, but Dr. Yeh cured mine in 2006 with surgery (that the 1986 McCoy would have called "barbaric" despite the fact that it was painless).
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"Until talking to yourself without a cell phone to your ear is socially acceptable"
Until? Have you been outside in the past ten years?
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"Until talking to yourself without a cell phone to your ear is socially acceptable"
Until? Have you been outside in the past ten years?
Slashdot user posting as AC... Yours was a rhetorical question, wasn't it?
Re: Reener (Score:2)
This just in (Score:5, Insightful)
This just in (Score:2)
She's right about everyone else, but Google Glass is also boring [oculusvr.com].
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Having to drive interferes with your ability to play with your iPhone and tablet. So hurry up already Google!
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That's ok, download Dessert Bus for your phone
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I desire to make a phone call, have it arrive within 10 minutes clean, take me to my destination and then allow me to forget it ever existed (screw parking), until I make the next call and wait 10 minutes (careful timing of making the call and walking to the pick up point could get that down to seconds).
As for google glass, yeah I want some privacy invasive freak jamming adds into my eyeballs in accompaniment with maximum volume screaming "BUY THIS", all at random intervals, trust Google when they jump i
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Time to hype the future and remind people of the global brand power.
'boring' and 'mind-numbing' seems to point to people not been full immersed in the daily use of the product and helping the revenue stream.
Boring means they are still using other products?
Mind-numbing means only the expected trendies who signed their digital habits away years ago are users?
Capturing the bottom 90% of the market
Re: This just in (Score:3)
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Re:This just in (Score:4, Informative)
Another manager says their product is really exciting and interesting
I would agree with you however MLJ is the same woman who designed the display on the OLPC [laptop.org] which was quite remarkable at the time. It utilized 200dpi color while maintaining readability in direct sunlight while not being a crippling drain on the battery. Although google may pay her to hype up "Google X" , she is quite talented and innovative. It would be wise to give her the benefit of the doubt.
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Truth (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes , I know what you mean. Im almost due for an upgrade on my smartphone (s3) and having looked at whats currently out there nothing excites me. Truth be told i use about 3 different "apps" daily and very occasionally play a game - but only if im very bored i cannot stand touchscreens for gaming.
Im considering just keeping the phone and switching to a sim-only tariff when my contract ends.
N
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Mobile = growth, growth = money, money = marketing.
Overlooking an obvious fact (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Overlooking an obvious fact (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 agree with you that automated cars are likely to be a source of revenue but there a huge slip between the cup and the lip, and the fact is that while these are good bets the surety that they will be profitable and financially sustainable is definitely not guaranteed!
airships (Score:3)
Autonomous solar power airships are a much better idea. Navigation would be easier and you end a lot of other driving problems on the way.
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sustainable is definitely not guaranteed!
Google has no problems terminating a service. If I was less lazy, I would have provided links, but frankly you (not you specifically) don't belong on /. if you can't think of a couple off the top of your head.
Re:Overlooking an obvious fact (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh goody. I can't wait to purchase one of these things. It's got all the tracking and remote control the wannabe KGB types running this country would want, google selling my location and destination information to all interested private parties, and it participates in the privacy rapage of anyone it happens to drive by.
Re:Overlooking an obvious fact (Score:5, Interesting)
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Granted, but the current situation is under my control. The former is not.
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As of October 2013, it is still legal to turn off you cell phone when driving.
Encouraged, even.
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Driverless cars will not do very well in the winter. I live in an area where we can get snow 6 to 7 months out of the year. Snow on the car image sensors will make the car blind. Ice on the road will be nearly impossible for the car to distinguish. I wish I could be more optimistic but driverless cars will be as useful as google glass appears to be.
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Lane markings and road edges (Score:2)
Humans will never be able to drive in the winter, because the windshield will be covered in snow so you can't see out. I'm not seeing how this problem is any harder for a machine, especially since you already rely on mechanical wipers to solve it for you.
It's not the snow on the car that is the biggest problem. It's the snow on the road that obscures lane markings, signs, and road edges. Buried curbs can be detected using snow-penetrating radar, but non-raised features like painted-on markings are a difficult problem.
Re:Overlooking an obvious fact (Score:5, Insightful)
Driverless cars will not do very well in the winter.
They'll drive better than people in the winter.
Snow on the car image sensors will make the car blind.
That's possible, but I suspect Google engineers would be able to rig up some sort of wiper system... Sarcasm aside, they'll be able to use far better snow clearing systems than we can now, with spinning lenses, lasers etc that would be impossible to implement with human drivers.
Ice on the road will be nearly impossible for the car to distinguish.
Road ice is clearly visible using infrared thermometry, but not in visible light. The car will see it more clearly than you will.
I wish I could be more optimistic but driverless cars will be as useful as google glass appears to be.
Both of these things are taking their first tottering steps down what looks like a very long path. They are enabling technologies that will change as our society works out how we want to use them.
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Not to mention a small overlooked story from one of the business magazines this week: top-end car manufacturers, from Acura to Mercedes to Cadillac, are already pouring as many sensors & automatic safety control systems into their cars as they can. Arguing that consumers won't buy automatic cars is therefore claiming that these manufacturers don't know their target audience, a highly unlikely situation.
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I don't consider a fully self driving is even remotely capable of coping with real life conditions. It's more likely that vehicles will gain advanced
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But they still need a driver, one wh
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Snow on the car image sensors will make the car blind.
Frost on my windshield will make me blind, so I wait until it defrosts to take off just as an autonomous car will.
Ice on the road will be nearly impossible for the car to distinguish.
Pretty damned hard for a human to distinguish, too. But the car will have the advantage of being able to see in wavelengths that make the ice and snow completely transparent.
I wish I could be more optimistic but driverless cars will be as useful as google glass appears to b
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Tell that to me when I'm cruising for 16 hours on I-10 and rather be asleep the whole way.
You're living in cloud cuckoo land if you think a driverless car will arrive any time in the forseeable future will let you do that. I expect even if a car came with a driver assist mode to maintain distance and speed on a motorway that the driver would be required to be ready to take over with a split second's notice. Such a vehicle might even have to monitor the driver's alertness somehow so they couldn't fall asleep or otherwise not be ready to take over.
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An the in-car navigation can serve up some sponsored search results, too. They could even make arrangements with radio stations to perform advert substitution - the station sends the time and duration of adverts to google, and when listening the car radio can transparently dub them over with new adverts custom-targetted at the car occupents. As those adverts are targetted, they'd be worth a lot more than untargetted broadcasts.
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So does that mean we'll know ahead of time where the traffic jams are, and can avoid them?
Sign me up ... I don't care if they have to beam ads into my brain. Sign me up!
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She didn't say anything that would indicated that she overlooked what you mention. She stated her opinion about how cool the new technologies her group is working on, are compared to the in
Project Loon (Score:3)
Are they cloning Sergei Brin?
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Are they cloning Sergei Brin?
Damn it! Don't give them ideas.
Thanks for the Google ad. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure glad, as a nerd, that Ms. Jepsen took the time to inform me there are projects in the works that I can get really excited about without actually telling me what they are, just after making condescending remarks aimed at consumer electronics and just before extolling the genius of Google's new cell phone that holds itself up to your face. Because I am a nerd these things really appeal to me. Thank you Ms. Jepsen and Mr. Woodward, you guys are really nerds like me.
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Google glass is perfectly fine. But if her case is that consumer electronics get boring quickly, there's not much separating Google Glass from what's on the market currently.
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Google glass is a terrible design (Score:3)
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Useful = boring (Score:4, Interesting)
She seems to be telling us that when technology finally becomes useful enough to be mainstream, it's boring. OK, fine, I can accept that, somewhat. But the point of developing something new and "exciting" is so that someday it will be mundane and boring. And when Google spends all their time on the new, that makes more room for others to innovate with the "old".
She has a point (Score:4, Interesting)
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"bored out of her mind"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
A laptop is a TOOL. A cellphone is a TOOL. When you need them to be the entertainment in themselves you have issues.
“I interviewed a month ago a recent college graduate from Stanford—a mechanical engineering degree. She was already on her third cellphone or laptop and bored out of her mind,” Jepsen said. “She graduated in 2010. I think it gets depressing. It was so exciting three years ago.”
Three years ago your cellphone and laptop were "exciting", but now they are "boring"? If you are talking about building them - maybe. But using them? If the form factor of your computers and communication devices are boring you "out of your mind", maybe that's your problem more than the devices'.
Re: "bored out of her mind"?? (Score:3)
Re:"bored out of her mind"?? (Score:5, Funny)
A laptop is a TOOL. A cellphone is a TOOL.
Pop quiz, Mary Lou Jepsen is .........
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a record-breaking American runner of African descent whose gender has been in dispute in the past?
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Indeed, total case of WTF did I just read? She has a mechanical engineering degree and she's fucking BORED because waaaaah, I don't have any shiny new toys!
So your gadgets aren't exciting anymore? Here's an idea ... you have a degree in mechanical fucking engineering, go be creative, MAKE something exciting!
Oh, what's that? You have no imagination because you're just a shallow, entitled bitch who skimmed through an entire education that was paid for by her rich parents? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Call Me Maybe? (Score:1)
Is she related to Carly Rae?
As others said... Google glass? (Score:3)
Yeah, tablets and apps are not as impressive as people think. That said, google has given birth to some absolute duds.
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The future is, of course, Teledildonics (Score:5, Funny)
All that other stuff is bullshit. Once you combine teledildonics with direct brain stimulation, it's game over man.
Comfortably Numb, or Anesthetisensational?! (Score:5, Funny)
What utter bull sack! I'll have you know I hand craft the kerning of my fonts with painstaking attention to detail, and sculpt those myriad of pixel perfect displays and animations a single frame at a time. When it all comes together right in some yuppie's eye, IT IS Exhilarating!
The only thing more exciting than building those big, beautiful, almost intuitive, displays is making the tools one uses to make them:
A P fucking I's!!!
Why, I once met a guy who helped standardize IEEE 1364...
That's Verilog to you philistines.
He was a veritable volcano of vivacity whose smile beamed with the brilliance of a billion bacon breakfasts.
The further down you go the more excited the turtles are!
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beamed with the brilliance of a billion bacon breakfasts.
+1 alliteratively adventurous
Hey Google, Mrs. Jepsen: (Score:1)
What's Missing (Score:5, Interesting)
Visicalc was invented in 1979.
It was written by two hard-working geniuses who busted ass for months and months to get it to work. Visicalc changed the world.
The reason they were able to write this software is because the Apple II had the tools to do so. If you had an Apple II, you had everything you needed to develop new software for it. Same goes for the PC.
Mobile phones and tablets have no such tools. They are locked, proprietary devices forbidden to developers. They use locked, proprietary programming languages, obscure, flabby and inconsistent APIs and cannot communicate with anything but the "cloud."
They also suck ass as computing platforms. Their operating systems are shit packed on top of shit, and their hardware is flimsy plastic shit to go with it.
Mobile phones and tablets are fiddly little distraction machines that function as brightly colored noisy little pets. They are nothing more than over-engineered tamogatchis. They are useless for real work, especially compared to open platforms like the PC. At best, they are a good place to store phone numbers. They also give teenage girls a way to drain their parents' wallets by sending nonsense to each other 24 hours a day for $1500 a megabyte.
The "post-PC world" is a marketing slogan designed to get you back on the upgrade treadmill and wanting the next version of the device you bought last month.
The difference is mobile devices cannot replace or even occasionally substitute for the PC, because there is no mobile device software that even remotely compares to the world-changing technology the PC made possible.
What was the last "visicalc-level" software title developed from scratch? I'm going to say the last of them debuted in the mid 1990s. With the exception of FOSS, there hasn't been shit developed for any platform since. It's like the fucking software industry was unplugged in the late 90s. (Gee, I wonder why?)
The worst part is, anyone in their teens or early 20s right now is so distracted by Unity and HTML5 and Haskell and all the other flavors of proprietary dumbfuckery that they will never learn why things work on a computer.
And that's a fucking shame.
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While I agree with you that developing for phones could me made more accessible, you can't say that they are *forbidden* to developers. I can't speak about iOS, but developing for Android isn't that hard once you know where to get the tools, even on Linux. You do need to have some programming experience beforehand though, because it can seem daunting at first.
Developing for the two major mobile platforms does not involve proprietary programming languages (there exist open-source implementations of Java and
Re:What's Missing (Score:4, Insightful)
Heh.
The everlasting rant of one generation of tech to the n+1 generation. I'm with you buddy. But I suspect we could hit the usenet archive and find something very similar to this, but from 1986. And then again in 1995 and again in 2002.
99% of people probably can't open the hood of their car without some help. Heck, it's been several years since I have.
I don't think we're seeing the end of the hard core nerds that make things work. We're seeing the expansion of the pool of people who are building things. Not all care about low level stuff. But they can build some really nice high level stuff, stuff that us low level guys will never bother with.
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Laffo, Nice rant, grandpa.
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Visicalc was invented in 1979.
It was written by two hard-working geniuses who busted ass for months and months to get it to work. Visicalc changed the world.
The biggest difference between then and now is that users now demand software that is much more featured and sophisticated. One or two guys could write software that changed the world in 1979 because back then software was so much more simple.
The reason they were able to write this software is because the Apple II had the tools to do so. If you had an Apple II, you had everything you needed to develop new software for it.
I consider this a very sad state of affairs for iOS and Android. I'll consider them "grown up" when you can write first class software for them using the devices themselves.
Same goes for the PC.
This is both true and not true... Windows does not ship by default with the development tools ne
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That only emphasizes my other question. What was the last new (not a remake, not an iteration, not FOSS, not a game) piece of Visicalc-caliber commercial software developed from scratch on any platform?
I can't find one post-1997. In fact, ironically enough, Macromedia Flash was probably the crowning achievement of the 1990s software-wise.
I'm not sure that's a fair question. Early on, software developers had lots of low hanging fruit to pick, and even though it was low hanging, much of it was world-changing.
There are now much fewer opportunities to create world-changing software and it's harder to develop modern software due to higher expectations from users.
So if the market is demanding "sophisticated" software, nobody is providing it, which only serves to emphasize my first question: where are the tools?
Do you see how the "post-PC world" is up its own ass?
As much as I love my iPad, I do entirely agree with you here.
iOS and Android should ship with development tools capable of writing first class software for the platform. It would be a hu
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We can't be satisfied with the "everything's been invented already" approach. That would be admitting we've invented technology we can't manage.
Oh, I agree, I'm just saying that it's become harder to invent new things (in software). It was much easier in 1979 (which is, coincidentally, the first year I started writing code).
News; established not as exciting as bleeding edge (Score:2)
Tablets and smartphones stopped being exciting 3-4 years ago. Now they are reliable, established tech with minor improvements every year.
Every major technology goes through the same cycle; they start off as innovative, exciting and new (and scary to some), then they gradually improve and become reliable and established. Once your mother has startet using them, they are most definitely no longer exciting.
Luckily we live in an age where there's always another exciting new thing around the corner.
people are full-on-retards (Score:1)
I don't want a computer to control my car... but I'm ok with Cruise Control.
I don't want a ticket when I text & drive.. but I'm gonna sue that MF who hit me while text'in.
I don't want to complain.. but I've got nothing better to do.
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you don't need "electronics" for increased gas mileage; you don't need a computer to implement cruise control
Mind-numbing has a few subtle meanings (Score:2)
While I'm certainly one of those people that find it "mind-numbing" that someone would want to use tiny screens, tiny fiddly on-tiny-screen change-mode-every-3-keycaresses (can't make myself call *that* key-"stroke"s), wasting an entire hand holding the device, barely-past-modem-era-connections, modem-era-connection-reliability, etc.. in the first place, when large-screen laptops with decent keyboards and 100Mbit/s to the home and office are readily available, it can also be said that the only thing to be g
ClusterStack (Score:2)
I just want my phone, tablet, and i5 desktop to act as a cluster and share cycles and memory. This seems easier than most of Google's moonshots.
This passes for 'new and exciting'? (Score:1)
These are all really old ideas waiting for technology to make them possible, i.e. driverless cars and 'wearable' computers. Whether they're ever going to be practical or useful is another matter. The 'computer embedded in glasses' concept is something I've seen people working on 10 years ago, but even then I wondered, "who in their right mind would want to wear glasses unless they absolutely had to?"
I have to wear glasses - I can't drive, read, or carry out a host of other daily tasks without them. I've gro
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I'm a glasses-wearer. I need them all day, every day, have done since I was 7 and the teachers realised I'd just memorised the words of all the school hymns rather than try to squint at the OHP projected words on the wall during assembly.
Fragility was a problem for me as a kid. Once I stopped getting into fights in the playground and playing rugby in PE, the number of times I've broken them is minimal. If I did those things now, I'd buy proper prescription sports goggles. Instead I buy glass lenses with
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It doesn't much appeal to me, no, but then I'm not exactly the target market for any of this stuff. It is clear to me though, that the ergonomics of the hand-helds that everyone is so excited about really suck: I see people on the train holding their phones up in front of their face, bracing their hand with their other hand, just so they can keep their heads upright for awhile.
On the other hand, I already hate the fact that I'm out riding a bicycl
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Instead of working on mind-numbing and boring smartphones and pads, I'll work for balloon-based wireless transponders for those mind-numbing and boring gadgets.
Hurray!
Google Opiate (Score:2)
real hardcore nerds? (Score:2)
And all meetings start when I get there and are over when I leave.
Fat Cat Nerds (Score:2)
pixel qi? (Score:2)
Does that mean Pixel Qi dead?
I've been looking forward for years for their displays to go mainstream.
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Maybe not so much excitement. Our vehicles have already learned to maintain speed, enhance braking, honk-and-flash when the door is opened from the inside after the key's been out of the ignition too long, detect road obstacles and now can take over parking.
It's all incremental improvement, like the cinder-block-to-pocket-slate cell phone evolution.
Re:It is mind-numbing, let's face it (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe not so much excitement. Our vehicles have already learned to maintain speed, enhance braking, honk-and-flash when the door is opened from the inside after the key's been out of the ignition too long, detect road obstacles and now can take over parking.
It's all incremental improvement, like the cinder-block-to-pocket-slate cell phone evolution.
There are already vehicle "autopilot" systems good enough to allow the driver to stop looking at the road some of the time. Radar-controlled cruise control plus lane keeping is enough to allow that. But it's not enough to prevent accidents caused by even slightly difficult situations. Several car companies have shipped "driving assist" systems which can do that, but they've deliberately kept them from operating with no driver input. [youtube.com] Ford, Mercedes, BMW, and Audi have all stopped just before hands-off driving.
The auto industry recognizes that there is a "deadly valley" that begins when a vehicle "autopilot" is good enough to allow the driver to stop looking at the road some of the time. On the other side of the deadly valley is fully hands-off autonomous driving, which Google almost has now. We will see commercilaly successful systems on the other side of the deadly valley within the next decade.
Systems that operate in the "deadly valley" will make things worse, for obvious reasons.