301–310 of 434 posts
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The iPhone was the first phone with visual voicemail.
Sorry to be completely lost but what is "visual voicemail"? This is an odd term - almost as daft as "visual BASIC"
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How much energy does it take to move 500 cars? How much energy does it take to move one train? That's your answer.
How much energy does it take to operate a train station or get people to the train station? What is the time and monetary cost spent getting to and from a train station and waiting on trains? How many NYC or Paris or Seoul subways run at 3am?
If Apple were truly serious about building self-driving cars, they would buy one of the big 3 US auto manufacturers. It could buy all 3 with cash and still have one of the largest hoards of cash ever accumulated.
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I can't see spherical wheels working well. They would have a smaller contact patch on the road surface than a standard wheel, and consequently less traction.
And then there is stronger braking to be considered, which almost always is some kind of disk brake which you can't do if there is no shaft to mount one on. Which means the spherical wheel system would have to be oversized to compensate for lack of such a shaft even if it would work to drive the car. Magnetic wheels have other interesting problems that would need to be solved such as when two cars get close to each o…
TaDa: the self driving Tron motorcycle!
“From the beginning, the employees dedicated to Project Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed silently. They also studied ways to redesign a car interior without a steering wheel or gas pedals, and they worked on adding virtual or augmented reality into interior displays. The team also worked on a new light and ranging detection sensor, also known as lidar. Lida…
Very large tech companies always have people looking into weird slightly bullshit things. Doesn't necessarily mean that they had any real intention of committing to these ideas.
The Apple Knowledge Navigator video comes to mind, it feels very similar to video-vaporware like Microsoft Origami and Microsoft Courier
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Because outsourcing car manufacturing doesn't make much sense. The transportation costs eat up most of the savings. That's why Toyotas, Volkswagons, etc sold in the US are made in the US. One shipping container holds 60,000 iphones. One shipping container holds one car.
Also, for historical and political reasons, auto importing tends to be subject to a lot more taxing by customs.
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Spherical wheels are such a stupid, dangerous idea. The contact patch on regular tires is already tiny. Make them spherical and the contact patch becomes even smaller, which will cause them to lose traction and spin out in any rapid maneuver (like to avoid a collision).
Only if you massively increase the PSI so that the tire stays spherical. If you keep the PSI at normal levels the contact patch will be exactly the same size as it is now, and the tire will deform on the bottom. So just design it to be extra flexible.
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I remember reading about Goodyear releasing a "spherical wheel" concept in early 2016: http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a19747/goodyear-eagle-3...
ISTM you could get all the same benefits much more easily using four-wheel independent steering, on regular, cylindrical wheels. The design could also be much more compact by sacrificing fully horizontal motion. (IE if the rear wheels only turned up to +-30 degrees, say.) It could still park very tightly using a zig-zag motion, and in any other situation tighter turning wouldn't be useful. Porsche (and possibly other…
* Nissan stared offering it with several 1986 Skyline trims, and would also offer it on Z32 300ZXs.
* Honda starting offering it on the 1987 Prelude, and also on the Accord starting in 1991.
* The 1988 Mazda 626 sedan (predecessor to the Mazda 6) had it.
* Toyota offered it in Japan on the Camry/Vista for the 1988 model year.
* ... and many, many more. From MPVs to pickup trucks.
The modern resurgence started again with Nissan, with several Infiniti models (the M and Q) offering electric versions from around 2006, and it appeared in the R35 GT-R. Though BMW was technically first with the E65 7-series. Porsche got into the game with the 991 911 GT3 (and optional on all 991.2 911s) because it alone hacked 1.5% off of lap times. The benefit of the newer setups is how wonderfully simple it is in terms of parts, complexity, and reliability (and no more hydraulic leaks!)
Having driven both the R35 and 991.2s, the difference is pronounced. RWS is one of the reasons why the GT-R could manage itself (it is approaching 4000 pounds) as well as it could around the track, and why the latest 911s I've driven on track were so eager to dive-bomb apexes compared to any other 911 I've ever driven.
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AWS is an offshoot of building the massive system needed to process the "we sell absolutely everything" goal. Methinks they just got so good at it, cloud services just kinda took on a life of its own and grew from there - but still feeds the retailing monster. Echo is a consequence of exploring digital appliances as marketing tools. If you're going to build a device which can voice-interface someone ordering 6 bottle…
In what way is the billions of dollars Amazon is spending on original content "just an extention to feeding the retailing monster"? It's easy to point to one failed product as proof that "straying too far doesn't work", if you can do the mental gymnastics required to classify all their successful products as somehow more connected to their original goal.