Comment So? (Score 1) 397
There is very little US-brewed beer that is drinkable. Maybe Sam Adams and some microbreweries but most of the decent ones are imported regardless where these rules don't apply.
There is very little US-brewed beer that is drinkable. Maybe Sam Adams and some microbreweries but most of the decent ones are imported regardless where these rules don't apply.
Ah, now we've officially extended the discussion to broad generalizations.
Most people (not all, but most), I'd day say, have families and already have two vehicles in the household. Using a particular one to use when making extended trips, and either one for everything else, is not an absurd proposition.
It's a perfectly cromulent approach in that it offers solutions to the perceived problems.
"Nails are hard to use because I keep breaking bricks on them" is an obviously silly thing to say when hammers are cheap and available.
Likewise, "Teslas are hard to use because they take forever to recharge, and only go a few hundred miles" is also a silly thing to say when other tools are readily available, especially since most people don't drive more than a couple of hundred miles round-trip on a regular basis and normally come home every night.
It's a matter of using the right tool for the job. I don't need to drive a car every day that can do anything, and most other people don't either.
I'm not going to explain why it's better to use a hammer, or the proper application of a wrench. Their relative merits are implicit.
Smart engineering thinking. These are the details that make for verisimilitude.
Sad. A future that could never, ever be. Remember when the situation of Kubrick's 2001 seemed not only plausible, but likely?
Was that an ironic comment? It's SO hard to tell these days.
Hey! Look! We're all meta!
That's a fact.
Nobody dealin' with that winter, for rent.
Meh.
I drive quite a lot, at least compared to most people I know around here. I drive an old, small, fun, reasonably efficient gas-burner. Lately, I've been doing about 700 miles a week, and I'm home every night.
A Tesla would be awesome for this, if my current car weren't already so paid-for and weren't relatively cheap to maintain.
Every now and then (once or twice a year on rough average), I do drive more than 450 miles at a stretch. Filling up in minutes instead of hours is admittedly very handy.
But for a long trip, I can just rent something more appropriate. No big deal.
I made a conscious decision a long time ago that I didn't need to own a truck because I can always have Big, Heavy Things delivered, or just rent something more appropriate. ("Renting something more appropriate" usually means renting a truck by the hour from Lowes/Home Depot, but has also included U-Haul box trucks of various sizes. Either is economical and easy compared to owning, driving, insuring, maintaining...etc...a truck of my own.)
If I were in car-buying mode I could very easily decide that I don't need a gas tank, and that a Tesla would be a perfect fit.
If the Tesla is cheap to drive (it seems to be), and fun and comfortable (no stated complaints there that I've ever read), than yeah: A range of a few hundred miles would be perfect for the vast majority of my driving.
Sure, I'll occasionally need something else: But that's what rental agencies (and friends!) are for. ("Hey, you want to use my Tesla this week while I take your Honda to Florida for a week?")
So...*shrug*
Add on your 69 years for 3 generations and we'll be back to a population situation of 1933 + 69 = 2002. In short, we'd be back to the approximate population position of today.
I see that you cite American flu rates, suggesting that you may be American. Given that, likely you live there and rarely leave (average American)? Of the last 3 years I've spent about 8-9 months (I'd have to check my pay slips) living in various countries of Africa and on my last rotation out of there an aircraft fault put us down into Abidjan airport, which borders the most recent ebola outbreak. My next rotation into Africa will see me in Gabon, in the thick of the "ebola belt". Ebola isn't a theoretical issue for me, and I'm paying close attention to the vaccine work, and would consider participating in clinical trials of one.
It's perfect! Unsinkable? Unthinkable!
No Homer will ever be allowed, and all the regulators will be objective and unbowed!
That stuck in my memory for 8 years later when I was looking for something better then a Nokia Communicator, and which I'd be able to take to work. I wasn't disappointed by the hardware Psion were selling then.
Sure, it was running a great OS for the time but that OS did not have the kind of app ecosystem that the iPad does.
And it didn't need it.
Writing documents - covered on the stock ROM (and you could get converters to go to Word and or Write formats too).
Spreadsheets - I could make the stock ROM's spreadsheet do the calculations for steering oil wells. Other people I knew ran their stock portfolios on their Psions. Converters available.
Drawing
Database - again, good enough for my purposes. I knew a mud man who did his stock control on one, so I guess that was good enough for him.
Presentations
There were a LOT of other apps out there - I remember buying several, such as astronomical tools - but you could take the machine out of it's box on Xmas day and be up and running for any regular office tasks.
We hooked those systems up to the old Motorola analogue mobile phones - we could get 2400 BPS data links from 70 miles offshore. Since the antennae for a formal radio system would have cost 10s of thousands of dollars for installation, and be repeated each time we needed to hire a vessel, then the price of the touchscreen didn't seem too unreasonable. We saved hundreds of thousands over the years that system was working!
Ahhh, memories. Xenix! X! Multiple overlapping windows! All so new then.
And with an $800 BoM, you'd have been up against a £400 Psion 5 (retail cost), which included all applications necessary (was a web browser considered necessary at the time? I honestly can't remember. I know I did do some web browsing on it, because it would connect well to my Sony mobile or Nokia Communicator ; but I honestly can't remember if the web browser was built in or one I chose)., a large installed base of users with their own applications from the 3- and 5- series and an established dealer network.
Oh, hang on - you priced things in dollars. American? Then no Psion dealer network. Maybe you'd have survived.
Technologies that had to mature before the tablet computers became practical:
Wifi networking.
Useful, I'll agree. Not "necessary". I ran cables throughout the old house in the mid-1990s, and was getting a stable 100MBPS connection from any computer from about 1996 until we left in 2012. If I had a guest and I wanted to provide them with WiFi, I'd turn on the laptops WiFi card and the last time I did it, they could get half the connection speed that I had through the cable. I was considering running 1000-base, but would probably have left it until the previous cable was 20 years old before replacing it.
Capacitive Touchscreens -- Most early designs used a stylus, which sucks, and had poor resolution to boot
I used a touch screen with a stylus. You might think that they suck, but I'm perfectly happy with them. My Psion used one (and I never lost one!) and my last - or last-but-one - phone also had a stylus (which I also didn't lose, until I lost the phone itself). You might think that they suck, but that's a subjective opinion, not an objective fact.
Low power but still acceptably fast processors -- A huge sticking point, lots of early tablets had extremely poor battery life on top of being slow
Yeah
A touch enabled OS -- WinCE is terrible to use with a finger, and really pretty bad with a stylus. Symbian was never great. PalmOS was too narrowly focused on Palm pilots
When I discovered Symbian, I never felt the need to try a WinCE machine or a Palm machine. I just got on with using the applications and barely noticed the OS. Which is how it should be.
Battery capacity -- Battery technology has come a long way inetwork speed n the past 15 years. Early attempts would use NiCad batteries, which just aren't good enough, especially with the relatively high energy consumption figures from the old chips
See above comments about the horrors of a monthly battery change (Either NiCads, NiMHs or primaries).
The technology to make effective "tablet" devices was available in the late 1990s - Psion did it. To this day, it's a mystery to the community of "Psioneers" why they stopped manufacturing them, or why they didn't sell the hardware division as a going concern when they restructured to become a software-only company. If they'd continued
Work continues in this area. -- DEC's SPR-Answering-Automaton