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Comment Re:But... (Score 1) 316

I don't know if you've ever driven in snow, but most of the time Traction Control is useless in deep snow.

Even with winter tires, most of the times I disable the Traction Control because if it's activated it takes forever to accelerate. When you have a front wheel drive car in deep snow, with good tires, it's much more efficient to spin the front tires moderatly to accelerate. With Traction Control as soon as there is spin it strangle the engine and uses the brakes to try to modulate traction, but since there's almost no traction it's totally useless.

ECS is still usefull to prevent fishtailling tough.

Comment Learning COBOL is easy (Score 1) 335

Anyone with some coding experience can learn it in a couple of weeks.

What's more difficult is that every single company has it's own editing/compiling tools, source management, home made subroutines, programming standards, etc...

Coding for batch processing is a lot different than for a web pages or user applications.

And forget about the documentation, it has probably been lost in all the movings and restructurations. Some systems are more than 30 years old.

Comment Re:Scary (Score 2) 115

Err... all cars that are currently on sale have hydraulic brakes.

When you push on the brake pedal, you're actually operating a piston that pushes on brake fluid, and that fluid pushes on the pistons in the brake calipers. You have vacuum assist to make it easier, but even with the engine not running you can still brake (granted it takes much more force to do it).

And only one or two car models have steering by wire, almost all cars still have mechanical rack and pinion steering, with either hydraulic or electrical assist. Again if the engine cuts out it will take more effort to steer but it's still working.

Only the gas pedal is now almost always drive by wire, you no longer have that cable running from a pulley over the pedal to the throttle body, it's just a variable resistor measuring the movement of the pedal and relaying this information to the computer, wich then operate an servor motor on the throttle body.

Even the Tesla cars have a fully mechanically connected rack & pinion steering, but there's a small electric servo that can operate it when on autopilot. For the brakes the Tesla have conventionnal hydraulic brakes for the front, and electrically actuated rear brakes.

I don't know where you got your information, but it's moslty wrong.

Comment What about the lag? (Score 5, Insightful) 144

So they found a way to ignore the laws of physics?

Current consoles already have a lag problem. With wireless controllers, a TV that does all sort of processing to the image before displaying it, all of this is adding a small amount of delay that is already perceptible.

Adding the delay of sending the actions I do on my controller to the server over the internet and receiving the generated frames to display on the TV will add way too much lag.

But the younger generation seems to be unaware of the growing lag problem in the current world. It seems to me that as more and more of our technology is being driven by software instead of hardware, everything responds slowly to inputs. It used to be that changing a TV channel or changing volume was almost instantaneous, now you wait half a second for the damn thing to respond to your button press. I'm so tired of having to deal with laggy unresponsive touch screens, it's spreading like cancer in the technological world.

Now get off my lawn!

Comment Re: As someone.... (Score 1) 69

Imagine taking a cross country road trip where each morning you wake up at a different national park.

That would be a pretty boring trip.

Part of the fun of doing a car trip is having to navigate, finding unexpected things en route and stopping to see them, etc.

Driving a car is so much fun, why would you want to miss that and sleep instead?

Comment Re:That's just because they aren't building it. (Score 1) 303

I don't think they're fighting, they're just not willing to take risks. But by not taking risks, they risk missing the boat and giving away the market to a competitor.

I know that eventually the electric car offer will be better, and with volume manufacturing will cost less.

A 500km range is great, they need to shorten the recharge time in half tought. 15 min for 80% charge would be acceptable for me.

But I still see at least one internal combustion engine vehicle in my future before I can afford an electric one which responds to my needs. So we're talking about 7 to 8 years from now. Or maybe we'll buy a used one as a secondary car, and use the SUV only when absolutely necessary.

Comment Re:It is fuel vehicles that won't compete. (Score 1) 303

You realize that your reply doesn't adress any of my concerns about electric cars.

Like the fact that the cheapest one that I could buy right now is 35,000 CDN$, and that's for a subcompact that can do only 180KM in the best of conditions.

How in hell can I fit my kids in this car? That costs 50% more than my current car?

Comment Re:Lots of stops and starts. (Score 0) 303

All the problems with electric vehicles have been solved

Really? Find me a 6 passenger electric vehicle with 500km range (while towing a camping trailer) for less than 30,000 CND$. Which can recharge this 500km range in 5 minutes.

Because that's what electric vehicles have to compete with to win me over.

And yes I do use that 500km ranger multiple times a year. And we have 4 children, and a camping trailer that sees a lot of use. And we know a lot of families that have the exact same requirements.

So no, all the problems have not been solved.

We're getting there, and I'm excited to have an electric vehicle someday, but I bet it won't be in the next 5 years at the earliest. Again, for my needs.

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