Battery based electric vehicles of today and tomorrow.

[California]

The first windows ... the first time I saw it I thought it was stupid, very clunky, didn’t do much.

It was. Windows 3 was the first barely useful version but still mostly a novelty. Window 3.1 was the beginning of the Windows features we know today.

 

[airbiscuit]

I remember when we were looking to upgrade our business software - more Windows like. The IT developers were trying to convince us they had done it, but it was still ugly UNIX based, with inane codes and commands. They couldn't understand when I said "I just want to point at a printer icon" - "not submit jobs, do printer spools, etc." The old school IT folks just couldn't understand it. They were putting lipstick on a pig and calling it GUI.

 

[dragoneggs]

Dunno if this has been shared but I think this Personal Aerial Vehicle might be a good seller!

Opener | Home

Not sure of the price tag but I want one.

 

[Gale Hawkins]

DRDOS I think was from Digital Research.

 

[Grumpycat]

What really got me to thinking about self driving features were the Subara Eyesight self driving ads a few years ago with the lane keeping and automatic braking. On a wild hair some 3 years ago I dropped my wife off at work at 7 am on a Saturday and drove straight to Clarksville TN to look Subaru's for the first time because of the Eyesight ads. I was impressed but did not drive one because of the $30K price tag but was sold on getting a Subaru so before I left the parking lot I got on Craigslist looking for a used one to get my feet wet in ownership. I found a 2010 Forester Base model in Nashville with 105K miles but just had the 105K PM done including new head gaskets. I really was not wanting to drive to Nashville but the guy cut the price to $6K to get me to do the drive. The car drove well but the cloth interior was dirty and stained. I left $1600 with the seller and went back next week and picked it up.

I have a 2016 Outback with Eyesight. Its a toy compared to what Tesla was putting in cars 2 years prior. When compared to today's Tesla autopilot my Outback Eyesight is little more than an adaptive cruise control which will prevent you from rear ending the car you are following.

Eyesight will not "hold lane". If the assistive steering feature is turned on it will very very gently tug the steering wheel if it thinks you are crossing a line. If for laughs you try to let it steer it will tug left if it crosses the right line but it never tugs right until it crosses the left line. Drunken walk. After a cycle or two the car crosses a line hard enough the corrective tug doesn't work so you run off the road.

In normal operation Eyesight beeps if you cross a line without using turn signals. It will scream at you if another vehicle, person, or deer crosses too close in front. It beeps in reverse if it sees something moving behind you in the parking lot.

Its a good thing to have. Would not buy new Subaru without. But it is not a Tesla autopilot.

Oh, and Eyesight easily turns itself off in moderately heavy rain. Have learned to run wipers faster than I would just to keep cruise control operating. No Eyesight, no cruise control.

 

[Grumpycat]

Was this before or after gates stole the code from xerox to 田reate windows?

Gates stole the window concept from Apple who paid Xerox for the right to poach employees from Xerox PARC. Xerox executives were giggling because they were shutting down the unit, firing staff, and throwing everything away, yet Apple was paying them for it.

When the Macintosh was a success Xerox tried another go at the Star.

Xerox Star was still a text-based machine. The display was formed with special text characters on a grid. IBM PC also shipped with a bunch of special text characters for drawing boxes, arrow pointer, etc. Macintosh had none of this. Every bit on the screen was a bit in memory set or cleared by the CPU. Text had to be drawn by the CPU but this meant there was no limit to the size, shape, or position on the screen. No video text generator. Apple Lisa had a text generator, but not the Mac.

IBM really wanted CP/M-86 from Digital Research, the owners of CP/M. But Gary Kildall and his negotiating team were incompetent, slow, and arrogant, so IBM took Bill Gates up on his offer for PC-DOS. Microsoft was already under contract to provide BASIC.

 

[Gale Hawkins]

A small number of self-organizing autonomous vehicles significantly increases traffic flow

While this is not going to be helpful on my markings free road it may be meaningful like in LA, Houston, etc. Reaching the 5% level should not take many years in cities like that to speed up traffic flow.

 

[Gale Hawkins]

Gates stole the window concept from Apple who paid Xerox for the right to poach employees from Xerox PARC. Xerox executives were giggling because they were shutting down the unit, firing staff, and throwing everything away, yet Apple was paying them for it.

When the Macintosh was a success Xerox tried another go at the Star.

Xerox Star was still a text-based machine. The display was formed with special text characters on a grid. IBM PC also shipped with a bunch of special text characters for drawing boxes, arrow pointer, etc. Macintosh had none of this. Every bit on the screen was a bit in memory set or cleared by the CPU. Text had to be drawn by the CPU but this meant there was no limit to the size, shape, or position on the screen. No video text generator. Apple Lisa had a text generator, but not the Mac.

IBM really wanted CP/M-86 from Digital Research, the owners of CP/M. But Gary Kildall and his negotiating team were incompetent, slow, and arrogant, so IBM took Bill Gates up on his offer for PC-DOS. Microsoft was already under contract to provide BASIC.

Tesla and Apple Stocks Surge After Splits Become Effective

It is no accident that software companies are in the lead when it comes to EV's in general and self driving in specific and investors are still looking to technology based companies as great investments in a general sense. In 1969 I left the tobacco patch in West KY and went Louisville to study programming in assembly, RPG-2 and Cobol languages. Not sure why or how I got started on that path unless it was from reading Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines since at that point I had not been exposed to TV at home. I went on to study metal machining locally and worked in Tool and Die before studying advanced electronics in the Navy at Millington TN followed by college in Abilene TX and graduate school in Memphis TN only to start a computer business in 1992 that evolved into a small software development firm 25 years ago. Today most everything in life is impacted by software where it is planting corn, building a city on Mars or an EV.

 

[herm0016]

on the battery topic, RTG or radioisotope thermoelectric generators were not converting the radiation directly into electricity. they used thermocouples and solid state peltier junctions to convert the thermal energy that high energy isotopes of plutonium, strontium and others to electricity. the isotope is a way to make a block that stays hot for a long period of time. The new "batteries" use the radiation directly and thus are less dangerous and more efficient. they are using isotopes with much longer half lives, which means they decay and a much slower rate and give off much less radiation.

an RTG can contain a massive amount of radioactive material with a low half life / very high radiation output. SR-90 has a half life of around 30 years if memory serves. many many of these devices left to decay in Russia powering old lighthouses and things. also used to power space probes, like the voyager probes, Cassini and the latest mars rover.

 

[Gale Hawkins]

on the battery topic, RTG or radioisotope thermoelectric generators were not converting the radiation directly into electricity. they used thermocouples and solid state peltier junctions to convert the thermal energy that high energy isotopes of plutonium, strontium and others to electricity. the isotope is a way to make a block that stays hot for a long period of time. The new "batteries" use the radiation directly and thus are less dangerous and more efficient. they are using isotopes with much longer half lives, which means they decay and a much slower rate and give off much less radiation.

an RTG can contain a massive amount of radioactive material with a low half life / very high radiation output. SR-90 has a half life of around 30 years if memory serves. many many of these devices left to decay in Russia powering old lighthouses and things. also used to power space probes, like the voyager probes, Cassini and the latest mars rover.

Thanks for that detailed info. It sounds like they have been around for a while but just not in consumer based products.