Things I’m surprised we don’t have yet
slacy.com
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That's a multi billion dollar solution if anyone can manage it. Battery tech has definitely not stagnated - it is just maddeningly hard to progress.
Even the most modern car out there (arguably, the latest generation Toyota Prius) is still a mess of gears, oil, wires, and fairly crappy and old UI conventions on the inside
The reason that "mess" has survived relatively unchanged for so long is simple: it "just works". It works really well and is simple. Changing a winning formula is tough.
Better locks for my home
We have digital locks at work and they are the biggest pain ever :) again there is a reason we have keys - they work.
Those 4 AA batteries used to run your Game Boy for a handful of hours - nowadays a Li-ion battery packk that's half the size of those AA batteries can keep your Game Boy running for just about indefinitely. Except we no longer run 8MHz CPUs in our mobiles ;)
http://runagate.noisepages.com/2009/11/8-bit-touch-sensitive...
With an old-fashioned mechanical key, I can go to any dealer or most locksmiths with proof that I'm authorized to use the vehicle and have a new key cut by code in minutes. I don't find using a mechanical key to open my house especially inconvenient, and don't see any benefit to a more secure key; there are weaker points of entry for an intruder.
Why should my house come with an expensive item I will most likely never need and if I did need it, is available within hours?
If it wasn't worth it for them, how is it worth it for people who never have power outages?
"Video on demand for everything." The media czars own the copyrights and want to keep control.
"Batteries that last for months or years for portable electronics." There is not much "freedom to operate" with battery technologies. I haven't read up on this in a while, but my understanding of why Toyota had a hybrid that was head-and-shoulders above other companies was that Panasonic owned the patents for their batteries, and wouldn't let anyone else come close (except Ford, who licensed them for the Escape). I don't know as much about small electronics, but I'm guessing it isn't a much easier area to work in.
2) batteries: I don't think IP is the main gating factor. If there was such technology, it would get deployed pretty quickly. So it sounds like technology hasn't solved that problem yet.
Physics and economics.
You can get run flat tires and a spray to fix small holes in tires, though. But run flat tires are a compromise and the ride isn't the same as with non-runflat tires.
Tires are a compromise. In northern Europe many drivers change to winter tires in the winter and summer tires for the rest of the year. You can have "all season" tires but they don't have the same grip because they are a compromise. I don't know how many people use winter tires in the US.
The farther north you get in the US, the more likely it is that someone will use winter tires.
However, remember that the US tends to be farther south than Europe. For example, Rome, which is in Southern Europe, is about the same longitude as Chicago, which is north/central US. (See http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001769.html and http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001796.html .)
Yes, I know that winter temperatures and snowfall are more relevant but I don't have those.
- Solid urethane or other material tires. - Some other unpressurized (i.e. mechanical, rubber, electromechanical) device instead of pneumatics. - Built in air compressors into wheels. Alert for a slow leak and keep pumping in air until you get it fixed. (i.e. like a sump on a ship) - Built in "fix-a-flat" type goo dispersal device. - etc.
Jumper cables? Why doesn't my car have an "emergency electrical jack" that I can just plug into from a home outlet, tow truck, or other car? Why do I have to go on about finding batteries, connecting alligator clips, etc. It should be more like "Connect two devices with emergency electrical cable. Press start on both devices. Wait for green light. Remove cables. Drive to service station."
Tire chains? Do you seriously think this is the best solution to getting temporary cold weather traction? How about (at the least) those Spikes-Spyder things? (http://www.spikes-spiders.com/) That's just the beginning of innovation that could happen in this space.
The cars are the way they are because it works and it's a proven model. The basic engine designs live for decades because they work and it's not cheap to design a new one.
I don't think cars suck. Some brands/models do, but in general I think they work well. A modern car is very reliable. Much better than the ones from the beginning of the 1980s.
You can buy a 12V adapter to charge your car battery from a home outlet.
I didn't write I thought tire chains were the best thing for driving in cold weather. I think winter tires are. Yes, you have to change the tires, but it's the best solution there is right now.
Those spike spiders seem to add an additional permanent steel hub to your wheels. This adds unsprung weight to the car which is bad. The bottom line is that designs are compromises. A feature is not always worth the drawbacks.
So it's on the horizon. The speaker actually powers a mobile phone as one of his examples.
Yes! We moved house recently and setting up our projector, wii and mac-mini so that the cables didn't look horrific was way too much work. Maybe it's a bandwidth thing? I suppose wirelessly transmitting video and not interfering with your neighbors' setups might need quite a significant amount of spectrum?
Live events (sports, etc.) could be live-streamed.
Heh. Over the content-owners' dead bodies apparently.
So, that should explain why it can't be wireless.
It can be done over fiber—something the article's author apparently didn't bother to research as a Googling for "HDMI fiber" finds equipment. "HDMI cat5" tells me it can be done over CAT5 ("ethernet") cable as well.
So, that should explain why it can't be wireless.
I don't think this math alone shows video can't be wireless (all TV content used to be wireless, and many more channels were broadcast that way than I have close neighbors).
I would guess there's not enough unused spectrum to make it work right now though.
SDTV did not use bits, it was analogue (and had even less quality than ATSC).
A few months back I read something about streaming H264 but haven't got the time to dig up the link. That should likely be able to get the bandwidth down to something reasonable.
I guess the only sources of "pure" HDTV content are the rendered sources, like XBox, PS3, or a PC's framebuffer. Those are all never-compressed video sources.
As someone who majored in mechanical engineering and has worked in the auto industry before, I take some slight offense to this - IMHO this comment is incredibly out of touch with just how much cars have improved, even in just the last decade.
This is about as accurate and insightful as saying "well the web sure hasn't changed much in the last 10 years, it's still a mess of clickable links and pages".
If you don't understand "gears, oil, and wires", learn a little about what you're complaining about before doing so.
The energy density of batteries is dependent on basic chemistry.
The ideas about locks on our houses are pretty key, however.
Why don't we have good wireless home entry systems? Does physics explain this?
Why haven't displays followed Moore's law like everything else has?
They have: they shrunk. In depth.
If all of your devices were made by one company this year, they probably would (and definitely could) have a universal connector. It would probably be HDMI.
That's untenable because of price. Most people already have most of those things, and replace them piecemeal over time. I've actually thought about a startup to make all in ones, but TVs with integrated VCRs and DVD players have historically been so poorly manufactured that they leave a bad image in people's minds. It would be like selling a microbrew in aluminum cans. It;s a superior vessel to what's out there in every way, but because every other beer in a tin can is swill, serious beer drinkers would assume yours was too.
And, by the way, if you buy a Palm Pre you don't have to plug it in. That's actually one of my favorite features of it.
As does Fat Tire now.
It's the cool thing to do, since it doesn't take as much energy to move cans (they're lighter). So it's "Green" beer.
With a key you need to use hand eye coordination to stick the key into the hole and turn with (sometimes) force (and sometimes need to apply pressure to the door as well).
With a keypad you need to stick out your hand the same length as with a key- and push a few buttons. I do not believe you are correct.
Note that I am not trying to imply that stealing a key is hard or anything. It is in fact quite easy. But at least for me, I need my keys every few hours, so even if you managed to steal my keys from me without me noticing the theft, I would still know that my keys are gone at most a few hours later and 1 or 2 hours later, I'd be convinced that they are stolen. Thus, your window of opportunity is just around a few hours.
If you just spy on the combination, you know the combination and the window of opportunity to break into the house is as large as the frequency of combination-changes. which, considering password-changing-frequencies in real life, might be month to years.
Thus, I don't really think the coolness offsets the security issues.
What? I've never heard of such thing. What car does this?
Apparently the tech has been around for a while +5 years.
In fact, a lot of new cars in general are like this, which I find absurdly annoying.
Also prevents me from ever locking the keys in the car, since... they'd be in range, and it'd open.
The prius is like the iphone, it's not a very good car (like the iphone isn't a very good phone), but everything else is a nice touch that makes it fun to use.
http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/wireless_electr.php
A lot of the other things the OP wants already exist as well. Including monitors with about 10x more pixels than a 1024x768. Batteries in some devices can last months or years.
Most of the things that person wants are just too expensive or unnecessary or beyond the "i'm ready for this" stage of marketability. People don't want all electric cars. People don't want the expense when other things are "good enough".