1) No haptic feedback if I hit a key - did I hit it? just terrible for touch typists
2) Context switching according to an app - now you expect me to remember another whole new way to interact in addition to on-screen and keyboard short cuts - WHY?
3) Should I look at the keyboard or not - if not then why do the glowy keys on the keyboard keep distracting me? If yes then WTF is the screen for?
4)Do all Apple products have this or not? Why is there no external keyboard with TouchBar?
Complete misfire on Apple's part
(Reference : Currently use MBP 15 latest version for work)
A large number of users are not touch typists and do not remember keyboard shortcuts. They look down at the keyboard when typing. Those users will love the touch bar.
I do this and even though I'm not a touch typist, there is a sense of position information about keys in my mind. However with the touch bar (I'm assuming, having never used one for longer than 2 minutes), even that sense will not help.
I think so. One of the best programmers I know types quite slowly, often glancing down. He's the author of some very popular open-source work. Many thousands of programmers build on his code daily.
This is a very pernicious take on AI (and Amazon's usage of said AI). Amazon has hired 300000 professionals wohoo! more jobs!
All those jobs are poorly paid, very labour intensive have almost zero benefits and usually not full time. If AI is giving us these kinds of jobs for the many for the instant gratification of consumers then we are worse off NOT better-off.
Face it - the Advent of better AI (Robots, Driverless cars, etc) will lead to massive job losses and disruption of (currently) well paying jobs - the technology is advancing much faster than the ability of "blue collar" worker to retrain or adapt.
It is indeed a "massive failure of imagination" - of the author to understand the real world limitations.
Why do they need to sell browsing histories?
There are numerous way to profit without actually selling history:
1) Come buy our trueTarget analytic service - add a keyword search and out comes the name of every one interested in say "Evening college" (Comcast also has the address on file obviously)
2) Political observers - This Zipcode has the most mentions for "Climate change hoax"
3) Porn/Medical/<other potentially embarrassing stuff> : Too many services here -
None of this sells individual browsing history yet which of these would be certainly illegal?
This is a complete red herring to distract from the Republicans completely disgraceful sell out to big business.
If not illegal which of these would be ok under "we do not see your browsing history"?
Police are NOT requesting "whole city's Google Searches" - they are requesting the Whole WORLD's Google searches (if you will) for a specific search string (actually a variation of strings).
Realistically complying will get them a bunch of IP addresses. Lets say they get 100 IP addresses; then what?
Track down and investigate every one of them? For what? How do you go from IP address to potential suspect in Bank Fraud?
Apparently now rather than having a suspect and then going to Google for that specific suspect's records is no longer the in thing. These lazy coppers want Google's help to even develop a suspect...very very close to a fishing expedition.
When governments "break things" they are usually life or death things - Like Healthcare, Environment, Clean Water, Nuclear Weapons, etc.
The Trump WH could be spun as some well thought out scrappy disruption of Politics as usual, which it is not.
It very much is a chaotic mess led by a massively narcissistic man-child and the cynical and dangerous people he seeks advice from. I am amazed at Sam Altman for providing anodyne quotes which almost seems like he admires the chaos that Trump is causing. The disruption is causing massive REAL damage to the US and its allies - exactly unlike a start-up that improves choices for customers - not destroys the market itself.
The Mac is a victim of the iPhone's success - pure and simple.
From a short & medium term perspective the business/ops guys will tell you that any engineering resources spent on Mac would yield better results in iPhone land.
It requires fundamental "long-game" mindset to realise that once you lose the high-end Mac guys - you lose your best proponents - then you go into a decline, a long and very profitable decline.
There is no excuse for the current line-up of Macs - super expensive, incremental and confusing half-baked features.
> The Mac is a victim of the iPhone's success - pure and simple. From a short & medium term perspective the business/ops guys will tell you that any engineering resources spent on Mac would yield better results in iPhone land.
Which is why I'm voicing my objections to the way that Apple is treating their Mac lineup by leaving iOS. I sold my iPhone and iPads (I had 2) and moved to Android.
I'm still a Mac user who will happily spend thousands when they offer compelling reasons to upgrade. But if their belief is that there is more money in iOS, I'm making damn sure that I'm not part of that equation.
Switching to Android also has the pleasant side effect of being far cheaper. I was able to get a brand new Nexus 5X for net-$20 after trading in my old iPhone 6, which barely held a charge anymore. And Google Fi is so much cheaper for my use case (I use about a half gig per month and do a lot of travel in other countries) that I'm saving around $20/mo and getting better service.
For those of you wanting Apple to focus more product development resources on macOS and Macs, abandoning that platform will only confirm Apple's decision to focus on iOS. We need to abandon that platform if we want more focus on macOS.
For instance, if you are developing a game with Sprite Kit, you will find that around 95% of the code is IDENTICAL on Mac and iOS. Sprite Kit itself works the same on both. Sister frameworks like AVFoundation are mostly the same and they have peanut-buttered some #define values to allow “different” classes like UIColor and NSColor to be SKColor, etc. to make it easier to have code that does not needlessly vary. You end up having to clearly think about UI differences between the two but that is true anyway between desktop and mobile.
On the other hand, sure, a utility-style application is not that similar between iOS and macOS once you get past the likes of NSString and NSArray. Yet, utility applications often look and work quite differently between desktop and mobile so this may make sense. And if you rely on the cloud to implement part of the functionality (and share it between the two), you may find that again you are dealing with mainly a lot of UI-centered differences on the two platforms that would have been different anyway.
The iPad is the weird one. Here, Apple probably needs a middle API that really can use exactly the same constructs between mobile and desktop where they actually do end up looking or even working the same.
"Narcissistic Crazy person who might end civilization due to something he just saw on Fox news or because someone dissed him on Twitter" seems to be missing from the latest set of boxes.
While this feat depends on hitting a lot of intermediate milestones - Falcon Heavy Test, Crew Dragon Unmanned to ISS, Crew Dragon manned to ISS, etc, there is no "show-stopper" that is apparent right now.
I like how they have avoided committing to the much harder "landing on the Moon and then return" scenario.
We choose to not go to the moon, but do the other things, not because they are hard, but because they are relatively easy, and we can make a quick buck.
"Relatively" being very much a keyword here. Nothing about sending two people around the moon is easy, there's a reason it hasn't been done in several decades.
>there's a reason it hasn't been done in several decades
Because it lost its novelty. Clearly the technology's already been there and had the potential to get better with continued funding.
Apollo 11 was a huge moment for the US and the world. We beat the Soviet Union to the moon, and that was the primary goal. By the time Apollo 17 rolled around there were other things going on that grabbed our attention (like Vietnam). We had already spent too much money on the Apollo program and the public didn't really care anymore, so it ended.
The surprising thing about this announcement is that its a private mission. SpaceX has long resisted private tourism, to pursue CRS and Commercial Crew missions. I'm sure several billionaires would have written a large check, long ago, to go into orbit.
Have they really resisted it? SpaceX haven't had, and still don't have, a spacecraft capable of carrying people into orbit, so it's not like they've left money on the table. Delivering satellites and cargo was a good way to fund and prove the rocket themselves, without which any tourism is obviously a non-starter. And working with NASA on the Commercial Crew programme provides access to NASA expertise and facilities that SpaceX would otherwise have to develop from scratch. I suspect tourism was always part of the long-term plan.
If I had to guess why they decided to start with this mission in particular, I think it is probably because it provides a better PR opportunity than simple orbital tourism. SpaceX are clearly very image conscious, and beginning by taxiing billionaires into orbit perhaps sends the wrong signal. It's not doing anything that Russia hasn't already done, and undercuts the idealistic image they put across.
On the other hand, sending people beyond LEO for the first time in over forty years is clearly a major accomplishment. And having them be private citizens, even very rich ones, sends a very strong message that private spaceflight has come of age.
Yes, SpaceX resisted earlier tourism opportunities for a few reasons. One reason was they didn't have the corporate resources to do tourism flights, and do the R&D for CCDev & Commercial Crew Program (CCP), so they focused on Commercial Crew.
Another reason is that NASA doesn't want tourist flights to the ISS, and no private destinations were close to ready. Lets say CCP funding was delayed, and a private team offered $400m for tourist flights, they'd have to develop two different Dragon capsule specifications. One for ISS, and one for private tourism. Similar, but with non-identical requirements. With the CCP further along, the different specifications may no longer be an issue.
Another reason is SpaceX doesn't have a training program for space tourists, and they'd require a training program. The Russians require 3-6mo of training for a space tourist on the Soyuz.
That said, there are reasons SpaceX went for this plan now, and not before.
Indeed, the last time people went beyond LEO was Apollo 17 in 1972. Having the capability to do so is a big step towards re-attaining the Apollo level of humans in space.
Everyone replying is missing this oppositized JFK quote: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
I think possibly lots of people are missing it. How well known is Kennedy's speech for those who weren't alive at the time? And yes it was a joke, but contained within the joke is a pointed commentary.
I think it's one of the most famous quotations in the country (it has it's own wikipedia page[0]), and the reference wasn't exactly subtle. I'm betting most downvoters (myself included) got the reference.
Sorry, a bit dense maybe, but what's 'oppositized' about it? That looks like a verbatim quote to me.
EDIT: Oh, not your usage! You're suggesting people somehow haven't realised the GP was mis-quoting JFK, I guess? I think it's more likely that everyone reading that GP comment realised, since it was a pretty obvious context for the reference.
Everyone's always so cynical... They're sending (presumably) two non-astronauts further than any humans have ever been. I assume there will be future milestones that probably include landing on the moon to test the Mars landing.
Landing on the moon to "test" the Mars landing makes almost no sense. The a moon is just to different, landing on mars can be trained much better on Earth or on Mars itself.
The simuliertes are not enough to make it sensible if you don't have another reason to land on the moon too.
There's gravity and a rock. Ignoring all the differences these still two extremely hard things to solve first before you start thinking of anything else.
The Earth has a full atmosphere with winds, an expansive array of magnetic and electric fields, and a much much higher gravitational pull then Mars or the moon. About a factor of 10 removed from mars and about a further factor of 10 removed from the moon.
You'd obviously need more fuel, and fuel that can burn in a completely different atmosphere then it's intended to run in. It's an invalid test for the kind of useful metrics that would be obtainable in a "pure" vacume out in space.
Rockets carry oxidizer along with fuel, so the composition of the local atmosphere doesn't really figure. Also, your factors are way off; Martian gravity is a bit shy of 0.4g, and lunar gravity a bit proud of 0.1.
Finally, we don't need to land on the moon, or Earth, or anywhere else, to validate a method of landing on Mars, because we already know how to land on all of those things. We've done it plenty of times before, in all cases; the difference between doing it manned and doing it unmanned is purely one of mass.
We've only landed light things on mars, curiosity is the heaviest at 889kg, and the methods used don't scale easily.
Anything that can sustain humans for an extended period of time is going to weigh a lot more. EDL (Entry descent and landing) is a solvable problem, but it's not a solved one. You can find lots of recent work on it by googling that term.
Not to disagree that we can test on Earth better than the moon. Mars has a light atmosphere, but it doesn't have no atmosphere.
I wonder if there's an altitude you could do a "landing" at that would be thin enough atmosphere and weak enough gravity to get close to Martian conditions.
NASA does indeed use high-altitudes on earth to test Mars aerobraking, atmospheric entry, and supersonic parachute deployment[0]. For the actual terminal descent and landing speeds are low enough the atmosphere is not significant, you can just test that at sea level.
Gravity will still be too high, gravity at the ISS is 0.89 times gravity on the ground and you obviously need to be lower than that. But it's definitely the closest we can get to a large scale martian atmosphere.
You're wrong about the gravity. The escape velocity of Mars is 5 km/s, half of Earth's and twice the Moon's. The surface gravity is also .4G which is about half the Earth's and two and a half times the Moons. So they're all a lot closer together than you said.
The Moon has no atmosphere to use to shed speed. Very different animal than a Mars landing, to the point where it'd need a totally different landing vehicle than Mars.
Think heavy, shielded Apollo command modules versus the spidery lunar landers.
There's about .7kPa of atmos on mars. I'd have a hard time seeing how that would meaningfully influence escape or entrance velocity. In fact it should make entry easier because you'll have a higher resistance coming in meaning you'll have to do a lower deceleration burn.
Could you provide a source, of someone with experiance in this sort of work, telling me why this is the case? Why does this completely change the game? Why is a moon landing not the eaisiest "we know basically what we're doing"?
Money quote: “There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology completely,” said Manning, “and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. So, it’s in this ugly, grey zone.”
I believe that comment is more or less based on the shuttle landing and/or the soyuz capsules (eg parachutes) - but as far as I can tell, SpaceX is the only one currently capable (and using) propulsive landing on earth - so essentially they've already leapfrogged the grey zone to a large extent.
Makes me wonder whether testing a propulsive landing on an airborne drone barge is feasible? A blimp with a well-insulated large pad on the top - though I'm not sure how you'd effectively anchor it in the air - probably a active propulsion system as well.
You can bounce on the atmo and by passing threw it multible times you can bleed away speed. Then you can fly your capsule like a wing for a bit losing even more speed.
That's why a Dragon 2 can land on Mars, but not on the Moon.
Sure, if you ignore all the other problems. Why not fly to the Venus and test there? Why not on Saturn? The reason is simple, the cost of doing so outweighs the benefits of doing so.
Look, its simply almost as expensive to make such a test on the moon, as it is on mars. If mars is your goal, then testing on the moon makes absolutely no sense.
People seem to believe that because the moon is closer, it means its much easier there. The reality is that the deltaV is not that different, plus mars gives nice tools to actually land, like an atmosphere.
> plus mars gives nice tools to actually land, like an atmosphere.
Actually Mars is a pretty difficult place to land. The atmosphere is just thick enough to require heavy heat shields, but too thin for parachutes to be sufficient.
Still, you can get rid of most of the velocity for a Mars landing using aerobraking alone. To land on the Moon you'll be bringing all of that delta-V with you as fuel. Landing a Dragon on Mars already takes a lot of propellant: https://youtu.be/ZoSKHzziLKw
Even if Mars's atmosphere only kills 90% of your orbital velocity instead of the 99% you'd get on Earth[1] you're still saving a humongous amount of fuel, far more than the mass of the heat shield you have to carry along. If you're designing a new heat shield for each mission then the added complexity might make that not worth while but SpaceX is reusing the same heat shield design they've been testing on Earth so that isn't a concern.
OTOH, if you are "rapidly" (insofar as that is possible in space technology) iterating on some aspect of the system that is relatively insensitive to the differences between the Moon and Mars, the Moon being closer shortens your cycle time considerably. Delta-V isn't the only cost you might be concerned with.
True, but nobody has the money to develop something that needs multible moon test mission before it ever gets used productively.
Also, SpaceX has actually thought about the problem quite a bit and until somebody payed them they clearly said they are not going to do anything moon related.
They clearly did the same calculations. Moon is only worth it, if you actually want to go to the moon.
You can repeat that as often as you want, that does not make it true.
SpaceX clearly did not think that for their mars architecture needed a moon testing step. Mars concepts such as Mars Direct did not include such a step.
Unless you have extreme time pressure its much, much, much preferable to test on Earth and Mars, rather then the Moon. Earth because it's by far the cheapest, and it shares a reasonable amount with Mars, and Mars because that's where you want to go anyway.
The only advantage that the moon has is that it is closer than mars in pure distance. That advantage is eradicated when you consider the much more important DeltaV.
No. The Moon is in orbit around the Earth and both the Earth and Mars are in orbit around the sun. The Moon varies between 360,000 and 400,000 km away and the closest Mars gets to us is 54,600,000 kilometers. Those numbers are a bit of an exaggeration because how much fuel you need is just as important as absolute distance/time to travel and for that you need 4 km/s of delta-v to get from Earth orbit to Moon orbit and 5.7 km/s to get to Mars orbit.
I meant that the Earth is closer to Mars than the Moon is, not that Mars is closer to Earth than the Moon is (of course it isn't, that would make for a big, big blood moon)
Exactly and that's not mentioning the benifit of being able to easily recover a failed prototype or even just analysis of a failed prototype.
Imagine trying to diagnose a problem that comes up 10 months into the program after the probe is no longer in a direct visual path or while communications via microwaves start taking 10-20 seconds from point to point.
There are too many questions to be answered before we can just say "you know while we're at it lets just risk the lives of 10-20 people, who cares right?"
On the other hand, 10-20 people in a bus out of control on a mountainside can get in the news, even if it ends in tragedy. But we don't color our whole view of auto travel because of it. We don't make policy or even many business decisions because of it.
Space travel can be dangerous. We will likely lose some crews. Rescue will always be too far away to matter. But I think folks will do it anyway.
Have they said they'll test Martian equipment with Lunar landings? I'd guess it'd make a pretty poor testing ground, considering the cost of getting there.
That's a coin with a flipside though: you also don't need much in terms of heatshields so in that sense it is easier than on Mars.
A Mars landing needs both heatshields (because it does have an atmosphere) and retro-rockets to land with (because that atmosphere is not so dense that you can use it for gliding).
Well, they haven't got a lander for one thing. The Apollo LM had its design finalised in '63, and only flew in '65. SpaceX would surely do it quicker now, with the benefit of experience, but from scratch to operations in a year for such a unique vehicle is quite unrealistic.
The Apollo LM first flew in earth orbit on the Apollo 9 mission in March 1969. Its first test flight was only 4 months before the Apollo 11 mission landed one on the moon! And the first all-up Saturn V flew unmanned in November 1967. The incentives and funding were there very rapid development.
Dragon is only capable of crash-landing using its engines? I.e. there is not enough propellant, legs, etc... to do a soft landing? (not even considering take-off right now)
Depends on the rocket. With some modifications and the right rocket it should be possible to land a Dragon 2 on the moon. However, there it will be for a very long time. No chance to come back.
If you want to send up more propellant, you need to send up even more propellant to get the propellant you want up to space. Which means you have no room left for your actual payload.
Back in 2013, before SpaceX had recovered any rockets at all, Elon Musk talked about how the way they were going to get reusable rockets was by making the rocket and the reusability more efficient: https://youtu.be/vDwzmJpI4io?t=26m30s
It can land on Earth, because it uses the atmosphere to shed most of its speed, and rockets for the very last couple hundred miles an hour. No such luck on the airless Moon.
Not on the Moon. On Earth or Mars it can aerobrake away most of its orbital velocity but you can't do that on Mars. The Dragon 2 only carries 400 m/s of delta-v and you'd need 1.7 km/s to get from low lunar orbit to the surface even ignoring the need to brake into an orbit.
1) No haptic feedback if I hit a key - did I hit it? just terrible for touch typists
2) Context switching according to an app - now you expect me to remember another whole new way to interact in addition to on-screen and keyboard short cuts - WHY?
3) Should I look at the keyboard or not - if not then why do the glowy keys on the keyboard keep distracting me? If yes then WTF is the screen for?
4)Do all Apple products have this or not? Why is there no external keyboard with TouchBar?
Complete misfire on Apple's part (Reference : Currently use MBP 15 latest version for work)