Author:
madcows
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Date:
6/12/2020 6:10:37 PM
Subject:
RE: Airbrushes must die
There was a time when pretty much everything that could be adjusted on a car had to be... manually. And many of them had to be done while driving. Just look at all the levers and shit that cars from the early 1900s had. Not every idiot could just jump behind the wheel and get going, which is just as well since most people couldn't afford one anyway. Sure, there's some historical interest and quaintness in experiencing that, but I imagine that the number of people that want to deal with all that hassle on a regular basis is pretty much zero. I think that it has parallels with a lot of consumer technology. Look how much effort it took to tune old radios and then tweak a bunch of variable just to get it to sound decent. Computing as well.
For things that aren't widely adopted consumer items, it is a bit, or a lot different. Some things have changed so little, other than maybe some refinements in terms of materials or lower costs.
I currently drive a car with a manual trans, which is what most of my previous cars had as well. Fortunately I rarely drive in traffic so it's only minimally annoying, but I think my next car will have some form of automated transmission. Realistically, they're better now a days in pretty much every way. Just about every level of pro motorsport uses them too.
Do people really need a lot of control over their car's operation? Statistics show they're probably better off with much less. How much control do most people need over the low level operations of their computer? Interestingly, to some extent it's impossible to have it all. I watched an interview with Jim Keller a while back where he mentioned that the functionality of the system that manages the out-of-order execution of code is so complex now that software is never executed in the same sequence twice. All in the name of performance, of course.
