I lived in Pittsburgh from 1989 to 1991, very close to Carnegie Mellon University. One of their technical departments (CMU) had a self-driving car (really a van like a UPS van) even back then ; we saw it driving around our neighborhood sometimes. I think it always had an operator standing by inside it, for override.
That was the NavLab, an autonomous vehicle with a crew of 5. I was in it once when I visited CMU. Rack-mounted workstations in the back with up to 3 operators, a driver, and someone with a keyboard in the passenger seat. Top speed about 5 MPH. First 3D LIDAR.
Good ideas, nowhere near enough compute power or good enough sensors. Or precision GPS, which modern self-driving cars lean on too much.
They had to start somewhere. But progress was too slow for years. Tony Tether at DARPA came up with the DARPA Grand Challenge because he thought the DARPA-funded automatic driving projects needed a serious kick in the ass. It worked.
(The reason it worked is not well known. Some major research universities were quietly told by DARPA that if they didn't do well in the Grand Challenge, their DARPA funding would be cut off. Suddenly entire CS departments were being devoted to automatic driving. Levels of effort went from 5 people to over 100, and not at DARPA's expense.)
hey Wow so I stumbled into a Natoist troll army barracks here right I guess. No mention anywhere of the right of the population of Crimea to self determination. They held a vote right ?
HTML is for hypertext documents, and CSS an organ of the same organism called 'HTML/CSS'. It's made for text documents, and applying it to the implementation of GUI-centric applications has always been an ugly hack. For awhile (90s to 00s AJAX) it was necessary, and now the whole professional ecosystem has built up tremendous inertia over the millions of accumulated people/hours of perfecting this 'competency'/hack. Now though, I would recommend to switch over to building 2D webapps entirely out of SVGs (say with React + Flux) e.g.:
https://github.com/Terebinth/Vickers
or, even better, to building them entirely out of WebGL. SVGs are easy and would lead to a wonderfully efficient workflow, but I think WebGL holds the advantage for performance considerations, given the way it goes to the hardware.
I don't believe WebGL is suitable for rendering applications. Look at game UIs, they usually are either crap (low-cost games, where devs didn't sped too much time and simply blit button sprites somewhere on screen), or the authors had to implement a widget set on top of GL (WoW comes to mind). But a widget set is exactly what React and web components give you (built in top of basic building blocks like divs and spans and of course CSS for styling).
And while HTML was initially created for hypertext documents, it doesn't mean it can't be used for somthing else. I disagree that it's an ugly hack. Some parts may not be suitable for GUI apps (uhm, like <blink>), but then simply don't use them in your application. Or implement something better on top of the good parts (like React did). Eventually the good parts may be come standard.
Moving entirely to svg for user interface has some of its own issues (i.e. there's no default layout engine in svg; everything is essentially absolutely positioned...) but would be interesting to think about. Moving entirely to WebGL would only be viable if you don't care at all about accessibility though. For some subset of applications that might be acceptable (i.e. games), but for something like gmail or other similar applications it's definitely not.
You just have to create widgets libraries, compile them to WebAsm or something alike, and export an event-based framework for the developers to use. It can even be in another language, compiled to WebAsm.
Or, alternatively, you can just use Flash, instead of cloning it.
There is already a very compact 2D vector-oriented format with its own scripting language: SWF. You don't even need to use Adobe's implementation - there are alternative Flash Players and authoring tools out there.
