That is certainly not extremely unlikely, at least not in any European country I've been to. I'd say at least 80% of the travelers look at their phones, a book, paper etc. I can do it almost any time I choose to.
"People get worked up as hell and I frankly just want to have fun with my devices."
How is this entire post anything but "getting worked up as hell"? Seems to me to be a case of "when other people complain, they're whiny, but when _I_ get annoyed, heads must roll!".
Forgive my ignorance, but when I was introduced to the Chromebook concept a few years ago, it was basically supposed to be a cheaper "thin" (not physically necessarily but spec-wise) computer mostly running web apps. Now they're instead high-end laptops. Are they no longer about running mostly web apps, or what? What changed in the last couple of years? Why is this hardware needed? I don't get it.
Also, the web changed; there are webapps that require gigabytes of memory out there, such as Gmail.
All respect to Google, I use a Chromebook for offline writing and general browsing and it's wonderful, but I agree that I'm not seeing the use-case for this one yet.
Maybe they'll port Android Studio to it? That might be pretty nice.
Nowadays browsers use relatively a lot of resources. I don't know how ChromeOS handles tabs, but I imagine running everything in a browser takes a toll on performance.
I remember the agony I experienced when I needed to use Word365 online for a project. The javascript implementation was so slow and resource heavy that I was almost going to go crazy. Google Docs on the other hand worked fine most of the time. But none of them could replace a native MS Office or Libreoffice. Maybe with webassembly things are going to get different, but adding abstraction layers come at a cost.
Also these machines need to run videos and process pictures and maybe movies. With those requirements performance doesn't hurt.
How is this more useful than an ordered list of search results, exactly? Once you've picked your destination, based on travel time, you still want figure out how to get there.
Well it still maintains some geographic info by keeping the direction. This helps for instance in identifying clusters of places, so user can think: "If I go that way there a N other places nearby too". Also the cardinal directions are still preserved, which help to interface with user's preexisting geographic knowelege.
Well, to some degree, yes. Maybe it's even mostly true. But the fact that point A and B are close to point C by some mode of transportation does not guarantee that they are close to each other. They might be separated by some geographic feature like a river, mountain or large road that doesn't separate them from C. Or the transportation options between A and C and between B and C may be excellent, but horrible between A and B. And so on. You need a normal map, or very good prior knowledge of the geography indeed, to know that.
If you click on A, you will be able to see if it is close to B or not. Or, more generally, clicking on a few points in a cluster on this map should give you an idea of whether you'll be able to travel easily between places once you get there. So I don't think it's as useless as you are making it out to be.
Then again, I fail to see how this is a major improvement over just clicking the first location of interest in an ordered list to generate a new list etc.
My main point is that to me, you're either interested in going to the closest location from where you are, and you'd probably want a brief description of each location to filter out points of interest to you. A list is just as good if not better (since you can quickly glance more information about each place) for that purpose.
Or else you're interested in the geography of the different locations or their exact spatial relationship and then you need a normal map anyway.
Sure, this is a neat geographic data visualization, but I just can't see myself using it in a real world situation.
It lets you quickly see which search results you're walking toward and want to check the details on. You could get the same info from reading a result list, but if this takes less attention it's a good presentation.
Honestly I think a standard map with the times for destinations of interest shown in a little caption next to each point would be more useful. That preserves the geographic location information visually.
The map doesn't guarantee that at all. Two items on the map can appear next to each other and take a very long time to get between -- perhaps they're separated by a freeway that you can't cross, for example.
That is true, though in practice it would mostly be true that destinations sharing similar travel times and similar directional vectors would typically be close to each other. If you didn't already have some general knowledge of the area, you'd probably notice the complication of a freeway when you "zoomed in" to the standard map view.
Imagine a long river with a bridge at the point you are currently located, but no other bridges. Two places across from the river from each other might each be an hour away, but two hours apart from each other because you have to come back to your current location to cross the river. They'd look nearby on this map because they're in close places and similar times to get to.
This is actually an extremely common case with public transportation:
There are two channels of buses going N-S in the city, and both channels meet downtown. From downtown, two locations can be about equally distant in travel time northwards, and nearby in E-W distance compared to their N-S displacement, but they're separated by a freeway and lie on different N-S channels, and so the E-W distance takes as long to commute (by foot or transit) as going downtown and back northwards would.
That's an interesting and commonly occurring case for this kind of map. I wonder if the visualization would be improved by introducing visual connections between points that are nearby, and/or painting barriers between points that are close in the map but far away in reality.
Two locations that are close to a third location need not be close to each other. A and B might be separated by some barrier which does not separate them from C. Maybe a bit of an edge case, but still, not that uncommon.
Well, it's easier to see the distribution of distances. Knowing something is the 3rd closest is less useful that knowing it is actually 30 minutes away.
More so, it is common to want to go to more than one place in an outing. Most of the time when I am searching for the "nearest" X, I'm really searching for the X that is least out of the way between points A and B. This map doesn't help answer that question while an isochrone, or heatmap, or even standard map does.
It's pretty sad to me that there's more excitement for Snapchat filters than for VR. Also, I'm getting absolutely fed up with the term "social". People are attention junkies, that's what it is. It's not "social". They're hooked on likes and instant gratification.
Hell if you are a lurker it's not even social, some people just scroll through without ever contributing. The addiction is in the continued novelty of a new headline, comment or post every few moments.
Although I can see why once you do begin to invest and contribute you can begin to really solidify the addiction and start to integrate it into your personality and sense of self.
I don't use Snapchat or VR and even I am more interested in the filters. They are funny and the friction to try it out is literally zero. The tech itself is cool as well.
Aren't they? I didn't have a mac a decade ago, and I never really used photo booth since I got one anyway.
But I think snapchat has face-altering features as in 3D modifications while photo booth only changed the image itself or maybe identified "head is at x,y" at most.
Snapchat can modify your head, make interactive animations and all that jazz. Do note that I never really used snapchat, but these are my impressions from the few times someone pointed it at me.
I don't think it's sad, VR just doesn't provide a compelling enough experience for many to be excited over it currently. I think for it to work next round, it must have as close to photo realism as possible, it's what we expect when looking around. I do agree with the sentiment about 'social', an internet wide replace-all with 'narcissism' would be great.
It is easy to become jaded by the monetary or social aspects. But the technology in Snapchat is pretty staggering really. I felt a sense of wonder when I first saw filters that I have not felt about any technology for years. But it is just a toy for kids, obviously.
What's your point? That oat milk is processed? Do you usually drink cow milk from the udder? Of course it's heavily processed and enriched with different additives as well.
People are obviously not grossed out because it's called milk or because it's a white liquid. They're grossed out because of how the animals are treated. Or because they think diary production is principally wrong. Or maybe they just don't like the thought of drinking animal milk. Or simply don't quite like the taste. Maybe they're milk protein intolerant.
Or they're not grossed out at all. They just make the rational decision to not consume dairy because of the water, energy and food consumption of the dairy/meat industry. Or because of the greenhouse gas emissions.
What are you saying, if you don't want to contribute to the things mentioned above, you shouldn't be allowed to drink anything that remotely resembles cow milk?
