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Domain: unipr.it

Stories and comments across the archive that link to unipr.it.

Comments · 15

  1. Re:15 minutes or 15 seconds? by MartinSchou · · Score: 1 · on Meteor Spotted Yesterday Over Midwestern United States

    Just to expand it a bit, I just stumbled across this link:

    The Great Daylight 1972 Fireball.

    One of four scientifically observed Earth grazing fireballs.

    Speed before the encounter was 15.083 +- 0.019 km/s, and afterwards it was 14.208 +- 0.005 km/s. This is the slowest one on the list, and it would travel 12,600 km in 15 minutes. Even at half that speed, there is no way you can observe anything at 6,000 km distance, unless it's straight up, in which case it's not glowing any more and thus impossible to see.

  2. Re:The fiber debate by teebob21 · · Score: 1 · on Verizon, Copper, Fiber, and the Truth
    (Forgive me, oh karma lords, for the flame^H^H^H^H^H informative post I am about to deliver. I've had a day full of dimwits, and it's time to take it out on a random Internet poster.)

    I have discussed the network that Verizon is setting up with some of my buddies who install for them. It appears to be a type of glass threw connection over a single strand for hundreds of households. Well, duh. Welcome to how fiber works. The capacity of fiber using light is so great that it is a waste to run a dedicated loop to each household. You know that old copper? Dedicated loop. Fully utilized 48-count fiber can pump an insane amount of data. Like into the hundreds of Gigabits/second. Read up on wavelength-division multiplexing sometime. Small variances in the wavelength allow the light to perform as separate carriers. Time domain multiplexing can also be used. Capacity over fiber is NO problem.

    It is prone to dB loss and don't even think about pulling the specs for the splices and couplers that they are using. Not really. Fiber loses about 0.2 dB/km at 1550 nm wavelength. Compare this to RG-6 coax, which loses about 155 dB/km at 550 Mhz. (Not a typo, really, 155 dB over a kilometer. This is why cable attenuation is measured in dB/100m or 100 ft.) Fiber loss is extremely minimal. Plus, the specs on the optical splitters can't be too insane, something like this would do the trick, although it might not pass Verizon's standards: http://www.bnisolutions.com/products/broadband_networking/otr.html

    I fully understand running more than one user on a single strand of fiber however they are running hundreds with high db loss and compensating with repeaters. No, you don't. Also, no, they aren't. Fiber/light isn't as susceptible to noise and distortion as coax/RF, so a whole bunch of optical splitters, and properly spaced EDFA's are a critical part of any long-loop fiber plant. Field re-amplification is a fact of life in cable (trunk amps and line extenders), phone (load coils), electricity (local substations), and yes, even fiber.

    I guess if I was going to do it I would have simply ran a larger bundle of fibers to a neighborhood and broke it apart there. That would allow for vast expansion on the part of the telco. Why, it's too bad Verizon didn't call you before rolling this out! No, seriously, they are building their FiOS network well within industry and trade standards. Fiber would be prohibitively expensive to roll a 256-count fiber out the the DSLAM (or whatever the equivalent is in a all-fiber plant) then break to 256 homes with a single strand.

    And for those interested, yes, I have worked extensively with fiber before, thanks for asking! :) Also, I work for a direct competitor of Verizon's FiOS offering. Thankfully, they haven't been granted franchises in any of our markets yet, so I can still say (semi-)decent things about FiOS.

  3. Fine paper, but why not quote all of PAMI ? by HuguesT · · Score: 4, Informative · on Recognizing Scenes Like the Brain Does
    This is a nice paper by respected researchers in AI+Vision, however pretty much the entire content of the journal this was published in (IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence) is up to that level. Why single out that particular paper ?

    Interested readers can browse the content of PAMI current and back issues and either go to their local scientific library (PAMI is recognisable from afar by its bright yellow cover) or search on the web for interesting articles. Often researchers put their own paper on their home page. For example, here is the publication page of one of the authors (I'm not him).

    For the record, I think justifying various ad-hoc vision/image analysis techniques using approximations of biological underpining is of limited interest. When asked if computer would think one day, Edsgerd Dijkstra famously answered by "can submarine swim?". In the same manner, it has been observed that (for example) most neural network architectures make worse classifiers than standard logistic regression, not to mention Support Vector Machines, which what this article uses BTW.

    The summary by our friend Roland P. is not very good :

    This versatile model could one day be used for automobile driver's assistance, visual search engines, biomedical imaging analysis, or robots with realistic vision


    • There already exist working automated driving software. The december 2006 issue of IEEE Computers magazing was on them last month. Read about the car that drove a thousand miles on Italy's road thanks to Linux, no less.
    • Visual search engine exist, at the research level. The whole field is called "Content Based Retrieval", and the main issue is not so much to search, but to formulate the question.
    • Biomedical image analysis has been going strong for decades and is used every day in your local hospital. Ask your doctor !
    • Robotic vision is pretty much as old as computers themselves. There are even fun robot competitions like robocup.


    I could go on with lists and links but the future is already here, generally inconspicuously. Read about it.
  4. Re:Nice acheivement, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Stanley and the Conquest of the DARPA Challenge

    In support of this I would like to point out the ARGO project http://millemiglia.ce.unipr.it/ARGO/english/index. html which drove across Italy in 1998 on autopilot using only real-time image processing without artificial cues.

  5. Right link by incuso · · Score: 1 · on Intelligent Transportation Systems
    Ok, ok I missed the link:

    The ARGO car M.

  6. Re:Team Terramax - Incredible Vehicle by incuso · · Score: 1 · on Fifteen Teams Selected for DARPA Grand Challenge
    Forgot to mention, the Terramax is a not only a oskosh - ohio university collaboration.

    The University of Parma (Italy) developed the vision system (using Linux).

    Unfortunately, due to problems in communication (Ohio's guys are using windows they proposed to use NIST but it does not work very well), I think they switched it off during the race (buat I am not sure).

    Vision laboratory of the University of PArma ITALY

  7. Re:Team Terramax - Incredible Vehicle by incuso · · Score: 1 · on Fifteen Teams Selected for DARPA Grand Challenge
    It has been highly modified:

    TerraMax photos

  8. TerraMax vehicle photos by incuso · · Score: 0 · on DARPA Grand Challenge Kicks Off March 13th

    http://vislab.ce.unipr.it/terramax

  9. Re:All ready done in Italy.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Teach A Robot To Drive, Win A Million Bucks

    The ral link is:

    http://www.argo.ce.unipr.it

  10. Italian Linux-based project should compete by HuguesT · · Score: 4, Funny · on Teach A Robot To Drive, Win A Million Bucks

    No offence to Italian drivers, but this little project developed an autonomous vehicle using Linux, that could drive on Italian highways. Pretty impressive!

    the ARGO project

    If you've ever driven in Italy you should be impressed too...

  11. Re:Done already with Linux (no crashes since 1998) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Volvo's "Safety Car" Runs Windows 98

    Yes the Linux car is still alive! Visit us at
    http://www.argo.ce.unipr.it

    We are currently switching to a newer car (and a new kernel too! ARGO is still running 2.0.38).

    M.

  12. Re:Oxymoron by pauleir · · Score: 2, Informative · on Volvo's "Safety Car" Runs Windows 98

    check out the ARGO project.
    They had an autonomous car running linux in June 1998.

  13. Using POV-Ray on cluster systems by Hassan79 · · Score: 3, Informative · on POV-Ray 3.5 Rendered
    There are some patches for POV-Ray that enable parallel rendering on multiple machines, unfortunately not yet for the new version:
    I hope that there will be something like this for version 3.5 soon.
  14. Re:What if the car kills someone? by gad_zuki! · · Score: 2 · on Computer Will Take On Formula 1 Champion

    I'm glad everyone doesn't hold that opinion, the linux powered autonomous car ARGO could be the future of urban transportation and it could kill a lot more than a couple drivers if it ran over a dozen pedestrains crossing a downtown intersection.

    Sure races are dangerous and this is a silly competition because somehow, somewhere someone let out the man vs. machine meme and it isn't going away. I'd much rather see more socially-friendly projects like ARGO than publicity-friendly crap like this.

    Oh man who takes this page seriously its starts off with the words, "The Vision..." Not to mention this quote:

    Formula One alone has 40-billion-plus television viewers annually.

    That must include all the extraterrestial fans in our system. Could be worse they could be watching the 700 club.

  15. another car driven by Linux by PD · · Score: 4 · on German Robot Klaus Passes Driving Test

    This page describes a car driven by a Linux computer. It's called the ARGO project, and it's in Italy. It's driven a long distance around Italy in what they called the "MilleMiglia in Automatico Tour".