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Pentium Throws a Fastball

phillippaxton writes: "Abner Doubleday lives in the 21st century. Two mechanical engineers have gotten together and created what may be the perfect pitching machine, powered by a P3 850MHz computer. Using an eight-axis industrial robot, it has the ability to throw practically any pitch within the strike zone. Custom-built software enables you to choose the type of pitch by pointing at a touch-screen, setting the speed, location, handedness, as well as fastball, curveball, slider, slurve, changeup, cutter, sinker, splitfinger fastball or knuckleball. There's also a database of 2500 preset pitches in a database."

5 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Great. by Wakko+Warner · · Score: 5
    Until a floating-point error causes it to bean Mike Piazza.

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    "Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
  2. Re:The real innovation here... by rnturn · · Score: 5
    ``Viola: A database in a database.''

    I think you actually meant to say:

    ``Viola: The beefier cousin of the violin.''

    Cheers...
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    CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
  3. Newsradio? by evilpenguin · · Score: 5

    I immediately thought of the Newsradio "Space" episode. Joe is thawed out in the far future and immediately asks who won the World Series since he went into hibernation. I forget the exact words, but it was something like "In 2021 it was the Yankees, 2022 the Braves, 2023 the Robots, '24 the Robots, Robots, Robots...."

    Made me laugh...

  4. Re:Science and sports don't mix. by aonifer · · Score: 5

    I have to disagree with the sediment. I think they mix quite well.

    That's not a very concrete response.

  5. Someone has to ask.. by CrazyLegs · · Score: 5

    Does their code throw exceptions?

    That's not even funny.

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    CrazyLegs

    "Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.