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Robotic Mine Exploration
Punty writes "CMU has yet again pushed the envelope of robotic technology. After the Quecreek mine incident, technology experts made a quick move to come up with solutions to mine mapping. Well, CMU has made major progress thanks to Red Wittaker, who created the Mobile Robotics Development Course with such goals in mind. It is especially interesting to see that it is the students doing most of the work in such a complex project. The full story, along with links to the "Groundhog" and "Nomad" projects can be found here. . ."
of mines?
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
you were to get Marcel Marceau to swallow the video-equipped capsules described in this recent /. article, would that be considered "robotic mime exploration"?
"When are you really going to be ready?" he adds, encouragingly. "You know, when they launch the shuttle, it's never ready. It always has dozens of flaws they know about. They launch anyway."
:X
WTF!?
Dude, get a better comparison
That being said, this will be really neat if the robots become cheap. Imagine what could be done in the world of urban exploration with this kind of technology!
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
It would be interesting to see whether mine exploration robots would be able to investigate the progress of mine fires.
Really? From my experience it's almost always the students doing most of the work.
The faculty is there to guide them, come up with the ideas, etc. -- but they use cheap student labor to get the job done.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
... But I initially confused The title for saying actually exploiting mines... Would be cool to have something like that, too... a lot less people would have to risk their lives, that way. Also, imagine robot miners on the moon, on mars... Let them loose for a couple of months, years,... and hey presto: ready to use subsurface tunnels for manned missions, with a bounty of ore, ready to process, to boot.
and some robotic virus...
To have a full real Descent experience!!
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Space mining seems like something we need more funding for, if this is the first step then that is great.
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