On the Gripping Hand

eek_the_kat writes "The Sensor Fusion Project at Ishikawa Hashimoto Laboratory has developed a high speed visual feedback system called SPE-256. It allows the robot to track fast randomly moving objects and grasp them (movies here). The applications seem endless! I have seen many robot mpegs as of late, many courtesy of /., but these have to be some of the coolest I have ever come across. A must see."

Comments

It's dead, Jim

[Anonymous Coward]

The site is slashdotted - posting the google cache is a public service.

Or do you think you know more then the moderators? Their smart enough to think for themselves.

Re:It's dead, Jim

[Dthoma]

"Or do you think you know more then the moderators?"

I probably don't know more in general than the moderators, but I'd say I know more about moderation than the moderators. I've seen a "Slashdot is gay" troll modded up to (3, Insightful). I've seen a Matrix Reloaded spoiler modded up to 4; ditto article text trolls. I've seen countless curt though otherwise insightful comments modded down to (-1, Flamebait). I've seen driveby moderations of controversial comments and I've been the victim of a rogue moderator who hit five or six of my comments with Overrated moderations. I've seen trollish pro-Windows and pro-Linux rants with bad spelling and grammar modded up to 2 or 3. I've seen a repost of the "Gentoo Linux Zealot translator" modded up to 4. I've seen posts that do nothing but suck up to the moderators get a score of 5 with Interesting or Insightful moderations. People getting the first or second post have been hit with -1, Redundant. The list goes on and on.

Please don't try to tell me that the moderators know what the hell they're doing. I've seen too many examples of it being perverted. The M1 system is fundamentally broken:

• People get unequal numbers of points
• Moderators are randomly chosen from the /. population
• There are random intervals of time between M1 opportunities
• The sheep effect: latter moderations of a comment generally duplicate that of the first
• Overrated and Underrated: why?
• Ridiculously easy to subvert
• Ridiculously widely subverted
• Can't handle large crapfloods

So, no, I don't think the moderators are smart enough to think for themselves.

Worse, still, apparently CmdrTaco himself refuses to fix the trolls. He says himself in the FAQ that he has no plans to make Underrated or Overrated M2'able, or to stop the editors from having more mod points, or to just give everyone more mod points, or anything else which could help the system. His changes have just served to obfuscate the system; hiding "Overrated" and "Underrated" from the "Score: X, Modifier" text, using percentages to show total moderations and keeping the system for selecting and removing moderators wrapped up in a pile of unreadable Slash code: don't tell me it's not unreadable, since I have a copy of the "overhauled" Slash 2.2.6 Perl code, and it's buried in subfolder upon subfolder with a dozen different types of files.

And what will happen now? I'll no doubt be slapped with a (-1, Offtopic) or (-1, Troll) by those very same moderators the parent post is defending, which serves to reinforce my point. The moderation system and the moderators themselves are horrendously broken and no one is willing to do anything about it; the users are too apathetic and moronic, the trolls are too busy trying to further demonstrate the stupidity of it and the head honchos are burying their heads in the sand or attacking other innocents with bitchslaps to compensate for their bruised egos. Just beneath the seemingly successful surface of moderation lies a horrible seething, teeming mass of gleeful trolls, random users and vindictive editors clawing at each other. Is there a way out? Yes, but unfortunately there is little you can do about it. The only people who can really make an immediate difference are the site coders, but they're too far removed from it to noticce what's going on. You can try to help by no longer moderating - M2 instead. If enough people do this then maybe it might just make them sit up and notice.

I hope you appreciate the salient points I have made. Thank you for taking the time to read this post and moderating me "Insightful".

Re:It's dead, Jim

[Bunji X]

What could really fix M1 is making it non-anonymous, like K5. I think it would at least remove some of the problems with stalkers.

Grasping fast randomly moving objects

[Muhammar]

Future likely application on a turtle ranch:

Turtle owner: "Where are all turtles?"
Cybogr the turtle sheppard: "Wait. I was counting them. One turtle, two turtles, three turtles... trrrr and suddenly they were all gone away, pro'ly off to someplace"

Re:Site is Slashdotted - and no comments!

[jpmkm]

Uh... maybe the IP address is the address of a load balancer. With such a large volume of traffic as google I imagine actual load balancing equipment would be much better than some kind of round-robin dns system. In any case, I'm sure they know what they are doing.

Re:Nice Niven reference...

[Pall Agamemnides]

In case anyone's interested, Jerry Pournelle has a blog:

The View from Chaos Manor