Slashdot Mirror
Meet Lucy, The Orangutan Robot
Roland Piquepaille writes "Lucy is not an ordinary robot, driven by software. She's a pure product of artificial intelligence (AI). And after a three-year long training, she's now able to make a difference between an apple and a banana, which is quite handy for an orang-utan, even if she doesn't eat them. Her five microcontroller chips wouldn't like this... In "A Grand plan for brainy robots," BBC News Online tells us that Lucy is the brainchild of Steve Grand, an honorary research fellow at Cardiff University's School of Psychology. And why did he choose an orang-utan design? "I made Lucy as an orang-utan because, can you imagine how scary it would be if she looked like a human baby?," said Grand. More details and references are available in this overview which also includes the cover of Grand's last book, 'Growing Up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps,' which was already reviewed on Slashdot."
Best quote in the article: "I like 'intelligent' people. It's the thick ones that worry me."
Contender for best story title? =D
The final test will be if she can pull the football away just before Charlie Brown tries to kick it.
that or rip his legs off...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I haven't been this creeped out since the first time I saw that Quiznos Subs commercial.
And what's with that glowing blue Terminator eye? Imagine that thing chasing Linda Hamilton around.Can't he cover that thing with fur or something? Make it look like a toy instead of like something out of madman's nightmare?
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
My girl robot.
This is very similar to a Mini-ITX [mini-itx.com] project I saw a while ago.
The main difference is, the Mini-ITX page shows you how everything is layed out inside the picture frame.
buvcjfkojz
This might be the breakthrough the BION folks could use to advance their research [vard.org].
mukrhxktjbp
That is so over the top. Creating an entire PC just to show a picture? That's 200 for the screen and another 200 for the computer. On top of that they are recommending a hard disk?
My version [man.ac.uk] uses a 5 quid FPGA and some junk thrown away equipment. The LCD was a 12" 9bit colour from some factory and a fiend of a friend offered them to us for a quid each. And the RAM is an old 1Mb 30simm (I have about 3kg of these). There you go. A picture displaying system with no need for a huge/noisy PC power supply (runs from one of those 12v ac/dc plug converters). The images can be sent to it via a serial cable (two wires internally so it can be passed over any old cable you have lying around).
ebizvyuspt
... or probably Perl or Python, either.
It doesn't actually seem to grok the commands that are being run, so something like
proc try {times script} {
if { [catch [uplevel $script] err] } { cleanup ; retry }
}
is all that's needed (of course to do it right you'd need a bit more, but still...).
try {5 times} {
commands...
}
Although Tcl is a bit lower level, and would require you to do exec ls, you could of course wrap that too so that all commands in the $script block would just be 'exec'ed by default.
In any case, better to use a flexible tool that can be tweaked to do what you need then write highly specialized tools.
hhfcwjevflou
Here's a company with many thousands of employees, more money than God, and a dominant position in almost every market segment they're in. And they STILL can't write secure code OR meet most of their delivery deadlines (deadlines which they set themselves, not ones that were imposed on them).
Meanwhile, the groups that produce products like MySQL and PostgreSQL have had steady releases, a wealth of needed features, and relatively few security incidents.
Unless you're already so heavily bought in to their infrastructure that any change would be prohibitively expensive, I can't see how it makes any sense to base your business on Microsoft's products. They're expensive, they're insecure, they're performance laggards, and you just can't rely on them for support.
Cheers,
rwxlkxlggl
Isn't Slashdot run on MySQL [slashdot.org]?
zqhqfhrmsi
I can't really say I care for the precedent being set here.
How are you supposed to get anything done on the internet if you have to worry about not only the laws in your country, but those all over the world?
(Realistically, the laws in your country plus those in the US)
deozhnofdbu
Lucy's home page is an even better place for technical details, including an anatomical overview and scrapbook pictures
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
umm...unicos/mk?
dyyghrnmiw
Is this to say I can't tell when I'm being spammed?
Leaving aside the part where you barely avoid the paranoid rantings of a madman, yes, there are times when you can't tell if you're being spammed. Like, how many times have you accidentally deleted an email that you thought was spam but was really from a long-lost friend? Or how many times have you opened Spam because you weren't sure that it was Spam or something from your ISP (or whatever).
Say you've done it 10 times in 10 000 messages. If this program only did it once in 10 000 messages (false positive or missing negative) then it was 10x as accurate as you.
rzenaaroxea
nt.
unfortunately, this is nothing new [snacc.mb.ca].
CBS
kcxrgfnkvtts
Ditto, I'd also like to add that I use our home 'pokey' laptop to ssh and remote desktop into much faster/less portable computers. Think of it as a wireless console and it's CPU horsepower doesn't matter AT ALL.
mbthct
I wonder, whether our Russian militaries can buy the complex to keep missiles closer to their targets?:)
ozbkswqyzn
he said: "can you imagine how scary it would be if she looked like a human baby?"
did you guys look at the picture of that thing? It looks like my mother-in-law! Thats friggen scary! I guess he spend all the money on research, and not on matching eye's.:)
...to avoid being scary, he's failed miserably.
Can't sleep...orangutan robot'll kill me...can't sleep...orangutan robot'll kill me...can't sleep...orangutan robot'll kill me...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Maybe he could build and program an entire zoo (extinct species and all)..No feeding, no vets, just an occasional tune-up :0
kseyetsywrr
I have been looking at the MM10 (the older version) as a small GNAA/Linux computer for some months now and the memory was always a hold up. This things solves that and then some.
The older model was small and light, but very usable. You could confortably hold it in one hand for a long time and it never got warm/hot. This was the thinnest thing I've ever seen, and the smallest without seeming to sacrifice on usability (close to sacrifice though).
I might just have get one and see about running GNAA/Linux on this little guy.
rtvewirwgzpf
I wonder what is so important that NASA is going to wait until Monday. Maybe they will be unveiling something else at the same time?
--
Real-time deal updates [dealsites.net]
xjfkzgvdjjp
> How many companies these days are willing to drop money into some technology that may not turn a profit for many years?"
Aerospace, for one. Working at one of the companies that makes commercial (and military) aircraft engines, it is jokingly quoted that: "A decision to launch a new engine program is a calculated risk to go into the hole for about 20 years" (Meaning it takes about that long to "turn profit" off all the years of design, development, testing, and certication processes.) Imagine how many times the market flops around responding to other market pressures in that length of time.
As an interesting aside for many of you, aircraft engines have historically been sold on the razor/blades business model, so its an interesting business balance between a quality engine that airline customers will buy and the need to sell spares to eventually make money on FAR down the road.
pivpbhmdqfcd
All of them.
Dave Brubeck can't [duke.edu]. Django Reinhardt couldn't [playjazzguitar.com]. Paco de Lucia can't [geocities.com] (he learned the notation when he wanted to record Falla's classical pieces and Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, but it was laborious). Not all musicians need to know to read music, and not all musical cultures use western notation even when they write music (eg, India).
tvnjzevxafei
Even if her conversations are above the "why don't you just download me?" level, she won't get too far if she looks like she was standing in front of, and looking at a microwave oven as it was exploding.
Maybe she was trying to download the oven?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Different countries/governments/political systems have different laws concerning freedom of expression, privacy, property rights, etc.
How can it be possible to create one set of rules that can apply to all nations with regards to Internet access?
vcu
This story is just asking for a frosty piss joke to be made!
joayybtnsl
SQL7 was only 1.0 if you ignore versions 4.2, 6.0 and 6.5.
pgteynolbqy
don't know if anyone else feels this way, but I'm kind of let down by the fact that our most interesting space story for awhile now is that we MAY have a 10th planet in our solar system.
Umm...what? The past few months have been *spectacularly* exciting from a space point of view. We have two probes that successfully landed on Mars and have found strong evidence that Mars had liquid brine at one point. We have a ton of pictures from the surface to look at, and are expecting tons of findings, papers, and theories based on probe data that's been returned.
And while, yes, the classification may not be interesting, the fact that we discovered a new, sizeable chunk of matter in our solar system is not small stuff either.
yrxf
would like to welcome our new orangutan robot overlords!
Come on, editors- this is news? We have already researched laser technology, so SDI defense is available. It should only take 2 or 3 turns to equip all of our cities with this technology.
ctqjlwvntfmb
If dogs are flying, then that is not weed you are smoking... Tread carefully, but enjoy.
vrhg
I think perl is where it is because so many people use it as "super script." To me that says, a) we recode all the Bourne and csh and bash in perl or b) we look at why people do shell scripting in perl or other languages and add that to the shell. I couldn't tell you which is right. It's a neat idea though and I'm glad they made it.
A real example I can think of, I had a test machine that had some kind of ext3 corruption and so it mounted up in read-only mode when it booted. I spent time diagnosing an application error in our application because nothing caught that; these are redhat type startup scripts. I noticed that our app couldn't write logs and began to debug the system. More interestingly, a dozen or so start-up scripts failed to start up critical components and their failure wasn't noticed. If you can't write to the filesystem, you can't create a socket(AF_UNIX) and all sort's of things go tits up then. If that's how you debug it's only going to get more difficult as you add more and more complexity, you have to detect the lower level failures and report them. Perversely, this wouldn't have been noticed had a different partition been read-only. Turns out that a drive was going bad. Had it been a different partition, it would have been noticed at catastrophic system failure time when the drive died.
I've done a fair amount of embedded work and there is always a test for new guys, you can tell the new guy (new college grad, whatever) because he skips half or more of the error checking in his code. You know printf returns a value? Funnier still, if you develop something like a consumer app in embedded space, you'll eventually see things like printf fail. We know it never should, but with 20,000+ users in different environments and what not, things like that can and do fail and usually point to a greater problem, like a dead drive or something. Instead of logging/alerting something to the critical and unusual printf failure, the app fails in a different way because this printf failed. Heaven forbid that it was sprintf that failed and then you shove bad data in to a database or configuration file and not just fail the system but corrupt the data too. Inspite of all of that, even veterans will forget error checking at times, it's a common bug and so having higher level tools to help assist, like exception in the shell can only be a good thing.
rvbuovjedpk
a auto-completing python interpreter and editor
Try the Wing IDE [wingide.com]. It has most of the functions you wanted... But it's not free software.
wqanirtazr
opensource AI projects? It'd be interesting to play around with something, even very primative. It' would need to be OSS so I could actually modify it though.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
The CPU is just one component that eats electricity in a laptop; the other big hog is the back lit screen.
Do you really need much compute power in a walk-about machine to do email, web browsing, word smithing ? In a trade off give me battery time over machine horsepower every time.
I think that many people have a laptop for ease of use (all your files not backed up in one place that moves with you) and expect the laptop to do everything. What I like is those laptops that drop performance in battery mode.
tafqokmhegri
- Incredible tree-climbing ability
- Facial-gesture mimicry
- Pick parasites out of fur (useful!)
- Poo-flinging
And I don't know if it's all orangutans, but the ones at my local zoo have an affinity for tire swings. They wear through the rope and then roll the tire into the safety moat.
My sigs always suck.
I seem to remember /. was down for a few hours last week... but somehow that story didn't make the front page.
-a
vmwwfwlojet
Did you see the picture of the orang in the article? Looks like the crypt keeper from tales of the crypt.
An AI crypt keeper is the last thing we need.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Really, why is this even slightly +5 Interesting? Fair enough that you love the company...they did employ Linus for a while after all, and this is Slashdot, so I guess that counts for something. But Transmeta is nothing more than a hyped up dot.com remnant that hasn't realised that it should have crawled away and died somewhere a few years ago. Transmeta overpromised and underdelivered. Its CPUs have never really carved out a niche, suffering from terrible performance, and negligible gains in power efficiency over mobile designs from Motorola, Intel and AMD. Too underpowered for a mainstream notebook, and too power hungry for a PDA or cellphone, Transmeta CPUs linger on in a kind of zombie state, appearing from time to time in strange Japanese systems like this Sharp Actius, itself nothing more than a pale imitation of an Apple 12" G4 PowerBook.
You're entitled to your opinion. It's just -1, Clueless Linus Fanboy, not +5, Interesting.
Thank you.
yk
jzv and posted on the web - like this site [allpar.com]
cht
That said the issues are subtley but still substantially different. Libel is a civil issue, facilitation of piracy is criminal. International treaties handle these cases differently (and quite often not at all), it would have not been possible to sue that jornelist if his paper had no dealings in Australia as if I remember correctly Australian defamation laws are not recognised by America because of the differnces in laws and to a lesser extend the differences in culture. Only the Australian arm of that company could be sued.
But even if the crime was ruled to have been commited in America, as is possible extradition may not be possible. This is because nomatter where a crime was commited, if a sovereign nation does not recognise those crimes or recognises them to a lesser extent (as is the case here) then deportation may be conditional or even impossible.
Personally I don't see a deportation happening, the backlash that would occur when an Australian is sent to a foreign land that he has never set foot on before, to stand before a foreign jury to answer to foreign crimes for an action that was alledged to occur in the man's own home, in his own country would be sickening to most Australians or anyone with a sence of national identity, even if they are not Australian. There is a strong undercurrent of hostility towards the US flowing around Australia's youth and left wing. No judge would be willing to make this man a martr to Australian nationalism. Australia is one of the only countrys never to have had any wars or bloody revolutions, nobody would risk making this sacrifice to appease a foreign power if it meant a remote possibilty that thousends of angry young people with a newfound nationalistic furver could be storming the high court, parlement house, the US embassy and pine gap.
One also has to consider that a legal system that would entitle a foreign power to snatch away citizens for breaking laws of another nation into a distant land where they have never been is harldy soverign. Even if he is not crushed by homocidal revolutionarys, any judge that allows this extradition will surely be relinquising his own power to those overseas. This is completely contrary to human nature, let alone the nature of one ambitious enough to become a high court justice.
But let me say this. If this extradition is allowed, whosoever allows this man has commited nothing wrong in his own country to be taken to a foreign land as a prisoner, shall have fire and chaos thown down on him or her by either their power being snatched away by the American judituary or their life being snatched away by hostile revolutionarys. If they act in the wrong way, their own actions shall not go unlamented.
g
cd I think its great that Microsoft includes basic functionality like a media player, word processor, calculator, internet browser, etc.
I hope that we all realize that the PROBLEM lies in preventing the uninstallation of said items without "crippling" the OS.
I think MS should be allowed to include whatever they want, as long as the no-install/uninstall option is there and its real (as in really uninstalls the files, not just "hiding" them).
Why can't Microsoft see how easy it would be to fix this? But then again, that sort of tunnel vision is what has gotten them into the hot water they are in.
j
ah >I'm surprised people still use BSD after that
;)
>security fiasco last year.
so what do u suggest windows? LOL
sorry
zx
nop *cough*Linus Torvalds*cough*
gd
trq Don't you know? In Japan all cars transform into fighting robots! Being able to pilot a fighting robot is required of everyone who gets a drivers licence. My friend Mark once saw this giant moth just think about attacking his town and Fighting Robots chopped it head off just like that! I mean, with the restrictions on their official military, it's either that or have you country taken over giant monsters. It's an easy choice in my opinion.
c
lis Yukon is finally going to deliver online restoration, database mirroring with automatic failover, and support for mirrored backup sets.
Let's face it, these features isn't something most users need. If Microsoft sees real trouble, they will simply slash the per-processor license cost by a factor of 50 or 100, and switching suddenly becomes a non-issue for most users.
Per-client licenses and awfully high per-processor licensing costs are the most important factor which motivates most users to attempt other solutions. Of course, the proprietary databases have important features which look very good on paper, but I've seen quite a few installations which use a multi-thousand dollar database as if it were MySQL (not even using online backup). You can get away with that if you only need a workgroup server license, but if you need 20,000 client access licenses (or multiple per-processor licenses), licensing becomes a problem and you'll certainly consider other options.
tup
n the prices are:
You get 5 tracks for $6.99 and $1 per each track after 5. With your CD you get a custom designed cardboard package with user designed 4 color insert) plus a four color image (and your CD title) printed on the CD itself (no sharpies used here).
ulb
a Check these links for a Duo (Laptop) mod to a picture frame. I remember this site as the first I saw. I have an old 486 and a 64MB compaq flash just waiting for a conversion.
m e
http://www.applefritter.com/hacks/duodigitalfra
http://www.applefritter.com/node/view/728
Duo Digital Frame by James Roos
bt
x Mike:
As privacy advocates, what can we do to impress the importance of privacy without coming off as tinfoil-hatted whack jobs?
An example was a presentation I prepared for co-workers a while back regarding grocery store "loyalty" cards. In it, even after detailing the California case of a store that in a slip and fall case in their store, tried to introduce the customer's purchases, tracked via a card, saying he may have been drunk at the time because of frequent alcohol purchases. Afterwards, I was hit with several questions about being paranoid. I used the standard "this is why we have envelopes and blinds instead of postcards and open windows" argument, and while most seemed to understand, some were obviously unimpressed. What can we do to convince people of the need for privacy without being over the top?
q
ftsh has great utility in the realm it's written for. Obviously, it's not a basis for installing kernels or doing password authentication. In a Grid (not just distributed) environment, things break for all sorts of reasons all the time. You're dealing with a Friendly Admin on another system, one who may well be unaffiliated with your institution, project or field of study. He doesn't have any particular reason to consult with you about system changes.
Now you find yourself writing a grid diagnostic or submitter or job manager. One does not need strongly typed compiled languages for this. Shell scripts are almost always more efficient to write, and the speed difference is unimportant. Right now, most Grid submitters are being written in bash or Python or some such. Bash sucks for exception handling of the sort we're talking about. Python does better with its try: statements, but there's room for improvement. ftsh is a good choice for a sublayer to these scripts. One writes some of the machinery that actually interacts with the Grid nodes and supervisors in this easy, clear and flexible form.
Now there are a lot of specific points to answer:
One needs a Windows port to be able to make the Grid software we write in GNAA/Linux available to the poor drones who are stuck with Win boxes.
This is not a code spellchecker or coding environment. At all.
This is not a crutch for inadequate programmers. This is a collection of methods to deal with a specific set of recalcitrant problems.
As I was pointing out before, this is, after all, an unstable system. One is using diverse resources on diverse platforms in many countries at many institutions. I appreciate the comment made by unixbob about operating in heterogeneous environments.
This isn't a substitute for wget. One uses wget as an example because it's clear.
The "pull" model breaks down immediately when there is no unified environment, as is described on infrastructures.org. When you're not the admin, and your software has to be wiped out the minute your job is done, "push" is the only way to do it. This is the case with most Grid computing right now (that I know about)
All the woe and doom about the sloppy coding and letting the environment correct your deficiencies is... ill-thought-out. That's what a compiler is, folks. Should we all be coding in machine language?:) Use the right tool for the job and save time.
I do agree, however, that one should indeed hone one's craft. Sloppy coding in projects of importance is inexcusable (M$). There is no reason to stick to strict exception handling, however, in the applications being discussed by ftsh's developers (the same folks who brought you Condor). When code becomes 3/4 exception handling, even when the specific exceptions don't matter, there's a problem, IMHO.:)
erb
bx All these suggestions make the naive assumption that people in general learn from past mistakes.
yqj
vvo Why is it that so many Unix/GNAA/Linux programs (and everything else, for that matter) do not provide simple screenshots on their products websites?
If I'm going to download your program and install it (and in many cases, take time to compile it...) I want to know that it's going to look halfway decent when I'm done.
Why is this so hard for some programmers to understand?
kn
vr I'm sorry, but I can't understand why a Windows port (even if not native) is even attempted. Seems kind of useless in a totally GUI environment. Of course, maybe it's just me?
nz
hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such robot-apes movies as "Bedtime for Bender" and "Bananabots: Gorilla Rampage"
Fur?! Good god man!
A thick blanket is what is needed here!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
td Yes, it does.
Now go back to cowering you insensitive clod!
val
m
.. I hope he never designs a text file format!
Han-Wen says: In my opinion, any file format that claims to be universal should have two properties: it should have an expressive structure, so other formats can be expressed in it, and it should be as lean as possible, so that converting from other formats amounts to removing information.
I assume this guy didnt design GIF or PNG then (might have designed JPEG)
pxj
ma All the programmers who need the environment to compensate for their inadequacies, step on one side. All the programmers who want to learn from their mistakes and become better at their craft, get on the other side.
Most of us know where this line is located.
"In other news, at the local beach today a vicious fight broke out between geeks about where to draw a line. Sand was kicked, noses have been blooded, we have some unconfirmed reports of a wedgie. We will have more on this breaking news as it comes in."
z
Why are people who are into psychology such wackos?
a ought to have better things to be doing than looking at bubbles in beer glasses dammit.
a
Controversy continued on Monday as surgeons successfully transplanted little Django's brain into a robot monkey body. Scientists now say human-to-robot brain transplants will be possible within ten years. On a sad note, however, Django died late Tuesday, after drinking his own urine. (Sealab 2021, I, Robot)
For more information, click here.
f We've got this beer bubble thing licked, but still no cure for cancer...
e.
u
rby Virtyally none of the diagnosic capabilities in modern cars are accessible via OBD-II.
Every manufacturer has proprietary networks built into the car of which OBD-II is a tiny emulation layer. Its designed for emissions testing and emissions related codes, nothing else.
You can't diagnose why your power locks aren't working with it, you can't diagnose why your HVAC controls aren't working. You can't read exhaust gas temperatures, or any other direct sensor outputs. You can't bleed ABS pumps with it, etc, etc, etc.
There are VERY few models you can get that sort of information about. Volkswagen/Audi group cars have some diagnostic software available, but virtually 100% of the information about what you can access and what sort of tests you can run have been reverse engineered, and is very incomplete. VAG also recently changed their protocols for newer cars to block those systems from working.
You may have watched mechanics sweat this stuff, but some of us sweat this stuff directly. This is coming from the direct experience of someone who both repairs cars and works for a internationally ranked professional racing team.
vjt
lc Spell checkers discourage people from learning to spell.
Done correctly, spellcheckers can be the best spelling-learning tool there is.
"Correctly" here means the spell-checkers that give you red underlines when you've finished typing the word and it's wrong. Right-clicking lets you see suggestions, add it to your personal dict, etc.
"Incorrectly" is when you have to run the spell-checker manually at the "end" of typing. That's when people lean on it.
The reason, of course, is feedback; feedback is absolutely vital to learning and spell-checkers that highlight are the only thing I know of that cuts the feedback loop down to zero seconds. Compared to this, spelling tests in school where the teacher hands back the test three days from now are a complete waste of time. (This is one of many places where out of the box thinking with computers would greatly improve the education process but nobody has the guts to say, "We need to stop 'testing' spelling and start using proper spell-checkers, and come up with some way to encourage kids to use words they don't necessarily know how to spell instead of punishing them." The primary use of computers in education is to cut the feedback loop down to no time at all. But I digress...)
'gaim' is pretty close but it really ticks me off how it always spellchecks a word immediately, so if you're typing along and you're going to send the word "unfortunately", but you've only typed as far as "unfortun", it highlights it as a misspelled word. Bad program! Wait until I've left the word!
ymy
v | Japan and their rise in technology, is that
| since the end of WWII, they haven't had a
| military to take up financing, (or resources, or
| R&D, etc..)
True, but the huge amount that the US spends on Military is largely by choice.
Is it really necessary to have sufficient armaments to destroy the planet seven times over? Is it really necessary to have sufficient firepower to independantly forcibly take over any other country/contitent on the planet?
And are these things more important than education, health care etc etc.
Every country sets its own agenda. The US wants to be the untouchable goliath of military power. If the US wanted to be the world leader in non-military research and development, they could be.
lvd
k In order for this to work, it might need changes in the OS level.
Imagine you access a block/char device or an NFS mounted directory and the device driver never returns from the system call. Your script would hang, and a kill would produce a zombie process.
If you want fault tolerance, you'd have to have a timeout mechanism for all device drivers. But if you read from/dev/mt0 and the tape needs rewinding and it takes 6 minutes, you don't want to have your script aborted after 5 minutes.
rjg
I think your psychology professor may be a Scientologist in disguise. Are you learning about Thetans or clearing? If so, run!
(First sentence is a joke. Rest of paragraph is not!)
Do you really need the random character string at the end? Isn't there a more elegant way to evade the slashdot filter?
tn Except that it's not actually an auction. I made the same mistake (hey, it's EBay), but there's no place to enter a bid and if you look down at the bottom it says:
"This listing is an advertisement. There is no bidding! If you are interested in this property, you may contact the seller/agent to request additional information."
Which is probably smart. If it were an auction, it'd have eleventy-million fake bids by now.
It also tends to indicate that this is a real property. If it was just someone goofing around, it'd be an auction. That's not strong evidence, but it's certainly an indication.
uy
oo This sounds like an election year doggy treat. Pass it in the House and kill it in the Senate.
kq
qpw I had a class with this professor earlier this year. This really explains his teaching style... he must have done his beer "research" each day right before he lectured...
jrm
fw The article states that Starbucks is working in conjunction with Hear Music. I know that in Chicago, there is (or was, havent been there in awhile) a Starbucks that had a Hear Music CD store next door. The two stores were connected, and you could bring your coffee in with you while you browsed for CDs and listened to music at the listening stations. Sounds like this is just a natural extension of that. And I think its a great idea. I'm not too optomistic about getting one in Pittsburgh, however, where the only common record store chain (NRM) is long since gone and bankrupt and a Virgin Megastore or even a Tower Records has never touched the shores of the Mon River. But I digress.
v
That it not be absolutely terrifying looking.
jjv Why doesn't anyone here seem to interview someone more interesting? I have no idea who the hell these people are, and no idea why I should care.
Hell, go interview that Darl McBride guy everyone here is always blathering about. Here, I'll even give you the contact info I nicked off those posts of his info someone keeps spamming.
Home phone #: (801) 424-2006
Office phone #: (801) 932-5820
Email: darl@sco.com
ke
That is one of the most frightening things I have ever set eyes on in my entire life. I can't imagine that a baby would have been even _more_ terrifying. Look at the cover of the book. It resembles the aliens from "Mars Attacks" to me. Also, according to the article, Frankenstein is a robot? I always thought he was a meat-bag like us? And, do we all have to refer to the hour-too-long movie "AI" every time Artificial Intelligence is referenced? Would it be infringement otherwise? Yeesh, I can't stop looking at that train wreck of a face... haunt me all night. -Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
my I thought we were supposed to send criminals *to* Australia?
gf
jnv Perhaps they've decided to locate and fix bugs and security issues BEFORE they release a product...
rja
Get you stinking claws off of me, you damn dirty bot!
l I'm not sure it's that simple. There are tons more regulations that manufacrurers must meet today - from safety regulations to pollution measures. Throwing a 440ci engine with a four barrel carb into a light car simply isn't possible anymore.
nh
xw Got my Titan Missile Complex but the tall backed leather chair did not swivel and the white cat was already dead when i got there! Avoid!!!!!!
zz
Kernel threads almost universally stay on the cpu they were originally assigned to. High performance threaded subsystems, such as the network stack, are replicated. That is, the network stack creates multiple threads (one per cpu) and those threads do not migrate because, obviously, they do not need to.
Generally speaking, the purpose of making thread migration explicit instead of automatic is to partition a larger data set across available cpu caches rather then cause the same data to be shared amoungst all cpu caches. The processors operate a lot more efficiently and SMP scales a lot better. Most people do not realize the horrendous cost of moving threads between cpus because the cache mastership change is invisibly handled by hardware, but the cost is still there and still very real.
-Matt
unf
s "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr.
Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers
come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas
that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage
wni
ur don't know if anyone else feels this way, but I'm kind of let down by the fact that our most interesting space story for awhile now is that we MAY have a 10th planet in our solar system.
Umm...what? The past few months have been *spectacularly* exciting from a space point of view. We have two probes that successfully landed on Mars and have found strong evidence that Mars had liquid brine at one point. We have a ton of pictures from the surface to look at, and are expecting tons of findings, papers, and theories based on probe data that's been returned.
And while, yes, the classification may not be interesting, the fact that we discovered a new, sizeable chunk of matter in our solar system is not small stuff either.
yuc
It's a DO-IT-YOURSELF Orangutan Erector set, from Hasbro Toys. Where can I buy one? I wonder if these will sell like Tickle Me Elmo's?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
ha Just because it CAN be used for something else doesn't mean it is.
which doesn't mean it won't be in the near future. if you want to regulate or in some way crack down on the software implementations of p2p that are used for violating copyrights, that is fine as long as it is done in a respnosible manner. But if you want to make it illegal for me to write a p2p software system that is not in any way related to unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials, then that is absolutely wrong.
No, this statement is naive.
explain why, i'm listening...
n
Is she programmed in Ook?
I think the best answer the 'If nobody would by this stuff...' argument was:
Spam works on the level of 1 in 10,000. The general population contains a far higher rate of mental illness, senility, and retardation.
You'll never cure spam by 'education' of any sort. There are some people who are just too crazy or too stupid to learn.
clw
jt As soon as they said Rubbery Behavior, I am thinking of this ultra advanced underwear.
What a change since the medievil days when knights used to wear potato-sack-material like underwear.
alg
hpu Wasn't 'Apollo' considered the sun. Remember, this wasn't just a 'naming convention' but actual mythology. Apollo drove the chariot of the sun across the sky. Mars, the god of war, appeared in certain places at certain times, same with Venus.
Now that Roman mythology isn't really considered religion (outside of Berkeley) it can be a nice tradition. I mean, it's not lik the Inuit have really contributed to Western Culture except for, I guess, hockey and lacrosse.
eib
xlb Yes. Would the prices be reasonable? Doubtful.
su
l "With that information, Territo said, independent mechanics and parts manufacturers could duplicate major components such as fuel injectors that automakers have spent millions of dollars developing."
If the manufacturers spent millions of dollars designing parts and *didn't* get patents on those parts, then it's their own damn fault...and they have also failed their shareholders.
If they had patented their expensively-designed parts, they would have zero problems with opening the specs for third-party repair shops and could still prevent third-party replica parts.
ar
h How does this chip compare with that other energy-saving chip, the Celeron?
And more importantly, is there any reason you'd choose a Transmeta-powered rig over an Intel one?
a
ubx We are forced to run SQL 7.0 Standard Edition so I have no Idea what any of these post are talking about. Sigh... I digress
z
r Get off your high horses people (not just you, all the posters along this vein).
Look, what are you waiting for in the next release of SQLServer? Anything? Nope...didn't think so.
You HAVE a rock-solid DB solution from MS right now, so who cares if the next release from MS is late, especially when it represents a fundamental change, and thus nothing you're doing _right now_ will suffer if it's not out next week will it?
Damned, the only thing I know of that's being worked on that requires this to be released is WinFS, which will be released in Longhorn when? A couple more years you say?
Besides, when was the last time your OSS project of choice went gold on time? And no, not having release deadlines doesn't count.
zfo
Change your content, or else: Manufacturer's demanding content changes is nothing new in the tech site community. We take a look at this topic, including one very public example that started in the past three weeks.
Date: March 15, 2004
Manufacturer: N/A
Written By: Hubert Wong
Just under a year ago, we provided some insight on the inner workings of running a tech site [slashdot.org]. Yes, there are thousands of sites out there, and despite the diversity, there are several constants in our universe... costs, advertising, readership, and most important of all, integrity.
Running a site, especially a tech site, isn't free and there are plenty of costs involved. Everything from the hardware purchases (not everything is free, which is a general misconception I think), to the server and bandwidth... it all has a price.
This is where advertising comes in. If the site is lucky enough, advertising will net a nice income each month, but for a greater number of owners, they'll be lucky if it helps them break even.
Of course, an advertiser is not going to consider a site that doesn't meet their traffic requirements. Readership is what makes our world go round. Without our loyal readers, VL wouldn't be where it is today, and I would say that the same goes for the majority of sites out there.
Casual readers come and go, but a loyal reader is somebody that means a lot to a site. It's common knowledge that most sites track their traffic. This gives us an idea of trends, and how to cater our content. We're not too concerned about our uniques a day, but rather our bookmarks and returns. People who bookmark and/or return multiple times a day make up a site's readership. Uniques are new visitors who either stop and go, or decide to stay. What turns a unique visitor into a regular reader? Content? Yes. Attention to detail? Sure thing. Integrity? Nobody likes a site that lies about a product just to suck up, right?
Granted, the last point isn't something that is respected by a great number of sites (the actual number is more than you think), but the site's I do frequent on a regular basis (Ed. Note: Including our own:D) do try hard to stick with their journalistic integrity. There are instances though where manufacturers will try to influence a site's review. Sadly, this happens quite often, and it becomes a problem when this influence attempts to change a writer's perception of the product. This is something site owners need to deal with constantly, and yes, here at VL we've been asked to have a change of heart on more than one occasion. Errors or omissions happen, and we're more than happy to make amendments, but as a reader, you can rest assured knowing we'll never mislead you because somebody asked us to so they can improve sales.
Luckily, most Tier-1 manufacturers; i.e., the ones who have a good amount of exposure within the enthusiast community, do respect a journalist's right for free speech. Sure, even some of the big dogs take issue with what we in the community say, but that's the price of exposing yourself with press releases. Whether a product is released and performs less than expected, or
Read the rest of this comment...
stx
id As I recall, the US Army was suffering from a shortage of bugle players to play taps for the passing generation of soldiers. They developed a digital bugle [geek.com] that can play taps even if the bugler is incompetent, drunk, or both.
Since Toyota has now developed a vastly more complicated technology that can be used to solve the same problem as the slightly complicated one above, I look forward to future Pentagon procurement hearings.
Note to self: Sarcasm in this post often results in massive retribution.
dji
I'm feeling so wired today.
ywa
k It's known for that Torvalds kid that worked there
nwg
b Here's another one: IBM. Big Blue has been behind so much of the scientific grunt work, a great deal of which has consisted of conceiving of and building experimental scientific equipment [about.com].
qf
w lemme check the calendar to make sure it aint april 1st.
Indeed, transmetas have an extremely low power-consumption rate, but one can't say they are fast, especially post-Enron; u can't fudge the numbers. If power consumption was a part of the performance index (let's say for a SpecInt or a SpecFP), then yea...it might be able to compete. But it's like Via's C3; its low power in more than one way.
Just like you can't have a Lamborgini that gets 60MPG, you ccan't expect to have low power with high power; only some balance of the two in between.
t
Considering that the real ones are headed for extinction, at least we'll have some facsimile as a reminder.
(Not sure whether I should follow that with a winky-face or a sad-face.)
zjc (nt)
js
Who are they trying to fool? When they said this about Internet Explorer I could imagine how this could be true, but what parts of Media player might be essential for other applications???
r
iwc RMS is planning to start his own free email service. Supported clients will include Emacs and Netcat.
xgp
bp (Courtesy of Daily Telegraph)
I met him down in Mordor, he gave me the eye -
Da do Sauron-ron, da do Sauron,
And then he nearly slayed me, what a wicked guy!
Da do Sauron-ron, da do Sauron.
u
nzg Something perhaps like this [catb.org]?
z
Furthermore, I find LilyPond's text format far faster for input than using a GUI. Like speach, music is an abstract concept that the human can nevertheless learn to set in a concrete form using a keyboard. Payware music typesetting programs also has a keyboard input mode, and most advanced users use it.
ur
yh Ok, everybody seems to knocking LilyPond so far, so I thought I'd put out my initial opinion. I've been learning LaTeX recently, and in spite of the waves of horror you feel the first time you look at it, it is actually extremely good at what it does. Revelation, I know, but the point is it ISN'T made for high schoolers writing their history reports. Same thing with LilyPond here. It doesn't look easy, but then, typesetting music isn't easy. LilyPond and LaTeX are an order of magnitude less complex, even if the coefficient is higher than, say, MS Word or Finale. I know I would die if I had to write a book in Word. :) I thought, "If someone did it for typesetting, can't it be done for music?"
Also note that this is not intended to be a replacement for Finale, but rather an entirely different way of getting the job done. They've taken to engraving what TeX took to typesetting.
The coolest thing about this project to me is that I was wondering earlier if anything existed.
wv
h The one from the logged in poster is a faithful reproduction of the article. The anonymous coward one mentions cowboyneal and male body parts.
That probably explains why the moderation was done the way it was far more the the stated author of the article.
c
td I have a Crusoe based Fujitsu P2110 and it's
been great.... fast enough to do video
production even. But I carry it with me
everywhere and it's starting to wear out.
This looks like the perfect replacement!
qa
be Perhaps Microsoft's heavy-handed tactics against Lindows in Europe (and everywhere for that matter) will not go unnoticed by the European courts and/or regulators...
kxx
Who are they trying to fool? When they said this about Internet Explorer I could imagine how this could be true, but what parts of Media player might be essential for other applications???
ipy
kq The reviewer said all data came from the manufacturer's public information & Google. Finding it on Google doesn't validate the data. You need to look at the site that Google sends you too, validate that it is a trustworthy site which has information that you can use.
gx
m What a stupid comment. How could a Bayesian filter (human trained) be more accurate than a human? Has AI had some quantum leap overnight that I didn't hear about? It is a fault in logic, pure and simple.
...
Unless of course, they are talking about identifying spam at the subject header part. But even that is mucking with the statistics. A filter will 'read' the content of an email and judge a spam percentage on that, which is information a human doesn't have without opening an email.
Stupid.
Of course, RTFA could explain this for me but I'm not new here.
Profit!
lgb
Not correct. I can make unlimited copies of DVDs without any access to codes - just as I can make copies of a text written in German without being able to read that language. Mass bootlegging of DVDs happens this way already.
CSS is all about controlling who gets to make DVD players. It does nothing to prevent copying.
dyh
xjh Here's what I posted on Wi-Fi Networking News [wifinetnews.com] about why Starbucks efforts are misguided:
Starbucks reportedly to offer music burning service in up to 2,500 stores: The system will allow customers to have CDs burned while they wait; eventually, it will also allow downloads of music over Wi-Fi, the article in BusinessWeek says.
Starbucks demanded a T-1 (1.544 Mbps in each direction) digital service infrastructure from its first hotspot partner, MobileStar, as well as its second, T-Mobile. I've speculated for a while on how this high-speed network could be used to cache material in each Starbucks, like movie and music downloads.
This latest project sounds somewhat misguided for the reason cited by the Forrester analyst in the article: Your typical barista may be great at making espresso but is not in a position to fix the broken CD burner.
My cousin Steven was involved almost 20 years ago with a company called Personics. The company had worked out a catalog licensing deal with more than 70 labels from the largest down to some independents to allow them to offer custom mix tapes for about a buck a song. This was a reasonable price in those days. The system had a few thousand songs mastered onto CD-ROMs stored in a special employee-operated CD-ROM changer behind the counter. An employee would punch in your choices, and the system created a high-speed cassette tape dub.
The company failed for two primary reasons: the hardware was proprietary, meaning that engineers had to fly around the country to fix it when it inevitably had glitches; and the catalog they offered too small because labels balked at including their most popular stuff for fear of cannibalizing pre-recorded CD and tape sales. (Price, my cousin reports, was not a problem: many customers were willing to pay even more, he noted to me after this item was originally posted.)
If Starbucks creates the expectation of an easy process that's always available and then isn't available even part of the time at any given store, they lose their audience. Starbucks makes its money from processing a high volume of custom drinks--you don't want to distract from that. CD burners aren't that difficult to keep operating, but a failure rate that's a fraction of that experienced by typical home and business users could be a dramatic problem in a high-expectation retail environment.
The article says the price is comparable to Apple and other download services. Two problems with that comparison. First, it's not. It's $7 for five songs, or 40 percent, or $13 for an album, or 30 percent higher. That's a significantly different price when you're dealing with price sensitivity. It's comparable to a mass-produced discounted audio CD.
Second, you're receiving an audio CD, not digital music per se, which could be a turnoff for the audience that might be interested in a fast, in-store music service. (However, since HP is the partner, and is reselling their own version of the iPod, it's possible that the ultimate digital delivery system will be a version of the iTunes Music Store.)
This is the latest incarnation of Compaq-cum-Hewlett Packard's attempts to capitalize on their relationship as a supplier to Starbucks. In January 2001, when the MobileStar deal was announced for installing hotspots, Starbucks made a big deal about Microsoft and Compaq's participation. Compaq wasn't a partner, though; Starbucks had signed a $100 million, five-year deal to buy equipment and services. Microsoft was a partner, and it never seemed to amount to anything that saw the light of day.
In the years since this deal, Compaq and then HP have reaped advertising benefits, appearing in full-page newspaper advertisements as part of the Starbucks hotspot system, even though they had nothing to do with MobileStar and T-Mobile's deployment. At one point, Starbucks had Compaq iPaq's available for customers to play with, and those disappeared, too.
It's this
"Time is an abstract concept devised by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay." - Thundercleese
lyh I don't get SPAM. I don't have SPAM filters. How is this possible? Simple. I create a different e-mail address for any new untrusted entity that I have to provide one for. In the beginning I took advantage of being able to alias all e-mail for non-existent mailboxes (basically, *) at my domain to my primary account. It seemed to me an obvious and simple approach. Whenever I needed to provide an e-mail address, I just made one up, and it was forwarded to my regular Inbox. In my opinion, at that time my ISP was more "sophisticated" than most. Since then I have moved to hosting all of my domains on my own co-located server which runs Exchange 2000, thus complicating things. Now I have to actually add any new aliases that I want to use into my user account. I know of at least one product out there that can handle non-existent addresses and forward them to a specific account, but it is rather expensive for a feature that should have been built-in from the beginning (althought I'm not aware if the new Exchange can do this out of the box). Not to mention that someone with the proper knowledge and skills could make a similar add-on in relatively short order, but who ever has the time? The point is that you have to consider when and where you give your e-mail address out, and the possible consequences therein. It's not altogether different from giving out your phone number (especially if you are unlisted) or even your SSN.
nk
ut Actually, they switched back in 1999; Pluto is again further away than Neptune.
as
lfz That kind of culture explains why Toyota was first to market with a profitable hybrid car, and why they're so far ahead that Ford's licensing hybrid technology from them.
Here's the missing link that doesn't get publicized: automakers are ahead of the curve on robots because they use robotics extensively in assembly. The more accurately their robots move, the more accurately they assemble cars. Next time you wonder why Japanese cars have a reputation for being so well-built, think of projects like these.
hl
Luckily I don't use Hotmail (or any other Microsoft product).
vwy
evi You think that's bad? Try working at an isp and have people yelling at you and blaming you for breaking hotmail ;).
ahh the joys of the internet.
t
w When the MPAA comes a callin' with their CSS encryption, the answer is the DMCA.
But when it comes to open-standards for automobiles, they're all for it.
Why won't they make up their minds?
q
bm Coffee - and coasters to put the mugs on, too! It just doesn't get better than that...:)
gn
c I don't get SPAM. I don't have SPAM filters. How is this possible? Simple. I create a different e-mail address for any new untrusted entity that I have to provide one for. In the beginning I took advantage of being able to alias all e-mail for non-existent mailboxes (basically, *) at my domain to my primary account. It seemed to me an obvious and simple approach. Whenever I needed to provide an e-mail address, I just made one up, and it was forwarded to my regular Inbox. In my opinion, at that time my ISP was more "sophisticated" than most. Since then I have moved to hosting all of my domains on my own co-located server which runs Exchange 2000, thus complicating things. Now I have to actually add any new aliases that I want to use into my user account. I know of at least one product out there that can handle non-existent addresses and forward them to a specific account, but it is rather expensive for a feature that should have been built-in from the beginning (althought I'm not aware if the new Exchange can do this out of the box). Not to mention that someone with the proper knowledge and skills could make a similar add-on in relatively short order, but who ever has the time? The point is that you have to consider when and where you give your e-mail address out, and the possible consequences therein. It's not altogether different from giving out your phone number (especially if you are unlisted) or even your SSN.
w
ik Sounds related to "Muscle Wire" special wires used in a field of robotics called "BEAM" to cause movement without motors. Basically they are wires made of different metals fused together so that they react to electrical charge by contracting. Some really cool insect bots made from them can be found here: http://www.solarbotics.net/bestiary/2502_walker_2m ot_gal.html
Muscle Wire: Muscle Wires are thin, highly processed strands of a nickel-titanium alloy called Nitinol - a type of Shape Memory Alloy that can assume radically different forms or "phases" at distinct temperatures.
However, when conducting an electric current, the wire heats and changes to a much harder form that returns to the "unstretched" shape - the wire shortens in length with a usable amount of force.
ea
iuq Take a look at www.tomplay.com [tomplay.com].
a
The DMCA contains an obscure clause about interoperability, what does this mean? That is could I break encryption to allow DVD player to work, so long as I maintained the spirit of the encryption (not allowing copies)? Can I break the encryption on various games to allow them to run under Wine?
fqh
I don't know if this is a trend exhibited by the majority of Japanese android/robotics researchers, but from what I've seen they tend to follow a no-face design ethic that I'm most pleased with. I think it's safe to say that most people would find anthropomorphic robots that don't look 100% identical to people (there's something off with that one) very creepy.
And besides, these Japanese robots look way cooler and have this implied subservience about them, at least to me. It's a lot harder to humanize and attach (scary) emotion to something that's faceless and non-human looking, rather than something that looks like a hairy/scary-ass rendition of a planet of the apes extra.
I haven't been able to find any more of the sordid details about it, but I do remember this
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
lhl All the programmers who need the environment to compensate for their inadequacies, step on one side. All the programmers who want to learn from their mistakes and become better at their craft, get on the other side.
Most of us know where this line is located.
"In other news, at the local beach today a vicious fight broke out between geeks about where to draw a line. Sand was kicked, noses have been blooded, we have some unconfirmed reports of a wedgie. We will have more on this breaking news as it comes in."
wqk
Whence the 'orang-utan' hifen?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Why do I keep seeing this false meme repeated and repeated and repeated?
Longhorn never got "delayed" because it never had a release date. They were targetting late 2005. Then they came out and said late 2005 is possible, but they're targetting early 2006. They haven't changed a thing since.
So where did this "Longhorn is vaporware, it keeps getting delayed" idea start?
acg
How long till I have to upgrade/patch the OS on my underwear?
gxbh
As a side-bar, is the FTSH acronym pronounced... fetish?
All kidding aside, this sounds like a great idea.
As for the comments about encouraging sloppy code, it is clear those posters have never worked in demanding moving-target environments. The kinds of errors encountered cannot be solved easily in code - this extension would help.
As for the comments on "you can do this in Perl, Python, and ", this is true, but if I know Bash and want tolerance, why should I have to learn a new language to get it? Likely all I'm doing is copying files, forking off subprocesses, and the like.
For the comments on "why another shell," I would tend to agree that it would be best integrated into Bash - but then, you change the implementation of Bash, create incompatible situations, and have to retest volumes of existing scripts. It's best to have this as a separate shell with close look/feel semantics to Bash (or Csh).
hwxf
ro It's a well meaning idea, but it would cause more problems than it would solve. It would just encourage sloppy code; people would rationalize "I don't need to fix errors because it doesn't matter", which is a very bad habit to get into when programming, ignoring errors, or even warnings
The same logic could be applied to any security system, from the automatic door lock on the front of your house to Airbags in your car. Spell checkers discourage people from learning to spell. Antibiotics prevent the growth of the immune system. Why have a lock on your trigger, if it will encourage you to leave it in a place where your kids can find it.
The fact of the matter is, if the code works, it's good code. This is a shell scripting language we're talking about here... Not exactly assembly. Programmers would be better off spending more time thinking about the higher structure of their applications and less time hunting down trivial mistakes.
Of course, I know that this isn't quite what the article is talking about, but it's the principle of the thing. Augmentation would be an improvement.
lmy
djq ... they postponed yet another piece of software?? See me not being amazed here, I mean, it seems to be the trend at MS currently to announce new software and then postponing it due to "problems"... I wonder why. Would it be because the want to see what OSS has to offer first so they can steal the ideas and then sell 'em off?
On the other side, if developers start saying this "slip" is becoming "a credibility issue", then maybe certain OSS apps will finally be accepted in full as being grown-up pieces of software. At best this will cause MS to loose a few points in goodwill with a large group of people that still (foolishly) place their trust in them.
g
We all know Bubbles was the mastermind behind the recent Jackson family assaults on our children and our public decency.
And you know that gorilla that uses sign-language? Well, when the researcher tells you Koko loves you, Koko is really outlining the Monkey Master Plan to overthrow humanity.
No wonder Heston joined the NRA...Those damn dirty apes...
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
k I can't really say I care for the precedent being set here.
How are you supposed to get anything done on the internet if you have to worry about not only the laws in your country, but those all over the world?
(Realistically, the laws in your country plus those in the US)
af
qdf Found it here [slashdot.org].
It's old:)
bn
I've always looked for the perfect place to build an audio production studio. It would need to be stylish.. and well isolated.. I guess you could play with plutonium-powered speakers in this place, without getting complaints from your neighbours.
uee
Seriously though, this sounds fine for integrating electronics into fabrics, but the "artificial nerve" idea conjures images on Christopher Reeve leaping up and tap dancing. This invention doesn't sound like it has any therapeutic uses that a normal wire doesn't. Perhaps users of vagus nerve stimulators or other devices requiring in vivo wiring could be a little more physically vigorous without worrying about things pulling or breaking... but I have my doubts about even that.
eyyuyyivvd
Spell checkers discourage people from learning to spell.
Done correctly, spellcheckers can be the best spelling-learning tool there is.
"Correctly" here means the spell-checkers that give you red underlines when you've finished typing the word and it's wrong. Right-clicking lets you see suggestions, add it to your personal dict, etc.
"Incorrectly" is when you have to run the spell-checker manually at the "end" of typing. That's when people lean on it.
The reason, of course, is feedback; feedback is absolutely vital to learning and spell-checkers that highlight are the only thing I know of that cuts the feedback loop down to zero seconds. Compared to this, spelling tests in school where the teacher hands back the test three days from now are a complete waste of time. (This is one of many places where out of the box thinking with computers would greatly improve the education process but nobody has the guts to say, "We need to stop 'testing' spelling and start using proper spell-checkers, and come up with some way to encourage kids to use words they don't necessarily know how to spell instead of punishing them." The primary use of computers in education is to cut the feedback loop down to no time at all. But I digress...)
'gaim' is pretty close but it really ticks me off how it always spellchecks a word immediately, so if you're typing along and you're going to send the word "unfortunately", but you've only typed as far as "unfortun", it highlights it as a misspelled word. Bad program! Wait until I've left the word!
thrzrjefir
It's a free email service.
I'm sure RMS would disagree with you.
yn
Looking for spam by content analysis for a single user only works for some people. If, for example, your legitimate E-mail contains many messages about investments, mortgages, and similar financial subjects, it's going to be hard to separate out financial spam by word analysis.
Spamcop does multiple-user analysis. It works better than most of the single-user systems.
mgbzqsfybe
x Does Lilypond, or any other program, for that matter, do a good job of drum music? Don't just drumset, but marching percussion, too? With diddles, shots, pings, rolls, 32nd notes, whatever? I have never seen a program that handles all of these things, and it would be great if there were one.
w
And the other side of the coin:
What do you think needs to be done to ensure that the rights of creators and artists are preserved in the digital age?
Suppose it is determined that a solution that both protects the producer's copyrights and the consumer's fair-use rights is not possible. Which side's rights deserve more protection?
qzisqjurlwxi
You can make bit-for-bit copies of any DVD now, complete with all the encryption on it. And the laws preventing the distribution of those DVDs (normal copyright law) has been on the books for a long, long time. If you follow the money, the bottom line is that the CSS and region codes on a DVD only help to support cartel price-fixing profits.
tmfqocvfkll
mnu No "customers" were harmed. The only people who use Hotmail are people who are too poor/lazy to install their own ISP's mail system on their machines.
And if you base your business on Hotmail, i'd say you have a serious I.T. decisions problem.
b
RTFA. You're lightyears away from what it's about.
pk
jpy ...a laptop with a dedicated "portable" architecture. I can definately see Intel saying "More transistors, more power, more clock, and it'll be okay" - which is questionable on the desktop but not at all adequate with laptops. Transmeta's departure from this is an interesting turn of events - Will we see two separate processor lines, one for the laptop, and one for the desktop? And I don't mean the M-series, which just added variable clock and PM, but something like two different design philosophies.
And damn, that's a sexy laptop...:)
x
I would bet that the thought of a baby would be on the order of 1,000,000 times of that of this robot. And probably 100,000 times that of a real Orangoutang. Obviously I have absolutely no backing for those figures. As for AI, the studying I have done has made me conclude it's a failed, crack science at this point for people who really have no concept that a brain doesn't act like a computer, or a computer programmed to act like a brain. In order for this to work we have to be able to quantify a brains element, chemicals etc and we haven't much idea of most of these anyways, and if we do we don't have a clue as to how they function together.
I'm just sick of recursive "best yet" algorithms that claim to be AI when in fact it's nothing more than deduced logic and we are, thankfully, a but deeper than that.
So, go ahead and study AI as perhaps one day something may come of it but be realistic in that you're becoming skilled in a clever art of trickery and deterministic patterns. Good luck!
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
I know this is redundant, but I just had to say...that thing is hideously ugly and creepy. I wouldn't want to be in the same room with it. They need to use it for filming the next horror flick.
//m
strange brew [kombucha.org]
nearly free, as in you make it yourself. bubbles included.
ifo
zq Influence will always occur, never take a single opinion as fact. But unless there is a dramatic smoking gun, memo, email, hidden video of the editor at Bill's place on the lake sipping a pina colada (yea, sure), proof will be very hard to come by. Look at a long track record of information, and if you see a lot of ads by one vendor, grain of salt time.
b
m .. the shell just got the cool error-handling lisp has always had (condition-case in elisp, for example). From a lisper's perspectice, things will be so much easier now... and I can really try some more scripting..
sea
x This might be the breakthrough the BION folks could use to advance their research [vard.org].
yfv
mqf for obvious reasons...
t
Lucy's picture on the book cover is pretty heavily airbrushed... I bet once she looks in a mirror, she'll be in for a lifetime of robot-angst.
What's with all of the people claiming that FTSH will ruin the world because it makes it easier to be a sloppy programmer. Did you freaking read the documentation?
To massively oversimplify, FTSH adds exceptions to shell scripting. Is that really so horrible? Is of line-after-line of "if [$? -eq 0] then" really an improvement? Welcome to the 1980's, we've discovered that programming languages should try and minimize the amount of time you spent typing the same thing over and over again. Human beings are bad at repetitive behavior, avoid repetition if you can.
Similarlly FTSH provides looping constructs to simplify the common case of "Try until it works, or until some timer or counter runs out." Less programmer time wasted coding Yet Another Loop, less opportunities for a stupid slip-up while coding that loop.
If you're so bothered by the possibility of people ignoring return codes it should please you to know that FTSH forces you to appreciate that return codes are very uncertain things. Did diff return 1 because the files are different, or because the linker failed to find a required library? Ultimately all you can say is that diff failed.
Christ, did C++ and Java get this sort of reaming early on? "How horrible, exceptions mean that you don't have to check return codes at every single level."
f
I've used kde since the 1.0 days, upgrading all along on my dual ppro-200. Even in the slowest 2.0 days, it ran fast enough on my system. Sure I turned the eye-candy slider way down when I configured KDE the first time, but that is all. It works, and is fast enough.
The only time I have problems is when I hear the harddrive grinding away, swapping. Even then I'm running something heavy duty in addition to KDE, something that can take up most of my memory alone.
hsb
dc Doesn't that depend on the definition of clustered though? Clustered systems can be things like beowulf clusters. But often a collection of standalone web servers behind a http load balancers is commonly referred to as a web cluster or array.
IMHO as someone who works in a complex web server / database server environment, there are many interdependancies brought by different software, different platforms and different applications. Whilst 100% uptime on all servers is a nice to have, it's a complex goal to achieve and requires not just expertise in the operating systems & web / database server software but an indepth understanding of the applications.
A system such as this fault tolerant shell is actually quite a neat idea. It allows for flexibility in system performance and availability, without requiring complex (and therefore possibly error prone or difficult to maintain) management jobs. An example would be server which replicates images using rsync. If one of the targets is busy serving web pages or running another application, ftsh would allow for that kind of unforeseen error to be catered for relatively easily.
c
(Courtesy of Daily Telegraph)
I met him down in Mordor, he gave me the eye -
Da do Sauron-ron, da do Sauron,
And then he nearly slayed me, what a wicked guy!
Da do Sauron-ron, da do Sauron.
So why should we start counting an even smaller "planet"? Pluto gets grandfathered in, and that's it.
It's encouraging to see unemployeed techs finally taking advantage of all that time they spent fixing friends computers for free. I know I'm usually the first one several of my friends and family call when their computer starts acting weird, and all they want to do is send email.
Now if somebody was really smart, they'd find a way to get partnered with the local Best Buy and could probably turn it into a full time job. You'd be amazed at how much people are willing to pay if you can bring some sanity to their assorted home electronics. My mom loves the 3 page FAQ I made for her that goes step by step how to do everything with the home theatre system my Dad has. She used to not watch any DVDs just because she was scared to touch anything.
Consider this: training, amount of time, and tools. Think of how ugly it is to uninstall a nasty worm virus; think of the effort it takes to salvage files from a flaky/dying hard drive, plus rebuilding the machine. Think of the cost of all the diagnostic software/tools you might have, even if its just some Norton Utilities, a MS Technet subscription, and an AV program.
If a lawyer or a plumber or an exterminator can charge $50-100/hour, a computer technician should be allowed to do the same.
Technician skills are expensive. My company now maintains images of your hard drive. If you have a problem that can't be resolved within 30 minutes of trouble shooting, they take your laptop away, re-image a new laptop, and give it to you the next morning. Its not worth the recovery effort. Bad ofr people with desktop support skills (used to be LAN admins who did that stuff). Now a force of >100 LAN admins across the Greater Toronto Area is less than 20 individuals.
"... the cutting edge of artificial intelligence or AI, a title used by Steven Spielberg for his 2001 film starring Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law."
Now that's good journalism: a little background about the history of AI for the lay-people who might be reading this article.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
Playing the Organ in a devilish fashion!
An AI robot being taught to recognize banana-shaped objects, anyone?
vvy
Congress to Automakers: "G1bb0rz u5 j00r l337 c0d3x0r5555!"
fw
The expected lifetime of these wires will be heavily dependent upon the total strain they encounter in the duty cycle. Basically, it depends upon whether the deformation of the gold is in the elastic or plastic portion of the deformation curve.
Small deformations just cause the atoms in the gold (or any other material) to get closer or further apart. This is elastic deformation and can be done about infinity + 1 times before the metal breaks. eg: you can slightly flex a paper clip until doomsday and it is largely unaffected.
Larger deformations actually cause the atoms to start moving around, changing places in the atomic lattice structure to accomodate the strain. This is primarily accomplished by the movement of defects and dislocations through the material. This is plastic deformation and each plastic deformation lowers the lifetime of the material. eg: if you take a paper clip and start seriously bending it, in a few cycles, the part you're bending breaks off.
I have no idea what the threshhold is between plastic and elastic deformation in these wires is but it should be possible to design devices where the flex wires are in the elastic deformation regime most of the time. Eg: a smart shirt would have flex wires designed to be in the elastic regime when you're skipping around, swinging your arms, whistling show tunes. However, when you trip over a comatose mime and fall into an open storm serwer, the wires would be plastically deformed but won't break like conventional electrodes would in the same situation. Thus giving us essential data to force passage of the mime prevention act of 2008.
dw
i Screen [gnu.org] is a terminal which can survive connection problems. You can start your script, detach terminal, and then came back 10 minutes later and watch what its doing. I know, that's not "fault tolerant", but, most of the times, its enaugh.
dkc
strange brew [kombucha.org]
nearly free, as in you make it yourself. bubbles included.
p
Couldn't they have gotten a better face for the poor thing? It looks like it was dragged out of the dumpster by the dog, and then viciously attacked by mauling centipedes, whereupon it flopped on the metal body of the ape and took on a very sinister appearance. I vote they spend their budget on getting a cute orangutan face!
ky since it cannot really do a lot (of damage) in the first place!
Anyway, a shell is just a shell is just a shell...
dv
vh
It's a standard rule of Public Relations. Never announce anything between Friday at 4pm till Monday at 8am.
The reason being that news outlets are not at full capacity during the weekends, so any news announced over the weekend won't get as much coverage. If NASA announced the news today, it will be covered on the Sunday evening news, and never again since that piece of news was already done, even when not many saw it.
You can notice this practice when someone famous dies over a weekend. There will be an immediate announcement saying that the person is missing or very ill or something of the sort, then make the announcement on Monday.
hqbn
yeah rock solid fault tolerance, hehe, it might even "Resume Next" if u show how delete the executable from your file system.
oo
If you then check the link to CRM114's project, you'll find this: "I measured my own accuracy to be around 99.84%, by classifying the same set of 3000ish messages twice over a period of about a week, reading each message from the top until I feel "confident" of the message status, (one message per screen unless I want more than one screen to decide on a message.) and doing the classification in small batches with plenty of breaks and other office tasks to avoid fatigue. Then I diff()ed the two passes to generate a result. Assuming I never duplicate the same mistake, I, as an unassisted human, under nearly optimal conditions, am 99.84% accurate.)."
Given the amount of people who even read the article on slashdot I doubt anyone else is going to check the tiny [1] footnote and find this.
ny
but rather our "bookmarks" and "returns".
For you window's folk out there, lete me translate:
but rather our "My Favorites" and "Carrage Returns and Line Feeds".
qpmc
But I thought they were the spammers.
ffc
joshua:~#rm -Rf//tmp //tmp
Probable typing error detected. Parsed as rm -Rf
gxe
But of course if a drug company spends 7 years developing a drug and starts trying to recoup some of that cost over the next few years everyone will forget the R&D and point out how the drug costs nothing to make and so the company is ripping everyone off. When I worked at a pharmaceutical company there were cases when it took so long to develop a drug that it wasn't worth bringing it to market because the patent would almost have expired by time it was ready for release. (The patent needs to be filed right at the beginning of the testing process.)
ld
I think I would follow this with a scared-and-crapping-my-pants face myself, jesus, if this is what they look like, get rid of them!
:(
On a serious note, orangutangs going away is sad
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Moreover, 12" Vinyl has made a huge comeback over the past few years because its "mixable" and "scratchable," on turntables, great for live performance purposes.
tk
...or does that kind of look like Tom Servo in a halloween disguise?
"Mike, you'll NEVER be extreme" - Crow T. Robot
Un-news
The work being done by Deb Roy's Cognitive Machines Group @ MIT might also be of interest.
Sure would be nice if Grand started making bits of code and a few technical papers available. Guess he can't just give it away if its his bread and butter though.
Really, why is this even slightly +5 Interesting? Fair enough that you love the company...they did employ Linus for a while after all, and this is Slashdot, so I guess that counts for something. But Transmeta is nothing more than a hyped up dot.com remnant that hasn't realised that it should have crawled away and died somewhere a few years ago. Transmeta overpromised and underdelivered. Its CPUs have never really carved out a niche, suffering from terrible performance, and negligible gains in power efficiency over mobile designs from Motorola, Intel and AMD. Too underpowered for a mainstream notebook, and too power hungry for a PDA or cellphone, Transmeta CPUs linger on in a kind of zombie state, appearing from time to time in strange Japanese systems like this Sharp Actius, itself nothing more than a pale imitation of an Apple 12" G4 PowerBook.
You're entitled to your opinion. It's just -1, Clueless Linus Fanboy, not +5, Interesting.
Thank you.
be
...overburned? - the CDs or the coffee?
inq
Chucky, from Childsplay,
And this freaky uncombed urang utang thingy
I think i can understand why they went with this one. ;)
One kink and it's trash can city.
hly
The question is - how many nerds use Hotmail.com, and why does this non-event warrant a front page article?
vgdz
In order for this to work, it might need changes in the OS level.
Imagine you access a block/char device or an NFS mounted directory and the device driver never returns from the system call. Your script would hang, and a kill would produce a zombie process.
If you want fault tolerance, you'd have to have a timeout mechanism for all device drivers. But if you read from/dev/mt0 and the tape needs rewinding and it takes 6 minutes, you don't want to have your script aborted after 5 minutes.
cttl
DSPAM is one of these statistical filters (like spamprobe and CRM114) that can perform virtually perfect filtering of spam/non-spam you receive.
Now that you are free of spam yourself, may I suggest that you take it one step further and share your data with the anti-spam community; the WPBL project lets many users report the IPs sending them spam and non-spam in realtime using a couple simple scripts installed in procmail.
Our central database then publishes a real-time list of spam sources (the IP blocklist). Unlike spamcop, WPBL is entirely based upon automatic decisions made by statistical filters, 24/7. The resulting blocklist is already used by many ISPs; and you can also use it to block spamming IPs at your own server.
gl
heu ...I'm afraid I can't do that.
lf
This'll get modded as redundant, as well it should. But... holy crap:
http://www.cyberlife-research.com/diary/0104.htm
When researchers placed Lucy in a cage with real orangutans to see how the other primates reacted, the orangutans were quick to notice that Lucy did not take part in the favorite orangutan past time of throwing their excrement at Zoo visitors. Dejected, the researchers were forced to go back to the AI drawing boards.
The article mentions that they dont use software to cheat. Does that mean that any sort of matching via a database is not "real" AI??
The / in
I did. Endlessly is good. The network overhead is negligible.
Check once every 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,whatever,mins *all the time anyway* whether it fails or succeeds and you *absolutely don't* want to have to explicitly tell 1000 machines to start again.
You simply generalise the update process, get rid of the special cases. In the case of patches, you know you're going to have to distribute them out to clients at some point anyway so have all the clients check once a day, every day. If the distribution server is down for a couple of days it's pretty much irrelevant.
My error detection code is trivial the network traffic is negligible unless the job's actually being done and I still haven't been given a good case for ftsh. I have a good case for a better randomising algorithm within a shell and a decent distributed cron (which is simple BTW), but not for a specifically fault tolerant shell.
You've got to stop thinking of these things as individual systems. The network is the machine.
swfw
It has occurred to me, whenever the subject of AI is broached, that scientists seem to be doing a bang-up job of heading towards replicating the proper function of a brain in computer hardware, but none of the projects I've seen try to replicate the errors that result when the brain cell sending or receiving a message dies, is replaced incorrectly, is deformed one way or another, or is subject to any of the other myriad flaws of flesh.
Could it be that sentience, in the end, is the result of brain farts?
:::The Spear in the heart of the Other is the Spear in the heart of You; You are He - Surak of Vulcan:::
Guess flexible wiring is more pleasant to be strapped into than a squid or a cuttlefish, though I doubt it'd be as fast. Cephalopods have very fast nervous systems, they're lightning quick partly as a result.
rjt
So what happens if the files are crucial (let's use the toy example of kernel modules being updated): The modules get deleted, then the update fails because the remote host is down. Presumably the shell can't rollback the changes a la DBMS, as that would involve either hooks into the FS or every file util ever written.
Now I think it's a nice idea, but it could easily lead to such sloppy coding; if your shell automatically tries, backs off and cleans up, why would people bother doing it the 'correct' way and downloading the new files before removing the old ones?
nvy
And here my girlfriend is blaming that stupid mozilla program. Try explaing that its Microsofts fault to someone who thinks that MS is infallable.
ynm
... they postponed yet another piece of software?? See me not being amazed here, I mean, it seems to be the trend at MS currently to announce new software and then postponing it due to "problems"... I wonder why. Would it be because the want to see what OSS has to offer first so they can steal the ideas and then sell 'em off? On the other side, if developers start saying this "slip" is becoming "a credibility issue", then maybe certain OSS apps will finally be accepted in full as being grown-up pieces of software. At best this will cause MS to loose a few points in goodwill with a large group of people that still (foolishly) place their trust in them.
gk
People have been doing research for thousands of years, and most of the research have led to woudnerful discoveries, but.. to be honest, I cant see that this discovery can leed to any major breakthoughs. Not even minor ones.
wf
MySQL Control Center is a step in that direction (client side) if they implement some more features on server side M$ centric customers need, it could get Microsoft into trouble in the future (some years)
zrm
Do you see the DMCA as a law that can truly benefit the world as a whole, or just a tool of the big corporations (MPAA, I'm looking at you) or whatever?
nqk
a auto-completing python interpreter and editor
Try the Wing IDE. It has most of the functions you wanted... But it's not free software.
ovzn
If I were the dictator, MS would be forced to document the file formats it is using (including all WMV formats, of course), all network protocols, and to provide sufficient NTFS documentation so that I can finally can mount/dev/hda2 with read-write soonish.
vc
...overburned? - the CDs or the coffee?
fr
I wonder if this could help patients with I.C. It's rather painful and if the "new nerves" can be made to ignore certain impulses...that'd be very beneficial. Very intriguing, anyway
he
Something to consider about Japan and their rise in technology, is that since the end of WWII, they haven't had a military to take up financing, (or resources, or R&D, etc..) thus leaving the government, and the culture as a whole, to focus on something else...like business and technology.
pbng
Servo had CURVES, baby. Mmm...
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode." - Crow T. Robot
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
That must have been one heck of an internal problem for it to knock out Hotmail AND MSN Messenger.
For example, the problem might have lain in the Passport login servers. Single sign-on is a single point of failure.
fmhg
If I install a fleshlight in my robotic orangutang, does that mean *BSD won't have drivers for it?!!!
the japanese developed a nice looking actroid:
Realistic Japanese Female Actroid Robot
Interesting how we see strong-arm tactics against some aussie warez-puppy, but we don't see them waltzing into Moscow to shut down the mass-piracy of the Russian mafia groups, or the cd-r markets throughout Asia.
I guess this is to be expected from a government that will storm into a crippled-to-the-level-of-impotence Iraq to stop them from developing, err, "weapons of mass destruction", but will just cautiously sidestep any country of real WMD threat (China, NK, Israel).
Seems to be another case of break the weakling orpahan to keep the rest in line.
iu
has 50000 'neurons'. Does Steve Grand really think he'll approach mammalian intelligence with so few? I agree strongly with him giving Lucy a rich environment, but maybe he should be looking at using something like FPGAs to get more neurons on board for a reasonable cost. That's what Hugo de Garis is doing, and he had much more ambitious plans. The company he was working for failed though, so I don't know whether he's still making progress in actual building of AI. Anyone?
When she can drink beer out of the can, lift cars and hit/give the finger to hells angels.
I grow weary of all the people with cyberist attitudes who are scared of machines simply because they don't look exactly like us. If you look at the best of our CG characters today, they STILL don't look like us. I imagine that the first humanoid robots will probably look a lot like CG characters come to life. Get rid of those old fashioned attitudes... ;P
Un-news
the self-parallel parking car.
I read a piece about him in the tree-unfriendly Mail on Sunday sometime last year and apparently he (or was it his wife?) tried mutilating an existing cuddly orangutan, but it didn't fit.
Hey, can we build something like this into a RealDoll?
score of GNAA ownz
If we wanted to build a bona fide organic human brain, yes we would need to quantify not only the brain's elemental composition but also how it functions. You are right in that it clearly seems beyond our reach to do that.
... impossible. Do a Google search on the topic.
But AI isn't about building an organic brain. It simply seeks to replicate the output on a particular level i.e. not at the neuronal level but at the behavioural level say. To achieve the latter do we need to understand the deep functioning of the brain? There seems to be no compelling reason. And fundamentally, AI has to work with the materials available i.e. silicon and metal and our concept of logic. Organic systems evolved to suit their medium. We can't (at the moment) use that medium so we can only expect to have to find an alternative means to the same end. Sort of like fixed wings and airfoils vice flapping wings of bone and feathers.
As for the "trickery and deterministic patterns", that's human arrogance at work. How do you know that that isn't all there is to it? You don't. There is such a problem with the definition of intelligence that it actually makes benchmarking quite
What is particularly nice to see is that the "oragutan" has learned over a long time period. It still mystifies me why we expect to achieve learning in short time frames (see all the arguments about how neural networks take too long to train). A human child using the most sophisticated natural computer (the brain) still takes years to grasp all the basic elements needed for survival. Heck, the Darwin awards show that decades is often not sufficient for adequate human learning.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Man those games were obsessions...
And I quote: "...conjures up fears of super-clever robots, the likes of Frankenstein..." Umm yeah.
OK, what about C-3PO?
I guess if you're going to build an anthropomorphic robot, you need to give it an irritating voice to balance out the face.
Yes it's akin to how both electric motors and human muscles can create motion. The actual mechanism behind the two movement systems is very different, but the output at the level of motion is basically the same.
Lucy isn't the most attractive robot I've ever seen. Here's my own robot-ape. http://www.fuzzgun.btinternet.co.uk/flint/index.ht m
My open source AI software can also be found here:
http://www.fuzzgun.btinternet.co.uk/rodney/compone nts.htm