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Japanese Researchers Create Skiing Robot
An anonymous reader writes "In a bid to better understand the art of an effective ski turn researchers have recently built a robot to simulate the exact movements of a skier. The team of researchers from Kanazawa University in Japan built the ski robot to investigate the existing movements of skier's turns and see if there is any room for improvement on current techniques."
The talk at last week's Semicon West in San Francisco was, for the most part, about the economy. Everyone seemed depressed by the fact that things are not picking up as much we'd all like, and that there are few "bright spots" in the market.
Thing is, the picture never seems bleak for Apple. I mean, the company is killing everyone. What is wrong with this picture? What is Apple doing right? Well, first of all, Apple is still advertising like crazy and paying no attention to the doomsayers. In other words, it has a positive attitude.
In addition to a positive attitude, there are other issues that need addressing if this industry is to survive. I've listed them here in order of importance. I truly believe that if we fix these problems/issues, things like the economic crises would not have much of a negative effect. Seriously. Here is what we need.
1) New killer apps. Where are they? The last killer app was actually the World Wide Web. People have been fixated on it and produced various Web apps that have yet to set the world on fire. There are some note-taking apps, a bookmarking app, and a bunch of other cute niche products. While some of these hobby apps, such as Writely, the online word processor, get bought by Google, most are pretty simplistic and none are earth shattering. I mean, take Flickr (please!). You can live without it.
2) Core development! While Linux, for example, will do some load balancing with six-core chips, and some programs are coded to use multi core, the fact is that these chips have not set the world on fire with huge performance jumps. On a typical Windows machine that runs Word and Excel, these chips provide little improvement. You'd think four cores would be four times as fast but no. Where is the multi-core OS? This all harkens back to the debate over parallel processing: no genius has come along with great code that takes advantage of the inherent power so all apps benefit. Pity.
3) Robots. I thought I'd drop this zinger onto the list. Where are the robots? Roomba comes along years ago and that's it? A floor-sweeping robot? Sigh. Meanwhile, Japan is working like crazy on robots. In the 1980's people were jazzed about the robot idea. Over 35 years go by, and we've got little to show. Oh, and by robot, I mean some device that can pick up the dishes and wash them as well as scrub the floor.
4) The talking and listening computer. This is actually one step down from robots, and nobody can mange to do this either. IBM kept bragging about its upcoming human-centric computer, or whatever it was going to call it. You could actually chat with the device. I'll give up on robots for the sake of a simple computer that can talk like the one in Star Trek. The fact is that today's machines cannot understand a word we say, and the computer-generated voices are from the late 1980's. How hard can this all be?
5) Machine translation. OK, now you have probably noticed that I constantly complain about this topic. And here I go again. I know that the complexities of idiomatic languages are incredibly varied, but can't we do better that what we have. Without knowing the language, you can likely do better by guessing context than most of these translators do. Often the translations do not make any sense whatsoever. And yes, machine translation is very good at translating "hello" and "where is the train station?" And so are the reference books from Berlitz. So what?
6) Handwriting recognition. As I write this complaint, I realize that I write this almost exact same column every five or six years and nothing changes. This in itself, of course, suggests the overall stagnation in the business.
I suppose the iPhone represents where we are currently in our industry. One of the most popular apps for the iPhone is a flashlight. This is an app that turns the screen bright white, so you can use the device to find your keys in the dark. Handy, yes, but it's not the killer app we need.
And speaking of needing better translation tools, the iPhone would make the perfect