A 150k chunk of ironmongery that you stick in a corner...
You missed the point here -- the comparison is between a $5000 machine that makes burgers and the $150K 'Armatron'. (Can you still buy those? I used to spend hours at Radio Shack playing with them as a kid)
Making machines that work like people, even to the extent of simply having an 'arm', is usually a fundamentally stupid thing to do. The human machine is very adaptable, but isn't terribly good at basic tasks, and it takes an insane amount of computing power to run. Simple, dedicated hardware will be always be cheaper, more efficient, and easier to maintain.
Perhaps this is intended only as a proof-of-concept, but a spatula-wielding arm is an extremely overcomplicated way of producing hamburgers and pancakes. Much cheaper (but admittedly less impressive) custom 'hamburger' or 'pancake' machines could accomplish the same work at several orders of magnitude less cost.
An articulated arm is an extremely flexible tool that can be repurposed for the evolving needs of say, a car factory, where new vehicle models require that the same tools adapt to manufacturing new products. I don't think that the same requirements apply to a fast food restaurant.
The real value of the robot would be as a 'hook' to attract customers to see it work, not it's raw savings in labour cost.
So, commercial software is lousy because we're all stupid, and choose not to use good development practices.
Bullshit.
NASA didn't just have a solid process, they had MONEY. They BOUGHT that quality, by hiring an order of magnitude more testers than you'd find in the commercial world. By budgeting several years of development time rather than weeks or months. By reducing the number of lines of code that any one developer is responsible for.
There's a lot to learn from a highly structured development process like NASA's. But don't kid yourself that the quality they produced is simply because they 'had the right process' or had better management.
Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.
This software is the work of 260 women and men...
Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have been written by 7 or 8 people.
I can't see why highways are considered one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century. It takes lots of materials, but the engineering is just about leveling ground and paving it.
Apart from the use of asphalt and concrete, there's nothing involved in a highway that the Romans hadn't done thousands of years ago. The aspect of highways that require great feats of engineering, the bridges and tunnels, are projects to themselves that aren't tied intrinsically to highway engineering.
On top of all this, the highway isn't even that great a solution to basic problem of transportation.
they just should have thought things through a little better as far as WHO is going to buy this and WHAT they are going to want to use!
Huh? You mean they forgot to take into account that huge fraction of the population that don't have phone lines in their home? Give me a break. You'd have to custom build a house today to NOT get RJ11 wiring.
HomePNA is going to be THE standard way of networking devices in homes inside of the next couple years. It works in all existing homes, doesn't need a hub, is a no-brainer to set up, and is fast enough (10Mb) for anything outside of corporate networking requirements.
I've been networking computers for years, and recently installed this for my home network instead of twisted pair. I did it because wiring my house would have been a pain in the ass, but I'd recommend it now for anyone else.
You can expect cable modems to be shipping with built in HPNA support this year.
I don't see how it can be done with only two companies. The rumored proposal is 'office' vs. 'OS' divisions. What about all the other Microsoft components?
Services (MSN, Hotmail, MSNBC)
Internet Explorer (Surely this can't be part of the OS!:) )
Hardware
Development software (VC++, VB)
MSDN (Developer services, training)
BackOffice (Server apps)
Non 'Office' Software (Games, educational software)
All of those are key players in Microsoft's unified Juggernaught. Any two of them in combination provide all kinds of competitive advantages to MS.
I don't see any simple way to divide the company in two to remove the monopoly power.
Adding features to digital products is relatively easy
Which is why it's rather unfortunate that we're going to have to buy entirely different units to take advantage of different features like voice-recognition or digital radio or whatever.
I'd much rather pay a bit extra to get a generalized system that could be upgraded and enhanced. Why not simply a "ruggedized notebook" whose components are designed to fit into a car? Commodity parts running a standard os, attached to whatever specialized peripherals are necessary (dash-mounted LCDs, a sunvisor mic for voice-recognition, etc.) would be way more flexible, and probably be cheaper than custom-designed hardware.
In other words, solve all the _general_ PC-in-a-car problems -- power, connectivity, resistance to bumpy roads -- with a single 'reference pc', then let the user and third-party companies add whatever hard/software they need for themselves.
Without decent encryption, this practically begs to be wiretapped.
Huh? This has FAR more security than any other form of wireless transport. Without compromising the endpoints, it can only be intercepted by putting a reciever in the line of sight, instead of merely being withing broadcast range. This would both be really easy to detect (wtf is that helicopter doing hovering beside my building?) and would be very difficult to do without disrupting the communication.
But for the paranoid, there's certainly no reason not to add encryption to the link.
First to break the gigapixel barrier!!
on
ATI Radeon 256
·
· Score: 2
Fun with marketing!!
Bitboys Oy The one and two chip solutions will deliver the first one and two gigatexels per second performance in the 3D market, with an amazing feature set and low solution cost!
ATI First graphics chip to break through the Gigatexel barrier with an awesome 1.5 Gigatexel per second rendering engine.
3DFX Taking advantage of the revolutionary scalable architecture of the 3dfx VSA-100 chip, the Voodoo 5 6000 AGP features four processors working together to be the world's first 3D accelerator to break the Gigapixel barrier.
Ok, that last one says 'pixel', but 3DFX is probably referring to single-texture polys anyway.
Couldn't find an nVidia reference, can anyone else find one?
The goal of the pilot study was to select a pair of games that differed primarily in amount of violence. The goal was best achieved by pairing of Myst and Wolfenstein 3D.
Suddenly the results become clearer. Of course the Wolfenstein 3D group was more violent! The control group was probably asleep by the end of the test.
None of these three things are physically accurate; they apply more to atmospheric flight. What Terminus is doing is getting rid of those things, so that when you point your ship somewhere you actually have to thrust to change direction. When you shut the engines off, you keep going. And so forth.
I hope that they aren't going for Wing Commander-eque gameplay with this -- because real spaceflight physics SUCK for dogfighting. There was a game called Mantis that came out not too long after Wing Commander that used 'real' physics, and it turned every fight into a jousting match. You found the guy, he found you, you charged at each other guns-ablaze, and then shot off in opposite directions, counter thrusting to attempt another pass. Forget 'getting on somone's tail', it ain't gonna happen. Lining up a ship for docking is difficult enough, never mind maintaining position with respect to a guy that is trying to get away.
Atmospheric flight performance is much more fun for dogfights. And besides, you can always rationalize it. The Star Wars (novels, anyway) universe refers to 'ethereal' rudders and ailerons. Same principles as atmospheric flight, but your flaps are pressing against some as-yet-undiscovered-to-us medium, instead of air.
the LoC's resources are contrained. if they spend 20% of their money, time, space, on digitizing existing content, they would have 20% fewer resources to apply to the first two priorities.
You assume that resources must somehow be divided and allocated specifically to each 'priority'. Also, you assume that digitizing the content will not have a positive impact on the first two priorities.
Both of these assumptions are false.
1. THE FIRST PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to make knowledge and creativity available to the United States Congress.
This is a blanket priority that is fulfilled implicitly by all the other priorities.
2. THE SECOND PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to acquire,
Moving the library into a digital format makes acquisition of new materials far easier. No longer do physical books have to be printed, transported, indexed, and tracked.
organize,
Do I need to address the organizational advantages of digital information? Instant content retrieval, plaintext searching, automated indexing, cross-linking across different volumes, remote access, etc., etc.
preserve, secure and sustain [knowledge] for the present and future use of the Congress and the nation.
Paper is a relatively fragile medium. Books that are only a hundred years old are effectively impossible to use. Ongoing maintenance means having to continually reprint material, a process as if not more expensive than digitizing it. Digital information can be copied and backed up an infinite number of times at near zero cost.
1. THE FIRST PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to make knowledge and creativity available to the United States Congress.
2. THE SECOND PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to acquire, organize, preserve, secure and sustain [knowledge] for the present and future use of the Congress and the nation.
3. THE THIRD PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to make its collections maximally accessible to (in order of priority) A. the Congress; B. the U. S. government more broadly; C. the public.
He appears to have forgotten the third priority entirely. Digitizing the contents would improve accessibility to all three of the above groups, particularly the third, without compromising either of the first two priorities.
Levar hosts Reading Rainbow, an excellent kids' show about reading. Oh, no... the theme song is back in my head.... "Butterfly in the skyyyyyyyy! I can go twice as hiiiiiiigh!!"
I have a friend who buys sympathy greeting cards and crosses out the copy and writes in his own greeting. His reason, the card companies monitor the sales so closely the purchase of a couple of sympathy cards instead of birthday cards will modify what is being marketed, ipso facto one less sappy commercial for birthday cards.
So, what you're saying is that he paid them $3 for a piece of paper, and walked away feeling like he'd taken advantage of them.
It's not even for saving money on power bills. Where this thing is useful, is for charging batteries in a location where there is NO power available. Think being at a remote cabin, where you leave the charging unit in a sunny window all day, to afford yourself a couple hours of hacking in the afternoon.
Every discussion involving solar energy always brings out the guys saying how impractical it is to have huge panels strapped to your car / body, and how solar panels don't have enough juice to run a TV all day, and how your device will shut down when a cloud comes by.
Duh.
Solar power application today is always about charging batteries, and it's always about low-power requirements in a place where more conventional power is not available.
At HS they decided to give everyone an email account (and webaccess). I'd say a good 80-90% (students and teachers) of people use it. Step into the computer lab at a given day, you'll see 1 (maybe two, if a paper is due) people working on homework, and about 12-15 people writing email.
This doesn't address your point, but take a step back and look at what those kids are doing -- they're writing! Granted, it probably ain't Shakespeare, but I'd be ecstatic as an educator if I could encourage kids to sit down and write mini-essays to each other without even asking them. Getting a kid to write the equivalent of a 2-300 word email down on paper, in a classroom, is like pulling teeth.
Now, the chair/desk assemblages...the chair is ABSOLUTELY necessary, as is some sort of writing surface. So, let's throw a 10.5" cheap LCD (akin to the ones used in the iOpeners) under some sort of VERY durable/abuse resistant clear polymer cover, and mount this where the desk normally attaches (usually right-hand side) - the clear top serves as a writing surface, while still allowing the screen to show.
This kind of custom unit sounds nice, but in reality it's terribly inflexible. You're locked into a very specific model of seating, you can't repurpose the desk for anything other than classroom computer use, and it will likely become obsolete very quickly. A laptop and a plain old table or desk is very simple and very flexible.
Well, in the above circumstance, there could simply be ethernet hookups run to each of the desks. In a circumstance where there are full-fledged laptops being used, just build an ethernet port into the existing desks.
I think wireless is required for a couple of reasons:
1) Classrooms are not offices. They have to be very flexible environments, that can be rearranged on a moment's notice for a variety of roles. Working in groups may mean shuffling desks around, having school events may mean clearing out a room to make way for bake sale tables. You can't have a hardwired network in this kind of place. Classrooms are also rough environments. I'd give any classroom about a week before kids had stuffed gum into half the RJ45 connectors...
2) Schools can't afford good technical administrators. This will be a critical problem in any implementation, but maintaining hubs and wiring in every class will only exacerbate the problem. Wireless would lighten some of the load.
I see some reason is supplying kids with free/cheap/subsidized computers -- desktops which they'll have at home. I don't see much use in giving them laptops to be used in class. The problem is that effectively using laptops in class is very complicated.
Using desktops is even more complicated. You need a 'lab' to use desktop machines. The classroom will be effectively useless for any non-computer based work. If the computers are to be used 'ubiquitously' for parts of all classes, every classroom would have to be a 'computer room'.
I think we're a couple years -- but not much longer -- away from a feasible classroom notebook solution. In terms of the hardware.
A classroom network will have to be wireless, I don't see a way around this. So we need wireless networking. And we need at least 8 hour battery life (wireless means power too) for the computers. They'll need to be ruggedized, commodity machines in a very standard configuration. These things aren't yet available on the cheap, but they will be shortly.
but I haven't seen one single source offered that this guy could not have found spending fifteen minutes on the web, or in a library. Research is part of the work and the learning process, by his skipping that part, it is in effect getting someone else to write a part of it.
Skipping what part? There's a lot of stuff on the web, most of it crap. He's asking an authoritative source (the folk on slashdot) for a short list of useful material. Asking an authority on a subject for direction is a valid research technique. Why force him to wade through dozens of Cryptography for insanely stupid people books before he finds Applied Cryptography?
Many people here seem upset that this student has the internet at his disposal for doing his research, while they had to do without in their day. Get over it. Effectively using the net -- including asking known reliable people on the net for pointers -- is an essential modern research technique.
Slashdot Mirror
A 150k chunk of ironmongery that you stick in a corner...
You missed the point here -- the comparison is between a $5000 machine that makes burgers and the $150K 'Armatron'. (Can you still buy those? I used to spend hours at Radio Shack playing with them as a kid)
Making machines that work like people, even to the extent of simply having an 'arm', is usually a fundamentally stupid thing to do. The human machine is very adaptable, but isn't terribly good at basic tasks, and it takes an insane amount of computing power to run. Simple, dedicated hardware will be always be cheaper, more efficient, and easier to maintain.
An articulated arm is an extremely flexible tool that can be repurposed for the evolving needs of say, a car factory, where new vehicle models require that the same tools adapt to manufacturing new products. I don't think that the same requirements apply to a fast food restaurant.
The real value of the robot would be as a 'hook' to attract customers to see it work, not it's raw savings in labour cost.
Bullshit.
NASA didn't just have a solid process, they had MONEY. They BOUGHT that quality, by hiring an order of magnitude more testers than you'd find in the commercial world. By budgeting several years of development time rather than weeks or months. By reducing the number of lines of code that any one developer is responsible for.
There's a lot to learn from a highly structured development process like NASA's. But don't kid yourself that the quality they produced is simply because they 'had the right process' or had better management.
This software is the work of 260 women and men...
Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have been written by 7 or 8 people.
Apart from the use of asphalt and concrete, there's nothing involved in a highway that the Romans hadn't done thousands of years ago. The aspect of highways that require great feats of engineering, the bridges and tunnels, are projects to themselves that aren't tied intrinsically to highway engineering.
On top of all this, the highway isn't even that great a solution to basic problem of transportation.
Huh? You mean they forgot to take into account that huge fraction of the population that don't have phone lines in their home? Give me a break. You'd have to custom build a house today to NOT get RJ11 wiring.
HomePNA is going to be THE standard way of networking devices in homes inside of the next couple years. It works in all existing homes, doesn't need a hub, is a no-brainer to set up, and is fast enough (10Mb) for anything outside of corporate networking requirements.
I've been networking computers for years, and recently installed this for my home network instead of twisted pair. I did it because wiring my house would have been a pain in the ass, but I'd recommend it now for anyone else.
You can expect cable modems to be shipping with built in HPNA support this year.
- Services (MSN, Hotmail, MSNBC)
- Internet Explorer (Surely this can't be part of the OS!
:) ) - Hardware
- Development software (VC++, VB)
- MSDN (Developer services, training)
- BackOffice (Server apps)
- Non 'Office' Software (Games, educational software)
All of those are key players in Microsoft's unified Juggernaught. Any two of them in combination provide all kinds of competitive advantages to MS.I don't see any simple way to divide the company in two to remove the monopoly power.
Which is why it's rather unfortunate that we're going to have to buy entirely different units to take advantage of different features like voice-recognition or digital radio or whatever.
I'd much rather pay a bit extra to get a generalized system that could be upgraded and enhanced. Why not simply a "ruggedized notebook" whose components are designed to fit into a car? Commodity parts running a standard os, attached to whatever specialized peripherals are necessary (dash-mounted LCDs, a sunvisor mic for voice-recognition, etc.) would be way more flexible, and probably be cheaper than custom-designed hardware.
In other words, solve all the _general_ PC-in-a-car problems -- power, connectivity, resistance to bumpy roads -- with a single 'reference pc', then let the user and third-party companies add whatever hard/software they need for themselves.
Huh? This has FAR more security than any other form of wireless transport. Without compromising the endpoints, it can only be intercepted by putting a reciever in the line of sight, instead of merely being withing broadcast range. This would both be really easy to detect (wtf is that helicopter doing hovering beside my building?) and would be very difficult to do without disrupting the communication.
But for the paranoid, there's certainly no reason not to add encryption to the link.
Bitboys Oy
The one and two chip solutions will deliver the first one and two gigatexels per second performance in the 3D market, with an amazing feature set and low solution cost!
ATI
First graphics chip to break through the Gigatexel barrier with an awesome 1.5 Gigatexel per second rendering engine.
3DFX
Taking advantage of the revolutionary scalable architecture of the 3dfx VSA-100 chip, the Voodoo 5 6000 AGP features four processors working together to be the world's first 3D accelerator to break the Gigapixel barrier.
Ok, that last one says 'pixel', but 3DFX is probably referring to single-texture polys anyway.
Couldn't find an nVidia reference, can anyone else find one?
Uh, they did. nVidia is building the X-Box's graphics hardware.
Suddenly the results become clearer. Of course the Wolfenstein 3D group was more violent! The control group was probably asleep by the end of the test.
I hope that they aren't going for Wing Commander-eque gameplay with this -- because real spaceflight physics SUCK for dogfighting. There was a game called Mantis that came out not too long after Wing Commander that used 'real' physics, and it turned every fight into a jousting match. You found the guy, he found you, you charged at each other guns-ablaze, and then shot off in opposite directions, counter thrusting to attempt another pass. Forget 'getting on somone's tail', it ain't gonna happen. Lining up a ship for docking is difficult enough, never mind maintaining position with respect to a guy that is trying to get away.
Atmospheric flight performance is much more fun for dogfights. And besides, you can always rationalize it. The Star Wars (novels, anyway) universe refers to 'ethereal' rudders and ailerons. Same principles as atmospheric flight, but your flaps are pressing against some as-yet-undiscovered-to-us medium, instead of air.
the LoC's resources are contrained. if they spend 20% of their money, time, space, on digitizing existing content, they would have 20% fewer resources to apply to the first two priorities.
You assume that resources must somehow be divided and allocated specifically to each 'priority'. Also, you assume that digitizing the content will not have a positive impact on the first two priorities.
Both of these assumptions are false.
1. THE FIRST PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to make knowledge and creativity available to the United States Congress.
This is a blanket priority that is fulfilled implicitly by all the other priorities.
2. THE SECOND PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to acquire,
Moving the library into a digital format makes acquisition of new materials far easier. No longer do physical books have to be printed, transported, indexed, and tracked.
organize,
Do I need to address the organizational advantages of digital information? Instant content retrieval, plaintext searching, automated indexing, cross-linking across different volumes, remote access, etc., etc.
preserve, secure and sustain [knowledge] for the present and future use of the Congress and the nation.
Paper is a relatively fragile medium. Books that are only a hundred years old are effectively impossible to use. Ongoing maintenance means having to continually reprint material, a process as if not more expensive than digitizing it. Digital information can be copied and backed up an infinite number of times at near zero cost.
Priorities
1. THE FIRST PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to make knowledge and creativity available to the United States Congress.
2. THE SECOND PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to acquire, organize, preserve, secure and sustain [knowledge] for the present and future use of the Congress and the nation.
3. THE THIRD PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to make its collections maximally accessible to (in order of priority)
A. the Congress;
B. the U. S. government more broadly;
C. the public.
He appears to have forgotten the third priority entirely. Digitizing the contents would improve accessibility to all three of the above groups, particularly the third, without compromising either of the first two priorities.
Levar hosts Reading Rainbow, an excellent kids' show about reading. ... the theme song is back in my head .... "Butterfly in the skyyyyyyyy! I can go twice as hiiiiiiigh!!"
Oh, no
So, what you're saying is that he paid them $3 for a piece of paper, and walked away feeling like he'd taken advantage of them.
Every discussion involving solar energy always brings out the guys saying how impractical it is to have huge panels strapped to your car / body, and how solar panels don't have enough juice to run a TV all day, and how your device will shut down when a cloud comes by.
Duh.
Solar power application today is always about charging batteries, and it's always about low-power requirements in a place where more conventional power is not available.
This doesn't address your point, but take a step back and look at what those kids are doing -- they're writing! Granted, it probably ain't Shakespeare, but I'd be ecstatic as an educator if I could encourage kids to sit down and write mini-essays to each other without even asking them. Getting a kid to write the equivalent of a 2-300 word email down on paper, in a classroom, is like pulling teeth.
This kind of custom unit sounds nice, but in reality it's terribly inflexible. You're locked into a very specific model of seating, you can't repurpose the desk for anything other than classroom computer use, and it will likely become obsolete very quickly. A laptop and a plain old table or desk is very simple and very flexible.
Well, in the above circumstance, there could simply be ethernet hookups run to each of the desks. In a circumstance where there are full-fledged laptops being used, just build an ethernet port into the existing desks.
I think wireless is required for a couple of reasons:
1) Classrooms are not offices. They have to be very flexible environments, that can be rearranged on a moment's notice for a variety of roles. Working in groups may mean shuffling desks around, having school events may mean clearing out a room to make way for bake sale tables. You can't have a hardwired network in this kind of place. Classrooms are also rough environments. I'd give any classroom about a week before kids had stuffed gum into half the RJ45 connectors...
2) Schools can't afford good technical administrators. This will be a critical problem in any implementation, but maintaining hubs and wiring in every class will only exacerbate the problem. Wireless would lighten some of the load.
Using desktops is even more complicated. You need a 'lab' to use desktop machines. The classroom will be effectively useless for any non-computer based work. If the computers are to be used 'ubiquitously' for parts of all classes, every classroom would have to be a 'computer room'.
I think we're a couple years -- but not much longer -- away from a feasible classroom notebook solution. In terms of the hardware.
A classroom network will have to be wireless, I don't see a way around this. So we need wireless networking. And we need at least 8 hour battery life (wireless means power too) for the computers. They'll need to be ruggedized, commodity machines in a very standard configuration. These things aren't yet available on the cheap, but they will be shortly.
I'll do that when the anemic little Netscape/Mozilla browser provides such an obvious, useful functionality.
<HTML>
<H1>CaseyB's Amazing Web Links Database</H1>
<!--miscellaneous banner ads, etc.-->
<IFRAME SRC="http://www.yahoo.com/">
</HTML>
With some clever Javascript, I could probably even size and scroll the frame so that Yahoo's ads never appear on the screen.
Now I just advertise this to unsuspecting web users, and make some cash.
Note that this doesn't involve my copying Yahoo's data, nor even accessing their servers myself. Yet I'm making a profit off of their work.
I'm curious: how well does gene sequence information compress? Is this effectively random data, or are there patterns?
I can see the disclaimers now:
The GeneStor PeopleBackup(tm) device can now store the complete* contents of your genetic makeup!!
(* Storage assumes 2x data compression. Results may vary.)
Skipping what part? There's a lot of stuff on the web, most of it crap. He's asking an authoritative source (the folk on slashdot) for a short list of useful material. Asking an authority on a subject for direction is a valid research technique. Why force him to wade through dozens of Cryptography for insanely stupid people books before he finds Applied Cryptography?
Many people here seem upset that this student has the internet at his disposal for doing his research, while they had to do without in their day. Get over it. Effectively using the net -- including asking known reliable people on the net for pointers -- is an essential modern research technique.