NASA is in the awful position of trying to pretend that Bush's lunar program is real. Congress isn't going to appropriate the money. Smart people aren't going to come to work on the program. The date is always a decade or two off. It's vaporware. So they futz around with stuff like this, lacking the money or capability to develop a new launch vehicle.
NASA barely has a manned launch capability. The Shuttles will be retired in three years, and the "Crew Exploration Vehicle" program is vaporware. The General Accounting Office was very critical of the program in 2006: NASA has attempted several expensive endeavors such as
the National Aero-Space Plane, the X-33 and X-34, and the Space Launch Initiative,
among others. While these endeavors have helped to advance scientific and technical
knowledge, none have completed their objective of fielding a new reusable space
vehicle. We estimate that these unsuccessful development efforts have cost
approximately $4.8 billion since the 1980s." The original schedule called for contract award for the CEV in 2006 after the preliminary design review, but although a contract has been awarded, the PDR has been pushed back to 2008.
Originally, the CRV was supposed to fly in 2014. Unlikely at this point.
It's sad to note that the Big Gemini spacecraft, proposed in 1967 and mocked up by McDonnell Douglas, was intended to take 9 people to a space station in low orbit. If that had been built, reusing the Gemini technology (which was quite good), the US would have had a low-end crew vehicle. So NASA is now trying to replicate 1967 technology. But with the second team; who goes to work for NASA today?
Realistically, the US manned space effort ends in 2010.
In the 1980s I believed that "strong AI" was forthcoming...
In the 1980s, I was going through Stanford CS, where some of the AI faculty were indeed saying that. Read Feigenbaum's "The Fifth Generation", to see how bad it got. It was embarrassing, because very little actually worked.. Expert systems really were awfully dumb. They're just another way to program, as is generally recognized today. But back then, there were people claiming that if you could only write enough rules, intelligence would somehow emerge. I knew it was bogus at the time, and so did some other people, but, unlike most grad students, I was working for an big outside company, not a professor, and could say so. At one point I noted that it was possible to graduate in CS, in AI, at the MSCS level, without ever actually seeing an expert system work. This embarrassed some faculty members.
There was a massive amount of self-delusion in Stanford CS back then. When the whole AI boom collapsed, CS at Stanford was moved from the
School of Arts and Sciences to Engineering, to give the place some adult supervision.
Eventually, the Stanford AI Lab was dissolved. It's been brought back in the last few years, but with new people.
We're making real progress today, finally. Mainly because of a shift to statistical methods with sound mathematical underpinnings, plus enough compute power to make them go. Trying to hammer the real world into predicate calculus was a dead end. But number crunching is working. Computer vision actually sort of works now. Robots are starting to work. Automatic driving works. Language translation works marginally. Voice recognition works marginally. There are real products now.
But the AI field really was stuck for over a decade. The phrase "AI Winter" has been used.
So, the HP laptops that come with FreeDOS don't count?
No, they don't, obviously.
HP has toyed with Linux on laptops a few times. Back in 2003, they even supported Red Flag Linux for a while. But no longer.
Besides, an HP laptop with FreeDOS costs more than a standard system with Windows XP. The HP Compaq nx6325 as a standard package costs $679, but if you go through the configurator and select FreeDOS, you can't get below $1000.
Ars has an article exploring why it's hard to program such GPUs for anything other than graphics applications.
No, Ars has an article blithering that it's hard to program such GPUs for anything other than graphics applications. It doesn't say anything constructive about why.
Here's an reasonably readable tutorial on doing number-crunching in a GPU. The basic concepts are that "Arrays = textures", "Kernels = shaders", and "Computing = drawing". Yes, you do number-crunching by building "textures" and running shaders on them. If your problem can be expressed as parallel multiply-accumulate operations, which covers much classic supercomputer work, there's a good chance it can be done fast on a GPU. There's a broad class of problems that work well on a GPU, but they're generally limited to problems where the outputs from a step have little or no dependency on each other, allowing full parallelism of the computations of a single step. If your problem doesn't map well to that model, don't expect much.
Yes. A big problem with Wikipedia is that not only are the users anonymous, the administrators and arbitrators are anonymous. Only members of the Board of Directors actually have to give their real name. This is a problem. There's no sense of responsibility associated with authority.
As for "Jayjg", he has made over 28,000 edits to Wikipedia, almost all related to Israel. Most of them are deletions; he doesn't actually write much new content. He seems to be a full-time lobbyist for some pro-Israel organization. But all Wikipedia shows is a pseudonym.
NaturalMotion isn't quite as dynamic as it may appear. It's not doing a full physical simulation most of the time. There's still considerable use of motion capture data and kinematics. Blended approaches like that are the norm in animation; full control of a humanoid character with real physics is still not that great. There's continual progress, though. Today, we have the MIPS and many of the algorithms. When I was first working on this, we had 20 MIPS, and things were rather slow. We could get the theory to work, but the hardware wasn't there yet.
Much of this was done a decade ago, by Motion Factory, which was a Stanford spinoff. That was purely kinematic, but produced reasonably good movement. Eventually, Softimage/Avid bought that company, but didn't do much with it. Boston Dynamics has also done work in that area.
Told you so. Microsoft won't let Dell do it. Microsoft controls the terms of Dell's OEM discount on Windows. Microsoft imposes many requirements for that discount. Why do you think you see "Dell Recommends Windows Vista" all over the site?
Kuffner (above) is right, of course. Dynamically stabilized walking has been around for years. It's not easy to do, but it's been done. Raibert first did it in the 1980s. See
his book, "Legged Robots that Balance".
Most of the self-balancing walkers, as Kuffner points out, use a ZMP-based approach. This works for walking, although it's not quite enough for effective running.
Many of the dynamically balanced robots can rebalance after a shove. BDI's Big Dog can. So can some Japanese hobbyist robots.
If you're not up to date on how far along Japanese hobbyist robotics has progressed, see these videos of this month's humanoid robot soccer match. These robots are mostly manually controlled, but have computers managing some functions. Many have rate gyros to assist with balance. Gradually, the computers and sensors are taking over more of the control. The hobby robotics manufacturers in Japan now have about 70% of the functionality of Asimo at 2% of the price. There are hobbyist robots with WiFi links and cameras on board. A few more improvements and you'll be able to do all the
Asimo stuff with a $1500 robot. But it will only be about 60cm high.
In San Francisco, we have Kink.com. They've been around for years, quietly, and very profitably, running a number of kinky websites.
Recently, they decided to expand. So they bought the San Francisco Armory, an huge, old National Guard armory that's been vacant for thirty years. It covers half a city block. Paid $14 million in cash for it.
Big flap. National press coverage. Minor local protests. But Kink.com has all the planning permissions it needs; it's a done deal.
The CEO of Kink.com, Peter Acworth, isn't embarrassed about the business. He's met with local politicians, neighborhood groups, and the planning department. He has these meetings videotaped, and puts stills and video on Kink.com. (This is not a work-safe page; scroll down past the kinky stuff to the pictures of City Hall.)
The mayor of San Francisco has been a bit upset about the "Kink.com" thing. But the mayor has worse problems than Peter does - he's in rehab right now after an affair.
The original US patent (5,440,676) that opened the door to patenting software...
That's bogus information. Software patents go back much further than that. The first software patent was filed in 1965, issued in 1968, and expired in 1981. It's Martin Goetz's U.S. "Sorting System", Patent #3,380,029, the sorting algorithm that broke the O(N log N) barrier. That's the technology behind SyncSort, and it powered mainframe sorting for a generation.
As the IEEE points out, relative engineering salaries have been declining since the 1970s.
What Gates is whining about is that there aren't enough people willing to learn the ins and outs of Microsoft's software and work around its problems in the field. What he wants are cheap janitors to clean up the Mess from Redmond.
Try configuring a Dell D520 with Windows and a Dell 520 without Windows. Select the same hardware options on both. (Note that the default for the non-Windows machine is a 40GB hard drive and a CD drive only, but the default for the Windows machine is a 60GB hard drive and a DVD drive. Adjust options to match.)
With Microsoft: $699.
Without Microsoft: $747.
And Dell won't even install Linux. They give you FreeDOS.
U.S. Patent #4,809,158 has a description of a more modern version of the SyncSort algorithm, with discussions of efficiency issues and comparison graphs.
This isn't the big deal it used to be, but back in the batch era, these algorithms knocked days off some big sort jobs.
Just watch. They'll put Linux on one overpriced laptop, won't make it cheaper than the version with Windows and Office, and will hide the order page for it. Then they'll claim the market doesn't want Linux.
Because if they do more than that, Microsoft will cut their discount.
Dell used to have a Linux laptop. They discontinued it.
Wal-Mart used to have a Linux laptop. They discontinued it.
HP used to have a Linux laptop. They discontinued it.
While radix sorts are limited, binned sorts, which are a superset of radix sorts, are more powerful.
Binned sorts do work on a broad set of data types, but you have to use statistical techniques to dynamically pick a good distribution among the bins. SyncSort developed this technique in the 1960s, and
had the first software patent, now long-expired. Mainframe batch systems have used such techniques for decades.
The general idea is that if you're sorting, say, text strings, you watch them go by for a while, accumulating statistics, then compute a set of bin division points which will divide them into bins of roughly equal size. The bins have to be watched, and if some get too big or too small, the bin division points have to be adjusted. It's a tree-rebalancing problem.
If your sort is too big for RAM, and you have to go out to disk (or, in early systems, tape) this is a huge win. It lets you beat O(N log N), both in theory and in practice. SyncSort times grow at worse than O(N), but better than O(N log N).
It's really gotten out of hand. I just bought a new 2007 Jeep Wrangler. This is a major redesign of the old Wrangler line, and, for the first time, includes not only ordinary ABS, but active stability control in both yaw and roll, with rate gyros and computers.
Yesterday, I received a recall notice:
DamlierChrysler Safety Recall F50 - Reprogram ABS Control Module
"The software
programmed into the ABS control module on your vehicle may cause
the rear brakes to lock up during certain braking conditions.
This could result in a loss of vehicle control and cause a crash
without warning".
So it has to go in for a firmware upgrade. Over 60,000 vehicles are affected.
When you read the guy's actual review, most of the things he's complaining about are gameplay design decisions, not code defects. He's not complaining about rendering problems or bad collision detection. He's complaining about the plot and dialog being lame, and the terrain and characters being boring.
That's not a "released too early" issue. That's a bad screenplay issue.
Sooner or later, OLPC will actually ship, and some commercial vendor will license the hardware design and sell it commercially without any nonsense. Probably before the big deals involving governments actually get very far.
As a technical concept, this is reasonable, since NASA historically has used their own proprietary protocols, even between ground stations and on equipment buses. Spacewire is an example. In the early days of the space effort, this was necessary, but today, NASA
tends to have people on staff re-inventing the wheel.
Slashdot Mirror
Make Gonzales look stupid. What terrorist who's a real threat is going to upload pictures to a web server. Hello? Write to your congressman.
NASA is in the awful position of trying to pretend that Bush's lunar program is real. Congress isn't going to appropriate the money. Smart people aren't going to come to work on the program. The date is always a decade or two off. It's vaporware. So they futz around with stuff like this, lacking the money or capability to develop a new launch vehicle.
NASA barely has a manned launch capability. The Shuttles will be retired in three years, and the "Crew Exploration Vehicle" program is vaporware. The General Accounting Office was very critical of the program in 2006: NASA has attempted several expensive endeavors such as the National Aero-Space Plane, the X-33 and X-34, and the Space Launch Initiative, among others. While these endeavors have helped to advance scientific and technical knowledge, none have completed their objective of fielding a new reusable space vehicle. We estimate that these unsuccessful development efforts have cost approximately $4.8 billion since the 1980s." The original schedule called for contract award for the CEV in 2006 after the preliminary design review, but although a contract has been awarded, the PDR has been pushed back to 2008.
Originally, the CRV was supposed to fly in 2014. Unlikely at this point.
It's sad to note that the Big Gemini spacecraft, proposed in 1967 and mocked up by McDonnell Douglas, was intended to take 9 people to a space station in low orbit. If that had been built, reusing the Gemini technology (which was quite good), the US would have had a low-end crew vehicle. So NASA is now trying to replicate 1967 technology. But with the second team; who goes to work for NASA today?
Realistically, the US manned space effort ends in 2010.
In the 1980s I believed that "strong AI" was forthcoming...
In the 1980s, I was going through Stanford CS, where some of the AI faculty were indeed saying that. Read Feigenbaum's "The Fifth Generation", to see how bad it got. It was embarrassing, because very little actually worked.. Expert systems really were awfully dumb. They're just another way to program, as is generally recognized today. But back then, there were people claiming that if you could only write enough rules, intelligence would somehow emerge. I knew it was bogus at the time, and so did some other people, but, unlike most grad students, I was working for an big outside company, not a professor, and could say so. At one point I noted that it was possible to graduate in CS, in AI, at the MSCS level, without ever actually seeing an expert system work. This embarrassed some faculty members.
There was a massive amount of self-delusion in Stanford CS back then. When the whole AI boom collapsed, CS at Stanford was moved from the School of Arts and Sciences to Engineering, to give the place some adult supervision. Eventually, the Stanford AI Lab was dissolved. It's been brought back in the last few years, but with new people.
We're making real progress today, finally. Mainly because of a shift to statistical methods with sound mathematical underpinnings, plus enough compute power to make them go. Trying to hammer the real world into predicate calculus was a dead end. But number crunching is working. Computer vision actually sort of works now. Robots are starting to work. Automatic driving works. Language translation works marginally. Voice recognition works marginally. There are real products now.
But the AI field really was stuck for over a decade. The phrase "AI Winter" has been used.
So, the HP laptops that come with FreeDOS don't count?
No, they don't, obviously.
HP has toyed with Linux on laptops a few times. Back in 2003, they even supported Red Flag Linux for a while. But no longer.
Besides, an HP laptop with FreeDOS costs more than a standard system with Windows XP. The HP Compaq nx6325 as a standard package costs $679, but if you go through the configurator and select FreeDOS, you can't get below $1000.
"What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity." -- Paul Fussell
The reason this matters is that there are no Linux laptops available from any vendor bigger than a garage shop.
Yes, there's Linux Certified, in the same building with Mr. Chau's Chinese Fast Food in San Jose. And there's System76, whose address is a Pak Mail in Denver.
If you're selling hardware that may have to be maintained or replaced, you need to be bigger than that to play.
Of course, once upon a time there was VA Linux, but we know what happened to them.
Ars has an article exploring why it's hard to program such GPUs for anything other than graphics applications.
No, Ars has an article blithering that it's hard to program such GPUs for anything other than graphics applications. It doesn't say anything constructive about why.
Here's an reasonably readable tutorial on doing number-crunching in a GPU. The basic concepts are that "Arrays = textures", "Kernels = shaders", and "Computing = drawing". Yes, you do number-crunching by building "textures" and running shaders on them. If your problem can be expressed as parallel multiply-accumulate operations, which covers much classic supercomputer work, there's a good chance it can be done fast on a GPU. There's a broad class of problems that work well on a GPU, but they're generally limited to problems where the outputs from a step have little or no dependency on each other, allowing full parallelism of the computations of a single step. If your problem doesn't map well to that model, don't expect much.
Yes. A big problem with Wikipedia is that not only are the users anonymous, the administrators and arbitrators are anonymous. Only members of the Board of Directors actually have to give their real name. This is a problem. There's no sense of responsibility associated with authority.
As for "Jayjg", he has made over 28,000 edits to Wikipedia, almost all related to Israel. Most of them are deletions; he doesn't actually write much new content. He seems to be a full-time lobbyist for some pro-Israel organization. But all Wikipedia shows is a pseudonym.
NaturalMotion isn't quite as dynamic as it may appear. It's not doing a full physical simulation most of the time. There's still considerable use of motion capture data and kinematics. Blended approaches like that are the norm in animation; full control of a humanoid character with real physics is still not that great. There's continual progress, though. Today, we have the MIPS and many of the algorithms. When I was first working on this, we had 20 MIPS, and things were rather slow. We could get the theory to work, but the hardware wasn't there yet.
Much of this was done a decade ago, by Motion Factory, which was a Stanford spinoff. That was purely kinematic, but produced reasonably good movement. Eventually, Softimage/Avid bought that company, but didn't do much with it. Boston Dynamics has also done work in that area.
Get an electrician's license instead. You're still stringing wires, but the pay is better and it's often unionized.
Told you so. Microsoft won't let Dell do it. Microsoft controls the terms of Dell's OEM discount on Windows. Microsoft imposes many requirements for that discount. Why do you think you see "Dell Recommends Windows Vista" all over the site?
Kuffner (above) is right, of course. Dynamically stabilized walking has been around for years. It's not easy to do, but it's been done. Raibert first did it in the 1980s. See his book, "Legged Robots that Balance".
Most of the self-balancing walkers, as Kuffner points out, use a ZMP-based approach. This works for walking, although it's not quite enough for effective running.
Many of the dynamically balanced robots can rebalance after a shove. BDI's Big Dog can. So can some Japanese hobbyist robots.
If you're not up to date on how far along Japanese hobbyist robotics has progressed, see these videos of this month's humanoid robot soccer match. These robots are mostly manually controlled, but have computers managing some functions. Many have rate gyros to assist with balance. Gradually, the computers and sensors are taking over more of the control. The hobby robotics manufacturers in Japan now have about 70% of the functionality of Asimo at 2% of the price. There are hobbyist robots with WiFi links and cameras on board. A few more improvements and you'll be able to do all the Asimo stuff with a $1500 robot. But it will only be about 60cm high.
In San Francisco, we have Kink.com. They've been around for years, quietly, and very profitably, running a number of kinky websites. Recently, they decided to expand. So they bought the San Francisco Armory, an huge, old National Guard armory that's been vacant for thirty years. It covers half a city block. Paid $14 million in cash for it.
Big flap. National press coverage. Minor local protests. But Kink.com has all the planning permissions it needs; it's a done deal.
The CEO of Kink.com, Peter Acworth, isn't embarrassed about the business. He's met with local politicians, neighborhood groups, and the planning department. He has these meetings videotaped, and puts stills and video on Kink.com. (This is not a work-safe page; scroll down past the kinky stuff to the pictures of City Hall.)
The mayor of San Francisco has been a bit upset about the "Kink.com" thing. But the mayor has worse problems than Peter does - he's in rehab right now after an affair.
So now there's going to be an "informational hearing" at City Hall on March 8th. Both sides are working to get a turnout from their crowd.
Now that's a real "porn portal".
The original US patent (5,440,676) that opened the door to patenting software...
That's bogus information. Software patents go back much further than that. The first software patent was filed in 1965, issued in 1968, and expired in 1981. It's Martin Goetz's U.S. "Sorting System", Patent #3,380,029, the sorting algorithm that broke the O(N log N) barrier. That's the technology behind SyncSort, and it powered mainframe sorting for a generation.
Read this Congressional testimony, by Dr. Norman Matloff at UC Davis. It explains the whole "programmer shortage" scam.
There's no shortage. Salaries are too low.
As the IEEE points out, relative engineering salaries have been declining since the 1970s.
What Gates is whining about is that there aren't enough people willing to learn the ins and outs of Microsoft's software and work around its problems in the field. What he wants are cheap janitors to clean up the Mess from Redmond.
Try configuring a Dell D520 with Windows and a Dell 520 without Windows. Select the same hardware options on both. (Note that the default for the non-Windows machine is a 40GB hard drive and a CD drive only, but the default for the Windows machine is a 60GB hard drive and a DVD drive. Adjust options to match.)
With Microsoft: $699. Without Microsoft: $747.
And Dell won't even install Linux. They give you FreeDOS.
U.S. Patent #4,809,158 has a description of a more modern version of the SyncSort algorithm, with discussions of efficiency issues and comparison graphs.
This isn't the big deal it used to be, but back in the batch era, these algorithms knocked days off some big sort jobs.
Just watch. They'll put Linux on one overpriced laptop, won't make it cheaper than the version with Windows and Office, and will hide the order page for it. Then they'll claim the market doesn't want Linux.
Because if they do more than that, Microsoft will cut their discount.
Dell used to have a Linux laptop. They discontinued it.
Wal-Mart used to have a Linux laptop. They discontinued it.
HP used to have a Linux laptop. They discontinued it.
While radix sorts are limited, binned sorts, which are a superset of radix sorts, are more powerful. Binned sorts do work on a broad set of data types, but you have to use statistical techniques to dynamically pick a good distribution among the bins. SyncSort developed this technique in the 1960s, and had the first software patent, now long-expired. Mainframe batch systems have used such techniques for decades.
The general idea is that if you're sorting, say, text strings, you watch them go by for a while, accumulating statistics, then compute a set of bin division points which will divide them into bins of roughly equal size. The bins have to be watched, and if some get too big or too small, the bin division points have to be adjusted. It's a tree-rebalancing problem.
If your sort is too big for RAM, and you have to go out to disk (or, in early systems, tape) this is a huge win. It lets you beat O(N log N), both in theory and in practice. SyncSort times grow at worse than O(N), but better than O(N log N).
Few people bother for in-memory sorts, though.
"Show us the code" is the wrong question here. "Show us the patent numbers" is the right question. The guy behind this has no clue.
It's really gotten out of hand. I just bought a new 2007 Jeep Wrangler. This is a major redesign of the old Wrangler line, and, for the first time, includes not only ordinary ABS, but active stability control in both yaw and roll, with rate gyros and computers.
Yesterday, I received a recall notice:
DamlierChrysler Safety Recall F50 - Reprogram ABS Control Module
"The software programmed into the ABS control module on your vehicle may cause the rear brakes to lock up during certain braking conditions. This could result in a loss of vehicle control and cause a crash without warning".
So it has to go in for a firmware upgrade. Over 60,000 vehicles are affected.
When you read the guy's actual review, most of the things he's complaining about are gameplay design decisions, not code defects. He's not complaining about rendering problems or bad collision detection. He's complaining about the plot and dialog being lame, and the terrain and characters being boring.
That's not a "released too early" issue. That's a bad screenplay issue.
Sooner or later, OLPC will actually ship, and some commercial vendor will license the hardware design and sell it commercially without any nonsense. Probably before the big deals involving governments actually get very far.
As a technical concept, this is reasonable, since NASA historically has used their own proprietary protocols, even between ground stations and on equipment buses. Spacewire is an example. In the early days of the space effort, this was necessary, but today, NASA tends to have people on staff re-inventing the wheel.
But it's not a big deal.