"if I send them as a PDF I know it's going to work."
I keep getting PDF files that won't render in Acrobat Reader ("the viewer is unable to decript this document") but will render fine in old versions of "gsview". Adobe may be shooting themselves in the foot with badly implemented DRM.
What this means to the general user is "buy a new computer and you lose all your stuff". That's going to hurt Dell and HP (both of whom are already hurting big-time).
We've already had this happen with TV sets. The HDMI/HDCP debacle is interfering with big-screen HTDV sales. Anyone who bought a HDTV screen and discovered it wouldn't work with a Blu-Ray player has been badly burned already. HDTV adoption has been much slower than expected, and botched DRM is partly to blame. The display DRM, the set-top box DRM, the broadcast DRM, and the PVR DRM all have to work together seamlessly, and they don't.
I do suspect that the Hitec servos may be running something like Dallas one-wire command systems to provide feedback and such.
No, it's dumber than that. Here's the interface spec. You send pulses of special lengths and you get back pulses. There's supposedly also an "RS232C daisy chain mode", but it's not documented.
This is getting very close to what's needed for good feedback, but it's not quite there yet.
The assembly is about typical for a Kyosho product. Try building one of their better 4WD R/C cars, with a working suspension, transmission and differentials to assemble. Very similar experience.
The actuators for this robot are apparently still output-only R/C PWM-type servos. The competitive product Robonova, though, has position and current feedback from the servos to the control computer, which moves it out of the dumb preprogrammed category into something that has potential for real autonomy.
The sensor suite on these things is still below par. These things really need a 6DOF inertial navigation system for balance, which means three rate gyros (about $22 each) and three accelerometers (about $6 total). They need force sensing in the feet and hands. With that, a camera, and a WiFi link to an external computer, you have almost ASIMO-level hardware functionality. I'll bet we see all that in a year. It's the obvious next step.
Then the problem is to develop software for robust legged locomotion. There's been work on that, but most of it is with expensive one-off machines. Once that moves to commercial robot hardware in the $1K range, progress will be rapid.
While i do conceed that the overall manufacturing levels in the US are declining, the amount of manufacturing done by automation is rapidly expanding.
Right. What manufacturing is left in the US is heavily automated. Visit a US plant that makes some high volume consumer product, and you'll see barely any people. If it's labor-intensive, it's been offshored by now.
US
robot sales are falling right now. For the first half of 2006, "total sales for North American robot suppliers totaled 7,141 robots valued at $501.4 million. The totals represent a decline of 37% in units and 26% in revenue." (over 2005). This reflects the decline in the automotive sector. The long term trend is up, but not steeply.
$1 billion a year isn't a big industry. By comparison, ringtone sales are around $600 million per year and climbing rapidly.
There are academic programs, but the US robotics industry is tiny. I have a slide I use in talks; it compares total spending on robots, mobile robots, and ringtones. Ringtones are far bigger.
Robot R&D in Japan is serious, but in the US, it's the same old academic groups grinding away. The number of US commercial companies shipping products in the mobile robot space is very small, as is number of units shipped. Above the Roomba/toy level, there just aren't any volume applications. This seriously limits job and business prospects. There's a market in teleoperators for bomb disposal applications, and the machinery developed for that is quite nice, but it's not autonomous.
Even industrial robotics and factory automation is declining in the US. With manufacturing moving offshore to low-wage countries, the end of union labor, and a huge supply of illegal immigrants, plants are less automated than they were twenty years ago. The original Macintosh had less assembly labor in it than today's PCs. I can't recommend a US career in manufacturing engineering today.
Robot hardware is better than ever. The Lego Mindstorms stuff is primitive, but around $1000, things get quite good. Check out RoboNova. Further upscale, see Mobile Robots, Inc.
The theory is getting better. Vision is starting to work. Planning actually works in the real world now. Adaptive control and learning finally work. There's enough CPU power to do hard stuff in real time on cheap hardware.
Much is technically possible. But the market isn't there.
I ran one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams. That didn't really lead anywhere. The two best young people we had are doing very well, but not in robotics. One is running a hedge fund and one is working for an offshore derivatives fund. Of the older people, one is running a big web server farm, and one has retired. If you understand all the practical stuff and all the theoretical stuff to operate at that level, you can do very well at other things. But the payoff isn't in robotics.
This field needs a killer app.
YouTube may have Napster-like legal problems
on
What Is Real On YouTube?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Most of the content on YouTube is either pirated, marketing material, or total crap.
Which is a real problem. YouTube is starting to have the problems Napster did, with lawsuits from content owners cropping up every few days. Legitimate ones, too. Putting someone else's music on someone else's video and redistributing it is not original work. Not even close.
YouTube is starting to deal with this.
"Removed for terms of service violation" messages are showing up more frequently. But that cuts into their free content supply.
So what's going up now? Marketing material. All ads, all the time. Music videos this week, with the Warner deal.
Already, more than half the YouTube screen space is third-party ads anyway. And YouTube is signed up with everybody. Watch a YouTube page load stall while "yieldmanager.com", "atmdt.com", "doubleclick.com", "insightexpressai.com", "euroclick.com" and "tacoda.net" ("an end-to-end marketing application used for analyzing customer interactions and segmenting and monetizing audience members") all are read. For one page.
YouTube is not the next Google. YouTube is the next MP3.com.
Electrostatic precipitators work fine at pulling particles out of air, but they don't provide air movement. They need a fan to push the air through them.
Large versions of this technology are used at coal fired power plants to remove the particulates from the flue gases. (Doesn't help with sulfur; that takes another process.) The resulting powder is used to make cement.
The next step is an automated
Counter Fire System. Fire a gun, and within seconds, you're taking heavy fire.
The U.S. Army has had that for almost two decades with the Fire Finder radar system, but that's for heavy artillery. Now DARPA is downsizing the technology to the counter-sniper level.
Twenty-two years on, here's my obvous password detector. This is C source code I wrote in 1984. This simple piece of code will prevent the use of passwords that are English words, by requiring that the password have at least two sequences of three letters not found in the dictionary. The "dictionary" is compressed down to a big table of hex constants; it's a 27x27x27 array of bool, with a 1 for each triplet found in the UNIX dictionary. So the code is simple, self-contained, and does no I/O.
Put this in your password-change program and dictionary attacks stop working.
The code is a bit dated; this is original K&R C, not ANSI C.
I should do a Javascript version and give that out. The code is so small that it could easily be executed on user-side password pages.
The blogger who wrote "I'm a tenured professor at a large, accredited university" either isn't a professor or is an incompetent one. Quotes from the article:
some of which are actually bear research utility - "are actually"?
outright plagiarism, "group work" taken to extremes, falsification of data and everything in between. - a comma before the "and" would help.
Simple: Our students are now - "Our" should not have been capitalized.
The more concerning and potentially insidious academic threat - "More concerning"?
"interent generation"
- spelling and capitalization are wrong.
That's C- work. This was written by an undergrad, and a second-rate one.
(If this really was written by a tenured faculty member somewhere, that school has serious problems.)
Not interested until somebody figures out a way to unduplicate articles, and where the article is some blog regurgitating some other source, track back to the original source and give you that.
One of the simplest things to do is to raise your monitor up to eye height. Then get a chair with armrests, a decent keyboard, and arrange everything so that when your back is against the chair back, you can type comfortably with your arms supported.
John Smith
krasnaya ploschad
Moskva 00000
Russian Federation
714987650
lawyercatcher@lawyer.com
("krasnaya ploschad" is Red Square, the big plaza in front of the Kremlin.)
Ordinarily, faced with obnoxious registrar behavior, you can transfer the domain to another registrar.
Given this phony domain registration info, thus domain owner can't do that.
That's the price of phony domain registration info - any trouble, and you lose the domain.
One of the great features of the original MacOS was that it didn't have "installation". You put an application somewhere, the Finder found it, and you could launch it. If you wanted to delete it, you deleted it, and it disappeared. Maybe once in a while you had to rebuild the desktop to update the derived info that made this work.
But now, Apple has "installation", where install programs put stuff all over the place, and maybe change the state of the system. Just like Windows. Big step backwards.
First, this isn't about a battery with a 100x higher energy density. That would be a major breakthrough. It's about one with a high peak power, for surge applications. That's a specialty item.
It's also been done.
Flat batteries with high peak-power outputs were invented over 25 years ago at Polaroid, for the PolaPulse battery. One of those was in every Polaroid film pack for years. It could put out 15 amps for a brief period, providing plenty of power to run the camera mechanism. (Since, in that camera, the battery had to power the mechanism that squeezed the film between the development rollers, substantial power was required for about one second.) The battery chemistry wasn't rechargeable, although there's no reason a rechargeable chemistry couldn't have been put in that packaging.
PolaPulse batteries are still available, and turn up now and then when a flat battery with a high peak current is needed.
One amusing use of PolaPulse batteries is StartMeUp, which is a pocket-sized unit with six PolaPulse batteries used to restart a car.
Several other manufacturers claim to make flat batteries, some of which are rechargeable. However, none of the manufacturers mentioned in that article actually seem to be shipping product.
Wikipedia itself has several language versions. They're not translations; they're separate systems, run by different people. The German version already runs under somewhat stricter rules than the English version. Often, articles are translated from one language fork to another, but that's for new article creation. An update to one won't be translated and propagated to the others. So they're forks.
Then there's Wikinfo, a true Wikipedia fork branched off in 2003. It's not very popular.
And, of course, there are all the copies of Wikipedia that add advertising, like answers.com. But they aren't really forks.
They list Webvan, which was actually a good idea. The problem was that they had 3% market share in 30 cities, and needed 30% market share in 3 cities to make the delivery costs work.
Safeway actually does that today, but in fewer markets.
Most PDFs can be viewed with gsview, the old Postscript previewer. It doesn't have all that crap Adobe put in like WebBuy, but nobody uses that anyway. Gsview will display PDFs that older versions of Adobe Reader won't.
Just for fun, here's the video from our 1995 simulation work mentioned above. This shows a passive ankle, though; it's just used to sense the ground angle for slip control. That's the first requirement for dealing with rough terrain. Those "crutch tip" feet that many legged robots use don't give you any info about the ground angle.
Slashdot Mirror
"if I send them as a PDF I know it's going to work."
I keep getting PDF files that won't render in Acrobat Reader ("the viewer is unable to decript this document") but will render fine in old versions of "gsview". Adobe may be shooting themselves in the foot with badly implemented DRM.
What this means to the general user is "buy a new computer and you lose all your stuff". That's going to hurt Dell and HP (both of whom are already hurting big-time).
We've already had this happen with TV sets. The HDMI/HDCP debacle is interfering with big-screen HTDV sales. Anyone who bought a HDTV screen and discovered it wouldn't work with a Blu-Ray player has been badly burned already. HDTV adoption has been much slower than expected, and botched DRM is partly to blame. The display DRM, the set-top box DRM, the broadcast DRM, and the PVR DRM all have to work together seamlessly, and they don't.
I do suspect that the Hitec servos may be running something like Dallas one-wire command systems to provide feedback and such.
No, it's dumber than that. Here's the interface spec. You send pulses of special lengths and you get back pulses. There's supposedly also an "RS232C daisy chain mode", but it's not documented.
This is getting very close to what's needed for good feedback, but it's not quite there yet.
The assembly is about typical for a Kyosho product. Try building one of their better 4WD R/C cars, with a working suspension, transmission and differentials to assemble. Very similar experience.
The actuators for this robot are apparently still output-only R/C PWM-type servos. The competitive product Robonova, though, has position and current feedback from the servos to the control computer, which moves it out of the dumb preprogrammed category into something that has potential for real autonomy.
The sensor suite on these things is still below par. These things really need a 6DOF inertial navigation system for balance, which means three rate gyros (about $22 each) and three accelerometers (about $6 total). They need force sensing in the feet and hands. With that, a camera, and a WiFi link to an external computer, you have almost ASIMO-level hardware functionality. I'll bet we see all that in a year. It's the obvious next step.
Then the problem is to develop software for robust legged locomotion. There's been work on that, but most of it is with expensive one-off machines. Once that moves to commercial robot hardware in the $1K range, progress will be rapid.
Signed code? Signed by whom?
A new attack vector!
OpenOffice should not have plug-ins. Why copy Microsoft's mistakes.
That's a sounding rocket. In terms of performance, it seems comparable to the WAC Corporal of 1944, or maybe the Aerobee of 1947.
Nothing wrong with building one cheaply, but it's not a step forward.
While i do conceed that the overall manufacturing levels in the US are declining, the amount of manufacturing done by automation is rapidly expanding.
Right. What manufacturing is left in the US is heavily automated. Visit a US plant that makes some high volume consumer product, and you'll see barely any people. If it's labor-intensive, it's been offshored by now.
US robot sales are falling right now. For the first half of 2006, "total sales for North American robot suppliers totaled 7,141 robots valued at $501.4 million. The totals represent a decline of 37% in units and 26% in revenue." (over 2005). This reflects the decline in the automotive sector. The long term trend is up, but not steeply.
$1 billion a year isn't a big industry. By comparison, ringtone sales are around $600 million per year and climbing rapidly.
There are academic programs, but the US robotics industry is tiny. I have a slide I use in talks; it compares total spending on robots, mobile robots, and ringtones. Ringtones are far bigger.
Robot R&D in Japan is serious, but in the US, it's the same old academic groups grinding away. The number of US commercial companies shipping products in the mobile robot space is very small, as is number of units shipped. Above the Roomba/toy level, there just aren't any volume applications. This seriously limits job and business prospects. There's a market in teleoperators for bomb disposal applications, and the machinery developed for that is quite nice, but it's not autonomous.
Even industrial robotics and factory automation is declining in the US. With manufacturing moving offshore to low-wage countries, the end of union labor, and a huge supply of illegal immigrants, plants are less automated than they were twenty years ago. The original Macintosh had less assembly labor in it than today's PCs. I can't recommend a US career in manufacturing engineering today.
Robot hardware is better than ever. The Lego Mindstorms stuff is primitive, but around $1000, things get quite good. Check out RoboNova. Further upscale, see Mobile Robots, Inc.
The theory is getting better. Vision is starting to work. Planning actually works in the real world now. Adaptive control and learning finally work. There's enough CPU power to do hard stuff in real time on cheap hardware. Much is technically possible. But the market isn't there.
I ran one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams. That didn't really lead anywhere. The two best young people we had are doing very well, but not in robotics. One is running a hedge fund and one is working for an offshore derivatives fund. Of the older people, one is running a big web server farm, and one has retired. If you understand all the practical stuff and all the theoretical stuff to operate at that level, you can do very well at other things. But the payoff isn't in robotics.
This field needs a killer app.
Most of the content on YouTube is either pirated, marketing material, or total crap.
Which is a real problem. YouTube is starting to have the problems Napster did, with lawsuits from content owners cropping up every few days. Legitimate ones, too. Putting someone else's music on someone else's video and redistributing it is not original work. Not even close.
YouTube is starting to deal with this. "Removed for terms of service violation" messages are showing up more frequently. But that cuts into their free content supply.
So what's going up now? Marketing material. All ads, all the time. Music videos this week, with the Warner deal.
Already, more than half the YouTube screen space is third-party ads anyway. And YouTube is signed up with everybody. Watch a YouTube page load stall while "yieldmanager.com", "atmdt.com", "doubleclick.com", "insightexpressai.com", "euroclick.com" and "tacoda.net" ("an end-to-end marketing application used for analyzing customer interactions and segmenting and monetizing audience members") all are read. For one page.
YouTube is not the next Google. YouTube is the next MP3.com.
Electrostatic precipitators work fine at pulling particles out of air, but they don't provide air movement. They need a fan to push the air through them.
Large versions of this technology are used at coal fired power plants to remove the particulates from the flue gases. (Doesn't help with sulfur; that takes another process.) The resulting powder is used to make cement.
The next step is an automated Counter Fire System. Fire a gun, and within seconds, you're taking heavy fire.
The U.S. Army has had that for almost two decades with the Fire Finder radar system, but that's for heavy artillery. Now DARPA is downsizing the technology to the counter-sniper level.
Twenty-two years on, here's my obvous password detector. This is C source code I wrote in 1984. This simple piece of code will prevent the use of passwords that are English words, by requiring that the password have at least two sequences of three letters not found in the dictionary. The "dictionary" is compressed down to a big table of hex constants; it's a 27x27x27 array of bool, with a 1 for each triplet found in the UNIX dictionary. So the code is simple, self-contained, and does no I/O.
Put this in your password-change program and dictionary attacks stop working.
The code is a bit dated; this is original K&R C, not ANSI C.
I should do a Javascript version and give that out. The code is so small that it could easily be executed on user-side password pages.
That's C- work. This was written by an undergrad, and a second-rate one.
(If this really was written by a tenured faculty member somewhere, that school has serious problems.)
Not interested until somebody figures out a way to unduplicate articles, and where the article is some blog regurgitating some other source, track back to the original source and give you that.
One of the simplest things to do is to raise your monitor up to eye height. Then get a chair with armrests, a decent keyboard, and arrange everything so that when your back is against the chair back, you can type comfortably with your arms supported.
The owner of that domain is listed as
John Smith
krasnaya ploschad
Moskva 00000
Russian Federation
714987650
lawyercatcher@lawyer.com
("krasnaya ploschad" is Red Square, the big plaza in front of the Kremlin.)
Ordinarily, faced with obnoxious registrar behavior, you can transfer the domain to another registrar. Given this phony domain registration info, thus domain owner can't do that.
That's the price of phony domain registration info - any trouble, and you lose the domain.
One of the great features of the original MacOS was that it didn't have "installation". You put an application somewhere, the Finder found it, and you could launch it. If you wanted to delete it, you deleted it, and it disappeared. Maybe once in a while you had to rebuild the desktop to update the derived info that made this work.
But now, Apple has "installation", where install programs put stuff all over the place, and maybe change the state of the system. Just like Windows. Big step backwards.
The PolaPulse can do that, too. You can draw 15 amps for a few seconds, or a few microamps for years to keep a clock alive.
Ah, Roland the Plogger again.
First, this isn't about a battery with a 100x higher energy density. That would be a major breakthrough. It's about one with a high peak power, for surge applications. That's a specialty item.
It's also been done. Flat batteries with high peak-power outputs were invented over 25 years ago at Polaroid, for the PolaPulse battery. One of those was in every Polaroid film pack for years. It could put out 15 amps for a brief period, providing plenty of power to run the camera mechanism. (Since, in that camera, the battery had to power the mechanism that squeezed the film between the development rollers, substantial power was required for about one second.) The battery chemistry wasn't rechargeable, although there's no reason a rechargeable chemistry couldn't have been put in that packaging.
PolaPulse batteries are still available, and turn up now and then when a flat battery with a high peak current is needed. One amusing use of PolaPulse batteries is StartMeUp, which is a pocket-sized unit with six PolaPulse batteries used to restart a car.
Several other manufacturers claim to make flat batteries, some of which are rechargeable. However, none of the manufacturers mentioned in that article actually seem to be shipping product.
Wikipedia itself has several language versions. They're not translations; they're separate systems, run by different people. The German version already runs under somewhat stricter rules than the English version. Often, articles are translated from one language fork to another, but that's for new article creation. An update to one won't be translated and propagated to the others. So they're forks.
Then there's Wikinfo, a true Wikipedia fork branched off in 2003. It's not very popular.
And, of course, there are all the copies of Wikipedia that add advertising, like answers.com. But they aren't really forks.
They list Webvan, which was actually a good idea. The problem was that they had 3% market share in 30 cities, and needed 30% market share in 3 cities to make the delivery costs work.
Safeway actually does that today, but in fewer markets.
Most PDFs can be viewed with gsview, the old Postscript previewer. It doesn't have all that crap Adobe put in like WebBuy, but nobody uses that anyway. Gsview will display PDFs that older versions of Adobe Reader won't.
Me either. Just an endless loop of ads. No wonder nobody reads Salon any more.
Just for fun, here's the video from our 1995 simulation work mentioned above. This shows a passive ankle, though; it's just used to sense the ground angle for slip control. That's the first requirement for dealing with rough terrain. Those "crutch tip" feet that many legged robots use don't give you any info about the ground angle.