This will be more useful for surveillance cameras than for entertainment. High-res surveillance cameras are very useful, because you can zoom in to read license plates and recognize faces.
Already, improved resolution in surveillance cameras is paying off. Everybody used to have VHS, which is really only 260 to 320 lines, and zooming in was useless. Now, 640 x 480 digital is common, 1024 x 768 isn't expensive, and you can get 1920 x 1200. (Here's a gallery of high-resolution surveillance pictures.). With such high resolution, a camera with a distant view of a store or shopping mall generates usable information.
Noticed how much better those pictures on "Wanted" posters and news stories are getting? That's what this is all about.
What you're looking at is a one-legged hopper. Locomotion researchers find it useful to work on one-legged hoppers because the system is simple enough to be analyzed analytically.
The new feature of this leg seems to be that it has three active joints with sufficient power behind them for jumping. Most legged robots, such as the BDI Big Dog, only have two active joints in the leg, although some have a weak or passive ankle. This is enough to position the leg to any point in the working envelope, and it's not obvious what a third joint buys you. ASIMO has an "ankle", but it's used only to align the foot with the ground, not for active running; ASIMO runs flat-footed, not on the ball of the foot. This Toyota machine seems to have both an ankle and a toe joint.
This is a big win, as I described back in 1995 in my "Why Legs have Three Joints" paper. With three joints involved in running and jumping, you gain control over the force vector for ground contact, which allows slip control. Also, the hip joint (which is usually the most powerful) can be used more effectively; the lower joints position the leg so that the hip muscles can do most of the work. For humans, this is subtle, because the ankle-toe distance is small. It's much clearer for horses, where the hind leg has three sections of roughly equal length.
Unfortunately, you bought one that isn't HDCP compliant. Expect trouble when you're using HDCP content. Switching will mess up the crypto handshake, and the DRM system will shut down the output. Rebooting the endpoints (the display and the source) will usually clear up the problem, or it may clear up by itself in a while. But it's a headache.
No, actually. The reason for the "voluntary recall" is that the Consumer Product Safety Commission gives manufacturers an option. They can either do a "voluntary recall", or the CPSC can do it the hard way, with injunctions, orders, fines, and bans on further sales of the product. That results in announcements like Dynacraft To Pay $1.4 Million Penalty for Failing to Report Hazard with Mountain Bicycles. "The forks, which are part of the steering column, can break apart and separate from the front wheel, causing the rider to lose control and suffer serious injuries."
Most manufacturers take the voluntary option. A few try defying the recall order. Doesn't work. "John Rasmus, of Hallstead, Pennsylvania, the owner of Pyrotek, was sentenced to 5 months in prison, 5 months home confinement and three years of supervised release."
Well, first of all, this is a state school, and the professor is a Government employee. So state conflict of interest laws apply.
First, North Carolina State University permits faculty to own copyright in instructional materials:
"NC State does not, however, claim ownership of faculty-created instructional materials or courseware merely because it requires faculty members to teach courses as part of their regular responsibilities."
However, the department has the option of taking title to such "Directed Works":
"Directed works also include works created by faculty or staff in an institute, center, department, or other unit that, with approval of the Provost, has adopted rules providing that copyright in materials prepared by such faculty or staff in the course of their work with that unit vests in NC State and not in its creator. NC State holds copyright to Directed Works."
However, see Conflicts of Interest and Committment Affecting Faculty and Non-Faculty EPA Employees.
"Activities requiring disclosure for administrative review...
An EPA employee requiring students to purchase the
textbook or related instructional materials of the employee or
members of his or her immediate family, which produces
compensation for the employee or family member."
Provided that the professor made the proper disclosures and those disclosures are in his personnel file, he's probably OK. The university has the option of taking over this business from the individual faculty.
Policies vary with the school. The University of Michigan permits commercial note-taking services but prohibits faculty from selling notes. (This resulted in a note-taking startup, Versity.com, which was acquired by CollegeClub.com, which dumped the note-taking business to focus on entertainment content.) Yale is at the other extreme; they let faculty control their content. That's what you'd expect; state schools have to be much more careful about conflict of interest issues.
In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System, no central office was ever out of service for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. That record has definitely not been maintained in the computer era.
Electric power system reliability in the United States is down, mostly as a result of deregulation.
Rate-of-return regulation tended to encourage utilities to overbuild their systems, which
was good for reliability. When there's a free market in electric power, no one bears responsibility for downtime.
I don't expect things to get better. Not after Cleveland had a five-day outage and nobody went to jail.
To submit your resume, you have to construct a URL manually. The Angelides campaign in California is in trouble for doing that on Governor Schwartznegger's "speeches" site, where all they did was to look at the directory of available audio and listen to it, instead of just listening to the stuff that had external links.
The author complaining about this writes what's basically "bible fancruft", stuff with elements of religion but kind of warped. Such writing is kind of a cop-out, because critics tend not to say "this is utter bullshit" about something with religious overtones, even when it would be appropriate. But really, this guy is writing non-canon fan fiction in the "bible universe". He could just as well be writing "Star Wars Tales #NNN".
Wikipedia: John Faa and Farder Coram are leaders of the community of river gyptians. When the gyptians' children are kidnapped by the Church to serve as experiments in the frozen outpost of Bolvangar, they mount a rescue expedition, bringing Lyra along.
That sounds like something from Everquest.
This guy is in no position to criticize crap in popular culture. He's selling crap popular culture.
Most of the personals ads in Women seeking Men on Craigslist are fake. Most of them are spam for dating services, autoresponders for porno sites, or gay guys trolling for pictures of men.
Some of the fake ads are from a commercial service, CatchEmOut.com. This company runs fake dating ads, logs the e-mail addresses, and, for only $4.95, you can search their database. "Find out about their secret life before it's too late" they advertise. "Dating and Escort sites are booming with some genuine people and many people just trawling for an affair or casual sex. If you think, or are just curious if your partner maybe registered on one of these sites, has answered to one or has contacted a prostitute via E-Mail there is now an answer." "We will look through our available database and let you know INSTANTLY which site they are registered on, or which ads they may have replied to."
So someone has already been doing this. For money.
Driving the truck. That's what the job looks like. Those guys even look like truck drivers.
Then when they get there, they have to unload the truck. ""There's an awful lot going on, and it's going to be non-stop work from start to finish... with virtually no time for breaks."
Actually, if you rebuilt the i-Opener software in QNX with QNX 6.3, the current version, you'd get a new browser that supports more modern web sites. You just have to build a distro with the pieces you need, use "mkifs" to build a ROMable image with the components needed, and burn a new ROM.
It would cost about $8000 to buy a QNX development seat, but you could distribute the resulting software. You can get a free 30 day trial version, and after 30 days, the Eclipse IDE turns off, as does "QCC", the front end to gcc that makes it take POSIX command line options. Everything else still works.
Sadly, QNX backed away from their "open QNX" effort of 2002, and the system is now more proprietary and more expensive.
Being an astronaut is an incredibly hard job and I salute the brave men and women who risk their lives (and sanity) in the name of science.
As a job, being an astronaut today is not that great. The guys who go up on the ISS are being worked really hard for their whole tour, because it's now so hard to get people up there. The workload has increased substantially since the number of flights declined. There's a good chance the tour of duty in space may be longer than expected, due to problems on the ground.
(The Soviet-era cosmonauts had it even worse; one guy was up on Mir for 438 days, being unfortunate enough to be up during the collapse of the Soviet Union.)
But that's not the worst part.
NASA has too many people for the flight slots, so many of the "astronauts" will never fly. Right now, there are 100 flight-eligible astronauts, most of whom are doing mid-level management jobs. (NASA's phrase is "will serve in technical assignments until assigned to a space flight.") Or worse, filling the daily "lunch with an astronaut" slot. NASA is no longer training new astronauts.
Being an astronaut doesn't make you famous any more. Here's the list of active astronauts. How many have you heard of?
This should be reported to StopBadware.org. It appears to violate Guideline G ("An application must permit end users to uninstall it (in the customary place the applicable operating system has designated for adding or removing programs, e.g., the Add/Remove Programs control panel in Windows) in a straightforward manner, without undue effort or a high degree of technical skill.") and Guideline E ("Software Which Transmits Data To Unknown Parties").
The great thing about StopBadware is that their guidelines define some actions as making software "badware" despite any disclaimers or EULA terms. "Hard to uninstall" software is always "badware", no matter what the EULA says.
This wasn't a decision that websites have to be "accessable". The judge just refused to dismiss the suit in the preliminary stages. The judge also refused to compel Target to make the site "accessable" during the litigation. So this just means that there's enough of a question to proceed to trial. It's not a "decision". Computerworld has a better story on this.
Postponing the launch may help the PS3. The basic problems with the PS3 are 1) it costs too much, and 2) Cell programming is still in the experimental stages. A relaunch in time for the 2007 holiday season might actually succeed. The games will be better, and it will be time for the price to drop to Xbox 360 levels.
The early bombes were built by The British Tabulating Machine Company. The later, improved version (with a printer) was built by NCR in Dayton. The initial British Tabulating Machine version just slowed and stopped after a hit, and someone had to crank the thing backwards to the hit point, record the settings, and restart, since many hits were false alarms. The improved version would stop, reverse to the hit point, print the stop info, and restart.
Visit Bletchley Park if you're in London. It's a short train trip, it's near the railroad station, and there's a tour. But go on a weekend, or you're liable to get someone who's an expert on British manor house architecture and will focus on that.
Lucas isn't responsible for the "grubby future" concept. That was introduced in 1972, in Doug Trumbell's Silent Running. Although it wasn't a hugely popular movie, it introduced many of the background concepts seen in later SF films. It's worth seeing today; it looks less dated than Star Trek movies made after it.
The building layout seems inefficient. There are only 19 general classrooms. The classrooms are perhaps a third of the building space. There's a big auditorium, with all the bells and whistles, including 100-seat sections on turntables. And of course there's a big "Interactive Learning Center". There's a "Food court", which seems to be lifted from a mall design.
It's also four floors with only two sets of stairs, which will probably be a headache. All the classrooms are on the upper floors.
There's real progress in kit robotics, but you have to be willing to pay roughly the price of a PS3 for it. See Lynxmotion and Hitec Robotics.
Among other things, you can finally get stock R/C type servos with a digital interface providing position and torque feedback. That's a huge step up - you're no longer stuck with blind position control; you can do force control and software-implemented compliance, like Brooks' insects from a decade ago.
The actuator hardware is now available.
Sensing is improving, but a 6DOF INS is still rare on kit robots. That's purely a volume problem; accelerometer and gyro chips are cheap, but the systems haven't come down enough yet. We're starting to see rate gyros in kit robots; adding a rate gyro to an R/C biped makes the thing much more stable.
The software used to drive hobbyist robots tends to be way behind the state of the art, but that will get fixed as more people read the papers and write code. The next few years are going to be interesting.
If the consumer-electronics people weren't so hung up on proprietary interfaces, consumer electronics could just use 100baseT for everything. More bandwidth than some UWB thing, can be extended to cover just about any house, cables are cheap, and interference isn't a problem. You can get a whole 100baseT/TCP/IP node in the RJ45 connector now, so low data rate sources like audio devices could play cheaply. Power over Ethernet could power some of the lesser boxes, like cable modems.
That "30 meter UWB" link will turn out to be a huge pain. It probably won't work through walls especially ones with metal studs, so inter-room links in houses will fail. Even across a large classroom (an obvious application), there might be problems. The DRM probably won't allow multipoint distribution, so you can only have one monitor per Blu-Ray player, but that's another issue.
The site referenced is so crapped up with "Web 2.0" junk that it doesn't work. The picture links result in a neat animated effect in which a translucent rectangle grows. Then it disappears without displaying the picture, at least in Firefox 1.5.
If you have something important to say, use standard HTML. Especially if it's something important enough that it should be archived. Using "TiddlyWiki" with images on Flickr means your site will not be archived properly, and many search engines won't even index it with all that Javascript.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the Enterprise still go "swoosh" when it goes by in vacuum?
This will be more useful for surveillance cameras than for entertainment. High-res surveillance cameras are very useful, because you can zoom in to read license plates and recognize faces.
Already, improved resolution in surveillance cameras is paying off. Everybody used to have VHS, which is really only 260 to 320 lines, and zooming in was useless. Now, 640 x 480 digital is common, 1024 x 768 isn't expensive, and you can get 1920 x 1200. (Here's a gallery of high-resolution surveillance pictures.). With such high resolution, a camera with a distant view of a store or shopping mall generates usable information.
Noticed how much better those pictures on "Wanted" posters and news stories are getting? That's what this is all about.
Big Brother is getting another vision upgrade.
What you're looking at is a one-legged hopper. Locomotion researchers find it useful to work on one-legged hoppers because the system is simple enough to be analyzed analytically.
The new feature of this leg seems to be that it has three active joints with sufficient power behind them for jumping. Most legged robots, such as the BDI Big Dog, only have two active joints in the leg, although some have a weak or passive ankle. This is enough to position the leg to any point in the working envelope, and it's not obvious what a third joint buys you. ASIMO has an "ankle", but it's used only to align the foot with the ground, not for active running; ASIMO runs flat-footed, not on the ball of the foot. This Toyota machine seems to have both an ankle and a toe joint.
This is a big win, as I described back in 1995 in my "Why Legs have Three Joints" paper. With three joints involved in running and jumping, you gain control over the force vector for ground contact, which allows slip control. Also, the hip joint (which is usually the most powerful) can be used more effectively; the lower joints position the leg so that the hip muscles can do most of the work. For humans, this is subtle, because the ankle-toe distance is small. It's much clearer for horses, where the hind leg has three sections of roughly equal length.
Unfortunately, you bought one that isn't HDCP compliant. Expect trouble when you're using HDCP content. Switching will mess up the crypto handshake, and the DRM system will shut down the output. Rebooting the endpoints (the display and the source) will usually clear up the problem, or it may clear up by itself in a while. But it's a headache.
No, actually. The reason for the "voluntary recall" is that the Consumer Product Safety Commission gives manufacturers an option. They can either do a "voluntary recall", or the CPSC can do it the hard way, with injunctions, orders, fines, and bans on further sales of the product. That results in announcements like Dynacraft To Pay $1.4 Million Penalty for Failing to Report Hazard with Mountain Bicycles. "The forks, which are part of the steering column, can break apart and separate from the front wheel, causing the rider to lose control and suffer serious injuries."
Most manufacturers take the voluntary option. A few try defying the recall order. Doesn't work. "John Rasmus, of Hallstead, Pennsylvania, the owner of Pyrotek, was sentenced to 5 months in prison, 5 months home confinement and three years of supervised release."
Well, first of all, this is a state school, and the professor is a Government employee. So state conflict of interest laws apply.
First, North Carolina State University permits faculty to own copyright in instructional materials: "NC State does not, however, claim ownership of faculty-created instructional materials or courseware merely because it requires faculty members to teach courses as part of their regular responsibilities."
However, the department has the option of taking title to such "Directed Works": "Directed works also include works created by faculty or staff in an institute, center, department, or other unit that, with approval of the Provost, has adopted rules providing that copyright in materials prepared by such faculty or staff in the course of their work with that unit vests in NC State and not in its creator. NC State holds copyright to Directed Works."
However, see Conflicts of Interest and Committment Affecting Faculty and Non-Faculty EPA Employees. "Activities requiring disclosure for administrative review ...
An EPA employee requiring students to purchase the
textbook or related instructional materials of the employee or
members of his or her immediate family, which produces
compensation for the employee or family member."
Provided that the professor made the proper disclosures and those disclosures are in his personnel file, he's probably OK. The university has the option of taking over this business from the individual faculty.
Policies vary with the school. The University of Michigan permits commercial note-taking services but prohibits faculty from selling notes. (This resulted in a note-taking startup, Versity.com, which was acquired by CollegeClub.com, which dumped the note-taking business to focus on entertainment content.) Yale is at the other extreme; they let faculty control their content. That's what you'd expect; state schools have to be much more careful about conflict of interest issues.
In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System, no central office was ever out of service for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. That record has definitely not been maintained in the computer era.
Electric power system reliability in the United States is down, mostly as a result of deregulation. Rate-of-return regulation tended to encourage utilities to overbuild their systems, which was good for reliability. When there's a free market in electric power, no one bears responsibility for downtime.
I don't expect things to get better. Not after Cleveland had a five-day outage and nobody went to jail.
And then you have to build up the URL as if some app had built it. The arguments are
p="auto_submit"&hash="number you get from form page"&referer="URL of form page"...
There's more, but you get the idea.
To submit your resume, you have to construct a URL manually. The Angelides campaign in California is in trouble for doing that on Governor Schwartznegger's "speeches" site, where all they did was to look at the directory of available audio and listen to it, instead of just listening to the stuff that had external links.
If anybody cares, http://www.proveyourworth.net/?p=begin&mistake=lit tle gets you to their stupid form.
The author complaining about this writes what's basically "bible fancruft", stuff with elements of religion but kind of warped. Such writing is kind of a cop-out, because critics tend not to say "this is utter bullshit" about something with religious overtones, even when it would be appropriate. But really, this guy is writing non-canon fan fiction in the "bible universe". He could just as well be writing "Star Wars Tales #NNN".
Wikipedia: John Faa and Farder Coram are leaders of the community of river gyptians. When the gyptians' children are kidnapped by the Church to serve as experiments in the frozen outpost of Bolvangar, they mount a rescue expedition, bringing Lyra along.
That sounds like something from Everquest.
This guy is in no position to criticize crap in popular culture. He's selling crap popular culture.
Most of the personals ads in Women seeking Men on Craigslist are fake. Most of them are spam for dating services, autoresponders for porno sites, or gay guys trolling for pictures of men.
Some of the fake ads are from a commercial service, CatchEmOut.com. This company runs fake dating ads, logs the e-mail addresses, and, for only $4.95, you can search their database. "Find out about their secret life before it's too late" they advertise. "Dating and Escort sites are booming with some genuine people and many people just trawling for an affair or casual sex. If you think, or are just curious if your partner maybe registered on one of these sites, has answered to one or has contacted a prostitute via E-Mail there is now an answer." "We will look through our available database and let you know INSTANTLY which site they are registered on, or which ads they may have replied to."
So someone has already been doing this. For money.
Driving the truck. That's what the job looks like. Those guys even look like truck drivers.
Then when they get there, they have to unload the truck. ""There's an awful lot going on, and it's going to be non-stop work from start to finish ... with virtually no time for breaks."
That's the reality of the job.
Actually, if you rebuilt the i-Opener software in QNX with QNX 6.3, the current version, you'd get a new browser that supports more modern web sites. You just have to build a distro with the pieces you need, use "mkifs" to build a ROMable image with the components needed, and burn a new ROM.
It would cost about $8000 to buy a QNX development seat, but you could distribute the resulting software. You can get a free 30 day trial version, and after 30 days, the Eclipse IDE turns off, as does "QCC", the front end to gcc that makes it take POSIX command line options. Everything else still works.
Sadly, QNX backed away from their "open QNX" effort of 2002, and the system is now more proprietary and more expensive.
Being an astronaut is an incredibly hard job and I salute the brave men and women who risk their lives (and sanity) in the name of science.
As a job, being an astronaut today is not that great. The guys who go up on the ISS are being worked really hard for their whole tour, because it's now so hard to get people up there. The workload has increased substantially since the number of flights declined. There's a good chance the tour of duty in space may be longer than expected, due to problems on the ground. (The Soviet-era cosmonauts had it even worse; one guy was up on Mir for 438 days, being unfortunate enough to be up during the collapse of the Soviet Union.)
But that's not the worst part. NASA has too many people for the flight slots, so many of the "astronauts" will never fly. Right now, there are 100 flight-eligible astronauts, most of whom are doing mid-level management jobs. (NASA's phrase is "will serve in technical assignments until assigned to a space flight.") Or worse, filling the daily "lunch with an astronaut" slot. NASA is no longer training new astronauts.
Being an astronaut doesn't make you famous any more. Here's the list of active astronauts. How many have you heard of?
That should earn it the Badware Logo.
The great thing about StopBadware is that their guidelines define some actions as making software "badware" despite any disclaimers or EULA terms. "Hard to uninstall" software is always "badware", no matter what the EULA says.
This wasn't a decision that websites have to be "accessable". The judge just refused to dismiss the suit in the preliminary stages. The judge also refused to compel Target to make the site "accessable" during the litigation. So this just means that there's enough of a question to proceed to trial. It's not a "decision". Computerworld has a better story on this.
Postponing the launch may help the PS3. The basic problems with the PS3 are 1) it costs too much, and 2) Cell programming is still in the experimental stages. A relaunch in time for the 2007 holiday season might actually succeed. The games will be better, and it will be time for the price to drop to Xbox 360 levels.
The early bombes were built by The British Tabulating Machine Company. The later, improved version (with a printer) was built by NCR in Dayton. The initial British Tabulating Machine version just slowed and stopped after a hit, and someone had to crank the thing backwards to the hit point, record the settings, and restart, since many hits were false alarms. The improved version would stop, reverse to the hit point, print the stop info, and restart.
Visit Bletchley Park if you're in London. It's a short train trip, it's near the railroad station, and there's a tour. But go on a weekend, or you're liable to get someone who's an expert on British manor house architecture and will focus on that.
Lucas isn't responsible for the "grubby future" concept. That was introduced in 1972, in Doug Trumbell's Silent Running. Although it wasn't a hugely popular movie, it introduced many of the background concepts seen in later SF films. It's worth seeing today; it looks less dated than Star Trek movies made after it.
Microsoft has a web site for this project. (Requires Macromedia Flash)
The building layout seems inefficient. There are only 19 general classrooms. The classrooms are perhaps a third of the building space. There's a big auditorium, with all the bells and whistles, including 100-seat sections on turntables. And of course there's a big "Interactive Learning Center". There's a "Food court", which seems to be lifted from a mall design.
It's also four floors with only two sets of stairs, which will probably be a headache. All the classrooms are on the upper floors.
There's real progress in kit robotics, but you have to be willing to pay roughly the price of a PS3 for it. See Lynxmotion and Hitec Robotics.
Among other things, you can finally get stock R/C type servos with a digital interface providing position and torque feedback. That's a huge step up - you're no longer stuck with blind position control; you can do force control and software-implemented compliance, like Brooks' insects from a decade ago. The actuator hardware is now available.
Sensing is improving, but a 6DOF INS is still rare on kit robots. That's purely a volume problem; accelerometer and gyro chips are cheap, but the systems haven't come down enough yet. We're starting to see rate gyros in kit robots; adding a rate gyro to an R/C biped makes the thing much more stable.
The software used to drive hobbyist robots tends to be way behind the state of the art, but that will get fixed as more people read the papers and write code. The next few years are going to be interesting.
They tried that. Didn't help.
SGI also tried making overpriced Windows desktops. That also flopped. Nice cases, though.
If the consumer-electronics people weren't so hung up on proprietary interfaces, consumer electronics could just use 100baseT for everything. More bandwidth than some UWB thing, can be extended to cover just about any house, cables are cheap, and interference isn't a problem. You can get a whole 100baseT/TCP/IP node in the RJ45 connector now, so low data rate sources like audio devices could play cheaply. Power over Ethernet could power some of the lesser boxes, like cable modems.
That "30 meter UWB" link will turn out to be a huge pain. It probably won't work through walls especially ones with metal studs, so inter-room links in houses will fail. Even across a large classroom (an obvious application), there might be problems. The DRM probably won't allow multipoint distribution, so you can only have one monitor per Blu-Ray player, but that's another issue.
The site referenced is so crapped up with "Web 2.0" junk that it doesn't work. The picture links result in a neat animated effect in which a translucent rectangle grows. Then it disappears without displaying the picture, at least in Firefox 1.5.
If you have something important to say, use standard HTML. Especially if it's something important enough that it should be archived. Using "TiddlyWiki" with images on Flickr means your site will not be archived properly, and many search engines won't even index it with all that Javascript.