There's a Congressional mandate to develop military robots, and it's being carried out. The DARPA Grand Challenge is the best known part of this, but it's not the only part, or even the largest part, of the effort.
There's a classic set of five books, Build Your Own Metalworking Shop from Scrap, by Dave Gingery, written in the 1970s. This set covers how to bootstrap up a machine shop starting from very little.
Step one is to make a charcoal foundry, starting with a pail, fire clay, and a steel pipe. With this you can cast parts. You hand-carve wooden masters, make sand moulds, and pour molten metal into them.
Once you can cast, the next step is to build a lathe - the simplest machine tool. You'd probably have to make a very crude lathe first, but once you have even a crude lathe, you can make round things. Then you can make a better lathe.
The next tool is a shaper, or planer, which allows you to make flat things. You're now up to the machining technology of 1850 or so, and can make small steam engines. Take a look at a steam locomotive. It's all castings with a little finish machining. All the finish machining is either lathe or planer work - there are no milled parts with complex surfaces.
The other early power tool, not mentioned in Gingery, is a steam hammer. You don't need that
for small work, but the steam hammer is the tool that made it possible to make stuff too big to hammer out by hand. Watt's factory had a steam hammer by 1810 or so.
Once you have the lathe and planer, you can build, with difficulty, a milling machine. Once you have a milling machine, you can build more milling machines without too much trouble. And you can build a better mill than the one you've got.
Once you have a good mill, you can make almost anything makeable in metal.
People have built machine tools from these books, so it's quite possible.
Hiring minions to build our army of killer robots
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Here's your opportunity to become an Evil Genius in the real world.
We're hiring minions to build our army of killer robots. Must know C++ and be in Silicon Valley.
Game programming experience a plus. Help build America's robot army!
Did the interviewer make up the bit about Republicans claiming an entitlement to certain jobs based on their control of Congress, or is their support for this?
No, that's real. See this article. There are open statements from Republican congressmen about this.
There's been an ongoing Republican effort, starting about ten years ago, to divert donations away from Democrats. Lobbyists used to donate roughly equal amounts to both parties, but that's no longer the case. It's part of Karl Rove's strategy for defunding the Democrats.
Part of this is that Washington lobbyists are now expected to be Republicans, and to assist in Repubican fund-raising.
As any kid who's read the book can tell you, the locomotive pulling the Polar Express is a 2-8-4 Berkshire. From the size, it's the AMC-upgraded model with the 69-inch drivers and the bigger boiler, rather than the original 63-inch model.
RFID authentication of guns would be easy to jam. That has possibilities.
There's been one purely mechanical system that worked, where you wore a magnetized ring on your trigger finger to enable the gun. This became unpopular when floppy disks came in. All it was really good for was keeping kids from accidentally firing a gun, anyway.
"Final Fantasy", the 2001 movie, did this, although they used more hand animation than motion capture.
It was a beautifully rendered movie with a stupid plot, from a studio that came out of nowhere and disintegrated after the movie.
From an industry perspective, the problem with "Polar Express" is that it only took 30 days of principal photography, all of it in the studio, yet it still cost $150 million. "Sky Captain" was supposed to be low-budget, but wasn't. What's needed is technology that can produce similar movies for $20 million.
Evolution eventually makes each antibiotic obsolete. The process takes a few decades. The same effect applies to herbicides, and now we're getting a picture of how long that takes.
The "Green Revolution" may stop working in a few decades. That's serious.
Why are vendors downloading firmware, anyway? Device vendors used to just preload firmware into some form of non-volatile memory at the factory. If the firmware has to be downloaded, it takes extra steps to get the device going. Either you have to download it from some "install disk", which is a pain, or your have to get Microsoft to put it in their Windows distros.
The latter would be a huge pain unless Microsoft was very cooperative. It's worth finding out just how that arrangement works.
(One could make a conspiracy in restraint of trade argument, but under Bush and Ashcroft, antitrust enforcement is out to lunch, so that's hopeless.)
Ironport sells both rackmount spam filters and rackmount spam senders. They own SpamCop. They also operate the Bonded Spammer program, which "certifies" spammers as OK to bypass spam filters. They're definitely playing both sides of the street. The New York Times picked up on this last year.
Oh, yeah, Ironport claims their multimillion e-mail per hour senders are only for use by good guys. Right.
SCO's output of over-the-top press releases stopped about the time IBM started quoting them in court filings. It looks bad to the judge when the plaintiff is making public statements that contradict what they're saying in their court filings. And SCO definitely did.
Over on the stock front, SCOX is at $2.93 today, continuing the long, slow slide of the last year. Since July, the price decline has been almost a straight line on a linear scale. The market cap seems to be tracking how much cash SCO has left, which means the market is valuing SCO's UNIX rights at zero.
The chemistry sounds similar to that used in ultraviolet-cured dental resins. Since those materials are tough enough for years of hard chewing, they probably will hold up to CD handling.
Right, it was the Sony version of Godzilla. I met the guys who did the baby 'zillas at the Softimage offices in LA. They hand-animated a standard set of nice-looking moves, and had a probabilistic state machine driving them. Moves were animated so that the tangents matched, and about 5-15 frames were overlapped during the blend, to avoid jerks at the transitions. There's no physical simulation, but the behaviors try to prevent collisions.
There are two main approaches to this - the "animation splicing" systems, where canned bits of motion are spliced together by a program, and the "behavior" systems, where control programs are trying to optimize some goal. The first major appearance of a good "splicing" system was the baby 'zillas in Godzilla 2000. That's what most feature films are using today.
Kinematic motion generation has been around for years, and that's what you see in games. It doesn't look real, but it works well enough for gameplay. The physics isn't realistic. That's why, from across the room, EA Football looks different from NFL football. Those jerky
motions really pop out at you, especially when they're alternated with nice motion-captured moves.
Endorphin isn't as automated as it looks; much manual tweaking of the motion is necessary. Motion Factory has more automation, but it's kinematic. Automatic physically-realistic animation is hard, because you have to solve the robotic control problem. The animation community may yet do this. But they're not there yet.
As I keep pointing out, if grid computing was good for anything, it would be a service that hosting companies sold to keep their machines busy during off-peak hours.
Hosting companies have large numbers of identical machines with high bandwidth interconnects. That's just what you want for "grid computing". They're already set up to allow customers to run applications on their machines, and are able to deal with the security problems. Load is very low during off-peak hours. The machines stay up; they don't suddenly get disconnected from the net because somebody turned their desktop off. They're all loaded with the same base software. It's the ideal situation for commercial "grid computing".
So why is nobody selling this? Because there's no market for it.
There's no real commercial market for supercomputer time, distributed or otherwise.
Once upon a time, from about 1960 to 1980, there were engineering computer service centers, where you bought time-sharing service on big mainframes. Control Data and UNIVAC were the preferred machines for this. But that business is dead.
CPU time became too cheap.
A well-known commercial grid was
Gateway Processing on Demand, announced in late 2002 with great fanfare. Gateway offered "grid computing" on thousands of Gateway-owned machines. They quietly dropped that service some time last spring. Their former CEO admitted that it generated "not a lot" of revenue. Basically, it was an attempt to generate some revenue from Gateway's unsold inventory of machines.
Grid computing is one of those schemes where all the interest is on the sell side. Nobody wants to buy it. "Micropayments" and "portals" are like that. They didn't sell either.
A much bigger deal was the retirement, last August, of the Dash-80.
The Dash-80, the original KC-135/Boeing 707 prototype, first flew in 1954. It was used for many test programs therafter, flying until 2003. This was the prototype of the first really successful jetliner.
(The DeHavilland Comet flew years before the Dash-80, but the underpowered Comet had metal fatigue problems and all were grounded after several crashes. The Tupolev Tu-104 was a civilian version of the Badger bomber, braking chutes and all. The Dash-80/707/KC-135 was
the first commercial transport that really worked.)
This is part of the Cornerstone Initiative, "Protecting the Homeland through Economic Security". Their site is "being revised", but their newsletter lists what they're up to.
You'd think they'd learn. Remember ".biz"? Makes South Central LA look like a good neighborhood. Most "businesses" in.biz seem to be somewhere between marginal and illegal.
Registry keys intended to keep a demo version from being reused usually have some obscure name and are in some obscure place. Looking in the obvious places didn't help.
It may even be a bug on the server side; the problem comes up during authentication. But I don't think so.
If you try to upgrade from a 30-day demo version of Keyhole to a pay version by uninstalling the demo, buying a real, but different, version, and installing, you end up in a copy protection hell. Somewhere, Keyhole has stored that you've previously had a demo version, and the real version doesn't deal with that properly.
Never did get it working on that machine; had to get a refund from Keyhole.
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I run one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams, and I'm up-front about the military implications. Some of the academic teams don't want to admit they're part of a weapons program. But they are.
Step one is to make a charcoal foundry, starting with a pail, fire clay, and a steel pipe. With this you can cast parts. You hand-carve wooden masters, make sand moulds, and pour molten metal into them.
Once you can cast, the next step is to build a lathe - the simplest machine tool. You'd probably have to make a very crude lathe first, but once you have even a crude lathe, you can make round things. Then you can make a better lathe.
The next tool is a shaper, or planer, which allows you to make flat things. You're now up to the machining technology of 1850 or so, and can make small steam engines. Take a look at a steam locomotive. It's all castings with a little finish machining. All the finish machining is either lathe or planer work - there are no milled parts with complex surfaces.
The other early power tool, not mentioned in Gingery, is a steam hammer. You don't need that for small work, but the steam hammer is the tool that made it possible to make stuff too big to hammer out by hand. Watt's factory had a steam hammer by 1810 or so.
Once you have the lathe and planer, you can build, with difficulty, a milling machine. Once you have a milling machine, you can build more milling machines without too much trouble. And you can build a better mill than the one you've got.
Once you have a good mill, you can make almost anything makeable in metal.
People have built machine tools from these books, so it's quite possible.
Here's your opportunity to become an Evil Genius in the real world. We're hiring minions to build our army of killer robots. Must know C++ and be in Silicon Valley. Game programming experience a plus. Help build America's robot army!
No, that's real. See this article. There are open statements from Republican congressmen about this.
There's been an ongoing Republican effort, starting about ten years ago, to divert donations away from Democrats. Lobbyists used to donate roughly equal amounts to both parties, but that's no longer the case. It's part of Karl Rove's strategy for defunding the Democrats.
Part of this is that Washington lobbyists are now expected to be Republicans, and to assist in Repubican fund-raising.
So there.
There's been one purely mechanical system that worked, where you wore a magnetized ring on your trigger finger to enable the gun. This became unpopular when floppy disks came in. All it was really good for was keeping kids from accidentally firing a gun, anyway.
From an industry perspective, the problem with "Polar Express" is that it only took 30 days of principal photography, all of it in the studio, yet it still cost $150 million. "Sky Captain" was supposed to be low-budget, but wasn't. What's needed is technology that can produce similar movies for $20 million.
Androbot had those things in production, and you could really buy one. Now they're something of a collectable.
Evolution eventually makes each antibiotic obsolete. The process takes a few decades. The same effect applies to herbicides, and now we're getting a picture of how long that takes.
The "Green Revolution" may stop working in a few decades. That's serious.
If it did end-to-end encryption with suitable handsets, that would be useful.
The latter would be a huge pain unless Microsoft was very cooperative. It's worth finding out just how that arrangement works.
(One could make a conspiracy in restraint of trade argument, but under Bush and Ashcroft, antitrust enforcement is out to lunch, so that's hopeless.)
Oh, yeah, Ironport claims their multimillion e-mail per hour senders are only for use by good guys. Right.
Over on the stock front, SCOX is at $2.93 today, continuing the long, slow slide of the last year. Since July, the price decline has been almost a straight line on a linear scale. The market cap seems to be tracking how much cash SCO has left, which means the market is valuing SCO's UNIX rights at zero.
The chemistry sounds similar to that used in ultraviolet-cured dental resins. Since those materials are tough enough for years of hard chewing, they probably will hold up to CD handling.
Right, it was the Sony version of Godzilla. I met the guys who did the baby 'zillas at the Softimage offices in LA. They hand-animated a standard set of nice-looking moves, and had a probabilistic state machine driving them. Moves were animated so that the tangents matched, and about 5-15 frames were overlapped during the blend, to avoid jerks at the transitions. There's no physical simulation, but the behaviors try to prevent collisions.
There are two main approaches to this - the "animation splicing" systems, where canned bits of motion are spliced together by a program, and the "behavior" systems, where control programs are trying to optimize some goal. The first major appearance of a good "splicing" system was the baby 'zillas in Godzilla 2000. That's what most feature films are using today.
Kinematic motion generation has been around for years, and that's what you see in games. It doesn't look real, but it works well enough for gameplay. The physics isn't realistic. That's why, from across the room, EA Football looks different from NFL football. Those jerky motions really pop out at you, especially when they're alternated with nice motion-captured moves.
Endorphin isn't as automated as it looks; much manual tweaking of the motion is necessary. Motion Factory has more automation, but it's kinematic. Automatic physically-realistic animation is hard, because you have to solve the robotic control problem. The animation community may yet do this. But they're not there yet.
(I've done some work on this.)
Hosting companies have large numbers of identical machines with high bandwidth interconnects. That's just what you want for "grid computing". They're already set up to allow customers to run applications on their machines, and are able to deal with the security problems. Load is very low during off-peak hours. The machines stay up; they don't suddenly get disconnected from the net because somebody turned their desktop off. They're all loaded with the same base software. It's the ideal situation for commercial "grid computing".
So why is nobody selling this? Because there's no market for it. There's no real commercial market for supercomputer time, distributed or otherwise. Once upon a time, from about 1960 to 1980, there were engineering computer service centers, where you bought time-sharing service on big mainframes. Control Data and UNIVAC were the preferred machines for this. But that business is dead. CPU time became too cheap.
A well-known commercial grid was Gateway Processing on Demand, announced in late 2002 with great fanfare. Gateway offered "grid computing" on thousands of Gateway-owned machines. They quietly dropped that service some time last spring. Their former CEO admitted that it generated "not a lot" of revenue. Basically, it was an attempt to generate some revenue from Gateway's unsold inventory of machines.
Grid computing is one of those schemes where all the interest is on the sell side. Nobody wants to buy it. "Micropayments" and "portals" are like that. They didn't sell either.
A much bigger deal was the retirement, last August, of the Dash-80. The Dash-80, the original KC-135/Boeing 707 prototype, first flew in 1954. It was used for many test programs therafter, flying until 2003. This was the prototype of the first really successful jetliner.
(The DeHavilland Comet flew years before the Dash-80, but the underpowered Comet had metal fatigue problems and all were grounded after several crashes. The Tupolev Tu-104 was a civilian version of the Badger bomber, braking chutes and all. The Dash-80/707/KC-135 was the first commercial transport that really worked.)
The story is weak, too. No hard news there.
This is part of the Cornerstone Initiative, "Protecting the Homeland through Economic Security". Their site is "being revised", but their newsletter lists what they're up to.
You'd think they'd learn. Remember ".biz"? Makes South Central LA look like a good neighborhood. Most "businesses" in .biz seem to be somewhere between marginal and illegal.
It could be called "Music TV".
I liked some of the ideas there, but it's not happening.
It may even be a bug on the server side; the problem comes up during authentication. But I don't think so.
Never did get it working on that machine; had to get a refund from Keyhole.