Shakey is actually at the Silicon Valley Computer Museum. Shakey was one of the first mobile robots, yet turned out to be a dead end. The Shakey approach to vision, which dominated vision research for a decade, was to try to extract a line drawing (the "primal sketch") from a scene. Then, "reasoning" algorithms were applied to determine which objects occluded other objects.
At the time, this was incredibly slow, but that wasn't the real problem. The problem is that it only works for worlds composed of simple geometric objects with uniformly colored faces. Shakey's world was a room with big colored blocks, so those algorithms could work.
Wasn't it possible back then to create a Powerpoint presentation that would run standalone from a floppy disk (that is, Powerpoint didn't have to be installed on the target machine)?
OpenOffice Impress will export a presentation as Flash, so you can play it in any browser.
This also allows you to easily put your presentations on web sites for later viewing.
The author does a bit of scripting. It's not like he's the lead developer on Oracle or something. A look back at Brooks by a major developer would be more useful.
The "chief programmer team" concept has fallen out of favor, with one notable exception - game development. Game projects have team members with well-defined roles, because they must integrate many elements that aren't just code. Games have artwork, music, motion capture data, maps, textures, character models, and props. Game teams look more like film production crews, with individuals responsible for specific areas. "Librarian" and "toolsmith" jobs are very real in game development. There's usually a lead "director", who is expected to know all the technologies involved.
A big problem with censoring "anti-Semitic" speech today is that the groups that want to censor it want to stop criticism of Israel. Look at what the Anti-Defamation League is currently wound up about.
"We were very disturbed by Scott Simon's question to interviewee Richard Ben Cramer (June 12, 2004 "Weekend Edition"): "is there still a need for Israel to exist?" "
None of this stuff is hate speech.
These are political statements.
This issue tends to be framed in terms of "Nazis", but the Nazis died out a long time ago. Today's issues revolve around Israel vs. its Arab neighbors, Israel vs. its Palestinian population, and US support of Israel. The ADL has a major cow whenever the anti-Israel side of those issues gets major press in the US. (Interestingly, the domestic Israeli press criticizes the government of Israel over these issues frequently, but the ADL doesn't get mad at the Jerusalem Post.)
There's a real political question as to whether continued support of Israel is in the interest of the United States. It's important to Israel's survival to divert serious poliical debate on that issue. That's the real meaning of this "anti-hate-speech" push. It's not about Nazis.
Power supplies in the 90-95% range are available. They're compact, rugged, and reliable, But they cost about $1/watt.
The cheapo power supplies used in PCs cost less than a tenth of that. Many of them don't have protection circuitry and forged UL certifications are common.
Most won't deliver their rated load, and many, if loaded up to their rated load, will burn out, or worse, catch fire.
The real problem is to get to 90-95% efficiency at $0.10/watt.
The commission didn't suggest any tough decisions, like shutting half NASA's "centers", or accepting that chemical propulsion has reached its limits,
Or closing out NASA's non-spaceflight activities.
That's my point,
NASA Centers be reconfigured as Federally Funded Research and Development Centers to enable innovation, to work effectively with the private sector, and to stimulate economic development.
"Stimulate economic development" is a code word for "spend money in my Congressional district".
And "Federally Funded Research and Development Centers" aren't organizations tightly focused on single goals.
That "executive summary" addresses all the wrong stuff. It doesn't mention cost, schedule, or basic approach. It's all about organizational structure. That's not how Apollo was done.
It also says very little about NASA's thirty years of failures to build a new launch vehicle. Those bozos can't even replace the existing Shuttle. Not for lack of money, either. In the past 30 years, NASA has spent more money than it did from 1960 to 1974, with far less to show for it.
Keeping all those "centers" going costs billions.
DARPA, by comparison, is tiny. DARPA itself is a few hundred people. They buy and evaluate; they do nothing in house. There are no "DARPA centers" chewing up billions in overhead.
Switching from Office 97 (what everybody really uses) to Office 200x is as traumatic as switching to OpenOffice. As Microsoft points out, OpenOffice is comparable to Office 97. And Office 97 is about as good as Office ever got. Beyond that, it's tons of features you don't need, and integration with stuff you don't want to integrate with.
Paul Allen was, of course, one of the original Microsoft people. Gates had the sense to get him out of there before he screwed it up. Since then, there have been a long string of Paul Allen companies, almost none of them successful.
Some of them were successful before Allen acquired them.
I would have though he couldn't screw up a science fiction museum, but apparently he did. Then again, he owns two sports teams, both of which he screwed up.
The current big issue in California telecom regulation is the "Telecommuncations User's Bill of Rights", a very mild set of consumer protection rules the industry is fighting.
The CPUC has announced its intent to regulate some DSL-related issues, mainly in the service quality area.
We just put a replacement radio in my wife's car, a '93, and instead of knobs and a few large buttons there are these tiny little buttons that I can't read the labels for without a magnifying glass. WTF is that?
It's amusing how bad controls on radios are. They're designed to be easy to implement, not easy to use.
The right way to do it would be to have two big knobs - volume and channel. But "channel" should be smart. If the channel isn't in use, it doesn't get a position on the knob. Turning the knob should instantly switch to the next channel, within 50ms or so. No wait for AGC, AFC, or DRM cryptosync. No fading out during channel switching.
That's actually hard to do. Right now, you have a basic radio front-ended by a simple microprocessor tied to some buttons and a display. Doing it right requires at least two radio front ends. You need one for the channel you're listening to, and one to maintain the inventory of incoming stations. Systems that receive digital radio may need more, so they can have the adjacent stations synched up in advance.
Or you could use a whole-band digital radio, like Gnu Radio.
There is no excuse for an entertainment device in a car requiring "head-down time".
Yes. This virus will apparently attack Bluetooth-enabled printers. It's not clear how successful the attacks are. But there may be an attack route there.
Printers are a great potential target for spammers. Visualize Viagra ads appearing on your printer.
Google apparently cuts deals with sites so that Google's crawler can read them, while others can't. Those sites show as "(subscription)" in Google News.
If Google took the position that "if we can't get in as a normal user, we won't index it", this "registration" thing would stop.
Read the project web site. This has very little to do with "camoflage" in the military sense. This is a visualization technique. The best approach involves the user wearing a head-mounted projector so they can see the projection from the correct angle. In any case, you have to be very near the projection axis for this to work. The target object is painted with the retro-reflective beaded paint used on traffic signs. That stuff has great reflectivity for a very narrow angle, and very little dispersion. So a projector of modest power can make the illusion work from a single point of view. Off-axis, forget it.
"Camoflage" seems to be a mistranslation from the Japanese original.
Would someone who reads Japanese well please read the Japanese version of the site and try to clear this up?
This needs "fibre to the curb/pole" technology
on
200mbps DSL On Its Way?
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· Score: 2, Informative
This isn't a breakthrough. It's a deployment plan.
This isn't about getting huge bandwidth from the CO to the end user via installed copper. It's about installing boxes on poles, pedestals, in apartment houses. These boxes have fibre coming in from the CO and provide LAN-range connections to the end user.
The basic idea is to have a compatible set of equipment that works with existing DSL standards, but can be upgraded, section by section, without changing out the other parts.
It's a somewhat lower cost alternative to fibre-to-the-home.
This is roughly comparable to what cable companies do, running a neighborhood LAN with a box that provides an upstream connection, usually over fibre. The topology is about the same.
Have them try to do a minimum of four things: email, a letter (including printing it), a firewall, and surfing the web. (That includes setting up for email and surfing the web.) Ask them to log out at the end. What do they spontaneously say they like and what do they say upsets them? Is the menu clear? Where do they get lost? Record what you see, not just what they say. If they have a prompt on the screen, and stop for five minutes trying to figure out what it means or how to move past it, note such bumps in the road, even if they eventually solve it.
Watch them try and record the results. If you have a video, and they are willing, record it for your own use so as to analyze carefully what happens.
That's how usability testing is done. Although, to do it right, the user should be alone; no hints. And you need video and audio of the screen and the user.
It is worthwhile to make a highlights reel from such videos for developers to watch.
I'm disappointed in Google. Their spam filtering is apparently only 25-50% accurate.
I would have expected better.
Single-user spam filters have to solve a tough problem, but Gmail can use a multi-user spam filter, which recognizes similar spams mailed to different mailboxes. The fundamental property of spam is that similar messages go to many people.
Google can exploit that, much as Spamcop does.
In theory, Google should be able to recognize spam far more reliably than single-user spam filters.
And this is a search problem, something Google is good at. What's wrong over there?
By the way, I cannot imagine how spatial browsing must lead to screen clutter: opening folders with double-middle-click or Shift-double-click closes the parent folder window at once. And even if it is not enough, one can click one field in the gconf configuration editor and turn Nautilitus into "classical" non-spatial file browser. Don't know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn't change the way Nautilitus works, I presume.
Or, "I am so l33t that I know how to use double-middle-click and the "gconf configuration editor". And people wonder why Linux has trouble getting traction on the desktop.
Keyboard "shortcuts" are shortcuts. You should never have to use them, and all of them should be visible in menus. Go read "Tog on Interface", or "The Inmates are Running the Asylum".
The user should never need to know a secret code to do something.
OK, they've got a large-screen TV showing screen-saver like content, some audio, a powered curtain rod, a motorized bed, and lighting controls. Sounds like something you'd build out of a low-end Linux PC and some X10 controllers.
The thing it seems to lack is any feedback. If they had a system that could read your heart rate or EEG, or at least tell if your eyes are open, that would be more impressive. What they've got now sounds like the Bedroom of The Future, circa 1964.
Intel designed the 286 to run UNIX, or a UNIX-like OS. PDP-11 era UNIX, with an address space with 64K protected segments. Each process was to be limited to a few 64K segments. Back then, everybody thought that the hardware had outgrown DOS, and it was time for a real OS.
AT&T built and shipped the "AT&T PC", which actually worked that way. It didn't sell, but it did work. It was just like running UNIX on a PDP-11.
Intel never intended the machine to be used as a psuedo-flat address space with base/displacement addresses. Let alone use the hacks that led to "extended" and "expanded" memory.
With the 386, Intel got the architecture right, and that's essentially what we have today. But the 286, even though it was the mainstream machine during the years PCs really took off, was fundamentally broken.
Slashdot Mirror
At the time, this was incredibly slow, but that wasn't the real problem. The problem is that it only works for worlds composed of simple geometric objects with uniformly colored faces. Shakey's world was a room with big colored blocks, so those algorithms could work.
Total dead end.
OpenOffice Impress will export a presentation as Flash, so you can play it in any browser. This also allows you to easily put your presentations on web sites for later viewing.
The "chief programmer team" concept has fallen out of favor, with one notable exception - game development. Game projects have team members with well-defined roles, because they must integrate many elements that aren't just code. Games have artwork, music, motion capture data, maps, textures, character models, and props. Game teams look more like film production crews, with individuals responsible for specific areas. "Librarian" and "toolsmith" jobs are very real in game development. There's usually a lead "director", who is expected to know all the technologies involved.
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"We were very disturbed by Scott Simon's question to interviewee Richard Ben Cramer (June 12, 2004 "Weekend Edition"): "is there still a need for Israel to exist?" "
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They're unhappy about Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ.
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They're unhappy about The Financial Times publishing a letter by the Ambassador from one of the Arab League countries.
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They're unhappy about the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. They think it's too one-sided.
None of this stuff is hate speech. These are political statements.This issue tends to be framed in terms of "Nazis", but the Nazis died out a long time ago. Today's issues revolve around Israel vs. its Arab neighbors, Israel vs. its Palestinian population, and US support of Israel. The ADL has a major cow whenever the anti-Israel side of those issues gets major press in the US. (Interestingly, the domestic Israeli press criticizes the government of Israel over these issues frequently, but the ADL doesn't get mad at the Jerusalem Post.)
There's a real political question as to whether continued support of Israel is in the interest of the United States. It's important to Israel's survival to divert serious poliical debate on that issue. That's the real meaning of this "anti-hate-speech" push. It's not about Nazis.
The cheapo power supplies used in PCs cost less than a tenth of that. Many of them don't have protection circuitry and forged UL certifications are common. Most won't deliver their rated load, and many, if loaded up to their rated load, will burn out, or worse, catch fire.
The real problem is to get to 90-95% efficiency at $0.10/watt.
The commission didn't suggest any tough decisions, like shutting half NASA's "centers", or accepting that chemical propulsion has reached its limits, Or closing out NASA's non-spaceflight activities. That's my point,
"Stimulate economic development" is a code word for "spend money in my Congressional district". And "Federally Funded Research and Development Centers" aren't organizations tightly focused on single goals.
That "executive summary" addresses all the wrong stuff. It doesn't mention cost, schedule, or basic approach. It's all about organizational structure. That's not how Apollo was done.
It also says very little about NASA's thirty years of failures to build a new launch vehicle. Those bozos can't even replace the existing Shuttle. Not for lack of money, either. In the past 30 years, NASA has spent more money than it did from 1960 to 1974, with far less to show for it. Keeping all those "centers" going costs billions.
DARPA, by comparison, is tiny. DARPA itself is a few hundred people. They buy and evaluate; they do nothing in house. There are no "DARPA centers" chewing up billions in overhead.
Switching from Office 97 (what everybody really uses) to Office 200x is as traumatic as switching to OpenOffice. As Microsoft points out, OpenOffice is comparable to Office 97. And Office 97 is about as good as Office ever got. Beyond that, it's tons of features you don't need, and integration with stuff you don't want to integrate with.
I would have though he couldn't screw up a science fiction museum, but apparently he did. Then again, he owns two sports teams, both of which he screwed up.
Yes, ".pif" files actually have a purpose other than as a means of transmitting viruses.
The current big issue in California telecom regulation is the "Telecommuncations User's Bill of Rights", a very mild set of consumer protection rules the industry is fighting.
The CPUC has announced its intent to regulate some DSL-related issues, mainly in the service quality area.
It's amusing how bad controls on radios are. They're designed to be easy to implement, not easy to use.
The right way to do it would be to have two big knobs - volume and channel. But "channel" should be smart. If the channel isn't in use, it doesn't get a position on the knob. Turning the knob should instantly switch to the next channel, within 50ms or so. No wait for AGC, AFC, or DRM cryptosync. No fading out during channel switching.
That's actually hard to do. Right now, you have a basic radio front-ended by a simple microprocessor tied to some buttons and a display. Doing it right requires at least two radio front ends. You need one for the channel you're listening to, and one to maintain the inventory of incoming stations. Systems that receive digital radio may need more, so they can have the adjacent stations synched up in advance.
Or you could use a whole-band digital radio, like Gnu Radio.
There is no excuse for an entertainment device in a car requiring "head-down time".
Printers are a great potential target for spammers. Visualize Viagra ads appearing on your printer.
Google apparently cuts deals with sites so that Google's crawler can read them, while others can't. Those sites show as "(subscription)" in Google News. If Google took the position that "if we can't get in as a normal user, we won't index it", this "registration" thing would stop.
"Camoflage" seems to be a mistranslation from the Japanese original. Would someone who reads Japanese well please read the Japanese version of the site and try to clear this up?
This isn't about getting huge bandwidth from the CO to the end user via installed copper. It's about installing boxes on poles, pedestals, in apartment houses. These boxes have fibre coming in from the CO and provide LAN-range connections to the end user.
The basic idea is to have a compatible set of equipment that works with existing DSL standards, but can be upgraded, section by section, without changing out the other parts. It's a somewhat lower cost alternative to fibre-to-the-home.
This is roughly comparable to what cable companies do, running a neighborhood LAN with a box that provides an upstream connection, usually over fibre. The topology is about the same.
Watch them try and record the results. If you have a video, and they are willing, record it for your own use so as to analyze carefully what happens.
That's how usability testing is done. Although, to do it right, the user should be alone; no hints. And you need video and audio of the screen and the user.
It is worthwhile to make a highlights reel from such videos for developers to watch.
Single-user spam filters have to solve a tough problem, but Gmail can use a multi-user spam filter, which recognizes similar spams mailed to different mailboxes. The fundamental property of spam is that similar messages go to many people. Google can exploit that, much as Spamcop does.
In theory, Google should be able to recognize spam far more reliably than single-user spam filters. And this is a search problem, something Google is good at. What's wrong over there?
I wrote about this back on the 50th anniversary.
The images are coming from his own web site, which is now slashdotted.
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By the way, I cannot imagine how spatial browsing must lead to screen clutter: opening folders with double-middle-click or Shift-double-click closes the parent folder window at once. And even if it is not enough, one can click one field in the gconf configuration editor and turn Nautilitus into "classical" non-spatial file browser. Don't know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn't change the way Nautilitus works, I presume.
Or, "I am so l33t that I know how to use double-middle-click and the "gconf configuration editor". And people wonder why Linux has trouble getting traction on the desktop.Keyboard "shortcuts" are shortcuts. You should never have to use them, and all of them should be visible in menus. Go read "Tog on Interface", or "The Inmates are Running the Asylum". The user should never need to know a secret code to do something.
Anybody remember Hasbro's "Clueless Organizer", in bright pink, aimed at high school girls?
What we really need is a standard for hot-synching all the low-end devices.
NSA Secure Linux is GPL. It has to be, since it's a set of patches to Linux. It's now part of the standard kernel, even.
The thing it seems to lack is any feedback. If they had a system that could read your heart rate or EEG, or at least tell if your eyes are open, that would be more impressive. What they've got now sounds like the Bedroom of The Future, circa 1964.
Intel designed the 286 to run UNIX, or a UNIX-like OS. PDP-11 era UNIX, with an address space with 64K protected segments. Each process was to be limited to a few 64K segments. Back then, everybody thought that the hardware had outgrown DOS, and it was time for a real OS.
AT&T built and shipped the "AT&T PC", which actually worked that way. It didn't sell, but it did work. It was just like running UNIX on a PDP-11.
Intel never intended the machine to be used as a psuedo-flat address space with base/displacement addresses. Let alone use the hacks that led to "extended" and "expanded" memory.
With the 386, Intel got the architecture right, and that's essentially what we have today. But the 286, even though it was the mainstream machine during the years PCs really took off, was fundamentally broken.