From being a bike racer, the main thing that pops up is that K2 is involved in it - they're the guys that developed piezoelectric damping mountain bike forks, which I've heard perform really well. I wouldn't be surprised at all if a lot of the same technology is involved.
From a physics geek point of view, it sounds like they're using a spiffy inductance circuit attached to the strings to damp the strings (just figure out the harmonic frequency of the string and tune the inductor to counteract it), though I've no idea how the rest of it works.
Well, of course, *they'd* be better off - there'd be more people to pay them to say stuff! The world would definitely suffer, but they'd be happy with themselves until they'd figured out what they'd done:-)
We actually got ours from Angland, the *other* england:-)
Ours evolved seperately, while india stayed an english colony for a while, and thus was forced to stick with the england-version of english until a lot more recently, so theirs is a lot more similar to what you would expect to hear someone from england itself.
I wrote todd (http://todd.cx), so speaking from how mine is written, it wouldn't be too hard at all to set it up to have a system where you could just have <area code>.todd.cx point to a bunch of computers in that area code (though you'd have to hope they were telling the truth when they typed in their area code).
> Anything to spite qwest! Qwest runs the main internet backbones you'd have to use for east-coast to west-coast calls:-) They thought of that already.
Also, it'd be kind of weird to have the possibility of people picking up the phone in their house only to hear two parties they don't know using their phone - 'daddy, there are people talking about bad things on the phone')
My physics professor/boss was talking about how some of the fusion/fission experiments they run here have to use gigantic flywheels to gradually tap energy off of the power grid for rapid release, and somehow got on the topic of how MIT designed theirs to be safe -
They pointed them so that if the flywheels somehow broke, they'd go straight through the engineering/architecture offices. And the people that designed them, too. Now *that's* pressure.
This really isn't all that new. I'm the computer nerd in my dorm, so every week or two, someone's computer starts acting funny, and I'll have already installed Ad-Aware, and it's just that the spyware has inserted itself into Ad-Aware's ignore list, so it doesn't get touched.
Some people complain that attbi service is slower, but I still seem to get good speeds.
The speeds to most of the commercial net are still pretty good back home (Atlanta) on AT&T Broadband, with one exception: Internet2.
Before we lost @Home and went to AT&T Broadband, I could regularly get 10-15ms pings to GA Tech, UNC (metalab), and Auburn (here), but since the switch, ping times have gone up to ~200ms on average, and bandwidth was cut from 500 k/s (this was before the cap) to ~20 k/s (with dropped packets and hangs all the time).
So I did a little research, and it now appears that everything going from Internet2 to AT&T Broadband goes through San Fransisco. Even from my house in Atlanta to GA Tech (maybe 5 miles?). Yeah. And since that's what I mainly use my cable modem at home for (getting updates and stuff off of my main server here), it kind of stinks. A lot.
But apart from that (and as far as my mom is concerned), it's plenty quick for wandering around on the web and email and all that stuff:)
Well, I guess it's between destroying it permanently or just making all the miniature electomagnetic fields point the same direction again.:)
Personally, I'd take a nice-sized horseshoe magnet (we have one here for demo's - it will damage CRTs permanently if it gets near them), and have it in one pocket and the iPod in the other. If someone approaches, simply put it in the wrong pocket and you're on your way home, where you can just format it and try again.
It's either that, or glancing up, looking back down, looking back up in disbelief, and yelling 'GHEISTER-STRAUSS!' and run like your life depends on it;)
You gotta remember - the auction won't keep the company alive. They have to sell mass quantities of them at reasonable prices (albeit they may not be as cheap as something like a wal-mart bike), or else they won't bring in enough revenue to stay alive in the market.
As it is with open source, people do stuff because they want to. In general, they don't get paid for their work. So, as a result, the response to people telling them to do something else with their time will be something along the lines of 'I'm doing this because I want to do this; I would be doing that if it's what I wanted to do, but it's not.'
Also, improving OpenGL wouldn't help them in achieving what appears to be their objective - they want to play D3D stuff on non-win32 systems. Or, if not that, to just do it because they could (along with the general 'Hey MS, guess what? I just ported your API to someone else's backend!')
Cringely definitely does deserve his own icon-thingy. Heck, you could even just get him an editor account and let him post it here, for that matter.
However, the thing I like about having it as a story is that there's a fairly large number of people who will comment on it here - there's no (obvious) comment forum on PBS's site, and a lot of the things he says are things that do bring up discussion - how valid the technology is, realism, things having to work in the known universe (for the time being), etc.
As someone else explained above, the aibopet site used to have unencrypted copies of the firmware/os that comes on it. The significance of unencrypted firmware, you ask? Having a copy of someone else's firmware would make it a *lot* easier to make your own Aibo clone.
I think you've just summed up the situation. It's generally not so easy - so many things depend on X to work like X and interoperability with different versions of X (Free86 v3.x, v4.x, Sun's stuff, etc), it's basically asking for the world's biggest headache ever.
I think you're underestimating the intelligence (or, should I say, raw thought power) such an accomplishment takes!
A quick illustration:
My physics professor graduated from MIT with a Ph.D. at the age of 23. He's worked with mathematica for ~2 years now (quite constantly - research on particle physics in plasmas), and hasn't yet been able to figure out any sense in which kind of brackets to use where. Yeah. Needless to say, when we have problems, we just guess until something comes out right;)
It's just a weird situation with all the discussions and flames being out in the open all the time; I guess it to some extent dulls one's sense of keeping certain things between two people. Also, ego tends to have a factor in stuff like this (it's been said that kernel hackers tend to have the egos of small countries; I think small continents would be far for accurate for the comparison;) )
...Rik's repeated attacks on Linus will certainly not move the operating system forward.
Rik was interviewed in order to get insight into how he thinks/sees things, no? So if he doesn't like the way Linus does things, is he not at liberty to say so? (also, see quote below about still having respect for Linus in spite of their disagreements/conflicts)
Rik's behavior really isn't funny... It speaks volumes about Rik's emotional maturity or more accurately his lack thereof.
Rik Say:
With Linus out of the way, I can make a good VM. I no longer have to worry about what Linus likes or doesn't like.... Yes, though I guess I have to add that I have a lot of respect for Linus. He is a very user unfriendly source management system, but he is also very honest about it.
I don't quite think that qualifies as immature - granted, there is a lot of conflict going on, but they still have respect for each other, even if Rik doesn't like to work with him, and there's not really anything showstopping about it. The VM situation wasn't pretty, but it's being resolved.
Slashdot Mirror
(begins downloading all the ISO's he'll ever use before they start charging extra)
From being a bike racer, the main thing that pops up is that K2 is involved in it - they're the guys that developed piezoelectric damping mountain bike forks, which I've heard perform really well. I wouldn't be surprised at all if a lot of the same technology is involved.
;-)
From a physics geek point of view, it sounds like they're using a spiffy inductance circuit attached to the strings to damp the strings (just figure out the harmonic frequency of the string and tune the inductor to counteract it), though I've no idea how the rest of it works.
But very pretty indeed
Well, of course, *they'd* be better off - there'd be more people to pay them to say stuff! The world would definitely suffer, but they'd be happy with themselves until they'd figured out what they'd done :-)
-Echy
(hey, it's easier to replace into conversations that 'Lord Protector', no?)
Did he end up killing kenny in the end?
(sorry, had to say it!)
We actually got ours from Angland, the *other* england :-)
Ours evolved seperately, while india stayed an english colony for a while, and thus was forced to stick with the england-version of english until a lot more recently, so theirs is a lot more similar to what you would expect to hear someone from england itself.
> no offence
Isn't that how the american word 'offense' is spelled in England (which is where India got its english from)?
I wrote todd (http://todd.cx), so speaking from how mine is written, it wouldn't be too hard at all to set it up to have a system where you could just have <area code>.todd.cx point to a bunch of computers in that area code (though you'd have to hope they were telling the truth when they typed in their area code).
:-) They thought of that already.
> Anything to spite qwest!
Qwest runs the main internet backbones you'd have to use for east-coast to west-coast calls
Also, it'd be kind of weird to have the possibility of people picking up the phone in their house only to hear two parties they don't know using their phone - 'daddy, there are people talking about bad things on the phone')
My physics professor/boss was talking about how some of the fusion/fission experiments they run here have to use gigantic flywheels to gradually tap energy off of the power grid for rapid release, and somehow got on the topic of how MIT designed theirs to be safe -
They pointed them so that if the flywheels somehow broke, they'd go straight through the engineering/architecture offices. And the people that designed them, too. Now *that's* pressure.
This really isn't all that new. I'm the computer nerd in my dorm, so every week or two, someone's computer starts acting funny, and I'll have already installed Ad-Aware, and it's just that the spyware has inserted itself into Ad-Aware's ignore list, so it doesn't get touched.
Famous Last Words:
Hey Y'all, Watch This
(really close, but sometimes there's just not a bubba around when you need one)
Isn't that the captain's line?
The speeds to most of the commercial net are still pretty good back home (Atlanta) on AT&T Broadband, with one exception: Internet2.
Before we lost @Home and went to AT&T Broadband, I could regularly get 10-15ms pings to GA Tech, UNC (metalab), and Auburn (here), but since the switch, ping times have gone up to ~200ms on average, and bandwidth was cut from 500 k/s (this was before the cap) to ~20 k/s (with dropped packets and hangs all the time).
So I did a little research, and it now appears that everything going from Internet2 to AT&T Broadband goes through San Fransisco. Even from my house in Atlanta to GA Tech (maybe 5 miles?). Yeah. And since that's what I mainly use my cable modem at home for (getting updates and stuff off of my main server here), it kind of stinks. A lot.
But apart from that (and as far as my mom is concerned), it's plenty quick for wandering around on the web and email and all that stuff
Well, I guess it's between destroying it permanently or just making all the miniature electomagnetic fields point the same direction again. :)
;)
Personally, I'd take a nice-sized horseshoe magnet (we have one here for demo's - it will damage CRTs permanently if it gets near them), and have it in one pocket and the iPod in the other. If someone approaches, simply put it in the wrong pocket and you're on your way home, where you can just format it and try again.
It's either that, or glancing up, looking back down, looking back up in disbelief, and yelling 'GHEISTER-STRAUSS!' and run like your life depends on it
I have a vested interest in proprietary software. It's how I pay for food and stuff.
I make proprietary software for people. They don't want their competition to have the advantage, so they have exclusive rights to the code.
They pay me. I eat.
'nuff said.
> $8000 Segway
You gotta remember - the auction won't keep the company alive. They have to sell mass quantities of them at reasonable prices (albeit they may not be as cheap as something like a wal-mart bike), or else they won't bring in enough revenue to stay alive in the market.
Well, you know how sometimes you look at a story title and only see part of it at first?
'Woody Nearing Release.'
As it is with open source, people do stuff because they want to. In general, they don't get paid for their work. So, as a result, the response to people telling them to do something else with their time will be something along the lines of 'I'm doing this because I want to do this; I would be doing that if it's what I wanted to do, but it's not.'
Also, improving OpenGL wouldn't help them in achieving what appears to be their objective - they want to play D3D stuff on non-win32 systems. Or, if not that, to just do it because they could (along with the general 'Hey MS, guess what? I just ported your API to someone else's backend!')
Cringely definitely does deserve his own icon-thingy. Heck, you could even just get him an editor account and let him post it here, for that matter.
;)
However, the thing I like about having it as a story is that there's a fairly large number of people who will comment on it here - there's no (obvious) comment forum on PBS's site, and a lot of the things he says are things that do bring up discussion - how valid the technology is, realism, things having to work in the known universe (for the time being), etc.
Anyway, yeah, that's my speel for today
As someone else explained above, the aibopet site used to have unencrypted copies of the firmware/os that comes on it. The significance of unencrypted firmware, you ask? Having a copy of someone else's firmware would make it a *lot* easier to make your own Aibo clone.
:)
I'm watching you
> that's easy: design an upgraded protocol
I think you've just summed up the situation. It's generally not so easy - so many things depend on X to work like X and interoperability with different versions of X (Free86 v3.x, v4.x, Sun's stuff, etc), it's basically asking for the world's biggest headache ever.
- Maybe i'll get a phone call from my ISP saying a Denial of Service attack to the Whitehouse site has been detected from my machine.
Well, personally, I think whitehouse.com is a bit overrated, anyway....
(This moment brought to you by the letter upside-down-i)
> This guy might know how to use Mathematica ...
;)
I think you're underestimating the intelligence (or, should I say, raw thought power) such an accomplishment takes!
A quick illustration:
My physics professor graduated from MIT with a Ph.D. at the age of 23. He's worked with mathematica for ~2 years now (quite constantly - research on particle physics in plasmas), and hasn't yet been able to figure out any sense in which kind of brackets to use where. Yeah. Needless to say, when we have problems, we just guess until something comes out right
It is better that way, I agree :)
;) )
It's just a weird situation with all the discussions and flames being out in the open all the time; I guess it to some extent dulls one's sense of keeping certain things between two people. Also, ego tends to have a factor in stuff like this (it's been said that kernel hackers tend to have the egos of small countries; I think small continents would be far for accurate for the comparison
RTI - Read The Interview.
...Rik's repeated attacks on Linus will certainly not move the operating system forward.
... Yes, though I guess I have to add that I have a lot of respect for Linus. He is a very user unfriendly source management system, but he is also very honest about it.
Rik was interviewed in order to get insight into how he thinks/sees things, no? So if he doesn't like the way Linus does things, is he not at liberty to say so? (also, see quote below about still having respect for Linus in spite of their disagreements/conflicts)
Rik's behavior really isn't funny... It speaks volumes about Rik's emotional maturity or more accurately his lack thereof.
Rik Say:
With Linus out of the way, I can make a good VM. I no longer have to worry about what Linus likes or doesn't like.
I don't quite think that qualifies as immature - granted, there is a lot of conflict going on, but they still have respect for each other, even if Rik doesn't like to work with him, and there's not really anything showstopping about it. The VM situation wasn't pretty, but it's being resolved.