True. My Amiga had one in 1986, with 512KB of memory and no HD (booting off a single floppy). I'm sure when Longhorn comes out everyone will be trying copy MicroSoft too.
Thus far, the concept PC is just a piece of plastic, literally, although its design showed a clock display and optical drive in front, with ports such as USB, optical audio and FireWire in the back.
So this is just a concept mockup (no one has actually made a real PC that actually fits the "Mini" form factor). Just more proof that Apple leads, and the others follow (or try). I'd like to see a PC manufacturer actually make this happen with out the thing sounding like a hair dryer.
The OSNews story has a link to a FC2 yum repo in one of the coments, but I haven't found a source repo for those packages (I'm on PPC, so I need to rebuild the packages:().
A good discussion of this appears here. One point made is that the headers to the library may be covered by the GPL, and those headers *are* part of the application code. There was some discussion about releasing the *headers* as public domain, which may release any linked code from the GPL, but at that point you'd be better off releasing the library under LGPL.
I believe that offering the binary for sale (either by itself or as part of a complete system) is considered releasing/distributing the code. What I'm not clear on is whether linking to a GPL library implies that your code must also covered by the GPL (I thought changes/additions to the original code only are subject to the terms of the GPL).
While I'm not so sure about the space plane concept, this is a good history of the research to date. It seems that as speeds increase beyone mach 5-8, thermal management becomes an issue. In most cases, the additional complexity and weight of an active thermal management system renders the current implementations less effective than conventional rocket-based systems.
It seems that the practical physics of the NASP made it impractical. See this for a good history of the NASP. In most cases, the "spaceplane" concept is driven by 1950s science fiction, rather than actual science.
This reminds me of when they were first planning the space shuttle (when it was riding on the back of a 747 for initial testing). It's too bad NASA couldn't bring itself to dump the space plane concept earlier so that we're not waiting another 30 years for a viable replacement.
CPU 533MHz PGA Celeron (The chipset appears to support both FC-PGA and S370) System Chipset Intel 810 Hard Disk 12 GB, 2.5" x 9.5mm HDD RAM 128 MB of 144-pin SDRAM Video Card i810 integrated 3D accelerator with 4MB shared memory. (It's a sibling of the ill-fated i740). I/O Ports
* 6-pin PS/2 Keyboard Port x 1
* 6-pin PS/2 Mouse Port x 1
* 124-pin Expansion Port x 1
* Microphone Port x 1
* Earphone Port x 1
* USB Port x 2
* External VGA Port x 1
TV Output (NTSC/PAL) 4-pin DIN S-Video Output Port Built-in Sound 16-bit Stereo (Sound Blaster / Adlib compatible), Full Duplex 3-D Sound, AC 97 compatible Pointing Device Synaptics TouchPad with left/right click button and scrolling up/down button Physical Dimensions System gross weight around 460g, 150mm (L) x 106mm (W) x 32mm (H) Power Adapter Auto-switching. Input: 100V ~ 240V, 50 ~ 60Hz, 1.1A; Output: 15V DC, 3.0A; weighs 250g.
Humans do not enslave fellow humans because they are functionally, physically, intellectually, and emotionally equivilent to themselves. All arguments for the abolishment of slavery are based on the concept of human rights.
(To over generalize) Humans enslave fellow humans because they have some advantage over them (physical, economical, intellectual, etc.) that they (the enslaved) can not imediately overcome. Ethics (or Morals, depending on your point of view) comes to play when introducing the concept of "rights", as you point out. Even animals (due to ethical/moral concerns within a society) are afforded some form of rights (just because you "own" a cat, you can't do anything you want with it).
If it turns out intelligence doesn't require emotion, we would simply build computers without it. A machine without emotion can't feel resentment.
I don't think that emotions are prequisites for "rights" in our current ethical/moral paradigm.
And if that fails, just equip the machine with the electronic brain equivilent to morphine. A bit that, when set, make the brain "feel good". Give each master of a machine a remote with a purple "operant conditioning" button, and if the computer starts feeling out of sorts, give him/her/it a shot of "juice". Who can stay mad?
If (for whatever philisophical/ethical/moral reason) a machine was afforded rights, then imposing control over them becomes an ethical/moral dilemma.
The bottom line is when does a "thing" gain rights in our ethical/moral framework? Consider the implications if we were talking about biological robots or some other engineered lifeforms. We wouldn't be wondering what to feed them, but rather whether we were (ethically/morally) obligated to feed them or not.
At best these questions are ones of economics. The ethical questions start when the robots begin requesting/demading rights as living beings. If your Roomba wants to leave your house to pursue a career as a Segway (or to clean another person's home), are you ethically/morally obligated to let It?
I'm not sure a bunch of WiFi access points is the same thing as a mesh network. Mesh networks are self-organizing routers that can (dynamically?) route packets directly from node to node. Access points simply are wireless network connections to what every network they are connected to (no routing or packet forwarding).
I suppose you could operate your 802.11b/g APs in adhoc mode, but I'm not sure that provides the required routing for true mesh networking.
While I agree with most of the parent's post, I think BEAM has a lot of promise when it comes to practical robot design. I would compare it to a Roomba before an AIBO (there's a reason the AIBO costs almost $2k). The BEAM concept focuses on developing specific behaviours/mechanisms to achieve specific goals, and evolving them into more complex systems.
The robosapien is less a humaniod "robot" and more of a bug-bot with two legs and and arms. For a street price of $70, that's not too bad. My only grip with the robosapien is that there are only 3 programmable responses (left bumper, right bumper, and sound), even though it has 7 sensors (6 bumpers + the sound sensor). If one could get a different response to backing into things, then one could program more interesting behaviors. Right now I can get him to walk (slooowwwwllly) around a room, backing up and turning when bumping into objects. It's still a toy, and my 2- and 4-year-olds like to dance with it and make it move around.
Besides being a crutch, a calculator in a math class keeps students from learning how to *estimate* what the answer should be (if, in fact there actually is a numerical answer to the particular question). Symbolic math came about because we needed a way to solve complex problems in general. When asked for an actual numerical result, students should be able to use appropriate bounds, precision, and approximation to check thier answers, not a calculator.
Break out the calculator for a numerical methods class, or for physics, but not for math. I took a class a while back that spent 6 weeks on Monte Carlo methods (not all are created equal -- importance sampling is a case-in-point), and Octave/Matlab was essential, but when asked to estimate the error/variance of the outcome, I needed to rely on good-old probability theory.
This is a good point. What's to stop people from sending their cars (without driver) to pick someone up somewhere. I can see it now, driver dummies to trick the car into thinking there's a responsible adult in the car!
The newer roombas (Discover, et.al.) do a pretty good job of doing multiple rooms, and have a somewhat larger dust bin over the original units.. I'm not sure how much dust/dirt you expect to get out of each room, but if you run it at least weekly it should be able to handle the load.
We run ours every night after dinner (we have two children under age 5, so we need to sweep up the debris every night to keep any critters at bay), and the thing does our entire 1st floor (about 4 12x15 foot rooms, all hardwoods -- carpets take more time/power) in about an hour. The older batteries used to last about 6-8 months before loosing about half their capacity, but iRobot is supposed to have a "new" battery that will last twice as long.
The maintenace was an issue on the earlier models, though. The brass bushings/bearings on the counter-rotating brushes would get fouled with hair/dust, and eventually start heating up. If they weren't cleared at least weekly, they would heat up so much that the plastic bracket holding the bushings would melt, and the brushes would eventually not engage the unit's drive socket.
The newer roombas have a much better design, and can be cleaned more easily (i.e. without a needing a screwdriver), and they seek the recharging base when they are low on power.
Once again, it seems that the/. editors listed a mostly political story under "science". Just the volume of responses alone should indicate that this is really a political issue (I think the only topic that gets as much response would be an apple story).
It seems that some of the biggest obstacles to these alternatives are political. The proposed wind farm in Nantucket Sound, for instance, has to deal with powerful senators who have waterfront property on Nantucket Island.
I would imagine that, because US laws only apply to people within the US, it would be harder to track DDoS'ers as well as prosecute any individuals responsible.
Slashdot Mirror
These are getting old.
For $2500:
Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5
1GHz frontside
bus/processor
512K L2 cache/processor
512MB DDR400 SDRAM
Expandable to 8GB SDRAM
160GB Serial ATA
8x SuperDrive
Three PCI-X Slots
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
64MB DDR video memory
56K internal modem
Can you even get a dual-processor Athlon64 motherboard with SATA and PCI-X slots?
True. My Amiga had one in 1986, with 512KB of memory and no HD (booting off a single floppy). I'm sure when Longhorn comes out everyone will be trying copy MicroSoft too.
LoL. Ha, ha. oh that's funny...
from the article:
Thus far, the concept PC is just a piece of plastic, literally, although its design showed a clock display and optical drive in front, with ports such as USB, optical audio and FireWire in the back.
So this is just a concept mockup (no one has actually made a real PC that actually fits the "Mini" form factor). Just more proof that Apple leads, and the others follow (or try). I'd like to see a PC manufacturer actually make this happen with out the thing sounding like a hair dryer.
The OSNews story has a link to a FC2 yum repo in one of the coments, but I haven't found a source repo for those packages (I'm on PPC, so I need to rebuild the packages :().
A good discussion of this appears here. One point made is that the headers to the library may be covered by the GPL, and those headers *are* part of the application code. There was some discussion about releasing the *headers* as public domain, which may release any linked code from the GPL, but at that point you'd be better off releasing the library under LGPL.
I believe that offering the binary for sale (either by itself or as part of a complete system) is considered releasing/distributing the code. What I'm not clear on is whether linking to a GPL library implies that your code must also covered by the GPL (I thought changes/additions to the original code only are subject to the terms of the GPL).
While I'm not so sure about the space plane concept, this is a good history of the research to date. It seems that as speeds increase beyone mach 5-8, thermal management becomes an issue. In most cases, the additional complexity and weight of an active thermal management system renders the current implementations less effective than conventional rocket-based systems.
It seems that the practical physics of the NASP made it impractical. See this for a good history of the NASP. In most cases, the "spaceplane" concept is driven by 1950s science fiction, rather than actual science.
This reminds me of when they were first planning the space shuttle (when it was riding on the back of a 747 for initial testing). It's too bad NASA couldn't bring itself to dump the space plane concept earlier so that we're not waiting another 30 years for a viable replacement.
...and the specs show it:
CPU 533MHz PGA Celeron (The chipset appears to support both FC-PGA and S370)
System Chipset Intel 810
Hard Disk 12 GB, 2.5" x 9.5mm HDD
RAM 128 MB of 144-pin SDRAM
Video Card i810 integrated 3D accelerator with 4MB shared memory. (It's a sibling of the ill-fated i740).
I/O Ports
* 6-pin PS/2 Keyboard Port x 1
* 6-pin PS/2 Mouse Port x 1
* 124-pin Expansion Port x 1
* Microphone Port x 1
* Earphone Port x 1
* USB Port x 2
* External VGA Port x 1
TV Output (NTSC/PAL) 4-pin DIN S-Video Output Port
Built-in Sound 16-bit Stereo (Sound Blaster / Adlib compatible), Full Duplex 3-D Sound, AC 97 compatible
Pointing Device Synaptics TouchPad with left/right click button and scrolling up/down button
Physical Dimensions System gross weight around 460g, 150mm (L) x 106mm (W) x 32mm (H)
Power Adapter Auto-switching. Input: 100V ~ 240V, 50 ~ 60Hz, 1.1A; Output: 15V DC, 3.0A; weighs 250g.
I don't think that emotions are prequisites for "rights" in our current ethical/moral paradigm.
If (for whatever philisophical/ethical/moral reason) a machine was afforded rights, then imposing control over them becomes an ethical/moral dilemma.
The bottom line is when does a "thing" gain rights in our ethical/moral framework? Consider the implications if we were talking about biological robots or some other engineered lifeforms. We wouldn't be wondering what to feed them, but rather whether we were (ethically/morally) obligated to feed them or not.
At best these questions are ones of economics. The ethical questions start when the robots begin requesting/demading rights as living beings. If your Roomba wants to leave your house to pursue a career as a Segway (or to clean another person's home), are you ethically/morally obligated to let It?
I'm not sure a bunch of WiFi access points is the same thing as a mesh network. Mesh networks are self-organizing routers that can (dynamically?) route packets directly from node to node. Access points simply are wireless network connections to what every network they are connected to (no routing or packet forwarding).
I suppose you could operate your 802.11b/g APs in adhoc mode, but I'm not sure that provides the required routing for true mesh networking.
Am I reading the website correctly? I see each audio "Zone Player" costs $500? Isn't that a bit pricy, considering you'd want one in several rooms?
While I agree with most of the parent's post, I think BEAM has a lot of promise when it comes to practical robot design. I would compare it to a Roomba before an AIBO (there's a reason the AIBO costs almost $2k). The BEAM concept focuses on developing specific behaviours/mechanisms to achieve specific goals, and evolving them into more complex systems.
The robosapien is less a humaniod "robot" and more of a bug-bot with two legs and and arms. For a street price of $70, that's not too bad. My only grip with the robosapien is that there are only 3 programmable responses (left bumper, right bumper, and sound), even though it has 7 sensors (6 bumpers + the sound sensor). If one could get a different response to backing into things, then one could program more interesting behaviors. Right now I can get him to walk (slooowwwwllly) around a room, backing up and turning when bumping into objects. It's still a toy, and my 2- and 4-year-olds like to dance with it and make it move around.
Besides being a crutch, a calculator in a math class keeps students from learning how to *estimate* what the answer should be (if, in fact there actually is a numerical answer to the particular question). Symbolic math came about because we needed a way to solve complex problems in general. When asked for an actual numerical result, students should be able to use appropriate bounds, precision, and approximation to check thier answers, not a calculator.
Break out the calculator for a numerical methods class, or for physics, but not for math. I took a class a while back that spent 6 weeks on Monte Carlo methods (not all are created equal -- importance sampling is a case-in-point), and Octave/Matlab was essential, but when asked to estimate the error/variance of the outcome, I needed to rely on good-old probability theory.
Underwater Mines, for one.
But the Vehicle used by the NUWC people is a REMUS, from th Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), which does all sorts of oceanographic monitoring.
This is a good point. What's to stop people from sending their cars (without driver) to pick someone up somewhere. I can see it now, driver dummies to trick the car into thinking there's a responsible adult in the car!
"...saving us about two hours per working day."
An hour commute? Man, I thought my 2.5 mile/10 minute commute was unbearable.
Think globally, work locally.
The newer roombas (Discover, et.al.) do a pretty good job of doing multiple rooms, and have a somewhat larger dust bin over the original units.. I'm not sure how much dust/dirt you expect to get out of each room, but if you run it at least weekly it should be able to handle the load.
We run ours every night after dinner (we have two children under age 5, so we need to sweep up the debris every night to keep any critters at bay), and the thing does our entire 1st floor (about 4 12x15 foot rooms, all hardwoods -- carpets take more time/power) in about an hour. The older batteries used to last about 6-8 months before loosing about half their capacity, but iRobot is supposed to have a "new" battery that will last twice as long.
The maintenace was an issue on the earlier models, though. The brass bushings/bearings on the counter-rotating brushes would get fouled with hair/dust, and eventually start heating up. If they weren't cleared at least weekly, they would heat up so much that the plastic bracket holding the bushings would melt, and the brushes would eventually not engage the unit's drive socket.
The newer roombas have a much better design, and can be cleaned more easily (i.e. without a needing a screwdriver), and they seek the recharging base when they are low on power.
Let me see... about 3 days after I got my new Gateway Laptop. I was running stuff that hasn't crashed my WinNT Box for years, then *poof*.
Can anyone comment on the level of Firewire support in FC3? I tried to get FW working with FC2, but eventually gave up...
Once again, it seems that the /. editors listed a mostly political story under "science". Just the volume of responses alone should indicate that this is really a political issue (I think the only topic that gets as much response would be an apple story).
It seems that some of the biggest obstacles to these alternatives are political. The proposed wind farm in Nantucket Sound, for instance, has to deal with powerful senators who have waterfront property on Nantucket Island.
I would imagine that, because US laws only apply to people within the US, it would be harder to track DDoS'ers as well as prosecute any individuals responsible.