I'm not sure where you found it, but that is significantly out of date.
It was a November news item, and the report I wrote (which I copied, pasted, formatted, and link-verified above) was written in January. Note that I do comment on the seeming lack of removed materials just below that headline.
Actually it is a rather secure copy-protection mechanism.
Back doors that were left open in the first AIBO 210 release have been closed. Copy protection is important to Sony.
Ah. I was working with an ERS-210.
Since AIBO understands voice commands, the Japanese sticks must be translated to understand English.
I was under the terribly-odd impression that Japanese sticks couldn't be used in U.S. retail models. Am I perhaps thinking of something that only applies to AiboLife?
The problem is not the CPU, but all the custom peripherals.
In our case (we were trying to make a webserver that barks), the electronics between the memory stick slot and the CPU were far more interesting than the rest of the him ("Pheonix", in case you were curious).
Most of Aibo's brain is written in C++.
Couldn't comment on that, but what people commonly think of as Aibo's brain--AiboLife--is an R-Code product.
Check out AbNet (http://www.dogsbodynet.com/aibnet.html) if interested in writing your own RCODE. There are tools to make RCODE easier to write (and more like C/C++)
They are quite nice tools. It was going to be my summer project to write a cross-compiler for x86 machine code to R-Code. It was going to be terribly hackish, but I thought it would be neat.
... that I found in January when I was researching this for a professor:
Site Gutted by Sony based on DMCA My Take: This site is great. I think this is exactly what we need. The only thing that really got removed per the story referenced below is "virgin" copies of Aibo-Life, because everything you could possibly want, and more, is available, including "RCodePlus", which appears to be a utility for writing and transferring RCode ("Plus" some aibohack.com extensions) to your Aibo.
Summary: http://www.aibohack.com had much of its content removed because it built on Sony's AiboWare, but added new features. Among its programs: AiboScope: Wirelessly transmits images from robot's camera to a computer Disco Aibo: Execute a programmable dance when Aibo hears a certain song. Brainbo: Uses voice-recognition. When Aibo hears a phrase, Aibo selects an appropriate response and "says" it.
AIBO Uses Copy-Protection on its Memory Sticks My Take: While it would probably be trivial to overcome Sony's copy-protection algorithms, it's not worth the bother. $35 for a PMS (Programmable Memory Stick) is money well spent, and if all the code consists of is bootstrapping into the WLAN, we'd only need one for each 'bot.
Summary: Sony makes red/pink memory sticks specifically for the Aibo. They contain copy-protection code that means that you can't copy their programs from one stick to another (unless, of course, the second one already had that program installed).
Japan-Only AiboWare Releases My Take: Nothing new here.
Summary: Sony released several pieces of AiboWare that are only available in Japan. Based on what a friend of mine could manage to decode, there's nothing here to pique our interest.
More-or-less Complete 210 Hardware Reference My Take: Note that the 200Mhz (!) CPU uses the MIPS IV instruction set, for which there are no shortage of compilers. We may be in luck yet! (Of course, we might have to replace the current flash ROM with a custom one to develop that luck, but based on other readings, there seems to be very little code in the flash ROM and a heck of a lot of JPEGs of the development team.) You want to read this page.
Brain Surgery: a Tool for Editing AiboLife My Take: An excellent tool, but not very applicable to our particular challenge. Nonetheless, a useful resource of which to be aware.
Summary: Basically, Brain Surgery allows users to view and edit the data Aibo "feels". What does this mean? You can abuse your Aibo, and fix it yourself--no Sony required.
First of all, the Aibo is programmed in something called "R-Code", part of the "Open-R" standard. The odd thing about this is that Open-R gets licensed to other companies for a fee, and the documentation is not available. Not so sure where the "Open" came from. At any rate, R-Code is a poor imitation of assembly language that is interpreted in real time by the Aibo. Only one program, Sony's Master Studio, is capable of producing R-Code through anything other than editing the R-Code directly.
One of the interesting things about Sony's marketing strategy is that they intended changes you made to the Aibo to be well-nigh permanent. The idea was to get people to send in their Aibos if they didn't take proper care of the little beasties, charge an exorbitant fee for resetting them to the "newborn" state, and send them back. It apparently surprised Sony quite a bit that, when they released Aibo in the U.S., people started clamoring for a tool to allow them to do these resets themselves. It apparently surprised them even more that U.S. consumers wanted a way to bypass the entire, carefully-scripted AiboLife evolution and go straight to an Aibo adult.
In general, U.S. owners wanted to hack their Aibos, Japanese owners wanted to watch their Aibos grow.
On another terribly-interesting note: Brain Surgery allows you to see the internal phonemes for the name you gave your Aibo. This has come in handy at least once when I was trying to determine how I was saying a command incorrectly.
Actually, the instructions won't be stored on the AIBO in machine code. Instead, they'll be stored in "R-Code", a seldom-documented, bastardized form of assembly language that is interpreted in real time by the AIBO.
To get an idea how this works, write a program for the AIBO in Aibo Master Studio ($500 from Sony).
I've been working with a professor for a number of months now trying to reverse-engineer this puppy (pun intended), and I assure you that the Sony engineers responsible for it are both brilliant and incredibly averse to writing documentation.
With up2date, how much longer can RedHat release CDs?
It has been our policy at work for some time now to grab whatever the latest release is, run up2date on it, and modify a CD image of the old CD so it has the new RPMs.
or use one of those key rings with an LED that flashes when your GSM phone is active
It disturbs me deeply that such a thing apparently exists. Is it really that much trouble to check your phone to determine service availability? I mean, if you've got a phone that's jumping out of contact so often you're afraid you'll miss calls, you probably need a new phone or a new location. And in many cases where such a thing would happen (i.e., driving down the highway), there's nothing you can do about it.
And as far as the digital computer part goes, the work at Bletchley Park gets too little praise, because it was conducted during World War II under conditions of extreme secrecy. They did, however, use a computer to crack the "unbreakable" Enigma code, enabling many victories for the Allies.
They're running low on funding, by the way, and it's a great museum--you should consider helping.
"I would hate to think we could reach a point that, whenever a dialog box comes up and says, 'Do you want to do this,' bells go off and people become worried." --Robert Regular, vice president of sales and marketing at digital advertising firm Cydoor.
God forbid, people actually check what it does before clicking yes.
Walk into the room with a CD-R for every student with RedHat burned on there (or your favorite distro, whatever). Explain you've given them a 100% legal copy of this operating system that they are free to use in almost any way they can imagine, and that you downloaded it ten minutes ago from the company's website.
It'll not only blow some minds, but they may also go home and actually use the discs.
What a lot of the Yankees don't understand is that what with the per-minute charges for local calls, you really get screwed over by analog modem service. This is going to be huge in the circles I frequent. Finally, a cheap way to connect to bnetd servers overseas, without feeling guilty or using an egg timer to watch your costs!
It's worth noting that the LOC also archives video and audio, which, depending on the sample rate if they're stored in analog, could theoretically encompass infinite data.
Also, they're probably assuming 8-bit bytes for character representation. Why not 6-bit bytes (1950-1960's) or even Unicode 2-byte characters?
Actually, you have to email ussales@cray.com. Here's a recent email I received from them regarding prices:
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 12:51:56 -0600 From: Cathy Wells Subject: Re: Prices To: Dan Reif Organization: Cray Inc. X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.79 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U) X-Cray-VirusStatus: clean
The Cray SV-1 vector supercomputer is the current production product for vector types of application problems and most legacy Cray scientific and engineering applications. A 32 processor SV-1 with 32 megabytes of shared main memory would have a list price over $3M depending on the configuration and peripherals required.
The Cray T3E massively parallel supercomputer continues to be the world record holder for the fastest sustained performance on a real world application. These systems can scale to over 2000 processors. An entry level configuration for the Cray T3E might start at approximately $2M with a 1000 processor system listing at over $30M depending on the configuration.
The MTA-2 will be available 3Q 2001. It will be an all CMOS machine--much simpler to manufacture than the all GaS system at SDSC. The MTA-2 will have between 16 - 256 processors and 64 - 1024 GBytes of shared memory. We plan to build the MTA-2 in 16P cages. A case, or stack as we're calling it, will house 4 cages. The case will be approximately 3 ft wide, 5 ft deep, and 7 ft tall. It will weigh a few thousand pounds.
Yes. In fact, I love in Norman, Oklahoma, and we have several Crays hard at work on weather prediction and modeling. The National Severe Storms Laboratory houses several, as does Sarkey's Energy Center. Specifically, Sarkey's has a very nice Cray J-90 that I get to play with.;)
Actually, what they do is input test parameters from before previous weapons explosions, run the simulation, and compare the results to the actual data. A system is considered to have "passed" when it is fed a set of data to which its programmers did not have access and spits out the correct results.
Priority 1: World Peace. Priority 2: Reducing or eliminating the need for physical testing of nuclear warheads, an important part (for the time being, at least) of maintaing the U.S.'s nuclear deterrent to war. ASCI White does this. Priority 3: Provide for world happiness--this includes your proposal.
See my point? If people have energy, but are DEAD, they don't tend to enjoy the fact that they have the energy.
"Oh, by the way, there's this little F00F bug in those chips, but the average user won't run into it for years and years."
Jouster
Re:JPEG does have a lossless mode
on
JPEG2000 Coming Soon
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The Joint Picture Experts Group has a very nice applet available to demonstrate this, but they put it in a ZIP file for some reason, so you can't directly execute it in the browser. I have posted the applet here, with a slight modification to use an image borrowed from CmdrTaco's really crappy movie.
Actually, they use a lossy wavelet compression multiple times, until they've produced a perfect image.
The JPEG has a very nice applet which explains everything, but it is unfortunately stuck inside a ZIP file (why do you make an applet, then put it in a ZIP?). At any rate, I've posted a working copy here.
Granted, this works, but it's breaking the rules, so to speak. We are using physical analogies, and one cannot--without breaking the continuity of one or the other--wrap a rubber band around the outside ring of a donut. (Ignore momentarily that one could conceivably do this prior to cooking.:>)
Slashdot Mirror
yet it's the same story as Emacs. Thanks anyway, boys, a line editor works fine for me.
Jouster
Ah. I was working with an ERS-210.
I was under the terribly-odd impression that Japanese sticks couldn't be used in U.S. retail models. Am I perhaps thinking of something that only applies to AiboLife?
In our case (we were trying to make a webserver that barks), the electronics between the memory stick slot and the CPU were far more interesting than the rest of the him ("Pheonix", in case you were curious).
Couldn't comment on that, but what people commonly think of as Aibo's brain--AiboLife--is an R-Code product.
They are quite nice tools. It was going to be my summer project to write a cross-compiler for x86 machine code to R-Code. It was going to be terribly hackish, but I thought it would be neat.
Jouster
My Take:
This site is great. I think this is exactly what we need. The only thing that really got removed per the story referenced below is "virgin" copies of Aibo-Life, because everything you could possibly want, and more, is available, including "RCodePlus", which appears to be a utility for writing and transferring RCode ("Plus" some aibohack.com extensions) to your Aibo.
Summary:
http://www.aibohack.com had much of its content removed because it built on Sony's AiboWare, but added new features.
Among its programs:
AiboScope: Wirelessly transmits images from robot's camera to a computer
Disco Aibo: Execute a programmable dance when Aibo hears a certain song.
Brainbo: Uses voice-recognition. When Aibo hears a phrase, Aibo selects an appropriate response and "says" it.
Source: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-000086726nov01
http://www.latimes.com/search/lat_all.jsp?Query=A
My Take:
While it would probably be trivial to overcome Sony's copy-protection algorithms, it's not worth the bother. $35 for a PMS (Programmable Memory Stick) is money well spent, and if all the code consists of is bootstrapping into the WLAN, we'd only need one for each 'bot.
Summary:
Sony makes red/pink memory sticks specifically for the Aibo. They contain copy-protection code that means that you can't copy their programs from one stick to another (unless, of course, the second one already had that program installed).
Source: http://www.aibohack.com/123/format.htm
My Take:
Nothing new here.
Summary:
Sony released several pieces of AiboWare that are only available in Japan. Based on what a friend of mine could manage to decode, there's nothing here to pique our interest.
Source: http://www.yk.rim.or.jp/~hkora11/aibo_2nd-g/kAibo
My Take:
Note that the 200Mhz (!) CPU uses the MIPS IV instruction set, for which there are no shortage of compilers. We may be in luck yet! (Of course, we might have to replace the current flash ROM with a custom one to develop that luck, but based on other readings, there seems to be very little code in the flash ROM and a heck of a lot of JPEGs of the development team.) You want to read this page.
Source: http://www.aibohack.com/210/hardware.htm
My Take:
An excellent tool, but not very applicable to our particular challenge. Nonetheless, a useful resource of which to be aware.
Summary:
Basically, Brain Surgery allows users to view and edit the data Aibo "feels". What does this mean? You can abuse your Aibo, and fix it yourself--no Sony required.
Source: http://www.aibohack.com/2or3/browser.htm
Now, some explanations are in order.
First of all, the Aibo is programmed in something called "R-Code", part of the "Open-R" standard. The odd thing about this is that Open-R gets licensed to other companies for a fee, and the documentation is not available. Not so sure where the "Open" came from. At any rate, R-Code is a poor imitation of assembly language that is interpreted in real time by the Aibo. Only one program, Sony's Master Studio, is capable of producing R-Code through anything other than editing the R-Code directly.
One of the interesting things about Sony's marketing strategy is that they intended changes you made to the Aibo to be well-nigh permanent. The idea was to get people to send in their Aibos if they didn't take proper care of the little beasties, charge an exorbitant fee for resetting them to the "newborn" state, and send them back. It apparently surprised Sony quite a bit that, when they released Aibo in the U.S., people started clamoring for a tool to allow them to do these resets themselves. It apparently surprised them even more that U.S. consumers wanted a way to bypass the entire, carefully-scripted AiboLife evolution and go straight to an Aibo adult.
In general, U.S. owners wanted to hack their Aibos, Japanese owners wanted to watch their Aibos grow.
On another terribly-interesting note: Brain Surgery allows you to see the internal phonemes for the name you gave your Aibo. This has come in handy at least once when I was trying to determine how I was saying a command incorrectly.
Jouster
Actually, the instructions won't be stored on the AIBO in machine code. Instead, they'll be stored in "R-Code", a seldom-documented, bastardized form of assembly language that is interpreted in real time by the AIBO.
To get an idea how this works, write a program for the AIBO in Aibo Master Studio ($500 from Sony).
I've been working with a professor for a number of months now trying to reverse-engineer this puppy (pun intended), and I assure you that the Sony engineers responsible for it are both brilliant and incredibly averse to writing documentation.
Jouster
If you do just a "standard" (workstation) install, you only need Disc 1.
If I remember correctly, server installs require more than that.
Personally, I just get Disc 1, and use rpmfind.net whenever I need a given server.
Jouster
With up2date, how much longer can RedHat release CDs?
It has been our policy at work for some time now to grab whatever the latest release is, run up2date on it, and modify a CD image of the old CD so it has the new RPMs.
Is this prevalent? Will it become more so?
Jouster
Penguins at the North Pole! It's about time we counteracted the mass of all those penguins sitting in Antarctica, screwing up our moment of inertia!
Jouster
Jouster
Jouster
Gadget gratia Geekus
Jouster
And as far as the digital computer part goes, the work at Bletchley Park gets too little praise, because it was conducted during World War II under conditions of extreme secrecy. They did, however, use a computer to crack the "unbreakable" Enigma code, enabling many victories for the Allies.
They're running low on funding, by the way, and it's a great museum--you should consider helping.
Jouster
God forbid, people actually check what it does before clicking yes.
Jouster
...exactly why Anonymous Coward has a valid email address?
Jouster
Walk into the room with a CD-R for every student with RedHat burned on there (or your favorite distro, whatever). Explain you've given them a 100% legal copy of this operating system that they are free to use in almost any way they can imagine, and that you downloaded it ten minutes ago from the company's website.
It'll not only blow some minds, but they may also go home and actually use the discs.
Jouster
What a lot of the Yankees don't understand is that what with the per-minute charges for local calls, you really get screwed over by analog modem service. This is going to be huge in the circles I frequent. Finally, a cheap way to connect to bnetd servers overseas, without feeling guilty or using an egg timer to watch your costs!
Jouster
I've got a few interesting links related to this story in my journal.
Jouster
It's worth noting that the LOC also archives video and audio, which, depending on the sample rate if they're stored in analog, could theoretically encompass infinite data.
Also, they're probably assuming 8-bit bytes for character representation. Why not 6-bit bytes (1950-1960's) or even Unicode 2-byte characters?
Jouster
Yes. In fact, I love in Norman, Oklahoma, and we have several Crays hard at work on weather prediction and modeling. The National Severe Storms Laboratory houses several, as does Sarkey's Energy Center. Specifically, Sarkey's has a very nice Cray J-90 that I get to play with. ;)
Jouster
Actually, what they do is input test parameters from before previous weapons explosions, run the simulation, and compare the results to the actual data. A system is considered to have "passed" when it is fed a set of data to which its programmers did not have access and spits out the correct results.
Jouster
Priority 1: World Peace.
Priority 2: Reducing or eliminating the need for physical testing of nuclear warheads, an important part (for the time being, at least) of maintaing the U.S.'s nuclear deterrent to war. ASCI White does this.
Priority 3: Provide for world happiness--this includes your proposal.
See my point? If people have energy, but are DEAD, they don't tend to enjoy the fact that they have the energy.
Jouster
"Oh, by the way, there's this little F00F bug in those chips, but the average user won't run into it for years and years."
Jouster
The Joint Picture Experts Group has a very nice applet available to demonstrate this, but they put it in a ZIP file for some reason, so you can't directly execute it in the browser. I have posted the applet here, with a slight modification to use an image borrowed from CmdrTaco's really crappy movie.
Enjoy!,
Jouster
Actually, they use a lossy wavelet compression multiple times, until they've produced a perfect image.
The JPEG has a very nice applet which explains everything, but it is unfortunately stuck inside a ZIP file (why do you make an applet, then put it in a ZIP?). At any rate, I've posted a working copy here.
Enjoy!,
Jouster
Granted, this works, but it's breaking the rules, so to speak. We are using physical analogies, and one cannot--without breaking the continuity of one or the other--wrap a rubber band around the outside ring of a donut. (Ignore momentarily that one could conceivably do this prior to cooking. :>)
Jouster