Robert Heinlein had something to say about national ID cards: "When the local governments expect you to start carrying identification,it's time to get off the planet."
Unfortunately, getting off the planet doesn't seem to be an option for the forseeable future.
"When Mozilla copylefts SAMPLE code, the only way to avoid the risk to corporate intellectual property is to use cleanroom reverse engineering procedures.
This is quite expensive. Just use a BSD compatible license and you do the entire world a favor. If you want commercial software developers to be able to read and help you improve your code, give us a license that dosen't kill our employers."
Look, if Microsoft wants to stea^H^H^H^Huse Mozilla code in IE 7 or whatever, you can just come out and say it.
"What a piece of shit license. The free license is only for non-comercial use."
That's because Intel makes good money selling its compiler as an MSVC++ plugin. Be glad that they are offering what is by far the best IA32 compiler as a free Linux program. Anyway, to my knowledge you can't get the Windows version for free, even for non-commercial use.
Actually, I've got a Sony TRV-17 camcorder right here. It has a memory stick slot that can be used for still pictures and for recording MPEG-2 videos to. That's right, it records MPEG-2 on the fly. Admittedly the movie quality is only as good as the stills (about 640x480), but it can record them. As such, it'd be great to have a high-capacity medium for them, as even a 128MB memory stick won't allow for a very long recording.
Well, the win2k drivers for the G400's have big problems with dual processor systems. That's probably the problem.
For instance, when Black and White came out, a lot of dual-processor-having-folks (such as me) swamped the Matrox message boards with complaints about missing textures, texture corruption, and crashes. After a while, they admitted that the drivers are quite buggy when used in an SMP machine (and an OS that supports it).
I'm not sure if the Xfree86 G400 drivers have the same problem exactly, but maybe they do. I don't have tribes2 on my machine, although I do reccommend Loki's other titles. SMAC, particularly, is quite good.
I'm not too sure. You claim that it doesn't offer compatibility. Well, the thing is, through the magic of import/export filters and Linux's ability to read many kinds of filesystems (including Mac and Windows fs's), KOffice can provide the same compatibility as OpenOffice.
And since KDE is a Unix desktop environment, it can provide compatibility not only between office suites (i.e., Office and Office for Mac as well as WordPerfect, OpenOffice, and GNOME Office) but also between platforms (i.e., anything that KDE runs on). So, I consider your comments to be utterly unfounded. And as far as "wasted effort" goes, well, TMTOWTDI.
"Perhaps I've been poorly misinformed, but don't rocket launches release a shitload of ozone-depleting chemicals?"
Depends on the rocket in question. If, like the space shuttle, they use liquid oxygen and hydrogen for their main thrusters, no, that's not a problem. Unless you hate water.
If they use methane (CH4) and liquid oxygen, that's still not a problem, since that (like all hydrocarbon combustion reactions) just produces CO2, CO, and water--none of which are actually "ozone-depleting chemicals."
If they use solid rocket boosters, that might be a problem, but I'm pretty sure that none of the Russian heavy-lifters use solid rockets, and of the liquid fuels liquid oxygen/hydrogen and liquid oxygen/methane are the most common.
(oh, and 'poorly misinformed' is a bit of a, well, it's probably not what you meant to say, I'll leave it at that:)
The reason the Wince devices are finally catching up is that handheld technology has reached a point where Palm's philosophy of (relatively) cheap and simple is no longer necessary. Handhelds can have large storage, hi-res color graphics, accessory ports and the like and still have good battery life and be (again, relatively) cheap and useful.
Many people have often pointed out that MS rarely gets anything right on the first try. But by the 3rd iteration or so, the competetion is in trouble. Look at Office, DirectX, and Windows itself. The Wince devices are entering their 3rd generation but Palm's are just now getting past their early limitations (storage space, expandability, and screen resolution being the major sticking points).
Like 'Taco said, the next Clie and similar Palm devices are Palm's 'last, best hope' for keeping their dominant market position.
(Working harder on cooperating with Handspring probably wouldn't hurt....)
I'll tell you why you (well, maybe not you, but some people) might like this very much, in fact. 1.3GB is about the point where a DivX (re)encoded DVD becomes (for most people) better than VHS quality. Normally, such movies are burned to two CDs, but you have to swap CDs in the middle of the movie. With this technology, you could very easily backup your DVD collection (or put your VHS tapes on digital media for portable viewing! (if they make a portable model)). Since the cheapest true DVD-Rs still cost something like a $1000, this is a very cheap alternative.
Also, I have many friends with multi-GB mp3 collections. Backing up their collections takes all day, literally. With a 1.3GB disc, it would only take half that time, not entirely unuseful.
And what about those home movies that you made with your spiffy new digital camera? Wanna have them recorded at full quality but don't have the hard drive space to keep them all at once? No problem...you can still view them easily on your computer and have them neatly indexed, just store them on a few DD-RW, or whatever the official name is.
So, yeah, I can see where this could be pretty dang useful for a lot of people.
Learn to not take things out of context. What he said was:
"This code is of course the source that runs Slashdot, however 2.0 is far more advanced then the code you see here, to say nothing of utterly embarassing any other weblog software available for free, and written by us, and codenamed after a cartoon." (emphasis mine)
Geez. Used to be we had trouble with people not reading the articles now they don't even read the damn post.
Two things:
You require 1GHz CPUs. The GHz mobile P3 isn't even out yet (although it will be soon). A few (reckless) notebook makers have begun putting desktop P3s in, but they're very hot. 2 would be unmanageable.
I can only assume that battery power is a non-issue. Otherwise, the battery life would be like an hour, tops. Especially if you go the do it yourself route. As such, I'd suggest doing the 1U rack thing and just don't worry about battery stuff.
Actually, it just shows that even if they don't know how to configure Unix that Linux is much better configured out of the box than the Solaris (or SunOS, depending on which version they used). Still a win for Linux, if not as great a win. And they didn't say what speed the four processors were or how much RAM it had relative to the pentium or the disk drive configuration etc, etc.
1) Tribes2 is not old at all. This is a long-planned near-simultaneous release. The Windows version came out like a week ago.
2) What software is available for Linux? Well, there's WordPerfect Office 2000 and Oracle 8i, to name a couple of fairly heavy-duty apps. Also, IBM DB2 and ViaVoice. Then of course there are the thousands of 'minor' applications like Blender and the GIMP. True, none of those are the 'heavyweight' office automation package (I assume you mean MS Office), but they are some pretty major applications.
Another way of looking at this is that it would be better for Linux to have -some- high-visibility apps than none, even if they are a little older.
One of the coolest things that can be done with Progeny is upgrade straight to "real" debian, since Progeny is (AFAIK/can tell) completely debian compatible. A simple sources.list edit and a somewhat lengthy apt-get update/upgrade later and bang! regular debian, with the benefit of a really keen graphical installer and a lot of the major packages already installed.
Even so, Progeny itself is quite cool, especially the commercial support aspects. Hopefully they can succeed where (in some sense) Storm Linux failed.
(interesting test of the strength of the apt/dpkg system: switch from progeny to unstable to stable and all the way back and see if stuff still works stably....)
A minor, even offtopic point...CS is far from dead. More people play CS today than UT and Q3A combined. According to gamespy stats, anyway.
True, it may suck a bit more, but it's far far from dead.
Two points. The Crusoe uses a VLIW instruction set, not RISC. Also, Torvalds himself has said that things do not run much faster in 'native mode,' and not releasing anything in 'native mode' allows them to change the chip's internal structure without breaking compatability, which is something I'll bet Intel and/or AMD would love to be able to do freely.
And the really funny thing is, HAL stands for 'hardware abstraction layer,' not 'hardware application layer.' I guess either Ballmer goofed or 'most people at Microsoft' think wrong. Maybe both.:)
Something that I think a lot of people are missing is the difference between randomness and unpredictability. A computer can generate random numbers (digits of pi satisfy all known tests for randomness quite handily) easily. What it cannot do is generate unpredictable or chaotic numbers (because all pseudo-random number generators use a seed, and the seed will always give the same sequence).
All is not lost, however. Quantum mechanics, for instance, (if you believe it) shows that the randomness behind subatomic particle motion (like electrons in their orbits) and the like demonstrates a sort of 'deep cosmic chaos.' Thus, for instance, the decay of radioactive stuff is truly unpredictable, so it's not impossible to come up with numbers that are both random and unpredictable.
Although your second to last sentence seems a bit sarcastic, your title doesn't. I don't see why -any- of that would be opposed by 'Moral rectaltude.' The only remotely objectionable thing would be the liquors, but only because they're hard and not because they're 'good,' and I've seen all that at bars before, and more besides. (The bar at the Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in Phoenix, AZ has blended cognacs for $75 per 1.5 ounces, dunno the brands involved)
Sorry, that's a bunch of crap. There isn't a single GPU on the market that can 'do photo-realistic rendering at over 30fps.' Consider that a photo is something like 4000x3000. Now consider 30fps. Now consider 32bpp necessary to do photo-realism. Just pumping out the bitmap is
4000x3000x32x30=11.5Gb/s of bandwidth.
There isn't an architecture on the planet (save -maybe- Crays) that has that kind of bandwidth. Even the on-die interconnect between the processor cores of the POWER4 is only like 6.4Gb/s, a little more than half, and the POWER4 isn't even out yet.
Take a look at the DOOM3 screenshots. That's not photo-realistic. The technology doesn't even exist to make photo-realistic pictures on the fly. Even the Final Fantasy movie, while extremely realistic, is still fairly obviously CG. Consider that Toy Story 2 took, I believe, 2 weeks on 168 processors worth of Sun servers to do the final render, I think it's safe to say that there are many years yet to go before a game console is capable of real-time photo-realistic rendering at over 30fps, much less the 60-70fps that the human eye can differentiate between.
Probably redundant, but CSS -does- use keys. Every licensed DVD player has a different key. Admittedly, the key length is short, so it could've been brute-forced, but the real trick was the Xing didn't encrypt (or even obfuscate) their CSS key in their DVD player software. That's what allowed DeCSS to be written in the first place.
They key makes up most of the C code version, though, so I'm not sure how the Perl version gets away without using it (apparently...maybe it's buried in there somewhere).
Anyway, it also has public keys, I think, in the form of what the DVD itself is encrypted with. The private player keys are the only things that can decrypt it properly.
If indeed the perl version doesn't use the key, then that means it's obviously weaker than I suspected.
I am not a robotics researcher, so this is based on intuition and what I've read and seen.
I think that one of the reasons that animals 'have it so easy' is that we've got so many more sensors, as well as the 'circuitry' to put all of that sensory data together. And I don't mean the strict inner-ear stuff, either. I mean the somatosensory (joint position and such) senses. How many robots 'know' where all of their limbs are as easily as I can know exactly where my hand is with my eyes closed? Furthermore, humans (and presumably other animals) have the benefit of learning exactly what works for their body, motion-wise. If my brain was suddenly put into the body of someone differently sized than mine, I'd probably be unable to walk for a while. I'm guessing that most robots don't have the benefit of years of experience learning how to move optimally. This kind of thing is why it needs a 700Mhz processor in each leg.
And another thing is that, however it gets that way, the brain tissue that controls movement and the coordination is optimized, both to begin with and then fine-tuned over time. If robotics researchers could make the equivalent of a DSP for balance and coordination, I'm sure the specs would appear much more 'reasonable.' After all, a quad Pentium III system running, say, a chess program will tend to lose to a world-class human chess player, and chess is an inherently mathematical problem! Walking is so much more...well, certainly not mathematical, really.
Anyway, those are just some of my idle ramblings on the subject. Maybe that helps, I dunno.
(One thing I question is your notion of more than half of the human brain being devoted to coordination and balance...doing some searching reveals that, from the brain diagrams I looked at, roughly a tenth of the frontal lobe is given over to 'movement.' Also, some parts of the basal ganglia are involved with inhibitory balance, reflexes, and the initiation of voluntary movement. Coordination, by which I mean the coordination of multiple sensory inputs and movements, is the domain of the right hemisphere, but I imagine that's not all of what it does. Also, that definition of coordination seems substantially separate from simple balance. That is, it's gymnastics and playing the piano, not walking while whistling. It may take a large chunk of the human brain, but it's so much more than what robots can do now that I imagine that it would only take a small portion of it to replicate simple movement and things like rubbing your stomach while patting your head (which is a silly example, I know).
Actually, a fair number of nuclear power plants that are still operational were built without any computer automation at all. I know for a fact that Arkansas Nuclear One can be run without any computers whatsoever, even today, so it wouldn't be too bad off.
I don't know about others, but ANO is a serious piece of work. The reactor core building can survive a dead on hit from a 727 without breaching. It's situated on a lake made by damming the arkansas river (for cooling), but even if every single dam up river simultaneously burst, the PP would be fine because the lower level is water tight and on top of the building is a dock and crane setup. Over-engineered? Maybe, but impressive nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
Robert Heinlein had something to say about national ID cards: "When the local governments expect you to start carrying identification,it's time to get off the planet."
Unfortunately, getting off the planet doesn't seem to be an option for the forseeable future.
"When Mozilla copylefts SAMPLE code, the only way to avoid the risk to corporate intellectual property is to use cleanroom reverse engineering procedures.
This is quite expensive. Just use a BSD compatible license and you do the entire world a favor. If you want commercial software developers to be able to read and help you improve your code, give us a license that dosen't kill our employers."
Look, if Microsoft wants to stea^H^H^H^Huse Mozilla code in IE 7 or whatever, you can just come out and say it.
(Note: this is sarcastic)
"What a piece of shit license. The free license is only for non-comercial use."
That's because Intel makes good money selling its compiler as an MSVC++ plugin. Be glad that they are offering what is by far the best IA32 compiler as a free Linux program. Anyway, to my knowledge you can't get the Windows version for free, even for non-commercial use.
(These work best when told between two people (i.e., aloud))
What's brown and sticky?
A stick!
What's orange and sounds like a parrot?
A carrot!
*ducks rotting vegetables*
(I think we need a -1, Not Funny moderation...)
Actually, I've got a Sony TRV-17 camcorder right here. It has a memory stick slot that can be used for still pictures and for recording MPEG-2 videos to. That's right, it records MPEG-2 on the fly. Admittedly the movie quality is only as good as the stills (about 640x480), but it can record them. As such, it'd be great to have a high-capacity medium for them, as even a 128MB memory stick won't allow for a very long recording.
Well, the win2k drivers for the G400's have big problems with dual processor systems. That's probably the problem.
For instance, when Black and White came out, a lot of dual-processor-having-folks (such as me) swamped the Matrox message boards with complaints about missing textures, texture corruption, and crashes. After a while, they admitted that the drivers are quite buggy when used in an SMP machine (and an OS that supports it).
I'm not sure if the Xfree86 G400 drivers have the same problem exactly, but maybe they do. I don't have tribes2 on my machine, although I do reccommend Loki's other titles. SMAC, particularly, is quite good.
I'm not too sure. You claim that it doesn't offer compatibility. Well, the thing is, through the magic of import/export filters and Linux's ability to read many kinds of filesystems (including Mac and Windows fs's), KOffice can provide the same compatibility as OpenOffice.
And since KDE is a Unix desktop environment, it can provide compatibility not only between office suites (i.e., Office and Office for Mac as well as WordPerfect, OpenOffice, and GNOME Office) but also between platforms (i.e., anything that KDE runs on). So, I consider your comments to be utterly unfounded. And as far as "wasted effort" goes, well, TMTOWTDI.
"Perhaps I've been poorly misinformed, but don't rocket launches release a shitload of ozone-depleting chemicals?"
:)
Depends on the rocket in question. If, like the space shuttle, they use liquid oxygen and hydrogen for their main thrusters, no, that's not a problem. Unless you hate water.
If they use methane (CH4) and liquid oxygen, that's still not a problem, since that (like all hydrocarbon combustion reactions) just produces CO2, CO, and water--none of which are actually "ozone-depleting chemicals."
If they use solid rocket boosters, that might be a problem, but I'm pretty sure that none of the Russian heavy-lifters use solid rockets, and of the liquid fuels liquid oxygen/hydrogen and liquid oxygen/methane are the most common.
(oh, and 'poorly misinformed' is a bit of a, well, it's probably not what you meant to say, I'll leave it at that
The reason the Wince devices are finally catching up is that handheld technology has reached a point where Palm's philosophy of (relatively) cheap and simple is no longer necessary. Handhelds can have large storage, hi-res color graphics, accessory ports and the like and still have good battery life and be (again, relatively) cheap and useful.
Many people have often pointed out that MS rarely gets anything right on the first try. But by the 3rd iteration or so, the competetion is in trouble. Look at Office, DirectX, and Windows itself. The Wince devices are entering their 3rd generation but Palm's are just now getting past their early limitations (storage space, expandability, and screen resolution being the major sticking points).
Like 'Taco said, the next Clie and similar Palm devices are Palm's 'last, best hope' for keeping their dominant market position.
(Working harder on cooperating with Handspring probably wouldn't hurt....)
I'll tell you why you (well, maybe not you, but some people) might like this very much, in fact. 1.3GB is about the point where a DivX (re)encoded DVD becomes (for most people) better than VHS quality. Normally, such movies are burned to two CDs, but you have to swap CDs in the middle of the movie. With this technology, you could very easily backup your DVD collection (or put your VHS tapes on digital media for portable viewing! (if they make a portable model)). Since the cheapest true DVD-Rs still cost something like a $1000, this is a very cheap alternative.
Also, I have many friends with multi-GB mp3 collections. Backing up their collections takes all day, literally. With a 1.3GB disc, it would only take half that time, not entirely unuseful.
And what about those home movies that you made with your spiffy new digital camera? Wanna have them recorded at full quality but don't have the hard drive space to keep them all at once? No problem...you can still view them easily on your computer and have them neatly indexed, just store them on a few DD-RW, or whatever the official name is.
So, yeah, I can see where this could be pretty dang useful for a lot of people.
Learn to not take things out of context. What he said was:
"This code is of course the source that runs Slashdot, however 2.0 is far more advanced then the code you see here, to say nothing of utterly embarassing any other weblog software available for free, and written by us, and codenamed after a cartoon." (emphasis mine)
Geez. Used to be we had trouble with people not reading the articles now they don't even read the damn post.
Two things:
You require 1GHz CPUs. The GHz mobile P3 isn't even out yet (although it will be soon). A few (reckless) notebook makers have begun putting desktop P3s in, but they're very hot. 2 would be unmanageable.
I can only assume that battery power is a non-issue. Otherwise, the battery life would be like an hour, tops. Especially if you go the do it yourself route. As such, I'd suggest doing the 1U rack thing and just don't worry about battery stuff.
Actually, it just shows that even if they don't know how to configure Unix that Linux is much better configured out of the box than the Solaris (or SunOS, depending on which version they used). Still a win for Linux, if not as great a win. And they didn't say what speed the four processors were or how much RAM it had relative to the pentium or the disk drive configuration etc, etc.
1) Tribes2 is not old at all. This is a long-planned near-simultaneous release. The Windows version came out like a week ago.
2) What software is available for Linux? Well, there's WordPerfect Office 2000 and Oracle 8i, to name a couple of fairly heavy-duty apps. Also, IBM DB2 and ViaVoice. Then of course there are the thousands of 'minor' applications like Blender and the GIMP. True, none of those are the 'heavyweight' office automation package (I assume you mean MS Office), but they are some pretty major applications.
Another way of looking at this is that it would be better for Linux to have -some- high-visibility apps than none, even if they are a little older.
One of the coolest things that can be done with Progeny is upgrade straight to "real" debian, since Progeny is (AFAIK/can tell) completely debian compatible. A simple sources.list edit and a somewhat lengthy apt-get update/upgrade later and bang! regular debian, with the benefit of a really keen graphical installer and a lot of the major packages already installed.
Even so, Progeny itself is quite cool, especially the commercial support aspects. Hopefully they can succeed where (in some sense) Storm Linux failed.
(interesting test of the strength of the apt/dpkg system: switch from progeny to unstable to stable and all the way back and see if stuff still works stably....)
A minor, even offtopic point...CS is far from dead. More people play CS today than UT and Q3A combined. According to gamespy stats, anyway.
True, it may suck a bit more, but it's far far from dead.
Two points. The Crusoe uses a VLIW instruction set, not RISC. Also, Torvalds himself has said that things do not run much faster in 'native mode,' and not releasing anything in 'native mode' allows them to change the chip's internal structure without breaking compatability, which is something I'll bet Intel and/or AMD would love to be able to do freely.
And the really funny thing is, HAL stands for 'hardware abstraction layer,' not 'hardware application layer.' I guess either Ballmer goofed or 'most people at Microsoft' think wrong. Maybe both. :)
Something that I think a lot of people are missing is the difference between randomness and unpredictability. A computer can generate random numbers (digits of pi satisfy all known tests for randomness quite handily) easily. What it cannot do is generate unpredictable or chaotic numbers (because all pseudo-random number generators use a seed, and the seed will always give the same sequence).
All is not lost, however. Quantum mechanics, for instance, (if you believe it) shows that the randomness behind subatomic particle motion (like electrons in their orbits) and the like demonstrates a sort of 'deep cosmic chaos.' Thus, for instance, the decay of radioactive stuff is truly unpredictable, so it's not impossible to come up with numbers that are both random and unpredictable.
Although your second to last sentence seems a bit sarcastic, your title doesn't. I don't see why -any- of that would be opposed by 'Moral rectaltude.' The only remotely objectionable thing would be the liquors, but only because they're hard and not because they're 'good,' and I've seen all that at bars before, and more besides. (The bar at the Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in Phoenix, AZ has blended cognacs for $75 per 1.5 ounces, dunno the brands involved)
Sorry, that's a bunch of crap. There isn't a single GPU on the market that can 'do photo-realistic rendering at over 30fps.' Consider that a photo is something like 4000x3000. Now consider 30fps. Now consider 32bpp necessary to do photo-realism. Just pumping out the bitmap is
4000x3000x32x30=11.5Gb/s of bandwidth.
There isn't an architecture on the planet (save -maybe- Crays) that has that kind of bandwidth. Even the on-die interconnect between the processor cores of the POWER4 is only like 6.4Gb/s, a little more than half, and the POWER4 isn't even out yet.
Take a look at the DOOM3 screenshots. That's not photo-realistic. The technology doesn't even exist to make photo-realistic pictures on the fly. Even the Final Fantasy movie, while extremely realistic, is still fairly obviously CG. Consider that Toy Story 2 took, I believe, 2 weeks on 168 processors worth of Sun servers to do the final render, I think it's safe to say that there are many years yet to go before a game console is capable of real-time photo-realistic rendering at over 30fps, much less the 60-70fps that the human eye can differentiate between.
Probably redundant, but CSS -does- use keys. Every licensed DVD player has a different key. Admittedly, the key length is short, so it could've been brute-forced, but the real trick was the Xing didn't encrypt (or even obfuscate) their CSS key in their DVD player software. That's what allowed DeCSS to be written in the first place. They key makes up most of the C code version, though, so I'm not sure how the Perl version gets away without using it (apparently...maybe it's buried in there somewhere). Anyway, it also has public keys, I think, in the form of what the DVD itself is encrypted with. The private player keys are the only things that can decrypt it properly. If indeed the perl version doesn't use the key, then that means it's obviously weaker than I suspected.
I am not a robotics researcher, so this is based on intuition and what I've read and seen.
I think that one of the reasons that animals 'have it so easy' is that we've got so many more sensors, as well as the 'circuitry' to put all of that sensory data together. And I don't mean the strict inner-ear stuff, either. I mean the somatosensory (joint position and such) senses. How many robots 'know' where all of their limbs are as easily as I can know exactly where my hand is with my eyes closed? Furthermore, humans (and presumably other animals) have the benefit of learning exactly what works for their body, motion-wise. If my brain was suddenly put into the body of someone differently sized than mine, I'd probably be unable to walk for a while. I'm guessing that most robots don't have the benefit of years of experience learning how to move optimally. This kind of thing is why it needs a 700Mhz processor in each leg.
And another thing is that, however it gets that way, the brain tissue that controls movement and the coordination is optimized, both to begin with and then fine-tuned over time. If robotics researchers could make the equivalent of a DSP for balance and coordination, I'm sure the specs would appear much more 'reasonable.' After all, a quad Pentium III system running, say, a chess program will tend to lose to a world-class human chess player, and chess is an inherently mathematical problem! Walking is so much more...well, certainly not mathematical, really.
Anyway, those are just some of my idle ramblings on the subject. Maybe that helps, I dunno.
(One thing I question is your notion of more than half of the human brain being devoted to coordination and balance...doing some searching reveals that, from the brain diagrams I looked at, roughly a tenth of the frontal lobe is given over to 'movement.' Also, some parts of the basal ganglia are involved with inhibitory balance, reflexes, and the initiation of voluntary movement. Coordination, by which I mean the coordination of multiple sensory inputs and movements, is the domain of the right hemisphere, but I imagine that's not all of what it does. Also, that definition of coordination seems substantially separate from simple balance. That is, it's gymnastics and playing the piano, not walking while whistling. It may take a large chunk of the human brain, but it's so much more than what robots can do now that I imagine that it would only take a small portion of it to replicate simple movement and things like rubbing your stomach while patting your head (which is a silly example, I know).
Actually, a fair number of nuclear power plants that are still operational were built without any computer automation at all. I know for a fact that Arkansas Nuclear One can be run without any computers whatsoever, even today, so it wouldn't be too bad off.
I don't know about others, but ANO is a serious piece of work. The reactor core building can survive a dead on hit from a 727 without breaching. It's situated on a lake made by damming the arkansas river (for cooling), but even if every single dam up river simultaneously burst, the PP would be fine because the lower level is water tight and on top of the building is a dock and crane setup. Over-engineered? Maybe, but impressive nonetheless.
terribly offtopic, but it was sunsite, then metalab, now ibiblio, so he was more or less right.