It's not clear what the impact on efficiency is, so it's not clear if this is a true solution, but it's an interesting possibility!
I actually think the U.S. Military would be interested in a high passenger-load super-sonic airplane. It could be a good way to mobilize a rapid-response team in a hurry...
My coworkers and I were talking about this over lunch a few weeks ago...
One guy saw BSOD's on gate information displays at Heathrow.
Another guy saw the BSOD, and then subsequent rebooting and attempts to fix the system being displayed on a "jumbotron" type display on the Las Vegas Strip which lasted a few minutes until the tech apparently realized he should disconnect the big display...
I met SRL when I was teenager visiting Gunnison Colorado for the Rocky Mountain SOG. That was over 15 years ago. He was well into GA's then. Good to see he's still at it!
Sometimes, things will be really fubar'd and you won't be able to get in. Identify/designate a backup admin (or "remote hands") that you know you can rely on in a critical situation, and keep those people's contact info on a hardcopy that stays in your wallet.
Seriously, it would help if the guy was more clear about what he wants to embed linux for. He says he wants USB+Video+Audio, but I don't know if he wanted something that is meant to be a large ATM/Kiosk or something hand-held.
As for the AMD processor -- with a little bit of work, you can take an Au1100 and turn it into a device that will do USB + Audio + Video with a BOM cost of probably around $50 *if* he's making a bunch...
That's correct -- the "forward" command from the controller to the RMP would cause the Segway platform to first move back, causing the whole robot to tip forward -- at which point the platform will then move in the forward direction.
> Making the robot's centre of gravity very low (lead-acid batteries, anyone?) would probably make the robot stable enough without all that expensive electronics.
By extending that argument, wouldn't evolution optimize animals and people to have low center of gravity?
I think there's a lot to be said for dynamic stability. I'm not saying the Segway is the *right* approach. But it's the first mass-produced dynamically-stabilized mobile platform.
I personally think a more compact version of the iBot wheelchair would make a better robotic platform -- it is just much more expensive today -- since it can go into dynamic stabilization on two wheels, or gracefully degrade back to static stabilization on four wheels.
Actually, the robot doesn't have to shift its weight. It just has to temporarily move backward a tiny bit to cause the unit to tip forward, and then scoot forward at the precise speed necessary to keep it in balance.
It's sort of like how motorcycle riders twitch left before leaning into a right turn.
The iBot wheelchair (which is what the Segway technology spun off from) uses this to good effect -- the rider doesn't have to move his body at all -- he can command the wheelchair left/right back/forward with a joystick.
The gyroscope in the unit DOES NOT directly provide force to balance the unit. Instead, the gyro's help the system to monitor and close the control loop of keeping the unit in balance. Sort of like gyroscopic autopilot on an airplane.
Touche'. I should have known better to make such a blanket statement -- after all, I'm working with one such low-power processor (AMD/Alchemy Au1000).
But it seems to me that a good chunk of the work in improving efficiency today still comes from process improvement and selective block powering, and not from more "exotic" approaches being discussed on this topic.
The problem with reversability is that for any given semiconductor process, it effectively doubles the number of gates that need to be built on the chip, and manufacturers are currently more interested in cramming more features into the chip; not to make them more efficient.
It might be theoretically possible to build smaller and faster chips by reducing the energy/thermal issues, but I suspect most companies are not willing to take that leap of faith.
I bet the first places we'll see reversible gates being used in a full-fledged MCU/CPU would be for a mobile/handheld processor running reversified version of an older (less gates) core using latest processes...
Dang... And all this time, I thought the great open-source software used by many academic institutions (TeX) was written by an esteemed computer science scholar...
I swear, every time I see that cat logo, I think of Sinistar. To this day, that face (and the associated "Beware, I live" voice) still gives me the heebie-jeebies. Brrr.
Yup. That pretty much sums it up. We humans are ultimately a rather lazy bunch and would rather do away with tasks from which we derive litte/no value.
We value clean clothes, so we wash them. But we don't value the process of washing, so we now use washing machines or send it out to the cleaners.
We value mobility, but we normally don't value the effort it takes to get from point A to point B. So we find the "easiest" method of transportation available. (The fitness minded, however, do value the effort because it's exercise.)
Minor bugs might be okay, but show stopper bugs are definitely more expensive.
Here's why: when it's early in the development cycle, the team working on the product is small and intimately familiar with it. Finding and fixing the bug takes less time and costs less money in idled staff-hours affected by the bug.
As the product grows, more developers are added, additional staff (let's pretend this is a commercial effort) comes in, sales, marketing, customer support, et cetra... Now, the same show-stopper bug might take the same amount of time to identify and fix, but there's potentially more people down the dependency chain that will also be affected.
and, in reality, as the product gets bigger and has more developers, there's a fair chance the developers will be less intimately familiar with their code and will end up spending more time fixing the bug!
I first saw them ca. 1993 when I was on the OS/2 platform. A few years later, I found one at a clearance and bought it. It is a damn fine keyboard worth every penny. I ended up hoarding more via eBay. I now own 3 TP 2's, and 2 TP 4's. They rock.
I sometimes use my Segway in conjunction with the Metro Rail. It works well in my case. But you've made it clear you dislike the Segway (either because of cost or because you think it's stupid), so that's clearly out.
I'm guessing you live in a suburban sprawl environment. Otherwise, I would expect that there would be a nearby feeder bus service to the train station that you could take.
I'm also assuming that there's adequate transportation from the work-side train station to the office, and that you just want to take your "solution vehicle" with you for sake of convenience. (Otherwise, driving the 6.2 miles to the train station wouldn't help you at the other end of the line, because you currently would then need a solution from the train station to work.)
The smaller electric scooters would certainly work. The better ones are quite capable of carrying a full-sized adult, while remaining relatively small and unobtrusive.
You might also consider getting a cheap used bicycle to leave at the work-side train station that you can leave parked over the weekend and leave parked outside of your office during the day. Something that you wouldn't mind getting stolen over a long weekend... Of course, you need to be concerned about security of the bike at the home-side station... (Oh, if only secured bike stations were more common! Or if America was less crime-ridden... This is not an issue in Japan where I grew up.)
I personally think skating 12+ miles every day would be undesirable. Plus you have the hassle of having to switching between shoes and skates at the train stations. But, then again, maybe you like being outside of the metal cocoon......speaking of which, you might also consider getting a used moped. That's what I used to have before my Segway.
It would help if you better defined what you're looking for in the mode of transportation... But I'm afraid there's not much else to choose from...
I've heard of immersive environments being used to cure certain phobias. Acrophobia, in particular, was "curable" with a few treatments in a VR environment. An immersive interactive environment can be used to let people play out/explore/explain out their anxieties...
This must be a cheapie consumer routers intended to be "install and forget" devices. No serious self-respecting network/communications equipment make would ever rely solely on such cruft for out-of-band management of devices!
These generate a pretty decent airflow with ionic (electrostatic) propulsion. No idea, however, about the many claims of cleaning the air, improving one's health, killing germs, et cetra, et cetra, et cetra.
I have one (received as a gift from the friend-of-friend) in my house. If I leave the bedroom door/windows closed during the day, I can definitely smell the "ozone" when I get back home at night.
...but it's good to see it officially approved and available for those who need it.
Read: those who can afford it.
Yeah? Most technological improvements start out that way. The rich essnetially sponsors new technology (and tolerate the limitations of early generation products) which, if the technology is truly good, eventually drop down in price and becomes accessible to the general population.
You *do* use a telephone, right? And a personal computer? And drive a car (presumably with antilock brakes, and air bags)? And watch movies on DVD's? And should you ever get in an accident, MRI's are much more accurate and affordable...
Slashdot Mirror
> Sure, a supersonic airliner would be much higher, but the sonic booms would still be unacceptable.
There is work in progress to drastically the sonic boom... As this article shows...
It's not clear what the impact on efficiency is, so it's not clear if this is a true solution, but it's an interesting possibility!
I actually think the U.S. Military would be interested in a high passenger-load super-sonic airplane. It could be a good way to mobilize a rapid-response team in a hurry...
My coworkers and I were talking about this over lunch a few weeks ago...
One guy saw BSOD's on gate information displays at Heathrow.
Another guy saw the BSOD, and then subsequent rebooting and attempts to fix the system being displayed on a "jumbotron" type display on the Las Vegas Strip which lasted a few minutes until the tech apparently realized he should disconnect the big display...
I met SRL when I was teenager visiting Gunnison Colorado for the Rocky Mountain SOG. That was over 15 years ago. He was well into GA's then. Good to see he's still at it!
Sometimes, things will be really fubar'd and you won't be able to get in. Identify/designate a backup admin (or "remote hands") that you know you can rely on in a critical situation, and keep those people's contact info on a hardcopy that stays in your wallet.
100,000 to 300,000 pps? No, unless the gigabit MAC's do a lot of hardware assist. I have no experience with gigE MAC's, so I have no idea.
Last I heard, ZFx86 was in limbo due to a dispute with NatSemi.
See this
I have not heard any news of them resuming production of the ZFx86...
*pffbt* to you!
Seriously, it would help if the guy was more clear about what he wants to embed linux for. He says he wants USB+Video+Audio, but I don't know if he wanted something that is meant to be a large ATM/Kiosk or something hand-held.
As for the AMD processor -- with a little bit of work, you can take an Au1100 and turn it into a device that will do USB + Audio + Video with a BOM cost of probably around $50 *if* he's making a bunch...
If you're just looking for an embeddable PC, just use a standard PC and then migrate to a small-form-factor PC...
If you're talking about hand-held Linux development, a PDA might be the right way to go.
If you're going to roll your own, I've personally had good experiences with an AMD Alchemy processor.
And uclibc and busybox are definitely the way to go for embedded linux.
That's correct -- the "forward" command from the controller to the RMP would cause the Segway platform to first move back, causing the whole robot to tip forward -- at which point the platform will then move in the forward direction.
> Making the robot's centre of gravity very low (lead-acid batteries, anyone?) would probably make the robot stable enough without all that expensive electronics.
By extending that argument, wouldn't evolution optimize animals and people to have low center of gravity?
I think there's a lot to be said for dynamic stability. I'm not saying the Segway is the *right* approach. But it's the first mass-produced dynamically-stabilized mobile platform.
I personally think a more compact version of the iBot wheelchair would make a better robotic platform -- it is just much more expensive today -- since it can go into dynamic stabilization on two wheels, or gracefully degrade back to static stabilization on four wheels.
Actually, the robot doesn't have to shift its weight. It just has to temporarily move backward a tiny bit to cause the unit to tip forward, and then scoot forward at the precise speed necessary to keep it in balance.
It's sort of like how motorcycle riders twitch left before leaning into a right turn.
The iBot wheelchair (which is what the Segway technology spun off from) uses this to good effect -- the rider doesn't have to move his body at all -- he can command the wheelchair left/right back/forward with a joystick.
The gyroscope in the unit DOES NOT directly provide force to balance the unit. Instead, the gyro's help the system to monitor and close the control loop of keeping the unit in balance. Sort of like gyroscopic autopilot on an airplane.
on the unit, just like the gyroscope
Touche'. I should have known better to make such a blanket statement -- after all, I'm working with one such low-power processor (AMD/Alchemy Au1000).
But it seems to me that a good chunk of the work in improving efficiency today still comes from process improvement and selective block powering, and not from more "exotic" approaches being discussed on this topic.
The problem with reversability is that for any given semiconductor process, it effectively doubles the number of gates that need to be built on the chip, and manufacturers are currently more interested in cramming more features into the chip; not to make them more efficient.
It might be theoretically possible to build smaller and faster chips by reducing the energy/thermal issues, but I suspect most companies are not willing to take that leap of faith.
I bet the first places we'll see reversible gates being used in a full-fledged MCU/CPU would be for a mobile/handheld processor running reversified version of an older (less gates) core using latest processes...
Dang... And all this time, I thought the great open-source software used by many academic institutions (TeX) was written by an esteemed computer science scholar...
I swear, every time I see that cat logo, I think of Sinistar. To this day, that face (and the associated "Beware, I live" voice) still gives me the heebie-jeebies. Brrr.
Yup. That pretty much sums it up. We humans are ultimately a rather lazy bunch and would rather do away with tasks from which we derive litte/no value.
We value clean clothes, so we wash them. But we don't value the process of washing, so we now use washing machines or send it out to the cleaners.
We value mobility, but we normally don't value the effort it takes to get from point A to point B. So we find the "easiest" method of transportation available. (The fitness minded, however, do value the effort because it's exercise.)
How about a networked version of Adventure on an Ethernet-enabled Atari 2600? :)
Minor bugs might be okay, but show stopper bugs are definitely more expensive.
Here's why: when it's early in the development cycle, the team working on the product is small and intimately familiar with it. Finding and fixing the bug takes less time and costs less money in idled staff-hours affected by the bug.
As the product grows, more developers are added, additional staff (let's pretend this is a commercial effort) comes in, sales, marketing, customer support, et cetra... Now, the same show-stopper bug might take the same amount of time to identify and fix, but there's potentially more people down the dependency chain that will also be affected.
and, in reality, as the product gets bigger and has more developers, there's a fair chance the developers will be less intimately familiar with their code and will end up spending more time fixing the bug!
I first saw them ca. 1993 when I was on the OS/2 platform. A few years later, I found one at a clearance and bought it. It is a damn fine keyboard worth every penny. I ended up hoarding more via eBay. I now own 3 TP 2's, and 2 TP 4's. They rock.
I sometimes use my Segway in conjunction with the Metro Rail. It works well in my case. But you've made it clear you dislike the Segway (either because of cost or because you think it's stupid), so that's clearly out.
...speaking of which, you might also consider getting a used moped. That's what I used to have before my Segway.
I'm guessing you live in a suburban sprawl environment. Otherwise, I would expect that there would be a nearby feeder bus service to the train station that you could take.
I'm also assuming that there's adequate transportation from the work-side train station to the office, and that you just want to take your "solution vehicle" with you for sake of convenience. (Otherwise, driving the 6.2 miles to the train station wouldn't help you at the other end of the line, because you currently would then need a solution from the train station to work.)
The smaller electric scooters would certainly work. The better ones are quite capable of carrying a full-sized adult, while remaining relatively small and unobtrusive.
You might also consider getting a cheap used bicycle to leave at the work-side train station that you can leave parked over the weekend and leave parked outside of your office during the day. Something that you wouldn't mind getting stolen over a long weekend... Of course, you need to be concerned about security of the bike at the home-side station... (Oh, if only secured bike stations were more common! Or if America was less crime-ridden... This is not an issue in Japan where I grew up.)
I personally think skating 12+ miles every day would be undesirable. Plus you have the hassle of having to switching between shoes and skates at the train stations. But, then again, maybe you like being outside of the metal cocoon...
It would help if you better defined what you're looking for in the mode of transportation... But I'm afraid there's not much else to choose from...
I've heard of immersive environments being used to cure certain phobias. Acrophobia, in particular, was "curable" with a few treatments in a VR environment. An immersive interactive environment can be used to let people play out/explore/explain out their anxieties...
This must be a cheapie consumer routers intended to be "install and forget" devices. No serious self-respecting network/communications equipment make would ever rely solely on such cruft for out-of-band management of devices!
Interesting. A friend-of-a-friend is a distributor of ionizing air cleaners. You've probably seen ads of Sharper Image's Quadra Breeze products.
These generate a pretty decent airflow with ionic (electrostatic) propulsion. No idea, however, about the many claims of cleaning the air, improving one's health, killing germs, et cetra, et cetra, et cetra.
I have one (received as a gift from the friend-of-friend) in my house. If I leave the bedroom door/windows closed during the day, I can definitely smell the "ozone" when I get back home at night.
Of course, the next thing is to add this video display:/ braziltv.h tml
http://members.fortunecity.com/drg45nzp
We're all in this together!
Yeah? Most technological improvements start out that way. The rich essnetially sponsors new technology (and tolerate the limitations of early generation products) which, if the technology is truly good, eventually drop down in price and becomes accessible to the general population.
You *do* use a telephone, right? And a personal computer? And drive a car (presumably with antilock brakes, and air bags)? And watch movies on DVD's? And should you ever get in an accident, MRI's are much more accurate and affordable...
*sheesh*