Spacewalk is a very hazardous operation. Why can't NASA develop a small tethered inspection robot? It is technically quite viable.
If in further operations, the robot discovers some problems outside the shuttle, they can then decide whether it worths to risk the life of the astronauts to go out the shuttle and carry out an unscheduled repair.
I also remember that "cut stop powder". I probably know why it got ditched as well.
I grow up in a small warehouse in Hong Kong. When I was a kid, I felt so sleepy one day and crashed my head into the sharp edge of construction material when crawling to my makeshift bed. The cut bled like hell.
At that time (late 70's) many household stored a powder can "Yunam White" manufactured by China, which claimed to be a very effective blood clotting powder and proven to work well in Vietnam War (well, for the other side). It really worked. I saw a tv documentary that showed how it stopped bleeding on an animal within about 2 mins... But, the nurses in ER really hated that. She kept on swearing when cleaning up my wound. That powder is not soluble in anything and must be cleaned before stitching.... Maybe, that's the reason it got banned/phased out of the market later on...
It is a bit dumb IMO... I would rather suffer in the hospital then bleed to death on the way to it...
More Info (direct translation from CCTV)
on
Tai Chi Robots
·
· Score: 3, Informative
CCTV is the major state TV station in China. They have just run a Taichi Robot story last night. It has a nice photo. The text is in chinese. I don't want to spend too much time for translation. So I just add a few extra points. The university names are my direct translation. They are unlikely to be the correct spelling... I am not a native Mandarin speaker.
BHR-01 is a 158cm tall humanoid robot, developed in the 863 national technology advancement programe.
BHR-01 weighs 76kg. It has 32 degree of freedom with extra dexterity around the hand and foot joints.
Main contributions: improved system integration and gait control.
The second country developed advanced non-tethered humanoid robot.
Recent advancement in robotics:
Security robot (demostrated on Dec 2002), capable of walking up/down stairs/uneven terrain, very flexible hand, can be remote controlled/ in autonomous mode. Targeted application: explosive disposal and handling of armed offender.
12 joint biped robot developed by CheungXua Defense University, capable of moving like a ordinary human (eg move sizeward and other acrobat like movements).
Beijing Aerospace University: robot hand capable to handle objects with vastly different texture and hardness.
I am not sure when/how did you do the search. I find many links related to the posted story, although the content is more or less the same in everyone. It is not at all surprising. The reporters duplicated the official press release from englishdaily.com.cn. In a sense, Chinese is similar to Japanese. Many of these news are not for "export". They just publish the stories in their own language. You really cannot say it does not exist until you search in their own language (if you can...)
Japan (or I should say East Asia, just look at the trendy color screen mobile phones in South Korea) is the place for gadgets.
The high population density is a big drive factor behind these things. An average 20-something guy in US (Canada, Australia...) may spend quite a big chunk of his disposable income in car, surfing gear etc. In East Asia, living space is much smaller, car is considered a luxury for most... To show off, the equivalent Joe Sixpack will in fact buy cool tech gadget (mobile phones/ PDA/ digital cameras...).
The technical content to design a 850hp car or any latest cool tech gadget is not low. But, the tech understanding (or even literacy levl) of the end-user can be quite low. The desire for gadget and technolgy level in society does not correlate strongly due to the population density factor.
Open Source is political. However, it is just not nice to raise more than one issue in a single run. Choose (use/develop/promote)open source is a message in its own right. It is so easy to upset others if you want to do more. People will think you are either completely irrelevant, or even worse, sabotaging the whole business.
As an analogue, I guess you won't be a very popular man if you are trying to raise fund for your local football team while in a anti-war protest.:-)
A small retail price, obviously, comes from mass production. China is indeed a huge market, but more in terms of population size, not income. China is indeed a huge market, but not in terms of income, or population size. Their export oriented consumer electronics industry needs to import more than 80% of the high end components, IIRC. That's the market drive for fab investiment.
China actually just enters the big fab building exercise in the last year or so. A few 1 2 8-inch/0.18um production lines will be completed in the near future. It may be part of the reason why they want to fast track their first MCU design.
AFAIK, Russia still lacks behind in consumer electronics. Hong Kong... All my friends in HK motorola, which is the only major HK semiconductor, got sacked. They (the semi dept) just do chip testing in recent years while most of the chips are from a Motorola fab in mainland China.
I read an interview with one of the Dragon Chip project leader (Dr Hu) a few months ago in a magazine. It gives a lot more details if I can still recall correctly.
The reporter interviewed him after their team booted into Linux successfully with their prototype chip (or I should say FPGA implementation). Follow the common practice, they have written a C simulator for the chip, followed by hardware logic verification with FPGAs. I think the latest news is refering to the completion of the initial silicon design.
The team focuses on the hardware design. The proposed chip is compatible with the MIPS instruction, IIRC. For the floating point arithmatic, it follows the IEEE 754 standard. That's why they can boot to Linux to verify their design quite early on without too much tweaking.
The targeted performance is close to PII. Not too bad for an embedded microprocessor at this moment... But, maybe a bit old when they commerically release it. But, as long as they can find applications into consumer electronics, the chip may get a good life like our good old Z80, HC11... Nevertheless, it is a good achievement consider the fact that the bulk of the team has no previous MCU design experience.
I agree those ITX form factor board is very nice. However, mounting it back to an ATX case just defeat the original purpose. I cannot find any nice smaller case say, in outpost.com. What do you guys normally do? DIY case??
The bigger hassle is we usually need 2-3 nics for this sort of apps. ITX board above cannot do that.
The claim that PSLV is 12 times cheaper than the Chinese equivalent is basically a self-advertisement. The DF5 ICBM's manufacturing is about US$15M ($100M yuan). Long March 3 series is based on DF5 ICBM missile's technology. Who can believe a Long March satellite lanuching rocket is 12 times more expensive than DF5!!! (check some of the articles in www.kanwa.com, probably last summer).
As a side note: the Chinese space program is about 100% indegenous. DF5 was developed in early 80's. With a range that can reach US, Americans could not be the partner. Former USSR had a very bad relationship with China at that moment.
Labour cost is not high in China either. All the lanuching pads are in remote area. The salary is really low. For manufacturing cost, most agree that China is lower than India... Well, India is better in more service-oriented industry, eg IT. No one is all-rounder, right?
Probe that later on. Many parts of China got hit by major DNS problem on 31/8, Beijing time. So the results were not at all reliable during the first 12 hours after this story was posted in slashdot.
However, if his approach is correct, other guys should have already validated his claim. The experiment is so simple, only superconducting ceramic + strong magnet... Two percent in weight change is quite detecatable. Any university's physics dept can do that. If his experiment *still* works, it is his responisble for him to demostrate that to the commnunity. If it was due to experimental error, he should post a correction to say physics review letter. He has done neither; just after money.... As someone who is sort of belong to the science community, I suggest we should start questioning this guy's integrity.
People used to say that "extraordinary claim needs extraordinary proof". But, if you want to siphon money from the military-industry complex "extraordinary dubious claim makes you money".
It is fair to say that the proposed laser is an inhumane large scale blinding weapon. Its danger comes with its high power. Well, if there is a direct hit, the target gets vaporised. No question ask, not an ethical issue either.
After a target (say a truck) is destructed, the beam will be scattered to n different directions. A 50W laser can burn a hole on a piece of wood. To make that even worse, the optical gain of the eye is about 100000... A pulsed (20ms @ 1-2W) IR laser for atmospheric research can blind a person.
All the civilians (and soldier) say 1-2 mile around the target will be blinded permanently if they watch that by accident. When you considered all the armed conflict involves US troops in the last decade, the use of such weapon will cause serious collateral damage each time.
To disable, say, a anti-aircraft radar right at the city center, I don't think one will consider the dropping of a cluster bomb (damage radius around 300m??) acceptable. If it is used for ICBM, you can say you are sort of have no choice... It really does not make sense to arm a JSF with this.
Don't think "desktop replacement"--think "death to the PLC."......
Programmable Logic Controllers are tiny CPUs that appear in all sorts of specialty uses: controllers, valves, automated-just-about-anything.....
The Palm OS, WinCE, and the Transmeta chips are going to change all that....
I have very very strong doubt about this. Industrial automation people are in general very conservative (for some good reasons, sometimes). The reason that they tolerate PLC because PLC is rock-solid. In a lot of cases, the task PLC controls is really simple but critical (e.g. if the nuclear reactor is going to melt down, push all the goddamned controller rod right into it!!!).
Many chemical processing plants have modern looking control rooms with goodies like touch-screen big CRT a decade ago; they do not really care about money. In many cases, the SCADA system and the nice GUI frontend just reads data from the PLC... Once upon a time, I did some contract work for a beer brewery. During one of the presentations, I forgot to explicitly mention we won't touch their PLCs if we are going to install the proposed software sensor module in the first slide. I did see the technical manager's face changed colour and wanted to kick us out...
Simputer is a cool idea, but based on bad commerical decision. With a form factor like a PDA, they are effectively competing for the same type of high cost components, manufacturing facilities with all the major players in the market. Business is business, you should not expect others to do you a favour.
Even the projected 50000 units in a year (for 2004) is not a big number. If I were the Simputer Foundation, I would try to cut a deal with cheap PDA manufacturers for a standard PDA and focus on just providing Linux specialised software initially.
Most PC components are built in Taiwan, China, Japan, & Korea. These countries don't trade much with India..... Lower volume=higher prices.
Agree. However, if you fix to a single spec (ie same mobo, same case) for a few thousand units (or even few tens of thousand), the unit price can actually be as cheap as you can get in US.
Tariff is a big deal in India. For example, cabling materials are taxed at 35 %. It probably concludes the whole situation.
I think you may miss my point. I just want to point out cheap PC's price is on par of the Simputer. That does not really make sense to ship assembled PC from US. Most PC components (mobo, case, keyboard etc) are manufactured in some part of Asia anyway. Of course, if the price difference is due to tariff, talk to their govt instead..
Power supply voltage (110 vs 220 V, 50 vs 60Hz) is not at all a problem, any manufacturer can supply both spec. If an organisation like simputer.org can figure out how to design a PDA, I don't think they will have any trouble sort these out when ordering parts.
The idea is cool, but the market orientation of Simputer is really not that clear to me.
If the Simputer is supposed to be shared by villagers, I will suggest them to buy a cheap PC instead. Sharing a PC is much easier than sharing a PDA size device (more expandable, easier to service, not that easy to get stolen or squashed by a careless user...). According to Price Watch, a completed Duron 750MHz system with 128MB RAM, 20GBHDD, CD/modem/ethernet/video/keyboard/mouse/MS tax costs US$255. Adding a 14-15 inch monitor, the price is still around $350, on par with the Simputer ($214 to $469).
If you really think the handheld form factor is important, get this Linux PDA for US$160.
Our university network has just changed the default browser to Mozilla. The users do not seem to have too much (if any) bad feeling.
The lack of chance for ordinary user to try out these open source browser, rather than IE only sites, is the greatest problem nowadays.
Dear sysadmins, we need your help. If your intranet is flooded with IE only page, I agree you cannot do much. But, for most university/high school/public library etc, I don't really think IE is really that crucial.
By AtomicBomb >>ATTN NASA: >>Maybe sending me up the space is not such a bad >>idea. (A gnome shorter than 5'3" who can >>use both micropipette and computer program. )
By snake_dad >>Sending you up might spark some protests... You mean from KDE people:-)
It seems Russian astronauts are trolling for supermodels as passengers It makes good sense. In terms of payload, probably you can send 2 supermodels for same weight as Tito.
ATTN NASA: Maybe sending me up the space is not such a bad idea. (A gnome shorter than 5'3" who can use both micropipette and computer program. )
After so many years, Mills still cannot show the hydrino/blacklight whatever/ is not a crackpot idea.
Even according to their own website, I cannot see a single reference of the work being accepted by any reputable scientific journal. (Well, submitted to an IEEE journal is nothing. Rejection process typically takes about 6 months. With so many tech reports, they can keep on submitting and pretending they are doing something.)
Are you implying that the light source will become stronger when reflected multiply times???
The number of photon reaches a given area will become less when the laser is being scanned in a fast rate. That's exactly the reason why visual inspection machine operating at high speed usually need very strong light source (eg class 3b laser).
>Just like many voice recognition, the way how you >speak will determine the accuracy of voice >recognition (with a thick accent, you won't go >anywhere). Not only accent, background noise can usually kill these tidy little programs. I went to a trade show in Hong Kong couple of years ago. A reputable telco company was selling their interactive phone menu system. Basically, it recognises the language you are speaking and then replaces the touch-tone options by voice. The vocabulary is pretty limited, of course... (Just numbers, alphabets and simple options eg "which language are you using, English or Cantonese?" )
It failed horribly. That guy who showed me the product was so embarrassed that he asked all his colleagues to shut up. Suddenly, everything works 100% fine...
Slashdot Mirror
Spacewalk is a very hazardous operation. Why can't NASA develop a small tethered inspection robot? It is technically quite viable.
If in further operations, the robot discovers some problems outside the shuttle, they can then decide whether it worths to risk the life of the astronauts to go out the shuttle and carry out an unscheduled repair.
I also remember that "cut stop powder". I probably know why it got ditched as well.
/phased out of the market later on...
I grow up in a small warehouse in Hong Kong. When I was a kid, I felt so sleepy one day and crashed my head into the sharp edge of construction material when crawling to my makeshift bed. The cut bled like hell.
At that time (late 70's) many household stored a powder can "Yunam White" manufactured by China, which claimed to be a very effective blood clotting powder and proven to work well in Vietnam War (well, for the other side). It really worked. I saw a tv documentary that showed how it stopped bleeding on an animal within about 2 mins... But, the nurses in ER really hated that. She kept on swearing when cleaning up my wound. That powder is not soluble in anything and must be cleaned before stitching.... Maybe, that's the reason it got banned
It is a bit dumb IMO... I would rather suffer in the hospital then bleed to death on the way to it...
Taichi Robot story last night. It has a nice photo. The text is in chinese. I don't want to spend too much time for translation. So I just add a few extra points. The university names are my direct translation. They are unlikely to be the correct spelling... I am not a native Mandarin speaker.
I am not sure when/how did you do the search. I find
many links related to the posted story, although the content is more or less the same in everyone. It is not at all surprising. The reporters duplicated the official press release from englishdaily.com.cn. In a sense, Chinese is similar to Japanese. Many of these news are not for "export". They just publish the stories in their own language. You really cannot say it does not exist until you search in their own language (if you can...)
Japan (or I should say East Asia, just look at the trendy color screen mobile phones in South Korea) is the place for gadgets.
The high population density is a big drive factor behind these things. An average 20-something guy in US (Canada, Australia...) may spend quite a big chunk of his disposable income in car, surfing gear etc. In East Asia, living space is much smaller, car is considered a luxury for most... To show off, the equivalent Joe Sixpack will in fact buy cool tech gadget (mobile phones/ PDA/ digital cameras...).
The technical content to design a 850hp car or any latest cool tech gadget is not low. But, the tech understanding (or even literacy levl) of the end-user can be quite low. The desire for gadget and technolgy level in society does not correlate strongly due to the population density factor.
Open Source is political. However, it is just not nice to raise more than one issue in a single run. Choose (use/develop/promote)open source is a message in its own right. It is so easy to upset others if you want to do more. People will think you are either completely irrelevant, or even worse, sabotaging the whole business.
:-)
As an analogue, I guess you won't be a very popular man if you are trying to raise fund for your local football team while in a anti-war protest.
A small retail price, obviously, comes from mass production. China is indeed a huge market, but more in terms of population size, not income.
China is indeed a huge market, but not in terms of income, or population size. Their export oriented consumer electronics industry needs to import more than 80% of the high end components, IIRC. That's the market drive for fab investiment.
China actually just enters the big fab building exercise in the last year or so. A few 1
2 8-inch/0.18um production lines will be completed in the near future. It may be part of the reason why they want to fast track their first MCU design.
AFAIK, Russia still lacks behind in consumer electronics. Hong Kong... All my friends in HK motorola, which is the only major HK semiconductor, got sacked. They (the semi dept) just do chip testing in recent years while most of the chips are from a Motorola fab in mainland China.
I read an interview with one of the Dragon Chip
project leader (Dr Hu) a few months ago in a magazine. It gives a lot more details if I can
still recall correctly.
The reporter interviewed him after their team booted into Linux successfully with their prototype chip (or I should say FPGA implementation). Follow the common practice, they have written a C simulator for the chip, followed by hardware logic verification with FPGAs. I think the latest news is refering to
the completion of the initial silicon design.
The team focuses on the hardware design. The proposed chip is compatible with the MIPS instruction, IIRC. For the floating point
arithmatic, it follows the IEEE 754 standard. That's why they can boot to Linux to verify their
design quite early on without too much tweaking.
The targeted performance is close to PII. Not too bad for an embedded microprocessor at this moment... But, maybe a bit old when they commerically release it. But, as long as they can find applications into consumer electronics, the chip may get a good life like our good old Z80, HC11... Nevertheless, it is a good achievement consider the fact that the bulk of the team has no previous MCU design experience.
I agree those ITX form factor board is very nice. However, mounting it back to an ATX case just defeat the original purpose. I cannot find any nice smaller case say, in outpost.com. What do you guys normally do? DIY case??
The bigger hassle is we usually need 2-3 nics for this sort of apps. ITX board above cannot do that.
The claim that PSLV is 12 times cheaper than the Chinese equivalent is basically a self-advertisement. The DF5 ICBM's manufacturing is about US$15M ($100M yuan). Long March 3 series is based on DF5 ICBM missile's technology. Who can believe a Long March satellite lanuching rocket is 12 times more expensive than DF5!!! (check some of the articles in www.kanwa.com, probably last summer).
As a side note: the Chinese space program is about 100% indegenous. DF5 was developed in early 80's. With a range that can reach US, Americans could not be the partner. Former USSR had a very bad relationship with China at that moment.
Labour cost is not high in China either. All the lanuching pads are in remote area. The salary is really low. For manufacturing cost, most agree that China is lower than India... Well, India is better in more service-oriented industry, eg IT. No one is all-rounder, right?
Probe that later on. Many parts of China got hit by major DNS problem on 31/8, Beijing time. So the results were not at all reliable during the first 12 hours after this story was posted in slashdot.
However, if his approach is correct, other guys should have already validated his claim. The experiment is so simple, only superconducting ceramic + strong magnet... Two percent in weight change is quite detecatable. Any university's physics dept can do that. If his experiment *still* works, it is his responisble for him to demostrate that to the commnunity. If it was due to experimental error, he should post a correction to say physics review letter. He has done neither; just after money.... As someone who is sort of belong to the science community, I suggest we should start questioning this guy's integrity.
People used to say that "extraordinary claim needs extraordinary proof". But, if you want to siphon money from the military-industry complex "extraordinary dubious claim makes you money".
It is fair to say that the proposed laser is an inhumane large scale blinding weapon. Its danger comes with its high power. Well, if there is a direct hit, the target gets vaporised. No question ask, not an ethical issue either.
After a target (say a truck) is destructed, the beam will be scattered to n different directions.
A 50W laser can burn a hole on a piece of wood. To make that even worse, the optical gain of the eye is about 100000... A pulsed (20ms @ 1-2W) IR laser for atmospheric research can blind a person.
All the civilians (and soldier) say 1-2 mile around the target will be blinded permanently if they watch that by accident. When you considered all the armed conflict involves US troops in the last decade, the use of such weapon will cause serious collateral damage each time.
To disable, say, a anti-aircraft radar right at the city center, I don't think one will consider the dropping of a cluster bomb (damage radius around 300m??) acceptable. If it is used for ICBM, you can say you are sort of have no choice... It really does not make sense to arm a JSF with this.
Many chemical processing plants have modern looking control rooms with goodies like touch-screen big CRT a decade ago; they do not really care about money. In many cases, the SCADA system and the nice GUI frontend just reads data from the PLC... Once upon a time, I did some contract work for a beer brewery. During one of the presentations, I forgot to explicitly mention we won't touch their PLCs if we are going to install the proposed software sensor module in the first slide. I did see the technical manager's face changed colour and wanted to kick us out...
Simputer is a cool idea, but based on bad commerical decision. With a form factor like a PDA, they are effectively competing for the same type of high cost components, manufacturing facilities with all the major players in the market. Business is business, you should not expect others to do you a favour.
Even the projected 50000 units in a year (for 2004) is not a big number. If I were the Simputer Foundation, I would try to cut a deal with cheap PDA manufacturers for a standard PDA and focus on just providing Linux specialised software initially.
An optical mouse! It always lives with you, very low maintainance and get along well with computer...
Tariff is a big deal in India. For example, cabling materials are taxed at 35 %. It probably concludes the whole situation.
I think you may miss my point. I just want to point out cheap PC's price is on par of the Simputer. That does not really make sense to ship assembled PC from US. Most PC components (mobo, case, keyboard etc) are manufactured in some part of Asia anyway. Of course, if the price difference is due to tariff, talk to their govt instead..
Power supply voltage (110 vs 220 V, 50 vs 60Hz) is not at all a problem, any manufacturer can supply both spec. If an organisation like simputer.org can figure out how to design a PDA, I don't think they will have any trouble sort these out when ordering parts.
The idea is cool, but the market orientation of Simputer is really not that clear to me.
If the Simputer is supposed to be shared by villagers, I will suggest them to buy a cheap PC instead. Sharing a PC is much easier than sharing a PDA size device (more expandable, easier to service, not that easy to get stolen or squashed by a careless user...). According to Price Watch, a completed Duron 750MHz system with 128MB RAM, 20GBHDD, CD/modem/ethernet/video/keyboard/mouse/MS tax costs US$255. Adding a 14-15 inch monitor, the price is still around $350, on par with the Simputer ($214 to $469).
If you really think the handheld form factor is important, get this Linux PDA for US$160.
Our university network has just changed the default browser to Mozilla. The users do not seem to have too much (if any) bad feeling.
The lack of chance for ordinary user to try out these open source browser, rather than IE only sites, is the greatest problem nowadays.
Dear sysadmins, we need your help. If your intranet is flooded with IE only page, I agree you cannot do much. But, for most university/high school/public library etc, I don't really think IE is really that crucial.
By AtomicBomb
:-)
>>ATTN NASA:
>>Maybe sending me up the space is not such a bad
>>idea. (A gnome shorter than 5'3" who can
>>use both micropipette and computer program. )
By snake_dad
>>Sending you up might spark some protests...
You mean from KDE people
It seems Russian astronauts are trolling for supermodels as passengers
It makes good sense. In terms of payload, probably you can send 2 supermodels for same weight as Tito.
ATTN NASA:
Maybe sending me up the space is not such a bad idea. (A gnome shorter than 5'3" who can use both micropipette and computer program. )
After so many years, Mills still cannot show the hydrino/blacklight whatever/ is not a crackpot idea.
Even according to their own website, I cannot see a single reference of the work being accepted by any reputable scientific journal. (Well, submitted to an IEEE journal is nothing. Rejection process typically takes about 6 months. With so many tech reports, they can keep on submitting and pretending they are doing something.)
Are you implying that the light source will become stronger when reflected multiply times???
The number of photon reaches a given area will become less when the laser is being scanned in a fast rate. That's exactly the reason why visual inspection machine operating at high speed usually need very strong light source (eg class 3b laser).
>Just like many voice recognition, the way how you >speak will determine the accuracy of voice >recognition (with a thick accent, you won't go >anywhere).
Not only accent, background noise can usually kill these tidy little programs. I went to a trade show in Hong Kong couple of years ago. A reputable telco company was selling their interactive phone menu system. Basically, it recognises the language you are speaking and then replaces the touch-tone options by voice. The vocabulary is pretty limited, of course... (Just numbers, alphabets and simple options eg "which language are you using, English or Cantonese?" )
It failed horribly. That guy who showed me the product was so embarrassed that he asked all his colleagues to shut up. Suddenly, everything works 100% fine...