Not a super good photo, looks kind of like an eSATA connector...?
Here, by the way, is the combined SATA connector: image. I've seen these with two cables or a single cable in, and without the gap so they can take a SAS or SATA drive. Here's the SAS and SATA drive connectors: image.
The official hard drives and memory units do not connect using USB (hard drive is a special SATA+power port, and the memory units have 2 special ports in the front of the xbox) and use proprietary file system that is given full read, write, and execute access by the 360.
OK, then Microsoft is guilty of no more than setting people up the bomb. Which is of course typically Microsoft.
What do you mean by a "special SATA+power" port? The normal SATA connection supports power... they're normally wired as separate connectors and cables on PCs but on servers and dedicated RAID shelves the SATA power and data connection is frequently on a single connector on a single cable or backplane... and usually supports both SAS and SATA.
Sorry, I wasn't sure which ID you were referring to, because the device ID was fine as far as the USB group was concerned.
Whether or not the USB working group was OK with it, I'd call that a hack when you combine it with the fact that they were using an undefined reverse-engineered protocol.
Now I AM assuming that the XBox 360 devices are just mass storage devices, not using a hack like this. If they were playing sillybuggers with USB like this then the worst Microsoft is guilty of is procrastination. If Microsoft was a monopoly in the console market they might be guilty of anti-trust violations but they're not so... IF that's the case... they get a pass from me too.
They were using the iPod compatible device ID, but the manufacturer ID was Palm.
Since the API they were using was completely undocumented, and never intended for public use, I fail to see the distinction: they were still pretending to be an Apple device.
What Apple did is not like Microsoft disabling standard mass storage devices. It is like Microsoft (or Sony, or Nintendo) disabling Linux installation on their consoles via some hack. Which happens, and people complain about it, but they knew it was likely to happen when they started. So most people weren't effected, because most people knew it was bogus. Most companies don't use hacks to interface to their competitor's hardware. It was obvious from the moment they announced the capability that APple wasn't going to let that stand.
Or are you saying that these mass storage devices were deliberately faking a Microsoft device ID to be accepted by the XBox? That the XBox doesn't use a standard mass-storage API? If that's the case, then the only thing I can fault Microsoft for is procrastination.
Apple isn't blocking the Pre from working with iTunes. Apple is blocking the Pre from working with iTunes by pretending it's an iPod. If Palm had used supported APIs (say, by letting you create a "Palm Pre" playlist and then reading the songs from that playlist to sync to the Pre) there wouldn't be a problem. Palm cheaped out to avoid having to write their own sync application (which is crazy, because they made the best handheld sync I've ever used) and used a hack instead.
People expect publishers to lock out hacks. They don't expect them to lock out stuff using standard APIs.
What, that he thinks people are out to get him and that carrying a gun will make a difference if they are? That he thinks it's something to brag about?
The quoted text didn't indicate that he had any rational reason to take those actions.
I mean, really... I've had death threats from disagreeing with someone on Usenet about technical details of the process of creating new groups. This is the Internet, that kind of thing happens. You can't take it seriously.
you may be right that a ball with a load of wires sticking out the back may not be all too useful
I think you misunderstood what I'm talking about. This technology has a lot of potential uses... consider a chair that could switch between a soft "bean bag" shape and a rigid form. The question is... why is this a good application of the technology, not whether it has good applications.
In addition, this has nothing to do with the macroscopic appearance of the device, or whether this kind of robot would be useful, but the implementation. This technology is a clumsy mechanism to implement the desired functionality. With or without the wires it requires a bulkier and less efficient mechanism than using conventional actuators to implement the same design. In fact you could use a "soft piston" design to get the same effect, simply by replacing the wall segments with bubble-wrap-like protrusions and inflating them inside a soft envelope. The amount of pressure that could be applied would be higher, because it would not need to be restricted by the counterpressure from the matrix of beads... leading to a simpler "soft robot" that would fit into smaller volumes (you could contract the pistons to the point where the robot took up little more space than the pump and payload, which isn't possible in this design) and operate on less power (giving it more running time or a higher velocity).
It could collapse all gooey (except the core which obviously remains hard) and by inflating the skeleton (or parts of it) take form. Try doing that with pistons.
That's not how this stuff works. When it collapses it gets hard, when it expands it gets soft. The soft skeleton you're describing is already in use in a number of applications... I'm sure you've seen examples in playgrounds and amusement parks.
PS: when Ken Olsen made that comment I already had a computer in my home.
if your OS is modifying the functionality of your favorite browser in a way you dont like, or forcing you to do things you dont like, then change your operating system.
Someone else wrote:
Have you considered changing distributions?
Yes, every single time I try something like this, I very seriously consider getting a Mac.-- jwz
Maybe it's more resistent to damage, as it can be made air/water tight, withstand shock (as components are surrounded in effectively an air bag).
This is also true for the equivalent design using conventional piston actuators, or the serpentine design.
and all this while remaining mechanically very simple
Valves require hinges, joints, ball bearings, etcetera... piston actuators are mechanically simpler than this design.
They could also be used in non-ball form, as artificial muscles for a skeletal robot, depending on how much force it can be made to exert.
Hmmm, I think I might have mentioned that the technology might be useful in other applications, I just don't see this application as having a great deal of promise, which is why I wondered what I might be missing.
No one could think of any uses for the integrated circuit when that was first invented.
Remote Procedure Call is another 'WTF?' claim -- you know Unix is very big on these things called Pipes, right? What the hell do you think those are?
They're not RPC. RPC is a mechanism to model access to remote resources analogously to access to local resources. To hide the mechanism (pipes, sockets, packets, connections, TCP, NetBIOS, OSI,...) under a synchronous call model.
Pipes are streams, at least on UNIX (I don't know what other operating systems might put under that name, we're talking about UNIX pipes here). They model access to remote resources through a serial I/O model.
The RPC model and the stream model each have their strengths and weaknesses, which I'd be happy to discuss if you want, but the point is that they are not the same thing at all.
If the situation was reversed? You mean if Microsoft blocked some obscure add-on or application that nobody knew about and was installed as a plug-in to Internet Explorer without my knowledge or approval? This isn't Firefox blocking IE or Windows Media Player, this is Firefox blocking something that most people have no idea exists, don't use, have no reason to care about, and never asked to have installed in the first place.
I wish Firefox would block more things like this. In fact I wish IE would block things like this. Every time I install or update Acrobat Reader I have to go through and physically remove the plugin components from the install to keep it from opening PDFs in my browser. When I check my Windows box at work and look at what's been installed in Firefox (and IE, and Windows Explorer, and...) I *always* find something new that I didn't ask to have installed, that sneaked in from some other package or program. I want an option in the Addins page in Firefox that lets me say "remove this now, and don't let it get installed again, ever."
Introducing a completely new OS was barely possible in 1985. If the OS had developed with unbroken continuity it might have gotten somewhere, but by the mid '90s the writing was on the wall. OS/2, BeOS, consumer QNX... if an OS didn't already have a committed user and application base, if it wasn't UNIX or Windows, it was doomed... and even then it wasn't anything like certain.
The operating system is like the roads. Most people don't care how the roads are built, and they're not going to buy a new car just to go down your driveway.
In other words, you don't know the answer to my question either.
I understand the point of research. I can see possible uses for this kind of material, even. I'm asking why this design might be expected to be superior to more conventional ones for locomotion, even in tight spaces, for macroscopic robots.
This design is not a swarm or a slime mold, it has nothing to do with that kind of colony organism. it's a single macroscopic device, one that has no relationship to either.
Neither your swarm robots and slime molds move by inflating different parts of a membrane with their bodily fluids or cytoplasm, on a macroscopic scale, as an amoeba or this robot do. That is, the similarity between the macroscopic behavior of a slime mold and an amoeba is not structural. It's not the same mechanism.
Why would this be more effective than a robot consisting of 20 linear actuators inside a tough enclosure? For that matter a serpentine or ferret-like robot would be more effective at fitting through narrow openings. There's reasons large animals abandoned amoeboid motion in favor of crawling or slithering.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a super good photo, looks kind of like an eSATA connector...?
Here, by the way, is the combined SATA connector: image. I've seen these with two cables or a single cable in, and without the gap so they can take a SAS or SATA drive. Here's the SAS and SATA drive connectors: image.
According to the comparison sheet, you can.
The official hard drives and memory units do not connect using USB (hard drive is a special SATA+power port, and the memory units have 2 special ports in the front of the xbox) and use proprietary file system that is given full read, write, and execute access by the 360.
OK, then Microsoft is guilty of no more than setting people up the bomb. Which is of course typically Microsoft.
What do you mean by a "special SATA+power" port? The normal SATA connection supports power... they're normally wired as separate connectors and cables on PCs but on servers and dedicated RAID shelves the SATA power and data connection is frequently on a single connector on a single cable or backplane... and usually supports both SAS and SATA.
Good point. I'd mod you up funny if I had mod points, and if I hadn't already posted in the thread.
Sorry, I wasn't sure which ID you were referring to, because the device ID was fine as far as the USB group was concerned.
Whether or not the USB working group was OK with it, I'd call that a hack when you combine it with the fact that they were using an undefined reverse-engineered protocol.
Now I AM assuming that the XBox 360 devices are just mass storage devices, not using a hack like this. If they were playing sillybuggers with USB like this then the worst Microsoft is guilty of is procrastination. If Microsoft was a monopoly in the console market they might be guilty of anti-trust violations but they're not so... IF that's the case... they get a pass from me too.
They have one-of-everything-else already.
Palm Pre used the device ID for an iPod
Which is what I wrote: "They were using the iPod/iPhone USB identifier from the start."
The Pre started using the iPod USB identifier to work around the fact that the software started looking for it.
The Pre started out using the iPod DEVICE ID. They later added the Apple MANUFACTURER ID.
Since the Pre is not an iPod, and had to reverse-engineer the protocol to masquerade as an iPod, it was a hack from the start.
They were using the iPod compatible device ID, but the manufacturer ID was Palm.
Since the API they were using was completely undocumented, and never intended for public use, I fail to see the distinction: they were still pretending to be an Apple device.
What Apple did is not like Microsoft disabling standard mass storage devices. It is like Microsoft (or Sony, or Nintendo) disabling Linux installation on their consoles via some hack. Which happens, and people complain about it, but they knew it was likely to happen when they started. So most people weren't effected, because most people knew it was bogus. Most companies don't use hacks to interface to their competitor's hardware. It was obvious from the moment they announced the capability that APple wasn't going to let that stand.
Or are you saying that these mass storage devices were deliberately faking a Microsoft device ID to be accepted by the XBox? That the XBox doesn't use a standard mass-storage API? If that's the case, then the only thing I can fault Microsoft for is procrastination.
sorry you forgot to mention the alternate Apple API for iTunes is intentionally crippled
[citation needed]
When the Pre came out it could sync with iTunes with no problem.
Because it used the same device ID as an iPod. It was pretending to be an iPod. Pretending to be an iPod isn't a supported API.
They switched to using the iPod/iPhone USB identifier only because Apple blocked the Pre from using iTunes...
They were using the iPod/iPhone USB identifier from the start. That's how their sync hack worked.
Apple isn't blocking the Pre from working with iTunes. Apple is blocking the Pre from working with iTunes by pretending it's an iPod. If Palm had used supported APIs (say, by letting you create a "Palm Pre" playlist and then reading the songs from that playlist to sync to the Pre) there wouldn't be a problem. Palm cheaped out to avoid having to write their own sync application (which is crazy, because they made the best handheld sync I've ever used) and used a hack instead.
People expect publishers to lock out hacks. They don't expect them to lock out stuff using standard APIs.
Endgagdet story from 2007
Siggraph 2007 video
Siggraph 2009 demo
Over a third of the people tested thought the lower bit rate audio sounded BETTER.
Which is a pretty sad commentary.
What, that he thinks people are out to get him and that carrying a gun will make a difference if they are? That he thinks it's something to brag about?
The quoted text didn't indicate that he had any rational reason to take those actions.
I mean, really... I've had death threats from disagreeing with someone on Usenet about technical details of the process of creating new groups. This is the Internet, that kind of thing happens. You can't take it seriously.
you may be right that a ball with a load of wires sticking out the back may not be all too useful
I think you misunderstood what I'm talking about. This technology has a lot of potential uses... consider a chair that could switch between a soft "bean bag" shape and a rigid form. The question is... why is this a good application of the technology, not whether it has good applications.
In addition, this has nothing to do with the macroscopic appearance of the device, or whether this kind of robot would be useful, but the implementation. This technology is a clumsy mechanism to implement the desired functionality. With or without the wires it requires a bulkier and less efficient mechanism than using conventional actuators to implement the same design. In fact you could use a "soft piston" design to get the same effect, simply by replacing the wall segments with bubble-wrap-like protrusions and inflating them inside a soft envelope. The amount of pressure that could be applied would be higher, because it would not need to be restricted by the counterpressure from the matrix of beads... leading to a simpler "soft robot" that would fit into smaller volumes (you could contract the pistons to the point where the robot took up little more space than the pump and payload, which isn't possible in this design) and operate on less power (giving it more running time or a higher velocity).
It could collapse all gooey (except the core which obviously remains hard) and by inflating the skeleton (or parts of it) take form. Try doing that with pistons.
That's not how this stuff works. When it collapses it gets hard, when it expands it gets soft. The soft skeleton you're describing is already in use in a number of applications... I'm sure you've seen examples in playgrounds and amusement parks.
PS: when Ken Olsen made that comment I already had a computer in my home.
if your OS is modifying the functionality of your favorite browser in a way you dont like, or forcing you to do things you dont like, then change your operating system.
Maybe it's more resistent to damage, as it can be made air/water tight, withstand shock (as components are surrounded in effectively an air bag).
This is also true for the equivalent design using conventional piston actuators, or the serpentine design.
and all this while remaining mechanically very simple
Valves require hinges, joints, ball bearings, etcetera... piston actuators are mechanically simpler than this design.
They could also be used in non-ball form, as artificial muscles for a skeletal robot, depending on how much force it can be made to exert.
Hmmm, I think I might have mentioned that the technology might be useful in other applications, I just don't see this application as having a great deal of promise, which is why I wondered what I might be missing.
No one could think of any uses for the integrated circuit when that was first invented.
[citation needed]
Remote Procedure Call is another 'WTF?' claim -- you know Unix is very big on these things called Pipes, right? What the hell do you think those are?
They're not RPC. RPC is a mechanism to model access to remote resources analogously to access to local resources. To hide the mechanism (pipes, sockets, packets, connections, TCP, NetBIOS, OSI, ...) under a synchronous call model.
Pipes are streams, at least on UNIX (I don't know what other operating systems might put under that name, we're talking about UNIX pipes here). They model access to remote resources through a serial I/O model.
The RPC model and the stream model each have their strengths and weaknesses, which I'd be happy to discuss if you want, but the point is that they are not the same thing at all.
Calling pipes "RPC" is a complete WTF.
If the situation was reversed? You mean if Microsoft blocked some obscure add-on or application that nobody knew about and was installed as a plug-in to Internet Explorer without my knowledge or approval? This isn't Firefox blocking IE or Windows Media Player, this is Firefox blocking something that most people have no idea exists, don't use, have no reason to care about, and never asked to have installed in the first place.
I wish Firefox would block more things like this. In fact I wish IE would block things like this. Every time I install or update Acrobat Reader I have to go through and physically remove the plugin components from the install to keep it from opening PDFs in my browser. When I check my Windows box at work and look at what's been installed in Firefox (and IE, and Windows Explorer, and...) I *always* find something new that I didn't ask to have installed, that sneaked in from some other package or program. I want an option in the Addins page in Firefox that lets me say "remove this now, and don't let it get installed again, ever."
Introducing a completely new OS was barely possible in 1985. If the OS had developed with unbroken continuity it might have gotten somewhere, but by the mid '90s the writing was on the wall. OS/2, BeOS, consumer QNX... if an OS didn't already have a committed user and application base, if it wasn't UNIX or Windows, it was doomed... and even then it wasn't anything like certain.
The operating system is like the roads. Most people don't care how the roads are built, and they're not going to buy a new car just to go down your driveway.
In other words, you don't know the answer to my question either.
I understand the point of research. I can see possible uses for this kind of material, even. I'm asking why this design might be expected to be superior to more conventional ones for locomotion, even in tight spaces, for macroscopic robots.
This design is not a swarm or a slime mold, it has nothing to do with that kind of colony organism. it's a single macroscopic device, one that has no relationship to either.
Neither your swarm robots and slime molds move by inflating different parts of a membrane with their bodily fluids or cytoplasm, on a macroscopic scale, as an amoeba or this robot do. That is, the similarity between the macroscopic behavior of a slime mold and an amoeba is not structural. It's not the same mechanism.
Why would this be more effective than a robot consisting of 20 linear actuators inside a tough enclosure? For that matter a serpentine or ferret-like robot would be more effective at fitting through narrow openings. There's reasons large animals abandoned amoeboid motion in favor of crawling or slithering.