Me and many other people, according to Microsoft usage statistics. Usage in the start menu has dropped tremendously since the introduction of the start bar. What exactly do you use the start menu for anyway? At its core it's just a box with shortcuts on it. Fast desktop-wide searching has removed my need to ever use the "all programs link" and jump lists have removed the need to ever use the documents links. The only other useful function is pinned apps, and they go on my start bar anyway.
Except - how many people in a work environment have their data reported?
Microsoft addressed this exact question in this post, reposted below:
@Andrew wrote:
"I'd like to point out that this data you collect is most likely from non-corporate users, you're basing all your statistics around home users and not business users. Most enterprises will turn off the CEIP by default in Group Policy as a security precaution and to prevent chatter from the network."
Andrew, while it’s true that some enterprises choose not to enable the CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program, which gives us anonymous, opt-in feedback about how people are using Windows,) we still receive a huge amount of data from this program, including from enterprise customers. In addition, knowing the region, language, edition, and deployment attributes of the product allows us to further refine the data as needed. We often refer to this data as a full "census" (again noting that the data is opt-in and anonymous) as the number of unique data points is magnitudes beyond a "sampling."
In addition to the CEIP program, we have a wide variety of channels to our corporate customers to understand their needs. For example, we collect feedback continuously during direct engagement with customers (such as during on-site visits and in our briefing centers around the world), from advisory council and early-adopter program members, and at public events such as TechEd and//build/. We also work closely with industry analysts (via consultations and their research) and execute a wide range of our own research studies directly. From these interactions, we know the kind of functionality and control that enterprises want over the Start menu and we are definitely taking these into account as we are designing and developing the changes for Windows 8.
When you look at the data, we can see that enterprise customers do, in fact, have some different experiences with their Start menus:
While 81% of home users have the default links like Control Panel, Games, and Documents on right hand-side of the Start menu , fewer than 2% of our enterprise customers have this experience.
Most people have removed some items in this part of the Start menu (with Games and Media Center entry points most often removed).
Enterprise users are launching pinned Start menu apps 68% more often than home users, but the usage of pinned items is still less than 10% of the sessions.
What are we doing with this information?
In general, individual enterprise customers are using Start menus that their administrators have customized. Using this research and our engagement with the enterprise community, we are working on special features that can help address the need for customization in the Start screen. For example, enterprises can remove items like Games and Help & Support from the Start screen. For Windows 8, we support deployment scenarios that include Start screens with a layout of tiles that matches their business group’s needs, allowing for an even greater number of pinned apps to be pre-defined for their users. We also support the managed lockdown of customization of the Start screen so that it is consistent across the corporation. These features have been built especially for our enterprise customers, taking into account the existing functionality that we have provided in the past and the needs that we perceive they will have in the future. And as many know, tech-savvy individuals can use these customizations as well.
Honestly I never even use the start menu anymore. All the programs I ever use are pinned on the start bar. I guess the only time I actually open the start menu is to search. This is in line with what MS found through usage statistics gathered from thousands of users; that people just aren't using the start menu anymore. So I have to wonder how many people this change actually affects, and I also imagine the impact is blown out of proportion on sites like slashdot where people A) don't even use windows and B) have some sort of axe to grind against Microsoft.
The start menu may be flawed in some ways, but it is the evolution of years of interface feedback.
This same feedback is actually the driving force behind the new start screen. This msdn blog post explains that because of the new start bar win Windows 7, the start menu has become somewhat of a relic. In my own experience, I have to agree, as the only time I open the start menu is to search. So why continue to "evolve" something that has pretty much outlived its time. The start menu doesn't need any more evolution.
It's the distance one has to move the mouse (to "invisible icons" in the corners).
These "invisible icons" as you call them, or hot corners as they're commonly known, have infinite size, so according to Fitts's law, the distance you have to move to them has no bearing on the time it takes to target the corner.
It's the mandatory whole screen paradigm.
There is a whole screen paradigm, but it's not mandatory. You're free to use the desktop and open however many apps and windows you want.
It's the AOL look and feel
Not sure what this means but I enjoy the aesthetic, and certainly prefer it to faux textures and gradients/rounded edges/mirrored surfaces/shadows prevalent in every other interface out there.
snapping smart corners that are great on a touch screen - but not so much with a mouse.
For me the mouse analogues to touch features serve just fine.
It's the assumption that people want their desktop screen to be touch
This assumption has never been made; there are plenty of mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts being designed specifically for keyboard/mouse. In fact, I can get around the interface pretty handily by just using a keyboard.
I'm wondering exactly in what way you feel MS is imposing a particular workflow on you. If you use Windows 8, you're free to use the desktop just as you always have. In fact, they're expanding and improving multi monitor support.
Actually more like 3 versions where Enterprise is just a different license on Pro. And of those 3 the consumer can only buy 2. Wasn't the complaint on previous version consumer confusion? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
You might be interested in this blog post, which tries to address concerns that the new start screen is less efficient. For example, you complain about things being further away and larger, but according to Fitts law, this exact combination maintains the efficiency of the menu, and if fact the math works out so that it's more efficient for a higher number of items. Further, the shape and grouping capability of the new start screen, which is only possible because it's a screen instead of a menu, make it possible to take advantage of different types of memory recall like spatial memory. After using the new start screen for a while, I find it much more useful than the start menu.
With the plethora of forwarding and mailbox combining options available, even in 2003, switching mail providers is pretty seamless. This is in stark contrast to changing your phone number and bank.
Gmail offered 1gb of mail storage per user while the competition offered something like 2mb. For Google Drive to be equally impressive, I'd expect them to offer 1.25tb of cloud storage per user.:P
You must be pretty young to not remember a time when someone might have had to actually delete messages before they received new ones because they ran out of storage in their inbox. We're talking services that offered like 2mb for storage. Then Google came around and offered an entire gigabyte, promising to never have to worry about your inbox capacity again. This absolutely caused many people to switch to gmail. When hotmail and others realized this, they followed suit and started upping their mailbox capacity to match gmail's.
Both the Cyan and Black versions are topping the charts at Amazon, and my local stores sold out. The reviews have been very favorable, and the people who have used mine are very jealous of it. I don't know who this "unnamed source" is our where he gets his "estimate" but by all accounts the phone is doing well for a contender most on/. think can't sell more than 2 phones, and personally I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't already sold more than 100,000 units.
The positive effect is that companies on the top can't get away with buggy hardware/software without their customers saying "Look what Nokia did for their customers." Otherwise, those same customers will think twice when their next cellphone contract is up.
This is the big difference between the front runner in a market and the lagging competition. When Apple is confronted with claims of dropped calls via "the grip of death" they responded with things like "you're holding it wrong." Only after the problem persisted they provided everyone with free bumpers (still somehow without admitting there's an actual problem).
MS and Nokia, with their drastically lower and non-dominating marketshare, are not in a position to make such claims, and they immediately respond by comping the price of the phone and signaling exactly when the fix will be available.
No matter what your feelings toward WP7 are, you should be able to recognize its presence has a positive affect in overall market quality.
Did you RTFA? The competition will involve much more than that: it needs to drive a vehicle, including entering it, using all the controls as-is, and exiting the vehicle; it needs to climb ladders and traverse grated catwalks; it needs to use tools made specifically for humans; it needs to traverse several types of terrain, including moving over rubble and then move said rubble.... exactly what kind of robot would you propose that can do all that?
If it is not a humanoid it is going to be highly engineered for this specific competition which defeats the purpose of a grand challenge.
This is classic DARPA... while these grand challenges are good for focusing research initiatives, they tend to ask for much more than the field can offer in a reasonable amount of time given the funds. Look at the first grand challenge: not a single team finished the race, and even the best team from the best school with the most funding only finished 12km of the proposed 240km course.
It was an utter embarrassment. Only after they relaxed the requirements in 2005 of the competition to more accurately reflect what was humanly (or more aptly roboticly) possible at the time was the competition a success.
Now they're expecting a full-on humanoid that can drive a car, bust down walls, move rubble, operate tools, all in unstructured environments? Look at the DARPA ARM grand challenge, where the state of the art could barely do these kinds of manipulations in a controlled well-lit laboratory.
On the other hand, I suppose if they're allowing teleoperation/assisted autonomy that makes things a lot easier. I guess I just don't want a repeat of the collective embarrassment of the robotics community that happened in 2004.
I went to Best Buy the other day to get 2 gigs of DDR2 PC2 5300 RAM for my laptop, something that costs $12 on newegg. I needed it sooner rather than later, so I figured even if it cost $25-$30 I'd buy it for the convenience of having it a couple days sooner than ordering it online.
First, I asked an employee where they were. He lead me to the laptop RAM, picked up a desktop stick, handed it to me, and walked off. I of course put it back and looked through the selection, only to find there weren't any 2gb sticks, but only 2x1gb sticks. Still I wanted to buy it and it was only $30, so I get to the register and the kid rings me up at $55. Turns out $30 was the price of 1gb and the 2x1gb was hanging in the wrong spot... they wanted 55 freaking dollars for 2x1gb of old outdated RAM. Obviously I left Best Buy without RAM in hand and ordered straight from newegg. It arrived in 2 days for $13.71 including taxes and shipping.
So now you're trying to tell me that taxes are killing best buy? I gave them plenty of opportunities to make a sale. After driving 15 minutes to get there, terrible customer service, terrible selection, inaccurate prices, I was still willing to buy from them. But all that, AND they are trying to gouge me on an item I KNOW I can buy elsewhere for 75% less... no, it's not sales tax; they have it coming and have only themselves to blame.
I'd like to echo and build on sirrunsalot's reply. Researching is a skill that can be learned, not an inherent talent you either possess or don't. For instance, I reviewed a paper last week where they didn't review any literature relevant to their work, they didn't conduct many experiments, they didn't provide any metric to gauge the quality of their methods, and they certainly didn't write with enough clarity and detail to make their work reproducible. Some people think that being a good researcher means making clever insights that solve problems no one else can. That is wrong. Being a good researcher is about doing something no one else has done, no matter how small, and being rigorous about reporting the results.
No it is true even today. Experiment's for DARPA's ARM project were conducted under bright lighting in ideal, static conditions. I've used the bumblebee cameras and other stereo vision systems, and they have limitations that inhibit the operation of many mobile robots including frame rate and maximum discernible range, (which is limited by the baseline of the camera), and most of all differences in lighting conditions.
When I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team a decade ago, we relied on LIDAR too much, and vision not enough. The winning teams relied almost entirely on vision when they were going fast - the LIDARs didn't have the range or angular accuracy to read terrain out to the stopping distance.
Look at the more recent DARPA Urban challenges. Of the 6 teams that completed the challenge, all of them used the Velodyne 3D LIDAR as their primary vision sensor, in addition to several peripherial LIDARs. None of the teams who relied on vision primarily finished. Look at Google's Autonomous Prius. Its primary navigational sensor is the Velodyne. If vision were good enough, a car should be able to run on vision alone. After all, I do. But they can't.
What they got from vision was basically "distant part of road looks like near part of road - OK to go fast if near part of road is good", obtained from a classifier system.
Again, the assumptions of most classifiers are that the training data represent a stable underlying distribution. What happens if the road color changes? What happens if everything looks the same color, like in the desert or at night? With a LIDAR these things are no problem. With vision, a human can solve these problems. With vision, a computer cannot. Vision systems are not robust enough.
Don't get me wrong, vision systems are important and can do many things a LIDAR cannot do, and in the future they will be indispensable, but they are simply not "good enough", especially for the task described in this DARPA challenge.
This isn't a problem in my field. In fact, it's standard procedure to present work first at a conference, build on it, and then expand on it in a Journal paper. You're expected of course to cite your previous work in your new paper and explain explicitly what the new results are. One of the biggest journals actually suggests this before submitting.
In the journals I review for, usually, several reviewers look at a paper, and recommend a decision to an editor, who makes the final call based on those reviews, so the bias or agenda of one reviewer is diluted.
Machine learning and vision processing are good enough.
I disagree on both counts. Machine learning is very good at specific problems. Current best techniques to train classifiers need millions of samples of ground truth training data, which is incredibly expensive to produce. Most classifiers like this make several assumptions about the training data, namely that it is representative of a stable underlying unknown distribution, which of course is hardly true. The best uses for machine learning techniques are for very specific applications where this assumption can be enforced, like optical character recognition. Machine learning has amazing applications, but it's hardly a field where I would say the results are "good enough," especially for most outdoor mobile robotics applications, like this DARPA project.
Same goes for vision processing. The reason most robots today use LIDARs as their primary "vision" sensor is that image processing is very slow and not very good. With a 3d LIDAR you can do mapping, object detection and recognition, people detection, grasp planning, obstacle avoidance, etc. all very easily in polynomial time. Most of these tasks are computationally intractable using images, if they're possible at all (for example, night time operations).
I've actually been on a ranting spree the past couple of days due to terrible journal manuscript submissions I've had to review recently. I can't tell you the number of times I've read a submission that was outright published in another periodical. Many foreign submitters don't understand the concept of plagiarism, let along self plagiarism. These "scientists" are ranked and compensated by the number of publications they produce, so they publish one piece of research and try to pass it off in as many periodicals as possible, essentially representing old research as brand new. This compensation system has obscured the true purpose of publication: what was once a means to disseminate your work to the general population is now a means to get you and your lab more money.
I take my responsibility as a reviewer very seriously; the job of a scientist is not only to create new research, but to critique and evaluate the research of others. But many academics who have been in the field longer than I approach reviewing as a chore, and only focus on half of the interesting part of their job, the research. I don't know how many of these terrible publications slip through the cracks due to lazy reviewers, but I'm sure it's more than I'm comfortable to admit to myself.
I use ROS in my research daily, and it's a great framework. However, it suffers from the a lot of the same problems other open source project face. Foremost, aside from stacks produced by Willow Garage, the documentation is incredibly spotty. For the most part, packages rely on doxygen API documentation as a substitute for true documentation, when really it tells you nothing of how to use a particular package. For the majority of stacks, there are no tutorials, examples, or even indications on how to get a particular package running correctly.
Further, like most FOSS projects, direction is very scattered. Again, aside from stacks developed at Willow Garage, a lot of code is very specialized to a specific robot platform, when it should be generalized to work on any platform. I think this is in part due to the disperate nature of the field, but also is a side effect from the lack of documentation; instead of using an undocumented stack, most groups will simply reinvent the wheel because figuring out the mystery package would take longer. I mean, only last month a generalized teleoperation stack was released. Before that, each robot seemed to have its own specialized teleoperation package coded for a particular input type.
Honestly, what I like most about ROS is the TCP/IP node framework, the trasnformation stack, the point cloud library (PCL), and the wide array of message types (plus the ability to define my own). Also the device drivers are very handy, so I can be assured most of my devices are plug and play. I think being able to leverage this framework and common robotics algorithms is incredibly powerful. However I'm not convinced of the utility in most community developed stacks, as they're still too specialized and too undocumented to be generally useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Good for **YOU**
Me and many other people, according to Microsoft usage statistics. Usage in the start menu has dropped tremendously since the introduction of the start bar. What exactly do you use the start menu for anyway? At its core it's just a box with shortcuts on it. Fast desktop-wide searching has removed my need to ever use the "all programs link" and jump lists have removed the need to ever use the documents links. The only other useful function is pinned apps, and they go on my start bar anyway.
Except - how many people in a work environment have their data reported?
Microsoft addressed this exact question in this post, reposted below:
@Andrew wrote: "I'd like to point out that this data you collect is most likely from non-corporate users, you're basing all your statistics around home users and not business users. Most enterprises will turn off the CEIP by default in Group Policy as a security precaution and to prevent chatter from the network."
Andrew, while it’s true that some enterprises choose not to enable the CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program, which gives us anonymous, opt-in feedback about how people are using Windows,) we still receive a huge amount of data from this program, including from enterprise customers. In addition, knowing the region, language, edition, and deployment attributes of the product allows us to further refine the data as needed. We often refer to this data as a full "census" (again noting that the data is opt-in and anonymous) as the number of unique data points is magnitudes beyond a "sampling."
In addition to the CEIP program, we have a wide variety of channels to our corporate customers to understand their needs. For example, we collect feedback continuously during direct engagement with customers (such as during on-site visits and in our briefing centers around the world), from advisory council and early-adopter program members, and at public events such as TechEd and //build/. We also work closely with industry analysts (via consultations and their research) and execute a wide range of our own research studies directly. From these interactions, we know the kind of functionality and control that enterprises want over the Start menu and we are definitely taking these into account as we are designing and developing the changes for Windows 8.
When you look at the data, we can see that enterprise customers do, in fact, have some different experiences with their Start menus:
While 81% of home users have the default links like Control Panel, Games, and Documents on right hand-side of the Start menu , fewer than 2% of our enterprise customers have this experience.
Most people have removed some items in this part of the Start menu (with Games and Media Center entry points most often removed).
Enterprise users are launching pinned Start menu apps 68% more often than home users, but the usage of pinned items is still less than 10% of the sessions.
What are we doing with this information?
In general, individual enterprise customers are using Start menus that their administrators have customized. Using this research and our engagement with the enterprise community, we are working on special features that can help address the need for customization in the Start screen. For example, enterprises can remove items like Games and Help & Support from the Start screen. For Windows 8, we support deployment scenarios that include Start screens with a layout of tiles that matches their business group’s needs, allowing for an even greater number of pinned apps to be pre-defined for their users. We also support the managed lockdown of customization of the Start screen so that it is consistent across the corporation. These features have been built especially for our enterprise customers, taking into account the existing functionality that we have provided in the past and the needs that we perceive they will have in the future. And as many know, tech-savvy individuals can use these customizations as well.
Honestly I never even use the start menu anymore. All the programs I ever use are pinned on the start bar. I guess the only time I actually open the start menu is to search. This is in line with what MS found through usage statistics gathered from thousands of users; that people just aren't using the start menu anymore. So I have to wonder how many people this change actually affects, and I also imagine the impact is blown out of proportion on sites like slashdot where people A) don't even use windows and B) have some sort of axe to grind against Microsoft.
The start menu may be flawed in some ways, but it is the evolution of years of interface feedback.
This same feedback is actually the driving force behind the new start screen. This msdn blog post explains that because of the new start bar win Windows 7, the start menu has become somewhat of a relic. In my own experience, I have to agree, as the only time I open the start menu is to search. So why continue to "evolve" something that has pretty much outlived its time. The start menu doesn't need any more evolution.
It's the distance one has to move the mouse (to "invisible icons" in the corners).
These "invisible icons" as you call them, or hot corners as they're commonly known, have infinite size, so according to Fitts's law, the distance you have to move to them has no bearing on the time it takes to target the corner.
It's the mandatory whole screen paradigm.
There is a whole screen paradigm, but it's not mandatory. You're free to use the desktop and open however many apps and windows you want.
It's the AOL look and feel
Not sure what this means but I enjoy the aesthetic, and certainly prefer it to faux textures and gradients/rounded edges/mirrored surfaces/shadows prevalent in every other interface out there.
snapping smart corners that are great on a touch screen - but not so much with a mouse.
For me the mouse analogues to touch features serve just fine.
It's the assumption that people want their desktop screen to be touch
This assumption has never been made; there are plenty of mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts being designed specifically for keyboard/mouse. In fact, I can get around the interface pretty handily by just using a keyboard.
I'm wondering exactly in what way you feel MS is imposing a particular workflow on you. If you use Windows 8, you're free to use the desktop just as you always have. In fact, they're expanding and improving multi monitor support.
Actually more like 3 versions where Enterprise is just a different license on Pro. And of those 3 the consumer can only buy 2. Wasn't the complaint on previous version consumer confusion? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Make the start screen more efficient
You might be interested in this blog post, which tries to address concerns that the new start screen is less efficient. For example, you complain about things being further away and larger, but according to Fitts law, this exact combination maintains the efficiency of the menu, and if fact the math works out so that it's more efficient for a higher number of items. Further, the shape and grouping capability of the new start screen, which is only possible because it's a screen instead of a menu, make it possible to take advantage of different types of memory recall like spatial memory. After using the new start screen for a while, I find it much more useful than the start menu.
With the plethora of forwarding and mailbox combining options available, even in 2003, switching mail providers is pretty seamless. This is in stark contrast to changing your phone number and bank.
I know, I found it interesting that TFA doesn't mention this. As a live account user, I don't see this big deal of this announcement.
Gmail offered 1gb of mail storage per user while the competition offered something like 2mb. For Google Drive to be equally impressive, I'd expect them to offer 1.25tb of cloud storage per user. :P
You must be pretty young to not remember a time when someone might have had to actually delete messages before they received new ones because they ran out of storage in their inbox. We're talking services that offered like 2mb for storage. Then Google came around and offered an entire gigabyte, promising to never have to worry about your inbox capacity again. This absolutely caused many people to switch to gmail. When hotmail and others realized this, they followed suit and started upping their mailbox capacity to match gmail's.
Both the Cyan and Black versions are topping the charts at Amazon, and my local stores sold out. The reviews have been very favorable, and the people who have used mine are very jealous of it. I don't know who this "unnamed source" is our where he gets his "estimate" but by all accounts the phone is doing well for a contender most on /. think can't sell more than 2 phones, and personally I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't already sold more than 100,000 units.
I don't believe any such commitment was made. That might have been a dream you had.
Um, the phone went on sale Monday. Bit premature to be claiming it's not selling well. It still needs to launch internationally as well.
The positive effect is that companies on the top can't get away with buggy hardware/software without their customers saying "Look what Nokia did for their customers." Otherwise, those same customers will think twice when their next cellphone contract is up.
This is the big difference between the front runner in a market and the lagging competition. When Apple is confronted with claims of dropped calls via "the grip of death" they responded with things like "you're holding it wrong." Only after the problem persisted they provided everyone with free bumpers (still somehow without admitting there's an actual problem).
MS and Nokia, with their drastically lower and non-dominating marketshare, are not in a position to make such claims, and they immediately respond by comping the price of the phone and signaling exactly when the fix will be available.
No matter what your feelings toward WP7 are, you should be able to recognize its presence has a positive affect in overall market quality.
Did you RTFA? The competition will involve much more than that: it needs to drive a vehicle, including entering it, using all the controls as-is, and exiting the vehicle; it needs to climb ladders and traverse grated catwalks; it needs to use tools made specifically for humans; it needs to traverse several types of terrain, including moving over rubble and then move said rubble.... exactly what kind of robot would you propose that can do all that?
If it is not a humanoid it is going to be highly engineered for this specific competition which defeats the purpose of a grand challenge.
This is classic DARPA... while these grand challenges are good for focusing research initiatives, they tend to ask for much more than the field can offer in a reasonable amount of time given the funds. Look at the first grand challenge: not a single team finished the race, and even the best team from the best school with the most funding only finished 12km of the proposed 240km course.
It was an utter embarrassment. Only after they relaxed the requirements in 2005 of the competition to more accurately reflect what was humanly (or more aptly roboticly) possible at the time was the competition a success.
Now they're expecting a full-on humanoid that can drive a car, bust down walls, move rubble, operate tools, all in unstructured environments? Look at the DARPA ARM grand challenge, where the state of the art could barely do these kinds of manipulations in a controlled well-lit laboratory.
On the other hand, I suppose if they're allowing teleoperation/assisted autonomy that makes things a lot easier. I guess I just don't want a repeat of the collective embarrassment of the robotics community that happened in 2004.
I went to Best Buy the other day to get 2 gigs of DDR2 PC2 5300 RAM for my laptop, something that costs $12 on newegg. I needed it sooner rather than later, so I figured even if it cost $25-$30 I'd buy it for the convenience of having it a couple days sooner than ordering it online.
First, I asked an employee where they were. He lead me to the laptop RAM, picked up a desktop stick, handed it to me, and walked off. I of course put it back and looked through the selection, only to find there weren't any 2gb sticks, but only 2x1gb sticks. Still I wanted to buy it and it was only $30, so I get to the register and the kid rings me up at $55. Turns out $30 was the price of 1gb and the 2x1gb was hanging in the wrong spot... they wanted 55 freaking dollars for 2x1gb of old outdated RAM. Obviously I left Best Buy without RAM in hand and ordered straight from newegg. It arrived in 2 days for $13.71 including taxes and shipping.
So now you're trying to tell me that taxes are killing best buy? I gave them plenty of opportunities to make a sale. After driving 15 minutes to get there, terrible customer service, terrible selection, inaccurate prices, I was still willing to buy from them. But all that, AND they are trying to gouge me on an item I KNOW I can buy elsewhere for 75% less... no, it's not sales tax; they have it coming and have only themselves to blame.
I'd like to echo and build on sirrunsalot's reply. Researching is a skill that can be learned, not an inherent talent you either possess or don't. For instance, I reviewed a paper last week where they didn't review any literature relevant to their work, they didn't conduct many experiments, they didn't provide any metric to gauge the quality of their methods, and they certainly didn't write with enough clarity and detail to make their work reproducible. Some people think that being a good researcher means making clever insights that solve problems no one else can. That is wrong. Being a good researcher is about doing something no one else has done, no matter how small, and being rigorous about reporting the results.
When I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team a decade ago, we relied on LIDAR too much, and vision not enough. The winning teams relied almost entirely on vision when they were going fast - the LIDARs didn't have the range or angular accuracy to read terrain out to the stopping distance.
Look at the more recent DARPA Urban challenges. Of the 6 teams that completed the challenge, all of them used the Velodyne 3D LIDAR as their primary vision sensor, in addition to several peripherial LIDARs. None of the teams who relied on vision primarily finished. Look at Google's Autonomous Prius. Its primary navigational sensor is the Velodyne. If vision were good enough, a car should be able to run on vision alone. After all, I do. But they can't.
What they got from vision was basically "distant part of road looks like near part of road - OK to go fast if near part of road is good", obtained from a classifier system.
Again, the assumptions of most classifiers are that the training data represent a stable underlying distribution. What happens if the road color changes? What happens if everything looks the same color, like in the desert or at night? With a LIDAR these things are no problem. With vision, a human can solve these problems. With vision, a computer cannot. Vision systems are not robust enough. Don't get me wrong, vision systems are important and can do many things a LIDAR cannot do, and in the future they will be indispensable, but they are simply not "good enough", especially for the task described in this DARPA challenge.
This isn't a problem in my field. In fact, it's standard procedure to present work first at a conference, build on it, and then expand on it in a Journal paper. You're expected of course to cite your previous work in your new paper and explain explicitly what the new results are. One of the biggest journals actually suggests this before submitting. In the journals I review for, usually, several reviewers look at a paper, and recommend a decision to an editor, who makes the final call based on those reviews, so the bias or agenda of one reviewer is diluted.
Machine learning and vision processing are good enough.
I disagree on both counts. Machine learning is very good at specific problems. Current best techniques to train classifiers need millions of samples of ground truth training data, which is incredibly expensive to produce. Most classifiers like this make several assumptions about the training data, namely that it is representative of a stable underlying unknown distribution, which of course is hardly true. The best uses for machine learning techniques are for very specific applications where this assumption can be enforced, like optical character recognition. Machine learning has amazing applications, but it's hardly a field where I would say the results are "good enough," especially for most outdoor mobile robotics applications, like this DARPA project.
Same goes for vision processing. The reason most robots today use LIDARs as their primary "vision" sensor is that image processing is very slow and not very good. With a 3d LIDAR you can do mapping, object detection and recognition, people detection, grasp planning, obstacle avoidance, etc. all very easily in polynomial time. Most of these tasks are computationally intractable using images, if they're possible at all (for example, night time operations).
I've actually been on a ranting spree the past couple of days due to terrible journal manuscript submissions I've had to review recently. I can't tell you the number of times I've read a submission that was outright published in another periodical. Many foreign submitters don't understand the concept of plagiarism, let along self plagiarism. These "scientists" are ranked and compensated by the number of publications they produce, so they publish one piece of research and try to pass it off in as many periodicals as possible, essentially representing old research as brand new. This compensation system has obscured the true purpose of publication: what was once a means to disseminate your work to the general population is now a means to get you and your lab more money.
I take my responsibility as a reviewer very seriously; the job of a scientist is not only to create new research, but to critique and evaluate the research of others. But many academics who have been in the field longer than I approach reviewing as a chore, and only focus on half of the interesting part of their job, the research. I don't know how many of these terrible publications slip through the cracks due to lazy reviewers, but I'm sure it's more than I'm comfortable to admit to myself.
I use ROS in my research daily, and it's a great framework. However, it suffers from the a lot of the same problems other open source project face. Foremost, aside from stacks produced by Willow Garage, the documentation is incredibly spotty. For the most part, packages rely on doxygen API documentation as a substitute for true documentation, when really it tells you nothing of how to use a particular package. For the majority of stacks, there are no tutorials, examples, or even indications on how to get a particular package running correctly.
Further, like most FOSS projects, direction is very scattered. Again, aside from stacks developed at Willow Garage, a lot of code is very specialized to a specific robot platform, when it should be generalized to work on any platform. I think this is in part due to the disperate nature of the field, but also is a side effect from the lack of documentation; instead of using an undocumented stack, most groups will simply reinvent the wheel because figuring out the mystery package would take longer. I mean, only last month a generalized teleoperation stack was released. Before that, each robot seemed to have its own specialized teleoperation package coded for a particular input type.
Honestly, what I like most about ROS is the TCP/IP node framework, the trasnformation stack, the point cloud library (PCL), and the wide array of message types (plus the ability to define my own). Also the device drivers are very handy, so I can be assured most of my devices are plug and play. I think being able to leverage this framework and common robotics algorithms is incredibly powerful. However I'm not convinced of the utility in most community developed stacks, as they're still too specialized and too undocumented to be generally useful.