As others have stated, while it was a wacky decision to stop it, it was irrelevant.
SOW wasn't immobile, and had hit Biohazard several times even after one of the stabilizer bars had become partially detached. Go watch the fight again.
Regardless, there was only 10 seconds left in the match - Biohazard wasn't going to mystically fix its drive motors and ram and flip SOW in that time period.
My point exactly. And this is exactly what this battlebot is: A super-engineered robot killer. It should only be pitted against other super-engineered robot killers!
Uh, so you're entering a competition called BattleBots with a robot designed for what? House cleaning?
Sorry, but this is just whining that you can't engineer or spend as much money as someone else. BattleBots isn't the place for you then, go to a lower weight class or another competition or learn how to engineer.
There are defenses against any offense - flip a spinner and they're toast. You could design a bot specifically for use against Wyachi (and son, etc) by having a long flipper arm with one hell of a powerful motor/piston behind it and flip him before he can hit you. Game over - there's no righting mechanism. You can design a flip-proof bot, or one that has a quick self-righting mechanism, but then you may be vulnerable to spinners. Choose your poison.
The fact is, BattleBots is a pretty serious competition now. Win a title, get $6400. And then everytime they air a show with your bot, get a check in the mail for an additional $1600.
As for splitting the competition up even more - hell, there were over 500 bots there this year. Comedy Central showed a very small percentage of all the matches (too lazy to do the math right now). I'm rather annoyed about that, since they didn't even show all the regular matches, much less the prelims.
Actually, the really impressive thing is that they expect the redesigned Son of Wyachi 2.0 to have an impact of 72,000 ft-lbs next year, along with 15x the rotor strength.
They also speed limited Wyachi to 5 ft/sec, but later tested it successfully at 15 ft/sec. If they can do the same for Wyachi (or if they can move to a stable wheeled platform), then no wonder they think Comedy Central should strengthen the arena (currently uses 1" or so of Lexan, which may not cut it soon).
The real issue I see for them is that with that much impact force you have a problem keeping control of the bot immediately after impact. Even at a "mere" 10k ft-lbs of impact force SoW went spinning off several times during the semi-finals and finals in this year's tournament. Sure, so did the other bot, but now you're talking about a lighter wheeled bot (walkers have higher weight limits) with even more force. I'll be interested to see how they deal with this.
Gotta get home tonight and watch the super heavyweight championship! Thanks TiVo!
One of my college English teachers at Georgia Tech said she made the mistake of asking a freshman class to write an essay on their favorite childhood toy. She read 30 essays extolling the virtues of the legos we grew up with, and bashing on the "new" legos that had such specific parts.
She never made the mistake of asking for that essay again.
I have two TiVo's in my house - I bought mine about 18 months ago, and when my GF moved in she bought one too (basically due to TV show scheduling conflicts). We both love our TiVo's. I can't imagine going back to watching TV without one. Watching live TV is just annoying now.
The problem is, no matter what _WE_ want, the fact of the matter is that the content owners don't necessarily like it. TiVo was pressured into not providing a 30-second skip function and only fast-forward/reverse. They considered it a necessary evil to get funding they needed. Both DirecTV and Echostar are finding out that content providers are unhappy with consumers being able to record direct digital feeds - and are putting in controls to prevent recording of some movies or timed automatic deletion of the movies. TiVo is floundering despite its success, and is becoming targeted more and more for extermination by advertisers and networks (the same networks that funded their startup!).
And take a look at HDTV. The hardware manufacturers, cable companies, and content providers have finally agreed on an interconnection standard - one that will provide uncompressed full digital audio/video between set-top boxes and displays. Of course, it has multiple layers of encryption (duh) and it has the capability to disallow ANY form of digital recording, to allow for time-limited recording, disallow fast-forwarding through certain content, etc.
We could see this coming with DVDs, with the regional encoding, the forced previews, and so forth. The fact of the matter is that the advertisers and content providers don't see digital medium as a freedom for us, the consumers. They see it as the ability to lock us in to forced advertising, better copy protections, and ultimately pay-for-anything viewings.
Oh, and while you may say "hah, it's digital! It's just bits! I can do whatever I want with those bits!", realize that:
Mass market OS's (e.g.- Windows), will ship only with support for the copy protection schemes. There are indications that ONLY drivers that conform to these schemes will be licensed. Eventually it may require hacking to install "unlicensed" drivers.
The DMCA and similar laws will make writing programs that bypass these protections illegal inside of the US (and, uh, who outside the US is going to write HDTV code?)
Should Linux alternatives become popular, then major Linux releases will be forced, by lawsuit if necessary, to comply to the same restrictions as Windows, etc. as best possible. Thanks DMCA!
And, no matter what you may wish, the fact is that TV is not a free ride. The shows cost money to make. It costs money to broadcast. This money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is advertising. Advertisers won't pay unless they think their ads are being watched, and so both the advertisers and the content providers are going to do their damnedest to make sure you see the advertising so you'll buy the product.
The other option, of course, is all-pay channels, or pay-per-view on all shows. That's what you want, right?
Gee, six months ago it would've been a reasonable price? Well hell, if you want to base "reasonable pricing" based on 6 month old data please let me know. I'll sell you anything you want at prices from 6 months ago.
You can buy 256MB of high quality PC2100 RAM for $40-50 now, including shipping. 256MB of PC800 RDRAM is $100-$120. So only a 2.5x markup for RDRAM. Nice. Yes, it's better than the 10x markup that used to exist, but still - you're paying a premium price for an inferior product.
Yes, inferior. Because RDRAM has numerous technical issues that can't be solved. There's no tolerance in the design for timing. The more chips you add, the slower the entire memory system runs because the serialized bus is limited to the speed of the slowest chip. And while bandwidth is high, the constant problem in memory architectures is lowering latency. Unless you're doing some VERY specific operations you are more likely to be doing random lookups on memory than streaming huge chunks. Even with modern dataset sizes this is true.
Intel upper management made several very bad decisions about 5 years ago. One of them was RAMBUS. And given the long cycle times in the semiconductor industry, it's taking until now to start recovering. Hopefully Intel will come out with a slightly redesigned P4 that will finally get the performance that it was supposed to for current apps. At the same time they should be able to ditch the RAMBUS monstrosity for cheaper memory that runs faster in everyday situations.
About time really. Of course, this is the kind of technology that the established hierarchy wouldn't care to see (it has, to some extent, the ability to significantly reduce publisher's clout since an independant could have as much 'shelf space' as a large house).
A few questions though... first, does the machine do different typographic styles and layouts? Does it print in the font of the author's/editor's choosing, complete with pictures, chapter icons, and so forth? All of these things are stylistically important, and are often chosen by the author for particular reasons.
Second, standard copier paper is usually considerably worse than the paper used for hardback books. It doesn't have the grain or the weight. This machine is obviously not meant for this kind of thing, but it'd be nice if it was an option.
Third, while it's a nifty thought of "wow, you could replace that huge brick & mortar bookstore with a machine the size of a photocopier!", don't forget the rest of the experience you would thus forgo - browsing the aisles, finding new and interesting books by leafing through them, meeting people, avoiding people, etc.
A complementary device for this is a high quality electronic viewer. Current display devices have nowhere close to the resolution that's given by real books, which is one of the reasons there is eyestrain with computers. Fix that, then you can browse through books electronically and then print them out for cheap (and still pay the author legitimitely) and carry them with you wherever you go.
The HTPC crowd has been into silencing their systems for quite awhile now - after all, if your PC is an integral part of the home theatre do you want to be listening to the whirring and clicking of the PC or to the movie you're supposed to be watching?
Go to the AVS Home Theater Forum. Read there, search there, and you'll find both do-it-yourself suggestions (such as rubber grommets on hard drive screws) and places to go buy "quiet" power supplies, fans, and so forth.
Be careful buying a region free DVD player right now. Columbia TriStar (and other studios) are planning to implement a new regional encoding scheme that will refuse to play on region 0 (aka region free) players.
For more info, read this Digital Bits story - go down to the 10/19 post and below.
--
Yes, but subverting their own system to eliminate their profit is another issue. If you don't like TiVo's policies, that's fine. But kindly go build your own system to do it. TiVo has been incredibly cool with hackers to date - they have [b]no[/b] problems with hacking the hardware. But touch the software and you violate their licensing policy, and they've been pretty clear that they won't allow this. (NB - you do recommend this at the end of your post, I just wanted to reinforce it).
2) Privacy. TiVo's privacy policy is pretty well defined on their web page ( http://www.tivo.com/care/privacy.html ). Yes, they
sell info about what TiVo users are watching, but only at the zip code level. I'm comfortable with their privacy policy.
are you comfortable with them changing it at any time, like Amazon just did?
Since I trust TiVo a great deal more than Amazon - yes (TiVo has one of the few customer service departments that's actually customer oriented). More importantly, with TiVo I can call an 800 number and have them stop using my viewing habits for any kind of marketing. So it's a non-issue.
Personally, I don't mind if they use it for marketing. The current anonymity level is just right IMO, and hopefully my viewing habits will be used to get more TV shows on the air that I like.
As far as commercial skip goes - yeah, it'd be nice to have. I'm not too unhappy about it though, since occasionally I'll see a commercial flying by at 20x or 60x speed that I actually want to watch -- I wouldn't know about B5 Widescreen on SciFi later this month otherwise. If it had just instantly fast-forwarded through I would miss the rare gem.
--
3) Very very commonly, cases involving sciences use an expert witness, generally a scientist or engineer that is unrelated to the case but an
expert in the field. I would think a similar system would work for computer experts, however, there is something of an informal fraternity of
geekdome throughout this area, so that finding a computer expert that was imparital to the deCSS case would probably be very difficult. But I
don't see why this can't be attempted at least.
Ah, but that already occurs. There were several expert witnesses in the Microsoft case. Some testified for MSFT, some against.
In any case where the plaintiff or defendant feels the court (judge and/or jury) may need knowledge above and beyond what one might expect they'll call in expert witnesses. And if one side does it the other side will call an expert witness to contradict them.
Expert witnesses are not impartial. They are hired by the plaintiff or defendant to testify. Not all experts in any field have the same opinion -- I'm sure you could find many who felt the DeCSS verdict was correct. And to be cynical about it, if you wave around enough money, fame, or influence you'll eventually find an "expert" who is willing to testify whatever way you want them to. Just go look at the OJ Simpson case as an example...
--
I don't want to sit at my computer to watch a DVD.
I do, however, want to have my computer drive my FPTV (or RPTV, or Plasma screen, or anything better than that dinky 13" TV in your bedroom) because no set top DVD player can come close to the quality. In fact, to get close to the quality you need a $700+ progressive scan DVD player and a $2000+ line scalar.
Or just a $700 PC, and a third of that cost is the graphics card.
Go see the AV Science Home Theater PC forum at http://www.avsforum.com for info. Stereophile's Guide to Home Theater is also running a monthly column on it now (with an AVS forum participant writing the masthead).
As for why Linux - it's basically the same reasons why Linux (or Unix in general) is desired over Win32 in other applications. Stability, flexibility, and remote operation.
--
Slashdot Mirror
As others have stated, while it was a wacky decision to stop it, it was irrelevant.
SOW wasn't immobile, and had hit Biohazard several times even after one of the stabilizer bars had become partially detached. Go watch the fight again.
Regardless, there was only 10 seconds left in the match - Biohazard wasn't going to mystically fix its drive motors and ram and flip SOW in that time period.
Uh, so you're entering a competition called BattleBots with a robot designed for what? House cleaning?
Sorry, but this is just whining that you can't engineer or spend as much money as someone else. BattleBots isn't the place for you then, go to a lower weight class or another competition or learn how to engineer.
There are defenses against any offense - flip a spinner and they're toast. You could design a bot specifically for use against Wyachi (and son, etc) by having a long flipper arm with one hell of a powerful motor/piston behind it and flip him before he can hit you. Game over - there's no righting mechanism. You can design a flip-proof bot, or one that has a quick self-righting mechanism, but then you may be vulnerable to spinners. Choose your poison.
The fact is, BattleBots is a pretty serious competition now. Win a title, get $6400. And then everytime they air a show with your bot, get a check in the mail for an additional $1600.
As for splitting the competition up even more - hell, there were over 500 bots there this year. Comedy Central showed a very small percentage of all the matches (too lazy to do the math right now). I'm rather annoyed about that, since they didn't even show all the regular matches, much less the prelims.
Actually, the really impressive thing is that they expect the redesigned Son of Wyachi 2.0 to have an impact of 72,000 ft-lbs next year, along with 15x the rotor strength.
They also speed limited Wyachi to 5 ft/sec, but later tested it successfully at 15 ft/sec. If they can do the same for Wyachi (or if they can move to a stable wheeled platform), then no wonder they think Comedy Central should strengthen the arena (currently uses 1" or so of Lexan, which may not cut it soon).
The real issue I see for them is that with that much impact force you have a problem keeping control of the bot immediately after impact. Even at a "mere" 10k ft-lbs of impact force SoW went spinning off several times during the semi-finals and finals in this year's tournament. Sure, so did the other bot, but now you're talking about a lighter wheeled bot (walkers have higher weight limits) with even more force. I'll be interested to see how they deal with this.
Gotta get home tonight and watch the super heavyweight championship! Thanks TiVo!
One of my college English teachers at Georgia Tech said she made the mistake of asking a freshman class to write an essay on their favorite childhood toy. She read 30 essays extolling the virtues of the legos we grew up with, and bashing on the "new" legos that had such specific parts.
She never made the mistake of asking for that essay again.
The problem is, no matter what _WE_ want, the fact of the matter is that the content owners don't necessarily like it. TiVo was pressured into not providing a 30-second skip function and only fast-forward/reverse. They considered it a necessary evil to get funding they needed. Both DirecTV and Echostar are finding out that content providers are unhappy with consumers being able to record direct digital feeds - and are putting in controls to prevent recording of some movies or timed automatic deletion of the movies. TiVo is floundering despite its success, and is becoming targeted more and more for extermination by advertisers and networks (the same networks that funded their startup!).
And take a look at HDTV. The hardware manufacturers, cable companies, and content providers have finally agreed on an interconnection standard - one that will provide uncompressed full digital audio/video between set-top boxes and displays. Of course, it has multiple layers of encryption (duh) and it has the capability to disallow ANY form of digital recording, to allow for time-limited recording, disallow fast-forwarding through certain content, etc.
We could see this coming with DVDs, with the regional encoding, the forced previews, and so forth. The fact of the matter is that the advertisers and content providers don't see digital medium as a freedom for us, the consumers. They see it as the ability to lock us in to forced advertising, better copy protections, and ultimately pay-for-anything viewings.
Oh, and while you may say "hah, it's digital! It's just bits! I can do whatever I want with those bits!", realize that:
And, no matter what you may wish, the fact is that TV is not a free ride. The shows cost money to make. It costs money to broadcast. This money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is advertising. Advertisers won't pay unless they think their ads are being watched, and so both the advertisers and the content providers are going to do their damnedest to make sure you see the advertising so you'll buy the product.
The other option, of course, is all-pay channels, or pay-per-view on all shows. That's what you want, right?
Sure. Have fun guessing that one minute out of sixty when they ARE listening.
Gee, six months ago it would've been a reasonable price? Well hell, if you want to base "reasonable pricing" based on 6 month old data please let me know. I'll sell you anything you want at prices from 6 months ago. You can buy 256MB of high quality PC2100 RAM for $40-50 now, including shipping. 256MB of PC800 RDRAM is $100-$120. So only a 2.5x markup for RDRAM. Nice. Yes, it's better than the 10x markup that used to exist, but still - you're paying a premium price for an inferior product. Yes, inferior. Because RDRAM has numerous technical issues that can't be solved. There's no tolerance in the design for timing. The more chips you add, the slower the entire memory system runs because the serialized bus is limited to the speed of the slowest chip. And while bandwidth is high, the constant problem in memory architectures is lowering latency. Unless you're doing some VERY specific operations you are more likely to be doing random lookups on memory than streaming huge chunks. Even with modern dataset sizes this is true. Intel upper management made several very bad decisions about 5 years ago. One of them was RAMBUS. And given the long cycle times in the semiconductor industry, it's taking until now to start recovering. Hopefully Intel will come out with a slightly redesigned P4 that will finally get the performance that it was supposed to for current apps. At the same time they should be able to ditch the RAMBUS monstrosity for cheaper memory that runs faster in everyday situations.
About time really. Of course, this is the kind of technology that the established hierarchy wouldn't care to see (it has, to some extent, the ability to significantly reduce publisher's clout since an independant could have as much 'shelf space' as a large house).
A few questions though... first, does the machine do different typographic styles and layouts? Does it print in the font of the author's/editor's choosing, complete with pictures, chapter icons, and so forth? All of these things are stylistically important, and are often chosen by the author for particular reasons.
Second, standard copier paper is usually considerably worse than the paper used for hardback books. It doesn't have the grain or the weight. This machine is obviously not meant for this kind of thing, but it'd be nice if it was an option.
Third, while it's a nifty thought of "wow, you could replace that huge brick & mortar bookstore with a machine the size of a photocopier!", don't forget the rest of the experience you would thus forgo - browsing the aisles, finding new and interesting books by leafing through them, meeting people, avoiding people, etc.
A complementary device for this is a high quality electronic viewer. Current display devices have nowhere close to the resolution that's given by real books, which is one of the reasons there is eyestrain with computers. Fix that, then you can browse through books electronically and then print them out for cheap (and still pay the author legitimitely) and carry them with you wherever you go.
Go to the AVS Home Theater Forum. Read there, search there, and you'll find both do-it-yourself suggestions (such as rubber grommets on hard drive screws) and places to go buy "quiet" power supplies, fans, and so forth.
For more info, read this Digital Bits story - go down to the 10/19 post and below.
--
Yes, but subverting their own system to eliminate their profit is another issue. If you don't like TiVo's policies, that's fine. But kindly go build your own system to do it. TiVo has been incredibly cool with hackers to date - they have [b]no[/b] problems with hacking the hardware. But touch the software and you violate their licensing policy, and they've been pretty clear that they won't allow this. (NB - you do recommend this at the end of your post, I just wanted to reinforce it).
Since I trust TiVo a great deal more than Amazon - yes (TiVo has one of the few customer service departments that's actually customer oriented). More importantly, with TiVo I can call an 800 number and have them stop using my viewing habits for any kind of marketing. So it's a non-issue.
Personally, I don't mind if they use it for marketing. The current anonymity level is just right IMO, and hopefully my viewing habits will be used to get more TV shows on the air that I like.
As far as commercial skip goes - yeah, it'd be nice to have. I'm not too unhappy about it though, since occasionally I'll see a commercial flying by at 20x or 60x speed that I actually want to watch -- I wouldn't know about B5 Widescreen on SciFi later this month otherwise. If it had just instantly fast-forwarded through I would miss the rare gem.
--
Ah, but that already occurs. There were several expert witnesses in the Microsoft case. Some testified for MSFT, some against.
In any case where the plaintiff or defendant feels the court (judge and/or jury) may need knowledge above and beyond what one might expect they'll call in expert witnesses. And if one side does it the other side will call an expert witness to contradict them.
Expert witnesses are not impartial. They are hired by the plaintiff or defendant to testify. Not all experts in any field have the same opinion -- I'm sure you could find many who felt the DeCSS verdict was correct. And to be cynical about it, if you wave around enough money, fame, or influence you'll eventually find an "expert" who is willing to testify whatever way you want them to. Just go look at the OJ Simpson case as an example...
--
I don't want to sit at my computer to watch a DVD.
I do, however, want to have my computer drive my FPTV (or RPTV, or Plasma screen, or anything better than that dinky 13" TV in your bedroom) because no set top DVD player can come close to the quality. In fact, to get close to the quality you need a $700+ progressive scan DVD player and a $2000+ line scalar.
Or just a $700 PC, and a third of that cost is the graphics card.
Go see the AV Science Home Theater PC forum at http://www.avsforum.com for info. Stereophile's Guide to Home Theater is also running a monthly column on it now (with an AVS forum participant writing the masthead).
As for why Linux - it's basically the same reasons why Linux (or Unix in general) is desired over Win32 in other applications. Stability, flexibility, and remote operation.
--