A lot of people seem to be complaining that Halo isn't supported on XBox Live. I suspect this is because Halo requires 256 Kbps of bandwidth per player -- its not very stingy at all with bandwidth, and while its okay on a LAN, out on the internet the rules change. You CAN play Halo online using tunnelling software from Game Spy Arcade, and its really fun. And its free. But from my experience, once I get more than four players in a game, it begins to lag a bit too much for comfort. Then again, I'm on a not-so-good 10 Mbps LAN, not 100.
Searching on Guiness' site for "most practical suit of clothing" or even just "practical" yields no record along these lines. Given that there's no picture in the article, I'd say this is a hoax. Can anyone substantiate it if it's not?
Actually, in the state of Ohio at least, if you own 25 or more cars, you are automatically considered self-insured, and don't need to buy insurance. In theory, you could buy 25 old, beat-up cars for $100 each, and never pay for insurance again. Of course, you'll still be liable if you crash into someone with the car you're trying to avoid paying insurance on...
If this hurts you so much, then it stands to reason that you could have saved the machine he hacked up. Surely you can advertise that you'll buy old machines for a lot of money. I doubt this guy, who seems to like it, would have let his commodore 64 go for $100, but if you offered him $100,000, you'd probably have saved it. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be personal, its just that a lot of people seem to be complaining how this vintage piece of hardware was destroyed, yet I bet almost none of them try to save any vintage hardware themselves.
Please see one of my other replies under my original comment for a discussion of sensors being imperfect. The chances that black would absorb the laser are almost 0. Feel free to shoot me an email (furchin@hotmail.com) if you'd like my reasons for this statement.
Because a human doesn't weigh 300 lbs, and won't continue to run over another person. Of course, there are exceptions, with disasterous consquences (The Who concert in Cincinnati, Ohio, back around 1970 or whenever, where 13 people died in a stampede). The point is we should code safety into a robot; we cannot do so in humans.
My original post notes that CNN states that GRACE bumped a judge. My point differentiates bumping a judge from aggressive behavior. People can make physical contact with others in lines because we won't hurt each other. Robots are metal and pretty solid, and weigh a lot. Given that the programmers behind GRACE did not intend physical contact with a judge (indeed, physical robot-human contact is a bad idea in general), this is a bad situation.
You bring up a number of distinct issues which I will try to address here.
I am indeed aware that sonar can reflect in odd directions off surfaces, leading to readings that indicate the nearest obstacle is far away. Similarly, laser cannot see glass and mirrored obstacles very well. However, using both sensors generally results in very acceptable performance. Moreover, it is one thing if GRACE bumped into a glass wall or a wall at a weird angle, either of which could cause sensors to give incorrect readings. However, humans tend to be picked up by both sensors quite well. Two weeks ago at SIGGRAPH, Lewis the Robotic Photographer ran for 5 days using just laser sensors for obstacle avoidance, and did not bump anyone.
Unforseen sensor dead spots. This is hard, since you say unforseen. I'll argue that you should fully know the physical limitations of your robot before you start programming code for it, much less set it free in a crowded conference. As for dead spots in sensors in general, you should also be aware of where these are, and your control code should account for them. For example, if there are no sensors in front of the robot, it should never move in that direction. Similarly, if there is very spotty coverage on the right of the robot, rather than move right, the robot should perhaps rotate first to get a more accurate reading of what's on its right before chosing a path to take.
Slow sensor response and recovery time. Your robot should never move faster than it is capable of sensing. If you do, its really easy to plummet down a flight of stairs or run over someone. Similarly, you should travel slowly enough that once an obstacle is verified, you still have time to stop and avoid it. This is the same principle as applies to your car on the freeway -- you should leave enough room in front of you to react and stop if the car in front of you stops.
Noisy supply lines. This is irrelevant to a robot that runs on batteries. GRACE was not dragging a power cord. Batteries have known behavior -- they drain slowly over time. How quickly this happens varies from battery to battery, but most robotics research is done with the same set of batteries on a researcher's robot, so its not like GRACE got a random set of batteries it was never programmed on.
Do you honestly believe that there is not a single person here who is willing to argue in favor of Microsoft, either because they like Microsoft, don't have a problem with Microsoft, or perhaps they just want to play the devil's advocate to steer the discussion towards an issue I had not thought about?
The CNN article states that the robot bumped into a judge, rather than cut in line. That's a significant difference. Cutting in line indicates a tempramental personality, with some true intelligence perhaps. Bumping into a judge indicates that the programmers in charge of GRACE failed basic obstacle avoidance -- which boils down to the following for loop:
for (int i = 0; i<num_sensors; i++)
if (sensor_distance[i] < 5 inches)
motors = off;
I'm involved in a lot of robotics work, and while I believe that robots should eventually attain very intelligent behavior, I also believe that the first priority in programming a robot is to ensure it does not harm humans. By bumping a judge, GRACE has shown that it is not capable of functioning safely in society. If it bumps a judge, what's to keep it from running a judge over and killing him? Standard robots the size of GRACE are 300 lbs, quite capable of inflicting significant damage.
As a side note, most robots have touch sensors on their side panels that automatically shut off power to the motors when they are triggered. I'm willing to bet that this is what kept GRACE from running over the judge.
Yeah, and a girlfriend has the exact same side effects. That's why people on/. don't have girlfriends -- combined with the caffeine, we'd have double the intensity of all the symptoms.
Because there is a significant non-zero probability that a slashdotter owns a katana, while the odds of actually having a girlfriend are significantly lower.
They have created software which is so faulty that it's caused losses to other people counted in the Billions of Dollars. ( The cost of time needed to clean up after all the viruses and worms. )
So let me get this right. You're saying Honda should be held resonsible if someone steals my car and drives it into a tree, claiming that the car should be intelligent enough to avoid the tree? Bullshit. While the technology does exist to do this, it is expensive, and avoiding trees is your responsability. Similarly, if a script kiddie hacks your server, its the kiddie's fault.
They have charged hundreds and thousands of dollars for bits of plastic worth cents. That's a con job netting 40 Billion Dollars.
Sure. You ever paid $0.99 for a coke at McDonald's? I've been to fancy restaurants where they charged me $2.50 per glass, without free refills. Do you think a glass of coke costs nearly that much? Sure, the profit margins aren't as great as they are in the software industry, but you also need to factor in the cost of actually developing the software and not just the cost of materials that go into stamping a CD.
They have charged hundreds and thousands of dollars for bits of plastic worth cents. That's a con job netting 40 Billion Dollars. A criminal gang steals money and kills people. Tell me the last time Microsoft killed someone. And don't start with the crap about Microsoft stealing money -- companies are quite free to go open source if they like.
I realize Microsoft isn't everyone's favorite company, and there are many arguments you can make against it, but your arguments are critically flawed.
That's why most boxed software has some sort of seal on the software media itself stating that by breaking that seal you are agreeing to the terms - by then you have the box open, and can read the terms enclosed. That arrangement is likely to be enforceable.
That is not true. You cannot agree to a contract without having read it. Since the EULA contract is inside the box, breaking the seal on the outside of the box is the least enforceable part of the EULA. However, if I am not mistaken, by breaking the seal on the box, you agree to a smaller agreement that is on the outside of the box. Generally, it reads something along the lines of "Either you must agree to the EULA inside, or return the product to the place of purchase for a refund." Of course, getting stores to refund your money is an entirely different matter...
Re:The concept of intellectual property has got to
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
The one exception that I would make to getting rid of all IP laws is the use of Trademarks. These are less in the way of making a piece of information which *should* be able to be copied freely uncopiable, but is a lot more about an individual or a business uniquely identifying themselves.
That's just silly -- do you have limits on trademark length? One word? Two? Three lines? How about forty? I have a forty line method here, that I want to claim as my trademark, and no one else can use my trademark.
I agree with the principle of having a stripped down version of windows which will run faster and be less bloated. I cannot stand outlook express nor MSN Messenger (though I can thankfully delete its DLLs). I also see the arguments that if you strip out basic functionality that third party developers are expecting, you cause a big mess. That's a very valid point to me. I recently encountered a situation which seemed to me the opposite path of Microsoft -- instead of including everything it can, this company (Mathworks) included as little as it could. When you want to use an additional feature, you pay for it. Specifically, I wanted to compile matlab code into C++ code. So let's say you have the basic Matlab release 12.1. To compile matlab code written in Matlab, you need to Matlab compiler. That's $200 (Academic pricing). Fine. I understand. Not everyone needs a compiler, so it can be extra. But you get the compiler, and you realize that really, you also need the Matlab C/C++ Math Libraries, since in Matlab you do, well, math. The libraries are another $200, and if you want to do anything like image manipulation, you need another set of libraries. Since everything you do in matlab is pretty much math, having a compiler without math libraries is worthless. They should sell both together for the combined cost ($400), but they don't since the lower cost brings them more customers who buy just the compiler for $200 before finding out that to use it they'll need to shell out another $200.
Personally, as much as I hate the features I don't use because of the bloat, I like the ones I do use. I like the fact that Explorer can open zip files, and that I can burn CDs without using that stupid easy CD creater (though I prefer cloneCD myself). Imagine if Microsoft did the same thing as Matlab -- they sell you the operating system for $10. As soon as you install it, you realize you didn't buy the keyboard package that allows you to use a keyboard with your system. You buy that, and then you realize that you also need the usb package so you can plug your keyboard in. Granted, most computers have keyboards, but for those that don't (like dedicated servers that never get accessed locally), isn't a keyboard driver just bloat and slowing the system down? There's a very fine line...
Without slashdot, there would be no nerd and geek productivity. It's scary to even try to imagine the amount of $$ slashdot pumps into the economy daily:)
If you're really interested in where I work, why don't you email me? I don't think you'd be eligible for my position, however, so don't get your hopes up.
It's great that you can work starting at 8, and stop at 5. Its just not the way I work. There is a problem with your brick analogy. A bricklayer needs to work during the daytime, for safety's sake, so he can see what he is doing. A programmer sitting in a building can work at day or at night equally well. Moreover, I think that bricklaying isn't quite as skilled a profession as programming. If you had a master brick layer who could work like mad some weeks and do the work of five men that week, I'm pretty sure that if he wasn't in the brick-laying zone one week, he would still have his job.
Nothing consistently gets me into a programming mood. Sometimes I want to code, sometimes I don't. I think the best way in a corporate environment to encourage people to code is to give them the freedom to decide when to code. Of course, the project needs to be done by a certain date, but perhaps this week the coders want to work from 2am to 6am, and that's it. Don't make them come in during regular business hours if they don't want to. Maybe next week they'll code from 6am to 6pm, and make up the time they lost this week. Also, if you absolutely must have coders around during the day, be lenient about when they can arrive and leave, and if they don't feel like coding, allow them some distractions. Buy a couple arcade machines or allow counter strike games on the LAN. For me, if I don't feel like working, I won't work. If I have to sit around somewhere and don't feel like working, I don't want to be bored.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops, forgot the link
A lot of people seem to be complaining that Halo isn't supported on XBox Live. I suspect this is because Halo requires 256 Kbps of bandwidth per player -- its not very stingy at all with bandwidth, and while its okay on a LAN, out on the internet the rules change. You CAN play Halo online using tunnelling software from Game Spy Arcade, and its really fun. And its free. But from my experience, once I get more than four players in a game, it begins to lag a bit too much for comfort. Then again, I'm on a not-so-good 10 Mbps LAN, not 100.
Searching on Guiness' site for "most practical suit of clothing" or even just "practical" yields no record along these lines. Given that there's no picture in the article, I'd say this is a hoax. Can anyone substantiate it if it's not?
This deals with enrolling in the AAdvantage program. You can still buy a ticket from them, you just can't get the frequent flier miles :)
Actually, in the state of Ohio at least, if you own 25 or more cars, you are automatically considered self-insured, and don't need to buy insurance. In theory, you could buy 25 old, beat-up cars for $100 each, and never pay for insurance again. Of course, you'll still be liable if you crash into someone with the car you're trying to avoid paying insurance on...
If this hurts you so much, then it stands to reason that you could have saved the machine he hacked up. Surely you can advertise that you'll buy old machines for a lot of money. I doubt this guy, who seems to like it, would have let his commodore 64 go for $100, but if you offered him $100,000, you'd probably have saved it. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be personal, its just that a lot of people seem to be complaining how this vintage piece of hardware was destroyed, yet I bet almost none of them try to save any vintage hardware themselves.
Please see one of my other replies under my original comment for a discussion of sensors being imperfect. The chances that black would absorb the laser are almost 0. Feel free to shoot me an email (furchin@hotmail.com) if you'd like my reasons for this statement.
Because a human doesn't weigh 300 lbs, and won't continue to run over another person. Of course, there are exceptions, with disasterous consquences (The Who concert in Cincinnati, Ohio, back around 1970 or whenever, where 13 people died in a stampede). The point is we should code safety into a robot; we cannot do so in humans.
Just out of curiosity, which three disciplines? I can see software and hardware/mechanical engineering, but what's the third?
My original post notes that CNN states that GRACE bumped a judge. My point differentiates bumping a judge from aggressive behavior. People can make physical contact with others in lines because we won't hurt each other. Robots are metal and pretty solid, and weigh a lot. Given that the programmers behind GRACE did not intend physical contact with a judge (indeed, physical robot-human contact is a bad idea in general), this is a bad situation.
You bring up a number of distinct issues which I will try to address here.
I am indeed aware that sonar can reflect in odd directions off surfaces, leading to readings that indicate the nearest obstacle is far away. Similarly, laser cannot see glass and mirrored obstacles very well. However, using both sensors generally results in very acceptable performance. Moreover, it is one thing if GRACE bumped into a glass wall or a wall at a weird angle, either of which could cause sensors to give incorrect readings. However, humans tend to be picked up by both sensors quite well. Two weeks ago at SIGGRAPH, Lewis the Robotic Photographer ran for 5 days using just laser sensors for obstacle avoidance, and did not bump anyone.
Unforseen sensor dead spots. This is hard, since you say unforseen. I'll argue that you should fully know the physical limitations of your robot before you start programming code for it, much less set it free in a crowded conference. As for dead spots in sensors in general, you should also be aware of where these are, and your control code should account for them. For example, if there are no sensors in front of the robot, it should never move in that direction. Similarly, if there is very spotty coverage on the right of the robot, rather than move right, the robot should perhaps rotate first to get a more accurate reading of what's on its right before chosing a path to take.
Slow sensor response and recovery time. Your robot should never move faster than it is capable of sensing. If you do, its really easy to plummet down a flight of stairs or run over someone. Similarly, you should travel slowly enough that once an obstacle is verified, you still have time to stop and avoid it. This is the same principle as applies to your car on the freeway -- you should leave enough room in front of you to react and stop if the car in front of you stops.
Noisy supply lines. This is irrelevant to a robot that runs on batteries. GRACE was not dragging a power cord. Batteries have known behavior -- they drain slowly over time. How quickly this happens varies from battery to battery, but most robotics research is done with the same set of batteries on a researcher's robot, so its not like GRACE got a random set of batteries it was never programmed on.
Which is why we have prisons...
Do you honestly believe that there is not a single person here who is willing to argue in favor of Microsoft, either because they like Microsoft, don't have a problem with Microsoft, or perhaps they just want to play the devil's advocate to steer the discussion towards an issue I had not thought about?
The CNN article states that the robot bumped into a judge, rather than cut in line. That's a significant difference. Cutting in line indicates a tempramental personality, with some true intelligence perhaps. Bumping into a judge indicates that the programmers in charge of GRACE failed basic obstacle avoidance -- which boils down to the following for loop:
for (int i = 0; i<num_sensors; i++)
if (sensor_distance[i] < 5 inches)
motors = off;
I'm involved in a lot of robotics work, and while I believe that robots should eventually attain very intelligent behavior, I also believe that the first priority in programming a robot is to ensure it does not harm humans. By bumping a judge, GRACE has shown that it is not capable of functioning safely in society. If it bumps a judge, what's to keep it from running a judge over and killing him? Standard robots the size of GRACE are 300 lbs, quite capable of inflicting significant damage.
As a side note, most robots have touch sensors on their side panels that automatically shut off power to the motors when they are triggered. I'm willing to bet that this is what kept GRACE from running over the judge.
Yeah, and a girlfriend has the exact same side effects. That's why people on /. don't have girlfriends -- combined with the caffeine, we'd have double the intensity of all the symptoms.
More like a beer booth at an alcoholics anonymous convention...
Because there is a significant non-zero probability that a slashdotter owns a katana, while the odds of actually having a girlfriend are significantly lower.
So let me get this right. You're saying Honda should be held resonsible if someone steals my car and drives it into a tree, claiming that the car should be intelligent enough to avoid the tree? Bullshit. While the technology does exist to do this, it is expensive, and avoiding trees is your responsability. Similarly, if a script kiddie hacks your server, its the kiddie's fault.
They have charged hundreds and thousands of dollars for bits of plastic worth cents. That's a con job netting 40 Billion Dollars.
Sure. You ever paid $0.99 for a coke at McDonald's? I've been to fancy restaurants where they charged me $2.50 per glass, without free refills. Do you think a glass of coke costs nearly that much? Sure, the profit margins aren't as great as they are in the software industry, but you also need to factor in the cost of actually developing the software and not just the cost of materials that go into stamping a CD.
They have charged hundreds and thousands of dollars for bits of plastic worth cents. That's a con job netting 40 Billion Dollars.
A criminal gang steals money and kills people. Tell me the last time Microsoft killed someone. And don't start with the crap about Microsoft stealing money -- companies are quite free to go open source if they like.
I realize Microsoft isn't everyone's favorite company, and there are many arguments you can make against it, but your arguments are critically flawed.
That's why most boxed software has some sort of seal on the software media itself stating that by breaking that seal you are agreeing to the terms - by then you have the box open, and can read the terms enclosed. That arrangement is likely to be enforceable.
That is not true. You cannot agree to a contract without having read it. Since the EULA contract is inside the box, breaking the seal on the outside of the box is the least enforceable part of the EULA. However, if I am not mistaken, by breaking the seal on the box, you agree to a smaller agreement that is on the outside of the box. Generally, it reads something along the lines of "Either you must agree to the EULA inside, or return the product to the place of purchase for a refund." Of course, getting stores to refund your money is an entirely different matter...
The one exception that I would make to getting rid of all IP laws is the use of Trademarks. These are less in the way of making a piece of information which *should* be able to be copied freely uncopiable, but is a lot more about an individual or a business uniquely identifying themselves.
That's just silly -- do you have limits on trademark length? One word? Two? Three lines? How about forty? I have a forty line method here, that I want to claim as my trademark, and no one else can use my trademark.
I agree with the principle of having a stripped down version of windows which will run faster and be less bloated. I cannot stand outlook express nor MSN Messenger (though I can thankfully delete its DLLs). I also see the arguments that if you strip out basic functionality that third party developers are expecting, you cause a big mess. That's a very valid point to me. I recently encountered a situation which seemed to me the opposite path of Microsoft -- instead of including everything it can, this company (Mathworks) included as little as it could. When you want to use an additional feature, you pay for it. Specifically, I wanted to compile matlab code into C++ code. So let's say you have the basic Matlab release 12.1. To compile matlab code written in Matlab, you need to Matlab compiler. That's $200 (Academic pricing). Fine. I understand. Not everyone needs a compiler, so it can be extra. But you get the compiler, and you realize that really, you also need the Matlab C/C++ Math Libraries, since in Matlab you do, well, math. The libraries are another $200, and if you want to do anything like image manipulation, you need another set of libraries. Since everything you do in matlab is pretty much math, having a compiler without math libraries is worthless. They should sell both together for the combined cost ($400), but they don't since the lower cost brings them more customers who buy just the compiler for $200 before finding out that to use it they'll need to shell out another $200.
Personally, as much as I hate the features I don't use because of the bloat, I like the ones I do use. I like the fact that Explorer can open zip files, and that I can burn CDs without using that stupid easy CD creater (though I prefer cloneCD myself). Imagine if Microsoft did the same thing as Matlab -- they sell you the operating system for $10. As soon as you install it, you realize you didn't buy the keyboard package that allows you to use a keyboard with your system. You buy that, and then you realize that you also need the usb package so you can plug your keyboard in. Granted, most computers have keyboards, but for those that don't (like dedicated servers that never get accessed locally), isn't a keyboard driver just bloat and slowing the system down? There's a very fine line...
Without slashdot, there would be no nerd and geek productivity. It's scary to even try to imagine the amount of $$ slashdot pumps into the economy daily :)
If you're really interested in where I work, why don't you email me? I don't think you'd be eligible for my position, however, so don't get your hopes up.
It's great that you can work starting at 8, and stop at 5. Its just not the way I work. There is a problem with your brick analogy. A bricklayer needs to work during the daytime, for safety's sake, so he can see what he is doing. A programmer sitting in a building can work at day or at night equally well. Moreover, I think that bricklaying isn't quite as skilled a profession as programming. If you had a master brick layer who could work like mad some weeks and do the work of five men that week, I'm pretty sure that if he wasn't in the brick-laying zone one week, he would still have his job.
Nothing consistently gets me into a programming mood. Sometimes I want to code, sometimes I don't. I think the best way in a corporate environment to encourage people to code is to give them the freedom to decide when to code. Of course, the project needs to be done by a certain date, but perhaps this week the coders want to work from 2am to 6am, and that's it. Don't make them come in during regular business hours if they don't want to. Maybe next week they'll code from 6am to 6pm, and make up the time they lost this week. Also, if you absolutely must have coders around during the day, be lenient about when they can arrive and leave, and if they don't feel like coding, allow them some distractions. Buy a couple arcade machines or allow counter strike games on the LAN. For me, if I don't feel like working, I won't work. If I have to sit around somewhere and don't feel like working, I don't want to be bored.