Seems like the company could do a little more research into force feedback
We did. For six months, I had the best job in the world - testing the collision-detection software that monitored the current on the motors and stopped the robot if they deviated too much from what was expected. I got paid to whack big robots into things.
The problem is, the sensitivity isn't enough to keep it from injuring a human. Humans are fragile, watery things when you're whipping around a 200lb metal spot-welding gun. It was enough to reduce damage to the robot, the gun, and metal parts it whacked into, but people are softer.
Having a common software platform which has been tested and debugged across multiple projects should result in more reliable robots exhibiting fewer errors.
Sure, that makes sense from a technical perspective. The problem is the legal perspective... because "fewer errors" does not equal "no errors". Bugs will still happen. And who takes responsibility when a bug results in a robot suddenly whipping around and killing someone? (We just talked about OSS & liability last week on Slashdot.)
So, would you contribute to such a project when you might get summoned to court years later because someone misused a function you wrote, somebody died, and the developer blamed you? Even if you prove that it wasn't actually your fault, you're still out legal fees and time and stress. (And that's assuming you really didn't make a mistake...)
I recognize that this is a common FUD tactic against Linux. But Linux isn't generally used in situations where people could die if it fails. I'm not sure, given the legal landscape, any open-source OS could work in such situations.
I actually worked for an industrial robot company - the big robots that carry around spot-welding guns weighing a couple hundred pounds. The worst kind of bug wasn't when the system went down and the robot froze up. The worst kind of bug was an "unexpected motion" bug where the robot moved in a way it wasn't supposed to.
Safety was taken really seriously. When testing, you'd set up a tripwire fence that'd shut the robot down if it were jiggled. Every single person inside that fence had to be holding a deadman switch - let go and the robot shuts down. When I saw one of those suckers casually drag around a 500lb steel table that hadn't been bolted to the floor I got respect fast. Thankfully nobody got hurt, but at a customer site once, a badly-maintained spot welder managed to attach itself to a truck body on an assembly line. The robot kept right on going and literally threw the truck body into the aisle.
Liability's kinda critical for something like that. For unarmed, relatively weak research robots, a common platform makes sense. For higher-powered industrial robotics, this ain't gonna fly.
If the company had known about it, they would have sent a specialized team there instead of diverting a freighter.
Not necessarily. In the film, they use hypersleep - suspended animation - because even at whatever multiple of the speed of light the ships move at, trips still take months. (Script says they're near Zeta II Reticuli, 39 light years from Earth, and they still have ten months to go.) If they can transmit data faster than ships move (or unmanned ships can move faster) then mobilizing a specialist team might take more time than they want to spend, when they can divert a freighter going by anyway.
The novelization (non-canon, but working from the shooting script) had Ash saying that the beacon had a fairly detailed warning, so the Company may well have known that parasitic aliens were there. No biggie, let the crew get infected and the ship return on autopilot.
Congratulations, you successfully dodged the point. And you clearly didn't follow the link.
Before the 1700's, if someone had asked, "What's lightning?", what would have been the proper answer? Was it reasonable to say that God (or Thor, or the Thunderbirds, or Zeus, or Seth, or what have you) caused lightning? No, the proper response was, "I dunno, yet. Maybe somebody will figure it out someday."
A couple of quotes, just for fun:
"To the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained." - The Doctor
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." -Isaac Asimov
Allow me to point out that the list of "things that don't require a god to explain" has been growing monotonically since we've been keeping records. The total has never gone down - nothing has ever moved from the "explained without gods" to the "explained with gods" column.
Source and "iD Tech [some integer]" were what people expected to be the big engines. Apparently times have changed and there's room for more than a couple talented development teams.
With fully homomorphic encryption, you can perform operations on the encrypted data, in encrypted form, that produces encrypted output. Sort of like doing a database query on encrypted data, that produces an encrypted result. So you could store your data somewhere in encrypted form, ask the host to perform some operations using their CPU cycles, and send you the result. You decrypt the result yourself, the host never sees unencrypted data at any point.
Cool, but I'm half-convinced that holes will be found. The first time a new encryption scheme is put to the test, it usually fails. Still, hopefully, it'll lead to a truly secure scheme.
Companies do have to be careful how they use GPL code, sure. But the real lesson here is that companies have to be much more careful about who their subcontractors are!
You mean two carnivores/scavengers who directly fight one another for the same resources (turf, food)? Bad analogy.
It's a shame your comment was so low-moderated I didn't see it before. The analogy was actually pretty apt.
Lions and hyenas do compete for some resources, but they also have very distinct 'home niches' that the other can't touch. Hyenas don't bring down really big game, and lions can't afford to bother with the smaller stuff hyenas also hunt. There is definitely some overlap, but the reason we still have lions and hyenas is because each has prey the other can't address.
That's because the top of the line game on iPhone is no where near comparable to the new games and new ports of those systems
What looks fine on a 480x320 screen doesn't look quite so hot in 720p, let alone 1080p. The length of gaming session's going to be rather different, too.
Of course there's a lucrative model and market for iPhone games. But they are different things entirely from console games, occupying a different ecological niche. It's like comparing hyenas and lions.
Sometimes I need to leave my PS3 on for a while. (Recharging the controllers, big download, whatever.) I have the "automatically turn off after one hour of inactivity" setting checked, so sometimes the process wouldn't finish before it shut down.
So, I fire up Folding@Home (technically called "Life With Playstation" now) before I go to bed. Takes about six hours, plus or minus. Enough time for downloads or recharging, does something useful while the PS3's on, shuts off once the work unit's done, everybody's happy.
You obviously missed the "heavily intoxicated" and "still score well" parts of my initial post.
No, actually, I think you missed the part about how it uses the "SIXAXIS" accelerometers for control - i.e. motion control. It's easier than Wii bowling in some ways.
"Coalition military intelligence officials estimated that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year 'had been arrested by mistake,' according to a confidential Red Cross report given to the Bush administration earlier this year."
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0511-04.htm
"In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to win their trust, the military official said. The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar's taxi were sent home from Guantánamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed 'no threat' to American forces."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?ei=5088&en=4579c146cb14cfd6&ex=1274241600&pagewanted=all
...there's not enough room for a PS3 in my living room, and besides, I already have a George Foreman grill.
Um... my PS3 doesn't get particularly hot, and it's got the 90nm graphics chip and the 65nm Cell. The newer models have 65nm graphics chips, too, and consume even less power. The Xbox 360, on the other hand... well, I don't know if it consumes less power or not, but whatever heat it generates, it can't handle it.
Spacewise, I can't help you. But it fits in my living room just fine.:->
I've never used Eyetoy or other webcam-based games, but somehow I don't think it could afford the same degree of responsiveness of the Wiimote.
Actually, the EyeToy is pretty good. The minigames it came with work quite well. And as to rhythm-based games, many of the DDR games can optionally add hand-movements to the dance, and that's a challenge (at least for me:-> ) but not because it's not sensitive enough. The game Antigrav is right on the edge of what the EyeToy can do, but if you have good lighting and a neutral background to provide good contrast, it's just fine.
The main problem is when you've got multiple people in-frame - that can confuse things. On the other hand, for many of the games that just means cheap co-op multiplayer.:->
With a higher-resolution camera and the 360's CPU, more advanced stuff should be possible... but then, Sony could do the same things.
Yeah, but sadly, the PS3's wifi can't handle that, and mine's not in a place where I can run a wired connection. I also like PMS, and it works quite well, but for HD stuff I still mostly use sneakernet. Eventually I'll get Tomato or DD-WRT installed on my Linksys router and try booting the signal a little, see if that helps the wifi speed.
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Recursion (n): see recursion.
Illiberal Politics: America's Unjust Sex Laws.
We did. For six months, I had the best job in the world - testing the collision-detection software that monitored the current on the motors and stopped the robot if they deviated too much from what was expected. I got paid to whack big robots into things.
The problem is, the sensitivity isn't enough to keep it from injuring a human. Humans are fragile, watery things when you're whipping around a 200lb metal spot-welding gun. It was enough to reduce damage to the robot, the gun, and metal parts it whacked into, but people are softer.
Sure, that makes sense from a technical perspective. The problem is the legal perspective... because "fewer errors" does not equal "no errors". Bugs will still happen. And who takes responsibility when a bug results in a robot suddenly whipping around and killing someone? (We just talked about OSS & liability last week on Slashdot.)
So, would you contribute to such a project when you might get summoned to court years later because someone misused a function you wrote, somebody died, and the developer blamed you? Even if you prove that it wasn't actually your fault, you're still out legal fees and time and stress. (And that's assuming you really didn't make a mistake...)
I recognize that this is a common FUD tactic against Linux. But Linux isn't generally used in situations where people could die if it fails. I'm not sure, given the legal landscape, any open-source OS could work in such situations.
Safety was taken really seriously. When testing, you'd set up a tripwire fence that'd shut the robot down if it were jiggled. Every single person inside that fence had to be holding a deadman switch - let go and the robot shuts down. When I saw one of those suckers casually drag around a 500lb steel table that hadn't been bolted to the floor I got respect fast. Thankfully nobody got hurt, but at a customer site once, a badly-maintained spot welder managed to attach itself to a truck body on an assembly line. The robot kept right on going and literally threw the truck body into the aisle.
Liability's kinda critical for something like that. For unarmed, relatively weak research robots, a common platform makes sense. For higher-powered industrial robotics, this ain't gonna fly.
You mean you weren't sure whether or not you were stoned for half the tests?
If you go to a concert and end up close to someone smoking a joint, will this pick up the presence of cannabinoids in your saliva?
Not necessarily. In the film, they use hypersleep - suspended animation - because even at whatever multiple of the speed of light the ships move at, trips still take months. (Script says they're near Zeta II Reticuli, 39 light years from Earth, and they still have ten months to go.) If they can transmit data faster than ships move (or unmanned ships can move faster) then mobilizing a specialist team might take more time than they want to spend, when they can divert a freighter going by anyway.
The novelization (non-canon, but working from the shooting script) had Ash saying that the beacon had a fairly detailed warning, so the Company may well have known that parasitic aliens were there. No biggie, let the crew get infected and the ship return on autopilot.
A different way to evade the point. You're using "proper" in the sense of "socially acceptable", instead of "correct".
Before the 1700's, if someone had asked, "What's lightning?", what would have been the proper answer? Was it reasonable to say that God (or Thor, or the Thunderbirds, or Zeus, or Seth, or what have you) caused lightning? No, the proper response was, "I dunno, yet. Maybe somebody will figure it out someday."
A couple of quotes, just for fun:
Allow me to point out that the list of "things that don't require a god to explain" has been growing monotonically since we've been keeping records. The total has never gone down - nothing has ever moved from the "explained without gods" to the "explained with gods" column.
(Oh, and something else to consider.)
Source and "iD Tech [some integer]" were what people expected to be the big engines. Apparently times have changed and there's room for more than a couple talented development teams.
Cool, but I'm half-convinced that holes will be found. The first time a new encryption scheme is put to the test, it usually fails. Still, hopefully, it'll lead to a truly secure scheme.
Companies do have to be careful how they use GPL code, sure. But the real lesson here is that companies have to be much more careful about who their subcontractors are!
It's a shame your comment was so low-moderated I didn't see it before. The analogy was actually pretty apt.
Lions and hyenas do compete for some resources, but they also have very distinct 'home niches' that the other can't touch. Hyenas don't bring down really big game, and lions can't afford to bother with the smaller stuff hyenas also hunt. There is definitely some overlap, but the reason we still have lions and hyenas is because each has prey the other can't address.
What looks fine on a 480x320 screen doesn't look quite so hot in 720p, let alone 1080p. The length of gaming session's going to be rather different, too.
Of course there's a lucrative model and market for iPhone games. But they are different things entirely from console games, occupying a different ecological niche. It's like comparing hyenas and lions.
So, I fire up Folding@Home (technically called "Life With Playstation" now) before I go to bed. Takes about six hours, plus or minus. Enough time for downloads or recharging, does something useful while the PS3's on, shuts off once the work unit's done, everybody's happy.
No, actually, I think you missed the part about how it uses the "SIXAXIS" accelerometers for control - i.e. motion control. It's easier than Wii bowling in some ways.
http://www.us.playstation.com/PS3/Games/High_Velocity_Bowling
Of course, whether it deserves that celebration can be questioned.
"Coalition military intelligence officials estimated that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year 'had been arrested by mistake,' according to a confidential Red Cross report given to the Bush administration earlier this year." http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0511-04.htm "In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to win their trust, the military official said. The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar's taxi were sent home from Guantánamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed 'no threat' to American forces." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?ei=5088&en=4579c146cb14cfd6&ex=1274241600&pagewanted=all
Um... my PS3 doesn't get particularly hot, and it's got the 90nm graphics chip and the 65nm Cell. The newer models have 65nm graphics chips, too, and consume even less power. The Xbox 360, on the other hand... well, I don't know if it consumes less power or not, but whatever heat it generates, it can't handle it. Spacewise, I can't help you. But it fits in my living room just fine. :->
A gene therapy in humans that reawakens a gene we lost. The kicker? A kind of antibiotic cream can reawaken it without gene therapy!
Actually, the EyeToy is pretty good. The minigames it came with work quite well. And as to rhythm-based games, many of the DDR games can optionally add hand-movements to the dance, and that's a challenge (at least for me :-> ) but not because it's not sensitive enough. The game Antigrav is right on the edge of what the EyeToy can do, but if you have good lighting and a neutral background to provide good contrast, it's just fine.
The main problem is when you've got multiple people in-frame - that can confuse things. On the other hand, for many of the games that just means cheap co-op multiplayer. :->
With a higher-resolution camera and the 360's CPU, more advanced stuff should be possible... but then, Sony could do the same things.
Yeah, but sadly, the PS3's wifi can't handle that, and mine's not in a place where I can run a wired connection. I also like PMS, and it works quite well, but for HD stuff I still mostly use sneakernet. Eventually I'll get Tomato or DD-WRT installed on my Linksys router and try booting the signal a little, see if that helps the wifi speed.