Hello huge fallacy: "They do _not_ need that to refine their searches. If I search for, say, "Oracle auto-tuning", that's that. I expect the same result regardless of what my IP is, regardless of whether I searched for "
Google (and all search engines) are all interested giving you a more personalized set of results tailored to you specifically. If you search for "Oracle" right after you search for "delphi greece", you're probably looking for something different than if you just searched for "RDMS".
Well, as a recent graduate of, I think I can safely call shenanigans on this post. It's definitely harder to get your foot in the door, but my classmates and I have all found we're more than well prepared enough when it comes to interviewing. Getting past the first hurdle of "I've never heard of this school" is much more difficult than actually getting a job. As far as "established" companies, I have friends working for Google, Raytheon, IDEO, Northop Grumman, Johnson&Johnson, iRobot, HP, and DEKA to name a few. There are also the ones in grad school at Stanford, Berkeley, Cornell, Columbia, Harvard and Oxford (again, to name a few).
"I repair computers as a side line cause I want to keep up on what's going on in the world of computer technicians." Clearly not for the money. Oh no, you do it for the EXPERIENCE of getting bitched at by people whose computers are broken.
Doctorow actually came to visit my school and give a talk on DRM and the future. He's a really great speaker (I got a little excited), and if you get a chance to see him or talk to him you should definitely take it.
Also, while a few newtons of force isn't a whole lot, it builds up surprsingly fast over time, especially when it's running 24/7 (as opposed to the few dozen seconds a chemical rocket runs for to get off Earth). Especially for deep space (re: outside the solar system) probes this could be pretty exciting.
Well, one thing they don't take into account is the dollar value of the emissions reduction you'd get by driving a Prius. Turns out polluting isn't all that expensive.
From Cascadia Scorecard Weblog: "In reality, the cost of offsetting a ton of CO2 emissions isn't all that high. Today's L.A. Times reports on a company that's selling what it calls a TerraPass: "essentially, a pricey bumper sticker that identifies the driver as a volunteer in the fight against global warming." When you buy a TerraPass, the parent company buys up CO2 credits in the newly established Chicago Climate Exchange, whose member corporations have committed to reducing greenhouse emissions. The rub: a TerraPass that offsets 10 metric tons of CO2 emissions costs just $79.95. If the program really works as advertised (a big if, obviously) $120 would be more than enough to offset the increase in emissions from buying a Corolla vs. a Prius. If you were willing to commit just one-tenth of the cost difference between the Prius and the Corolla, you could make your driving climate neutral for 10 full years. For one-fifth the savings vs. a Prius, you could offset both your emissions, plus a neighbor's. And so on."
I'm sure this is valuable information, but I couldn't even get through the first half page. This is probably the worst written thing I've seen on Slashdot all month. There's a writer and an editor credited on the page, so you'd think some sort of effot had gone into this article. The sentence construction and word choice is just painful to read. It's great to see the sort of journalistic standards news websites are holding themselves to these days.
Ok, so I assume the Slashdot "editors" at least give a casual glance at the stories before they post them. Would you all mind terribly correcting the often atrocious grammar stories are submitted with? Posts like this give the Grammar Nazi inside me a nervous twitch.
This is really awful. Not what he's talking about, I mean this flash animation. It's poorly conceived, ignores real market realities and does exactly what it purports to be fighting against by sensationalizing a non-existant problem. I don't mean to say that none of what he's talking about is true, but it's not very well thought out or particularly inspired.
Why can't people on Slashdot ever just answer the question that's posed? The first thing everyone does is declare that the fact that the question is even being asked it totally ridiculous and how dare the poster be so stupid as to even consider asking it? Can't people just be helpful without being assholes?
Re:sensors and subprocessors.
on
Animal Robots
·
· Score: 1
I used a $3k 6-axis accelerometer on a robotics project this summer that works just dandy. And "expensive" is a relative term.
I actually spent this last summer working on M2, so I can tell you a little about how it works. M2 was designed to make use of two nifty ideas, the first being Series-Elastic Actuators (photo)and the other being Virtual Model Control link to pdf journal article).
The series elastic actuators are meant to simulate the interaction of a human muscle-tendon-bone system, and to allow for the design of a low-impedance system. M2 is designed to actually mimic the inherent low-impedence (low-stiffness) mechanical system that people represent. People are really awful at position based/high-impedance control, which is what most traditional robots use. This is useful for manufacturing, when you want the robot arm to always put the bolts in the same place, but leads to stereotypical "robot" movement (like the guy spastically jerking around on the dance floor). People are pretty good at force control though (there are all sorts of biological reasons for this). So M2 was built to be low-impedance like a person by using these S-A Actuators.
Virtual Model Control is supposed to allow more a more intuitive control of a robot by simulating it as a mechanical system. VMC lets you basically define springs and dampers at different points which are then simulated by the actuators. So to keep M2 standing, you might make a granny-walker out of springs, and to make it walk you could "attach" a spring to its chest pulling it forward. VMC has been implemented in simulation (where it works great), but it's not quite ready in real life.
The really cool thing about M2 is its potential. It already moves much more fluidly and naturally than any other robot out there, and its not nearly done yet. Once its working properly, it'll be able to walk essentially blindly (becuase its low impedance) like a person, rather than needing to know exactly where to place each foot (*cough*ASIMO*cough*) to keep from shattering itself.
If anyone has any other questions about how M2 actually works, I'd be happy to answer them.
Keeping things up and stable isn't hard. There are satellites from the 60s that are happily orbiting.
And there's not catastrophe if a space elevator fails. Have you ever read any of the literature on it? Even if you lost your tether point in space, the amount of energy the thing would pick up coming down would probably vaporize it before it hit anything. And weather wouldn't really matter, anymore than it does when you hop on any sort of ground based train system.
Also, a mess of airtight ultralight fabric fluttering down and covering big patches of land doesn't sound all that safe to me...
I'm looking at that video of the robots dancing, and the farther it runs, the more I'm thinking it's CG. The lighting doesn't look quite right on the robots' skins and there's some fuzz where they interact with the background.
It could just be the poor quality of the video, but I'm dubious.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello huge fallacy:
"They do _not_ need that to refine their searches. If I search for, say, "Oracle auto-tuning", that's that. I expect the same result regardless of what my IP is, regardless of whether I searched for "
Google (and all search engines) are all interested giving you a more personalized set of results tailored to you specifically. If you search for "Oracle" right after you search for "delphi greece", you're probably looking for something different than if you just searched for "RDMS".
Project page: http://www.hypertable.org/
Zvents: http://www.zvents.com/
I'd hide all the annoyingly noisy equipment in some sucker's office down the hall.
Hmm, someone might have beat you to that already...
There's actually quite a bit of overlap, at least 8 Y Combinator founders have been Olin students.
Well, as a recent graduate of, I think I can safely call shenanigans on this post. It's definitely harder to get your foot in the door, but my classmates and I have all found we're more than well prepared enough when it comes to interviewing. Getting past the first hurdle of "I've never heard of this school" is much more difficult than actually getting a job. As far as "established" companies, I have friends working for Google, Raytheon, IDEO, Northop Grumman, Johnson&Johnson, iRobot, HP, and DEKA to name a few. There are also the ones in grad school at Stanford, Berkeley, Cornell, Columbia, Harvard and Oxford (again, to name a few).
Overall, I think we're doing ok for ourselves.
"I repair computers as a side line cause I want to keep up on what's going on in the world of computer technicians."
Clearly not for the money. Oh no, you do it for the EXPERIENCE of getting bitched at by people whose computers are broken.
So that's a 1.6% rate of failure to please the customer. Whatever happened to 5-nines?
Doctorow actually came to visit my school and give a talk on DRM and the future. He's a really great speaker (I got a little excited), and if you get a chance to see him or talk to him you should definitely take it.
Also, while a few newtons of force isn't a whole lot, it builds up surprsingly fast over time, especially when it's running 24/7 (as opposed to the few dozen seconds a chemical rocket runs for to get off Earth). Especially for deep space (re: outside the solar system) probes this could be pretty exciting.
Well, one thing they don't take into account is the dollar value of the emissions reduction you'd get by driving a Prius. Turns out polluting isn't all that expensive.
From Cascadia Scorecard Weblog:
"In reality, the cost of offsetting a ton of CO2 emissions isn't all that high. Today's L.A. Times reports on a company that's selling what it calls a TerraPass: "essentially, a pricey bumper sticker that identifies the driver as a volunteer in the fight against global warming." When you buy a TerraPass, the parent company buys up CO2 credits in the newly established Chicago Climate Exchange, whose member corporations have committed to reducing greenhouse emissions. The rub: a TerraPass that offsets 10 metric tons of CO2 emissions costs just $79.95. If the program really works as advertised (a big if, obviously) $120 would be more than enough to offset the increase in emissions from buying a Corolla vs. a Prius. If you were willing to commit just one-tenth of the cost difference between the Prius and the Corolla, you could make your driving climate neutral for 10 full years. For one-fifth the savings vs. a Prius, you could offset both your emissions, plus a neighbor's. And so on."
For the love of christ, stop posting pseudo science bullshit from Open Source Energy. This is like the 4th one this week.
I'm sure this is valuable information, but I couldn't even get through the first half page. This is probably the worst written thing I've seen on Slashdot all month. There's a writer and an editor credited on the page, so you'd think some sort of effot had gone into this article. The sentence construction and word choice is just painful to read. It's great to see the sort of journalistic standards news websites are holding themselves to these days.
Ok, so I assume the Slashdot "editors" at least give a casual glance at the stories before they post them. Would you all mind terribly correcting the often atrocious grammar stories are submitted with? Posts like this give the Grammar Nazi inside me a nervous twitch.
Or Apple could just not want to write all those drivers for random hardware that might possibly be in your DIY beigebox...
Only having to deal with the high-quality hardware they stick in their own boxes makes Apple's job much easier.
This is really awful. Not what he's talking about, I mean this flash animation. It's poorly conceived, ignores real market realities and does exactly what it purports to be fighting against by sensationalizing a non-existant problem. I don't mean to say that none of what he's talking about is true, but it's not very well thought out or particularly inspired.
I don't think you understand. Your way is hard. His is easy.
Why can't people on Slashdot ever just answer the question that's posed? The first thing everyone does is declare that the fact that the question is even being asked it totally ridiculous and how dare the poster be so stupid as to even consider asking it? Can't people just be helpful without being assholes?
I used a $3k 6-axis accelerometer on a robotics project this summer that works just dandy. And "expensive" is a relative term.
I actually spent this last summer working on M2, so I can tell you a little about how it works. M2 was designed to make use of two nifty ideas, the first being Series-Elastic Actuators (photo)and the other being Virtual Model Control link to pdf journal article).
The series elastic actuators are meant to simulate the interaction of a human muscle-tendon-bone system, and to allow for the design of a low-impedance system. M2 is designed to actually mimic the inherent low-impedence (low-stiffness) mechanical system that people represent. People are really awful at position based/high-impedance control, which is what most traditional robots use. This is useful for manufacturing, when you want the robot arm to always put the bolts in the same place, but leads to stereotypical "robot" movement (like the guy spastically jerking around on the dance floor). People are pretty good at force control though (there are all sorts of biological reasons for this). So M2 was built to be low-impedance like a person by using these S-A Actuators.
Virtual Model Control is supposed to allow more a more intuitive control of a robot by simulating it as a mechanical system. VMC lets you basically define springs and dampers at different points which are then simulated by the actuators. So to keep M2 standing, you might make a granny-walker out of springs, and to make it walk you could "attach" a spring to its chest pulling it forward. VMC has been implemented in simulation (where it works great), but it's not quite ready in real life.
The really cool thing about M2 is its potential. It already moves much more fluidly and naturally than any other robot out there, and its not nearly done yet. Once its working properly, it'll be able to walk essentially blindly (becuase its low impedance) like a person, rather than needing to know exactly where to place each foot (*cough*ASIMO*cough*) to keep from shattering itself.
If anyone has any other questions about how M2 actually works, I'd be happy to answer them.
-Zach
This sort of reminds me of the smart wheels from "Snow Crash"...
Keeping things up and stable isn't hard. There are satellites from the 60s that are happily orbiting.
And there's not catastrophe if a space elevator fails. Have you ever read any of the literature on it? Even if you lost your tether point in space, the amount of energy the thing would pick up coming down would probably vaporize it before it hit anything. And weather wouldn't really matter, anymore than it does when you hop on any sort of ground based train system.
Also, a mess of airtight ultralight fabric fluttering down and covering big patches of land doesn't sound all that safe to me...
To steal a line from the Windows camp:
"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
I'm looking at that video of the robots dancing, and the farther it runs, the more I'm thinking it's CG. The lighting doesn't look quite right on the robots' skins and there's some fuzz where they interact with the background.
It could just be the poor quality of the video, but I'm dubious.
I have a friend whose parents tried to give him the middle name "Hen3ry", but the state of Oklahoma wouldn't allow it.
You don't read much Science Fiction, huh?