When will they be available to the public? And how much? I want one.
US $150, available after all the Mars guys, then JPL interested guys get them. And as far as I can tell, everybody that bought one paid out of their own pocket. That includes all those nice embroidered shirts and hats you see in the press briefings. The watches were bought at the Watchmaker, and everything else at the JPL Store. Damned rules about sepending Government money! We can't even get freebies! *grin*
I pay charter for 768/128 and they've started giving me 2048/128.
You probably missed getting a postcard right before it happened. I've got the same thing happening to me and they sent me a postcard right before they did that saying something along the lines of "Yes, you're paying for 768/128, but we've decided to give you 2048/256 for a year at the same rate."
Its probably to get you hooked on the high speed so you're more willing to pay for the higher bandwidth when they knock you down again to your paid rate.
I am suprised that no one has mentioned "The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act" which could be taken to forbid this kind of warrenty restriction.
True, Magnusson-Moss does prevent product tying as a condition of warranty. I can use aftermarket parts on a product had have the manufacturer honor the warranty if the aftermarket part didn't cause the failure.
HOWEVER, Magnussen-Moss does allow restrictions if such restrictions are provided to the consumer AT NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE. An example is if I buy a car, and the warranty requires scheduled labor at a specified garage, the scheduled labor has to be FREE OF CHARGE for the restrictions to be effective.
In AMD's case, their AMD, processor in a box package provides the heatsink and fan. They can indeed say: "You can only use this heatsink." in the warranty terms.
metaserver.netrek.org is the round-robin for both metaserver.us.netrek.org and metaserver2.us.netrek.org, FYI.
Netrek is still around, to be sure. There are quite often full servers on the main bronco and hockey variant servers. It is definitely on life support, though.
Why is netrek so tiny now? I can probably offer a few personal opinions, in order of importance.
The decline in University UNIX labs and the rise in Windows systems without a stable (or even available) Windows client during the Windows boom. There are now 2 good clients available for Windows, but during the critical time, there was nothing, so people couldn't easily play. On top of that, being in a UNIX lab gave exposure to the game. "Hey, what's that guy playing? I wanna play too!" was/is Netrek's only source of advertising. We can't buy ad space in gaming magazines.
The rise of twitch games. "Lets blow this guy away with a rocket" sounds more fun than "Lets escort this guy to such-and-such a planet and hope he can take it." Netrek, being mainly a strategy game, requires more thought and concentration and less reflex and adrenalin. Twitch games are essentially "mouse, move, and fire." Netrek requires that the player learn tons of nuances, rules-of-thumb, and situational awareness skills, which Netrek calls "clue," for a team to be successful. But before he can even learn that, the keyboard control scheme and operation of the client requires much practice. The steep Netrek learning curve is a big hurdle for newbies.
The simple graphics. Netrek is a strategy game with simple pieces that were hashed out 13 years ago haven't changed in a while. On top of that, those pieces were developed from Netrek's predecessor, a 2-D text based game. There's no need for anything more than just sprites to represent those pieces. That makes the client look lackluster compared to high polygon count, bump-mapped, real-time generated backgrounds with tons of gore games on the market now.
People got real lives. The original player base isn't in college anymore. We now have jobs, families, and a house or apartment to take care of. I stopped playing for a bit because I was working full time, getting a graduate degree, and am currently recovering from spine surgery, for example.
And finally, of those remaining, a small subset of players are rather abusive of newbies. We should be encouraging newbies and teaching them how to play. However a few expect new players to be uber-clue the moment they first start the client. To be fair, a great majority of the old-clue aren't like that, but the abusers are rather loud.
Netrek isn't dead. There are still organized league play groups active, and I would imagine that the regular league playerbase is bigger than the pickup playerbase. www.netrek.org should show you where to start.
By comparison, there were - and are - Los Angeles suburbs in which police will ticket a car parked facing the wrong direction. The police infer that something illegal must have happened to place the car in that position.
Ummm, yeah. Something illegal DID happen. CVC 22502 (a) was violated. Not parking with your right side up against a curb or side of the road. Sub (e) is the exception for one way roads.
Well, there are two fronts to reimbursable projects at JPL. Government funded, and Industry funded.
If a private company wants to fund JPL, they're not funding JPL to do it on the cheap. Any work JPL does for them is paid for by them. If anything, they probably get a better workforce per dollar ratio in house than they do funding JPL. All the money that they give us goes through NASA because of the JPL Prime Contract with NASA. Industry pays NASA, NASA takes their cut, pays Caltech, Caltech takes their cut, give it to JPL, and then the standard burden overhead rates apply. We're still pretty good compared to industry for burden rates, but suck for FFRDCs and Universities in general. What industry is paying for is our experience and focus in new technologies. They're hoping we can leverage past work and our skills into a new technology.
Now while I apreciate the Industry funding, I strongly believe that there should be more Government funding for raw new technology research and development. The Government has always been, and will always be an anchor tennant for technologies and that are too far into the future for common industry. Many of the technologies we take for granted today started out as wholly developed or heavily subsidized projects of the US Government. The telecommunications industry, the Internet, high performance computing in general, GPS, and the Airline industry just to name a very short list of things. I strongly believe that we can and should colonize space, however I think it is a big mistake to do it with manned exploration first. Although I don't think JPL will be the only organization to do it, I do think JPL will be and should be the foundation of solar system exploration and travel developments in the future.
"Applied Research" is not the only thing JPL does, but it does do it well. We do have our dreamers that come up with things no one has thought before, those dreamers feed it to our second level visionaries in society that hopefully will have the wisdom to point us in the right direction and tell us (me) what to work on.
There are also things called SBIRs (Small Business Innovative Research, IIRC). They're small, multi-level grants to small buisinesses that each large agency or organization that receives Government funding has to participate in. Grants are given in stages for new technology development.... Paper study, prototype, and so forth up the technology readiness levels. Those I believe are beneficial and allows industry to participate in the bleeding edge. Those are the types of programs are what I think you're talking about and those types of subsidies should continue. Why let the FFRDCs have all the fun. We get stagnant too.
If the JPL is a gov't entity (and I'm not sure yet, haven't read the article) then isn't all their software already public domain? Isn't it impossible for them to have a copyright?
JPL is NOT a government Agency. JPL is an operating division of the California Institute of Technology and a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC). The people are Caltech/JPL empoloyees, however the land, buildings, and property are all US Government owned.
As for who owns what work, as will all Goverment grants, the Government owns everything that the Government pays for and can use it or give it to whoever it wants to for Government purposes. The Government can pay me to develop a widget, and then give that widget design to another company to build a bigger widget that will be sold to the Government. However, if that second company wants to use my widget to develop a product that it is NOT going to sell to the Government, then they have to negotiate a licence from me to use it.
I speak as a random schmoe who likes to work at JPL, not as a JPL representative. Take my comments as editorial, not fact.
JPL has always farmed out new technology to private industry. Its our secondary charter just under our NASA work. From what I've read of the press report linked, this just seems to be a re-organization and re-focus of the old Technology Affiliates Program. I've worked primarily for non-NASA reimbursable projects. In the 10 years I've worked at JPL, I've only charged to a NASA number ONCE. And then only for a summer. A reimbursable project is when an outside organinzation pays JPL (through NASA) to do work for for them, and they get something in return, like a research paper, technology, or a piece of hardware. JPL will do the work, and then will get reimbursed by the company at completion, IIRC.
As an example of some of the work either I, or my co-workers have done under the TAP-like programs include things like systems, hardware, and behavior software for autonomous urban robots like Urbie under DARPA. Ford has funded my group to develop hardware for Engine Control, Emission Control, and diagnostics using Neural Networks. 3-Dimensional IC stacks with Irvine Sensors Corporation for novel Neural Network architectures. Quantum Well Infrared Photodetectors (QWIP) imagers by various companies. Active Pixel Sensors (APS, buzword category: CMOS Imagers) has been licenced to private companies like Micron (formerly Photobit, before they were bought by Micron). Our Micro Devices Lab has farmed out a metric buttload of MEMS instruments and sensors to more companies than I can remember.
That said, JPL WILL NOT compete with private industry. We're not allowed to and it doesn't make sense to. We don't do manufuacturing or marketing. JPL does things that no-one else does. Once we figure out how to do something, we give it to someone else and figure out how to do something new. Since we are a Federally Funded Research and Development Center, it is unappropriate for us to steal business away from legitamate business. However it is appropriate for us to be in bleeding edge research areas that are still not financially or strategically desirable for private industry. The Government usually plays anchor tennant to most technolgies.
As a peon looking up, I can see why they've started to emphasize more on reimbursable projects. NASA and Congress is getting more and more fickle on what and when to pay for new projects. The next rover is finishing up soon (The Mars Exploration Rovers, or Mars '03) and work is rolling off. Everyone coming off MER is looking for new jobs and the project that was supposed to pick everyone up (Mars '05) was pushed back to '07. So the scare of layoffs is real amongst us. I'm actually in the same boat since my projects had the misfortune of ending at the same time MER did, so I'm competing with them. (I believe I've got my funding covered, but I'm in the gap at the moment taking vacation). I'm not the only one I know in my situation. If JPL can get more reimbursable projects, I believe JPL can better weather the whims of congress.
I am glad that JPL is re-emphasizing in comercialization. Although Space missions are fun, novel technology is much more satisfying to me. If we can get more industry to fund new technology, I believe the US will be much better off.
NetTrek was one of three games I fondly recall from my undergrad days.
Ah, yes. That and Stats are inversely proportional to GPA.
Netrek has had lots of influence and history.
on
Netrek
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Wow. Netrek made it to the front page. Took long enough *grin*
Netrek has had quite a bit of history and influence on many. Not only has had a long history since Empire as listed in the above history link, it has had many of its programmers and players go on to bigger and brighter things.
For example, Kevin Smith, one of the 2 original writers of the modern netrek client now works at TiVo, and Dave Taylor (of id, Crack.com and now Transmeta) did a lot of borg writing.
Netrek has also been used as a model for other games. Most recent was when Quake was opened up and people were trying how to prevent cheaters. A few groups came to the Netrek community to ask about our "blessed client" models. And Netrek was even used as prior art to convice a stupid patent holder that they shouldn't pursue litigation. Dave Ahn and I (as current developers) consulted with the defendants on a case where somebody tried to patent client/server game communication with information hiding.
I've been playing Netrek since Summer of 1990. I discovered Xtank and Netrek at the same time, but Netrek had the staying power. Its a game with so many levels, from deep strategy, to mindless fun, all in the same session. Although I never got into Paradise or Chaos, I found ample time to waste on Bronco and Hockey.
There are 2 active leagues(INL, WNL), 1 draft league, and 2 leagues on hiatus (A hockey league and a Euro leage). Games usually have players from all around the world.
Its a fun game! You should all try! Just be patient enough to get over the initial learning curve. For more info go to www.netrek.org or rec.games.netrek.
Ex post facto means someone cannot be punished for something that was legal at the time of action, but was made illegal by a later law, it makes no sense in your sentence...
No, Ex Post Facto is latin for "After the fact." Jeremy was stating that generally, (IMO) you are punished for your actions after you commit them. He was complaining about being punished for something you might commit, but havent yet, or a priori to the action.
In a pinch, if you don't have purpose hand cleaners, a smidge of liquid laundry detergent (I use Tide) works wonders.
Just wet your hands, and put a bit of detergent on your hands. I find that if you tip the bottle upside down and back, the stuff that clings to the cap is enough to go up to your elbows.
Below is about the robot with tracks and flippers.
I doubt they rely on batteries for those particular robots.
Yes we do use batteries. Right now they suck. (NiCds) But we're in the middle of developing LiIon. That should give us $BIGNUM hours of life.
I'm nearly positive they would have a tether on most of the robots that go in deep rubble, if something goes wrong you can usually use the umbilical to pull the robot back out.
In this case, I imagine they did use a safety tether, and there is hard-line ethernet and serial on the robot. However, we've been tasked to not use a tether. We're still experimenting with various comms from wireless modems to 802.11b to even 802.11b downconverted to the military band (so we can up the power).
Additionally, the chaotic nature of the environment wouldn't be one where you could depend on getting wireless coverage easily.. it could be easy to drop into a dead spot and lose control until the coverage is somehow fixed.
Losing comms is something everybody in this program has been trying to tackle for the last 3 years. There are 2 methods currently used. The dumber robots backtrack along their path until it gets back into comm. The smarter ones will either backtrack, or if it was given a task before comms drop, it'll finish the task and try to re-acquire.
I'm on the JPL portion of TMR. TMR stands for Tactical Mobile Robotics and is the DARPA program headed by Lt. Col. John Blitch before he retired. Its the tracked robot with flippers in the front. The chassis is made by IRobot and JPL is doing the Sensors/Autonomous behavior portion of the program. You can see last year's effort on the previous version of the chassis at our website: http://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/tasks/tmr
Those things are not easy to drive. One of the most difficult things is getting a perspective on where the robot is in relation to it's surroundings (very rough rubble). This is an ongoing research area for many robotics teams, and one we have been working on also.
Yes, they are very difficult and disconcerting at first. It does take training. One of our most difficult long distance runs was with the operator out of sight of the robot and the robot having to navigate through a forested area, go to a tower across a parking lot using cover, and climb up a set of stairs. The hard part were the questions, "Where am I?" and "Where can I go?" The operator had to depend heavily on the 360 degree view camera and the computer bread-crumb trail to figure out where he was and where to go, but the question of traversal across obstacles.
With a simple black-and-white camera it is hard to tell what's out there. Is there something behind that grass? Is it a rock, a hole? or a log that can high-center us? Now roll in trying to do that autonomously. The computer can see the clump of grass, but if its thick enough, it'll see it as an obstacle instead of something it can just roll over. And even if it knows it can roll over it, it can't see if there are any obstacles hidden in the grass. We're trying to use laser scanners and radars to try to solve that problem.
Multiple cameras helps, but adds significant complexity and disjoint views. A technology which really makes this easier is an Omni-directional Video sensor (which has a 360 deg. field of view around the sensor).
Yup, we have one of those from a company called Remote Reality. Nifty items. The one with the hole in the center of the picture gives the best resolution at the horizon. 180 degree fisheyes don't give the hole in the center, but suck at resolution on the horizon.
When I was at Caltech Prefrosh, we took a tour of JPL and I noticed that in the main control room they
had two "official JPL time" clocks - really big digital displays that hang over the workstations - that were
off by one second.
Umm. Duh! One was Earth/celestial time, the other was atomic time, which can be up to a second off.
That's the reasons we have leap seconds every once in a while. To bring them into sync.
I was really annoyed when AOL started sending me CDs rather than floppies because I can't use the CDs for anything but coasters, and now I have plenty of coasters.
Yeah, but now I'm glad that they've moved from cardboard sleeves to Amray DVD cases. Just pull the jacket, and voila! Instant replacement DVD cases.
I think you missed the guy's point. Under tvtwm, the screen you were looking at is just a viewpoint to the entire desktop. The entire virtual desktop is continuually scrollable. A quick example is running your XF86 desktop at a higher resolution than your physical screen.
tvtwm includes a 'pan window' that allows you to move the viewpoint wherever you want in the virtual desktop. You aren't limited to moving in integral screen widths/heights, its a continuous scroll unlike CDE style 'desktops' where you can't view parts of more than 1 desktop at the same time. It even has a little map of where all your windows are.
I know---I used to work for NASA. Everything we did was considered classified. When we asked why, we were told that it was to maintain NASA's image.
Um.. I DO work for NASA (Well, JPL anyway) and the reason we don't have unfettered public information dissemination is for ITAR regulations for the most part. The stuff we do is too high-tech to be exported. For most things, it just takes a blessing from the Public Information Office. But some things the PIO can't do. I've jumped through hoops before to get an expidited DoD paper clearance for a conference I was presenting at.
Slashdot Mirror
Its probably to get you hooked on the high speed so you're more willing to pay for the higher bandwidth when they knock you down again to your paid rate.
Not the TV series, the movie Airheads.
It was a running gag.
True, Magnusson-Moss does prevent product tying as a condition of warranty. I can use aftermarket parts on a product had have the manufacturer honor the warranty if the aftermarket part didn't cause the failure.
HOWEVER, Magnussen-Moss does allow restrictions if such restrictions are provided to the consumer AT NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE. An example is if I buy a car, and the warranty requires scheduled labor at a specified garage, the scheduled labor has to be FREE OF CHARGE for the restrictions to be effective.
In AMD's case, their AMD, processor in a box package provides the heatsink and fan. They can indeed say: "You can only use this heatsink." in the warranty terms.
And both are still alive.
metaserver.netrek.org is the round-robin for both metaserver.us.netrek.org and metaserver2.us.netrek.org, FYI.
Netrek is still around, to be sure. There are quite often full servers on the main bronco and hockey variant servers. It is definitely on life support, though.
Why is netrek so tiny now? I can probably offer a few personal opinions, in order of importance.
The decline in University UNIX labs and the rise in Windows systems without a stable (or even available) Windows client during the Windows boom. There are now 2 good clients available for Windows, but during the critical time, there was nothing, so people couldn't easily play. On top of that, being in a UNIX lab gave exposure to the game. "Hey, what's that guy playing? I wanna play too!" was/is Netrek's only source of advertising. We can't buy ad space in gaming magazines.
The rise of twitch games. "Lets blow this guy away with a rocket" sounds more fun than "Lets escort this guy to such-and-such a planet and hope he can take it." Netrek, being mainly a strategy game, requires more thought and concentration and less reflex and adrenalin. Twitch games are essentially "mouse, move, and fire." Netrek requires that the player learn tons of nuances, rules-of-thumb, and situational awareness skills, which Netrek calls "clue," for a team to be successful. But before he can even learn that, the keyboard control scheme and operation of the client requires much practice. The steep Netrek learning curve is a big hurdle for newbies.
The simple graphics. Netrek is a strategy game with simple pieces that were hashed out 13 years ago haven't changed in a while. On top of that, those pieces were developed from Netrek's predecessor, a 2-D text based game. There's no need for anything more than just sprites to represent those pieces. That makes the client look lackluster compared to high polygon count, bump-mapped, real-time generated backgrounds with tons of gore games on the market now.
People got real lives. The original player base isn't in college anymore. We now have jobs, families, and a house or apartment to take care of. I stopped playing for a bit because I was working full time, getting a graduate degree, and am currently recovering from spine surgery, for example.
And finally, of those remaining, a small subset of players are rather abusive of newbies. We should be encouraging newbies and teaching them how to play. However a few expect new players to be uber-clue the moment they first start the client. To be fair, a great majority of the old-clue aren't like that, but the abusers are rather loud.
Netrek isn't dead. There are still organized league play groups active, and I would imagine that the regular league playerbase is bigger than the pickup playerbase. www.netrek.org should show you where to start.
Ummm, yeah. Something illegal DID happen. CVC 22502 (a) was violated. Not parking with your right side up against a curb or side of the road. Sub (e) is the exception for one way roads.
If a private company wants to fund JPL, they're not funding JPL to do it on the cheap. Any work JPL does for them is paid for by them. If anything, they probably get a better workforce per dollar ratio in house than they do funding JPL. All the money that they give us goes through NASA because of the JPL Prime Contract with NASA. Industry pays NASA, NASA takes their cut, pays Caltech, Caltech takes their cut, give it to JPL, and then the standard burden overhead rates apply. We're still pretty good compared to industry for burden rates, but suck for FFRDCs and Universities in general. What industry is paying for is our experience and focus in new technologies. They're hoping we can leverage past work and our skills into a new technology.
Now while I apreciate the Industry funding, I strongly believe that there should be more Government funding for raw new technology research and development. The Government has always been, and will always be an anchor tennant for technologies and that are too far into the future for common industry. Many of the technologies we take for granted today started out as wholly developed or heavily subsidized projects of the US Government. The telecommunications industry, the Internet, high performance computing in general, GPS, and the Airline industry just to name a very short list of things. I strongly believe that we can and should colonize space, however I think it is a big mistake to do it with manned exploration first. Although I don't think JPL will be the only organization to do it, I do think JPL will be and should be the foundation of solar system exploration and travel developments in the future.
"Applied Research" is not the only thing JPL does, but it does do it well. We do have our dreamers that come up with things no one has thought before, those dreamers feed it to our second level visionaries in society that hopefully will have the wisdom to point us in the right direction and tell us (me) what to work on.
There are also things called SBIRs (Small Business Innovative Research, IIRC). They're small, multi-level grants to small buisinesses that each large agency or organization that receives Government funding has to participate in. Grants are given in stages for new technology development.... Paper study, prototype, and so forth up the technology readiness levels. Those I believe are beneficial and allows industry to participate in the bleeding edge. Those are the types of programs are what I think you're talking about and those types of subsidies should continue. Why let the FFRDCs have all the fun. We get stagnant too.
As for who owns what work, as will all Goverment grants, the Government owns everything that the Government pays for and can use it or give it to whoever it wants to for Government purposes. The Government can pay me to develop a widget, and then give that widget design to another company to build a bigger widget that will be sold to the Government. However, if that second company wants to use my widget to develop a product that it is NOT going to sell to the Government, then they have to negotiate a licence from me to use it.
JPL has always farmed out new technology to private industry. Its our secondary charter just under our NASA work. From what I've read of the press report linked, this just seems to be a re-organization and re-focus of the old Technology Affiliates Program. I've worked primarily for non-NASA reimbursable projects. In the 10 years I've worked at JPL, I've only charged to a NASA number ONCE. And then only for a summer. A reimbursable project is when an outside organinzation pays JPL (through NASA) to do work for for them, and they get something in return, like a research paper, technology, or a piece of hardware. JPL will do the work, and then will get reimbursed by the company at completion, IIRC.
As an example of some of the work either I, or my co-workers have done under the TAP-like programs include things like systems, hardware, and behavior software for autonomous urban robots like Urbie under DARPA. Ford has funded my group to develop hardware for Engine Control, Emission Control, and diagnostics using Neural Networks. 3-Dimensional IC stacks with Irvine Sensors Corporation for novel Neural Network architectures. Quantum Well Infrared Photodetectors (QWIP) imagers by various companies. Active Pixel Sensors (APS, buzword category: CMOS Imagers) has been licenced to private companies like Micron (formerly Photobit, before they were bought by Micron). Our Micro Devices Lab has farmed out a metric buttload of MEMS instruments and sensors to more companies than I can remember.
That said, JPL WILL NOT compete with private industry. We're not allowed to and it doesn't make sense to. We don't do manufuacturing or marketing. JPL does things that no-one else does. Once we figure out how to do something, we give it to someone else and figure out how to do something new. Since we are a Federally Funded Research and Development Center, it is unappropriate for us to steal business away from legitamate business. However it is appropriate for us to be in bleeding edge research areas that are still not financially or strategically desirable for private industry. The Government usually plays anchor tennant to most technolgies.
As a peon looking up, I can see why they've started to emphasize more on reimbursable projects. NASA and Congress is getting more and more fickle on what and when to pay for new projects. The next rover is finishing up soon (The Mars Exploration Rovers, or Mars '03) and work is rolling off. Everyone coming off MER is looking for new jobs and the project that was supposed to pick everyone up (Mars '05) was pushed back to '07. So the scare of layoffs is real amongst us. I'm actually in the same boat since my projects had the misfortune of ending at the same time MER did, so I'm competing with them. (I believe I've got my funding covered, but I'm in the gap at the moment taking vacation). I'm not the only one I know in my situation. If JPL can get more reimbursable projects, I believe JPL can better weather the whims of congress.
I am glad that JPL is re-emphasizing in comercialization. Although Space missions are fun, novel technology is much more satisfying to me. If we can get more industry to fund new technology, I believe the US will be much better off.
Ah, yes. That and Stats are inversely proportional to GPA.
Netrek has had quite a bit of history and influence on many. Not only has had a long history since Empire as listed in the above history link, it has had many of its programmers and players go on to bigger and brighter things.
For example, Kevin Smith, one of the 2 original writers of the modern netrek client now works at TiVo, and Dave Taylor (of id, Crack.com and now Transmeta) did a lot of borg writing.
Netrek has also been used as a model for other games. Most recent was when Quake was opened up and people were trying how to prevent cheaters. A few groups came to the Netrek community to ask about our "blessed client" models. And Netrek was even used as prior art to convice a stupid patent holder that they shouldn't pursue litigation. Dave Ahn and I (as current developers) consulted with the defendants on a case where somebody tried to patent client/server game communication with information hiding.
I've been playing Netrek since Summer of 1990. I discovered Xtank and Netrek at the same time, but Netrek had the staying power. Its a game with so many levels, from deep strategy, to mindless fun, all in the same session. Although I never got into Paradise or Chaos, I found ample time to waste on Bronco and Hockey.
There are 2 active leagues(INL, WNL), 1 draft league, and 2 leagues on hiatus (A hockey league and a Euro leage). Games usually have players from all around the world.
Its a fun game! You should all try! Just be patient enough to get over the initial learning curve. For more info go to www.netrek.org or rec.games.netrek.
No, Ex Post Facto is latin for "After the fact." Jeremy was stating that generally, (IMO) you are punished for your actions after you commit them. He was complaining about being punished for something you might commit, but havent yet, or a priori to the action.
It is redundant because the entire article is in the link provided in the article summary.
They have their own tap off JPL's isolation router. Coming into our isolation router are quite a few REALLY fat pipes.
Just wet your hands, and put a bit of detergent on your hands. I find that if you tip the bottle upside down and back, the stuff that clings to the cap is enough to go up to your elbows.
"Its a YULE TIDE!!!!!!"
"Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho"
Yes we do use batteries. Right now they suck. (NiCds) But we're in the middle of developing LiIon. That should give us $BIGNUM hours of life.
In this case, I imagine they did use a safety tether, and there is hard-line ethernet and serial on the robot. However, we've been tasked to not use a tether. We're still experimenting with various comms from wireless modems to 802.11b to even 802.11b downconverted to the military band (so we can up the power).
Losing comms is something everybody in this program has been trying to tackle for the last 3 years. There are 2 methods currently used. The dumber robots backtrack along their path until it gets back into comm. The smarter ones will either backtrack, or if it was given a task before comms drop, it'll finish the task and try to re-acquire.
Yes, they are very difficult and disconcerting at first. It does take training. One of our most difficult long distance runs was with the operator out of sight of the robot and the robot having to navigate through a forested area, go to a tower across a parking lot using cover, and climb up a set of stairs. The hard part were the questions, "Where am I?" and "Where can I go?" The operator had to depend heavily on the 360 degree view camera and the computer bread-crumb trail to figure out where he was and where to go, but the question of traversal across obstacles.
With a simple black-and-white camera it is hard to tell what's out there. Is there something behind that grass? Is it a rock, a hole? or a log that can high-center us? Now roll in trying to do that autonomously. The computer can see the clump of grass, but if its thick enough, it'll see it as an obstacle instead of something it can just roll over. And even if it knows it can roll over it, it can't see if there are any obstacles hidden in the grass. We're trying to use laser scanners and radars to try to solve that problem.
Yup, we have one of those from a company called Remote Reality. Nifty items. The one with the hole in the center of the picture gives the best resolution at the horizon. 180 degree fisheyes don't give the hole in the center, but suck at resolution on the horizon.
--Carlos V.
Yes, they will have Speakers/mic. IRobot (the company who makes the chassis) has provisions for that in their upgrade path on the chassis)
--Carlos V.
That's the reasons we have leap seconds every once in a while. To bring them into sync.
Yeah, but now I'm glad that they've moved from cardboard sleeves to Amray DVD cases. Just pull the jacket, and voila! Instant replacement DVD cases.
I think you missed the guy's point. Under tvtwm, the screen you were looking at is just a viewpoint to the entire desktop. The entire virtual desktop is continuually scrollable. A quick example is running your XF86 desktop at a higher resolution than your physical screen.
tvtwm includes a 'pan window' that allows you to move the viewpoint wherever you want in the virtual desktop. You aren't limited to moving in integral screen widths/heights, its a continuous scroll unlike CDE style 'desktops' where you can't view parts of more than 1 desktop at the same time. It even has a little map of where all your windows are.
Um.. I DO work for NASA (Well, JPL anyway) and the reason we don't have unfettered public information dissemination is for ITAR regulations for the most part. The stuff we do is too high-tech to be exported. For most things, it just takes a blessing from the Public Information Office. But some things the PIO can't do. I've jumped through hoops before to get an expidited DoD paper clearance for a conference I was presenting at.