It can make some fairly simple yet effective walkers, that have no concept of what to do when they get there, or even have any concept of getting there. They just go, they don't do anything else. They are toys.
So, walking across broken ground is a "toy" action? Degrading gracefully upon damage is useless?
Hate to tell you this, but these are problems that the top-down school of AI has not been able to solve worth a damn. The military spent a fortune trying to get various AI labs at places like MIT and Stanford to build autonomous walkers- the AI labs failed dismally.
Tilden's developed simple, robust walkers. Couple these with cameras and some basic logic and transmission stuff and you have a cheap robot explorer.
So they can't learn. Who cares? They walk, and that's proven to be harder than most anyone imagined.
Eric
Station a lousy microgravity environment
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 1
Microgravity/Freefall. This is useful, makes interesting things such as growing crystals and studying the possible effects of a prolonged space voyage possible.
Long term effects of weightlessness on humans are fine, but for anything requiring real microgravity space stations are close to useless. People moving around constantly ruins it: it's so bad that one major speculation of why the Russians are so reluctant to give out data on Mir is that the US will find out how bad the microgravity on board is. (We had to fly a special isolation mount for Mir to even make it barely acceptable.)
If you really need microgravity to grow crystals, use an unmanned platform.
I looked at the review on LinuxWorld and they say that you need at least a "300 MHz Pentium II, 64 MB of RAM, and a 16 bit graphics card." I've run HOMM3 on a P200 laptop with 32 MB RAM and el-cheapo 2MB graphics under Win95 and had no problems at all, other than a bit of swapping when switching between towns of different types, which went away when I upgraded to 96MB RAM. Why does the Linux version take far more hardware: it's not like the OS is any bigger.
The biggest change IMHO is the new magic system. Each spell falls into earth/air/fire/water, and each hero has a skill when casting spells of that type. Expert skill often affects an entire army, not just a stack, so all of a sudden the best spells for an expert are things like Haste, Slow, Curse, Bless, StoneSkin and the like. It's an entirely new flavor to magic combat. They've added an underground area on some maps, kind of like Myrror in Master of Magic, reduced the number of artifacts a hero can carry, and greatly revamped the money from castles so that you can make a lot more if you have all the structures.
That being said I've heard that the music was better for HOMM2
It was. HOMM2 had the best music I've ever heard in a game bar none. Not only did it fit perfectly with the game, it was so good I transferred it to tape just to listen to it in the car.
Also I have the AB expansion pack, the Conflux (elemental) race is a mediocre addition (at least they didn't include the "forge" race *shudders*), but the new campaigns and creatures made it worth recommending for HOMM3 fans.
The AB pack is fun: the HOMM3 campaign didn't do anything for me (The HOMM2 campaign I've played through at least four times.) but the AB new campaigns are for the most part fun. You'll get used to the Conflux: the strategy with them is different- you've got crappy low and high end troops, but the middle is solid and you'll always move first, which is a serious advantage.
Not true! Who says you cannot do orbitals or animations in VRML? We do them!
Of course you can- never said you couldn't. You can even get the physics better. (Although most Chime animations are just output from MD programs, so the physics is as good as the MD. Want better vibrations? Do better calculations.)
Now try to do HIV-1 protease with VRML (198 amino acids), in stick model form with dots showing the VDW surface. Can you get it to label certain residues or show beta-sheet structure? Sure, you *can*, but it's painful.
I tried using VRML for a while. I gave up- it's just not worth the effort.
This site doesn't even touch on what Chime can do. It's fully scriptable, can do animations, is chemically smart, etc. I always laugh when I hear folks talking about how VRML will revolutionize chemistry on the web: VRML is simply pitiful compared to what Chime can do.
For a couple of pages I worked up using Chime, see
To the poster who lamented that Chime isn't available for Linux. Nope, but the Rasmol source code is available- start porting. Chime is one of the major reasons I use NT on my workstation rather than Linux. (I'm not a good enough C programmer to do it, or I'd consider it.)
Everyone here seems to think 1 watt is great. Guess what- it's great by desktop standards, but certainly not by Palm standards. A Pilot, running flat out (Screen, backlight, serial port, CPU and all the trimmings) draws something like 0.25 watts (assuming I did my math right- 0.085 A at 3V.), the vast majority of that drawn by the screen, serial port and backlight.
Stick a Crusoe in there and your battery life will be a fifth of what it is now- you'd be changing cells every 2 hours.
This is why Transmeta isn't interested in palmtops- Crusoe + a color screen just won't fit energy wise. Something more like a Newton is a better fit, although StrongARM does better on power.
Finally, for everyone complaining about the PalmOS, it's not supposed to be a real OS. It does what it does very well, and fills a nitche. Sure, it would be nice if it could play MP3s, but not at the cost of losing the wonderful, simple functionality and very long battery life. (You'd think folks would realize this after the WinCE debacle.)
He clearly doesn't care that much about money: you don't give away $11 billion if your end goal is to be the richest man in the world.
However, I bet he has a program that calculates his wealth to the penny, updated every second. Come on, wouldn't you write a program like this if you had his kind of cash? It's the geek thing to do, and whatever else you think of Gates, he is a geek. Put the number up on a big wall display in your living room and watch the numbers fly.
Should we sue Oasis because they sound so much like the Beatles?
No, we should sue Oasis because they suck. I've put many extra years of wear and tear on my mute and scan buttons just avoiding Oasis' music. Add to that personal suffering from getting "Wonderwall" stuck in my head and surely that should be worth a class-action suit. If they sounded like the Beatles they'd actually be good.
Oh boy, my first flamebait post. Negative karma here I come!
...just not using his mind. Reading of his various exploits, I'm not surprised he has to make a living suing people. He certainly couldn't make it as a (honest) magician.
Many, many moons ago I remember the day when Yahoo! switched to using that newest of web inventions, tables. There had actually been a fair amount of discussion about it: they sent a lot of early users emails asking if they should include tables or not, since very few web browsers supported them. (I voted yes, although table support in the version of Mosaic I was using was poor.)
What really irritates me: I was a grad student at the same school at the same time as Filo and Yang. All of my friends and I collected web site addresses and indexed our favorites: there were no search engines at that time. Then we found the precursor to Yahoo and more or less stopped: we sent our lists to them and just let them do the indexing. Now I teach chemistry and they're gazillionaires. Sigh....
Nice idea, but not feasible. You'd need to get a direct transmission model, not a bucket-dropper(Direct film return), i.e., post KH-9. These are big machines- Hubble+ sized. There's just no way at all you could move one to Mars orbit with current boosters. Add to that they aren't cheap- the budget for space surveillence is rather high, and each satellite is mucho expensive.
I think most people here are missing the point. When Sun says "Java everywhere",what they mean is "Java on Windows and Solaris." McNealy couldn't care less about anything else.
Linux on x86 is a serious competitor to low end Sun hardware, as is *BSD although it gets less publicity. Why does Sun want a free OS on cheap commodity hardware getting more software support? It will just make the transition from SPARC/Solaris->Linux easier, something Sun doesn't want. Yes, I know Sparc/Linux exists, but honestly what kind of support does it get compared to x86? With the newer x86s like Athlon SPARC doesn't have the staggering performance advantage it used to. (I'm not talking here the Sun "big iron"- we won't be seeing 64 processor x86 anytime soon.)
"Java everywhere" is a weapon to try and kill MS. Nothing more.
Assuming it went into deep safemode, the scope is fine. The aperature door will close and the scope will keep position in space. Safe mode is something Hubble's controllers understand very well...
Check out Eric Chaisson's The Hubble Wars for a good description of just how FUBARed the Hubble really is. Among the interesting points: several of the initial gyros on the scope were engineering test models that already had tens of millions of hours of use. A number failed before the last repair mission: they were only 1 gyro away from safe then.
Chaisson (ex-Space Telescope Science Institute high-muckity-muck) was more than a bit critical of the entire design process. Even beyond the the well-known mirror and solar panel problems, the number of design flaws and construction problems were amazing. For example, while it waited for launch nobody could find the documentation that stated that the secondary mirror had ever been installed. They had to tip the scope and build a $BIGNUM "diving board" so someone could climb into the scope and look.
Guess what. OS/2 was exactly this OS a few years back- a better Windows than Windows (TM). Ran DOS and Windows software beautifully + all its own native, more advanced stuff.
Too bad that nobody every bothered to write more advanced stuff. After all, you had all the Windows world available... OS/2, despite being a damn sight better than Win3.1 never went anywhere. I switched to NT when it became obvious that all I was using OS/2 for was to multitask Windows apps- why not just use Windows for that?
You don't want to compete with MS here. Running their software is only a trip to obscurity-land.
I cannot think of a single example of a Microsoft proprietary plugin or extension to Java for which there is not a functionally equivalent open solution.
Chime. Not MS proprietary, but Mac/Windows only. http://www.mdli.com Until this gets ported to Linux you can forget about me using Linux for a workstation. (My server runs it.)
I'm one of the webmasters for a chemistry department.
I use a plugin called Chime which embeds 3-d models of molecules into a web page. I use it a lot- it's a tremendous tool. Yes, there are Java programs which do the same thing- they have a 10th the features of Chime and are far buggier and slower.
Guess what- Mac, Windows or SGI only. My server runs Linux, but my lab machines don't and won't anytime soon, simply due to this plugin.
The real problem here is that even if Chime gets ported, there is going to be someone in Physics who has a plug-in they need. Finish that and deal with the ones that bio, math, etc want. It's even more effort than Mozilla...
Depending on how you want to define a robot, there are quite a few hunter-killer systems that might classify. For example, the Swedish Strix mortar shell is a "fire+forget" antitank weapon- launch it and it will find a tank and kill it. Tacit Rainbow was a similar US project to develop an anti-radar missile: fire it at a target area and it would circle around until it found a target- it worked but was cancelled due to budget problems. No human intervention in either, both are self-powered and self-targeting, so they seem to meet most definitions of robots.
I've got a CGI (online testing program) which reads in a text file which contains one or more equations. It generates random numbers for the input and then outputs the results of the equations.
I had two choices.
Write many, many lines of C code to parse the equations
my $result = eval $specialpart[1];, where specialpart is the equation stripped from the text file.
Given the ease of doing this + the great string handling routines in Perl, it wasn't a hard choice.
Eric
None of Stephenson's books have an ending
on
Snow Crash
·
· Score: 1
Snow Crash has an epic, book-length ending compared to most of Stephenson's books. Compare The Diamond Age, where it was clear that he had no idea how to end the book and simply stopped writing when he got bored. Cryptonomicon isn't much better, nor is Zodiac.
Still a great boook nonetheless: I just wish that he'd think the entire novel, including the ending, through before writing.
As someone who does computer-based educational stuff for a living, it still amazes me how gullible people are when they start working on projects like this
It doesn't save time, it takes it. In large amounts. Your average college prof or high school teacher is basically clueless about what you need to do- they can put up a simple web page, but interactive programming is difficult and beyond most of them.
There are a ton of products out there to "make it easy" for the professor to setup an online class. Every one I've seen isn't worth the effort: they are complex, fragile and very limited in capabilites. Sure, you can click a few boxes and put a quiz online. Too bad it will be only multiple choice and have virtually no useful feedback to the student unless the professor spends the time writing detailed answers. The web-based discussion boards have a fraction the capabilites of USENET. The integrated grade books don't hold a candle to a spreadsheet like Excel.
The CD-ROMs in most books are worse. They always want a version of Quicktime you don't have. They are poorly designed, filled with examples that are simply copied from the paper book and still have limited feedback on the quizzes.
Thus, you get people like me helping out. I do web page/CGI/Java/multimedia stuff for the department. But now you have to find someone who knows both chemistry and the Net. You have to pay my salary and all the other overhead. And I still have to train professors in how to use this material.
We won't even get into the problems of distance ed. Is the person taking the test online the same person that signed up for the class? How do I get people even to show up to class- one of the best determiners of who will do well in the course?
There are a ton of great things you can do with the web. (See the Chime plug-in for example, an amazing tool for chemistry.) But how to rework an entire course to be web-based is not at all clear.
I run a website for a chemistry learning center and use Perl for just about everything. It's not all chemistry related- much of it is fairly generic, but I've written lots of snippets of Perl to do things like generate Chime images of atomic orbitals.
Slashdot Mirror
It can make some fairly simple yet effective walkers, that have no concept of what to do when they get there, or even have any concept of getting there. They just go, they don't do anything else. They are toys.
So, walking across broken ground is a "toy" action? Degrading gracefully upon damage is useless?
Hate to tell you this, but these are problems that the top-down school of AI has not been able to solve worth a damn. The military spent a fortune trying to get various AI labs at places like MIT and Stanford to build autonomous walkers- the AI labs failed dismally.
Tilden's developed simple, robust walkers. Couple these with cameras and some basic logic and transmission stuff and you have a cheap robot explorer.
So they can't learn. Who cares? They walk, and that's proven to be harder than most anyone imagined.
Eric
Microgravity/Freefall. This is useful, makes interesting things such as growing crystals and studying the possible effects of a prolonged space voyage possible.
Long term effects of weightlessness on humans are fine, but for anything requiring real microgravity space stations are close to useless. People moving around constantly ruins it: it's so bad that one major speculation of why the Russians are so reluctant to give out data on Mir is that the US will find out how bad the microgravity on board is. (We had to fly a special isolation mount for Mir to even make it barely acceptable.)
If you really need microgravity to grow crystals, use an unmanned platform.
Eric
Eric
The biggest change IMHO is the new magic system. Each spell falls into earth/air/fire/water, and each hero has a skill when casting spells of that type. Expert skill often affects an entire army, not just a stack, so all of a sudden the best spells for an expert are things like Haste, Slow, Curse, Bless, StoneSkin and the like. It's an entirely new flavor to magic combat. They've added an underground area on some maps, kind of like Myrror in Master of Magic, reduced the number of artifacts a hero can carry, and greatly revamped the money from castles so that you can make a lot more if you have all the structures.
It's a worthy addition.
It was. HOMM2 had the best music I've ever heard in a game bar none. Not only did it fit perfectly with the game, it was so good I transferred it to tape just to listen to it in the car.
Also I have the AB expansion pack, the Conflux (elemental) race is a mediocre addition (at least they didn't include the "forge" race *shudders*), but the new campaigns and creatures made it worth recommending for HOMM3 fans.
The AB pack is fun: the HOMM3 campaign didn't do anything for me (The HOMM2 campaign I've played through at least four times.) but the AB new campaigns are for the most part fun. You'll get used to the Conflux: the strategy with them is different- you've got crappy low and high end troops, but the middle is solid and you'll always move first, which is a serious advantage.
Not true! Who says you cannot do orbitals or animations in VRML? We do them!
Of course you can- never said you couldn't. You can even get the physics better. (Although most Chime animations are just output from MD programs, so the physics is as good as the MD. Want better vibrations? Do better calculations.)
Now try to do HIV-1 protease with VRML (198 amino acids), in stick model form with dots showing the VDW surface. Can you get it to label certain residues or show beta-sheet structure? Sure, you *can*, but it's painful.
I tried using VRML for a while. I gave up- it's just not worth the effort.
Eric
For a couple of pages I worked up using Chime, see
The atomic orbitals page
Repr esentative proteins
To the poster who lamented that Chime isn't available for Linux. Nope, but the Rasmol source code is available- start porting. Chime is one of the major reasons I use NT on my workstation rather than Linux. (I'm not a good enough C programmer to do it, or I'd consider it.)
Eric
Everyone here seems to think 1 watt is great. Guess what- it's great by desktop standards, but certainly not by Palm standards. A Pilot, running flat out (Screen, backlight, serial port, CPU and all the trimmings) draws something like 0.25 watts (assuming I did my math right- 0.085 A at 3V.), the vast majority of that drawn by the screen, serial port and backlight.
Stick a Crusoe in there and your battery life will be a fifth of what it is now- you'd be changing cells every 2 hours.
This is why Transmeta isn't interested in palmtops- Crusoe + a color screen just won't fit energy wise. Something more like a Newton is a better fit, although StrongARM does better on power.
Finally, for everyone complaining about the PalmOS, it's not supposed to be a real OS. It does what it does very well, and fills a nitche. Sure, it would be nice if it could play MP3s, but not at the cost of losing the wonderful, simple functionality and very long battery life. (You'd think folks would realize this after the WinCE debacle.)
Eric
He clearly doesn't care that much about money: you don't give away $11 billion if your end goal is to be the richest man in the world.
However, I bet he has a program that calculates his wealth to the penny, updated every second. Come on, wouldn't you write a program like this if you had his kind of cash? It's the geek thing to do, and whatever else you think of Gates, he is a geek. Put the number up on a big wall display in your living room and watch the numbers fly.
Eric
No, we should sue Oasis because they suck. I've put many extra years of wear and tear on my mute and scan buttons just avoiding Oasis' music. Add to that personal suffering from getting "Wonderwall" stuck in my head and surely that should be worth a class-action suit. If they sounded like the Beatles they'd actually be good.
Oh boy, my first flamebait post. Negative karma here I come!
Eric
...just not using his mind. Reading of his various exploits, I'm not surprised he has to make a living suing people. He certainly couldn't make it as a (honest) magician.
Many, many moons ago I remember the day when Yahoo! switched to using that newest of web inventions, tables. There had actually been a fair amount of discussion about it: they sent a lot of early users emails asking if they should include tables or not, since very few web browsers supported them. (I voted yes, although table support in the version of Mosaic I was using was poor.)
What really irritates me: I was a grad student at the same school at the same time as Filo and Yang. All of my friends and I collected web site addresses and indexed our favorites: there were no search engines at that time. Then we found the precursor to Yahoo and more or less stopped: we sent our lists to them and just let them do the indexing. Now I teach chemistry and they're gazillionaires. Sigh....
Eric
In any case, since when do all nerds use Linux? Personally, I use NT, Mac and Linux as needed.
Eric
I think most people here are missing the point. When Sun says "Java everywhere",what they mean is "Java on Windows and Solaris." McNealy couldn't care less about anything else.
Linux on x86 is a serious competitor to low end Sun hardware, as is *BSD although it gets less publicity. Why does Sun want a free OS on cheap commodity hardware getting more software support? It will just make the transition from SPARC/Solaris->Linux easier, something Sun doesn't want. Yes, I know Sparc/Linux exists, but honestly what kind of support does it get compared to x86? With the newer x86s like Athlon SPARC doesn't have the staggering performance advantage it used to. (I'm not talking here the Sun "big iron"- we won't be seeing 64 processor x86 anytime soon.)
"Java everywhere" is a weapon to try and kill MS. Nothing more.
Eric
That statement, in itself, is enough to discredit your whole post. FYI, 24*365 = 8760, meaning each year is composed of roughly 8760 hours.
Sorry- mistake of magnitude. (I was thinking pi*10million seconds/year and stupidly wrote hours.)
However, the point that the gyros were engineering test models is in fact correct: not my point, it's Chaisson's.
Eric
Assuming it went into deep safemode, the scope is fine. The aperature door will close and the scope will keep position in space. Safe mode is something Hubble's controllers understand very well...
Check out Eric Chaisson's The Hubble Wars for a good description of just how FUBARed the Hubble really is. Among the interesting points: several of the initial gyros on the scope were engineering test models that already had tens of millions of hours of use. A number failed before the last repair mission: they were only 1 gyro away from safe then.
Chaisson (ex-Space Telescope Science Institute high-muckity-muck) was more than a bit critical of the entire design process. Even beyond the the well-known mirror and solar panel problems, the number of design flaws and construction problems were amazing. For example, while it waited for launch nobody could find the documentation that stated that the secondary mirror had ever been installed. They had to tip the scope and build a $BIGNUM "diving board" so someone could climb into the scope and look.
Guess what. OS/2 was exactly this OS a few years back- a better Windows than Windows (TM). Ran DOS and Windows software beautifully + all its own native, more advanced stuff.
Too bad that nobody every bothered to write more advanced stuff. After all, you had all the Windows world available... OS/2, despite being a damn sight better than Win3.1 never went anywhere. I switched to NT when it became obvious that all I was using OS/2 for was to multitask Windows apps- why not just use Windows for that?
You don't want to compete with MS here. Running their software is only a trip to obscurity-land.
Eric
I cannot think of a single example of a Microsoft proprietary plugin or extension to Java for which there is not a functionally equivalent open solution.
Chime. Not MS proprietary, but Mac/Windows only. http://www.mdli.com Until this gets ported to Linux you can forget about me using Linux for a workstation. (My server runs it.)
Eric
I'm one of the webmasters for a chemistry department.
I use a plugin called Chime which embeds 3-d models of molecules into a web page. I use it a lot- it's a tremendous tool. Yes, there are Java programs which do the same thing- they have a 10th the features of Chime and are far buggier and slower.
Guess what- Mac, Windows or SGI only. My server runs Linux, but my lab machines don't and won't anytime soon, simply due to this plugin.
The real problem here is that even if Chime gets ported, there is going to be someone in Physics who has a plug-in they need. Finish that and deal with the ones that bio, math, etc want. It's even more effort than Mozilla...
Eric
Depending on how you want to define a robot, there are quite a few hunter-killer systems that might classify. For example, the Swedish Strix mortar shell is a "fire+forget" antitank weapon- launch it and it will find a tank and kill it. Tacit Rainbow was a similar US project to develop an anti-radar missile: fire it at a target area and it would circle around until it found a target- it worked but was cancelled due to budget problems. No human intervention in either, both are self-powered and self-targeting, so they seem to meet most definitions of robots.
I've got a CGI (online testing program) which reads in a text file which contains one or more equations. It generates random numbers for the input and then outputs the results of the equations.
I had two choices.
- Write many, many lines of C code to parse the equations
- my $result = eval $specialpart[1];, where specialpart is the equation stripped from the text file.
Given the ease of doing this + the great string handling routines in Perl, it wasn't a hard choice.Eric
Still a great boook nonetheless: I just wish that he'd think the entire novel, including the ending, through before writing.
It doesn't save time, it takes it. In large amounts. Your average college prof or high school teacher is basically clueless about what you need to do- they can put up a simple web page, but interactive programming is difficult and beyond most of them.
There are a ton of products out there to "make it easy" for the professor to setup an online class. Every one I've seen isn't worth the effort: they are complex, fragile and very limited in capabilites. Sure, you can click a few boxes and put a quiz online. Too bad it will be only multiple choice and have virtually no useful feedback to the student unless the professor spends the time writing detailed answers. The web-based discussion boards have a fraction the capabilites of USENET. The integrated grade books don't hold a candle to a spreadsheet like Excel.
The CD-ROMs in most books are worse. They always want a version of Quicktime you don't have. They are poorly designed, filled with examples that are simply copied from the paper book and still have limited feedback on the quizzes.
Thus, you get people like me helping out. I do web page/CGI/Java/multimedia stuff for the department. But now you have to find someone who knows both chemistry and the Net. You have to pay my salary and all the other overhead. And I still have to train professors in how to use this material.
We won't even get into the problems of distance ed. Is the person taking the test online the same person that signed up for the class? How do I get people even to show up to class- one of the best determiners of who will do well in the course?
There are a ton of great things you can do with the web. (See the Chime plug-in for example, an amazing tool for chemistry.) But how to rework an entire course to be web-based is not at all clear.
Eric
I run a website for a chemistry learning center and use Perl for just about everything. It's not all chemistry related- much of it is fairly generic, but I've written lots of snippets of Perl to do things like generate Chime images of atomic orbitals.
Eric