The two rovers were not designed to work for 90 days.
They were guaranteed to work for 90 days.
The various components were designed to work no matter what they experienced for 90 days on the Martian surface.
I suspect that they were designed for the worst possible set of circumstances for 90 days which has allowed them to operate for the much longer time in the actual environment which is more benign than the worst case scenario.
Regardless of the semantics of the 90 days, the time the two robots have been operating is still an amazing achievement and everybody involved should be very proud.
I was the design manager on Logitech's Harmony One remote and I fought for a touch screen for the programmable controls - in the past these were physical buttons beside the different controls on the remote. Implementing physical buttons close to an LCD are very difficult to implement correctly. I thought the touch panel would improve the quality of the product and give it much cleaner look to the overall product.
I was half right - it is a gorgeous remote but the touch panel just doesn't match the rest of the remote and the time taken in the mechanical design to product an interface that you don't have to look down at to use. Coupled with the cost of the capacitive touch panel (about 10x what it would cost for poly dome and plastic/elastomer buttons) it really isn't worth it.
I'm very unimpressed with the touch panel for typing on the iPhone and iPod touch so I'm going to be watching to see how companies design their user interfaces to give users as positive an interface as they would have with buttons.
If it's not done well, then I would expect a backlash against touch panels by consumers.
Reading the article, it really just comes across as Obama trying to push the shuttle layoffs to the right so they don't take place during his first term in office.
It's unfortunate, but I would really like to see him and McCain come up with a strong vision for space to spur international and private sector investments with a corresponding push in maths, sciences and engineering.
As trite as they may be, I could get excited about a candidate that pushed:
Solar Power Satellites
Mining of the moon and asteroids
Manufacturing of proteins and other molecules that can't be done efficiently on Earth
etc.
Note that I don't say "NASA". I think NASA has a very important role to play in the development of space technology but at some point they have to be out of the business of LEO (Low Earth Orbit) operations.
I've written a couple of emails and talked to his office manager about the issue and asked why the Liberal party is not making this a confidence motion. It's bad legislation and bad for the country.
For anybody else in Etobicoke-Lakeshore (Toronto South-West), please drop a line to Michael Ignatieff and let him know what you think.
Yes you can get lots of jokes from this idea, but what about serious applications like using it for communications in noisy environments? I would think that this concept would be ideal on the battlefield where you don't want to impair the listener's hearing, but make sure they get the message just the same.
Except for sports (which we use an antenna), nobody in my family has watched live TV for several years. We get Internet for our news (usually more in depth) and for TV shows we wait until the end of the season and then when the season's DVDs come out, read the reviews on Amazon and talk to friends.
Cost wise, over the course of the year, the season sets for a dozen shows (say $50 average each for sake of argument) is less than the cable/satellite options which have the specialty channels with CW, HBO, SHO & SciFi shows as well as the network shows. Having the DVDs allows very comfortable time-shifting and being able to re-watch of shows.
I know quite a few people do it this way (with some swapping of sets although with the recipient usually watching an episode or two and then buying a set for themselves if they like the show).
Maybe it's *my* demographic, but it works and the content owners are being paid for their product.
Giving the subject a series of comparisions to make and determine the difference of when they make the decision and when they act on it.
Use the same apparatus, but ask the subjects to select which they would prefer at that moment in time:
Steak vs Salad Blonde vs Brunette Pepsi vs Coke Car vs Bicycle Mac vs PC and so on...
You could go on and try to week out personal preferences with things that the subject has to evaluate: Which would you like in your front hall: A Van Gough or a Gougain? Which is funnier: A joke from Steve Martin or a joke from Robin Williams? What smells better: Roses or Cinnamon? With a given math problem, what is the better of two choices to solve it?
I would think this approach would be a better way to see how decisions are made within the human mind.
The first place I saw the idea of extracting hydrogen from water to create power was the method used in the original Jules Verne (not the Disney version) "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea".
So, it's definitely not original and if it were possible, don't you think that somebody would have done it by now?
As I understand it, every military in the world assess the threat its opponents pose by their capabilities rather than perceived intents.
How do you perform a threat assessment in the area of cyber-warfare where the physical weapons (as was pointed out in an earlier post) is the keyboard and mouse with much of technology being used as a threat being developed in the U.S?
Looking at the demo video (comment below) and reading TFA, it looked more like a gesture response on a 2D screen than anything approaching a holodeck. More like Tom Cruise's display selection used in "Minority Report"
In any case, the guy in the video looked like he was following the movement of the Rubic's cube, not guiding it. If you were a VC, I would suggest investigating this a lot more - it seems to be more vapourware than something that's ready for prime time.
This is a perfect example of a propellor head trying to come up with an analogy for a media/marketing type. I suspect that this was the only one that the powers that be felt non-techies could relate to. I've been asked to come up with these analogies a couple of times and it can be pretty frustrating on both sides.
I suspect the first example of this happening was trying to estimate how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.
Other meaningless analogies could be:
How long it would take Roadrunner to count all the atoms in the universe
What speed your car would run at if the speed difference between Roadrunner and your home computer was multiplied by 60 mph
If we could go this many times faster than the speed of light, how fast could we cross the universe
If in every instruction it could take in one byte of text, how long it would take to read the Library of Congress
How fast it could render "The Incredibles" compared to how long it took the original server farm (actually, this might be one that's understandable)
How fast it could break the 128 bit encryption used when you log onto your bank's web page to pay your bills (this might also be understandable and would probably be a bit scary)
The simple fact is that a petaflop computer works faster than humans can conceive and any kind of analogy cannot be comprehended.
Just reading TFA and thinking that, after reading the sentence "When they mixed small amounts of carbon nanotubes and epoxies (glue-like materials) with crushed rock that has the same composition and grain size as lunar dust, they discovered to their surprise that they had created a very strong material with the consistency of concrete.", wouldn't building living (and other) structures on the moon using this material be a better application of this technology?
Seriously - reports and papers are expected to be typed.
I would consider it to be a significant advantage to learning how to program if you already knew where all the keys were and weren't hunting and pecking (and not focusing on what you should be learning).
How about we take the mice that have been loaded with the Tassie Tiger (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/20/132238) and load some others with the DNA of the Vikings and let's see who dominates!
The winner can take on mice bred with the dinosour DNA taken from fossilized mosquitos!
The best way I've found to avoid jet lag is to force myself to sleep at what would be the appropriate time for the time zone I'm going to - usually Asia or back home to Toronto.
6mg of Melatonin and a couple of beers in the airport bar are usually enough, but it doesn't hurt to have some soft music (I use "Music for the Mozart effect") and dark glasses (which don't look anywhere near as looserish as a sleep mask) to help with the process. If I do it right, I end up waking up at 7:00-8:00AM Hong Kong time at which point most people are finally falling asleep.
It's not perfect, but it gives me at least a good start,
As I read the previous posts, it seems like the focus is on RISC vs CISC but I think the real question is there value-add for designers to have an x86 compatible embedded microcontroller?
People (and not just us) should be asking would end customers find it useful to be able to run their PC apps on their mobile devices? Current mobile devices typically have PowerPoint and Word readers (with maybe some editing capabilities) but would users find it worthwhile being able to load apps onto their mobile devices from the same CDs/DVDs that were used to load the apps onto their PCs?
If end customers do find this attractive, would they be willing to pay the extra money for the chips (the Atom looks to require considerably more gates than a comparable ARM) as well as for the extra memory (Flash, RAM & Disk) that would be required to support PC OSes and apps? Even if end customers found this approach attractive, I think OEMs are going to have a long, hard think about whether or not they want to port their radio code to the x86 with Windows/Linux when they already have infrastructures built up with the processors and tools they are currently using.
The whole thing doesn't really make sense to me because if Intel wanted to be in the MCU business, then why did they spin it off as Marvell (which also included the mobile WiFi technology as well)?
The whole think seems like a significant risk that customers will want products built from this chip and the need for Intel and OEMs to recreate the infrastructure they have for existing chips (ie ARM) for the x86 Atom.
Here's my start at one (sorry no list because it ended up having too few characters per line): Neuromancer (kudos to parent)/Crytonomicon (kudos to parent)/Ringworld/Rendezvous with Rama (I know but we've been waiting forever for it)/The moat in god's eye/Stranger in a strange land/Childhood's end/The man in high tower/Little Fuzzy/The moon is a harsh mistress/Starship troopers (one that doesn't suck)/The foundation trilogy/The caves of steel or The naked sun (erase "iRobot" from everybody's memory)/Red Mars going to Green Mars going to Blue Mars/The forever war/Ender's Game (I know that's been going on for years as well)/The long ARM of Gil Hamilton/Oath of fealty (I always liked that book)/Have spacesuit will travel/Tau Zero/Gateway/There will be time/Ensign Flandry/Dorsai/Berzerkers/Slan/The weapon shops of Isher/The duelling machine/The demolished man/The fountains of paradise/The city and the stars/Sun diver going to Startide rising/Way station
Please feel free to add to the list,
If there are any big hollywood producers out there, remember where this idea came from and I would think that you should be looking for an executive producer that understands this stuff so what you create doesn't suck (my rates are surprisingly reasonable).
I don't want to start a philosophical battle here, but I would appreciate it if you could give me a pointer to a reference explaining what are the features of C that make it suitable for "low-level manipulation of memory and I/O"?
I've always found it to be sub-optimal due to its lack of a "bit" data type, the need to explicitly set pointers to address specific regions in memory (which may or may not be in the same address space as I/O - ie the x86 architecture), etc. To get around these issues, access functions are typically written in assembler and then accessed by the C mainline code or the compiler is enhanced to provide these functions more natively. For high performance applications, the programmers may find that they have to use assembler to minimize latency between commands. These factors typically result in code that isn't portable unless the compiler features and libraries can be used in the target.
It might seem that I'm glossing over the point (that I agree with) that C can be used in 99% of the places where assembly language could be used, but what I'm really doing is questioning why it is accepted as the best language, and how it has been optimized, for low-level programming.
Slashdot Mirror
The two rovers were not designed to work for 90 days.
They were guaranteed to work for 90 days.
The various components were designed to work no matter what they experienced for 90 days on the Martian surface.
I suspect that they were designed for the worst possible set of circumstances for 90 days which has allowed them to operate for the much longer time in the actual environment which is more benign than the worst case scenario.
Regardless of the semantics of the 90 days, the time the two robots have been operating is still an amazing achievement and everybody involved should be very proud.
myke
Actually, Scotty fall in love in "The Lights of Zetar" to Lieutenant Mira Romaine.
Then of course there's "Wolf in the Fold" in which Scotty tries to pick up a dancer and she ends up dying and Scotty has her blood on his hands.
myke
My votes are for:
myke
I'm curious because he always has a "Dave Barry for President in ####" where "####" is the year of the next election.
I'm wondering how easy it is to get on the ballot.
myke
I was the design manager on Logitech's Harmony One remote and I fought for a touch screen for the programmable controls - in the past these were physical buttons beside the different controls on the remote. Implementing physical buttons close to an LCD are very difficult to implement correctly. I thought the touch panel would improve the quality of the product and give it much cleaner look to the overall product.
I was half right - it is a gorgeous remote but the touch panel just doesn't match the rest of the remote and the time taken in the mechanical design to product an interface that you don't have to look down at to use. Coupled with the cost of the capacitive touch panel (about 10x what it would cost for poly dome and plastic/elastomer buttons) it really isn't worth it.
I'm very unimpressed with the touch panel for typing on the iPhone and iPod touch so I'm going to be watching to see how companies design their user interfaces to give users as positive an interface as they would have with buttons.
If it's not done well, then I would expect a backlash against touch panels by consumers.
myke
Reading the article, it really just comes across as Obama trying to push the shuttle layoffs to the right so they don't take place during his first term in office.
It's unfortunate, but I would really like to see him and McCain come up with a strong vision for space to spur international and private sector investments with a corresponding push in maths, sciences and engineering.
As trite as they may be, I could get excited about a candidate that pushed:
Note that I don't say "NASA". I think NASA has a very important role to play in the development of space technology but at some point they have to be out of the business of LEO (Low Earth Orbit) operations.
myke
Except that Harper's itching for an election - if he could trigger one on somebody looking at him funny he would do it.
myke
I've written a couple of emails and talked to his office manager about the issue and asked why the Liberal party is not making this a confidence motion. It's bad legislation and bad for the country.
For anybody else in Etobicoke-Lakeshore (Toronto South-West), please drop a line to Michael Ignatieff and let him know what you think.
Thanx,
myke
Yes you can get lots of jokes from this idea, but what about serious applications like using it for communications in noisy environments? I would think that this concept would be ideal on the battlefield where you don't want to impair the listener's hearing, but make sure they get the message just the same.
myke
Except for sports (which we use an antenna), nobody in my family has watched live TV for several years. We get Internet for our news (usually more in depth) and for TV shows we wait until the end of the season and then when the season's DVDs come out, read the reviews on Amazon and talk to friends.
Cost wise, over the course of the year, the season sets for a dozen shows (say $50 average each for sake of argument) is less than the cable/satellite options which have the specialty channels with CW, HBO, SHO & SciFi shows as well as the network shows. Having the DVDs allows very comfortable time-shifting and being able to re-watch of shows.
I know quite a few people do it this way (with some swapping of sets although with the recipient usually watching an episode or two and then buying a set for themselves if they like the show).
Maybe it's *my* demographic, but it works and the content owners are being paid for their product.
myke
Giving the subject a series of comparisions to make and determine the difference of when they make the decision and when they act on it.
Use the same apparatus, but ask the subjects to select which they would prefer at that moment in time:
Steak vs Salad
Blonde vs Brunette
Pepsi vs Coke
Car vs Bicycle
Mac vs PC
and so on...
You could go on and try to week out personal preferences with things that the subject has to evaluate:
Which would you like in your front hall: A Van Gough or a Gougain?
Which is funnier: A joke from Steve Martin or a joke from Robin Williams?
What smells better: Roses or Cinnamon?
With a given math problem, what is the better of two choices to solve it?
I would think this approach would be a better way to see how decisions are made within the human mind.
myke
I remember a cel coming out after Mel Blanc's death of a single microphone with many of the characters he voiced standing around mourning him.
Maybe something similar could be done for Winston.
From everything I've read about him, he was somebody that was generous, helpful and incredibly creative.
He will be missed,
myke
The first place I saw the idea of extracting hydrogen from water to create power was the method used in the original Jules Verne (not the Disney version) "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea".
So, it's definitely not original and if it were possible, don't you think that somebody would have done it by now?
myke
As I understand it, every military in the world assess the threat its opponents pose by their capabilities rather than perceived intents.
How do you perform a threat assessment in the area of cyber-warfare where the physical weapons (as was pointed out in an earlier post) is the keyboard and mouse with much of technology being used as a threat being developed in the U.S?
Thanx,
myke
Looking at the demo video (comment below) and reading TFA, it looked more like a gesture response on a 2D screen than anything approaching a holodeck. More like Tom Cruise's display selection used in "Minority Report"
In any case, the guy in the video looked like he was following the movement of the Rubic's cube, not guiding it. If you were a VC, I would suggest investigating this a lot more - it seems to be more vapourware than something that's ready for prime time.
myke
Thanx - I should have done the back of envelope like you've done here before coming up with that particular analogy.
myke
I suspect the first example of this happening was trying to estimate how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.
Other meaningless analogies could be:
The simple fact is that a petaflop computer works faster than humans can conceive and any kind of analogy cannot be comprehended.
myke
Just reading TFA and thinking that, after reading the sentence "When they mixed small amounts of carbon nanotubes and epoxies (glue-like materials) with crushed rock that has the same composition and grain size as lunar dust, they discovered to their surprise that they had created a very strong material with the consistency of concrete.", wouldn't building living (and other) structures on the moon using this material be a better application of this technology?
myke
"All this has happened before and it will happen again."
myke
Seriously - reports and papers are expected to be typed.
I would consider it to be a significant advantage to learning how to program if you already knew where all the keys were and weren't hunting and pecking (and not focusing on what you should be learning).
myke
How about we take the mice that have been loaded with the Tassie Tiger (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/20/132238) and load some others with the DNA of the Vikings and let's see who dominates!
The winner can take on mice bred with the dinosour DNA taken from fossilized mosquitos!
myke
The best way I've found to avoid jet lag is to force myself to sleep at what would be the appropriate time for the time zone I'm going to - usually Asia or back home to Toronto.
6mg of Melatonin and a couple of beers in the airport bar are usually enough, but it doesn't hurt to have some soft music (I use "Music for the Mozart effect") and dark glasses (which don't look anywhere near as looserish as a sleep mask) to help with the process. If I do it right, I end up waking up at 7:00-8:00AM Hong Kong time at which point most people are finally falling asleep.
It's not perfect, but it gives me at least a good start,
myke
As I read the previous posts, it seems like the focus is on RISC vs CISC but I think the real question is there value-add for designers to have an x86 compatible embedded microcontroller?
People (and not just us) should be asking would end customers find it useful to be able to run their PC apps on their mobile devices? Current mobile devices typically have PowerPoint and Word readers (with maybe some editing capabilities) but would users find it worthwhile being able to load apps onto their mobile devices from the same CDs/DVDs that were used to load the apps onto their PCs?
If end customers do find this attractive, would they be willing to pay the extra money for the chips (the Atom looks to require considerably more gates than a comparable ARM) as well as for the extra memory (Flash, RAM & Disk) that would be required to support PC OSes and apps? Even if end customers found this approach attractive, I think OEMs are going to have a long, hard think about whether or not they want to port their radio code to the x86 with Windows/Linux when they already have infrastructures built up with the processors and tools they are currently using.
The whole thing doesn't really make sense to me because if Intel wanted to be in the MCU business, then why did they spin it off as Marvell (which also included the mobile WiFi technology as well)?
The whole think seems like a significant risk that customers will want products built from this chip and the need for Intel and OEMs to recreate the infrastructure they have for existing chips (ie ARM) for the x86 Atom.
myke
Here's my start at one (sorry no list because it ended up having too few characters per line):
Neuromancer (kudos to parent)/Crytonomicon (kudos to parent)/Ringworld/Rendezvous with Rama (I know but we've been waiting forever for it)/The moat in god's eye/Stranger in a strange land/Childhood's end/The man in high tower/Little Fuzzy/The moon is a harsh mistress/Starship troopers (one that doesn't suck)/The foundation trilogy/The caves of steel or The naked sun (erase "iRobot" from everybody's memory)/Red Mars going to Green Mars going to Blue Mars/The forever war/Ender's Game (I know that's been going on for years as well)/The long ARM of Gil Hamilton/Oath of fealty (I always liked that book)/Have spacesuit will travel/Tau Zero/Gateway/There will be time/Ensign Flandry/Dorsai/Berzerkers/Slan/The weapon shops of Isher/The duelling machine/The demolished man/The fountains of paradise/The city and the stars/Sun diver going to Startide rising/Way station
Please feel free to add to the list,
If there are any big hollywood producers out there, remember where this idea came from and I would think that you should be looking for an executive producer that understands this stuff so what you create doesn't suck (my rates are surprisingly reasonable).
myke
I don't want to start a philosophical battle here, but I would appreciate it if you could give me a pointer to a reference explaining what are the features of C that make it suitable for "low-level manipulation of memory and I/O"?
I've always found it to be sub-optimal due to its lack of a "bit" data type, the need to explicitly set pointers to address specific regions in memory (which may or may not be in the same address space as I/O - ie the x86 architecture), etc. To get around these issues, access functions are typically written in assembler and then accessed by the C mainline code or the compiler is enhanced to provide these functions more natively. For high performance applications, the programmers may find that they have to use assembler to minimize latency between commands. These factors typically result in code that isn't portable unless the compiler features and libraries can be used in the target.
It might seem that I'm glossing over the point (that I agree with) that C can be used in 99% of the places where assembly language could be used, but what I'm really doing is questioning why it is accepted as the best language, and how it has been optimized, for low-level programming.
Thanx,
myke