Implementing real world solutions to simulated problems always brings up quite a number of "interesting" problems. Things you never thought would be obstacles turn out to be nightmares in the real world. And on the flip side. sometimes a quirky solution to a problem presents itself.
I was working with some friends recently in testing a cross compiler for a robotics platform. They had a simulator and their code worked just fine in it.
But in the real robot it didn't work at all. It turns out that there was an mistake in their control logic such that the bot was switching between two motor drive states at millisecond intervals. This worked fine in the simulated bot, but the real motors of the real robot couldn't handle this (obviously), so it behaved poorly until we change the logic to switch more slowly.
This is a simplistic example yes, but also an excellent one, of the types of real world problems you can face.
Another frequently encountered problem is a light sensitive robot that works fine in the morning but falls to pieces in the afternoon when the sun shines through the windows of the experimental room.
Noone who builds robots only in simulators can be trusted to design real world devices. Their implementations will be brittle and practically guaranteed to be inoperative without major tweaking.
They were certainly the wrong instruments, as they are providing incorrect data.
It is only by virtue of the luck that both Rovers are functional that NASA discovered this problem. If either one had end up dysfunctional after landing, this error would have remained uncorrected and scientists would be basing the next decade of Mars geology on incorrect measurements!
Had either of the Mars Rovers crashed or broken in some way, this mistake would never have been discovered. With only 1 rover's data, there would be no mysterious discrepency to solve and this mistake would have never been resolved.
So scientists would have spent the next 10 years developing their theories of martian geology based on incorrect data if either one of those rovers hadn't deployed and you call this a minor issue?!
This kind of error is inexcusable. But of course, it'll get brushed over because NASA was lucky enough to be in a position to fix it.
What's more impressive than the dinosaurs
on
Bipedal Dinosaur Robot
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Is that these servers can host hefty videos under a full on slashdotting without missing a beat.
The technological tenacity of the Japanese is almost frightening. They're probably laughing at the tiny spike of the/. effect in their NOC, the same sort that can burn major US university and news outlet servers into cinders.
You would have to replace my eyes and my visual cortex with substantial upgrades for me to be able to perceive down to the crystal level.
So you're talking about REPLACING PARTS OF MY BRAIN so that I can perceive the imperfections in the film?
That's hardly capturing the "original experience". People in the theaters today aren't bemoaning the fact that they don't have rod/cone density sufficient to perceive colour crystals. Rather they are quite glad that they cannot. There is nothing inherently good in the flaws of original media if those flaws are below the level of perception.
It's still about visual resolution at the end of the day. You could show me atomic level recreations of films and I couldn't tell the difference from modern digital remasterings.
The art of this process is in learning what has to be preserved for perfect perception, not slavishly reproducing every physical detail of the original.
And remember, crystal level resolution is BAD. They are effectively a blotchy quantal reproduction of what is really a smooth analog transition from one colour to the next. But of course, people tend to confuse "original" with "good", and seem intent on dragging the baggage of previous, shitty technologies into the digital age. Same story with vacuum tubes and audio equipment.
He is biased towards the left because the right is in power, therefore they give him more material. There's precious little to ridicule the democrats about at the moment. We all know they're hopelessly bad at politics, but there aren't any specific foibles to poke fun.
But if Kerry had won, you can be sure Stewart would be tearing him apart as well.
He's even said as much if you've ever seen the amazing appearance of Stewart on that political talk show with the bowtie guy(CNN I think?)
Actually, your immune system is a sort of genetics lab.
When it encounters something new, it creates a template to it and stores that away in memory.
And differenter the better IS how it works, in general. You don't have a catalogue of every possible germ and virus encoded into your DNA, that would be ridiculously impossible to evolve. Your immune system needs to react over the course of days, not generations!
The problem with new flus are not that they are too different, it's that they people haven't been exposed to low levels of them from a young age, and therefore get caught with the pants down. But over in Europe, immune systems were trained from birth by chronic exposure to low doses.
Now if there came along a germ with no holes or receptors in its surface, that would be tough to deal with. This is why your body doesn't try to reject titanium, there's nothing for the system to create antibodies too. But such a germ would difficulty sensing the environment and eating.
Yea, it's not the Windows is "gaining" ground in the PDA market.
They are instead "losing less" ground relative to the competitors. Why I guess you can consider gaining, but it's like arguing over who gets to eat the last piece of cake on board the titanic.
"the truth is, the impression I have of most "Asperger's" sufferers is that they're mostly just normal geeks that would rather believe that there is something chemical that prevents them from engaging socially rather than just plain not being good at it. "
You're trying to draw a dichotomy where nothing exists. It's all chemical (unless you're a dualist).
Whether you're a moron, a pedophile, an asperger, a socially inept geek, or a low functioning autistic, there's a neurological explanation somewhere, whether genetic, environmental or a combination of both.
You seem fixated by these black and white labels; this person has that disease, but that person is ok, they're just inept.
???
The truth is that there's a broad landscape of ability and disability. For purposes of mental health treatment, it helps to draw circles around certain peaks and call them disorders, but in reality it's all shades of gray on a huge multidimensional surface.
It's extremely likely that some subset of the genes that cause autism/aspergers are active in the socially inept. Why do you take such offense at this? Does it make you feel better to tell these people "no, you're just inept, you don't get to claim that it's because of the way your brain is wired."
There's no amount of changes that can make the Shuttle a relative safe means of space travel (relative in comparison to the Soyuz or other capsule approaches).
The shuttle is an inherently crappy space launch vehicle and no amount of to-do lists are going to change the laws of physics.
So in a sense, it's good that they've had to drop these to-do lists, because more accidents are inevitable.
What NASA really needs to do is grow a pair and get on with it. Why is 7 people dying such a tragedy? We lose hundreds a month in Iraq, and unlike astronauts, many of those had no idea that they were signing up for something dangerous when they signed up with the reserves. Are those people somehow less important that we don't even bat an eyelash at their loss but spend untold millions to secure the safety of our tiny handful of astronauts? And it's not even clear that these millions can have much practical benefit.
So NASA, at some point we'll get back to capsule based launches when it's finally sunk into your thick heads that reuseable launch vehicles are just not going to work ( and that needs to happen ASAP). In the meantime, buck up and deal with it. Space travel is hard, and dangerous. So is living.
Slashdot Mirror
Your brain doesn't forget because it needs the space
Your brain forgets because it becomes intolerably complex to sort through all the shit.
Archiviging becomes about limitations of CPU cycles at some point. yours.
Not verbatim, but it's just a mindless paraphrase, probably trolling for delicious karma.
It only seems like a waste until you've tried it.
Implementing real world solutions to simulated problems always brings up quite a number of "interesting" problems. Things you never thought would be obstacles turn out to be nightmares in the real world. And on the flip side. sometimes a quirky solution to a problem presents itself.
I was working with some friends recently in testing a cross compiler for a robotics platform. They had a simulator and their code worked just fine in it.
But in the real robot it didn't work at all. It turns out that there was an mistake in their control logic such that the bot was switching between two motor drive states at millisecond intervals. This worked fine in the simulated bot, but the real motors of the real robot couldn't handle this (obviously), so it behaved poorly until we change the logic to switch more slowly.
This is a simplistic example yes, but also an excellent one, of the types of real world problems you can face.
Another frequently encountered problem is a light sensitive robot that works fine in the morning but falls to pieces in the afternoon when the sun shines through the windows of the experimental room.
Noone who builds robots only in simulators can be trusted to design real world devices. Their implementations will be brittle and practically guaranteed to be inoperative without major tweaking.
Damn your Dumb!
Damn you're Dumb!
They were certainly the wrong instruments, as they are providing incorrect data.
It is only by virtue of the luck that both Rovers are functional that NASA discovered this problem. If either one had end up dysfunctional after landing, this error would have remained uncorrected and scientists would be basing the next decade of Mars geology on incorrect measurements!
Had either of the Mars Rovers crashed or broken in some way, this mistake would never have been discovered. With only 1 rover's data, there would be no mysterious discrepency to solve and this mistake would have never been resolved.
So scientists would have spent the next 10 years developing their theories of martian geology based on incorrect data if either one of those rovers hadn't deployed and you call this a minor issue?!
This kind of error is inexcusable. But of course, it'll get brushed over because NASA was lucky enough to be in a position to fix it.
Is that these servers can host hefty videos under a full on slashdotting without missing a beat.
/. effect in their NOC, the same sort that can burn major US university and news outlet servers into cinders.
The technological tenacity of the Japanese is almost frightening. They're probably laughing at the tiny spike of the
Gibberish.
You would have to replace my eyes and my visual cortex with substantial upgrades for me to be able to perceive down to the crystal level.
So you're talking about REPLACING PARTS OF MY BRAIN so that I can perceive the imperfections in the film?
That's hardly capturing the "original experience". People in the theaters today aren't bemoaning the fact that they don't have rod/cone density sufficient to perceive colour crystals. Rather they are quite glad that they cannot. There is nothing inherently good in the flaws of original media if those flaws are below the level of perception.
You paid $50,000 for your home stereo didn't you?
It's still about visual resolution at the end of the day. You could show me atomic level recreations of films and I couldn't tell the difference from modern digital remasterings.
The art of this process is in learning what has to be preserved for perfect perception, not slavishly reproducing every physical detail of the original.
And remember, crystal level resolution is BAD. They are effectively a blotchy quantal reproduction of what is really a smooth analog transition from one colour to the next. But of course, people tend to confuse "original" with "good", and seem intent on dragging the baggage of previous, shitty technologies into the digital age. Same story with vacuum tubes and audio equipment.
You know, the sad part is, I don't think he was embarassed.
I think he thought he tore Jon a new one.
I think he thought that this "comedian" was out of his league on a real hard-hitting news show.
At the end Jon just bites his tongue. It's like letting a child think they've beaten you because it would do no good to tell them otherwise.
He is biased towards the left because the right is in power, therefore they give him more material. There's precious little to ridicule the democrats about at the moment. We all know they're hopelessly bad at politics, but there aren't any specific foibles to poke fun.
But if Kerry had won, you can be sure Stewart would be tearing him apart as well.
He's even said as much if you've ever seen the amazing appearance of Stewart on that political talk show with the bowtie guy(CNN I think?)
The article says nothing of the sort.
The cells are certainly not 16 million years old.
Actually, your immune system is a sort of genetics lab.
When it encounters something new, it creates a template to it and stores that away in memory.
And differenter the better IS how it works, in general. You don't have a catalogue of every possible germ and virus encoded into your DNA, that would be ridiculously impossible to evolve. Your immune system needs to react over the course of days, not generations!
The problem with new flus are not that they are too different, it's that they people haven't been exposed to low levels of them from a young age, and therefore get caught with the pants down. But over in Europe, immune systems were trained from birth by chronic exposure to low doses.
Now if there came along a germ with no holes or receptors in its surface, that would be tough to deal with. This is why your body doesn't try to reject titanium, there's nothing for the system to create antibodies too. But such a germ would difficulty sensing the environment and eating.
That's not really the way the immune system works. It attacks things that are different. The differenter the better.
The germs that are most dangerous are ones that have evolved tricks to evade detection.
Germs from Mars would be the first against the wall when the T-cells rolled into town.
Yea, it's not the Windows is "gaining" ground in the PDA market.
They are instead "losing less" ground relative to the competitors. Why I guess you can consider gaining, but it's like arguing over who gets to eat the last piece of cake on board the titanic.
Enhance your Stack!
Have you ever wanted your TCP stack to be more secure? Has your internet ever dribbled? Sign up for intel soft tabs now!
That all costs money.
I just put toothpicks in the PSU, video card and CPU fans, now my computer is now dead sil
NO CARRIER
"the truth is, the impression I have of most "Asperger's" sufferers is that they're mostly just normal geeks that would rather believe that there is something chemical that prevents them from engaging socially rather than just plain not being good at it. "
You're trying to draw a dichotomy where nothing exists. It's all chemical (unless you're a dualist).
Whether you're a moron, a pedophile, an asperger, a socially inept geek, or a low functioning autistic, there's a neurological explanation somewhere, whether genetic, environmental or a combination of both.
You seem fixated by these black and white labels; this person has that disease, but that person is ok, they're just inept.
???
The truth is that there's a broad landscape of ability and disability. For purposes of mental health treatment, it helps to draw circles around certain peaks and call them disorders, but in reality it's all shades of gray on a huge multidimensional surface.
It's extremely likely that some subset of the genes that cause autism/aspergers are active in the socially inept. Why do you take such offense at this? Does it make you feel better to tell these people "no, you're just inept, you don't get to claim that it's because of the way your brain is wired."
I don't think getting shipped overseas is part of the National GUARD mandate.
Humans Fix Problems and Do Stuff that robots cannot.
If we had only sent robots to the Moon, we'd have accomplished far less.
The National Guard is being used.
No, they sure as hell didn't sign up to be shipped overseas to get shot at by hostile insurgents.
http://www.antiwar.com/lind/?articleid=3651
There's no amount of changes that can make the Shuttle a relative safe means of space travel (relative in comparison to the Soyuz or other capsule approaches).
The shuttle is an inherently crappy space launch vehicle and no amount of to-do lists are going to change the laws of physics.
So in a sense, it's good that they've had to drop these to-do lists, because more accidents are inevitable.
What NASA really needs to do is grow a pair and get on with it. Why is 7 people dying such a tragedy? We lose hundreds a month in Iraq, and unlike astronauts, many of those had no idea that they were signing up for something dangerous when they signed up with the reserves. Are those people somehow less important that we don't even bat an eyelash at their loss but spend untold millions to secure the safety of our tiny handful of astronauts? And it's not even clear that these millions can have much practical benefit.
So NASA, at some point we'll get back to capsule based launches when it's finally sunk into your thick heads that reuseable launch vehicles are just not going to work ( and that needs to happen ASAP). In the meantime, buck up and deal with it. Space travel is hard, and dangerous. So is living.
Nasa needs
No algorithm is unbreakable.
You'll always be upgrading methods to stay ahead of computing power.
Fortunately, it's not that hard to do.
How is a point as vacuous as this modded up to 5?
To set a bar that only one side of the argument has to jump in order to participate? The other side gets a free pass why?
Has pro-envioronmentalism reached such a fevered pitch here that mods don't even bother thinking before pressing +1 button?
With that inline link, you've put the majority of active /. readers on the FBI's "watch this guy" list.
At least I no longer have to worry about remembering what I ate for breakfast, they'll do it for me.