The problem with setting up a terrestrial or local area wireless system is that the trainer would have to do so at every track the horse trains at. Horses do not stay at the same track during racing season, or even off-season--they are often carted all over the world. Having to set this up each and every time would consume time and, you might not always get permission to set it up. With GPS, the technology has already been put in place. All it takes is a GPS transceiver on the horse, and you are ready to go, thus making the technology very portable. As for cost, well this is the horse industry and you have horses like Cigar whose breeding ability was insured for nealry $25 million (before it was known that he could not sire), so money is not as much an issue in the horse world as it is in ours.
Good enough is not really good enough when you consider that a split second can be the difference between breaking a track record an not. That is the problem that I have with this specific technology. Despite its convenience, I do not consider it accurate enough to get an exact (within fractions of an inch) placement of the horse, and therefore an accurate finishing time. While "close" might count in horse shoes, it does not count in horse racing.
Importance of GPS, & questions on its Reliabil
on
Equine Speedometers
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
A smally nitpick: As someone who worked in the equine industry before I entered the tech world, I personally believe that horse racing is a science (in a broad sense), and always has been. *smiles*
I believe several posters hit an important point when they stated that they have been able to measure a horse's speed for years using stopwatches. However, they should consider that this technology is only as useful as the person pressing the button, and relies on the user to be able to determine *exactly* when that horse's nose touches the line, and for them to be able to press the stop button fast enough. This tool is extremely handy because, assuming it has great accuracy, it takes the human error problem out. You might not think that parts of a second would matter in horse racing, but it does. Fractions of a second came between breaking Secretariats (famous race horse) track record, and not. It is true that they have bream beams at the major tracks, but overall photo technology is used to determine split seconds, who won, etc., and often this is not available to trainers outside of a race. GPS will simplify that process.
However, my concern is that, having used this technology in a robot that we are working on, the readings are sometimes unreliable as one second it may say you are one place, and the next tell you that you are a foot the other way. That might not seem like a huge distance to you, but combine that with the 30+ mph galloping speed of a well-trained thoroughbred, and you have a problem when it reads the horse as finishing when it really has not. I would be interested in seeing how they address this problem. In horse racing, when gauging against track records, split seconds count!
I believe that a greater application of this technology would be to track those expensive animals in the case that they get stolen. They have been using a variant of RFID to do this for years, but it is limited in distance and thus rarely actually catches animals except at slaughterhouses where they are required to scan for a stolen animal. This might ease an insurance company's mind, and also the owner's, knowing that their animal can be tracked in-transit. Awesome.
Note: The most up-to-date info is in my/. journal, so I suggest that you start there.
Our team's website I am afraid that it is rather lacking on updates and was done very poorly. I need to get it up-to-date and looking better. It was put online very quickly by request of a sponsor. I promise that I will update it and put new pictures up, since the pictures our framegrabber can now take really puts the one on the front page to shame. I also plan to upload the source code to our vision and navigation systems as well as a technical overview of the robot itself. Perhaps a trouble shooting guide would help as well to let aspiring engineers learn from our mistakes. Very funny stories, those are. Having trouble finding significant support within our university, our robotics team is slowly weaning itself away from the university and competitive mode, and are developing into a more independent group, especially since I graduated and our two other members will shortly as well. We do not receive large funding from the university, and faced with having to pay for our "toys" out-of-pocket while working within university policy, we will likely eventually take this project in new directions.
The IGVC website This is one of the competitions that we compete in. It is more driven by the Department of Defense and the automotive industry, and is more lenient in its acceptance of participants than the DARPA one is. Our university, however, competes in various robotics competitions. Some are for autonomous robots (such as firefighting robots and military-grade mobile ones) and others for general robots that can perform different tasks. Heck, we even have (or had, rather) a battlebots team.
I have put a small article in my slashdot journal and will be posting news from time to time there. I will also be more than happy to answer any questions that you might have. (I enabled comments) I have added pictures to the journal so I really suggest that you start there.:)
I am a member of a robotics team. We are building a sub-AI mobile robot very similar to the ones involved in the DARPA Challenge. In fact, we had illusions at some point of competing in a future challenge iff the challenge was not won this year.
We compete in a similar, less-publicized contest. We have three members on our team and had a starting budget of $300. We had our PC104 board and $200 diff. GPS donated, and all of the coding has thus far been done by the three of us. We didn't have any money, and thus we selected an embedded Linux system, which introduced all of us to the world of Linux for the very first time. We work in the lab at all hours of the night, with no help, and no budget. The teams we compete against have corporate backing, 30+ members, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our robot looks very rough and overly simple compared to their corporate-sponsored monsters. Yet, we continually *stomp* them in competition. If that contest were administered like the DARPA one, we would not even be allowed to compete, yet we do compete and win.
Part of this is because our simple solution is: INNOVATION.
Throwing money and lots of members at something does not make it innovative. Advanced Technology doesn't mean that the robot is any good. We compete against a military academy and their robot, despite its "advanced" bells and whistles, does not hold a candle to ours. Heck, we have duct tape holding things onto our bot and it looks pathetic beside the smooth-formed frames of the other robots. But we win because our lack of support and budget forced us to be creative.
And wasn't innovation supposed to be the purpose of this competition?
Wow. I cannot wait until they expand this further. Forget pencil and paper AD&D. Imagine expanding on this idea and using known-maps of cities as the dungeons where you take up a character and text message your responses. "I am Tier, master of the Bronx." Certainly redefines the idea of the RPG.
That touches on one problem I have concerning the game. I think they will have trouble with game dynamics until they are able to provide real-maps of the service area. Imagine having to reach a point in the game that, in your world, would put you in the middle of the river, or inside a concrete wall. I suppose that you could possibly re-define your position, but for users in crowded areas (like the test cities that they mentioned), this would get frustrating. It would not have to be terribly detailed, since the landscape often changes, but it should not be too difficult to define the main buildings of the city and use this as the background map for the game.
The only question that I have is: how reliable is the positioning? I realize that they are not using straight-GPS, but I am curious as to how reliable the positioning is. When I was working on autonomous robot navigation (keeping in mind that we did not have a differential GPS system readily available), we had problems with floating satellite positioning that sometimes put the target nine foot away from its actual position. The article mentioned getting within five meters, which makes the nine foot floating irrelevant (unless both positions ended up 9 feet on either side from eachother), but I am curious nonetheless.
I am not sure if you are attempting to argue with me or not, but it sounds like you are actually agreeing/clarifying points that I actually meant, but are better said by you.
I am sure that the average Linux user was at some point technologically unsavvy, but you usually find that individuals who migrate from Windows to Linux are those users with at least some grasp on what they are doing. However, that does not change the end result, that being that the average Linux user probably has some idea of how to "secure" their computer. Now, as Linux desktops become more popular, we will find that these numbers will change. However, I would feel a lot more confident running an unpatched Open Source product than an unpatched Microsoft one, although doing either is tempting fate.
I did take the time to point out that contributors to the Linux community are far fewer than those who use Linux. However, it still holds true that the few people who do contribute, do an excellent job at it. Anyone disagree with this? I, for one, am impressed with the thankless work that they do.
And the "any idiot can run a MS network" fits perfectly in with my point that the insecurity, often times, lies in the user/administrator. *Laughs* Do Microsoft certifications even mean anything anymore? Or are there big wigs out there who use terms like "paradigm" and phrases like "thinking outside the box" that still get impressed with shiny stones and MS Certs?
As I said, same point (with an argumentative tone), better said by you.
I absolutely agree with every point in your bulleted list. But the short answer is yes, I do believe that bugs make it into code because of emphasis on cranking out software quickly. It would seem illogical to do so, true, but the sad truth is that it happens and I have watched in horror as it has happned at the place at which I work. When the CEO comes in screaming "ship it! ship it!" and you are given very little alternative, that is exactly what happens. And yes, it does cost more money to repair the bugs later than sooner, but management knows no logic, and developers many times get no say in when their project ships.
Jack Ganssle gave a very nice keynote speech at the recent Boston Embedded Systems Conference that touched on those very same problems. We all know better, but it still happens. And no, not just at M$. However, when you can crank out a new OS every couple of years and the sheep still buy it despite knowing that the OS is unstable, then why not?
Some of the security holes that we have seen come from M$ products (and other products as well!) show the lack of real testing... problems that never should have been seen by the end user.
Ahhh, but the difference is that if I throw a stone and break my little glass Linux house, I have the ability to fix it... for free. That is the beauty of Open Source.
In my experience with both Operating Systems, I have often found that a lot of the insecurity lies with the user. Again, this is just my observations and not hard fact, but I have found that the average Linux user is more aware and technologically savvy than the average Windows user. Linux has traditionally served as a geek playground whereas Windows seeps into the marketplace on new-from-the-store PCs and thus is usually the first operating system most people learn on. My mother, who would "never try an operating system like 'Linus'" is just as oblivious to the necessity of a good firewall on her machine. In fact, before I intervened, she nor any of her friends even had one. Worse, they were under the opinion that you can not retrieve email without Outlook, and that Internet Explorer was the internet. That might sound preposterous to you or I, but I have found this to be true of many casual PC owners. So, beyond security problems inherent in code are problems inherent in the user as well.
Linux is also very community-minded (hence, the "Open Source Community.") We vehemently defend Linux and thus have greater stock in its success. Now, I do not subscribe to the idea of thousands of users pouring over the source code and fixing security holes, but I will assert that the small number of users who actually contribute to the community do a fine job of it, and are extremely dedicated. What Open Source offers is the ability to pour over the code, even if most of us don't take advantage of this. M$ developers are usually money-driven and thus focus more on how fast they can get a product on the shelves than how rock-solid they can make it. Linux developers seem to take more pride in their product as, since many of them donate their work, all they really have is that pride to guard. You won't find the Linux community only putting out one large, obscure patch a month and then declaring "AHA! We have less patches than M$.";) Hmmm... that seems vaguely familiar.:)
If I had to put my money down on which one was more secure, my money would go on Linux.
I feel like perhaps I shouldn't grace this silly comment with a reply, but I will bite.
Well actually, Mr. Anonymous Coward, I have already turned down several job offers from places including (but not limited to) Google (the geek job) and Boeing, so that I can pursue my master's degree. Maybe my odd Christmas fortune is a function of attitude. Perhaps that is what sets me above you and the "million other people" who got a lump of coal for Christmas.
My bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, and a full ride starting next semester to graduate school. (It only took me 3 1/2 years.) A little gift to myself.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with setting up a terrestrial or local area wireless system is that the trainer would have to do so at every track the horse trains at. Horses do not stay at the same track during racing season, or even off-season--they are often carted all over the world. Having to set this up each and every time would consume time and, you might not always get permission to set it up. With GPS, the technology has already been put in place. All it takes is a GPS transceiver on the horse, and you are ready to go, thus making the technology very portable. As for cost, well this is the horse industry and you have horses like Cigar whose breeding ability was insured for nealry $25 million (before it was known that he could not sire), so money is not as much an issue in the horse world as it is in ours.
Good enough is not really good enough when you consider that a split second can be the difference between breaking a track record an not. That is the problem that I have with this specific technology. Despite its convenience, I do not consider it accurate enough to get an exact (within fractions of an inch) placement of the horse, and therefore an accurate finishing time. While "close" might count in horse shoes, it does not count in horse racing.
A smally nitpick: As someone who worked in the equine industry before I entered the tech world, I personally believe that horse racing is a science (in a broad sense), and always has been. *smiles*
I believe several posters hit an important point when they stated that they have been able to measure a horse's speed for years using stopwatches. However, they should consider that this technology is only as useful as the person pressing the button, and relies on the user to be able to determine *exactly* when that horse's nose touches the line, and for them to be able to press the stop button fast enough. This tool is extremely handy because, assuming it has great accuracy, it takes the human error problem out. You might not think that parts of a second would matter in horse racing, but it does. Fractions of a second came between breaking Secretariats (famous race horse) track record, and not. It is true that they have bream beams at the major tracks, but overall photo technology is used to determine split seconds, who won, etc., and often this is not available to trainers outside of a race. GPS will simplify that process.
However, my concern is that, having used this technology in a robot that we are working on, the readings are sometimes unreliable as one second it may say you are one place, and the next tell you that you are a foot the other way. That might not seem like a huge distance to you, but combine that with the 30+ mph galloping speed of a well-trained thoroughbred, and you have a problem when it reads the horse as finishing when it really has not. I would be interested in seeing how they address this problem. In horse racing, when gauging against track records, split seconds count!
I believe that a greater application of this technology would be to track those expensive animals in the case that they get stolen. They have been using a variant of RFID to do this for years, but it is limited in distance and thus rarely actually catches animals except at slaughterhouses where they are required to scan for a stolen animal. This might ease an insurance company's mind, and also the owner's, knowing that their animal can be tracked in-transit. Awesome.
Note: The most up-to-date info is in my /. journal, so I suggest that you start there.
:)
:) Have a nice day.
Our team's website
I am afraid that it is rather lacking on updates and was done very poorly. I need to get it up-to-date and looking better. It was put online very quickly by request of a sponsor. I promise that I will update it and put new pictures up, since the pictures our framegrabber can now take really puts the one on the front page to shame. I also plan to upload the source code to our vision and navigation systems as well as a technical overview of the robot itself. Perhaps a trouble shooting guide would help as well to let aspiring engineers learn from our mistakes. Very funny stories, those are.
Having trouble finding significant support within our university, our robotics team is slowly weaning itself away from the university and competitive mode, and are developing into a more independent group, especially since I graduated and our two other members will shortly as well. We do not receive large funding from the university, and faced with having to pay for our "toys" out-of-pocket while working within university policy, we will likely eventually take this project in new directions.
The IGVC website
This is one of the competitions that we compete in. It is more driven by the Department of Defense and the automotive industry, and is more lenient in its acceptance of participants than the DARPA one is. Our university, however, competes in various robotics competitions. Some are for autonomous robots (such as firefighting robots and military-grade mobile ones) and others for general robots that can perform different tasks. Heck, we even have (or had, rather) a battlebots team.
I have put a small article in my slashdot journal and will be posting news from time to time there. I will also be more than happy to answer any questions that you might have. (I enabled comments) I have added pictures to the journal so I really suggest that you start there.
Hope that helps.
I am a member of a robotics team. We are building a sub-AI mobile robot very similar to the ones involved in the DARPA Challenge. In fact, we had illusions at some point of competing in a future challenge iff the challenge was not won this year.
We compete in a similar, less-publicized contest. We have three members on our team and had a starting budget of $300. We had our PC104 board and $200 diff. GPS donated, and all of the coding has thus far been done by the three of us. We didn't have any money, and thus we selected an embedded Linux system, which introduced all of us to the world of Linux for the very first time. We work in the lab at all hours of the night, with no help, and no budget. The teams we compete against have corporate backing, 30+ members, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our robot looks very rough and overly simple compared to their corporate-sponsored monsters. Yet, we continually *stomp* them in competition. If that contest were administered like the DARPA one, we would not even be allowed to compete, yet we do compete and win.
Part of this is because our simple solution is: INNOVATION.
Throwing money and lots of members at something does not make it innovative. Advanced Technology doesn't mean that the robot is any good. We compete against a military academy and their robot, despite its "advanced" bells and whistles, does not hold a candle to ours. Heck, we have duct tape holding things onto our bot and it looks pathetic beside the smooth-formed frames of the other robots. But we win because our lack of support and budget forced us to be creative.
And wasn't innovation supposed to be the purpose of this competition?
Wow. I cannot wait until they expand this further. Forget pencil and paper AD&D. Imagine expanding on this idea and using known-maps of cities as the dungeons where you take up a character and text message your responses. "I am Tier, master of the Bronx." Certainly redefines the idea of the RPG.
That touches on one problem I have concerning the game. I think they will have trouble with game dynamics until they are able to provide real-maps of the service area. Imagine having to reach a point in the game that, in your world, would put you in the middle of the river, or inside a concrete wall. I suppose that you could possibly re-define your position, but for users in crowded areas (like the test cities that they mentioned), this would get frustrating. It would not have to be terribly detailed, since the landscape often changes, but it should not be too difficult to define the main buildings of the city and use this as the background map for the game.
The only question that I have is: how reliable is the positioning? I realize that they are not using straight-GPS, but I am curious as to how reliable the positioning is. When I was working on autonomous robot navigation (keeping in mind that we did not have a differential GPS system readily available), we had problems with floating satellite positioning that sometimes put the target nine foot away from its actual position. The article mentioned getting within five meters, which makes the nine foot floating irrelevant (unless both positions ended up 9 feet on either side from eachother), but I am curious nonetheless.
I am not sure if you are attempting to argue with me or not, but it sounds like you are actually agreeing/clarifying points that I actually meant, but are better said by you.
I am sure that the average Linux user was at some point technologically unsavvy, but you usually find that individuals who migrate from Windows to Linux are those users with at least some grasp on what they are doing. However, that does not change the end result, that being that the average Linux user probably has some idea of how to "secure" their computer. Now, as Linux desktops become more popular, we will find that these numbers will change. However, I would feel a lot more confident running an unpatched Open Source product than an unpatched Microsoft one, although doing either is tempting fate.
I did take the time to point out that contributors to the Linux community are far fewer than those who use Linux. However, it still holds true that the few people who do contribute, do an excellent job at it. Anyone disagree with this? I, for one, am impressed with the thankless work that they do.
And the "any idiot can run a MS network" fits perfectly in with my point that the insecurity, often times, lies in the user/administrator. *Laughs* Do Microsoft certifications even mean anything anymore? Or are there big wigs out there who use terms like "paradigm" and phrases like "thinking outside the box" that still get impressed with shiny stones and MS Certs?
As I said, same point (with an argumentative tone), better said by you.
I absolutely agree with every point in your bulleted list. But the short answer is yes, I do believe that bugs make it into code because of emphasis on cranking out software quickly. It would seem illogical to do so, true, but the sad truth is that it happens and I have watched in horror as it has happned at the place at which I work. When the CEO comes in screaming "ship it! ship it!" and you are given very little alternative, that is exactly what happens. And yes, it does cost more money to repair the bugs later than sooner, but management knows no logic, and developers many times get no say in when their project ships.
Jack Ganssle gave a very nice keynote speech at the recent Boston Embedded Systems Conference that touched on those very same problems. We all know better, but it still happens. And no, not just at M$. However, when you can crank out a new OS every couple of years and the sheep still buy it despite knowing that the OS is unstable, then why not?
Some of the security holes that we have seen come from M$ products (and other products as well!) show the lack of real testing... problems that never should have been seen by the end user.
Ahhh, but the difference is that if I throw a stone and break my little glass Linux house, I have the ability to fix it... for free. That is the beauty of Open Source.
In my experience with both Operating Systems, I have often found that a lot of the insecurity lies with the user. Again, this is just my observations and not hard fact, but I have found that the average Linux user is more aware and technologically savvy than the average Windows user. Linux has traditionally served as a geek playground whereas Windows seeps into the marketplace on new-from-the-store PCs and thus is usually the first operating system most people learn on. My mother, who would "never try an operating system like 'Linus'" is just as oblivious to the necessity of a good firewall on her machine. In fact, before I intervened, she nor any of her friends even had one. Worse, they were under the opinion that you can not retrieve email without Outlook, and that Internet Explorer was the internet. That might sound preposterous to you or I, but I have found this to be true of many casual PC owners. So, beyond security problems inherent in code are problems inherent in the user as well.
;) Hmmm... that seems vaguely familiar. :)
Linux is also very community-minded (hence, the "Open Source Community.") We vehemently defend Linux and thus have greater stock in its success. Now, I do not subscribe to the idea of thousands of users pouring over the source code and fixing security holes, but I will assert that the small number of users who actually contribute to the community do a fine job of it, and are extremely dedicated. What Open Source offers is the ability to pour over the code, even if most of us don't take advantage of this. M$ developers are usually money-driven and thus focus more on how fast they can get a product on the shelves than how rock-solid they can make it. Linux developers seem to take more pride in their product as, since many of them donate their work, all they really have is that pride to guard. You won't find the Linux community only putting out one large, obscure patch a month and then declaring "AHA! We have less patches than M$."
If I had to put my money down on which one was more secure, my money would go on Linux.
-dexterpexter
I feel like perhaps I shouldn't grace this silly comment with a reply, but I will bite.
Well actually, Mr. Anonymous Coward, I have already turned down several job offers from places including (but not limited to) Google (the geek job) and Boeing, so that I can pursue my master's degree. Maybe my odd Christmas fortune is a function of attitude. Perhaps that is what sets me above you and the "million other people" who got a lump of coal for Christmas.
-dexterpexter
My bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, and a full ride starting next semester to graduate school. (It only took me 3 1/2 years.) :)
A little gift to myself.
Otherwise, I got socks for Christmas. lol.
-dexterpexter