This'll cause wars when it comes out. We'll invade the colonies...er... mars.... er... no the clans will attack... or maybe... nah... it'll be the bugs....
Why does it seem that every SF involving this sort of robot always seems to focus them on war? Well most of them I haven't really seen any SF out there that has just used an exoskeliton for labour.
If you think about it these things would be useless in a fight. The profile of them would basically make them a target for any decent sized shot. Unless they make them small (no more then 10 feet tall) then they'd be useless. And making them that small mean they can't carry much. For a long time its been a case of who's seen first is the one who loses in a military fight.
That's just me venting, about some SF. These suits would be nice for labour purposes, for the not so fine work, and the heavy work. I don't see them in any of the fine work (every tried soildering with a pair of gloves on?)
Back in the days when I was a third year university student our professor had us look into either Linux or BSD for a specific section and research it.
We then had to write a mini paper on how it worked and give a presentation to the class so that the rest of the class got a good look at how these other areas of the kernel worked.
I only remember the following topics of the ones we were told to research:
Inter Process Communications Device Independent I/O Task management (process switching) Memory Management (with swap space) File management (main filesystem) Device management (drivers for network, scsi, etc)
There was a list of 20 or so topics, and a team of three could pick one of them for either Linux or BSD.
I'm not sure what a class of college students will be able to do to help with kernel development. After all, your average college student isn't a kernel hacker, and you're not going to have an entire class be able to contribute. I'd say only a handful of the students in the class would have the ability, time, or the interest to contribute to the kernel, and that's not fair for the rest of the class who paid to learn the theory and the knowledge to develop the ability.
Anyways when I took the class, Murry Goldberg at UBC was teaching it. Just look up CPSC 315 and 415 at UBC, he's usually open to questions.
First off I don't believe that Microsoft is spending the money on making a linux office port. Its too much of a change in architecture, and too much of the code needed to run Office is in active X and IE 5. I may be wrong on that but the way its interfaced to the OS and to the Internet I don't see why it wouldn't be.
If Microsoft was making a linux port they'd have to come out with it soon to beat KOffice and all the other Linux office suites for mindshare. If they don't they'd have to do what they did to netscape and offer it for free just to compete and to push the others out of the way.
They can do this and still make money. During 'development' of the suite they can offer out time limited betas that expire after 90 days. After all the rest of office suites are out of the way they announce that they are going to release and the beta program is closed down. A few months or so later all the free betas expire and the new office still isn't out. People will have lost interest in the other office suites and the documents made by MS office for linux may not be readable (encrypted for security perhaps?). People will have to buy/install windows and office for windows just to do work. Microsoft can claim that the final release was delayed because of a large bug found, who can fault them for bug fixing. After the majority of people have switched back to windows they can annouce that they're restarting the beta program, but who's going to use it? With the low responce to the second beta program they can claim that there isn't interest in office for linux and drop the program.
I know there are some holes in that arguement, like you can save files in older formats of office and read them with other office applications, but how many people are going to do that? And it now seems to be illegal to decrypt data that you didn't encrypt (al la DeCSS But lets not get into that).
Also Microsoft has announced that they would like to start renting applications. The office port to linux could be the start of this, combined with one for windows. They could set up the renewal process for the linux version on a 'overloaded' server that will only send out the new license code a week after the expiration of the old code. Users would be so frustrated but in dire need to use office that they'd switch to windows just to get their work done. But they can only do this after the competition for office suites under linux has been removed. Interest would lag for linux office and they could close down the project saying linux was a failure.
If they're careful everything they do here is legal. Underhanded and evil, but still legal. If they only offer their betas as free instead of the final product then they won't run into the same anti-trust problems they had with netscape. They can use their betas to draw away the mindshare from the other office suites, and then cancel the project to move people to windows where they can actually get at their data again. If they get enough mindshare from the rest of the suites then those might die, and that's what Microsoft would want.
Serial is similar. Serial is still the default way of connecting to a massive range of hardware appliances, from robots to burglar alarms, to telecoms hardware. Having just designed a large server farm, I can testify to the usefulness of Serial as a fall-back remote access channel.
I'll put in my word there as well. I don't know of many embedded controllers that use USB as their primary connection to a controller computer. Besides I don't think you have the same surge capibilities on USB that you can get on serial devices.
I'm not sure on the spec, but in the Electrical utility industry you're not going to find many devices operating faster then 38,400 baud because of the surge requirements. The device I'm helping to design can do 57,600 but if you get more then 20 or so feet away with a serial cable it doesn't communicate reliably, the filters and MOVs round the edges of the signals.
Running USB in that sort of enviroment would be almost impossible, unless you went out there with a USB to serial converter and hooked it onto the IEDs, but you certainly couldn't leave it there. And you can't use it for SCADA systems so you're still stuck with serial.
I don't think removing serial ports from a computer is a good idea. I know they're trying to get rid of legacy devices in the PC, but that means they won't be able to support the legacy devices that aren't connected directly to the PC.
Before you say 'you can just get a little box that has serial devices and can hook up to USB' I know you can. But I think those devices will become rarer and rarer as serial port modems and other similar devices become rarer themselves.
The fact that cyberwarfare is going on, and the fact that almost everything is connected these days will make you scared how far it can reach.
I work for a company that produces electrical utility relays. For those who don't know a relay in this instance isn't just a little box that you apply power too and it flips a switch that allows greater amounts of power to flow through another circuit. Power relays are complicated microprocessor systems that monitor power lines for trouble, they then trip large breakers that will cut power.
Anyways back to the topic. The power industry is currently moving towards a standardized protocol called UCA. UCA is an application layer protocol that sits ontop of either TCP or a seven layer OSI stack. Within the protocol are things called GOMSFEE objects.
GOMSFEE objects are a standardized way of naming values the relays can report back to whoever has a UCA master station, they also have a standardized way of naming the controls that a relay can accept. Such as 'Trip breaker on feeder to Iraqi command post'. No there isn't a command that is called this exactly that's just an example.
With a standardized way of naming controls, and information, it makes it easier for utilities to control their equipment. And it makes it easier for utilities to figure out what a device is telling them without having to look up a points list. But this also makes it easier for everyone else to as well.
UCA runs over TCP, which means it can run over ethernet and over the internet. If a cyberwarrior knew where a UCA enabled relay was in the world, he could hack his way through the network and then tell it to turn off power to whatever site, and in some cases in such a way that the large UPSes won't kick in. The smaller APC UPSes will always kick in. But if the relay that cuts off main power to a system, also controls the bus transfer to the site UPS, the cyberwarrior can completely shut down a site.
I don't know the UCA protocol as much as I should, but I don't think there are securities built into it like encrypted master/slave authentication. And I really don't think this would matter if it did. I'm pretty sure that a large national defense department will have the legal leverage to foce the equipment manufactures to hand over the keys to let them into the control equipment.
This is only one case of how our connected world makes it easier for the armies/terrorists of the world to do some truely dangerous things. It may be hard to kill a person accross the internet. But if you shut down the bus transfer relays in a hospital that the person is on life support in....
BTW these are my view alone, not my employers. I only deal with UCA from the outskirts at most, so I may be wrong with how it works. But I'm pretty sure I have the basic points of it.
If you look at the article they have at the bottom something about 30-40 mm disks that hold 10 or so gigs. Think of the possibilities of that. Software wouldn't be shipped on those big bulky CDs or DVDs, instead they'd go out on these little ~1.5 inch disks.
After you take the disk out of the drive and put it down, you'd better remember where you put it.
But these things can fit into your pocket which is one of the big things that came with the 3.5 inch disks. If you needed to go somewhere with a disk you put it in a shirt pocket and walked away.
With the 30-40 mm disks you can carry hours and hours of music for your C3Dman and conviently change music when you're bored. Its such a pain to chain music in a discman when you're on a bus.
Also hiding these little discs would be easy, slip it into your wallet or something and access all the files you have on it anywhere. Carrying around a CD-rom is inconvient unless you have a backpack.
So 10 gigs isn't 150 gigs, but the small size is more convient, I think the smaller disks will catch on if this is pushed for convience then capacity.
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This'll cause wars when it comes out. We'll invade the colonies...er... mars.... er ... no the clans will attack... or maybe ... nah... it'll be the bugs....
Why does it seem that every SF involving this sort of robot always seems to focus them on war? Well most of them I haven't really seen any SF out there that has just used an exoskeliton for labour.
If you think about it these things would be useless in a fight. The profile of them would basically make them a target for any decent sized shot. Unless they make them small (no more then 10 feet tall) then they'd be useless. And making them that small mean they can't carry much. For a long time its been a case of who's seen first is the one who loses in a military fight.
That's just me venting, about some SF. These suits would be nice for labour purposes, for the not so fine work, and the heavy work. I don't see them in any of the fine work (every tried soildering with a pair of gloves on?)
Back in the days when I was a third year university student our professor had us look into either Linux or BSD for a specific section and research it.
We then had to write a mini paper on how it worked and give a presentation to the class so that the rest of the class got a good look at how these other areas of the kernel worked.
I only remember the following topics of the ones we were told to research:
Inter Process Communications
Device Independent I/O
Task management (process switching)
Memory Management (with swap space)
File management (main filesystem)
Device management (drivers for network, scsi, etc)
There was a list of 20 or so topics, and a team of three could pick one of them for either Linux or BSD.
I'm not sure what a class of college students will be able to do to help with kernel development. After all, your average college student isn't a kernel hacker, and you're not going to have an entire class be able to contribute. I'd say only a handful of the students in the class would have the ability, time, or the interest to contribute to the kernel, and that's not fair for the rest of the class who paid to learn the theory and the knowledge to develop the ability.
Anyways when I took the class, Murry Goldberg at UBC was teaching it. Just look up CPSC 315 and 415 at UBC, he's usually open to questions.
First off I don't believe that Microsoft is spending the money on making a linux office port. Its too much of a change in architecture, and too much of the code needed to run Office is in active X and IE 5. I may be wrong on that but the way its interfaced to the OS and to the Internet I don't see why it wouldn't be.
If Microsoft was making a linux port they'd have to come out with it soon to beat KOffice and all the other Linux office suites for mindshare. If they don't they'd have to do what they did to netscape and offer it for free just to compete and to push the others out of the way.
They can do this and still make money. During 'development' of the suite they can offer out time limited betas that expire after 90 days. After all the rest of office suites are out of the way they announce that they are going to release and the beta program is closed down. A few months or so later all the free betas expire and the new office still isn't out. People will have lost interest in the other office suites and the documents made by MS office for linux may not be readable (encrypted for security perhaps?). People will have to buy/install windows and office for windows just to do work. Microsoft can claim that the final release was delayed because of a large bug found, who can fault them for bug fixing. After the majority of people have switched back to windows they can annouce that they're restarting the beta program, but who's going to use it? With the low responce to the second beta program they can claim that there isn't interest in office for linux and drop the program.
I know there are some holes in that arguement, like you can save files in older formats of office and read them with other office applications, but how many people are going to do that? And it now seems to be illegal to decrypt data that you didn't encrypt (al la DeCSS But lets not get into that).
Also Microsoft has announced that they would like to start renting applications. The office port to linux could be the start of this, combined with one for windows. They could set up the renewal process for the linux version on a 'overloaded' server that will only send out the new license code a week after the expiration of the old code. Users would be so frustrated but in dire need to use office that they'd switch to windows just to get their work done. But they can only do this after the competition for office suites under linux has been removed. Interest would lag for linux office and they could close down the project saying linux was a failure.
If they're careful everything they do here is legal. Underhanded and evil, but still legal. If they only offer their betas as free instead of the final product then they won't run into the same anti-trust problems they had with netscape. They can use their betas to draw away the mindshare from the other office suites, and then cancel the project to move people to windows where they can actually get at their data again. If they get enough mindshare from the rest of the suites then those might die, and that's what Microsoft would want.
Serial is similar. Serial is still the default way of connecting to a massive range of hardware appliances, from robots to burglar alarms, to telecoms hardware. Having just designed a large server farm, I can testify to the usefulness of Serial as a fall-back remote access channel.
I'll put in my word there as well. I don't know of many embedded controllers that use USB as their primary connection to a controller computer. Besides I don't think you have the same surge capibilities on USB that you can get on serial devices.
I'm not sure on the spec, but in the Electrical utility industry you're not going to find many devices operating faster then 38,400 baud because of the surge requirements. The device I'm helping to design can do 57,600 but if you get more then 20 or so feet away with a serial cable it doesn't communicate reliably, the filters and MOVs round the edges of the signals.
Running USB in that sort of enviroment would be almost impossible, unless you went out there with a USB to serial converter and hooked it onto the IEDs, but you certainly couldn't leave it there. And you can't use it for SCADA systems so you're still stuck with serial.
I don't think removing serial ports from a computer is a good idea. I know they're trying to get rid of legacy devices in the PC, but that means they won't be able to support the legacy devices that aren't connected directly to the PC.
Before you say 'you can just get a little box that has serial devices and can hook up to USB' I know you can. But I think those devices will become rarer and rarer as serial port modems and other similar devices become rarer themselves.
The fact that cyberwarfare is going on, and the fact that almost everything is connected these days will make you scared how far it can reach.
I work for a company that produces electrical utility relays. For those who don't know a relay in this instance isn't just a little box that you apply power too and it flips a switch that allows greater amounts of power to flow through another circuit. Power relays are complicated microprocessor systems that monitor power lines for trouble, they then trip large breakers that will cut power.
Anyways back to the topic. The power industry is currently moving towards a standardized protocol called UCA. UCA is an application layer protocol that sits ontop of either TCP or a seven layer OSI stack. Within the protocol are things called GOMSFEE objects.
GOMSFEE objects are a standardized way of naming values the relays can report back to whoever has a UCA master station, they also have a standardized way of naming the controls that a relay can accept. Such as 'Trip breaker on feeder to Iraqi command post'. No there isn't a command that is called this exactly that's just an example.
With a standardized way of naming controls, and information, it makes it easier for utilities to control their equipment. And it makes it easier for utilities to figure out what a device is telling them without having to look up a points list. But this also makes it easier for everyone else to as well.
UCA runs over TCP, which means it can run over ethernet and over the internet. If a cyberwarrior knew where a UCA enabled relay was in the world, he could hack his way through the network and then tell it to turn off power to whatever site, and in some cases in such a way that the large UPSes won't kick in. The smaller APC UPSes will always kick in. But if the relay that cuts off main power to a system, also controls the bus transfer to the site UPS, the cyberwarrior can completely shut down a site.
I don't know the UCA protocol as much as I should, but I don't think there are securities built into it like encrypted master/slave authentication. And I really don't think this would matter if it did. I'm pretty sure that a large national defense department will have the legal leverage to foce the equipment manufactures to hand over the keys to let them into the control equipment.
This is only one case of how our connected world makes it easier for the armies/terrorists of the world to do some truely dangerous things. It may be hard to kill a person accross the internet. But if you shut down the bus transfer relays in a hospital that the person is on life support in....
BTW these are my view alone, not my employers. I only deal with UCA from the outskirts at most, so I may be wrong with how it works. But I'm pretty sure I have the basic points of it.
If you look at the article they have at the bottom something about 30-40 mm disks that hold 10 or so gigs. Think of the possibilities of that. Software wouldn't be shipped on those big bulky CDs or DVDs, instead they'd go out on these little ~1.5 inch disks.
After you take the disk out of the drive and put it down, you'd better remember where you put it.
But these things can fit into your pocket which is one of the big things that came with the 3.5 inch disks. If you needed to go somewhere with a disk you put it in a shirt pocket and walked away.
With the 30-40 mm disks you can carry hours and hours of music for your C3Dman and conviently change music when you're bored. Its such a pain to chain music in a discman when you're on a bus.
Also hiding these little discs would be easy, slip it into your wallet or something and access all the files you have on it anywhere. Carrying around a CD-rom is inconvient unless you have a backpack.
So 10 gigs isn't 150 gigs, but the small size is more convient, I think the smaller disks will catch on if this is pushed for convience then capacity.
Anyways just my two cents.