One thing I've noticed is that while lots of universities are doing research in this area, there's very little actual code out there - or at least very little that I've found. Does anyone know of a repository someplace that collects AI and motor control source code, and all that other good stuff relevent to making a robot?
The things that bothered me with the original (like the gratuitious nudity and slow pace) were left out.
There was nothing gratuitous about the nudity in the first film - it served a rather clear purpose, in scenes aesthetically meant to highlight the differences between human and machine. (of course I'm not sure how much sense it makes to talk about what's clearly a mechanical body being "naked")
On the other hand I think the animators know that their machine, even though she LOOKS like a machine, will titilate the repressed anime geek masses. Which is why it's so super cool that Kusinagi's last scene in her shapely adult body involves blowing up that body. What a great way to fuck with those people! I sort of view sticking her in a kid's body the same way - just sort of a great sick joke to play on the people who were enjoying their peeks at what was an attractive machine a little too much.
To any skeptics out there, there is a pre-order link on the official Doom III site with links to 3 sites, EB Games, Gamestop and Best buy... All 3 list ship dates of 8/3.
To any people who just fell off the turnip truck, pre-orders are a scam and don't mean a damn thing. It doesn't lock in a release date and it doesn't get you the game any earlier than the day it appears on store shelves. Enjoy!
I was created a few years ago, but it seems to apply more and more. America is leaving the classification of "superpower" behind and moving towards what can be defined as a "hyperpower".
Number one, splurge on Aeron chairs. I used one at a consulting job I was at last year. Dear GOD I want one.
I own one. IMO they are quite overrated. Common problems: 1. The armrests don't stay up, no matter how hard you tighten them. And if you tighten them really hard the screw tears into the composite chair material. 2. The armrests aren't NEARLY high enough for a tall person sitting with good posture, even on the largest Aeron model. 3. There are lots of weird little nooks and crannies in the chair, and disassembly is far from straightforward. Once the chair starts collecting dust it's really never clean again. 4. The internal resistance mechanism tends to be cranky and on a lot of the chairs, the chair won't hold the position you set it to. When it slips from this position, it won't do it slowly, it will POP free, sending the user flinging forward. This is exciting. 5. It's absurdly expensive.
These problems aren't universal but the longtime Aeron owners I know have all seem to have experienced at least a couple of them. I'm sure there are other problems which I haven't seen or just forgot to mention. The funny thing is that when I point these things out sometimes, I'm usually attacked... by people who don't own Aerons.:D
Enough out of the atmosphere for the aerodynamic controls not to work, but not enough into space for the peroxide jets to function either.
Why wouldn't the peroxide thrusters work? All the thruster needs is for the peroxide to pass through the catalyst, right? That's going to happen at sea level just as well as in space.
I'm talking out of my ass but I'm guessing the peroxide thrusters didn't get the nose of that F-104 down because of some other severe aerodynamic thing the plane was experiencing. But the thrusters fired and exerted their pressure - it just wasn't enough. But maybe that's what you meant.:)
It also occurs to me that if something bad happens to the Russian space program, the ISS crew may have to wait for Rutan's future orbital project, if they hope to get home at all...
Or they could use the Soyuz capsule which is attached to the station at all times. Their operations are designed such that there is always a vehicle at the station, ready to take the astronauts home.
Unlike some other news shows (Fox, I'm very pointedly not looking at you), he doesn't harrase or ridicule his guests, even if they don't agree with him.
Yeah, it's pretty horrible that harassing guests has become acceptable practice on some news shows. It also makes for lousy comedy. This is one reason why Dennis Miller's show is doing so poorly in the ratings IMO.
Comedy Central also produces the great The Daily Show [comedycentral.com], which I'm sure a few guests are upset they appeared on after it airs. (Host Jon Stewart recently jokingly asked on the show why anyone is still willing to appear). It's more widely known, though, and they seem to be open about who they are.
Jon Stewart's actually pretty good about not humiliating people, even when they seem set on embarassing themselves. That's why people are willing to go on his show, and return to it. (and it's why in the case of Crossballs, they cannot tell people what their MO is.)
Really, the problem with many experts is that they are so focused on their issue, their area of expertise, that nothing about it is funny.
You're totally right. I really hope the next time I'm watching CNN and they're interviewing a WMD expert or talking about the Sudan genocide, they find a way to get some laughs out of it. I mean, lighten up, people!
Look, if you're interested in anything more important than MTV or the useless crap in People magazine, you're going to have to live with the occasional sober conversation. Some things are important enough that they need to be discussed, even though they're not funny at all.
I don't see any problem with this, or with shows like the Daily Show. They are fun, and they people they pick on even can have fun too, if they just will roll with it and take a joke.
The Daily Show is nothing like what is described here. One of Jon Stewart's most impressive talents is the way he manages to keep everything lighthearted and funny without humiliating his guests, even when he's making jokes at their expense. Everyone, including the guests, typically goes away with a smile.
Some of that is enlightened self-interest: a good guest is someone worth having on again, not someone you want to humiliate. But mostly it's just good lighthearted comedy (and good interviewing), which is so rare today.
Easy there... you would be hard pressed to find anyone besides Mormons that considers Mormons to be "Christians".
Christian: Professing belief in Jesus as Christ or following the religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus.
They believe Jesus is Christ and they read the New Testament. What other criteria do you recommend? It's amazing that such bigotry can get modded up so high. Thanks Slashdot!
To me, UnixWare is like a horrible car accident. I don't want to look because I know it's going to be bad, but the perverted side of me just can't resist. Anyway, here's an OSNews review of a recent release of UnixWare (just in case you have a kinky side).
It's actually not that bad - just USL UNIX with some cruft. SCO OpenServer, on the other hand, is A Thing Of Horror, from what I can tell.
RAID 5 is the most common for a large redundant array. The array size is (N-1)*size . The more drives you use in a single array, the better off you are for size loss.
And the more completely fucked you are performance-wise when a drive dies and the array has to run in degraded mode. In that instance the controller has to read from every drive in the array for every single block read and calculate parity, so the performance suckiness increases linearly. It also takes longer to rebuild a drive in a really large array.
As a practical matter a lot of that probably isn't important, just thought I should mention it.
RAID 1 - Drive mirroring.
Pros: -Excellent read performance, no loss of performance if one drive crashes.
Cons: -The amount of space you can have on this array is limited to the largest drive you can find. Then you have to buy a second one to mirror the data, which means you are paying double the cost per unit storage on your array. -Write performance is slower than other RAID levels.
And if RAID 1, 5, and 10 are the only RAID levels you've ever heard of, that statement is probably true. A nice mirror will be a heck of a lot faster with writes than RAID 3 or RAID 4, though, and will use much less CPU in a software RAID configuration.
The jury is there to decide if the person actually committed the crime in question, not whether the law makes sense.
Bullshit. How do you do that if you can't even figure out what the law means or how it could possibly be applied? I've been on a jury, and I've been there.
It's an interesting phenomenon, too, when you come up against this in real life. Our jury had determined for sure that the defendent was guilty on the first count. The second count was a pretty strangely worded law. It was interesting in that situation to see which people "defaulted" to guilty or not guilty once it was clear that we were not going to get a better interpretation of the law from the judge.
But I don't think any of us viewed this as "jury nullification," which the way it is ordinarily described seems like a (constitutionally protected) form of civil disobedience. We weren't motivated by any sort of moral thing, just by confusion.
The problem with this type of trial is that the jurors are not aware of what they are supposed to be doing. They are supposed to be using their conscience, not "jury instructions".
It's not like you can really choose one or the other. Keep in mind you swear an oath to the effect that you'll follow instructions. (the oath might vary from state to state, I guess) Fulfilling that oath is also a matter of conscience for most people.
The BSDs (excluding FreeBSD 5.x, which isn't finished yet and is probably still slower than 4.x) and Solaris (both Intel and SPARC, and - ironically - excluding Solaris running the new GNOME desktop for Solaris).
New releases of Solaris have been, if anything, FASTER on my ancient Sparcstation 5 70MHz, though it won't be supported in Solaris 10. There's a notion among Linux users in particular that Solaris x86 is bloated and slow. This notion is based on old experience, as far as I can tell - it was pretty slow when machines had 64MB of RAM, or less, on the average. Now, machines are a heck of a lot faster, and Solaris hasn't bloated much at all. It performs really well.
Simply writing zeros to every location on the hard drive that stores data doesn't completely erase the data. That is the magnetic field of the bits are not set at exactly '0'. Slight variations in the magnetic material, write head field strength, and positioning all contribute to increase the odds of data being recoverable.
This is just one of the problems. One problem which is really insurmountable with software is what to do about data that is, during the life of the drive: 1) Written to a sector of the disk 2) said sector is discovered by the drive electronics to be going flaky 3) the drive moves the data to a new sector, for safety 4) the old sector(s) are marked bad and no longer used by the drive 5) the data is now inaccessible
If you're paranoid enough to use the methods of wiping that ostensibly go beyond what recovery is possible with software and are meant to protect against recovery with special equipment, well, you need to just destroy the drive and skip the whole software wiping rigamarole, since it will never accomplish what you want 100%. If you've got access to replacement drive firmware maybe you've got some other options...
I think one of the reasons behind Google's success isn't just the sheer number of PhDs they have. Its the PhD's having the power, rather than the PHBs (pointy-haired bosses). Having a PhD and being a pointy-haired boss are in no way mutually exclusive. See: University administrators and officials.
2) On a per-processor basis, Linux-on-Intel/PowerPC is faster than Solaris-on-anything hands down. (This will probably change after the next generation of Sparc chips comes out.)
Solaris on Intel is very competitive with Linux on Intel today as far as performance goes. I really don't think that anyone tests this, it just seems that everyone has made up their mind that Linux is faster, perhaps based on really old rumor, or testing back when the average Intel machine had 64MB of RAM.
As an "enterprise" operating system on Intel hardware, it's also a hell of a lot cheaper than RHEL or SLES. Patches for a given version of Solaris tend to go back 6 or 7 years while Linux versions, even the pricey "enterprise" versions, are rarely supported so long.
So you end up installing a huge set of GNU tools and libraries on Solaris and... geez by this time you've almost got GNU/Linux again on Sun hardware.
I think a GNU/Solaris thing would be very, very cool. The GNU userland really deserves a better kernel than Linux.;)
what a shoddy piece of journalism. His deferred compensation was coming no matter what.
Cheney left haliburton's board of directors when tapped for vice president. However, in terminating his contract with the board, he was entitled to severance. he chose to take it over four years instead of all at once for tax reasons. to imply that he 'made' $178,000 last year is incorrect. he had already earned it but took the deferred compensation. He would have got it no matter who got that contact.
Of course this situation is instructive, it shows why it is traditionally considered very important for political figures to avoid both "impropriety and the appearance of impropriety" in their affairs - see recent Supreme Court deliberations re: campaign finance reform for more on this. The appearance of impropriety can be very damaging to the process of democratic government.
Whether there's any actual wrongdoing is only half the equation. Cheney undermined the public's trust in his office by maintaining this association with Halliburton. (and didn't help Halliburton any) Mistrust is the inevitable result of a public figure getting a large check from a company, whether there is tangible wrongdoing involved or not - again, see campaign finance reform.
I suspect if he had it to do over again he would just take the tax hit: all this mistrust has got to hurt personally, in addition to casting doubts on the integrity of himself, his former company and his work. It can't have been worth it.
Reprocessing has been a non-starter due to environmentalist opposition, expense, additional waste generation, and worries about having purified plutonium around.
Which isn't unreasonable if you read about what went on at Hanford or Fernauld. It's not that nuclear fission is inherently dangerous. It's that a lot of the work involved means having people handle dangerous stuff, and people by nature don't appear to be careful enough.
The safety of the reactor and disposing of used up fuel, which are the factors most people obsess about, appear to be the least of the problem. Processing seems to offer lots of opportunites for screwups, and for some reason less accountability.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I've noticed is that while lots of universities are doing research in this area, there's very little actual code out there - or at least very little that I've found. Does anyone know of a repository someplace that collects AI and motor control source code, and all that other good stuff relevent to making a robot?
There was nothing gratuitous about the nudity in the first film - it served a rather clear purpose, in scenes aesthetically meant to highlight the differences between human and machine. (of course I'm not sure how much sense it makes to talk about what's clearly a mechanical body being "naked")
On the other hand I think the animators know that their machine, even though she LOOKS like a machine, will titilate the repressed anime geek masses. Which is why it's so super cool that Kusinagi's last scene in her shapely adult body involves blowing up that body. What a great way to fuck with those people! I sort of view sticking her in a kid's body the same way - just sort of a great sick joke to play on the people who were enjoying their peeks at what was an attractive machine a little too much.
To any people who just fell off the turnip truck, pre-orders are a scam and don't mean a damn thing. It doesn't lock in a release date and it doesn't get you the game any earlier than the day it appears on store shelves. Enjoy!
Empire. The word is Empire.
I own one. IMO they are quite overrated. Common problems:
1. The armrests don't stay up, no matter how hard you tighten them. And if you tighten them really hard the screw tears into the composite chair material.
2. The armrests aren't NEARLY high enough for a tall person sitting with good posture, even on the largest Aeron model.
3. There are lots of weird little nooks and crannies in the chair, and disassembly is far from straightforward. Once the chair starts collecting dust it's really never clean again.
4. The internal resistance mechanism tends to be cranky and on a lot of the chairs, the chair won't hold the position you set it to. When it slips from this position, it won't do it slowly, it will POP free, sending the user flinging forward. This is exciting.
5. It's absurdly expensive.
These problems aren't universal but the longtime Aeron owners I know have all seem to have experienced at least a couple of them. I'm sure there are other problems which I haven't seen or just forgot to mention. The funny thing is that when I point these things out sometimes, I'm usually attacked... by people who don't own Aerons.
Why wouldn't the peroxide thrusters work? All the thruster needs is for the peroxide to pass through the catalyst, right? That's going to happen at sea level just as well as in space.
I'm talking out of my ass but I'm guessing the peroxide thrusters didn't get the nose of that F-104 down because of some other severe aerodynamic thing the plane was experiencing. But the thrusters fired and exerted their pressure - it just wasn't enough. But maybe that's what you meant.
Or they could use the Soyuz capsule which is attached to the station at all times. Their operations are designed such that there is always a vehicle at the station, ready to take the astronauts home.
Yeah, it's pretty horrible that harassing guests has become acceptable practice on some news shows. It also makes for lousy comedy. This is one reason why Dennis Miller's show is doing so poorly in the ratings IMO.
Jon Stewart's actually pretty good about not humiliating people, even when they seem set on embarassing themselves. That's why people are willing to go on his show, and return to it. (and it's why in the case of Crossballs, they cannot tell people what their MO is.)
You're totally right. I really hope the next time I'm watching CNN and they're interviewing a WMD expert or talking about the Sudan genocide, they find a way to get some laughs out of it. I mean, lighten up, people!
Look, if you're interested in anything more important than MTV or the useless crap in People magazine, you're going to have to live with the occasional sober conversation. Some things are important enough that they need to be discussed, even though they're not funny at all.
The Daily Show is nothing like what is described here. One of Jon Stewart's most impressive talents is the way he manages to keep everything lighthearted and funny without humiliating his guests, even when he's making jokes at their expense. Everyone, including the guests, typically goes away with a smile.
Some of that is enlightened self-interest: a good guest is someone worth having on again, not someone you want to humiliate. But mostly it's just good lighthearted comedy (and good interviewing), which is so rare today.
Christian: Professing belief in Jesus as Christ or following the religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus.
They believe Jesus is Christ and they read the New Testament. What other criteria do you recommend? It's amazing that such bigotry can get modded up so high. Thanks Slashdot!
It's actually not that bad - just USL UNIX with some cruft. SCO OpenServer, on the other hand, is A Thing Of Horror, from what I can tell.
And the more completely fucked you are performance-wise when a drive dies and the array has to run in degraded mode. In that instance the controller has to read from every drive in the array for every single block read and calculate parity, so the performance suckiness increases linearly. It also takes longer to rebuild a drive in a really large array.
As a practical matter a lot of that probably isn't important, just thought I should mention it.
And if RAID 1, 5, and 10 are the only RAID levels you've ever heard of, that statement is probably true. A nice mirror will be a heck of a lot faster with writes than RAID 3 or RAID 4, though, and will use much less CPU in a software RAID configuration.
Bullshit. How do you do that if you can't even figure out what the law means or how it could possibly be applied? I've been on a jury, and I've been there.
It's an interesting phenomenon, too, when you come up against this in real life. Our jury had determined for sure that the defendent was guilty on the first count. The second count was a pretty strangely worded law. It was interesting in that situation to see which people "defaulted" to guilty or not guilty once it was clear that we were not going to get a better interpretation of the law from the judge.
But I don't think any of us viewed this as "jury nullification," which the way it is ordinarily described seems like a (constitutionally protected) form of civil disobedience. We weren't motivated by any sort of moral thing, just by confusion.
It's not like you can really choose one or the other. Keep in mind you swear an oath to the effect that you'll follow instructions. (the oath might vary from state to state, I guess) Fulfilling that oath is also a matter of conscience for most people.
ftp.exe is NOT part of the TCP/IP stack. Jesus.
The BSDs (excluding FreeBSD 5.x, which isn't finished yet and is probably still slower than 4.x) and Solaris (both Intel and SPARC, and - ironically - excluding Solaris running the new GNOME desktop for Solaris).
New releases of Solaris have been, if anything, FASTER on my ancient Sparcstation 5 70MHz, though it won't be supported in Solaris 10. There's a notion among Linux users in particular that Solaris x86 is bloated and slow. This notion is based on old experience, as far as I can tell - it was pretty slow when machines had 64MB of RAM, or less, on the average. Now, machines are a heck of a lot faster, and Solaris hasn't bloated much at all. It performs really well.
This is just one of the problems. One problem which is really insurmountable with software is what to do about data that is, during the life of the drive:
1) Written to a sector of the disk
2) said sector is discovered by the drive electronics to be going flaky
3) the drive moves the data to a new sector, for safety
4) the old sector(s) are marked bad and no longer used by the drive
5) the data is now inaccessible
If you're paranoid enough to use the methods of wiping that ostensibly go beyond what recovery is possible with software and are meant to protect against recovery with special equipment, well, you need to just destroy the drive and skip the whole software wiping rigamarole, since it will never accomplish what you want 100%. If you've got access to replacement drive firmware maybe you've got some other options...
Way to perpetuate a silly rumor that's completely false. There's no BSD code in the NT kernel.
I think one of the reasons behind Google's success isn't just the sheer number of PhDs they have. Its the PhD's having the power, rather than the PHBs (pointy-haired bosses).
Having a PhD and being a pointy-haired boss are in no way mutually exclusive. See: University administrators and officials.
Solaris on Intel is very competitive with Linux on Intel today as far as performance goes. I really don't think that anyone tests this, it just seems that everyone has made up their mind that Linux is faster, perhaps based on really old rumor, or testing back when the average Intel machine had 64MB of RAM.
As an "enterprise" operating system on Intel hardware, it's also a hell of a lot cheaper than RHEL or SLES. Patches for a given version of Solaris tend to go back 6 or 7 years while Linux versions, even the pricey "enterprise" versions, are rarely supported so long.
I think a GNU/Solaris thing would be very, very cool. The GNU userland really deserves a better kernel than Linux.
Of course this situation is instructive, it shows why it is traditionally considered very important for political figures to avoid both "impropriety and the appearance of impropriety" in their affairs - see recent Supreme Court deliberations re: campaign finance reform for more on this. The appearance of impropriety can be very damaging to the process of democratic government.
Whether there's any actual wrongdoing is only half the equation. Cheney undermined the public's trust in his office by maintaining this association with Halliburton. (and didn't help Halliburton any) Mistrust is the inevitable result of a public figure getting a large check from a company, whether there is tangible wrongdoing involved or not - again, see campaign finance reform.
I suspect if he had it to do over again he would just take the tax hit: all this mistrust has got to hurt personally, in addition to casting doubts on the integrity of himself, his former company and his work. It can't have been worth it.
Which isn't unreasonable if you read about what went on at Hanford or Fernauld. It's not that nuclear fission is inherently dangerous. It's that a lot of the work involved means having people handle dangerous stuff, and people by nature don't appear to be careful enough.
The safety of the reactor and disposing of used up fuel, which are the factors most people obsess about, appear to be the least of the problem. Processing seems to offer lots of opportunites for screwups, and for some reason less accountability.
That's true of nuclear fission. If we ever get nuclear fusion to be sustainable and productive it shouldn't suck at all.
I'm just saying.