You are paying for hardware and software... trust me, the software is the biggest expense. What is surprising about that? Just wait till your refridgerator has a console in the door, that won't be the kind of present you give away very often either.
What's even worse about Aibo is that the amount of creativity that it permits the owner is not exactly what I would call an open source kind of effort.
I've not heard of them going BSOD as yet, but there is always a new version to be released.
This is just one of the first of this kind of robot, and really the first successful sale of closed software in a toy/robot/moving-appliance. There will be others of course, but this represents the first of this new 'Jetsons' world of things to come. A world where buying a personal robot is ranked about the same place in life experiences as buying a car for most people.
Of course, I could be wrong, YMMV but things are slowly going the way of the Jetsons. This year, its bluetooth and WiFi, in 10 years, who knows what?
The MPAA has set in motion litigation against makers of big screen televisions. According to one industry insider, these home entertainment people have to be stopped, their evil must be undone. If G*d wanted us to watch movies in our homes, he would have made television... oh wait
Can we change the/. icon for google now to an ant?
This is just one more reason...
on
Sorry, Wrong Wiretap
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· Score: 2, Insightful
To put the tinfoil hats away, or throw them out. Some want us to believe that the government is capable of all this conspiracy crap.... Hell, they can't even use the toilet by themselves if you look at stories like this one. Carnivore was supposed to be scary... the only real thing scary about it was the shortage of harddrives that it promised to create storing all those email messages... and I KNOW they weren't going to get away with using Exchange to store them!
The government might be ominous, but its run by humans, and they are too busy tripping on their own resume's to do anything truthfully scary. Its only individuals who are left without oversight that can be scary... groups of people.. pfft! Hitler and Mousolini were individuals... groups of people just don't manage to get it together fast enough or hard enough... self regulating so to speak...
Now, if individuals are doing wiretaps... could be different
Does that mean these guys are being drugged, shown a couple of movies for a week, and released having been fleeced of their millions? If that's true, I'm sure these Russian space guys will get hired by Hollywood...
If they could just get us to believe that file sharing is wrong?
Call me sarcastic, but I can see the world not trusting MS systems in the future... if Vista performs as well as IE has, perhaps the divide will be a good thing in the eyes of those who have jumped off the MS ship before it sinks... Maybe that is harsh, but MS does seem to be working hard to make itself irrelevent in ways that will not be fully understood for years...
Sounds like a reasoned decision, and not a surprising one either. Time will tell what really happens when they switch from XP. I think that if you have your own in-house expertise, the TCO will be lower in whatever OS that knowledgebase is best versed in.
This group has time to ensure that they are versed in the Linux OS Desktop environment before they switch, so I'm betting that they have a smooth-ish transition.
would someone point to information that proves or at least more than strongly indicates that P2P file sharing has harmed artists? Yeah, I heard Metallica, but I still haven't seen evidence that musicians are poor because of file sharing, or that they have actually lost money. Does anyone know of studies that actually and truthfully show that this is the case?
to think that anyone can look at ICANN and how it has operated (free to the world mostly) over the years, and think there is a better way to run it. There has been no issue, or even hiccup regarding the function of ICANN or the root servers. It seems to me that anyone who wants control of these functions turned over to another governing body simply wants that because they need to change how these function operate...
To put a point on it, if they need to change control, it can only be due to the fact that the current controllers won't let them use it as a means of controlling others or let them use it for nefarious purposes.
As was said, it aint broke, don't fix it.... its not currently used in corrupt ways, we don't need to hand over control to others who just might (probably will) use it corruptly! No country even needs to be mentioned, its working... "don't change horses in the middle of the stream" as they say...
"While outlawing the Internet might be a stupid move in the long run, it is VERY easy for any government to do it, and enforcing it isn't that difficult."
You fool, go ahead, stop commerce, stop the Internet, try it... you obviously have no clue that you live in the empire of the doller.... pitty you.
You obviously paid out for $250/plate dinners for political people that never got anywhere. You have no clue what commerce in the real world is.
The Internet has enabled commerce, both in North America and the world that the affected governments could not have accomplished. Yes, you think isolationist, keep that up, and you will be one of the people that my tax dollars are used to support. Get off your face and realize that the world is small these days. You can't be isolationist, unless you want to wither and die. Commerce happens on a global scale now, the Internet is global, and its unregulated... plus (read this next part slowly so you understand) its functioning better and more efficiently than any government on the face of the earth. Free trade actually works, when its actually free....
Your belief in certain people to rule how your business is run is absolutely foolish. Business runs best when there are no restrictions, or government subsidies of certain industries... Just let one airline fail and the rest will soon be in a boon situation... everybody eventually benefits. Arggghhh I so dislike when you 'special' people think you know how to run the global economy by not participating in it.
At last, finally, it comes down to "show me when and where and how they broke the law" instead of OMG, they have P2P software, they must have broken the law. Maybe the wildfires in CA are because of their exploitation of the world in general? Well, maybe not, but its about time someone made them prove illegal file sharing actually took place.
My opinion? The Internet is so big, so anonymous, so unstoppable... to try to stop it is just ignorant. Litigation in these cases is so much like trying to stop the tide from coming in with buckets. Get over it, your business model is gone... nobody likes you... start selling your product with at least 20th century means. Joining the 21st century would be better.
When will the world learn that TCP/IP and the Internet are far more than they know how to deal with?
It gives me more glee to see the *AA in a bit of trouble than it does to see MS losing ground in their marketplace...... I don't even care how much trouble, the fact that they have to prove something is just a very good thing. and it is about time.
And Carnivore did something good for the goverment? If it did, it taught them that using buckets to stop the tide from coming in was not a good idea.... let them listen, tin-foil-hats be damned. I dare them to analyze all my phone conversations! Go ahead, listen, analyze, process the bits of data that are my conversations with my wife! FOOOLS!!!
I will damn any government representative that wants to spend my tax dollars building super-clusters to monitor my voice conversations... Besides that, they don't have the resources to do so... so I say, I dare you, do it... we will burn you at every turn, we will ignore you, and elect people that fire you... go ahead, try it...
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I dare you to even try to find the DBA that wants to deal with your Sagan-bytes database ROFL
The government agencies can't even cooperate on providing aid to disaster victims, who in the world expects them to spy on 500 million vioce calls per day... ROFLMAO
Well, some entries are small, some are large. The little ones plan to go around things, the big ones have a plan that doesn't include worrying about the small stuff... same theory as people who go 4WD-ing, some have Jeep CJ5s, others have monster trucks.... The course is designed to be navigated by a standard pickup truck, so the need for huge behemouth vehicles is not absolute. Last year, there was a team that tried with a golf cart based vehicle, and even one team that tried with a motorcycle?
this is just a case of proving that the *AA really are bullying? If you can't afford to fight them (or just claim it) isn't that bad press for the *AA? Isn't this proof that they are attempting to rule what innovations should be allowed and which shouldn't? Doesn't this demonstrate that you can have a business or technology as long as it doesn't harm anyone else? at least not those with 150 year copyrights (even if your business isnt't designed to ruin them). Wow, those poor folk that owned train businesses! And those bad people that built horse drawn wagons. They got put out of business... shouldn't we pay their families restitution?.... Seems to me that this is the pinnacle of why software patents, DRMing, and such are stiffling innovation, and using monopolistic business practices.
YES, this task is THAT hard. If the military could simply throw money at the problem and get the solution, there would be no DARPA Grand Challenge competition at all.
The simple fact is that while we use senses in our bodies to do things, the similar versions for robots and autonomous vehicles are crude, expensive, and no-one is quite sure how to make them work the way we think they should. Computer vision is becoming a big thing, and despite the millions of people working with it or on it around the globe, there is still no standard way to immitate what the human does with one eye, let alone two. Humans have that inner-ear thing, and this tells us many things: if we are vertical, falling, rising, moving forward or sideways... Our eyes do way more than a movie camera does. People are only now beginning to understand how many ways that we analyze the visual data presented to us through our eyes.
The problems of autonomous ground vehicles are greater than that of planes because there is so much to run into, get stuck on, fall off of etc. Just writing some code to keep a toy robot from getting stuck under the kitchen table is a huge task without boatloads of sensory data and processing power.
The tasks the DARPA GC vehicles are trying to accomplish ARE that difficult.
There are two groups you can try if you are interested in finding out more about hobbyists that are working on these problems http://www.dprg.org/ and http://www.seattlerobotics.org/index.php . There are many others, of course, but these two are fairly active groups.
The software and use of sensors, as well as the sensors themselves are being driven to places that they probably wouldn't have gone if not for this contest. Sure, the 2 million dollars is a big-ish prize, but bragging rights are bigger.
I've seen some hobby roboticists building smaller robots for a scaled down version of this that are just amazing. Even on smaller scales, this is pushing technology. The good part? Much of the hobby stuff is pretty much shared in an OSS kind of way. That means that the technology behind all this will not belong entireley to the military, and will soon find its way into our vehicles and homes.... THAT is very cool!
that there are more people in the world than the fanatics. See my journal (if you care to) as I have decided to rip MS products out of my home network, not because I hate MS (I have used MS since win3.1) or because I feel F/OSS is infinitely better than not-free software. I didn't make the change because IE is insecure, or more insecure than other browser(s), but because the licensing and costs issues simply do not make sense in view of equally usable software that I can decide how much its worth to me. I have also tried Maxthon, which was hugely better to use than IE.
I find that Maxthon and Firefox are similar enough that most users wouldn't know too much difference. Having experienced the joys of wanting to move my XP license to a different machine, it was not difficult to make the choice to quit MS products wholesale.
I'm not a fanatic, I'm not a MS hater, I am simply someone that wants to use my hardware and resources in the way that I want to without being hobbled by someone else's idea of how I should do that. Add to that the joys of having to pay someone to show me how to use my computer resources and you have all the ingredients needed to feel completely insulted.
Sure, each OS has its place. Each has issues to resolve, including security, interoperability, and open standards. I know how to crash Firefox, and several other of the main applications that I use. I also know how to crash them on Windows systems. If you push a computer hard enough, you'll find problems somewhere.
In the long term, it will slowly dawn on the computer users of the world that there are people out there with equally usable software that costs very little, and is based on open standards that will allow them to interact with other people's computers and data in ways that closed standards (MS?) would never allow since they would not make any money on it.
While it might be true that adoption of Firefox may have slowed, there is no need to hit the panic button yet... or even at all. I seriously doubt that IE7 will ever catch up completely. The issue here is not that MS isn't losing ground fast enough, or at all, the issue is that F/OSS is gaining ground. In the 70's, not many people had VCRs, but now you probably won't find a house in North America without a VCR and/or DVD player.
All the F/OSS community really needs is enough support to make it through the 'ohhh, I didn't realize' time span while the rest of the computer using world comes to the realization that you don't have to have government officials in your pocket to produce good quality software. That usually takes awhile for the realization to happen.
pudding, so they say, and this type of FUD is proof (or close enough) for the State of Mass. to know that they are doing exactly the right thing. Despite the fact that it makes me giddy to see the MS machinations squeeling like stuck pigs, I think this sort of FUD, and the resultant outcries are just the thing that will slowly turn the world to look at F/OSS. This, I believe, is due to the fact that if F/OSS wasn't worth looking at, wasn't a threat to the juggernaut that is MS, then there would not be this outlandish FUD going on.
While I feel sad that such pains must be endured, I'm glad to see the MS machine slowing down, losing some ground, and perhaps looking a bit pale in the face.
is that there are complaints of all this lack of engineering staff... I'm willing to bet a 12 pack that there are thousands of people doing engineering like work, that would be more than happy to take night classes if someone would help them pay for it....
Sheesh, take the motivated people and turn them into engineers instead of just trying to churn out thousands of newbie engineers that don't know the first thing about working in a business environment and expecting them to be uber-engineers.
I think there is a general lack of focus and understanding of this problem. Its not just why don't more people go into engineering, why don't more people go get a degree? Damn, if you are going spend that much money, it won't be your money, and all these 18 year olds (since the beginning of colleges) don't know what they want to do... anything is okay as long as it doesn't interrupt their social schedules. Fsck! Where is the focus and systematic help programs for people that really DO want to be engineers but can't afford it?
After working for as long as I have, I know that school isn't as hard as people say... Imagine yourself with the Learning PERL book in your hand and contemplating a 3 month project that will eventually include 32000 lines of PERL, 60000+ lines of SQL, and unimaginable days and nights of trying to learn while you are coding. School is not more difficult than that. School has a grade in the balance, that project had my job in the balance!
Yep, lets see some of those programs start funding older-than-23 students, then I will believe they are serious about changing things.
Its more of the same, imagine some little thing better than what you have, add a buzzword or new technology, and its news... What is really news is that this is the start of both technological and regulatory beginnings of pervasive and ubiquitous highspeed wireless. Never mind the VoIP, use some imagination... if there really is huge wireless broadband, then all that is tethered to a PC LAN connection can be free (as in look ma, no hands) of wires. As soon as that happens, things get pretty out of control, but no one wants to go there for predicitions, nooo, they might be wrong... Well let me go there for a few minutes:
Wireless broadband will or can bring us several things:
Right now, you have the choke the living fsck out of a processor to make full use of 24Mb bandwidth, but trust in the geeks, we'll find a way to do it. Processors will get more powerful, less power hungry, and more capable... think a dual core cpu is cool? just wait.
With a glut of bandwidth, the future will include quite a few changes that people didn't see coming. Your car insurance will see a 5-15% discount if you purchase the State Farm in-car wireless diagnostics package. This will measure a plethora of data on your car, including those things that harm safe operations of the vehicle. As an adjunct, Firestone and Goodyear et al will live or die by quarterly insurance company safety reports on tires. As a natural extension, not only will your car assistant tell you when the tank is getting low, but will have a list of local gas stations and their prices, working out in advance a map to get to the best bargains in your current locale.
Television.... huh? Sony, get back! The television reciever of the near future will look more like the dreamed of set-top box than you can imagine. You will have a video display capable of HD or whatever format falls out to be popular, and it will have a GigE connector in the back. That will hook to your "content reciever" which will have connections to multiple sources, including a tray in the front that is not unlike a CD player, but deeper, holding the cable connection for various wireless devices such as your new PDA or wireless phone.
Speaking of wireless PDA and phones?... They will rival today's most powerful laptops aside from the screen. Yes, why stay up all night surfing Pr0n? Simply download the 'complete Mozilla suite' and let your home entertainment system do it for you, then tomorrow morning, say about 10:32 when the server you are working on is rebooting, you put on your new Baucsh & Laumb HD sun glasses, replete with Bluetooth 3.0 wirelesss connectivity, and silently scroll through 5 or 6 'pod casts' from your favorite Pr0n sites.
As geeks, we'll push things all the way up to the point of jacking into the matrix, only stopping there because we've not discovered the Matrix exists yet. Yes, many will use the now cheap HD glasses for other things... like getting their news from Jon Stewart while riding home on the hover train (using gasoline is a bad thing in the future)
Once we get home, the home automation system (another 15% discount from State Farm) will recognize you walking up to the door, and open it automatically. As it closes behind you, lights automatically come on where you need them as you walk to the fridge for a beer. If you had spent the extra 1500 bucks, a robot would have brought it to you in the entertainment room. As you sit down, the home computer system asks you if you want to know about email, or go over the grocery shopping list.
You opt for email and it is read to you, with brief vocal interactions about which to toss in the trash and who to never take email from again. When the email is done, you ask the home automation system what about the groceries? As you wait for the answer, you wince at not having spent the extra 1500-3500 for the robot version.
The home automation system tells you that you need several things from the grocery store, and you agree. The system tells you where there are sales on these items i
This topic has been coming up since the advent of the mobile computer. There are definitive reasons, both business and technological, for using either a desktop or a laptop.
Things to consider: Is the user mobile often enough to warrant the cost and risks? Is the user likely to damage, lose, or steal it? Is the user likely to lose, damage, or sell company information?
People who work in call centers are not likely to warrant the cost and risk of a laptop. At least not yet. 'Green' PCs and monitors mean that laptops don't save that much energy, and risk of theft or damage is higher when using laptops for non-mobile users. Additionally, upgrades and change out programs are much more expensive.
Using laptops and mobile devices increases the risks: financial, corporate IP theft or sale, information loss, productivity loss, risk of loss of functionality when the IT department isn't there to support it, and many other things.
What I basically feel is that this article, while posing some good points, is just a troll dressed in sheep's clothing. Hardware choices make sense in view of, and in combination with the domain of their use. If that domain is airplanes and hotel rooms, definitely a laptop. If that domain is strictly a cubicle - no laptop. If the domain is mixed, business reasoning comes into play. For personal use, style has its say in that choice too.
A poor analogy is that a 4wheel drive is good to have when you are fjording rivers. But if you are just commuting to work then a Hummer is a bad idea... no matter what size bear you are.
Wow, so the article points out that now computers can be mobile... not a lot to see here, move along.
Despite my normal anti-Microsoft stance on the world in general, this type of information usage is going to happen no matter what we as users want. The worst case is the governments of the world using personally identifying information in similar kinds of ways.
Since I don't think it can be stopped any easier than spam-email can be stopped altogether, I want to make my online profile seem as non-descript as possible. That is to say that I don't want to be part of a 'demographic'. That probably means I'll get lumped in with people that buy things I don't want or am allergic to. This is all the more reason to not use MSN... to avoid becoming a user in a demographic. We don't allow the government to use racial profiling... this is just cyber profiling in my opinion, and far worse that standard advertisement campaigns.
Of course the French will have differing demographic and cyber values than people in North America... we won't be looking to buy white flags:)
Despite the jokes, does anyone know of software or companies that specifically work to help a user maintain anonymity in the face of this type of information usage?
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You are paying for hardware and software... trust me, the software is the biggest expense. What is surprising about that? Just wait till your refridgerator has a console in the door, that won't be the kind of present you give away very often either.
What's even worse about Aibo is that the amount of creativity that it permits the owner is not exactly what I would call an open source kind of effort.
I've not heard of them going BSOD as yet, but there is always a new version to be released.
This is just one of the first of this kind of robot, and really the first successful sale of closed software in a toy/robot/moving-appliance. There will be others of course, but this represents the first of this new 'Jetsons' world of things to come. A world where buying a personal robot is ranked about the same place in life experiences as buying a car for most people.
Of course, I could be wrong, YMMV but things are slowly going the way of the Jetsons. This year, its bluetooth and WiFi, in 10 years, who knows what?
The MPAA has set in motion litigation against makers of big screen televisions. According to one industry insider, these home entertainment people have to be stopped, their evil must be undone. If G*d wanted us to watch movies in our homes, he would have made television... oh wait
That this story isn't already on this site
http://www.world-science.net/
All the wild science you ever needed....
Can we change the /. icon for google now to an ant?
To put the tinfoil hats away, or throw them out. Some want us to believe that the government is capable of all this conspiracy crap.... Hell, they can't even use the toilet by themselves if you look at stories like this one. Carnivore was supposed to be scary... the only real thing scary about it was the shortage of harddrives that it promised to create storing all those email messages... and I KNOW they weren't going to get away with using Exchange to store them!
The government might be ominous, but its run by humans, and they are too busy tripping on their own resume's to do anything truthfully scary. Its only individuals who are left without oversight that can be scary... groups of people.. pfft! Hitler and Mousolini were individuals... groups of people just don't manage to get it together fast enough or hard enough... self regulating so to speak...
Now, if individuals are doing wiretaps... could be different
Does that mean these guys are being drugged, shown a couple of movies for a week, and released having been fleeced of their millions? If that's true, I'm sure these Russian space guys will get hired by Hollywood...
If they could just get us to believe that file sharing is wrong?
Call me sarcastic, but I can see the world not trusting MS systems in the future... if Vista performs as well as IE has, perhaps the divide will be a good thing in the eyes of those who have jumped off the MS ship before it sinks... Maybe that is harsh, but MS does seem to be working hard to make itself irrelevent in ways that will not be fully understood for years...
Sounds like a reasoned decision, and not a surprising one either. Time will tell what really happens when they switch from XP. I think that if you have your own in-house expertise, the TCO will be lower in whatever OS that knowledgebase is best versed in.
This group has time to ensure that they are versed in the Linux OS Desktop environment before they switch, so I'm betting that they have a smooth-ish transition.
would someone point to information that proves or at least more than strongly indicates that P2P file sharing has harmed artists? Yeah, I heard Metallica, but I still haven't seen evidence that musicians are poor because of file sharing, or that they have actually lost money. Does anyone know of studies that actually and truthfully show that this is the case?
to think that anyone can look at ICANN and how it has operated (free to the world mostly) over the years, and think there is a better way to run it. There has been no issue, or even hiccup regarding the function of ICANN or the root servers. It seems to me that anyone who wants control of these functions turned over to another governing body simply wants that because they need to change how these function operate...
To put a point on it, if they need to change control, it can only be due to the fact that the current controllers won't let them use it as a means of controlling others or let them use it for nefarious purposes.
As was said, it aint broke, don't fix it.... its not currently used in corrupt ways, we don't need to hand over control to others who just might (probably will) use it corruptly! No country even needs to be mentioned, its working... "don't change horses in the middle of the stream" as they say...
"While outlawing the Internet might be a stupid move in the long run, it is VERY easy for any government to do it, and enforcing it isn't that difficult."
You fool, go ahead, stop commerce, stop the Internet, try it... you obviously have no clue that you live in the empire of the doller.... pitty you.
You obviously paid out for $250/plate dinners for political people that never got anywhere. You have no clue what commerce in the real world is.
The Internet has enabled commerce, both in North America and the world that the affected governments could not have accomplished. Yes, you think isolationist, keep that up, and you will be one of the people that my tax dollars are used to support. Get off your face and realize that the world is small these days. You can't be isolationist, unless you want to wither and die. Commerce happens on a global scale now, the Internet is global, and its unregulated... plus (read this next part slowly so you understand) its functioning better and more efficiently than any government on the face of the earth. Free trade actually works, when its actually free....
Your belief in certain people to rule how your business is run is absolutely foolish. Business runs best when there are no restrictions, or government subsidies of certain industries... Just let one airline fail and the rest will soon be in a boon situation... everybody eventually benefits. Arggghhh I so dislike when you 'special' people think you know how to run the global economy by not participating in it.
geeez, can we get a 'fsck you' here?
At last, finally, it comes down to "show me when and where and how they broke the law" instead of OMG, they have P2P software, they must have broken the law. Maybe the wildfires in CA are because of their exploitation of the world in general? Well, maybe not, but its about time someone made them prove illegal file sharing actually took place.
My opinion? The Internet is so big, so anonymous, so unstoppable... to try to stop it is just ignorant. Litigation in these cases is so much like trying to stop the tide from coming in with buckets. Get over it, your business model is gone... nobody likes you... start selling your product with at least 20th century means. Joining the 21st century would be better.
When will the world learn that TCP/IP and the Internet are far more than they know how to deal with?
It gives me more glee to see the *AA in a bit of trouble than it does to see MS losing ground in their marketplace...... I don't even care how much trouble, the fact that they have to prove something is just a very good thing. and it is about time.
And Carnivore did something good for the goverment? If it did, it taught them that using buckets to stop the tide from coming in was not a good idea.... let them listen, tin-foil-hats be damned. I dare them to analyze all my phone conversations! Go ahead, listen, analyze, process the bits of data that are my conversations with my wife! FOOOLS!!!
I will damn any government representative that wants to spend my tax dollars building super-clusters to monitor my voice conversations... Besides that, they don't have the resources to do so... so I say, I dare you, do it... we will burn you at every turn, we will ignore you, and elect people that fire you... go ahead, try it...
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I dare you to even try to find the DBA that wants to deal with your Sagan-bytes database ROFL
The government agencies can't even cooperate on providing aid to disaster victims, who in the world expects them to spy on 500 million vioce calls per day... ROFLMAO
yeah, right, they'll manage.... LOLOLOLOLOLOL
Now that google is working with NASA (Twice) does this mean that Ms will build the MS Spacestation in order to beat google?
Resistance is futile, you will be put online....
Time for people to get into the 21st century
Well, some entries are small, some are large. The little ones plan to go around things, the big ones have a plan that doesn't include worrying about the small stuff... same theory as people who go 4WD-ing, some have Jeep CJ5s, others have monster trucks.... The course is designed to be navigated by a standard pickup truck, so the need for huge behemouth vehicles is not absolute. Last year, there was a team that tried with a golf cart based vehicle, and even one team that tried with a motorcycle?
this is just a case of proving that the *AA really are bullying? If you can't afford to fight them (or just claim it) isn't that bad press for the *AA? Isn't this proof that they are attempting to rule what innovations should be allowed and which shouldn't? Doesn't this demonstrate that you can have a business or technology as long as it doesn't harm anyone else? at least not those with 150 year copyrights (even if your business isnt't designed to ruin them). Wow, those poor folk that owned train businesses! And those bad people that built horse drawn wagons. They got put out of business... shouldn't we pay their families restitution? .... Seems to me that this is the pinnacle of why software patents, DRMing, and such are stiffling innovation, and using monopolistic business practices.
YES, this task is THAT hard. If the military could simply throw money at the problem and get the solution, there would be no DARPA Grand Challenge competition at all.
The simple fact is that while we use senses in our bodies to do things, the similar versions for robots and autonomous vehicles are crude, expensive, and no-one is quite sure how to make them work the way we think they should. Computer vision is becoming a big thing, and despite the millions of people working with it or on it around the globe, there is still no standard way to immitate what the human does with one eye, let alone two. Humans have that inner-ear thing, and this tells us many things: if we are vertical, falling, rising, moving forward or sideways... Our eyes do way more than a movie camera does. People are only now beginning to understand how many ways that we analyze the visual data presented to us through our eyes.
The problems of autonomous ground vehicles are greater than that of planes because there is so much to run into, get stuck on, fall off of etc. Just writing some code to keep a toy robot from getting stuck under the kitchen table is a huge task without boatloads of sensory data and processing power.
The tasks the DARPA GC vehicles are trying to accomplish ARE that difficult.
There are two groups you can try if you are interested in finding out more about hobbyists that are working on these problems http://www.dprg.org/ and http://www.seattlerobotics.org/index.php . There are many others, of course, but these two are fairly active groups.
The software and use of sensors, as well as the sensors themselves are being driven to places that they probably wouldn't have gone if not for this contest. Sure, the 2 million dollars is a big-ish prize, but bragging rights are bigger.
I've seen some hobby roboticists building smaller robots for a scaled down version of this that are just amazing. Even on smaller scales, this is pushing technology. The good part? Much of the hobby stuff is pretty much shared in an OSS kind of way. That means that the technology behind all this will not belong entireley to the military, and will soon find its way into our vehicles and homes.... THAT is very cool!
that there are more people in the world than the fanatics. See my journal (if you care to) as I have decided to rip MS products out of my home network, not because I hate MS (I have used MS since win3.1) or because I feel F/OSS is infinitely better than not-free software. I didn't make the change because IE is insecure, or more insecure than other browser(s), but because the licensing and costs issues simply do not make sense in view of equally usable software that I can decide how much its worth to me. I have also tried Maxthon, which was hugely better to use than IE.
I find that Maxthon and Firefox are similar enough that most users wouldn't know too much difference. Having experienced the joys of wanting to move my XP license to a different machine, it was not difficult to make the choice to quit MS products wholesale.
I'm not a fanatic, I'm not a MS hater, I am simply someone that wants to use my hardware and resources in the way that I want to without being hobbled by someone else's idea of how I should do that. Add to that the joys of having to pay someone to show me how to use my computer resources and you have all the ingredients needed to feel completely insulted.
Sure, each OS has its place. Each has issues to resolve, including security, interoperability, and open standards. I know how to crash Firefox, and several other of the main applications that I use. I also know how to crash them on Windows systems. If you push a computer hard enough, you'll find problems somewhere.
In the long term, it will slowly dawn on the computer users of the world that there are people out there with equally usable software that costs very little, and is based on open standards that will allow them to interact with other people's computers and data in ways that closed standards (MS?) would never allow since they would not make any money on it.
While it might be true that adoption of Firefox may have slowed, there is no need to hit the panic button yet... or even at all. I seriously doubt that IE7 will ever catch up completely. The issue here is not that MS isn't losing ground fast enough, or at all, the issue is that F/OSS is gaining ground. In the 70's, not many people had VCRs, but now you probably won't find a house in North America without a VCR and/or DVD player.
All the F/OSS community really needs is enough support to make it through the 'ohhh, I didn't realize' time span while the rest of the computer using world comes to the realization that you don't have to have government officials in your pocket to produce good quality software. That usually takes awhile for the realization to happen.
Its just a matter of time...
pudding, so they say, and this type of FUD is proof (or close enough) for the State of Mass. to know that they are doing exactly the right thing. Despite the fact that it makes me giddy to see the MS machinations squeeling like stuck pigs, I think this sort of FUD, and the resultant outcries are just the thing that will slowly turn the world to look at F/OSS. This, I believe, is due to the fact that if F/OSS wasn't worth looking at, wasn't a threat to the juggernaut that is MS, then there would not be this outlandish FUD going on.
While I feel sad that such pains must be endured, I'm glad to see the MS machine slowing down, losing some ground, and perhaps looking a bit pale in the face.
is that there are complaints of all this lack of engineering staff... I'm willing to bet a 12 pack that there are thousands of people doing engineering like work, that would be more than happy to take night classes if someone would help them pay for it....
Sheesh, take the motivated people and turn them into engineers instead of just trying to churn out thousands of newbie engineers that don't know the first thing about working in a business environment and expecting them to be uber-engineers.
I think there is a general lack of focus and understanding of this problem. Its not just why don't more people go into engineering, why don't more people go get a degree? Damn, if you are going spend that much money, it won't be your money, and all these 18 year olds (since the beginning of colleges) don't know what they want to do... anything is okay as long as it doesn't interrupt their social schedules. Fsck! Where is the focus and systematic help programs for people that really DO want to be engineers but can't afford it?
After working for as long as I have, I know that school isn't as hard as people say... Imagine yourself with the Learning PERL book in your hand and contemplating a 3 month project that will eventually include 32000 lines of PERL, 60000+ lines of SQL, and unimaginable days and nights of trying to learn while you are coding. School is not more difficult than that. School has a grade in the balance, that project had my job in the balance!
Yep, lets see some of those programs start funding older-than-23 students, then I will believe they are serious about changing things.
two cents used
Its more of the same, imagine some little thing better than what you have, add a buzzword or new technology, and its news... What is really news is that this is the start of both technological and regulatory beginnings of pervasive and ubiquitous highspeed wireless. Never mind the VoIP, use some imagination... if there really is huge wireless broadband, then all that is tethered to a PC LAN connection can be free (as in look ma, no hands) of wires. As soon as that happens, things get pretty out of control, but no one wants to go there for predicitions, nooo, they might be wrong... Well let me go there for a few minutes:
Wireless broadband will or can bring us several things:
Right now, you have the choke the living fsck out of a processor to make full use of 24Mb bandwidth, but trust in the geeks, we'll find a way to do it. Processors will get more powerful, less power hungry, and more capable... think a dual core cpu is cool? just wait.
With a glut of bandwidth, the future will include quite a few changes that people didn't see coming. Your car insurance will see a 5-15% discount if you purchase the State Farm in-car wireless diagnostics package. This will measure a plethora of data on your car, including those things that harm safe operations of the vehicle. As an adjunct, Firestone and Goodyear et al will live or die by quarterly insurance company safety reports on tires. As a natural extension, not only will your car assistant tell you when the tank is getting low, but will have a list of local gas stations and their prices, working out in advance a map to get to the best bargains in your current locale.
Television.... huh? Sony, get back! The television reciever of the near future will look more like the dreamed of set-top box than you can imagine. You will have a video display capable of HD or whatever format falls out to be popular, and it will have a GigE connector in the back. That will hook to your "content reciever" which will have connections to multiple sources, including a tray in the front that is not unlike a CD player, but deeper, holding the cable connection for various wireless devices such as your new PDA or wireless phone.
Speaking of wireless PDA and phones?... They will rival today's most powerful laptops aside from the screen. Yes, why stay up all night surfing Pr0n? Simply download the 'complete Mozilla suite' and let your home entertainment system do it for you, then tomorrow morning, say about 10:32 when the server you are working on is rebooting, you put on your new Baucsh & Laumb HD sun glasses, replete with Bluetooth 3.0 wirelesss connectivity, and silently scroll through 5 or 6 'pod casts' from your favorite Pr0n sites.
As geeks, we'll push things all the way up to the point of jacking into the matrix, only stopping there because we've not discovered the Matrix exists yet. Yes, many will use the now cheap HD glasses for other things... like getting their news from Jon Stewart while riding home on the hover train (using gasoline is a bad thing in the future)
Once we get home, the home automation system (another 15% discount from State Farm) will recognize you walking up to the door, and open it automatically. As it closes behind you, lights automatically come on where you need them as you walk to the fridge for a beer. If you had spent the extra 1500 bucks, a robot would have brought it to you in the entertainment room. As you sit down, the home computer system asks you if you want to know about email, or go over the grocery shopping list.
You opt for email and it is read to you, with brief vocal interactions about which to toss in the trash and who to never take email from again. When the email is done, you ask the home automation system what about the groceries? As you wait for the answer, you wince at not having spent the extra 1500-3500 for the robot version.
The home automation system tells you that you need several things from the grocery store, and you agree. The system tells you where there are sales on these items i
This topic has been coming up since the advent of the mobile computer. There are definitive reasons, both business and technological, for using either a desktop or a laptop.
Things to consider:
Is the user mobile often enough to warrant the cost and risks?
Is the user likely to damage, lose, or steal it?
Is the user likely to lose, damage, or sell company information?
People who work in call centers are not likely to warrant the cost and risk of a laptop. At least not yet. 'Green' PCs and monitors mean that laptops don't save that much energy, and risk of theft or damage is higher when using laptops for non-mobile users. Additionally, upgrades and change out programs are much more expensive.
Using laptops and mobile devices increases the risks: financial, corporate IP theft or sale, information loss, productivity loss, risk of loss of functionality when the IT department isn't there to support it, and many other things.
What I basically feel is that this article, while posing some good points, is just a troll dressed in sheep's clothing. Hardware choices make sense in view of, and in combination with the domain of their use. If that domain is airplanes and hotel rooms, definitely a laptop. If that domain is strictly a cubicle - no laptop. If the domain is mixed, business reasoning comes into play. For personal use, style has its say in that choice too.
A poor analogy is that a 4wheel drive is good to have when you are fjording rivers. But if you are just commuting to work then a Hummer is a bad idea... no matter what size bear you are.
Wow, so the article points out that now computers can be mobile... not a lot to see here, move along.
Despite my normal anti-Microsoft stance on the world in general, this type of information usage is going to happen no matter what we as users want. The worst case is the governments of the world using personally identifying information in similar kinds of ways.
:)
Since I don't think it can be stopped any easier than spam-email can be stopped altogether, I want to make my online profile seem as non-descript as possible. That is to say that I don't want to be part of a 'demographic'. That probably means I'll get lumped in with people that buy things I don't want or am allergic to. This is all the more reason to not use MSN... to avoid becoming a user in a demographic. We don't allow the government to use racial profiling... this is just cyber profiling in my opinion, and far worse that standard advertisement campaigns.
Of course the French will have differing demographic and cyber values than people in North America... we won't be looking to buy white flags
Despite the jokes, does anyone know of software or companies that specifically work to help a user maintain anonymity in the face of this type of information usage?