A friend of Georgia's connected her to the US embassy; she ended up using my girlfriend's cell phone to call the police by dialling 112. (random question: how many Americans know that that's the international GSM emergency number? My guess, not many.) Still, there was a whole bunch of "not my problem" going on on the part of the hotel staff; they spoke English just fine until we asked for them to call the police; after that, the only words they said were "No speak English".
The fundamental problem was only partially getting the police to file the police report. The main problem was that after the report was filed, she would have had to come back to Poland at an unpredictable time for the trial, entirely on her own dime, which is not really an option for a freelancer in the States.
Uhhh.. I would find this very hard to believe, as: A) Encryption is very difficult to detect. Suppose that I were to chose 256 words in some language, and encode each byte as one of those ("zero", "one",..., would do). If ISPs were to block that, then they'd be likely to block massive amounts of legitimate moterial as well. Further, this would catch other forms of binaries, such as zip files being downloaded.
B) As detecting encryption is difficult, they might detect protocols, which would catch most P2P. However, if SSH is included, it means that they've added a special filter
8086 assembly (long story) Basic Bourne Shell C C++ C# (partly... I had to fix some program) Forth Java Javascript Lisp (some) Matlab Mathematica OpenGL (if that counts) Perl PHP Python (some) VB (if I remember any of it) XSLT
I've learned all of that (on my own), and yest I still haven't figured out how to get what everybody else is bragging about.
Hmmm... though I'd really rather be the kind of person who can respond to somebody asking me about the paris Hilton video with an offhand "It sucks."
There has been nothing more enlightening for me than trying to write code for my calculators... there are many things that you leran there, and you don't easily loose them.
Plus, that experience was really helpful when I had to work on PC/104 boards for a project
You obviously haven't done any real work in Java. I wrote one thing of value in Java; then gave up because Java was too limited.
Note the next line in your program though:
System.out.println(z);
Try figuring out what that's supposed to mean without knowing the concepts of the language.
Still, Java is not a bad language, the same way the basic is not a bad language, nor is x86 assembly. But, there are better languages, and that, I believe, is GP's point.
Also, the code sample that GP hd in mind was probably something like you would see in HS compsci:
---
static public void main (String args[]) {
int i = Integer.parseInt(args[1]);
int j = Integer.parseInt(args[2]);
int k = i + j;
System.out.println(k); }
---
Or worse, something using JOptionDialog. (Won't put a sample of that; partly laziness, partly amnesia).
I wrote something exactly like the UNIX "talk" program... and it worked over the IR link. But yeah, that's exactly what I used it for, except that I cheated in Chem, not Math.
Right... I used to blow people away with my 1337 3D graphs that I did on my TI-83+ (slowly, but they were awesome)... people asked me how I did it, and I always responded "It's all in the manual... Chapter 14, if you're interested."
The response ways always the same: "You read that thing?!"
for the RPN thing... there's an RPN calculatro flash app on ticalc... and you could probably get a forth environment somewhere. (essentially, an RPN programming language.) But yeah... I want one of the 49G+'s as well.
At one of teh better high schools in america, sadly, that is true. Fortunately, though, I can still log into my home computer via SSH do do something useful (like write eye candy with OpenGL)
I agree; this is one of teh two reason's I set up an LFS system... couldn't be happier with it (except for multilib braindamages, but...)
<flame-resistant suit> I agree wholeheartedly about linux evangelists (although I used to be one myself). Yes, Linux is good for many things, but, as we have learned from that other operating system, being all things for all people ends up being awful fro everybody.
Further, I would even suggest (God forbid) that Linux not cater towards the "newbies" (I hate that term too), or at least not go out of its way to do so, but instead provide an environment where "men are men and write their own device drivers".
For other people, there is always Windows, or my path into linux (installed it, overwriting everything, without any clue on how to use it or what anything did: "Xfree86? Don't think I need that!". Needless to say, I learned very quickly). </flame-resistant suit>
Still, aside from the snobbishness and distro evangelism that you see, Linux does have a very nice community.
Back to the evangelism, though: one short rant about diehard <insert distro here> users:
<rant> Just because a distro works for you doen't mean it'll be the best for everybody. Gentoo especially; I used it and loved it...But, I rarely reccomend it, because it is far too complex for a beginning user. Instead, I reccomend Debian, or even ubuntu.
Linux from scratch especially... this has been the most incredible experience of my time with Linux. So far, I have learned way more than I possible could have from installing Gentoo or working with Gentoo, and I now have certain bragging rights (my friends and I tend to one-up each other, and so far this tops everybody else.)
Would I reccomend this to other people? Not unless they had been using Linux fro several years, or they wanted to learn everything and were willing to make mistakes and spend several weeks without a functioning computer.
</rant>
What really crytsallized this for me was my brother's teasing: "It may not be as effective, but you have so muct more control". And he is partially right: for day to day work, Linux currently offers no advantage. It is only for development, servers, and embedded systems that there is really a point to switching, and for those Linux gives you the control.
But then again, even I somethimes just want things to work, and I don't want to futz around with them. There windows has the lead, and it doesn't seem that Linux will take it soon. Not that that is bad; half the fun of Linux is fixing things, and finding out all of the cool stuff in the proccess.
So, anyways, linux isn't for everybody, and acting like it is will only hurt the FOSS community in the end...
Re:I'm a geek, so I watched this twice last night.
on
Inside DARPA's Robot Race
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Sorry to break up the party, but the second race was MUCH easier then the first. For the first 7 or 8 miles, each vehicle was in a dry lakebed. Comapre this to the ravines and washes that were in the first 7 or 8 miles of the last course.
Why did they make it easier? My personal theory is the act of congress that calls for 2/3 of the armed forces to be autonomous vehicles by 2008 (or something of the sort; I'm probably wrong about the date).
By making people win (not to denigrate their achievement... debugging an autonomous vehicle is no mean feat!), DARPA has robbed the rest of the teams of a fair shot.
TerraHawk, in particular, was designed for a much mure brutal course. It was not the fastest vehicle, but in the terrain that we expected, it wouldn't need to be. (actually, the 5 m/s speed cap was in software... we limited it for safety reasons, as well as the trash can we murdered at the Site visit when we tried to raise the speed a bit:-)
We had problems because, In an effort to deal with that kind of course, we were replacing components right up until the end. (and we did our first test of the new vehicle the day before we went up to Fontana. The old vehicle was well tested, but it had issues with the pneumatics, and we were willing to risk failure in order to get a better chance of success.)
Now that I'm partially off topic, I might as well go the rest of the way.
I am most probably the only person in the world who has worked on no less than THREE teams (PVRW, Team Tormenta, and Terra Engineering). But, I also noticed that is was the big money teams that got through the NQE and on to the main race. Interestingly enough, after the race, when DARPA refused to announce the winner immediately, conspiracy theorists were arguing (with reason) that DARPA was trying to find some technicality to let the Red team win; 8 hours later, they realized that there was no such technicality, and their favored team lost.
Now, before that's marked as flaimbait, keep in mind that this is coming from someone who hasd been involved with this for 2 years, and who noticed the beaurocracy involved.
As a final illustration of this beaurocracy, at the gate to the team garages, ther was a seperate entrance fro people. For about 25 feet on the public side of the gate, there was a portable barrier set up so separate the footpath and the path for vehicles. On the other side, however, there was absolutely nothing. Now the guard was rather strict about the "humans on the human path, and 'bots on the 'bot path" rule, een when someone was coming out the the team area to go to something right next to the gate.
Comaring this to the creativity shown by the teams, you really had to wonder: who was really more organized?
I second that... I am currently in school, and I keep all of my source code, homework, websites, and my system config in subversion. Plus, it makes backups REALLY easy; tar up the repository, compress and PAR it, burn it onto a CD, and I have backups of not only the most recent version, but every version since I started. And it's hard to forget to include something in the backup.
Actually, the first race was a "Grand Challenge"... we had to deal with canyons, and actual hazards. And, the tunnel was there because it needed to be.
With the second race, any of the original "bots" could have made it; they started out on a dry lakebed and the race got easier from there.
Not to put down Stanley or anything; they did a wonderful job (and, I'm hoping I get into Stanford next year... hint, hint)
Actually, Terra Engineering had two industrial-strength switches fail in Fontana; we plugged the old Linksys switch from 2004 in, and it worked without a hitch.
I can say, without a doubt, that all teams uses GPS...
The E-Stop boxes are GPS based.
The reason I know this is that I spent a good amount of time in the garages at the NQE (except from noon to one when I escaped the heat by going the the Internet center to read slashdot), and saw the announcements that "Teams are to keep their E-Stop recievers off in the garage area because, WITHOUT A GPS FIX, they cause interference.
The thing is, autopilot is much easier than autonomous ground vehicles... an autopilot can be done with a simple closed-loop feedback circut (too high, tilt nose down...)
Ground vehicles need to deal with obstacles and terrain. See my earlier post on obstacle avoidance for the whole problem with obstacles.
For terrain though, it's kind of hard to see a 40-foot-deep wash until you're right on it... so it's really hard to avoid.
Frankly, having worked on three of the teams (the three teams based in Palos Verdes), i know that collision avoidance is much harder that it might seem.
When you're driving, you can see an oncoming car and avoid it. However, you had a couple million brain cells to pick out the points of light, identify them as a car, make the decision to turn, decide which way to turn, figure out how far the steering wheel needs to move to make the turn, then actually send the commands to your muscles to do that.
With a computer though, the first two steps are (currently) near impossible to do in realtime.
Computer vision is SLOW (and inaccurate, to boot). WHen I was working on a computer vision algorithm, I got excited when, in the output from two stereo images taken on a black highway with dark brown dirt next to it, I could pick out the center line! In this output, I didn't see the edge of the road or the car in front of me. Plus, it took about 30 seconds to generate this image on a dual processor AMD workstation. Now, consider that the processing loop on a grand challenge vehicle runs anywhere from 100 Hz to 10 Hz (100 Hz for Terra Hawk, 10 Hz for Team Tormenta's entry). We just didn't have the processing time. Plus, we could see about 15 seconds ahead with the cameras; by the time we identified a fence post, it would be embedded in our front bumper.
There's a good reason nearly every team used a LADAR unit (on of those beige or blue SICK boxes) to detect obstacles: LADAR data is very specific and doesn't require much processing beyond polar to cartesian conversion.
These are things that you don't really think about until you need to deal with them.
This is a true story with only slight embellishment. On the way back from the test site after our successful rough terrain runs, a sharp eyed Los Angeles County Sheriff spied our TerraHawk trailer missing its license plate, which has not been installed yet (who was supposed to do that, anyway?). But really, he wanted to know what the heck it was that we were towing. We gave him the DARPA Grand Challenge Overview, which was slightly difficult without our slides and laser pointer. Turns out, he writes software when he is not cruising in the Sheriff's car, and so the pivotal question he asked was, "You're not running Windows on that, are you?" We were able to answer that TerraHawk runs Linux. This greatly relieved the potential seriousness of the situation, avoiding the obligatory high speed chase and final standoff, but most important, he did not have to write a fix-it ticket for conversion from Windows to Linux. We were extremely relieved. Our advice to other DARPA GC teams who may be running Windows: check your brake lights, license stickers, drive under the speed limit and hope you don't get pulled over -- else you could be hauled into court with big OS conversion task on your hands.
I presume that you were watching the PV Road Warriors? I can't remember how many lines of code went in that one, but I seem to remember lines like
sleep (10000);//We can't crash if we aren't moving!
decideNextAction();
BTW... I was on the team.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of Georgia's connected her to the US embassy; she ended up using my girlfriend's cell phone to call the police by dialling 112. (random question: how many Americans know that that's the international GSM emergency number? My guess, not many.) Still, there was a whole bunch of "not my problem" going on on the part of the hotel staff; they spoke English just fine until we asked for them to call the police; after that, the only words they said were "No speak English".
The fundamental problem was only partially getting the police to file the police report. The main problem was that after the report was filed, she would have had to come back to Poland at an unpredictable time for the trial, entirely on her own dime, which is not really an option for a freelancer in the States.
Uhhh.. I would find this very hard to believe, as: ..., would do). If ISPs were to block that, then they'd be likely to block massive amounts of legitimate moterial as well. Further, this would catch other forms of binaries, such as zip files being downloaded.
A) Encryption is very difficult to detect. Suppose that I were to chose 256 words in some language, and encode each byte as one of those ("zero", "one",
B) As detecting encryption is difficult, they might detect protocols, which would catch most P2P. However, if SSH is included, it means that they've added a special filter
I'm 18, and I know:
8086 assembly (long story)
Basic
Bourne Shell
C
C++
C# (partly... I had to fix some program)
Forth
Java
Javascript
Lisp (some)
Matlab
Mathematica
OpenGL (if that counts)
Perl
PHP
Python (some)
VB (if I remember any of it)
XSLT
I've learned all of that (on my own), and yest I still haven't figured out how to get what everybody else is bragging about.
Hmmm... though I'd really rather be the kind of person who can respond to somebody asking me about the paris Hilton video with an offhand "It sucks."
There has been nothing more enlightening for me than trying to write code for my calculators... there are many things that you leran there, and you don't easily loose them.
Plus, that experience was really helpful when I had to work on PC/104 boards for a project
Note the next line in your program though:
System.out.println(z);
Try figuring out what that's supposed to mean without knowing the concepts of the language.
Still, Java is not a bad language, the same way the basic is not a bad language, nor is x86 assembly. But, there are better languages, and that, I believe, is GP's point.
Also, the code sample that GP hd in mind was probably something like you would see in HS compsci:
------
Or worse, something using JOptionDialog. (Won't put a sample of that; partly laziness, partly amnesia).
I wrote something exactly like the UNIX "talk" program... and it worked over the IR link. But yeah, that's exactly what I used it for, except that I cheated in Chem, not Math.
Right... I used to blow people away with my 1337 3D graphs that I did on my TI-83+ (slowly, but they were awesome)... people asked me how I did it, and I always responded "It's all in the manual... Chapter 14, if you're interested."
The response ways always the same: "You read that thing?!"
for the RPN thing... there's an RPN calculatro flash app on ticalc... and you could probably get a forth environment somewhere. (essentially, an RPN programming language.) But yeah... I want one of the 49G+'s as well.
Me either... I do have a girlfriend, but she has no f***ing cluse what XML is.
At one of teh better high schools in america, sadly, that is true. Fortunately, though, I can still log into my home computer via SSH do do something useful (like write eye candy with OpenGL)
Coding doesn't need to be useful...
Heh.
I agree; this is one of teh two reason's I set up an LFS system... couldn't be happier with it (except for multilib braindamages, but...)
<flame-resistant suit>
I agree wholeheartedly about linux evangelists (although I used to be one myself). Yes, Linux is good for many things, but, as we have learned from that other operating system, being all things for all people ends up being awful fro everybody.
Further, I would even suggest (God forbid) that Linux not cater towards the "newbies" (I hate that term too), or at least not go out of its way to do so, but instead provide an environment where "men are men and write their own device drivers".
For other people, there is always Windows, or my path into linux (installed it, overwriting everything, without any clue on how to use it or what anything did: "Xfree86? Don't think I need that!". Needless to say, I learned very quickly).
</flame-resistant suit>
Still, aside from the snobbishness and distro evangelism that you see, Linux does have a very nice community.
Back to the evangelism, though: one short rant about diehard <insert distro here> users:
<rant>
Just because a distro works for you doen't mean it'll be the best for everybody. Gentoo especially; I used it and loved it...But, I rarely reccomend it, because it is far too complex for a beginning user. Instead, I reccomend Debian, or even ubuntu.
Linux from scratch especially... this has been the most incredible experience of my time with Linux. So far, I have learned way more than I possible could have from installing Gentoo or working with Gentoo, and I now have certain bragging rights (my friends and I tend to one-up each other, and so far this tops everybody else.)
Would I reccomend this to other people? Not unless they had been using Linux fro several years, or they wanted to learn everything and were willing to make mistakes and spend several weeks without a functioning computer.
</rant>
What really crytsallized this for me was my brother's teasing: "It may not be as effective, but you have so muct more control". And he is partially right: for day to day work, Linux currently offers no advantage. It is only for development, servers, and embedded systems that there is really a point to switching, and for those Linux gives you the control.
But then again, even I somethimes just want things to work, and I don't want to futz around with them. There windows has the lead, and it doesn't seem that Linux will take it soon. Not that that is bad; half the fun of Linux is fixing things, and finding out all of the cool stuff in the proccess.
So, anyways, linux isn't for everybody, and acting like it is will only hurt the FOSS community in the end...
Sorry to break up the party, but the second race was MUCH easier then the first. For the first 7 or 8 miles, each vehicle was in a dry lakebed. Comapre this to the ravines and washes that were in the first 7 or 8 miles of the last course.
:-)
Why did they make it easier? My personal theory is the act of congress that calls for 2/3 of the armed forces to be autonomous vehicles by 2008 (or something of the sort; I'm probably wrong about the date).
By making people win (not to denigrate their achievement... debugging an autonomous vehicle is no mean feat!), DARPA has robbed the rest of the teams of a fair shot.
TerraHawk, in particular, was designed for a much mure brutal course. It was not the fastest vehicle, but in the terrain that we expected, it wouldn't need to be. (actually, the 5 m/s speed cap was in software... we limited it for safety reasons, as well as the trash can we murdered at the Site visit when we tried to raise the speed a bit
We had problems because, In an effort to deal with that kind of course, we were replacing components right up until the end. (and we did our first test of the new vehicle the day before we went up to Fontana. The old vehicle was well tested, but it had issues with the pneumatics, and we were willing to risk failure in order to get a better chance of success.)
Now that I'm partially off topic, I might as well go the rest of the way.
I am most probably the only person in the world who has worked on no less than THREE teams (PVRW, Team Tormenta, and Terra Engineering). But, I also noticed that is was the big money teams that got through the NQE and on to the main race. Interestingly enough, after the race, when DARPA refused to announce the winner immediately, conspiracy theorists were arguing (with reason) that DARPA was trying to find some technicality to let the Red team win; 8 hours later, they realized that there was no such technicality, and their favored team lost.
Now, before that's marked as flaimbait, keep in mind that this is coming from someone who hasd been involved with this for 2 years, and who noticed the beaurocracy involved.
As a final illustration of this beaurocracy, at the gate to the team garages, ther was a seperate entrance fro people. For about 25 feet on the public side of the gate, there was a portable barrier set up so separate the footpath and the path for vehicles. On the other side, however, there was absolutely nothing. Now the guard was rather strict about the "humans on the human path, and 'bots on the 'bot path" rule, een when someone was coming out the the team area to go to something right next to the gate.
Comaring this to the creativity shown by the teams, you really had to wonder: who was really more organized?
Red Team perhaps?
Don't know of a FUSE frontend for Subversion, but I'll start writing one tomorrow. It'll probably show up on thequux.com in a month or two.
I second that... I am currently in school, and I keep all of my source code, homework, websites, and my system config in subversion. Plus, it makes backups REALLY easy; tar up the repository, compress and PAR it, burn it onto a CD, and I have backups of not only the most recent version, but every version since I started. And it's hard to forget to include something in the backup.
Actually, the first race was a "Grand Challenge"... we had to deal with canyons, and actual hazards. And, the tunnel was there because it needed to be.
With the second race, any of the original "bots" could have made it; they started out on a dry lakebed and the race got easier from there.
Not to put down Stanley or anything; they did a wonderful job (and, I'm hoping I get into Stanford next year... hint, hint)
Actually, Terra Engineering had two industrial-strength switches fail in Fontana; we plugged the old Linksys switch from 2004 in, and it worked without a hitch.
Says something about Linksys, if you ask me...
I can say, without a doubt, that all teams uses GPS...
The E-Stop boxes are GPS based.
The reason I know this is that I spent a good amount of time in the garages at the NQE (except from noon to one when I escaped the heat by going the the Internet center to read slashdot), and saw the announcements that "Teams are to keep their E-Stop recievers off in the garage area because, WITHOUT A GPS FIX, they cause interference.
The thing is, autopilot is much easier than autonomous ground vehicles... an autopilot can be done with a simple closed-loop feedback circut (too high, tilt nose down...)
Ground vehicles need to deal with obstacles and terrain. See my earlier post on obstacle avoidance for the whole problem with obstacles.
For terrain though, it's kind of hard to see a 40-foot-deep wash until you're right on it... so it's really hard to avoid.
Frankly, having worked on three of the teams (the three teams based in Palos Verdes), i know that collision avoidance is much harder that it might seem.
When you're driving, you can see an oncoming car and avoid it. However, you had a couple million brain cells to pick out the points of light, identify them as a car, make the decision to turn, decide which way to turn, figure out how far the steering wheel needs to move to make the turn, then actually send the commands to your muscles to do that.
With a computer though, the first two steps are (currently) near impossible to do in realtime.
Computer vision is SLOW (and inaccurate, to boot). WHen I was working on a computer vision algorithm, I got excited when, in the output from two stereo images taken on a black highway with dark brown dirt next to it, I could pick out the center line! In this output, I didn't see the edge of the road or the car in front of me. Plus, it took about 30 seconds to generate this image on a dual processor AMD workstation. Now, consider that the processing loop on a grand challenge vehicle runs anywhere from 100 Hz to 10 Hz (100 Hz for Terra Hawk, 10 Hz for Team Tormenta's entry). We just didn't have the processing time. Plus, we could see about 15 seconds ahead with the cameras; by the time we identified a fence post, it would be embedded in our front bumper.
There's a good reason nearly every team used a LADAR unit (on of those beige or blue SICK boxes) to detect obstacles: LADAR data is very specific and doesn't require much processing beyond polar to cartesian conversion.
These are things that you don't really think about until you need to deal with them.
I presume that you were watching the PV Road Warriors? I can't remember how many lines of code went in that one, but I seem to remember lines like sleep (10000); //We can't crash if we aren't moving!
decideNextAction();
BTW... I was on the team.
They can't tell you to use Linux, I guess. That's the obvious choice, right?