I've always been a little fuzzy on the concept of using a robot for something a real live solider can't do better. For recon, OK, it makes sense -- we need to see somewhere, its a dangerous job, send the robot to see and we don't care if it gets shot.
How many other operations are there for the military, though? Killing stuff? Great, we send the robot swarm somewhere with its little pop gun to... oh, wait. If we already know where the enemy is, we don't need to kill them with little pop guns. We kill them the American Way, by painting them with a laser and annihilating the area from the air (see how Saddam's sons died: demand surrender once, cordon off area, bomb). Every bit as effective, negligible danger to anyone we care about, and doesn't require any expensive capital investments in robots you're intending on using as smart-bombs anyhow.
Or maybe the enemy is somewhere we can't airstrike, like Baghdad Hospital? Then we'll end up sending in the marines, no matter what -- we can't tolerate SwarmBot 2015 mistaking a crippled kiddy for an insurgent because if we could crippled kiddy and insurgent would both be vaporized already. Same with remote operation of the robot -- as long as we've made the decision as a nation that innocent lives are sometimes worth more than our own that calculation is going to make robots a losing proposition every time.
Robots for remote demolition, now that I could see. They sure make a lot more sense than sending out members of the bomb squad.
P.S. The "freedom fighters" we're facing in Afghanistan and Iraq are largely foreign, killing for the freedom to impose an Islamicist Caliphate over people that happen to resemble them a little more than they resemble us (but not by much), so they can get back to doing that whole stoning women accused of adultery and collapsing walls on top of gay guys thing that us pesky imperialists went and interrupted.
Its a survey conducted on the web, if you've had Stats 101 you know its not reliable. Want a non-quantifiable demonstration of how big OSS is at the moment? Here is the front page of the Nikkei (Japanese equivalent of Wall Street Journal) Technology Section. You don't even have to read Japanese to pick out the OSS stuff.
In other news, there was a thirty-minute report on OSS on the news after Bill Gates' Japan trip earlier this week (in which one of the newscasters said something to the effect of "Poor Gates, he must be worried").
I get called away from development about three to five times a day for a "Hey, where is the button I need?" consultation, and the R&D group has a "translations of common error messages" list on one of the whiteboards in their office. Don't even get me started about the input method editor -- MS's default one is generally seen as pretty suboptimal around the office, and most of the geeks use a closed-source one from a Japanese company, but every OS one I ever saw is abysmal. You type in "Nagoya", a word which should be *completely* unambiguous in Japanese, and end up getting a reading which hasn't been used since the Kamakura Shogunate. And then after you page down the list to get to the actual name of the city, the IME forgets it for the next session. (Like, if you type the sentence, "Nagoya, site of the Aichi Expo,...", when you switch back to alphabet for Expo you clear the recently-used list on the IME and then the next time you type Nagoya its back to Kamakura for you).
Its also a really basic barrier to getting acceptance of any particular package. We wanted to demo about 25 CMS packages earlier this year -- nixed 13 off the list immediately because they had no Japanese version (and about half of the rest had translation errors so bad there was no way you could allow them into production use).
I work in a Japanese government-established technology incubator and we're pushing OSS as hard as possible. Heck, I got two weeks off of my normal development schedule to contribute to an OSS *game*, for God's sakes. Especially outside of Tokyo (in the vast chunk of the Japanese economy that the rest of the world doesn't hear about), OSS is taking off like a rocket -- we've had a lot of consultations with itty-bitty businesses about "Say, do you have any of that free software stuff that does ?" They're pretty happy when it actually works.
The reason American OSS geeks should be happy Japanese OSS is starting to take off (despite the barriers like language and etc -- keep in mind that Windows took a while to hit 20% penetration here, too, because like half of the Linux distributions it didn't ship with a way to natively input Japanese text) is that Japan exports technical knowhow like crazy. Our last OSS conference had delegates from governments in about six countries (Phillipines, India, etc) who we were telling "Hey, you can save yourself a heck of a lot of money and you'll never have government continuity threatened by loss of a key vendor ever again... Did we mention you save a lot of money?" Obviously, countries take their cues from US usage too, but as the biggest foreign aid donor in the world when the Japanese government says "Hey, we'd appreciate if you economized on our technology funds we're giving you -- here are some ideas on how", people tend to listen.
We had a university try that on us once (I work for a technology incubator in Japan). We were going to pay one of their professors a sum in the low five figures (USD) to come out here and give a conference. He never got the invitation due to spam filtering. I wasn't in the room when that prof chewed out his IT department, obviously, but I was in the room when our boss chewed out him on the telephone for trying to justify the policy (direct quote: "Japan is not #$#$$&$%# China, dickwad" -- my boss studied at Harvard and apparently majored in Intercultural Cursing, because I've seen him do it in four languages now).
Why did I switch from IE to Firefox? Tabbed browsing, no popups, security. Firefox gave me something that I wasn't getting right then, and I didn't give up anything I was using.
Why do I use Linux for development? To have a rock solid system with fine-grained control of my development environment, and built-in, easy to use tools to automate the tedious parts of the job, like text processing.
Why do I use Windows at home? Because no acceptable substitute exists for playing World of Warcraft, etc.
Why didn't I switch my development machine from Linux to an untried OS? I don't know, you tell me, what does your OS do better than Linux that justifies me abandoning the comfort of having a million-hacker install base I can ask questions to when the box blows up and download software from when it doesn't?
With a database like the Chicago crime statistics, I don't think thats too farfetched. Something similar would really be useful for police departments -- color code the drug deals and murders by gang affiliation and you'll have a pretty good idea of where you need to keep an eye on fairly quickly. I'm guessing Chicago already does something like this internally (praying they do, at any rate), but it might help a smaller city which has trouble with gang territories not lining up with precinct boundaries.
I beg to differ, ants will attack the stuff like its watermelon coated in honey.
Uh, or so I've heard.
Re:Wood Ipod (guilt)
on
Real Wood iPod
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
OK, basic conservation of energy: unless you're feeding the process with juice from a nuclear plant or some other semi-renewable energy source you're just transferring the energy expenditure from the non-rewewable fossil fuel you used to make the plastic to the non-renewable fossil fuel you used to provide the energy to make the oil to make the plastic. Except you lose efficiency on the intermediate steps.
Piracy is so high in Southeast Asia, the pirates are working out how to pirate Linux. You think it might be hard stealing something which is generally given away for free, but don't count these ingenious pirates out for the count yet -- they've defeated every copyright protection yet known to man and "open source" won't be any different:)
I work in the R&D department at a Japanese technology incubator, and mocked up a demo of distributed computing (counting solutions for N-Queens for N=20+, for those that are interested). Our largest test was with 1300 computers. Some real numbers for you: the program running on one computer (Java for logic and the unused networking, one C++ module for the inner loop calculation) is 25% as effective as the world-record C++ code running on the same computer.
Yeah, that sucks. Just use the C++ code, which is GPLed anyhow. But we were able to get 1300 machines in various cooperating organizations which a) were all 2.0+ GHz machines on a problem which is processor bound and b) had an average load factor of less than 1% during the day. The vast majority are off-the-shelf Windows boxes which sit in computer labs that are 80% empty 80% of the time and busy themselves with displaying screen savers (I imagine usage patterns at the typical American university are similar). Even if 75% of our theoretical capacity slipped through our fingers, thats still harnessing many thousands of times more useful work out of those boxes than we were getting before we implemented the computer grid.
Actually, due to innovations like the 401K plan with matching contributions, corporations have more owners than ever. The investor class now includes over a third of the country (or half of the households) and its growing fast.
The name means "Sulfur Island" and they didn't just decide to name it after an element because the cool names were already taken. Due to volcanic activity, the place constantly smells like rotten eggs, and looks like Hell relocated to the central Pacific. That was BEFORE the US and Japan fought a major battle over it, littering the place with unexploded ordinance (grandpa did his part cleaning it up, bringing two live artillery shells to his house as souvenirs, where they stayed undisturbed until he died... we then had to call the Chicago bomb squad twice in one week after we found them in the basement). Its still in a vaguely decent geostrategic position, but anything else you'd use an island in the Pacific (tourism, etc) for can be done better at Okinawa or Hawaii, or for that matter just about anywhere other than Iwo.
Or, you could buy a Windows machine, and still get the iTunes & etc line for free. Apple went to the trouble of porting them for the 90% of the world that doesn't use their hardware.
Whats stopping them from kidnapping his head NOW and using that to hack into his Paypal account? Surely not the rest of him... A man of many talents, but fighting off goons is probably not one of them.
Of course, he DOES have a reputation for hiring talent:) My guess is his personal security is a lot like a better paid version of the Secret Service.
I'm in Japan in a guild with 20 Aussies, the only one who has trouble is the one stuck with that government semi-monopoly as his ISP. You probably know the name better than I do. Although I don't really understand how its a semi-monopoly if one out of twenty has it... then again, I can appreciate with 2000ms pings why nineteen out of twenty would find somebody else.
Its easy for those of us who live in the Western world, where food comes from the supermarket, to say "Hey, thats mildly amusing and useful in no practical way -- why not throw it back?" Would you say the same if it required that *your* kids not have dinner that night?
You mean something like the Bandit, a remotely-operated camera with a thruster attached which is under NASA funded development at my alma mater. I was actually in the class with the folks working on it -- fascinating stuff. Unfortunately, if you discover that there is a hole in your wing, what do you do? There is no rescue ship available, and if there was we couldn't get it to you in time. You can't repair the damage, heck, you can't even be realistically expected to figure out the true extent of the damage from a visual inspection (bear in mind: a scratch more than one tenth of an inch swwp anywhere on the the downward facing bits means everyone onboard dies).
Anyhow, the Bandit was pretty cheap. I recall them saying it was $5,000 for all the electronics and $40,000 for the booster -- "It would be the cheapest thing on the shuttle at those prices", quoting the professor.
>>the fact that languages like java allow poor coders to produce code that kind of works rather than total failures probablly doesn't help the languages reputation either.>>
As opposed to C++, which really separates the men from the boys when it fails totally transparently due to a pointer error several years after the product has shipped, resulting in 100,000 boxes getting owned. Good thing seg faults have long since chased all of the non-serious developers away from the language, so we have only our l33t hackers creating buffer overruns for our other l33t hackers to patch.
>>and who would seriously wan't to release thier software as java bytecode when jad is arround?[sic]>>
I'd imagine anyone who is big enough on open software to winge about not having a free-as-in-speech runtime environment (despite having free-as-in-beer ones readily available) wouldn't be too worried about the possibility of someone seeing, gasp, their source code.
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How many other operations are there for the military, though? Killing stuff? Great, we send the robot swarm somewhere with its little pop gun to... oh, wait. If we already know where the enemy is, we don't need to kill them with little pop guns. We kill them the American Way, by painting them with a laser and annihilating the area from the air (see how Saddam's sons died: demand surrender once, cordon off area, bomb). Every bit as effective, negligible danger to anyone we care about, and doesn't require any expensive capital investments in robots you're intending on using as smart-bombs anyhow.
Or maybe the enemy is somewhere we can't airstrike, like Baghdad Hospital? Then we'll end up sending in the marines, no matter what -- we can't tolerate SwarmBot 2015 mistaking a crippled kiddy for an insurgent because if we could crippled kiddy and insurgent would both be vaporized already. Same with remote operation of the robot -- as long as we've made the decision as a nation that innocent lives are sometimes worth more than our own that calculation is going to make robots a losing proposition every time.
Robots for remote demolition, now that I could see. They sure make a lot more sense than sending out members of the bomb squad.
P.S. The "freedom fighters" we're facing in Afghanistan and Iraq are largely foreign, killing for the freedom to impose an Islamicist Caliphate over people that happen to resemble them a little more than they resemble us (but not by much), so they can get back to doing that whole stoning women accused of adultery and collapsing walls on top of gay guys thing that us pesky imperialists went and interrupted.
http://itpro.nikkeibp.co.jp/
They also have a site dedicated completely to OSS.
In other news, there was a thirty-minute report on OSS on the news after Bill Gates' Japan trip earlier this week (in which one of the newscasters said something to the effect of "Poor Gates, he must be worried").
Its also a really basic barrier to getting acceptance of any particular package. We wanted to demo about 25 CMS packages earlier this year -- nixed 13 off the list immediately because they had no Japanese version (and about half of the rest had translation errors so bad there was no way you could allow them into production use).
The reason American OSS geeks should be happy Japanese OSS is starting to take off (despite the barriers like language and etc -- keep in mind that Windows took a while to hit 20% penetration here, too, because like half of the Linux distributions it didn't ship with a way to natively input Japanese text) is that Japan exports technical knowhow like crazy. Our last OSS conference had delegates from governments in about six countries (Phillipines, India, etc) who we were telling "Hey, you can save yourself a heck of a lot of money and you'll never have government continuity threatened by loss of a key vendor ever again... Did we mention you save a lot of money?" Obviously, countries take their cues from US usage too, but as the biggest foreign aid donor in the world when the Japanese government says "Hey, we'd appreciate if you economized on our technology funds we're giving you -- here are some ideas on how", people tend to listen.
We had a university try that on us once (I work for a technology incubator in Japan). We were going to pay one of their professors a sum in the low five figures (USD) to come out here and give a conference. He never got the invitation due to spam filtering. I wasn't in the room when that prof chewed out his IT department, obviously, but I was in the room when our boss chewed out him on the telephone for trying to justify the policy (direct quote: "Japan is not #$#$$&$%# China, dickwad" -- my boss studied at Harvard and apparently majored in Intercultural Cursing, because I've seen him do it in four languages now).
Why did I switch from IE to Firefox? Tabbed browsing, no popups, security. Firefox gave me something that I wasn't getting right then, and I didn't give up anything I was using.
Why do I use Linux for development? To have a rock solid system with fine-grained control of my development environment, and built-in, easy to use tools to automate the tedious parts of the job, like text processing.
Why do I use Windows at home? Because no acceptable substitute exists for playing World of Warcraft, etc.
Why didn't I switch my development machine from Linux to an untried OS? I don't know, you tell me, what does your OS do better than Linux that justifies me abandoning the comfort of having a million-hacker install base I can ask questions to when the box blows up and download software from when it doesn't?
...and crashes when any dog gets a straight flush in clubs, or is an instance of chihuahua.
With a database like the Chicago crime statistics, I don't think thats too farfetched. Something similar would really be useful for police departments -- color code the drug deals and murders by gang affiliation and you'll have a pretty good idea of where you need to keep an eye on fairly quickly. I'm guessing Chicago already does something like this internally (praying they do, at any rate), but it might help a smaller city which has trouble with gang territories not lining up with precinct boundaries.
No.
Uh, or so I've heard.
OK, basic conservation of energy: unless you're feeding the process with juice from a nuclear plant or some other semi-renewable energy source you're just transferring the energy expenditure from the non-rewewable fossil fuel you used to make the plastic to the non-renewable fossil fuel you used to provide the energy to make the oil to make the plastic. Except you lose efficiency on the intermediate steps.
Piracy is so high in Southeast Asia, the pirates are working out how to pirate Linux. You think it might be hard stealing something which is generally given away for free, but don't count these ingenious pirates out for the count yet -- they've defeated every copyright protection yet known to man and "open source" won't be any different :)
Yeah, that sucks. Just use the C++ code, which is GPLed anyhow. But we were able to get 1300 machines in various cooperating organizations which a) were all 2.0+ GHz machines on a problem which is processor bound and b) had an average load factor of less than 1% during the day. The vast majority are off-the-shelf Windows boxes which sit in computer labs that are 80% empty 80% of the time and busy themselves with displaying screen savers (I imagine usage patterns at the typical American university are similar). Even if 75% of our theoretical capacity slipped through our fingers, thats still harnessing many thousands of times more useful work out of those boxes than we were getting before we implemented the computer grid.
Actually, due to innovations like the 401K plan with matching contributions, corporations have more owners than ever. The investor class now includes over a third of the country (or half of the households) and its growing fast.
The name means "Sulfur Island" and they didn't just decide to name it after an element because the cool names were already taken. Due to volcanic activity, the place constantly smells like rotten eggs, and looks like Hell relocated to the central Pacific. That was BEFORE the US and Japan fought a major battle over it, littering the place with unexploded ordinance (grandpa did his part cleaning it up, bringing two live artillery shells to his house as souvenirs, where they stayed undisturbed until he died... we then had to call the Chicago bomb squad twice in one week after we found them in the basement). Its still in a vaguely decent geostrategic position, but anything else you'd use an island in the Pacific (tourism, etc) for can be done better at Okinawa or Hawaii, or for that matter just about anywhere other than Iwo.
Or, you could buy a Windows machine, and still get the iTunes & etc line for free. Apple went to the trouble of porting them for the 90% of the world that doesn't use their hardware.
Of course, he DOES have a reputation for hiring talent :) My guess is his personal security is a lot like a better paid version of the Secret Service.
1. Create time machine. 2. Cause this article to become a dupe, triggering bickering hordes of ./ians to descend on the world.
3. ???
4. Profit!
I'm in Japan in a guild with 20 Aussies, the only one who has trouble is the one stuck with that government semi-monopoly as his ISP. You probably know the name better than I do. Although I don't really understand how its a semi-monopoly if one out of twenty has it... then again, I can appreciate with 2000ms pings why nineteen out of twenty would find somebody else.
And be a square? Never!
This means those Indiana legislators who decided pi = 3 must be pretty happy.
Its easy for those of us who live in the Western world, where food comes from the supermarket, to say "Hey, thats mildly amusing and useful in no practical way -- why not throw it back?" Would you say the same if it required that *your* kids not have dinner that night?
Bonus nerd points for anyone who catches the reference.
Anyhow, the Bandit was pretty cheap. I recall them saying it was $5,000 for all the electronics and $40,000 for the booster -- "It would be the cheapest thing on the shuttle at those prices", quoting the professor.
>>the fact that languages like java allow poor coders to produce code that kind of works rather than total failures probablly doesn't help the languages reputation either.>> As opposed to C++, which really separates the men from the boys when it fails totally transparently due to a pointer error several years after the product has shipped, resulting in 100,000 boxes getting owned. Good thing seg faults have long since chased all of the non-serious developers away from the language, so we have only our l33t hackers creating buffer overruns for our other l33t hackers to patch. >>and who would seriously wan't to release thier software as java bytecode when jad is arround?[sic]>> I'd imagine anyone who is big enough on open software to winge about not having a free-as-in-speech runtime environment (despite having free-as-in-beer ones readily available) wouldn't be too worried about the possibility of someone seeing, gasp, their source code.