Speeds in the NQE event were limited by DARPA. They hand us a file containing waypoints, speeds, and track widths that we're limited to. Go too fast or wander outside the gates and they penalize you. The speeds at the NQE event are not representative of what you'll get to see once the robots are in the open desert.
Highlander's record time was only 7 seconds slower than the "course ideal" that you could expect to get if you went exactly the speed limit all the way around. In fact, we were scolded by DARPA for pushing the speed limit to get that time. They didn't think we could do it without speeding.
I know Mark very well. We went to high school and college together.
He's an extremely bright, motivated guy who gave up a very well paying job at Microsoft go to work for Google.
He's told me that Google has no formal written policy on blogging. He didn't say anything bad about the company. They simply took issue with the fact he was saying anything at all.
About ten years ago, my father ran a household server with a 7-disk SCSI array acquired from work in his basement workshop. It was heated, but since it was in the basement and he did a lot of woodwork, it was very dusty.
We'd have to clean out the case every month or two to keep the dust down to a reasonable level. Eventually the dust began creeping into the drives and every time we powered down the array, one of the platters would seize up and we'd lose that drive.
I was in HKN at the University of Michigan. Joining was one of the best decisions I made while I was there.
We did various service projects, provided tutoring, and ran a snack bar in the EECS building. It was also great for job networking - at each bi-weekly meeting we'd have a member of the industry come give a talk and it gave you a chance to hand out resumes and build your contacts.
What was interesting was that since we were a social and service society selected from the top students of our university, the "nerd factor" was actually very low. Everybody was friendly and outgoing and we drank a lot of beer.
Hardware companies PAY PEOPLE to write drivers for their "state-of-the-art" hardware.
The Linux devs were lucky if they could get technical docs, let alone support from the hardware manufacturers. Things are a bit harder when you have to reverse-engineer everything.
Things are a lot better now, except for the video card market. The competition is so tight there that the last thing they want is an open-source driver.
About 7 years ago I started playing with Linux. About 5 years ago I deleted my last Windows partition.
I started using Linux because I wanted something more stable and open than Windows. I grew to love it. I discovered I could work faster and more efficiently with it. I loved mucking about its insides and tweaking things to work better.
Its like asking somebody "What makes you stay with your wife?". Well duh, you've never found anything better than your wife and you couldn't imagine life without it. Thats how Linux is.
Like everybody else, I've accumulated a lot of random old computer hardware (Yes, I really do need those old ISA video cards. I've also decided that if left in the same box long enough cards breed. I now have 3 original SoundBlaster Live! cards when I've only bought one).
Last summer I went to California for 8 months to intern. While I was gone, my father inventoried all my old hardware for me. Sent me spreadsheets full of listed items so I could decide what to keep, what to sell, and what to donate. All the things he couldn't identify he spread out on the floor and sent digital photos of. I'd load them up in The Gimp, draw a red X on top of each thing to get rid of, and mail it back.
Then he eBayed all the extra stuff and sent me the money. All the stuff I decided to keep he placed in neatly labeled Tupperware boxes in my closet, with all the cords velcro-strapped and sorted into ziplock bags.
However, he did manage to take back all the hardware I've "borrowed" from him over the last 22 years...
Back in the days before half the world knew the internet existed, there used to be a website that was chock full of this stuff. I think it was called the "Death Museum"
They listed photos and videos of famous suicides, grotesque battlefields, and gruesome accidents.
They even claimed to have a photo of Kurt Cobain post-shotgun. Not that there was really much left to confirm it with.
Here in the Detroit area we have a company called Technical Youth that hires up high school and college techies and farms them out as temp work. Looks like good money.
I second his opinion. I've got a JVDS server and I'm currently running 3 sites off it. Its been great.
And Rus kicks ass. There's nothing quite as convenient as having tech support available over AIM... And he even answers "I'm stupid and can't figure out how to configure BIND" questions without grumbling too much.
I see no reason to fight with MythTV when I can hack my Tivo Series 1 into something much better than a Myth box.
Cost: $120 for a refurbished Tivo Series 1 $70 (at discount) for a 120gb Western Digital drive. $10 for a round double-connector IDE cable for the second hard drive. I like round cables, so shoot me. $70 for a 9thTee.com "TurboNet" 100bt Tivo Ethernet card ------ = $270 for a 246 hour PVR I can access remotely from the internet (TivoWeb), extract video from, and hack to my hearts content.
And its well worth $15/mo for me not to have to deal with a flaky PVR.
And theres a reason why TiVo has such a lock on the market. They've spent so much on UI development and Human Factors that the interface is unbeatable. I've used MythTV. Its nice, but it just can't touch the TiVo.
I worked under the table (tax-free) as a tech at a local shady computer shop. It was great... the money was good, the work was easy, and I got to make my own hours.
One day I came into work and noticed that my time card wasn't there anymore. I went to my boss to ask for a new one. He told me that I wasn't required anymore, and that I should go talk to the secretary and collect my last paycheck.
I was nice enough not to tattle about the fact that he'd been having us install unlicensed copies of Windows 95 when we ran out of license slips. Or about all the stolen laptops he fenced and resold.
Its not *completely* custom, but IBM doesn't publish its full laptop lineup. If you call them up and find a human to talk to (at least if you're an employee), you can tell them what you're looking for and they'll find a base system that fits and then customize the components to match your needs.
For example, did you know you can get the Thinkpad X31 (their top of the line ultralight) with the high resolution screen that you usually only find on the R series? Throw in a high-capacity battery, 802.11g mini-PCI card, and max out the memory and hard drive, and you've got a pretty sweet machine
Step on board the hottest racing boats and you'll see as much or more carbon fiber, kevlar, and titanium as in any F1 car.
Boats are entirely CAD designed, virtually tow-tested inside super computers, and individual carbon and kevlar fibers laid along stress lines to control flex and structure while minimizing weight. Imagine building an F1 car or a bridge with a safety factor of 1.5 or less... thats what sailboat designers do every day. Americas Cup racers have hulls that weigh the same as a VW Beetle, but support 100 foot masts and keels that weigh 15,000 lbs. Hundreds of millions of dollars go into researching hull and foil shapes.
Then look at the sails. No self-respecting racer leaves the dock without a full suit of Kevlar, PBO, or carbon fiber sails. Sails are constructed on 3D molds that form perfect airfoils, and robots lay individual fibers so the sails keep that perfect shape.
And of course the hardware. Every ounce of weight you can remove from a yacht improves its chance of winning, so blocks (pulleys) and winches are made from titanium or even more carbon fiber. Imagine the engineering that goes into making a 150 foot carbon fiber mast less than a foot in diameter stay up under tens of thousands of pounds of load (and many many times that amount in SHOCK loads), while still leaving it flexible enough to be tweaked and tuned to maximize the performance of the sails.
Oh yes, and electronics. Modern race boats are wired from end to end like F1 cars, with load cells, weather instruments, GPS, and gyrocompasses. Race teams use doppler RADAR, LIDAR, and supercomputer weather models to predict the wind for any given race.
And all so we can go sail in circles chasing some crazy trophy.
I was having a tough time finding internships despite a ton of interviews and a great resume, when a family friend of ours, a recruiter from IBM, suggested I try and pursue a CoOp opportunity. Now I'm up for two Co-Op's at IBM, with one offer and another in the works.
Works out fine for me because I was already a term ahead, so it really doesn't push me that far behind. Its a good opportunity, because employers aren't afraid to give you REAL work to do, because you'll be there a full 6-8 months, instead of just 3. It pays better too!
I work for a large university doing some part time development. My boss and I like to come up with fun names for our projects.
My favorite is "NASTI" - The Nightly Apache STatistical Information generator. Its a big name for a pretty simple perl script that uses Sawmill to parse Apache logs into pretty looking statistics pages.
My boss' pet project is "Dominate"... The name has almost nothing to do with the project.
Linux is Dead, and RMS is the Walrus
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 1
Great... now I have to play my whole mp3 collection backwards to hear all the damn hidden messages...
I've had many an IBM Thinkpad (701, 750C, 720?, i1721, and now a 600E), every one with Linux on it, and every one worked like a charm.
You can't beat IBM for laptops. Look at the X-Series or the older 240/240x.
Watch it! Its an awesome documentary.
on
Revolution OS
·
· Score: 1
Every computer user should watch it, regardless in whether or not they belive in open source software. I watched it with my father, the stereotypical "corporate weenie" (Hes worked for IBM for 30 years, hes an exec, made his life and money on selling non-free software). We turned the 80 min documentary into a 3 hour debate/discussion on software and the history of computing. And we realized that the "corporate weenie" and the "linux biggot" have much in common. Watch it! And soon!
They really should put it in RealVideo or something on the web.
Slashdot Mirror
Speeds in the NQE event were limited by DARPA. They hand us a file containing waypoints, speeds, and track widths that we're limited to. Go too fast or wander outside the gates and they penalize you. The speeds at the NQE event are not representative of what you'll get to see once the robots are in the open desert.
Highlander's record time was only 7 seconds slower than the "course ideal" that you could expect to get if you went exactly the speed limit all the way around. In fact, we were scolded by DARPA for pushing the speed limit to get that time. They didn't think we could do it without speeding.
I know Mark very well. We went to high school and college together.
He's an extremely bright, motivated guy who gave up a very well paying job at Microsoft go to work for Google.
He's told me that Google has no formal written policy on blogging. He didn't say anything bad about the company. They simply took issue with the fact he was saying anything at all.
Go read his blog before you criticize him.
A short blurb on how they did the popcorn house in Real Genius can be found at:
.
http://www.vkn.com/movies/realgenius/science.html
Scroll down to #15
About ten years ago, my father ran a household server with a 7-disk SCSI array acquired from work in his basement workshop. It was heated, but since it was in the basement and he did a lot of woodwork, it was very dusty.
We'd have to clean out the case every month or two to keep the dust down to a reasonable level. Eventually the dust began creeping into the drives and every time we powered down the array, one of the platters would seize up and we'd lose that drive.
I second that
I was in HKN at the University of Michigan. Joining was one of the best decisions I made while I was there.
We did various service projects, provided tutoring, and ran a snack bar in the EECS building. It was also great for job networking - at each bi-weekly meeting we'd have a member of the industry come give a talk and it gave you a chance to hand out resumes and build your contacts.
What was interesting was that since we were a social and service society selected from the top students of our university, the "nerd factor" was actually very low. Everybody was friendly and outgoing and we drank a lot of beer.
Thats what 802.11b was invented for, right?
Ok I just lost 40 minutes of productivity to that website.
That shit is cool. Somebody needs to set up a military "fantasy camp" where you can go play soldier with that stuff for a week or so.
You're forgetting something...
Hardware companies PAY PEOPLE to write drivers for their "state-of-the-art" hardware.
The Linux devs were lucky if they could get technical docs, let alone support from the hardware manufacturers. Things are a bit harder when you have to reverse-engineer everything.
Things are a lot better now, except for the video card market. The competition is so tight there that the last thing they want is an open-source driver.
About 7 years ago I started playing with Linux. About 5 years ago I deleted my last Windows partition.
I started using Linux because I wanted something more stable and open than Windows. I grew to love it. I discovered I could work faster and more efficiently with it. I loved mucking about its insides and tweaking things to work better.
Its like asking somebody "What makes you stay with your wife?". Well duh, you've never found anything better than your wife and you couldn't imagine life without it. Thats how Linux is.
Like everybody else, I've accumulated a lot of random old computer hardware (Yes, I really do need those old ISA video cards. I've also decided that if left in the same box long enough cards breed. I now have 3 original SoundBlaster Live! cards when I've only bought one).
Last summer I went to California for 8 months to intern. While I was gone, my father inventoried all my old hardware for me. Sent me spreadsheets full of listed items so I could decide what to keep, what to sell, and what to donate. All the things he couldn't identify he spread out on the floor and sent digital photos of. I'd load them up in The Gimp, draw a red X on top of each thing to get rid of, and mail it back.
Then he eBayed all the extra stuff and sent me the money. All the stuff I decided to keep he placed in neatly labeled Tupperware boxes in my closet, with all the cords velcro-strapped and sorted into ziplock bags.
However, he did manage to take back all the hardware I've "borrowed" from him over the last 22 years...
Back in the days before half the world knew the internet existed, there used to be a website that was chock full of this stuff. I think it was called the "Death Museum"
They listed photos and videos of famous suicides, grotesque battlefields, and gruesome accidents.
They even claimed to have a photo of Kurt Cobain post-shotgun. Not that there was really much left to confirm it with.
Here in the Detroit area we have a company called Technical Youth that hires up high school and college techies and farms them out as temp work. Looks like good money.
Drink lots of it. I'd suggest at least 6 of them, within a half hour of going to bed.
Hard liquor also works well, and you won't have to climb out of the loft as much during the night.
I second his opinion. I've got a JVDS server and I'm currently running 3 sites off it. Its been great.
And Rus kicks ass. There's nothing quite as convenient as having tech support available over AIM... And he even answers "I'm stupid and can't figure out how to configure BIND" questions without grumbling too much.
I see no reason to fight with MythTV when I can hack my Tivo Series 1 into something much better than a Myth box.
Cost:
$120 for a refurbished Tivo Series 1
$70 (at discount) for a 120gb Western Digital drive.
$10 for a round double-connector IDE cable for the second hard drive. I like round cables, so shoot me.
$70 for a 9thTee.com "TurboNet" 100bt Tivo Ethernet card
------
= $270 for a 246 hour PVR I can access remotely from the internet (TivoWeb), extract video from, and hack to my hearts content.
And its well worth $15/mo for me not to have to deal with a flaky PVR.
And theres a reason why TiVo has such a lock on the market. They've spent so much on UI development and Human Factors that the interface is unbeatable. I've used MythTV. Its nice, but it just can't touch the TiVo.
I worked under the table (tax-free) as a tech at a local shady computer shop. It was great... the money was good, the work was easy, and I got to make my own hours.
One day I came into work and noticed that my time card wasn't there anymore. I went to my boss to ask for a new one. He told me that I wasn't required anymore, and that I should go talk to the secretary and collect my last paycheck.
I was nice enough not to tattle about the fact that he'd been having us install unlicensed copies of Windows 95 when we ran out of license slips. Or about all the stolen laptops he fenced and resold.
Its not *completely* custom, but IBM doesn't publish its full laptop lineup. If you call them up and find a human to talk to (at least if you're an employee), you can tell them what you're looking for and they'll find a base system that fits and then customize the components to match your needs.
For example, did you know you can get the Thinkpad X31 (their top of the line ultralight) with the high resolution screen that you usually only find on the R series? Throw in a high-capacity battery, 802.11g mini-PCI card, and max out the memory and hard drive, and you've got a pretty sweet machine
Yes, go ahead, laugh.
Step on board the hottest racing boats and you'll see as much or more carbon fiber, kevlar, and titanium as in any F1 car.
Boats are entirely CAD designed, virtually tow-tested inside super computers, and individual carbon and kevlar fibers laid along stress lines to control flex and structure while minimizing weight. Imagine building an F1 car or a bridge with a safety factor of 1.5 or less... thats what sailboat designers do every day. Americas Cup racers have hulls that weigh the same as a VW Beetle, but support 100 foot masts and keels that weigh 15,000 lbs. Hundreds of millions of dollars go into researching hull and foil shapes.
Then look at the sails. No self-respecting racer leaves the dock without a full suit of Kevlar, PBO, or carbon fiber sails. Sails are constructed on 3D molds that form perfect airfoils, and robots lay individual fibers so the sails keep that perfect shape.
And of course the hardware. Every ounce of weight you can remove from a yacht improves its chance of winning, so blocks (pulleys) and winches are made from titanium or even more carbon fiber. Imagine the engineering that goes into making a 150 foot carbon fiber mast less than a foot in diameter stay up under tens of thousands of pounds of load (and many many times that amount in SHOCK loads), while still leaving it flexible enough to be tweaked and tuned to maximize the performance of the sails.
Oh yes, and electronics. Modern race boats are wired from end to end like F1 cars, with load cells, weather instruments, GPS, and gyrocompasses. Race teams use doppler RADAR, LIDAR, and supercomputer weather models to predict the wind for any given race.
And all so we can go sail in circles chasing some crazy trophy.
I was having a tough time finding internships despite a ton of interviews and a great resume, when a family friend of ours, a recruiter from IBM, suggested I try and pursue a CoOp opportunity. Now I'm up for two Co-Op's at IBM, with one offer and another in the works.
Works out fine for me because I was already a term ahead, so it really doesn't push me that far behind. Its a good opportunity, because employers aren't afraid to give you REAL work to do, because you'll be there a full 6-8 months, instead of just 3. It pays better too!
So think about it...
I work for a large university doing some part time development. My boss and I like to come up with fun names for our projects.
My favorite is "NASTI" - The Nightly Apache STatistical Information generator. Its a big name for a pretty simple perl script that uses Sawmill to parse Apache logs into pretty looking statistics pages.
My boss' pet project is "Dominate"... The name has almost nothing to do with the project.
Great... now I have to play my whole mp3 collection backwards to hear all the damn hidden messages...
I've had many an IBM Thinkpad (701, 750C, 720?, i1721, and now a 600E), every one with Linux on it, and every one worked like a charm.
You can't beat IBM for laptops. Look at the X-Series or the older 240/240x.
Every computer user should watch it, regardless in whether or not they belive in open source software. I watched it with my father, the stereotypical "corporate weenie" (Hes worked for IBM for 30 years, hes an exec, made his life and money on selling non-free software). We turned the 80 min documentary into a 3 hour debate/discussion on software and the history of computing. And we realized that the "corporate weenie" and the "linux biggot" have much in common. Watch it! And soon!
They really should put it in RealVideo or something on the web.
One of my friend bought my gf socks with PENGUINS on them because she thought it would spice up our sex life...
She wears them all the time, and we have a lot of sex, so I guess it works!
Geek's in love, ain't it sweet?