"I don't know how they make money off of advertising their own service in the beginning of the song."
Presumably, their intent is to get buzz now, get bought out later, and then get rich selling ads from real companies. That's basically the business model of every significant Internet startup.
As someone marginally involved with the project (my wife is Illah's student), I thought I might clear up some confusion that I've seen in the comments so far.
First of all, the writeup focuses a lot on the funding from Microsoft, Google, and Intel, but in reality these robots' hardware and software are being designed at Carnegie Mellon. Specifically, Microsoft isn't involved with any of the programming and design. The robots indeed run Linux, not Windows. They're not using the MS robotics studio to develop the robot.
This robot is primarily geared toward education: interesting kids in science and robotics. The project lead (Illah Nourbakhsh) has extensive experience creating science museum exhibits, tour-guide robots, and other forms of human-robot interaction. The networking functionality allows users to teleoperate the robot easily from a web browser.
Right now, the project has obtained funding for curriculum development, integrating the TeRK into beginning computer science courses at the junior college and university levels, in order to increase the appeal of computer science to people who might not otherwise be interested in the field.
See section 5 of their whitepaper for a full analysis -- but basically this allows for versioning and interface-definition changes. They can roll out changes to the interfaces in an incremental manner because the servers can robustly deal with new clients that send unexpected fields and old clients that neglect to send expected fields.
In other news, Carnegie Mellon researchers know more about statistics than you give them credit for; blame ComputerWorld for crappy coverage of what the paper says. If you read the paper or the abstract, the researchers actually claim the opposite of what you are suggesting, namely, that the "infant mortality effect" (bathtub curve) often claimed for hard drives isn't actually the case. See Figure 4 in the paper and Section 5 ("Statistical properties of disk failures"). The paper is online here:
How sad is it when a non-scientist is presented with evidence of a phenomenon for the millionth time and rather than saying "maybe these scientists are on to something after all" says "this must be religion striking yet again"?
Re:Sounds good, a quasi Wikipedia like development
on
Everybody Votes on the Wii
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Everybody Votes is unique in that it really is a game. You don't just vote, you also make predictions on how other people will vote. You get scored for "distance from popular opinion" and for your prediction accuracy.
Of course, like Brain Age or Wii Fitness scores, the values reported make no sense... I'm currently 290 meters away from popular opinion. What the heck does that mean?
The simplest solution may be an economic one: ITMS could charge something like $100 per album upload. Then a band would actually have to consider whether it's likely that their tracks will get a couple hundred downloads. It's not a perfect solution, but it'd probably weed out about 75-90% of the crap.
In addition to the fact that European spaghetti dates to 300 BC, there's also controversy over whether Marco Polo ever went to China at all. Polo's famous book about his travels never mentioned any Chinese place names, the Chinese style of writing, chopsticks, or woodblock printing. The Chinese bureaucrats never recorded his presence, despite recording the presence of other Westerners who had been to China (Polo was not the first Westerner in China, but he was the first to write a book about it). Many modern scholars think that Polo perhaps ended up in the Middle East, and wrote the book about China based on third-hand knowledge he heard from Persians or Arabs there.
Somebody already mentioned Player/Stage; there is also Pyro, a framework for developing robotics code in Python. Pyro is open-source and geared toward educational purposes.
I owned the previous version of this -- the Sony Librie. The screen is about the size of a paperback. I think adding a backlight to a screen this size would suck a lot of power, and also add significantly to the manufacturing cost and weight. I never found myself wanting a backlight, as the screen contrast is so good that I can read it in very dim light. Unlike an LCD screen, shining a bright light on it doesn't wash it out, so I could see a market for a detachable "front light". But backlighting the screen seems like overengineering the problem when you can get yourself a book lamp for $5-10 that will work just as well.
If you've not seen an E-Ink screen in person, don't try to tell others what the Reader does or doesn't need; the screen is amazing, I was floored when I first saw it.
Many of the Creative Commons licenses are more useful for non-software creative works. They have a wide variety of licenses, including "share-alike" (similar to the GPL), "attribution required" (similar to BSD), and so on. The GFDL is also meant for "documentation", but I personally don't like it (the bit about "invariant sections" is very crufty.)
"The parable describes a shopkeeper whose window is broken by a little boy. Everyone sympathizes with the man whose window was broken, but pretty soon they start to suggest that the broken window makes work for the glazier, who will then buy bread, benefitting the baker, who will then buy shoes, benefitting the cobbler, etc. Finally, the onlookers conclude that the little boy was not guilty of vandalism; instead he was a public benefactor, creating economic benefits for everyone in town. The fallacy of the onlookers' argument is that they considered the positive benefits of purchasing a new window, but they ignored the hidden costs to the shopkeeper and others. He was forced to spend his money on a new window, and therefore could not have spent it on something else. Perhaps he was going to buy bread, benefitting the baker, who would then have bought shoes, etc., but instead he was forced to buy a window. Instead of a window and bread, he had only a window. Or perhaps he would have bought a new shirt, benefitting the tailor; in that case the glazier's gain was the tailor's loss, and again the shopkeeper has only a window instead of a window and a shirt. The child did not bring any net benefit to the town. Instead, he made the town poorer by the value of one window."
This is already possible -- in fact, it is already done in Maine and Nebraska. Each individual state decides for itself how its electoral votes are spent. In Maine and Nebraska, the winner of the congressional district receives one electoral vote; the two remaining votes are given to the plurality winner of the whole state. This method has been used in Maine since 1972 and Nebraska since 1996, though neither has ever actually split its electoral votes.
So if you like this system, lobby your state government to enact something like it, not the federal government.
The ESP Game (http://www.espgame.org) has been on the web for a couple years now. It pairs you up with a random partner, and your goal is to type the same words as your partner in response to a series of pictures. It's a rather fun game that has convinced some users that they really do have ESP. (The real purpose of the ESP Game is not to discover users' latent psychic abilities, but to utilize human processing power to label images on the Web.)
"create non privliged testuser account on your linux (or other non standard OS) box"
Better idea... use any live CD, and make sure that it doesn't mount any of your real hard drives before you plug the USB stick in. For more paranoia, use Anonym.OS, the OpenBSD live CD: http://kaos.to/cms/content/view/14/32/. For maximum paranoia, unplug your hard drives entirely before booting the CD... maybe the stick exploits a security vulnerability in your live CD to gain root access and mount your hard drives.
Some better photos can be found here, along with a video. Unfortunately the video seems to show the vortex from its side rather than the top. Pretty cool though!
Some quick examples in Python (not fully tested, but this is the basic idea):
bufferedFile = open("foo.txt", buffering=True) # or specify an integer if you want to manually set the buffer size
sock = socket.socket() # then set it up objectReader = pickle.Unpickler(gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=sock)) obj1 = objectReader.load() obj2 = objectReader.load()...
I will admit that setting up the socket in Python follows a painful, C-like method (bind(), connect(), etc.); however, for any real networking application, you'd probably be using the Twisted library anyways, which does a whole lot more.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I did that earlier today when I saw this story on Reddit.
Why use UAC when a much more intuitive sudo interface has already been developed?
"I don't know how they make money off of advertising their own service in the beginning of the song."
Presumably, their intent is to get buzz now, get bought out later, and then get rich selling ads from real companies. That's basically the business model of every significant Internet startup.
As someone marginally involved with the project (my wife is Illah's student), I thought I might clear up some confusion that I've seen in the comments so far.
First of all, the writeup focuses a lot on the funding from Microsoft, Google, and Intel, but in reality these robots' hardware and software are being designed at Carnegie Mellon. Specifically, Microsoft isn't involved with any of the programming and design. The robots indeed run Linux, not Windows. They're not using the MS robotics studio to develop the robot.
This robot is primarily geared toward education: interesting kids in science and robotics. The project lead (Illah Nourbakhsh) has extensive experience creating science museum exhibits, tour-guide robots, and other forms of human-robot interaction. The networking functionality allows users to teleoperate the robot easily from a web browser.
Right now, the project has obtained funding for curriculum development, integrating the TeRK into beginning computer science courses at the junior college and university levels, in order to increase the appeal of computer science to people who might not otherwise be interested in the field.
"We have no details, but if we did, they'd be wrong anyway!"
See section 5 of their whitepaper for a full analysis -- but basically this allows for versioning and interface-definition changes. They can roll out changes to the interfaces in an incremental manner because the servers can robustly deal with new clients that send unexpected fields and old clients that neglect to send expected fields.
dontthinkofthechildren
This is handled in the paper. See this graph: http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder /schroeder_html/img14b.PNG
Unfortunately there is no big "spike"; the average replacement rate just grows and grows with time.
In other news, Carnegie Mellon researchers know more about statistics than you give them credit for; blame ComputerWorld for crappy coverage of what the paper says. If you read the paper or the abstract, the researchers actually claim the opposite of what you are suggesting, namely, that the "infant mortality effect" (bathtub curve) often claimed for hard drives isn't actually the case. See Figure 4 in the paper and Section 5 ("Statistical properties of disk failures"). The paper is online here:
r /schroeder_html/index.html
http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroede
How sad is it when a non-scientist is presented with evidence of a phenomenon for the millionth time and rather than saying "maybe these scientists are on to something after all" says "this must be religion striking yet again"?
Everybody Votes is unique in that it really is a game. You don't just vote, you also make predictions on how other people will vote. You get scored for "distance from popular opinion" and for your prediction accuracy.
Of course, like Brain Age or Wii Fitness scores, the values reported make no sense... I'm currently 290 meters away from popular opinion. What the heck does that mean?
The simplest solution may be an economic one: ITMS could charge something like $100 per album upload. Then a band would actually have to consider whether it's likely that their tracks will get a couple hundred downloads. It's not a perfect solution, but it'd probably weed out about 75-90% of the crap.
In addition to the fact that European spaghetti dates to 300 BC, there's also controversy over whether Marco Polo ever went to China at all. Polo's famous book about his travels never mentioned any Chinese place names, the Chinese style of writing, chopsticks, or woodblock printing. The Chinese bureaucrats never recorded his presence, despite recording the presence of other Westerners who had been to China (Polo was not the first Westerner in China, but he was the first to write a book about it). Many modern scholars think that Polo perhaps ended up in the Middle East, and wrote the book about China based on third-hand knowledge he heard from Persians or Arabs there.
-1, humor not appreciated
Somebody already mentioned Player/Stage; there is also Pyro, a framework for developing robotics code in Python. Pyro is open-source and geared toward educational purposes.
I owned the previous version of this -- the Sony Librie. The screen is about the size of a paperback. I think adding a backlight to a screen this size would suck a lot of power, and also add significantly to the manufacturing cost and weight. I never found myself wanting a backlight, as the screen contrast is so good that I can read it in very dim light. Unlike an LCD screen, shining a bright light on it doesn't wash it out, so I could see a market for a detachable "front light". But backlighting the screen seems like overengineering the problem when you can get yourself a book lamp for $5-10 that will work just as well.
If you've not seen an E-Ink screen in person, don't try to tell others what the Reader does or doesn't need; the screen is amazing, I was floored when I first saw it.
Many of the Creative Commons licenses are more useful for non-software creative works. They have a wide variety of licenses, including "share-alike" (similar to the GPL), "attribution required" (similar to BSD), and so on. The GFDL is also meant for "documentation", but I personally don't like it (the bit about "invariant sections" is very crufty.)
See www.creativecommons.org for more info.
Urban legend -- albatrosses sleep on the surface, not in flight.
_ and_flight
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albatross#Morphology
This sort of reasoning is known as "the fallacy of the broken window". The wiki says it better than I can:
n _window
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broke
"The parable describes a shopkeeper whose window is broken by a little boy. Everyone sympathizes with the man whose window was broken, but pretty soon they start to suggest that the broken window makes work for the glazier, who will then buy bread, benefitting the baker, who will then buy shoes, benefitting the cobbler, etc. Finally, the onlookers conclude that the little boy was not guilty of vandalism; instead he was a public benefactor, creating economic benefits for everyone in town. The fallacy of the onlookers' argument is that they considered the positive benefits of purchasing a new window, but they ignored the hidden costs to the shopkeeper and others. He was forced to spend his money on a new window, and therefore could not have spent it on something else. Perhaps he was going to buy bread, benefitting the baker, who would then have bought shoes, etc., but instead he was forced to buy a window. Instead of a window and bread, he had only a window. Or perhaps he would have bought a new shirt, benefitting the tailor; in that case the glazier's gain was the tailor's loss, and again the shopkeeper has only a window instead of a window and a shirt. The child did not bring any net benefit to the town. Instead, he made the town poorer by the value of one window."
This is already possible -- in fact, it is already done in Maine and Nebraska. Each individual state decides for itself how its electoral votes are spent. In Maine and Nebraska, the winner of the congressional district receives one electoral vote; the two remaining votes are given to the plurality winner of the whole state. This method has been used in Maine since 1972 and Nebraska since 1996, though neither has ever actually split its electoral votes.
So if you like this system, lobby your state government to enact something like it, not the federal government.
The ESP Game (http://www.espgame.org) has been on the web for a couple years now. It pairs you up with a random partner, and your goal is to type the same words as your partner in response to a series of pictures. It's a rather fun game that has convinced some users that they really do have ESP. (The real purpose of the ESP Game is not to discover users' latent psychic abilities, but to utilize human processing power to label images on the Web.)
This "article" is mostly a waste of space, but the clue spray http://darkcreek.com/detective_equipment/clue_spra y.htm made me chuckle. Favorite equipment of BOFHs everywhere?
"create non privliged testuser account on your linux (or other non standard OS) box"
Better idea... use any live CD, and make sure that it doesn't mount any of your real hard drives before you plug the USB stick in. For more paranoia, use Anonym.OS, the OpenBSD live CD: http://kaos.to/cms/content/view/14/32/. For maximum paranoia, unplug your hard drives entirely before booting the CD... maybe the stick exploits a security vulnerability in your live CD to gain root access and mount your hard drives.
Some better photos can be found here, along with a video. Unfortunately the video seems to show the vortex from its side rather than the top. Pretty cool though!
http://dcwww.camp.dtu.dk/~tbohr/RotatingPolygon/
Some quick examples in Python (not fully tested, but this is the basic idea):
...
bufferedFile = open("foo.txt", buffering=True) # or specify an integer if you want to manually set the buffer size
sock = socket.socket() # then set it up
objectReader = pickle.Unpickler(gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=sock))
obj1 = objectReader.load()
obj2 = objectReader.load()
I will admit that setting up the socket in Python follows a painful, C-like method (bind(), connect(), etc.); however, for any real networking application, you'd probably be using the Twisted library anyways, which does a whole lot more.