Robotics is advancing in leaps and bounds, but it's happening in places that probably aren't visible to you in your daily life.
I was recently at the SAE World Congress tradeshow in Detroit. While I was there, I saw a robot that knocked my socks off.
The automotive industry uses a lot of robots, but most of them are basically clockwork devices - they repeat a series of operations. Move arm to this co-ordinate, active spot welder for 2 seconds, move to different co-ordinate, activate welder, withdraw arm and wait for next cycle. Etc.
Aside from some basic safety and maintainence self-checks, there's no decision making here. If. for example, you chage the part on the line without changing the program on the robot, you'll get a "crash" when the robot attempts to move through space already occupied by the part.
But I saw a new robot on display that had some decision-making properties. It had a camera system and a visual recognition program, such that it could recognise the shape and orientation of the part. On this particular model, it was pulling cylinder heads (a great big aluminum casting) off a rack and placing them on the engine block. The postitions of the head and block - which normally would have to be fixtured in place - could vary in 3D space, and the robot would self-align and pick it up/put it down anyway. And we're talking about variances on the order of inches, not thousandths of an inch.
This is a robot that could be fit into a production line originally designed for humans. You don't need to construct special tooling for your whole line to make the robot work possible.
It may not sound like much... but this is a huge step forward.
Further developments in robotics will probably follow similar lines. With time, special-purpose robots get more general-purpose. Eventually, the "general-purpose" toolbox will get large enough to accomodate human-ish robots.
There's PLENTY to lose by "assuming [human-caused] global warming is real" because the actions taken to rectify the greenhouse gas "problem" diverts time, energy, and money away from less sexy problems that may have much greater impact on our lives.
For example, mercury emissions from power plants and other industrial processes are poisoning real people, NOW - mercury accumulates in fish and makes them toxic - but that gets a tiny fraction of the time and attention that it deserves.
And stop picking on SUVs. They may be the vehicle of choice of Yuppie Scum, but modern examples get decent gas milage and thanks to the latest generation cat converters and emissions hardware/software, produce tiny fractions of the noxious crap that used to come out of cars. In some places, the tailpipe emissions from an SUV is cleaner than the ambiant air.
The whole Global Warming thing is akin to standing on a train track, screaming that if a train comes you'll be killed (even though there's no train in sight) all the while ignoring the tiger that is busy munching on your leg. There's bigger problems to deal with right now.
You're brushing up against the truth... and I hope you get a chance to read this before the roving eye of Slashdot moves on.
You have to remember that people of pre-modern times were 1) every bit as intelligent as modern humans and 2) DEEPLY religeous, on a scale that (mostly) no longer exists.
This gets mentioned briefly late in Con-fusion, when (parphrased from memory) Newton says he cannot be as wise or skilled (read as "intelligent") as King Solomon, as the Bible says that Solomon was the wisest man to ever be. The Bible is literal truth, ergo, Newton must be less wise than Solomon. Collorary - technology PEAKED with Solomon, and has been degrading ever since.
Now I don't think this _exact_ line of reasoning was the common prevailing opinion of the time... but it IS true that "old" was considered better than "new", and for religeous reasons. The world had been created perfect, and then Man corrupted it, and all had been decaying ever since.
As such, the only place to look for "new" knowledge was in old books - to recover information previously lost.
(And to a Europe slowly recovering from the Dark Ages, where much had indeed been lost and where conditions in general HAD worsened over a long period of time, there would be much recent evidence supporting this position)
However, around about the time of the Enlightenment (when these books are set), there was a sea change in people's perceptions. Mankind was NOT in a state of perpetual decay; the "ancients" had NOT known everything - rather, the opposite: mankind was slowly lifting himself out of the swamp, and the ancients had known mostly nothing. Darwin put the capstone on this....
This opinion isn't just revolutionary, it's the sort of thing that gets men labeled "heretics" - and THAT can get you tortured and killed! (NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!) And even if you are not afraid at being burned at the stake, for someone so deeply religeous as pretty much everybody was at the time, it must have been a tremendous internal struggle to find that your work and findings contradicted the Church's teachings.
I know it's a very alien mindset to what we have today, but probably the single biggest concept to come out of this period in time was the very *possibility* that new knowledge capable of being worked out from first principles.
I found it to be much faster paced than QS, and there are less technical asides - something that I actually missed a little.
I also thought it was a lot funnier too. If you liked the ostritch scene in QS, there's more of the same in CF.
And - without giving anything away - there are some payoffs to be had in CF, rather than being forced to wait to the last chapter of the last volume to get those payoffs. Some subplots actually END.
Stick with it and I'm sure you won't regret the decision.
I used to work for DaimlerChrysler IS/ITM up until fairly recently.
DISCLAIMER: It's a big company. I couldn't possibly have been aware of everything going on there.
That being said... SCO targeting DCX makes zero sense, as not only was there not much SCO product there, there's not much Linux there either.
I was there for 7 years, and I saw exactly ONE SCO server in that whole time - and it was a legacy deal running some service that was due to go away soon. Maybe there was some more in the plants (plants always seem to have strange things going on) but certainly there wasn't much in the core ops.
DCX, at least the Chrysler half, runs mostly on IBM mainframes. 3270 green-screen stuff. While the amount of UNIX use was growing, THAT was mostly Solaris with a few IBM AIX boxes mixed in to keep things interesting.
There were a few people investigating Linux (and I know we had at least one running instance of Linux-on-a-mainframe) but I'm not aware of any production Linux deployments. If they existed, they were very low-key and not widespread.
I had a Linux box as one of my workstations, but I did that on my own.
If there was any signifigant SCO deployments in the plants, they would probably have been replaced by Solaris or AIX boxes, not Linux. SCO just wasn't taken seriously as a UNIX.
The Bradley has a serious case of "Jack of all trades, master of none"
The prime use for an IFV/APC is shuttling infantry around. They are not expected to stand up to direct fire much bigger than 7.62, but they _are_ supposed to provide protection from shell splinters and whatnot.
So the most important part of an IFV/APC is the ability to carry a full section of infantry, plus their gear. That's 8-9 guys. Plus the driver (who doesn't dismount) and the crew commander (who shouldn't dismount - especially if he has a support weapon he can use)
Ideally, the APC should drive up near to the objective as possible, take a hull-down position (so the crew commander's support weapon is unmasked), disembark the section under cover, and then the section assaults forward under cover from the crew commander.
M113 can do this - does it well (although it is pretty slow) Bison (based on the LAV) does this. Even BTR-80 and it's cousins do this, although out side doors rather than a rear-facing ramp.
Bradley, however, carries only 6 troops who can dismount. It carries 3 crew (driver, gunner, and commander) who must stay with the vehicle.
So it takes 2 Bradleys and 2 extra support pers to do the same job as 1 Bison or M113. That's double the vehicle costs, double the maintainence, double the consumables, double the parking space, etc etc etc.
As a recce vehicle, it's actually pretty good. For recce, you have driver, gunner, crew commander, and JAFO in the back, which works out ideally from a mission perspective. it could be faster, but the gun is nice, and the missiles give a commander options that he might not otherwise have.
Although man, did I ever get a suprise when I found out that deploying the missile launcher means you can't move....
In a wierd connection betwixt Slashdot and Toaster, I have a NewTek demo tape featuring a clip starring our very own CleverNickName, where he gushes about how the Toaster is, like, going to change the world!
Hey Wil! It's blackmail time! How much to keep me from vidcapping that tape and posting it for the world to see?:)
Even weirder - NewTek's HQ was in Topeka, KS. Every year for the past 7 years or so, I travel from Windsor Ont to Topeka for the SCCA autocross National Championships - meaning that I take my frikin' vaction in WW's old stompin' grounds.
Whenever you start talking about hardware drivers, especially bleeding-edge hardware in a highly competitive market like video cards, you run into the following problems:
1) There is a natural desire to keep technical details (both in the hardware and in the driver implimentation) secret from one's competitors, so as to build a competitive advantage.
2) You may not own all the technology in the hardware or the drivers, and your licencing agreement with the 3rd-party technology providers may include terms of non-disclosure.
This tends to disincline one from open-sourcing the drivers.
The advantages of having them opened up everybody here is well aware of. But realizing those advantages takes time to sink in at the hardware company - especially when their Linux market is very small (so the perceived risks outweigh the rewards)
As time goes on, and especially as the Linux market grows (to the point where it is providing a signifigant fraction of a company's revenue) I believe the value of opening up the drivers will become more compelling to the driver authors (and more importantly, their management)
Baby steps. Rome wasn't built in a day.
In the meantime, there is value in supporting companies who provide closed-source drivers for products where there is no other alternative. Help them build the Linux experience - both on the technical and social aspects - that will eventually lead them along the path to opening their drivers up.
Would I prefer to see fully open-and-GPLed NVIDIA drivers? You bet your ass. But for whatever reason, they aren't ready to jump off that particular cliff, so I'll support them anyway in anticipation of the day when they DO open the drivers up.
We're fighting 20 years of a culture of secrecy and code-hording here. It'll take time to work through that.
Speaking as one who did his share of epee in college....
Real sword fights - at least, between two skilled and prepared opponents (which I guess makes it more of a "duel") make for poor cinema, because they tend to be over very quickly.
And even then, they favour economy of movement. Big swinging flourishes get you killed.
If you watch an epee match, you'll see some opening and closing of distance and some beats (that don't commit anybody to anything) and then suddenly lunge-point! or lunge-riposte-point! or rarely even lunge-riposte-counter-point! But certainly never these long phrases that last for minutes at a time.
I've never done any Kendo, but I suspect that's true there too.
The writing, especially, was absolutely brilliant, and the performances were outstanding. Dame Dench as Queen Lizzie is heartstopping.
"I know something of a woman in a man's profession. Oh yes by God I do."
Wow.
I don't know much about the studio lobbying shenannigans behind the scenes, but the movie was certainly Oscar worthy on it's own merits. If you haven't seen it - do.
It's not like somebody managed to wrangle an Oscar for Gigli or something.:)
DG
(btw, is anybody else worried about the chilling effect Gigli might have on Jersey Girl?)
I'm actually even more impressed with how FEW liberties he took.
The Lord of the Rings is a monsterous book, and (as one learns when one reads the Simarillion, Unfinished Tales et al) there are precious few throwaway scenes, or even LINES. Almost everything has a fully realized backstory out there somewhere.
The notable exception is Bombadil... but almost everything else is fully fleshed out somewhere.
You can indulge in this luxury in print, because you are working with the imagination and because you're not limited in time.
But with a film, you're working with a visual medium and a fixed run time. Dialogue, especially, is resistant to time compression. So too is the exposition of backstory - otherwise you are faced with somebody delivering a history lecture in the midst of your movie.
(Amazingly, Jackson pulled this part off in the prologue to FotR - but in the DVD commentaries, we learn just how contraversial that was amongst the filmmakers. They know the dangers of characters lecturing the screen)
Given this, I'm amazed at just how much of the book they were able to work in (more or less) untouched - and certainly, they stayed very true to the spirit of the original work.
There were a couple of decisions made that I would have done differently had I been in charge, but nothing there is egrariously WRONG.
Incidently, after watching LotR/TTT back to back with the Bashki animated version, I was struck by the enormous influence Bashki had on Jackson. In fact, I think that with no Bashki version, there is no Jackson version - Ralph's movie, flawed as it was, shows how the book _could_ be successfully adopted to film.
The fine folks at FMC (look up the acronym for a chuckle) won the contract to provide the Army with a tracked Armoured Personnel Carrier, and what they came up with was the M113.
In order to meet weight targets though, they couldn't use steel armour. Instead, they used an aluminum/magnisium alloy. Tough and light, it provided the required level of protection, but it had one wee little drawback....
We used to scrape shavings off the armour and burn them in front of recruits. Nice bright white magnesium flare.:)
Now in practice, it took a LOT of effort to get the armour burning. There wan't much danger of your carrier suddenly igniting.
But...
A few years ago, a small brush fire got started in a training area. This happens all the time when you do live fire with tracers, and is nothing new. But this time, a couple of mental midgets thought the bast way to put it out was to run over it, repeatedly, with their M113.
Somehow, they managed to get the hull temperature up to the point of ignition - and once lit, that sucker was NEVER going out.
They bailed, but all that was left once the fire burnt out was the engine block and the torsion bars.:)
DG
(no, it wasn't me. _My_ tracer-ignited brush fire story has a happy ending)
A spoiler is a lift-killing device, where a wing is a lift-generation device - it's just upside-down, so it's lift vector is "down" with respect to the car.:)
You use a wing when you want to force the car onto the road; you use a spoiler when your body shape is such that it generates lift (away from the road) and you want to stop the car from becoming airborne.
The issue here is that tires make grip in proportion to the download on them. (Tires are funny, they don't behave according to the classical Newtownian friction laws) Tires forced into the ground make more grip. Tires lifted away from the ground (even slightly) lose grip.
On a car where the body shape generates lift, as you go faster, the road surface effectively gets "slipperier"
Real wings are typically a race-car-only item, as the extra downforce creates a lot of extra drag, which in turn has an effect on fuel economy.
Spoilers, done right, can kill high-speed lift, with little or no drag penalty.
DG
As a racing engineer....
on
The Star Wars Car
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I am, in fact, a racing engineer. I make cars go fast for a living.
Let's break this out into two sections: spoilers, and wings.
A wing is supposed to be an active downforce device. The idea is to provide increased grip by providing a downward-facing aero lift (the wing, from an aircraft perspective, is upside-down)
99% of the wings fitted in the aftermarket are appearence items only (especially those ridiculous aluminum-siding extruded horrors) in that they provide zero downforce.
But a properly-engineered wing can provide lots of useable downforce at suprisingly low speeds - and for cars that rely on underbody aero (like LeMans LMP cars) the negative pressure area under the wing can interact with the underbody aero and make the underbody stuff work even better.
For production-based cars, most wings don't do much, if anything. The exception is when production parts must be homolgemated for use in competition, like with WRC cars and similar series.
Spoilers, on the other hand, have a different purpose. A car, seen in profile, makes a pretty good wing, and many body shapes produce signifigant vertical lift. The effects tend not be be noticable at lower speeds, but at speeds exceeding 70 MPH and higher, depending on the car, that lift can become signifigant.
A spoiler seeks to disrupt the airflow around the rear of the car, killing the lift provided by the body shape - exactly the same way a spoiler does on an aircraft wing (especially as fitted to many gliders and certain passenger aircraft)
These tend to be VERY effective in improving high-speed stability. Sometimes you get lucky and the spoiler actually creates downforce (this is engineered in on purpose in a NASCAR Cup car, for example) but most of the time, killing lift suffices.
The little ducktails on the 2G GM F-bodies actually made 60 or so lbs of downforce at 100 MPH. Done correctly, they ARE functional.
More recently, the Audi TT grew a spoiler to combat lift and the associated instability at autobahn speeds - look it up.
Driving south on I-69 heading to Indianapolis, pull off to get something to eat at the typical "McDonalds on an exit" that are scattered all over the US.
My McMeal rings up as $6.66. Teenaged girl behind counter flips out, and insists that the food is free. When I try and tell her it's no big deal; I'm not afraid of a number she gets REAL upset and flat-out REFUSES to take my money.
Rather than cause more of a scene that was already developing, I accepted, and her relief was palpable - like my immortal soul had been just snatched back from the firey jaws of Satan himself.
Some people REALLY believe this devil shit is BAD.
Actually, no, we DON'T (necessarily) depend on packaged software. By far the majority of the stuff we have around here (at least, the stuff that drives the business) was written in-house.
And huge chunks of that are COBOL on mainframes.
The big exception is the desktop stuff - but Linux and OpenOffice prove that it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, the only non-OSS software I use with any regularity is that Godforsaken Lotus Notes (a case in point if there ever was one). All my other desktop stuff in done on a Linux desktop.
Like this reply, for example.:)
And without exception, every time we switch out a proprietary package for something Free, there's a HUGE leap forward in quality and reliability. By the same token, not once - not ONCE - has adopting a proprietary solution done anything but cause trouble and pain.
Seven years I've been working for a major manufacturing company, and my experience with "packaged software vendors" has been nothing but HORRIBLE. Consider this - they all aspire to be the next Microsoft, with EVERYTHING that entails.
My bottom line is my pager - and my pager says OSS/Free is just flat-out superior.
DG
Re:The same physics still applies
on
Lonely Planets
·
· Score: 1
I certainly agree with you about the small sample space - ever read a short story called "Meat"?:)
But unless you're envisioning creatures for whom space travel is a biological function (and even then, where do they get the energy?) intelligences of the nature of termite colonies pose us little threat, because they are unlikely to ever develop technology at all, never mind on a scale likely to be threatening.
Termites etc. make good models for slow building of complex structures, but it's hard to imagine termites managing fire. And fire is a key component of a technological society.
Based on the physics, crossing space and messing up our planet is very much likely to be nontrivial. That's not the same as "impossible"; for those determined to do it, it could be done. But it is not likely to be an accident, as it was with the ant & the bulldozer example.
DG
The same physics still applies
on
Lonely Planets
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Let's examine your bulldozer/anthill analogy a little closer:
If the fear is that that we might encounter beings who are so far above us that we are beneath notice, this is unlikely to happen, mostly because of the physics of scale.
There is a minimum amount of matter in which one can develop intelligence like our own. We don't know what that amount is, but from observing the world around us we can get a ballpark figure.
It seems unlikely that something as small as an ant could develop human-level intelligence and with it, human-level technology. The scale is too small. Try sustaining an ant-scale fire for an ant-scale blacksmith, for example.
Similarily, there is a maximum end to the scale as well. One might be able to imagine dinosaur-sized intelligences, but it's hard to imagine beings and the associated technical societies that are on the scale of kilometres in size. The loads scale faster than the energy output and material strengths.
So while there's quite a bit of room for variation, it's probably safe to say that for the most likely examples of intelligent, technical societies, objects the size of planets are likely to be signifigant, energy levels involved with intersteller travel are likely to be signifigant, and quite possibly, lifespans are going to be of a similar order (an intelligent, technical creature needs a "timesense" at least as fast as a human's in order to be able to react to physical processes, and I wouldn't be at all suprised to find that the percieved duration of time is closely coupled to the strength of the gravitational field in which one evolved - where stronger gravity equals higher time resolution)
That's not to say that a sufficiantly advanced civilization couldn't wield vastly more powerful energy levels than what we currently manipulate, but scale dictates that dealing with masses on the order of planets or energy levels on the order of stars is ever likely to become TRIVIAL.
Put another way, I don't need a bulldozer to crush an ant - I get that ability by virtue of scale and physics. Those same physics makes it unlikely that anything is going to be of scale large enough to unknowingly crush planets.
By far the largest population of people employed in IT do NOT sell software as a product to be sold. Instead, we work for other business entities providing IT services to them as part of their daily business.
Think of the software managing bank transactions. Or shipping/receiving/supply chain management for manufacturing industries. Or common essential business services like HR/Payroll, email, web services, LDAP services, computer security, desktop management etc etc etc.
We outnumber the people who develop software for eventual sale probably 100:1
And not to put too fine a point on it, people like you cause people like me enormous headaches when you manage to convince my management that we Reall Really Need To Buy Your Stuff, and then it's buggy and we can't get it fixed, or you decide to End Of Life something that has been working fine for 5 years, or you go out of business, or you purposely break compatibility with similar products such that making MY crap work with that Other Product that some other sales guy managed to convince some other business unit's management to buy (to do the same thing) is nearly impossible... yadda yadda yadda.
For us, Open Source/Free Software is a huge breath of fresh air. It is the correction of the anomaly that was "software for sale". And accordingly, we are adopting it just as fast as we can, whenever it makes technical sense (ie, the FS version meets the technical requirements) to do so - and if the Free version isn't quite up to snuff yet, we often donate time and effort to working on it to improve it to the point where we CAN use it - because one day, we'll be able to get out from under your stupid licencing charges, persistant bugs, and God knows what else.
My quality of life depends on how often my pager goes off, and Open Source/Free Software contributes directly to that AND doesn't cost me anything to set up. The sooner I wash my hands of commercially-produced software, the happier I'll be.
You might well be a "good, honest and reliable developer", and I feel for you, but there were "good, honest and reliable" buggy whip designers too. You may have had a good run while it lasted, but the world is changing, and it's adapt or die time.
I just - like 5 min ago - finished the Hordes of the Underdark expansion (on Linux, thank you very much)
This is, by far, the best one yet. The quality of NWN doubles with every expansion pack. It's so far ahead of the original NWN single player campaign that it might as well be a new game.
Very, very highly recommended. And did I mention works on Linux?
What walks down stairs alone or in pairs/ and makes a slinkety sound? A spring a spring, a marvelous thing/ Everyone knows it's Slinky!/It's Slinky!/It's Slinky!/For fun it's a wonderful toy!/It's Slinky!/It's Slinky!/It's fun for a girl and a boy.
Slashdot Mirror
Robotics is advancing in leaps and bounds, but it's happening in places that probably aren't visible to you in your daily life.
I was recently at the SAE World Congress tradeshow in Detroit. While I was there, I saw a robot that knocked my socks off.
The automotive industry uses a lot of robots, but most of them are basically clockwork devices - they repeat a series of operations. Move arm to this co-ordinate, active spot welder for 2 seconds, move to different co-ordinate, activate welder, withdraw arm and wait for next cycle. Etc.
Aside from some basic safety and maintainence self-checks, there's no decision making here. If. for example, you chage the part on the line without changing the program on the robot, you'll get a "crash" when the robot attempts to move through space already occupied by the part.
But I saw a new robot on display that had some decision-making properties. It had a camera system and a visual recognition program, such that it could recognise the shape and orientation of the part. On this particular model, it was pulling cylinder heads (a great big aluminum casting) off a rack and placing them on the engine block. The postitions of the head and block - which normally would have to be fixtured in place - could vary in 3D space, and the robot would self-align and pick it up/put it down anyway. And we're talking about variances on the order of inches, not thousandths of an inch.
This is a robot that could be fit into a production line originally designed for humans. You don't need to construct special tooling for your whole line to make the robot work possible.
It may not sound like much... but this is a huge step forward.
Further developments in robotics will probably follow similar lines. With time, special-purpose robots get more general-purpose. Eventually, the "general-purpose" toolbox will get large enough to accomodate human-ish robots.
AI is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
DG
There's PLENTY to lose by "assuming [human-caused] global warming is real" because the actions taken to rectify the greenhouse gas "problem" diverts time, energy, and money away from less sexy problems that may have much greater impact on our lives.
For example, mercury emissions from power plants and other industrial processes are poisoning real people, NOW - mercury accumulates in fish and makes them toxic - but that gets a tiny fraction of the time and attention that it deserves.
And stop picking on SUVs. They may be the vehicle of choice of Yuppie Scum, but modern examples get decent gas milage and thanks to the latest generation cat converters and emissions hardware/software, produce tiny fractions of the noxious crap that used to come out of cars. In some places, the tailpipe emissions from an SUV is cleaner than the ambiant air.
The whole Global Warming thing is akin to standing on a train track, screaming that if a train comes you'll be killed (even though there's no train in sight) all the while ignoring the tiger that is busy munching on your leg. There's bigger problems to deal with right now.
DG
You're brushing up against the truth... and I hope you get a chance to read this before the roving eye of Slashdot moves on.
You have to remember that people of pre-modern times were 1) every bit as intelligent as modern humans and 2) DEEPLY religeous, on a scale that (mostly) no longer exists.
This gets mentioned briefly late in Con-fusion, when (parphrased from memory) Newton says he cannot be as wise or skilled (read as "intelligent") as King Solomon, as the Bible says that Solomon was the wisest man to ever be. The Bible is literal truth, ergo, Newton must be less wise than Solomon. Collorary - technology PEAKED with Solomon, and has been degrading ever since.
Now I don't think this _exact_ line of reasoning was the common prevailing opinion of the time... but it IS true that "old" was considered better than "new", and for religeous reasons. The world had been created perfect, and then Man corrupted it, and all had been decaying ever since.
As such, the only place to look for "new" knowledge was in old books - to recover information previously lost.
(And to a Europe slowly recovering from the Dark Ages, where much had indeed been lost and where conditions in general HAD worsened over a long period of time, there would be much recent evidence supporting this position)
However, around about the time of the Enlightenment (when these books are set), there was a sea change in people's perceptions. Mankind was NOT in a state of perpetual decay; the "ancients" had NOT known everything - rather, the opposite: mankind was slowly lifting himself out of the swamp, and the ancients had known mostly nothing. Darwin put the capstone on this....
This opinion isn't just revolutionary, it's the sort of thing that gets men labeled "heretics" - and THAT can get you tortured and killed! (NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!) And even if you are not afraid at being burned at the stake, for someone so deeply religeous as pretty much everybody was at the time, it must have been a tremendous internal struggle to find that your work and findings contradicted the Church's teachings.
I know it's a very alien mindset to what we have today, but probably the single biggest concept to come out of this period in time was the very *possibility* that new knowledge capable of being worked out from first principles.
DG
I found it to be much faster paced than QS, and there are less technical asides - something that I actually missed a little.
I also thought it was a lot funnier too. If you liked the ostritch scene in QS, there's more of the same in CF.
And - without giving anything away - there are some payoffs to be had in CF, rather than being forced to wait to the last chapter of the last volume to get those payoffs. Some subplots actually END.
Stick with it and I'm sure you won't regret the decision.
DG
Finished reading "Con-Fusion" yesterday; great read.
More in a similar vein:
"The Days of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson
"Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus" by Orson Scott Card (the last decent book he wrote)
Less speculative, but historical and rollicking good fun: "The Aubury-Maurtin Series" by Patrick O'Brian, starting with "Master and Commander"
Pure history: "The Invasion of Canada" by Pierre Burton
DG
I used to work for DaimlerChrysler IS/ITM up until fairly recently.
DISCLAIMER: It's a big company. I couldn't possibly have been aware of everything going on there.
That being said... SCO targeting DCX makes zero sense, as not only was there not much SCO product there, there's not much Linux there either.
I was there for 7 years, and I saw exactly ONE SCO server in that whole time - and it was a legacy deal running some service that was due to go away soon. Maybe there was some more in the plants (plants always seem to have strange things going on) but certainly there wasn't much in the core ops.
DCX, at least the Chrysler half, runs mostly on IBM mainframes. 3270 green-screen stuff. While the amount of UNIX use was growing, THAT was mostly Solaris with a few IBM AIX boxes mixed in to keep things interesting.
There were a few people investigating Linux (and I know we had at least one running instance of Linux-on-a-mainframe) but I'm not aware of any production Linux deployments. If they existed, they were very low-key and not widespread.
I had a Linux box as one of my workstations, but I did that on my own.
If there was any signifigant SCO deployments in the plants, they would probably have been replaced by Solaris or AIX boxes, not Linux. SCO just wasn't taken seriously as a UNIX.
Why SCO picked DCX to target is beyond me.
DG
The Bradley has a serious case of "Jack of all trades, master of none"
The prime use for an IFV/APC is shuttling infantry around. They are not expected to stand up to direct fire much bigger than 7.62, but they _are_ supposed to provide protection from shell splinters and whatnot.
So the most important part of an IFV/APC is the ability to carry a full section of infantry, plus their gear. That's 8-9 guys. Plus the driver (who doesn't dismount) and the crew commander (who shouldn't dismount - especially if he has a support weapon he can use)
Ideally, the APC should drive up near to the objective as possible, take a hull-down position (so the crew commander's support weapon is unmasked), disembark the section under cover, and then the section assaults forward under cover from the crew commander.
M113 can do this - does it well (although it is pretty slow) Bison (based on the LAV) does this. Even BTR-80 and it's cousins do this, although out side doors rather than a rear-facing ramp.
Bradley, however, carries only 6 troops who can dismount. It carries 3 crew (driver, gunner, and commander) who must stay with the vehicle.
So it takes 2 Bradleys and 2 extra support pers to do the same job as 1 Bison or M113. That's double the vehicle costs, double the maintainence, double the consumables, double the parking space, etc etc etc.
As a recce vehicle, it's actually pretty good. For recce, you have driver, gunner, crew commander, and JAFO in the back, which works out ideally from a mission perspective. it could be faster, but the gun is nice, and the missiles give a commander options that he might not otherwise have.
Although man, did I ever get a suprise when I found out that deploying the missile launcher means you can't move....
DG
In a wierd connection betwixt Slashdot and Toaster, I have a NewTek demo tape featuring a clip starring our very own CleverNickName, where he gushes about how the Toaster is, like, going to change the world!
:)
Hey Wil! It's blackmail time! How much to keep me from vidcapping that tape and posting it for the world to see?
Even weirder - NewTek's HQ was in Topeka, KS. Every year for the past 7 years or so, I travel from Windsor Ont to Topeka for the SCCA autocross National Championships - meaning that I take my frikin' vaction in WW's old stompin' grounds.
DG
... but I play one on TV.
So:
"If dark matter doesn't exist, there will be a lot of erasers sold to the astrophysics department of your friendly neighbourhood university"
DG
Are they not teaching long division by hand in schools anymore?
Seriously?
I must have spent doing 2 or 3 hours a day in elementary school practicing techniques like this.
That is no longer taught?
DG
Whenever you start talking about hardware drivers, especially bleeding-edge hardware in a highly competitive market like video cards, you run into the following problems:
1) There is a natural desire to keep technical details (both in the hardware and in the driver implimentation) secret from one's competitors, so as to build a competitive advantage.
2) You may not own all the technology in the hardware or the drivers, and your licencing agreement with the 3rd-party technology providers may include terms of non-disclosure.
This tends to disincline one from open-sourcing the drivers.
The advantages of having them opened up everybody here is well aware of. But realizing those advantages takes time to sink in at the hardware company - especially when their Linux market is very small (so the perceived risks outweigh the rewards)
As time goes on, and especially as the Linux market grows (to the point where it is providing a signifigant fraction of a company's revenue) I believe the value of opening up the drivers will become more compelling to the driver authors (and more importantly, their management)
Baby steps. Rome wasn't built in a day.
In the meantime, there is value in supporting companies who provide closed-source drivers for products where there is no other alternative. Help them build the Linux experience - both on the technical and social aspects - that will eventually lead them along the path to opening their drivers up.
Would I prefer to see fully open-and-GPLed NVIDIA drivers? You bet your ass. But for whatever reason, they aren't ready to jump off that particular cliff, so I'll support them anyway in anticipation of the day when they DO open the drivers up.
We're fighting 20 years of a culture of secrecy and code-hording here. It'll take time to work through that.
DG
Speaking as one who did his share of epee in college....
Real sword fights - at least, between two skilled and prepared opponents (which I guess makes it more of a "duel") make for poor cinema, because they tend to be over very quickly.
And even then, they favour economy of movement. Big swinging flourishes get you killed.
If you watch an epee match, you'll see some opening and closing of distance and some beats (that don't commit anybody to anything) and then suddenly lunge-point! or lunge-riposte-point! or rarely even lunge-riposte-counter-point! But certainly never these long phrases that last for minutes at a time.
I've never done any Kendo, but I suspect that's true there too.
DG
I actually think SIL totally deserved that Oscar.
:)
The writing, especially, was absolutely brilliant, and the performances were outstanding. Dame Dench as Queen Lizzie is heartstopping.
"I know something of a woman in a man's profession. Oh yes by God I do."
Wow.
I don't know much about the studio lobbying shenannigans behind the scenes, but the movie was certainly Oscar worthy on it's own merits. If you haven't seen it - do.
It's not like somebody managed to wrangle an Oscar for Gigli or something.
DG
(btw, is anybody else worried about the chilling effect Gigli might have on Jersey Girl?)
I'm actually even more impressed with how FEW liberties he took.
The Lord of the Rings is a monsterous book, and (as one learns when one reads the Simarillion, Unfinished Tales et al) there are precious few throwaway scenes, or even LINES. Almost everything has a fully realized backstory out there somewhere.
The notable exception is Bombadil... but almost everything else is fully fleshed out somewhere.
You can indulge in this luxury in print, because you are working with the imagination and because you're not limited in time.
But with a film, you're working with a visual medium and a fixed run time. Dialogue, especially, is resistant to time compression. So too is the exposition of backstory - otherwise you are faced with somebody delivering a history lecture in the midst of your movie.
(Amazingly, Jackson pulled this part off in the prologue to FotR - but in the DVD commentaries, we learn just how contraversial that was amongst the filmmakers. They know the dangers of characters lecturing the screen)
Given this, I'm amazed at just how much of the book they were able to work in (more or less) untouched - and certainly, they stayed very true to the spirit of the original work.
There were a couple of decisions made that I would have done differently had I been in charge, but nothing there is egrariously WRONG.
Incidently, after watching LotR/TTT back to back with the Bashki animated version, I was struck by the enormous influence Bashki had on Jackson. In fact, I think that with no Bashki version, there is no Jackson version - Ralph's movie, flawed as it was, shows how the book _could_ be successfully adopted to film.
DG
The fine folks at FMC (look up the acronym for a chuckle) won the contract to provide the Army with a tracked Armoured Personnel Carrier, and what they came up with was the M113.
:)
:)
In order to meet weight targets though, they couldn't use steel armour. Instead, they used an aluminum/magnisium alloy. Tough and light, it provided the required level of protection, but it had one wee little drawback....
We used to scrape shavings off the armour and burn them in front of recruits. Nice bright white magnesium flare.
Now in practice, it took a LOT of effort to get the armour burning. There wan't much danger of your carrier suddenly igniting.
But...
A few years ago, a small brush fire got started in a training area. This happens all the time when you do live fire with tracers, and is nothing new. But this time, a couple of mental midgets thought the bast way to put it out was to run over it, repeatedly, with their M113.
Somehow, they managed to get the hull temperature up to the point of ignition - and once lit, that sucker was NEVER going out.
They bailed, but all that was left once the fire burnt out was the engine block and the torsion bars.
DG
(no, it wasn't me. _My_ tracer-ignited brush fire story has a happy ending)
The last couple of seasons of DS9 were REALLY good, to the point that I think the whole Star Trek TV franchise peaked with DS9.
Voyager stank, and Enterprise is beyond putrid.
It's dead, Jim.
DG
A spoiler is a lift-killing device, where a wing is a lift-generation device - it's just upside-down, so it's lift vector is "down" with respect to the car. :)
You use a wing when you want to force the car onto the road; you use a spoiler when your body shape is such that it generates lift (away from the road) and you want to stop the car from becoming airborne.
The issue here is that tires make grip in proportion to the download on them. (Tires are funny, they don't behave according to the classical Newtownian friction laws) Tires forced into the ground make more grip. Tires lifted away from the ground (even slightly) lose grip.
On a car where the body shape generates lift, as you go faster, the road surface effectively gets "slipperier"
Real wings are typically a race-car-only item, as the extra downforce creates a lot of extra drag, which in turn has an effect on fuel economy.
Spoilers, done right, can kill high-speed lift, with little or no drag penalty.
DG
I am, in fact, a racing engineer. I make cars go fast for a living.
Let's break this out into two sections: spoilers, and wings.
A wing is supposed to be an active downforce device. The idea is to provide increased grip by providing a downward-facing aero lift (the wing, from an aircraft perspective, is upside-down)
99% of the wings fitted in the aftermarket are appearence items only (especially those ridiculous aluminum-siding extruded horrors) in that they provide zero downforce.
But a properly-engineered wing can provide lots of useable downforce at suprisingly low speeds - and for cars that rely on underbody aero (like LeMans LMP cars) the negative pressure area under the wing can interact with the underbody aero and make the underbody stuff work even better.
For production-based cars, most wings don't do much, if anything. The exception is when production parts must be homolgemated for use in competition, like with WRC cars and similar series.
Spoilers, on the other hand, have a different purpose. A car, seen in profile, makes a pretty good wing, and many body shapes produce signifigant vertical lift. The effects tend not be be noticable at lower speeds, but at speeds exceeding 70 MPH and higher, depending on the car, that lift can become signifigant.
A spoiler seeks to disrupt the airflow around the rear of the car, killing the lift provided by the body shape - exactly the same way a spoiler does on an aircraft wing (especially as fitted to many gliders and certain passenger aircraft)
These tend to be VERY effective in improving high-speed stability. Sometimes you get lucky and the spoiler actually creates downforce (this is engineered in on purpose in a NASCAR Cup car, for example) but most of the time, killing lift suffices.
The little ducktails on the 2G GM F-bodies actually made 60 or so lbs of downforce at 100 MPH. Done correctly, they ARE functional.
More recently, the Audi TT grew a spoiler to combat lift and the associated instability at autobahn speeds - look it up.
DG
True story:
Driving south on I-69 heading to Indianapolis, pull off to get something to eat at the typical "McDonalds on an exit" that are scattered all over the US.
My McMeal rings up as $6.66. Teenaged girl behind counter flips out, and insists that the food is free. When I try and tell her it's no big deal; I'm not afraid of a number she gets REAL upset and flat-out REFUSES to take my money.
Rather than cause more of a scene that was already developing, I accepted, and her relief was palpable - like my immortal soul had been just snatched back from the firey jaws of Satan himself.
Some people REALLY believe this devil shit is BAD.
DG
Actually, no, we DON'T (necessarily) depend on packaged software. By far the majority of the stuff we have around here (at least, the stuff that drives the business) was written in-house.
:)
And huge chunks of that are COBOL on mainframes.
The big exception is the desktop stuff - but Linux and OpenOffice prove that it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, the only non-OSS software I use with any regularity is that Godforsaken Lotus Notes (a case in point if there ever was one). All my other desktop stuff in done on a Linux desktop.
Like this reply, for example.
And without exception, every time we switch out a proprietary package for something Free, there's a HUGE leap forward in quality and reliability. By the same token, not once - not ONCE - has adopting a proprietary solution done anything but cause trouble and pain.
Seven years I've been working for a major manufacturing company, and my experience with "packaged software vendors" has been nothing but HORRIBLE. Consider this - they all aspire to be the next Microsoft, with EVERYTHING that entails.
My bottom line is my pager - and my pager says OSS/Free is just flat-out superior.
DG
I certainly agree with you about the small sample space - ever read a short story called "Meat"? :)
But unless you're envisioning creatures for whom space travel is a biological function (and even then, where do they get the energy?) intelligences of the nature of termite colonies pose us little threat, because they are unlikely to ever develop technology at all, never mind on a scale likely to be threatening.
Termites etc. make good models for slow building of complex structures, but it's hard to imagine termites managing fire. And fire is a key component of a technological society.
Based on the physics, crossing space and messing up our planet is very much likely to be nontrivial. That's not the same as "impossible"; for those determined to do it, it could be done. But it is not likely to be an accident, as it was with the ant & the bulldozer example.
DG
Let's examine your bulldozer/anthill analogy a little closer:
If the fear is that that we might encounter beings who are so far above us that we are beneath notice, this is unlikely to happen, mostly because of the physics of scale.
There is a minimum amount of matter in which one can develop intelligence like our own. We don't know what that amount is, but from observing the world around us we can get a ballpark figure.
It seems unlikely that something as small as an ant could develop human-level intelligence and with it, human-level technology. The scale is too small. Try sustaining an ant-scale fire for an ant-scale blacksmith, for example.
Similarily, there is a maximum end to the scale as well. One might be able to imagine dinosaur-sized intelligences, but it's hard to imagine beings and the associated technical societies that are on the scale of kilometres in size. The loads scale faster than the energy output and material strengths.
So while there's quite a bit of room for variation, it's probably safe to say that for the most likely examples of intelligent, technical societies, objects the size of planets are likely to be signifigant, energy levels involved with intersteller travel are likely to be signifigant, and quite possibly, lifespans are going to be of a similar order (an intelligent, technical creature needs a "timesense" at least as fast as a human's in order to be able to react to physical processes, and I wouldn't be at all suprised to find that the percieved duration of time is closely coupled to the strength of the gravitational field in which one evolved - where stronger gravity equals higher time resolution)
That's not to say that a sufficiantly advanced civilization couldn't wield vastly more powerful energy levels than what we currently manipulate, but scale dictates that dealing with masses on the order of planets or energy levels on the order of stars is ever likely to become TRIVIAL.
Put another way, I don't need a bulldozer to crush an ant - I get that ability by virtue of scale and physics. Those same physics makes it unlikely that anything is going to be of scale large enough to unknowingly crush planets.
Not impossible, but unlikely.
DG
Here's my answer to you:
Software is a Service, not a Product.
By far the largest population of people employed in IT do NOT sell software as a product to be sold. Instead, we work for other business entities providing IT services to them as part of their daily business.
Think of the software managing bank transactions. Or shipping/receiving/supply chain management for manufacturing industries. Or common essential business services like HR/Payroll, email, web services, LDAP services, computer security, desktop management etc etc etc.
We outnumber the people who develop software for eventual sale probably 100:1
And not to put too fine a point on it, people like you cause people like me enormous headaches when you manage to convince my management that we Reall Really Need To Buy Your Stuff, and then it's buggy and we can't get it fixed, or you decide to End Of Life something that has been working fine for 5 years, or you go out of business, or you purposely break compatibility with similar products such that making MY crap work with that Other Product that some other sales guy managed to convince some other business unit's management to buy (to do the same thing) is nearly impossible... yadda yadda yadda.
For us, Open Source/Free Software is a huge breath of fresh air. It is the correction of the anomaly that was "software for sale". And accordingly, we are adopting it just as fast as we can, whenever it makes technical sense (ie, the FS version meets the technical requirements) to do so - and if the Free version isn't quite up to snuff yet, we often donate time and effort to working on it to improve it to the point where we CAN use it - because one day, we'll be able to get out from under your stupid licencing charges, persistant bugs, and God knows what else.
My quality of life depends on how often my pager goes off, and Open Source/Free Software contributes directly to that AND doesn't cost me anything to set up. The sooner I wash my hands of commercially-produced software, the happier I'll be.
You might well be a "good, honest and reliable developer", and I feel for you, but there were "good, honest and reliable" buggy whip designers too. You may have had a good run while it lasted, but the world is changing, and it's adapt or die time.
DG
I just - like 5 min ago - finished the Hordes of the Underdark expansion (on Linux, thank you very much)
This is, by far, the best one yet. The quality of NWN doubles with every expansion pack. It's so far ahead of the original NWN single player campaign that it might as well be a new game.
Very, very highly recommended. And did I mention works on Linux?
DG
What walks down stairs alone or in pairs/ and makes a slinkety sound? A spring a spring, a marvelous thing/ Everyone knows it's Slinky!/It's Slinky!/It's Slinky!/For fun it's a wonderful toy!/It's Slinky!/It's Slinky!/It's fun for a girl and a boy.
DG