Thanks. I think this answer makes the most sense. It sounds like at standard speeds it moves just enough to keep you from falling, but if you try to lean outside of that range it starts trying to balance you like an inverted broom. It sounds like if you try to lean to far forward it will make a quick burst that puts the wheels slightly in front of you and then slows down once you are more balanced.
As I understand it, you move forward by leaning foward. The segway moves forward to stay underneath you which keeps you from falling over. Like walking, it is a controlled fall. But there is also a built in speed limit, so if you lean forward too far (trying to go faster) the Segway would not be able to keep up and you would keep leaning farther until your face meets the sidewalk (presumably while going around 12 mph). Does anyone know what keeps it from doing this?
I predicted this when DirectX 1.0 was released. DirectX uses MS's COM architechute. It only made sense that they would eventually move their graphics handlers to use COM. Now we just need to wait for DirectX to work over DCOM and we can have remote displays like Unix has been doing for the last number of years.
There was an article a few year back (in Wired I think), about some researcher who believes there is a huge amount of microscopic life in the Earth's crust and that it produces oil as a byproduct of its metabolism. If there is this much hydrogen available, it would provide a nice source for material to make hydrocarbon chains. Most geologists think the guy's theories are wacky, but he has had some other wacky theories that proved to be correct. If he is correct we will not be running out of oil anytime in the near future.
I remember reading in Science News a few months back that a new process for reclaiming Ti from oxide compounds was discovered. Ti is one of the more abundant elements on the planet, but most of it is in a form that makes it unusable for metal products. The article predicted that it would be used for all sorts of things very soon (like car frames).
According to the article, his field will swap space and time so that travelling through space will result in a time shift. One problem with pratical time travel is that time and space are the same. "Light speed" is a good measure of how time and space measurements compare. In order to travel one year forward or backward in time, one would need to travel 5865696000000 miles in the time distortion field.
Re:laws for time travellers? who cares?
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
If every time someone time travels they end up in a parallel dimension then we every time traveller will disappear never to be seen again. We'll just assume that the device destroy them. It might be a great way to get rid of nuclear waste though.
It is interesting that he wants to focus light in ways to distort space time. The recent time machine movie alluded to just that technique. Maybe he will go into the future, see a bunch of canabalistic humans then try to come back to warn us but over-shoot the mark and end up talking to HG Wells.
Obviously, people will be controlling the robots. The points is that their, assumed, increased productivity will drive the price of resources higher than the average person will be able to afford. What happens with the robots at that point is anybody's guess. Maybe we'll enter back to a feudal society. Maybe everyone will we become a utopian welfare state. Then again, maybe the uber-rich will let everyone else die.
The real danger robots pose comes from an econimic front. If a robot can do more work with fewer resources than a human, then there will be no reason to invest capital in human. This will result in land, energy, and whatever other resources you can think of being too expensive for any human to own.
I am more productive in Java than in C or C++. I think it is because in Java I only have to deal with a single file, while in C++ I need to keep my header and implementation files consistent.
Java also seems to build much faster on comparably sized projects.
Borland has a history of bad license agreements. I remember one forbid you to write operating systems with their development tools. I suspect they will back off of the agreement in a few weeks.
Unless they broke the encryption they are going to have a tought time doing an emulator. They are also going to have a tough time from Microsoft's legal department.
From the site: Using microwave ovens as radar decoys.
"I liked that about the microwave ovens very much, and I just feel that I must add something about it. This is a very interesting experiment but I certainly hope that you will never get in position to try it.:-) I'm from Yugoslavia and I supposed that you know very well what was happening here a year ago. Well I have some friends from the army and they learned me the new application for microwave ovens. It is not widely known that the regular microwave ovens use the same wavelength as most of the air-defense radar. So what we did was (it is no longer classified:-) only adjusting the regular microwave to work with it's door opened somewhere under the open sky. I'm not sure, but we were probably using just long cables connected with standard 220V~ output as a power supplies. And what was happening: if that bastard pilot (no offense to you since I can see that you are from The Netherlands:-) doesn't have a visual contact he can only say that radar is tracking him. So he launches the anti-radar missile and - he wastes a several hundred thousand $ missile for a price of one microwave oven. We literaly used hundreds of such decoys - often planting tens of decoys with one REAL radar. And if the pilot is lucky enough to hit the actual radar, then everything is O.K. for him. But there are much bigger chances that he will hit a decoy instead, and after that he gets what he deserves from the actual radar. That's the story. What do you say? A total new application for an MW oven!:-)"
Microsoft recently gave a presentation at my school on how the XBox works. I don't know how much of this information is available elsewhere, but here is what we were told:
DVD is not included because it would have cost $8 more per box. They decided to let the people who wanted it pay for the license. The DVD codec is stored in the dongle.
The controllers are big because printing smaller circuit boards is expensive. There is a Japanese controller that about half the size of the US controller and they said it would work on the US version.
A guy named Horace designed the logo (he's also done branding work for Nike) and working on the branding. The first concept sketch was done with a green highlighter marker. The color stuck.
The XBox allows ripping of CDs into 128 bit using WMAC codec. The CD tracks can be used to replace game music streams (perhaps by choosing a radio station in your racecar). Volume level is normalized when ripping CDs.
The strategy for the XBox is to provided ease of development. Single platform. No plans to upgrade since that would destroy ease of development.
The XBox uses an extremely stripped Win2K kernel. The original was something like 12MB. The stripped version is around 28kb (I didn't get the exact number). When the XBox boots, the kernel is running in ring 0 and nothing else is running. The game loads all of the remaining libraries. A game could also use completely custom libraries.
No dynamically linked libraries. All libraries are statically linked into games during development. Driver upgrades will only be on new games to prevent DLL incompatibility hell.
The XBox has "strong security". They do a lot of tricks to make sure that you cannot hack the box (regions, copy protection, unauthorized software). A comment was made about unsoldering three chips. Microsoft does all production of disks and all games have been 'encrypted' to run on the XBox. It sounds similar to the DVD encryption, but Microsoft is holding all the keys so that they do not leak.
The developer talking to us said he would like to see Linux running on the box, but thought it unlikely that anyone would get past the security schemes.
They said that no mouse or keyboard would be released. "Not a Trojan horse".
The hard drive has three 700MB partitions that are allocated to the three most recently played games. These partitions are used to cache data from the slow DVD drive. After loading onto the drive, subsequent loads will be must faster.
4.5 MB are allocated for each game to store persistent world data and save games. For example: If you crash into a coffee store in a driving game, the next day you play the windows might be boarded up. A few days later the store has a "Closed for Repairs" sign on it. These world details would be up to the game developer to implement of course, but the potential is there.
Ethernet is enabled out of the box for local networks. The presenting developer was aware of software allowing internet play and seemed happy about it. Microsoft has an online program in the works where you will be able to get software updates for the XBox. Something was said about providing emulators and MAME was mentioned.
Graphics chip is a custom nVidia GeForce3 chip. It is slightly older and probably slightly slower that current consumer chips, but the standard platform will allow games to be much faster since code can be optimized for the standard platform that they are not going to change.
They will release a voice-peripheral with hardware compression that plugs into the controller. This could be used in multiplayer games like Halo for communication. This was described as a work around for not having a keyboard.
The Devkit does not have the security lock on it (which is why MAME was only on a Devkit - I don't think we'll be seeing a consumer version until MS authorizes it). The Devkit has a 9GB hard drive that acts as a DVD simulator. The developer downloads their executable to the hard drive then reboots and the XBox loads it. It can simulate DVD load time too. There is an extra serial port on the Devkit, which is used for kernel debugging. There is also a way to set the game region. The game region might be software settable on the consumer boxes too.
There is a 64MB memory limit. The XBox will crash if this is exceeded. More memory will not be available in the future.
System menus use a vertex shader to do green x-ray effects. The entire vertex shader is stored on the GPU and only polygons are sent to the card once the shader is loaded.
DOA3 has the best 3rd party utilization of the XBox and it uses pixel vertex shaders.
Halo has 8 texturing passes. One of the MS developer beat Halo on the hardest level using only pistol whip.
Slashdot Mirror
MS could buy back all of Mr. Gate's stock. Talk about an exit plan.
Technically, isn't a photograph already a form of biometric data?
Thanks. I think this answer makes the most sense. It sounds like at standard speeds it moves just enough to keep you from falling, but if you try to lean outside of that range it starts trying to balance you like an inverted broom. It sounds like if you try to lean to far forward it will make a quick burst that puts the wheels slightly in front of you and then slows down once you are more balanced.
As I understand it, you move forward by leaning foward. The segway moves forward to stay underneath you which keeps you from falling over. Like walking, it is a controlled fall. But there is also a built in speed limit, so if you lean forward too far (trying to go faster) the Segway would not be able to keep up and you would keep leaning farther until your face meets the sidewalk (presumably while going around 12 mph). Does anyone know what keeps it from doing this?
I predicted this when DirectX 1.0 was released. DirectX uses MS's COM architechute. It only made sense that they would eventually move their graphics handlers to use COM. Now we just need to wait for DirectX to work over DCOM and we can have remote displays like Unix has been doing for the last number of years.
Some references:
Thomas Gold at Cornell
Wired article
I remember reading in Science News a few months back that a new process for reclaiming Ti from oxide compounds was discovered. Ti is one of the more abundant elements on the planet, but most of it is in a form that makes it unusable for metal products. The article predicted that it would be used for all sorts of things very soon (like car frames).
It is a well known fact that robots eat old people's medicine.
According to the article, his field will swap space and time so that travelling through space will result in a time shift. One problem with pratical time travel is that time and space are the same. "Light speed" is a good measure of how time and space measurements compare. In order to travel one year forward or backward in time, one would need to travel 5865696000000 miles in the time distortion field.
If every time someone time travels they end up in a parallel dimension then we every time traveller will disappear never to be seen again. We'll just assume that the device destroy them. It might be a great way to get rid of nuclear waste though.
Didn't you read the article? They are in "parallel universes". Some people...
It is interesting that he wants to focus light in ways to distort space time. The recent time machine movie alluded to just that technique. Maybe he will go into the future, see a bunch of canabalistic humans then try to come back to warn us but over-shoot the mark and end up talking to HG Wells.
Possession is 9/10 of ownership.
Obviously, people will be controlling the robots. The points is that their, assumed, increased productivity will drive the price of resources higher than the average person will be able to afford. What happens with the robots at that point is anybody's guess. Maybe we'll enter back to a feudal society. Maybe everyone will we become a utopian welfare state. Then again, maybe the uber-rich will let everyone else die.
The real danger robots pose comes from an econimic front. If a robot can do more work with fewer resources than a human, then there will be no reason to invest capital in human. This will result in land, energy, and whatever other resources you can think of being too expensive for any human to own.
Java also seems to build much faster on comparably sized projects.
Borland has a history of bad license agreements. I remember one forbid you to write operating systems with their development tools. I suspect they will back off of the agreement in a few weeks.
Unless they broke the encryption they are going to have a tought time doing an emulator. They are also going to have a tough time from Microsoft's legal department.
From the site: Using microwave ovens as radar decoys. :-) I'm from Yugoslavia and I supposed that you know very well what was happening here a year ago. Well I have some friends from the army and they learned me the new application for microwave ovens. It is not widely known that the regular microwave ovens use the same wavelength as most of the air-defense radar. So what we did was (it is no longer classified :-) only adjusting the regular microwave to work with it's door opened somewhere under the open sky. I'm not sure, but we were probably using just long cables connected with standard 220V~ output as a power supplies. And what was happening: if that bastard pilot (no offense to you since I can see that you are from The Netherlands :-) doesn't have a visual contact he can only say that radar is tracking him. So he launches the anti-radar missile and - he wastes a several hundred thousand $ missile for a price of one microwave oven. We literaly used hundreds of such decoys - often planting tens of decoys with one REAL radar. And if the pilot is lucky enough to hit the actual radar, then everything is O.K. for him. But there are much bigger chances that he will hit a decoy instead, and after that he gets what he deserves from the actual radar. That's the story. What do you say? A total new application for an MW oven! :-)"
"I liked that about the microwave ovens very much, and I just feel that I must add something about it. This is a very interesting experiment but I certainly hope that you will never get in position to try it.
I have the name of developer who made the claim. I'll have to get him in touch with you so we can get this story straigtened out.
University of Texas at Austin
DVD is not included because it would have cost $8 more per box. They decided to let the people who wanted it pay for the license. The DVD codec is stored in the dongle.
The controllers are big because printing smaller circuit boards is expensive. There is a Japanese controller that about half the size of the US controller and they said it would work on the US version.
A guy named Horace designed the logo (he's also done branding work for Nike) and working on the branding. The first concept sketch was done with a green highlighter marker. The color stuck.
The XBox allows ripping of CDs into 128 bit using WMAC codec. The CD tracks can be used to replace game music streams (perhaps by choosing a radio station in your racecar). Volume level is normalized when ripping CDs.
The strategy for the XBox is to provided ease of development. Single platform. No plans to upgrade since that would destroy ease of development.
The XBox uses an extremely stripped Win2K kernel. The original was something like 12MB. The stripped version is around 28kb (I didn't get the exact number). When the XBox boots, the kernel is running in ring 0 and nothing else is running. The game loads all of the remaining libraries. A game could also use completely custom libraries.
No dynamically linked libraries. All libraries are statically linked into games during development. Driver upgrades will only be on new games to prevent DLL incompatibility hell.
The XBox has "strong security". They do a lot of tricks to make sure that you cannot hack the box (regions, copy protection, unauthorized software). A comment was made about unsoldering three chips. Microsoft does all production of disks and all games have been 'encrypted' to run on the XBox. It sounds similar to the DVD encryption, but Microsoft is holding all the keys so that they do not leak.
The developer talking to us said he would like to see Linux running on the box, but thought it unlikely that anyone would get past the security schemes.
They said that no mouse or keyboard would be released. "Not a Trojan horse".
The hard drive has three 700MB partitions that are allocated to the three most recently played games. These partitions are used to cache data from the slow DVD drive. After loading onto the drive, subsequent loads will be must faster.
4.5 MB are allocated for each game to store persistent world data and save games. For example: If you crash into a coffee store in a driving game, the next day you play the windows might be boarded up. A few days later the store has a "Closed for Repairs" sign on it. These world details would be up to the game developer to implement of course, but the potential is there.
Ethernet is enabled out of the box for local networks. The presenting developer was aware of software allowing internet play and seemed happy about it. Microsoft has an online program in the works where you will be able to get software updates for the XBox. Something was said about providing emulators and MAME was mentioned.
Graphics chip is a custom nVidia GeForce3 chip. It is slightly older and probably slightly slower that current consumer chips, but the standard platform will allow games to be much faster since code can be optimized for the standard platform that they are not going to change.
They will release a voice-peripheral with hardware compression that plugs into the controller. This could be used in multiplayer games like Halo for communication. This was described as a work around for not having a keyboard.
The Devkit does not have the security lock on it (which is why MAME was only on a Devkit - I don't think we'll be seeing a consumer version until MS authorizes it). The Devkit has a 9GB hard drive that acts as a DVD simulator. The developer downloads their executable to the hard drive then reboots and the XBox loads it. It can simulate DVD load time too. There is an extra serial port on the Devkit, which is used for kernel debugging. There is also a way to set the game region. The game region might be software settable on the consumer boxes too.
There is a 64MB memory limit. The XBox will crash if this is exceeded. More memory will not be available in the future.
System menus use a vertex shader to do green x-ray effects. The entire vertex shader is stored on the GPU and only polygons are sent to the card once the shader is loaded.
DOA3 has the best 3rd party utilization of the XBox and it uses pixel vertex shaders.
Halo has 8 texturing passes. One of the MS developer beat Halo on the hardest level using only pistol whip.
the 'year' part of light year is a human peculiarity.
I am pretty sure US law requires that the employers owe unemployment payments -- that is unless they pay to employees to forfeit those rights.
eom