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Robotics

The Best Robots of 2009 51

Posted by samzenpus from the best-of-show dept.
kkleiner writes "Singularity Hub has just unveiled its second annual roundup of the best robots of the year. In 2009 robots continued their advance towards world domination with several impressive breakouts in areas such as walking, automation, and agility, while still lacking in adaptability and reasoning ability. It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable, but in the meantime they are still pretty awesome."
The Almighty Buck

eBay For Millionaires 118

Posted by samzenpus from the auction-site-of-substance dept.
AC writes "Got $2 million in assets? Then you can join BillionaireXchange; just the place to find a 2006 Bugatti Veyron with a Start Bid of $1,050,000.00. Or perhaps you are looking for a boat like the Disco Volante (from James Bond), for example the 2000 Azimut Motor Yacht, a lovely 85-footer with a Start Bid of $2,700,000.00. On the other end of the deal, did your hedge fund leave you in the lurch? This is the place to sell those extravagant toys you thought you could afford."
Robotics

Skiing Robot May Not Be Useful, But Fun To Watch 64

Posted by timothy from the rescue-me-in-the-alps dept.
kkleiner writes "Bojan Nemec from the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia recently presented his skiing robot at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). The robot won't be winning skiing records anytime soon and its usefulness as a ski instructor or in any other capacity seems quite a ways off. Nonetheless, the videos of this robot taking a ride down the ski slopes are well worth watching. In case you are wondering, this is a completely different robot than the one Slashdot covered earlier."

Comment Re:Serious question (Score 1) 168

by Penguin (#29165619) Attached to: Google Chrome For Linux Goes 64-bit

Besides all the other posts, this might just be a small improvement in rare cases:

The V8 javascript engine does some clever work when performing regular expression matching. Normal engines would compare one character at a time, but whenever the possibility occurs V8 matches several characters at once (eg. for /foobar/ it will try fo match "foob" instead of just first "f", then "o", then "o"), doing comparison on longer segments than just (usually) 8 bits at a time. This usually means that comparisons are grouped together as 32 bit values matching several characters at once.

I reckon the 64-bit edition would simply match up to 64 bits as well.

There are a lot of exceptions where the engine can't just simply match long segments (unicode, case-insensitive searches and so on) and there surely are operations that are a lot more cpu intensive than just comparing strings. I'm just excited about that simple optimization :)
Image

NASA Wants To Fund Space Taxis 136

Posted by samzenpus from the would-you-like-a-trip-to-the-stars dept.
NASA plans on using $50 million in stimulus funds to seed development of a commercial passenger transportation service to space. Potential space taxi inventors have 45 days to submit their proposals. The proposals will be competitively evaluated and the winners will be announced by the end of September. It is unclear what other Commodore 64 games NASA plans on making a reality, but I hope Arkanoid makes the short list.
Image

The Twitter Book 88

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
stoolpigeon writes "Microblogging service Twitter has undeniably been a hit, with growth rates that were at times in excess of 1400%. The growth was rapid enough that the site became well known for its periodic, and, at times, extensive downtime. Even with these issues, the service continued to grow rapidly, and with celebrities getting into the mix Twitter was quickly on the radar of mainstream media. The ubiquity of Twitter and ever-increasing coverage of 'tweets' has also brought the inevitable backlash. As with anything that gains high-profile popularity, there are plenty of Twitter haters out there, though the role Twitter has played in the recent Iranian elections seems to have brought more legitimacy to Twitter in the eyes of many. With popularity come books, and quite a few are already out there about and for Twitter, but my favorite so far is The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein." Read below for the rest of JR's review.

Comment Re:I was pleasantly surprised... (Score 5, Funny) 223

by Penguin (#28326845) Attached to: DTV Transition Mostly Smooth, Windows Media Center Problems

I got eight new channels on Friday -- the MHz and ION networks went digital in my area, so now I can watch Bollywood movies, English-language Russian TV, NHK Today, and some Chinese thing, among others.

These actually can be quite interesting to browse -- the Russian take on the Iranian election was kind of interesting.

Caveat: These reports origin from foreign dubious sources and haven't been processed by the US News un-bias-o-matic.

Comment Re:Software really has yet to catch up to hardware (Score 5, Funny) 177

by Penguin (#28326823) Attached to: A Twitter Client For the Commodore 64

Care to count how many layers of abstraction there are between a typical GUI application and the bare metal on a modern *nix?

I look forward to reading /. in fifteen years.

"Windows FOX is bloated. Why does it require 2 TB of ram just to boot when I can browse the intercloud without problems on Gnubun*x running with only 512 GB ram?"
Privacy

Online Vigilantes, Or "Crowdsourced Justice" 339

Posted by Soulskill from the when-internet-detectives-attack dept.
destinyland writes "The Chinese credit the 'human flesh search engine' for successfully locating 'the kitten killer of Hangzhou' from clues in her online video. But in February, the same force identified a teenage cat-abuser in Oklahoma — within 24 hours of his video's appearance on YouTube. 'Netizens are the new Jack Bauer,' argues one science writer, and with three billion potential detectives, 'attempts to hide will only add thrill to the chase.' But China's vigilantes ultimately turned their attention to China's Internet Propaganda Office, bypassing censorship of a director's personal information using social networks, including Twitter. The author suggests there's a new principle emerging in the online world: 'The Internet does not forget, does not forgive and cannot be stopped. Ever.'"

Comment Re:Hah, you wish (Score 1) 158

by TheViciousOverWind (#27976985) Attached to: Turn Your iPhone Into a Web Server

Or whatever, rather than stating it as unlimited and then "defining" unlimited as something clearly NOT unlimited. It's like telling your buddy that you just "hung out" with his girlfriend last weekend and nothing more, but then trying to hide somewhere you're redefining "hung out" to really mean "banged like bunnies". In all other walks of life that's just called a lie.

I KNEW you were still holding a grudge!
The Internet

Charter Launches 60 Mbps Service 299

Posted by timothy from the deepening-the-digital-divide dept.
ndogg writes "While other companies are throttling their services, and capping bandwidth, Charter Communications, the cable company, is launching a 60/5 Internet service, starting in St. Louis, MO. It's certainly not cheap, starting at 129.99 per month (add another 10 if it's not being bundled with television or phone.) Currently, it's the fastest down stream speed available, and being a cable company, they potentially have greater reach than FiOS." However, there may be a risk to putting too much money down on this service; Charter Communications as a company faces some serious financial problems right now. As reader Afforess writes, "rumors abound that Paul Allen may just cut his losses and run," by selling the company. (Allen is the majority stockholder.)

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"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein

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