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Submission + - Festo's Robot Ants And Butterflies (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Every year around this time of year Festo builds some amazing robot or other — last year it was a kangaroo. What could it possibly do to top previous amazing devices? What about some even more amazing robotic insects.
BionicANT is designed not only look good but to demonstrate swarm intelligence. The robot not only looks like an ant, but it works like one. The design makes use of piezo bending transducers rather than servos to move. As well as being able to move its six legs, it also has a piezo-activated pair of pincers.

The second insect robot is a butterfly — eMotion. For flying machines these are incredibly lightweight at 32 grams. The bodies are laser sintered and the wings use carbon fibre rods. Two miniature servo motors are attached to the body and each wing. The electronics has a microcontroller, an inertial sensor consisting of gyro, accelerometer and compass and two radio modules. Flying time is around 3 or 4 minutes.
Both devices push the boundaries of miniature robotics and they just look so good...

Submission + - Random Numbers in Virtual Machines

Submitted by amitshah
amitshah writes: Access to random numbers in virtual machines is difficult. Here's an article that lists the new features in recent Linux kernel versions which make it easy for Linux guests on QEMU/KVM hypervisors have access to randomness — transparently!

Comment Re: Idiot Parents (Score 2) 569

Raising kids is a lot like trying to influence your friends to do the right thing, you can tell them until youre blue in the face but at the end of the day they're going to do what they want. Are you 100% responsible for everything your friends do? Of course not, then why should parents be 100% responsible for everything their teenager does?

Swatting is not like killing or stealing or doing drugs, picking up a phone and making a prank phone call is not on the same level as grabbing a gun and killing someone even if that phone call could have the same consequences. So the people that say "the parents always say they're a good kid" maybe they are a good kid because they would never pick up a gun and kill someone but they might pick up a phone and make a prank phone call and they should be severely punished for it.

Submission + - Magic Leap's New Game Changer? (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Magic Leap is a secretive company promising to deliver Virtual Reality that will change everything. It was going to show off a first-person real world shoot-em up at TED, but suddenly pulled out. Why is unclear, but the company seems to be happy to show the video it would have used in the TED talk.If you take a look.
OK, you have probably seen it all before and yes this could, and probably is, a mock-up rather than the real thing — but it doesn't matter you want to play it. If you look at its publicity material what you see are lots of things that are typical of VR, but none of the viewers are wearing any sort of VR headset. This is the "magic" part of the leap. The best guess is that the Digital Lightfield that they claim to have invented is most probably a fibre optic device that projects light straight into the retina so that it merges with the light from the real scene. So you might have to wear a device but it will be small and it should produce a natural VR effect.

Submission + - GCHQ Builds A Raspberry Pi Super Computer Cluster (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: GCHQ, the UK equivalent of the NSA, has created a 66 Raspberry Pi cluster called the Bramble for "educational" purposes. What educational purposes isn't exactly clear but you do associate super computers with spooks and spies. It seems that there was an internal competition to invent something and three, unnamed, GCHQ technologists decided that other Pi clusters were too ad-hoc. They set themselves the target of creating a cluster that could be reproduced as a standard architecture to create a commodity cluster.
The basic unit of the cluster is a set of eight networked Pis, called an "OctaPi" — one thing you have to admit is that the Raspberry Pi name lends itself to silly variations. Each OctaPi can be used standalone or hooked up to make a bigger cluster. In the case of the Bramble a total of eight OctaPis makes the cluster 64 processors strong. In addition there are two head control nodes, which couple the cluster to the outside world. Each head node has one Pi, a wired and WiFi connection, realtime clock, a touch screen and a camera.
This is where the story becomes really interesting. Rather than just adopt a standard cluster application like Hadoop, OctaPi's creators decided to develop their own. After three iterations, the software to manage the cluster is now based on Node.js, Bootstrap and Angular.
So what is it all for?
The press release says that:
"The initial aim for the cluster was as a teaching tool for GCHQ’s software engineering community."
and then goes on to say:
"The ultimate aim is to use the OctaPi concept in schools to help teach efficient and effective programming. Watch this space for more details!"
The second point seems a bit unlikely.
Is it going to be open source?
Given that this is a GCHQ creation it seems unlikely, but we can hope.

Comment Re:Well, I wouldn't buy one (Score 1) 389

I predict a lot of people will buy the 1.0 product and it will become obsolete quicker than you can say "apple stock". The 2.0 product might be more interesting. Can't believe they are charging 10k for the "higher end" watch. Bragging rights for rich folks, but rings pretty hollow considering what you get.

Apple Watch will probably go obsolete as quick as any iOS product, which takes a few years before they stop supporting it. The latest iOS 8 still supports the 2011 iPhone 4s. That's much better than Android, I don't think there are any 2011 Android devices that support Android 5.0 without rooting them.

Comment Re:Well, I wouldn't buy one (Score 1) 389

First of all, it needs an iPhone. Don't have one, don't want one.

So you don't have what it requires so you don't want one. Thanks for that. Guess you don't want a furnace because you live in Hawaii so therefore no one else on earth needs a furnace. Apple has sold over 700 million iPhones as of March 2015, even if only 5% buy an Apple Watch it will be a huge success.

Everyone cried that the iPad was ridiculous, it was just a large iPod Touch that cost triple the price. It sold like crazy. The Apple Watch will sell like hotcakes. Apple Watch will sell more in 1 day than all the Android Watches ever sold. Then Samsung will make an exact copy of the Apple Watch, add a SD card and removable battery, and the samsung fanbois will make fun of Apple for not having a micro SD card slot and a removable battery.

Submission + - Classic Mac Icons Archive Bought By MOMA (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Susan Kare is the artist responsible for many of the classic Mac icons that are universally recognized. Now her impact as a pioneering and influential computer iconographer has been recognized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
She designed all of her early icons on graph paper, with one square representing each pixel. Now this archive of sketches has been acquired by MoMA, jointly with San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, and has gone on show as part of a new exhibition, This is for Everyone: Design Experiments For The Common Good.
So now you can think of the smiling mac, the pointing finger and scissors as high art.

Submission + - Nao's Creator Quits Aldebaran As Pepper Goes On Sale (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Bruno Maisonnier, founder of Aldebaran, the French company that brought us the friendly humanoid robot Nao, is standing down as its CEO. This coincides with the availability, in Japan, of company's latest creation Pepper which has quickly established itself in a hospitality role. At Bruno Maisonnier's request SoftBank,which already owned a majority share, will purchase all his shares in the company he founded in 2005. Pepper was created for SoftBank a Japanese phone company and now basically it is on sale for an upfront fee of $1,600 followed by a subscription of $206 per month for 3 years for access to Softbank’s cloud-based artificial intelligence software.
However its main purpose seems to be in the role of a greetings robot at the door to the store, a role that even Nao seems to be getting involved in. It is arguable that a "greetings" robot is really only something that could be a success in countries that have the same cultural background as Japan. Try to imagine the customer reaction to being formally greeted by a Pepper-like robot in a US phone store — the novelty would wear off very quickly.
This probably isn't the future Maisonnier had in mind for his creations.

Comment Re:Yes, a variety of ways (Score 1) 183

by dkf (#49101417) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Can Technology Improve the Judicial System?

The UK is putting its judicial system under tremendous financial pressure at the moment, to the extent that some criminal cases are just being abandoned because there's insufficient money to run them. They're (finally!) starting to experiment with allowing small claims court cases to be resolved over the phone, and also looking at decriminalising TV license violations to reduce pressure on the system. But you get the idea - the judicial system innovates extremely slowly even when being sliced to the bone. So don't hold your breath.

They're also moving the low-level courts to use a lot more technology to support them, things like video links so remand prisoners do not need to be brought to court, tablet computers with the legal texts on them in searchable form, that sort of thing. These are the sorts of things that technology can definitely help with, even though they definitely change the nature of justice somewhat.

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