Ed Black - Slashdot User

New HRP-4 Humanoid Robots From Japan To Go On Sale 157

Posted by Soulskill on Friday September 17, 2010 @02:29PM from the do-they-come-with-evil-brothers dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Kawada Industries and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology have unveiled their new humanoid robot, HRP-4. The new humanoid stands 151cm tall and is much thinner than its predecessors. For Japan, HRP-4 is another step forward in creating useful mechanical workers to deal with a forthcoming shortage in the labor force and care for an aging population. HRP-4's creators expect to start selling the robot to universities and other research institutions as early as January 2011 for a price tag of $300,000, which is not that bad for a humanoid." The HRP-4s are a whole $100,000 cheaper than Willow Garage's PR2 (non-humanoid) robots, which became available earlier this month. The difference really adds up when building your robot army. Ron Moore could not be reached for comment.

Honda's Exoskeletons Help You Walk Like Asimo 135

Posted by timothy on Friday September 17, 2010 @05:04AM from the walk-me-to-the-store dept.

kkleiner writes "Honda has created two walking exoskeletons based on Asimo research that assist humans in walking. The Bodyweight Support Assist exoskeleton is a set of thin legs attached to a seat. Users sit on the seat and slip their feet into shoes on the robotic legs. This system supports bodyweight to assist people in walking and moving up and down steps. The other, Stride Management Assist, is a brace worn around the hips and thighs that provides added strength when flexing that joint. It's currently under development and being tested by 130 patients in the field. Both devices may prove to be valuable tools in helping the elderly maintain their mobility, assisting the disabled, and easing the stress on physical laborers."

Comment Re:Comparisons like this don't mean squat... (Score 1) 702

by Ed Black on Thursday September 16, 2010 @04:56PM (#33604438) Attached to: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04

Mainstream PC makers in the United States have chosen to do a number of things with new PCs, including Windows Vista, Linux (RH and Ubuntu) distros with wine packages, and invasive shovelware the novice end user can't get rid of without thermite.

Dell being the most obvious example in the US, there are others outside the US (like Acer, for example).

In the light of these widely varied good/bad decisions, what they choose to "make a business out of" or not demonstrates.. very little.

Comment Re:Comparisons like this don't mean squat... (Score 1) 702

by Ed Black on Thursday September 16, 2010 @04:46PM (#33604322) Attached to: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04

Understandable because the key word in the original assertion was "always":

"Native clients will always run faster than Wine."
...*snip*...
"what happens when Wine supports DirectX directly?"

Torvalds Becomes an American Citizen 654

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 14, 2010 @12:29PM from the i-did-that-34-years-ago dept.

netbuzz writes "Having brought his open-source work and family to the United States from Finland some time ago, Linus Torvalds has marked an important personal milestone by attaining US citizenship. A casual remark on the Linux kernel mailing list about registering to vote led to the community being in on the news. Torvalds has acknowledged being a bit of a procrastinator on this move, writing in a 2008 blog post: 'Yeah, yeah, we should probably have done the citizenship thing a long time ago, since we've been here long enough (and two of the kids are US citizens by virtue of being born here), but anybody who has had dealings with the INS will likely want to avoid any more of them, and maybe things have gotten better with a new name and changes, but nothing has really made me feel like I really need that paperwork headache again.' In that post he also expresses dislike for the American style of politics in which he will now be able to participate directly."

Stuxnet May Represent New Trend In Malware 58

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 25, 2010 @09:28AM from the stux-on-you dept.

Trailrunner7 writes "As more information continues to come out about the Stuxnet worm and the vulnerabilities that it exploits, it's becoming increasingly clear that this kind of attack may be a preview of the attacks that are likely to become commonplace in the months and years ahead. The most interesting aspect of all of this is the fact that the attackers behind Stuxnet clearly knew about the vulnerability in the Siemens WinCC system before the malware was written. That implies the malware authors had some advance intelligence about the configuration of the Siemens software and knew exactly where there was a weakness."

Comment Two small things. (Score 1) 335

by Ed Black on Sunday August 26, 2007 @03:00PM (#20364041) Attached to: Skype Linux Reads Password and Firefox Profile

1. A *LOT* of software looks in /etc/passwd because you can get uid, gid, homedir etc. from there (try grep $USER /etc/passwd - go on) 2. Passwords are very rarely stored in /etc/passwd these days. 3. I've written scripts that touch firefox profiles for stuff as innocuous as protocol handlers..yeah, erm. 4. Why is AppArmor a link to an ubuntu wiki? Are Ubuntu about to invent AppArmor like they invented networkmanager et al?

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