My, Robot?

Lots of what appear to be practical developments in consumer robotics these days. And now, I'm not talking about the Sony Aibo robotic cat and dog, or the Honda Asimo (named for robotic-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, one of whose famous works was the (apparently very loose) basic for the current Will Smith flick "I,Robot".

These are robotic lawnmowers and floor sweepers. Things more in line with what Robert Heinlein's character Dan Davis came up with in "The Door into Summer".

• Electrolux's Automower lawnmower


• Electrolux's Trilobite floor sweeper (cute name)


• Roomba's floor sweeper.
  

And on the not-quite-"practical"-but-a-hell-of-a-lot-of-fun front, check out the movie of this Korean humanoid kit robot. It dances, it does karate, it does calisthenics. Nifty.

Personally, I'm kind of fond of the toy R2-D2 robot from Hasbro I've got that can respond to voice command, etc. (Especially the "easter eggs" it has - if you have one, tell it to "follow me"!)

The X-Prize starts to pay off

As noted on Slashdot, it looks like the folks competing for the X-Prize to develop private, commerical space travel and launch vehicles are starting to have an effect. Now someone's starting to take the NASA project for inflatable space stations (which were surprisingly safe and cheap...even better than metal ones, as I recall) and apply it to low-cost space stations.

Reminds me of the novel Waldo, by Robert Heinlein, where the eponymous character lived in his own space station due to suffering from myasthenia gravis.

Of course, we'll have to have some standards on docking, etc. Affordable ones. I know the US and Russians have some standards on this (at least I hope so, otherwise how could the Soyuz and Progress capsules and the Shuttle all dock at the International Space Station? I think work on this started with the Apollo-Soyuz mission in the 1970's).

And we'll need some autonavigation/autodocking. 'Taint easy to dock with a big balloon in space! The Russians use autonav/autodock on their unmanned Progress resupply capsule to ISS and to their old Mir station (and perhaps older Salyuts?) So sounds like a way for the cash-strapped Russian economy to make some coin.

We may get the government pork barrel off the back of the space industry/program sooner than we think.

Why does Star Trek matter so much to some people?

Don't understand what we geeks see in Star Trek? Read this.

Because it, more than anything else I can think of (including the Bible), speaks to children and people of all ages about hope for the future. I've heard people (including an ex-President who died recently) say that without religion, there are no morals, etc.

To that I say - bull. I'm not a religious person, never have been. Oh, I attended Sunday School when I was small. But since then, not so much.

Although for some sad individuals, Star Trek (or the Bible, the Koran, or whatever) is the be-all and end-all and answer to every question (usually for folks incapable or afraid to use their minds and think), the rest of us see it as fiction, have fun with it, and recognize that it, too, speaks to us of important truths....without being nearly as divisive as religions have been in past centuries and millenium. Because it speaks to the FUTURE instead of the past, maybe.

Oh, the geeks "war" about whether Star Trek (or which particular Star Trek series), or Babylon 5 or Stargate or Farscape or whatever is the BETTER series, me I just enjoy 'em all. Farscape and Stargate don't get overly preachy about any sort of message (although they do show good moral tone). B5 and Star Treks are more overt about it. But these are wars of words. Of thought. Of Ideas and Ideals. Religion is examined by Stargate and B5 and Star Trek too, at times. Respectfully, but without bias. (I love the bit in a B5 episode where all the ambassadors of the various races are showing each other their religious or spiritual convictions.....the final scene is when the representative of Earth startrs to tell about ours...by introducing representatives of ALL the Earth religions he could find. The were all lined up in a row. It was a LONG line.)

Live long and prosper, y'all.

They Paved Paradise and Put In A Parking Lot, indeed

NASA and NOAA have determined that the amount of concrete-paved surface (and I assume this means asphalt and such too) in the USA is approximately the size of the state of Ohio.

That's more than the amount of wetlands in the USA. And still growing by 10,000 miles of road and one million new homes a year. And that's not counting other countries, either.

Wow. That's a lot of green plants lost. I wonder if they have information about the rate of growth.....because I'd kinda like to know how long it it going to be before the Earth looks like Coruscant from Star Wars, or Trantor from Isaac Asimov'e Foundation novels.

This brought to mind a new cover of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi", I've recently been listening too, by Counting Crows and Vanessa Carlton. This is the song everyone probably remembers as "They Paved Paradise And Put In A Parking Lot"
Hey, the hippies and environmentalists warned us. We just haven't been listening...

The truth hurts, doesn't it?

Here's a good article about the problems Microsoft faces in continuing "business as usual" and why they may not continue to succeed

Mac fans have been pointing this out for years. Interesting to see that viewpoint in someone who worked for MS for a decade, and recently got so frustrated with Windows that he gave up and switched to a Mac (and has been living happily ever after).

The truth is out there!
The truth will set you free!

What goes around comes around

Well, the bean-counters and MBA-drones were quick to jump all over outsourcing USA programmer's jobs to India.

But like all (ahem) "good things", it can't last.

Just hope that people are willing to come back to fill the jobs you can no longer fill so cheaply in India.....and don't be surprised if you end up paying more when they do.

That'll teach 'em.

Standard, standards, who's got the standards

God knows I love new tech and new gadgets. But sometimes I wonder if things move too damn fast. Now they've developed PAPER DVD's and other new larger-capacity DVD formats.

Besides the above, I read today they're already looking to replace the DVD....and the DVD is supposedly going to replace the CD. It's moving towards replacing it for CD-R uses on computers.

Hell, I haven't finished replacing all my LP's and VHS tapes with DVD yet. Cut it out, guys!

Thanks heavens they are making DVD drives that are able to read and write the old formats. Oh yeah.....there's a ton of different DVD formats out there (DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW and these new things.)

Unix and Linux have this problem too. There's eleventy-one different flavors of Unix and even of Linux. Hell, there's a half dozen Linuxii for the MACINTOSH for crissakes....And Mac OS X is a BSD Unix variant. I wonder if this hurts or help Unix/Linux. I'm betting it hurts.

COOL new tech makes for much more efficient motors and quieter fans

A Japanese inventor has come up with a new idea to make electric motors 80% more efficient. This will also help fans run more quietly and use less power.

Dandy!

Novel cell phone service helps you figger out what song that is on the radio!

John C. Dvorak posited in one of his columns a while back that killing Napster (the free version) was the worst thing the music industry ever did, because it killed the major way to sample new music. You can't do it on the radio anymore, because they play songs for 20 minutes and don't tell you who the heck played that song you liked. (I've never understood this.....you'd think they'd be doing MORE commercial breaks these days, not less. It's all about advertising after all...)

Well, AT&T has solved this problem with a new cell phone service.

Reminds me of a widget I saw some years back that you could buy and push a button on to "bookmark" music you were listening to at a particular time and then use it with your computer later to find out what the song was. Never heard about it again (not surprised, are you?)

So I dunno if this AT&T service will go anywhere either. I only sort of agree with Dvorak, too. After all, even though Napster has gone commercial, there's always KaZaa, Gneutella, OpenNap, Usenet newsgroups, etc, etc. But then, I've long since stopped paying attention to Mr. Duh Whore Hack. Him and Dennis Miller used to be great....but they've gone down the tubes the last few years.

First steps towards Replicators?

Hmmm....what with nanontech and such things as these small logic blocks, are we on the way to making "Replicator" robots, ala the TV show Stargate SG-1?

Anyone got the Asgard's address?

My next job may be in the auto industry....

Looks like cars are becoming so hight tech, computerized, and hard to repair that they are looking for people with IT and electronics backgrounds to diagnose and fix 'em

I've never been one to work on my own car.....but hmmmmmmmm....

Methinks it's time to rethink the auto industry AND the computer industry....

Oh my freaking god....JOHN CARTER OF MARS is being made into a movie

Man, I gotta read "SciFiWire" more often.

Someone is actually making a movie of one of the classic SF novels of all time, "A Princess of Mars"!

We may have the makings of a franchise here. On par with The Lord of the Rings, too.

"A Princess of Mars" is the first of 14 "John Carter of Mars" novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs (you know, the guy who also crreated Tarzan, Pellucidar, etc.) Not to be confused with that other thrice-named British author, Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), or the quadruply-named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien...

I've actually got a 1910 edition of this novel in excellent shape. Looks like it was a Christmas gift from "Horace" to someone back then, too. I've read several of these books, but haven't finished the whole series. Gotta do that soon. (If you've never read it, I've got to tell you the style is NOT like current literature. It's rather breathless.....but oddly it's actually PERFECT for a modern Hollywood action/sci-fi movie. What goes around comes around, I guess.)

And my favorite artist, Michael Whelan, did the book covers for a reprint series a few years back. I've bought a number of his book covers for my walls.

And once they're done with the John Carter books, they could make a movie of one of my favorite Robert Heinlein books, "The Number of The Beast", whose main characters are (intentionally) named "Zebediah JOHN CARTER" and "Deety (short for DEJAH THORIS) BURROUGHS". This could be a franchise on par with Riverworld and John Carter of Mars, too. Either this book and it's related followups, or the whole Heinlein Future History or Lazarus Long cycles.

Pinch me, I must be dreaming - FARSCAPE returns!

Good heavens....I must be dreaming. The SciFi channel, who killed off one of the best and most innovative science fiction shows, Farscape, a few months back because they apparently couldn't have all the control they wanted, is actually bringing it back, at least as a miniseries.

THANK YOU, SCI FI.

And they picked up the excellent re-make of the campy old TV series Battlestar Galactica....and have kept Stargate going and are making a sequel series, Stargate Atlantis. And just picked up Andromeda. They had Earth: Final Conflict for a while too....but it mysteriously vanished. That series was ok for a while, but kind went downhill fast. Watchable, but not excellent.

Oh, and they tried to keep Babylon 5 going (but didn't have the guts to keep Legend of the Rangers going despite bad ratings due to the world's most horrible example of scheduling ever seen....opposite a major sporting event on another channel.)

How amazing that virtually everything ELSE they beyond the above mentioned items and the occasional movie or miniseries such as the two Dune ones show is utter trash! Some of it is HORRIBLY BAD (and I'm talking about new/exclusively-made-for-SciFi stuff, not ancient old stuff that's just campy/dated.) Even Spielberg's "Taken" minseries was pretty bad (not to mention about twice as long as it needed to be.)

Amazing....especially from the channel that actually had the gus to make a movie/miniseries out of Phillip José Farmer's RIVERWORLD (which would make an excellent TV series. I think their Riverworld was a pilot for a series, but not sure.)

I think the SciFi channel staff must be collectively bipolar or schizo or something. Such extremes of trash and treasure give ME mood swings just thinking about it!

I guess this is an example of Sturgeon's Law in action: "90% of everything is crud."

Freaky number coinky-dinks

I was checking my cell phone timers today (I couldn't remember if I'd reset the resettable one last month when the billing cycle changed). Sure enough, I hadn't (gotta set up a reminder in my PDA to do that). The freaky thing was that all three timers started with "43". The last incremental (per-call) timer was 43:16. The Resettable (monthly total) timer was 432, and the Cumulative (lifetime) total was 4332. If the incremental timer was 43:2x, I'd have gotten worried....too many coincidences. (Actually, I'd have been worried about a bug in the cell phone software.....) And when was the last call I made on my cell phone? On Saturday, 4/3. AHHHHH!!!!!

Two other cell phone thoughts:

• The first cell phone call was made 31 years ago yesterday (1973).

  
  

• Here's a great joke, from the "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" DVD I watched last night, from comedian Jeff Foxworthy: "If your father's cell number doesn't have anything to do with his telephone number....you might be a redneck." Great comedy "concert", by the way. They only other two comedy shows that've had me laughing so hard I cried are Bill Cosby's "Himself" and anything by Robin Williams. Recommended (any of 'em).
  

The anniversary of another odd numerical coincidence is coming up, too. Next Tuesday, April 13th, is the 34th anniversary of the problem on the Apollo 13 moon flight. (Can't recall if that's the day it was launched or the day the actual problem occurred. Perhaps the same day, but I don't think so...I think they were more than a day along in the mission.) At least the problems wasn't on a FRIDAY the 13th (4/13/1970 was a Monday). Triskadekaphobes would've had a field day. As I recall, the launch time for the mission was 1:13 pm. Another 13! And of course, NASA uses 24-hour military time, and 1:13pm is "13:13". ANOTHER 13. Spooky. not sure if the seconds weren't :13 too. Hope not, that'd be too freaky for words.

Can you believe it's been 30+ years since we've walked on the moon? The last man walked on the moon on Dec. 14, 1972. 32 frickin' years ago.

Like Jerry Pournelle has said: I figured we'd go to the moon in my lifetime. I just didn't figure we'd go there then STOP.

Can you imagine where we'd be if NASA hadn't screwed the pooch for the last 30 years of manned spaceflight (pork, pork, pork!)

Oh well, at least JPL and a few other places are doing interesting things. Pity that all the really interesting (to non-science type) missions are being done by robotic probes.

Man, I hope the X-Prize is successful....and the winners and some of their competitors are commercially successful thereafter, because the space program is too important to leave to the government (pork, pork, pork).

Of course, they guv'mint is about the only one who seems to be able/willing to pay for it. Unless the X-Prize does for the space program what similar prizes did for aviation (can you say Charles Lindbergh?)

Hey, at NASA's $15 billion a year budget (a paltry figure for all NASA does)....maybe we should get Microsoft interested. They've got several years worth of NASA's budget in CASH lying around. So does Apple, for that matter. You can be darn sure that EITHER of 'em would be making a profit. They're about the only ones in the computer industry who ARE making profits these days.

Man, if we could get Microsoft to fund a Mars mission, I'd never say a bad word about 'em again. I'd buy a PC. (There's a nifty Gateway model that's a "media center" PC too....and beleagured Gateway could sure use the help right now....)

Better yet...maybe NASA needs to stop giving away all it's research and charge license fees instead. Our investment in NASA R&D pays us back many-fold each year in new technologies that "spin off" from NASA....commercial companies make beaucoup bucks from NASA R&D without paying a cent to the government to use it. No one remembers that, of course....they just piss and moan about all this money spent on "Buck Rogers and a buncha moon rocks". That ALWAYS comes up in the Letters to the Editors or other Opinion page articles in the newspapers each time NASA has a controversy or problem. Short sighted fools.

You know what I say? "No bucks, no Buck Rogers".

Apple turns 28. (But who cares, everyone knows Apple is going out of business, right?)

Apple (you know, that company everyone says is going out of business soon) turned 28 this week.

I've been hearing that Apple can't last for almost as long as I've owned a Mac. And I've owned a Mac since they came out in 1984 (got mine of February 29, 1984 in fact. Still have it too, and it still works.) It's gotten so ridiculous, a web site has been set up to track all the ludicrous "Apple Death Knell" stories. Fun (and funny) reading.

When I was moving to my current abode about 2.5 years back, I was going through a bunch of old Byte Magazines and flipped through an article about the 512k Mac upgrade....and even then (the article was from 1984 or maybe 85) they were running the old line that "Apple must do x, y and z or they won't survive."

Man, I'm getting tired of this. Talk about your "broken record" (sorry, I'm dating myself with that reference....I should have said "talk about your scratched CD")

Twenty eight years later (and incidentally, 20 for the Mac...this is the Mac's 20th birthday year) Apple and the Mac are still here, still selling millions of units a year.

Apple's not going to die anytime soon, Apple and Mac bashers. Deal with it! (And be thankful, because computing life would be a much more boring place without Apple and it's innovations.)

More on the sad state of "journalism" these days...

More thoughts on the matter I discussed in a recent post. Apparently I'm not the only one who feels this way.

More reasons why you should fear Microsoft

Microsoft has taken over your college textbooks

Why Microsoft doesn't need to worry about complying with the DOJ's ruling or the recent EU $600 Million fine from the EU.

TANJ!

And you thought computer manuals were bad...

I just purchased a new watch because the 20+ year old Seiko LCD watch I'd been using was having trouble with it's buttons.

Of course, it then occured to me to find a watch repair place (yes, they still have them) and get that watch and another old watch I inherited from my father fixed. Actually, it was getting dad's old watch fixed that gave me the idea to try to fix the other one. I was referred to the watch repair guy by K's Merchandise when I went there to try to get a band....because they didn't sell one that would work. The watch guy just ended up fixing the pin though (apparently K's doesn't have the pins either.) Charged me a whopping $1 for the pin and time.

But let me tell you, the manual for the old Seiko is 10 times better (even if translated from the Japanese) than the manual for this NEW watch made by Elgin of Illinois. Not to mention larger.....you need a magnifying glass for the Elgin manual!

This Elgin watch cost (I think) more than then Seiko or it's contemporaries would and is from a US company (Elgin of Illinois, purchased at Sears on sale for $79 from it's normal $250 price). It's one of those fancy "chronographs" with all the graduated dials around the rim and it's got an LCD insert for showing a second time or date, timer, stopwatch, etc (part of the reason I got it, as my old Seiko had that and I used it. A lot.)

The Seiko watch booklet is about the size of a pocket notepad (or a curent PDA) and pretty clear and straightforward. Lots of pictures too. You could probably figure out how to use the watch from the pics even if it wasn't translated.

The Elgin watch came with booklet designed for several TOTALLY DIFFERENT types of watches (apparently the company only prints ONE booklet for ALL it's men's watches!) and the section for my watch was terse and unclear to the point of unbelievability.

Even worse, the booklet is about the size of a packet of stamps you buy from the machine at the post office. It fits in my wallet right next to it. Anyone much older than me would truly need a magnifying glass to read it.

And I've discovered several "features" of the watch that don't seem to be documented or explained. The fourth button only seems to have one vague undocumented use, for example, yet seems to have others that aren't documented.

The instructions for using the rings around the watch face (for doing math and conversions, in somewhat of a rotary slide rule fashion) are both far too terse and (from what I can tell) WRONG in some cases. Hell, I've used slide rules before so I have some idea what they are trying to do, but the instructions are useless (I used slide rules briefly when I was taking algebra in high school, pocket calculators had just started to become widely available and the course still discussed using slide rules. I still have a couple of slide rules that belonged to my dad.)

I gotta tell you man....before you buy a watch, have them let you take a look at the manual. I'll grant you I only paid $79 for this watch instead of the usual $250 Sears charges....I strongly doubt I'd have paid $250 for a watch. $79 was a stretch but it was the closest I'd found to my old Seiko. But if I HAD paid $250 for this watch, I'd probably drive to Elgin's HQ in Illinois and toss it through their front window. I'm about ready to now. (I may actually check out Sear's return policy.)

It seems to be a fine watch, otherwise, but the manual is frankly insulting! And in many ways, even with the main hands, three subsidiary dials, and 3 LCD panels, it is LESS capable than my 20+ year old Seiko!

I feel a letter to the manufacturer coming on.

And of couse, now my old Seiko watch works fine after the watch repairman cleaned it. He was a breath of fresh air too....real service in this day and age is hard to find and he provided quick, friendly, inexpensive and polite service. [If you're in or near Des Moines Iowa, and need a watch fixed, go to John's Watch Repair in McNeal Shopping Center at Merle Hay Road and Urbandale Avenue.]

Sears on the other had I had to practically force information out of about the watch, since they were out of it when I went to buy it and weren't sure if they would get more, etc. I was figuring they wouldn't since $79 for a $250 watch looked like a close-out to me...but apparently not! Either they're taking a loss on this watch, or their mark-up is normally obscene. If they made ANY profit on that $79 sale, then their normal $250 price is even more absolutely offensive.

They did finally get more in and call me, I'll grant you, and were good after that about adjusting the band and stuff....although I had to go back and ask them to adjust the band; they didn't ask ME up front. Maybe it was because it was on sale...but so what. It was THEIR sale. I didn't make 'em sell it cheaper. Maybe I should have paid $15 for that 2 year extended warranty.....nah. A 2 years warranty is a waste. I had my last watch for TWENTY (and apparently I'll have it a while longer yet.) Maybe I pissed 'em off by not purchasing the warranty on an on-sale watch.

But in another example of the difference between the Sears workers and the watch repair guy....I took my Dad's watch back in when I went to pick up the repaired Seiko. because I'd neglected to check and see if Dad's watch actually fit me (I just assumed it would since many of the other wearables I inherited from him do.)

Of course, the watch didn't fit, so I asked the watch repair guy about a new band for it.

But instead of just selling me a band...he CHECKED TO SEE IF IT COULD BE ADJUSTED. Something I should have thought to do (since I had to adjust the clasp of the new Elgin watch myself after Sears was done anyway. They didn't offer to do that either.). I felt like a dope for not thinking of this myself, since I'd just done it on another watch a week before.

But lo and behold, he just adjusted the clasp (I thought I had thin wrists, but Dad's were apparently thinner!) and he did so in two seconds and it fit fine. For free! Granted I'd just paid him $25 to clean the watch and add a screw for the battery holder in the watch and a pin for Dad's watchband as well...but still, he did the professional thing and merely adjusted the band instead of selling me a new band as he could quite easily have done since I was obviously prepared to buy a new one! Professionalism in action. Refreshing!

I just wish I had more watches for the watch repair fellow to repair. He at least deserves my business.

You can bet I'll remember this, however, in years to come, as both an objectl lesson and as a source of watch repair should I need it again. I'll even go out of my way to get bands and batteries from him if possible. Such professionalism deserves rewards, respect...and repeat business.

More evidence for life on Mars

Cool! Some evidence has just been announced that pretty much seems to clinch the possibility of at least microbial life on Mars.

No LGM's, though.

Computer history galore!

The GUIdebook graphical user interface gallery web site has a great history and comparison of all the major GUIs from the past 20+ years.

They also have a collection of great GUI-related articles from Byte magazine from my formative computer days, including one of my all-time favorites about designing the Xerox STAR user interface, as well as older and new GUIs. Man, sure wish I could still get Byte on the newstands. I'm still pissed that McGraw-Hill stopped publishing it. (And I work for a McGraw-Hill division!) Byte is still around on the web, thank heavens....but it's just not the same as the old paper version (which is a funny statement coming from me, considering how much I love the web and digital books and mags.) I've still got about 15-20 years of BYTE mags in my garage. I was starting to cherry-pick them for good articles and pitch them when I bought my house....but I just couldn't bring myself to throw them out.

Speaking of cool computing history web sites, Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original Mac designers (I got to meet him once and thank him for the Mac) has put together a good site about the history of the Mac (he has other non-Mac plans for it as well, but it starts off right!)