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Hitachi's Lovable EMIEW 2 Gets Upgraded! - 0 views

  • Remember Hitachi’s little helper robot, EMIEW 2 (Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Work-mate)?  It’s been a couple of years since we heard anything regarding the project and we feared the worst.  Hitachi has put those fears to rest by holding a news conference to show off its new enhanced voice recognition and driving performance! Known primarily for its unique legs which have wheels for feet, EMIEW 2 can drive at up to 6km/h to keep pace with people.  If it needs to carry something it can kneel down (for added stability) and scoot around, and thanks to its bipedal legs it can step over obstacles that are too high to drive over.  Now it has been given adaptive suspension control technology which increases its stability when driving over bumpy terrain such as elevator doors.  During the press demonstration, EMIEW 2′s springy legs bobbed independently as it drove over cables and uneven flooring.
Aasemoon =)

Oracle's "new" kernel for RHEL clone: The real truth | NetworkWorld.com Community - 0 views

  • Oracle made a big noise in the Linux community yesterday by announcing its own spin on the Linux kernel on top if its so-called Unbreakable Linux. Oracle presented the announcement as offering a "modern" Linux kernel on top of its own clone of Red Hat. Underneath the hype, what's Oracle really offering, and what does it mean for Linux? For years, Oracle has ridden Red Hat's coattails and tried to present it as a good thing to its customers. Oracle rebrands Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), slaps its own support package on it, and lets Red Hat do all the heavy development lifting while it tries to poach Red Hat's customers. All perfectly legal according to the licenses that RHEL is shipped under, but a bit skeezy nonetheless. Or perhaps parasitic might be a better word.
Aasemoon =)

Odex I Hexapod Robot From 1984 | BotJunkie - 0 views

  • Commenter Cynox was browsing through the 137 years of Popular Science magazine which are now available online, and he noticed this robot in the September 1984 issue. Called Odex I, it was developed by a (now apparently defunct) company called Odetics. Odex was six and a half feet tall, had six legs, and was fully capable of walking. Although it only weighed 370 pounds, each of its legs could lift 400 pounds. It could dead lift some 2100 pounds, and carry 900 pounds while walking at normal speed (which was about 18 inches per second). Odex used a tripod gait, and the fishbowl thing on top contained sensors that helped it avoid obstacles. It was one of the first robots with an onboard computer that helped coordinate all of its limbs. Since the limbs could articulate themselves in several directions independently, Odex was able to rapidly change its limb configuration to squeeze through tight spaces, move quickly, or lift stuff. It was able to climb into the back of a truck through a combination of automated step behaviors and teleoperation, which was pretty damn good for 1984.
Aasemoon =)

Nvidia Showcases Tablets, Tegra 2 Platform - Reviews by PC Magazine - 1 views

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    "LAS VEGAS- Nvidia declared that 2010 is the year of the tablet at its CES2010 press conference, and went on to launch its latest Tegra 2 platform, running on a slew of them. The company wanted these tablets to have the performance of a PC, but have the energy efficiency of a cell phone. This is where the next generation of Nvidia's Tegra 2 comes in. It features a dual-core Cortex A9 processor-part of its eight independent processors, which also include a Geforce GPU. Nvidia claims Tegra 2 will have 10 times the performance of a smartphone, operating at only 500 milliwatts. So battery life will be far better than products based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon or Intel's Atom chips, according to Nvidia. "
Aasemoon =)

Make Computers See with SimpleCV - The Open Source Framework for Vision - 0 views

  • So after all that you are probably asking, “What is SimpleCV?” It is an open source computer vision framework that lowers the barriers to entry for people to learn, develop, and use it across the globe. Currently there are a few open source vision system libraries in existence, but the downside to these is you have to be quite the domain expert and knowledgeable with vision systems as well as know cryptic programming languages like C. Where SimpleCV is different, is it is “simple”. It has been designed with a web browser interface, which is familiar to Internet users everywhere. It will talk to your webcam (which most computers and smart phones have built in) automatically. It works cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc). It uses the programming language Python rather than C to greatly lower the learning curve of the software. It sacrifices some complexity for simplicity, which is needed for mass adoption of any type of new technology.
Aasemoon =)

Vale Java? Scala Vala palava - O'Reilly Broadcast - 0 views

  • Dave Megginson (who drove the development of the SAX API that will be familiar to many XML developers who use Java) recently wrote Java is dead. Java stood out as a programming language (though not as a platform) in that Sun had refused to standardize it through an independent and reputable standards organization (a lot of the hard work had been done in one attempt to put it through ECMA and one to put it through ISO, both times Sun pulled out and eventually made their highly unsatisfactory JCP Java Community Process system.) Without the ability to alter Java significantly in ways that might go against their druthers, Java suffered two major forks (Microsoft's J++ then its C#, and IBM's SWT) where significant players disagreed with a major component (the graphics library). Java succeeded in middleware, and but failed to take advantage of the rise of browsers on the deskop: their HTML parser was great for the middle 1990s but was deliberately neglected to the point of being unusable: it is hard not to see this as a deliberate attempt by Sun to leave the browser market to its friends and enemies. I really liked Java, and bet my company on it (in a sense): I would not do that today.
Aasemoon =)

・e-nuvo HUMANOID - 0 views

  • The Nippon Institute of Technology, with Harada Vehicle Design, ZMP, and ZNUG Design, have developed a humanoid robot about the size of an elementary school student for educational purposes.  The university adopted 35 of ZMP’s e-nuvo WALK robots in 2004 for a 1:1 student-robot ratio.  Whereas the e-nuvo WALK (the educational version of NUVO) is quite small, the new robot is tall enough to interact with its environment in a more meaningful way.  Students will demonstrate the robot at elementary and junior high schools, as well as care facilities.  The goal is to improve student learning by raising awareness of bipedal robot technology and its connection to math and physics, while also giving them hands-on experience with the bot.  Additionally, by visiting care facilities the university students will come to understand the real-world needs and applications for robots.
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    The Nippon Institute of Technology, with Harada Vehicle Design, ZMP, and ZNUG Design, have developed a humanoid robot about the size of an elementary school student for educational purposes.  The university adopted 35 of ZMP's e-nuvo WALK robots in 2004 for a 1:1 student-robot ratio.  Whereas the e-nuvo WALK (the educational version of NUVO) is quite small, the new robot is tall enough to interact with its environment in a more meaningful way.  Students will demonstrate the robot at elementary and junior high schools, as well as care facilities.  The goal is to improve student learning by raising awareness of bipedal robot technology and its connection to math and physics, while also giving them hands-on experience with the bot.  Additionally, by visiting care facilities the university students will come to understand the real-world needs and applications for robots.\nThe e-nuvo HUMANOID stands 126cm (4′) tall and weighs 15kg (33 lbs), with 21 degrees of freedom (2 legs x6, 2 arms x3, head x3), powered by a Lithium Ion battery.  It is equipped with the usual sensors including cameras, accelerometers, gyro sensors, obstacle detection sensors, distance sensors, and peizoelectric sensors, and can be controlled via PC or remote controller.  Besides basic speech capabilities, the robot can serve as a kind of teacher's assistant, since it has a built-in projector which will allow it to display diagrams on a blackboard that might be difficult to explain in words alone.  The robot will be programmed using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio, which the students have been using to test control algorithms for the e-nuvo WALK robots
Aasemoon =)

The Blue Talkz...: Winduino II - 4 views

  • This is really kool. I mean REALLY REALLY. Based on the ancient Aeolian harp, and made out of Adruino BT Bluetooth board, this little instrument plays with wind. Oh, and it’s solar powered. More info can be found here.  
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    Very interesting idea, but I'm not really impressed by the music it generates.
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    Thanks for the tip, Aasemoon - I liked it so much - http://www.jackdlogan.com/music/winduino_II.html - surely, the Aeolian harp must have been the way humans first learned about pitched sound; in its original form - "Aeolian harps in literature and music Aeolian harps are featured in at least two Romantic-era poems, "The Aeolian Harp" and "Dejection, an Ode", both by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In William Heinesen's novel The Lost Musicians set in Tórshavn, Kornelius Isaksen takes his three sons to a little church where, in the tower, they sit listening to the 'capriciously varying sounds of an Aeolian harp', which leads the boys into a lifelong passion for music. Aeolian harps are mentioned in Vladimir Nabokov's classic Lolita. A lyre is mentioned in Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" which is another name for an Aeolian Harp. An aeolian harp is featured in Ian Fleming's 1964 children's novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to make a cave seem haunted. Henry Cowell's Aeolian Harp (1923) was one of the first piano pieces ever to feature extended techniques on the piano which included plucking and sweeping the pianist's hands directly across the strings of the piano. The Etude in A flat major for piano (1836) by Frédéric Chopin (Étude Op. 25, No. 1 (Chopin)) is sometimes called the "Aeolian Harp" etude, a nickname given it by Robert Schumann. The piece features a delicate, tender, and flowing melody in the fifth finger of the pianist's right hand, over a background of rapid pedaled arpeggios. One of Sergei Lyapunov's 12 études d'exécution transcendante, Op.11 No.9, is named by the author "Harpes éoliennes" (aeolian harps). In this virtuoso piece, written between 1897 and 1905, the tremolo accompaniment seems to imitate the sounding of the instrument. Young Thomas at work on his harp. In 1972, Chuck Hancock and Harry Bee recorded a giant 30 foot
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    Cool... glad you like this Jack! =) It amazed me quite a bit too...
Aasemoon =)

Don Syme's WebLog on F# and Related Topics : F# 2.0 Released - 0 views

  • Today sees the launch of Visual Studio 2010, at five launch events around the world, as announced by Bob Muglia, Jason Zander and S. Somasegar, and presented live today in Las Vegas.   Visual Studio 2010 includes the official version 2.0 of the F# language. As is our custom on the F# team, we also release a matching MSI and ZIP of F# 2.0 (for use with Visual Studio 2008 and as a standalone compiler on a range of platforms)   Today represents the culmination of 7 years of work on the language at Microsoft Research, and, more recently, the Microsoft Developer Division. I am immensely proud of what we’ve achieved. F# brings a productive functional and object-oriented programming language to .NET, extending the platform to new audiences in technical, algorithmic, data-rich, parallel and explorative domains, and its inclusion in Visual Studio 2010 represents a huge milestone for the language.   To help understand what we’re doing with F#, I’ve listed some of the common questions people have about the language below.  We thank everyone who has been involved in the production of F#, especially the many users who have given us feedback on the language!
Aasemoon =)

7mm Thick Pico Projector Can Produce a 70 inch Image (video) | Singularity Hub - 0 views

  • Japan’s Explay Ltd recently announced that it has begun to ship its pico projector engines to developers around the world. The Explay Projector Engine is only 6.7 cubic centimeters in size and just 7mm thick (~1/4 of an inch). Despites its tiny dimensions, the pico projector generates 14 lumens laser light on just 1.3 Watts of power (1.8 with control circuits) and can produce images 7 to 70 inches in size. Resolution is a respectable 852×480 and with a laser based system it should stay in sharp focus over a wide range (20 to 200cm). While Explay has yet to announce which manufacturers will be using their projector they did say that they expect it to appear in devices as early as February of 2011. Looks like we’ll need to watch for it at CES. Explay plans on improving their projector engine further. They hope that the end of 2011 will see the arrival of a 25 lumens WXGA 1366×768 version. A member of the R&D team in Israel (part of XDM Ltd) shows off the 14 lumens pico projector in a prototype testing rig in the video below. Not a bad image for the world’s smallest laser projector.
Aasemoon =)

IEEE Spectrum: Cornell's Ranger Robot Breaks New Walking Record - 0 views

  • Ranger, a four legged bi-pedal robot, set an unofficial record at Cornell last month for walking 23 kilometers (14.3 miles), untethered, in 10 hours and 40 minutes. Walking at an average pace of 2.1 km/h (1.3 miles per hour), Ranger circled the indoor track at Cornell’s Barton Hall 108.5 times, taking 65,185  steps before it had to stop and recharge. Ranger walks much like a human, using gravity and momentum to help swing its legs forward, though its looks like a boom box on stilts. Its swinging gait is like a human on crutches since the robot has no knees, and its two exterior legs are connected at the top and its two interior legs are connected at the bottom.
Aasemoon =)

Carnegie Mellon's Incredible Robot Snake Climbs a Real Tree | Singularity Hub - 0 views

  • Carnegie Mellon has taught its robotic snake to climb trees, though one hopes it won’t start offering your spouse apples. “Uncle Sam” (presumably named for its red, white, and blue markings) is a snake robot built from modular pieces. The latest in a line of ‘modsnakes’ from Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab, Uncle Sam can move in a variety of different ways including rolling, wiggling, and side-winding. It can also wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically, which comes in handy when scaling a tree. You have to watch this thing in action. There is something incredibly life-like, and eerie, about the way it scales the tree outdoors and then looks around with its camera ‘eye’. Projects like Uncle Sam show how life-mimicking machines could revolutionize robotics in the near future.
Aasemoon =)

Think it - Draw it - Build it - 0 views

  • Embedded systems designers deserve better than the feature-lacking point-tools available today. Embedded designs should be more than a collection of microcontrollers and discrete components, pulled together by board design tools and software development environments that are not aware of each other presence, let alone integrated together. Programmable devices are not new. Embedded software is older than most of us! And a lot of embedded design is highly focused on specific interaction between the software and peripherals. So why do we still not have tools that bring all this together and make our lives easier and more productive?
Aasemoon =)

・HRP-2FX - 1 views

  • Bipedal humanoid robots can step over obstacles and negotiate stairs where their wheeled counterparts cannot, but this comes with the risk of falling down.  Naturally, humanoid robots will never be accepted in society if they break when they fall down.  The bigger the robot, the more likely it is that it will damage itself during a fall and be unable to get up. In 2003 the HRP-2P was the first full-scale humanoid that could fall over safely and get back up, and so far remains alone; not even Honda’s ASIMO can do this.  As soon as it detected that it was falling, the HRP-2P would bend its knees and back, which helped to reduce the ground impact.  This motion, called “UKEMI”, is quite similar to how the SONY QRIO would react when falling over to reduce the risk of damaging its components.
Aasemoon =)

Sunlight Labs: Blog - ClearMaps: A Mapping Framework for Data Visualization - 0 views

  • Despite the recent explosion of web based cartography tools, making effective maps for data visualization remains a challenge. While tools like Google Maps are great for helping navigate the world they are often poorly suited for thematic mapping, as many features like roads and cities only get in the way of telling compelling stories with data. In fact, even the distance between places can be a distraction – who cares how far away Alaska is when the goal is to make a simple comparison between US states? To help overcome some of the limitations with existing mapping tools Sunlight Lab is releasing ClearMaps, an ActionScript framework for interactive cartographic visualization. In addition to giving designers and developers more control over presentation the project aims to address some of the common technical challenges faced when building interactive, data driven maps for the web. ClearMaps is designed as a lightweight, flexible set of tools for building complex data visualizations. It is a framework not a plug-and-play component (though it could be a starting point for those wishing to make reusable tools).
  • Despite the recent explosion of web based cartography tools, making effective maps for data visualization remains a challenge. While tools like Google Maps are great for helping navigate the world they are often poorly suited for thematic mapping, as many features like roads and cities only get in the way of telling compelling stories with data. In fact, even the distance between places can be a distraction – who cares how far away Alaska is when the goal is to make a simple comparison between US states? To help overcome some of the limitations with existing mapping tools Sunlight Lab is releasing ClearMaps, an ActionScript framework for interactive cartographic visualization. In addition to giving designers and developers more control over presentation the project aims to address some of the common technical challenges faced when building interactive, data driven maps for the web. ClearMaps is designed as a lightweight, flexible set of tools for building complex data visualizations. It is a framework not a plug-and-play component (though it could be a starting point for those wishing to make reusable tools).
  • Despite the recent explosion of web based cartography tools, making effective maps for data visualization remains a challenge. While tools like Google Maps are great for helping navigate the world they are often poorly suited for thematic mapping, as many features like roads and cities only get in the way of telling compelling stories with data. In fact, even the distance between places can be a distraction – who cares how far away Alaska is when the goal is to make a simple comparison between US states? To help overcome some of the limitations with existing mapping tools Sunlight Lab is releasing ClearMaps, an ActionScript framework for interactive cartographic visualization. In addition to giving designers and developers more control over presentation the project aims to address some of the common technical challenges faced when building interactive, data driven maps for the web. ClearMaps is designed as a lightweight, flexible set of tools for building complex data visualizations. It is a framework not a plug-and-play component (though it could be a starting point for those wishing to make reusable tools).
Aasemoon =)

Want To Know Why Visa & Mastercard Cut Off Wikileaks? Because Its Latest Leak Was About... - 0 views

  • Visa's slogan used to be "Everywhere you want to be," but apparently one place it did not want to be was on Wikileaks. We've already covered how both Visa and MasterCard cut off Wikileaks quite quickly, with MasterCard even going so far as to claim that it did so because of illegal activity by Wikileaks -- despite no charges or convictions for any actual illegal activity. Just a day later, it seems, we may have some new insight into why this is. Chris Rhodes was the first of a bunch of you to send over the news that the latest cable leak shows that US diplomats worked hard on Visa and MasterCard's behalf in Russia, where the Russian government was working on a new national payment card system, that would likely deprive Visa and MasterCard of transaction fees in Russia. Convenient timing.
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    Holy cow! Now that explains a few things...
Aasemoon =)

IEEE Spectrum: Breakthrough in Creating a Band Gap for Graphene Promises Huge Potential... - 0 views

  • Ever since graphene was first produced in a lab at the University of Manchester in 2004, researchers around the world have been fascinated with its potential in electronics applications. Graphene possessed all the benefits of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), namely its charged-carrier mobility, but it didn’t have any of the down sides, such as CNTs’ need for different processing techniques than silicon and the intrinsic difficulty of creating interconnects for CNTs. But all was not easy for applying graphene to electronics applications. One of the fundamental problems for graphene was its lack of a band gap, which left it with a very low on-off ratio measured at about 10 as compared to in the 100s for silicon. Now this fundamental hurdle has been overcome. Based on research led by Phaedon Avouris at IBM’s IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, IBM is reporting that they have created a significant band gap in graphene.
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    VERY interesting...
fishead ...*∞º˙

Popped Culture: Rick Roll In A Bottle - 1 views

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    " I know, it's probably old (I couldn't find it on Cyanide and Happiness) and Rick Astley is so last decade, but it made me laugh and it's a meme kind of day for me. (Link via Tumblefrog)"
  • ...3 more comments...
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    Hahahahahahaha.... good one fishy! =D
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    Eh?? Where did the image go?
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    The image disappeared! =P But the link is still there!
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    hmmnn...it's visible when you click 'snapshot' above. It's also visible if you view on the "My Network" page. perhaps on Groups, the highlighted images don't show on purpose?
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    But it did, at first! And the rest of the images that you've posted still show up!
Aasemoon =)

Develop Web Apps in F# with WebSharper | .NET Zone - 1 views

  • In ASP.NET development, F# also offers productivity advantages over VB and C#.  F# is different because it is statically checked and type-safe.  It addresses weaknesses in ASP.NET development like untyped values, complex form construction, and using strings for IDs and method names that connect markup with code-behind (class-files).  Writing a web application in F# on the WebSharper platform can be less-time consuming if a developer is not great at writing web apps in JavaScript.  Through WebSharper, developers can write a web app using a large subset of F# and .NET core libraries and then just let WebSharper map the code to JavaScript.  WebSharper can integrate with ASP.NET applications, but it is different from the standard approach because it builds applications from miniature web pages called "pagelets".  The pagelets correspond to functions on the client-side and they are automatically translated into JavaScript.   WebSharper supports a wide range of JavaScript libraries, making it easy for developers to optimize their code in whatever way they choose.  jQuery, qooxdoo, Flapjax, and Yahoo UI are all supported by WebSharper.  The leap from F# to JavaScript is manageable because both are functional languages that support lambda expressions and closures.  Another unique part of WebSharper is a "formlet".  A formlet is a special pagelet that provides form functionality.  Formlets in Web Sharper run and validate on the client, submitting their result to a either a client- or a server-side callback.
Aasemoon =)

Facebook Developers | HipHop for PHP: Move Fast - 0 views

  • Today I'm excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP. While HipHop has shown us incredible results, it's certainly not complete and you should be comfortable with beta software before trying it out. HipHop for PHP isn't technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.
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