Links for Sunday, April 29, 2007

• PC World: Build Your Own Internet-Controlled Robots – “One example of a robot that could be built with the kit is a three-wheeled rover with a camera attached that could keep an eye on your house or pet. Other examples are a flower loaded with sensors and an Internet-controlled teddy bear.“
• TeRK: Educational Robotics – Vehicles for Teaching and Learning – “TeRK, which stands for Telepresence Robot Kit, is a project of the Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Our aim with TeRK is to make educational robotics fun, affordable, and accessible to a diverse community of college students, pre-college students, and all individuals interested in robotics.“
• MPK20: Sun’s Virtual Workplace – “MPK20 is a virtual 3D environment in which employees can accomplish their real work, share documents, and meet with colleagues using natural voice communication. Just like on Sun’s physical Menlo Park campus, known as “MPK,” inhabitants of the virtual MPK20 office building can work together in planned meetings, or can talk informally in unplanned encounters.“
• 3PointD: More on IBM’s Mainframe for Virtual Worlds – “We see this technology moving into banking and retail and anything where the consumer is involved in a transaction of commerce that they would today do over the Web, online shopping, online banking. The problem is that rendering is kind of weak. We haven’t figured out how to accelerate that yet, and how to marry that to transactions.“
• Valerie Henson: Repair–Driven File System Design – “Seagate projects that during the same time that disk capacity increases by 16 times, disk bandwidth will increase by only 5 times, and seek times will remain nearly unchanged. This is good news for many common workloads—we can store more data and read and write more of it at once. But it is terrible news for any workload that is (a) proportional to the size of the disk, (b) throughput–intensive, and (c) seek–intensive. One workload that fits this profile is file system check and repair.“
• Make: US Post Office Hacking – “The parcel travels to Canada, to the area to which the specified ZIP code belongs and there postal workers just see it’s not a Canadian address but Russian. They consider it to be some sort of mistake and forward it further, to Russia.“