Newsgroups: comp.robotics
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From: rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
Subject: Re: If you split it, they will come?
Organization: The Armory
Date: Sat, 17 Sep 1994 13:35:42 GMT
Message-ID: <CwA0Fn.M4t@armory.com>
References: <clint.laskowski-120994203424@jjwwjj.mixcom.com> <3545mq$3lo@nrtphaa9.nt.com>
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In article <3545mq$3lo@nrtphaa9.nt.com>,
Steve Holmes NT <sherlock@brtph862> wrote:
>Clint Laskowski (clint.laskowski@mixcom.com) wrote:
>: I still am not convinced of the value of splitting comp.robotics. However,
>
><stuff deleted>
>
>: For example, does a PUMA arm fall under industrial or research (is it
>: industrial or research)? How about a RHINO arm (is it research or
>: homebrew)?
>
>I would propose that stuff dealing with how to get a PUMA arm up and
>running, where to find manuals, what are the trad offs between various
>robotic equipment, what development tools are available for industrial
>applications, would fit into the industrial group.
>
>The research area would allow for discussion of various robotic
>research areas:
>
>Mobile Robots:
-----------------------------
Gee, excuse the fuck out of me, but these are homebrew topics!
All such tagged below (***) are as well!!:
***> - Path Finding
Give us all a break! Do you suspect that path finding is out of the realm
of homebrew! Shit! It's a very common question!

***> - Sensor Fusion
***> - Control Paradigms (although I think paradigm was a 1993 word)
And that's nonsense anyway, as Rodney Brooks paper on subsumption
architecture reads like it was written for ninth graders! The principles
are novel enough, but simple to explain!!! That's my point here!!!

***> - Vision Integration
Some is esoteric, but much is not!

***> - Learning
I can write a ten line program in BASIC that learns! Give us a break! There
are surely things anyone here can understand!

***> - Mapping
And I've written robot emulators to do this as well, it is NOT that HARD!

***> - Reactive Behavours
Now what is the reason "homebrew-ers" wouldn't have need of that?

***> - Planning
***> - Goal Achievement
And precisely why wouldn't that topic be of interest to everyone? I AM
beginning to think that there are none out there willing to expound on
these subjects out of sheer cowardice about their OWN competence!!! I don't
think we have a group of waiting "'X"-spurts" out there at all who would
magically appear on c.r.research!!!
-Steve Walz

>Industial:
> - Kinematic Algorithms,
> - other stuff I dont know enough about.
>
>I think Homebrew is pretty self explainatory.
----------------------------
And I think that's a pretty cheesy and condescending remark! Among your
"research" topics, I know that *I* will be crossposting questions regarding
the applications of these "research" topics from and to ".homebrew" and
that you won't be able to escape the interest of the "homebrew" people by
creating a group promising a place for snobs to discuss things they IMAGINE
many of us here don't ALSO understand as well! So knowing that IN ADVANCE,
do you REALLY think that all these unpublished (here) snobs are going to
magically appear and take the questions of all who have interest any more
than they will on comp.robotics right now???? I think NOT!!!

And these automagically appearing snobs you claim, quite like the Great
Prophet Zarquon, are just as likely to be shitty to people anyway until we
roast them for not answering for what they post!! You forget that there is
an implied responsibility on the net to inform in the process of posting,
and that this extends all the way down through many levels of expertise!!
Now you can PRETEND that these snobbish blackguards are not going to have
truck with the plebes who ask too many questions, but I rather think that
they will fold their tents and depart in the face of genuine questions to
which it may become ever more doubtful that they have REAL answers anyway,
and that they may be shown for the dabblers they are, with little interest
in testing their theories. I HAVE read a lot of papers in these fields of
interest, and with some exceptions which are notable, most of them are
pure backfill!!! Where these papers extend into Italian Restaurant Check 
mathematics they belong in a math group, but where they deal with genuine
concepts in robotics, they belong here as well as anywhere. Admittedly we
don't have the facility to deal with teaching control theory in
high-falutin' terms in ASCII very well, but there are a number of important
principles within that and many other fragmentary disciplines of
automation/robotics which ARE of importance and ARE discussable here!!
It is this that those with some facility either have not interest or no
ability to teach! And this day and age in AI/robotics has people scrambling
to publish and not to fool around reading the net all that often!! I don't
see Rodney Brooks diddling about on the Usenet groups or Internet, for
example. Many cutting edge people simple do NOT have the time to appear on
a "research" group, or else they'd be damned if they are going to tell YOU
everything they're working on, as they haven't milked it enough quite yet!
-Steve Walz

><stuff deleted>
>: Gosh... what are the people in sci.electronics doing?
>
>sci.electronics added the groups sci.electronics.repair, and
>sci.electronics.cad.  I for one did not believe that there
>was enough repair discussion in the sci.electronics group to 
>justify a new group (<1 post per day was repair related).
>However, after the split the .repair group has easily had as much
>traffic as this group (comp.robotics), it seems there was a lot
>of pent up interest in finding out how to fix one's CD player.
-----------------------------------------
Which, I might add has gone so unanswered, that the people with any sense
are back on sci.electronics asking again how to repair their home
appliances in three easy lessons!!! SOMEONE is either going to have to break
the news to these people that they would either have to do a lot of nasty
hard messy learning they don't want to do, or else break down and start
some groups where courses are published and republished with regularity so
that beginners CAN learn basic level skills in electronics!
-Steve Walz   rstevew@armory.com



>Steve Holmes
>sherlock@bnr.ca


