shorty
Shorty - Who would have thought that a toddler would be terrified by a robot dog? One could teach the child to overcome the fear by kicking the dog, but that seems a bit cruel, even if the dog is artificial. Maybe future versions of these dogs could be programmed to do something amusing and non-threatening (like run away yipping) when a small child yells “boo!”. Some fur or other soft covering would help, too. Disney makes a Mickey Mouse that crawls around on all fours and is much more appealing to toddlers; it seems the dogs are getting much smarter, though.
Honda is manufacturing a little robot called ASIMO who walks just like a Japanese child. It’s really incredible how sophisticated the biped motion is; I thought researchers had given up on two-legged robotics. Honda is apparently using these as receptionists, and I suppose the specter of a humanoid receptionist scuttling around on hands and knees is more than a little disturbing. Sony’s dogs can talk, though, so maybe one day dogs will be more common as receptionists.
Well, gamespyarcade.com has reverse-engineered the Xbox network protocol and already has built the capability to play games like Halo against other players over the Internet. Tonight there are 350+ people online playing Halo. Now my crappy cable connection is really bugging me. After the Excite(at)Home debacle, I was getting just 128k. And even though the speeds have improved on downlink, the uplink speeds for cable Internet have never been that good, and slow uplink is not very nice for online Halo. Maybe it is time to switch back to DSL.