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Platform Enigma- an off topic chat thread.


OdinYggd

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They're not at all the same thing. All I know is, if I were building a robot, it'd work just as well while charging. Furthermore, it wouldn't need charging, just a refill of whatever fissile material sounds the coolest for a robot to use.

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I'm sorry y'all. I can't hear you over the sound of how far the range is.

http://i.imgur.com/lxsbenB.png

Not to mention the accuracy.

Irrelevant when I can bullseye you from LKO with a MOAB (Orange tank + guidance thrusters).

You can run but you can't hide from 36 tons of heat-seeking rocket fuel tank that will happily detonate on impact and blow your mecha into tiny bits, in my mercy.

I repeat. This isn't reality. This is KSP, Stock KSP. Your argument is invalid.

Cool looking okay. Useful, probably not. Though he might have applications as a flare launcher to detect weather conditions prior to launching a satellite. He can't fly can he, and he's too odd-shaped to attach to a rocket.

A robot that requires sleep? Seems rather silly if you ask me.

Humans must sleep periodically to allow their bodies to revitalize, but also to allow the brain to untangle the web of memories produced that day. Failure to do so leads to sanity problems.

I would think that a robot would also likely need a similar resting cycle, although they would not necessarily have to become unconscious for it a period of reduced physical activity would still allow processing power to be utilized for upkeep tasks like defragmenting the hard drive and internal status assessment via offline selftest.

Edited by OdinYggd
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Humans must sleep periodically to allow their bodies to revitalize, but also to allow the brain to untangle the web of memories produced that day. Failure to do so leads to sanity problems.

That explains so much...

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Eh, my two hours sleep to twenty-two hours wake system works pretty well in keeping me moderately sane.

Why would a robot need to go offline to defrag their drives? Most proper operating systems have been doing it while running for over a decade. Besides, my robots would use SSDs or whatever technology replaces SSDs in the future. Internal status tests are actually easily performed while the hardware is online. Indeed, it's often better to do so as well, think SMART-capable harddrives.

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You'd have to be pretty darn incompetent to build a robot with sluggish, obsolete storage. I can't imagine a lot of robots where slow loading of information has ever proven useful (though I can think of several where deleting a copy of a file on a floppy also deleted every other copy of it remotely somehow).

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Eh, my two hours sleep to twenty-two hours wake system works pretty well in keeping me moderately sane.

Why would a robot need to go offline to defrag their drives? Most proper operating systems have been doing it while running for over a decade. Besides, my robots would use SSDs or whatever technology replaces SSDs in the future. Internal status tests are actually easily performed while the hardware is online. Indeed, it's often better to do so as well, think SMART-capable harddrives.

Most SMART-capable hard drives automatically go offline for brief periods to perform selftests even in current hardware and have done so since SMART was first concieved. You can also induce this level of testing by command, but it is best not to unless you have your OS running from a different hard drive.

Also like I said they might not have to shut down completely. But best practice is to not do CPU intensive tasks while realtime operations are in progress. So to that effect it would be best if the robot waited until it was idle to perform such work.

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I like to imagine a robot wouldn't put something as vital as its operating system and basic drivers on any corruptible storage device, and it would probably have enough random access memory to simply load the chunks of information being cleaned up in whatever process to the memory while running the operations. And also to have significant redundancy in certain cases, such as anything that might need to stay running after sustaining some degree of damage (like a combat drone or worker robot for radioactive or otherwise hazardous environments).

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Pretty sure they would, because typical worst case scenario data corruption disables the unit and it has to be wiped and reloaded. Modern engineers tend to be forced to do things the cheap way as much as possible because of the forces of money and corporate politics.

In real world industrial robots, the operating system and vital config info is stored on either a hard drive or flash chip- I actually recently modified one that ran from a floppy disc to utilize a CompactFlash card as a hard drive for storing its OS and configuration because the floppy drive kept wearing out. They do eventually get messed up, but a trained technician will take mere hours at most to repair one when that happens assuming that proper backups were being kept- and offline maintenance is often needed to produce those backups.

As far as CPU and RAM goes, no for the most part ordinary hardware is used. The only real difference is it is packaged into casings that are more durable than your household computer, in my environment these are designed to resist dust and coolant infiltration and small impacts such as a forklift bumping it while moving a skid of material. Typically the actual hardware stats reflect a low end system for the time period it was built, again the result of the forces of money and corporates. I've upgraded a few of them over the years.

For cost reasons redundancy is only added for applications where a failure resulting in downtime is unacceptable. Most of the time the machine is wired and configured such that if anything goes wrong it performs an automatic emergency stop, and then sits there unusable with the error that caused it on the screen until a technician arrives to put the trouble right and get it going again. That's my job, figuring out just what happened and making sure it doesn't happen again.

Where I work, you do not press the big red button unless it is an actual emergency. It won't explode, but you will have to hear it from me about how pressing that button runs the risk of hardware damage from the servo amplifiers being abruptly forced offline without necessarily being commanded to stop first.

Edited by OdinYggd
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Yes. Didn't you know? All cyborgs all attracted to cats because of a apparent personality similarity. that and we both have the mindset that if we had the power to, we would instantly turn on you. That's why 85% of cyborgs go rampant. :D

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