Recently, there are some news about Google test driving their new innovative toy - self-driving automated cars that can start, stop, steer and run without any human intervention.
This project involved 7 cars (6 Toyota Priuses and 1 Audi TT) that have mostly been driven without any human assistance for at least 1000 miles (or 1609 kilometers) on major California roads. In fact, they've already gone through more than 140,000 miles (or 225,260 kilometers) with only occasional human control.
The cars know speed limits, traffic patterns and road maps. This is made possible by a rotating sensor on the roof to create an environment around the car, a video-camera behind the windshield for pedestrians and traffic lights, radar on the front and back bumper, GPS and motion sensors, controlled by computer with artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.
Google claimed that these automated self-driving cars can react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated. As a result, this can reduce accident on the road.
The car can even be programmed for different driving personalities — from "cautious" to "aggressive" mode.
This project is the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, 43, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Google engineer and the co-inventor of the Street View mapping service.
Though this invention is still far from production yet, we can probably foresee the automated car KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand) that we watched in the TV show Knight Rider to come into reality in the near future.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Google conducts R&D on self-driving automated cars
Guidelines for Gated Community and Guarded Neighbourhood by JPBD
The Department of Town and Country Planning Peninsular Malaysia (Jabatan Perancangan Bandar dan Desa Semenanjung Malaysia, JPBD) has finally published the Guidelines for Gated Community (GC) and Guarded Neighbourhood (GN) in their website.
By definition, "Gated Community" refers to a gated and guarded residential community, either in highrise or landed properties. The properties in a Gated Community need to have strata title (including landed strata). This kind of community is only allowed in limited location in urban area.
Meanwhile, "Guarded Neighbourhood" refers to residential community with individual land title properties which has security service either with or without security house. It can be of "guarded only" (without fence) and "guarded and gated" (with fence).
For Gated Community:
- Minimum area under the scheme is 1 hectar and maximum is 10 hectar (200-500 house units)
- The roads and shared amenities inside the GC belong to the community, and managed by Management Corporation elected by the residents
- Building of wall to separate the community from its neighbourhood is not allowed
- Social Impact Analysis needs to be carried out before the establishment of GC be considered
- Need to have 2 entrances/exits (one for main usage, another for emergency)
- Perimeter fencing of height not more than 9 feets and at least 50% visible from outside is allowed
- Boom gate is not allowed
- Guard house of 1.8m x 2.4m
- The houses cannot be more than 4 levels (18.5 meters) from basement
- Visitors' parking must be allocated
- Only allowed in urban area
- Establishment of GN needs to be proposed by Residents Association and supported by majority of the residents
- Guard house of 1.8m x 2.4m or smaller
- Manual boom gate with 24 hours security control can be considered
- Guards need to registered with Home Ministry
Sunday, October 10, 2010
LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice.org and be independent from Oracle
Over the last decades, Sun Microsystems has supported a lot to OpenOffice.org, and successfully made it the world's leading open-source productivity suite nowadays.
That was happened after they acquired StarDivision in 1999, forking out OpenOffice.org from the proprietary StarOffice by releasing its source code to the public. Sun continued selling StarOffice, which then based heavily on the development of OpenOffice.org by the community.
10 years later in 2009, Sun Microsystems was in turn acquired by Oracle. Oracle has then rebranded the proprietary StarOffice to be Oracle Open Office. At the same time, Oracle announced their intention for "Oracle Cloud Office" as a cloud-computing suite, a similar approach like Microsoft Office 2010 Live. The future of OpenOffice.org remains uncertain.
As contributions to OpenOffice.org project requires copyright assignment to Sun (now Oracle), which the community has faith with Sun but might not remains at the same level with Oracle, it is this critical moment that some lead developers of OpenOffice.org had just made a critical decision, to form a new group called The Document Foundation and to fork a rebranded OpenOffice.org called LibreOffice. The historical moment was 28 September 2010 .
The Document Foundation will continue to be focused on developing, supporting, and promoting "the same software", now known as LibreOffice as the OpenOffice.org trademark is legally owned by Oracle.
In fact, this move also resolved some of the former disputes in the project. For example, LibreOffice will now incorporate all the enhancements produced by the Go-oo team (with Novell behind the scene). Go-oo was forked earlier from OpenOffice.org as Sun refused to put in some of the contributions such as better support to Microsoft's OOXML into OpenOffice.org. With this latest move, Go-oo might be obsoleted by LibreOffice.
The Document Foundation and its LibreOffice have received support from Red Hat, Canonical (maker of Ubuntu), Novell (maker of SUSE), Google, Free Software Foundation (FSF, which Richard Stallman is the president), The GNOME Foundation, The Open Source Initiative (OSI), etc.
LibreOffice 3.3.0 is currently on beta, and has been downloaded for over 80,000 in a week time. People have started to contribute to the code, suggesting features, committing patches and filing bugs. In just one week, around 80 code contributions (patches, and direct commits) have been accepted in LibreOffice from a total of 27 volunteers, several of them newly-won, with around 100 developers hanging out on the #libreoffice irc channel which is buzzing with activity (around 14,000 messages sent).
Click here for more information about The Document Foundation and LibreOffice.
