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A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

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Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#151

Post by GuB-42 »

bambax wrote: post #101

Fascinating article. About this: > Before GPS, navigation systems used a technique called ‘dead reckoning‘. Dead reckoning relied on sensors to determine distance traveled and direction of travel. However, no sensor is perfect. As a result the further you travel the greater the errors build. Pretty quickly you have no idea where you are. > To solve this problem Etak invented ‘augmented dead reckoning’. This used a pr…

About all somewhat advanced military systems do some kind of "augmented dead reckoning", including what you suggest.

Civilian systems are usually not designed to work in a hostile environment, not only it is costly for a situation that is unlikely to happen in normal use, but authorities usually don't like it when such technology is available to the public. As a result, it tends to be classified. They want to be keep the advantage over enemies and criminals.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#152

Post by knodi123 »

gizmo wrote: post #130
empath-nirvana wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the reasons why I think patents are important, because it allows them to profit from their inventions, and for the inventions to be reused later by others, even if the product was "too soon". They invented innovative technology, tried to build a real product, they should be able to make some money from others picking up the baton -- and presumably they did, when they sold the company through the chain…

I couldn't disagree more. If you try to build a commercial product and fail that doesn't entitle you to the profits made by others who made a successful product.

I couldn't disagree with you more.

Patents exist to reward research or invention that results in practicable ideas. Entrepreneurialism is not (and should not be) part of that.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#153

Post by bsenftner »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #113
bsenftner wrote: post #76

My first job after undergrad ('88) was creating a Mac-like GUI for Etak for a vehicle tracking company in Los Angeles. GUIs were still new, DOS was still king, I had experience working on the Mac OS as a beta OS developer, and I'd been working in a 3D graphics research lab (yeah, 3D graphics was research back then), and this company named TeleTrak needed a real time updating map. So I made the GUI for their mapping a…

Remember what it was like when you have wonderful kilobytes of memory and megabytes of storage? Your programming is constantly focused, not on the limitations this imposes, but on the opportunities opened up by this vast blank canvas like never before. Imagine what it would be like if programmers still got as much user-utility per user-kilobyte as they did when that's all they had. Back in 1982 with the mass-producti…

I remember when I was hired, because of my past having made and sold video games (Vic-20 & C-64), TeleTrak make me sign a work agreement that included I would not try to write any games or goose eggs in their software.

> Remember what it was like when you have wonderful kilobytes of memory and megabytes of storage?

We've exceeded on multiple fronts what I thought I'd see in my lifetime. I can't imagine what people entering the field will see if they stay in the career. I started coding in '76, professionally in '82. My first deployment hardware had 3.5K, and today it's just ridiculous the resources on has, and exponentially so if one can still drop in assembly when needed. :)

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#154

Post by recursive »

knodi123 wrote: post #152
gizmo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't disagree more. If you try to build a commercial product and fail that doesn't entitle you to the profits made by others who made a successful product.

I couldn't disagree with you more. Patents exist to reward research or invention that results in practicable ideas. Entrepreneurialism is not (and should not be) part of that.

I think this divide basically shows which part of making a product is harder? The R&D? Or the operational side of production and support?

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#155

Post by flyinghamster »

cpr wrote: post #132

And, of course, the Asteroids Atari game sure looks like a version of the original Star Wars game on the PDP-1 from MIT I used to play in the Harvard grad computing center...

There actually was a cabinet called "Space Wars" that was a coin-op implementation of Spacewar.

https://www.arcade-museum.com/Videogame/space-wars

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#156

Post by BenjiWiebe »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #67
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #47

The article claims that the "match roads by turns" technique "was later adopted by all navigation apps". Does anyone know if this is true? My impression was that they rely on GPS position only for positioning, even though modern phone hardware should give really nice gyroscope/accelerometer data.

GPS and other signals aren't continuous, they all use dead reckoning to fill in the blanks in between. This was even more of a necessity with early smartphones and navigation systems that only had GPS; nowadays they can use a combination of GPS, GSS, Gallileo, GPS and wifi networks. The latter was a secondary goal of the Google Street View project, matching GPS / location with wifi signals.

Your list should be: GPS, Galileo, BeiDou, GLONASS, and Wifi. Probably cellular too.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#157

Post by jrd259 »

gizmo wrote: post #118

One the one hand this is a cool story about real technology pioneers. On the other hand, this is a story about people building technology that was so ahead of its time that it had no chance of turning into a good product. Too expensive, too unreliable, too complicated. I think there are some obvious parallels here to General Magic and the Apple Newton. Very cool technology. Impressive demos. But ultimately the produc…

The other issue is that it requires the driver to read a screen while driving. in 1988 at the MIT Media Lab I built a system called Back Seat Driver that provides spoken driving directions, allowing the driver to keep their visual attention on the road. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C0V6lDKQ0Y&t=21s. It ran on a Lisp Machine, not in the vehicle. A later version ran on a Sun computer in the trunk.

The in-car nav system was also augmented dead-reckoning, like Etak. GPS was still denied to civilians at the time.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#159

Post by yc-kraln »

bambax wrote: post #101

Fascinating article. About this: > Before GPS, navigation systems used a technique called ‘dead reckoning‘. Dead reckoning relied on sensors to determine distance traveled and direction of travel. However, no sensor is perfect. As a result the further you travel the greater the errors build. Pretty quickly you have no idea where you are. > To solve this problem Etak invented ‘augmented dead reckoning’. This used a pr…

Working on this. It is harder than it sounds, but not impossible.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#160

Post by ljf »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #112
btbuildem wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read somewhere that part of the method they intuited their way was to read the waves. As faraway land masses can affect the shape of waves, supposedly these navigators could "see" beyond the horizon due to how the swell was behaving. I can sort of see that in a mind's eye, with rings of waves spreading as they bounce off obstacles in water. But that's bird's view of a miniature -- and seeing that from the surfac…

I think more than viewing a ring of waves bounce of objects in the water, they observed waves diffracting around an island

As a young child I went mackerel fishing on a small boat in Shetland with my father and a local he knew.

The man steered the boat with one had in the water, until he announced we were near a shoal of mackerel - he said he could feel the grease of their bodies in the sea water.

We threw some lines in and sure enough we caught plenty of fish for dinner.

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