If your robotic vacuum can’t help with spills and stains, fret not. Its cousin, the robo-mop, is on the way.
Thirty engineers worked three years on challenges such as preventing the robo-mop from slipping on cleaning fluid or leaving tracks behind, said Colin Angle, chief executive of the mop’s developer, iRobot Corp. Those sticking points solved, a robo-mop called Scooba will be available early next year.
IRobot Corp. is best known for Roomba, the robo-vacuum it introduced three years ago. About 1.2 million Roombas have been sold.
Scooba has many of Roomba’s features but it’s more complicated because it’s designed to automatically vacuum, scrub and dry hard floors rather than just vacuum them.
At 13 inches in diameter and 4 inches high, Scooba resembles the disc-shaped Roomba. One difference is its two tanks, one for water mixed with cleaning fluid developed by Clorox Co., the other for dirty water.
Scooba sprays and scrubs water and cleaning fluid onto the floor as the robot’s front end passes over. The back end sucks the liquid into the dirty water tank.
Scooba’s price will be comparable to Roomba, which sells from $150 to $300.
Anti-piracy laws in Sweden: Sweden’s Parliament recently made it illegal to download copyright material from the Internet and approved measures to discourage people from burning copies of CDs and DVDs.
The law, which takes effect July 1, also bans technology and software used to circumvent protections on copyright material, including music, movies and games.
Until now, it was prohibited in Sweden to make copyright material available for others to download. But downloading such material was legal.
The new law also makes it illegal to copy an entire book, including textbooks, on a copying machine.
It does not forbid making a copy of a CD or DVD for personal use but slaps a tax on recordable CD and DVD-discs. Consumers will have to pay a 24-cent tax for a 700-megabyte disc.
Collaborative game development on next-generation Internet: The next-generation Internet proved the perfect virtual sandbox for developing a video game completed this week by students from eight universities in four countries.
The game, “Descent to the Underworld” re-imagines the Orpheus myth in settings designed by the students, who live in Philadelphia, Beijing, Brazil and Prague. Producer Nora Barry, a filmmaker who led the project, calls the hybrid a “game-film.” Players don’t accumulate points. Instead, the player’s moves create a story that is retold in scenes filmed or animated by the students.
The students collaborated using the nonprofit Internet2 network, which delivers data transfer speeds of at least 100 megabits per second to the desktops of users at universities, corporations and other institutions in the United States and abroad. The network’s backbones operate at between 2.4 gigabits per second and 10 Gbps.
President Constantine Papadakis of Drexel University, one of the eight schools involved in the video game project, said he hopes similar uses of the network will continue.
“This is an outlet for students of higher capability, higher energy, who sometimes have problems in an environment that’s designed for the average student,” he said.
The students who produced “Descent to the Underworld” worked in three teams for 12 weeks.
A team from the University of Washington and Tsinghua University in Beijing set the story in sixth century China, juxtaposing computer-generated images and hand-drawn illustrations. They met when it was night in Seattle and morning in Beijing. Other student teams created the music and sound effects.
Ask Jeeves keeps trying: Question: What well-known Internet search engine continues to lag industry leaders no matter how smart it becomes?
Answer: Ask Jeeves Inc.
The Oakland-based company on Thursday is launching its latest effort to win more fans. The hook: A new feature designed to provide more immediate answers to inquiries.
With the change, Ask Jeeves will display a “Web Answer” to many of the requests its search engine processes. For instance, if someone enters “world’s largest lake” into Ask.com’s search box, the top result will include a snippet listing the Caspian Sea, including its size and location.
That answer isn’t as plainly evident on other major search engines because they generally respond to queries with nothing but Web links that guide visitors to sites that might provide the correct information.
Ask Jeeves pulls its answers from the billions of Web pages contained in its search index.
In another change, Ask Jeeves is introducing a feature, called “Zoom,” focused on determining the precise objective of a search.
Entering the term “Raleigh” returns the standard results in the center of the page, accompanied by a column to the right displaying other topics – the North Carolina city, the bike manufacturer, the 16th century explorer – that might be related to the query.
Through March, Google, founded two years after Ask Jeeves started, had 36.4 percent of the U.S. search engine market compared to 5.5 percent for Ask Jeeves, according to comScore Media Metrix, a research firm. Yahoo Inc. (30.6 percent market share), Microsoft Corp.’s MSN (16.5 percent) and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL (8.9 percent) also beat Ask Jeeves.
From Herald news services
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