

The $210,000 cow-milking robot - hansy
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-05/the-210-000-cow-milking-robot#r=hp-ls

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cstross
My favourite anecdote about cow milking robots comes from a consultant who was
dealing with them from the other end. It turns out that the udder-recognition
software isn't perfect, and fails to find the udder some of the time. Farmers
noticed this. Then they noticed that the software release cycle for the robot
took more than 10 months.

As that's the gestation period for a cow, they worked out that it would be
faster to breed cows with udders that were easier for the existing recognizer
to identify, than to wait for the robot manufacturers to upgrade their
firmware ...

