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On the subject of Post-it Notes, 3m offers this history. Very interesting.

On the subject of Post-it Notes, 3m offers this history. Very interesting.

On the subject of Post-it Notes, 3m offers this history. Very interesting.

Can be useful in the library world. check out http://cms.3m.com/cms/US/en/2-115/cerueFD/view.jht ml for more. For example, it can tell you when a book is on the wrong place on the shelves (a misplaced book is as good as lost when this happens), and you can also have a 'auto check out' system where a book goes on loan to someone just by them walking out the exit gate (if the borrower card and the book have these tages in them).

Will they offer a discount on 5L of 3M Fluorinert?

$100/L might be fine for Cray, but not for me.

I don't think many people with $600 cpus and $400 video cards want to watch things go up in smoke when a clamp fails.

Are there any tests that show how well a machine holds up if deionized water leaks from this type of system onto the motherboard and processor?

What if you combined this with another project?

I suppose all of that Fluorinert probably wouldn't be too good for the fishies, though.

Hypothetically, could oxygen even be dissolved in Fluorinert? (I'm thinking not as it's probably a nonpolar fluid, but whatever)...

The history of tablet computing is littered with failure, and MS is joining the parade 10 years late (though, as a history lesson, MS crushed Go by promising pen-windows 3.1 and forcing vendors to dump Go to get seeded with pen windows, then after Go tanked, they pulled the plug).

If you could get a touch/pen interface for trivial incremental cost and no resolution/weight/durability penalty, people would probably go for it. Maybe someday, but not yet.

Until then, as for Apple taking the niche: I worked on Scribe, the ATG's predecessor to the PenMac, a project so lost to history you can only find references to references on the web.

And the PenMac had, back in 95/96, many of the features of the new windows versions, including pressure sensitivity, a very accurate neural net based natural handwriting engine, etc. It even seemed quite a bit more responsive on that old 68020. It sold briefly in Japan for Kanji entry...

One problem with tablets... who writes anymore? Have you tried to write a letter recently? If you're less than 20, you probably never did. It's a compelling paradigm, but ultimately retro. Honestly, I can't anymore; my hand gets tired after a few paragraphs. Sure I could if I did it every day but I still wouldn't write this much with a pen. (Would the quality of writing improve if we took away all the keyboards?)

To be sure, there are niche markets. It's a solid interface extension to existing touchscreen applications like POS and machine control, and it's a nice for sketching.

But niche markets won't make for profitable software or affordable hardware. The problem is, in a nutshell, if you do it really well - get the tactile interaction just right, eliminate the display parallax, get the contrast up, get the pen as light and durable as a regular pen, even make the display flexible, make the whole thing weigh only a few hundred grams, and make it "instant-on," uncrashable, and with failsafe archival data retention and you've got....

...paper.

3M has recently come out with Transparent Duct Tape. I haven't repaired anything with it yet, but it looks and feels like a big roll of medical tape.
This stuff is better than Transparent Aluminum!
Here's a link to 3M's website: http://www.3m.com/us/office/scotch/transducttape/

I've always wanted a reasion to have an alarm that would warn me of a containment leak. (like in the movies, flashing lights, recorded female voice over intercom, men in white suits running by)

And the 3M stuff you're looking for is here

Here is a link to Yoshi's Submersion Cooling Case. They used hydrofluoroether (HFE) from 3M.

How about ear plugs

Did you know that the "q" in qmail stands for "queer"??? That's SO cool!!!

Top results for one-letter google searches as of Sat May 17
a : Apple
b : B'Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the ...
c : CNET.com
d : D-Link Systems, Inc.
e : Welcome to E! Online
f : Welcome to F-Secure, Securing the Mobile Enterprise
g : G*Loomis
h : H-Net, Humanities & Social Sciences Online
i : Yahoo!
j : J-???
k : KDE Homepage - Conquer your Desktop!
l : LEXPRESS.fr : l'info au quotidien. L'actualité économique, ...
m : 3M Worldwide
n : SBC Pacific Bell Knowledge Network Explorer : Online Learning : ...
o : www.oreilly.com -- Welcome to O'Reilly & Associates -- computer ...
p : Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
q : Q4music.com - The World's Greatest Music Magazine Online
s : GNU's Not Unix! - the GNU Project and the Free Software ...
t : AT&T
u : The whatUseek Network
v : Welcome to Bobby WorldWide
w : Welcome to the White House
x : Netscape.com
y : Yahoo!
z : HealthAtoZ - Your Family Health Site

Two things:

1) It would not be a bad thing for a few hundred square miles of sunlight to be prevented from hitting the earth. To anyone under it, it would seem like just another cloud, and they would probably live a few minutes longer because of it.

2) There would be little 'loss' in the mirror system described above. Even lightweight films can have a reflectivity of up to 95%. Converting the sunlight into electricity, then microwaves, and maintaining such a system in space, however, is sure to have much higher losses. This paper cites a 54% overall dc to dc efficiency for microwave conversion alone, neglecting collection and transmission losses.

The Cray T3E is cooled with fluorinert. The heat is then dumped into cooling water with an external heat exchanger unit. The processor element modules (PEMs) - a board with 8 alpha processors 4 on the bottom mounted against an solid aluminium block and 4 on the top mounted upside down to the same block - slide into the processor cabinet and have quick release cooling hose couplings.

Flourinert is expensive stuff ($500/gallon). And yes, it's been tried.

Mineral oil, too. Do some google searches, there are some interesting things to find. I know there's been a story on slashdot about the mineral oil submersion technique, but the search engine suxors.

Aha, Google to the rescue! Mineral oil on /.

HFE-7100

I'm not a material scientist, though

If we are doing this for sound reasons (pun intended), then you should remove all fans from your computer and submerge the whole computer in hydrofluoroether . Well maybe you want to keep your floppy and CD drives out of it. And it boils at 61 degrees Celsius, so you can visually see if it is getting too hot. TechTV has a story about building a case and sticking your motherboard in it, but no reason why you couldn't do the same for the whole computer.

It would look cool in a fish tank with some fake fish and plants. Plus you could use your aquarium thermometer...

...I'm scared to think of what these people would do to this poor shreader if they were introduced to liquid nitrogen cooling.

I've used, the slightest debris on the mouse area can render the mouse useless until you clean it.

I purchased a 3M Precision Mousing Surface and have had any problems since. Quite impressive little device.

There's fluorinert, made by 3m, but it's VERY pricey.

The best product for this particular issue that I am aware of is the Vu-Ryte Document Holder. The only potential drawback is that installing the Vu-Ryte raises your monitor by almost an inch. The 3M DH640 is similar and doesn't raise your monitor. Unfortunately this means it can't handle large books as well because they cause it to tip forward.

It's a type of transparent screen filters with properties like microscopic vertical blinds. When affixed to the front of any backlit image, the filter restricts the viewing angle to a few degrees. From any other angle than almost perpendicular, the screen appears completely dark. The moving subway ads have the same type of screen filters attached, which means that the frame only becomes visible when it is nearly perpendicular to the train window, and it rapidly flickers out of sight as you move past it.

The persistance of vision means the eye is tricked into seeing these brief glimpses of each frame as a continous motion picture sequence, although the blank inter-frame interval is presumably much longer than that of normal television, and the framerate is presumably lower.

Technology aside, ads do get ever more obnoxious and intrusive, on the net and off the net. Other posts in this thread have briefly touched on future ad-blanking augmented reality applications, and I believe there will be a market for such things as we move ever closer to the nightmare situation of animated, personalized, intrusive ads everywhere, as depicted beautifully in Minority Report.

One day every inner-city billboard will be plastered with animated ads, as the cost of printing flexible, brught polymer displays will plummet in the next decade.

Flourinert.

Mineral oil is also a good cooling liquid and is used in transformers. The specific heat is not as high, but the stuff is fairly cheap. You just have to keep it clean.

they make such a contraption already. it's by 3M, no less! http://www.3m.com/ergonomics/ergonomicmouse.jhtml

I agree 100% that it all depends on the person.

What works for me is a combination of the Comfort Keyboard (three detachable sections on ball-and-socket joints) and the 3m Ergonomic Mouse (shaped sort of like a joystick).

With the standard keyboard or common "ergo" models I'll get shooting pains down the back of my hands after a couple of hours, even if I take regular breaks.

And yes, the idea of life as a waiter sucks :-)

Step one: cut & paste your fav descrambler into MS Wordpad.

Step two: select a dark font (like Arial Rounded Bold) and crank the point down to 2.

Step three: use the office's HP laser printer to produce legible copies.

Step four: trim down the output and tape it to a Sharpie Marker(tm).

Step five: submit a memo to the RIAA and the DVDCCA accusing Microsoft, HP (with a 'Q'), Fiskars, and 3M of producing copyright infringement devices -- with your new marker!!

--Logan

Gee, how many times does a 3M product come into the discussion?

This link refers to Liquid Nitrogen-cooled Fluorinert(tm) FC-40 (Link points to 3M's page for this)...

An expensive yet cool (pardon the pun ;-p) way to keep a system at low temperatures.

Hey! Don't be dissin The Handyman's Secret Weapon!

Seriously though, a watercooling solution using duct tape is something that only Red Green would do ^_^

Although Duct Tape is good enough for astronauts... it's policy to have a roll of good ole Duct Tape on space missions...

Many replies have criticized fiber as being "expensive" and "a pain in the ass". While this may be true of many of the traditional fiber types, 3M has a much better solution.

Check out 3M Volition Fiber. This stuff is amazing (we just installed 53 drops). You can tie the fiber in knots. The connectors (VF-45) can be yanked out (literally) and replugged hundreds of times without failures. This is in stark contrast to some of the problems experienced with the old-school fiber connections. And to top it off, it's only a bit more than Cat5 per drop.

Also, check out Gemflex for some inexpensive 100Mbit network cards and 8-port switches. 3M also sells a line of high-performance Gigabit switches, but they are still out of range for a normal home network.

To give you an idea, Gemflex pricing is around:
- $ 90 VF-45 NICs
- $400 VF-45 8-port switches
- $100 RJ-45 to VF-45 converter

It will be more expensive to build a fiber network (mainly due to NIC and switch cost), and for a home it may not be worth it. For a small/medium-sized office, however, I think it's a great option.

• They were **THE** pionneers in instituting an online society.
  More than 20 years ago, they decided to implement the fabled Minitel in order to eliminate paper telephone directories.
• They're not anglo-saxons.
  So the french don't have that innate distrust of the State. Thus, they not only do not continually question what the State does, but they don't view working for the State as something demeaning, so the best minds are naturally attracted to work for the State so everyone benefits.
• De Gaulle did not like using a phone.
  He himself took maybe three phone calls a year, and made perhaps only one (on a good year) phone call on the same year (he didn't have a phone on his desk). Therefore, telephone infrastructure lagged sorely behind most countries (and was the butt of cruel jokes, like Fernand Raynaud's fabled: "Hello New-York, gimme the 22 at Asnières", which is said to have humiliated french telephone network engineers more than anything else. So, upon De Gaulle's resignation, the authorities embarked into a record-breaking research program to enhance the french phone network.
  The retarded phone network was a blessing in disguise, because in most cases, switches simply bypassed mechanical switching and they went from manual operators straight to digital packet-switching.
  This gave France a head-start in digital communications, which enabled them to quickly implement the Minitel network.
• They're catholics
  The french didn't have much choice but either to listen to the priests or to dump them, which is what they've been doing en masse for the last 200 years or so. (By contrast, a protestant can either find a sect that tells him what he likes, or simply make-up one of his own)
  Republican ideals naturally spurns religion as something which enslaves humanity, so the State is quite rigorously insulated from the church. Official education is strictly non-religious (law forbids teaching religion in public schools), so therefore, the french put much virtue in Science (and the fabled cartesian spirit also helps). So it is quite normal that the french will rigorously embrace new technology without having any philosophical qualms about it.
• French culture values intellectual achievement
  And it does so far more than financial success (you just can't get rid of the the old scatholic foundations...), so plenty of people are drawn into scientific studies. Scientists enjoy recognition and are respected. So, naturally, luddites do not really get listened to...
  This enables a great penetration of advanced technological ideas throughout society.
• The education system does not make specialists, but generalists.
  French scientists have a shallower knowledge that spans far more areas of interests, so they are more able to connect seemingly disconnected technologies together.
  A most successful and innovative american company has fully understood this idea. Researchers working for the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing company are forced NOT to spend 10 to 15% of their research budget on their primary research area. But they are quite free to spend it investigating side-effects discovered through their research. That's why they have so much innovative products.
• France values education and culture.
  Since then, it is only natural that education is freely available to anyone. The cream of the crop is also enrolled in the grandes écoles where they are given the best education for free, for which they then serve the State as the fabled highly-competent senior bureaucrates.

Couldn't you come up with some kind of translucent bump on the surface to indicate tactile reference points? Use dots of scotch tape or some kind of epoxy that doesn't hurt the surface. Better yet, try these adhesive BumpOns from 3M. Here's some that are transparent acrylic dots.I bet you always wondered where to get those little acrylic dots. These things stick to glass, wood or metal. They stick firm and handle abuse, but come off with no residue.

• 3M Renaissance Mouse

  This joystick-shaped mouse is the most comfortable pointing device I've ever used—better than the Marble FX Trackball or the Wacom pen tablet. It was formerly sold as the Anir Mouse until 3M bought the rights. I hope they sell millions of them. They are about $45.

• Repetitive Strain Injury : A Computer User's Guide

  This book has useful things to say about workspace design, posture, stretching and breaks.

Actually, how about dumping the entire thing in
a bath of Fluorinert (an electrically inert hydrocarbon (IIRC?) liquid)
as used for cooling the Cray C90 amongst others.

This is *immensely* neat stuff - I once saw a television (operating) dumped in a tub of this stuff, incredibly weird sight.

Ah. In checking back through my bookmarks, I see something similar has been mentioned Here

On a separate though, I wonder if they could use the negative refractive index composite material in making the solar sails, since they are probably still investigating the material to use for the sail?

From yesterday's linked article:
"``negative refraction'' would make possible the construction of a lens capable of focusing light to limits not currently achievable. "

and a related article on the Economist about how negative refractive index material can possibly help make a "perfect lens"

Perhaps they could use the phenomenon of the negative refractive index to make more efficient or more maneuverable sails?

For example, lets say that you're with an opponent, and they foolishly ask you to get them a drink. You bring back a can that has a PostIt® note on the bottom that says "Cyanide". If they drink the can without noticing the note, you get a point and they lose one. Or you can plant an alarm clock somewhere, with a PostIt® note reading "Bomb". Anyone in the room when it goes off loses a point apiece, and you get them all.

P.S. This was back in 1976, before the term "LARP" was invented. Ah, the good old days, before all those new-fangled computers showed up.

For example, lets say that you're with an opponent, and they foolishly ask you to get them a drink. You bring back a can that has a PostIt® note on the bottom that says "Cyanide". If they drink the can without noticing the note, you get a point and they lose one. Or you can plant an alarm clock somewhere, with a PostIt® note reading "Bomb". Anyone in the room when it goes off loses a point apiece, and you get them all.

P.S. This was back in 1976, before the term "LARP" was invented. Ah, the good old days, before all those new-fangled computers showed up.

IBM wants to squash Microsoft like a grape. There's still a lot of bad blood between them over that whole OS/2 thing. As if that's not enough, IBM's been very bloodthirsty about competition lately and have been celebrating taking business away from Sun, Microsoft and other competitors in a very gloating manner.

It seems to me that IBM "Gets" the open source movement and how to make money with it better than any other company in the industry, possibly even Redhat and the other Linux companies. And in many ways their goals align quite nicely with ours.

They just need to understand that they oughta keepa their handsa offa da source , and they'll get wonders of cooperation, especially if it is aims squarely against Redmond.

Besides, nothing could prevent them from being generous towards Open Source developpers (k00l hardware, seminars, whatnot) as a genuine, legitimate R&D expense.

Ever wondered why Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing offers so many ingenious products? Well, it's their R&D policy that does the trick. Every researcher is forced to set aside some 20% of his research budget to investigate side effects, and they are forbidden to use it on their main research activities.

They could very well do the same for Linux.

--
Game over, 2000!

Imation is a 3M company. It's not just a "brand".

Superdisk is an open standard championed by 3M/Imation.

Neither one has anything to do with Sony.

So it not only cost these guys NZD 1000, but it also contributes significantly to global warming. Right on, guys! Well done! At this rate, most of New Zealand will be underwater in a few more years. Now that's what I call a problem that solves itself.

Here, have some more. Let's see if we can get that 286 to play Diablo 2.

Well 3M discribes it as: " Gel composite with oil barrier film"

Whatever that means, a little more digging you can find out that 3M uses the same gel in their Health care products a little more digging and you find that it's a plain old "Polyurethane Gel" and yes it is used in breast implants as one person noted before ;) Then using the nifty ol ChemFinder We find it is known as C3H8N2O with a chemical mass of 88.109 and CAS RN of 9009-54-5.

So there ya go that's what's in those things ;)

Well 3M discribes it as: " Gel composite with oil barrier film"

Whatever that means, a little more digging you can find out that 3M uses the same gel in their Health care products a little more digging and you find that it's a plain old "Polyurethane Gel" and yes it is used in breast implants as one person noted before ;) Then using the nifty ol ChemFinder We find it is known as C3H8N2O with a chemical mass of 88.109 and CAS RN of 9009-54-5.

So there ya go that's what's in those things ;)

Not mineral oil - fluorinert. Costs about $18 for a 5 gallon container. Does not corrode, conduct electricity, and it absorbs heat 12 times better than water. I'm actually trying to get some startup capitol to mass manufacture some cases for full submersion of computers in flourinert. Well, there are other options other than fluorinert. 3M makes several dielectric chemicals like it. Check out their Specialty Fluids website for information on lots of flourinated chemicals, or check out Flourinert directly.

Not mineral oil - fluorinert. Costs about $18 for a 5 gallon container. Does not corrode, conduct electricity, and it absorbs heat 12 times better than water. I'm actually trying to get some startup capitol to mass manufacture some cases for full submersion of computers in flourinert. Well, there are other options other than fluorinert. 3M makes several dielectric chemicals like it. Check out their Specialty Fluids website for information on lots of flourinated chemicals, or check out Flourinert directly.

*LMFAO* You're thinking of 3M makers of PostIts, Scotch Tape and all kinds of nifty paper products...not 3Com the makers of some of the best NIC cards ever made *LMFAO*

I'm /sure/ that was a joke....it was a joke...right?

I converted to the MS keyboard sometime ago and found it really helps (I don't like the MS Elite one though as they did stupid things with cursor and navigation keys).

Coupled with a really good keyboard try, I've been very comfortable. I can't remember what tray we had at my last job, but right now I'm looking at something from 3M.

My ideal setup involves getting the keyboard almost in my lap with negative tilt (front higher than the back). I sit back quite comfortably in my chair (a good monitor really helps here) with my hands basically resting in my lap. My sore elbows and wrists improved at my last job with this set up. I also had less tension in my shoulders, etc.

I would think that the acetone would start attacking the solder mask, plastic packages and seals on the electrolytic capacitors. 3m makes a thermal transfer fluid for electronics called fluorinert.