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People Often Deride Game Changing Technology as 'a Toy' (medium.com)
Steven Sinofsky, former President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, has cataloged how often game-changing technologies have been derided as toys. Some of the things he has included in the list include a PC, C programming, PC networking, GUI, color screen, AI, and internet video. He writes: As many have recognized, when inventions and innovations first appear they are often (always) labeled as "toys" or "incapable" of doing "real work" or providing "real entertainment." Of course, many new inventions don't work out the way inventors had hoped, though quite frequently it is just a matter of timing and the coming together of a variety of circumstances. It can be said that being labeled a toy is necessary, but not sufficient, to become the next big thing. This got me thinking about all the conferences, trip reports, and new products I have looked at over many years. Sure turns out that a huge number of things in my own career were labeled as toys -- not just by me, but by an industry at large. Check out the list on Medium.
Was a toy, still is a toy, and always will be a toy.
sure sure, you may be the exception. but you may in fact be a toy.
They laughed at Columbus - but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
This is not news, this does not matter, this is not thought-provoking.
This is some suit's banal blog-spam.
Leave it on medium.com where it belongs, along with the other shite
"People Often Deride Game Changing Technology as 'a Toy'"
That is ridiculous. Things that change games are properly classified as "sports equipment".
Clippy was once a "toy" Microsoft sent to annoy millions of office workers just trying to get something written and go the hell home.
After a sex change (not that there's anything wrong with that), he/she's back to annoy over a billion people as "Cortana" (que the ESPY awards) whether they are at work or not.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/15/5617234/clippy-replaces-cortana-in-windows-phone-easter-egg
This article is just a list of game-changing technologies coupled to unsourced assertions that these were derided as toys when they were first introduced.
I don't recall a widespread opinion that color monitors, sound cards, digital cameras, wireless networking or AI were "toys" when first introduced. If anything, I recall and endless stream of over-hyped articles about how they heralded the second coming of Christ.
foo mane padme hum
Some things which have been game changers have been dismissed as toys. Just because your shit was dismissed as being a toy doesn't make it a game changer either.
All that shit Microsoft said was a game changer but nobody gave a damn about? Not game changers.
The only thing which differentiates the two is reality of what has actually happened. But the history of people saying "this will revolutionize the world", or "in 5 years we'll all be doing X" -- well, the pundits seem to have a far worse track record of telling us what will happen than what won't.
How many of us have spent decades seeing the stuff the pundits and futurists said would change our lives, only to have them fizzle out into nothing?
If we stamped 100% of all ideas as "toy" or "garbage", I bet we'd be right 80% of the time. People suck at predicting the future.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Well, that's not really true. There are already industrial 3D printing machines.
Now as for "tabletop" 3D printing? It is a toy at the moment, but it wouldn't be hard to see how the idea could become something very important under the right circumstances.
Decades later, people will dig up the quotes about the new thing that has survived all these years, make a big story about it and feel smug about it. Many new things that actually turned out to be dumb (NeXT? Newton? That Timex+Microsoft chimera watch that downloaded data by the blinking[*] CRT montor? Plasma TV? HD-DVD? TurboPascal? FoxBase? Quattro spreadsheet? ), and the new things that were merely ahead of their time (geocities? myspace?) will be forgotten...
[*] Actual blinking, blinking not used as a euphemism
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
None of these things were considered "toys" when first introduced. Who ever said the "C programming language" was a "toy"??? No wonder this guy is VP at MS. He is clueless.
Every new thing is a 'toy' because it's unproven in the real world. An academic paper, or lab experiment, or startup company doesn't mean much. And for every 'toy' that ends up being the next big thing there are thousands that are failures.
And that's why research, and experimentation, and startups are so important. It takes hundreds or thousands of failures to find one success story, but the benefits of that one success pay for the failures a thousand-fold.
How would this ever have been considered a toy? Small, non-mechanical and fast, seems like the future to me. Yeah it was expensive when it first came to market but like most tech you know its going to improve and get cheaper as time goes by.
The prime example is Edison calling the air plane a toy and therefore declining to work on it.
I looked down the entire list: well, yeah... they're all toys. What's wrong with that?
I love my toys. The fact that I happen to make a living using some of those toys is really immaterial.
Repeat something that is true most of the time eventually it will be false. It is the reverse of the "even a broken clock is right twice a day".
The list on Medium suffers from selection bias. It is merely a list of times when calling a new technology a "toy" was false. It says nothing about the number of times saying "it's a toy" was true.
Agreed. I had fun with mine, it is useful for prototyping and making custom parts easily is really nice, but now I'm regretting not buying a decent MIG welder.
"The Beatles have no future in show business,"
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Well, he wasn't entirely wrong. When the iPhone first came out, it wasn't that great for productivity. Sites weren't mobile-friendly, it only had shitty EDGE cellular internet, didn't have (official) third party app support. Back then, you had to jailbreak it for the thing to be usable.
It's possibly worth noting here that "Game changing" does not necessitate "good". For instance, Windows 8 could be said to have been "Game changing", given how big a turd it was.
Certainly changed Sinofsky's game, at any rate.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
-- not just by me, but by an industry at large.
Dont get me started. As a scientist here on spider skull island ive created numerous game changing technologies. For example, I created a disruptive app that uses high energy laserbeams to "disrupt" regular people into charred piles of ash, but my colleagues dismissed the whole thing as "impractical" for holding an entire city hostage. absurd!
i have a new game changing technology im trying out on the city of Metropolis right now that I think will be a real winner if i can just keep those darn haters off my back. You see, it changes regular parking meters into a game by causing every other one to randomly explode into a shower of molten metal and sparks whenever someone doesnt pay my one million dollar ransom. **sigh**
but knowing my colleagues im sure its going nowhere fast. Dr. Doom (congratulations on your dissertation that melted the entire physics department into a sentient fluid!) has already come up with a scaleable, licensed and renewable heat ray hes using to heat the very breath in your lungs to plasma. Oh and dont get me started on countess chaos...shes invented some kind of innovative and transformational technology at a ted conference that transformed the innards of the entire audience into highly unstable raw sodium. shes just...so creative.
Good people go to bed earlier.
3D printers is a huge category. There are a wide range of 3D printers from sub-$500 glorified hot glue guns to multi$100K laser-sintering printers. To me, the low end printers are a toy as they have many issue that only hobbyists could love. The high end ones are definitely not toys considering the awesome stiff they can make. Sometimes it is the implementation and not the technology that makes it a toy. For example, the standard household oven is not a toy but the Easybake Oven is.
"Computer, Earl Grey tea, hot."
Can you show me a game-changing technology that was completely productive on it's first try? Many times it takes a few software updates or even hardware generations to become productive. This is also why many businesses are reluctant to purchase a brand new product that doesn't have much of a history. Can't blame them for being skeptical when money is involved.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
**lyric stolen from Drivin N Cryin'
This is consistent with the principles discussed in Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. Low-end products with a new value proposition eventually become good enough to overtake the high-end products.
I still think of my iPhone as a toy computer. That doesn't mean I don't use it or like it, but it still feels extremely limited compared to a desktop computer (which I think of as a "real computer").
Mac, iPad, etc.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I still think anything other than the Nomad is lame.
In the early 2000's I remember thinking this about camera phones. After all, why would you want a camera in your phone when "real" camera takes pictures that are so much better. Just a toy really ...
Nowadays it's almost the opposite. Why do you need a camera when you have a perfectly good one in your phone.
No 3D printer yet but I'm planning on adding a hot end (E3D v6) and extruder (something geared, current choice is the Toranado right now) to my CNC.
Since I don't have a 3D printer yet, let's use my CNC as a comparison. So far, I've cut a lot of parts for projects that would already have cost me a lot more than the CNC itself if I had to pay to have the parts made by someone else. And judging from the quotes I get from 3D printing services online, it won't take long for my future 3D printer to pay for itself.
If something is not fun to use, then it isn't a toy.
If something isn't fun to use, then it is likely to never go anywhere, no matter how much people think it is important to their personal product/use.
But merely being fun does not mean it is also useful.
To be a game changer, it must be useful, and also fun. Then people will use it. If it isn't fun, someone will find a better way.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Brand new technology rarely as well fleshed out as existing technologies, This is the obvious statement news at 11.
It's not that it's "not as well fleshed out". There are lots of things that start out as "not as well fleshed out". It's not about features and power users. It's more that many technologies actually start out as toys. Being a toy is the killer app that allows them to continue to grow until they get a real killer app. Today's CPUs and GPUs would be a lot further behind if they didn't have the cashflow from gamers on the leading edge. If you want to look at current toys that might one day make the switchover look at drones, immersive technology, 3d printing, and the handsfree interfaces of xbox/wii. At their current level they aren't really useful outside of toys but people buying them as toys is what allows money to continue to flow in so that they can improve. The automobile is another such toy that took early adopters to get it off the ground.
Another interesting thought experiment would be what technologies are we missing out on because they are harder to "toyify" and therefore never get the cashflow needed to progress to the next level?
To be fair Facebook seems like a toy.
I don't know any serious organization or person which uses Facebook as a means of publishing serious data in the first place.
Perhaps there are serious ways in which FB can be used, but I cannot think of any. Communications? People still end up using their cell phones to set up meetings or exchange the most important information. Spreading of serious information/news/etc? FB is almost always secondary. Ah, blogging ... no, most serious bloggers user wordpress/blogger/LiveJournal.
TFA causes a loss in IQ - Labels like "toy", "Fad", and even "Game changing" are simply labels. There are far more failures than successes. Basic mathematics should be all it takes to realize that the label makes no difference in the statement. Things labelled "toys" failed at roughly the same rate as things labelled "game changers", and "must have", and "earth shattering", etc.. etc...
Society ends up placing the proper label on things. The label does not make the product, the product makes the label.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
In your cost calculations how much did you figuratively pay yourself? If you valued your time at $0/hr your calculations may be a bit off.
As for 3D services, they generally have printers that produce much higher quality that desktops can produce. A desktop extruder is very different than a laser sintering printer.
3D films will move past the toy phase once an entire 3D movie occurs without them throwing something into your face. Once that happens, I expect it to be more accepted. 3D is still used as a gimmick instead of as a storytelling medium.
The article is merely a list of technologies that some people might have referred to as "toys" when they first appeared. There are not links, and nothing indicates that was the prevalent opinion at the time. I'm sure it is possible to find references with "people" calling the same technologies "revolutionary".
Many of the things that are labelled a "toy" really are. Others are until someone drops millions on R&D to make it useful.
"PC is a toy"
The PC in 1981 *was* a toy. With 16 kilobytes of memory, no concept of directories, and a ludicrous buy-in required, it was a niche machine. Lotus 1-2-3 was two years away. Obviously it was a toy with a great deal of potential, but it took a lot of time to get there.
“C programming language is a toy”
When I google this, it takes me to the article and no place else. If this quote is real, it wasn't a very popular opinion. By 1982, C had been used for Unix for a decade or something- how a popular and standard OS and its myriad of tools was dismissed as "toy-like" isn't obvious to me, and I'd be surprised to find out that this claim got much purchase. Assuming it exists. I mean, it must, right? Someone had to be clueless.
"Mouse is a toy", "GUI is a toy"
GUIs were a toy in the early 80s, and so were mice. With a mouse driver chewing up your precious RAM and an utter lack of support, it took a long time before a mouse was considered something that you could assume your users would own. Windows could be run entirely from the keyboard for this reason. Despite being so good at its thing, it took a long damned time before it had real use.
"Email on a pager is a toy"
And it was. We don't all have email enabled pagers, we have touchscreens that didn't exist back then with high res displays that didn't exist back then running on batteries that didn't exist back then with a huge wad of software that cost a ton of time and money to create. Smartphones aren't email pagers that got bigger, smartphones are PCs that shrunk.
Many of the others, I don't think anyone believed. I don't know anyone who dismissed VOIP, the Macintosh, Flash storage, Youtube, or touch screens. Facebook is STILL a toy, it just has large buy-in and a bunch of money. Hell, people keep creating things that will be "the next facebook", and those are mostly toys too- if one catches on and turns facebook into myspace, that won't really change that. Cloud has never been a toy, but its certainly been oversold, and most of the critiques mock that point- the upsides of clouds are hyped, the downsides ignored.
The list has some good points on it, but mostly it deals with technologies that took years to decades, and tons of research and development, to leave their "toy" status behind. If you call something gimmicky and then it catches on twenty years later after all the underlying tech has changed, that doesn't make you wrong.
The primary reason the iPhone was popular (even around here) was that its browser didn't require sites to be mobile friendly. Before the iPhone mobile browsing sucked.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
This has certainly been the case for the DNA Sequencer I've been doing "technology development" on. It's been almost impossible to get people to treat it like a useful, serious sequencing device.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
I'm not calculating my time because the parts I make are for personal projects, i.e. it's a hobby.
As for 3D services, it's desktop FDM printers and not polyjet or anything fancy and even those prices are too high. Once you add shipping on top of that, plus the delays, it's much better to make the parts yourself. These days, even commercial FDM printers have a hard time beating a properly calibrated 3D printer kit or a home-made one. One service I called was proud that their Stratasys was able to make 0.25mm layers even though a properly calibrated home-made printer can do 0.10mm layers.
I didn't know what was a Viewmaster, and I looked it up. It's a passive viewer for stereoscopic stills, this existed much earlier in the 19th century. "3D" has been trying to take over for about 170 years.
I was mobile browsing on the Palm Treo as well and, frankly, I think you're remembering it through Rose-colored glasses. It technically worked but everything was formatted in a screwy way and didn't have the zooming options we're familiar with now. It was a step up from IE on Windows mobile, but the Safari browser blew it away. The only real advantage Palm had was it had working copy/paste.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Being considered a toy is a requirement for being a game changer. If a technology is taken seriously early on, it's inmediately locked down with patents and pricetags by big business. That's why toys always win in the long run.
iPhone? Toy. Who want's that? ... Whooops.
PC? Toy. Here are the specs and the architecture, for free. Go play. We sell real computers. 20 years later x86 is all there is.
The Web? A toy.
PHP? JavaScript? Toy languages, laughed out of the room, even still yet. While everybodys laughing, they're taking over the web. Well, PHP at least.
WordPress? Yet another shitty CMS/bloggin engine by someone who can't programm. Toy. Oh. 102 Million active installs. 25% of the web. Mmmh.
Toys win, because they initialy aren't taken seriously and thus have room to get adopted by those who want to build stuff without being at the mercy of some psychopath corporation. Once they've gained traction it's to late to box them in and everybody has to follow suit to stay in the game.
It's that simple.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Seriously, most new stuff is junk and even the survivors of the shakeout were often pretty lousy in their first offerings.
"hot" is way less specific than tea...
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
This article could be interesting if it included references to who said what and in which context. Just saying "[[tech]] is a toy." without further developing or even including at least a reference is pointless - one could come up with just about any tech as an example whenever real or not.
This article is unfortunately nothing more than a waste of time :(
The Palm web browser didnt work on a lot of sites that the iPhone did and the keyboard didn't matter that much unless you were using it to spend an inordinate amout of time posting on forums... where the wysiwyg interfaces never worked. The iPhone also had wifi from day 1.
Again, rose-colored glasses.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Londoners who remember buzz-bombs dropping all around them during the blitz would beg to disagree.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I'm not calculating my time because the parts I make are for personal projects, i.e. it's a hobby.
By definition a tool used for a hobby is also a toy.
What commercial services use FDM? The one I have seen use much more expensive technologies.
One service I called was proud that their Stratasys was able to make 0.25mm layers even though a properly calibrated home-made printer can do 0.10mm layers.
That is kind of strange since the lowest cost Stratsis, the Mojo, can do 0.178mm layers. This also brings up the question of how hard is it to "properly calibrate" and how long does that celebration last? If it takes hours of setup to print one item it is a toy. Sure, if you compare low quality prints done by a hobbyist and the same prints using similar equipment by a service the hobbyist will always be cheaper. You have to pay something for not doing it yourself.
There are quite a few services that use technologies other than FDM. I was referring to companies like Shapeways and Quickparts.
New technology usually are toys. They are immature and not road-tested. Hobbyists fortunately don't mind taking the proverbial arrows in the back to find the kinks and build/find uses for them.
The first photographs required sitting perfectly still for 5 minutes; the first phonographs had the quality of rusted tin cans with a nose plug; the first cars broke down often and required lots of fiddling to keep going, their starter mechanisms often braking arms; the first electronic computers took more time replacing vacuum tubes than computing; the first satellites kept blowing up on the launch pad; the first PC's had crappy software, unreliable storage, and crashed often for no reason; the Newton was bulky and slow; the Lisa & Mac were too expensive for most home/biz users and lacked useful software until desktop publishing matured years after release; the first online services made molasses look fast; both Java and JavaScript were buggy and inconsistent upon release; and HTML 5 is still buggy and inconsistent. And node.JS? I still don't know what the fock that's all about, I hope to finally "get it" before I die, or maybe dying is preferable?
Table-ized A.I.
3D printer advocates have as much trouble getting their replies to flow as they do their printing material.
While we're on the topic of "fleshed out" - what about the "porn drives technology" factor behind internet (DVD, VHS, printed, etc.) transmission of photos, video, video chat, and all manner of other remote applications? If it's "a tech toy" that has porn applications, that seems to drive adoption and growth in most cases - later leading to more mainstream applications.
'Game Changer' considered a 'Toy'.
IF a toy is something you can't do real work with then no, desktop 3D printers do not qualify as mere toys. Citation: I've done actual real work using one.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Really? Who's definition is that? Does your hammer become a toy if you repair something in your house with it? You should look up the definition for the word "toy". A hobby is not "playing" with something.
It's a Stratasys uPrint Plus. In the specifications page, it says "Layer thickness: .254 mm (.010 in.) or .330 mm (.013 in.)"
It depends. If it takes hours of setup every time you print one item, it's just an unreliable tool, but still not a toy. If it takes hours of setup to properly calibrate once in a while, it's just normal wear and tear. We're talking about fractions of millimetres here.
Of course the quality from higher-end 3D printers will be much better, but so will the cost. If we're talking precision alone, an FDM from Stratasys won't stand a chance against a Polyjet from the same company.
But comparing the output quality of a Stratasys FDM vs a well-calibrated RepRap? You'd be surprised which one you'd pick and the price difference between the two.
Give me a break, it's -17C outside, of course I have flow problems!
No, it's not a toy. They're used in a lot of low-volume specialized applications like R&D.
And occasionally a piece of technology is heralded as a world-changing innovation, and end up just being a toy. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Segway.
My car is a toy. It's a sportscar, and it's fun. It also gets me places, and it also keeps me warm, but what it brings to my transportation over a normal car is unnecessary for transportation. In other words, the more that it offers doesn't make the transportation any better (not faster, not more comfortable, not easier).
Each of those items, and the mouse is an easy example to discuss, was a toy when it came out. At the time, computers were used for typing. What the mouse offered wasn't necessary for computer use. It didn't improve any task being done at the time. That's what made it a toy.
Obviously any toy, once it becomes ubiquitous, becomes flexible as a tool. If everyone had a sportscar like mine, we could redesign the roads to function like the track, and all drive at twice the speed; we could redesign parking lots to fit more cars too.
Agreed, but my desktop (or even the laptop) doesn't fit well into my pocket.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I can just see the senior engineers watching the junior engineers waving their hands in the air with VR goggles on and thinking that it isn't "Real work"
The telescope was actually a toy first.
[Stupid] People Often Deride Game Changing Technology as 'a Toy'
A little less profound that way, but mostly true.
Some of it may be useful, especially energy-related such as closing and opening window blinds, turning off/on heat automatically (even using a weather forecast?). But the rest seems to be crap like a touchscreen mirror that teaches you how to brush teeth, music that follows you around if you have a mansion and no family or friends, a fridge that thinks it's a mainframe or any contraption they can come up with. Will we really need, eventually, a conveyor belt that feeds bread slices to a toaster, then a cartoony white-glove-hand seizes the toasted bread that flies out of the toaster and hand it to a butter-knifing-and-spreading robot?
Will we spend our time to reconfigure the robot to use peanut butter or jam, rather than do the task ourselves?
Now a bread dispenser that cuts a slice for me would be fun I guess. Sliced bread is the worst invention since sliced bread : if you slice real bread beforehand, it will just go stale and hard faster. Also it sucks when you want a thick slice but all the slices available are thin ones.
So, here comes the smart bread slicing machine. It either has a touchscreen, or you pull your smartphone to ask for the desired thickness and number of slices, with options for thickness randomization or custom thickness distributions. Great! Now I can't hurt myself. Although I could hurt myself when doing the cleaning and maintenance of my Bread Slicer 2000, or when it jams. Also I think I should share my bread stats on Facebook. Hey friend, I crumbed you three times today! Why didn't you answer or comment on me?
In the "real" world there are such fine pieces of art as "smart switches" or power bars that turn everything off if you turn the TV off. (Some might even add an inconspicuous killer switch next to a light switch, for guests to press when they're trying to find their keys). So, your set-top box or ISP box gets its power cut while in the middle of writing to disk ; DVR recording is lost, downloads are interrupted, NAS shares are dead and when you turn the thing on you watch the poor thing show a spinner on its VFD screen forever while it fscks the file system.
The music files from iTunes can be accessed by most devices too, only the early ones had DRM on them.
Music videos/TV shows/movies, on the other hand, are another story.
In fact, industrial 3D printing came first. Look at Makerbot's parent company, Stratasys
I suppose I'll be saying the same thing again some day...
Well, if you think about it, that's actually quite normal.
Most new disruptive technology are developped quickly, with a lots of iteration and experimentation.
(That comes more or less with the fact that they are trying something new, and iterative and rapid development are more or less a requirement).
Of course that means that the technology will necessarily go through a "minimum delivrable" phase.
It's not complete yet, it only contains the bare minimum to make a viable product.
Then of course, obviously, old guns won't necessarily see the potential. The only see the current state and consider it a toy.
They ARE right, it IS *currently* a toy. But a toy designed to show possibilities.
And thus visionary people will quickly notice all the potential and see beyond the toy. They see what is now possible to achieve with the technology that wasn't possible before.
One man's shiny new toy, is another man's first step to reaching the moon.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
when you lumped Java and Javascript together.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Like how the iPad was going to revolutionize the workplace?
Still a toy
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
- Slashdot Founder
Some tech seems to go through a set of stages: 1. Toy, usually just for the rich. 2. Still a toy, but you don't have to be super-rich any more. 3. A nice thing to have that opens doors. 4. A necessity if you really want to do well. 5. So essential in society that it's somewhat subsidized for those who can't afford it, or even regarded as a basic right.
Consider these 5 basic stages, and ponder this history of: 1. Motorized transportation. 2. Computers. 3. Jet packs. 4. Electric fans. 5. Intravenous fluids.
Please provide at least 10 references. Have your essays on my desk by Wednesday morning.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
On the issue of "toy". What do most people say when they have purchased a FDM printer? It is usually "Look at my new toy".
Show me a service that uses a uPrint Plus. Notice that it is in the "Idea" line of printers and not the higher quality series.
But comparing the output quality of a Stratasys FDM vs a well-calibrated RepRap? You'd be surprised which one you'd pick and the price difference between the two.
Who would build the RepRap for me if I don't have the skill? Who will teach me how to calibrate it successfully?
It comes down to the fact that if you put your time at $0 doing it yourself will always be cheaper.
We ultimately returned our 3D printer because the building air was rarely above 18C and the printer couldn't get decent adhesion between layers because the material cooled too quickly.
While we're on the topic of "fleshed out" - what about the "porn drives technology" factor behind internet (DVD, VHS, printed, etc.) transmission of photos, video, video chat, and all manner of other remote applications? If it's "a tech toy" that has porn applications, that seems to drive adoption and growth in most cases - later leading to more mainstream applications.
Sadly, I think it all really comes down to "money drives technology". Whether it is toys, porn, war, the space race, smuggling drugs, or grants for pure research, it takes money to move technology forward. And in the case of just a tinkerer in the basement, it has to be something interesting to the tinkerer for them to invest time and money into making it better and unless you're Tony Stark, the scale is usually going to be considerably smaller than what can be achieved by selling the intermediate products to first adopters.
What I would like is a robot arm that takes the game disc out of the Xbox/Wii, puts it away, and puts in another one I want to play next.
Yep - that would be a game-changer.
"It's a good computer... for I to BM on!" - apologies to Triumph, the insult comic dog
Computers are not really necessary in our personal lives for happiness. However now we are forced to use it because 'the neighbor has it'. Mankind has complicated its existence unnecessarily with too much personal tech. Yes, maybe they are needed in industry and science, to help solve global problems of poverty and environment, advance scientific knowledge, etc. To help reach other planets, explore space, etc.
But wasn't your grandpa happy without these gazillion gadgets and online video and music and what not?
"Really? Who's definition is that?" Possibly most peoples, or possibly not. I've personally always understood the two(toys and hobbies) to be closely related, and the prescriptive interpretations do as well. In fact, they're so closely related that the word "hobby" is actually the shortened word for the name of a "toy". And on a note more personal than prescriptive interpretations(I'm not a prescriptivist by any means), I would say that a hobby is in fact "playing" with something, or at least it is for me.
[3D Printers] Enough said. Watch the flow of negative replies under this post.
Here's one (negative reply) :-
3-D printers will be used, but they are not a game-changer. I would place them on about the same level as say Dymo label printers or super-glue.
I am a practical guy and make and repair a lot of stuff, but would not see much use for one. To make a replacement part with one I'd first need to code in the shape I wanted; I could probably make the thing by other means faster.
A reasonable MIG welder isn't that expensive. Granted Hobart is a Miller with some corners cut (example: mine doesn't have a thermal switch for the fan so the fan just runs all the time) but they are well made. For what I weld even the smallest ones are overkill. Unlike some of the really cheap crap they are reliable and I gather that Lincoln Electric also offers some small ones now so just check around you and get one that does what you need, as the Miller vs. Lincoln fight makes Vi vs. Emacs fight seem halfhearted.
I view 3d printers now like welders from 30 years ago. You could get some consumer ones but they weren't good but someone could produce things with them and at the professional level there were great ones. I figure by the time I retire 3d printers will likely be like welders now where one can get pretty nice ones that offer professional quality but with fewer features for a good price.
Time to offend someone
Holy crap, do you live at the North Pole or something?
Wait... Santa? Is that you?!
I've seen some nice-looking things coming from sub-$500 printers. They still look more like another hobby than I want at the moment, but I think I'm going to get one in a few years.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If you could download the file for the replacement part and set up your 3D printer, it wouldn't take much of your time. I'm seeing downloadable files becoming available for stuff I'm interested in.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You say 'Toy' as if it's a bad thing. Toys are awesome. There's nothing quite so childish as wanting to be a grown-up.
Florida, in a building built in the 1960s when the theory of AC was: put in a huge, oversized chiller and adjust the temperature with heat strips - so the most efficient way to run the units is at "full cold" (or not at all, which leads to problems due to lack of ventilation.)
You don't seem to have read my post. I do like my iPhone.
Florida? Well, put the 3D printer outside, you won't even need a hot end!
My aged father, who's seen his son "play" video games since the late 1970's. Who went to university to study Software Engineering. Who worked on both sides of the Atlantic developing applications and games, still considers games to be for children. This is all while he's on his Android tablet playing games! You can't win!
No, it didn't. The issue to overcome wasn't the complexity of the page, it was the automatic re-formatting the Treo and Windows Mobile browsers attempted to do in order to make the page fit on a screen that was barely 300 pixels wide. The iPhone's approach was to render the page into a much larger canvas and to use a combination of scrolling and pinch-to-zoom to navigate, sort of like using a magnifying glass over a large book. The meant that unlike the various Treo phones at the time web pages were rendered in their orignal formatting. The Treo was a joke in comparison.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it did. Page reflow on the Treo worked fine with most sites of the day. You're talking about stuff that you clearly haven't experienced.
Apparently not. Was this on the Palm OS version or the Windows version?
The iPhone approach meant that you had to constantly zoom in and out to read a page and again. That's why mobile sites still exist to this day.
Yep. Oh and by sheer coincidence it's also the approach all the mobile browsers in use today use, mainly because the automatic-reformatting was too spotty.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The big hype around smart watches got us ridiculously expensive gadgets that are not smart without a smart phone which by itself is shockingly dumb without a decent data plan that allows asking servers permanently for what to do. And what do these overpriced gizmos do? Tell time, measure heart beat, and show a notice that you need to pull your phone out of your pocket. Yea, it is great for bragging, like owning a yacht or a souped up Mercedes that shares the garage with a Tesla and a Porsche, but so far there is little to no practical use that would turn a smart watch to have a positive ROI. That makes the difference between a tool and a toy even in consumer space.