I'm working on some hinge designs for something for a renaissance faire, so it would be nice if the files Makerbot uses could be handed to a metal sintering company to make the identical object... but made from Iconel.
I wonder how this will turn out. Dell resells a lot of products, so it does make sense, as it does keep them as a one stop shop for businesses.
I'm probably sure (please correct if I am wrong) there are better printers for the money, but Makerbot seems to have their act together the best for getting stuff made.
I wonder what the layer thickness and X-Y resolution will be on the device will be. If I choose to print out a model similar to a class ring, will I get something where I can read a fine inscription on the inside, or will it be a glob of plastic that is sort of roundish.
I went with LED bulbs not because they will "pay me back" in energy costs. Instead, it is pure laziness on my part. Some bulbs I want to change as few times on possible, such as the one at the top of the stairs or behind a mirror.
Plus, if I drop a LED, it bounces, and may end up breaking. I then pick it up and toss it in the trashcan. A broken glass bulb is a lot more annoying to get picked up, and a CFL is a mini Superfund site.
I still have a color laser that I bought in '06 for around $75 when a local Office Depot moved. It still sits on the network for the occasional time I need to print out a decent photo in full color, still on its "starter" cartridges...
Yes, replacing the cartridges would be $350 or so... but for ~1000 or so color pages? Worth it. If I get ten full color photos from a $50 inkjet cartridge pair, I'm lucky.
Portland suffered through this fate many years ago. There is one thing that will put Detroit back on the map, something California and Texas do not have...
Fresh water. Chip plants need it, businesses require this to run. When the major aquifers dry up and make sunbelt areas extremely expensive to live in (barring an advance in desalination, and even then, trying to pump that water inland), Detroit, and Michigan in general, will be relevant again. No water worries, fairly stable terrain (no earthquakes), worst issue might be blizzards.
I'd give Detroit a couple years for it to reach its nadir, because the one-two punch of a continual drought combined with the extreme populations trying to live in desert will eventually cause an exodus back to the northern climates, as that will be where the companies relocate and where the jobs will be.
What I've found interesting is that the successful groups tend to have two other factors in common, and that is not just working hard, but working smart. One can work hard doing double-shifts at Burger World or Krusty Burger, but after 20 years, still be making minimum wage.
One can jump from job to job doing nothing and just paying lip service, but come a recession, eventually not make it.
I hate stereotyping, but a lot of ethnic groups work extremely hard. However, what they have might be a restaurant, grocery store, or laundry. It takes that quality, plus the ability to go do something off the beaten path, that gets companies like the next Snapchat or Facebook on the map.
Parenting in the US is like the parable of the miller, his son, and the donkey. Follow the doctors and teachers, the kid gets drugged up and possibly development is damaged due to unexpected side effects. Not using drugs, one might end up facing CPS.
Schooling is similar if one isn't wealthy enough to afford a private school. One can hope the public school system isn't going to churn out too broken an education, or one can try homeschooling, and that is another bag of worms [1].
[1]: So far, the closest thing I've seen to a one room schoolhouse is at renaissance faires where the cast and participants end up setting up de facto schools for all the worker's kids. So far, even though I'm just a volunteer (as it is a nice change from IT work), it is pretty interesting how wide the kids' knowledge is, and how well they read/write.
They do know what they are doing. The cost of licenses went up by a good chunk of change (think 20% or so.) Because most businesses rely on MS for day to day use, that additional 20% in license revenue definitely didn't hurt revenue gains.
There are the SELinux policies that got checked into 4.5 a few days ago which make it impossible for even a program running as root to extract and run files in the/data filesystem. Not an impossible task, but it will require all root apps to be re-engineered.
I don't think Google did this to lock out root apps, but plug some vulnerabilities, but there is a lot of bellyaching about this. It would be nice to have some switch to allow root apps (or just the su binary) to have their own SELinux security contexts, or a way to turn SELinux off without changing kernel arguments.
One can use NTFS and turn on deduplication, then manually fire off the background "optimization" task. It isn't a "presto!", but after a good long while, it will find and merge duplicate files, or duplicate blocks of different files.
Caveat: This is only Windows 8 and newer, or Windows Server 2012 and newer.
The main reason for the 1800/3600 RPM is that one can take an off the shelf generator and use that. However, if it is designed for the vehicle, there isn't stopping anyone from designing it to invert to DC with variable voltage to accurately charge the battery bank.
There are definitely losses, but the advantage is that the losses are only felt when the vehicle's batteries are at a low SOC and the generator is on to feed them. If one is in their normal range, this wouldn't be an issue.
Done right, it just might replace diesels. Electric motors get their best torque at 0 RPM and are very efficient. Good enough that one could be within an order of magnitude of diesel or gasoline with energy density and still be better off.
Here in the US, solar is actually being attractive to both ends of the political spectrum. The far left and the Tea Party people find solar very useful. Fewer people are saying the "it costs more to make a panel than the panel ever gets back in energy over its life" claptrap.
The trick now is to get panels deployed in more places (such as glass tint), better charge controllers, and of course, batteries with better energy density.
If an automaker made something like a Leaf, except with a small fuel tank (whatever fuel the customer wanted) and an Onan generator for that fuel, that would solve both short-range solutions, not to mention allow longer trips.
A Volt is decent, but what would be the next step is having the fossil fuel burner only have the function of charging the batteries, not part of the drivetrain. This would allow it to just run at one RPM (likely 1800 RPM if a four pole, 3600 RPM if a two pole, or 3000 RPM if a two pole and in Europe.) It is a lot easier to design an engine that just runs at one speed than worry about transmissions and power bands.
Devil's advocate here: Other than being the local "watering hole", what service or services does FB provide that nobody else does?
For authentication, MS and Google can provide that, or one can use OpenID. In fact, during the age of GINAs with XP, I had a machine that authenticated users using their Slashdot IDs.
For walls, cat pictures, random ramblings, and political statements, the Web has done that for decades. MySpace, G+, Blogger, Livejournal, Deadjournal, and many custom Web pages have this.
For online messaging, SMS, MMS, old fashioned E-mail, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, IRC, talk, and rwall have been around. Similar with offline messages and group chats.
Other than just pure momentum, I just don't see anything FB unique that can't be duplicated by G+ or someone else. Their backend software is pretty cool, but that isn't exactly something the users see or care about.
At least fixing a patch is a lot easier than trying to keep playing cat and mouse with the PLA:
1: Get a cryptographic hash of a file that is going to be installed and present on the user's system. A file necessary for game operation.
2: Encrypt patch with said hash as key, and a random salt/IV at the beginning of patch.
3: The patcher executable knows where to find the file and extract its hash, then uses said hash to decrypt everything.
4: The patcher executable, and just it is downloaded via HTTPS.
5: Problem solved, barring some cyphertext having words in it. The fix for that would be having part of the encryption process be encoding in a manner opposite of uuencode or MIME... instead, encoding without using human readable characters either in ASCII or Unicode. Of course, the downside is that the patch file just almost doubled in size due to this.
It might have its uses as a cast for a mold. Stick it in a cube, fill the area around it with sand and compress. Then heat it so the plastic all drops out. Once gone, pour one's molten metal of choice, let cool, and then remove the sand for a decent meal object. With the finer tolerances, it might just be better suited for this purpose, including proper sprues in place, as shown by the software.
Yes, what they have has finer tolerances than the typical Makerbot [1], but I wonder if the existing 3D printers are "good enough" for buyers, similar to the fact that inkjet printers outsell PostScript network printers by a wide margin, since most inkjets are "good enough".
Now, if Formlabs can get sintered metals like Iconel variants working in an inexpensive, reliable product, that would be very useful news because their main competition would be a Mitsubishi unit that goes well in excess of $600,000.
[1]: I assume Makerbots are the best price/performance for general amateur use outside of a machine shop.
What is killing us is the industry settling for "good enough". SSL is "good enough", with the assumption that CAs won't be compromised. This was true back in the 1990s, but Diginotar and other CAs have shown that the single, ultimate trust model will fail.
Then there are devices. Even though I have a client key for one E-mail address, because iOS requires an Exchange server, no S/MIME for me unless I JB the device. PGP/gpg is doable, but some apps don't like being switched out and start glitching when they get switched back in. Android is better because of utilities that have better OpenPGP support (K9 Mail for example.)
Once app makers and Apple can be convinced to have usable encryption (OpenPGP and S/MIME) on the individual E-mail level, the big hurdle will be getting users to work on webs of trust, or even just signing/decrypting messages. This isn't rocket science, but security is oftentimes tossed in the back seat compared to virtually anything else. It can be done, though. Most people lock their doors before they leave for the day, so getting them to click on the sign/encrypt button may be eventually doable, given the consequences of not doing so.
Very true. The OP was running Windows, so I handed him a solution along those lines.
On OS X, there is VirtualBox, Parallels, and VMWare Fusion.
On Linux, one has VMWare Workstation, VirtualBox, and Xen (Xen being a level 1 hypervisor.)
*BSD has QEMU.
Yes, there are alternatives to VMs. Jails and chrooting come to mind. However, in Windows, the OP is pretty much reliant on virtual machines to do what he needs to do.
Virtual machines are great for other uses. Malware or corruption? Roll back to a snapshot. Want to see how one's system is at the exact time a 1.0 release gets pushed out? Snapshot time. Fearing that a bad coding error takes the VM out? Snapshot before the run.
Of course, VMs won't help much if doing hardware development, but with just one PC used by multiple people, VMs are pretty much the only way to go.
As for VM software, that can be a toss-up. VirtualBox is licensed at no charge, VMWare costs a couple C-notes, and Hyper-V may be present on the box. Hyper-V is nice since it is a type 1 hypervisor (so a second VM runs on the same level as the main machine), but VMWare Workstation has a lot of nice tools (encryption for the disk files, auto-protect for snapshot backups, etc.)
The ironic thing is that the first time I heard about 3D printing, over 10 years ago (it was called stereolithography), was to produce prototype parts for IV roller valves for hospitals. After that, it was used for short runs of parts, replacements for things that have long since stopped being made, and other niche markets.
The pursuit of guns came a lot later when the technology came out of the factories.
With accurate 3D printing, we can make circuit boards as an integral part of a product. It might not be useful for large-scale production, but there are likely some objects where having the ability to not have to assemble something and have no weak seams or welds might be of great use. A seamless Faraday cage comes to mind. Perhaps a bottle for highly compressed gas?
I think part of adopting a technology is how it appeals to some peoples' banal nature. A lot of people love pr0n, so it propelled the Internet into homes. Printing out a firearm of questionable use got 3D printing on the map. Paranoia got solar adopted by both the right wing and left wing in the US.
There are a lot of uses for 3D printing. I'm probably going to wind up with a Makerbot so I can prototype a few lock mechanisms. If they actually work, then I will moved to sintered Iconel for the key and the lock. After that, hand some of the locks to the local locksport group and Youtube SPP people and see if the lock passes the real world muster. That way, if it actually is something pick resistant, I can always state an average time a pro can open the lock, rather making vague "unpickable" claims.
Look at historic security breaches in the past that resulted in massive data compromise. Most companies that were breached are back to their stock norms, or perhaps even higher [1] a few quarters after the incident. Couple this with the belief that security has no ROI...
I wouldn't expect anything to change anytime soon.
[1]: I remember being told by an MBA that all press is good press, so a security breach is still getting a company name in front of people's eyes/ears where they may never have gotten with normal advertising methods.
On Android, a phone will appear as a storage device or camera, unless someone enables debugging and authorizes a computer with its individual key to connect.
I don't see how an app could get data to a computer from a locked Android device unless the app managed to get itself root, or there was some other trick to break into the Android device (physical dumping the RAM), and if an attacker is that sophisticated, pretty much what an app tries to do for security is pointless.
There are simpler ways as well, depending on what one's forseen adversary is. In a past life, I had to deal with a third party whose E-mail server refused to allow any E-mail attachments whatsoever except Acrobat, and AutoCAD files were needed to be exchanged fairly quickly. So, when sending the DXF file, I ended up embedding it as an attachment in a password-protected PDF, and this did the trick.
There are tools to spot obvious steganography, especially if the de-stegged picture is already on the Internet somewhere. I remember reading something on/. where a researcher did a mass scan of Web pictures, and found almost no stego whatsoever.
Stego is a useful tool for transporting provided the de-stegoed document never, ever winds up on the Internet, but for storing data, it would be a lot better to use something like TrueCrypt or PhonebookFS.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm working on some hinge designs for something for a renaissance faire, so it would be nice if the files Makerbot uses could be handed to a metal sintering company to make the identical object... but made from Iconel.
I wonder how this will turn out. Dell resells a lot of products, so it does make sense, as it does keep them as a one stop shop for businesses.
I'm probably sure (please correct if I am wrong) there are better printers for the money, but Makerbot seems to have their act together the best for getting stuff made.
I wonder what the layer thickness and X-Y resolution will be on the device will be. If I choose to print out a model similar to a class ring, will I get something where I can read a fine inscription on the inside, or will it be a glob of plastic that is sort of roundish.
I went with LED bulbs not because they will "pay me back" in energy costs. Instead, it is pure laziness on my part. Some bulbs I want to change as few times on possible, such as the one at the top of the stairs or behind a mirror.
Plus, if I drop a LED, it bounces, and may end up breaking. I then pick it up and toss it in the trashcan. A broken glass bulb is a lot more annoying to get picked up, and a CFL is a mini Superfund site.
I still have a color laser that I bought in '06 for around $75 when a local Office Depot moved. It still sits on the network for the occasional time I need to print out a decent photo in full color, still on its "starter" cartridges...
Yes, replacing the cartridges would be $350 or so... but for ~1000 or so color pages? Worth it. If I get ten full color photos from a $50 inkjet cartridge pair, I'm lucky.
Portland suffered through this fate many years ago. There is one thing that will put Detroit back on the map, something California and Texas do not have...
Fresh water. Chip plants need it, businesses require this to run. When the major aquifers dry up and make sunbelt areas extremely expensive to live in (barring an advance in desalination, and even then, trying to pump that water inland), Detroit, and Michigan in general, will be relevant again. No water worries, fairly stable terrain (no earthquakes), worst issue might be blizzards.
I'd give Detroit a couple years for it to reach its nadir, because the one-two punch of a continual drought combined with the extreme populations trying to live in desert will eventually cause an exodus back to the northern climates, as that will be where the companies relocate and where the jobs will be.
What I've found interesting is that the successful groups tend to have two other factors in common, and that is not just working hard, but working smart. One can work hard doing double-shifts at Burger World or Krusty Burger, but after 20 years, still be making minimum wage.
One can jump from job to job doing nothing and just paying lip service, but come a recession, eventually not make it.
I hate stereotyping, but a lot of ethnic groups work extremely hard. However, what they have might be a restaurant, grocery store, or laundry. It takes that quality, plus the ability to go do something off the beaten path, that gets companies like the next Snapchat or Facebook on the map.
Parenting in the US is like the parable of the miller, his son, and the donkey. Follow the doctors and teachers, the kid gets drugged up and possibly development is damaged due to unexpected side effects. Not using drugs, one might end up facing CPS.
Schooling is similar if one isn't wealthy enough to afford a private school. One can hope the public school system isn't going to churn out too broken an education, or one can try homeschooling, and that is another bag of worms [1].
[1]: So far, the closest thing I've seen to a one room schoolhouse is at renaissance faires where the cast and participants end up setting up de facto schools for all the worker's kids. So far, even though I'm just a volunteer (as it is a nice change from IT work), it is pretty interesting how wide the kids' knowledge is, and how well they read/write.
They do know what they are doing. The cost of licenses went up by a good chunk of change (think 20% or so.) Because most businesses rely on MS for day to day use, that additional 20% in license revenue definitely didn't hurt revenue gains.
There are the SELinux policies that got checked into 4.5 a few days ago which make it impossible for even a program running as root to extract and run files in the /data filesystem. Not an impossible task, but it will require all root apps to be re-engineered.
I don't think Google did this to lock out root apps, but plug some vulnerabilities, but there is a lot of bellyaching about this. It would be nice to have some switch to allow root apps (or just the su binary) to have their own SELinux security contexts, or a way to turn SELinux off without changing kernel arguments.
One can use NTFS and turn on deduplication, then manually fire off the background "optimization" task. It isn't a "presto!", but after a good long while, it will find and merge duplicate files, or duplicate blocks of different files.
Caveat: This is only Windows 8 and newer, or Windows Server 2012 and newer.
The main reason for the 1800/3600 RPM is that one can take an off the shelf generator and use that. However, if it is designed for the vehicle, there isn't stopping anyone from designing it to invert to DC with variable voltage to accurately charge the battery bank.
There are definitely losses, but the advantage is that the losses are only felt when the vehicle's batteries are at a low SOC and the generator is on to feed them. If one is in their normal range, this wouldn't be an issue.
Done right, it just might replace diesels. Electric motors get their best torque at 0 RPM and are very efficient. Good enough that one could be within an order of magnitude of diesel or gasoline with energy density and still be better off.
Here in the US, solar is actually being attractive to both ends of the political spectrum. The far left and the Tea Party people find solar very useful. Fewer people are saying the "it costs more to make a panel than the panel ever gets back in energy over its life" claptrap.
The trick now is to get panels deployed in more places (such as glass tint), better charge controllers, and of course, batteries with better energy density.
If an automaker made something like a Leaf, except with a small fuel tank (whatever fuel the customer wanted) and an Onan generator for that fuel, that would solve both short-range solutions, not to mention allow longer trips.
A Volt is decent, but what would be the next step is having the fossil fuel burner only have the function of charging the batteries, not part of the drivetrain. This would allow it to just run at one RPM (likely 1800 RPM if a four pole, 3600 RPM if a two pole, or 3000 RPM if a two pole and in Europe.) It is a lot easier to design an engine that just runs at one speed than worry about transmissions and power bands.
Devil's advocate here: Other than being the local "watering hole", what service or services does FB provide that nobody else does?
For authentication, MS and Google can provide that, or one can use OpenID. In fact, during the age of GINAs with XP, I had a machine that authenticated users using their Slashdot IDs.
For walls, cat pictures, random ramblings, and political statements, the Web has done that for decades. MySpace, G+, Blogger, Livejournal, Deadjournal, and many custom Web pages have this.
For online messaging, SMS, MMS, old fashioned E-mail, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, IRC, talk, and rwall have been around. Similar with offline messages and group chats.
Other than just pure momentum, I just don't see anything FB unique that can't be duplicated by G+ or someone else. Their backend software is pretty cool, but that isn't exactly something the users see or care about.
At least fixing a patch is a lot easier than trying to keep playing cat and mouse with the PLA:
1: Get a cryptographic hash of a file that is going to be installed and present on the user's system. A file necessary for game operation.
2: Encrypt patch with said hash as key, and a random salt/IV at the beginning of patch.
3: The patcher executable knows where to find the file and extract its hash, then uses said hash to decrypt everything.
4: The patcher executable, and just it is downloaded via HTTPS.
5: Problem solved, barring some cyphertext having words in it. The fix for that would be having part of the encryption process be encoding in a manner opposite of uuencode or MIME... instead, encoding without using human readable characters either in ASCII or Unicode. Of course, the downside is that the patch file just almost doubled in size due to this.
It might have its uses as a cast for a mold. Stick it in a cube, fill the area around it with sand and compress. Then heat it so the plastic all drops out. Once gone, pour one's molten metal of choice, let cool, and then remove the sand for a decent meal object. With the finer tolerances, it might just be better suited for this purpose, including proper sprues in place, as shown by the software.
Yes, what they have has finer tolerances than the typical Makerbot [1], but I wonder if the existing 3D printers are "good enough" for buyers, similar to the fact that inkjet printers outsell PostScript network printers by a wide margin, since most inkjets are "good enough".
Now, if Formlabs can get sintered metals like Iconel variants working in an inexpensive, reliable product, that would be very useful news because their main competition would be a Mitsubishi unit that goes well in excess of $600,000.
[1]: I assume Makerbots are the best price/performance for general amateur use outside of a machine shop.
What is killing us is the industry settling for "good enough". SSL is "good enough", with the assumption that CAs won't be compromised. This was true back in the 1990s, but Diginotar and other CAs have shown that the single, ultimate trust model will fail.
Then there are devices. Even though I have a client key for one E-mail address, because iOS requires an Exchange server, no S/MIME for me unless I JB the device. PGP/gpg is doable, but some apps don't like being switched out and start glitching when they get switched back in. Android is better because of utilities that have better OpenPGP support (K9 Mail for example.)
Once app makers and Apple can be convinced to have usable encryption (OpenPGP and S/MIME) on the individual E-mail level, the big hurdle will be getting users to work on webs of trust, or even just signing/decrypting messages. This isn't rocket science, but security is oftentimes tossed in the back seat compared to virtually anything else. It can be done, though. Most people lock their doors before they leave for the day, so getting them to click on the sign/encrypt button may be eventually doable, given the consequences of not doing so.
Very true. The OP was running Windows, so I handed him a solution along those lines.
On OS X, there is VirtualBox, Parallels, and VMWare Fusion.
On Linux, one has VMWare Workstation, VirtualBox, and Xen (Xen being a level 1 hypervisor.)
*BSD has QEMU.
Yes, there are alternatives to VMs. Jails and chrooting come to mind. However, in Windows, the OP is pretty much reliant on virtual machines to do what he needs to do.
Virtual machines are great for other uses. Malware or corruption? Roll back to a snapshot. Want to see how one's system is at the exact time a 1.0 release gets pushed out? Snapshot time. Fearing that a bad coding error takes the VM out? Snapshot before the run.
Of course, VMs won't help much if doing hardware development, but with just one PC used by multiple people, VMs are pretty much the only way to go.
As for VM software, that can be a toss-up. VirtualBox is licensed at no charge, VMWare costs a couple C-notes, and Hyper-V may be present on the box. Hyper-V is nice since it is a type 1 hypervisor (so a second VM runs on the same level as the main machine), but VMWare Workstation has a lot of nice tools (encryption for the disk files, auto-protect for snapshot backups, etc.)
The ironic thing is that the first time I heard about 3D printing, over 10 years ago (it was called stereolithography), was to produce prototype parts for IV roller valves for hospitals. After that, it was used for short runs of parts, replacements for things that have long since stopped being made, and other niche markets.
The pursuit of guns came a lot later when the technology came out of the factories.
With accurate 3D printing, we can make circuit boards as an integral part of a product. It might not be useful for large-scale production, but there are likely some objects where having the ability to not have to assemble something and have no weak seams or welds might be of great use. A seamless Faraday cage comes to mind. Perhaps a bottle for highly compressed gas?
I think part of adopting a technology is how it appeals to some peoples' banal nature. A lot of people love pr0n, so it propelled the Internet into homes. Printing out a firearm of questionable use got 3D printing on the map. Paranoia got solar adopted by both the right wing and left wing in the US.
There are a lot of uses for 3D printing. I'm probably going to wind up with a Makerbot so I can prototype a few lock mechanisms. If they actually work, then I will moved to sintered Iconel for the key and the lock. After that, hand some of the locks to the local locksport group and Youtube SPP people and see if the lock passes the real world muster. That way, if it actually is something pick resistant, I can always state an average time a pro can open the lock, rather making vague "unpickable" claims.
Inductive reasoning states never.
Look at historic security breaches in the past that resulted in massive data compromise. Most companies that were breached are back to their stock norms, or perhaps even higher [1] a few quarters after the incident. Couple this with the belief that security has no ROI...
I wouldn't expect anything to change anytime soon.
[1]: I remember being told by an MBA that all press is good press, so a security breach is still getting a company name in front of people's eyes/ears where they may never have gotten with normal advertising methods.
On Android, a phone will appear as a storage device or camera, unless someone enables debugging and authorizes a computer with its individual key to connect.
I don't see how an app could get data to a computer from a locked Android device unless the app managed to get itself root, or there was some other trick to break into the Android device (physical dumping the RAM), and if an attacker is that sophisticated, pretty much what an app tries to do for security is pointless.
There are simpler ways as well, depending on what one's forseen adversary is. In a past life, I had to deal with a third party whose E-mail server refused to allow any E-mail attachments whatsoever except Acrobat, and AutoCAD files were needed to be exchanged fairly quickly. So, when sending the DXF file, I ended up embedding it as an attachment in a password-protected PDF, and this did the trick.
There are tools to spot obvious steganography, especially if the de-stegged picture is already on the Internet somewhere. I remember reading something on /. where a researcher did a mass scan of Web pictures, and found almost no stego whatsoever.
Stego is a useful tool for transporting provided the de-stegoed document never, ever winds up on the Internet, but for storing data, it would be a lot better to use something like TrueCrypt or PhonebookFS.