FYI: I find that putting my 4 in Airline mode for a few seconds then back into normal mode will force a reconnect with towers, on those rare instances when it is stuck on Edge network when I know darn well I am in range of a 3G tower. No reboot necessary.
Biggest issue with the technique right now is selective targeting. To do it you need to know the promoter sequence for a gene of interest, and it has to be small enough to be packaged into the viral vector along with the channelrhodopsin (to activate neurons) or halorhodopsin (to inactivate neurons, responds to yellow rather than blue wavelengths). For many genes the promoters are either not well characterized or too big, which is why so much of the current work in optogenetics is being done in mice - we have the genome mapped out and can easily generate transgenics to avoid the use of viral approaches. I really wish we could do this in rats as easily as in mice. My entire lab is having to switch over from rats to mice for some planned studies and grants, because the tools just aren't as mature in rats. And it's expensive as hell to get up and running... And mice are cheaper than rats. (Lasers are expensive too... Our lab is going with the LEDs, but the original work was all lasers.)
About a year ago I did the trip to Stanford to see how this is done... I mean, seriously people. Have you ever actually SEEN a mouse with laser beams shooting into its head? It's what we always expected science would look like when we were kids.
Recent data shows that "monkey" is only a monophyletic group if you also include apes. So no, humans are monkeys after all, in the exact same a that birds are dinosaurs.
I work in a US government facility. Today I got a message telling us we need to take some training for the upcoming transition to Windows 7 and Office 2010. We've been stuck on WinXP / IE7 forever precisely because they were scared of Vista, and that delayed the move to 7. I've already been told that they have zero interest in implementing Windows 8. By the time our IT people upgrade again, MS will be releasing Office 16.
Yet LaTeX persists because people in academia find that it fits their needs better.
People in certain fields of academia. I've worked with people in a lot of academic research fields - statistics, Alzheimer's research, behavioral neuroscience, energy expenditure, circadian biology, food science, etc. I've been employed at three major research universities and a government research facility. I haven't ever worked with anyone who used LaTeX. 99% use Word; the single exception I can think of prefers Pages. My colleagues include people who spend half their time in SPSS or R, and I do a reasonable amount of scripting to automate data file processing, but nobody I know has bothered with LaTeX. Comp sci and engineering folks might use LaTeX. But even leaving out social sciences, "academia" encompasses a whole lot more than comp sci and engineering. If you want to collaborate with anyone outside of the limited circle who use LaTeX, you're going to be using Word, or dealing with those who do.
Also, as an aside, there are plenty of "better" development boards available than the Raspberry Pi. Take, for example, the ODROID-X (http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G133999328931), which comes with a 1.4 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9, a quad-core ARM Mali-400 GPU, 1 GB of LP-DDR2 RAM, and much more, all for $129 USD.
Yeah, but I only spent $35. Tell me how to convince my wife it's worth spending another hundred bucks for a tiny computer I can play around with... Not going to happen. But for $35, she doesn't care. My order is actually shipping right now. The point was to create something nearly anyone could afford and toy with. They did it, hence the interest.
Fake FB accounts are set up and send friend requests to random users. Some FB users will accept any friend request they get. I know a few who do this. If a friend likes something, it shows up in your news feed (which is dumb, why do I care that you like a company?). If you click the link and then like it yourself, the company just gained access to your feed too. And your demographic info. Mission accomplished.
I see this all the time - so-and-so likes Target or Walmart or whatever. It makes me feel kinda bad for those people, because they don't realize how much personal info they give up when they click that little button. It's the same reason I never use FB to log in anywhere - if a site requires FB login only, I don't use it.
Maybe that has something to do with the manufacturer's need to keep the hardware compatible with the software Microsoft had available. If some killer feature is a great idea but isn't supported by the operating system, what exactly is Dell or HP or Lenovo supposed to do? They built the devices the OS could handle, not the devices that would dethrone the iPad.
If this discussion were about poor response to, say, Google creating a hot new built-in-house Android tablet, you'd have a point. But unlike an open-source OS like Andrid, OEMs have never had the ability to change Windows itself, just the option of adding in bundled drivers and software. And as mentioned upthread, there was no incentive for Microsoft to work with one specific OEM to produce a feature that other OEMs wouldn't have.
If you want to blame the OEMs for anything, blame them for trying as hard as possible to make their devices look just like Apple's, while simultaneously (and largely unsuccessfully) trying to claim they were different and much better than Apple's devices. Almost every "ultrabook" mimics MacBook Air. There are lots of laptops that look like MacBooks. Nearly every slate/tablet (including Surface!) looks like an iPad clone, and many, many, many phones are as close to the iPhone design as they can get without getting sued. If they want a killer device they need it to look like it isn't copying Apple, because no one wants a knock-off.
it looks more like a Macbook Air than an iPad, despite it's being a tablet
That's part of the problem. When you design your hot new item to look almost exactly like the competitor, you set yourself up for failure by inviting direct comparisons to your competition.
My first thought was "It looks almost exactly like an iPad, except there's a keyboard in the cover." When you are trying to compete with a device that is three generations ahead of you and already has proven popularity, this is a bad, bad start.
True. Yet another reason not to tolerate a set-top box. The only reason they really exist is to allow pay-per-view; there's probably no technical reason a descrambler couldn't be installed at the incoming source rather than on a per-set basis, except that the set-top setup makes you use their (usually awful) remote, allows pay-per-view, forces you to accept their ad-laden on-screen channel guide, runs about the shoddiest DVR interface you can think of, and conveniently costs you an extra $10 per month per device.
We really need a universal descrambler that can be incorporated into viewing devices themselves. Perhaps with a slot to allow providers to hand you a thingy that ties your device to their service to discourage hacking. Oh wait, we tried that, and even though CableCard works fine in my TiVo for some reason the cable companies defined it as a "failure" and continue to push their shitty set-top boxes.
The kerning looks like crap? So you mean the journal editors take the text that is sent to them, and just paste it into the final page layout?
No academic journal in which I have ever published has ever printed ANYTHING (aside from graphs/figures) in the font or format in which it was submitted. If the kerning looks like crap, then the editor in charge of assembling the page layout is at fault. If the figure looks bad, blame the author (or the reviewers for not asking them to revise it, which I do every time I get a crappy figure sent to me for review).
Not tenable. Do you really want to trade the brand new battery in your brand new car for a used one with an unknown number of duty cycles? If so, I'd be happy to trade the fully charged battery in my MacBook for your brand new but empty one. Sure mine says "replace battery now" in the health indicator but it is fully charged and compatible with other laptops with the same battery form factor.
And how much is the lead plaintiff spending on legal fees? With what chance of success, given the legal team Google has on hand? Should have just eaten the $1k. Throwing good money after bad if you ask me.
I have a PhD in Zoology / Evolutionary Biology. I spent years in grad school teaching an undergrad-level comparative vertebrate anatomy lab and a developmental bio lab. I work with MDs and PhDs now in a neuroscience lab. None of the models we have heard of or have tried are in any way a suitable replacement for actual dissections. The times I have tried to teach anatomy with models or predissected specimens... well, let's just say that I wouldn't be willing at this point to take on a PhD student who hadn't ever laid hands on an actual animal, nor would I trust an MD who had never touched a specimen before medical school.
Why do you leave the program open for months? I mean, does it really take that long to fire it up again? Does it not remember and auto-load the last tabs you had open when relaunched? Do you never install updates requiring a reboot? Honestly interested in what you are thinking here - I can't understand why one would want to leave ANYTHING open for that long. I close things out when I am done for the day. If I want to reopen the same tabs, I bookmark them and relaunch or let the program reopen them for me. Even knowing that Lion reclaims memory from "inactive" apps I see no reason to leave anything running if I am not still using it.
There is no functional PDF plugin for Firefox on OS X. The one that worked in prior versions (PDF-Quartz) was broken by Fx 4 and only works if you use the right patched unofficial version, and force Fx to start in 32-bit mode. I look forward to a working, built-in PDF plugin. The goal here is a cross-platform plugin that eliminates the need for third party crap (I don't like having things open in a separate window, because that forces a local download whether I want the PDF on my disk or not, and every version of the Acrobat plugin I've ever used on Windows was dog-slow and laden with unnecessary features).
I welcome any software that makes it easier for me to be platform-agnostic in my daily computing tasks.
You're arguing this from the standpoint of someone who assumes all scientific papers are centered around MathML. You're ignoring humanities, for example, and behavioral sciences where images and graphs are a lot more common than equations. Anything that can be a vector should be a vector, in my mind, and PDF works very well for this. It's not new technology, it's mature, and it works on essentially any device and platform.
What is more, PDF works for papers already published. I need to access stuff from JStor, from pre-digital archives of Nature and Science, and so forth. If you want to go and retroactively convert millions of articles into XHTML, you go ahead. The rest of us will scan them into a PDF with OCR.
What you really NEED for scientific papers is a format that works on any device, including paper. We need to have the information available to anyone, anywhere, not just on 1st world computing devices. PDFs do this quite well.
You mean Arachnophilia? I used that ages ago but hated the Java version, so dumped it for Notepad++. These days TextWrangler does everything I need. WYSIWYG editors, feh. If you can't parse the code you shouldn't be building the page. If you are relying on a WYSIWYG editor you are not a designer, you are a hobbyist. And I say this as a definite hobbyist, even though I prefer a plain text editor. I have a site, I get lots of hits, but I know enough to know that I am not a pro. HTML, Javascript, CSS. That's my limit, aside from a few *nix command line tools. I am not fast enough or good enough to make more than a few bucks here and there helping others maintain sites. And I'm that good only because I've been hand-coding HTML since 1995 or so. If I made more money at it I'd be better, because I'd do it more often - but for a full-time research scientist I figure I do OK, and am happy with what I can do.
The UI is better than it used to be but it isn't all that. I've run into problems - things like "You need an administrator password to do this" but then no prompt for password. Which is f'ing stupid, any other OS would throw up an admin prompt when admin access is required or requested. Still takes way too damn long to get network properties when it used to be one or two clicks away from the system tray. Many other strange issues - we had a machine that refused to connect to the network until it was restarted (it could see all other networked PCs in the room, but stated it had no connectivity!), when on XP plugging in the cable gave it full connection immediately.
On the plus side, I started migrating our machines to Win7 specifically because managing malware and virus infections on the XP boxes was getting out of hand. Even the guy who had the most problems with his computer is now working happily virus-free. So a win for increased security, and I'll grudgingly give them a step forward on usability but there are still a lot of aggravations. But it certainly looks transparent and shiny, so that's all good. I might even upgrade my Boot Camp partition to 7...
Not coincidentally, upon reading this article I took two actions: First, I deleted the Last.fm app from my phone. Second, I decided that if I'm going to have to pay for music, I'll pay for something I want to hear - so I am about to renew my membership with my local NPR music station, which plays some killer stuff and incidentally has an iPhone app for free live streaming of their broadcasts.
Last.fm needs to know that if they are going to charge for it, they are going to have to be better than the other paid services. They aren't, from my experience.
"In fact, we've created tools that let our customers check their voice and data usage at any time during their billing cycle to help eliminate bill surprises."
Yep. And the total data usage shown by one of these tools does not match either the total data shown by the other, or the amount shown on my bill. Called customer service about it, and they had no answer. I think I just found out why, thanks to the article posted up top.
Not really. They've made it obvious over and over again that they really don't give a crap about the end users. If they did, there would be a simple way of offering feedback. Heck, even Microsoft has a simple, easy-to-find suggestion box on their site. Facebook tries damn hard NOT to allow you any chance to voice your opinion anywhere the people writing the code will see it.
I work in a research hospital. I recently had a conversation with our in-house shop guy, while he was doing a 3D build of a prototype part for me. He said this is a huge friggin' deal for people in the industry. He has had his finger on the pulse of this for quite some time now, and the big companies are very definitely worried about this. Right now, he can make anything he wants, and the only major issue is cost of materials. In the future, especially when metal forming rather than plastic is more easily done, who knows? His take is that the commercial-size 3D printers are quite likely going to come complete with DRM systems that will check specs and refuse to print anything that matches certain database flags. He doesn't like this, but he sees it on the horizon. As it is now, it's cheaper for us to do prototyping and then have a manufacturer mass-produce the part we designed; it won't be too much longer before it's just as cheap and fast to do it in-house. Manufacturers are worried. They won't sit idly by and let it happen without a huge fight.
There's almost nothing available for download these days that doesn't try to package the Yahoo toolbar into the installer. I simply can't understand why so many companies are happy to have that that asinine, invasive, virus of a toolbar associated with their product. The only thing I can think of is that Yahoo might be hosting the download bandwidth for them.
And now this? My prediction: That damn toolbar will start showing up in MORE places, because now every Microsoft download will include it too.
The transparency roll is one of my favorites. I used to use it in concert with a slide projector; I'd black-screen the slide, reproduce on the transparency what was in the slide as I lectured, then switch the projector back on to emphasize what I'd just drawn or written. Seemed to work. Kept me at a normal pace, drawing things out meant students could follow along easily, and showing the image or concept again at the end reinforced it through repetition. Straight slides? Ick. I wouldn't want to do that. I need a chalkboard at the least, I like drawing as I lecture.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI: I find that putting my 4 in Airline mode for a few seconds then back into normal mode will force a reconnect with towers, on those rare instances when it is stuck on Edge network when I know darn well I am in range of a 3G tower. No reboot necessary.
Biggest issue with the technique right now is selective targeting. To do it you need to know the promoter sequence for a gene of interest, and it has to be small enough to be packaged into the viral vector along with the channelrhodopsin (to activate neurons) or halorhodopsin (to inactivate neurons, responds to yellow rather than blue wavelengths). For many genes the promoters are either not well characterized or too big, which is why so much of the current work in optogenetics is being done in mice - we have the genome mapped out and can easily generate transgenics to avoid the use of viral approaches. I really wish we could do this in rats as easily as in mice. My entire lab is having to switch over from rats to mice for some planned studies and grants, because the tools just aren't as mature in rats. And it's expensive as hell to get up and running... And mice are cheaper than rats. (Lasers are expensive too... Our lab is going with the LEDs, but the original work was all lasers.)
About a year ago I did the trip to Stanford to see how this is done... I mean, seriously people. Have you ever actually SEEN a mouse with laser beams shooting into its head? It's what we always expected science would look like when we were kids.
Recent data shows that "monkey" is only a monophyletic group if you also include apes. So no, humans are monkeys after all, in the exact same a that birds are dinosaurs.
I work in a US government facility. Today I got a message telling us we need to take some training for the upcoming transition to Windows 7 and Office 2010. We've been stuck on WinXP / IE7 forever precisely because they were scared of Vista, and that delayed the move to 7. I've already been told that they have zero interest in implementing Windows 8. By the time our IT people upgrade again, MS will be releasing Office 16.
Yet LaTeX persists because people in academia find that it fits their needs better.
People in certain fields of academia. I've worked with people in a lot of academic research fields - statistics, Alzheimer's research, behavioral neuroscience, energy expenditure, circadian biology, food science, etc. I've been employed at three major research universities and a government research facility. I haven't ever worked with anyone who used LaTeX. 99% use Word; the single exception I can think of prefers Pages. My colleagues include people who spend half their time in SPSS or R, and I do a reasonable amount of scripting to automate data file processing, but nobody I know has bothered with LaTeX. Comp sci and engineering folks might use LaTeX. But even leaving out social sciences, "academia" encompasses a whole lot more than comp sci and engineering. If you want to collaborate with anyone outside of the limited circle who use LaTeX, you're going to be using Word, or dealing with those who do.
Also, as an aside, there are plenty of "better" development boards available than the Raspberry Pi. Take, for example, the ODROID-X (http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G133999328931), which comes with a 1.4 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9, a quad-core ARM Mali-400 GPU, 1 GB of LP-DDR2 RAM, and much more, all for $129 USD.
Yeah, but I only spent $35. Tell me how to convince my wife it's worth spending another hundred bucks for a tiny computer I can play around with... Not going to happen. But for $35, she doesn't care. My order is actually shipping right now. The point was to create something nearly anyone could afford and toy with. They did it, hence the interest.
Fake FB accounts are set up and send friend requests to random users. Some FB users will accept any friend request they get. I know a few who do this. If a friend likes something, it shows up in your news feed (which is dumb, why do I care that you like a company?). If you click the link and then like it yourself, the company just gained access to your feed too. And your demographic info. Mission accomplished.
I see this all the time - so-and-so likes Target or Walmart or whatever. It makes me feel kinda bad for those people, because they don't realize how much personal info they give up when they click that little button. It's the same reason I never use FB to log in anywhere - if a site requires FB login only, I don't use it.
Maybe that has something to do with the manufacturer's need to keep the hardware compatible with the software Microsoft had available. If some killer feature is a great idea but isn't supported by the operating system, what exactly is Dell or HP or Lenovo supposed to do? They built the devices the OS could handle, not the devices that would dethrone the iPad.
If this discussion were about poor response to, say, Google creating a hot new built-in-house Android tablet, you'd have a point. But unlike an open-source OS like Andrid, OEMs have never had the ability to change Windows itself, just the option of adding in bundled drivers and software. And as mentioned upthread, there was no incentive for Microsoft to work with one specific OEM to produce a feature that other OEMs wouldn't have.
If you want to blame the OEMs for anything, blame them for trying as hard as possible to make their devices look just like Apple's, while simultaneously (and largely unsuccessfully) trying to claim they were different and much better than Apple's devices. Almost every "ultrabook" mimics MacBook Air. There are lots of laptops that look like MacBooks. Nearly every slate/tablet (including Surface!) looks like an iPad clone, and many, many, many phones are as close to the iPhone design as they can get without getting sued. If they want a killer device they need it to look like it isn't copying Apple, because no one wants a knock-off.
it looks more like a Macbook Air than an iPad, despite it's being a tablet
That's part of the problem. When you design your hot new item to look almost exactly like the competitor, you set yourself up for failure by inviting direct comparisons to your competition.
My first thought was "It looks almost exactly like an iPad, except there's a keyboard in the cover." When you are trying to compete with a device that is three generations ahead of you and already has proven popularity, this is a bad, bad start.
True. Yet another reason not to tolerate a set-top box. The only reason they really exist is to allow pay-per-view; there's probably no technical reason a descrambler couldn't be installed at the incoming source rather than on a per-set basis, except that the set-top setup makes you use their (usually awful) remote, allows pay-per-view, forces you to accept their ad-laden on-screen channel guide, runs about the shoddiest DVR interface you can think of, and conveniently costs you an extra $10 per month per device.
We really need a universal descrambler that can be incorporated into viewing devices themselves. Perhaps with a slot to allow providers to hand you a thingy that ties your device to their service to discourage hacking. Oh wait, we tried that, and even though CableCard works fine in my TiVo for some reason the cable companies defined it as a "failure" and continue to push their shitty set-top boxes.
The kerning looks like crap? So you mean the journal editors take the text that is sent to them, and just paste it into the final page layout?
No academic journal in which I have ever published has ever printed ANYTHING (aside from graphs/figures) in the font or format in which it was submitted. If the kerning looks like crap, then the editor in charge of assembling the page layout is at fault. If the figure looks bad, blame the author (or the reviewers for not asking them to revise it, which I do every time I get a crappy figure sent to me for review).
Not tenable. Do you really want to trade the brand new battery in your brand new car for a used one with an unknown number of duty cycles? If so, I'd be happy to trade the fully charged battery in my MacBook for your brand new but empty one. Sure mine says "replace battery now" in the health indicator but it is fully charged and compatible with other laptops with the same battery form factor.
And how much is the lead plaintiff spending on legal fees? With what chance of success, given the legal team Google has on hand? Should have just eaten the $1k. Throwing good money after bad if you ask me.
No.
I have a PhD in Zoology / Evolutionary Biology. I spent years in grad school teaching an undergrad-level comparative vertebrate anatomy lab and a developmental bio lab. I work with MDs and PhDs now in a neuroscience lab. None of the models we have heard of or have tried are in any way a suitable replacement for actual dissections. The times I have tried to teach anatomy with models or predissected specimens... well, let's just say that I wouldn't be willing at this point to take on a PhD student who hadn't ever laid hands on an actual animal, nor would I trust an MD who had never touched a specimen before medical school.
Why do you leave the program open for months? I mean, does it really take that long to fire it up again? Does it not remember and auto-load the last tabs you had open when relaunched? Do you never install updates requiring a reboot? Honestly interested in what you are thinking here - I can't understand why one would want to leave ANYTHING open for that long. I close things out when I am done for the day. If I want to reopen the same tabs, I bookmark them and relaunch or let the program reopen them for me. Even knowing that Lion reclaims memory from "inactive" apps I see no reason to leave anything running if I am not still using it.
There is no functional PDF plugin for Firefox on OS X. The one that worked in prior versions (PDF-Quartz) was broken by Fx 4 and only works if you use the right patched unofficial version, and force Fx to start in 32-bit mode. I look forward to a working, built-in PDF plugin. The goal here is a cross-platform plugin that eliminates the need for third party crap (I don't like having things open in a separate window, because that forces a local download whether I want the PDF on my disk or not, and every version of the Acrobat plugin I've ever used on Windows was dog-slow and laden with unnecessary features).
I welcome any software that makes it easier for me to be platform-agnostic in my daily computing tasks.
You're arguing this from the standpoint of someone who assumes all scientific papers are centered around MathML. You're ignoring humanities, for example, and behavioral sciences where images and graphs are a lot more common than equations. Anything that can be a vector should be a vector, in my mind, and PDF works very well for this. It's not new technology, it's mature, and it works on essentially any device and platform.
What is more, PDF works for papers already published. I need to access stuff from JStor, from pre-digital archives of Nature and Science, and so forth. If you want to go and retroactively convert millions of articles into XHTML, you go ahead. The rest of us will scan them into a PDF with OCR.
What you really NEED for scientific papers is a format that works on any device, including paper. We need to have the information available to anyone, anywhere, not just on 1st world computing devices. PDFs do this quite well.
You mean Arachnophilia? I used that ages ago but hated the Java version, so dumped it for Notepad++. These days TextWrangler does everything I need. WYSIWYG editors, feh. If you can't parse the code you shouldn't be building the page. If you are relying on a WYSIWYG editor you are not a designer, you are a hobbyist. And I say this as a definite hobbyist, even though I prefer a plain text editor. I have a site, I get lots of hits, but I know enough to know that I am not a pro. HTML, Javascript, CSS. That's my limit, aside from a few *nix command line tools. I am not fast enough or good enough to make more than a few bucks here and there helping others maintain sites. And I'm that good only because I've been hand-coding HTML since 1995 or so. If I made more money at it I'd be better, because I'd do it more often - but for a full-time research scientist I figure I do OK, and am happy with what I can do.
The UI is better than it used to be but it isn't all that. I've run into problems - things like "You need an administrator password to do this" but then no prompt for password. Which is f'ing stupid, any other OS would throw up an admin prompt when admin access is required or requested. Still takes way too damn long to get network properties when it used to be one or two clicks away from the system tray. Many other strange issues - we had a machine that refused to connect to the network until it was restarted (it could see all other networked PCs in the room, but stated it had no connectivity!), when on XP plugging in the cable gave it full connection immediately.
On the plus side, I started migrating our machines to Win7 specifically because managing malware and virus infections on the XP boxes was getting out of hand. Even the guy who had the most problems with his computer is now working happily virus-free. So a win for increased security, and I'll grudgingly give them a step forward on usability but there are still a lot of aggravations. But it certainly looks transparent and shiny, so that's all good. I might even upgrade my Boot Camp partition to 7...
Not coincidentally, upon reading this article I took two actions: First, I deleted the Last.fm app from my phone. Second, I decided that if I'm going to have to pay for music, I'll pay for something I want to hear - so I am about to renew my membership with my local NPR music station, which plays some killer stuff and incidentally has an iPhone app for free live streaming of their broadcasts.
Last.fm needs to know that if they are going to charge for it, they are going to have to be better than the other paid services. They aren't, from my experience.
"In fact, we've created tools that let our customers check their voice and data usage at any time during their billing cycle to help eliminate bill surprises."
Yep. And the total data usage shown by one of these tools does not match either the total data shown by the other, or the amount shown on my bill. Called customer service about it, and they had no answer. I think I just found out why, thanks to the article posted up top.
Not really. They've made it obvious over and over again that they really don't give a crap about the end users. If they did, there would be a simple way of offering feedback. Heck, even Microsoft has a simple, easy-to-find suggestion box on their site. Facebook tries damn hard NOT to allow you any chance to voice your opinion anywhere the people writing the code will see it.
I work in a research hospital. I recently had a conversation with our in-house shop guy, while he was doing a 3D build of a prototype part for me. He said this is a huge friggin' deal for people in the industry. He has had his finger on the pulse of this for quite some time now, and the big companies are very definitely worried about this. Right now, he can make anything he wants, and the only major issue is cost of materials. In the future, especially when metal forming rather than plastic is more easily done, who knows? His take is that the commercial-size 3D printers are quite likely going to come complete with DRM systems that will check specs and refuse to print anything that matches certain database flags. He doesn't like this, but he sees it on the horizon. As it is now, it's cheaper for us to do prototyping and then have a manufacturer mass-produce the part we designed; it won't be too much longer before it's just as cheap and fast to do it in-house. Manufacturers are worried. They won't sit idly by and let it happen without a huge fight.
There's almost nothing available for download these days that doesn't try to package the Yahoo toolbar into the installer. I simply can't understand why so many companies are happy to have that that asinine, invasive, virus of a toolbar associated with their product. The only thing I can think of is that Yahoo might be hosting the download bandwidth for them.
And now this? My prediction: That damn toolbar will start showing up in MORE places, because now every Microsoft download will include it too.
The transparency roll is one of my favorites. I used to use it in concert with a slide projector; I'd black-screen the slide, reproduce on the transparency what was in the slide as I lectured, then switch the projector back on to emphasize what I'd just drawn or written. Seemed to work. Kept me at a normal pace, drawing things out meant students could follow along easily, and showing the image or concept again at the end reinforced it through repetition. Straight slides? Ick. I wouldn't want to do that. I need a chalkboard at the least, I like drawing as I lecture.