These are some development pictures I took of the print head testing. Note at this stage James, Nicholas and Leon were playing with the consistancy of the chocolate and managed to print something that didn't totally look unlike something much more worrying.
This is just a prototype. The next stage in development is to have mechanism after each 2D print to put down some form of powder that can support printing things not directly on top of the previously printed layer. This is what real 3D printers do. You then shake out or vacuum out the powder once you're done leaving a proper 3d object.
We were thinking icing sugar.
Mark (who hasn't really been involved in this apart from talking to James about it over tea every morning)
Full details have now been finalised. We're meeting at BUPA House near Holborn.
Find out more (including how to sign up so you can attend) from the message I posted to the London.pm mailing list.
See you there (if not in the pub tonight).
Alex Giving a Talk in London a Week Today
on
Live Nightclub Hacking
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Alex will be giving the London Perl Mongers a talk (and live demo) on his work in the evening of Thursday 9th September in central London. It's our normal technical meeting and alongside Alex, we'll be featuring talks by Simon Cozens (the current perl.com editor), Tom Husins, and I'll be talking about Perl Testing project.
I'm just working thought the details of the venue now and I'll post a follow up to this thread once I've sorted them out. As always, we're pleased to welcome new faces. Oh, and if anyone wants, they can pop along to the pub for our monthly social tonight.
It used to be the case that If you put something temporarily in a
directory on your webserver (that didn't have indexes turned) on you
could simply give the URL of the file to a couple of people to have a
quick look at and not have to worry about putting a password on the
file. Because it wasn't linked from anywhere unless someone could
guess the URL then no-one else wouldn't be able to find it.
This is no longer the case. The Google toolbar reports home to Google
about sites people visit. Within a couple of minutes of someone
viewing a URL that was private and only meant for them with a browser
with the google toolbar installed the googlebot will come along to the
site and grab the file for indexing. Nasty if you're not expecting
it.
No, I'm sure they wouldn't. If Airport *did* become the generic name for Wireless Access Points then Apple would lose their trademark and *anyone* would be able to produce Airport badged WAPs.
The first thing is it'll be much the same as it is now. We'll not have flying cars. Some of the unluckly ones of us will still be driving exactly the same cars we're driving today. It's only ten years away right?
New technology will be more connected. Home gadgets will start to talk to each other. They'll be multiple competing standards and even though they're meant to all work on IP for some reason they'll all be subtly different and not be able to communicate properly. Things that never used to be able to crash (like your fridge) will be able to crash. Consumers will be annoyed by this, but just like computers these days they'll suck it up. Hell, we're almost there now. But it'll be more commonplace.
They'll be viruses for this stuff too. People will be pissed off.
But they'll still buy them.
Since we're all moving to voice-over-IP (VOIP) we'll all be using IP addresses in the future anyway.
And yes, we'll eventually just use DNS for this. So you'll just call my domain and my domain server can (just as it can for mobile laptops now) return the IP I'm currently using.
I don't think he's really thought some of these things through.
I mean, contact lenses that act as video screens? I haven't seen the prototype yet. Let's assume we have some in three years. two years to design the production model. Tack on a couple of years to tool up a production facility. Add on a couple of years for FDA approval. That leaves us just a year for them to become commonplace in the market place. Hell, we haven't all moved over to flatpanel screens yet, and they've been out for *years*.
Oh, and someone's going to have to write software for these to make them do something useful. A large number of people are still running Windows 95 and that was developed...what fifteen years ago.
The other problem I have witth typing tests is that it doesn't just check my typing ability, it also checks my spelling ability. It's not the speed of my typing that's slowing me down, it's the fact that I have to think how to spell something (or at least slow down and read the word off screen letter by letter.) In short, increasing my typing speed wouldn't really increase my entry speed that much.
The tests also completely fail to recognise just how well I've trained my figures to type emacs macros too;-)
Microwave ovens operate by bombarding hundreds or thousands of watts...
My current microwave is 900W. The first microwave we owned was 600W. Are these figures actaully Megawatts then? (Like 'calories' are actually kilo-calories?)
Yes, if it meant that you'd get a flock of people who wanted to watch the show and the combined revenue from advertising (both for this show, people who watch following shows because they liked this show) and resale rights is more than the million.
I could easily use the quantity of text messages a day for personal reasons. Imagine I've got two computers connected to mobile phones, one monitoring something in a remote location another at home connected to the net. The remote machine sends five different values every minute to the net connected machine that thne publishes them on a website.
Sure, you might say that I'm abusing the system, but hey, I signed up for unlimited text messages, so that's what I expected to get. If they didn't want it to be unlimited why didn't they just say '500 free messages a day' or something.
They run out of power. The units are recharged by solar panels which stop working as well over time as they slowly get covered by dust and dirt that can't be cleaned off.
Also every action the rovers take place them in danger, so there's risk associated with every day of their existance - if they get stuck, it's not like there's anyone there to pull them off a rock or turn them back over.
It certainly seems more than chance. It seems that everyone I know has problems with them. Of course, the way probability works we could just be that one statistical blip. Someone has to be.
Of course, the IBM I had before my Mac failed three times (two screen faults, one dead hdd.) So it's fair to say that other manufacturers have problems too. But the number of macs I've seen shipped to people that were broken on arrival scares me - it's not just that I mistreat the machines.
Bah. My advice: Buy apple, but accept it's quite likely to fail, and put up the cash for Applecare if you know what's good for you.
You do get pesky Mac problems though. Like the hardware falling to bits *all* the time. Seriously, I've sent my mac back to apple twice. The person across the desk from me sent his new mac back as soon as he got it (fried mainboard) - and he's sent his old one back several times. The other person opposite me sent his better half's back three times. My flatmate had to send his TiBook back as soon as it arrived. And it seems everyone else I know (and I'm not exagerating here) has sent theirs back too. It's like one of the things you just have to accept - the hardware *will* fall to bits.
This isn't to say that your points are invalid. This isn't to say that I don't still keep buying apple hardware. But the build quality sucks! I'm not sure if I recommended one to a friend how I'd feel saying "Oh yeah, that needs to go back to the shop. They all do that".
Slashdot Mirror
These are some development pictures I took of the print head testing. Note at this stage James, Nicholas and Leon were playing with the consistancy of the chocolate and managed to print something that didn't totally look unlike something much more worrying.
We were thinking icing sugar.
Mark (who hasn't really been involved in this apart from talking to James about it over tea every morning)
James is working on getting it to support SDL files; So if you can render a 3d object out of your fonts...
Find out more (including how to sign up so you can attend) from the message I posted to the London.pm mailing list.
See you there (if not in the pub tonight).
I'm just working thought the details of the venue now and I'll post a follow up to this thread once I've sorted them out. As always, we're pleased to welcome new faces. Oh, and if anyone wants, they can pop along to the pub for our monthly social tonight.
Slashdot, your local friendly pub invite list.
This is no longer the case. The Google toolbar reports home to Google about sites people visit. Within a couple of minutes of someone viewing a URL that was private and only meant for them with a browser with the google toolbar installed the googlebot will come along to the site and grab the file for indexing. Nasty if you're not expecting it.
No, I'm sure they wouldn't. If Airport *did* become the generic name for Wireless Access Points then Apple would lose their trademark and *anyone* would be able to produce Airport badged WAPs.
Heh. I was sent this link by a friend earlier today, and that was my response to him. "Nice PDF. Like the way it's mimicking a printed document"
New technology will be more connected. Home gadgets will start to talk to each other. They'll be multiple competing standards and even though they're meant to all work on IP for some reason they'll all be subtly different and not be able to communicate properly. Things that never used to be able to crash (like your fridge) will be able to crash. Consumers will be annoyed by this, but just like computers these days they'll suck it up. Hell, we're almost there now. But it'll be more commonplace.
They'll be viruses for this stuff too. People will be pissed off. But they'll still buy them.
And yes, we'll eventually just use DNS for this. So you'll just call my domain and my domain server can (just as it can for mobile laptops now) return the IP I'm currently using.
I mean, contact lenses that act as video screens? I haven't seen the prototype yet. Let's assume we have some in three years. two years to design the production model. Tack on a couple of years to tool up a production facility. Add on a couple of years for FDA approval. That leaves us just a year for them to become commonplace in the market place. Hell, we haven't all moved over to flatpanel screens yet, and they've been out for *years*.
Oh, and someone's going to have to write software for these to make them do something useful. A large number of people are still running Windows 95 and that was developed...what fifteen years ago.
Of course I could just be horseless carriage thinking
Like this one?
The tests also completely fail to recognise just how well I've trained my figures to type emacs macros too ;-)
Still, if that's the case, I'm not sure I want a 50W antenna. 10% of what it takes to nuke my tea in the morning sounds pretty nasty.
Yes, if it meant that you'd get a flock of people who wanted to watch the show and the combined revenue from advertising (both for this show, people who watch following shows because they liked this show) and resale rights is more than the million.
http://london.openguides.org
Yep, it's another wiki (though one with a shedload of metadata bolted on)
Sure, you might say that I'm abusing the system, but hey, I signed up for unlimited text messages, so that's what I expected to get. If they didn't want it to be unlimited why didn't they just say '500 free messages a day' or something.
Also every action the rovers take place them in danger, so there's risk associated with every day of their existance - if they get stuck, it's not like there's anyone there to pull them off a rock or turn them back over.
Bah, I'm a Template Toolkit user myself. I just want to steal the nice error messages! ;-)
Hmm, nicely formatted error messages. Does anyone know what this is? I'm assuming it's a mod_perl handler of some sort.
Of course, the IBM I had before my Mac failed three times (two screen faults, one dead hdd.) So it's fair to say that other manufacturers have problems too. But the number of macs I've seen shipped to people that were broken on arrival scares me - it's not just that I mistreat the machines.
Bah. My advice: Buy apple, but accept it's quite likely to fail, and put up the cash for Applecare if you know what's good for you.
This isn't to say that your points are invalid. This isn't to say that I don't still keep buying apple hardware. But the build quality sucks! I'm not sure if I recommended one to a friend how I'd feel saying "Oh yeah, that needs to go back to the shop. They all do that".
No. I want to pay to have Dickens read to me! Keep up ;-)
Hopefully this will be true. I'd love to get something like Dickens for a few bucks.