And that pretty much works in flatland. In fact, you do the opposite of "micro-cells" that are useful in urban areas. Micro-cells are when you have many users so having many cells with short towers to limit coverage overlap allows more call density. Out in flatland, oversubscribing the spectrum is not an issue, so you can put the towers higher and make larger than normal cells.
This doesn't work in the mountains, however. I own a mountainop with 14 (last I counted) towers on it. Totally crappy for cell phone. The cells would end up way too large. I can't get cell coverage on top because my handset lights up cells sites so far away that the speed-of-light round trip time makes the call fail. But the people living the the valleys want cell coverage. They don't have it though, because it isn't economical to put a cell site in every nook and hollow. So only the towns get much coverage. The typical cell conversation with my mountain neighbors is a comedy of dropped calls and searching for the right rock to stand on.
So, yeah, your idea works in Iowa. In the Sierra foothills, not so much.
Your assertion is certainly not true in the area where I grew up. There are a couple of notable corporate farms. There are several hundreds of economically-on-the-edge family farms. Maybe 1 in 20 family farms throw off enough cash to privide a decent living without subsidizing the income by sending the wife into the city for a 9-5 job. But that's just my raw data, covering the 1000 square mile area I am familiar with. And I discarded the Amish from the dataset (who's phones are subsidized by gullible neighbors, but I digress....)
Since you have a college degree, I assume you are an officer. So you have leadership experience. That is worth a lot. I would look at that resume and be thinking more about hiring someone who will be a good manager some day, even if they are a little rusty on design skills right now. Which is not to say I would put you straight into management, or give you a pass on sloppy design work, but I'd give you a chance to come up to speed again.
In my former life as a hiring manager, I can look at someone with a successful military career, *especially* a career in a complex rating such as "combat pilot" and know there is a huge list of things I don't have to teach you. Like showing up on time. Like clearly understanding your deliverables. Like fulfilling your role in the team and working with a team toward a complex goal.
So if you can refresh your skills, even with a hobby project, do it and push it to github. That gives you something technical to talk about that is fresh. Then sell what you've got, because you've got something that most new hires don't, and that is a demonstratable track record of delivering complicated goals in a high pressure and disciplined environment. Oh... and you were entrusted with the operation of multiple millions of dollars worth of delicate capital equipment.
I'll tell you what, the best boss I ever had was an ex Israeli commando officer. Why? 1. There was never, ever, any doubt whatsoever what he wanted me to accomplish. 2. When he asked what I needed to get the job done, he listened and either got it or adjusted plans accordingly. When you think about it, that makes total sense, you don't send commandos in with a fuzzy idea of what to do and insufficient equipment and support, because the alternative is writing a lot of unpleasant letters to parents. I'm guessing you have some of that in you, and that will go far. If I was interviewing you today, I'd be asking questions to probe for *that*, and be less interested if you can recite the latest data sheets from memory.
Meh... if Makerbot disappeared tomorrow, little would be lost. Makerbot turned to the Dark Side long ago, closed their hardware, and their software fell behind. There are open clones of everything good Makerbot ever did, and a huge number of open competitors. The open 3D printer world is thriving, and is more innovative (and confusing) than at any previous time, and the quality of the output from open hardware and software is better than ever. And better than Makerbot.
Stratasys has pattents. The only really meaningful patent (which doesn't have much life left, IIRC) is the enclosed build chamber patent, which is why all the clones are open to the breeze. But... a patent only stops you from selling enclosured 3D printers, not from building your own enclosure. An old carboard box and a sharp knife is all it takes to create an enclosed build chamber on most 3D printers. If you have access to a laser cutter, then for $20 in acrylic you can have a purty one.
Shortly after the moveable type press got going in Europe, books of tables of interest rates were popular among the merchants. Of course, they all had to be laboriously hand calculated by mathematicians (long division was college undergraduate math in those days...). Publishers would sprinkle errors into the least signficant digits on various entries to use as evidence in copyright cases. Because, you know, if you had a printing press, you could make good money by pirating somebody else's table of interest rates.
Speaking as someone who has a) built a lot of robots, and b) towed a lot of heavy loads with farm trucks and farm tractors, it seems to me trucks are going to be the *last* to go.
One: Robotics is hard. Robots are gruesomely hard to test. It is very hard hard to sensitize all the test conditions that you will actually see in the field.
Two: Towed loads have many non-linear behaviors. There are a lot of ways a load can start giving you fits as a driver. It can whip, it is very subject to wind gusts. It pushes you down slopes and wants to jack-knife. It exacerbates any slick road conditions.
Show me a credible validation plan for a truck tractor that can deal with a high-side load like a moving van, filled to maximum legal weight, going down the western slope of the Sierra Nevada on I-80, in the rain, coming to a curve at the bottom of a 6% grade, dealing with a jack-ass driver in a light hatch-back returning from a ski trip cutting off the truck. Until you've thought through all the case and then done enough field trials to find out that, well, really you only thought of 10% of the cases up front, you haven't really given sufficient thought to the problem.
If you said that taxi cabs in flat city streets would be the first application, I'd believe you on that. But trucks? No way.... much harder problem, by at least an order of magnitude.
You should help the IT manager's manager articulate his/her expectations of how the department should be run. Your value add here is to make sure the expectations are acievable by a competent IT manager, are actually useful results for the organization, and to the extent possible, objectively measureable. If the expectations can be clearly articulated, then the offending manager either measures up (which is a win) or he is fired for cause (also a win). That's assuming the IT manager's manager has it in him to fire somebody.
Even if it was the same, there *are* placed where "displaced emmisions vehicles" have value. Like California's San Fernando valley. Summer weather patterns cause pretty much anything put into the air to stay for weeks inside the bowl formed by the ring of mountains around the valley. Being able to displace tail pipe emmisions outside the bowl is beneficial. Beneficial, at least, to San Fernando valley... points East, I'm not so sure about:)
Has Android started sending acceptable patches up stream then? Or are they still on an unmergeable fork? (Not a troll, I simply don't follow Android that closely any more.)
Not legally. Simplistic explanation: You can make guns for yourself, legally. As many as you want. You can't sell them, though, without an 07FFL. The CNC operator you talk about is not building a gun for himself, and would be committing a felony unless he has an 07FFL. You need to do the work yourself to be legal under the rules for home made guns.
OK, that isn't quite true. There are gun parts that are not tracked as a firearm, and the CNC operator can make those for you. These parts are regulated the same as paper clips, that is, not at all. For every type of gun there *is* some part that is considered the "firearm" for FFL tracking/transfer purposes. You can't legally make one of those for somebody else without a type 07 FFL. (07 == manufacturer, 01 == regular gun dealer, not a manufacturer, 03 == "curio and relic" collector. Other FFL flavors I don't remember off hand.)
What you have described is a "zip gun". It can be easily made from hardware store parts by any handy teen-ager. It is also already illegal. Home gunsmiths that make fully-legal home-made guns have to pay attention to a few details, such as minimum barrel length if smooth-bore, etc, in order to keep it legal. Rifling is one of the hard steps that requires specialized equipment, as is applying a plated barrel lining if so desired. So most home gunsmiths purchase "barrel blanks", which are drilled, rifled, and plated. Using a lathe they cut the blank to length, turn to size, turn a crown, bore a chamber, and thread for attachment to the receiver. The rest of a gun is comparatively easy to mill.
It *is* possible to bore/ream a barrel to size, but the tolerances are on the order of +/- 0.0003 inches. It *is* possible to build a home-shop rifling tool (search youtube). It *is* possible to do metal plating at home, if you want a lined barrel. But most home gunsmiths don't.
... what we did is first give a verbal warning, then a written warning, and then bust them a pay grade. Oh wait, that takes a manager with balls. Maybe you should be looking at your company's management training first? Sounds to me like you have spineless managers that either ignore problems, or can't articulate problems to the underperforming individual, or lack the courage to have difficult conversations.
Now, think..... think..... hmmmmm..... is there *any* other reason he might have put all this effort into making a totally impractical gun and publishing the plans? Hmm....
Well, a mill and a lathe aren't cheaper than a 3D printer. At least not the ones I own, and I own one of each. But the practicality of a 3D printed plastic gun is not the point. It is the proof of the concept. I agree there is very little practical about a 3D printed gun at this point. The Liberator is a political statement -- just like wearing the DVD decryption key on a tee-shirt.
Well, according to FBI statistics, more people are killed every year by blunt trauma (a hammer to the head) than by rifles of any kind. So, yes, you should have to be fingerprinted, wait 10 days, and pass a DOJ background check to buy a hammer at Home Depot. Actually, more people are killed by being beaten to death with fists and feet than by rifles of any kind, so you are guilty by the theory of "constructive possession" of having deadly weapons on or about your person at all times. I hope you have a concealed-weapons license, otherwise it may be a felony to wear shoes. Sandals are technically legal, but expect them to be probably cause for a stop-and-frisk.
California gun owners have been fighting that ass-hat Leland Yee for years. It is getting expensive and annoying. I'm glad now that all the hackers at Maker Faire are going to be joining us so that Yee doesn't take away our 3D printers, too.
Yee is the enemy of freedom. I hope this allows more people to see that. Yesterday, he came for our guns. Today, he is coming for our 3D printers. Tomorrow, what will it be? Your Dremel tool? Or.... maybe if he finds out that all you need to melt lead for casting bullets is a cast iron pot, some charcoal, and a good blower to get the charcoal hot enough he will ban cookware, charcoal, and shop vacuums.
You must have had better luck finding a WiFi card compatible with the DN2800MT that supported hostapd than I did. Maybe things have changed recently and I need to go update bios and such, but I eventually gave up trying to get hostapd to work and moved on to other things. What hardware have you actually gotten to work in host mode? What BIOS rev are you on? I'd still like to go back and get the AP function working on my robot. (DN2800MT is a great card for higher-end robots, since the power supply requirements are "something resembling DC". I like when a robot can be its own AP (no back-haul while driving around, obviously) but it makes debug and control much simpler if any WiFi device can get a DHCP address and ssh into the robot.)
There are glass-filled nylon resins, for instance, that can be injection molded and have the same strength as aluminum. We're not 3D printing with that stuff, though.
Slashdot Mirror
And that pretty much works in flatland. In fact, you do the opposite of "micro-cells" that are useful in urban areas. Micro-cells are when you have many users so having many cells with short towers to limit coverage overlap allows more call density. Out in flatland, oversubscribing the spectrum is not an issue, so you can put the towers higher and make larger than normal cells.
This doesn't work in the mountains, however. I own a mountainop with 14 (last I counted) towers on it. Totally crappy for cell phone. The cells would end up way too large. I can't get cell coverage on top because my handset lights up cells sites so far away that the speed-of-light round trip time makes the call fail. But the people living the the valleys want cell coverage. They don't have it though, because it isn't economical to put a cell site in every nook and hollow. So only the towns get much coverage. The typical cell conversation with my mountain neighbors is a comedy of dropped calls and searching for the right rock to stand on.
So, yeah, your idea works in Iowa. In the Sierra foothills, not so much.
Citation needed. Let's see your statistics.
Your assertion is certainly not true in the area where I grew up. There are a couple of notable corporate farms. There are several hundreds of economically-on-the-edge family farms. Maybe 1 in 20 family farms throw off enough cash to privide a decent living without subsidizing the income by sending the wife into the city for a 9-5 job. But that's just my raw data, covering the 1000 square mile area I am familiar with. And I discarded the Amish from the dataset (who's phones are subsidized by gullible neighbors, but I digress....)
Since you have a college degree, I assume you are an officer. So you have leadership experience. That is worth a lot. I would look at that resume and be thinking more about hiring someone who will be a good manager some day, even if they are a little rusty on design skills right now. Which is not to say I would put you straight into management, or give you a pass on sloppy design work, but I'd give you a chance to come up to speed again.
In my former life as a hiring manager, I can look at someone with a successful military career, *especially* a career in a complex rating such as "combat pilot" and know there is a huge list of things I don't have to teach you. Like showing up on time. Like clearly understanding your deliverables. Like fulfilling your role in the team and working with a team toward a complex goal.
So if you can refresh your skills, even with a hobby project, do it and push it to github. That gives you something technical to talk about that is fresh. Then sell what you've got, because you've got something that most new hires don't, and that is a demonstratable track record of delivering complicated goals in a high pressure and disciplined environment. Oh... and you were entrusted with the operation of multiple millions of dollars worth of delicate capital equipment.
I'll tell you what, the best boss I ever had was an ex Israeli commando officer. Why? 1. There was never, ever, any doubt whatsoever what he wanted me to accomplish. 2. When he asked what I needed to get the job done, he listened and either got it or adjusted plans accordingly. When you think about it, that makes total sense, you don't send commandos in with a fuzzy idea of what to do and insufficient equipment and support, because the alternative is writing a lot of unpleasant letters to parents. I'm guessing you have some of that in you, and that will go far. If I was interviewing you today, I'd be asking questions to probe for *that*, and be less interested if you can recite the latest data sheets from memory.
Meh... if Makerbot disappeared tomorrow, little would be lost. Makerbot turned to the Dark Side long ago, closed their hardware, and their software fell behind. There are open clones of everything good Makerbot ever did, and a huge number of open competitors. The open 3D printer world is thriving, and is more innovative (and confusing) than at any previous time, and the quality of the output from open hardware and software is better than ever. And better than Makerbot.
Stratasys has pattents. The only really meaningful patent (which doesn't have much life left, IIRC) is the enclosed build chamber patent, which is why all the clones are open to the breeze. But... a patent only stops you from selling enclosured 3D printers, not from building your own enclosure. An old carboard box and a sharp knife is all it takes to create an enclosed build chamber on most 3D printers. If you have access to a laser cutter, then for $20 in acrylic you can have a purty one.
Shortly after the moveable type press got going in Europe, books of tables of interest rates were popular among the merchants. Of course, they all had to be laboriously hand calculated by mathematicians (long division was college undergraduate math in those days...). Publishers would sprinkle errors into the least signficant digits on various entries to use as evidence in copyright cases. Because, you know, if you had a printing press, you could make good money by pirating somebody else's table of interest rates.
Speaking as someone who has a) built a lot of robots, and b) towed a lot of heavy loads with farm trucks and farm tractors, it seems to me trucks are going to be the *last* to go.
One: Robotics is hard. Robots are gruesomely hard to test. It is very hard hard to sensitize all the test conditions that you will actually see in the field.
Two: Towed loads have many non-linear behaviors. There are a lot of ways a load can start giving you fits as a driver. It can whip, it is very subject to wind gusts. It pushes you down slopes and wants to jack-knife. It exacerbates any slick road conditions.
Show me a credible validation plan for a truck tractor that can deal with a high-side load like a moving van, filled to maximum legal weight, going down the western slope of the Sierra Nevada on I-80, in the rain, coming to a curve at the bottom of a 6% grade, dealing with a jack-ass driver in a light hatch-back returning from a ski trip cutting off the truck. Until you've thought through all the case and then done enough field trials to find out that, well, really you only thought of 10% of the cases up front, you haven't really given sufficient thought to the problem.
If you said that taxi cabs in flat city streets would be the first application, I'd believe you on that. But trucks? No way.... much harder problem, by at least an order of magnitude.
You should help the IT manager's manager articulate his/her expectations of how the department should be run. Your value add here is to make sure the expectations are acievable by a competent IT manager, are actually useful results for the organization, and to the extent possible, objectively measureable. If the expectations can be clearly articulated, then the offending manager either measures up (which is a win) or he is fired for cause (also a win). That's assuming the IT manager's manager has it in him to fire somebody.
So, sure, I use github. But... it goes down for a couple of hours and SlashDot panics? This isn't news.
n/t
Even if it was the same, there *are* placed where "displaced emmisions vehicles" have value. Like California's San Fernando valley. Summer weather patterns cause pretty much anything put into the air to stay for weeks inside the bowl formed by the ring of mountains around the valley. Being able to displace tail pipe emmisions outside the bowl is beneficial. Beneficial, at least, to San Fernando valley... points East, I'm not so sure about :)
Actually, what needs to happen is a few senators need to clone Chuck Grassley's spine and attitude. That is what congressional oversight is all about.
Misleading summary. Probably more like 50 to 100 man-years of development in the PR2 hardware and the ROS software stacks.
Has Android started sending acceptable patches up stream then? Or are they still on an unmergeable fork? (Not a troll, I simply don't follow Android that closely any more.)
Not legally. Simplistic explanation: You can make guns for yourself, legally. As many as you want. You can't sell them, though, without an 07FFL. The CNC operator you talk about is not building a gun for himself, and would be committing a felony unless he has an 07FFL. You need to do the work yourself to be legal under the rules for home made guns.
OK, that isn't quite true. There are gun parts that are not tracked as a firearm, and the CNC operator can make those for you. These parts are regulated the same as paper clips, that is, not at all. For every type of gun there *is* some part that is considered the "firearm" for FFL tracking/transfer purposes. You can't legally make one of those for somebody else without a type 07 FFL. (07 == manufacturer, 01 == regular gun dealer, not a manufacturer, 03 == "curio and relic" collector. Other FFL flavors I don't remember off hand.)
What you have described is a "zip gun". It can be easily made from hardware store parts by any handy teen-ager. It is also already illegal. Home gunsmiths that make fully-legal home-made guns have to pay attention to a few details, such as minimum barrel length if smooth-bore, etc, in order to keep it legal. Rifling is one of the hard steps that requires specialized equipment, as is applying a plated barrel lining if so desired. So most home gunsmiths purchase "barrel blanks", which are drilled, rifled, and plated. Using a lathe they cut the blank to length, turn to size, turn a crown, bore a chamber, and thread for attachment to the receiver. The rest of a gun is comparatively easy to mill.
It *is* possible to bore/ream a barrel to size, but the tolerances are on the order of +/- 0.0003 inches. It *is* possible to build a home-shop rifling tool (search youtube). It *is* possible to do metal plating at home, if you want a lined barrel. But most home gunsmiths don't.
You are clueless. Leland Yee is part of California's looney left.
... what we did is first give a verbal warning, then a written warning, and then bust them a pay grade. Oh wait, that takes a manager with balls. Maybe you should be looking at your company's management training first? Sounds to me like you have spineless managers that either ignore problems, or can't articulate problems to the underperforming individual, or lack the courage to have difficult conversations.
Sheet metal knife? Google "AK-47 flat" to see what you can do with sheet metal.
Ummmm.... he knows.
Now, think..... think..... hmmmmm..... is there *any* other reason he might have put all this effort into making a totally impractical gun and publishing the plans? Hmm....
Well, a mill and a lathe aren't cheaper than a 3D printer. At least not the ones I own, and I own one of each. But the practicality of a 3D printed plastic gun is not the point. It is the proof of the concept. I agree there is very little practical about a 3D printed gun at this point. The Liberator is a political statement -- just like wearing the DVD decryption key on a tee-shirt.
Well, according to FBI statistics, more people are killed every year by blunt trauma (a hammer to the head) than by rifles of any kind. So, yes, you should have to be fingerprinted, wait 10 days, and pass a DOJ background check to buy a hammer at Home Depot. Actually, more people are killed by being beaten to death with fists and feet than by rifles of any kind, so you are guilty by the theory of "constructive possession" of having deadly weapons on or about your person at all times. I hope you have a concealed-weapons license, otherwise it may be a felony to wear shoes. Sandals are technically legal, but expect them to be probably cause for a stop-and-frisk.
California gun owners have been fighting that ass-hat Leland Yee for years. It is getting expensive and annoying. I'm glad now that all the hackers at Maker Faire are going to be joining us so that Yee doesn't take away our 3D printers, too.
Yee is the enemy of freedom. I hope this allows more people to see that. Yesterday, he came for our guns. Today, he is coming for our 3D printers. Tomorrow, what will it be? Your Dremel tool? Or.... maybe if he finds out that all you need to melt lead for casting bullets is a cast iron pot, some charcoal, and a good blower to get the charcoal hot enough he will ban cookware, charcoal, and shop vacuums.
OK, so I think I am in BIOS upgrade-ville, because Atheros cards don't work with the old BIOS that I have. Is this the card you are using?
http://www.amazon.com/Atheros-AR5B95-AR9285-802-11B-PCI-E/dp/B005HMZ8B2
-tnx
You must have had better luck finding a WiFi card compatible with the DN2800MT that supported hostapd than I did. Maybe things have changed recently and I need to go update bios and such, but I eventually gave up trying to get hostapd to work and moved on to other things. What hardware have you actually gotten to work in host mode? What BIOS rev are you on? I'd still like to go back and get the AP function working on my robot. (DN2800MT is a great card for higher-end robots, since the power supply requirements are "something resembling DC". I like when a robot can be its own AP (no back-haul while driving around, obviously) but it makes debug and control much simpler if any WiFi device can get a DHCP address and ssh into the robot.)
There are glass-filled nylon resins, for instance, that can be injection molded and have the same strength as aluminum. We're not 3D printing with that stuff, though.