I see an attitude problem that would make you a very risky hire. I also see a person who doesn't know enough about any application area to be able to understand customer requirements. I also see a boring jerk that is no fun to go to lunch with, because he can't discuss music, history, physics, economics, or politics. In the general flood of resumes, yours is one of the easier ones to dump in the circular file.
OS X here -- I usually have 8 to 12 tabs open. I almost never see memory usage below 500M, and it usually grows to about 1G after 2 or 3 hours. Firefox 4 for the Mac is seriously broken w.r.t. memory usage IMHO, and if they can't fix it fast, I'll probably be switching. I clobbers the performance of the whole system when it hogs that much memory. I'm tired of having to restart FF all the time.
You need layout dye and a hand scraper to make a precision bed for a lathe. Surface grinders are a mere convenience item. The lathe existed before mills, the mill is a replacement for the shaper.
Go to Lindsay Books, and check out the home workshop series by Dave Gingery. Volume 1 starts with a charcoal fired crucible furnace that you can build in an old 5 gallon can. Volume two has the patterns for all the castings you need to build a metal lathe using nothing more sophisticated than a hand drill. Volumes 3 through 7 complete your workshop.
Have I done it? No... no time, I just rub money on the problem. But anyone who *has* done it the Gingery way is manly, no doubt about it. The books are well worth reading in any case.
yes, I've worked with several 3d printers. there are many technologies. Some do fused metal deposition. Steel parts straight off the printer into the application.
A twin spindle lathe with live tooling and a bar feeder can crank out parts all shift long -- the only thing a person needs to do is add stock to the bar feeder on occasion.
Ha ha! So right. Mega Bloks are sucky. Lego is outrageously precise injection molding -- that's one of the reasons they cost so much, the tooling is super precise. On the spectrum of machinists there are hack hobbyists like me, professional machinists, mold makers, gods, and Lego's mold makers.
Resolution is limited by the deposition process, not the Cartesian robot. On the typical RepRap, thats around 0.5mm, although some guys are experimenting with finer nozzles. High res 3D printers exist -- one I have seen prints UV curable resin using something like an ink-jet process. Outrageously fine resolution.
I have a CupCake -- it's tweaky. It's fun for hackers, but it isn't turn-key, it's a lifestyle choice.
Well, except that the resolution limit in 3D printing isn't the Cartesian robot, it's the material and method of deposition. With the print head I'm currently using on my makerbot, the extruded thread of ABS is about 0.45mm give-or-take the phase of the moon, the color of the plastic feed stock, etc.
But essentially you are correct -- if you already have a perfectly good Cartesian robot, just put a 3D print head on it. Although if you use a plastic extrusion process you will also probably want a heated build platform and a temperature controlled build chamber -- which aren't difficult, just more stuff. The real trick is is that RepRap/MakerBot G-code is wacko -- it would require some translation effort to drive your CNC mill around from they typical RepRap CAM back-end.
Milling is a subtractive process. Start with a block of stock material and a drawing of the part you want. Cut away everything that ain't your part.
3D printing is an additive process. Start with feedstock material of some kind, and through some process fuse bits of it together to form your part. The machine in the article solidifies a resin slurry. Many 3D printers extrude plastic rod through a heater barrel, and deposit the molten plastic onto previous layers and let the whole thing solidify again. There are many 3D printing processes with various advantages and drawbacks.
Both milling and 3D printing involve a Cartesian robot that moves the tool head and/or the build table to achieve X/Y/Z positioning. A key difference between something like the MakerBot is that there are zero side forces on the tool head as it moves around. When you are driving cutting tool through steel stock on a mill there are big-time side forces. This is the key reason 3D printers are small, light, and office friendly, and why mills are big, nasty machines that weigh thousands of pounds and can rip your arm off.
Well, yes, but a totally different animal. I own a makerbot, and have used a Tormach, a ShopBot, and a Techno. The MakerBot is far simpler to use, and far less messy. Our makerbot is in the living room. No CNC mill is going to live there, spitting chips and collant all over the place, and potentially ripping the arm off an unwary passerby. It's very handy to be able to print small widgets in plastic quickly and easily, even with size and resolution limitations. But there are times when that doesn't cut it, and you go machine plastic, aluminum, brass, or steel on a mill.
Don't be taken in by the little CNC mill ads that you see for little guys like the Sherline -- not that the Sherline is bad, but most people that haven't used a mill don't understand the limitations. The work envelope is so small you can't make much of interest, and the machine isn't rigid enough to do anything harder than aluminum and even then you need to take pretty light cuts. And guess what -- end mills and dial indicators and so forth don't cost less just because you are going to use them on a Sherline -- the mill is just the beginning of the expenses and buying a cheap mill is sort of silly when you compare the cost of the mill to the tooling. The smallest, wimpiest mill I would even consider spending my money on is a Tormach. http://www.tormach.com/
And then there is ease of use. My 12 year old daughter prints doll house furniture on the MakerBot. In a CNC machine shop, the machinist that has been there ten years is "the new guy" -- there is *huge* amount to learn to become anything beyond a hack hobby machinist like me.
I have a MakerBot -- I wouldn't call it a "bear" to calibrate, but it *is* tweaky. The one linked to here has much better resolution than a makerbot, and presumeably is turnkey. The MakerBot isn't turnkey -- it is a lifestyle choice:) but great fun if you are the tinkering type. But nobody would confuse the output with service bureau SLA output.
Yes, antennas tend to be very narrow band. Rectification is the key here... I remember hearing about somebody using nano-antennas to capture solar energy in the early 80's... back then, though, they figured they were 5-10 years away from having something ready for the market.
Actually, the thing that is most hurting political discourse in the USA is that the nutter branches on *both* the left and the right are controlling the conversation... er... shouting match. I'm tired of the nutter left's frothing, angry, invective that is targeted at anyone who disagree with them. And I'm tired of the right's white-washing of the subtle complexities in the problems that we face. Political discussions have become a discourteous shouting match between pseudo-intellectuals on the left and anti-intellectuals on the right. Where has thought gone?
Fortunately, I have discovered a reliable filter to identify nutters. Present raw data and see how people react. If the person gets angry, it says volumes about the person and their agenda. Raw data has no agenda. A person who has a non-linear, non-thoughtful response to raw data should be avoided like toxic waste.
Learn to think, and all will be well. If your highest ambition is to be a code monkey, then expect off-shore programmers to eat your lunch. OTOH, there is always demand for a genuine problem solver. Bring solutions (in whatever your domain of expertise) and people will seek you out and you will be in charge of the code monkeys. And even better than being the person with the answers: be the person that asks the right questions. The corner office goes to the person with the best bullshit detector, errm... excuse me... the person with the right questions.
I would also say that after my experience of it I decided I'd never travel to Israel again.
Yes, well, that's relative, isn't it? I can understand how you feel that way. Was your experience with Israeli airport security before or after the TSA instituted invasive procedures? How a person reacts to the experience is going to be shaped by what you have experienced in other places. Having gone through many US airports, Tel Aviv, Zurich, Frankfort, London, Stockholm, Oslo, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, and Kota Kinabalu, I think the Israeli's are doing a decent job of security without sacrificing personal dignity. No Israeli security agent has ever cut me any slack and I wouldn't go so far as to call the experience pleasant, but on the other hand, I felt I was treated with respect.
Israel has to take security seriously. One day the front page of the news contained a photo of the lobby of a high-end business hotel I had stayed in -- except this time with bullet holes and blood on the walls. That certainly drove home the point for me.
As to how many bad guys they have actually caught -- I wouldn't know, and if they are managing their intel correctly, they shouldn't say.
My basic assertion here is that the TSA could learn a thing or two about treating travelers with respect, and they would do well to look at the Israeli model.
More to the point.... does Israel? I've flown in and out of Tel Aviv 3 times on business. They take security seriously -- and have for much longer than the USA. You get a thorough interview from a well-trained, intelligent professional. No pat downs. They *gasp* profile. Israeli airport security is not theater, it is effective, yet it is not degrading. Fly in and out of Israel once and you will want to strangle everyone associated with the TSA.
Except that if memory serves correctly... the German army assembled a work train of well trained track layers as part of an invasion force and converted a strategic section of the Soviet rails over to German standards.
"Intel does what ever you pay them to make." -- Well, no, yes, and no. Intel does have a ton of fab. But Intel tends to be fab limited most of the time, running them all flat out. Intel runs whatever parts yield highest gross margin per wafer. Beginning and end of story. Projects from inside Intel that fall below a certain threshold are forced to use outside fab. Gross margin per wafer is king. Atom is cheap, but a tiny part, which is the only way it works in the Intel world model. And Intel doesn't do custom fabrication -- you can't really walk in with money and masks and get them to run parts for you -- and having worked at Intel, I wouldn't do that, the kind of customer relationship management that custom fab requires just isn't part of their DNA.
Ha ha.... while true, I sympathize with the grandparent. My daughter is also a Pi digit memorizer. She adds a few digits every so often, I can't keep track of how many she knows. I'd guess 75 or 100 or something like that.:) I don't think she knows or cares exactly how many digits of Pi she has memorized, as long as it is more digits than anyone else she meets...
Yes. This. I used to work in a research organization surrounded by smart folks with Ph.D's in various subjects. A lot of them would never be anything but a highly skilled worker bee, because they lacked the ability to make good decisions. They were whizzes at solving problems in their specific domain -- but at deciding which problems to solve or which were even worth solving, not so much. The corner office didn't go to a Ph.D. --- it went to the guy with best bullshit detector -- excuse me: best critical thinking skills.
Teach critical thinking skills, and all other problems solve themselves. Teach them how to ask the right questions. They can then hire Ph.D. worker bees to go find the answers.
I have a cabin in the mountains -- my neighbor in the next cabin a mile up the road is an old rancher. His mother believed in the value of education and forced him to stay in school until he finished the 8th grade, even though sending him out to pick fruit would have been of significant financial help to the family. He eventually ended up as general manager of a huge farm with dozens of workers. They hired a plane once a week to send him out on crop inspections. He did very well financially, and did a good job of investing his savings. He knows how to ask the right questions. He is financially better off than a lot of those Ph.D. worker bees.
Yes, few of us know any punctuation beyond comma, period, and question mark. ('?' being used most often as a short hand for "duh... wha?? say again?") But the international Morse alphabet is still growing! Not that long ago, '@' was added so that you can send e-mail addresses with Morse code. And there are other variants, like Cyrillic Morse. I'm guessing he had an interface that accepted standard international Morse code with some extensions -- I'm not sure the '{' has a defined standard pattern, for instance.
After WWII, the USA put significant effort into creating a light weight A-bomb because the size of the rocket you need to put a bomb on the other side of the earth grows exponentially with payload weight. Stalin, OTOH, pretty much said: "This one's good enough. Now go build a rocket big enough to throw it." The result of this is that the USSR had launch vehicles with a larger throw weight than the USA.
Launching a person into orbit requires a certain minimum throw weight because you need room for the person and life support systems. The USSR could re-purpose an ICBM and achieve orbit. The USA, however, needed to build a bigger launch vehicle to put that much weight into orbit.
The thing most people forget about the space race is that military analysts looked at every manned launch as a demonstration of weapon capability. Which is was. That is why Sputnik scared the crap out of the government. That is why being first to orbit scared the crap out of the government.
Slashdot Mirror
I see an attitude problem that would make you a very risky hire. I also see a person who doesn't know enough about any application area to be able to understand customer requirements. I also see a boring jerk that is no fun to go to lunch with, because he can't discuss music, history, physics, economics, or politics. In the general flood of resumes, yours is one of the easier ones to dump in the circular file.
OS X here -- I usually have 8 to 12 tabs open. I almost never see memory usage below 500M, and it usually grows to about 1G after 2 or 3 hours. Firefox 4 for the Mac is seriously broken w.r.t. memory usage IMHO, and if they can't fix it fast, I'll probably be switching. I clobbers the performance of the whole system when it hogs that much memory. I'm tired of having to restart FF all the time.
What we need are editors that *edit*. Why does an article where the only cited source is a discredited bomb-thrower even make it through the queue?
Seriously, guys, quit wasting your time on repeatedly rewriting the UI and work on something that matters: fix the editing process.
You need layout dye and a hand scraper to make a precision bed for a lathe. Surface grinders are a mere convenience item. The lathe existed before mills, the mill is a replacement for the shaper.
Go to Lindsay Books, and check out the home workshop series by Dave Gingery. Volume 1 starts with a charcoal fired crucible furnace that you can build in an old 5 gallon can. Volume two has the patterns for all the castings you need to build a metal lathe using nothing more sophisticated than a hand drill. Volumes 3 through 7 complete your workshop.
Have I done it? No... no time, I just rub money on the problem. But anyone who *has* done it the Gingery way is manly, no doubt about it. The books are well worth reading in any case.
yes, I've worked with several 3d printers. there are many technologies. Some do fused metal deposition. Steel parts straight off the printer into the application.
A twin spindle lathe with live tooling and a bar feeder can crank out parts all shift long -- the only thing a person needs to do is add stock to the bar feeder on occasion.
Ha ha! So right. Mega Bloks are sucky. Lego is outrageously precise injection molding -- that's one of the reasons they cost so much, the tooling is super precise. On the spectrum of machinists there are hack hobbyists like me, professional machinists, mold makers, gods, and Lego's mold makers.
Resolution is limited by the deposition process, not the Cartesian robot. On the typical RepRap, thats around 0.5mm, although some guys are experimenting with finer nozzles. High res 3D printers exist -- one I have seen prints UV curable resin using something like an ink-jet process. Outrageously fine resolution.
I have a CupCake -- it's tweaky. It's fun for hackers, but it isn't turn-key, it's a lifestyle choice.
Well, except that the resolution limit in 3D printing isn't the Cartesian robot, it's the material and method of deposition. With the print head I'm currently using on my makerbot, the extruded thread of ABS is about 0.45mm give-or-take the phase of the moon, the color of the plastic feed stock, etc.
But essentially you are correct -- if you already have a perfectly good Cartesian robot, just put a 3D print head on it. Although if you use a plastic extrusion process you will also probably want a heated build platform and a temperature controlled build chamber -- which aren't difficult, just more stuff. The real trick is is that RepRap/MakerBot G-code is wacko -- it would require some translation effort to drive your CNC mill around from they typical RepRap CAM back-end.
Milling is a subtractive process. Start with a block of stock material and a drawing of the part you want. Cut away everything that ain't your part.
3D printing is an additive process. Start with feedstock material of some kind, and through some process fuse bits of it together to form your part. The machine in the article solidifies a resin slurry. Many 3D printers extrude plastic rod through a heater barrel, and deposit the molten plastic onto previous layers and let the whole thing solidify again. There are many 3D printing processes with various advantages and drawbacks.
Both milling and 3D printing involve a Cartesian robot that moves the tool head and/or the build table to achieve X/Y/Z positioning. A key difference between something like the MakerBot is that there are zero side forces on the tool head as it moves around. When you are driving cutting tool through steel stock on a mill there are big-time side forces. This is the key reason 3D printers are small, light, and office friendly, and why mills are big, nasty machines that weigh thousands of pounds and can rip your arm off.
Well, yes, but a totally different animal. I own a makerbot, and have used a Tormach, a ShopBot, and a Techno. The MakerBot is far simpler to use, and far less messy. Our makerbot is in the living room. No CNC mill is going to live there, spitting chips and collant all over the place, and potentially ripping the arm off an unwary passerby. It's very handy to be able to print small widgets in plastic quickly and easily, even with size and resolution limitations. But there are times when that doesn't cut it, and you go machine plastic, aluminum, brass, or steel on a mill.
Don't be taken in by the little CNC mill ads that you see for little guys like the Sherline -- not that the Sherline is bad, but most people that haven't used a mill don't understand the limitations. The work envelope is so small you can't make much of interest, and the machine isn't rigid enough to do anything harder than aluminum and even then you need to take pretty light cuts. And guess what -- end mills and dial indicators and so forth don't cost less just because you are going to use them on a Sherline -- the mill is just the beginning of the expenses and buying a cheap mill is sort of silly when you compare the cost of the mill to the tooling. The smallest, wimpiest mill I would even consider spending my money on is a Tormach. http://www.tormach.com/
And then there is ease of use. My 12 year old daughter prints doll house furniture on the MakerBot. In a CNC machine shop, the machinist that has been there ten years is "the new guy" -- there is *huge* amount to learn to become anything beyond a hack hobby machinist like me.
I have a MakerBot -- I wouldn't call it a "bear" to calibrate, but it *is* tweaky. The one linked to here has much better resolution than a makerbot, and presumeably is turnkey. The MakerBot isn't turnkey -- it is a lifestyle choice :) but great fun if you are the tinkering type. But nobody would confuse the output with service bureau SLA output.
Yes, antennas tend to be very narrow band. Rectification is the key here... I remember hearing about somebody using nano-antennas to capture solar energy in the early 80's... back then, though, they figured they were 5-10 years away from having something ready for the market.
Actually, the thing that is most hurting political discourse in the USA is that the nutter branches on *both* the left and the right are controlling the conversation... er... shouting match. I'm tired of the nutter left's frothing, angry, invective that is targeted at anyone who disagree with them. And I'm tired of the right's white-washing of the subtle complexities in the problems that we face. Political discussions have become a discourteous shouting match between pseudo-intellectuals on the left and anti-intellectuals on the right. Where has thought gone?
Fortunately, I have discovered a reliable filter to identify nutters. Present raw data and see how people react. If the person gets angry, it says volumes about the person and their agenda. Raw data has no agenda. A person who has a non-linear, non-thoughtful response to raw data should be avoided like toxic waste.
Learn to think, and all will be well. If your highest ambition is to be a code monkey, then expect off-shore programmers to eat your lunch. OTOH, there is always demand for a genuine problem solver. Bring solutions (in whatever your domain of expertise) and people will seek you out and you will be in charge of the code monkeys. And even better than being the person with the answers: be the person that asks the right questions. The corner office goes to the person with the best bullshit detector, errm... excuse me... the person with the right questions.
Provost@wwu.edu :)
address of the Provost's office. Of course, your thoughtful comments will be handled by one of her staff. Or... maybe more than one
I would also say that after my experience of it I decided I'd never travel to Israel again.
Yes, well, that's relative, isn't it? I can understand how you feel that way. Was your experience with Israeli airport security before or after the TSA instituted invasive procedures? How a person reacts to the experience is going to be shaped by what you have experienced in other places. Having gone through many US airports, Tel Aviv, Zurich, Frankfort, London, Stockholm, Oslo, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, and Kota Kinabalu, I think the Israeli's are doing a decent job of security without sacrificing personal dignity. No Israeli security agent has ever cut me any slack and I wouldn't go so far as to call the experience pleasant, but on the other hand, I felt I was treated with respect.
Israel has to take security seriously. One day the front page of the news contained a photo of the lobby of a high-end business hotel I had stayed in -- except this time with bullet holes and blood on the walls. That certainly drove home the point for me.
As to how many bad guys they have actually caught -- I wouldn't know, and if they are managing their intel correctly, they shouldn't say.
My basic assertion here is that the TSA could learn a thing or two about treating travelers with respect, and they would do well to look at the Israeli model.
More to the point.... does Israel? I've flown in and out of Tel Aviv 3 times on business. They take security seriously -- and have for much longer than the USA. You get a thorough interview from a well-trained, intelligent professional. No pat downs. They *gasp* profile. Israeli airport security is not theater, it is effective, yet it is not degrading. Fly in and out of Israel once and you will want to strangle everyone associated with the TSA.
Except that if memory serves correctly... the German army assembled a work train of well trained track layers as part of an invasion force and converted a strategic section of the Soviet rails over to German standards.
Why is this modded 'insightful'? I thought thought he was going for 'funny'....
"Intel does what ever you pay them to make." -- Well, no, yes, and no. Intel does have a ton of fab. But Intel tends to be fab limited most of the time, running them all flat out. Intel runs whatever parts yield highest gross margin per wafer. Beginning and end of story. Projects from inside Intel that fall below a certain threshold are forced to use outside fab. Gross margin per wafer is king. Atom is cheap, but a tiny part, which is the only way it works in the Intel world model. And Intel doesn't do custom fabrication -- you can't really walk in with money and masks and get them to run parts for you -- and having worked at Intel, I wouldn't do that, the kind of customer relationship management that custom fab requires just isn't part of their DNA.
Ha ha.... while true, I sympathize with the grandparent. My daughter is also a Pi digit memorizer. She adds a few digits every so often, I can't keep track of how many she knows. I'd guess 75 or 100 or something like that. :) I don't think she knows or cares exactly how many digits of Pi she has memorized, as long as it is more digits than anyone else she meets...
Yes. This. I used to work in a research organization surrounded by smart folks with Ph.D's in various subjects. A lot of them would never be anything but a highly skilled worker bee, because they lacked the ability to make good decisions. They were whizzes at solving problems in their specific domain -- but at deciding which problems to solve or which were even worth solving, not so much. The corner office didn't go to a Ph.D. --- it went to the guy with best bullshit detector -- excuse me: best critical thinking skills.
Teach critical thinking skills, and all other problems solve themselves. Teach them how to ask the right questions. They can then hire Ph.D. worker bees to go find the answers.
I have a cabin in the mountains -- my neighbor in the next cabin a mile up the road is an old rancher. His mother believed in the value of education and forced him to stay in school until he finished the 8th grade, even though sending him out to pick fruit would have been of significant financial help to the family. He eventually ended up as general manager of a huge farm with dozens of workers. They hired a plane once a week to send him out on crop inspections. He did very well financially, and did a good job of investing his savings. He knows how to ask the right questions. He is financially better off than a lot of those Ph.D. worker bees.
Yes, few of us know any punctuation beyond comma, period, and question mark. ('?' being used most often as a short hand for "duh... wha?? say again?") But the international Morse alphabet is still growing! Not that long ago, '@' was added so that you can send e-mail addresses with Morse code. And there are other variants, like Cyrillic Morse. I'm guessing he had an interface that accepted standard international Morse code with some extensions -- I'm not sure the '{' has a defined standard pattern, for instance.
After WWII, the USA put significant effort into creating a light weight A-bomb because the size of the rocket you need to put a bomb on the other side of the earth grows exponentially with payload weight. Stalin, OTOH, pretty much said: "This one's good enough. Now go build a rocket big enough to throw it." The result of this is that the USSR had launch vehicles with a larger throw weight than the USA.
Launching a person into orbit requires a certain minimum throw weight because you need room for the person and life support systems. The USSR could re-purpose an ICBM and achieve orbit. The USA, however, needed to build a bigger launch vehicle to put that much weight into orbit.
The thing most people forget about the space race is that military analysts looked at every manned launch as a demonstration of weapon capability. Which is was. That is why Sputnik scared the crap out of the government. That is why being first to orbit scared the crap out of the government.