There are a lot of posts saying "well, it's opt-in and college prep, so don't confuse correlation with causation". OK, I buy that, but here is something else to think about.
Critical thinking skills.
The main thing missing from modern education is teaching critical thinking skills at an early age. Algebra, by it's nature, requires developing both critical thinking skills and abstract thinking skills. There are a lot of ways to teach both of those skills outside of algebra. That is what the education system should be trying to achieve.
If you have good critical thinking skills you won't confuse anecdotes with data -- so here are some anecdotes to consider:
I once worked in a research division where I was surrounded by very smart Ph.D.'s. I noted that the corner office did *not* go to the guy with the highest IQ, it went to the guy with the best bullshit detector. Excuse me: best critical thinking skills. It's one thing to be able to work out an answer -- it's another thing entirely to be able to ask the right questions.
A friend of mine is a genuine Okie -- as in when he was a kid his family went back and forth between California and Oklahoma during the depression -- his dad would get a little money picking fruit in Cal, head back to OK and start ranching again, go bankrupt, head back to California.... lather, rinse, repeat. His mom was a big believer in education and *insisted* that my friend complete the 8th grade, which he did. He went on to become a farm and ranch manager, as in several dozens of workers, directed a multi-million dollar capital investment, and had access to a plane and pilot for weekly crop inspections. He is financially very comfortable. That man has one of the best bullshit detector I've ever seen.
Give kids good critical thinking skills. Bonus points for giving them abstract thinking. Everything else is just a tool in service of those two.
Yes, Lenovo is a reasonable choice. When I needed a Windows laptop for a consulting contract, I went with a Lenovo. I had a few start-up questions, not problems with the product per se, but software config stuff I had to talk through on tech support. The support was great -- good people on the support line. I've been happy with that choice.
That said, I'm kind of in the camp of those telling you to run bootcamp or parallels -- but if the laptop is getting old and crotchety then maybe it is time for a refresh anyway.
And the reason trucks damage roads is the way they are taxed. Trucks are taxed per axle, thus by loading up each axle to the weight limit they pay the least tax. But high axle loads in trucks is the cause of the majority of road wear. If instead trucks were taxed based on axle weight, they would have more axles to carry the same load and significantly reduce road wear. We should turn all those 18 wheelers in to 56 wheelers, and roads would last a lot longer.
The axle load versus wear effect has been well known for at least a quarter of a century. We could fix it by making a two line change in the tax code, thus realigning the incentives. Why doesn't this happen? Because all the truckers have to replace a lot of expensive infrastructure. So the way to make this happen is to phase it in -- all new trailers pay the tax the new way, all old trailers can pay the old tax for 10 years if they were manufactured before a certain date. Ten years is a long time? *pffft*, if we had done this when the problem was first documented we would have been converted over more than a decade ago.
Yes, I have two terminal windows open on my Mac right now. I wanted a reasonably priced, *nix-based laptop that would sync nicely to my PDA, and not become a maintenance chore (I have plenty of Linux machines for that). So far, Apple hasn't mucked-up the unix functionality too badly, although they try. So yes, some us bought Macbooks because they are one of the better unix laptop options out there, not because we are Apple fan boys. And yes, I pop open command shells all the time. But I'll admit I'm very old-school about unix in general -- on half my systems you need to type startx.
Amazon's distribution center in Reno can hit 90% of the population of Northern California overnight with *regular* UPS shipping. If you order for regular 5-7 day delivery, they pick, pack and label your parcel, and then let it age on a warehouse shelf for a few days. If you pay for overnight or Prime, they don't age it. Amazon Prime is a racket, a profit center, not free shipping.
Amateur Packet Radio was a big disappointment. Everybody got up and running at 1200 Baud and went: "Whoo Hoo! Problem solved!" and moved on. *sheesh*. No experimentation with higher speed RF modems to speak of.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that moder RF chips are so excruciatingly hard to use that nobody every gets very far with them. Some of the moder cell phone chips and WiFi chips could be used for other data networks, but dealing with tiny BGA packages and ticklish PCB layout problems is something only the pros have the funding to pursue.
Ultimately, though, the answer to decentralization is going to have to be some kind of RF mesh network with reasonable bandwidth -- so up at VHF or higher frequencies. But who is going to build all of that when most of the time DSL is way cheaper and 'fast enough'? You can't wait until you need it to start building something like that.
HF is a very narrow, crappy channel for digital transmission. With a lot of error correction, and long blocks, and ARQ, you can get data through. But is it slow. Years ago, I used to run radio-teletype on HF. We generally held things down to 60 Baud or so because shorter symbols got smeared. And even with freqency shift keying of 170 Hz, you would still sometimes get "single tone fades" -- that is the Mark tone or the Space tone would be great, but 170 Hz away the other one would fade.
HF *can* move data -- if you use good, modern codes. But it can't move a lot of it very fast. The correct RF approach would be to go to a mesh network at UHF frequencies, like some re-farmed analog TV channels.
No, not postulating that at all. Just saying that before a municipality futzes with life-safety systems *at* *all*, they will want something that will stand up to legal scrutiny, and that means PE stamp. I should probably read the article before making any more comments, but it really hinges on how Cox expects his input to be treated. It is a citizen's anecdote in the eyes of the law, regardless of how good his math grades were in school.
Did the work involved require a licensed engineer's "wet signature"? If not, then Lacy should STFU. On the other hand, if a non P.E. thinks his work is going to be given the same weight within a government organization that deals with life-safety issues, he is under informed. This is more of a case of lawyers generating work for PE's than PE's creating work for PE's. No government body is going to make a decision on a life-safety system without a PE stamp and wet signature. That is a liability hole you can drive a truck through. You might get them to have one of their engineers look at it.
That said, unless Cox is trying to say his work should be treated exactly like that of a licensed PE, Lacy is off base. If Cox is saying "Hey, I didn't pass the test, but I think you should treat my work just the same anyway." then all I have to say is, sorry Mr. Cox, if you want your work to have the same weight as a P.E's work, go sit the exams.
OK, I haven't worked at Intel in nearly 10 years, but I did work there for 11 years, and can clearly envision how this went down, since similar things happened on my watch. Key customers always get early units while Intel is still completing their own validation. The feedback from people using the parts in different designs, with different software, with different physical environments is very important since the test space is effectively infinite. Intel validates in many, many ways, but still can't practically have every possible motherboard design in the test flow, despite spending huge amounts of money on it with multiple, large organizations working the problem from different angles. And some customers are more timely than others at getting info back. Sometimes the data is mysterious to them and they don't think of reporting anomalies because they can't pin them down. (I worked on one like that... occasional boot failures at *one* customer on *one* software package that could not be correlated to anything but the phase of the moon for weeks. When they finally, at a late date, were able to get it to fail half-way consistently on a selected handful of parts they finally reported it and we had it nailed in 4 non-stop days of lab work (non-stop as in managers saying: "Shall I bring back pizza or Chinese?") And after we did get it nailed it was an oh-shit.)
So, while all of the above kind of basic functionality testing is going on, accelerated life testing is going on in parallel. But by its very nature, there is only so much acceleration you can get. Those reports always come in late in the validation cycle. So yes, this is exactly the kind of problem that only shows up late. And everybody, and I mean everybody that makes semi-conductor products is vulnerable to this with every product they ship. It's what keeps test engineers up at night.
The technology exists, but what does it cost? Motherboards are typically very low margin. Of course, these are high-end, higher margin boards. But in the end, you have to look at the cost of: receiving, handling to stage in to rework, doing the actual rework with sophisticated tools and well trained operators, QA and burn-in, and packaging. And you have to do all that and resell the board at a price such that the reworked board has equal margin to a newly manufactured board, or it simply doesn't make economic sense.
BGA rework makes sense for prototypes where the dollars expended buy schedule. But rework on high volume roboticly assembled electronics usually doesn't pencil out.
Smart move. My wife has had an iPhone for years, and recently switched to an Android. I've been carrying an iPod touch for years, but I don't develop for it -- I'm doing my homework so that I can develop for Android. The walled garden of Apple doesn't hold much differential appeal any more, either as a user or as a developer. OTOH, if you look at the terms for Amazon's new Android app store, their terms basically put you at their mercy for pricing. I'm no so sure Amazon is any less greedy or any more friendly to developers -- they simply have to shape their policies in a different competitive landscape.
In any case, I think we are simply seeing a replay of "Apple brings windows/icon/menu/pointer to the broad market, but because of their control-freak nature the generic PC's beat them at their own game." This time, it's "Apple brings the converged phone/PDA/computing-tablet to the broad market, but because of their control-freak nature the generic Android's beat them at their own game." Same writing on different wall.
Actually, wobble in the Cupcake comes from sloppy assembly. First, make sure the rods are straight. But even given straight rods, realize that you are putting imperial size threaded rods into a metric bearing -- lots of slop there. The best fix is to get some solid wire of the right gauge (#28 or so) and wrap it in the threads before putting the rods into the bearings. That keeps the rods centered as you tighten them onto the bearing. Wobble gone. Wobble arrestors are a band-aid on the symptom, not a fix for the root cause.
And to the grandparent, the Cupcake is *capable* of very good results -- but it takes tuning. A lot of people building Makerbots have very little experience with CNC machines and wonder why it doesn't work perfectly straight out of the box and lack the skills to diagnose the issues.
I've had one of the Makerbot Cupcakes for quite a while. Great fun to build and operate -- if you are a tinkerer and enjoy making things work, and tweaking them until they work, and tuning them again when they quit working. If you don't happen to have the tinkerer gene, then they are not for you. I tell anyone that asks me about it: "It's not turnkey like a laser printer, it's a lifestyle choice."
Outrageous good fun, though, if you like that sort of thing. My last few prints: a pair of wheels for a robot, a bracket to mount an Android phone on a robot, and a cookie cutter to give as a gift. In between, my daughter has been printing doll house furniture.
Seriously. You hire people to work at a start up, with start up risks, with start up health plans, and expect them to work start up hours without any ownership? To anybody worth hiring, that doesn't even pass the giggle test. Do *you* have stock? if not, why do you work there?
You are absolutely correct. Now let me point out that the choice is between being force-fed lame, expensive crap that doesn't work well together by Verizon, or being only allowed to use things that meet meet the minimum design standards of a walled-garden. In this case, Apple's good design wins over Verizon's bundle of goofs. Neither is a great option, but Verizon is the worse option.
Doesn't seem to me that simply taking a project off of SourceForge could ever be a very effective way of making something that is GPL'd proprietary. Nobody had a backup? I understand that some clueless person may *think* this would work, but really, how can it be effective?
I just got an Archos 70. Runs Froyo. No phone, has WiFi. Very hackable, Archos has built in a dual-boot mechanism, and is one of the few Android makers to be good about posting their GPL'd code. (They just put up an Angstrom distro you can dualboot.) If you just want a tablet to hack, and don't care about not having access to the cell network, an Archos generation 8 tablet is not a bad way to go. At this point, though, you have to consider *any* money spend on *any* tablet to be money flushed down the toilet. In my case, I got it mainly for hacking and am happy to consider it a disposable hack-toy.
Well, sure there are a lot of cheap 3D printers. I have a Makerbot Cupcake. Loads of fun. I've also seen several different commercial 3D printers, and talked to lots of owner/operators of those. The big difference between the commercial version and the homebrew printers is that the commercial versions have a commercial level of reliability. Homebrew/kit 3D printers are *not* turnkey, they are a chosen lifestyle. If you like to tinker, tweak, repair, and experiment, they are outstandingly good humor. If you want to hit "print" and walk away.... get a commercial 3D printer. Even then, the commercial ones are temperamental.
So a company I worked for had about 80 people in manufacturing and design engineering in one building. Some electrical contractors were doing upgrades to the manufacturing area -- pretty normal. But two guys on the crew wanted to make sure the line they were working on was dead, so they went to the main breaker panel and started systematically flipping breakers to identify their circuit. They had worked their way through all the circuits powering the engineering workstations, crashing Unix machines right and left, and had started on the circuits powering the PC board stuffing robots, etc., in the manufacturing area. The breaker panel was visible in that area, so one of the manufacturing managers figured out what was happening and put a stop to it. Still, it cost us in engineering most of a day to recover.
The manufacturing VP was a cool guy... he immediately walked the whole crew out the front door and called their boss to report their firing from the job... and said the tools they left behind would be sent to them. A lucky friend of mine got to pour all their tools randomly into a moderate-sized crate and wheel it to the loading dock.
Ohh... as to your naming contest... my contribution: Rita Reboot
I have been teaching my daughter to program over the past couple of years. Logo and turtle graphics were certainly good to start with. But there is *nothing* in BASIC that is easier/better/clearer/friendlier than Python with Idle. Ditch BASIC. Start your kids on Python. Go get the "Hello, World!" book by Sande and Sande.
Yes, I did my first programs in BASIC -- on an ASR33 with an acoustic coupler modem. This was *hot* stuff at the time. (The MITS 8800 and the ability to solder together your own computer was still three years down the road.) Stored my programs on punched paper tape. I loved it at the time, but sheesh already, let's move on.
Clearly, he provided his own buggy handler for the 'out of shampoo' exception. If he had simply failed back to the OS, he'd be alive today. 'MOOOOOMMMMM!!!!....'
Does anyone else remember when it was published by Wanye Greene? And the story about how his soon-to-be-ex-wife and the managing editor packed up Byte Magazine and moved it down the street one night? According to Wayne, she basically stole it and then got it in the divorce settlement, if I recall the story correctly. Of course, old Wayne himself was a piece of work, too. Someplace in my stash I have issue #1 of Byte, still with the mailing wrapper.
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Yes. Try to work a proof without being able to ask the right questions or plan in the face of incomplete data.
There are a lot of posts saying "well, it's opt-in and college prep, so don't confuse correlation with causation". OK, I buy that, but here is something else to think about.
Critical thinking skills.
The main thing missing from modern education is teaching critical thinking skills at an early age. Algebra, by it's nature, requires developing both critical thinking skills and abstract thinking skills. There are a lot of ways to teach both of those skills outside of algebra. That is what the education system should be trying to achieve.
If you have good critical thinking skills you won't confuse anecdotes with data -- so here are some anecdotes to consider:
I once worked in a research division where I was surrounded by very smart Ph.D.'s. I noted that the corner office did *not* go to the guy with the highest IQ, it went to the guy with the best bullshit detector. Excuse me: best critical thinking skills. It's one thing to be able to work out an answer -- it's another thing entirely to be able to ask the right questions.
A friend of mine is a genuine Okie -- as in when he was a kid his family went back and forth between California and Oklahoma during the depression -- his dad would get a little money picking fruit in Cal, head back to OK and start ranching again, go bankrupt, head back to California.... lather, rinse, repeat. His mom was a big believer in education and *insisted* that my friend complete the 8th grade, which he did. He went on to become a farm and ranch manager, as in several dozens of workers, directed a multi-million dollar capital investment, and had access to a plane and pilot for weekly crop inspections. He is financially very comfortable. That man has one of the best bullshit detector I've ever seen.
Give kids good critical thinking skills. Bonus points for giving them abstract thinking. Everything else is just a tool in service of those two.
Teach kids how to ask the right questions.
Yes, Lenovo is a reasonable choice. When I needed a Windows laptop for a consulting contract, I went with a Lenovo. I had a few start-up questions, not problems with the product per se, but software config stuff I had to talk through on tech support. The support was great -- good people on the support line. I've been happy with that choice.
That said, I'm kind of in the camp of those telling you to run bootcamp or parallels -- but if the laptop is getting old and crotchety then maybe it is time for a refresh anyway.
Yes. Extremely insightful.
And the reason trucks damage roads is the way they are taxed. Trucks are taxed per axle, thus by loading up each axle to the weight limit they pay the least tax. But high axle loads in trucks is the cause of the majority of road wear. If instead trucks were taxed based on axle weight, they would have more axles to carry the same load and significantly reduce road wear. We should turn all those 18 wheelers in to 56 wheelers, and roads would last a lot longer.
The axle load versus wear effect has been well known for at least a quarter of a century. We could fix it by making a two line change in the tax code, thus realigning the incentives. Why doesn't this happen? Because all the truckers have to replace a lot of expensive infrastructure. So the way to make this happen is to phase it in -- all new trailers pay the tax the new way, all old trailers can pay the old tax for 10 years if they were manufactured before a certain date. Ten years is a long time? *pffft*, if we had done this when the problem was first documented we would have been converted over more than a decade ago.
Yes, I have two terminal windows open on my Mac right now. I wanted a reasonably priced, *nix-based laptop that would sync nicely to my PDA, and not become a maintenance chore (I have plenty of Linux machines for that). So far, Apple hasn't mucked-up the unix functionality too badly, although they try. So yes, some us bought Macbooks because they are one of the better unix laptop options out there, not because we are Apple fan boys. And yes, I pop open command shells all the time. But I'll admit I'm very old-school about unix in general -- on half my systems you need to type startx.
Amazon's distribution center in Reno can hit 90% of the population of Northern California overnight with *regular* UPS shipping. If you order for regular 5-7 day delivery, they pick, pack and label your parcel, and then let it age on a warehouse shelf for a few days. If you pay for overnight or Prime, they don't age it. Amazon Prime is a racket, a profit center, not free shipping.
Amateur Packet Radio was a big disappointment. Everybody got up and running at 1200 Baud and went: "Whoo Hoo! Problem solved!" and moved on. *sheesh*. No experimentation with higher speed RF modems to speak of.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that moder RF chips are so excruciatingly hard to use that nobody every gets very far with them. Some of the moder cell phone chips and WiFi chips could be used for other data networks, but dealing with tiny BGA packages and ticklish PCB layout problems is something only the pros have the funding to pursue.
Ultimately, though, the answer to decentralization is going to have to be some kind of RF mesh network with reasonable bandwidth -- so up at VHF or higher frequencies. But who is going to build all of that when most of the time DSL is way cheaper and 'fast enough'? You can't wait until you need it to start building something like that.
HF is a very narrow, crappy channel for digital transmission. With a lot of error correction, and long blocks, and ARQ, you can get data through. But is it slow. Years ago, I used to run radio-teletype on HF. We generally held things down to 60 Baud or so because shorter symbols got smeared. And even with freqency shift keying of 170 Hz, you would still sometimes get "single tone fades" -- that is the Mark tone or the Space tone would be great, but 170 Hz away the other one would fade.
HF *can* move data -- if you use good, modern codes. But it can't move a lot of it very fast. The correct RF approach would be to go to a mesh network at UHF frequencies, like some re-farmed analog TV channels.
No, not postulating that at all. Just saying that before a municipality futzes with life-safety systems *at* *all*, they will want something that will stand up to legal scrutiny, and that means PE stamp. I should probably read the article before making any more comments, but it really hinges on how Cox expects his input to be treated. It is a citizen's anecdote in the eyes of the law, regardless of how good his math grades were in school.
Did the work involved require a licensed engineer's "wet signature"? If not, then Lacy should STFU. On the other hand, if a non P.E. thinks his work is going to be given the same weight within a government organization that deals with life-safety issues, he is under informed. This is more of a case of lawyers generating work for PE's than PE's creating work for PE's. No government body is going to make a decision on a life-safety system without a PE stamp and wet signature. That is a liability hole you can drive a truck through. You might get them to have one of their engineers look at it.
That said, unless Cox is trying to say his work should be treated exactly like that of a licensed PE, Lacy is off base. If Cox is saying "Hey, I didn't pass the test, but I think you should treat my work just the same anyway." then all I have to say is, sorry Mr. Cox, if you want your work to have the same weight as a P.E's work, go sit the exams.
OK, I haven't worked at Intel in nearly 10 years, but I did work there for 11 years, and can clearly envision how this went down, since similar things happened on my watch. Key customers always get early units while Intel is still completing their own validation. The feedback from people using the parts in different designs, with different software, with different physical environments is very important since the test space is effectively infinite. Intel validates in many, many ways, but still can't practically have every possible motherboard design in the test flow, despite spending huge amounts of money on it with multiple, large organizations working the problem from different angles. And some customers are more timely than others at getting info back. Sometimes the data is mysterious to them and they don't think of reporting anomalies because they can't pin them down. (I worked on one like that... occasional boot failures at *one* customer on *one* software package that could not be correlated to anything but the phase of the moon for weeks. When they finally, at a late date, were able to get it to fail half-way consistently on a selected handful of parts they finally reported it and we had it nailed in 4 non-stop days of lab work (non-stop as in managers saying: "Shall I bring back pizza or Chinese?") And after we did get it nailed it was an oh-shit.)
So, while all of the above kind of basic functionality testing is going on, accelerated life testing is going on in parallel. But by its very nature, there is only so much acceleration you can get. Those reports always come in late in the validation cycle. So yes, this is exactly the kind of problem that only shows up late. And everybody, and I mean everybody that makes semi-conductor products is vulnerable to this with every product they ship. It's what keeps test engineers up at night.
The technology exists, but what does it cost? Motherboards are typically very low margin. Of course, these are high-end, higher margin boards. But in the end, you have to look at the cost of: receiving, handling to stage in to rework, doing the actual rework with sophisticated tools and well trained operators, QA and burn-in, and packaging. And you have to do all that and resell the board at a price such that the reworked board has equal margin to a newly manufactured board, or it simply doesn't make economic sense.
BGA rework makes sense for prototypes where the dollars expended buy schedule. But rework on high volume roboticly assembled electronics usually doesn't pencil out.
Smart move. My wife has had an iPhone for years, and recently switched to an Android. I've been carrying an iPod touch for years, but I don't develop for it -- I'm doing my homework so that I can develop for Android. The walled garden of Apple doesn't hold much differential appeal any more, either as a user or as a developer. OTOH, if you look at the terms for Amazon's new Android app store, their terms basically put you at their mercy for pricing. I'm no so sure Amazon is any less greedy or any more friendly to developers -- they simply have to shape their policies in a different competitive landscape.
In any case, I think we are simply seeing a replay of "Apple brings windows/icon/menu/pointer to the broad market, but because of their control-freak nature the generic PC's beat them at their own game." This time, it's "Apple brings the converged phone/PDA/computing-tablet to the broad market, but because of their control-freak nature the generic Android's beat them at their own game." Same writing on different wall.
Actually, wobble in the Cupcake comes from sloppy assembly. First, make sure the rods are straight. But even given straight rods, realize that you are putting imperial size threaded rods into a metric bearing -- lots of slop there. The best fix is to get some solid wire of the right gauge (#28 or so) and wrap it in the threads before putting the rods into the bearings. That keeps the rods centered as you tighten them onto the bearing. Wobble gone. Wobble arrestors are a band-aid on the symptom, not a fix for the root cause.
And to the grandparent, the Cupcake is *capable* of very good results -- but it takes tuning. A lot of people building Makerbots have very little experience with CNC machines and wonder why it doesn't work perfectly straight out of the box and lack the skills to diagnose the issues.
I've had one of the Makerbot Cupcakes for quite a while. Great fun to build and operate -- if you are a tinkerer and enjoy making things work, and tweaking them until they work, and tuning them again when they quit working. If you don't happen to have the tinkerer gene, then they are not for you. I tell anyone that asks me about it: "It's not turnkey like a laser printer, it's a lifestyle choice."
Outrageous good fun, though, if you like that sort of thing. My last few prints: a pair of wheels for a robot, a bracket to mount an Android phone on a robot, and a cookie cutter to give as a gift. In between, my daughter has been printing doll house furniture.
Seriously. You hire people to work at a start up, with start up risks, with start up health plans, and expect them to work start up hours without any ownership? To anybody worth hiring, that doesn't even pass the giggle test. Do *you* have stock? if not, why do you work there?
You are absolutely correct. Now let me point out that the choice is between being force-fed lame, expensive crap that doesn't work well together by Verizon, or being only allowed to use things that meet meet the minimum design standards of a walled-garden. In this case, Apple's good design wins over Verizon's bundle of goofs. Neither is a great option, but Verizon is the worse option.
Doesn't seem to me that simply taking a project off of SourceForge could ever be a very effective way of making something that is GPL'd proprietary. Nobody had a backup? I understand that some clueless person may *think* this would work, but really, how can it be effective?
I just got an Archos 70. Runs Froyo. No phone, has WiFi. Very hackable, Archos has built in a dual-boot mechanism, and is one of the few Android makers to be good about posting their GPL'd code. (They just put up an Angstrom distro you can dualboot.) If you just want a tablet to hack, and don't care about not having access to the cell network, an Archos generation 8 tablet is not a bad way to go. At this point, though, you have to consider *any* money spend on *any* tablet to be money flushed down the toilet. In my case, I got it mainly for hacking and am happy to consider it a disposable hack-toy.
Well, sure there are a lot of cheap 3D printers. I have a Makerbot Cupcake. Loads of fun. I've also seen several different commercial 3D printers, and talked to lots of owner/operators of those. The big difference between the commercial version and the homebrew printers is that the commercial versions have a commercial level of reliability. Homebrew/kit 3D printers are *not* turnkey, they are a chosen lifestyle. If you like to tinker, tweak, repair, and experiment, they are outstandingly good humor. If you want to hit "print" and walk away.... get a commercial 3D printer. Even then, the commercial ones are temperamental.
Sure. The custom jewelry makers already have high resolution wax printers for exactly that process. SolidWorks->Wax->Hot metal casting
So a company I worked for had about 80 people in manufacturing and design engineering in one building. Some electrical contractors were doing upgrades to the manufacturing area -- pretty normal. But two guys on the crew wanted to make sure the line they were working on was dead, so they went to the main breaker panel and started systematically flipping breakers to identify their circuit. They had worked their way through all the circuits powering the engineering workstations, crashing Unix machines right and left, and had started on the circuits powering the PC board stuffing robots, etc., in the manufacturing area. The breaker panel was visible in that area, so one of the manufacturing managers figured out what was happening and put a stop to it. Still, it cost us in engineering most of a day to recover.
The manufacturing VP was a cool guy... he immediately walked the whole crew out the front door and called their boss to report their firing from the job... and said the tools they left behind would be sent to them. A lucky friend of mine got to pour all their tools randomly into a moderate-sized crate and wheel it to the loading dock.
Ohh... as to your naming contest... my contribution: Rita Reboot
I have been teaching my daughter to program over the past couple of years. Logo and turtle graphics were certainly good to start with. But there is *nothing* in BASIC that is easier/better/clearer/friendlier than Python with Idle. Ditch BASIC. Start your kids on Python. Go get the "Hello, World!" book by Sande and Sande.
Yes, I did my first programs in BASIC -- on an ASR33 with an acoustic coupler modem. This was *hot* stuff at the time. (The MITS 8800 and the ability to solder together your own computer was still three years down the road.) Stored my programs on punched paper tape. I loved it at the time, but sheesh already, let's move on.
Clearly, he provided his own buggy handler for the 'out of shampoo' exception. If he had simply failed back to the OS, he'd be alive today. 'MOOOOOMMMMM!!!!....'
Does anyone else remember when it was published by Wanye Greene? And the story about how his soon-to-be-ex-wife and the managing editor packed up Byte Magazine and moved it down the street one night? According to Wayne, she basically stole it and then got it in the divorce settlement, if I recall the story correctly. Of course, old Wayne himself was a piece of work, too. Someplace in my stash I have issue #1 of Byte, still with the mailing wrapper.