What about printing Firearms (AR-15 Lowers) or objects copyright holders will sue over object? How will they decide what to approve for printing and what to deny?
This isn't a problem that differs in any meaningful way between 3D printing traditional 2D printing.
If you want to know specifics about such policies, just Google the terms and conditions for a big-box-store photolab near you.
But, as an anecdote: I used to work in such a photolab, and it was very subjective. We would refuse to print images that made us uneasy because they were grotesque or sexual (although we always did give the negatives back, which always remain property of the customer).
If child porn was discovered, or any thing else blatantly illegal, police would have obviously been involved (we didn't have this issue during my tenure there).
We would refuse to duplicate images that appeared to be professionally done, unless the customer signed a copyright waiver or the image appeared to be old enough that the copyright must have expired.
Exceptions were made: If the customer themselves was a professional photographer and the work appeared to be their own (we had a few of them who used our shop for negative processing and proofs on a very regular basis), we'd do the work.
It was made clear to us that the impetus for judging things things correctly was our own, and that we would be personally responsible for the store's share of any wrong-doing that came from our printing efforts. And I think our guesses were pretty accurate: When you see thousands of different photographs every day for 8 hours (and see each one of them at least twice), anything unique that deserves further scrutiny is immediately obvious.
And again, I don't see how any of this would be different when printing an AR-15 lower (although the plastic one sounds scary enough, and Staples is doing 3D prints with paper!), or a particular rounded rectangle. In very real terms: If it looks iffy, they'll either distance themselves from it, or require verification that you're allowed to print what you're trying to print.
All this talk about difficulties with serial ports in these modern enlightened times... Everyone agrees that the USB devices can be hard to work with (and some hardware just doesn't like them at all).
My suggestion: Just add a real serial port to a modern portable computer.
$20. Works with Linux, Windows, and even MS-DOS (for times when genuinely antique hardware is at the other end of the wire that needs similarly-antique software to configure it).
I like your rant, and would like to add to it P25 ('merkin, barely works) vs. TETRA (everyone else, seems to have worked for years).
CDMA predates GSM, and some providers bet big on it early in America. Nothing America can really do about it except wait for it to age and be replaced, hopefully with an international standard. Data already has been merged with LTE.
But back in context, it amuses me that my DSL provider still doesn't have the ability to give me real IPV6 connectivity, but my CDMA/LTE cell phone scores 10 out of 10 on IPV6 at http://test-ipv6.com/ on Verizon with no trickery.
(Not that I give two shits about my IPV4 vs IPV6 on my cell phone......)
Yes I remember I bought qty four 4 meg 30 pin SIMMs for my 486 so I would have plenty of memory for a linux GUI and I could kernel compile without swapping from a "local computer store". That store didn't live long past that era.
Ah, yes. I remember that place. I bought some 72 pin SIMMs from there for my P100 for the same reason. And if I thought I had iffy RAM, they had a multi-kilobuck tester which would help narrow the issue down, and offered used RAM with a warranty (which they'd also test, again, before sending it out the door).
They had a junk box that was free to root through. When I most recently needed a 5.25" floppy drive, I scored it there for free, along with the appropriate cable with a card-edge connector.
My first modem came (and the PC it went into) came from another similar shop....come to think of it, we used to have a few good local PC stores to choose from.
Back when it was either the local shop or the back pages of Computer Shopper, it was kind of a no-brainer to buy PC parts locally.
Obviously, they're all gone, now.
But these days I sometimes consider setting up my own storefront, and I never do so because I doubt people will ever buy enough hardware there to make stocking hardware worthwhile.
I've seen it done a few times since, and I really don't know what they were doing wrong or right but they all disappeared within a few months (probably as soon as the "First X months' rent FREE!" expired).
So, yeah. Amazon, Newegg, whatever. It's what we've got.
That's nice and all, but the guy who owns the local corner store drives a new V8-fired Mercedes while paying his employees crap, and is never seen in the place except to count his money. I really don't want to get to know people like that.
Buy local? Meh. Given these options, I'd rather buy from Amazon: At least the UPS guy remembers me when I run into him while out and about, and isn't a douchebag.
In fact, if Amazon offered free (or prime) shipping on beer and cigarettes, I'd skip the corner store altogether. If I get to choose between a local asshole and a random website with a reputation for excellent service, then the local asshole isn't getting my money.
Slashdot has a lot of funny little bugs, but disappearing posts aren't one of them. (Except for one fateful day a decade or so ago wherein every. single. post. got deleted, forever.)
I want to live among businesses run by people I know
So do I. Unfortunately, nobody I know sells stuff that I want.
people who are accountable to the sensibilities of their particular customers
This word, "accountable." I do not understand how it applies to a transaction involving an exchange of money for goods in any way that is different when buying local vs. abroad.
people who interact with the neighborhood they do business in beyond dreary gray spreadsheet transactions.
How does a retailer's interaction with their neighborhood have any bearing on my experience as a consumer who just wants to buy stuff?
I want to know where my stuff comes from and how itâ(TM)s produced, and all of thatâ(TM)s worth a few extra bucks to me.
Other than shopping at a farmer's market, or buying furniture from a local carpenter, or otherwise buying locally-produced goods: How does "buying local" improve this?
âoeBuy localâ isnâ(TM)t about guilt-tripping you into buying from a less-efficient-than-Amazon retailer, itâ(TM)s about fostering values other than âoethe cheaper the better no matter what the external costs to society.â
Please explain, without hem-hawing about taxation (which plenty of small, local businesses avoid entirely by simply flying under the radar) how these values benefit me.
(posted separately because it is an entirely different thing)
And finally, I'd have to say, in this day and age, sometimes intelligence is overrated (even though this negates the above). As a young adult, the traffic lights in my town sensibly shifted to blinking yellow and red at late hours when the traffic was light.
This. We used to have lights that behaved in this fashion all over the place. It worked fine, and it was more-or-less free to implement.
ISTR that they did sometimes go a little wonky after a power outage, but meh: Getting a self-setting clock is trivial and cheap, these days on these scales. (And other, smart, video-controlled lights also seem to go wonky after a power outage here, so double-meh.)
There's no good reason (outside of different variations on intermittent "stadium traffic") where this can't work, and work well, for most straight-forward intersections that have little off-peak traffic.
Imagine a traffic light that could "see" traffic approaching from a distance. It could also see traffic backed up to the light. Instead of turning red when a car or two is approaching and the cross traffic is non-existent, it could remain green. Instead of turning green when traffic is backed up to the light, it could let other traffic, which is clear to continue, go.
Already being done, and has been for years at least in my small Ohio town and in other (mostly larger) nearby cities. There are stated plans to implement such a system at every intersection that is not simply timer-based.
They work great when they're set up to my liking, but either age, maintenance, or (most likely) an intentional desire to slow the flow of traffic seems to make them work less-well as time goes on.
For instance: There is a particular intersection in my town with five roads leading into it. When the video-based system was first installed, one could approach in any direction and as long as there wasn't other traffic, it would see you coming and the light would *always* be green by the time you got there if approaching from a side street at a reasonable speed.
A few seconds after passing through, the light would go to yellow and red, and return to its default state of allowing traffic on the main drag. (Presumably, "a few seconds" would increase if there were more than one car going in the same direction, but I only get to drive one of them at a time...)
It was very nice; folks hardly ever had to wait for anyone else during off-peak hours.
Lately its configuration is such that if approaching from one of the side streets and the light is red, you have to stop and wait for it turn green. This doesn't seem to be any better than an inductive loop in the pavement, and thus the current implementation is a waste of money (IMHO).
(This topic comes up every year or two on/., and I'm continually amazed when folks don't know that such systems exist.)
From the viewer's POV, video on the Internet sucks for the most part. It's not good enough for non-casual watching and is unlikely to be so for quite some time unless infrastructure becomes better.
Works fine for me with Netflix on a PS3, 360, or Wii (in order of preference and quality). On the PC, it's a mixed bag, but at least the other three are consistent.
Netflix's ~6Mbps streams can look pretty stunning on my calibrated 52" LCD, and it degrades gracefully instead of freezing if something else decides it wants to chomp massive amounts of bandwidth instead. (IIRC, this is patented, which may explain a lot of the "suck" that tends to plague Internet video.)
Random anecdotes accumulated over 20 years of fussing with things:
Cheap / no-name / "it came with the box" PSU failures I've experienced with hardware that is in my possession: 4.
Better / at least they put a name on it / expensive PSU failures I've experienced: 1.
Incidence of hard drive failures in machines in my posession using cheap power supplies: 3.
With good power supplies: Zero.
Just throwing that out there, but to qualify it slightly: I used cheap PSUs as a rule from around '92 to '02, and have been using "good" PSUs since then. I no longer have any cheap PSUs left in my fleet. And the quantity of computers I have running 24x7 has been going up, not down, which tends to make "good" PSUs statistically even better.
The 386 DX50 DID exist. It was uncommon, and was not routinely sold. It did exist however. I know, I distinctly remember that one. (Wikipedia is simply wrong. This is one of those cases where I wish I hadn't thrown it away. It was not an OCed 33. It was a straight up DX50. I ordered it from a computer shoppers magazine.)
Suuuure it did.
I find 173 hits on Google for "386DX/50", and just 14 from all of the depths of Usenet, and zero relevant results from Google Images. This level of result is more easily explained by an eternity of typos than the existence of an actual, mass-produced product that was available for people to buy.
For comparison, "386DX/40" returns many thousands of hits, which seems appropriate for the modern web, and around 7k hits on Usenet, which also seems reasonable.
There were a variety of "486" upgrade chips from Cyrix and TI which were largely pin-compatible with the 386, and these were available in clock-doubled 50MHz variations. But to call any ofthese a "386DX/50" is just plain wrong.
The courts say that if you believe the officer's order is unlawful then you need to obey anyway and file a civil lawsuit later to let the courts decide if you were right.
Civil? CIVIL?
So when I break the law and there's cops around, I can reasonably expect to be charged with a crime, prosecuted with public funds, and I may spend some of my previously-free time holding a bunk down in jail.
Meanwhile when the cops break the law and I'm around, then maybe someday I might be able to sue them in civil court, if I can afford to. And what do I get out of this effort? A pony?
It was also 20 years ago, I am human, getting older, and getting forgetful.
It was 20 years ago for the rest of us, too. That doesn't mean we get to make things up.
But now that you mention it, I think that particular board went from a P66 to a P90.
No. The 66MHz Pentium was a P5 chip running at 5V on socket 4, just like the 60MHz Pentium.
The 90MHz iteration was a P54C chip running at 3.3V on socket 5 or 7, and somewhat a different beast.
For the 386, it probably was a DX, since it was socketed. (Not ZIF, No. Neither was the 8086. It was a PGA array that you needed to be especially careful with when you pulled and replaced chips with, since you have to crush it into place.) Probably a DX33. I remember distinctly going to the DX50 and having timing issues with games from the time. (Changed the bus clock!)
No. There were no 50MHz 386DX parts from either Intel or AMD. Intel's 386DX topped out at 33MHz; AMD's at 40MHz.
Also, there is no such upgrade as from an 8086 to a V33, as the V33 does not exist. (The V30 did, and was an uncommon but not totally unusual upgrade.)
Meanwhile, about points: If there was no point to be made with your superfluous and incorrect specificity, then perhaps you should have been somewhat less specific to begin with.
And genuinely: When you list a whole lot of things as fact that are just plainly impossible, it really does get in the way of whatever point you really were trying to get across.
If Newegg doesn't like it, they can do the right thing and address their customer service and shipping issues.
The mere fact that they have a useful search engine does not somehow automatically entitle them to my money, especially if they're going to be ball-dropping assholes about the rest of the process.
They recognize a letter as a dot pattern instead of latin letter. It means 'a' to them be they might never know what 'a' actually looks like./blockquote:
I have four adults and one minor living in my house. We all use the same IP address, as do many of the various visitors we have who use the household WiFi.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't a problem that differs in any meaningful way between 3D printing traditional 2D printing.
If you want to know specifics about such policies, just Google the terms and conditions for a big-box-store photolab near you.
But, as an anecdote: I used to work in such a photolab, and it was very subjective. We would refuse to print images that made us uneasy because they were grotesque or sexual (although we always did give the negatives back, which always remain property of the customer).
If child porn was discovered, or any thing else blatantly illegal, police would have obviously been involved (we didn't have this issue during my tenure there).
We would refuse to duplicate images that appeared to be professionally done, unless the customer signed a copyright waiver or the image appeared to be old enough that the copyright must have expired.
Exceptions were made: If the customer themselves was a professional photographer and the work appeared to be their own (we had a few of them who used our shop for negative processing and proofs on a very regular basis), we'd do the work.
It was made clear to us that the impetus for judging things things correctly was our own, and that we would be personally responsible for the store's share of any wrong-doing that came from our printing efforts. And I think our guesses were pretty accurate: When you see thousands of different photographs every day for 8 hours (and see each one of them at least twice), anything unique that deserves further scrutiny is immediately obvious.
And again, I don't see how any of this would be different when printing an AR-15 lower (although the plastic one sounds scary enough, and Staples is doing 3D prints with paper!), or a particular rounded rectangle. In very real terms: If it looks iffy, they'll either distance themselves from it, or require verification that you're allowed to print what you're trying to print.
Why, in 2012, are you afraid of attachments?
All this talk about difficulties with serial ports in these modern enlightened times... Everyone agrees that the USB devices can be hard to work with (and some hardware just doesn't like them at all).
My suggestion: Just add a real serial port to a modern portable computer.
$20. Works with Linux, Windows, and even MS-DOS (for times when genuinely antique hardware is at the other end of the wire that needs similarly-antique software to configure it).
I like your rant, and would like to add to it P25 ('merkin, barely works) vs. TETRA (everyone else, seems to have worked for years).
But back in context, it amuses me that my DSL provider still doesn't have the ability to give me real IPV6 connectivity, but my CDMA/LTE cell phone scores 10 out of 10 on IPV6 at http://test-ipv6.com/ on Verizon with no trickery.
(Not that I give two shits about my IPV4 vs IPV6 on my cell phone......)
Ah, yes. I remember that place. I bought some 72 pin SIMMs from there for my P100 for the same reason. And if I thought I had iffy RAM, they had a multi-kilobuck tester which would help narrow the issue down, and offered used RAM with a warranty (which they'd also test, again, before sending it out the door).
They had a junk box that was free to root through. When I most recently needed a 5.25" floppy drive, I scored it there for free, along with the appropriate cable with a card-edge connector.
My first modem came (and the PC it went into) came from another similar shop....come to think of it, we used to have a few good local PC stores to choose from.
Back when it was either the local shop or the back pages of Computer Shopper, it was kind of a no-brainer to buy PC parts locally.
Obviously, they're all gone, now.
But these days I sometimes consider setting up my own storefront, and I never do so because I doubt people will ever buy enough hardware there to make stocking hardware worthwhile.
I've seen it done a few times since, and I really don't know what they were doing wrong or right but they all disappeared within a few months (probably as soon as the "First X months' rent FREE!" expired).
So, yeah. Amazon, Newegg, whatever. It's what we've got.
I fix broken things with my hands. My job can easily be outsourced to another country, but the travel expenses would provide quite a hurdle.
That's nice and all, but the guy who owns the local corner store drives a new V8-fired Mercedes while paying his employees crap, and is never seen in the place except to count his money. I really don't want to get to know people like that.
Buy local? Meh. Given these options, I'd rather buy from Amazon: At least the UPS guy remembers me when I run into him while out and about, and isn't a douchebag.
In fact, if Amazon offered free (or prime) shipping on beer and cigarettes, I'd skip the corner store altogether. If I get to choose between a local asshole and a random website with a reputation for excellent service, then the local asshole isn't getting my money.
It has?
Slashdot has a lot of funny little bugs, but disappearing posts aren't one of them. (Except for one fateful day a decade or so ago wherein every. single. post. got deleted, forever.)
So do I. Unfortunately, nobody I know sells stuff that I want.
This word, "accountable." I do not understand how it applies to a transaction involving an exchange of money for goods in any way that is different when buying local vs. abroad.
How does a retailer's interaction with their neighborhood have any bearing on my experience as a consumer who just wants to buy stuff?
Other than shopping at a farmer's market, or buying furniture from a local carpenter, or otherwise buying locally-produced goods: How does "buying local" improve this?
Please explain, without hem-hawing about taxation (which plenty of small, local businesses avoid entirely by simply flying under the radar) how these values benefit me.
(posted separately because it is an entirely different thing)
This. We used to have lights that behaved in this fashion all over the place. It worked fine, and it was more-or-less free to implement.
ISTR that they did sometimes go a little wonky after a power outage, but meh: Getting a self-setting clock is trivial and cheap, these days on these scales. (And other, smart, video-controlled lights also seem to go wonky after a power outage here, so double-meh.)
There's no good reason (outside of different variations on intermittent "stadium traffic") where this can't work, and work well, for most straight-forward intersections that have little off-peak traffic.
Time-based 2-way stops FTW.
Already being done, and has been for years at least in my small Ohio town and in other (mostly larger) nearby cities. There are stated plans to implement such a system at every intersection that is not simply timer-based.
They work great when they're set up to my liking, but either age, maintenance, or (most likely) an intentional desire to slow the flow of traffic seems to make them work less-well as time goes on.
For instance: There is a particular intersection in my town with five roads leading into it. When the video-based system was first installed, one could approach in any direction and as long as there wasn't other traffic, it would see you coming and the light would *always* be green by the time you got there if approaching from a side street at a reasonable speed.
A few seconds after passing through, the light would go to yellow and red, and return to its default state of allowing traffic on the main drag. (Presumably, "a few seconds" would increase if there were more than one car going in the same direction, but I only get to drive one of them at a time...)
It was very nice; folks hardly ever had to wait for anyone else during off-peak hours.
Lately its configuration is such that if approaching from one of the side streets and the light is red, you have to stop and wait for it turn green. This doesn't seem to be any better than an inductive loop in the pavement, and thus the current implementation is a waste of money (IMHO).
(This topic comes up every year or two on /., and I'm continually amazed when folks don't know that such systems exist.)
Works fine for me with Netflix on a PS3, 360, or Wii (in order of preference and quality). On the PC, it's a mixed bag, but at least the other three are consistent.
Netflix's ~6Mbps streams can look pretty stunning on my calibrated 52" LCD, and it degrades gracefully instead of freezing if something else decides it wants to chomp massive amounts of bandwidth instead. (IIRC, this is patented, which may explain a lot of the "suck" that tends to plague Internet video.)
I had this issue with recent FF builds under Windows. With one simple change, it works as fine now as it did several years ago:
Tools > Options > Advanced > Use hardware acceleration. Uncheck* this. Press OK. Restart FF.
Done.
*: Yes, really.
Random anecdotes accumulated over 20 years of fussing with things:
Cheap / no-name / "it came with the box" PSU failures I've experienced with hardware that is in my possession: 4.
Better / at least they put a name on it / expensive PSU failures I've experienced: 1.
Incidence of hard drive failures in machines in my posession using cheap power supplies: 3.
With good power supplies: Zero.
Just throwing that out there, but to qualify it slightly: I used cheap PSUs as a rule from around '92 to '02, and have been using "good" PSUs since then. I no longer have any cheap PSUs left in my fleet. And the quantity of computers I have running 24x7 has been going up, not down, which tends to make "good" PSUs statistically even better.
Suuuure it did.
I find 173 hits on Google for "386DX/50", and just 14 from all of the depths of Usenet, and zero relevant results from Google Images. This level of result is more easily explained by an eternity of typos than the existence of an actual, mass-produced product that was available for people to buy.
For comparison, "386DX/40" returns many thousands of hits, which seems appropriate for the modern web, and around 7k hits on Usenet, which also seems reasonable.
There were a variety of "486" upgrade chips from Cyrix and TI which were largely pin-compatible with the 386, and these were available in clock-doubled 50MHz variations. But to call any of these a "386DX/50" is just plain wrong.
Civil? CIVIL?
So when I break the law and there's cops around, I can reasonably expect to be charged with a crime, prosecuted with public funds, and I may spend some of my previously-free time holding a bunk down in jail.
Meanwhile when the cops break the law and I'm around, then maybe someday I might be able to sue them in civil court, if I can afford to. And what do I get out of this effort? A pony?
Meh.
It was 20 years ago for the rest of us, too. That doesn't mean we get to make things up.
No. The 66MHz Pentium was a P5 chip running at 5V on socket 4, just like the 60MHz Pentium.
The 90MHz iteration was a P54C chip running at 3.3V on socket 5 or 7, and somewhat a different beast.
No. There were no 50MHz 386DX parts from either Intel or AMD. Intel's 386DX topped out at 33MHz; AMD's at 40MHz.
Also, there is no such upgrade as from an 8086 to a V33, as the V33 does not exist. (The V30 did, and was an uncommon but not totally unusual upgrade.)
Meanwhile, about points: If there was no point to be made with your superfluous and incorrect specificity, then perhaps you should have been somewhat less specific to begin with.
And genuinely: When you list a whole lot of things as fact that are just plainly impossible, it really does get in the way of whatever point you really were trying to get across.
Nonsense. You eat SCADA. You drive SCADA. You probably even wear SCADA.
If the article were about CNC mills, would you want that term defined? Most of us don't deal with those, either...
So?
If Newegg doesn't like it, they can do the right thing and address their customer service and shipping issues.
The mere fact that they have a useful search engine does not somehow automatically entitle them to my money, especially if they're going to be ball-dropping assholes about the rest of the process.
This is non sequitur, to say the least.
It is like saying "If they sorted the apples from the oranges individually they wouldn't be able to recognize a reindeer, which they can."
In other words: It doesn't make sense.
Please try again.
I don't see any of that stuff in Pine.
This thing you refer to; I think we used to call it "Usenet".
I have four adults and one minor living in my house. We all use the same IP address, as do many of the various visitors we have who use the household WiFi.
Who committed what?
No.