Re:Old tech new again?
on
3D Printers
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· Score: 1
A couple of years ago at the Radiological Society of North America convention, I ran into a company called Z Corp that was marketing a 3D printer that squirted an epoxy-type liquid onto a layer of resin powder in ink-jet fashion. The printer was fed data from a 3D model generated by their software, which could take input from a series of 2D images (such as what you'd get from a CT or MRI scan). At the time they were looking at expanding their market to reconstructive surgery and other fields where they could use medical images. The printing process was kind of slow though. A full-sized head model took about 4-6 hours to "print".
the money he mentioned he's out of is probably a result of foreign exchange fees that credit card companies have taken to charging lately for any money transactions that don't occur in the card's native currency.
It occurs to me after reading the CNET article that although the companies might be paying users for their CPU time, eventually the costs of that will probably end up coming back to consumers. The majority of the projects mentioned had some pharmaceutical involvement. Protein folding models, pharmaceutical development, drug testing, virus modeling, etc.
The money paid out by these distributed computing ventures comes from money paid to them by these pharmaceutical companies (for example). They of course roll the cost of R&D into the cost of their medications. And that likely means increased prices for consumers.
Just something to ponder. Short term gain, long term pain?
only had a casual look at the two websites, but it's a pretty blatant ripoff of linux.com. layout, colours, formatting. heck the site even stole a bunch of the graphics used at linux.com.
I think it's one thing to borrow the layout of a website and modify formatting and colouring to suite your needs, but IMHO, this is pretty much the same as plagarizing.
Millikan didn't use magnetic fields in his experiment though. His oil drop experiment used fine oil drops produced by aerosol and were suspended in air by an electric field and brownian motion.
A very clever experiment. When the oil drops were aerosolized, they acquired an electric charge. By applying an electric field of the right magnitude, you can suspend the drops in air (until the charges are neutralized) or change the magnitude of the electric field and measure the rate the drops fall at. The experiment provided the first precise measurement of the magnitude of the charge of an electron.
this probably wouldn't be terribly entertaining, as all the data acquisition is done by computer and transferred by tape or FTP perhaps to the researcher's home institution for processing. Plus the telescope might be pointed at a particular position in the sky for hours on end. Might as well have a "Watch the grass grow" webcam.
Visibiilty of distant objects is ultimately limited by diffraction within the optics. Earth based observations are further hampered by the several miles of atmosphere that the light has to pass through. To get better pictures, you have to get closer (which is why it would be nice to send more probes out to the planets). Radio telescopes aren't terribly useful for looking at planets because they tend not to be strong radio sources (Jupiter throws off copious amounts of radio wave though)
The first NeXT cubes were pretty pricey, but later NeXTstations were pretty competitive (around the 3-4K range, much cheaper most other workstation class computers at the time).
My personal feeling is that NeXT's target market was too narrow and upgradeability was limited. About the only place you could buy one was through a university bookstore. This kind of limits the availability (how many university students can afford to shell out 4k for a really cool workstation). And at most university bookstores (that i've been in anyway), computer purchases are limited to students and academic faculty, so joe computer user isn't going to be able to walk in and purchase one, no matter how cool he thinks it is.
CPU wasn't upgradable (soldered to the MB in earlier versions), so the slabs (even the Turbostations) were quickly left behind when CPU speeds increased.
As far as being too different, the GUI was light years head of Windows 3.x and even MacOS at the time. It was easier to learn, and based on a BSDish Mach kernel. It was definitely ahead of it's time, but reached too small an audience for it to ever achieve a piece of the market.
i still love my NeXT slab. The NeXT will always be my all time favourite system.
Generally for the people eligible for TNs, the 3-4 years spent getting a degree is hardly a waste of time. That degree is usually essential for advancing in their field regardless of where they choose to work. Not getting that degree would cause them to fall behind. Besides, these people usually have their degrees anyway.
> Either build a bunch of high rise apartments and other high density living and then add some decent public transportation or -- de-populate a little.:)
I remember hearing somewhere (think it was a tv show on TLC or Discovery about SV) that the height of buildings was restricted by earthquake related building codes...thus no highrises were permitted. True? Sort of true?
Focus APS Abstract of the article in Physical Review Letters. To get the actual text, I think you have to subscribe to PRL. Any university with a physics department ought to have it in their library if you're not a subscriber.
Actually, c is derived from two more fundamental constants, the permittivity (epsilon) and permeability (mu) of free space, so that c = 1/sqrt(epsilon*mu)
If you're a Canadian, and looking for a job that's one of the eligible professions, then the TN is the way to go. Relatively easy to get provided you have the proper documentation. Basically all you need is a letter from your prospective employer. The letter needs to state certain things, otherwise you'll be turned away by the INS official processing your application (kind of sucks if you've already got the plane ticket and are ready to go). You can also apply for new TNs by mail, which I'm told takes a few months.
One thing to be careful of is that you don't tell the INS guy you want to renew your TN. Technically the TN is for temporary employment only and is non-renewable. You just apply for a new TN each year. Otherwise you might face end up being looked at a little more closely by the INS official.
Oh, and it'll cost you about $56US for the TN. $50 for the TN itself, and $6 for the I-94.
A 5-10 microcurie Cs-137 check source ought to produce a count rate of a few kcounts/sec if you place it right up against the geiger tube. This would give you maybe 1-2kbits worth of random data in less than a second. Probably a little longer than using rand() or something similar. Going with a hotter source will give you a higher count rate. Most geiger counters ought to be able to handle a count rate of 10-30 kcounts/sec quite easily before getting paralyzed, if random numbers are needed faster. And the source can be pretty easily shielded. Go to the nuc med dept of any major hospital and see if they'll give you some of their extra lead pigs (containers). Most departments I know usually have them in abundance.
What happens 5 or 10 years down the road? I realize in the computer world this is an eternity, and lots can change in that time interval. AT&T was broken up by the gov't, and lately we've been seeing a good many of the baby bells merging together to form bigger baby bells that provide services over large regions. It seems reasonable to project that the same thing will probably happen in the future with the mini-MS companies that form from this breakup. MS will metastasize and spread out over the computer landscape and continue to swallow up smaller companies while it competes with it's former self and other companies. The cycle will begin all over again.
Then again, the resulting mini-MS companies may disappear to be replaced with another.
What about the division of MS that puts their name on the mice, keyboards, joysticks and whatever other hardware MS is making? Granted it's not a monopoly like the software biz, but look at the desktops around you and see how many MS mice there are. Not that MS makes bad mice or anything. The wheelie thing is the next best thing to the mouse itself. Sure there's Logitech and Kensington, and other cheapie mouse makers out there, but how many computer makers bundle those with their computer systems?
The same thing had occurred to me as well. Instead of having one company dominating most aspects of the desktop, now we'll have two companies dominating most aspects of the desktop. The inertia of mainstream users will likely keep MS/OS on the desktop for the forseeable future, and without stronger competition in the office suite area, MS/Apps will probably continue to be the software selection of choice.
One thing that people seem to be overlooking is the hardware side of MS. Granted it's not nearly as high profile as the OS/Apps divisions and certainly not a monopoly, but how many people now have MS mice, keyboards and joysticks? Will DoJ make MS spin off the hardware into a separate company too?
The NeXT slabs and cubes had Mg cases. At some point in the infancy of the web, someone had taken a slab, torched it and put the movie up on the web. The case burned quite nicely too. IIRC, it took a blow torch to get the case blazing.
That's cool. I'd put one in the front too and program it to display backwards so that speed demons can see it in their rearview mirror when you catch up to them at the next light.
Borland/Inprise has also released it's Borland C++ Compiler 5.5 for free. Note, this is not Borland C++Builder, which I gather has all the extra bells and whistles. It's just the basic C/C++ library, STL and compiler. No IDE, no Windows MFC
From the website,
The Borland C++ Compiler 5.5 (BCC) is the core of Inprise's C++ compiler technology. Borland C++ Compiler 5.5 is a blazingly fast 32-bit optimizing compiler. It includes the latest ANSI/ISO C++ compliance including the RTL, the STL framework and C++ template support. And now, Borland C++ Compiler 5.5 is openly available for free download!
Haven't gotten around to using it yet, but for people who have a hard time replicating the Unixish environment that the Cygwin compiler wants, it might be good.
what the US needs is Interac like in Canada. After moving to the US, I had to get used to carrying money again. And US money is all the same colour, so at first it was hard to tell what bill I was grabbing. I still have to make sure I take a close look at what I'm handing over. Sure, there are a lot of places now where I can use debit card transactions with my ATM card, or those VISA cheque cards from the bank. But I still need actual money in my pockets. WIth Interac as ubiquitous as it is in Canada, all I needed was my ATM card.
I do that too. But I don't have a Klein bottle. Just a bowl...and an empty Classico jar for when the bowl gets full. When they get full, I roll them and take them to the bank.
And, as an added bonus, sometimes you can find interesting coins in that spare change. Some of the ones I've found are here.
while my bank (BB&T) offers online banking and billpaying, they insist on charging a monthly fee of about $6.95 for the online banking, and $6 for the bill paying option. I'm cheap, so I haven't gone for it. Fortunately, all the utilities and institutions I deal with (power, cable, car insurance, etc) do their own auto-payment scheme, so I've signed up with each of those and have the amount of each bill deducted from my chequing account each month. So far it's been working flawlessly.
With the exception of rent, power (haven't gotten around to doing that one yet), and student loans, all my bills are taken care of through the respective company. no third party to worry about. I still get paper bills in the mail to tell me how much I owe, and when my bank account is going to be debited.
So now I write far fewer cheques than I used to, and spend a good deal less on stamps too.
Octave is a GPL math package that uses a Matlab'ish command language. Interfaces quite nicely with GNUPlot too. There's a section in the FAQ that describes what to do with matlab scripts.
Octave is *big* and can take a while to compile from source. for most *nices, it should build out of the box though.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of years ago at the Radiological Society of North America convention, I ran into a company called Z Corp that was marketing a 3D printer that squirted an epoxy-type liquid onto a layer of resin powder in ink-jet fashion. The printer was fed data from a 3D model generated by their software, which could take input from a series of 2D images (such as what you'd get from a CT or MRI scan). At the time they were looking at expanding their market to reconstructive surgery and other fields where they could use medical images. The printing process was kind of slow though. A full-sized head model took about 4-6 hours to "print".
Pretty nifty stuff.
imabug
the money he mentioned he's out of is probably a result of foreign exchange fees that credit card companies have taken to charging lately for any money transactions that don't occur in the card's native currency.
imabug
It occurs to me after reading the CNET article that although the companies might be paying users for their CPU time, eventually the costs of that will probably end up coming back to consumers. The majority of the projects mentioned had some pharmaceutical involvement. Protein folding models, pharmaceutical development, drug testing, virus modeling, etc.
The money paid out by these distributed computing ventures comes from money paid to them by these pharmaceutical companies (for example). They of course roll the cost of R&D into the cost of their medications. And that likely means increased prices for consumers.
Just something to ponder. Short term gain, long term pain?
imabug
only had a casual look at the two websites, but it's a pretty blatant ripoff of linux.com. layout, colours, formatting. heck the site even stole a bunch of the graphics used at linux.com.
I think it's one thing to borrow the layout of a website and modify formatting and colouring to suite your needs, but IMHO, this is pretty much the same as plagarizing.
imabug
Millikan didn't use magnetic fields in his experiment though. His oil drop experiment used fine oil drops produced by aerosol and were suspended in air by an electric field and brownian motion.
A very clever experiment. When the oil drops were aerosolized, they acquired an electric charge. By applying an electric field of the right magnitude, you can suspend the drops in air (until the charges are neutralized) or change the magnitude of the electric field and measure the rate the drops fall at. The experiment provided the first precise measurement of the magnitude of the charge of an electron.
imabug
this probably wouldn't be terribly entertaining, as all the data acquisition is done by computer and transferred by tape or FTP perhaps to the researcher's home institution for processing. Plus the telescope might be pointed at a particular position in the sky for hours on end. Might as well have a "Watch the grass grow" webcam.
imabug
Visibiilty of distant objects is ultimately limited by diffraction within the optics. Earth based observations are further hampered by the several miles of atmosphere that the light has to pass through. To get better pictures, you have to get closer (which is why it would be nice to send more probes out to the planets). Radio telescopes aren't terribly useful for looking at planets because they tend not to be strong radio sources (Jupiter throws off copious amounts of radio wave though)
imabug
The first NeXT cubes were pretty pricey, but later NeXTstations were pretty competitive (around the 3-4K range, much cheaper most other workstation class computers at the time).
My personal feeling is that NeXT's target market was too narrow and upgradeability was limited. About the only place you could buy one was through a university bookstore. This kind of limits the availability (how many university students can afford to shell out 4k for a really cool workstation). And at most university bookstores (that i've been in anyway), computer purchases are limited to students and academic faculty, so joe computer user isn't going to be able to walk in and purchase one, no matter how cool he thinks it is.
CPU wasn't upgradable (soldered to the MB in earlier versions), so the slabs (even the Turbostations) were quickly left behind when CPU speeds increased.
As far as being too different, the GUI was light years head of Windows 3.x and even MacOS at the time. It was easier to learn, and based on a BSDish Mach kernel. It was definitely ahead of it's time, but reached too small an audience for it to ever achieve a piece of the market.
i still love my NeXT slab. The NeXT will always be my all time favourite system.
imabug
Quicken's billminder is easy to turn off. Edit/Options/Internet Connection and select the Don't use background downloading radiobutton.
imabug
Generally for the people eligible for TNs, the 3-4 years spent getting a degree is hardly a waste of time. That degree is usually essential for advancing in their field regardless of where they choose to work. Not getting that degree would cause them to fall behind. Besides, these people usually have their degrees anyway.
imabug
> Either build a bunch of high rise apartments and other high density living and then add some decent public transportation or -- de-populate a little. :)
I remember hearing somewhere (think it was a tv show on TLC or Discovery about SV) that the height of buildings was restricted by earthquake related building codes...thus no highrises were permitted. True? Sort of true?
imabug
Other articles on the discovery.
Focus APS
Abstract of the article in Physical Review Letters. To get the actual text, I think you have to subscribe to PRL. Any university with a physics department ought to have it in their library if you're not a subscriber.
imabug
Actually, c is derived from two more fundamental constants, the permittivity (epsilon) and permeability (mu) of free space, so that c = 1/sqrt(epsilon*mu)
imabug
If you're a Canadian, and looking for a job that's one of the eligible professions, then the TN is the way to go. Relatively easy to get provided you have the proper documentation. Basically all you need is a letter from your prospective employer. The letter needs to state certain things, otherwise you'll be turned away by the INS official processing your application (kind of sucks if you've already got the plane ticket and are ready to go). You can also apply for new TNs by mail, which I'm told takes a few months.
One thing to be careful of is that you don't tell the INS guy you want to renew your TN. Technically the TN is for temporary employment only and is non-renewable. You just apply for a new TN each year. Otherwise you might face end up being looked at a little more closely by the INS official.
Oh, and it'll cost you about $56US for the TN. $50 for the TN itself, and $6 for the I-94.
imabug
A 5-10 microcurie Cs-137 check source ought to produce a count rate of a few kcounts/sec if you place it right up against the geiger tube. This would give you maybe 1-2kbits worth of random data in less than a second. Probably a little longer than using rand() or something similar. Going with a hotter source will give you a higher count rate. Most geiger counters ought to be able to handle a count rate of 10-30 kcounts/sec quite easily before getting paralyzed, if random numbers are needed faster. And the source can be pretty easily shielded. Go to the nuc med dept of any major hospital and see if they'll give you some of their extra lead pigs (containers). Most departments I know usually have them in abundance.
What happens 5 or 10 years down the road? I realize in the computer world this is an eternity, and lots can change in that time interval. AT&T was broken up by the gov't, and lately we've been seeing a good many of the baby bells merging together to form bigger baby bells that provide services over large regions. It seems reasonable to project that the same thing will probably happen in the future with the mini-MS companies that form from this breakup. MS will metastasize and spread out over the computer landscape and continue to swallow up smaller companies while it competes with it's former self and other companies. The cycle will begin all over again.
Then again, the resulting mini-MS companies may disappear to be replaced with another.
What about the division of MS that puts their name on the mice, keyboards, joysticks and whatever other hardware MS is making? Granted it's not a monopoly like the software biz, but look at the desktops around you and see how many MS mice there are. Not that MS makes bad mice or anything. The wheelie thing is the next best thing to the mouse itself. Sure there's Logitech and Kensington, and other cheapie mouse makers out there, but how many computer makers bundle those with their computer systems?
The same thing had occurred to me as well. Instead of having one company dominating most aspects of the desktop, now we'll have two companies dominating most aspects of the desktop. The inertia of mainstream users will likely keep MS/OS on the desktop for the forseeable future, and without stronger competition in the office suite area, MS/Apps will probably continue to be the software selection of choice.
One thing that people seem to be overlooking is the hardware side of MS. Granted it's not nearly as high profile as the OS/Apps divisions and certainly not a monopoly, but how many people now have MS mice, keyboards and joysticks? Will DoJ make MS spin off the hardware into a separate company too?
The NeXT slabs and cubes had Mg cases. At some point in the infancy of the web, someone had taken a slab, torched it and put the movie up on the web. The case burned quite nicely too. IIRC, it took a blow torch to get the case blazing.
That's cool. I'd put one in the front too and program it to display backwards so that speed demons can see it in their rearview mirror when you catch up to them at the next light.
:)
hehe
From the website,
Haven't gotten around to using it yet, but for people who have a hard time replicating the Unixish environment that the Cygwin compiler wants, it might be good.
what the US needs is Interac like in Canada. After moving to the US, I had to get used to carrying money again. And US money is all the same colour, so at first it was hard to tell what bill I was grabbing. I still have to make sure I take a close look at what I'm handing over. Sure, there are a lot of places now where I can use debit card transactions with my ATM card, or those VISA cheque cards from the bank. But I still need actual money in my pockets. WIth Interac as ubiquitous as it is in Canada, all I needed was my ATM card.
I do that too. But I don't have a Klein bottle. Just a bowl...and an empty Classico jar for when the bowl gets full. When they get full, I roll them and take them to the bank.
And, as an added bonus, sometimes you can find interesting coins in that spare change. Some of the ones I've found are here.
With the exception of rent, power (haven't gotten around to doing that one yet), and student loans, all my bills are taken care of through the respective company. no third party to worry about. I still get paper bills in the mail to tell me how much I owe, and when my bank account is going to be debited.
So now I write far fewer cheques than I used to, and spend a good deal less on stamps too.
Octave is a GPL math package that uses a Matlab'ish command language. Interfaces quite nicely with GNUPlot too. There's a section in the FAQ that describes what to do with matlab scripts.
Octave is *big* and can take a while to compile from source. for most *nices, it should build out of the box though.