"Few multiples" of $10K won't buy you much in the range of around half the orchestral instruments. You'd be flat out trying to pay $30K for a pair of Clarinets or a trumpet, but the less popular instruments can get very, very pricey. As a bassoonist, many of our top of the line instruments are rather expensive. A good Fox or Heckel will be around $30K - 50K USD before custom keywork is factored in (can add up to $10K to the base price). My Fox Contra was, 10 years ago USD $30K so it would be significantly more than that to replace it now. If I was to purchase the same instruments here in Oz about triple that price in AUD.
Double basses and 'cellos also are upwards of $50K in the USA for good ones. Harpsichords also up over $30K for a reasonable one that wasn't assembled from a kit (lots in kit form for $15-20K). Harps also waaay up there in price. That's just from instruments I'm personally familiar with that I either play or someone in my family plays.
Friend of mine just moved into a new house that has NBN on it in NW Sydney. Fibre goes all the way to a termination box inside the garage and then he has standard cat6 ethernet ports connected to the fibre modem. No ability to have a fibre switch in there according to him.
Major problem there is the same as the mobile market - you have to write very fundamentally different code for a mobile and desktop. Some fascinating figures came out of this year's Siggraph. On the desktop you typically have up to 300W of power dedicated to graphics hardware. On a mobile device you have at most 1W (phone) or 5W (tablet). Those numbers will _never_ go up because anything more than that starts to fry your pocket or hand. So, the optimisation techniques that one uses to write a desktop app or game are extremely different to those written for a mobile device. There's just no getting around that at all.
One of the other interesting factors is that from a developer and graphics perspective now, except for the desktop gaming market, D3D is all but gone. I saw one mention of D3D at Siggraph this year, and that was because the chair of the panel was from MS. All those tablet/phone game writers were way over in the OpenGL ES camp. MS is trying to force the issue again like it's 1999 and now allowing OpenGL drivers on Win8, so you'll see how quickly the game studios will react to that - Even Valve were demoing OpenGL games this year that had better performance on Linux than on Windows on the same hardware according to their statements at one talk. Apart from business desktops, I don't see much more future market for the Microsoft and PCs. The games of interest are now appearing on mobiles and those developers are definitely not in the MS camp.
Summed up, it's a failed strategy and will do more to make people move away from MS than towards it.
You'd be surprised at how often point #2 cannot be assumed to be true. There are some personality types that just cannot see big picture stuff, despite how much you work on training them to see it. These are the detailed-oriented people who become fixated on minutae that they can't see big picture stuff.
I'm wondering what that might make room for in the pre-7th curriculum.
Suggestions?
Have a look at what the Motesorri style of teaching does. I have a few relatives that are teachers (active and retired) in traditional schools and the younger ones are sending their kids there, rather than through the traditional system.
Tufte's ideas are good for presenting simple information. He gets many things right (eg if the visualisation doesn't work in black and white, adding colour won't fix it). However, many in the infovis community are outright sceptical, if not dismissive of his ideas for analysing high dimensional datasets.
Where his ideas really work is once you have "the answer" that you want to present to someone else. However, the basic exploration of the data to find interesting keypoints, is not what he specialises in. There's whole communities devoted to techniques for datamining and presentation, principly infovis/Visual Analytics.
The infovis community has been dealing with these subjects for years. There's many different visualisation techniques around. Here's a list of the past conferences and the papers:
The one thing that my friends and I still talk about was the SWG crafting system. It's been the best of the lot. The whole concepts of materials having inconsistent quality and that the quality could allow you to produce good and bad lots of the same item, or optimise for one attribute over another really set them apart from anything before or after. It was the sort of thing that made a crafter playable as a long term character because there was so much variety and constantly having to stay on top of things, compared to the grind of combat characters.
What's interesting is LLVM and.NET, where you can run C/C++ code in an interpreted/JIT-compiled environment. Potentially, with the optimizations mentioned above, you could have C code running in a virtual machine that's faster than statically-compiled C code.
HP did a lot of research on this about 4-5 years ago where they proved this was exactly the case. Do some googling for HP's Dynamo project. Real runtime knowledge of exactly what is being used and when leads to better optimistaion than static optimisation.
Hmmm... don't know much about SE and what formats it can export. If you can get STL, then you should be fine. There's very few CAD apps that can't do at least STL. Many have Collada support already. Between those two you should be OK. If not, have a dig for software called PolyTrans (Okino Graphics). That's a huge file format conversion tool that supports almost every known 3D file format. I believe they have a free demo download.
Bounds constraints vary wildly and also vary by material type. A material may only be available on a specific printer (manufacturer and model), that will then limit what size model can be printed. For example, selecting an ABS material can be printed on all the machines, but 720 Fullcure is only available on one. Each machine has a limited production size. However, as an absolute max, no machine is capable of printing something greater than 1m cube - at least right now.
A current area of research in the rapid prototyping community is how to reduce this amount of material automatically. The most efficient way found so far is still a O(n^2) operation. For the size models we're looking at, that is several hours to process a single model. There are the potential for less efficient operations that use faster algorithms that we are investigating currently.
Also some of individuals involved in Shapeways are major Blenderheads.
I thought Shapeways was being supported by Phillips but was under the impression that it started externally and hence would not be a spinoff.
It is both. It's a technology spinoff from Philips. Also one of the heads of the company left the Blender foundation to join and run it, hence the connection.
Most of our users are using Blender to create their own model. In fact, one of the principles of the project is the former head of the Blender Foundation.
The difference here and the other companies is that this one is going for the mass market. The others are looking at niche areas. They are also looking at doing Cafe-Press-style stores and so on.
Yes. Prices are dropping dramatically. 12 months ago it was an order of magnitude higher than that.
In the not too distant future, there will be a lot of other materials too. We've seen both chocolate and metal (sort of a molten blob/sintering sort of deal). The chocolate material is the one I'm personally looking forward too. There's a huge amount of potential for Christmas, Valentines, Birthdays etc in that.
FWIW, I'm the lead dev on all the 3D portions of the site. I had no idea these guys were going to get it posted to/. today! I wake up late to find my inbox filled with emails about it....
Anyway, on to answer your questions. Two ways:
1. there's some simple editors built in for specific object types (and more on the way)
2. Upload from your favourite modelling tool. Right now support is for X3D, Collada and STL files. More formats are on the way, but are not, as yet, fully tested.
There is also some restrictions on the basic structure of the models. The system tries to correct a lot of problems, but it is by no means perfect as it is all automated.
Costs are like the article summary states - $50-$150 per piece. However, that is dropping very, very rapidly as volume increases. Only this time last year, costs were an order of magnitude higher for exactly the same pieces. We're expecting a similar sort of drop in prices over the next 12-18 months as bulk manufacturing really starts to drive prices down.
Turn around time is usually a couple of weeks. The actual printing process is still relatively slow and manually managed. We'd love t automate it, but the printer hardware companies are not giving us that capability yet.
Like the other respondents have stated, by far the majority is server side. The hard part for me, and my company, is that there are very few programmers that have desktop experience. We've been trying to hire desktop developers for the past 9 months and of the few resumes we get, they almost all have server experience and no desktop. Doesn't help that we're in a relatively niche market of 3D graphics as well, but, it's still darn hard to find anybody that does desktop programming, let alone good developers.
Why should ISO abandon patents? There are many thousands of standards that it manages - everything from software to the pitch of almost every single bolt and screw you'll ever buy.
It is currently the most fair system out there compared to every other body that exists. It promotes longevity of standards and has a darn good process in place to ensure that. The fact that your bolt manufactured in the 1930's still will mate with a nut produced today is a testament to that. The whole point of ISO's existance is that longevity (as compared to, say IEEE, ECMA, OASIS etc that actively demote "old" standards). And, just to let it be known, ISO does allow competing standards in the same place. Have a look at the ISO 19000 series of standards and their geospatial definitions (driven by OGC) and the competing SEDRIS standards, which do exactly the same thing.
This is the first time that I'm aware of (I've been involve with ISO writing standards and reviewing them for about 15 years now -including MPEG 4) that the process has been run roughshod by one company. The thousands of standards it manages are good counter-proof that it works really well.
Also, Standards are supposed to be open. On this point you are wrong. ISO is a standardisation body. It has no requirements for "openness". For example, MPEG is a standard and yet is extremely heavily encumbered with patents. Other standards are patent free, but you will find that the a large percentage of the ISO standards have patents on them (I believe it is a majority, but don't have numbers to back that up). All that ISO requires is that the terms of the usage of the standard is defined beforehand so that potential users of the standard know what they're in for.
The Hindmarsh island affair was pretty strange on so many levels because it felt a lot like some cultural things were being made up on the spot.
The western/eastern cultural "requirements" is a struggle seen the world over. I've spent some time living in the UK and 6+ years in the US and the same refrains are heard in those countries as well as most of western europe. It's a really hard balance to strike. I remember a story that dad told me as a kid when he came home from work one day. He was a solicitor at the time working in the western suburbs of Sydney. As such he had quite a few muslim clients. One of them was a muslim lady and they were heading off to court for some reason or another. He was trying to brief her on what was going to happen, things to say etc. The big problem that he had was she was strictly following the traditions of her religion and would always stay a couple of paces behind and just off to one side of dad. He had a hell of a time trying to talk to her like that, not to mention making his job a lot harder. I don't remember if he ended up winning the case or not, but it certainly wasn't helping.
Depending on which set of research you wish to believe, they've been living this way for the better part of 40,000 years. Their scholars are not doing anything their social customs haven't done for a very, very long time. Whiteman scholars may already have access to everything, but that is not what they're concerned about. This is an enabling technology for them, in that it allows them to store their currently verbal history for the long term in a way that is in accordance with their traditions and for their own people. It is so their own people don't accidentally look at the wrong thing in their tradition. They don't care about you and I.
There's official bindings to OpenGL with Java. That's called JSR-231, better known as JOGL. There's not software implementation of OGL in Java that I'm aware of.
At the InfoViz conference last year there was a company displaying a PCI-Express card that had 4 or 8 cell processors on it and a library to play with it. They had Java bindings to that, so you could something like what you want. They had an extremely impressive realtime mesh-extraction from volumetric data demo that they were running. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the company right now, but that card had very serious potential to be a vector supercomputer in a box for the high-end sciviz crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
"Few multiples" of $10K won't buy you much in the range of around half the orchestral instruments. You'd be flat out trying to pay $30K for a pair of Clarinets or a trumpet, but the less popular instruments can get very, very pricey. As a bassoonist, many of our top of the line instruments are rather expensive. A good Fox or Heckel will be around $30K - 50K USD before custom keywork is factored in (can add up to $10K to the base price). My Fox Contra was, 10 years ago USD $30K so it would be significantly more than that to replace it now. If I was to purchase the same instruments here in Oz about triple that price in AUD.
Double basses and 'cellos also are upwards of $50K in the USA for good ones. Harpsichords also up over $30K for a reasonable one that wasn't assembled from a kit (lots in kit form for $15-20K). Harps also waaay up there in price. That's just from instruments I'm personally familiar with that I either play or someone in my family plays.
If they get to the point where they have their own space program I say we just surrender in the war on drugs and let them run things.
It's when they start taking over pizza delivery franchises that you have to really begin to worry.
Friend of mine just moved into a new house that has NBN on it in NW Sydney. Fibre goes all the way to a termination box inside the garage and then he has standard cat6 ethernet ports connected to the fibre modem. No ability to have a fibre switch in there according to him.
That seems to describe a lot of badly written multithreaded code that I'm having to currently "fix".
Major problem there is the same as the mobile market - you have to write very fundamentally different code for a mobile and desktop. Some fascinating figures came out of this year's Siggraph. On the desktop you typically have up to 300W of power dedicated to graphics hardware. On a mobile device you have at most 1W (phone) or 5W (tablet). Those numbers will _never_ go up because anything more than that starts to fry your pocket or hand. So, the optimisation techniques that one uses to write a desktop app or game are extremely different to those written for a mobile device. There's just no getting around that at all.
One of the other interesting factors is that from a developer and graphics perspective now, except for the desktop gaming market, D3D is all but gone. I saw one mention of D3D at Siggraph this year, and that was because the chair of the panel was from MS. All those tablet/phone game writers were way over in the OpenGL ES camp. MS is trying to force the issue again like it's 1999 and now allowing OpenGL drivers on Win8, so you'll see how quickly the game studios will react to that - Even Valve were demoing OpenGL games this year that had better performance on Linux than on Windows on the same hardware according to their statements at one talk. Apart from business desktops, I don't see much more future market for the Microsoft and PCs. The games of interest are now appearing on mobiles and those developers are definitely not in the MS camp.
Summed up, it's a failed strategy and will do more to make people move away from MS than towards it.
You'd be surprised at how often point #2 cannot be assumed to be true. There are some personality types that just cannot see big picture stuff, despite how much you work on training them to see it. These are the detailed-oriented people who become fixated on minutae that they can't see big picture stuff.
I'm wondering what that might make room for in the pre-7th curriculum.
Suggestions?
Have a look at what the Motesorri style of teaching does. I have a few relatives that are teachers (active and retired) in traditional schools and the younger ones are sending their kids there, rather than through the traditional system.
Tufte's ideas are good for presenting simple information. He gets many things right (eg if the visualisation doesn't work in black and white, adding colour won't fix it). However, many in the infovis community are outright sceptical, if not dismissive of his ideas for analysing high dimensional datasets.
Where his ideas really work is once you have "the answer" that you want to present to someone else. However, the basic exploration of the data to find interesting keypoints, is not what he specialises in. There's whole communities devoted to techniques for datamining and presentation, principly infovis/Visual Analytics.
The infovis community has been dealing with these subjects for years. There's many different visualisation techniques around. Here's a list of the past conferences and the papers:
http://conferences.computer.org/Infovis/
Plenty of good products out there, but the one that I like most is from Tableau Software (http://www.tableausoftware.com/).
The one thing that my friends and I still talk about was the SWG crafting system. It's been the best of the lot. The whole concepts of materials having inconsistent quality and that the quality could allow you to produce good and bad lots of the same item, or optimise for one attribute over another really set them apart from anything before or after. It was the sort of thing that made a crafter playable as a long term character because there was so much variety and constantly having to stay on top of things, compared to the grind of combat characters.
What's interesting is LLVM and .NET, where you can run C/C++ code in an interpreted/JIT-compiled environment. Potentially, with the optimizations mentioned above, you could have C code running in a virtual machine that's faster than statically-compiled C code.
HP did a lot of research on this about 4-5 years ago where they proved this was exactly the case. Do some googling for HP's Dynamo project. Real runtime knowledge of exactly what is being used and when leads to better optimistaion than static optimisation.
Hmmm... don't know much about SE and what formats it can export. If you can get STL, then you should be fine. There's very few CAD apps that can't do at least STL. Many have Collada support already. Between those two you should be OK. If not, have a dig for software called PolyTrans (Okino Graphics). That's a huge file format conversion tool that supports almost every known 3D file format. I believe they have a free demo download.
Bounds constraints vary wildly and also vary by material type. A material may only be available on a specific printer (manufacturer and model), that will then limit what size model can be printed. For example, selecting an ABS material can be printed on all the machines, but 720 Fullcure is only available on one. Each machine has a limited production size. However, as an absolute max, no machine is capable of printing something greater than 1m cube - at least right now.
A current area of research in the rapid prototyping community is how to reduce this amount of material automatically. The most efficient way found so far is still a O(n^2) operation. For the size models we're looking at, that is several hours to process a single model. There are the potential for less efficient operations that use faster algorithms that we are investigating currently.
That's because the sketchup file format is proprietary and nobody really knows the specification.
Also some of individuals involved in Shapeways are major Blenderheads.
I thought Shapeways was being supported by Phillips but was under the impression that it started externally and hence would not be a spinoff.
It is both. It's a technology spinoff from Philips. Also one of the heads of the company left the Blender foundation to join and run it, hence the connection.
Most of our users are using Blender to create their own model. In fact, one of the principles of the project is the former head of the Blender Foundation.
The difference here and the other companies is that this one is going for the mass market. The others are looking at niche areas. They are also looking at doing Cafe-Press-style stores and so on.
Yes. Prices are dropping dramatically. 12 months ago it was an order of magnitude higher than that.
In the not too distant future, there will be a lot of other materials too. We've seen both chocolate and metal (sort of a molten blob/sintering sort of deal). The chocolate material is the one I'm personally looking forward too. There's a huge amount of potential for Christmas, Valentines, Birthdays etc in that.
FWIW, I'm the lead dev on all the 3D portions of the site. I had no idea these guys were going to get it posted to /. today! I wake up late to find my inbox filled with emails about it....
Anyway, on to answer your questions. Two ways:
1. there's some simple editors built in for specific object types (and more on the way)
2. Upload from your favourite modelling tool. Right now support is for X3D, Collada and STL files. More formats are on the way, but are not, as yet, fully tested.
There is also some restrictions on the basic structure of the models. The system tries to correct a lot of problems, but it is by no means perfect as it is all automated.
Costs are like the article summary states - $50-$150 per piece. However, that is dropping very, very rapidly as volume increases. Only this time last year, costs were an order of magnitude higher for exactly the same pieces. We're expecting a similar sort of drop in prices over the next 12-18 months as bulk manufacturing really starts to drive prices down.
Turn around time is usually a couple of weeks. The actual printing process is still relatively slow and manually managed. We'd love t automate it, but the printer hardware companies are not giving us that capability yet.
Like the other respondents have stated, by far the majority is server side. The hard part for me, and my company, is that there are very few programmers that have desktop experience. We've been trying to hire desktop developers for the past 9 months and of the few resumes we get, they almost all have server experience and no desktop. Doesn't help that we're in a relatively niche market of 3D graphics as well, but, it's still darn hard to find anybody that does desktop programming, let alone good developers.
Why should ISO abandon patents? There are many thousands of standards that it manages - everything from software to the pitch of almost every single bolt and screw you'll ever buy.
It is currently the most fair system out there compared to every other body that exists. It promotes longevity of standards and has a darn good process in place to ensure that. The fact that your bolt manufactured in the 1930's still will mate with a nut produced today is a testament to that. The whole point of ISO's existance is that longevity (as compared to, say IEEE, ECMA, OASIS etc that actively demote "old" standards). And, just to let it be known, ISO does allow competing standards in the same place. Have a look at the ISO 19000 series of standards and their geospatial definitions (driven by OGC) and the competing SEDRIS standards, which do exactly the same thing.
This is the first time that I'm aware of (I've been involve with ISO writing standards and reviewing them for about 15 years now -including MPEG 4) that the process has been run roughshod by one company. The thousands of standards it manages are good counter-proof that it works really well.
The Hindmarsh island affair was pretty strange on so many levels because it felt a lot like some cultural things were being made up on the spot.
The western/eastern cultural "requirements" is a struggle seen the world over. I've spent some time living in the UK and 6+ years in the US and the same refrains are heard in those countries as well as most of western europe. It's a really hard balance to strike. I remember a story that dad told me as a kid when he came home from work one day. He was a solicitor at the time working in the western suburbs of Sydney. As such he had quite a few muslim clients. One of them was a muslim lady and they were heading off to court for some reason or another. He was trying to brief her on what was going to happen, things to say etc. The big problem that he had was she was strictly following the traditions of her religion and would always stay a couple of paces behind and just off to one side of dad. He had a hell of a time trying to talk to her like that, not to mention making his job a lot harder. I don't remember if he ended up winning the case or not, but it certainly wasn't helping.
Depending on which set of research you wish to believe, they've been living this way for the better part of 40,000 years. Their scholars are not doing anything their social customs haven't done for a very, very long time. Whiteman scholars may already have access to everything, but that is not what they're concerned about. This is an enabling technology for them, in that it allows them to store their currently verbal history for the long term in a way that is in accordance with their traditions and for their own people. It is so their own people don't accidentally look at the wrong thing in their tradition. They don't care about you and I.
Perhaps you didn't fully read my post explaining what some of those examples are?
There's official bindings to OpenGL with Java. That's called JSR-231, better known as JOGL. There's not software implementation of OGL in Java that I'm aware of.
At the InfoViz conference last year there was a company displaying a PCI-Express card that had 4 or 8 cell processors on it and a library to play with it. They had Java bindings to that, so you could something like what you want. They had an extremely impressive realtime mesh-extraction from volumetric data demo that they were running. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the company right now, but that card had very serious potential to be a vector supercomputer in a box for the high-end sciviz crowd.