It seems that parts have been produced using stereolithographic techniques for years... While using a fused resin part for investment casting is not direct fabrication, that seems close enough to me.
There is a lot cooler stuff than this going on right now.. Take a look at this for some other cool 3-D rapid prototyping systems that are in development. The LENS system (about halfway down) is especially cool since they can form parts directly using materials that are difficult to form otherwise (strange Ti alloys), and change the composition and cooling rates along the length of the part...
Oh, and where the hell was this guy's boss when he used the quarter million dollar rapid prototyper to make a two dollar aluminum pulley for a sander... Don't even tell me that polycarbonate will be a good substitute for a pulley in a sander which was originally made from aluminum.
This does have very cool applications in fabrication of replica parts for antique cars and the like... It would be cool to go down to NAPA in 10 years and have them print out brake pad rubber for my subaru...
The impression that I got from the film was that a different genre ought have been chosen. If you are going to do Sci-Fi, you've got to at least have a decent plot... If you are going to be light on plot and acting talent, then you had better choose horror...
The characters were the most grotesque anime stereotypes that they could have been... The fragile, empath female, the square-jawed bullshit white male hero, a big, strong, black male expendable character of few words, and a skinny italian to boot... I guess that there are not a lot of hollywood movies that are more challenging than this but the damn hamfistedness of this was really noticeable... Also, they made the bad guy a little too evil...
So overall, expect this movie to tank after the first week. The CGI is pretty amazing, but you'd better have at least an interesting plot if you're going to try scifi.
I have been wondering this lately? Hopefully, by a happy accident, there isn't enough fossil fuel for us to screw things up royally... It has become pretty apparent to me that the oil on the planet is getting tapped out - hell, we've already fought an oil war...
After reading some R. Buckminster Fuller I got to wondering if there is enough oil/coal for us to screw things up completely. Obviously we are not very energy concious in the US as of yet... Anyone that has been outside of the US knows that we have a lot of nast habits about energy, not to mention that our appliances consume a sizeable chunk of power while just sitting there "off".
I just wonder:
Is there enough fuel for us to permanently break things
How will the transition to non-fossil fuel based energy go (peacefully or with wailing and gnashing of teeth)
How much will gas have to cost before people make it a point to get rid of cars?
How much will power have to cost before people get motivated to reevaluate their consumption...
Yes, I can back up to about 50 CD roms if I wanted to, but anyone that does it knows that it is a huge pain in the ass.
If you NEED to back up data, hard drives are VERRRY cheap, and high capacity tape drives are cheap as well.
Unless of course you mean backing up your MP3s to an audio CD. But you don't mean that, do you?
So anyway, 30 cents, 80 cents, $1, this is a non issue - CD-Rs started out at $25 or so each. What I want to know is when I ought to buy RAM to take best adventage of that market glut.
If this is actually READING articles and then making insights about their content, this could be a revolutionary search tool for any field! These guys should contact Lexis-Nexis or some other fact finding service. Finding information is a hell of a skill - I know that a lot of my time as a grad student has been spent on literature reviews.
This seems to be a symptom of the increasing complicatedness of computers themselves, along with "features" that enable more and more things to break...
I am sure anyone here who has worked with end users has answered calls along the lines of "I have a foppy here that is too powerful for my version of the internet. Can you help me make my connection to hotmail faster? I think that there is a problem with the server."
There is just too much information and too many words being bounced around for the average joe user to handle... It has almost become the case that to operate a computer without hassles, you must understand how to build one. Can you imagine if Ford said that they expected everyone to know how to build a car before they could expect to be able to drive?
I had a friend call me up the other day who had gotten the "mystical spiral" on his screen from the haha@sexyfun.net virus... It was impossible for me to explain over the phone how to fix it, like this:
You have to usa a DOS boot disk to avoid booting into the infected win98
A what?
Never mind...
As things get more and more complicated with individual PCs, I thnk that there will be a lot of money to be made for the first person who starts an app-server like network in which there is NO maintainence to be done on the user side. If you do person-to-person support it is easy to see the gulf of knowledge that is creating the unquenchable demand for tech support...
If this game does what the other 99% of movie adaptations of games do, it will rip off an existing game... I can't think of one that would fit very well with the plot of Akira, so why not rip off TRON. (Hey it worked for Journey, didn't it?
You could have:
Clown gang light-cycles
akira energy-ball MCP cone
police tanks
and grid bugs - why not, they were in Tron fopr what, 10 seconds?
But seriously, this game will suck, just like the Gundam games and movie adaptations in general always have...
It is interesting to hear about technologies like this, but this is the same no-technical-details type article about optical switching that has been around for years.
5ns is a nice number, but how exactly are you going to figure out where you need to switch that packet in 5ns? the whole optical-electronic translation problem still remains.
I do have to give them some credit for getting "little tiny very fast mirrors" out of the equation, since this seems like a stupid, non-robust way to do things.
Now, how long before I can get one of these and a 5ns latency?
Online resources to opt out of junk mail and email
on
Opt-in vs. Opt-out
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately, since monied interests own most of the lobbyists if not lawmakers, it is unlikely that opt-in will be made law anytime soon. I also predict that targeted arketing that has been declared illegal in the states such as automated phone dialers and junk faxes will appear with increasing frequency now that international long distance rates are getting so low.
Flatland available online for free...
on
The New Flatland
·
· Score: 2
You can get that book for 90 cents on Amazon or anywhere else that sells dover thrift editions.
You can also get it for free online from Project Geutenberg Any word on wether the new flatland will be sexist as hell? Reading the original was an interesting look into good old-school great chain of being type classism...
The nobitity are polygonal, with rank being determined by number of sides. Commoners are isocoles triangles, with acute angles at the low and equilaterals at the high end of the social spectrum. Women, whatever their rank, are lines.
I wonder how they are going to style the new one without being hopelessly sexist and classist while maintaining continuity...
Try this. I hardly get any junk mail or solicitations anymore. Now, if there were only a way to stop getting junk mail for the previous 10 years of tennants in my apartment...
I think that the major problem with PCI is that not all slots are "bus mastering" and Some types of cards require a bus mastering slot. There is an additional problem when you consider IRQ sharing - but these are all work-around that have come from the evolution of the hardware. Yes, bad design is bad design and you have some motherboards that do things in very stupid ways; hopefully the mistakes and ambiguities will work themselves out.
Compare the ease of use of the bus technologies in their order of development:
ISA - jumpers for IRQs, No sharing...
SCSI - IDs, termination, wide/narrow, high byte active/passive termination, and more connectors than you can shake a stick at...
IDE ATA/33 - master or slave - cables sometimed a little odd or keyed the wrong way
PCI - IRQs are now automatic, based on the slot
ISA PnP- sometimes a nasty hack but works better than opening the case to change a jumper every time
USB- the first dummy-proof connectivity. Only thing to worry about is power, and it is pretty good about babysitting you on that one
IDE ATA/66,100- Special, shandard cable that takes all ambiguities out of IDE cabling
IEEE 1394- Idiot proof autoconfiguration, not used much as of yet
Things are getting better all the time. I remember on the first PC I had, there were jumpers that had to be set in order to have the memory recognized. Now all that has to be done is to plug things in, and they (hopefully, usually) work. However, I don't think that there is any chance in hell that any OS running on PC hardware will not need to be rewritten a bit in order to deal with the next generation of Busses. A lot of the problems that we encounter with current systems is that they are designed for backward compatability...
I guess that this ad campaign is lost on me... I guess that it is trying to capitalize on the free-software-foundation-open-open-source-hippie vibe that people associate with linux, I guess. Are they pitching this to the pointy-haired managers or something? Not that ad campaigns generally make sense to me anyway.
The invasion of public space in cities by creeping advertising of this kind, stencilled graffiti-like ads (no, this is not the first of this kind), are another symptom of the malignant ad creep being experienced in major cities...
And whay, exactly, is so dang peace-love-linuxy about buying a server with linux over some other flavor of unix? I am for spreading linux as much as the next advocate, but when you are presumably paying for support AND the OS, where is the hippie philosophy?
Maybe I am wrong - is IBM advocating ordering their big iron servers and then downloading an ISO of the new redhat distro for S/390...
an adbusters link seems appropriate here somewhere.
Since macrovision is only to prevent dubbing of the video output, I assume that this kernel module will be responsible for feeding the DVD video stream to the S-video output...
Unloading the kernel module would probably just disable the S-video output or something like that.
So, who the heck is this aimed at? I am not aware of many people who use linux and want to be dependent upon the hardware vendor to supply kernels and binary-only kernel modules...
Another thing I would be interested in is if the DVD player sovtware or the hardware will regionalize. I think that the player is REQUIRED to regionalize if it is a 3rd generation player or later...
Another kludge to deal with stupid allocation of existing "real" IPs...
Well, at least somone realizes that there is going to be a need for different sollutions to the problem of migration to ipV6. Hell, we americans still can't figger out that there metric system, let alone how to use AAAA records.
Seriously though, There is a LOT of capital out there in hardware that doesn't support ipV6 yet, and a lot that never will... Lessee - large numbers of switches, routers, cable modems, print servers, gateway devices, etc... Using a tunnel to the 6bone will work for a little while, but there is some serious labor to be invested once ipv6 ONLY hosts start going up... Anyone have a feeling that there are going to be a lot of disgusting hacks to allow old hardware to keep working?
Somone PLEASE put something really cool on there with no IPv4 access so that we can all get a fire lit under our asses.
so they can get FREE TACOS this time...
on
Mir 2
·
· Score: 1
they need a MIR 2 so they have somewhere to send rich tourists and politicians of course, without pissing off us testy americans...
And of course, next time they will be precise about where they crash it so that everyone gets FREE TACOS....
Had a company that sold modems (or not cared about customer satisfaction) bought the rights to your Hayes drivers, would most users have an option other than upgrading?
Actually, they were eventually bought by Zoom... Before this there was fee-based tech support from a place called modem express, and no firmware upgrades. After zoom bought them, the drivers became available again...
Presumably the subscription will continue to be source of assets that somone will be interested in. As long as support costs a company less than they make in renewal fees somone will have an interest in collecting money... After there are too few people renewing to justify the cost of customer service, I would think that benevolent companies would make a "eternal key" public domain, but that's not to say that they would.
This reminds me of the drivers for my hayes modem. They disappeared for a while and now have come back since the rights were finally purchased by a company that cares... Of course, there is no advantage to the company offering the drivers now. It's kind of like legacy hardware support except that the money will keep coming in. It wouldn't surprise me if companies could be started merely to sell renewals for extinct companies.
In other news, yahoo will be featuring a pay-for-adoption service, allowing organ sales on their "yahoo auctions" site and spamming the shit out of all yahoo members with the "banned on e-bay" CD spam. They are also investigating plans to buy yahooka.com.
Yahoo execs were quoted as saying "we've found there is money in elicit markets, and hell if this dot com is going down without a fight..."
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that parts have been produced using stereolithographic techniques for years... While using a fused resin part for investment casting is not direct fabrication, that seems close enough to me.
There is a lot cooler stuff than this going on right now.. Take a look at
this for some other cool 3-D rapid prototyping systems that are in development. The LENS system (about halfway down) is especially cool since they can form parts directly using materials that are difficult to form otherwise (strange Ti alloys), and change the composition and cooling rates along the length of the part...
Oh, and where the hell was this guy's boss when he used the quarter million dollar rapid prototyper to make a two dollar aluminum pulley for a sander... Don't even tell me that polycarbonate will be a good substitute for a pulley in a sander which was originally made from aluminum.
This does have very cool applications in fabrication of replica parts for antique cars and the like... It would be cool to go down to NAPA in 10 years and have them print out brake pad rubber for my subaru...
SOMEBODY SET .US UP THE BOMB!!
Sorry, sorry...
The impression that I got from the film was that a different genre ought have been chosen. If you are going to do Sci-Fi, you've got to at least have a decent plot... If you are going to be light on plot and acting talent, then you had better choose horror...
The characters were the most grotesque anime stereotypes that they could have been... The fragile, empath female, the square-jawed bullshit white male hero, a big, strong, black male expendable character of few words, and a skinny italian to boot... I guess that there are not a lot of hollywood movies that are more challenging than this but the damn hamfistedness of this was really noticeable... Also, they made the bad guy a little too evil...
So overall, expect this movie to tank after the first week. The CGI is pretty amazing, but you'd better have at least an interesting plot if you're going to try scifi.
You mean like this?
So, you got to the trouble to link to the nude image, but can't figure out why it was made...
Hell, it could be fake, but it's not hard to figure out why the animators would make that...
I found it amuding to see in the hype for the Tomb Raider movie that one of the before-the-show slodes said something like I had to yell out "And over 50% of them are pornographic!" which got a laugh out of most of the theater...
It has become pretty apparent to me that the oil on the planet is getting tapped out - hell, we've already fought an oil war...
After reading some R. Buckminster Fuller I got to wondering if there is enough oil/coal for us to screw things up completely. Obviously we are not very energy concious in the US as of yet... Anyone that has been outside of the US knows that we have a lot of nast habits about energy, not to mention that our appliances consume a sizeable chunk of power while just sitting there "off".
I just wonder:
What do other people think?
What in the hell was this judge doing disallowing every defense that was going to be presented? Is he in the pocket of $cientology or what?
or a Dali maybe. Or one that makes it look like it was drawn by "Billy, age 7"... That would be sweeet....
Yes, I can back up to about 50 CD roms if I wanted to, but anyone that does it knows that it is a huge pain in the ass.
If you NEED to back up data, hard drives are VERRRY cheap, and high capacity tape drives are cheap as well.
Unless of course you mean backing up your MP3s to an audio CD. But you don't mean that, do you?
So anyway, 30 cents, 80 cents, $1, this is a non issue - CD-Rs started out at $25 or so each. What I want to know is when I ought to buy RAM to take best adventage of that market glut.
If this is actually READING articles and then making insights about their content, this could be a revolutionary search tool for any field! These guys should contact Lexis-Nexis or some other fact finding service.
Finding information is a hell of a skill - I know that a lot of my time as a grad student has been spent on literature reviews.
I am sure anyone here who has worked with end users has answered calls along the lines of "I have a foppy here that is too powerful for my version of the internet. Can you help me make my connection to hotmail faster? I think that there is a problem with the server."
There is just too much information and too many words being bounced around for the average joe user to handle... It has almost become the case that to operate a computer without hassles, you must understand how to build one. Can you imagine if Ford said that they expected everyone to know how to build a car before they could expect to be able to drive?
I had a friend call me up the other day who had gotten the "mystical spiral" on his screen from the haha@sexyfun.net virus... It was impossible for me to explain over the phone how to fix it, like this:
As things get more and more complicated with individual PCs, I thnk that there will be a lot of money to be made for the first person who starts an app-server like network in which there is NO maintainence to be done on the user side. If you do person-to-person support it is easy to see the gulf of knowledge that is creating the unquenchable demand for tech support...
You could have:
But seriously, this game will suck, just like the Gundam games and movie adaptations in general always have...
is here
Wouldn't want to try this thing first generation though - anyone seen the screen burn on 80's terminal monitors... Think about that on your eyeball...
Don't forget TRENCHCOAT COMPANIES!!
the evil bastards...
It is interesting to hear about technologies like this, but this is the same no-technical-details type article about optical switching that has been around for years.
5ns is a nice number, but how exactly are you going to figure out where you need to switch that packet in 5ns? the whole optical-electronic translation problem still remains.
I do have to give them some credit for getting "little tiny very fast mirrors" out of the equation, since this seems like a stupid, non-robust way to do things.
Now, how long before I can get one of these and a 5ns latency?
are at: opt-out.org
Unfortunately, since monied interests own most of the lobbyists if not lawmakers, it is unlikely that opt-in will be made law anytime soon. I also predict that targeted arketing that has been declared illegal in the states such as automated phone dialers and junk faxes will appear with increasing frequency now that international long distance rates are getting so low.
You can get that book for 90 cents on Amazon or anywhere else that sells dover thrift editions.
You can also get it for free online from Project Geutenberg
Any word on wether the new flatland will be sexist as hell? Reading the original was an interesting look into good old-school great chain of being type classism...
The nobitity are polygonal, with rank being determined by number of sides. Commoners are isocoles triangles, with acute angles at the low and equilaterals at the high end of the social spectrum. Women, whatever their rank, are lines.
I wonder how they are going to style the new one without being hopelessly sexist and classist while maintaining continuity...
Try this. I hardly get any junk mail or solicitations anymore. Now, if there were only a way to stop getting junk mail for the previous 10 years of tennants in my apartment...
Compare the ease of use of the bus technologies in their order of development:
Things are getting better all the time. I remember on the first PC I had, there were jumpers that had to be set in order to have the memory recognized. Now all that has to be done is to plug things in, and they (hopefully, usually) work. However, I don't think that there is any chance in hell that any OS running on PC hardware will not need to be rewritten a bit in order to deal with the next generation of Busses. A lot of the problems that we encounter with current systems is that they are designed for backward compatability...
I guess that this ad campaign is lost on me... I guess that it is trying to capitalize on the free-software-foundation-open-open-source-hippie vibe that people associate with linux, I guess. Are they pitching this to the pointy-haired managers or something? Not that ad campaigns generally make sense to me anyway.
The invasion of public space in cities by creeping advertising of this kind, stencilled graffiti-like ads (no, this is not the first of this kind), are another symptom of the malignant ad creep being experienced in major cities...
And whay, exactly, is so dang peace-love-linuxy about buying a server with linux over some other flavor of unix? I am for spreading linux as much as the next advocate, but when you are presumably paying for support AND the OS, where is the hippie philosophy?
Maybe I am wrong - is IBM advocating ordering their big iron servers and then downloading an ISO of the new redhat distro for S/390...
an adbusters link seems appropriate here somewhere.
Since macrovision is only to prevent dubbing of the video output, I assume that this kernel module will be responsible for feeding the DVD video stream to the S-video output...
Unloading the kernel module would probably just disable the S-video output or something like that.
So, who the heck is this aimed at? I am not aware of many people who use linux and want to be dependent upon the hardware vendor to supply kernels and binary-only kernel modules...
Another thing I would be interested in is if the DVD player sovtware or the hardware will regionalize. I think that the player is REQUIRED to regionalize if it is a 3rd generation player or later...
Another kludge to deal with stupid allocation of existing "real" IPs...
Well, at least somone realizes that there is going to be a need for different sollutions to the problem of migration to ipV6. Hell, we americans still can't figger out that there metric system, let alone how to use AAAA records.
Seriously though, There is a LOT of capital out there in hardware that doesn't support ipV6 yet, and a lot that never will... Lessee - large numbers of switches, routers, cable modems, print servers, gateway devices, etc... Using a tunnel to the 6bone will work for a little while, but there is some serious labor to be invested once ipv6 ONLY hosts start going up... Anyone have a feeling that there are going to be a lot of disgusting hacks to allow old hardware to keep working?
Somone PLEASE put something really cool on there with no IPv4 access so that we can all get a fire lit under our asses.
they need a MIR 2 so they have somewhere to send rich tourists and politicians of course, without pissing off us testy americans...
And of course, next time they will be precise about where they crash it so that everyone gets FREE TACOS....
Actually, they were eventually bought by Zoom... Before this there was fee-based tech support from a place called modem express, and no firmware upgrades. After zoom bought them, the drivers became available again...
Presumably the subscription will continue to be source of assets that somone will be interested in. As long as support costs a company less than they make in renewal fees somone will have an interest in collecting money... After there are too few people renewing to justify the cost of customer service, I would think that benevolent companies would make a "eternal key" public domain, but that's not to say that they would.
This reminds me of the drivers for my hayes modem. They disappeared for a while and now have come back since the rights were finally purchased by a company that cares... Of course, there is no advantage to the company offering the drivers now. It's kind of like legacy hardware support except that the money will keep coming in. It wouldn't surprise me if companies could be started merely to sell renewals for extinct companies.
In other news, yahoo will be featuring a pay-for-adoption service, allowing organ sales on their "yahoo auctions" site and spamming the shit out of all yahoo members with the "banned on e-bay" CD spam. They are also investigating plans to buy yahooka.com.
Yahoo execs were quoted as saying "we've found there is money in elicit markets, and hell if this dot com is going down without a fight..."