US manufacturing is *hard*, for sure, for small businesses. In fact, the system is set up so that I'm better off shipping jobs overseas.
We buy our extrusions from a small mill in California, a family owned business. Our first batch was great. We made a small engineering change on the next batch and ordered the extrusions in October of 2012. We received the parts in early December, and the black anodizing was crap - it literally looks like it's been dive bombed by seagulls with diarrhea. We shipped back 700 of 2000 pieces for rework, and we still have not received it back. Meanwhile, I'm out of stock, I have thousands of dollars of backorders that I can't fill, and I still have no idea when I'll get replacement stock back in. And to make things worse, when we complained initially about the quality of the parts, the answer we got was literally "you're small potatoes, we don't have time for you"
Meanwhile half way across the globe, my injection molder (http://blog.openbeamusa.com/2012/05/18/behind-the-scenes-injection-molding/) is churning out parts, 50,000 at a time. He always delivers when he says he'll deliver. With UPS and Expeditors I can get goods landed on my doorstep anywhere from 48 hours to less than 3 weeks for ocean freight shipping. It costed me $1000 to ocean freight half a metric *ton* of parts, and it'll be here in 3 weeks. The reason for going overseas for injection molding is simple: The material we use is a high end glass-reinforced nylon and the only shops the US that can handle it are military and aerospace molders and they demand an incredible premium.
On top of all this, I currently import a bunch of motors, pulleys, bearings for my 3D printer kits, US customs requires that I file an individual HTS classification for each line item, and taxes me individually. I then pay my old coworker's kid $20/hr, which is a princely sum for a 14 year old girl, to do my packaging and kitting. However, If I paid some guys overseas $10.00 a day to do the same job, I can declare my imported goods as "construction toy set" and avoid paying import taxes all-together. Therefore, there are absolutely NO incentives for me to keep the packaging job in the US, except for the short flexibility between an engineering change and getting the change pushed through on the line.
When it comes to export, I'm equally screwed. Until I signed up with Expeditors, there was no easy way for me to export my shipment around the world. So while I have customers in the UK, EU, and NZ/AU areas, for the longest time I had to resort to USPS Priority mail to ship them stuff, and priority mail rates just went up. Surface parcel service was discontinued a few years ago during budget cuts, so unless you are a bonded importer / exporter, you really have no option of doing a low cost export. Meanwhile, I paid US$20.00 for a batch of parts for 2 day shipping for a crate of timing belt pulleys from Shanghai to Hong Kong. There are so many Chinese logistics company these days that shipping is incredibly cheap to move things around in China.
People don't realize that the world is getting a lot smaller these days. The other day a vendor returned an email quotation - 5 weeks after initial RFQ. I had already paid someone else and landed parts in that amount of time. A supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link and it seems like for small businesses there are just no good options for manufacturing.
Wrong. FDM is used commercially to produce parts - including airplane parts. (I know, because one of my (OpenBeamUSA.com) vendors is printing cosmetic trim pieces for the Airbus A380). Commercial systems have no problem with overhang because they use a water soluble support system. And if you want something prototyped out of production representative material, it is one of the faster (and hands off) way to do it. I've used FDM for Ultem, Polycarbonate and ABS parts before.
The reason you don't see this in the hobby market, is because Dimension's patent on water soluble support, and heated build chamber, is valid until 2014 (or 2016). That's why there is no hobby grade 3D Printer on the market that is completely enclosed and they only have a heated bed. Most people enclose their printers if they are printing with ABS for a variety of reasons.
Kickstarter project creator here: I'm the guy behind OpenBeam (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ttstam/openbeam-an-open-source-miniature-construction-sys). And in case anyone's wondering - we shipped the majority of our rewards a *month* before the original promised date. That probably puts me in the top 5 percentile of projects...
Let's take a look at the new rules one by one:
“What are the risks and challenges this project faces, and what qualifies you to overcome them?”
- Okay, this is perfectly valid. I am surprised KS haven't done this earlier, because there are quite a few clueless guys (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/277210494/paint-be-gone) - *(http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/277210494/call-key) and http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/277210494/key-pad-case) out on here who seems be doing the "throw s*** at the wall and see what sticks" model of development.
"Product simulations are prohibited. Projects cannot simulate events to demonstrate what a product might do in the future. Products can only be shown performing actions that they’re able to perform in their current state of development."
"Product renderings are prohibited. Product images must be photos of the prototype as it currently exists. Products should be presented as they are. Over-promising leads to higher expectations for backers. The best rule of thumb: under-promise and over-deliver." Okay, so KS want a working prototype. I get that; that's pretty straightforward. But it doesn't stop someone from *faking* a prototype on camera. This however, won't stop a project like iCase (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1791911961/i-case-iphone-4s-and-iphone-4-bumper-case) from being a train wreck, as the protoytype would likely have been SLA, painted, and the problem wouldn't have been apparent until the metal parts were CNC machined and fitted and found to short out the iPhone's anntenna.
The OpenBeam project would have passed these requirements; we had a physical prototype for shooting the video, as part of a good product development practice.
"Offering multiple quantities of a reward is prohibited. Hardware and Product Design projects can only offer rewards in single quantities or a sensible set (some items only make sense as a pair or as a kit of several items, for instance). The development of new products can be especially complex for creators and offering multiple quantities feels premature, and can imply that products are shrink-wrapped and ready to ship."
And how would KS define "Multiple copies" of a reward? This I have a problem with. When you're in production, you are trying to get the manufacturing volume up to bring the costs down. If I were launching OpenBeam now, would I be limited to selling one stick of aluminum and one of each bracket to my backers (who wouldn't be able to do anything useful then with this?) If I packaged it up as a "kit", like I had on my KS, would I have gotten around these restrictions? Who decides whether multiple copies of the same item is required for the item to work (ie, construction toy kit), and when it becomes a way to side step your rules? How much "individual judgement" is there to allow the listing of a project, and do you consider the project creator's background (ie, having successfully delivered on a previous project) when you allow them to post? With the amount of controversy about what gets allowed (*cough* Tangibot (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mattstrong/the-tangibot-3d-printer-the-affordable-makerbot-re)*cough*) and what doesn't on Kickstarter already, this rule is probably going to make your selection process more Apple App-store like (arbitrary with no recourse for the project creator if you are not selected).
(Edited to add: The real problem, that KS probably don't want to admit, is that none of their hipster workers have a sufficient engineering / science / technology bac
There's two issues here: There's the issue of whether current (or more stringent) security measures can still be beaten by a determined foe, then there's the issue of actual Li-Ion batteries going kaboom. I'll address the later.
Li-Ion batteries are some of the highest energy-density storage devices available to the general public. As such, they *are* dangerous. I design battery packs for a living, and let me tell you - if not for microprocessors and safety circuits, we wouldn't use Li-Ion batteries.
They are the only batteries that I know of that can fail dangerously when over-discharged. You start creating internal shorts of lithium whiskers between the cathode and anode, which bypasses any cell safety circuits. They go boom very spectacularly if you overcharge them. The model RC heli folks have found this out the hard way, as they tend to run bare cells without protection circuits to save weight. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcwOwf55Rtc). They have very low internal resistance, which means in a short circuit, they can release energy very quickly. Every manufacturing engineer at the company I work at have welded calipers to cell tabs, from accidentally touching the wrong stuff while taking measurements.
For a good cell manufacturer - and I'm talking about the LiShens, Sanyos, Kokams, and Panasonics of the world, the failure rate is 1 in 1 million. It's just a fact of life. The fly-by-night operations in China, responsible for some of the god-awful counterfeit cells out there, god knows what those failure rates are. And the vendors who use these cells tends to not put in the safety features (look up a BQ20Z70 chip, for example) to make a failure more likely.
The nightmare scenario would be some dude getting some last minute work in at the terminal, plugging the battery in for charging. Then the plane takes off with the laptop in the overhead compartment where the oxygen lines for the safety masks are kept, and the cells let go. Judging from how much energy a single 18650 cell can contain, it could easily do some very serious damage.
With the prices on Li-Ion dropping and more devices using them, it's no wonder that almost all of the 22 incidents reported occured in the last 3 years. Still a small number considering the amount of airplanes in the air at any given time, but enough for someone to pause and think...
Yeah, but you'd have to film it in 30 second clips, as that's about how long you have in zero G. Better have a hell of a fluffer to make sure the guy's always good to go. Not to mention that if the girls' getting deepthroated or teabagged while they transition into the 2G pullup, both parties might be in for a hell of a surprise.
It's a medium format sensor; the silicon imaging area is twice as big as a single 35mm film slide. Currently there's only a handful of cameras that has a "full frame" sensor for 35mm.
So, no, it will NEVER be used in a consumer-level camera. This is for people who shoot billboard ads.
$1k per Megapixel is about right for a Hasselblad - the H3DII-39 is about $35k. And that's just the body only. Lenses start at 3k. Zeiss makes'em. Aside from Zeiss's optical reputation, these lenses are special because the clockwork mechanism and the shutter are integrated into the lens.
Unlike a DSLR which has to expose the image sensor a slit at a time at higher shutter speeds, this means that the entire frame can be exposed simultaneously, down to 1/8000 sec.
In other words... not your typical point and shoot or Digital Rebel XSi:-)
We used to bring a HD magnet down to the pin ball machine in high school. The owner of the Lamp Post pizza didn't mind as long as we kept buying drinks and pizza... he thought it was pretty clever:-)
(Pinballs are basically big steel bearings... place HD magnet at the bottom pass the flipper and voila! Unlimited life.)
Never did manage to leverage that little tidbit of knowledge to get a date...:sigh:
As an immigrant kid that went to high school here, I'll define that "culture malaise" for you. Academics just isn't given as high a recognition in American schools. The HS football game, the HS football team, the cheerleaders get paraded, and it's cool to be a jock. When's the last time you see the Math team, the Chess team, or the Academic Decathlon team get that sort of "hero's welcome"?
I guess I didn't try to act dumb enough. I flat out asked the sales guy if they unlock after contract is over. No. okay, what if I have to go overseas? "We provide roaming". You mean I can't use a local sim? "No".
They really should sue AT&T/Cingular first. Those bastards NEVER let you unlock your phone - not even after your contract period is over. That is why I refuse to go with them. With T-Mobile at least I can get it unlocked at the end of the contract.
Here's my easy fix to your problem - when I pull a card out, I leave the card door open, and when I pull the battery out for recharge, I leave the battery door open. I've trained myself that right before I grab the camera (usually sitting on a designated spot on a shelf) I visually check the doors and make sure that they are closed.
I also have a DSLR, which I never turn off - I just tap the shutter release to get it out of sleep mode, snap a pic real quick to make sure everything's cool before I go out.
Oh the horrors - a non-technical solution to a technical problem!:-)
You don't get a "green" cert. You get an EV-SSL, or, Extended Verification SSL. It's not like MS invented something horrible to extort money out of people. FYI, Firefox and Opera implements anti-phishing toolbars as well.
I'm a small businses owner, and guess what, I would have ZERO problems with this "green bar" policy.
Reason? I made damn sure that I'm incorporated as either a limited liability company (L.L.C) (www.3dprints4less.com - not up yet) or a S-corporation (www.seattleprototypes.com).
In this day and age of litigation, there is NO reason why if you're going into businses you should even consider sole proprietarship or general partnership agreement. IANAL, but go pick up any of the Nolo self-help books (recomemnded by lawyer friends) and they make it clear: The LLC and corp status is a bit more paperwork to upkeep, but offers MUCH better protection for the business owners. As a sole proprietarship, you are personally liable - down to your last nickel in your bank account, if your business incurs any liabilities. As a general partnership, you would be personally held liable for not only your business's liabilities, but the action of your partners well (if your partner racks up a debt, skips town, and the creditor have easy access to you - guess who's in the hot seat).
Not to mention, there's huge benifits you can get tax wise, from being a corporation or LLC. Corporate tax rates are a heck of a lot lower for one!
So, Aunt Joy making custom stockings, please, go pick up a self help book and get your business setup properly. This way some slimebag ambulance chaser can't sue you out of the house you're growing old in when some irresponsible parent let their kid chew off a bit of the stocking and the kid chokes on it.
I used to have a bowl of gumballs and dutch mints on my desk at college to help with late night studying. They'd disappear much quicker than anticipated - it was my roomie's friends, so it wasn't like I could just have a nice talk with my roommate about it.
One day I decided to fix the problem by replacing the bowl of mints with paintballs, before leaving for the weekend.
Came back Sunday night to find a chewed paintball split into a kleenix in my trash can. Never had a problem with candy theft after that!
- SK
Wars aren't won by armies praticing democracy...
on
The Open Source Business?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Obligatory Movie Quotes:
"Business is War" - Rising Sun - and - "We are here to preserve democracy, not to pratice it" - Crimson Tide
I've had some pretty shitty bosses in my career, and I'm now in the process of starting my own companies. One's bringing money in, the other will get there soon.
This is my comment(s):
In my current 9-5 job, whenever the democratic approach, people tend to debate things over until there's nothing left to be debated. Everyone in an organization fullfills different tasks, have different qualifications and skillsets as a result. If you were to run an org with true democracy, NOTHING will get done. You would have to A) make sure that EVERYONE understands WTF that they are voting on, B) you'd get so many different variants of ideas and sorting them through and then doing voting would be a nightmare, and C) there won't be any time left over from voting and hearing everyone's ideas.
What works best is soliciting a few ideas (have ideas bubble up to the top) then discussing a select few ideas that made it, and then having a decision made. A good leader would also justify why that decision is made (ie, I think this has merit, I"m aware of options X, Y and Z, but I'm chosing option D because of blah blah blah) and a good team should learn to stand behind the leader's decision. This of course goes both ways and assume a competant leader (which my current 9-5 job lacks, hence me heading off and starting my own business in the other 8 hours a day).
I've got a girlfriend (no joke) that knits, and while I can't understand the appeal behind it, I've just write it off as one of her quirks.
Can someone explain to me what the appeal is? Does clothes REALLY matter that much to some people that they'd spend the hours and hours on end to knit a pair of socks, or a sweater, or ? I understand the appeal of "see if I can do it", but to me it seems like a big repetition of moves, nothing more.
* It can't be to save money, b/c the material is ungodly expensive - well, the nicer yarns anyway. * I have a hard time believing it's because of the "custom" nature of it, because most people follow standard patterns out of pattern books. * I don't know how much of a challenge it can be, since knitters seems to be able to multi-task fairly well, which suggests that it doesn't require a lot of mental concentration.
So, $100 (or more) of yarn and a month or so later you'd have a sweater that you'd have to hand wash and pretty much treat like a museum piece. And possibly grow out of fairly quickly.
I'm not tryin to diss anybody, just want to hear what makes that hobby so appealing.
You realize that the GDP per capita in the US is about US$40k, vs about US$5.6k for China?
For the SAME job, the Chinese chemist / engineer is making a hell of a lot more, relative to local population. Cost of living is lower; compared to peers the chemist / engineer is doing MUCH better. Assume $50k a year, typical starting salary for a college grad in engineering, making $10k in China will be like having an $80k a year job in the US.
I grew up in Hong Kong SAR. Education is seen as the key to "the good life", go to a good school so you can go to college, so you can get a degree in a technical field and hold a high paying job. I bet if the people that actually do the work and innovation gets paid their fair share, we'd see more people going into the sciences too. Does a CEO really deserve 300+ times the pay of an engineer?
I own a F828 as well. The camera is the F717's sucessor and uses a different, 8MPx 4 color CCD (regular CCDs pick up the RGB, the one on the F828 picks up RGB and Emerald - then a tweaked image processor takes the emerald signal to give better shading of greens and blues). The camera CCD's "Super HAD" design uses bigger lens on the chip's surface for higher sensitivity, which probably means they use a different sealing process.
So, the F828's CCD is most likely built on a completely different assembly line using different processes. I wouldn't worry about it failing. Yet.
A) The demo was held at the World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. All the robots that were demoed there were functional to various degrees (some are commercially available, some are lab prototypes, but they all were functional - no funky mockups). I know this because I was there (http://erinandterencetravels.blogspot.com/2005/09 /back-in-tokyo.html) and I recognize exactly where in the EXPO that would be demoed at. That was demoed at the Robot Station, in the kid's zone.
B) The sticker on the Endoskeleton's thigh is for NEDO - New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (http://www.nedo.go.jp/english/). This is Japan's largest public R&D management organization. They are the equivalent of the NSF (http://www.nsf.gov/) in the US of A. Hardly the guys to sponsor amateur hacks.
My roommate from college (UW) used to, back when he was in High School, make reservations for him and his date at the space needle restaurant, then ride the elevator up and cancel the reservation:-).
Of course, being a slashdotter, the hardest part about duplicating that feat for me was finding a girl to take...
Yeah, right.... have you EVER used an NMR for ANTHING aside from what your instructor handed you, or tried making a sample yourself?
I'll give you a hint - NMR solvents, such as CDCL3, are VERY high purity, because any contamination will show up on the NMR and mask the readings. Didn't air the sample tube out properly after rinsing with acetone? You'll see the acetone peaks. Drop of water somewhere because you didn't dry it properly? You'll get that big blob from the OH group.
That ink is most likely a mixture of chemicals. Running it under an NMR will give you peaks. LOTS of peaks. Like - a solid set of spikes. You won't be able to read anything in there. Even if you were to run it through some sort of magical chromatography setup to separate out all the component chemicals, you'd still have to figure out stuff like particle size, mixing ratios, etc.
Palm is VERY quickly losing my respect with the way they treat their customers.
I started out with a Handspring Visor, my girlfriend has a Palm 3 series PDA. Almost all my friends and family uses Palm PDAs. That said, my Palm T3 will most likely be the last Palm PDA that I'll buy.
Started out with me purchasing my Nokia 6820 video phone in Asia - naively thinking that, "Hey, it's bluetooth, it'll be supported". It took almost half year after that phone's release before Palm would release drivers for it in their phone update - but, the drive only works as a modem driver. SMS and remote dialer apps for the phone isn't support. It *is* supported fully for the Palm T5 though.
Side by side comparison the T5 really isn't that much different from the T3 - minor tweaks in OS, faster processor and more memory. But what if I were to upgrade to the T5?
Forget it. I'd be ditching the "Collapsing PDA" feature that makes the T3 small and compact to carry, the silent, vibrating alarm for when you don't want to be obnoxious, the voice recorder functionality. I gain the ability to use the PDA as a flash drive, which I already own a few, and can add into the PDA via 3rd party software. They tossed out the Palm Universal Port which up till now most accessories use, as a standardized interface to the PDA - and for a top of the line product, the damn thing doesn't even come with a cradle.
What the hell are they thinking?
With the improvement of Pocket PC handhelds - and more vendors resulting in more selections - I'd have a hard time justifying purchasing another Palm PDA.
-=- Terence
Nothing's unpickable - how big a mess do you want?
on
Steel Bolt Hacking
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· Score: 5, Interesting
For locks like a Medaco lock - in which the tumblers have to be rotated to a certain angle (usually 15 deg increments) as well as lifted to a certain height - AFAIK there are no tools out there that can pick that. However, even the strongest locks uses brass for the tumblers (Medacos are no exception - at least the one that I opened up to play with:) ).
Brass is primarily a copper alloy. It is extremely reactive in the presence of strong acids. A few years back, a friend of mine wanted to look at a smart card under a microscope - just curious, that's all. I was working in a research lab then, and I mixed hydrochloric acid with nitric acid to make aqua regia. We were able to dissolve the GOLD contacts off the smart card to expose the chip underneath. (Aqua regia is used for lot assay analysis of alloys to determine alloy composition - you start by dissolving the metal, then feed it through some form of spectroscopy machine to measure the quantity and the composition of the metal). If I had squirted that into the door lock and held it in place with some bubble gum... I could probably have opened the door with just a screwdriver after the tumblers are dissolved.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a small business owner (I created OpenBeam: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ttstam/openbeam-an-open-source-miniature-construction-sys). It is basically a small, nice version of an erector set, that is currently being used for building 3D printers. (See: http://reprap.org/wiki/Kossel).
US manufacturing is *hard*, for sure, for small businesses. In fact, the system is set up so that I'm better off shipping jobs overseas.
We buy our extrusions from a small mill in California, a family owned business. Our first batch was great. We made a small engineering change on the next batch and ordered the extrusions in October of 2012. We received the parts in early December, and the black anodizing was crap - it literally looks like it's been dive bombed by seagulls with diarrhea. We shipped back 700 of 2000 pieces for rework, and we still have not received it back. Meanwhile, I'm out of stock, I have thousands of dollars of backorders that I can't fill, and I still have no idea when I'll get replacement stock back in. And to make things worse, when we complained initially about the quality of the parts, the answer we got was literally "you're small potatoes, we don't have time for you"
Meanwhile half way across the globe, my injection molder (http://blog.openbeamusa.com/2012/05/18/behind-the-scenes-injection-molding/) is churning out parts, 50,000 at a time. He always delivers when he says he'll deliver. With UPS and Expeditors I can get goods landed on my doorstep anywhere from 48 hours to less than 3 weeks for ocean freight shipping. It costed me $1000 to ocean freight half a metric *ton* of parts, and it'll be here in 3 weeks. The reason for going overseas for injection molding is simple: The material we use is a high end glass-reinforced nylon and the only shops the US that can handle it are military and aerospace molders and they demand an incredible premium.
On top of all this, I currently import a bunch of motors, pulleys, bearings for my 3D printer kits, US customs requires that I file an individual HTS classification for each line item, and taxes me individually. I then pay my old coworker's kid $20/hr, which is a princely sum for a 14 year old girl, to do my packaging and kitting. However, If I paid some guys overseas $10.00 a day to do the same job, I can declare my imported goods as "construction toy set" and avoid paying import taxes all-together. Therefore, there are absolutely NO incentives for me to keep the packaging job in the US, except for the short flexibility between an engineering change and getting the change pushed through on the line.
When it comes to export, I'm equally screwed. Until I signed up with Expeditors, there was no easy way for me to export my shipment around the world. So while I have customers in the UK, EU, and NZ/AU areas, for the longest time I had to resort to USPS Priority mail to ship them stuff, and priority mail rates just went up. Surface parcel service was discontinued a few years ago during budget cuts, so unless you are a bonded importer / exporter, you really have no option of doing a low cost export. Meanwhile, I paid US$20.00 for a batch of parts for 2 day shipping for a crate of timing belt pulleys from Shanghai to Hong Kong. There are so many Chinese logistics company these days that shipping is incredibly cheap to move things around in China.
People don't realize that the world is getting a lot smaller these days. The other day a vendor returned an email quotation - 5 weeks after initial RFQ. I had already paid someone else and landed parts in that amount of time. A supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link and it seems like for small businesses there are just no good options for manufacturing.
-=- Terence
Wrong. FDM is used commercially to produce parts - including airplane parts. (I know, because one of my (OpenBeamUSA.com) vendors is printing cosmetic trim pieces for the Airbus A380). Commercial systems have no problem with overhang because they use a water soluble support system. And if you want something prototyped out of production representative material, it is one of the faster (and hands off) way to do it. I've used FDM for Ultem, Polycarbonate and ABS parts before.
The reason you don't see this in the hobby market, is because Dimension's patent on water soluble support, and heated build chamber, is valid until 2014 (or 2016). That's why there is no hobby grade 3D Printer on the market that is completely enclosed and they only have a heated bed. Most people enclose their printers if they are printing with ABS for a variety of reasons.
-=- Terence
Posted also on the Kickstarter comment section:
Kickstarter project creator here: I'm the guy behind OpenBeam (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ttstam/openbeam-an-open-source-miniature-construction-sys).
And in case anyone's wondering - we shipped the majority of our rewards a *month* before the original promised date. That probably puts me in the top 5 percentile of projects...
Let's take a look at the new rules one by one:
“What are the risks and challenges this project faces, and what qualifies you to overcome them?”
- Okay, this is perfectly valid. I am surprised KS haven't done this earlier, because there are quite a few clueless guys (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/277210494/paint-be-gone) - *(http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/277210494/call-key) and http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/277210494/key-pad-case) out on here who seems be doing the "throw s*** at the wall and see what sticks" model of development.
"Product simulations are prohibited. Projects cannot simulate events to demonstrate what a product might do in the future. Products can only be shown performing actions that they’re able to perform in their current state of development."
"Product renderings are prohibited. Product images must be photos of the prototype as it currently exists.
Products should be presented as they are. Over-promising leads to higher expectations for backers. The best rule of thumb: under-promise and over-deliver."
Okay, so KS want a working prototype. I get that; that's pretty straightforward. But it doesn't stop someone from *faking* a prototype on camera. This however, won't stop a project like iCase (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1791911961/i-case-iphone-4s-and-iphone-4-bumper-case) from being a train wreck, as the protoytype would likely have been SLA, painted, and the problem wouldn't have been apparent until the metal parts were CNC machined and fitted and found to short out the iPhone's anntenna.
The OpenBeam project would have passed these requirements; we had a physical prototype for shooting the video, as part of a good product development practice.
"Offering multiple quantities of a reward is prohibited. Hardware and Product Design projects can only offer rewards in single quantities or a sensible set (some items only make sense as a pair or as a kit of several items, for instance). The development of new products can be especially complex for creators and offering multiple quantities feels premature, and can imply that products are shrink-wrapped and ready to ship."
And how would KS define "Multiple copies" of a reward? This I have a problem with. When you're in production, you are trying to get the manufacturing volume up to bring the costs down. If I were launching OpenBeam now, would I be limited to selling one stick of aluminum and one of each bracket to my backers (who wouldn't be able to do anything useful then with this?) If I packaged it up as a "kit", like I had on my KS, would I have gotten around these restrictions? Who decides whether multiple copies of the same item is required for the item to work (ie, construction toy kit), and when it becomes a way to side step your rules? How much "individual judgement" is there to allow the listing of a project, and do you consider the project creator's background (ie, having successfully delivered on a previous project) when you allow them to post? With the amount of controversy about what gets allowed (*cough* Tangibot (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mattstrong/the-tangibot-3d-printer-the-affordable-makerbot-re)*cough*) and what doesn't on Kickstarter already, this rule is probably going to make your selection process more Apple App-store like (arbitrary with no recourse for the project creator if you are not selected).
(Edited to add: The real problem, that KS probably don't want to admit, is that none of their hipster workers have a sufficient engineering / science / technology bac
There's two issues here: There's the issue of whether current (or more stringent) security measures can still be beaten by a determined foe, then there's the issue of actual Li-Ion batteries going kaboom. I'll address the later.
Li-Ion batteries are some of the highest energy-density storage devices available to the general public. As such, they *are* dangerous. I design battery packs for a living, and let me tell you - if not for microprocessors and safety circuits, we wouldn't use Li-Ion batteries.
They are the only batteries that I know of that can fail dangerously when over-discharged. You start creating internal shorts of lithium whiskers between the cathode and anode, which bypasses any cell safety circuits.
They go boom very spectacularly if you overcharge them. The model RC heli folks have found this out the hard way, as they tend to run bare cells without protection circuits to save weight. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcwOwf55Rtc).
They have very low internal resistance, which means in a short circuit, they can release energy very quickly. Every manufacturing engineer at the company I work at have welded calipers to cell tabs, from accidentally touching the wrong stuff while taking measurements.
For a good cell manufacturer - and I'm talking about the LiShens, Sanyos, Kokams, and Panasonics of the world, the failure rate is 1 in 1 million. It's just a fact of life. The fly-by-night operations in China, responsible for some of the god-awful counterfeit cells out there, god knows what those failure rates are. And the vendors who use these cells tends to not put in the safety features (look up a BQ20Z70 chip, for example) to make a failure more likely.
The nightmare scenario would be some dude getting some last minute work in at the terminal, plugging the battery in for charging. Then the plane takes off with the laptop in the overhead compartment where the oxygen lines for the safety masks are kept, and the cells let go. Judging from how much energy a single 18650 cell can contain, it could easily do some very serious damage.
With the prices on Li-Ion dropping and more devices using them, it's no wonder that almost all of the 22 incidents reported occured in the last 3 years. Still a small number considering the amount of airplanes in the air at any given time, but enough for someone to pause and think...
Yeah, but you'd have to film it in 30 second clips, as that's about how long you have in zero G. Better have a hell of a fluffer to make sure the guy's always good to go. Not to mention that if the girls' getting deepthroated or teabagged while they transition into the 2G pullup, both parties might be in for a hell of a surprise.
It's a medium format sensor; the silicon imaging area is twice as big as a single 35mm film slide. Currently there's only a handful of cameras that has a "full frame" sensor for 35mm.
So, no, it will NEVER be used in a consumer-level camera. This is for people who shoot billboard ads.
This is the camera that sensor's going into:
http://www.hasselbladusa.com/products/h-system/h3dii-50.aspx
$1k per Megapixel is about right for a Hasselblad - the H3DII-39 is about $35k. And that's just the body only. Lenses start at 3k. Zeiss makes'em. Aside from Zeiss's optical reputation, these lenses are special because the clockwork mechanism and the shutter are integrated into the lens.
http://www.zeiss.com/C12567A8003B58B9/Contents-Frame/2DFB31CE532E5E32C125711B0038D874
Unlike a DSLR which has to expose the image sensor a slit at a time at higher shutter speeds, this means that the entire frame can be exposed simultaneously, down to 1/8000 sec.
In other words... not your typical point and shoot or Digital Rebel XSi :-)
We used to bring a HD magnet down to the pin ball machine in high school. The owner of the Lamp Post pizza didn't mind as long as we kept buying drinks and pizza... he thought it was pretty clever :-)
:sigh:
(Pinballs are basically big steel bearings... place HD magnet at the bottom pass the flipper and voila! Unlimited life.)
Never did manage to leverage that little tidbit of knowledge to get a date...
As an immigrant kid that went to high school here, I'll define that "culture malaise" for you. Academics just isn't given as high a recognition in American schools. The HS football game, the HS football team, the cheerleaders get paraded, and it's cool to be a jock. When's the last time you see the Math team, the Chess team, or the Academic Decathlon team get that sort of "hero's welcome"?
I'm surprised no one posted this: http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/00jun/uf001930.gif
I guess I didn't try to act dumb enough. I flat out asked the sales guy if they unlock after contract is over. No. okay, what if I have to go overseas? "We provide roaming". You mean I can't use a local sim? "No".
That was about a year or so ago.
They really should sue AT&T/Cingular first. Those bastards NEVER let you unlock your phone - not even after your contract period is over. That is why I refuse to go with them. With T-Mobile at least I can get it unlocked at the end of the contract.
Here's my easy fix to your problem - when I pull a card out, I leave the card door open, and when I pull the battery out for recharge, I leave the battery door open. I've trained myself that right before I grab the camera (usually sitting on a designated spot on a shelf) I visually check the doors and make sure that they are closed.
:-)
I also have a DSLR, which I never turn off - I just tap the shutter release to get it out of sleep mode, snap a pic real quick to make sure everything's cool before I go out.
Oh the horrors - a non-technical solution to a technical problem!
RTFA.
You don't get a "green" cert. You get an EV-SSL, or, Extended Verification SSL. It's not like MS invented something horrible to extort money out of people. FYI, Firefox and Opera implements anti-phishing toolbars as well.
http://www.digicert.com/ev-ssl-certification.htm
And, guess what? cost of the EV-SSL, along with payments to banks, credit card processors, etc... are just a part of the cost of doing business.
-=- Terence
I'm a small businses owner, and guess what, I would have ZERO problems with this "green bar" policy.
Reason? I made damn sure that I'm incorporated as either a limited liability company (L.L.C) (www.3dprints4less.com - not up yet) or a S-corporation (www.seattleprototypes.com).
In this day and age of litigation, there is NO reason why if you're going into businses you should even consider sole proprietarship or general partnership agreement. IANAL, but go pick up any of the Nolo self-help books (recomemnded by lawyer friends) and they make it clear: The LLC and corp status is a bit more paperwork to upkeep, but offers MUCH better protection for the business owners. As a sole proprietarship, you are personally liable - down to your last nickel in your bank account, if your business incurs any liabilities. As a general partnership, you would be personally held liable for not only your business's liabilities, but the action of your partners well (if your partner racks up a debt, skips town, and the creditor have easy access to you - guess who's in the hot seat).
Not to mention, there's huge benifits you can get tax wise, from being a corporation or LLC. Corporate tax rates are a heck of a lot lower for one!
So, Aunt Joy making custom stockings, please, go pick up a self help book and get your business setup properly. This way some slimebag ambulance chaser can't sue you out of the house you're growing old in when some irresponsible parent let their kid chew off a bit of the stocking and the kid chokes on it.
-=- Terence
I used to have a bowl of gumballs and dutch mints on my desk at college to help with late night studying. They'd disappear much quicker than anticipated - it was my roomie's friends, so it wasn't like I could just have a nice talk with my roommate about it.
One day I decided to fix the problem by replacing the bowl of mints with paintballs, before leaving for the weekend.
Came back Sunday night to find a chewed paintball split into a kleenix in my trash can. Never had a problem with candy theft after that!
- SK
Obligatory Movie Quotes:
"Business is War" - Rising Sun
- and -
"We are here to preserve democracy, not to pratice it" - Crimson Tide
I've had some pretty shitty bosses in my career, and I'm now in the process of starting my own companies. One's bringing money in, the other will get there soon.
This is my comment(s):
In my current 9-5 job, whenever the democratic approach, people tend to debate things over until there's nothing left to be debated. Everyone in an organization fullfills different tasks, have different qualifications and skillsets as a result. If you were to run an org with true democracy, NOTHING will get done. You would have to A) make sure that EVERYONE understands WTF that they are voting on, B) you'd get so many different variants of ideas and sorting them through and then doing voting would be a nightmare, and C) there won't be any time left over from voting and hearing everyone's ideas.
What works best is soliciting a few ideas (have ideas bubble up to the top) then discussing a select few ideas that made it, and then having a decision made. A good leader would also justify why that decision is made (ie, I think this has merit, I"m aware of options X, Y and Z, but I'm chosing option D because of blah blah blah) and a good team should learn to stand behind the leader's decision. This of course goes both ways and assume a competant leader (which my current 9-5 job lacks, hence me heading off and starting my own business in the other 8 hours a day).
- SK
They look fake because the little caption on top, in Chinese, says "Simulated Rendering".
The rest of the images, they must have filmed in the same sound stage that faked the Apollo moon landings.
-=- Terence
I've got a girlfriend (no joke) that knits, and while I can't understand the appeal behind it, I've just write it off as one of her quirks.
Can someone explain to me what the appeal is? Does clothes REALLY matter that much to some people that they'd spend the hours and hours on end to knit a pair of socks, or a sweater, or ? I understand the appeal of "see if I can do it", but to me it seems like a big repetition of moves, nothing more.
* It can't be to save money, b/c the material is ungodly expensive - well, the nicer yarns anyway.
* I have a hard time believing it's because of the "custom" nature of it, because most people follow standard patterns out of pattern books.
* I don't know how much of a challenge it can be, since knitters seems to be able to multi-task fairly well, which suggests that it doesn't require a lot of mental concentration.
So, $100 (or more) of yarn and a month or so later you'd have a sweater that you'd have to hand wash and pretty much treat like a museum piece. And possibly grow out of fairly quickly.
I'm not tryin to diss anybody, just want to hear what makes that hobby so appealing.
-SK
You realize that the GDP per capita in the US is about US$40k, vs about US$5.6k for China?
For the SAME job, the Chinese chemist / engineer is making a hell of a lot more, relative to local population. Cost of living is lower; compared to peers the chemist / engineer is doing MUCH better. Assume $50k a year, typical starting salary for a college grad in engineering, making $10k in China will be like having an $80k a year job in the US.
I grew up in Hong Kong SAR. Education is seen as the key to "the good life", go to a good school so you can go to college, so you can get a degree in a technical field and hold a high paying job. I bet if the people that actually do the work and innovation gets paid their fair share, we'd see more people going into the sciences too. Does a CEO really deserve 300+ times the pay of an engineer?
I own a F828 as well. The camera is the F717's sucessor and uses a different, 8MPx 4 color CCD (regular CCDs pick up the RGB, the one on the F828 picks up RGB and Emerald - then a tweaked image processor takes the emerald signal to give better shading of greens and blues). The camera CCD's "Super HAD" design uses bigger lens on the chip's surface for higher sensitivity, which probably means they use a different sealing process.
So, the F828's CCD is most likely built on a completely different assembly line using different processes. I wouldn't worry about it failing. Yet.
-=- Terence
If you look closely at the second picture that you linekd to, http://www.cyberdyne.jp/Image/sakurai_double.JPG - you can see two things.
9 /back-in-tokyo.html) and I recognize exactly where in the EXPO that would be demoed at. That was demoed at the Robot Station, in the kid's zone.
A) The demo was held at the World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. All the robots that were demoed there were functional to various degrees (some are commercially available, some are lab prototypes, but they all were functional - no funky mockups). I know this because I was there (http://erinandterencetravels.blogspot.com/2005/0
B) The sticker on the Endoskeleton's thigh is for NEDO - New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (http://www.nedo.go.jp/english/). This is Japan's largest public R&D management organization. They are the equivalent of the NSF (http://www.nsf.gov/) in the US of A. Hardly the guys to sponsor amateur hacks.
My roommate from college (UW) used to, back when he was in High School, make reservations for him and his date at the space needle restaurant, then ride the elevator up and cancel the reservation :-).
Of course, being a slashdotter, the hardest part about duplicating that feat for me was finding a girl to take...
Yeah, right.... have you EVER used an NMR for ANTHING aside from what your instructor handed you, or tried making a sample yourself?
I'll give you a hint - NMR solvents, such as CDCL3, are VERY high purity, because any contamination will show up on the NMR and mask the readings. Didn't air the sample tube out properly after rinsing with acetone? You'll see the acetone peaks. Drop of water somewhere because you didn't dry it properly? You'll get that big blob from the OH group.
That ink is most likely a mixture of chemicals. Running it under an NMR will give you peaks. LOTS of peaks. Like - a solid set of spikes. You won't be able to read anything in there. Even if you were to run it through some sort of magical chromatography setup to separate out all the component chemicals, you'd still have to figure out stuff like particle size, mixing ratios, etc.
-=- SK
Palm is VERY quickly losing my respect with the way they treat their customers.
I started out with a Handspring Visor, my girlfriend has a Palm 3 series PDA. Almost all my friends and family uses Palm PDAs. That said, my Palm T3 will most likely be the last Palm PDA that I'll buy.
Started out with me purchasing my Nokia 6820 video phone in Asia - naively thinking that, "Hey, it's bluetooth, it'll be supported". It took almost half year after that phone's release before Palm would release drivers for it in their phone update - but, the drive only works as a modem driver. SMS and remote dialer apps for the phone isn't support. It *is* supported fully for the Palm T5 though.
Side by side comparison the T5 really isn't that much different from the T3 - minor tweaks in OS, faster processor and more memory. But what if I were to upgrade to the T5?
Forget it. I'd be ditching the "Collapsing PDA" feature that makes the T3 small and compact to carry, the silent, vibrating alarm for when you don't want to be obnoxious, the voice recorder functionality. I gain the ability to use the PDA as a flash drive, which I already own a few, and can add into the PDA via 3rd party software. They tossed out the Palm Universal Port which up till now most accessories use, as a standardized interface to the PDA - and for a top of the line product, the damn thing doesn't even come with a cradle.
What the hell are they thinking?
With the improvement of Pocket PC handhelds - and more vendors resulting in more selections - I'd have a hard time justifying purchasing another Palm PDA.
-=- Terence
For locks like a Medaco lock - in which the tumblers have to be rotated to a certain angle (usually 15 deg increments) as well as lifted to a certain height - AFAIK there are no tools out there that can pick that. However, even the strongest locks uses brass for the tumblers (Medacos are no exception - at least the one that I opened up to play with :) ).
... I could probably have opened the door with just a screwdriver after the tumblers are dissolved.
Brass is primarily a copper alloy. It is extremely reactive in the presence of strong acids. A few years back, a friend of mine wanted to look at a smart card under a microscope - just curious, that's all. I was working in a research lab then, and I mixed hydrochloric acid with nitric acid to make aqua regia. We were able to dissolve the GOLD contacts off the smart card to expose the chip underneath. (Aqua regia is used for lot assay analysis of alloys to determine alloy composition - you start by dissolving the metal, then feed it through some form of spectroscopy machine to measure the quantity and the composition of the metal). If I had squirted that into the door lock and held it in place with some bubble gum
- SK