Unless their lease specifically includes a clause whereby they can dictate (beyond reason -- they can obviously protect their property from damage) the use of their machine while under lease, and you'd be a fool to sign such a document,
Come on AC you've clearly never read or signed a lease contract. For anything, housing, cars, machinery... Google around, lots of lease contracts on line. Its extremely rare not to have a clause containing a phrase like "agrees not to engage in or permit any unlawful use of the" whatever.
There will always be idiots who wrote their own contract on the back of a bar napkin while drunk, but "real businesses" never do anything that stupid and always include a unlawful / illegal activity clause.
The printer maker is worried about becoming liable
Not just risking liability but risking revenue loss and probably capital loss. You make money as a leaser by leasing stuff to people who pay you. Not by investing in expensive stuff that rots in a federal evidence vault for years maybe a decade or two.
It depends on the costs of printing to the costs of buying a made item from the shop.
Any product over $50/Kg or so is a dead man walking today, right now. DnD miniature manufacturers should be Very nervous. On the other hand as I recall the shipping crate for my new home toilet, that was only about a buck per pound, (Its shocking how heavy a toilet is, somehow I thought it would be as light as a dining room chair) so that's safe for well over an order of magnitude of decreasing price. Now the little plastic handles on the bathroom faucets that cost $5 for a fraction of an ounce, they're toast. The business model where the handle that broke on my toilet that only costs $20 for a new handle and trip lever arm is toast, value engineered to fail annually, that is toast.
To a first approximation it'll never be all that much cheaper to turn pellets into filament that it'll be to turn pellets into injection molded stuff. So if a mfgr can keep his profit, R+D, and overhead costs reasonable, they'll never be put of out business by printing. Example: Cheap disposable plastic drinking cup is never going to cost much more than the cost of plastic to make it.
How is a 3D printer any different than a lathe, grinder or a milling machine?
Its not. Its standard lease terms that
1) We are not taking the fall in a conspiracy rap so officially we will not rent for illegal purposes. Often there's something along the lines of if we figure out you're a crook we reserve the right to violate privacy and turn you to the authorities in addition to cancelling the lease contract.
2) We have no desire to see our rentable machine rot in a federal evidence vault, unrented, for a decade or so as evidence while your trial grinds on, so doing something illegal, or even planning to do so, means the lease is broken.
Assuming you've rented anything like housing, cars, electronic tools ($150K spectrum analyzer, etc) or machine tools as you listed, you've probably signed off on this in the fine print.
No, this is not "censorship". This is Toyota reclaiming your car because you drove to a bar and they [Toyota] don't have a liquor license.
Not even close. More like Toyota voiding the lease and demanding the car back because the lease says "no entering car races" and you publicly state you're entering a car race with your leased Toyota.
That was a pretty good informative and interesting article. Seriously.
One or two minor issues in an otherwise pretty good article.
Before we can draw any conclusions, we need to first determine what your goals are
1) No you need to do that before you being your research.
2) Not mentioned in the conclusion at the end is 3rd party which might be driving your goals, although I do give credit that inline the article mentions:
RightScale has really good support for third-party development platforms. There’s full support for Chef and, with that, strong support for using Chef with Ruby
Sometimes the most important API calls are the ones you don't directly make. So if you're primary goal is making Chef, uh, cook or whatever, then suddenly rightscale goes from poor docs to the top of the pack. Which feeds right back to #1 gotta set your goals before beginning to research.
(Chef is basically puppet for ruby but not quite as good, in my humble opinion as a long term hard core puppet admin, although you individual situation probably determines which is superior, such as if you're doing Rightscale I guess Chef is where its at, they're kinda a package deal where they do well paired together)
You need to file an IFR flight plan to fly in the clouds. Pilot training for IFR cert requires a minimum of 40 hours of hood.....ie experience (get it, hoodie?).
As is the case with most silver bullets, cloud deployments often resemble controlled flight into terrain. And they always blame the pilot in the monday morning quarterbacking...
That's about all the IFR pilot humor I can offer (probably too much).
What's the deal with dropping the last vowel of a word? Started by flickr, now followed by hipster software everywhere else.
Funny you'd mention that here on/.s 15th birthday. You know what stylistic counter-reactions are, like women's skirts being shorter means that later on they'll be longer and vice versa? Ironically, "last vowel DELETION" was a stylistic counterreaction to the trendy slashdot trend of INSERTING a letter c consonant as the second to last letter, as seen in in such famous examples as faceboock, amazocn, slashdot.cocm and most well known who can forget seeing pictures of the slashdot 5 year anniversary party at the ground breaking "web 1.5" photo sharing site goatse.cx.
Your explicitly stating this implying that you thought some people might otherwise have considered renting them for a NON-integer number of rotations?!:-)
Can you base jump from only 600 feet or so? I'd be extremely nervous of being tangled in the machinery or blown back into it by a freak wind gust. You know some xtreme lunatic is going to figure out some maintenance door or whatever and smuggle a parachute onboard sooner or later.
Personally I think a really huge wheel with three access points would be the worlds most weirdly cool "skywalk". I don't know if they have skywalks below 45 or so degrees latitude so this might not make much sense. They're kind of like human subways but above ground and more like sidewalks than trains... Or they're like underground steam tunnels between buildings, but without steam and not underground. Anyway, I could see a 1000 foot diameter urban wheel with a skyscraper at 0 degrees and an access port around the 50th floor, another skyscraper at 180 degrees rotation about 1000 feet away also with an access port around floor 50, and the ground / subway station at 270 degrees rotation and zero feet altitude. Even better two counter rotating wheels on the same axle so both skyscrapers are never more than 1/4 turn away from the subway (you know new yorkers, always in a hurry).
This is probably proof that I shouldn't be an architect.
TFA says the ride takes 38 minutes. If that's just for one rotation, the cars will be moving at less than 1 ft/s; slow enough to load and unload without stopping the wheel.
Yikes that's a long time to not have air conditioning or heating. So it'll have full HVAC, I'm guessing. You can't have a tourist trap in NYC without selling $5 bottled water. Then you wanna take a leak (thats a long time!), so you put in bathrooms. Suddenly I'm thinking the "630 foot high club". In fact why not rent rooms for an integer number of rotations... This might actually be fun.
So I read the wiki and its going to be open from 10am to 10pm which is 12 hours, at 38 minutes/rotation that's a hair short of 19 rotations. At 19 rotations and 36 capsules and each capsule rated at 40 people thats 27360 people per day absolute maximum. Every day operation and by a miracle no maint or inclement weather means 9,986,400 people absolute maximum.
"Bloomber's office said it would expect up to 30,000 riders per day and about 4.5 million passengers per year"
Hmm so about a 50% annual load factor or a 110% daily load factor. Pick one?
The idea that there is some governing order to the universe via laws of physics is interpreted as enough
Yes I thought so but I can't remember the details.
Now see, AC, you're walking talking display of why people should log in with an account. If I hadn't already posted in this thread I'd mod you up as the most interesting thing I've read all day.
Now gimmie a URL or something to google for or something more than "some AC on/. said so" as I find this specific topic particularly interesting for some reason...
LOL you build two networks which happen to be in the same building. One is for the receptionist to play farmville and get infested with virii and worms and toolbars, and all the other cubie people do the same. If its down, frankly you'll make more money. The other network is for production where downtime costs the company $20000/hr in lost revenue. Although they're in the same building, they preferably never touch or only touch at a tough hardened firewall. Some tech people have two PCs on their desk, one on each network.
> Do yourself a favor and run fiber to every machine, not every desktop
Could you please elaborate on this? How would you get fiber to every machine?
The machines out on the factory floor pretty much have to run aerial along the roof trusses because in a big enough plant there are machines in the middle of the factory floor and buried conduit would fill with nasties like water and machine coolant. So you're juggling space with the power and often compressed air from the ceiling.
The desktops don't matter because they're on the same probably fairly clean AC power line with the same ground point and probably low neutral currents. So just wire like any old cubie-land. The machines out on the floor, however, do not have such clean power and they really need fiber.
As for getting the fiber to each machine, my advice is innerduct it. Well, run the numbers first. At one time it was cheaper to buy tough innerduct and wimpy indoor fiber, than it was to buy tough outdoor rated fiber and skip the duct. Maybe not now. As for the machine itself that was handled by plant maintenance... tell them to mount a small rack enclosure on the headstock side of the 80 foot lathe or the 20x20 plasma table control station or whatever and they'd just do it for me / us. The original poster is probably going to be stuck doing this by himself. This is sometimes challenging to not get in the way or create an osha violation somehow (you're blocking access to the first aid kit! You need 4 feet wide walkways in case the fire dept needs the jaws of life! etc)
Whatever you do, lock your stuff on the floor or every time the plasma cutter pops a breaker they're going to write in a procedure for minimum wage drones to reboot your stuff or otherwise mess around with it, if they can get access to it "just in case". Or they'll start storing their lunch in the cabinet or whatever and attract mice. Or they'll leave the door open and a passing forklift will rip the whole box off the milling center (whooops). Don't need fancy milspec locks just keep the casual interloper out.
Maybe the TLDR is just parallel the air line and power line installation?
We are an organization with secrets, not a secret organization
So you're saying the real organization is secret? OK then.
I'm the first in four generations not to be a mason. And with the advent of the internet there are really no masonic secrets anymore. And the topic is pretty interesting to me so I've struggled thru the Manly P Hall and friends books. The secrets are certain interpretations of some pretty esoteric stories along with some pretty impressive stagecraft and staged drama. Also I guess you could say some "inside jokes" but not really jokes. Also its historically been kind of a foundry / framework / startup for historical conspiracies, which does not mean your local temple is trying to take over the world or ever has. Stating this in the absolutely nicest way possible, its pretty much aesops fables for adults, in that its all about morality plays and ethics lessons but on an adult level. An inherently classist outlook in that the idea that 3rd level cannot even be interpreted until 2nd level is mastered, which depending on your outlook on life is either obvious (in which case you're a good masonic candidate) or horrible (in which case you're a good anti-masonic conspiracy theorist candidate). Probably would make a hell of an anime series.
"Ask a mason" would make an interesting/. interview, but making it more specific to Woz I really donno what to say.
Here's a fun one for "ask a mason" or "ask Woz about masonry". The requirement for belief in a supreme deity or whatever is a simplification of the long form and the long form seems to boil down to if I believe in physics and some philosophy I technically can fit. Analysis? Most opinions are probably going to reflect the responders biases more than being real analysis, but its something I've considered occasionally.
You forgot to mention why, the answer is one is the production network and one is the "IT" cubie network. Its OK to put a firewall between them, but it would be a career ending incident if a receptionist clicked on an exciting "comet cursor" pop up ad or installed a toolbar or whatever and suddenly all 40 machines grind to a halt, or even worse, crash (literally). At a billable rate of $100/hr per machine this could get expensive, and that's before the mfgr rep has to come on site individually decontaminate each CNC machine controller.
I've never worked at a employer who didn't have separate air gapped IT and production networks, but being a small place maybe you grew up different.
Pretty much everywhere I've worked, as you upgrade the "main IT computer" the old one gets wiped, sanitized, and reinstalled as the "new" production network box, with a nice air gap between the networks. So it doesn't really cost anything to dual machine dual network every applicable station.
Unless you are in a wildly electrically hostile environment
He's in a machine shop. Only thing worse is a arc welding plant. Do yourself a favor and run fiber to every machine, not every desktop. In ye olden days at the plant I had to run that new-fangled cat-5 thru roof trusses spaced many feet between power conduits just to keep interference down. We didn't even bother trying to set up a networked PC in the welding area. All that plant cat-5 was replaced with fiber as budget permitted. Assuming you terminate your own SC/ST (or whatever) connectors, the main cost is a couple hundred bucks for the ethernet to fiber converters.
An insightful observation, but I'd add that you need to factor in the reprap factor. If it goes makerbot, meaning no self replication, then you've got it, but if it goes reprap, meaning self replication, then things could get weird. If my laser printer could print another laser printer...
I'd say the best reprap analogy is livestock farming. Yes it reproduces itself to a first approximation for free, but its going to take up time and some specialized supplies, lots of specialized knowledge (although in the olden days every peasant knew everything about chickens, or thought they did, anyway), and space, and smell (molten PLA is not as stinky as molten ABS, both pale in comparison to the smell of a laser cutter exhaust or chicken droppings, but...). Admittedly for most people, chicken is what comes in little wrapped trays at the supermarket, or more likely the fast food drive thru...
My metal lathe can make another bigger lathe, but that's pretty rare in the hobby because its a lot of work, worse than printing reprap parts...
They already can. Metal-printers are not cheap though.
Also strength difference between sintered "technically a metal, but barely" vs (metalurgically) forged and heat treated specific alloy is a whole nother thing.
Its all at the level of a thousand hours vs thousands of dollars with a pretty smooth tradeoff in between. If you were hoping for $100 and a couple hours its not quite there yet.
This will probably be seen as heretical, but try an eggbot kit, if the electronics, mechanics, software, or price scare you away,han replicators aren't for you. However if you do the eggbot thing then say to yourself, "self, I can now handle 10x the challenge of an eggbot" then you're ready for a replicator.
If somebody's at a "curious hobbyist" level, where do they start?
In other words pr0n is going to drive the market. Home printing of customized "marital aids" and "massage machines" are going to drive the market. Whichever 3-d printer is first to market with a silicone print head wins. Also lots of size bragging... no one's going to admit a reprap huxley that can only print 5 inch long things (well, more on the diagonal) is "big enough".
When 3D printers can print rifled steel I'll start worrying about it.
Oh plastic would work, once, for a single shot application. Start worrying when you can print out copper jacketed lead crimped onto a brass case full of smokeless powder, in other words pretty much never.
Another problem is in strength applications the printed plastic to handle a force of X pounds is, as a raw material, Y times the cost of steel. So to correct your post:
"When 3D printers can print rifled plastic at less than 20x the cost of traditionally machined steel at the same strength I'll start worrying about it."
Not to say its useless for gunsmithing. I think the idea of laser scanning a hand, and being able to print the exact "reverse polarity" image of the owners hand to make a truely personalized bolt-on handgrip is pretty interesting. Very soon, collectors will see boring cross hatching grips as an indicator of pre-2010's firearms. Perhaps grips with such detail that they match the wrinkles (or hair) of the owners palm. Also embedding logos (probably illegally copied, or course) and other art works.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless their lease specifically includes a clause whereby they can dictate (beyond reason -- they can obviously protect their property from damage) the use of their machine while under lease, and you'd be a fool to sign such a document,
Come on AC you've clearly never read or signed a lease contract. For anything, housing, cars, machinery... Google around, lots of lease contracts on line. Its extremely rare not to have a clause containing a phrase like "agrees not to engage in or permit any unlawful use of the" whatever.
There will always be idiots who wrote their own contract on the back of a bar napkin while drunk, but "real businesses" never do anything that stupid and always include a unlawful / illegal activity clause.
The printer maker is worried about becoming liable
Not just risking liability but risking revenue loss and probably capital loss. You make money as a leaser by leasing stuff to people who pay you. Not by investing in expensive stuff that rots in a federal evidence vault for years maybe a decade or two.
Pity printers are not quite up to that yet
See the reprap project
It depends on the costs of printing to the costs of buying a made item from the shop.
Any product over $50/Kg or so is a dead man walking today, right now. DnD miniature manufacturers should be Very nervous. On the other hand as I recall the shipping crate for my new home toilet, that was only about a buck per pound, (Its shocking how heavy a toilet is, somehow I thought it would be as light as a dining room chair) so that's safe for well over an order of magnitude of decreasing price. Now the little plastic handles on the bathroom faucets that cost $5 for a fraction of an ounce, they're toast. The business model where the handle that broke on my toilet that only costs $20 for a new handle and trip lever arm is toast, value engineered to fail annually, that is toast.
To a first approximation it'll never be all that much cheaper to turn pellets into filament that it'll be to turn pellets into injection molded stuff. So if a mfgr can keep his profit, R+D, and overhead costs reasonable, they'll never be put of out business by printing. Example: Cheap disposable plastic drinking cup is never going to cost much more than the cost of plastic to make it.
How is a 3D printer any different than a lathe, grinder or a milling machine?
Its not. Its standard lease terms that
1) We are not taking the fall in a conspiracy rap so officially we will not rent for illegal purposes. Often there's something along the lines of if we figure out you're a crook we reserve the right to violate privacy and turn you to the authorities in addition to cancelling the lease contract.
2) We have no desire to see our rentable machine rot in a federal evidence vault, unrented, for a decade or so as evidence while your trial grinds on, so doing something illegal, or even planning to do so, means the lease is broken.
Assuming you've rented anything like housing, cars, electronic tools ($150K spectrum analyzer, etc) or machine tools as you listed, you've probably signed off on this in the fine print.
No, this is not "censorship". This is Toyota reclaiming your car because you drove to a bar and they [Toyota] don't have a liquor license.
Not even close. More like Toyota voiding the lease and demanding the car back because the lease says "no entering car races" and you publicly state you're entering a car race with your leased Toyota.
Forgive my ignorance here but don't we already have this?
Your confusion is that Kola was a lot deeper but was only about 1/3 of the way thru the crust, this is drilling thru a very thin area of the crust.
Traditional drilling methods don't work so they gave up on Kola.
That was a pretty good informative and interesting article. Seriously.
One or two minor issues in an otherwise pretty good article.
Before we can draw any conclusions, we need to first determine what your goals are
1) No you need to do that before you being your research.
2) Not mentioned in the conclusion at the end is 3rd party which might be driving your goals, although I do give credit that inline the article mentions:
RightScale has really good support for third-party development platforms. There’s full support for Chef and, with that, strong support for using Chef with Ruby
Sometimes the most important API calls are the ones you don't directly make. So if you're primary goal is making Chef, uh, cook or whatever, then suddenly rightscale goes from poor docs to the top of the pack. Which feeds right back to #1 gotta set your goals before beginning to research.
(Chef is basically puppet for ruby but not quite as good, in my humble opinion as a long term hard core puppet admin, although you individual situation probably determines which is superior, such as if you're doing Rightscale I guess Chef is where its at, they're kinda a package deal where they do well paired together)
You need to file an IFR flight plan to fly in the clouds. Pilot training for IFR cert requires a minimum of 40 hours of hood.....ie experience (get it, hoodie?).
As is the case with most silver bullets, cloud deployments often resemble controlled flight into terrain. And they always blame the pilot in the monday morning quarterbacking...
That's about all the IFR pilot humor I can offer (probably too much).
What's the deal with dropping the last vowel of a word? Started by flickr, now followed by hipster software everywhere else.
Funny you'd mention that here on /.s 15th birthday. You know what stylistic counter-reactions are, like women's skirts being shorter means that later on they'll be longer and vice versa? Ironically, "last vowel DELETION" was a stylistic counterreaction to the trendy slashdot trend of INSERTING a letter c consonant as the second to last letter, as seen in in such famous examples as faceboock, amazocn, slashdot.cocm and most well known who can forget seeing pictures of the slashdot 5 year anniversary party at the ground breaking "web 1.5" photo sharing site goatse.cx.
Your explicitly stating this implying that you thought some people might otherwise have considered renting them for a NON-integer number of rotations?! :-)
Can you base jump from only 600 feet or so? I'd be extremely nervous of being tangled in the machinery or blown back into it by a freak wind gust. You know some xtreme lunatic is going to figure out some maintenance door or whatever and smuggle a parachute onboard sooner or later.
Personally I think a really huge wheel with three access points would be the worlds most weirdly cool "skywalk". I don't know if they have skywalks below 45 or so degrees latitude so this might not make much sense. They're kind of like human subways but above ground and more like sidewalks than trains... Or they're like underground steam tunnels between buildings, but without steam and not underground. Anyway, I could see a 1000 foot diameter urban wheel with a skyscraper at 0 degrees and an access port around the 50th floor, another skyscraper at 180 degrees rotation about 1000 feet away also with an access port around floor 50, and the ground / subway station at 270 degrees rotation and zero feet altitude. Even better two counter rotating wheels on the same axle so both skyscrapers are never more than 1/4 turn away from the subway (you know new yorkers, always in a hurry).
This is probably proof that I shouldn't be an architect.
I don't see how having a random account here would help.
Because being a AC your posts default score is a zero with my particular settings. A lot more people will read a good posting if it gets modded up.
Slow-clap.
Slow clap would be paint it to look like a giant rotating goatse.
I should have entered that as an animated gif for the /. anniversary logo contest.
TFA says the ride takes 38 minutes. If that's just for one rotation, the cars will be moving at less than 1 ft/s; slow enough to load and unload without stopping the wheel.
Yikes that's a long time to not have air conditioning or heating. So it'll have full HVAC, I'm guessing. You can't have a tourist trap in NYC without selling $5 bottled water. Then you wanna take a leak (thats a long time!), so you put in bathrooms. Suddenly I'm thinking the "630 foot high club". In fact why not rent rooms for an integer number of rotations... This might actually be fun.
So I read the wiki and its going to be open from 10am to 10pm which is 12 hours, at 38 minutes/rotation that's a hair short of 19 rotations. At 19 rotations and 36 capsules and each capsule rated at 40 people thats 27360 people per day absolute maximum. Every day operation and by a miracle no maint or inclement weather means 9,986,400 people absolute maximum.
"Bloomber's office said it would expect up to 30,000 riders per day and about 4.5 million passengers per year"
Hmm so about a 50% annual load factor or a 110% daily load factor. Pick one?
Why don't you endorse President Obama? (Granted he's not perfect, but the alternative --being ruled by the "modern" republican party is insane.)
Do it.
False dichotomy. I'd rather see him endorse Gary Johnson.
The idea that there is some governing order to the universe via laws of physics is interpreted as enough
Yes I thought so but I can't remember the details.
Now see, AC, you're walking talking display of why people should log in with an account. If I hadn't already posted in this thread I'd mod you up as the most interesting thing I've read all day.
Now gimmie a URL or something to google for or something more than "some AC on /. said so" as I find this specific topic particularly interesting for some reason...
LOL you build two networks which happen to be in the same building.
One is for the receptionist to play farmville and get infested with virii and worms and toolbars, and all the other cubie people do the same. If its down, frankly you'll make more money.
The other network is for production where downtime costs the company $20000/hr in lost revenue.
Although they're in the same building, they preferably never touch or only touch at a tough hardened firewall.
Some tech people have two PCs on their desk, one on each network.
> Do yourself a favor and run fiber to every machine, not every desktop
Could you please elaborate on this? How would you get fiber to every machine?
The machines out on the factory floor pretty much have to run aerial along the roof trusses because in a big enough plant there are machines in the middle of the factory floor and buried conduit would fill with nasties like water and machine coolant. So you're juggling space with the power and often compressed air from the ceiling.
The desktops don't matter because they're on the same probably fairly clean AC power line with the same ground point and probably low neutral currents. So just wire like any old cubie-land. The machines out on the floor, however, do not have such clean power and they really need fiber.
As for getting the fiber to each machine, my advice is innerduct it. Well, run the numbers first. At one time it was cheaper to buy tough innerduct and wimpy indoor fiber, than it was to buy tough outdoor rated fiber and skip the duct. Maybe not now. As for the machine itself that was handled by plant maintenance... tell them to mount a small rack enclosure on the headstock side of the 80 foot lathe or the 20x20 plasma table control station or whatever and they'd just do it for me / us. The original poster is probably going to be stuck doing this by himself. This is sometimes challenging to not get in the way or create an osha violation somehow (you're blocking access to the first aid kit! You need 4 feet wide walkways in case the fire dept needs the jaws of life! etc)
Whatever you do, lock your stuff on the floor or every time the plasma cutter pops a breaker they're going to write in a procedure for minimum wage drones to reboot your stuff or otherwise mess around with it, if they can get access to it "just in case". Or they'll start storing their lunch in the cabinet or whatever and attract mice. Or they'll leave the door open and a passing forklift will rip the whole box off the milling center (whooops). Don't need fancy milspec locks just keep the casual interloper out.
Maybe the TLDR is just parallel the air line and power line installation?
We are an organization with secrets, not a secret organization
So you're saying the real organization is secret? OK then.
I'm the first in four generations not to be a mason. And with the advent of the internet there are really no masonic secrets anymore. And the topic is pretty interesting to me so I've struggled thru the Manly P Hall and friends books. The secrets are certain interpretations of some pretty esoteric stories along with some pretty impressive stagecraft and staged drama. Also I guess you could say some "inside jokes" but not really jokes. Also its historically been kind of a foundry / framework / startup for historical conspiracies, which does not mean your local temple is trying to take over the world or ever has. Stating this in the absolutely nicest way possible, its pretty much aesops fables for adults, in that its all about morality plays and ethics lessons but on an adult level. An inherently classist outlook in that the idea that 3rd level cannot even be interpreted until 2nd level is mastered, which depending on your outlook on life is either obvious (in which case you're a good masonic candidate) or horrible (in which case you're a good anti-masonic conspiracy theorist candidate). Probably would make a hell of an anime series.
"Ask a mason" would make an interesting /. interview, but making it more specific to Woz I really donno what to say.
Here's a fun one for "ask a mason" or "ask Woz about masonry". The requirement for belief in a supreme deity or whatever is a simplification of the long form and the long form seems to boil down to if I believe in physics and some philosophy I technically can fit. Analysis? Most opinions are probably going to reflect the responders biases more than being real analysis, but its something I've considered occasionally.
Dual Cat6 sockets on each desk
You forgot to mention why, the answer is one is the production network and one is the "IT" cubie network. Its OK to put a firewall between them, but it would be a career ending incident if a receptionist clicked on an exciting "comet cursor" pop up ad or installed a toolbar or whatever and suddenly all 40 machines grind to a halt, or even worse, crash (literally). At a billable rate of $100/hr per machine this could get expensive, and that's before the mfgr rep has to come on site individually decontaminate each CNC machine controller.
I've never worked at a employer who didn't have separate air gapped IT and production networks, but being a small place maybe you grew up different.
Pretty much everywhere I've worked, as you upgrade the "main IT computer" the old one gets wiped, sanitized, and reinstalled as the "new" production network box, with a nice air gap between the networks. So it doesn't really cost anything to dual machine dual network every applicable station.
Unless you are in a wildly electrically hostile environment
He's in a machine shop. Only thing worse is a arc welding plant. Do yourself a favor and run fiber to every machine, not every desktop. In ye olden days at the plant I had to run that new-fangled cat-5 thru roof trusses spaced many feet between power conduits just to keep interference down. We didn't even bother trying to set up a networked PC in the welding area. All that plant cat-5 was replaced with fiber as budget permitted. Assuming you terminate your own SC/ST (or whatever) connectors, the main cost is a couple hundred bucks for the ethernet to fiber converters.
An insightful observation, but I'd add that you need to factor in the reprap factor. If it goes makerbot, meaning no self replication, then you've got it, but if it goes reprap, meaning self replication, then things could get weird. If my laser printer could print another laser printer...
I'd say the best reprap analogy is livestock farming. Yes it reproduces itself to a first approximation for free, but its going to take up time and some specialized supplies, lots of specialized knowledge (although in the olden days every peasant knew everything about chickens, or thought they did, anyway), and space, and smell (molten PLA is not as stinky as molten ABS, both pale in comparison to the smell of a laser cutter exhaust or chicken droppings, but...). Admittedly for most people, chicken is what comes in little wrapped trays at the supermarket, or more likely the fast food drive thru...
My metal lathe can make another bigger lathe, but that's pretty rare in the hobby because its a lot of work, worse than printing reprap parts...
They already can. Metal-printers are not cheap though.
Also strength difference between sintered "technically a metal, but barely" vs (metalurgically) forged and heat treated specific alloy is a whole nother thing.
how do you do it cheaply?
Its all at the level of a thousand hours vs thousands of dollars with a pretty smooth tradeoff in between. If you were hoping for $100 and a couple hours its not quite there yet.
This will probably be seen as heretical, but try an eggbot kit, if the electronics, mechanics, software, or price scare you away,han replicators aren't for you. However if you do the eggbot thing then say to yourself, "self, I can now handle 10x the challenge of an eggbot" then you're ready for a replicator.
If somebody's at a "curious hobbyist" level, where do they start?
http://www.reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page
Even if you don't go reprap, you'll learn the terrain there.
The 3D printer of today is a lot like the VCR.
In other words pr0n is going to drive the market. Home printing of customized "marital aids" and "massage machines" are going to drive the market. Whichever 3-d printer is first to market with a silicone print head wins. Also lots of size bragging... no one's going to admit a reprap huxley that can only print 5 inch long things (well, more on the diagonal) is "big enough".
When 3D printers can print rifled steel I'll start worrying about it.
Oh plastic would work, once, for a single shot application. Start worrying when you can print out copper jacketed lead crimped onto a brass case full of smokeless powder, in other words pretty much never.
Another problem is in strength applications the printed plastic to handle a force of X pounds is, as a raw material, Y times the cost of steel. So to correct your post:
"When 3D printers can print rifled plastic at less than 20x the cost of traditionally machined steel at the same strength I'll start worrying about it."
Not to say its useless for gunsmithing. I think the idea of laser scanning a hand, and being able to print the exact "reverse polarity" image of the owners hand to make a truely personalized bolt-on handgrip is pretty interesting. Very soon, collectors will see boring cross hatching grips as an indicator of pre-2010's firearms. Perhaps grips with such detail that they match the wrinkles (or hair) of the owners palm. Also embedding logos (probably illegally copied, or course) and other art works.