Actually, it is being sold in reverse - you buy the DS1074Z for e.g. $500 and you get the basic scope as specced + some 50 hours of demo of extra features that would normally drive the cost to those $1500 if you buy all of them. You try whether you like them and if you do, you pay for the options (or use a keygen - Rigols were hacked long time ago).
However, if you are buying one of these from a shady dealer somewhere at a hamfest being sold out of a car boot and without doing your homework, you get what you pay for. I want the thing to have at least calibration and warranty, so I buy it from a proper dealer - that's where I have got mine from a month ago (for ~500 EUR, VAT included: http://ovio-scope.com/index.ph... ).
Actually the new DS1074Z is $500 bucks now (got one recently), the -S version with the built-in sig gen is $800. The old DS1052E is still being sold for about $400 new, but the DS1074Z is a much better deal - 4 channels, much faster waveform update, larger sample memory, intensity graded display, etc. It is more comparable to the 2000 series than the old DS1000 one.
I think it is pretty comparable with the low end Agilents also (which are actually rebadged Rigols sold for higher price - Rigol is OEM for Agilent).
The Agilent 2000 series is a higher class instrument, then you are in the $2000+ price category.
I have actually owned DS1052E, that one is not sw upgradable, no hidden surprises there. DS1074Z is on my desk today and you get something like 50 hours of usage from some advanced things like I2C/SPI decoding and triggering or double sample memory. Buying those options is not very expensive neither, but then there is also http://riglol.3owl.com/ if you want.
If you are an electronics teacher, you should know better. The PC-based scopes and the various "DSO Nano" clones are universally crap and none fits into your budget anyway.
Your students would be vastly better served by buying a used analog scope, those could be obtained on eBay and similar places for a song these days. A used Tektronix or Hameg scope will beat the pants off of any PC-based toy and, more importantly, the student will actually learn and understand how the instrument works and what is being measured, because there are no "magic buttons" to push.
If the student has a bit larger budget, then the Rigol DS1052E or the newer DS1074Z is a really hard to beat value. There are also Siglents or Attens for the budget conscious, but both brands tend to suffer from poor manufacturing quality and the price is not really much lower than the Rigols.
Forget spectrum analyzer - there is no decent one for less than $1000 on the market. Digital scopes can do FFT, that helps in a pinch, otherwise the student can always record the data from something like the Rigols above and do a proper spectrum analysis on the PC, e.g. using Matlab or some other tool.
It could pretty well be illegal in Europe. Many EU countries have laws banning this sort of tactics as the abuse of the "market power". If you have more than a certain percentage of the market, you are treated as a quasi-monopoly and restrictions apply. These laws are mostly targeted at various retail chains that have abusive terms in their supplier contracts, but it is only a matter of time before this gets applied to Amazon, Google and similar.
The problem is that the industry is spending the money on wrong things - massive marketing, shiny graphics, motion capture for animation... Unfortunately, most of that is extremely expensive and laborious. I really don't need my next stupid shooter game to have motion captured animations of every monster done by AAA Hollywood mocap specialists at several thousands of $/hour.
And as the "next gen" has to be bigger, better, shinier than the "last gen", the costs spiral out of control. Another consequence of this blockbuster mentality is that only few innovative "AAA" games get made, because nobody wants to take risks with such budgets - but how many times can you redo Doom?
It is possible to make and release games cheaper, even big titles (just look at the Witcher series). The companies and publishers need to start to work smarter, not just pour more money at the problem. However, when the most complex AI in games are finite state machines and motion capture is considered as "AI" (true quote from one major studio exec), every bit of content is hand modelled, textured and baked instead of some sort of automation or more clever game design, when the "next gen" game innovation stops with rendering more nose hair and dirty pores (or bigger boobs) of the main protagonist than the "last gen", then I am really sceptical...
Oh and cut out the middle men and stop reinventing the wheel for the sake of greed (Origin by EA anyone?). You will cut your expenses by a factor of 2 right there.
Good luck trying to get these in Europe. They are pretty much unobtanium, because nobody stocks them or they sell these only to companies (Farnell), with a huge shipping and handling markup (Digikey, Mouser, Farnell) or they simply don't carry the DIP version at all (RadioSpares).
It is way easier to buy one of the QFP packages - they are both cheaper, more available and with more pins. And either get it pre-soldered on a breakout board or buy a simple QFP to DIP adapter on eBay (or make your own).
Which is happening routinely. Many older birds don't require any authentication nor anything - they simply retransmit whatever they hear on one frequency on another one: http://spectregroup.wordpress....
And those are US NAVY (!!!) satellites!
Doing that with Iridium or Inmarsat hardware is a bit more complex, because the protocols are mostly digital, but not impossible neither.
Wasn't it just yesterday that someone has posted a flamebait summary about the Heartbleed bug changing the "Open source is safer" discussion?
This is a great evidence of what happens when you rely on security by obscurity in proprietary software. Nobody is forced to fix things, sloppy coding is the norm and there are backdoors galore...
Unfortunately, the bad guys laugh, the vendors play ostrich with the heads in sand and everyone else is suffering the consequences...
Certainly, nobody argued the opposite. However, they are also a "weapon of choice" for the various conmen and scam artists on IndieGogo looking for quick cash, because there is no obligation to deliver anything ("Hey, it wasn't funded, not our fault!").
So, Indiegogo flexible funding campaign? I.e. they get money even if the campaign doesn't meet the goals? 4 years in development and nothing to show on the project page apart from a few renders that any kid can do in a day in 3DS Max or Blender? They throw big names like DASSAULT or Airbus around, ostensibly as being interested, but they need a few millions on Indiegogo? The perks are an obvious joke (40k euro for an old Renault Espace? You got to be kidding...).
Mr. Chorostecki appears to be an economic consultant (nothing to do with aerospace whatsoever: http://www.figxy.com/ ) Mr. Buron is a design/creative consultant (with http://buron.phpnet.org/fre/ag... ) And the third founder Desauvage is, surprise, "creative director".
I wonder whether "inventor and designer" means "I have drawn something in Photoshop and now I only need someone to build it for me", because none of these guys has any relevant engineering qualifications whatsoever.
Oh and it seems they weren't very welcome in France for whatever reason in 2013 ( http://www.ladepeche.fr/articl... ), so that's why they want to go to Silicon Valley... The article also mentions that the vehicle was to be all-electric (yeah right, pipe dreams...).
The probability that any backers, who would put actually money into this, will see anything from this project, is pretty much zero, IMO.
That sounds as if the criminals actually cared about it being illegal. One of the guys has mugged someone to get the phone in the first place and the other one is dealing in them - both crimes with likely a lot stiffer sentence than a stupid IMEI change. C'mon....
Don't be ridiculous - until there stops being demand for extremely cheap phones (so that one can show off in front of the peers) and the manufacturers and network operators actually start doing something about it (Why is IMEI changeable in the first place?), trade in stolen phones will continue. Unfortunately, it would have to stop being profitable for them. All those IMEI blocks and such by the operators are ineffective if the phone can have the IMEI changed and not even all of them are implementing those blocks.
The other issue is that when even BBC can easily find and film (!) fences dealing in stolen goods, then what is the police doing? Ah, right, that is UK, so they are likely busy detaining journalists as terrorists, there is no time to fight petty theft and muggers.
Databases don't scale for people who don't understand SQL, don't understand data normalization, indexing and want to use them as flat files. Unfortunately, a way too common anti-pattern:(
The second group are too-cool-to-learn kids using the latest development tool fad on the market to build yet another Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/whatever clone...
This sort of reaction is nice, but don't forget that it needs gobs and gobs of energy to build those hydrocarbons. Don't forget that the energy you use up by burning that fuel (and some, because of the poor engine efficiency, reaction losses, etc.) had to be "put in" first. No free lunch here...
So yes, maybe a nuclear powered aircraft carrier could be producing jet fuel for its planes, but I don't see this supplanting the fossil fuels any time soon. It would be extremely expensive.
This topic has been re-hashed here before several times (e.g. here)
Let's see what is actually innovative or different on this printer when compared to the existing ones:
- automatic leveling - ok, but they seem to use a sensor ("motion sensor chip"?!) in the printer head (?!) and not moving bed. I am not really sure how this could actually work... - non-heated bed - they claim it is not needed because of autoleveling, but that is BS. You need heated bed for ABS to stick to it, level or not level, otherwise the moving head will lift the print or it will warp. Nothing to do with the bed being level. - tiny working volume - autocalibration - again some magical "motion sensor chip" is mentioned, without any explanation what that autocalibration is nor how it works... - they are keen on the artistic look of the thing, but I have serious reservations about the rigidity and accuracy of the device - the claimed 15um is only the theoretical resolution of the steppers, not actual resolution of the printer (depends on the nozzle size which is 0.45mm by default!). The ABS body doesn't instill much confidence! - reduced power consumption is somehow supposed to make things lighter and cheaper (?!) - that argument seems backwards to me... - startup, they don't have any other products - who knows when they will actually be able to deliver. The August date is completely unrealistic. - their team doesn't instill much confidence - 1 electronics guy, 1 CNC guy, 4 CAD people, 2 sw people, but they have 8 artists, 2 PR agencies and 4 lawyers! Not a healthy balance, IMO...
- incredibly cheap price ($300), but you get what you pay for IMO - they have exceeded their funding target 10x already...
Honestly, I don't see how this printer will make 3D printing somehow accessible to the unwashed masses - there are still all those issues of CAD, mechanical design, toy-like device with nebulous claims and nothing to back it up.
IANAL, but shouldn't this qualify as perjury? Sony needs to certify in their automated DMCA request that they, in fact, own the rights to the content in question, under the penalty of perjury. Someone really needs to take the big studios to court for this sort of abuse, otherwise it won't stop.
It rather shows that Microsoft *still* does not review security-sensitive code properly. How this could have passed any code review is beyond me.
Either they are so incredibly sloppy and incompetent (do you really want to entrust them your credit card then?!) or this was intentional. I am not sure which one is actually worse...
I am one of the original Oculus Kickstarter backers. I have received my Rift development kit without any problem, so I think you are grossly unfair to Oculus as far as the Kickstarter campaign is concerned. The perks were the development kits, not company shares, so there is no reason why I should be getting a cut of those 2 billions.
Also, honestly, do you really believe the company is operating on the Kickstarter money? You would be naive - there are several large investors there, the Kickstarter money went mainly into the original development kit.
However, I do wonder what the heck is going to happen now. They better tread really carefully or they could alienate many of their customers and developers in no time if they try to aggressively push Facebook everywhere (like the payment system - seriously, if one of the stated reasons for getting acquired was to get access to the Facebook's payment system, that's nuts).
I think you don't realize that a 3D printer is just that - a 3 axis CNC machine. Replace the extruder head with a spindle and you have a 3 axis CNC router (assuming your average printer has a frame rigid enough for the forces required, which it likely doesn't). There have been even some attempts to make a universal machine where you could choose to either mill/route or print depending on which tool head is installed. A CNC router can be trivially converted into a printer by simply installing the extruder head and/or heated bed. The machines even use exactly the same software, same protocols, are driven in the same way.
The only difference is that a mill/router removes material and a printer adds it and that routers/mills have to be better constructed (more rigid) because there are much higher lateral forces - a typical hobbyist 3D printer is a complete joke in this regard.
"Anyway, I think we're arguing at corossed purposes here. It is frankly indisputable that 3D printers are easier to use than CNC machine tools (a claim opposite would make me doubt you've used either, frankly)."
If you can operate a 3D printer, you could pretty much operate a similarly sized CNC mill/router, perhaps with a bit of basic safety training, because of the high-speed rotating bits that a typical printer doesn't have. The software, the design process, most of the maintenance, etc. is pretty much identical. It is not as if the 3D printing people have suddenly reinvented the machining world from scratch.
I know pretty well how these printers work and it takes to use them. My comment was not targeting someone like you, but the original poster who is obviously completely oblivious to the technology and wants it to be the same as a desktop printer or coffee machine before it is considered to be "consumer-level".
I disagree. They're certainly not now, and it will probably 20 years before they are, but imagine where home computers were in 1979.
Sorry, that's nonsense. Lathes, routers and other machine tools are around for what, 100+ years? (C)NC machines for at least 50 if not longer. By that measure everyone should have had one in their basements and living rooms since a long time already.
99.9% of consumers will never have any use for a 3D printer (or any machine tool, for that matter). We are certainly not going to 3D print stuff like coat hangers or door knobs at home (as some try to make people believe) when you can buy a new one for 1/10-1/100th of the price of a 3D printed one, not to mention in better quality and much less time. It just makes no economical sense to 3D print consumer item which are mass-produced already. Various machine shops and printing services will account for the occasional odd item needed to repair or replace broken bits at home - saves a lot of hassle and cost with running own printer. And that still generously assumes that the user actually knows how design the item. Don't forget that the most people can barely use e-mail and/or web browser, here we are asking them to do 3D modelling and use CAD + CAM tools (like slicer, g-code generators, etc) and understand certain engineering issues, such as the material properties, dimensions of the parts, limits of the machine (not everything is printable/machinable).
3D printers are a cool technology and a huge boon for tinkerers of all kinds, but most people are not tinkerers. Mass-market adoption of this ain't gonna happen, period.
I think you have unrealistic expectations fuelled by a lot of the hype around the printers (and the companies selling them).
Setting the poor quality and the need to constantly tinker with the calibration, belt tensions, levelling and what not aside, 3D printer is not a consumer device, even if it was plug & play today.
It is a machine tool and a pretty complex at that. Programming and using a 3D printer is comparable to a CNC router, which is a specialized skill that usually requires some extensive training. Sure, it is not rocket science neither, but expecting this to work as a printer in Windows (push a button and paper comes out with your document) is simply unrealistic.
Demanding things like "standardized 3D printer protocol" (hello g-code...) or companies like HP or Epson to produce 3D printers is off the mark - why should they? They don't make other machine tools neither, the only thing a 3D printer has in common with a regular printer is the word "printer"... These are all red herrings - those things are pretty much irrelevant. Without the engineering knowledge needed to build the part you won't be able to make a useful component beyond downloading and printing stuff someone else made. However, then you can order the parts cheaper and simpler from Shapeways or a similar place too.
The same holds for design of the parts - people complaining about the complexity of the CAD tools are way off the mark here. The tools have to be complex in order to be actually useful, otherwise designing precise parts would be impossible. Unfortunately, a lot of people think that CAD is like Photoshop or something - it is not. If you cannot construct a piece using a ruler & compass on paper, you probably shouldn't be using CAD neither.
One needs to look beyond the first graph that shows all sites surveyed to look at the actually active sites - there Apache appears to have more *active* deployments than the rest combined. Counting inactive, parked domains is not really indicative of particular server popularity.
The court ruled that the ISPs and search engines have 15 days to block the sites listed in the article and the order is in force for 12 months afterwards.
However, here is the kicker: the court ruled that the right holders are to pay the bill for the implementation of the blocks, the ISPs are not being asked to do it on their own dime. So carpet bombing the courts with poorly researched URLs to block could get really expensive...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it is being sold in reverse - you buy the DS1074Z for e.g. $500 and you get the basic scope as specced + some 50 hours of demo of extra features that would normally drive the cost to those $1500 if you buy all of them. You try whether you like them and if you do, you pay for the options (or use a keygen - Rigols were hacked long time ago).
However, if you are buying one of these from a shady dealer somewhere at a hamfest being sold out of a car boot and without doing your homework, you get what you pay for. I want the thing to have at least calibration and warranty, so I buy it from a proper dealer - that's where I have got mine from a month ago (for ~500 EUR, VAT included: http://ovio-scope.com/index.ph... ).
Actually the new DS1074Z is $500 bucks now (got one recently), the -S version with the built-in sig gen is $800. The old DS1052E is still being sold for about $400 new, but the DS1074Z is a much better deal - 4 channels, much faster waveform update, larger sample memory, intensity graded display, etc. It is more comparable to the 2000 series than the old DS1000 one.
I think it is pretty comparable with the low end Agilents also (which are actually rebadged Rigols sold for higher price - Rigol is OEM for Agilent).
The Agilent 2000 series is a higher class instrument, then you are in the $2000+ price category.
I have actually owned DS1052E, that one is not sw upgradable, no hidden surprises there. DS1074Z is on my desk today and you get something like 50 hours of usage from some advanced things like I2C/SPI decoding and triggering or double sample memory. Buying those options is not very expensive neither, but then there is also http://riglol.3owl.com/ if you want.
If you are an electronics teacher, you should know better. The PC-based scopes and the various "DSO Nano" clones are universally crap and none fits into your budget anyway.
Your students would be vastly better served by buying a used analog scope, those could be obtained on eBay and similar places for a song these days. A used Tektronix or Hameg scope will beat the pants off of any PC-based toy and, more importantly, the student will actually learn and understand how the instrument works and what is being measured, because there are no "magic buttons" to push.
If the student has a bit larger budget, then the Rigol DS1052E or the newer DS1074Z is a really hard to beat value. There are also Siglents or Attens for the budget conscious, but both brands tend to suffer from poor manufacturing quality and the price is not really much lower than the Rigols.
Forget spectrum analyzer - there is no decent one for less than $1000 on the market. Digital scopes can do FFT, that helps in a pinch, otherwise the student can always record the data from something like the Rigols above and do a proper spectrum analysis on the PC, e.g. using Matlab or some other tool.
It could pretty well be illegal in Europe. Many EU countries have laws banning this sort of tactics as the abuse of the "market power". If you have more than a certain percentage of the market, you are treated as a quasi-monopoly and restrictions apply. These laws are mostly targeted at various retail chains that have abusive terms in their supplier contracts, but it is only a matter of time before this gets applied to Amazon, Google and similar.
The problem is that the industry is spending the money on wrong things - massive marketing, shiny graphics, motion capture for animation ... Unfortunately, most of that is extremely expensive and laborious. I really don't need my next stupid shooter game to have motion captured animations of every monster done by AAA Hollywood mocap specialists at several thousands of $/hour.
And as the "next gen" has to be bigger, better, shinier than the "last gen", the costs spiral out of control. Another consequence of this blockbuster mentality is that only few innovative "AAA" games get made, because nobody wants to take risks with such budgets - but how many times can you redo Doom?
It is possible to make and release games cheaper, even big titles (just look at the Witcher series). The companies and publishers need to start to work smarter, not just pour more money at the problem. However, when the most complex AI in games are finite state machines and motion capture is considered as "AI" (true quote from one major studio exec), every bit of content is hand modelled, textured and baked instead of some sort of automation or more clever game design, when the "next gen" game innovation stops with rendering more nose hair and dirty pores (or bigger boobs) of the main protagonist than the "last gen", then I am really sceptical ...
Oh and cut out the middle men and stop reinventing the wheel for the sake of greed (Origin by EA anyone?). You will cut your expenses by a factor of 2 right there.
Good luck trying to get these in Europe. They are pretty much unobtanium, because nobody stocks them or they sell these only to companies (Farnell), with a huge shipping and handling markup (Digikey, Mouser, Farnell) or they simply don't carry the DIP version at all (RadioSpares).
It is way easier to buy one of the QFP packages - they are both cheaper, more available and with more pins. And either get it pre-soldered on a breakout board or buy a simple QFP to DIP adapter on eBay (or make your own).
Which is happening routinely. Many older birds don't require any authentication nor anything - they simply retransmit whatever they hear on one frequency on another one: http://spectregroup.wordpress....
And those are US NAVY (!!!) satellites!
Doing that with Iridium or Inmarsat hardware is a bit more complex, because the protocols are mostly digital, but not impossible neither.
Wasn't it just yesterday that someone has posted a flamebait summary about the Heartbleed bug changing the "Open source is safer" discussion?
This is a great evidence of what happens when you rely on security by obscurity in proprietary software. Nobody is forced to fix things, sloppy coding is the norm and there are backdoors galore ...
Unfortunately, the bad guys laugh, the vendors play ostrich with the heads in sand and everyone else is suffering the consequences ...
Certainly, nobody argued the opposite. However, they are also a "weapon of choice" for the various conmen and scam artists on IndieGogo looking for quick cash, because there is no obligation to deliver anything ("Hey, it wasn't funded, not our fault!").
So, Indiegogo flexible funding campaign? I.e. they get money even if the campaign doesn't meet the goals? 4 years in development and nothing to show on the project page apart from a few renders that any kid can do in a day in 3DS Max or Blender? They throw big names like DASSAULT or Airbus around, ostensibly as being interested, but they need a few millions on Indiegogo? The perks are an obvious joke (40k euro for an old Renault Espace? You got to be kidding ...).
Mr. Chorostecki appears to be an economic consultant (nothing to do with aerospace whatsoever: http://www.figxy.com/ )
Mr. Buron is a design/creative consultant (with http://buron.phpnet.org/fre/ag... )
And the third founder Desauvage is, surprise, "creative director".
I wonder whether "inventor and designer" means "I have drawn something in Photoshop and now I only need someone to build it for me", because none of these guys has any relevant engineering qualifications whatsoever.
Oh and it seems they weren't very welcome in France for whatever reason in 2013 ( http://www.ladepeche.fr/articl... ), so that's why they want to go to Silicon Valley ... The article also mentions that the vehicle was to be all-electric (yeah right, pipe dreams ...).
The probability that any backers, who would put actually money into this, will see anything from this project, is pretty much zero, IMO.
That sounds as if the criminals actually cared about it being illegal. One of the guys has mugged someone to get the phone in the first place and the other one is dealing in them - both crimes with likely a lot stiffer sentence than a stupid IMEI change. C'mon ....
Don't be ridiculous - until there stops being demand for extremely cheap phones (so that one can show off in front of the peers) and the manufacturers and network operators actually start doing something about it (Why is IMEI changeable in the first place?), trade in stolen phones will continue. Unfortunately, it would have to stop being profitable for them. All those IMEI blocks and such by the operators are ineffective if the phone can have the IMEI changed and not even all of them are implementing those blocks.
The other issue is that when even BBC can easily find and film (!) fences dealing in stolen goods, then what is the police doing? Ah, right, that is UK, so they are likely busy detaining journalists as terrorists, there is no time to fight petty theft and muggers.
Databases don't scale for people who don't understand SQL, don't understand data normalization, indexing and want to use them as flat files. Unfortunately, a way too common anti-pattern :(
The second group are too-cool-to-learn kids using the latest development tool fad on the market to build yet another Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/whatever clone ...
This sort of reaction is nice, but don't forget that it needs gobs and gobs of energy to build those hydrocarbons. Don't forget that the energy you use up by burning that fuel (and some, because of the poor engine efficiency, reaction losses, etc.) had to be "put in" first. No free lunch here ...
So yes, maybe a nuclear powered aircraft carrier could be producing jet fuel for its planes, but I don't see this supplanting the fossil fuels any time soon. It would be extremely expensive.
This topic has been re-hashed here before several times (e.g. here)
Let's see what is actually innovative or different on this printer when compared to the existing ones:
- automatic leveling - ok, but they seem to use a sensor ("motion sensor chip"?!) in the printer head (?!) and not moving bed. I am not really sure how this could actually work ... ... ... ...
- non-heated bed - they claim it is not needed because of autoleveling, but that is BS. You need heated bed for ABS to stick to it, level or not level, otherwise the moving head will lift the print or it will warp. Nothing to do with the bed being level.
- tiny working volume
- autocalibration - again some magical "motion sensor chip" is mentioned, without any explanation what that autocalibration is nor how it works
- they are keen on the artistic look of the thing, but I have serious reservations about the rigidity and accuracy of the device - the claimed 15um is only the theoretical resolution of the steppers, not actual resolution of the printer (depends on the nozzle size which is 0.45mm by default!). The ABS body doesn't instill much confidence!
- reduced power consumption is somehow supposed to make things lighter and cheaper (?!) - that argument seems backwards to me
- startup, they don't have any other products - who knows when they will actually be able to deliver. The August date is completely unrealistic.
- their team doesn't instill much confidence - 1 electronics guy, 1 CNC guy, 4 CAD people, 2 sw people, but they have 8 artists, 2 PR agencies and 4 lawyers! Not a healthy balance, IMO
- incredibly cheap price ($300), but you get what you pay for IMO ...
- they have exceeded their funding target 10x already
Honestly, I don't see how this printer will make 3D printing somehow accessible to the unwashed masses - there are still all those issues of CAD, mechanical design, toy-like device with nebulous claims and nothing to back it up.
IANAL, but shouldn't this qualify as perjury? Sony needs to certify in their automated DMCA request that they, in fact, own the rights to the content in question, under the penalty of perjury. Someone really needs to take the big studios to court for this sort of abuse, otherwise it won't stop.
It rather shows that Microsoft *still* does not review security-sensitive code properly. How this could have passed any code review is beyond me.
Either they are so incredibly sloppy and incompetent (do you really want to entrust them your credit card then?!) or this was intentional. I am not sure which one is actually worse ...
Fortunately the 5 years olds are easily bribed by a few games and an ice cream before they try to hack something more dangerous.
This sort of issue really instills a lot of confidence in the quality of that system *facepalm*.
This argument really goes like: "Oculus Rift is targeted at gamers, most gamers like bacon too, ergo Oculus Rift is competition for bacon."
WTF, people ... Why the most clueless idiots have to be the ones getting published at Slashdot ...
I am one of the original Oculus Kickstarter backers. I have received my Rift development kit without any problem, so I think you are grossly unfair to Oculus as far as the Kickstarter campaign is concerned. The perks were the development kits, not company shares, so there is no reason why I should be getting a cut of those 2 billions.
Also, honestly, do you really believe the company is operating on the Kickstarter money? You would be naive - there are several large investors there, the Kickstarter money went mainly into the original development kit.
However, I do wonder what the heck is going to happen now. They better tread really carefully or they could alienate many of their customers and developers in no time if they try to aggressively push Facebook everywhere (like the payment system - seriously, if one of the stated reasons for getting acquired was to get access to the Facebook's payment system, that's nuts).
I think you don't realize that a 3D printer is just that - a 3 axis CNC machine. Replace the extruder head with a spindle and you have a 3 axis CNC router (assuming your average printer has a frame rigid enough for the forces required, which it likely doesn't). There have been even some attempts to make a universal machine where you could choose to either mill/route or print depending on which tool head is installed. A CNC router can be trivially converted into a printer by simply installing the extruder head and/or heated bed. The machines even use exactly the same software, same protocols, are driven in the same way.
The only difference is that a mill/router removes material and a printer adds it and that routers/mills have to be better constructed (more rigid) because there are much higher lateral forces - a typical hobbyist 3D printer is a complete joke in this regard.
"Anyway, I think we're arguing at corossed purposes here. It is frankly indisputable that 3D printers are easier to use than CNC machine tools (a claim opposite would make me doubt you've used either, frankly)."
If you can operate a 3D printer, you could pretty much operate a similarly sized CNC mill/router, perhaps with a bit of basic safety training, because of the high-speed rotating bits that a typical printer doesn't have. The software, the design process, most of the maintenance, etc. is pretty much identical. It is not as if the 3D printing people have suddenly reinvented the machining world from scratch.
I know pretty well how these printers work and it takes to use them. My comment was not targeting someone like you, but the original poster who is obviously completely oblivious to the technology and wants it to be the same as a desktop printer or coffee machine before it is considered to be "consumer-level".
I disagree. They're certainly not now, and it will probably 20 years before they are, but imagine where home computers were in 1979.
Sorry, that's nonsense. Lathes, routers and other machine tools are around for what, 100+ years? (C)NC machines for at least 50 if not longer. By that measure everyone should have had one in their basements and living rooms since a long time already.
99.9% of consumers will never have any use for a 3D printer (or any machine tool, for that matter). We are certainly not going to 3D print stuff like coat hangers or door knobs at home (as some try to make people believe) when you can buy a new one for 1/10-1/100th of the price of a 3D printed one, not to mention in better quality and much less time. It just makes no economical sense to 3D print consumer item which are mass-produced already. Various machine shops and printing services will account for the occasional odd item needed to repair or replace broken bits at home - saves a lot of hassle and cost with running own printer. And that still generously assumes that the user actually knows how design the item. Don't forget that the most people can barely use e-mail and/or web browser, here we are asking them to do 3D modelling and use CAD + CAM tools (like slicer, g-code generators, etc) and understand certain engineering issues, such as the material properties, dimensions of the parts, limits of the machine (not everything is printable/machinable).
3D printers are a cool technology and a huge boon for tinkerers of all kinds, but most people are not tinkerers. Mass-market adoption of this ain't gonna happen, period.
I think you have unrealistic expectations fuelled by a lot of the hype around the printers (and the companies selling them).
Setting the poor quality and the need to constantly tinker with the calibration, belt tensions, levelling and what not aside, 3D printer is not a consumer device, even if it was plug & play today.
It is a machine tool and a pretty complex at that. Programming and using a 3D printer is comparable to a CNC router, which is a specialized skill that usually requires some extensive training. Sure, it is not rocket science neither, but expecting this to work as a printer in Windows (push a button and paper comes out with your document) is simply unrealistic.
Demanding things like "standardized 3D printer protocol" (hello g-code ...) or companies like HP or Epson to produce 3D printers is off the mark - why should they? They don't make other machine tools neither, the only thing a 3D printer has in common with a regular printer is the word "printer" ... These are all red herrings - those things are pretty much irrelevant. Without the engineering knowledge needed to build the part you won't be able to make a useful component beyond downloading and printing stuff someone else made. However, then you can order the parts cheaper and simpler from Shapeways or a similar place too.
The same holds for design of the parts - people complaining about the complexity of the CAD tools are way off the mark here. The tools have to be complex in order to be actually useful, otherwise designing precise parts would be impossible. Unfortunately, a lot of people think that CAD is like Photoshop or something - it is not. If you cannot construct a piece using a ruler & compass on paper, you probably shouldn't be using CAD neither.
One needs to look beyond the first graph that shows all sites surveyed to look at the actually active sites - there Apache appears to have more *active* deployments than the rest combined. Counting inactive, parked domains is not really indicative of particular server popularity.
In fact, the order is not as bad as some of the similar ones from the past. The original article is here (in French):
http://www.pcinpact.com/news/84642-la-justice-ordonne-blocage-galaxie-allostreaming.htm
The court ruled that the ISPs and search engines have 15 days to block the sites listed in the article and the order is in force for 12 months afterwards.
However, here is the kicker: the court ruled that the right holders are to pay the bill for the implementation of the blocks, the ISPs are not being asked to do it on their own dime. So carpet bombing the courts with poorly researched URLs to block could get really expensive ...