I went there about two years ago, it was fascinating. I _liked_ how the exhibits are mostly "as is". Too many museums try to look cool, but I'm there to see the history, not a rock concert. The guides and lectures told me a lot about the history and mathematics, some smart and interesting people.
The whole place is a/. mecca!
Open Source RepRap Project
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· Score: 3, Informative
A universal constructor is a machine that can replicate itself and - in addition - make other industrial products. Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost.
A rapid prototyper is a machine that can manufacture objects directly (usually, though not necessarily, in plastic) under the control of a computer.
The project described in these pages is working towards creating a universal constructor by using rapid prototyping, and then giving the results away free under the GNU General Public Licence to allow other investigators to work on the same idea. We are trying to prove the hypothesis: Rapid prototyping and direct writing technologies are sufficiently versatile to allow them to be used to make a von Neumann Universal Constructor.
LabView is great! Really, it is the best approach for abstracting hardware control, providing an easy GUI, and handling parallel loops.
But it has a learning curve like any programming language. If you are paging through huge screens of code, you are doing something wrong -- most of that complexity should be moved into objects or function blocks.
If you have some code (eg. number crunching) that is better written in text, then code it in C and link in the DLL.
Amber was a highlight for many of us, alas.
For something like a fix for your Amber addiction, have you tried the "Well-favored Man" series by Elizabeth Willey?
I use http://www.colinux.org/ to run linux inside windows 2000/XP. It is free and a lot faster than vmware. You can even download a debian image for a quickstart.
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I learnt to drive in Australia (on the left). Playing driving games made it easy to drive in America (on the right), it was very natural.
Me too. I have the library copy of TAOE here beside me, but it's hard to justify buying a 20-year old tech book.
I went there about two years ago, it was fascinating. I _liked_ how the exhibits are mostly "as is". Too many museums try to look cool, but I'm there to see the history, not a rock concert. The guides and lectures told me a lot about the history and mathematics, some smart and interesting people. The whole place is a /. mecca!
http://reprap.org/
A universal constructor is a machine that can replicate itself and - in addition - make other industrial products. Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost.
A rapid prototyper is a machine that can manufacture objects directly (usually, though not necessarily, in plastic) under the control of a computer.
The project described in these pages is working towards creating a universal constructor by using rapid prototyping, and then giving the results away free under the GNU General Public Licence to allow other investigators to work on the same idea. We are trying to prove the hypothesis: Rapid prototyping and direct writing technologies are sufficiently versatile to allow them to be used to make a von Neumann Universal Constructor.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
LabView is great! Really, it is the best approach for abstracting hardware control, providing an easy GUI, and handling parallel loops.
But it has a learning curve like any programming language. If you are paging through huge screens of code, you are doing something wrong -- most of that complexity should be moved into objects or function blocks.
If you have some code (eg. number crunching) that is better written in text, then code it in C and link in the DLL.
Amber was a highlight for many of us, alas. For something like a fix for your Amber addiction, have you tried the "Well-favored Man" series by Elizabeth Willey?
I use http://www.colinux.org/ to run linux inside windows 2000/XP. It is free and a lot faster than vmware. You can even download a debian image for a quickstart.