International Business Machines, a worldwide leader in technology innovation, has announced a new and affordable 3D video system that works with normal DLP (Digital Light Processing) televisions. Before now, 3D video systems would set you back at least $1,800 while the price of IBM's new system is expected to be only $1000 - if only a grand sounds cheap to you.
IBM has managed to alternate the video frames to give the appearance of double projectors without the added cost. This means adding video frames - lots of them. While normal "live" video is 30 frames per second, this device processes 144fps. First you see the frames from the left and then the right perspective giving the image an authentic three dimensional look.
So basically they reinvented the shutter glasses for DLP TVs. Nothing to see here folks, move on!
lets not forget to put this into units we can all understand. 5kg of mass = 4e+17Joules = 641 GigaSnickerBars recent tsunami = 6.4e+19Joules = 102 TeraSnickerBars
"I'm very interested to see what uses the Slashdot community can conceive for a household controlled through voice commands issued to a robot dog."
Prepare to disapointed kid...
Frankly the level of stupidity on most commercial stations either bores me to sleep or pisses me off to degree that I have diffuclties concentrating on the road. I'd rather listen to something that actually stimulates my brain.
I can strongly recommend NPR and PRI, infact I'm listening to an NPR station right now (89.3 kpcc) and just five minutes ago there was a guy on singing about brownian motion. If you can't appreciate that you don't belong on slashdot!:)
There actually is RP printers capable of printing metal through a process known a selective laser sinthering, they fuse toghether metal powder by melting it with a laser. www.arcam.se makes one that uses electric arcing to fuse metal powder.
I have for the past few weeks been evaluating all currently available rapid prototyping machines and technologies since we intend to purchase one at work. So let me try to answer your questions.
1) What is this thing capable of making (besides itself)?
Not even that. Almost all rapid prototyping machines can only print in one material at a time, usually some form of plastic. The resolution and material properties are not good enough to build any complicated mechanical parts such as the XYZ tables used in the dimension printer -- visible in one of the pictures in the artice.
You might be able to create a poorly functioning rapid prototyping (RP) printer by using several different RP technologies, the question is why you'd want to. The build time is usually counted in days for any larger part, say 12*12*12 inches. It would take months to build a refridgerator sized machine. Then you'd still have to assemble it manually anyway.
Standard manufacturing technologies would be much cheaper and faster.
2) How much human effort is involved in getting it to make anything? (ie: what resources are required, how must they be arranged, can this thing build several instances at once, or must it be "refilled" every go round...)
They're usually loaded with a cartridge, powder or fluid of material depending on the technology. You'll have to reload the material manually between builds.
The material is usually quite expensive compared to say ABS plastic used for injection molding. As one of the salesmen we talked to told us: "We make the money on the material not the printer". This guy was from dimension printers, their machines incidentally prints ABS plastic parts.
The software side takes any 3d model in STL format and prints it, no or little manual work is required.
3) How many of us (if any) got viruses from downloading and reading that word document on his website?
.. even the wind patterns in the dust around it look new.
Tell me, what natural process on Mars would make the wind patterns look old? Rain? Footprints? Dunebuggies?
A hundred years from now, I bet they still look "new", whatever that's supposed to mean.
Allow me to answer your question since the rest of the moro.. Uhm, slashdotters got hung up on the sea level rising.
The Island of La Palma is not some unpopulated rock in the middle of the atlantic. It's slightly less than half the size of the island of Maui (Hawaii), populated by 85.000 permanent residents and home to one huge tourist industry. The Canary islands is a very popular tourist destination for Europeans, kind of like Hawaii to Americans.
Needless to say, trying to get all those hotel chains and resorts on the island to abandon their investments on the dangerous part of the island so that you can slowly dump it in the ocean is going to take some major government intervention. This will not happen for the same reasons that there is no seizmic monitoring/varning system on the island.
Ofcourse, then you have the problem of actually dumping half the island into the ocean without disturbing the volcano.
The engine does not combust fuel; rather it splits atoms with electricity to get ions, accelerates them at high speed, and then ejects them, driving the spacecraft forward. SMART-1 generates its electricity by converting sunlight with outsize solar arrays that give the spacecraft a 45-foot wingspan.
Brilliant science journalism there. If the smart probe was splitting atoms it wouldn't need solar panels. Not to mention you don't need to split atoms to get ions.
That reminds me of the article that was written on some research I was involved with. We were pulsing cells with high potential electric fields. The field strength was measured in MegaVolts per meter due to a very small gap between the electrodes, the actual voltage was only a kilovolt or so (over a 300ohm load for 5-15 ns). The journalist / engineer-reject thought that megavolts sounded really big and took it upon herself to proclaim that our pulse generators could power a whole city. Moan, groan....
Dude, In 1985, SEGA created Outrun: 2x68000, Z80 for sound, a tremendous sprite scaler engine that could scale many many hardware sprites at real time...the 68000 had a full 32-bit architecture, but a 24-bit data bus. You can easily google arcade Outrun specs.
Furthermore, many mainframe systems used the 68000 with some version of Unix.
Furthermore, in 1985, you could buy an Amiga 1000 in US.
For the sake of nitpicking.....
The 68000 was indeed a 32 bit processor but it had a 16bit external databus and a 24 bit address bus.
You're emitting photons?? Did you have glow-worm for dinner or something? Perhaps you work at a nuclear powerplant?
The rest of us merely reflects photons.
Sadly it is not unique to the US. I have a friend who works for a large telecom company in Sweden. I regularly recieve forwarded email jokes from him with some ridicoulus legalese at the bottom. Ofcourse I take great pleasure in forwarding it to all my friends.
Lately you've been able to fry eggs on pretty much any surface in Los angeles. I'd recomend the hood of a black car or the freeway.
I'd pay good money for some coooold fusion right now.
Those unitard pictures are more than I can handle in the morning. For the love of god please cover your family jewels with some hard plastic. Think of the children! Won't somebody please think of the children!!!
Yet another proof the guy has no idea what he's talking about. 35kg is a measurement of mass and 16 watts is a measurement of power.
Incidentally it doesn't take any power to move 35kg (assuming no friction), accelerating it for a certain time period does but he makes no claim as to what the acceleration or time is, hence BAH HUMBUG!
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could just buy a pair of shutter glasses for 69.95 from this site http://www.ray3d.com/glasses.html/
So basically they reinvented the shutter glasses for DLP TVs. Nothing to see here folks, move on!
I for one am looking forward to my new robot assisted bowel movements in the morning!
lets not forget to put this into units we can all understand.
5kg of mass = 4e+17Joules = 641 GigaSnickerBars
recent tsunami = 6.4e+19Joules = 102 TeraSnickerBars
So now when I pop the DVD in it will say "applet started" and then nothing will happen.
"I'm very interested to see what uses the Slashdot community can conceive for a household controlled through voice commands issued to a robot dog."
Prepare to disapointed kid...
Frankly the level of stupidity on most commercial stations either bores me to sleep or pisses me off to degree that I have diffuclties concentrating on the road. I'd rather listen to something that actually stimulates my brain.
I can strongly recommend NPR and PRI, infact I'm listening to an NPR station right now (89.3 kpcc) and just five minutes ago there was a guy on singing about brownian motion. If you can't appreciate that you don't belong on slashdot! :)
There actually is RP printers capable of printing metal through a process known a selective laser sinthering, they fuse toghether metal powder by melting it with a laser. www.arcam.se makes one that uses electric arcing to fuse metal powder.
Not even that. Almost all rapid prototyping machines can only print in one material at a time, usually some form of plastic. The resolution and material properties are not good enough to build any complicated mechanical parts such as the XYZ tables used in the dimension printer -- visible in one of the pictures in the artice.
You might be able to create a poorly functioning rapid prototyping (RP) printer by using several different RP technologies, the question is why you'd want to. The build time is usually counted in days for any larger part, say 12*12*12 inches. It would take months to build a refridgerator sized machine. Then you'd still have to assemble it manually anyway.
Standard manufacturing technologies would be much cheaper and faster. They're usually loaded with a cartridge, powder or fluid of material depending on the technology. You'll have to reload the material manually between builds. The material is usually quite expensive compared to say ABS plastic used for injection molding. As one of the salesmen we talked to told us: "We make the money on the material not the printer". This guy was from dimension printers, their machines incidentally prints ABS plastic parts.
The software side takes any 3d model in STL format and prints it, no or little manual work is required.
Dont's use word!
I guess that game developers don't qualify as people then.http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11
Overkill
Tell me, what natural process on Mars would make the wind patterns look old? Rain? Footprints? Dunebuggies?
A hundred years from now, I bet they still look "new", whatever that's supposed to mean.
How I met the girl who is now my wife.
First msg is from my wife, I'm not one of the people who replied in the thread.
All nations with any smidgen of self respect has at one point or other partitioned Poland. It's a rite of passage.
Allow me to answer your question since the rest of the moro.. Uhm, slashdotters got hung up on the sea level rising.
The Island of La Palma is not some unpopulated rock in the middle of the atlantic. It's slightly less than half the size of the island of Maui (Hawaii), populated by 85.000 permanent residents and home to one huge tourist industry. The Canary islands is a very popular tourist destination for Europeans, kind of like Hawaii to Americans.
Needless to say, trying to get all those hotel chains and resorts on the island to abandon their investments on the dangerous part of the island so that you can slowly dump it in the ocean is going to take some major government intervention. This will not happen for the same reasons that there is no seizmic monitoring/varning system on the island.
Ofcourse, then you have the problem of actually dumping half the island into the ocean without disturbing the volcano.
True.
And technically our pulse generators could power a city, for a very very short period of time.
Brilliant science journalism there. If the smart probe was splitting atoms it wouldn't need solar panels. Not to mention you don't need to split atoms to get ions.
That reminds me of the article that was written on some research I was involved with. We were pulsing cells with high potential electric fields. The field strength was measured in MegaVolts per meter due to a very small gap between the electrodes, the actual voltage was only a kilovolt or so (over a 300ohm load for 5-15 ns). The journalist / engineer-reject thought that megavolts sounded really big and took it upon herself to proclaim that our pulse generators could power a whole city. Moan, groan....
Dude, In 1985, SEGA created Outrun: 2x68000, Z80 for sound, a tremendous sprite scaler engine that could scale many many hardware sprites at real time...the 68000 had a full 32-bit architecture, but a 24-bit data bus. You can easily google arcade Outrun specs. Furthermore, many mainframe systems used the 68000 with some version of Unix. Furthermore, in 1985, you could buy an Amiga 1000 in US. For the sake of nitpicking..... The 68000 was indeed a 32 bit processor but it had a 16bit external databus and a 24 bit address bus.
You're emitting photons?? Did you have glow-worm for dinner or something? Perhaps you work at a nuclear powerplant? The rest of us merely reflects photons.
Sadly it is not unique to the US. I have a friend who works for a large telecom company in Sweden. I regularly recieve forwarded email jokes from him with some ridicoulus legalese at the bottom. Ofcourse I take great pleasure in forwarding it to all my friends.
Lately you've been able to fry eggs on pretty much any surface in Los angeles. I'd recomend the hood of a black car or the freeway.
I'd pay good money for some coooold fusion right now.
Those unitard pictures are more than I can handle in the morning.
For the love of god please cover your family jewels with some hard plastic.
Think of the children! Won't somebody please think of the children!!!
Yet another proof the guy has no idea what he's talking about. 35kg is a measurement of mass and 16 watts is a measurement of power. Incidentally it doesn't take any power to move 35kg (assuming no friction), accelerating it for a certain time period does but he makes no claim as to what the acceleration or time is, hence BAH HUMBUG!
1. Save 1-2 pennies on each disk 2. multiply by 20 billion disks 3. $$$$$$$$$$$$$ 4. Profit
Brittish cops don't solve crimes they issue case numbers.