It's true that a printer that extrudes plastic can only make plastic things. But I think that there are many use cases beyond "expand your action figure universe, or fully equipt your doll house".

Yes, you could limit your 3D printing to toys (and toys can be fun), but it can be a lot more.

For example, 3D printed prosthetics (http://enablingthefuture.org) really change people's lives. And I've saved a fortune printing replacement parts that manufacturers wanted many, many hundreds of dollars for. And, of course, there's the creative and aesthetic ability to make anything that unleashes creativity, which has great value. And now that you can (for example) 3D print a statue that really looks and feels like Bronze, or iron, or stainless steel, or wood, it's even better! And if all you care about are the "functional" aspects, there are also materials, like Taulman3D's filament, with amazing strength, clarity, flexibility, etc., which people are using for 3D printing with very real world medical and engineering applications. There are things that are being 3D printed, like a strong, light flying wing with the motor and solar cells inside the wing, that couldn't reasonably be manufactured other ways.

This device http://tunell.us/ detects filament tangles, jams, and end-of-filament, and pauses the print. The price is pretty reasonable, given the stress reduction.

Note that it cannot detect cases where the print fails but filament continues to feed. So you still need to keep an eye out on your print. But it certainly reduces the stress involved in hitting the end of a spool of filament.

What I wrote was the opposite of that - I said that Apple, like all similar companies, documents the total storage precisely, and says that user available storage is less. The exact user storage varies by OS version, options enabled (some consume storage), fonts installed, apps, etc.

Keep in mind that iOS 8 is 1 GB, so it's not like (for example) the MS Surface, which uses 27 GB of storage for the OS and standard apps.

To be clear, FlashForge is based on the open source Replicator 1 designs, so while it's certainly "cloning", it's entirely legal for them to do so, so IMO it's not "ripping off" MakerBot.

Printing with mixed in particles has been going on a while - Laywood, BronzeFill, etc., have been happening over the last year or two, from a number of companies. So now MBI is doing it, too. And it's entirely possible that MBI is OEM-ing filament from those companies to sell under their label, as companies do that sort of thing all the time, because it's often smarter to do a deal (and rapidly/easily make money selling product) than to spend time/money engineering a competing product. So no reason to assume that they're "ripping off" anyone.

Nope, they filed patents on their original work, citing community created inventions as "prior art". People are reading the patents incorrectly and are interpreting the prior art section as if it's the claim - easy to do, as patents are pretty hard to read - but it doesn't help anything to repeat their incorrect analysis.

I agree that the new extruders suck, though. I like the idea that the extruder is an easy swap, but it's absurd that you can't open one up to clear a jam, so you have to swap the extruder for what should be routine maintenance.

As for the prices, well, it's far too high if you're happy with a cheap DIY-style printer, but there are many printers in the same price range as MBI (Ultimaker, for example) so I think that's probably a reasonable price if you want a professionally made printer with a real company behind it, with support, documentation, real R&D, etc. - remember, the price of the product has to support all of that for the company to be sustainable.

For structural purposes, these materials all give you a PLA print. The fact that it's got particles of something else mixed in just makes it a bit weaker because the print is full of "holes". So if you care about the structural properties, these filaments won't help you - look at Taulman filaments, etc., that have different base materials with different material properties.

In terms of appearance, or other properties, the particles matter. For example, if you print with BronzeFill, then sand it down a bit to wear away the outer PLA, you reveal the bronze particles, and the result is quite striking. Or if you print with iron or stainless steel particles, you get a part that magnets stick to. And wood particles change color depending on the print temp, so you can give prints a "wood grain" appearance, and of course they feel like wood, which is very nice.

There are "magnetic" filaments, such as https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... and the iron and stainless steel from http://www.proto-pasta.com/ . They have iron or stainless steel particles mixed into PLA, so magnets stick to the printed parts, you can magnetize them, etc.

I've uses laywood, bronzefill, etc., and in general the structural element is the PLA, and the material mixed into it really just affect the appearance or other properties (magnetism, surface texture, etc.). But since it's the PLA that is what bonds it all together, you aren't really "printing with metal" the way you are with an SLS printer - you are "printing with PLA, with metal powder mixed in".

For example, with laywood, the resulting print really does feel and look like wood. And bronzefill is very heavy and soft/flexible, which is a lot like bronze. There's also a material with iron in it, so it sticks to magnets, etc.

So if you're interested in structural strength, not appearance or feel, these materials won't help you. Instead, look at Taulman's filament (for example) which have really amazing structural properties.

According to the data, people with guns in their homes are 5x more likely to be shot than people without guns in their homes. So while guns might deter an attacker, in real life it's much more likely that someone in the house gets angry and shoots someone (2x as likely), or gets depressed and shoots themselves (10x more likely), and those deaths vastly outnumber the lives saved by the presence of the gun. And yes, people who are angry or depressed, but don't have a gun, could attack using a knife, etc., but the data there is clear, too - gun attacks have much higher fatality rates than knives, bats, etc. Because people who are shot die most of the time, people who are knifed or hit with a bat very rarely die. Or as an ER nurse put it a while ago, "people who arrive with knife wounds walk out. people who arrive with gunshot wounds are carried out."

This statistic is well known. Odd how it doesn't come up in these discussions too often.

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/...

The whole idea is stupid - good quality guns in the US (where this is going on) are cheap and easily available. 3D printed guns are expensive and incredibly unsafe, because they're not only made of bonded plastic powder or filament, which can't stand up to the stress of gunpowder exploding, so the guns risk exploding and injuring the user, and in any case will be inaccurate and have a very short useful life. You could make a better "gun" with a block of wood and a drill, more quickly and at lower cost.

The only perspective from which this makes sense is that they're gun fanatics trying to attach themselves to 3D printing for PR purposes, to promote their theory that there need to be more guns in the US, and that they be completely uncontrolled, which is a position that is not only extremely unpopular (90% of the US supports background checks, so violent felons can't easily get guns, and only a few fanatics think that it's a good idea for guns to not be detected by metal detectors).

So really, why promote a few fanatics who, if successful, would lead to even more gun deaths in the US? With the internet we can't stop them completely, but by giving them front-page promotion, we're just encouraging them, which is (IMO) extremely bad judgement.

I'd hope that you do in fact get higher quality DAC hardware, connectors, etc., so the actual sound quality is better. But the price is also "inflated" by the product being a niche, audiophile product. That is, if they're targeting a smaller market, they have to cover development costs, marketing, profit, etc., on a much smaller number of unit sales. For example, if they had a $1m marketing budget, and sell 10,000 units, that's $100/unit just for marketing. The same marketing budget for a product that sells 1m units would only be $1/unit. Now do the same math for covering the cost of everything about the product (R&D, running a manufacturing line, support team, etc.). It's the same reason that, back in the day, a "workstation" cost 5x as much as a "desktop computer" - there were some functional differences (unix, etc.), but most of the price difference was just due to the niche market having smaller volumes, so less "economy of scale". Heck, look at sports cars - they don't really cost 20x as much to make as a regular car, it's that they're covering the costs on a tiny fraction of the sales volume.

This is why, in every market, the best "price/performance" is for the most popular models. When you go up from more you're always paying disproportionately more for better than average.

I used to think this was insane - why doesn't everyone buy the best price/performance? Then I realized - if you're rich, and you need one of something (car, audio system, watch, etc.) and you can pay a lot more for it to be better than average. As an extreme example, a $24m watch (http://edition.cnn.com/2014/11/12/business/24-million-gold-watch-sothebys-record-patek-philippe/) doesn't keep time better than the $10 watch, but it's literally one of a kind, an insanely cool piece of engineering that packs astounding functionality into a mechanical watch. But price/performance is near-zero - a $10 plastic watch tells better time, and your smartphone has more functionality.

So Sony's aiming for the "willing to pay more for better than average" crowd.

There are many successful tech companies outside the US. Heck, Intel would be nearly dead if it weren't for their Israeli R&D team and the (British) ARM chip. And SAP is German. Samsung, Foxcon, Hitachi, Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, LG, Nokia, Arduino, ... they all do tech, and they're outside the US, right?

Yes, there are tons of US tech companies. But don't forget that the rest of the world exists, and has exciting stuff going on, too!

Exactly! The rule was supposed to be that managers didn't get overtime, but workers did. But the salary number stayed fixed for many decades, while inflation pushed 90% of workers above the line, so they're treated as if they were managers, who would be getting bonuses, etc., based on company performance. But they're (typically) not.

Don't bet on it. The large majority of real estate agents make very little money most of the time - big deals that pay well are relatively rare, so the cash flow is erratic. There's a small number of agents who are making huge money doing huge deals, of course.

Being a programmer gives you pretty good job security, and a consistent income, unless you've stayed current with mainstream technologies.

"But don't blame the process, blame the people who don't implement it well."

There's some truth to this, in that working remotely can work well, but there's a lot that you lose by not being co-located with the people you work with. That can be fine if you're working relatively independently, but if you're functioning as a part of a team and need to interact with them regularly, there's more friction involved if you're not co-located. It's not insurmountable, of course. But it's a lot easier for someone working remotely to "disconnect", because you can't see each other as casually, just in scheduled meetings, so you lose all of the informal lunch/hallway discussions, which have a lot of value. And, of course, when someone is remote they have less direct oversight, which can, if they lack discipline, lead to them spending a lot of time not getting work done. There are tools that help - IM, video (Skype, FaceTime, Hangouts), etc. But it's pretty consistent that, all things being equal, a team of people all in one room will generally work more effectively than a geographically dispersed team, because there's an energy and momentum that a team builds in their space, and a team bonding and commitment, which is hard to make work remotely. Because people aren't just "skills on legs" they are social creatures, and being in the same places works better for most people.

Of course, things aren't always equal. If the perfect developer that fills needed skills is remote, and won't move for the job, and you can't find anyone local who can do the work, you're certainly better off with him remote than not having the skills on the team at all (and failing).