Read the next paragraph. I've quoted it below for you.

It's cool, but not really news.

I was doing some work in Royal Perth Hospital sometime around 2008, and saw a small, beautifully detailed metal skull on one of the managers' desks. I asked him about it and was told he'd taken an MRI of his own skull and had it printed quarter-sized in sintered titanium. It was the best paperweight I've ever seen.

Cool factor aside, they've been scanning patients' actual bones, optimising them in software and printing titanium replacements (mostly hip joints) there for almost a decade now. There's even a few commercial madical 3d printing companies around AU (Anatomics is one).

It's great that SA is making jaws for people now though.

Microsoft OSs are down to 14% market share.

It simply makes no sense to continue using their outdated lockin-inspired formats. The world needs to transition to document editing formats that're portable across whatever computing devices users want to buy.

ODF was designed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium to be that set of formats in 2005, and was only derailed by an intense and deeply corrupt effort by Microsoft. It's incredibly sad that we've had to wait for almost a decade for governments to finally start the transition.

Or they could just link to the web page: http://webodf.org/

No. Just no. That's pure and slick as goose fat spin control. Businesses simply don't work that way.

That stuff didn't happen because Microsoft decided to spend the next decade and a half focused on embracing, extending and extinguishing or just f***ing killing and just f***ing burying their competitors instead of making good products.

With toxic corporate citizenship at their heart, they stacked standards committees instead of making a better Office product. When online security and malware became a problem, instead of improving and securing their colander-like OS they funded a feral and failing software company to attack a community-built competitor. When that failed, they wielded 235 patents as a FUD-bludgeon, and sold more to a 3rd party patent troll. When it became clear they couldn't compete in the mobile space, they used some questionable patents to extort money from manufacturers using a competing OS. Their customers suffered high costs and poor products because, whenever possible, they chose to litigate instead of innovate.

That's why they now have 14% market share and are laying off thousands of workers. As soon as there were viable alternatives, ex-Microsoft customers fled to them in droves.

Window anyway.

It's a VB6 program running on a single PC, supposedly for security reasons. The system is highly manual and failure prone enough that they're probably too embarrassed to release the code.

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/...
http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/...

You could use windtraps to increase humidity and use the electricity to pump the resulting water to your sietch water stores. Maybe not necessary on earth now, but who knows...

Popcorn Time.

audio quid ueteres olim moneatis amici,
"pone seram, cohibe." sed quis custodiet ipsos
custodes? cauta est et ab illis incipit uxor.

They were lying.

Like many aspects of the DotCom bubble before it, the housing bubble was thoroughly well understood and predicted by pretty much every observer (and discussed as such by those with integrity). The only people who said otherwise were those who were participating for their own benefit, and who well understood the risk to themselves of prematurely bursting their giant Ponzi scheme.

Similar liars will crawl out of the woodwork to pump up the next bubble too, I'm sure.

I still have an Intergraph TDZ 2000 workstation that I used for 3D/video editing back in the late '90s. It cost around $15,000 new, with dual PII 300MHz CPUs, 256MB RAM and dual 80GB 10,000rpm SCSI drives in RAID 0. It's still set up to dual boot NT4 and Debian 2.2, and I occasionally fire it up (if only to to remind myself what it was like to hear the jet-engine whine as those those drives spool up to speed).

It still feels very responsive with that old OS/software combination, so an old version of Linux on a cheap SBC should perform well enough. It will need to be an x86 based box to run OP's software though, so the (ARM based) Raspberry PI is out. Some of the Vortex86 based kits could be worth trying, though I suspect they'd fall over on driver support. They can be had for less than $40, and can run contemporary Linux so worth trying just for the fun of it. It's hard to say how well it would cope with drivers though

Or harpoon them from ships and render their blubber for oil.

If the Europeans were sensible, they'd erect statues of Cap'n Ahab in every capital city, legalize chubby-hunting as a sustainable biofuel harvesting method, and watch with glee as a combination of terror fueled adrenaline and frantic waddling from danger shrunk the waistlines of all but the most irredeemable behemoths to non-disabling proportions. Better still, if manufacturers fitted the harpoons to cars, I have no doubt that the average Citroen, Peugeot, Fiat or small VW could be run for several weeks on the fruits of just one venture onto the streets of Brussels or any other large European city.

Citizens of the world, start petitions, start lobby groups. This needs to happen now, to save our environment and improve the scenery in our streets and supermarkets..

The best option for students needing cheap and versatile measuring equipment. would be the Red Pitaya. http://redpitaya.com/?skip_int...

It's not as cheap as OP wants, but it's a far better learning tool than a half-assed knock off.