McCarthur was pissing over the Yalu river from the start. He backed bombing runs into China to stop supplies coming in to NK. If you remember Truman was pretty pissed about it. McCarthur assured him that the the Chinese were a bunch of pussy's and not to worry about it. He was dead wrong on both counts. Truman was right to want to keep China out of the war. How long would you allow your people to be bombed in your own country before responding?
For those people unfamiliar with the patent wars. Think of it as two large spanish galions loaded with treasure recently pillaged from the new world. If they both make it home they have to share in the bounty, but if one takes the other ship. Then only one ship goes home with the plunder.
So now we have two ships circling each other firing canon at close range hoping the other will surrender or sink..
In this case MS sued Motorola, and it's actually Motorola's shitty h.264 patents you are talking about not googles... and I seriously doubt they are anywhere near as bad as the list of patents that Barnes & Nobles releases when MS went to sue them for not using Windows. Google to my knowledge has not initiated a patent war with any major company. It has however been fighting as hard as it can.
Interesting, that when I read your post I couldn't help but think that very same though about politics, and social engineering. People seem to think that any solution that looks good on the surface should work, and yet hardly ever bother to measure the result of any given solution. On the whole we understand that things are f'd up but understanding why is simply beyond us. Makes me wonder what solutions machine learning algorithms would come up with given more and more criteria, and if those solutions would seem reasonable to humans or not. Just don't allow it access to Petman..
Hrm.. funny I had read that on the web. Couldn't find the off. I tried it before and after posting here.. then I shot video of the settings to show I wasn't making it up, and while viewing the video before uploading, I saw it. Right at the top, blue button. I'd been looking at it the whole time, and just couldn't see it. God knows this is the biggest problem I have when writing code too.. just some dumb spelling error that takes me an hour to debug because I can't see it right in front of me...
I actually like some of the things google does.. but I had to unistall google+ from my phone because I couldn't find a way to stop it from uploading all of my photos, and videos. I don't like the fact that they took out the setting that allows you to only upload what you want to. I don't care that they don't automatically share. I don't feel like going through and deleting 50 million images and movies every time I log in to G+
Kind sir, but really we are talking about graphene here. That miracle of all miracles, that elixer for the gods. If anything could pull 1000 times better out of a 20% increase it would be graphene. Actually I had some in my breakfast this morning and it was quite tasty as well.
Moving to open source, has been done. Even by profesionals http://www.davidrevoy.com/article170/the-choice-of-open-source
Gimp will have full 16 bit per channel support in the upcomming 3.0. If you can't wait for that and must have it Krita already supports 16 bits per channel.
Personally, I don't understand this. It does make sense for print ads, or high end photography, but for web, it does not even make a slight bit of difference."
Ya, I recently designed a settop for my ungodly raspberry pi monsters.. I wanted it all contained and nice looking. I priced out having them printed by Shapeways, but it would have cost me over a $1000. I ended up making it out of stainless steel using my tig welder, and some starboard plasic parts that I machined. The plastic printer makes a lot more sense to me after pricing out things at Shapeways.
Complex programs are expensive and require training, or are free and require more training (Blender).
I've done both parametric and polygonal modelling. Solidworks is a lot harder to learn than Blender. On top of that it's about $5000 and takes twice as long to create anything in. Don't get me wrong, Solidworks creates accurate reliable objects to a degree Blender can only dream of. But in most cases for the purposes of 3d printing Blender should work fine, and you don't have to know tons of higher math to use it.
For some reason, 3D printers care about the normal of a surface. Why should that matter?
The "face normals" show which is the inside and which is the outside of your surface. I'd think that would be pretty important to a 3d printer
As to the rest.. I'd love to try. I just can't afford the machine right now. I have the feeling that it would be a lot of fun to try
Working with parametric or polygonal 3d modelling, is by it's very nature difficult to conceptualize, much less learn. I've been doing it for years, and there is still a lot I don't know, and the amount of things you can do keep growing, and growing.
But I digress, the reason I'm responding to you is that, if you're an artist, then you may not need to use a parametric modeller. If you can create your base mesh (cube, sphere, tube.. whatever), to your needed dimensions then you can just sculpt it. No need to learn tons 3d modelling stuff. And yes Blender can export for 3d printing. Check this video out, to get a good idea of the state of sculpting in Blender, and what you can do with it.
Filabot is one simple way around that. The problem as I see it is the initial price of the printer. The current iteration of the Reprap project is the Mendal Max. This is the best deal out there. For $1500US you get a kit that you can put together yourself. I want one so badly it hurts.. but I don't have the money. I'm assuming I'm not the only one.
Ubuntu for phones.. hrm. I'm on the mailing list. It's a very empty mailing list. I'd love to see it. Hell I'd buy one.. but so far nothing.
Byte your tongue.
