One of the hackers at my makerspace has successfully used lost-PLA casting to cast steel. The result was a functional part used in a battle bot. That's using a standard consumer 3D printer.

Jewelers have been using 3D printers for lost-wax casting for years; there are specialized 3D printers sold for this.

The Kopimashin is illegal in England:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/17/high-court-quashes-regulations-copy-cds-musicians

It might be illegal in other jurisdictions as well? And that's kind of the point of building it.

The slide at 24:49 in the video summarizes the argument:
* Open Hardware licensing attempts to work using copyright but is unsuccessful in doing so. (You can't actually enforce an Open Hardware license in the courts, where the mechanism is a copyright on an electronic circuit. You can't really copyright a circuit.)
* Open Hardware licensing only works as the developers would have it work when there is a *patent* on the design.
* Patents are expensive to pursue, and not particularly attractive to people who work on Open things.
* If the law was changed to allow electronic circuits to be copyrighted, that would actually cause more harm to the community than good. (The reasons for this are discussed later in the video.) We could, through our own actions, make that happen.

No, LLVM/clang is all about having a superior architecture to GCC, so that a lot of new applications become possible. One of the key ideas is that the optimizer and code generator are libraries with a C++ API. One cool application of this is that you can use the LLVM library to implement a JIT compiler for your interpreted language: you generate the machine code directly into memory (instead of to a file), then execute it.

LLVM has many more developers than GCC, and is evolving and improving more quickly than GCC can. This is because of the licence: it turns out that corporations like Apple are more willing to provide developer resources for this open source project if the licence isn't copyleft. For this particular project, this means that the BSD license is more successful than the GPL. Of course, there are other projects for which the GPL produces better results in the real world.

If you want to make a GPL fork of LLVM just for the pure pleasure of fucking over the original project due their heresy in choosing a license you don't approve of, well, good luck with that.

Clang can compile to the LLVM "IR" format, which is a mostly machine-independent Intermediate Representation. Kind of like bytecode.

The IR file format has two variations: a human readable text format, and a more compact binary format.

Given an IR file, you can optimize it, which produces another IR file, or you can compile it into an object file.

Here in Canada, "bespoke" is used by businesses to mean custom designed solutions and products. That's how I know the word. This is is the first I heard that the word is only used in Britain.

www.bespokedesign.ca
bespokesuits.ca
www.bespokedecor.ca

https://web.archive.org/web/20150618010547/http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2015/05/29/community-council-statement-jonathan-riddell/

I'm not taking sides, just providing extra information that's not in the original post.

Rust has already been around for 10 years. The project started in 2006 as a hobby project, and "went big" in 2009 when people could play with a working Rust compiler, and Mozilla sponsored it. There are currently 1200 contributers to the Rust project. Given all the momentum, it will likely be around 10 years from now.

The Rust compiler and runtime system are written in Rust.

The compiler uses the LLVM library for code generation, which is a C++ library, so there is a bit of C++ glue code to interface the compiler to LLVM.

The runtime uses parts of the C library to make system calls, so there is a bit of C glue code to interface the runtime to the C library.

1) The Rust project is not controlled by Mozilla. Just look at the copyrights on the rust source code. It's permissive open source, with copyright shared by ~1200 individuals, and Mozilla is not on that list. So this is like spreading FUD by warning people that Linux is controlled by the Linux Foundation (Linus's employer)--hint, it isn't.

2) Mozilla and Oracle are quite different. The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, open source organization that exists to provide a public benefit through the creation of open source software. The Mozilla Corporation (employer of some of the Rust developers) is a wholly owned subsidiary that donates all of its profit to the foundation. By contrast, Oracle is known for being one of the most rapaciously greedy software organizations in existence: just consider the Oracle article on Slashdot right now, about how Oracle rips off customers via "traps" in the opaque licencing terms.

3) How can you be sure that Rachael Craig and Nicolette Verlinden are cisgender males? They have female names and photos.

So yeah, I'm pretty sure the parent is a troll, and I fell for the bait.

1st paragraph is false, due to the rather extraordinary design process that Rust went through.

The Rust community is quite large, including many skilled language designers. The Rust github repository has ~1200 contributers. With that pool of talent,
there are no features of C/C++ that the designers don't understand. With this kind of community, and a formal change review/feature addition process, there's not much danger of a single ego-tripping designer messing up the language.

The project transitioned from a hobby project to an official Mozilla project in 2009. During the 6 years from 2009 to 2015 (when the Rust 1.0 design was stabilized and released), a lot of Rust code was written. Features that seemed like a good idea at the time, but which had little practical use, were removed before 1.0.

3rd paragraph is also incorrect. The main feature of Rust is guaranteed memory safety, without a garbage collector, enforced by compile time type checking rather than by introducing run-time overhead. This memory safety includes a guarantee that shared global data can't be corrupted by simultaneous writes from different threads, something that no other language offers. C++ doesn't offer this today, no other language does.

I agree that Rust will influence future languages, but I don't think it will have much effect on C. The C++ community is already looking at Rust and trying to figure out how to compete with what it offers.

The SpineJS repository has 4 contributors. The Rust/Lang repository has 1,188 contributors. (on github)

I'm all for a big tablet. As someone who regularly works with large drawings having what effectively amounts to a digital piece of paper is a killer feature for me.

Consider buying a Cintiq. It's exactly what you are asking for, with superb software and stylus support, at sizes up to 27" diagonal. A bit expensive, but this is a niche market, and you get what you pay for.

Sorry about that mistake. I'm not a FreeBSD expert, I'm someone who is setting up a FreeBSD file server, after 10 years of using Linux. So I'm in the market for a book like this, and of course it is largely useless to me, because of course I'm using ZFS. I was confused by the PC-BSD installer, which *does* default to ZFS.

Now that ZFS is the default operating system for new installs of FreeBSD 10.x, it sounds like this book documents a lot of hard won technical insights that have been made obsolete by ZFS. Why would I configure RAID 10 for UFS when ZFS provides superior data protection? And so on. It's probably useful for people who have parachuted in and now must maintain a legacy FreeBSD system. It doesn't sound particularly useful for someone who is migrating from Linux to FreeBSD right now, since this is all about how people *used* to configure FreeBSD storage.