The point of 3d printers... make no mistake, within the next 10 years 3d printers will bring about the downfall of some very heavy industries.

Yes, right now they're limited, most people who would build such a thing (and i am one) are going to print things in (not that cheap) plastic but we already have printers capable of printing many different types of materials (including conductive) and in 5 years, those reprap's will be something there will be very big lawsuits over. Much like the digital media industry, the industry will have to cope with the change, they might win a few lawsuits, but they'll ultimately have to adapt. Consider what a 3d printer will give you in a couple of years:

- glasses (possibly even the lenses for them)
- fixtures (lights, power points, cases, things that other things hang on - this list is endless)
- crockery (plates, etc - theres no reason you could extrude a clay or clay substitute thats safe to eat off/drink from)
- Phone cases
- its hard to actually come up with a decent list thats compelling cause its just so wide ranging

With a minor amount of electronics, you can add to this:
- phone docks, keyboards, stands of so many different varieties, control devices....

Who'll benefit form this? The people who get on board... the guys who go "hmm, im just gunna make a iphone dock interface you can print an object around rather then making an entire iphone dock" - thats the industry of the future boys - selling electronics that you put inside objects people can 3d print... there isnt one yet, but mark my works, and heed this well as a prediction - in 10 years, this will be a major (or at least up-and-coming) industry. We'll even see a regulation and dmca like laws come into effect.

But look around you and take a SERIOUS look at the things around you and think, how many of these items could be printed? you'll be blown away by the things you could easily replace with something you can print yourself. The sad fact is people dont really notice until you have one, then you look around and see a whole bunch of industries destined for the scrap heap as people start printing their own items rather then running down the shops to pick one up.

sitting in front of me, i look and i think "my mouse, my keyboard, my glasses, my 3 hard drive cases, my phone stands, my mouse pad, my cup and the spoon thats in it. all my pens (sans ink)... i could go on".

The point is, the point people miss, isnt that 3d printing an object is in any way, shape or form more economical then buying the mass-produced equivalent. The point is that i can "have it now" (and have it my way)... much of what we do now and what the internet provided (and what content producers have fought hard to stop) is the "have it now" philosophy. Thanks to scale, prices of printing an object will go down, very far down. PLA and ABS (the main things people tend to use with the repraps) arent cheap, but that'll change. 3d printing isnt about "hey, new mass manufacturing process" cause its just not economical at that and never will be, its about not needing one in the first place, if everyone has a 3d printer (or access to one), whos going to make phone cases when people can just print their own?. The secondary point is you can build things you just cant buy or easily make or you can take a phone case and customise it. I dont know how many times i've wanted a lather or a router or whatever and even then thought "i probably wont be able to make it anyway"... well now i can and easily.

So right now you can do one of two things, look at 3d printing and see its potential or go "meh" and you'll miss out (even if missing out is simply the opportunity of being involved), but i believe that 3d printing will be one of the biggest and most disruptive techs to hit the world and when it does hit with full force it'll be one of the most important things we'll see - possibly even more important then computing. My point is make no mistake, what 3d printing can and will do will change life as we know it in ways you haven't considered (heres a simple example from the medical industry http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/penn-researchers-improve-living-tissues-3d-printed-vascular-networks-made-sugar).

To me, personally what the 'pi has always represented is a arduino replacement and hence while i'm very into arm and tech in general, i've never really been able to get into it given that its only got 256mb of ram. For a while i had this idea in my head of building a vps style system out of small arm boards and the 'pi just isnt going to cut it. The CPU in the thing is probably decent for some applications but there just not enough ram.

Calxeda are now doing just that (with hp) and now dell are getting into it too, but they're taking it to the high end of the spectrum. Personally i think this is where these little mini-pc's can fit. 1g of ram, 1.5ghz cpu, size of a thumb drive (ok a bit bigger than that). Sure they're 3x the price, but its 3x25$ In fairness what the 'pi's original goals are intended to achieve makes it idea for that application, but to the techo geek in me, its just not quite been able to raise my excitement.

actually this is even true on the general consumer focused firewall/routers you get down the shop for $50. Take the tp-link tl-wr1043nd (http://www.tp-link.com.au/products/details/?categoryid=238&model=TL-WR1043ND) internally its a 6-port switch, entirely asic driven, and programmed from the os (if your running openwrt you can run swconfig and play with the switch config). the switch does vlaning, and everything you expect from a basic switch. So everything layer 2 is done in asics...

One of the ports on the switch (the 6th) is directly connected to the linux OS sitting inside and the switch treats the linux os as just another connection.

Layer 3 however on these devices *IS* however driven by the linux OS inside, firewalling, routing, etc. On enterprise kit, alot of that is also moved into asic form and provided purely in silicon as well.

while this is true, theres a fundamental difference between a linux box with a 4-port quad card and say a cisco or juniper with 4 1 gig network ports. The primary purpose of the OS (bsd or linux) on these devices is to:
1) store configuration
2) provide a management interface
3) program asics

if, for example you took a whitebox, shoved two quad-port 1gig network cards in it and installed junos on it, it would be nothing like an srx210 - same port count, even same capabilities, but what you dont have is a bunch of asics that drive the network, and this is very fundamentally different. On these devices, the underlying os doesnt actually provide alot of the firewalling or routing capabilities and none of the switching, this is all handed off to dedicated hardware and the underlying os just provides a way of programming that in.

Dont try and beat companies for switching with linux grade equipment - there just isnt a good reason to. I love junos, screenos and ios - they kick arse... I also like what huawei do (they are a little cheaper, but at the switching side, they're very good). I've been doing networking for 15 years as a job and i've been doing linux since '92.

However, im also very VERY keen on linux at the routing side... I've even written my own firewall/routing software for linux. At the layer 3, linux has one advantage cisco, juniper (screenos and junos), and basically everyone else cannot give you - adaptability. just about any 1ru server capable of supporting either 8 1gbps nics (2x4 pci-e) or 2-4 10gbps nics (either 1x2 or 2x2 pci-e) is fantastic. Modern cpu's and busses really dont change much between vendors, only generation so you shouldn't really be bothered looking for "which has the best bus" cause they all do (dell, ibm, hp, it doesnt matter). If you can get a server with a serial lom (not just a network-connected web-gui based piece of nastyness (because you DO want oob management) you'll be laughing. Generally speaking, most x86 hardware will have around the same life expectancy as dedicated hardware and by that i mean if you get a dell server with redundant power supplies and so forth, it'll have about the same uptime as a juniper srx650 with dual power supplies. The one thing you'll probably miss out on is hot-swap-ability.

Now you plug that machine into your switch, etherchannel and vlan trunk it to your server and you have an amazing device. What you do with it then is entirely up to you, and this is generally the harder decision then the hardware - what you'll put on it. You can go with a real bit of firewall gui (such as vyatta) or you can do something far more interesting - i recommend devil linux personally as its the most flexible of the lot without being a bitch to maintain (as in, centos, ubuntu, fedora, whatever - not good choices for networking equipment cause there is alot of config to manage at the machine side - very bad for networking). One reason i say i dont like most firewall distro's in linux is that they tend to limit you and if your going to do this, go get a juniper netscreen/srx, they're just not that expensive (there is one exception to this, and thats openwrt, it runs on x86 and has almost every component a normal linux distro has). Its also worth avoiding harddrives (except if your going to put a network cache in there) and there are good options out there for doing just that.

Linux's most valuable asset is its abilities to do unbelievably fantastic things at the network layer and then be adapted easily. With vendor enterprise kit you'll get ipv4, ipv6, routing protocols (isis, ospf, bgp, rip and add eigrp for cisco) policy based routing, some network serivces (dhcp, ra's, etc) add firewall/loadbalancing/vpn depending on the device. With linux you get all this and a hell of a lot more in one device, it is well worth your time checking out the younger and more intresting routing protocols (like babel, oslr, etc etc, theres a few) - the fun is bringing it all together.

There is one downside to all this, too many options and alot to learn. Do you want a network device that will do:
1) policy based routing
2) ipv4 and 6 firewalling
3) load balancing
4) routing protocols
5) vpn'ing

1+2 come from the same place, so you'll be quite ok with that, the rest though is up to you, each has 15 different options from 15 different ppl and it takes some experimenting to know which is best for you. You'll also find none of them will configure or look anything like one another so you will be learning 4 very distinctly different software stacks with 4 very distinctly different configuration paradigms.

Personally, i dont see that as an issue for myself - in an organisation it can be a bit harder.

Its an interesting point, and while this is comedy, it also happens to be roughly true on occasion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLhFXkvugLM go to about 1:05 in the video.

Yes minister was a good series, pity they didnt make more

as in, second hand/older ipad really aint that expensive, and you'll be hard pressed to find anything that'll beat it for price... cheap chinese android tablet is really the only other option... you might get a laptop (netbook style one) for cheap, but probably not much cheaper... its a pretty low price point to start with imho.

The other problem is that you may find trying to protect anything is going to be the hard part (or perhaps expensive/tedious) rather then the device itself.

By that I mean saying that you could "get a cheap tablet and stick some plexiglass in front of it" sounds easy in practice, but not if you dont have the right tools. Personally i'd consider one of the older 10" android tablets and just put it out of reach - of course out of reach (For those with kids) often means "challenge" for child and can result in some truely god like resourcefulness on the part of the child.

Its quite possible, however, that theres an app on the android market that'll lockout an android tablets control surfaces (im pretty sure i've seen something like this).. im not sure if the same exists on the ipad, but maybe thats the way to go?

Not sure what GAME uk's demise means for the australian game line, but i keep wondering how they *STAY* in business. They are consistently higher then everyone else simply for price.

Consider their biggest competitor in the retail market is probably a place called JB hifi, and in shopping centers they're often so close (physically) together that you can see the big tags advertising their price for games (Specially up coming and new release ones). Yet, GAME au's prices are always more expensive.

When they go out of business in AU, I will not be supprised. I've bought games from them (but only second hand ones, and at most 3 - typically jbhifi is cheaper for those as well). But AU's model can be summed up in 3 links:

http://www.game.com.au/diablo-iii/pc-games/DIABLO3PC
http://www.jbhifionline.com.au/game/pc-games/diablo-3/654000
http://www.game-lane.com.au/pc-mac-games/2782-diablo-iii-3-pc.html

To me, in AU, its not "how did they go out of business" its "how do they stay alive?".

I personally find "fanciful" names for servers a little on the poor-judgement side of admin and they can lead to some regrettable situations when theres any real number of servers. We use dns to separate by location and network i.e. vlan.loc.domain.com, though vlan is a name, not a numeric. Then the server name defines its role in life. We dont generally mutli-purpose any server, though if we do it'll get a cname. Most things also have cnames to define roles as well.

for eg, lxweb001.dmz.sing.domain.com (linux web server 1 in the dmz network, in singapore), which might also be known as web001.dmz.sing.domain.com but if its a globally relavent server, it might also be web001.domain.com. It might also have a cname like web001.japn.domain.com meaning it also serves web content for japan, etc etc.

We never re-purpose servers (as in, web->dns) without rebuilds

That is the most bizarre set of stats i've ever read....

I cant understand why they would think the PERCENTAGE of the workforce for s&e would be on the increase? That just baffles me.

Its like, checkout people, the number you have is dependent on the number of retail places around, which is dependant on the population, and hence its probably always going to be relatively fixed (as a percentage). At the moment, that might be on the decrease cause of automated human-less checkouts, but the driving force behind checkout people is the size of your population.

I cant think of anything in the last decade that would propel more ppl (as a percentage) to enter either science or engineering. Any factor that might cause it is probably going to be offset by something else, ultimately if everyone started getting into science and engineering, who's gunna be a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, etc etc.

How that even begins to relate to "less innovation" baffles me even more because 5% of the population is a considerable number of people and innovation itself tends to be sporadic and driven by individuals (and then implemented by large armies of kill robots). Ultimately even 5% is an ever increasing number of people (given population growth).

I keep looking at the clock wondering if its april 1st, cause I really cant understand how they think "Ideally, the S&E workforce -- it numbers more than 7.6 million workers -- would be expanding as a percentage of the labor force. That would mean U.S. companies are increasing their use of S&E workers." is a remotely valid assumption. Again, given population growth, "That would mean U.S. companies are increasing their use of S&E workers" that is actually happening if your holding at 5%.

Truly bizarre, its like someone misunderstood the different between what a percentage is and an absolute figure.

More to the point (at least in australia) the cost of "fixing" someone is significant for the government and they also consider people to be an "investment" - as in "we spent heaps educating you to year 12, now you owe us".

The point being of course is that they dont want you doing anything that can either cost them money or kill their investment...

actually, just to reply to my own post... if i were doing this, what i would do is have an app that locked the tablet to only itself (pretty simple), then have a hard coded set of settings for wifi access and a content server it connected to (all provided by the application)... from the content server i would be able to then unlock the tablet, but to be safe, i'd also add a key combo that unlocked it too (like vol up, vol up, vol down, power power, etc, something complex).

I'd pick the cheapest tablet you can get (that'll support your content), then farm off the app coding to one of the many freelancing sites to do what you need..

tbh, this is a pretty simple thing to do on android - completely locking a tablet isnt hard, and completely locking the content isnt hard either. You could then have various external mechanisms for unlocking them again (via bluetooth, wifi, usb, etc).. as an android coder, i wouldnt think this would take more then a couple of hours personally.

If your determined to do it yourself, stackoverflow is a good place to start looking for ideas on how its achieved.

I always wanted to make my own unlock screen for android, but you cant do that, you have to code an entire launcher which is annoying.

What i wanted in an unlock though was for 3 buttons to come up on the screen in some random locations and have to click them all in order... slide to unlock just annoys me personally.

So i just skimmed it... however i'd find it hard to believe that such a thing is provable to any real extent. There are just too many other factors to play with when trying to apply such a broad brush.

simply put, the language you speak often dictates who you listen too, us here in AU, and no doubt in canada are greatly influenced by what happens in the US - though it wasnt always that way for us (AU) prior to the internet. There were certainly influences, but now those influences are faster and more prevalent. As such, AU'ers themselves are also less healthy, more fat, and more likely to spend money then they were say 50 years ago - yet we still spoke the same language.

Thats a pretty simple example, but in AU, alot of a social infrastruture has changed to be more like the US - AU used to provide much of its services by govt owned facilities - these days the reverse is true, and this impacts health care, so people without money are less healthy (perhaps).

My ultimate point being that today there are just too many other factors at work that could have larger impacts then simply the language you think and any proof derived from such would probably be easily flawed. My humble opinion anyway.