No, I had a Teac DSDD drive on my TRS-80 Model I. I had to build a custom disk controller to support it though. This was in '80, so it predated the IBM PC by about a year and a half. Also, the PC used soft sectors, didn't it? The TRS-80 drive controllers were all hard sector.

I also had a Shugart 35-track SSDD drive, if I remember correctly.

It's obviously been a while, but I remember 35 track hard sector SSSD, 40 track hard sector SSSD, 40 track hard sector SSDD, and the brilliant Holy Grail of 40 track DSDD.

I think you got PLA and ABS backwards.
Could well be. I often get lost in the TLA soup, especially when I'm trying to justify spending money on a new toy.

It all comes down to me being excited by the new developments in the low-end CNC world :)

ABS melts at around 200F, not 200C. But even at 100F you'll find that a lot of plastic structures lose their integrity. And it they're load bearing in any way, they're goners. PLA has a higher melt temperature, and Nylon higher still. You might be able to get away with those.

Still, aluminum! brass! wood! soap! er ... wax! ... er ... well, I dunno. I just like the idea of a diversity of material to work with. If I had more cash, I'd have both a 3D printer *and* a CNC router. And if I had even more? A full on 4+ axis CNC mill!

'zackly.

3-axis entry level CNC routers are down in the $1k-$3k range now. That's starting to get interesting!

I will have one of these soon.

It will work on materials other than soft plastics and nylon (e.g., wood, brass, aluminum), so it will be usable for fabricating real parts that can withstand temperatures like southern California car dashboards.

The downside is that the affordable ones are 3 axis, so you can't have overhang in parts. With clever use of zeroing and flipping the part, you can mitigate that somewhat.

I guess if I was willing to cast in metals, a standard 3D printer would be OK. Print in wax, make a mold, and cast. But that seems like a lot more work than its worth for most of the things I want to fab up.

Did Netcraft confirm it?

It's even worse. From the copy on the screen, each of your eyes makes another copy on its retina.

And on the technical side, all the routers temporarily put the data into a buffer. So it causes one extra copyright infringement for every router the data passes.

Did they also calculate how much energy would be saved if we would not waste processor power on DRM decoding?

Less than 1% of the electricity generated in the US is from oil. Solar and Wind only generate electricity.
So well under 1% of all oil is used to generate electrical power. It was less the 2% of all oil in 2004 and has gone down to under 1% of the oil used in the US.

What you say may be true. As non-American I'm not terribly interested in the details of the American energy mix. Indeed, before that post, I couldn't even know which county you are from, so even with perfect knowledge of the American energy mix I could not have decided on the truth of that statement.

But your definition of "stupid" is wrong. "Stupid" is not the same as "uninformed", "misinformed" or "wrong".

And you just flunked your skeptic and critical thinking test.

There was no critical thinking test. I didn't make any statement about the energy situation of the US or any other country. I only made a statement about your use of "stupid".

1. You assumed you knew the truth.

I didn't assume to know the truth of the statement. I did (and still do) assume I know the truth about the meaning of "stupid". And your use of that word doesn't fit that meaning.

2. You failed to question the truth.

OK, I indeed didn't consult a dictionary (but I'm convinced you didn't either). Well, let's do now (I omit the pronounciation and ethymology parts):

stupid I a: slow of mind: obtuse b: given to unwise decisions or actions 2: dulled in feeling or sensation 3: marked by or resulting from dullness: senseless (a stupid mistake) 4: dreary, boring (a stupid plot) [Source: Webster's New Encyclopedic Dictionary]

None of those fits your use of stupid.

3. spouted off without doing any research.

Yes, I did not do any research on the meaning of "stupid". Nor did you, apparently.

4. You trusted without question those that told you that Solar and Wind would reduce our dependence on foreign oil when it is less than 1% of our oil use.

Does not apply. I didn't make a statement about wind and solar energy, I made a statement about your use of "stupid".

5. I am willing to bet that you are proud of your critical thinking skills and consider yourself an enlightened skeptic yet you showed none of those skills.

While I do think I have some critical thinking skills, I certainly didn't need to use them on your comment. Basic language knowledge was sufficient. In that sense I agree that I didn't show any critical thinking skills in my reply, because there was no critical thinking skill needed or sufficient.

You better think about what your answer says about your critical thinking skills.

Stupid == We need solar and wind to reduce our dependance on foreign oil.

No, equalling that statement with "stupid" is stupid.

The smiley at the end already said so. But of course this is Slashdot, so stating it twice may be appropriate. ;-)

My average age is exactly half of my actual age. I'm speaking about the time average, of course.

Probably green jelly beans.

The sad thing is that now that everything's back up, it'll be business as usual.

I grudgingly subscribed to Adobe Creative cloud when I found that buying Illustrator would have cost me $750 for a legal copy, or $30/month and also include the rest of the CC package. I already own a legal copy of Photoshop CS5, which is good enough for me, so I haven't downloaded that, but I've had two projects that required video editing (so I downloaded Premier) and extracting difficult text from a PDF (so I downloaded Acrobat Pro after spending hours with PDFtk and PDFBox).

Before I subscribed, I found a torrents for a cracked version of Illustrator, which I used to determine that the program would solve the problem I was working on. After that, I bought the subscription. Adobe is really annoying; the software nags me a lot, and it opens a million network connections. Still, if I'm using their software to make money, I feel like I need to pay them.

Given the choice, I'd still rather have stand-alone versions of everything, but I can't afford to spend that much for programs I won't use very frequently.

HVAC? What HVAC?