Comment Incredible logic (Score 5, Funny) 108
This argument really goes like: "Oculus Rift is targeted at gamers, most gamers like bacon too, ergo Oculus Rift is competition for bacon."
WTF, people
This argument really goes like: "Oculus Rift is targeted at gamers, most gamers like bacon too, ergo Oculus Rift is competition for bacon."
WTF, people
I am one of the original Oculus Kickstarter backers. I have received my Rift development kit without any problem, so I think you are grossly unfair to Oculus as far as the Kickstarter campaign is concerned. The perks were the development kits, not company shares, so there is no reason why I should be getting a cut of those 2 billions.
Also, honestly, do you really believe the company is operating on the Kickstarter money? You would be naive - there are several large investors there, the Kickstarter money went mainly into the original development kit.
However, I do wonder what the heck is going to happen now. They better tread really carefully or they could alienate many of their customers and developers in no time if they try to aggressively push Facebook everywhere (like the payment system - seriously, if one of the stated reasons for getting acquired was to get access to the Facebook's payment system, that's nuts).
I think you don't realize that a 3D printer is just that - a 3 axis CNC machine. Replace the extruder head with a spindle and you have a 3 axis CNC router (assuming your average printer has a frame rigid enough for the forces required, which it likely doesn't). There have been even some attempts to make a universal machine where you could choose to either mill/route or print depending on which tool head is installed. A CNC router can be trivially converted into a printer by simply installing the extruder head and/or heated bed. The machines even use exactly the same software, same protocols, are driven in the same way.
The only difference is that a mill/router removes material and a printer adds it and that routers/mills have to be better constructed (more rigid) because there are much higher lateral forces - a typical hobbyist 3D printer is a complete joke in this regard.
"Anyway, I think we're arguing at corossed purposes here. It is frankly indisputable that 3D printers are easier to use than CNC machine tools (a claim opposite would make me doubt you've used either, frankly)."
If you can operate a 3D printer, you could pretty much operate a similarly sized CNC mill/router, perhaps with a bit of basic safety training, because of the high-speed rotating bits that a typical printer doesn't have. The software, the design process, most of the maintenance, etc. is pretty much identical. It is not as if the 3D printing people have suddenly reinvented the machining world from scratch.
I know pretty well how these printers work and it takes to use them. My comment was not targeting someone like you, but the original poster who is obviously completely oblivious to the technology and wants it to be the same as a desktop printer or coffee machine before it is considered to be "consumer-level".
I disagree. They're certainly not now, and it will probably 20 years before they are, but imagine where home computers were in 1979.
Sorry, that's nonsense. Lathes, routers and other machine tools are around for what, 100+ years? (C)NC machines for at least 50 if not longer. By that measure everyone should have had one in their basements and living rooms since a long time already.
99.9% of consumers will never have any use for a 3D printer (or any machine tool, for that matter). We are certainly not going to 3D print stuff like coat hangers or door knobs at home (as some try to make people believe) when you can buy a new one for 1/10-1/100th of the price of a 3D printed one, not to mention in better quality and much less time. It just makes no economical sense to 3D print consumer item which are mass-produced already. Various machine shops and printing services will account for the occasional odd item needed to repair or replace broken bits at home - saves a lot of hassle and cost with running own printer. And that still generously assumes that the user actually knows how design the item. Don't forget that the most people can barely use e-mail and/or web browser, here we are asking them to do 3D modelling and use CAD + CAM tools (like slicer, g-code generators, etc) and understand certain engineering issues, such as the material properties, dimensions of the parts, limits of the machine (not everything is printable/machinable).
3D printers are a cool technology and a huge boon for tinkerers of all kinds, but most people are not tinkerers. Mass-market adoption of this ain't gonna happen, period.
I think you have unrealistic expectations fuelled by a lot of the hype around the printers (and the companies selling them).
Setting the poor quality and the need to constantly tinker with the calibration, belt tensions, levelling and what not aside, 3D printer is not a consumer device, even if it was plug & play today.
It is a machine tool and a pretty complex at that. Programming and using a 3D printer is comparable to a CNC router, which is a specialized skill that usually requires some extensive training. Sure, it is not rocket science neither, but expecting this to work as a printer in Windows (push a button and paper comes out with your document) is simply unrealistic.
Demanding things like "standardized 3D printer protocol" (hello g-code
The same holds for design of the parts - people complaining about the complexity of the CAD tools are way off the mark here. The tools have to be complex in order to be actually useful, otherwise designing precise parts would be impossible. Unfortunately, a lot of people think that CAD is like Photoshop or something - it is not. If you cannot construct a piece using a ruler & compass on paper, you probably shouldn't be using CAD neither.
One needs to look beyond the first graph that shows all sites surveyed to look at the actually active sites - there Apache appears to have more *active* deployments than the rest combined. Counting inactive, parked domains is not really indicative of particular server popularity.
In fact, the order is not as bad as some of the similar ones from the past. The original article is here (in French):
http://www.pcinpact.com/news/84642-la-justice-ordonne-blocage-galaxie-allostreaming.htm
The court ruled that the ISPs and search engines have 15 days to block the sites listed in the article and the order is in force for 12 months afterwards.
However, here is the kicker: the court ruled that the right holders are to pay the bill for the implementation of the blocks, the ISPs are not being asked to do it on their own dime. So carpet bombing the courts with poorly researched URLs to block could get really expensive
Microsoft seems to operate using a very simple scheme whenever they encounter a market they are not familiar with:
1) Deny it, ignore it
2) Belittle it
3) OK, 1) and 2) don't seem to work, let's turn it into what we know already - PC! With some creative branding the customer won't see a difference!
This is going on for decades already. Basically, they are trying to turn everything into the only thing they know, where they have a strong market position and what they could leverage to conquer that market for themselves. That is PC and DOS/Windows. They don't really have a profitable market share elsewhere.
Good example of this was the Sun's NetPC (basically thin clients) vs Microsoft's Network PC (regular Windows PC booting over the network - no advantages of the NetPC, but all the disadvantages of the Windows PC), XBox (basically a PC with a proprietary/non-standard hw), PDAs with Windows CE (transplanting a desktop UI on a PDA with a stylus really didn't work too well), tablets with a desktop OS (even Windows RT is regular Windows, just crippled and running on ARM), etc.
Unfortunately, the above strategy worked probably only for the XBox, where it the customer didn't really care and it made development simpler. The rest were/are flops, because people don't want a crappy PC instead of a phone or a tablet. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't get that, they have an uncanny knack to take exactly the one feature that makes the device actually attractive to the user (usability, speed, battery life, portability, etc.), remove it or completely hose it up, but you do get the "Windows experience" instead! This, when combined with their frequently brain-dead UI implementations designed by someone who has likely never had to use their own products, is a deadly combination for any product.
Well, that is just a cover-your-ass excuse for the manager so that he or she doesn't have to go to the under-performer and tell it them face to face. "Oh, see, I am sorry that we have to fire you, but you are bellow this (arbitrary) line."
With that style of "management" you will be always firing someone just for the sake of firing them, regardless of the actual performance. If you want your best people to leave in a hurry and the rest of the team waste time trying to backstab each other, it is a wonderful way to achieve that. It makes no difference whether you set the cut-off at 1% or 10% - it is still only an arbitrary bullshit number made up out of thin air with some piss-poor application of statistics to make it look legit.
Someone wrote that grading on a curve works in academia but not in industry. Why should it work for grading exams when it doesn't for ranking the workers? Especially the academics that are using it should know better.
Grading on a curve (or the MS stack ranking, which is the same) is one of the most unfair and vile ranking/grading systems invented. Why? Because your actual skills don't matter. What matters is how many better (or worse) colleagues you have. If you have are in a large team (or class) of good performers, you are screwed, even if you are good - someone will be given the short end of the stick only because there are only so many "good marks" available. An extreme example are students "hacking" their exams by handing in blank sheets. Even if they all (or sufficiently many) do that, with curve grading they are guaranteed some 75% chance that they will pass - by doing nothing, because only the low 15-20% fails. Shouldn't we be marking their skills and knowledge instead?
This system also demotivates the good learners/workers - what is the point of trying to work hard, when you will not get that good mark only because there is only a limited amount given out and simply too many comparably good candidates. Essentially the system forces (undeserved) bad marks on people even though they performed equally well as the best ones. This sort of thing does wonders for morale.
Finally, the second fallacy why this is fundamentally broken is the assumption that the skill distribution in a work team or class is normal (follows a bell curve). There is absolutely no guarantee of that, because, heck, you aren't hiring the idiots, are you? I am sure that the company is hiring only "rock star" developers. Same with the students - they have to pass stringent exams and fulfill admission criteria that the majority of the population isn't able. So you have a sample here that isn't representative of the entire population (where the bell curve would be valid) and all bets are off, because the system was built on an invalid assumption. The most extreme example of this is the constant distribution - the case when all students turn in blank sheet of paper (identical "skill" level) for their exam and still pass. You would have to pick the students or hire employees randomly out of the entire population if you wanted to have a normal distribution of skill. Not very practical, though.
To conclude, if you are responsible for examining students or for evaluating employees, for the grace of God, stop using relative ranking schemes like this. Comparing people to each other is certainly easier than to evaluate their "absolute" skill, but it isn't fair, doesn't represent what you think it does and it creates a toxic environment for everyone.
It is a pity that the poster has never actually read the description of the auction, otherwise they would have found that:
"The pictures depicted from this auction show some of the early prototypes from the project; however, it should be noted that none of that hardware will be included in this auction as I had a non-intentionally set fire
and
" 1) Microhard Spectra 910 900MHz serial line radio with power supply (this was a prototype 900MHz radio that I believe went on to become the current generation of ZigBee-based XBee radios; 2) A collection of PC104-based enclosures and motherboards, with various interfacing such as serial ports, USB ports, etc; 3) A Mobile Wireless Technologies RM1000g AVS vehicle transponder with WWAN and GPS tracking support; 4) Novate wireless prototyping board; 5) GNU X-Tools cross compilation software; and 6) A CD filled with backup materials during several years of the company (the most valuable part of this auction obviously)"
So still some nice hw and docs, but certainly no "spy rocks" included. RTFA, guys!
So all in all - unless you are the type of person that wants to show off at the next Powerpoint presentation by changing slides by waving one's hands (and be a laughing stock when the device won't work or skip several slides instead), there isn't much to be excited about. It is really a solution looking for a problem.
Memory fault - where am I?