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Science

The Beckoning Promise of Personal Fabrication 131

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can-it-make-me-a-sandwich dept.
posys noted an interesting talk from Neil Gershenfeld's called "The beckoning promise of personal fabrication". It's a TED talk which I've found greatly enjoyable in the past, and is worth your time, assuming you have 20 minutes to see something really neat.
If you are interested, you can also return to the original TED page.

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The Beckoning Promise of Personal Fabrication More

The Beckoning Promise of Personal Fabrication

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  • Embedded Video? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dr. Eggman ( 932300 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @11:30AM (#22574730)
    Embedded Video? Sweet!

    Loading...Loading...Loading...

    This is awesome!

  • TLA (Score:3, Funny)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @11:31AM (#22574742)
    WTF is TED? I suppose I could RTFA (or even JFGI), but given that there is NFA, I don't know whether I should bother.

    Wow, I'd no idea so many initialisms had 'fuck' in them.

    ps: enlightenment dawns: maybe that flash thing I blocked isn't an ad after all, and is worth clicking on.
    • TED is short for:

      Meaning Category
      Tactical Enforcer Drone Community->Law
      Target Exit Device Governmental->Military
      Teamwork Effort And Deadlines Business->General
      Technology Entertainment Design Community->Media
      Tenders Electronic Daily Business->General
      Tending To Emotional Disorders Medical->Physiology
      Terrance's Eye For Detail Miscellaneous->Funnies
      Test and Evaluation Directorate Governmental->Military
      Text Entry Display Computing->General
      Thaddium Elemental Diverter Acade
  • Stuff that's 2 years old...

    "Filmed Feb 2006; Posted Feb 2007"

  • personal fabrication of (Score:3, Funny)

    by zappepcs ( 820751 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @11:33AM (#22574778) Journal
    cyclic links?

  • I thought something else (Score:3, Funny)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @11:33AM (#22574784)
    When I read title "the promise of personal fabrication", I thought they meant the benefits of making up lies for oneself.

    Honestly I did.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by esocid ( 946821 )
      Don't worry. That's exactly what came to mind for me as well.
    • Really? I thought it would be a method of creating your own CPU's...

      • Me too. In fact, I wished for a personal fab just the other day. How cool would it be to botch modifications to an open source CPU and then lose interest after sinking $15,000 of raw materials and equipment into it? :D

        -:sigma.SB

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by justfred ( 63412 )
      I remember seeing a job listing for Nothrup's B2 ("Most expensive plane crash...ever.") program; they were looking for "Advanced Composite Fabricators". I decided these are the people who make up really really intricate lies to tell the government to justify their prices.

  • Has Slashdot got slashdotted?
  • Making babies? I'd love to know but the embedded video is broken.

  • I don't believe it (Score:5, Funny)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @11:36AM (#22574832)
    I read this story, it may seem to have some credibility .. but let me tell you .. it's all fabrication.

    Ba da Bim

  • do Asimov law's apply to replicators? if not how long till whackjob's start making weapons in them?

    • Re:do they apply? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by denis-The-menace ( 471988 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @11:48AM (#22574964)
      RE: how long till whackjob's start making weapons in them?

      don't worry. This stuff will be illegal as soon as it is available because it will kill the revenue stream of too many rich people. And thanks to "the Shrub", only the terrorists will have access to this technology.
      • whackjobs have a right to defend themselves too.

      • how long till whackjob's start making weapons in them?

        Hmmm. I didn't have the patience to watch the video, but they have a machine here at work that makes objects out of plastic goo, working from a CAD design. Is that the kind of thing we're talking about? I asked the geek who runs it if he can make me a Glock. Now they've moved me to a new unheated cubicle with concrete walls in the basement, taken away my red stapler, and my manager never seems to be in when I want to discuss my working conditions.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sootman ( 158191 )
        This stuff will be illegal as soon as it is available because it will kill the revenue stream of too many rich people.

        For those who haven't read it, I highly recommend this [craphound.com] short story by Cory Doctorow.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jockeys ( 753885 )
      Ummm, you can already make a reasonably complicated firearm on a home CNC mill, or if you are a skilled craftsman, an unguided mill. It just takes a long time and won't be as good as one made in a factory. As long as there are factories stamping Kalashnikov receivers out of sheet metal for a couple bucks a pop, there won't be a lot of competition in the weapon market from expensive, one-off fabs.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Unending ( 1164935 )
        As CNC mills get cheaper it's possible that AKs will become incredibly cheap to home produce. People already fold their own AKs from parts kits at prices that are cheaper than retail (time not included).

  • Personal fabrication? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @11:40AM (#22574870)
    I didn't have time to RTFA, but this is about writing resumes, right?

  • they will never change the advantages of a factory (Score:4, Informative)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @11:42AM (#22574898)
    The whole point of factories is efficiency via spreading capital investment across a greater quantity of product. If fabricators become cheap enough for personal use, the factory ones will get cheaper, which means that they'll still make things cheaper and better than you can. They have more money for better equipment, trained staff to produce a high quality product, etc.

    Fabrication and prototyping has always been more expensive than manufacturing. That will not change simply because lots of people are infatuated with devices that take hours upon hours to construct, and make very poor looking "plastic" things made out of globs of goo stuck together.

    I like TED as much as the next guy, but more and more of it seems like a whitewash, style-over-substance dog and pony show.

    • I was going to watch the video, then I started thinking about the premise and then I saw your comment confirming my suspicious. Thank you for my time saved.
      • Watch it, its mainly about fab labs they set up in 3rd world countries where people are inventing brand new things on their own. Its not about mass production is about unlimited customization.
        • So these "fabs" won't come with scanners to measure/model "original objects" then.

          Remember how bad Diablo economy, in the original game, became once "duping" was common? No one respected your hours of hard work down in the catacombs and caverns any more. It was all "Godly Plate of the Whale" for all!

        • Exactly (Score:4, Insightful)

          by benjamindees ( 441808 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @02:01PM (#22576828) Homepage
          1) Mass-produced products are not better quality. They are often worse.

          2) What you want may not currently be made in a factory. It may be an "obsolete" style or model of something. I have a perfect example right in my kitchen: tupperware. I have three different sets of mis-matched tupperware. I don't like the "new" style. I like the old style. If personal fabrication devices ever become reality, Tupperware is toast. Their entire business, like fashion and other 'design' industries with extremely low raw materials costs, seems to revolve around changing the style of their products every few years and forcing you to purchase a completely new set.

          3) Not everything is made on an assembly line. Many products are simply not being produced in the most efficient way possible. Which is cheaper, paying someone to build something for you in a one-off fashion, or building it yourself in a one-off fashion? "Just-in-time" manufacturing was supposed to reduce costs by building things at the last minute as the parts arrive from your suppliers, but what it has really reduced is efficiency and quality, as parts are not inspected before they are installed and more often arrive "at the wrong time" rather than "just in time", completely screwing scheduling and any semblance of an assembly line at the manufacturers that implement it poorly.

          4) As the Open Source movement has proven, many times end-users have better ideas about how products should work than the people who make them. Personal fabrication can do for manufacturing what personal computing did for information technology.

          5) For certain 'disposable' products, personal fabrication has the potential to reduce waste and environmental impact. Recycle products instead of replacing them.

    • Re:they will never change the advantages of a fact (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sirch ( 82595 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @11:55AM (#22575062) Homepage
      I think you've missed one of his points - these fab labs are for bespoke solutions for the individual (or small community). The reason factories are cheaper and more efficient is due to economies of scale - the unit price for a unique item is a hell of a lot higher than the unit price for 10000. To create a product requires significant (compared to the cost of producing that unit) overhead in setup, design etc; that is where these labs come into their own.

      I'm sure that if someone came up with a brilliant item in one of these labs, a saleable item, they could take it to a factory to be mass-produced more cheaply. But until that happens, these labs represent one of the best opportunities for home-grown solutions from non-technical people.

    • Convenience and distribution costs (Score:4, Insightful)

      by PIPBoy3000 ( 619296 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @11:59AM (#22575124)
      Keep in mind that any time you have a factory make something for you, there will be delays and costs associated with getting the product into your hands. Over the last few decades, they've done an amazing job streamlining this process. Still, it costs five bucks and three days between the time I place my order for my widget and the time it shows up at my doorstep.

      I think that for many goods, that's fine. For things that cost a few dollars to make, spending five dollars on shipping will seem like madness. Plus there's always the "gimme now" factor, which seems to permiate our society.

      There's a reason most people have printers in their houses. We may send our photos off periodically to get printed in bulk for cheap, but still print the one or two off when we feel like it.
    • There are two reasons that factories produce better products more efficiently. One is economies of scale (addressed in another comment), which clearly doesn't apply in some cases (see the so-called "Long Tail"). Two is that the best machines have always also been the most expensive. But there is no a priori reason that better machines must be more expensive; it is entirely plausible that some technological advance will produce machines that are better than anything we've got now, and can be made and oper

    • Re: the advantages of a factory (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Lagged2Death ( 31596 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @12:40PM (#22575638)
      You're not wrong.

      But consider one very narrow aspect of this make-it-yourself-with-a-fancy-machine trend that we've actually got some real-world experience with: photo-printing.

      A photo-printing service can crank out reams of ultra-high-quality laser-printed photos with a gigantic, capital-intensive piece of equipment. Due to the economies of scale, the cost per print is actually very low.

      A personal inkjet photo-printer is slow, balky, finicky and has a voracious appetite for expensive supplies. Yet people buy and use them anyway, because they print -- or reprint, if they don't like the first result -- right here, right now.

      There seems to be plenty of room in the marketplace for both of these options.

    • Re:they will never change the advantages of a fact (Score:4, Informative)

      by oliderid ( 710055 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @12:48PM (#22575742) Journal
      The problem with this video is that it looks to much like an Apple marketing show. But he is brilliant IMHO. If Americans don't want him, he is more than welcome in Europe :-).

      Well here is a brief summary:
      He presented several new concepts and Fab labs. Fal Labs vulgarize sciences and technologies. His thesis is that non-technical people have technical skills too. The goal of a Fab lab is to provide an environment where they can create their own stuffs. he cited several examples, including children who produced a more efficient design than MIT engineers for a very specific task/tool. But well English isn't my native tongue, so I suggest you to watch the video clip. Anyway it looks like a very interisting approach but he was too "selling his stuffs", it wasn't an objective approach.

      Then there are also several concepts and proofs of concept (such a pity that he didn't provide more information). Most of them were related to "the code won't be abstract anymore". Basically your code becomes a "real" thing.

      For example students have used molecules as bytes (?). The idea behind this experiment is when you compile...Your compiler would produce molecules. The ultimate goal would be to use all these complex molecules as instructions, then as functions to program "living things" or complex material. Well I really wonder how the debugger and the compiler will look like :-). Anyway it truly looks like the final stage of "Object oriented" language :-).

      It is really interesting (IMHO), sure it is mainly about "ideas" but interesting ideas.

    • Doing computing at home will never become practical. The machines are too expensive, and if they are able to bring the prices down some, it will still be less expensive to do it on a big centralized computer with trained professionals.

      Saying that one-off fabrication can never become practical is about as short-sighted as saying the world market for computers is 4 or 5. It isn't that fabricators need to be able to crank out a million identical parts for less than a factory could, it's that a fabricator wi

    • Factories that mass-produce goods will probably be able to make things cheaper, but not necessarily better than you can.

      A factory is motivated by one thing: profit. A business -- any business -- will try to find the balancing point where the product is good enough to be accepted by consumers but cheap enough to to maximize profit. If you make the product cheaper, consumers get fed up with the shoddy quality and buy a competitor's product instead. If you make the product better, costs (usually) go up,
    • >>I like TED as much as the next guy, but more and more of it seems like a whitewash, style-over-substance dog and pony show.

      Welcome to academia. =)

      Also, TED's a little too self-congratulatory for my taste, but they do have some fun talks.
    • A professional printing press still has many advantages
      over a home or office printer as well, and certainly isn't
      going away for precisely that reason.

      Does that support the idea that cheap printers to the
      people hasn't changed anything about how we work with
      printed materials?
      Nope.

      Also, the personal one-off fabricators get the limelight,
      but probably more important are the middle ground:
      Professional short-series fabrication, analogous to the
      internet book publishing services

      You still use a professional service t

  • in the past (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Lord Ender ( 156273 )

    It's a TED talk which I've found greatly enjoyable in the past,
    Do you get paid by the word or something? The sentence is already past tense, so you don't have to say "in the past." Geeze...
    • Do you get paid by the word or something?

      Perhaps - depends on how you look at it [oreillynet.com]. And the way I look at it, anything taco says translates to "help me get money - blockhead".

      What I think is funny is how the lingo has gone from "...worth a read", to a supposedly apologetic "...and is worth your time, assuming you have 20 minutes to see something really neat." Oh, 'really neat' - well, in that case... (next time try not dating yourself).

      hey, LFTenan' taco: 20 should be twenty, except the whole thing,

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Gutboy ( 587531 )
      He could be implying that he no longer finds it enjoyable, as he did in the past
    • The simplest explanation is that the writer is a time traveller. Occam's Razor, everyone. Sheesh!

  • The overrated promise of personal fabrication (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @11:51AM (#22574996) Homepage

    Stereolithography machines aren't magic. They're a useful way of making plastic shapes in small quantities, expensively. But that's about it. Much of the same work can be done with a CNC milling machine. Roland [rolanddga.com] makes some nice little desktop CNC mills. They also make 3D "scanners" which work by touch, carefully servoing a tiny stylus with a phonograph pickup like device over the surface of a 3D object. So you can copy existing objects.

    All this stuff works fine, but it's a niche market. It's mostly used by people designing small, handheld devices.

    Making plastic parts by injection molding, vacuum forming, or hot stamping is incredibly cheap and fast compared to building them up with a stereolithography machine. Making, say, a keyboard key in an injection molding press costs maybe a penny. Making one in a stereolithography machine will cost about $40. Yes, you can make one-offs, but not cheaply.

    Realize that most manufactured goods (with the notable exception of wood products) are made by some kind of moulding process involving a master - stamping, casting, injection moulding, blowing and vacuum forming, etc. That's also true of photolithography, used for ICs and circuit boards. Building up something in layers or carving it out of a solid block costs orders of magnitude more.

    If you want to use a stereolithography machines, and you're in Silicon Valley, sign up with TechShop [techshop.ws]. They have one of the better ones, plus workstations with the necessary design software. It's not used much. Their laser cutter, which cuts flat sheets, gets much more use.

    • Re:The overrated promise of personal fabrication (Score:4, Interesting)

      by spleen_blender ( 949762 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @12:12PM (#22575280)
      You're not looking forward far enough. The future of personal fabrication machines lies with nanotechnology. Imagine downloading the schematic for a new video card, feeding in the raw material components, and watching the nanotech gobble it up and crap out a piece of engineering developed with precision at the molecular level.
      • It's all well and good being all bubbly about how cool it is to get computing down to the atomic scale, but what happens when we get a little too close and the big one, nature, stops working?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by deander2 ( 26173 ) *
          yes, but the argument against is that if grey goo [wikipedia.org] was really possible, it's almost certain that life (an uber-virus?) would have already figured out how, and we wouldn't be here to wonder about it. =P
          • An equally plausible argument from similar premises proves that we are (or will be) the first (and, ipso facto, last) creatures to create grey-goo tech.

            Maybe there's something wrong with those kinds of premises.

      • Re:The overrated promise of personal fabrication (Score:4, Funny)

        by Zackbass ( 457384 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @12:48PM (#22575738)
        You're not looking forward far enough. The future of personal fabrication machines lies with magic dragons. Imagine downloading the plans for a giant robot and watching your magic dragon gobble up the raw materials and crap it out with precision that only a magic dragon can provide. I personally can't wait for magic dragon research to bring us these magical beasts, sure the scientists at the forefront of magic dragon research can't so much as make a magic toenail, but it's right around the corner!

        See how much more sense it makes when I say it?

        • Why so dismissive? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Phoenix666 ( 184391 )
          3D printers that build structures with plastic beads exist. We also already know that it's possible to arrange molecules with a scanning-tunneling microscope. Why is it such a leap to imagine that process for complex structures could be automated?

          Yes, there are significant hurdles to overcome, but comparing the concept of 3D molecular deposition to a belief in magic dragons is off-base.

          It's important to strike a balance between luddism and vaporware, to be sure, but you're refusing to extrapolate logical s

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Reality Master 101 ( 179095 )

            We also already know that it's possible to arrange molecules with a scanning-tunneling microscope.

            One single molecule.

            Why is it such a leap to imagine that process for complex structures could be automated?

            Now figure out how many molecules make up, say, a 10 cm cube of your favorite material. Sure, you could do it if you want to wait a million years.

            The only way things like this are even remotely possible would be with self-replicating robots, to do parallel assembly. But then you have the probl

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by blahplusplus ( 757119 )
              "Nanotech robots are actually less practical that Star Trek teleportation"

              You've just made the argument that life is impossible. Im sorry, but all human beings are in fact, living nanotechnology. What exactly do you think every baby on earth is? An incredible feat of engineering.

              http://aimediaserver.com/studiodaily/videoplayer/?src=harvard/harvard.swf&width=640&height=520 [aimediaserver.com]

              • You've just made the argument that life is impossible. Im sorry, but all human beings are in fact, living nanotechnology. What exactly do you think every baby on earth is? An incredible feat of engineering.

                Life, indeed, is very flexible. If you want to argue that someday we'll be able to roll DNA that constructs just about any organic shape, I would accept that. But --

                1) Even organic life doesn't do construction at the molecular level. Cells are mega-sized machines and construction materials compared

        • There's just one problem with your version. People are actively researching and working on nanotechnology. They're doing piss-all about magic dragons.

          :)

          --Rob

    • Re:The overrated promise of personal fabrication (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zackbass ( 457384 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @12:36PM (#22575572)
      I agree with you completely. I'm a mechanical engineer and do a lot of prototyping and in my experience stereolithography is a very niche tool. We've got one in my lab and it's used a fair bit, it's pretty good for small plastic parts that must be made in 3D, but that turns out to be a surprisingly small section of useful parts. We've got a 120W laser cutter too, and it rocks. Material is cheap, the machine is extremely fast, and with a good designer almost anything can be made. This last month I made a small roomba style robot for a competition: 3 days in CAD, 2 hours on the laser cutter and 2 hours in the machine shop and I had a great machine, and I could make another in 4 more hours, and another ad nauseum.

      A part from any of these rapid prototyping machine is almost always useless by itself. You need hardware, motors, metal shafts, electronics, different materials, and some skill in putting it all together to make much of anything interesting. There might be a revolution, but it's for the people that have been fabricating for years anyway who are finding new and better ways to do the same jobs. I took a manufacturing class with one of the pioneers in applications for stereolithography, it's a useful process with some niche applications, but no revolution. It's no personal computer, life is a little harder when you're pushing around real matter instead of information.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Animats ( 122034 )

        You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car

        I've dealt with that problem.

        We had problems powering the shift lever in our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. The base vehicle was a Polaris ATV. We put a motor driven screw jack with analog feedback on a push-pull cable to drive the shift linkage. Positioning the shifter wasn't enough. We had to position it to the right place, then wiggle it back and forth under computer control with decreasing amounts of wiggle until the transmission fell into gear.

        • Great story and nice solution to the problem. It seems like no matter what the complexity of the robotics project you always end up coding for these little things, they're what separate programmers from roboticists. The interesting question to me is what layer of abstraction did you have your gear change fix at?

          • OK, gear change abstraction (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Animats ( 122034 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @03:08PM (#22577770) Homepage

            The interesting question to me is what layer of abstraction did you have your gear change fix at?

            Somewhat off topic, but anyway... Gear changing was abstracted to "change to desired gear" at the Galil motor controller, which is a programmable device interpreting a simple little programming language of its very own. The higher level computers would send it a UDP packet with the desired gear number, and every 50ms, read back the status. During gear changing, it would report "busy", and once gear change was complete, the new gear number would be reported.

            We had a GUI for debug, showing various buttons and meters. The transmission was represented with "D", "L", R", and "N" buttons. The current gear showed in green. During a gear change the button turned yellow, then green once gear change was complete.

            At the next level up, the "speed server", running on a QNX machine, was responsible for throttle, brakes, and transmission. It handled the interlock conditions for gear changing (vehicle speed zero, brakes locked, RPM at idle). The speed server was basically doing a "cruise control" job. It also handled the "rollback" problem.

            The level above that, the "move server", took requests like "advance forward 20m at 3 m/sec with turning radius 30m", and issued commands to the speed server and steering system. The move server understood stopping distance, including hills, and had an input from the simple anti-collision radar to stop if a big obstacle was in range. Move requests were replaced with new ones every 100ms by the map system.

            At the level above that, the map server/planner, operating at "back seat driver" level, was in charge of deciding where to drive. It didn't have to worry about vehicle dynamics. It just decided when backing up was necessary, and issued a backwards move. This would result in everything winding down to the vehicle stopped/brakes locked/engine idle condition, a gear change, a brake release, and acceleration.

            We lost the Grand Challenge, but the vehicle drove itself and never hit anything. We had about +- 2 degrees of compass noise, and that was enough to get the LIDAR-built map out of sync. The vehicle would stop, rescan, rebuild the map, and recover, but that was too slow. We tried to get by without a $40,000 FOG gyro, heading from dual GPS phase, or SLAM, and that wasn't good enough.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gatzke ( 2977 )

      But stereolithography can also do stuff you can't make in normal easy routes, like crazy "brain" gears.

      http://www.time-compression.com/articles/assets/images/fig4b.jpg [time-compression.com]

      And remember many wood products are often made in a press for all that composite shelving and furniture. Additionally, think about all the stuff you can make with cardboard. And wood is renewable, for all the hippies out there.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by mollymoo ( 202721 ) *

      Stereolithography machines aren't magic. They're a useful way of making plastic shapes in small quantities, expensively. But that's about it.

      Evidently you didn't watch the video, but there's no mention of stereolithography in the summary either, so I'm not sure why you went off on that tangent. The video is about personal fabrication, the technologies used for it are almost an aside - he gives examples of everything from CNC to proteins. They do, however, have a collection of technologies, called a Fab L [mit.edu]

  • fabricate a woman? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wake me when we can fabricate females to have them around as servants and other things. Although it would be fun to fabricate an effigy of my boss and watch him melt in the microwave.

    DIE YOU BASTARD DIE!!!!
  • It took a bit to realize that the random whitespace under the summary was in fact supposed to be an embedded video.

    Also, I'm expected at least 90% of the the comments to be prefaced with tl;dr because they didn't RTFA because it's too long. Or should it be tl;dw and WTFV?
  • I'm kind of curious about all this. It seems like the threshold to rapid manufacture/prototyping is being drastically lowered every day. I've seen past Slashdot stories about assembling prototyping machines for a few thousand dollars. Slap a few small motors, some wheels, and a manipulator arm on these 3D plotters and you really might start to have something . . .

    Besides a low nine figures in funding, a small army of engineers - mechanical, electrical, and especially software, and an iron mine near a riv
  • Isn't this essentially what Alvin Toffler [wikipedia.org] predicted. Home based fabrication replacing the mega-industrial state?

  • ?
    I must be misunderstanding something, as I watch videos relating to personal fabrication almost daily.
    I mean, I'm sure most of us here do. Right?

  • YouTube link (Score:2, Informative)

    by SteveMurphy ( 890510 )
    Since the /. effect has shut down the original site, check it out on youtube [youtube.com]

  • My biggest issue with these things.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt AT nerdflat DOT com> on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @12:42PM (#22575660) Journal
    ... is lack of resolution. Until they can bring the accuracy of part making down to the order of a few microns, it's not going to really be that practical.... for crying out loud, even the human eye can resolve measurements of only 35 microns. They need resolutions at better than half that before I'd ever look at getting one.
    • *shrug* I guess that's a matter of opinion. For most purposes, accuracy within a few mils should be fine.

      OTOH, it'll likely develop into a resolution war like we've had with digital cameras and inkjet printers.

  • Isnt loading in SWF player, but FLV is working fine

    http://static.videoegg.com/ted/movies/NEILGERSHENFELD_high.flv [videoegg.com] 53mb

    ...for now

  • Neil has a very good idea here. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by byteherder ( 722785 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @12:59PM (#22575918)
    I met Neil Gershenfeld at the Supercomputing Conference in 2007. He has set up these mini-fabs at MIT, Africa, Scandinavia and elsewhere. I remember reading about someone else setting up something similiar in Silicon Valley. Each time, they were a huge success. It gives people a chance to make a one-off prototype of a idea they have. Before this was a terribly expensive proposition. Once the initial capital costs are paid, these shops run fairly inexpensively. This is such a great way to unleash the creativity of so many inventors that normally would not be able to afford it.

    byteherder

    • I remember reading about someone else setting up something similar in Silicon Valley.
      I guess you were reading about this. They seem to be opening up in a number of locations in the US.
      http://www.techshop.ws/ [techshop.ws]
  • I saw Neil at SC07. He came off as quite insistent that his way of thinking is right and everyone else's thinking is wrong when it comes to development of compute power and the networking / programming interfaces we develop around that. How you could make buckets of compute power and if you needed more, just throw another bucket at it. He then went off on some tangent of making lightbulbs and buildings "intelligent". He showed off his internet0 devices. He then went on a long talk about his fab labs, showe

  • Xkcd is the prophet again... (Score:3, Funny)

    by A beautiful mind ( 821714 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @01:07PM (#22576020)
    ...as it is clearly evident [xkcd.com].
    • Would somebody please mod this up? Just cause they beat me to it, no reason the reply should suffer...

  • General Advice? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jekler ( 626699 ) on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @01:20PM (#22576238)

    I recommend a single article recommending that people keep an eye on TED instead of individual users, who apparently have just discovered TED, submitting "articles" suggesting everybody watch the latest one they stumbled upon. Actually I'd like to recommend people do that for a number of web sites, like LifeHacker and Wired. I'm glad you just discovered TED, but the fact that you are now aware of it doesn't qualify as news.

    I discover new information on the internet every day and I realize that just because it's the first time it's come into my periphery doesn't make it newsworthy. Just last night I watched a video about OOP by Dan Ingalls, as great as it was and however new to me, it was 20 years old to the rest of the world.

    • Just last night I watched a video about OOP by Dan Ingalls, as great as it was and however new to me, it was 20 years old to the rest of the world.
      Anything about OOP by Dan Ingalls or Alan Kay is likely to be news to people who think C++ or Java are object oriented.

      (Sorry, I've been hacking on LLVM all day and rediscovered my hatred for C++)

    • meh. why don't you take your suggestion to the logical conclusion? in reality, we should just have a _single_ article telling people to keep an eye on the AP wire, the Reuters wire, any of several major newspapers, CNet, Science, Nature.... i'm sure you can help fill out that list. if only the editors would publish that article, we could just take care of all these other, redundant "articles" polluting the purity which /. should be.

      personally, i don't have time to watch every media outlet, which is why

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jekler ( 626699 )
        Yes, aggregate news. I don't have a problem with that. A video from a year ago isn't news. If something new happened with TED, that would be news, but an alert that somebody found a video on their site that they liked isn't news. I don't need to be updated every time someone reaches into the archives of a web site and finds an interesting article. It's not that /. should be "pure", it's that it should at least be news.
  • He's talking about the future of the Santa Claus Machine [wikipedia.org]?

    Just put it in the garage beside my flying car, m'kay. Thanks.
  • As the penultimate nerd, what I think I'd really like is a fabricating machine with which I can fabricate 25.4mm scale miniatures on demand for fantasy wargaming, only requiring model files for the minis I want to make, and I could make as many as I want (I can paint 'em myself... so color isn't an issue for me). The minimum feature size supported would have to be phenomenal to be viable for this though... probably no larger than 0.1mm. I absolutely loathe shelling out oodles of cash every single time I n
  • The first Fab Lab giving people the technology to create technology. Not very original Mr Gershenfeld! I can do science me!

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