I love the project a lot; I was friends with one of the founders ~15 years ago, until we got separated by geography. He had an amazing hack/DIY ethic then, and clearly still does - I'm very impressed with what he's achieved.

But as you can see from the RepRap homepage, funding comes from donations, t-shirts and kit sales. Ideologically pure DIY is laudable but we've all seen software projects that were a triumph of individual achievement and a true labor of love, but where v1.0 finally landed with an interface that was >5 years out of date.

The problem at bottom is that RepRap can't do things on a very fine scale, and you can't build a new RepRap from an existing one - you can make bits, but not the motors or the extruder, which are exactly the (relatively) expensive and hard-to-source parts in shortest supply in places like Africa.

Given the increasing quality and affordability of commercial RP and 3d printing machines, it might make a lot more sense to raise a few hundred k or a few million in capital, buy the good commercial stuff, and skip several generations, just as the OLPC was (presumably) designed on the most up-to-date computers available, rather than being bootstrapped on 8086 machines for reasons of ideological purity.

Reprap is a great venture, but it's never going to get there by itself, and the founders are never going to dirty themselves asking for a big check in exchange for any kind of commercial license. It's held back by it's 'techno-Amish' origins.

and I think their emphasis on low cost and general utility (as opposed to self-reproducibility) will net them more users and $. I've also been following the Desktop Factory, who promise 3 desktop printing for $5k: http://www.desktopfactory.com/ Still vaporware commercially speaking, but ti doesn't hurt that they look a Real Company.

I hope I don't sound too down on the RepRap or on you for posting it. I've got a classic case of the 'introverted total DIY = unfinished project' myself.

For >20 years now, I've just been in the habit of preferring the odd-numbered versions, and assuming that the even-numbered versions were meant as incubators for the next major shift (most recently, from 32 to 64 bit computing). At first I thought this was due to ham-handedness at MS, but nowadays I wonder if it isn't the actual strategy - the pattern has repeated so many times now, perhaps it's because it actually works for MS. Notice how aggressive advertising on Vista's behalf only began last year as W7 was going into beta.

Thus, I predict that Windows 8 will require a minimum of 2 cores, 16gb of RAM and a 1gb Graphics card, leverage virtualization technology for application switching and be decried as a hugely inefficient and pointless attempt to recycle server solutions onto the desktop for no good reason. When Windows 9 emerges, there will be many headlines of the 'Microsoft desperately needs to recover from the disaster that was Windows 8...' variety.

Lottery addicts certainly can't do math since they waste a lot of money on tickets. But a good many other people just buy one a week or just occasionally, eg when there's a particularly large jackpot on offer. This isn't so irrational; a regular player will make a few bucks back over the year on small prizes, and the risk/reward ratio improves for a big jackpot even though the odds don't.

It's worth recalling that while the odds on any individual ticket are awful, enough people are playing that people do win big prizes on a semi-regular basis. For small-spend players who can afford it, and may think of it as semi-charitable given the uses to which lottery profits are put, is it really any more irrational than certain kinds of insurance?

You know when something is cool in your chosen field(s). If you're a geek, that means when you first encountered a modem, IP, Linux or Google, depending on your age. As Pirsig - or rather, his muse - says in 'Zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance': Quality is what you like. Everyone has in-depth knowledge of something, even stupid people; so when the 'woah, cool' reaction takes place it's just a matter of relating it back to your area of knowledge and the significance thereof (obviously, if your specialty is knitting, carbon-fiber knitting needles probably won't make the front page...but then, there are a lot of knitters out there....what do I know?).

You can, and do, sense the potential easily. It's the 10% inspiration. The reason most people, myself included, don't capitalize on things like this is because they are unable or unwilling to commit the money or time. Kinda like romance, you know pretty fast whether you'd like to sleep with someone, but committing to seeing them daily requires a decision, and many of us are nervous of risking the money or time involved; indeed, nervous in proportion to our ability to be carried away on a wave on enthusiasm. In this case, I recommend setting a limit of time and/or money to invest, and a cutoff date by which you'll give up if it turns out to suck.

Yes, amateur programmers will soon run up against the limits of their knowledge; a few will go pro, others will give up. But the most important outcome will be from non-programmers and non-designers coming up with paradigm-busting ideas, which will look like crap at first but turn out to be important later.

I've always liked recreational drugs, and a little boost at a critical moment can enhance work; but since one's body quickly develops a tolerance it's not compatible with any long-term work consumption (as many have found to their cost). Many (most?) articles about drugs posit some kind of linear relationship between the input and output, whereas the reality is nonlinear dynamic system with a complex feedback loop.

Thus, I love a big mug of coffee every morning, but it's not so much that it makes me super-productive as I get a bit slow and crabby on the days when I skip my coffee. It doesn't give me any edge over a non-coffee drinker. On the other hand I don't get a caffeine hangover or crash, which would be a risk with a more potent drug if I took it regularly.

Anyway...the article assumes there's only one kind of enhancement. A good scientist or engineer is just as likely to have a brekthrough idea while decompressing on the weekend with a beer or a fattie, as when sitting at their work station. Same reason many people get their best ideas while walking, soaking in the tub, or whatever.

Yes, the OS is less relevant now as many users don't need more computing power than a netbook + SAS can provide, but it still matters. High-powered consoles won't kill PC games, I doubt I'll be editing HD video over the net any time soon (although I wouldn't object), and no large corporation or medium is going to outsource its operations to some third-party provider of cloud services.

Just because something is commoditized doesn't make it irrelevant. Cars are functionally identical for 90% of drivers but people still have preferences there.

Personally, I don't see much hope for something that requires you to maintain a mental picture of a qwerty keyboard while you type. I do about 85 wpm with 10 fingers but when I try to type on the surface of my desk I just get lost, even looking right at my keyboard 3 inches away from my fingers.

tl;dr; 'intellectuals get high like everyone else - film at 11'.

Let's perform a little experiment...

Search the web for 'why is ask better than google' »

Result #1 Is Ask.com Better Than Google? Like you, I've been watching what looks to be a very powerful campaign by Ask.com quoting a bunch of folks I know as saying that its search engine is better than Google's. I'm a big Google user and have developed a set of skills that allows... http://www.technewsworld.com/story/commentary/53184.htm...

Result #2 Why is google better than ask jeeves? From: Recommended Search Engines UC Berkeley - Teaching Library Internet Workshops Google alone not always sufficient, however. Less than half the searchable Web is fully searchable in Google. Overlap studies show that more than 80% of the ... http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080311053...

Result #3...oh wait, that's it.

Hmmm.

a. you could do worse than learn to use sketchup. I can't tell from your description how complex or mechanical your 'thing' is. If it's beyond your capabilities, advertise for someone to do it, but have them sign a 'work for hire' agreement which includes a rigid confidentiality clause.

b. it's hard to say because I can't tell whether it's a widget (handy-shaped thing) or a gadget (handy single-function machine). If the former, look into Rapid prototyping and/or 3d printing. If the latter, research similar products, find out what class they are described as, then investigate manufacturers in China.*

* Who will probably ignore your confidentiality clause, foolish roundeye.

I'm sorry this is so hand-waving, but I honestly don't know whether you're making a plastic resistor drawer or a self-regulating soldering iron.

It might be worth advertising for an electronic engineer to do some consulting, executing the above-mentioned work-for-hire agreement, and asking them to evaluate the functionality of your prototype. Best of luck.

Good second link. I have nothing bad to say about Dr. Hoffman's 'problem child'.

Ultimately there is an economy of trust, and most people are poor economists. I share your regard for Gracian, despite being lamentably bad at such calculus. The best advice I ever received is to associate with successful people (however you define success) and be helpful when given the opportunity.

Owning your failures is always more satisfying than trying to assign them to someone else; sharing credit for your success is always more attractive than trying to hoard it. This kind of wealth is independent of your bank balance.

Nicotine consumption is at least as acceptable in poor or slowly developing countries as in well-developed ones. Lots of people smoke in Egypt, Greece, and France, but none of those countries is a trailblazing economy. France has many virtues, but is arguably excessively paternalistic.

Sure, you do have a point. I just had a cigarette, so I am in no position to argue :-) That said, at 38 I'm painfully aware of the deleterious effects of smoking for the last 2 decades and unable to be flippant about this. On a broader level, it's worth considering that something like 40-50% of tobacco sales in the US are made to mentally ill people, who find chemical relief therein, but aren't necessarily better off from doing so.

One might, with equal or greater historical basis, argue for the success of tea-drinking societies. Or marijuana. The bottom line is that the most productive people in society will find ways to leverage productivity out of drugs as much as anything else, while the least productive will substitute the feeling for the practice.

Obviously, I have a chip on my shoulder about these issues; you're not wrong, I'd just like see a better ange of therapeutic options.

I find it incredibly rude to get a 200k email where I have to keep scrolling up and down to older stuff to see what's being referred to, when inline quoting would be so much more efficient. the worst demographic are older (>35) users who came to email late. Younger people are more succinct and early adopters of email are still efficient.

Oh well, get off my lawn.

It's notable how strong a statement the selection of Twitter makes, though. Marshall McLuhan rides again!

I do think the graphic design of the thing is sheer genius. If the price is right and things are sufficiently maneuverable, then great. Not so smart, however, was choosing the same name as a poorly-perceived grocery delivery service: http://www.peapod.com/

There are many shareware programs which do this, and others are free: this goes double for plugins, and there's a better than-even chance that a musician who likes computers already has some kind of multitrack software which accomodates plugins. They likely also have a hardware audio interface with a special low-impedance input for plugging in a guitar and got equivalent software for free. So that's black mark #1 - you're not offering much new functionality.

Black mark #2 is your interface. It is beautifully clean, I applaud that. However, while an audio waveform is wonderful for engineers, it's not so much for musicians. It might be better to generate a low-resolution spectral display, by applying (say) a 256-band FFT which won't cause any computer to break a sweat but would give a more musically meaningful presentation, and set you apart from the competition. As you have already implemented pitch-independent time stretching, you probably know how to do this.

Personally, I would not waste so much space on the album art either, but that's me.

I'd like to see you add some more features, which wouldn't break your interface. While decomposing a a piece of music into polyphonic pitch information is hard (see http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=635 for the technology leader), deriving the 8key* of the music from a relatively coarse FFT analysis is not so difficult. Having the key signature, and indeed the bpm, appear on the left side or over blocks in the audio display should be easily achievable and would add a lot of value.

Another thing you could do is offer a button to extract or remove the top (usually vocal) melody line. This is easy: take a stereo file, invert one channel, and add it to the other. this will give you a (mono) karaoke track, since the vocals are almost always panned to the center. You'll lose the kick drums and bass too, but you could limit to the bandwidth of the human voice. Invert and add the karaoke channel to both sides of the stereo waveform, and you'll get only the center, allowing the musician to either copy or accompany the lead vocal and not much else. There's nothing more complex than a multiply-add operation going on here ((waveform.position.leftchannel.samplevalue * -1) + waveform.position.rightchannel.samplevalue ...etc.) so you should be able to do this in realtime with virtually no performance hit.

Finally, consider taking the live stream of input from the microphone input (eg the guitar), FFting it, and doing a loose correlation with the FFT of the playing track to derive a little 'accuracy' meter. Of course there will be much more audio information in the track unless it's also an acoustic guitar solo, but the frequency response of the live input should be a subset of this as long as the musician is playing in time. When they start to drag or lead the backing track, the energy of individual frequency bins will exceed those of the backing track.

Sorry for being so harsh, but I do think you're asking too much for something that most people will perceive as little more than a 'hello world' audio program. If I were you I would protoype the functionality in reaktor or some other visual-programming tool, add some more useful and unusual modes of display or operation as above, and then bring that back to your clean interface.

Yes...but the guitar will be seen/heard on stage. People will generally spend a lot more on their t-shirt than on their underpants or socks. Nobody with an interest in musical performance wants to advertise the tedium or difficulties of musical practice, so because that part isn't glamorous. So don't base your price point on appealing to the musician's ego about investing in themselves.

This plus a front-end DSP environment like http://synthmaker.co.uk/ would sell like hot cakes. Update to this now please: http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/vcl/asap/asap_demo_boards.html

I don't own a car, so to me a car fit for a road trip and a little runaround-town vehicle are two completely different products. I'd rather own the latter and rent the former once or twice a year.

edit: the proposed $20k isn't a winner, though. I think this kind of vehicle needs to be shooting for $5-7,500.

It's a fine and refreshingly hype-light product. The only change I'd like to see is a simple application included that takes a common 3d file format (blender, pov or something) and spits out a rendered bitmap.

Instead of waiting for developers to add Caustic support to their 3d apps over the summer, this would allow a 3d artist to start saving time tomorrow, even knowing that that it wasn't optimized. The little app displayed in the video demo would be more than sufficient, it just doesn't seem from the website like it comes with any ready-to-use tools for the non-programmer.

Perhaps having a high IQ slows down some kinds of learning because the holder tends to discount advice that is not presented in an intellectually compelling fashion. Telling a high-IQ child to behave a certain way 'because I said so' isn't terribly convincing. Even though the advice itself may be valuable, an inability to articulate why will hinder its delivery.

I like Win and Linux, Mac seems to me to combine the worst of both. Sure, it's personal. Application compatibility matters, Linux lags badly on video & audio editing tools.

When I first ran Linux around 1993, what really annoyed me were Emacs & vi. Sure, they're powerful, but extremely alienating to new users. DOS had Edit, or Windows 3 had Notepad. Ubuntu and like distros succeed because most people just want to drive without learning how to be a mechanic. Linux's biggest problem is people's perception that there's no 'standard' distribution and that they're going to have do an awful lot of icky maintenance.

As soon as you move away from a barter system and give up trading bullets for beans, then whatever you substitute, whether it's gold, greenbacks, or cowrie shells, is someone's obligation to pay - with a bank or government treasury acting as their proxy. The Dutch Tulip mania in the 17th century is a case in point. No matter how treasury power is configured, it will be open to abuse.

This is not to dispute your valid points about moral hazard. However, the 'sound money' meme is nothing more than a fetish which appeals to people who have trouble dealing with the abstractions of economics. In the simplest possible therms: gold is only valuable because a lot of people believe it to be so. Blaming the Fed for everything is a rabbit-hole down which intelligent analysis goes to die. Countries with an independent central back are almost always more stable than those where the government has direct control of the money supply. Today's outstanding example of that is Zimbabwe.

Is it me, or do all portal-type services seem to go through the same curve, since CompuServe to Facebook? Unified interface and handy tools excite early adopters, interest scales in sigmoid fashion, plateaus, and diminishing returns set in as the signal-to-noise ratio declines, followed by profitability.

It seems to happen over and over again, like waves on the seashore. Many people clearly want a 'home' on the net with a structured community...much the same way people like suburban tract housing with homeowner's associations. Every few years someone makes fat money by finding a new way to cater to these people, few of whom want to maintain their own domain or pages. Numerous me-too sites grab a small slice of this (like facespace.com...really). 5 years later, it's like that nightclub down the street that used to be so cool.

a) it vented liquidity from the dreadfully overheated mortgage market b) it deflected attention onto oil companies even though most of the change in oil prices was driven by merchant bankers looking for somewhere to park cash c) it created a high degree of demand destruction, slowing the economy down significantly

This didn't drive us (or any other country) into recession, but rather caused us to take a closer look at the drivers of the economy and realize that the real estate bubble had already peaked. My personal opinion is that if it hadn't been for the oil shock the financial crisis would have come 3-6 months earlier and been even more stabilizing.

I did a lot of research into this last year for a documentary, but shelved it due to inertia and changing events. I feel strongly that the oil crisis happened because of the deeper financial crisis, but still can't decide if it was a naturally emergent symptom or a wholly engineered plan B which succeeded in staving off total collapse. Or somewhere in between.

Primitive strategies are none the worse for being primitive: though no guarantor of success, they're often adequate. thus the number of citations of a science paper is not a direct reflection of its quality, but not irrelevant either. I was surprised to discover that market traders, far from being tight-lipped about their strategic overview, spend a lot of time calling each other up when things were slow to ask what their competitors thought of the day's financial 'weather'. Google's Pageranks are similar. And so on.

It is true that a fairly non-promiscuous person will likely be a better parent and thus a desirable match. Nevertheless, some competitive genes don't hurt. Also commitment after experience is more interesting than commitment by default (see daily YC thread on how 'Windows users only like it because it came with the computer they bought').

(17 page rant about the failings of most media and media consumers implied)

This tool is designed for audio DSP, but is not limited to that. If you're interested in this topic, I recommend downloading the trial, putting it in advanced mode, and just futzing about for a few hours.

It's very accessible and fast to work with, and could be adapted to quite a lot of non-DSP tasks. I would love to see it generalized: the modules within are how I feel libraries should present. Draw graphs for data flow or complex functions, open up a code box for tight procedural stuff. Perhaps not what the author had in mind, but audio synthesis of this kind is event-driven, asynchronous and features a high degree of interactivity, so it may be worth further exploration.

Please email if you know about this kind of cool stuff in other contexts.