3d printing

Well if you follow the current trends in the 3d printing market you know that the technology has come a long way in the last years. Does that mean that you will be able to print replicas of your favorite products? Simply put, no.

But then that isn’t their intended use either. Still 3d printer manufactures may be putting themselves in the firing line.

For all they know, people might start producing cheap replicas of all of the latest and greatest gadgets, wait they already do.

“A coming revolution in 3D printing, with average consumers able to copy and create new three-dimensional objects at home, may lead to attempts by patent holders to expand their legal protections, a paper from Public Knowledge says. Patent holders may see 3D printers as threats, and they may try to sue makers of the printers or the distributors of CAD (computer-aided design) blueprints, according to digital rights group Public Knowledge.”

You can read more in the original post.

Would a pre-emptive assault from patent holders cripple this fledgling market? Probably not. 3d printing is still in its infancy, it still has a long way to go before you’ll be able to print objects like this at home.

I am not sure if the traditional printing industry was against the desktop printer, though they probably had more to lose than other manufactures.

In closing I will leave you with this image.

Current state of 3d printing

Comet Hartley 2

Sometimes accidents turnout to have wonderful results. That is what happened with the Hartly 2 comet fly-by. You see in all rights we shouldn’t see Hartley 2, NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft wasn’t even supposed to film it.

The reason NASA took pictures of comet Hartley 2 was because they couldn’t find their original target. I guess that is understandable, after all there is plenty of space to loose something in.

Here is a little more information about comet Hartley 2:

NASA’s EPOXI mission spacecraft successfully flew past comet Hartley 2 at 7 a.m. PDT (10 a.m. EDT) Thursday, Nov. 4. Scientists say initial images from the flyby provide new information about the comet’s volume and material spewing from its surface.

Hartley 2 Gallery

More NASA related posts:
Astronauts’ Skin-Tight Bodysuits Could Protect From Bone Loss
New NASA MMO

Netflix bandwidth usuage?

So you’re sitting at your computer and you’ve waited forever for this page to load. Well, it’s Netflix fault.

Okay, that is a little bit of a stretch, however, I read an interesting article on slashdot about Netflix bandwidth usage.

While this isn’t something that I would normally post about, I thought that it brought up an interesting point and thought it was worth sharing.

Here is an excerpt from the article.

Netflix is swallowing America’s bandwidth and it probably won’t be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That’s one of the headlines from Sandvine’s Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report, an exhaustive look at what people around the world are doing with their Internet lines. According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America. That’s an amazing share — it beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent.

20% is an impressive amount of bandwidth usage for one company. What is even more impressive is that they are using it to watch Sean Connery classics like Zardoz.

NASA Skin-tight Bodysuits

Have you ever wondered why everyone needs to run around in skin-tight body suits in space? No, it’s not what you’re thinking, there is actually a science to the sexiness. Well, at least there is now.

Bone loss is a major problem for today’s astronauts. In fact, for every month in space they loose up to 2% bone density.

For a stay on the ISS this number might be acceptable, but think about effects this would have on the human body over a prolonged stay in space.

With current level of technology it would take NASA astronauts a minimum of 6 months to reach Mars. ESA is also planning a trip to Mars that would last 440 days. The Russian space program is planning the longest mission to the Red Planet, a staggering 2 year mission. As you can see, the math doesn’t add up, and certain areas need to be addressed before we can take a road trip through space.

That is where the skin-tight body suits come in.

MIT’s Man-Vehicle Laboratory into using “superhero-style” skinsuits to combat the effects of extended stays in microgravity on bone density in astronauts. (Abstract.) Quoting: “Astronauts lose 1 to 2 percent of their bone mass for each month they spend in space. As far back as the Gemini missions, conditioning exercise regimes have been used to slow the rate of bone loss, but a 2001-2004 NASA-sponsored study showed that crew members aboard the International Space Station were still losing up to 2.7 percent of their interior bone material and 1.7 percent of outer hipbone material for each month they spent in space. … With stirrups that loop around the feet, the elastic gravity skinsuit is purposely cut too short for the astronaut so that it stretches when put on — pulling the wearer’s shoulders towards the feet. In normal gravity conditions on Earth, a human’s legs bear more weight than the torso. Because the suit’s legs stretch more than the torso section, the wearer’s legs are subjected to a greater force — replicating gravity effects on Earth.

I don’t know about you but it doesn’t sound very comfortable.

There isn’t any question about the power of linux/unix on the server and desktop level, but a little acknowledgement never hurts.

I recently posted about the release of Ubuntu 10.10. While this isn’t as fresh, it is equally as interesting. Dustin Kirkland, a core developer of Ubuntu Server at Canonical posted in January about how Weta uses Ubuntu at their studio.

In his post Dustin mentioned how he had a chance to sit down and talk to Paul Gunn, the Systems Administrator at Weta Digital.

It was a great talk, about the type of data center needed to render special effects in today’s blockbuster movies. They have a 2 Petabyte disk array, 10gbps networking, and 35,000 cores (4,000+ HP blades) in their data center, and still it takes 48 hours to render some of their graphic sequences.

That is a pretty respectable data center! And Unbuntu is at the heart of it. The OS is currently running on all of the rendering nodes as well as 90% of the studios desktops. That means that all of those breath taking scenes you enjoyed in films like Avatar made their way through the sudio’s Ubuntu render farm.

I first saw this on Christer Edwards blog, Ubuntu Tutorials. He noted a couple of other films that Weta Digital has work on, these include such blockbusters as:

• Avatar
• District 9
• The Day the Earth Stood Still
• King Kong
• Jumper
• Lord of the Rings
• Fantastic Four
• i-Robot
• X-Men
• Eragon

Where they also rendered on Ubuntu? That isn’t confirmed but with the size of their render farm you can be sure it didn’t spring up over night.

The news last week that exoplanet Gliese 581g may be in the “goldilocks zone” and could therefore hold liquid water and alien life got everyone all excited, with good reason. A potentially habitable planet–and only 20 light years away! But to put things in perspective, here are a couple of estimates on what it would take to travel to Gliese 581g. One scientist puts the travel time at 180,000 years based on current space flight technology, while another explains that it could be quite quick if we build a matter-antimatter drive, and can figure out how to bring along 530 times as much mass in fuel as is contained in the ship and cargo itself.

Is the planet home to alien life? If it is I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting to find out, I don’t think that we’ll find out anytime soon. Until then it looks like we’ll just have to explore the “alien” lifeforms on our own planet.

Gliese 581g alien world

The Space Game

Want to try your hand at plotting a course to Jupiter? Well the European Space Agency might just have what you’re looking for. From the 4th of October to the tenth ESA will be celebrating World Space Week and they’ve released the Space Game (creative title isn’t it?) that allows you to do just that.

“The Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency is celebrating World Space Week (4-10 October 2010) with the release of ‘The Space Game,’ an online game for interplanetary trajectory design. The Space Game is an online crowdsourcing experiment where you are given the role of a mission designer to seek the best path to travel through space. The interactive game, coded in HTML5, challenges the players to devise fuel-efficient trajectories to various bodies of the Solar System via a user-friendly interface. The aim of the experiment is get people from all ages and backgrounds to come up with better strategies that can help improve the effectiveness of the current computer algorithms. As part of the events organized worldwide for Space Week, the first problem of the game is to reach Jupiter with the lowest amount of propellant. The best scores by 10 October will be displayed on the Advanced Concepts Team website and the three best designs will also receive some ESA prizes.”

Need some help? Watch the Space Game screencast.

You can visit the official website here.

If you’re waiting for the next release of Ubuntu (Maverick Meerkat) then you won’t have to wait long. 10.10 will be released in a matter of days. Just take a look at the nifty little counter to see how many that actually is.

Ubuntu 10.10 Change Log

Here are some of the features and changes that will be rolled out in the next release of Ubuntu.

Releases are big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely,
mind-bogglingly big they are. I mean, you may think it’s a long haul to
release a single Linux package or application, but that’s just peanuts
to a Linux distribution release. Because of this, we must work our way
up to it, incrementally…bit by bit…milestone by milestone…it takes a
lot of Deep Thought. So with that, we formally announce Ubuntu 10.10
Release Candidate. Codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”, 10.10 continues
Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open
source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

The GNOME base platform has been updated to the current 2.32 versions.
This includes the new dconf and gsettings API.

Evolution was updated to the 2.30.3 version, which operates much faster
than the version in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Shotwell has replaced F-Spot as the default photo manager.

Gwibber has been updated to support the recent change in Twitter’s
authentication system, as well as changing the back end storage to
improve performance.

The Sound Indicator has been enhanced to include music player controls.

The Ubuntu Software Center has an updated look and feel, including the
new “Featured” and “What’s New” views for showcasing applications, and
an improved package description view. You can now easily access your
package installation history, too.

New Design: The boot process is cleaner and faster. New themes, new
icons, and new wallpaper bring a dramatically updated look and feel to
Ubuntu.

Ubuntu One: Polished desktop integration with new sign up and sign in
process. Tighter integration with Ubuntu SSO. Nautilus enhancements for
managing folder sync preferences. Faster file sync speed. Share links to
music within the Ubuntu One Music Store.

You can check out the full list of features in the Ubuntu 10.10 change log.

If you are not familiar with the 3DS, it’s the first portable game device with 3D graphic technology. It will be released in Europe, Australia and the US in March 2011.

Nintendo 3DS

Here is a list of some of the games to be released:

Spring 2011
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D–Nintendo
Nintendogs + Cats–Nintendo
Pilotwings Resort (working title)–Nintendo
Pro Baseball Spirits–Konami
Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracle–Level 5
Ridge Racer 3D–Namco Bandai
Samurai Warriors Chronicle–Tecmo Koei
Steel Diver–Nintendo
Super Monkey Ball (working title)–Sega
Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition–Capcom

Unspecified 2011
Kid Icarus: Uprising–Nintendo
Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D – The Naked Sample–Konami

To Be Announced
Chocobo Racing 3D (working title)–Square Enix
Star Fox 64 3D–Nintendo
Animal Crossing (working title)–Nintendo
Dead or Alive: Dimensions–Tecmo Koei
Paper Mario (working title)–Nintendo
Mario Kart (working title)–Nintendo
Resident Evil: Revelations–Capcom
Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D–Capcom

Leonar3Do

I saw this earlier today and I was really impressed with how the idea has evolved. I saw something like this several years ago in a documentary and at that point it was closer to science fiction than reality. That has changed.

But before I go on I should probably explain what “this” is. Leonar3Do is a creates virtual space in front of your computer monitor. You can more it around and you can look at it from different angles as long as you are wearing the headset.

The device was created to allow you to sculpt on your computer, this actually isn’t anything new. There have been applications that allow you to do this for years but you were always restricted to the screen. Now with the creation of Leonar3Do that is no longer the case.

To get a better idea of what this means you can take a look at this video that demonstrates the technology better.

Black Dragon Sculpture

I should mention that this video is a mock-up, you can’t film the effect and you can’t see it unless you are wearing the glasses. My guess is we’ll have to wait a couple more years for something like that.

You can learn more on the official website, Leonar3Do.com. And if you are wondering how much this is going to cost, it may disappoint you to learn that it will be over $1000.