Summary: my problem with things today is that it's going to become virtually impossible to play. electronics is a good example. so many of the parts are surface mount only. meaning you can't just whomp something together on a bread board. but to push the idea even further, there is no way for two guys in a garage to make an iPod. okay they could but look at the skill set they have to have to make it happen. I read a Rudy Rucker book (http://www.rudyrucker.com/wares/) where lots of the tech is mindblowingly complex. tech that was so hard that a humans couldn't even be involved after a certain point. yet interfaces to tech creation allowed the characters to control making without thinking about who made who (robot making tech based on human interaction). the book Makers mentions combining complex programming projects into a greater object. this concept of reusing code is tossed out there like it's no big deal. but fiction always over simplifies making because the story would become boring otherwise. to most people man landing on the moon is a sound bite even though it took the better part of 20 years (don't forgot all the work before the Kennedy speech) to get there. I've had a lot of printers in my life from letter quality daisy wheels to dot matrix to dye sub to laser. and at some level the businesses I ran wouldn't have been possible without the leveraged use I got from printing without limits. Tom pointing that this same thing is right here with 3D printing is telling. 1) it's ground zero. think of MakerBot (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1449399061/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=knowtech-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1449399061)">Makerbot as a Epson MX-80 2) there potential for hundreds of new business 3) be prepared to see lots of failure as it engages 4) plastics and resins are toxic. stand by for regulation in California. the discussion last night over dinner before the show was about lots of different things but one subject was "I want one but I don't know why I want one." this was Kanen answering the question do you want a 3D printer because making 2 is just as easy as making 1. I think wanting one of these is the same as back when I had an Apple II of wanting a MX-80 printer. or a printer of any kind. it wasn't that I needed to print lots of things. it was the idea of having a printer right there next to me. that way I didn't have to wait to use somebody else's. over time printers got better. my Epson became a C-Itoh, then it was a Panasonic, next it was a ImageWriter and not too long after became an ImageWriter II which was my last dot matrix printer. after that it was lasers and film printers all the way. there is something satisfying about printing a stack of paper that is the manuscript / report / script / outline or whatever needs to be on paper to use properly. when tracking takes for a voice production I can't imagine NOT doing that on paper. and proof reading copy just looks different when it lands on dead trees. [note about editing: the trick of course is to make the copy look different. I can write all day long in whatever typeface but if I want to proof read it I have to copy paste into a different werp and change the font and size so I can "see it".] so yeah, that's been my question since the possibility of having one came up back in May. these things are all around me. really. there's a MakerBot an email away. and Shapeways will send me anything I can dream up. I even bought some tools to help me make things. so here's the very thing that I'm getting my head around in making my lens mount. I don't have to fab it think about "machining" like I would if I was building from PVC, aluminum and other hardware. right angles aren't even a requirement. one thing that comes to mind right off in learning to think like this is what Apple is doing. the original Mac Mini was the first thing that was made from a block of aluminum.
