Forgot your password?

Comment: Liberal Party is a confusing coalition already (Score 1) 343

by Wizarth (#44794333) Attached to: Australia Elects Libertarian-Leaning Senator (By Accident)

I honestly thought the Liberal Democratic Party was part of the "Liberal Party", since what is referred to as the Liberal Party is actually a coalition of 4 (I think) different parties with names of a similar structure.

And they sure as heck aren't liberal in policy, either. In fact they are the more conservative of the two main parties.

Comment: Re:Moore's Law? (Score 4, Interesting) 595

by Wizarth (#43448825) Attached to: Is Bitcoin Mining a Real-World Environmental Problem?

Actually they already use GPUs - and there are companies making ASICs now. Dedicated Bitcoin mining boxes. The people who purchased GPUs specifically with mining in mind are apparently already annoyed, because the new computational power coming online means they are seeing less return, due to the increasing requirements as the number of mined bitcoins increases.

Comment: Re:Or White Noise (Score 5, Informative) 561

by Wizarth (#43178579) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Block Noise In a Dorm?

I'm not a fan of white noise, but at various times and moods I've found other noise types (pink and brown in particular) to be effective. I've used http://simplynoise.com/ in the past as the generator - combined with a set of good headphones, it will block out most sound.


Comment: Re:Valve / Steam... (Score 5, Informative) 371

by Wizarth (#42855931) Attached to: Australian Govt Forces Apple, Adobe, Microsoft To Explain Price Hikes

Actually, Valve is mentioned in the article as one that people wanted investigated - but not as one that required a subpoena to provide information. This suggests that Valve voluntarily told them how their pricing works.

Which, as far as I know, is "We set what price the producer wants us to, or they refuse to sell on Steam at all."

Comment: Re:WTF, this was already invented (Score 1) 36

by Wizarth (#41986313) Attached to: Fabricating Nature and a Physical Turing Test

You're right, it's not just CSG - although the system does contain CSG-esque boolean operations.

Our currently live product (Symvol) shows how our software does keep a tree - and we use point evaluation for producing output. MeshUp is going to be more targeted/simplified to use, so the tree possibly wont be shown/will be an advanced view.


Comment: Re:Possibly a good product, but much marketing hyp (Score 1) 36

by Wizarth (#41975385) Attached to: Fabricating Nature and a Physical Turing Test




Comment: Re:Right conclusion, wrong reasoning (Score 2) 36

by Wizarth (#41975341) Attached to: Fabricating Nature and a Physical Turing Test

Without getting into too much detail:


NURBS and other parametric surfaces still have limitations. It's very difficult to define complex shapes with them, and the boolean operations often break, leaving you with gaps between patches or surfaces that have no matching other side. The staff and beta testers include people experienced with polygon and NURBS, and there are things people are used to not being able to do (or have to do certain ways) with NURBS that "just work" with this system.

Functional objects aren't new, by any means (they predate polygons in fact). We're using some new functions (rather then the boolean ones used in existing CSG modelers).

3D printing resolution IS limited by the polygons. If you try to put a mesh into any existing printing software that has individual polygons sized at the precision of the motors, the software does break (and the mesh file will be measured in gigabytes).

And yes, "resolution of nature" is a marketing phrase. Don't ask me, I just work here.

Disclaimer: I work for Uformia, the company running the Kickstarter. We have an existing product (which isn't mention in the summary, but is in the Kickstarter) but we want to make a more specific user friendly version.

Comment: Re:NURBS (Score 2) 36

by Wizarth (#41975001) Attached to: Fabricating Nature and a Physical Turing Test


We do support outputting to slice oriented formats (Bitmap and another that I've just gone completely blank on), but we don't use these internally. Instead, our software is using 3D functions. There is existing software that does this (CSG modellers) however we use both a different set of functions to those traditionally used, that have better properties for smooth objects (in our opinion).

Being mathematical, they are accurate to whatever numerical precision is used, so we can produce slices (our preferred format) or meshes at whatever resolution is wanted, as appropriate for the printer.

(The Fine Summary doesn't include that we already have an existing product based on the technology, but we want to make a more targeted version that doesn't require the customer to also have the Rhino 3D modelling software.)

Comment: Re:Right conclusion, wrong reasoning (Score 1) 36

by Wizarth (#41974349) Attached to: Fabricating Nature and a Physical Turing Test




Comment: Re:NURBS (Score 1) 36

by Wizarth (#41974281) Attached to: Fabricating Nature and a Physical Turing Test




Comment: Fiber for trading, good (Score 2) 212

by Wizarth (#40333243) Attached to: Aussie Telco Lays New Fiber For Microsecond Trading Boost

Fiber for stock trading is considered good by all the government departments that had to OK this. But according to (one half of) our government, fiber is a total waste for everyone else in the country, and we should never need more then the mobile (cell phone) networks can provide...

The dichotomy is impressive.

Comment: Duplicity, perhaps (Score 3, Informative) 153

by Wizarth (#40061613) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Temporary Backup Pouch?


Comment: Re:DOF (Score 1) 158

by Wizarth (#37437982) Attached to: Wolfenstein Ray Traced and Anti-Aliased, At 1080p


