From: Matt Ellis (matt.ellis@gmail.com)
Date: Sat Dec 31 2005 - 05:27:26 EET
Marshall,
What about:
http://cba.mit.edu/projects/fablab/
Regards,
Matt
On 12/30/05, Marshall Burns <ListMail@fabbers.com> wrote:
>
> Hey hey, Adrian,
>
> Good to hear from you on this subject! Interesting that you talk about the
> vendors being attached to their $25,000 machines because I've been thinking
> that 3D and Stratasys are trying to cripple sales of their low-cost machines
> to protect the market for their $500k and $800k machines.
>
> In any case, your efforts to turn the whole thing to open source is
> certainly interesting. I still don't really understand how open source works
> in hardware, but I'm looking forward to learning from market observation
> when you get things moving.
>
> In the meantime, I wonder, what are you guys doing at Bath on the curriculum
> side? Any comments on my call (rant) for a Fabricator Science program?
>
> Best regards,
> Marshall Burns
> www.fabbers.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Adrian Bowyer [mailto:A.Bowyer@bath.ac.uk]
> Sent: Friday, December 30, 2005 05:48
> To: Marshall Burns
> Cc: 'RP-ML'
> Subject: RE: [rp-ml] Where are the Universities?
>
> Quoting Marshall Burns <ListMail@fabbers.com>:
>
> > That's great! Thanks for doing that. I taught a course on
> > digital manufacturing for the last two semesters at USC (www.POOFF.com
> > <http://www.pooff.com/> ) and would you believe that 3D Systems, Z, and
> > Stratasys all turned me down to generate student designs for the class? I
> > even offered to cough up some of the lab fees from the course, but they
> just
> > didn't want to mess with it. Talk about lacking vision! Can you imagine
> > where the computer industry would be today if Apple hadn't launched the
> Mac
> > with aggressive promotion in schools? We'd probably still be kissing IBM's
> > butt for behemoth mainframes.
>
> That's very interesting, and is symptomatic of the RP (sorry) industry's
> single
> biggest problem: they are very heavily capitalized, they have to pay that
> back,
> and in a couple of years when their patents expire, no one will be paying
> $25,000 for their machines because HP will be selling ones for $800 in Radio
> Shack.
>
> All they want to do is to keep selling $25,000 machines to Ford and GM for
> as
> long as possible, and the last thing they need is a load of clever students
> thinking about alternatives. But people are beginning to drift out of the
> cathedral and into the bazaar...
>
> Yours
>
> Adrian Bowyer
>
> http://staff.bath.ac.uk/ensab
> http://reprap.org
>
>
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Mon Jan 02 2006 - 08:09:26 EET