TECHSTREET - Free Trade Magazine Subscriptions & Technical Document Downloads

TECHSTREET - Free Trade Magazine Subscriptions & Technical Document Downloads

I just found out about this last week and it does appear to have a few interesting magazines and technical documents at TECHSTREET 

Great Article on Direct Digital Manufacturing: A Technology Whose Time Has Come

This is a very interesting article on 3D printing by John Kirkley, editor of Digital Manufacturing Report titled: 

Direct Digital Manufacturing: A Technology Whose Time Has Come

"3D printing, a technology that has been in use for several decades, is part of a broader movement known as direct digital manufacturing (DDM) that could forever change the way we make things.

We're not quite at the stage envisioned by Star Trek: The Next Generation where a replicator on board the star ship can create any kind of inanimate matter, including food (but not, of course, antimatter, dilithium or latinum). But we're getting closer."

 I don't care what industry you come from or background you have, 3D printing is just flat out super cool.  For example, check the world's first 3D printed car - the Urbee automobile:

"For example, consider the Urbee automobile which was featured in a recent Digital Manufacturing Report posting. This cute little car, a two-seater, hybrid electric/ethanol vehicle capable of 200 mpg on the highway, is the first automobile to have its entire body printed using Statasys FDM technology and a tough plastic known as ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene). Traditional manufacturing methods, which involve making molds and shaping the parts out of fiberglass, would have been a laborious and expensive process stretching out over eight to 10 months. With FDM, several major body panels for the first prototype were built in weeks. Other parts were produced in days."

Vinod Khosla's Five Second Rule - Great Presentation Advice

Thanks to npg for sending this to me on Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems employee #2) on Forbes called - Vinod Khosla's Five Second Rule and it is great advice. 

Below is a snippet:

"For each of them, he applies his five-second rule: he puts a slide on a screen, removes it after five seconds, and then asks the viewer to describe the slide. A dense slide fails the test—and fails to provide the basic function of any visual: to aid the presentation.

By applying his simple rule, Mr. Khosla is addressing two of the most important elements in presentation graphics: Less is More, a plea all too often sounded by helpless audiences to hapless presenters; and more important, the human perception factor. Whenever an image appears on any screen, the eyes of every member of every audience reflexively move to the screen to process the new image. The denser the image, the more processing the audiences need. At that very moment, they stop listening to the presenter. Nevertheless, most presenters continue speaking, further compounding the processing task. As a result, the audience shuts down. Game over."