Yank politicians
Are definitely not going to like the name
Now I shall just pick an appropriate ico...oh wait
Sydney University is leading a research collaboration that inverts the familiar approach to astronomy: instead of more powerful telescopes looking at smaller parts of the sky, CAASTRO (Centre for All-sky Astrophysics) will be concentrating on whole-of-sky astronomy. The other partners in the group are the Australian National …
I own a dozen Gillette-brand double-edged razor blades that have a diamond coating on the cutting edges. I got them from ::mumble::[1] about 1997. They were produced with a "sputtering machine", in a variety of chemical vapor deposition, using equipment not really designed for the purpose, on a beer-driven "what if" whim by the techs running the gear ... I am still using the first one to shave with, and it shows no sign of getting dull almost a decade and a half later[2]. Anyone have any idea what happened to this technology?
[1] I don't feel comfy naming names ... Unusual for me.
[2] No, you can't purchase one of my "spares" ;-)
that published the razor blade classic a zillion years ago - happy inventor rushes in to razor-blade manufacturer executive to announce that he's devised a razor blade that will give the user a close and comfortable shave for a whole lifetime, to which the executive responds, «Too many bugs !». Several frames later the blade has been «improved» to the point where it is unusable after one shave, whereupon the exec declares it ready for the market. Anyone else rememember this classic ?...
Henri
Neither. It was a beer-driven whim. A hack, if you will. If management had ever found out about it, the perps would have undoubtedly been fired for "unauthorized use of corporate resources".
I was a contractor, working for a company that was experimenting with diamond vapor deposition. They had a mixed bag[1] of networking technology, I was upgrading it to 100Meg Ethernet. Various Vapor Deposition techs were assigned to me to pull wire, and other "dumb, heavy work". When the job was over, they took me out for a beer (or several). Bunch of techs, pizza & beer, and ... well, you get the picture.
We each chipped in $20 for the blades. At the time, I figured the money was actually my share of the pizza & beer. Somehow, they managed to figure out DVD time, at the exhaust end of the chamber (so as to not contaminate the actual test-run). Once they figured out which process worked best, they ran a full run of nothing but blades (late night). They divvied up the result, each of us getting a dozen blades, with the lead tech getting 15. I had no idea that they were actually proceeding with the crazy idea until they delivered my dozen to my office :-)
I was just wondering if anyone knew of anyone working on this obviously solvable problem ... or have the razor manufacturing industry threatened mayhem in the courts for anyone putting a "lifetime razor blade" for sale to the general public.
[1] StarLAN (some manufacturing stuff), Novell 2.x (TheBigBoss and his secretary) and 3.x (secretarial pool), thicknet (various), ArcNET (the CAD department) and thinnet (everywhere else; MILES of the stuff ...). Needless to say, their network wasn't designed, it evolved ... Yes, this was really in the late '90s. It was fun to fix :-)
In a related item, I just came across this on the BBC news site...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14896330
'Skynet seeks to crowdsource the stars
Idle home computers are being sought to help search through mountains of astronomical data.
The Skynet project involves using the spare processing capacity of computers as a giant, distributed supercomputer....'
Don't these people ever go to the movies? - I'm sure I saw exactly the same thing in a 'documentary' once - something about killer robots, I think!