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3D Printing in Windows 8.1

In this video Gavin Gear gives an overview of 3D printing support in Windows 8.1 and a demo of printing a 3D object from a Windows Store app to a 3D Systems Cube 2 printer using Windows 8.1 Preview build.

It is a nice, short video that demonstrates one example of the functionality Microsoft Windows 8.1 combined with a touchscreen delivers.

Paul Thurrot sobre Windows 8.1 (via mcontreras)

Dad’s Story: (he is retired btw)

My father recently purchased a new laptop with Microsoft Windows 8 and so he is making the transition from XP to 8!

I was surprised to see how many of the Apps features required sign-in only with a Microsoft e-mail account.  Dad does not have a Microsoft e-mail account and Dad is not a computer person!

Many people believe their computers are nothing more than "utility devices" about as useful as a telephone, they do not play games, they do not Chat, they do not Skype and they do not watch videos (unless something particularly cute is recommended on social media).  They use the computer to access the Internet for information such as health, banking, minor investments and “light” social media, so I think it is important for a major vendor like Microsoft to keep these Utility Users in mind as an important market segment.

Locking people into a specific feature by virtue of their having purchased a device with your brand of SOFTWARE THAT CAN BE REPLACED on it is narrow-minded.  Customization and allowing a user to personalize their computing experience should be as important as allowing smartphone users to enable and disable phone features!

The release of Windows 8.1 seems to be moving in the right direction and there are probably customization tips I have no experience with, or something equivalent to Desktop “Themes” to give Windows a distinctive look, sound and feel, but my father’s experience is more basic t than that.

Home computing as a “group activity”: In some multi-generational homes where a parent, aunt, or grandparent is involved, the primary user may have purchased a new computer secure in the knowledge they had someone nearby to help them with it.  However, the important thing to remember is situations change and sometimes things change suddenly! What happens if the person being depended upon to help understand and use that new five hundred dollar laptop is out of the picture?  Will the computer be shutdown and sit unloved on a coffee table or closet shelf until the Helper returns?  I certainly hope not.

Amazon’s new “Mayday” commercials for its Kindle Fire HDX product are very smart and show a level of dedication and commitment to their customers I am not used to seeing!  Well done Amazon!

The idea of a Technical Support type person being able to connect to your device, draw on the screen and explain features and settings in real-time is an idea whose time has come!

Yes, technical support SHOULD be included and it SHOULD be that easy!  Is Microsoft overlooking a huge opportunity to appeal to a completely new generation of user by NOT offering such a feature in conjunction with any of the hardware manufacturers?

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/exe-validation.aspx?id=370

It uses JavaScript or ActiveX to setup a tiny bit of interactive code on the computer, queries for the necessary information and then presents the User with the options to "Validate Windows" or "Validate Microsoft Office". I used it on the computer at work and a message similar to, 'This copy of Microsoft Windows (nn) has now been validated.'

If this is a Microsoft Windows computer, the "Event Viewer" is a good place to start to see what might be happening.  Right-click on "My Computer" and select "Manage" to get into the area where Event Viewer can be accessed.

Click the triangle next to "Event Viewer" and look for "Windows Logs", but keep in mind the appearance of this area may vary slightly.

The three important logs going back to the XP version of Windows are:

Application

Security

System

It is totally safe to browse these logs and see if there are "Information", "Warning" or "Error" messages.  If many Error messages are seen in any log with a little red symbol next to them, it is probably time to have a computer technician look at the system and help determine what they mean.  These messages are NOT easy to interpret, but they do not necessarily mean the computer is getting ready to "melt-down".

I hope this information is useful and I wish everyone reading it all the luck possible in handling their misbehaving computer.

This is one of the most cruel problems to face alone with computers and the reason EVERY user of the should understand the difference between "Copying" and "Moving" a file!  Seriously!

Moving a file instructs the computer to remove it from one location and replace it in another.  This is also commonly described as "Cut & Paste" (and accomplished on some systems with <Ctrl>+<X> and <Ctrl>+<V>).

We should never, repeat NEVER, use Cut and then Paste, and I cannot imagine a good reason why it was even invented!

Large files should always, repeat ALWAYS, be Copied and Pasted when moved from one location to another.  After the operation is complete, the User may go back and remove the original(s) from the starting location and this will result in a more "fool-proof" or safe computing experience.

Also, given the current low cost of removable media such as USB Thumb Drives and writable CD-ROM or DVD-ROM discs, there is no reason for anyone to not make back-up copies of critical files.

I just finished writing an article of Recovering a computer from a had drive failure, so the timing of this question could not have been more appropriate.  We spend almost uncountable hours pouring over facts and figures, entering data into spreadsheets and composing SQL queries to extract data from databases, and this information must be saved and should be saved in more than one location once it is obtained.

In fact, don't just make two copies, make THREE!  Put one copy on a USB Thumb Drive, burn another onto a blank DVD and then upload a third copy onto the school or office network.  This is why we have Thumb Drives with Gigabytes of capacity and Network Storage a thousand time bigger and described in Terabytes.

Do it now.  Do it often.  Make it a mantra: "Must backup my work.  Must backup my work." or have a skilled friend write a Batch file to automatically copy all the files in a "My Documents" file to another location.  All of these are ways to keep yourself sane and never have to experience the absolute terror of loosing weeks of effort.

If we think about the slightly-better-than-average employee making forty thousand dollars a year and taking only two weeks of each year, the "cost" of their contribution is at least one hundred and sixty dollars a day.  This is really a small sum if they are doing something that amounts to programming the "computer-like brain" of the next generation of youth!

How many children share a classroom with your son or daughter?  Let's put this number at forty just for arguments sake and then divide one hundred and sixty (the dollars I mentioned) by forty, please.  That works out to four (yes, "4") dollars a day per student.  Are you kidding me?

Of course the costs accelerate as each student moves through High School and college or university, but still!

We all have experiences of varying value every day!  Have you ever stopped to think about how much an employer is investing in you by creating a workplace where YOU learn?  What about the value of the knowledge you gain each day by investing in yourself? (i.e. by doing good work and taking time to understand and improve what you do each day)

It is kind of sad to think there are workplaces in which people feel they are only "pushing papers", going through the motions, or nothing more than a glorified file clerk and waiter, but I guess we have that also.

My school is changing dramatically, which means the past week of training and planning have been extreme and eye-opening. I’ve excited, and at the same I’m freaking out because it means I can basically plan nothing.Everything is up for change in the first two weeks after the kids come back, which for my OCD and extreme anxiety is very very stressful….but the excitement does win out :) We’re going from a Title I school, urban, 92% free lunch, very low test scores to (hopefully) a school unique from anywhere else in the district. To do this we’re:

Giving every single student a laptop.

Housing our own servers to handle the digital traffic (no slow connections due to the district servers!)

Turning the entire library digital - the kids can check their library books out digitally, read them on their laptops, and ‘check’ them back in.

Every classroom has a Smartboard, SmartResponse, SmartSlate, SmartDocument Camera.

School wide standard based grading.

A no zero policy.

An Academy system - Freshman Academy, Technical Science, and Consumer Science (we’re the CTAE Magnet)

Academic coaches for every subject

Our training the past few days on project based learning and textbooks has been carried out at a neck-breaking speed and has been riddled with problems. But we’ve all been flexible, haven’t complained, and really - the company training us has done a great job. We had about 4 student teachers in training with us this morning when the textbook implementation training hit a MASSIVE snag (ie. they didn’t buy any teacher editions of the books!). Our principal explained the problem, explained his frustration, apologized about the issues, and then cheekily told our student teachers “Welcome to Education!” :) 

As stressful as its been for them, I’m sure, I think it’s an important learning situation - our school really is a microcosm of the sweeping, varied, and intense change happening in education right now. It’s great that they’re getting exposed to it now, so it doesn’t surprise them later in their own classroom.

Our department is also undergoing a lot of firsts, and even though my 1st year was last year, this year is shaping up to be a doozy too….

Next time anyone thinks their job is demanding, please come back and read this posting from an educator of the bleeding edge of classroom technology!

In many businesses employees are often asked to do more with less, or accomplish more with the same resources of a previous year; every expense needs to be justified.  However, what we see in education, based on this small example, is someone under a great deal of pressure to do MORE with MORE! -- and I thought my previous full-time Defense Contracting Information Technology (I.T.) support job was tough??

This type of situation is going to require a transition period or assimilation time, whatever you care to call it.  The educators are being introduced to new uses of technology and may initially grasp the goals, but it is going to take time to get comfortable using it.  Comfort leads to confidence, and confidence is catching!

The students will feel most able (empowered) to learn anything when the educators demonstrate both concepts and tasks with confidence!

In my business I.T. experience I was occasionally able to explain the difficulty of a new technology or an inherent unreliability of a software "feature" and as long as a workaround was identified in short order, those "excuses" worked.  Work in the office continued and the business carried on.

I feel in a learning environment, the practical reality of this is going to be much different.  If a piece of software fails to perform as expected, the students' confidence in the technology will be shaken.  As for myself in the adult world, I know facts are facts, and beliefs can only be relied upon as long as they demonstrate themselves to be true or hold up to the scrutiny of daily use.  Children are just learning how to determine fact from fiction and build their worldview upon a foundation of facts demonstrated confidently.

The only worthy advice I have to offer anyone in this situation is, "Teach each person three ways to solve any technical difficulty they encounter."

It is a slightly updated version of the much older line about there being more than one way to 'skin a (blank)' and that phrase really should not be used again, ever.

Creating an expectation that problems with technology may be encountered and preparing technology users to deal with them, without panicking, is the Swiss Army knife of the modern world.  It helps alleviate End User frustration before it happens and empowers Users to deal with issues when they inevitably arise!

I cannot imagine any student saying, "The software glitch ate my homework, Ma'am." but I guess someone will try it sooner or later!

Best wishes,

And now Microsoft has copied KDE by adding “copy to” and “move to” sub-menus to Windows Explorer, which has been a feature of KDE since at least v3.5.

I think KDE has a means to sue Microsoft on basis of license violation; I believe it’s GPLed?

As an aspiring technology advocate myself I have found searching the U.S. Patent and Trade Office (uspto.gov) database to be reassuring when it comes to confirming what inventions have not been claimed/secured yet.

The other day I searched a well-known website and the name of its founder and came up with nothing.  Whether this means the technology of their site is all  derivative from prior works and they are licensing it, or they simply filed to secure their new methods under a different name, I cannot say.

So, how can anyone tell if something like "Move to" or "Copy to" as a defined process has been claimed and secured, and by whom it has been claimed and secured?

A search on the criteria of, [SPEC/"moving a file to another folder"] is more specific than searching for "move to" or "copy to", both of which seemed to be to vague (my guess) or simply not used in the Patent 'Description/Specification' field. So I thought of the more concise phrase of, "a method or process for moving a file to another folder or container" and then shortened the search string to the least number of words allowing to remain distinctive.  This search returned seventeen (17) results.

Sadly, the text of the actual Patents themselves is so long that reading them becomes a tedious chore.  One patent of the seventeen returned (#7340450)  when saved to a separate file is 83 Kb in size!  That is tremendous in my book.

My feeling is IF someone pursued Microsoft in court regarding a Patent infringement, the outcome would be a "sealed" settlement of some sort and in that case Microsoft would not be compelled to reveal anything of their current codebase.  Otherwise, the outcome may simply be Microsoft agreeing to change "Move to" to "-->" or something equally ridiculous, or that Microsoft would emerge victorious and a decision in their favor would also mean not being compelled to reveal anything of their current codebase.

I also think it is entirely possible the original procedure for and definition of "a method or process for moving a file to another folder or container" is contained in a prior work and both Microsoft, KDE and others have licensed it, or it resides in the public domain (having been freely opened to use by its original creator at some point in the past).

Sometimes the truth is difficult to know with any certainty and so costly to investigate that it becomes hardly worth the effort!

Nice question though!  I hope my writing on the topic is of some benefit.