O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies

Burning the silos

2013-05-23T14:02:56Z

If I’ve seen any theme come up repeatedly over the past year, it’s getting product cycle times down. It’s not the sexiest or most interesting theme, but it’s everywhere: if it’s not on the front burner, it’s always simmering in the background.

Cutting product cycles to the bare minimum is one of the main themes of the Velocity Conference and the DevOps movement, where integration between developers and operations, along with practices like continuous deployment, allows web-native companies like Yahoo! to release upgrades to their web products many times a day. It’s no secret that many traditional enterprises are looking at this model, trying to determine what they can use or implement. Indeed, this is central to their long-term survival; companies as different from Facebook as GE and Ford are learning that they will need to become as agile and nimble as their web-native counterparts.

Integrating development and operations isn’t the only way to shorten product cycles. In his talk at Google IO, Braden Kowitz talked about shortening the design cycle: rather than build big, complete products that take a lot of time and money, start with something very simple and test it, then iterate quickly. This approach lets you generate and test lots of ideas, but be quick to throw away the ones that aren’t working. Rather than designing an Edsel, just to fail when the product is released, the shorter cycles that come from integrating product design with product development let you build iteratively, getting immediate feedback on what works and what doesn’t. To work like this, you need to break down the silos that separate engineers and designers; you need to integrate designers into the product team as early as possible, rather than at the last minute.

Data scientist DJ Patil makes a similar point in Building Data Science Teams. Data isn’t new, nor is data analysis. Our ability to collect data by the petabyte certainly is new, but it isn’t revolutionary in itself. What really characterizes data science is the way data is incorporated into the product development cycle. Data analysts are frustrated and ineffective when they live in silos, and all they do is design complex queries and generate reports. They need to be integrated into decision making and product design. A data group that’s isolated from the organization’s business isn’t going to have the understanding they need to create insights from data. Their role will be limited to confirming what some manager or other thinks, and that’s neither fulfilling or effective.

If you’ve ever optimized code, you’ve experience this phenomenon in a different way: neatly designed, modular code may be well-architected and easy to work on, but when you need to tune for performance, the biggest gains usually come by breaking down these carefully designed modules. The well-designed boundaries that characterize many modern software projects are the silos that need to be broken down for the sake of efficiency.

Organizational structure and culture are no different: boundaries make large organizations manageable. That’s ultimately why we start by developing an idea into a prototype, getting it working, then handing it off to a design team to make it look good. And when it looks good, we throw it over the wall to the operations group. The org chart looks nicer when all the designers report to a design manager, all the software developers report to a software manager, and the operations team is part of IT. But that kind of product development is inherently slow, inefficient, and prone to turf battles and misunderstandings between departments.

And whether you’re building products that weigh tons or products that weigh a few ounces, whether you call it Industrial Internet, Smarter Planet, Internet of Things, Sensor Networks, or some other name, the current wave that re-connects computing with the physical world is no different. You can’t separate that electrical engineering team that makes circuits from the mechanical engineering team that builds the moving parts, or from the software team that does the programming. All of these groups have to work together from the start.

DevOps, data science, and even software development are teaching us that nice organizations with well-defined boundaries may be easy to manage, but they don’t get the job done. Siloed development locks you into long and ineffective product cycles; they lead you to build products that are obsolete when they’re finished, or aren’t what the customer wants. The results are inflexible: they are hard to modify, extend, or fix, and it may take months, not days, to get from version 1.0 to 1.0.1.

Innovation is intensely collaborative. Whether we’re building products to help fix health care, or building jet engines, or just making better online web sites, the boundaries created by traditional management are just getting in the way. We can no longer afford that. It’s time to burn the silos.

Four short links: 23 May 2013

2013-05-23T09:22:46Z

Kindle Worlds Fine Print — Amazon’s fanfic publishing system has a few flaws: no pr0n, no slash (crossovers), and Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright. I can’t see this attracting pinboard’s most passionate users.
XBox One Won’t Allow Indies to Self-Publish Games — When it comes to self-publishing, Microsoft is the odd man out. Both Sony and Nintendo allow developers to publish their own games onto PlayStation Network and Nintendo Network, respectively. Microsoft’s position stands in stark contrast to Sony, which has been aggressively pursuing indie content for PS4. (via Andy Baio)
3D Printers for Peace Competition (Michigan Tech) — We are challenging the 3D printing community to design things that advance the cause of peace. This is an open-ended contest, but if you’d like some ideas, ask yourself what Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, or Ghandi would make if they’d had access to 3D printing. (via BoingBoing)
covim — Collaborative editing for vim. My dream of massively multiplayer troff can finally be realised.

Talking about in-memory

2013-05-22T18:17:01Z

I flew to the west coast this week to attend Maker Faire with my computer-programming, ham-radio-building, hardware-curious teenage cousin. I’ve attended twice in New York but this was my first trip to the mothership. Wow. So much cool stuff to look at, interact with, talk about … and buy. Both of us bought one of these, among other things. He’ll actually use his, and I’ll pretend to, but mostly I was just overwhelmed with gadget envy and succumbed to the impulse buy. The end result of the weekend was a full brain, sunburn, lingering claustrophobia and a bunch of interesting stuff in my bag for TSA to radiate, plus lots of ideas for projects if I can find a bit of downtime.

While I was out West, Edd Dumbill, Roger Magoulas and I took advantage of our coastal proximity to get together in Sebastopol and have a conversation about in-memory databases. Roger, along with his colleague Ben Lorica, has been looking into this area for some time, and it seemed like a good opportunity for him to catch us up and share the conversation with all of you. I hope you enjoy it.

Update: I mean to add, if you would like to subscribe to these podcasts you can find them here.

Four short links: 22 May 2013

2013-05-22T11:22:47Z

XBox One Kinect Controller (Guardian) — the new Kinect controller can detect gaze, heartbeat, and the buttons on your shirt.
Surveillance and the Internet of Things (Bruce Schneier) — Lots has been written about the “Internet of Things” and how it will change society for the better. It’s true that it will make a lot of wonderful things possible, but the “Internet of Things” will also allow for an even greater amount of surveillance than there is today. The Internet of Things gives the governments and corporations that follow our every move something they don’t yet have: eyes and ears.
Daniel Dennett’s Intuition Pumps (extract) — How to compose a successful critical commentary: 1. Attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” 2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement). 3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
New Data Science Toolkit Out (Pete Warden) — with population data to let you compensate for population in your heatmaps. No more “gosh, EVERYTHING is more prevalent where there are lots of people!” meaningless charts.

Four short links: 21 May 2013

2013-05-21T11:49:03Z

Hyperinflation in Diablo 3 — interesting discussion about how video games regulate currency availability, and how Diablo 3 appears to have messed up. several weeks after the game’s debut a source claimed that there were at least 1,000 bots active 24/7 in the Diablo 3 game world, allegedly “harvesting” (producing) 4 million virtual gold per hour. Most of the gold generated by the ruthlessly productive, rapidly adapting bots found its way to third party vendors in a black market which undercut the prices in the sanctioned, in-game auction houses.
Dell Project Ophelia (PC World) — $100 USB-stick-sized Android computer.
Call Me Maybe (Kyle Kingsbury) — a series on network partitions. We’re going to learn about distributed consensus, discuss the CAP theorem’s implications, and demonstrate how different databases behave under partition.
OpenWorm (The Atlantic) — simulating the c. elegans nematode worm in software. OpenWorm isn’t like these other initiatives; it’s a scrappy, open-source project that began with a tweet and that’s coordinated on Google Hangouts by scientists spread from San Diego to Russia. If it succeeds, it will have created a first in executable biology: a simulated animal using the principles of life to exist on a computer.

Four short links: 20 May 2013

2013-05-20T10:00:56Z

Our Fair Deal — international coalition (EFF, InternetNZ, Demand Progress, Creative Freedom Foundation, many others) raising awareness and petitioning lawmakers to reject copyright proposals that restrict the open Internet, access to knowledge, economic opportunity and our fundamental rights. (via Susan Chalmers)
Welcome to the Programmable World (Wired) — For the Programmable World to reach its full potential, we need to pass through three stages. The first is simply the act of getting more devices onto the network—more sensors, more processors in everyday objects, more wireless hookups to extract data from the processors that already exist. The second is to make those devices rely on one another, coordinating their actions to carry out simple tasks without any human intervention. The third and final stage, once connected things become ubiquitous, is to understand them as a system to be programmed, a bona fide platform that can run software in much the same manner that a computer or smartphone can. (via Sacha Judd)
Inventables On The Road (YouTube) — new series where the Inventables folks interview their customers to show awesome projects. We’re trying to demystify the process of digital fabrication, give some visibility to people working on interesting things, and have some fun.
Psychological Pitfalls and Lessons of a Designer Founder (Aza Raskin) — You are a founder, which means each word you say lands like an anvil. Even in a very small company, and especially in a larger one, it takes fortitude and courage for a team member to honestly critique your work. The courage required isn’t a one-time cost. It’s incurred every single time. By nature of being a founder, you are used to saying things with charisma and force and you will undoubtedly be excited by your solution and argue for it. This just makes it worse. A final note: it doesn’t matter how nice you are, or how close you are to your team. As a founder, your words are always more powerful than you think.

Software and the physical world

2013-05-17T16:29:56Z

In this episode of the Radar podcast series, Jon Bruner and I are joined by Mike Loukides as we muse more on software and the physical world. No coffee shop clatter in the background this time around as we were forced by geography and time to talk on the phone, but I still managed to have a good cup from my favorite local cafe in my hand. In the course of our conversation, we discovered that Mike drinks tea, so this may be his last appearance.

Our discussion ranges from the declining cost of 3D printing to ham radio antenna design. Along the way, we touch on the ease with which data scientists can build data sensing motes with open source and open hardware components. We hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed talking.

Three organizations pressing for change in society’s approach to computing

2013-05-16T15:00:26Z

Taking advantage of a recent trip to Washington, DC, I had the privilege of visiting three non-profit organizations who are leaders in the application of computers to changing society. First, I attended the annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery’s US Public Policy Council (USACM). Several members of the council then visited the Open Technology Institute (OTI), which is a section of New America Foundation (NAF). Finally, I caught the end of the first general-attendance meeting of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

In different ways, these organizations are all putting in tremendous effort to provide the benefits of computing to more people of all walks of life and to preserve the vigor and creativity of computing platforms. I found out through my meetings what sorts of systemic change is required to achieve these goals and saw these organizations grapple with a variety of strategies to get there. This report is not a statement from any of these groups, just my personal observations.

USACM Public Policy Council

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has been around almost as long as electronic computers: it was founded in 1948. I joined in the 1980s but was mostly a passive recipient of information. Although last week’s policy meeting was the first I had ever attended at ACM, many of the attendees were familiar to me from previous work on either technical or policy problems.

As we met, open data was in the news thanks to a White House memo reiterating its call for open government data in machine-readable form. Although the movement for these data sets has been congealing from many directions over the past few years, USACM was out in front back in early 2009 with a policy recommendation for consumable data.

USACM weighs in on such policy issues as copyrights and patents, accessibility, privacy, innovation, and the various other topics on which you’d expect computer scientists to have professional opinions. I felt that the group’s domestic scope is oddly out of sync with the larger ACM, which has been assiduously expanding overseas for many years. A majority of ACM members now live outside the United States.

In fact, many of today’s issues have international reach: cybersecurity, accessibility, and copyright, to name some obvious ones. Although USACM has submitted comments on ACTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they don’t maintain regular contacts work with organizations outside the country. Perhaps they’ll have the cycles to add more international connections in the future. Eugene Spafford, security expert and current chair of the policy committee, pointed out that many state-level projects in the US would be worth commenting on as well.

It’s also time to recognize that policy is made by non-governmental organizations as well as governments. Facebook and Google, for example, are setting policies about privacy. The book The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used To Be by Moisés Naím claims that power is becoming more widely distributed (not ending, really) and that a bigger set of actors should be taken into account by people hoping to effect change.

USACM represents a technical organization, so it seeks to educate policy decision-makers on issues where there is an intersection of computing technology and public policy. Their principles derive from the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, which evolved from input by many ACM members and the organization’s experience. USACM papers usually focus on pointing out the technical implications of legislative or regulatory choices.

When the notorious SOPA and PIPA bills came up, for instance, the USACM didn’t issue the kind of blanket condemnation many other groups put out, supported by appeals to vague concepts such as freedom and innovation. Instead, they put the microscope to the bills’ provisions and issued brief comments about negative effects on the functioning of the Internet, with a focus on DNS. Spafford commented, “We also met privately with Congressional staff and provided tutorials on how DNS and similar mechanisms worked. That helped them understand why their proposals would fail."

Open Technology Institute

NAF is a flexible and innovative think tank proposing new strategies for dozens of national and international issues. Mostly progressive, in my view, it is committed to considering a wide range of possible solutions and finding rational solutions that all sides can accept. On computing and Internet issues, it features the Open Technology Institute, a rare example of a non-profit group that is firmly engaged in both technology production and policy-making. This reflects the multi-disciplinary expertise of OTI director Sascha Meinrath.

Known best for advocating strong policies to promote high-bandwidth Internet access, the OTI also concerns itself with the familiar range of policies in copyright, patents, privacy, and security. Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt is chair of the NAF board, and Google has been generous in its donations to NAF, including storage for the massive amounts of data the OTI has collected on bandwidth worldwide through its Measurement Lab, or M-Lab.

M-Lab measures Internet traffic around the world, using crowdsourcing to produce realistic reports about bandwidth, chokepoints, and other aspects of traffic. People can download the M-Lab tools to check for traffic shaping by providers and other characteristic of their connection, and send results back to M-Lab for storage. (They now have 700 terabytes of such data.) Other sites offer speed testing for uploads and downloads, but M-Lab is unique in storing and visualizing the results. The FCC, among others, has used M-Lab to determine the uneven progress of bandwidth in different regions. Like all OTI software projects, Measurement Lab is open source software.

Open Source Initiative

For my last meeting of the day, I dropped by for the last few sessions of Open Source Initiative’s Open Source Community Summit and talked to Deborah Bryant, Simon Phipps, and Bruno Souza. OSI’s recent changes represent yet another strategy for pushing change in the computer field.

OSI is best known for approving open source licenses and seems to be universally recognized as an honest and dependable judge in that area, but they want to branch out from this narrow task. About a year ago, they completely revamped their structure and redefined themselves as a membership organization. (I plunked down some cash as one of their first individual members, having heard of the change from Simon at a Community Leadership Summit).

When they announced the summit, they opened up a wiki for discussion about what to cover. The winner hands down was an all-day workshop on licensing — I guess you can tell when you’re in Washington. (The location was the Library of Congress.)

They also held an unconference that attracted a nice mix of open-source and proprietary software companies, software uses, and government workers. I heard working group summaries that covered such basic advice as getting ownership of the code that you contract out to companies to create for you, using open source to attract and retain staff, and justifying the investment in open source by thinking more broadly than the agency’s immediate needs and priorities.

Organizers used the conference to roll out Working Groups, a new procedure for starting projects. Two such projects, launched by members, are the development of a FAQ and the creation of a speaker’s bureau. Anybody with an idea that fits the mission of promoting and adopting open source software can propose a project, but the process requires strict deadlines and plans for fiscally sustaining the project.

OSI is trying to change government and society by changing the way they make and consume software. USACM is trying to improve the institutions’ understanding of software as well as the environment in which it is made. NAF is trying to extend computing to everyone, and using software as a research tool in pursuit of that goal. Each organization, starting from a different place, is expanding its options and changing itself in order to change others.

Four short links: 16 May 2013

2013-05-16T10:53:56Z

Australian Filter Scope Creep — The Federal Government has confirmed its financial regulator has started requiring Australian Internet service providers to block websites suspected of providing fraudulent financial opportunities, in a move which appears to also open the door for other government agencies to unilaterally block sites they deem questionable in their own portfolios.
Embedding Actions in Gmail — after years of benign neglect, it’s good to see Gmail worked on again. We’ve said for years that email’s a fertile ground for doing stuff better, and Google seem to have the religion. (see Send Money with Gmail for more).
What Keeps Me Up at Night (Matt Webb) — Matt’s building a business around connected devices. Here he explains why the category could be owned by any of the big players. In times like this I remember Howard Aiken’s advice: Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If it is original you will have to ram it down their throats.
Image Texture Predicts Avian Density and Species Richness (PLOSone) — Surprisingly and interestingly, remotely sensed vegetation structure measures (i.e., image texture) were often better predictors of avian density and species richness than field-measured vegetation structure, and thus show promise as a valuable tool for mapping habitat quality and characterizing biodiversity across broad areas.

Four short links: 15 May 2013

2013-05-15T10:56:36Z

Facial Recognition in Google Glass (Mashable) — this makes Glass umpty more attractive to me. It was created in a hackathon for doctors to use with patients, but I need it wired into my eyeballs.
How to Price Your Hardware Project — At the end of the day you are picking a price that enables you to stay in business. As @meganauman says, “Profit is not something to add at the end, it is something to plan for in the beginning.”
Hardware Pricing (Matt Webb) — When products connect to the cloud, the cost structure changes once again. On the one hand, there are ongoing network costs which have to be paid by someone. You can do that with a cut of transactions on the platform, by absorbing the network cost upfront in the RRP, or with user-pays subscription.
Dicoogle — open source medical image search. Written up in PLOSone paper.

Four short links: 14 May 2013

2013-05-14T06:52:18Z

Behind the Banner — visualization of what happens in the 150ms when the cabal of data vultures decide which ad to show you. They pass around your data as enthusiastically as a pipe at a Grateful Dead concert, and you’ve just as much chance of getting it back. (via John Battelle)
pwnpad — Nexus 7 with Android and Ubuntu, high-gain USB bluetooth, ethernet adapter, and a gorgeous suite of security tools. (via Kyle Young)
Terra — a simple, statically-typed, compiled language with manual memory management [...] designed from the beginning to interoperate with Lua. Terra functions are first-class Lua values created using the terra keyword. When needed they are JIT-compiled to machine code. (via Hacker News)
Metaphor Identification in Large Texts Corpora (PLOSone) — The paper presents the most comprehensive study of metaphor identification in terms of scope of metaphorical phrases and annotated corpora size. Algorithms’ performance in identifying linguistic phrases as metaphorical or literal has been compared to human judgment. Overall, the algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art algorithm with 71% precision and 27% averaged improvement in prediction over the base-rate of metaphors in the corpus.

Big data, cool kids

2013-05-13T20:27:00Z

My data’s bigger than yours!

The big data world is a confusing place. We’re no longer in a market dominated mostly by relational databases, and the alternatives have multiplied in a baby boom of diversity.

These child prodigies of the data scene show great promise but spend a lot of time knocking each other around in the schoolyard. Their egos can sometimes be too big to accept that everybody has their place, and eyeball-seeking media certainly doesn’t help.

POPULAR KID: Look at me! Big data is the hotness!
HADOOP: My data’s bigger than yours!
SCIPY: Size isn’t everything, Hadoop! The bigger they come, the harder they fall. And aren’t you named after a toy elephant?
R: Backward sentences mine be, but great power contains large brain.
EVERYONE: Huh?
SQL: Oh, so you all want to be friends again now, eh?!
POPULAR KID: Yeah, what SQL said! Nobody really needs big data; it’s all about small data, dummy.

The fact is that we’re fumbling toward the adolescence of big data tools, and we’re at an early stage of understanding how data can be used to create value and increase the quality of service people receive from government, business and health care. Big data is trumpeted in mainstream media, but many businesses are better advised to take baby steps with small data.

Data skeptics are not without justification. Our use of “small data” hasn’t exactly worked out uniformly well so far, crude numbers often being misused either knowingly or otherwise. For example, over-reliance by bureaucrats on the results of testing in schools is shaping educational institutions toward a tragically homogeneous mediocrity.

The promise and the gamble of big data is this: that we can advance past the primitive quotas of today’s small data into both a sophisticated statistical understanding of an entire system and insight that focuses down to the level of an individual. Data gives us both telescope and microscope, in detail we’ve never had before.

Inside this tantalizing vision lies many of the debates in today’s data world: the need for highly skilled data scientists to effect this change, and the worry that we’ll inadvertently enslave ourselves to Big Brother, even with the best of intentions.

So, as the data revolution moves forward, it’s important to take the long view. The foment of tools and job titles and algorithms is significant, but ultimately it’s background to our larger purposes as people, businesses and government. That’s one reason why, at O’Reilly, we’ve taken the motto “Making Data Work” for Strata. Data, not technology, is the heartbeat of our world because it relates directly to ourselves and the problems we want to solve.

This is also the reason that the Strata and Hadoop World conferences take a broad view of the subject: ranging from the business topics to the tools and data science. If you talk to Hadoop’s most seasoned advocates, they don’t speak only about the tech; they talk about the problems they’re able to solve. The tools alone are never enough; the real enabler is the framework of people and understanding in which they’re used.

Our mission is to help people make sense of the state of the data world and use this knowledge to become both more competitive and more creative. We believe that’s best served by creating context in which we think about our use of data as well as serving the growing specialist communities in data.

Enjoy the noise and the energy from the growing data ecosystem, but keep your eyes on the problems you want to solve.

The Strata and Hadoop World Call for Proposals is open until midnight EDT, Thursday May 16.

Four short links: 13 May 2013

2013-05-13T10:52:16Z

Exploiting a Bug in Google Glass — unbelievably detailed and yet easy-to-follow explanation of how the bug works, how the author found it, and how you can exploit it too. The second guide was slightly more technical, so when he returned a little later I asked him about the Debug Mode option. The reaction was interesting: he kind of looked at me, somewhat confused, and asked “wait, what version of the software does it report in Settings”? When I told him “XE4″ he clarified “XE4, not XE3″, which I verified. He had thought this feature had been removed from the production units.
Probability Through Problems — motivating problems to hook students on probability questions, structured to cover high-school probability material.
Connbox — love the section “The importance of legible products” where the physical UI interacts seamless with the digital device … it’s glorious. Three amazing videos.
The Index-Based Subgraph Matching Algorithm (ISMA): Fast Subgraph Enumeration in Large Networks Using Optimized Search Trees (PLoSONE) — The central question in all these fields is to understand behavior at the level of the whole system from the topology of interactions between its individual constituents. In this respect, the existence of network motifs, small subgraph patterns which occur more often in a network than expected by chance, has turned out to be one of the defining properties of real-world complex networks, in particular biological networks. [...] An implementation of ISMA in Java is freely available.

Four short links: 10 May 2013

2013-05-10T11:36:49Z

The Remixing Dilemma — summary of research on remixed projects, finding that (1) Projects with moderate amounts of code are remixed more often than either very simple or very complex projects. (2) Projects by more prominent creators are more generative. (3) Remixes are more likely to attract remixers than de novo projects.
Scratch 2.0 — my favourite first programming language for kids and adults, now in the browser! Downloadable version for offline use coming soon. See the overview for what’s new.
State Dept Takedown on 3D-Printed Gun (Forbes) — The government says it wants to review the files for compliance with arms export control laws known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. By uploading the weapons files to the Internet and allowing them to be downloaded abroad, the letter implies Wilson’s high-tech gun group may have violated those export controls.
Data Science of the Facebook World (Stephen Wolfram) — More than a million people have now used our Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook. And as part of our latest update, in addition to collecting some anonymized statistics, we launched a Data Donor program that allows people to contribute detailed data to us for research purposes. A few weeks ago we decided to start analyzing all this data… (via Phil Earnhardt)

Yet another Kickstarter: Otherlabs’ Home Milling Machine

2013-05-09T20:49:53Z

If you have a good memory, you know that I’ve written about 3D printers. Technically, I grew up with the laser printer; my first computer industry job (part-time while getting an English PhD) was with Imagen, a startup that built the first laser printer that cost under $20,000, then the first that cost under $10,000, then under $7,000, and died a slow death after Apple produced the first that cost under $5000. Now a laser printer costs a few hundred. And I’ve been cheering as 3D printers followed the the same price curve.

But even as I’ve been cheering, I’ve had this nagging doubt in the back of my head. So I can 3D-print my own chess set. Cool. So what? Sure, you can do great things with them (enclosures for projects; every DIY-bio lab I’ve visited has a 3D printer stashed somewhere). While a 3D printer is an important step in bringing 21st-century tooling to the home hacker, they’re still fairly limited.

Last night, the other shoe dropped. Otherfab, a project of Saul Griffiths’ Otherlab, has a new Kickstarter project for Othermill: a home computer-controlled milling machine. A milling machine is a large, versatile beast that uses a high-speed cutting bit to sculpt material (often metal) into the desired shape. Instead of adding layers of plastic or some other material, like a 3D printer, a milling machine cuts material away. If you’ve ever visited machine shops, you know that milling machines are where the magic happens. Particularly state-of-the-art computer controlled mills. They’re big, they’re expensive, and they can do just about anything. Putting one in the home shop — that’s revolutionary. A printer combined with a mill (additive and subtractive processes): that’s an exciting combination.

Otherfab’s mill is intended for making custom printed circuit boards; in a home environment, cutting away unneeded copper is much preferable to using acids to etch boards (I’ve made my own boards, and I know), and gives you more immediate feedback than sending a design off to a fabrication facility. But I don’t really think this is about PC boards and electronics. As the Kickstarter points out, their mill can be used to make anything that fits: it cuts metal, wood, wax, and plastic. I can’t wait to see what people use it for. And if we’re going to get serious about reinventing and re-envisioning manufacturing, home milling machines are essential infrastructure.

Othermill reached funding in under 24 hours; they have stretch goals ranging from $100K (already passed) up to a million. It looks like, when they have a commercially available unit, the price will be somewhere around $1500, though I’m just guessing; I’d also guess that the price will continue to drop as it did with 3D printers.

I don’t know, writing about Kickstarters could end up being too much fun.