I saw where @dan mentioned purple ones. I will be happy with whatever I get.
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“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black” — Henry Ford (1909)
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I confess I read the thread and my takeaway was that people were talking past each other about different topics. I’m happy to do my best with any direct questions & answer if I can.
And to go back to basics for a minute: I’m a superfan of all the folks involved in this thread, and I’m humbled and flattered that what we are building for you is important enough to all of you that it’s worth the discussion!
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My understanding is that the main questions are:
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Will the Glowforge be able to accurately engrave over a drawing (meaning, the laser goes where the marking is, and not where it isn’t.) Currently it appears that there’s some distortion in the camera view that isn’t accounted for in software.
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Will the Glowforge be able to precisely position cut or engrave lines from a design onto the medium in the bed (and with what margin of error?) Currently it appears that the distortion noted above would affect the precision of this operation.
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yea, that’s always a problem. I think the confusion it caused with me was the question whether or not the Glowforge will be able to scan and cut a design drawn on the material, right where the drawing is? I thought someone (don’t want to scroll all the way back up to remember who it was) was just talking about how you tend to lose registration on drawings toward the edge of the work area–the lens distortion issue that’s been discussed before. Was that the intended feature, or did I misunderstand the promotional material.
I’ll say it one other way since communcation has gotten a little jumbled (which is why I tend to repeat every point I make in a sermon multiple times each week 
). Say I take a piece of material and I draw multiple shapes on the material itself (or pint out on a piece of paper and glue it to the material), could I then tell the glowforge to cut those shapes out and could I expect it to cut out the shapes right on my designs as I drew them (once everything’s working the way it’s supposed to)?
Now that was what it seemed like the concern was to me, but then again, I’ve been known not to always pay the best attention 
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The offset that you’re seeing will be improved with forthcoming software updates. There are a few assembly problems that we’re working on that will improve this, too.
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Ha, it was like that with USB ports on PCs. They appeared when Win95 was out but didn’t work properly until Win98 SP2 or something.
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I thought I would investigate a little further how my prerelease handles the trace. in a new topic.
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And even then, only for small versions of “properly”. (My first job after college was program manager for hardware on the Win98 team… many war stories there).
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I’m sorry.
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We will probably have to update some software this spring/summer and the IDE only works on Win98. Whenever we have to do this (every five years or so) we cross our fingers and pray the last remaining machine boots up. Now I know who to contact if this time it doesn’t boot. 
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Nothing quite like working for a company that relies on a 20 year old operating system. Might as well hang a sign on your network that says “Hackers Welcome.”
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Unless you go older, in which case they don’t have tools. Work on an old school PDP-11 or we have some software that still runs a core PDP-8 (that’s 12-bit) inside a tiny emulator since the code was deployed in 1969, and to debug is painful as it is an NP complete problem to do unit testing, and requires 7000! (the ! is factorial not emphasis) iterations through the b-tree to determine if it works… So emulators are easier to verify than this ancient code. Someone could, but they’d have to start from scratch. Just like those missile launch systems which still run on 8" floppies; no virus on those things…
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It’s only powered up a couple times a decade and the network it’s on is an old one we keep around for pretty much it. We have machines in the production area that still have MS-DOS computers connected to them. Again, not on the network.
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Until somebody finds a way to Stuxnet 'em.
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Just make sure they’ve been patched against the Morris worm.
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I get your point - nuclear weapons, should really be safe. But the Stuxnet writers appeared to have their own machines to explore and find vulnerabilities. It would seem unlikely any black hats have an old missile command and control system to poke and prod.
On the other hand, you never know what the US govt has tossed on the ol’ surplus pile.
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I have an old Tektronix logic analyser that still runs Win98. It originally cost more than £20K. I wanted to post a trace from it on GitHub a while ago and since I don’t have any machines with 3.5" floppies anymore I decided the easiest way to get data off it was to plug a USB drive into it. To my surprise I found Win98 didn’t come with support for mass storage devices by default, so I had to find an ancient download that added it. I can’t remember how I got it onto the machine. I think I must have used a serial port.
I don’t know if I will ever use it again as it has a very wide but not very deep trace buffer. I don’t work on anything with wide external busses these days, so narrower and much deeper is more useful.
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We have an old logic analyzer we call the aircraft carrier. We don’t use it much. I know its nickname and that it doesn’t require an external computer and there my knowledge of it ends.
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