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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
12/15/09
1. The LEGO Company didn't technically invent the LEGO brick. The original LEGO Automatic Binding Brick was the result of receiving sample molds with their first injection molding machine, but it was invented in Great Britain. The tubes inside of the bricks were, however, added by The LEGO Company. The original patents were also purchased by The LEGO Company in the 80's.
2. The first LEGO sets sold in the US were not produced by The LEGO Company. The Samsonite company licensed the design from The LEGO Company, but did such a bad job with it that they've never licensed out the design again.
3. Most LEGO bricks are made from ABS plastic, but this was not always the case. The original Automatic Binding Brick was molded in cellulose acetate. Other parts are produced in at least five other materials (clear parts, rubber parts, lighter-density plastic like swords, extruded tubes, and the occassional metal parts are each made with different materials). MegaBloks are made from styrene, which is commonly used for hobby model kits.
4. The most complicated single-shot part produced is the minifig chain. All 29 interlocked links are formed at the same time, with no need for a post-forming assembly processes.
5. Whenever they produce a chromed part, they have to run the pre-chromed blanks on a different set of molds, as the blanks have to be slightly undersized to accomodate the thickness of the chrome and sealer layers on the finished piece.
6. The first parts that were molded in two blended colors were the Bohrok faceplates in 2002.
7. In 2004, they changed the colors of all parts molded in brown and the three shades of grey, but did not address this issue with the fan community until the color change was noticed in the wild. They have since promised to never permanently change the shade of an official color without first communicating with the fan community.
12/15/09
Is that why they suck so much?
12/15/09
Yup. Pretty much. Well, that and the fact that the part tolerance is pretty massive.
ABS has rubberizers mixed in with styrene, so it tends to hold its shape even after being deformed in some manner. Styrene tends to permanently change shape when deformed. The result is that if you leave a model assembled for a long time, the parts tend to loosen their grip on each other, regardless of which brand you used to build it, but the LEGO parts will return to their original shape after disassembly, where the Megabloks will be permanently deformed.
And as for the part tolerance, I've heard stories of how people could stack two MB bricks, pick up the top brick, and have the bottom brick not even budge because the fit was so loose, while others have complained that they almost needed a mallet to build the model because the fit was so tight (and then a month later it fell apart like a stack of wooden letter blocks).
12/14/09
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12/14/09
<-- is a Dane.
12/14/09
12/15/09
No, "lego" means "I play" in Latin. "Leg godt" means "play well" in Danish, and the combination of those two words (not the Latin one) is where the company name came from. It also had absolutely nothing to do with LEGO bricks, as The LEGO Company didn't start producing plastic toys for at least a decade. Before then, and for several years after introducing the Automatic Binding Brick (what they called the original version of the LEGO brick), they produced a lot of wooden toys, like building blocks and such (I hear you can still buy them in one of the stores at LEGOLAND Billund).
12/14/09
After that I always cleaned up before bedtime and to this day, my place is always clean.
12/14/09
I envy you =)
12/14/09
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12/15/09
Barnes & Noble has/had it available in stores for $90, plus if you have a B&N card you can knock 10% off the price. Also, it's the only one of the Architecture series that's really worth the price, in terms of price/piece ratio. The other five are only really worth it if you're buying them for the books that come with them.
12/15/09
There are six official sets, all of which are designed by one of the guys who runs the BrickWorld event in Chicago. The first two should be pretty easy to replicate from the cover art alone, the Seattle Space Needle is the only one of the four smaller sets that I think actually looks interesting (seriously, the Sears Tower done 8" tall is pretty much just a stack of black bricks with a pair of antennae on top). The Gugenheim isn't bad, but this is definitely the most interesting model in the series.
There was also at least one unofficial model in the series, which was the Westin Hotel where BrickWorld has been held every year so far. That set was the BrickWorld exclusive set this past summer. Didn't make it the previous two years, so I have no idea what custom sets were available to attendees those years.
12/15/09
That's as big as it's every going to get as an official set. Adam also designed a larger model for his own collection (which was displayed in a WIP form at BrickWorld this year), but considering the size, and the licensing/royalties involved, you'd probably be looking at upwards of $500 for MSRP.
12/14/09
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12/14/09
I tried to repeat the experiment with a standard height 2*4 brick, but I couldn't get the kid to swallow it.
12/14/09
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12/14/09
He was shitting bricks for a few days.
12/15/09
And for the record: It wasn't a 'him': I only have a daughter.
12/15/09
Sure. You can buy two-packs of gold-chrome (real chrome, not real gold) 4x4 bricks with magnets embedded in them on sale for $4.95 through Shop.LEGO.com right now. They aren't very common, but they do exist.
12/15/09
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12/14/09
And yes, I'll snap a pic if he comes back.
12/07/09
@ECAsh - Larrabee wasn't even related to the "standard" Intel graphics (GMA, etc), it was a discrete card with a LOT of x86 cores on it, like 40+ in the demo version I think. I don't know that Intel has ever shipped a discrete graphics card; not lately, anyway. This was (we presume) going to be a PCI-x card that would've competed with AMD's ATI cards, and NVidia's cards.
At least they've got experience with making many-core architectures and CPUs now - should come in handy when I get that 16-core Core i9 chip in 2012 or so !!!
12/06/09
12/04/09
A Facebook account is this generation's version of an email address or a phone number.
12/04/09
12/04/09
People get Intel graphics when all they want to do is do word, browsing + email, power point presentations, etc. - and have good battery life while doing it. The X4500HD never claimed to be able to run Crysis so don't lambast it for not doing so.
12/05/09
Eh, the X4500 is a fine chip, but like a lot of previous generation solutions, it's running into a "just-not-good-enough" wall in a world of "good-enough" computing. Does that make any sense? The same thing happened to Intel Celeron and AMD Turion. They were fine when they came out, but then they kind of fell by the wayside as they just couldn't cut it.
The reason netbooks have risen up in style is because of "good enough" computing, because people don't need Core2Duos to do what they want to do.
However, the X4500 is falling behind because of HD video on Hulu, Youtube, and GPU acceleration for Flash and Web Browsers, and that little bit of stuttering is just enough to make it "not good enough".
And throw in
12/05/09
12/05/09
Like I said, the X4500 is a fine solution for the everyday user, but it's slowly becoming just not powerful enough.
Even if it can push 720 video online, once GPU acceleration hits the market in force beyond just making things look pretty, it just might not get there any more.
I would take the 9400M over the X4500 any day, because to me, it's better to have the power when you need it than risk the extra $25 and having something underperform.
12/04/09
....Which leads me to believe many of these shouldn't really count as social networking sites in the traditional sense. I mean, LiveMocha? Really? I mean, I love the site, but it's primarily for teaching you other languages. You just happened to have the ability to meet and have your work reviewed by other members of the LiveMocha community. I mean, if anything, it functions more as a way to meet new people, not keep in touch with everyone you currently know. Unless every person you currently know is trying to learn Spanish and Russian.
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