Museum of Failure Opens In Sweden (failuremag.com) 253
Slashdot reader swellconvivialguy writes: A new museum in Helsingborg displays more than 70 failed products and objects, including the Apple Newton, Google Glass, Sony Betamax, Harley-Davidson perfume, and the Donald Trump board game. According to curator Samuel West, "none of the companies that I contacted wanted to cooperate. I approached quite a few innovation directors and asked them for examples of failure that they've learned from. I thought it would be easy to get them to collaborate but none of them -- zero -- choose to cooperate."
The curator urges people to accept failure -- "as an essential aspect of progress and innovation."
The curator urges people to accept failure -- "as an essential aspect of progress and innovation."
Sweden? (Score:5, Funny)
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Dammit, I went to Switzerland
Customs inspector: "... Where they make the watches."
Re:LIST OF EXHIBITS (Score:5, Funny)
My love life should get an entire wing.
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dunno man, all of your examples seem to have been smashing successes by the overall profit numbers..
Re: LIST OF EXHIBITS (Score:2)
If there was ever an appropriate thread for the 'you fail it' (links to goatse) guy...
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Let's not forget your English class.
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North America is the United States for all intents and purposes.
Much like Europe is Germany, right? :)
Re:Sweden? (Score:4, Funny)
Dammit, I went to Switzerland
Oh well, go see Ayers Rock instead. It can't be more than a couple of hours train ride east.
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Uluru, you insensitive clod!
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Uluru, you insensitive clod!
Is that the one right next to Ubuntu?
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Second door to your right, sir.
/. should contribute (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we donate a life-size portrait of Bennett Hasselton or Timothy?
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The Slashdot Cruiser [slashdot.org] could make a nice floor display.
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His main attraction should be Hillary (Score:3, Funny)
Losing twice for President, I'm sure she knows a lot about failure!!!
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Losing twice for President, I'm sure she knows a lot about failure!!!
Actually, no. She doesn't know a lot about failure, because she hasn't realized yet that she has failed. She accepts full responsibility for not winning the election, but blames it on literally everyone else. She hasn't comprehended yet that there are a lot of folks who simply don't like her. She really does believe that anyone who doesn't like her deserves to be called "deplorable".
This reminds me of how the former East German communists labeled anyone who was critical of communism as "asozial"; meani
Harley-Davidson Cat Collar (Score:5, Interesting)
I have always thought the Harley-Davidson Cat Collar should go in a display like this one. I bought one for our kitten once, though he's definitely not a failure of a cat. In the process of scratching and grooming he ended up rendering the Harley-Davidson logo on it illegible. Since then I have always said that Harley-Davidson can't even make a cat collar that lasts.
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They failed to make the perfume and cat collar loud enough. What were they thinking. Crank it up to 190dB!
Re: Harley-Davidson Cat Collar (Score:3)
They should also have made the collar leak oil. I'm also pretty sure it'd be inhumane put a fat woman on the back of a cat.
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That perfume was made to last. If only for a lack of use.
A friend actually bought me that stuff. And I was young enough and dumb enough to actually try it. From the skin reaction I had, my guess is that one of the main ingredients is battery acid.
What failure really means... (Score:5, Interesting)
An asshat recently asked this question [slashdot.org]: "Why do you set yourself up for massive failure? All. The. Fucking. Time?"
My (corrected) response: "If you have to ask that question, than you know nothing about success."
Let me elaborate... failure is a learning process. You can learn more from failure than you can from success. If the world already views you as a failure, say, for being the fat retarded kid on the short bus, than you have absolutely nothing to lose by trying to succeed. Not once, not twice, not thrice, but as many times as possible in a lifetime. Failure becomes permanent only when you give up. I have absolutely no intention of ever giving up.
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The fat retarded kid on the short bus who tries, and tries, and tries, over and over, is still just the fat retarded kid on the short bus who won't quit trying.
Failure only becomes permanent when you die having never succeeded. But if your struggles provide amusement to your fellow humans, you might not be a failure. Successfully being the village idiot probably can be seen as a form of success.
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Successfully being the village idiot probably can be seen as a form of success.
This village idiot just finished installing, partationing, and formatting a 3TB hard drive in his Red Hat Linux box, and is now testing rsync to backup his FreeNAS file server.
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Successfully being the village idiot probably can be seen as a form of success.
This village idiot just finished installing, partationing, and formatting a 3TB hard drive in his Red Hat Linux box
I'm not sure I understand the point you are trying to make. Installing, partitioning and formatting a hard drive is "village idiot" type of work. It is not something to be proud of doing, it's the grunt work that get's passed off to interns to do.
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It is not something to be proud of doing, it's the grunt work that get's passed off to interns to do.
Like the newbie developer who accidentally deleted [slashdot.org] the production database o his first day?
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An operation that should have taken you... what, 10 minutes?
Took me 30 minutes with the Cougar QBX mini-ITX case [amzn.to]. I may be a big guy but I build my systems small.
https://twitter.com/cdreimer/status/874112440379744257/ [twitter.com]
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Next he'll be bragging that he used the CLI to do it.
Via a Cygwin terminal window on my Windows laptop. Took all night to rsync 800GB to the new hard drive.
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Engineering is the study of making failure hurt the least. Not only is failure an option, it's the only option.
What failure really means... (Score:2)
"My (corrected) response: "If you have to ask that question, than you know nothing about success.""
"THEN" you two-seat taking dumbass!
Two important points about success.
1) Generally speaking, you can't succeed if you measure your success by what other people think of you.
I don't think creimer [slashdot.org] gives a rats ass whether his spelling or grammar are perfect in a quickly tossed post, and I would venture to guess that he especially doesn't care what "AC on the internet" thinks.
2) Success has been studied in-depth [google.com], and creimer [slashdot.org] has grasped probably the most important aspect.
Your response makes me think of this George Carlin quote:
There’s a reason you don’t talk to [your HS classmates] for 25 years. Because you don’t particularly like them! Besides, I already know what the captain of the football team is doing these days: mowing my lawn.
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[...] he cares very deeply what a bunch of "AC on the internet" people think - he's written blog posts about them, he tries to win arguments with them, and he fuels them with endless flamebait comments.
Actually, I don't. Not on a personal level. Pulling the controversy from Slashdot to a platform where I collect the ad revenues is good business for me. If there is anything that the asshats on Slashdot shown me in the last three months, controversy is good for business.
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And "controversy".... Holy shit you're delusional.
Here's $0, kid. Buy yourself a link to dictionary.com. Are you new?
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Where's the "public" part you cum-guzzling retard? Where's the "heated"?
That's where my blog come into play.
https://www.kickingthebitbucket.com/tag/slashdot/ [kickingthebitbucket.com]
I'll give you the "prolonged" part though. It's never gonna end.
Has it occurred to anyone that if they stop replying to my comments that I might go away?
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Legit sites with rich youtube content make revenue.
I guess you haven't heard about the advertiser boycott that had reduced YouTube ad revenues significantly. Content creators who don't have multiple revenue streams — merchandise, sponsorship and public speaking — are hurting badly.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/24/15053990/google-youtube-advertising-boycott-hate-speech [theverge.com]
You, must make pennies.
Ad revenues from Slashdot traffic alone pays for my monthly subscription to The Wall Street Journal.
Everyone uses adblock [...]
Uh, no.
[...] no one has heard of you, your absurd "personal brand", your Geocities-level website, or your shitty 1000-word ebooks.
Let me check my bank account... ROFL.
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On a personal level enough that you keep trying to get the last word.
The one time it got personal about having the last word, it turned out that a Slashdot comment thread can only have 256 comments before the reply button disappears.
Spare us the bullshit about ad revenues, too - an "all-digital" WSJ subscription costs $200 a year, or, as the WSJ likes to say, "Less than $4 a week!" In no reality are you making significant money from ad revenues.
I'm paying $30 per month for the WSJ "all digital" subscription. The introductory rate for a 12-month subscription is $278 with a 30% discount.
https://buy.wsj.com/wsjusjune17/?inttrackingCode=aaqpn5h3&icid=WSJ_ON_SPG_ACQ_NA [wsj.com]
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Seems like a waste of money when you only make 50k a year.
You probably don't invest in the stock market.
Oh crap (Score:3)
Ok, so... what if the museum itself is a failure? Will they try to put the museum into itself? Won't that cause a "divide by zero" or some shit and destroy the universe?
Damn you, Sweden! You were supposed to be good guys!
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It'll be fine as long as they get Xzibit to open it.
How about (Score:5, Funny)
Assange's condom
Trump Wing (Score:5, Funny)
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Was Trump University actually a failure? The lawsuit paid out millions of dollars, but how much money did it make?
A scam can be considered a success if the money made is significantly more than the cost of settling lawsuits and the scammer avoids jail.
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Trump Preside..... wait are we calling this one yet?
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Well, to be considered a failure, it kinda has to be "over with". That one is still waiting for a final verdict.
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You forgot Trump water, and it's more affordable knock-off (Andy) Dick Water.
I can't seem to find the Youtube video...
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I don't care what people say, it's still one of the more entertaining reality soaps currently running!
The Trump Wing (Score:2, Funny)
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Call Trump whatever else you will, but it's tough to call a guy who won the toughest race in American politics his first time out a "failure".
And yet here were are.
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Yes, and yet, look where he is.
It almost seems like to succeed in the US, you have to know how to fail right.
But there's already a Museum of Failed Inventions (Score:3)
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The only thing missing in there is my invention of an empty bottle that you can put in your fridge in case one of your guests doesn't want to drink anything.
Betamax (Score:5, Interesting)
Betamax was only a failure in the consumer market. The professional version, Betacam, was one of the most widely used videotape formats for professionals. So, eh, kinda sorta a failure, I guess.
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Being a failure depends on the company releasing a product. Betamax may have been a professional success but Sony went to incredible lengths to target it at consumers and to try and make it the consumer format of choice. Looking at the list many of the products were technical marvels with awesome features.
I kind of question Google Glass. Can a product that had a very limited run with a very limited release that was only really in beta and only really a trial for development be considered a "failure"? I mean
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Betamax lost because they didn't license it for porn, full stop. It's not because of the shorter tape length or anything else people think was the problem. It didn't lose because anyone worked against technological progress, it's because Sony worked against societal progress with their corporate prudism.
DAT lost because it was a tape and we were getting CDs at the time. Now we have digital recorders which make DAT utterly and completely irrelevant, and I'm glad it never caught on because I probably would ha
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Betacam and Betamax may have used similar technology (and the same physical tape format), but they were incompatible. Betacam used a tape speed 6 times (IIRC) higher than Betamax, and they couldn't read each other's tapes. So "professional version" is a bit of a stretch.
The Usual Suspects. (Score:2)
Didn't they already have this? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Vasa museum is a commemoration of a spectacular failure (and is a good museum). That's naval history rather than modern tech, but the principles are the same.
What? No Samsung Note 7? (Score:2)
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It's right next to the big fire extinguisher.
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Never mind. They had one but it self-emolated.
Were you going for an insensible pun about emokids here, or should everyone just ignore everything you say forever and ever amen because you use words you don't understand?
Beta a failure? (Score:5, Interesting)
Betamax recorders were in production for almost 40 years, the tapes were produced for 50 years. That's a high level of longevity for any digital format. Production of the units survived right into the DVD era, and it's probably DVDs which killed it in the end, not VHS. VHS had 40 years to kill it, and failed.
Additionally, Betcam is still in production as is HDCAM, they have two form factors, one of which is the same as Betamax, if you watch any anime, they are still almost all mastered on HDCAM, i.e. high-definition version of Betamax tapes.
It's only a very limited viewpoint that considers Betamax a flop / failed product. If we're going that far we should consider Apple Macs a failure because Windows is industry-standard.
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Betamax recorders were in production for almost 40 years, the tapes were produced for 50 years. That's a high level of longevity for any digital format.
Okay, but it's not a digital format, except for the audio on super beta, which by the way statistically nobody ever had.
It's only a very limited viewpoint that considers Betamax a flop / failed product.
The goal was to compete with VHS, which it never did successfully. It was always an also-ran. It's only a very limited, Sony-dick-riding viewpoint that doesn't think Betamax was a failure. Betacam SP used the same technology but not the same mechanisms or tapes; it's not Betamax, it's Betacam! So people bringing that up are daft. It's like attributing 1" VTR numbers to VHS.
If we're going that far we should consider Apple Macs a failure because Windows is industry-standard.
Apple is not a f
Huh. (Score:2)
I really wouldn't have expected an endeavor like that to succeed.
Not worth it (Score:2)
It should have read:
"Museum of failure fails to open"
Can it add itself? (Score:3)
Risky... (Score:2)
If the museum has low attendance, the name will take a whole new meaning.
Help me fund... (Score:2)
Cue Cat (Score:3)
Trump Presidential Library (Score:2)
I hear they're working on a deal to host the Trump Presidential Library.
It will be 'uge. The best library in human history. Because he has all the best words, and will be donating them! Well, except stupid, because that is the best word, so he's keeping that one for himself.
I have the best, but there is no better word than stupid. Right? There is none, there is none. There’s no, there’s no, there’s no word like that
(actual DJT quote)
But it will still have so many words, you'll be sick of all that reading.
An entire wing (Score:2)
Ah yes, the Museum of Failure...
I understand that they have an entire wing devoted to my ex-wife.
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Who'd want to walk through an empty museum?
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I approached quite a few innovation directors and asked them for examples of failure that they've learned from. I thought it would be easy to get them to collaborate but none of them -- zero -- choose to cooperate.
So the Museum of Failure is a failure.
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Nobody cares about you.
But the trolls like to keep you flipping around on the floor of their rowboat.
Re:Newton (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a Newton. It's battery compartment is a dismal failure. There are fussy little parts of the door that break off. I have long maintained that the reason Apple uses sealed-in batteries in their mobile devices is because they're not good enough designers to make a robust battery compartment. (Battery compartments, especially when they are designed to work with off-the-shelf consumer batteries, are an extremely difficult design challenge).
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I still have a Newton that works, but I only show it to people for comic value.
I've never had problems with the battery compartment. It lasts for quite a long time on a set of AA batteries. Until you put an 802.11 PCMCIA card in it, that is, then you're lucky to get 2 hours out of it.
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I have a Newton. It's battery compartment is a dismal failure.
Gee, yes, Replaceable batteries are a dumb idea after all.
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Found the Apple designer!
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My two Newton 2100s are elegant devices for that time. The rechargeable battery in one has failed, of course, the other with regular batteries worked fine last time I checked. I used them at university in the 1990s to take class notes. In screenwriting class, with the lights off during a movie, I was able to take notes both with the green backlight on and without. The handwriting recognition was good enough to just write without actually seeing the resulting text. Alas, my handwriting is so bad now that eve
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The Newton Messagepad could have forged the path to our current smartphones, and with handwriting recognition they would be much better today.
It exists. [google.com] And it's just less convenient than a swiping keyboard.
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The Newton was created in Jobs' absence and when he returned he immediately dumped it. A sad example of NIH syndrome.
"Get these damned scribble pads out of my office!" *throw*
The Newton Messagepad could have forged the path to our current smartphones, and with handwriting recognition they would be much better today.
No, it could not have. It was too expensive. It wasn't until the Palm Pilot that PDAs became inexpensive enough to be the basis of a ubiquitous computing platform.
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Toymakers seem to have it covered. Captive oversize screw. Oversize so you can use a coin if you don't have a screwdriver, captive so you can't lose it.
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Came here to see people in denial.
Left here not at all disappointed.
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That's right!
To fail, you first have to try.
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Google always says that about anything they come up with. Then, if it works out, they proclaim it a success. Otherwise, it was "just an experiment and they learned a lot from it." Google has a lot of money, but so does any entity that plays nice with the boys on Madison Avenue.
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Everything Google comes up with is an experiment, a beta, a test study...
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Google Glass was never meant to be a commerical product EVER. Google said so on release. It was always just an experiment.
Well, it looks like one part of the Glass project was a success... It made a lot of people swallow bullshit. You really believe[d] that?
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People didn't want to pay for an expensive product with limited use-cases. Once the technology improved through Psion, Palm Pilot, iPhone; tech geeks became interested.
Not exactly. Read "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" [amzn.to] by Jerry Kaplan, about the first pen-based handheld computer in the late 1980's that got screwed over by Microsoft ("Why aren't you using Windows?!"), Intel ("Why aren't you using the 386 processor?!"), Apple ("We invented that with the Apple Newton!"), and IBM ("We don't know what we're doing but sign these forms anyway!").
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A good product doomed by cheaper VHS technology.
I don't agree that Betamax was a failure. I owned two, and together they worked for over twenty-five years. Betamax was briefly superseded by VHS, which was then rendered obsolete by digital video. Does that make VHS a failure also?
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A good product doomed by cheaper VHS technology.
Betamax was briefly superseded by VHS, which was then rendered obsolete by digital video.
There was no "brief" about it. VHS was the highest selling video medium for two decades.
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Betamax failed because the better quality over VHS was insignificant compared to the price difference. Partly this was due to Sony not wanting to license the manufacturing of tapes, resulting in WAY higher tape prices (JVC licensed to anyone who was willing to produce VHS tapes and this resulted in competition).
Sony's decision to originally limit the size of Beta tapes to one hour, because they feared that people would use those tapes to record movies, and only after a LONG time (and a lot of pressure) rele
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It appears that residents of Malmö aren't required to keep a stick firmly implanted up their backsides, unlike Stockholmers, yes.
Re: Will they exhibit the Swedish Immigration poli (Score:5, Informative)
Did you know that this claim is total BS? Look at the numbers: [thelocal.se]
The definition of rape in >weden is broader than elsewhere in the west, including stuff that elsewhere would be charged under sexual harassment. Secondly the reporting works differently in that they estimate the total amount of offenses: So if a wife reports that her husband has been having sex with her against her will dozens of times, in most places it's filed as a single case of suspected rape for the national crime stats, but in Sweden they count each suspected instance separately meaning that a single case can easily generate tens or hundreds of incidents of rape for the stats. This means comparing Swedish stats to other western nations directly is not really sensible.
Lol, I can guarantee you've never lived in Sweden (me neither but I live next door in Finland and visit regularly and have friends there) . There's extensive discussion about crime stats as there's one party in the parliament that's trying to do exactly what you're trying to do, which is to insinuate that the fluctuation in the numbers is due to immigrants somehow raping people en masse on the streets, which is simply not true.
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Of course you can twist "statistics" to make it appear more rosey, when you are willing to redefine what "is" is (or in this case "rape")
Yeah, that's precisely what you're doing. Because GP showed how the statistics are not directly comparable, but you want to compare them anyway.
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Yeah, sounds doable conceptually but no idea about the packaging of it, although compute power could be off-board. Dynamic refocus could be tricky I think... probably needs eye tracking so the glasses know where the eyes are looking through the lenses, but yeah, you could have a fluid or viscous layer and use a combination of pressure and if you're brave perhaps magnetic attraction/repulsion between the outer layers to shape the lens. Most folks would just use a servo motor or linear drive through and forgo
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Why? Only now Swedes can understand what it feels like to live in a US metropolis. If that doesn't bring the cultures together, understanding each other's problems...