Slashdot Mirror
Building the A380
Gavinsblog writes "The Independent has a report on the construction
of the Airbus A380. Amazingly, a ship is being custom-built to ferry parts
for assembly, a custom fleet of trucks are also to be used - with roads widened
to suit. Oh and the assembly building is the size of two soccer pitches, and the
height of an olympic swimming pool."
Last time I checked, olympic swimming pools weren't very high. In fact, they actually went down into the floor.
We gave you the mobile phone, and now the world's biggest/best passenger plane. So what have the Americans ever done for us?
Planes this big are used to deliver all the printed Slashdot comments to Africa so that people without internet access could still read them.
Who measures things in soccer pitches olympic swimming pools? What sort of standards are these? I was just getting used to meters, had a basic understanding of fathoms, and had heard of rods, but what the heck are these new units?
30M ~= 1 olympic size swimming pool?, so is it 60 meters tall? ~190 feet tall?
And just how long exactly is a soccor (soccer!) pitch (field!). My reports show between 100 and 130 yards (Arph! yet another measurement!).
Let's all get together and use either metric or english systems please. Your preference, I don't care because I can translate easily enough between those two.
ADVENTUR>You are in a maze of twisty little passages.
The preceding comment has been reviewed and declared to be compliant with HIPPA Phase II regulations.
When I first read th title it sounded strange that IBM had to build a new ship to manufacture a new computer.
But now that I've read the article, I see it's about building airplanes. However I thinks it's kind of amusing that the airplane parts get thier own rest stops on the highway.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Hopefully it'll have custom jumbo-size seats to accomodate today's wider, fatter traveller!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Actually, it's not really so much need but productivity. If everyone went out tomorrow and spent all of their money on some useless thing, like dot-com stocks, and all of that money evaporated and was funneled into more useless things (like Ferraris) the productive uses of capital would diminish and... jobs would ultimately be lost because the economy would, shrink not grow, as we lost our ability to consume "productively". Read your business section for a real life example of this.
A bigger jet supposedly flys more people with less overhead. The trouble is that ultimately will mean less planes flying, less schedule freedom, and more of a pain overall for passengers. How many times have you missed the 8:00pm to London due to weather in Atlanta but you can grab the 9:30 from the same airline and arrive with minimal delay in time to make your meeting and catch the flight that evening to Dublin? It's happened to me a few times.
Put megaplanes in their place and I'm delayed a day getting to London, stuck in Atlanta, and I'm on the phone with airlines for hours trying to rearrange tickets and meetings. Not to mention it will take an hour just to get the passengers on the plane, and all of the lines as passengers simultaneously arrive instead of being spread out across mulitple flights when everything goes the way it should.
Productivity enhancement? Not for the passengers. It's an ego thing for Europe, like a skyscraper or a moon landing.
Now the Eurpoeans are building something so ridiculously big that no Americans want it.
Talk about role-reversal.
so in principle we do not disagree at all...
accept for this conclusion at the end of your post:
"Its not a perfect world, but at least its moving in the right direction, thanks to Capitalism."
How do you know? Perhaps it is 'despite Capitalism, due to the hard work of the Chinese people'.
I'm sorry, I'd love to continue this discussion, but I have to get back to the lab to work...
Take care Pharmboy,
Meneer de Koekepeer
Custom-built ships to ferry parts. Custom fleet of trucks. Roads widened for the trucks (custom set of roads).
Hate to say it, but sounds like a bunch of dot-com flunkies are on this project.
This report is riddled with holes. For example everyone knows that the standard unit for length in sensationalist reporting is the football field, not the soccer pitch. And the standard unit for height is the Empire State building, not the olympic swimming pool. Also conspicuously absent is any comparison to the width of a human hair, or to how many times we could go to and from the moon of we laid something-or-other end to end. Very disappointing...
Per se, democracy means "people's power", from ancient Greek, and it's de facto meaning in politics is a system in which every citizen has an equal opportunity to affect (or decide not to) the decisions made in the name of the community -essentially, everyone has a vote on everything. The reason democracy has failed so far is that after it's birth, communities grew faster than information transportation technologies, rendering the concept of equal vote useless. Now, as we are approaching the time when the whole world can be reached instantaneously, we might yet again see the real democracy rise. I'm also predicting communism will be successful when the information technologies get advanced enough.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
And for a second there I thought they were talking about building some new sort of Amiga.
--riney
You're right, and I can see the headline now:
NASA Probe Lost:
Scientists forget to convert football fields to ice hockey rinks
You're right, we should standardize on our field measurements. I suggest we use the current world record for the discus toss, since the Greeks are sort of the father of sports and that's probably the most famous of them all. Now if only I knew how far that was...
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,