A sometimes more useful way to contrast religions is to look at where they each look for authority.
Christianity and Islam both place a lot of Authority in the written word. Some sects more than others, but all sects to some degree.
Judaism places authority in the spoken word (the written texts must be read aloud to be understood, because it is the spoken word that has Authority; the written stuff is merely a mnemonic aid). This is a significant difference: the Authority is there only as the words are spoken; there is no absolute "This was once written therefore it shall forever be this way" dictatorial attitude about it. It is more a "Tell me again, right now," thing, with the inherent recognition that even though I may have heard this a thousand times before, maybe this time I will more clearly understand some meaning that I never really heard before.
Zen, Tao, and Buddhism state that the Authority has nothing to do with words, that it is found through wordless states like meditation. Zennist practice goes so far as to use koans to so twist up the language that the usefulness of words is momentarily broken, which provides an opportunity for the trained seeker to experience the wordless authority. The core written teaching about the Tao is: "The Tao that you read about is not the Tao".
In contemporary neopagan practice, authority is sought through directed visualizations augmented by chanting, drumming, dance, and ritual.
And so on. Something that is interesting here is that the religions that rely on the written word for their authority are historically the least tolerant and most war-like. They definitely score highest on the "holier-than-thou" scale.
I know nothing about the internals of Scientology. But what little I know of it suggests that it wants it adherents to put more faith into its written words than any other religion has ever done.
Is it not that the smallest level of granularity that git works with is the individual file? Is there some way that git can manage changes to records within a single file object-oriented database like a.blend file?
I agree that Blender proxies could be used within a.blend file that was specially prepared for a temp employee. I don't see any other way of doing it. As to using links, they would expose as much as append does.
But it remains true that you need to use an artist who understands Blender to prepare that special file, and burn up more artist time when the work the temp has completed needs to be merged back into the main development flow. And you still have versioning issues without any good version control at the object level if there are ever two or more temp workers on the payroll at the same time. And it remains true that the network technician you need anyway to manage a dozen or more workstations is fully capable of managing the security details of an Adobe product workflow, without any impact on the more costly artist time, and probably without any impact on any overhead (since you have to pay the net tech anyway).
Basically all that parent post has done is to clarify details of a process that cannot work at a corporate level, without addressing the problems that make it unworkable for anything but individual artists and partnerships.
I like Blender. I have tasted Maya, and I do not like it. Among other things, Maya requires setting up that nest of folders that makes it so easy to guard the corporate jewels. I don't need that, so why should I have to fuss with it when I have Blender? But Blender is not the answer for Big Studio work. It may well prove to be the death of Big Studio, since its approach can allow a small partnership of Blender artists to steal a lot of the work that currently goes to Big Studios.
There is no convenient way with Blender to give just the one piece of a project to some day worker while withholding access to those parts that need not concern him, and which he should not have access to. That is inherent in the Blender database, which is a single file all neatly zipped up and without any mechanisms for password protection or other security.
You hire some monkey off the street to do a week's worth of work for you and keep things on schedule while the artist who should be handling that piece is recovering from his appendectomy. You do not want that monkey to get his paws on anything other than the immediate task.
Maya's approach of splitting the database among umpteen zillion different folders that can each be secured separately makes a lot of sense to a business that wants to stay in business. Your network administrator can put a password lock on all the textures, and another on all the lighting setups, etc. (Actually ACLs. Access Control Lists, would probably be used.) Your one-week wondermonkey won't be able to get his paws on anything other than what you let him work on, and when he leaves to take a job with your competitor, he will not be able to carry any of your company's proprietary secrets with him. And all this is done without impacting anyone else on the team. No artist needs to be involved; the security is done by the network technician.
The closest you could get to this in Blender is to have an artist prepare a special, limited.blend file every time you bring in a temp for some small piece of the project. You would also need an artist to merge the new work in with the main flow when the temp is done. These tasks have to be done by artists who understand Blender's internals; the network technician would be of no use. Along with tying up precious artist resources with mundane admin work, it would be an error prone versioning nightmare. And it would not be long before its continuing costs were much greater than the cost of Adobe licenses.
Blender's approach moves a lot of database management crap out of the way of the artist, which is A Really Great Thing To Do when the artist is working by himself, or in partnership with other trusted artists. It just does not scale to Big Studio productions where there are always dozens of artists working simultaneously on different parts of the project, and maybe thousands of artists who have touched the product at one time or another during its development.
Parent post, and two others of mine on this thread, have been modded down as "over rated". Which is the clear sign of a cowardly moderator, since none of these three posts had been modded upward at all.
I can think of two possible reasons for being downrated in such a way
the moderator objects to my argument that Blender is unfit by design for Big Studio work since it is instead designed to meet the needs of individual artists, which cannot be reconciled with some legitimate business needs of Big Studios; or
the moderator objects to my implicit distinction between working as an individual artist with tools like Blender, versus working as a mere minion with Adobe tools in a Big Studio setting.
I have occasionally posted stupid things that deserve to be down rated, since sometimes I think I know more about a subject than I really do. I accept those without comment, and as soon as I'm done fussing over the ego bruise, I am kind of glad for it, for it is a learning experience. But that is not what is happening here; if that was the case I would have seen a reply pointing out the error of my ways.
Sometimes I get down rated because I have trampled on someone's astroturf. I accept that there are persons abusing Slashdot by attempting to use it to control mind share of the audience, rather than rationally discuss issues or expounding upon their emotional allegiances. I also accept those without comment, since like wharf rats at a busy port, astroturfers will always be skulking about slashdot.
But I speak up here because I cannot determine whether I have been down rated by some freak Adobe astroturfer--- I am not even sure they exist--- or by some over-zealous defender of Blender as the True, Right, and Only Way. Maybe this post will trigger a response that helps clarify things.
For hobbiests, and also for individual artists, Blender is top notch.
But to meet all the needs of Big Studios, Blender would need some serious redesign. Much of which would destroy features that are good for individual artists.
For instance, the.blend file is THE database that holds everything related to the scenes it contains. It is designed as a library so that an artist can easily take ("append" in Blender terms) something from his prior work and put it into his current work. Like a texture, or an armature, or a mesh, or a walk cycle-- anything and everything can be extracted from any.blend file you have access to. Now think for a moment about the risks of industrial espionage that are implicit in this approach.
For this and several other reasons that have to do with the business aspects of Big Studios, Blender as it stands is not acceptable. And there is no way that Blender could be redesigned to meet the business needs of Big Studios that would not destroy its value to individual artists. At best it would end up being no better than what Adobe's products might someday become.
Blender is unlikely to fill the needs of Big Studio Productions, for the simple reason that there is no good way to handle security with it. In an environment where $$millions are invested in the product and the product involves development of new animation techniques, the risks of industrial espionage have to be managed. Blender is not designed with that kind of management in mind. Adobe's products are.
Blender will become the best software for a 3D artist, if it is not already that. But it is not being developed to fit the needs of Big Studios.
Blender retains the modifier stack approach, but it is also increasingly adding nodes as an alternatve. As parent post points out, stack modifiers are easier to work with, while nodes are more versatile.
My own use of Blender is relatively simplistic; I don't attempt anything on the scale of __Tears of Steel__ or __Sintel__. For real estate fly-throughs, architect modeling, and most other commercial work, the limitations of modifier stacks do not get in the way.
Re:3D Comp[uter Graphics Software
on
Blender 2.65 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't think Blender is much like any of the Adobe products. The entire orientation of the development effort is different.
The Adobe products are designed for industrial use, where perhaps a hundred different artists are working simultaneously on the same 5 second animation scene, each doing some small piece of the whole. Blender is designed for an individual artist who exerts total control over every aspect of the work for as long as it is in his hands. That does not mean that Blender cannot be used collaboratively; it does mean that the collaboration has to be done consciously, between equal partners. Whereas with Adobe products there is the expectation that each minion will be walled off from all the others and there will be a rigid hierarchy of managers determining who will have what kind of access to which detail.
With Blender, the entire database for a sequence of scenes is wrapped up in the.blend file. And anyone who has access to the.blend can use it as a library of objects, meshes, textures, even reference images, exporting whatever they want into their own work. That is not true of Adobe, which is used in situations where industrial espionage is a concern. Pixar is not going to let the casual employee hired for a week to make the scales of the dragon more irridescent steal the walk cycle that has been 8 months in development and sell it to a competitor.
Big Corporate Art cannot afford to use Blender, except in certain corner cases. Blender is for the individual artist, not for big productions built by hundreds of minions.
Have you looked for correlations with school holidays and the presence or absence of school events that increase the likelihood of transmissions between cohorts? For instance, among high school students, dead weeks preceding end of term tests may decrease the usual amount of mingling between students of different schools and delay transmission of the virus. Similarly, there could be fluctuations in transmission opportunities related to the success or failure of a school team's advancement in semi-final competitions (teams that are losing generally attract fewer students to their "away" games, decreasing transmission opportunities for a virus).
I would expect to see some negative correlation between new cases and these kinds of events, with a time delay related to the incubation period of the virus.
School principals could provide some rough data on events that would affect exposures of their students to students of other schools.
Wind farms are best sited where the wind is frequently steady in direction and intensity. These airships will have sufficient inertia that minor deviations in the wind are not going to affect them. We already have the technology to keep floating drilling platforms positioned precisely above well heads thousands of feet below the surface of an ocean; that technology would also work to keep an airship at station above a windmill site.
This was a really bad article about science. (To be precise, it was a badly written article about one scientific investigation.)
Do not confuse a deliberate abuse of writing techniques with the scientific inquiry that was its subject. Scientific findings should be presented with expository writing techniques, not with the techniques used in the detective and mystery genres.
This piece could have been well written. It could have had an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Its avoidance of these high level structures, and the similar use of using deliberately misleading paragraphs, sentence structures, and vocabulary choices, is consistent with a deliberate attempt to hide information from the reader rather than to reveal it. The thing is written as if it were a very bad short piece of fiction, an incredibly bad knock-off of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories. Or one could argue equally easily that it is a very bad knock-off of H.P. Lovecraft's mystery - horror stories. It is so so awful in such an inappropriate way that one cannot even tell which genre the author was failing to emulate.
In any event the writing is entirely inappropriate for presenting scientific knowledge. The author's consistency demonstrates that he was doing this trash writing deliberately, not because he did not know how to make the words work, but because this kind of trash is what he fully intended to deliver to the reader.
I applaud those who designed and carried out this research, for they have contributed to everyone's understanding of the Universe.
I condemn the author of this piece. If he wants to apply his skills to writing fiction, then he should write fiction. If he wants to expound upon a scientific investigation, then he should do so with the appropriate non-fiction tools of expository writing.
Estimates are about 4x less fuel efficient than trucks when roads exist.
Good to know.
But fuel expense is just one of the costs of running a fleet of trucks. If one airship could deliver the same goods as ten big trucks, the total cost of goods shipped might be less (factoring in employee expenses-- drivers, mechanics, dispatchers, etc-- licensing, insurance, taxes, and so on).
But just looking at fuel efficiency, I am guessing that there are routes over mountains where airships would be more efficient than trucks on steep, winding roads. I drove across the northern tier of USA states the spring before last, and there were an awful lot of miles one had to go just to get around this or that obstacle, or line up with some mountain pass.
Another several times less fuel efficient than trains when rails exist.
Oh, yeah. Hard to beat rail once the tracks are laid down and paid for.
Cargo ships require water. That is not always available in sufficient quantity on trade routes. You can count the number of Chinese junks that plied the Silk Road on less than one hand.
Compare the airship with other means of overland transport, please. Relevant questions: is it cheaper than trucking? Probably most of the time. Is it cheaper than railroads? Probably not, along those routes where railroads already exist. Almost certainly better than putting in a new railroad, though.
Parent post is correct only if you look no further than the shipping lanes that are currently in existence.
I am pretty sure that these new airships will be more cost effective than any boats on the San Francisco to Denver route.
I think on that route they will be also more cost effective than trucks, but perhaps not as cheap as the railroad, in general. But for point to point transport, such as new cars off the dock in San Fran to dealerships in Denver, Kansas City, and St Louis, the airships will probably be competitive even with rail.
And there are certainly some interesting niche applications. One that I expect to see fairly early in the game will be transport of windmills from factory to installation site, with possibly the airship in hover mode used as a crane during installation. One of the limitations on today's wind generators is that the blades need to be transported by truck over existing roads. That limits the length of the blades.
On some routes, the dirigibles will definitely be better than the traditional boats. Such as the Chicago - Denver route, or almost all of the Moscow - Anywhere routes.
One factor not mentioned in TFA was whether these dirigibles will be all weather aircraft, or will be blue sky only aircraft. That will have an impact on their ability to compete with truck and rail freight.
When all you've got on your staff are wheelwrights, ostlers, and farriers, you just keep using the same horses and freight wagons. Well, you replace the horses when they get too old to pull their share of the load, and it's always nice to get a new wagon with brighter shinies every now and then.
But going to these new-fangled pickup trucks? Hiring mechanics to keep them running, and replacing the wooden wheels and horseshoes with these fancy pneumatic tyres? Oh, no sir, nosirree! The farriers would revolt for sure and start pitching horseshoes through the windows!
A lot of companies will stick with Windows to the bitter end. Easier to plan on five years of diminishing, but still adequate, profits and then shut the place down, than to go through the agony of replacing all the Windows expertise with this new-fangled expertise in Linux or BSD or Unix... and then there's this whole FOSS weirdness to contend with! Free software... how can that be? That makes as much sense as rolling the freight around on wheels made of air!
The real problem in switching from Windows to Linux is that you'd also have to swap out all the Windows-centric IT staff and replace them with people who know a bit about the realities of information technology.
Gee, that's a whole different kind of employee, isn't it? How do you even go about hiring someone like that, when you can no longer just count up the number of MSCE certificates? You might even have to replace a bunch of old HR habits with current best practices in hiring decisions. That would mean purging HR as well as IT. Oh what a bother.
Gee, maybe coughing up the extra cash to continue with Microsoft would be the better choice. Nobody ever gets fired for recommending Microsoft.
Within the context of their times, the first computers were definitely general purpose. The two major alternatives were the abacus (and various geared adding machines that basically worked the same way), and the sliderule. Neither type could easily do the work the other was designed for, and neither type had a mechanism for accurately repeating a series of operations.
Young'uns today have no sense of history.
With regard to the future, the first tablet that is delivered with bluetooth peripheral connectivity and a graphics output port will be a clear winner. When I can link my tablet to a keyboard, mouse, and desktop display screen, the tablet will become my primary computing device and I will be happy. Oh, I will want a connection to external storage, a DVD R/W, my Wacom drawing tablet, and a few other goodies, too, but you get the idea.
Until tablet computers evolve to that point, they will be useful auxilliary devices and nothing more than that. Tablets are providing computer benefits to a huge market of consumers who otherwise would never touch a computer, and that is of tremendous benefit to everyone. But these persons are not using their tablets as computers; they are using them as convenient and inexpensive containers for the ereaders, GPS mappers, phones, cameras, and other gadgets that can be stuffed into the small case. Today's tablet computer is a simpler way of carrying around multiple handheld gadgets-- only this, and nothing more.
It is not everyone on slashdot. It is just the fourteen year olds among us.
Some of them have been practicing at being fourteen for a decade or more. They are particularly obnoxious.
I look forward to Coleman's book. She may offer some insight into this failure to mature syndrome. I have a suspicion that it has something to do with over exposure to FPS games, but I'm just guessing.
This screening identifies possible associates of the thief but also potential victims of future crimes. With this alone there would be no way to separate the sheep from the goats, though.
But should the carriers robocall every number that the stolen phone had called in the week before it was stolen? Would a heads-up be appropriate: "You are receiving this call because John Smith's cell phone was stolen and calls that you may receive from it are not from John Smith."
I like my Nook. It is easier to haul around than the stack of reference books I need (PHP, Javascript, HTML5, CSS, Perl). And it takes up much less desk space.
OTOH, there was a time when I could flip to the exact page in this or that book to cross check some squirmy detail of syntax or best practice. I haven't figured out how to do that on the eReader as yet. But that is a matter of developing new habits to replace outmoded ones. Not a problem with the technology.
Slashdot Mirror
A sometimes more useful way to contrast religions is to look at where they each look for authority.
Christianity and Islam both place a lot of Authority in the written word. Some sects more than others, but all sects to some degree.
Judaism places authority in the spoken word (the written texts must be read aloud to be understood, because it is the spoken word that has Authority; the written stuff is merely a mnemonic aid). This is a significant difference: the Authority is there only as the words are spoken; there is no absolute "This was once written therefore it shall forever be this way" dictatorial attitude about it. It is more a "Tell me again, right now," thing, with the inherent recognition that even though I may have heard this a thousand times before, maybe this time I will more clearly understand some meaning that I never really heard before.
Zen, Tao, and Buddhism state that the Authority has nothing to do with words, that it is found through wordless states like meditation. Zennist practice goes so far as to use koans to so twist up the language that the usefulness of words is momentarily broken, which provides an opportunity for the trained seeker to experience the wordless authority. The core written teaching about the Tao is: "The Tao that you read about is not the Tao".
In contemporary neopagan practice, authority is sought through directed visualizations augmented by chanting, drumming, dance, and ritual.
And so on. Something that is interesting here is that the religions that rely on the written word for their authority are historically the least tolerant and most war-like. They definitely score highest on the "holier-than-thou" scale.
I know nothing about the internals of Scientology. But what little I know of it suggests that it wants it adherents to put more faith into its written words than any other religion has ever done.
Oh yes. I agree. xkcd for best single strip for sure.
Best serial strip is Girl Genius: adventure, romance, Mad Science!
Is it not that the smallest level of granularity that git works with is the individual file? Is there some way that git can manage changes to records within a single file object-oriented database like a .blend file?
I agree that Blender proxies could be used within a .blend file that was specially prepared for a temp employee. I don't see any other way of doing it. As to using links, they would expose as much as append does.
But it remains true that you need to use an artist who understands Blender to prepare that special file, and burn up more artist time when the work the temp has completed needs to be merged back into the main development flow. And you still have versioning issues without any good version control at the object level if there are ever two or more temp workers on the payroll at the same time. And it remains true that the network technician you need anyway to manage a dozen or more workstations is fully capable of managing the security details of an Adobe product workflow, without any impact on the more costly artist time, and probably without any impact on any overhead (since you have to pay the net tech anyway).
Basically all that parent post has done is to clarify details of a process that cannot work at a corporate level, without addressing the problems that make it unworkable for anything but individual artists and partnerships.
I like Blender. I have tasted Maya, and I do not like it. Among other things, Maya requires setting up that nest of folders that makes it so easy to guard the corporate jewels. I don't need that, so why should I have to fuss with it when I have Blender? But Blender is not the answer for Big Studio work. It may well prove to be the death of Big Studio, since its approach can allow a small partnership of Blender artists to steal a lot of the work that currently goes to Big Studios.
There is no convenient way with Blender to give just the one piece of a project to some day worker while withholding access to those parts that need not concern him, and which he should not have access to. That is inherent in the Blender database, which is a single file all neatly zipped up and without any mechanisms for password protection or other security.
You hire some monkey off the street to do a week's worth of work for you and keep things on schedule while the artist who should be handling that piece is recovering from his appendectomy. You do not want that monkey to get his paws on anything other than the immediate task.
Maya's approach of splitting the database among umpteen zillion different folders that can each be secured separately makes a lot of sense to a business that wants to stay in business. Your network administrator can put a password lock on all the textures, and another on all the lighting setups, etc. (Actually ACLs. Access Control Lists, would probably be used.) Your one-week wondermonkey won't be able to get his paws on anything other than what you let him work on, and when he leaves to take a job with your competitor, he will not be able to carry any of your company's proprietary secrets with him. And all this is done without impacting anyone else on the team. No artist needs to be involved; the security is done by the network technician.
The closest you could get to this in Blender is to have an artist prepare a special, limited .blend file every time you bring in a temp for some small piece of the project. You would also need an artist to merge the new work in with the main flow when the temp is done. These tasks have to be done by artists who understand Blender's internals; the network technician would be of no use. Along with tying up precious artist resources with mundane admin work, it would be an error prone versioning nightmare. And it would not be long before its continuing costs were much greater than the cost of Adobe licenses.
Blender's approach moves a lot of database management crap out of the way of the artist, which is A Really Great Thing To Do when the artist is working by himself, or in partnership with other trusted artists. It just does not scale to Big Studio productions where there are always dozens of artists working simultaneously on different parts of the project, and maybe thousands of artists who have touched the product at one time or another during its development.
Parent post, and two others of mine on this thread, have been modded down as "over rated". Which is the clear sign of a cowardly moderator, since none of these three posts had been modded upward at all.
I can think of two possible reasons for being downrated in such a way
I have occasionally posted stupid things that deserve to be down rated, since sometimes I think I know more about a subject than I really do. I accept those without comment, and as soon as I'm done fussing over the ego bruise, I am kind of glad for it, for it is a learning experience. But that is not what is happening here; if that was the case I would have seen a reply pointing out the error of my ways.
Sometimes I get down rated because I have trampled on someone's astroturf. I accept that there are persons abusing Slashdot by attempting to use it to control mind share of the audience, rather than rationally discuss issues or expounding upon their emotional allegiances. I also accept those without comment, since like wharf rats at a busy port, astroturfers will always be skulking about slashdot.
But I speak up here because I cannot determine whether I have been down rated by some freak Adobe astroturfer--- I am not even sure they exist--- or by some over-zealous defender of Blender as the True, Right, and Only Way. Maybe this post will trigger a response that helps clarify things.
For hobbiests, and also for individual artists, Blender is top notch.
But to meet all the needs of Big Studios, Blender would need some serious redesign. Much of which would destroy features that are good for individual artists.
For instance, the .blend file is THE database that holds everything related to the scenes it contains. It is designed as a library so that an artist can easily take ("append" in Blender terms) something from his prior work and put it into his current work. Like a texture, or an armature, or a mesh, or a walk cycle-- anything and everything can be extracted from any .blend file you have access to. Now think for a moment about the risks of industrial espionage that are implicit in this approach.
For this and several other reasons that have to do with the business aspects of Big Studios, Blender as it stands is not acceptable. And there is no way that Blender could be redesigned to meet the business needs of Big Studios that would not destroy its value to individual artists. At best it would end up being no better than what Adobe's products might someday become.
Blender is unlikely to fill the needs of Big Studio Productions, for the simple reason that there is no good way to handle security with it. In an environment where $$millions are invested in the product and the product involves development of new animation techniques, the risks of industrial espionage have to be managed. Blender is not designed with that kind of management in mind. Adobe's products are.
Blender will become the best software for a 3D artist, if it is not already that. But it is not being developed to fit the needs of Big Studios.
Blender retains the modifier stack approach, but it is also increasingly adding nodes as an alternatve. As parent post points out, stack modifiers are easier to work with, while nodes are more versatile.
My own use of Blender is relatively simplistic; I don't attempt anything on the scale of __Tears of Steel__ or __Sintel__. For real estate fly-throughs, architect modeling, and most other commercial work, the limitations of modifier stacks do not get in the way.
I don't think Blender is much like any of the Adobe products. The entire orientation of the development effort is different.
The Adobe products are designed for industrial use, where perhaps a hundred different artists are working simultaneously on the same 5 second animation scene, each doing some small piece of the whole. Blender is designed for an individual artist who exerts total control over every aspect of the work for as long as it is in his hands. That does not mean that Blender cannot be used collaboratively; it does mean that the collaboration has to be done consciously, between equal partners. Whereas with Adobe products there is the expectation that each minion will be walled off from all the others and there will be a rigid hierarchy of managers determining who will have what kind of access to which detail.
With Blender, the entire database for a sequence of scenes is wrapped up in the .blend file. And anyone who has access to the .blend can use it as a library of objects, meshes, textures, even reference images, exporting whatever they want into their own work. That is not true of Adobe, which is used in situations where industrial espionage is a concern. Pixar is not going to let the casual employee hired for a week to make the scales of the dragon more irridescent steal the walk cycle that has been 8 months in development and sell it to a competitor.
Big Corporate Art cannot afford to use Blender, except in certain corner cases. Blender is for the individual artist, not for big productions built by hundreds of minions.
Have you looked for correlations with school holidays and the presence or absence of school events that increase the likelihood of transmissions between cohorts? For instance, among high school students, dead weeks preceding end of term tests may decrease the usual amount of mingling between students of different schools and delay transmission of the virus. Similarly, there could be fluctuations in transmission opportunities related to the success or failure of a school team's advancement in semi-final competitions (teams that are losing generally attract fewer students to their "away" games, decreasing transmission opportunities for a virus).
I would expect to see some negative correlation between new cases and these kinds of events, with a time delay related to the incubation period of the virus.
School principals could provide some rough data on events that would affect exposures of their students to students of other schools.
Wind farms are best sited where the wind is frequently steady in direction and intensity. These airships will have sufficient inertia that minor deviations in the wind are not going to affect them. We already have the technology to keep floating drilling platforms positioned precisely above well heads thousands of feet below the surface of an ocean; that technology would also work to keep an airship at station above a windmill site.
I disagree, Sir.
That smile is totally right for a closet transvestite of that period.
This was a really bad article about science. (To be precise, it was a badly written article about one scientific investigation.)
Do not confuse a deliberate abuse of writing techniques with the scientific inquiry that was its subject. Scientific findings should be presented with expository writing techniques, not with the techniques used in the detective and mystery genres.
This piece could have been well written. It could have had an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Its avoidance of these high level structures, and the similar use of using deliberately misleading paragraphs, sentence structures, and vocabulary choices, is consistent with a deliberate attempt to hide information from the reader rather than to reveal it. The thing is written as if it were a very bad short piece of fiction, an incredibly bad knock-off of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories. Or one could argue equally easily that it is a very bad knock-off of H.P. Lovecraft's mystery - horror stories. It is so so awful in such an inappropriate way that one cannot even tell which genre the author was failing to emulate.
In any event the writing is entirely inappropriate for presenting scientific knowledge. The author's consistency demonstrates that he was doing this trash writing deliberately, not because he did not know how to make the words work, but because this kind of trash is what he fully intended to deliver to the reader.
I applaud those who designed and carried out this research, for they have contributed to everyone's understanding of the Universe.
I condemn the author of this piece. If he wants to apply his skills to writing fiction, then he should write fiction. If he wants to expound upon a scientific investigation, then he should do so with the appropriate non-fiction tools of expository writing.
Estimates are about 4x less fuel efficient than trucks when roads exist.
Good to know.
But fuel expense is just one of the costs of running a fleet of trucks. If one airship could deliver the same goods as ten big trucks, the total cost of goods shipped might be less (factoring in employee expenses-- drivers, mechanics, dispatchers, etc-- licensing, insurance, taxes, and so on).
But just looking at fuel efficiency, I am guessing that there are routes over mountains where airships would be more efficient than trucks on steep, winding roads. I drove across the northern tier of USA states the spring before last, and there were an awful lot of miles one had to go just to get around this or that obstacle, or line up with some mountain pass.
Another several times less fuel efficient than trains when rails exist.
Oh, yeah. Hard to beat rail once the tracks are laid down and paid for.
Cargo ships require water. That is not always available in sufficient quantity on trade routes. You can count the number of Chinese junks that plied the Silk Road on less than one hand.
Compare the airship with other means of overland transport, please. Relevant questions: is it cheaper than trucking? Probably most of the time. Is it cheaper than railroads? Probably not, along those routes where railroads already exist. Almost certainly better than putting in a new railroad, though.
Parent post is correct only if you look no further than the shipping lanes that are currently in existence.
I am pretty sure that these new airships will be more cost effective than any boats on the San Francisco to Denver route.
I think on that route they will be also more cost effective than trucks, but perhaps not as cheap as the railroad, in general. But for point to point transport, such as new cars off the dock in San Fran to dealerships in Denver, Kansas City, and St Louis, the airships will probably be competitive even with rail.
And there are certainly some interesting niche applications. One that I expect to see fairly early in the game will be transport of windmills from factory to installation site, with possibly the airship in hover mode used as a crane during installation. One of the limitations on today's wind generators is that the blades need to be transported by truck over existing roads. That limits the length of the blades.
On some routes, the dirigibles will definitely be better than the traditional boats. Such as the Chicago - Denver route, or almost all of the Moscow - Anywhere routes.
One factor not mentioned in TFA was whether these dirigibles will be all weather aircraft, or will be blue sky only aircraft. That will have an impact on their ability to compete with truck and rail freight.
One way of assessing the health of an economic ecosystem is by judging the rational elegance of the writing of those who defend it.
By this measure and recent posts, the Windows ecosystem died some time ago. In its place is a dwindling pile of minion infested rot.
The odour of the decaying bits is reason enough to go far, far away from all that was once the Redmond Empire.
Wrong.
When all you've got on your staff are wheelwrights, ostlers, and farriers, you just keep using the same horses and freight wagons. Well, you replace the horses when they get too old to pull their share of the load, and it's always nice to get a new wagon with brighter shinies every now and then.
But going to these new-fangled pickup trucks? Hiring mechanics to keep them running, and replacing the wooden wheels and horseshoes with these fancy pneumatic tyres? Oh, no sir, nosirree! The farriers would revolt for sure and start pitching horseshoes through the windows!
A lot of companies will stick with Windows to the bitter end. Easier to plan on five years of diminishing, but still adequate, profits and then shut the place down, than to go through the agony of replacing all the Windows expertise with this new-fangled expertise in Linux or BSD or Unix... and then there's this whole FOSS weirdness to contend with! Free software... how can that be? That makes as much sense as rolling the freight around on wheels made of air!
The real problem in switching from Windows to Linux is that you'd also have to swap out all the Windows-centric IT staff and replace them with people who know a bit about the realities of information technology.
Gee, that's a whole different kind of employee, isn't it? How do you even go about hiring someone like that, when you can no longer just count up the number of MSCE certificates? You might even have to replace a bunch of old HR habits with current best practices in hiring decisions. That would mean purging HR as well as IT. Oh what a bother.
Gee, maybe coughing up the extra cash to continue with Microsoft would be the better choice. Nobody ever gets fired for recommending Microsoft.
Within the context of their times, the first computers were definitely general purpose. The two major alternatives were the abacus (and various geared adding machines that basically worked the same way), and the sliderule. Neither type could easily do the work the other was designed for, and neither type had a mechanism for accurately repeating a series of operations.
Young'uns today have no sense of history.
With regard to the future, the first tablet that is delivered with bluetooth peripheral connectivity and a graphics output port will be a clear winner. When I can link my tablet to a keyboard, mouse, and desktop display screen, the tablet will become my primary computing device and I will be happy. Oh, I will want a connection to external storage, a DVD R/W, my Wacom drawing tablet, and a few other goodies, too, but you get the idea.
Until tablet computers evolve to that point, they will be useful auxilliary devices and nothing more than that. Tablets are providing computer benefits to a huge market of consumers who otherwise would never touch a computer, and that is of tremendous benefit to everyone. But these persons are not using their tablets as computers; they are using them as convenient and inexpensive containers for the ereaders, GPS mappers, phones, cameras, and other gadgets that can be stuffed into the small case. Today's tablet computer is a simpler way of carrying around multiple handheld gadgets-- only this, and nothing more.
I really wonder why people are so xenophobic.
It is not everyone on slashdot. It is just the fourteen year olds among us.
Some of them have been practicing at being fourteen for a decade or more. They are particularly obnoxious.
I look forward to Coleman's book. She may offer some insight into this failure to mature syndrome. I have a suspicion that it has something to do with over exposure to FPS games, but I'm just guessing.
Suspicion by association, if even that.
And properly so.
This screening identifies possible associates of the thief but also potential victims of future crimes. With this alone there would be no way to separate the sheep from the goats, though.
But should the carriers robocall every number that the stolen phone had called in the week before it was stolen? Would a heads-up be appropriate: "You are receiving this call because John Smith's cell phone was stolen and calls that you may receive from it are not from John Smith."
I like my Nook. It is easier to haul around than the stack of reference books I need (PHP, Javascript, HTML5, CSS, Perl). And it takes up much less desk space.
OTOH, there was a time when I could flip to the exact page in this or that book to cross check some squirmy detail of syntax or best practice. I haven't figured out how to do that on the eReader as yet. But that is a matter of developing new habits to replace outmoded ones. Not a problem with the technology.
Well, you are certainly entitled to your own view of things. As unique human beings, each of us can be wrong in our own special way.