Why not hot air? Surely they can mount an electric heat generator if it's going to be producing the stuff anyway. Then they can also regulate the balloons altitude on the fly.
The generators and equipment will get hot. The real problem will be getting rid of the heat. Putting the radiators in the airbag might be all that is needed.
Business can only tolerate simplification if they're willing to simplify the way they do business.
Unfortunately, that world simply doesn't exist. Business provides hard, difficult problems, with hidden internal inconsistencies that can only be sussed out through artful analysis.
Whenever someone works on something for an extanded time, it begins to seem easy to them. But try to teach it to a beginner, and you will see just how complicated it really is. That's why so many "experts" seem to think everyone else is stupid, if it is "easy" for them it should be the same for everyone else.
That applies as much to business operations as it does to programming.
... "Oh but it's difficult to do well!" cry the desperate and insecure. We can revisit that when "well" it's even potentially quantifiable. Until then, it's just pathetic empty rhetoric.
... Sure, for the simpler things electricians and nurses are fine, but for tricky cases (and all architecture and design and most non-simple implementation is tricky) they will fail and often fail spectacularly. (This is not to put down electricians or nurses. They serve a necessary function and deserve good recognition and compensation for doing their job just as well. And most of them do understand their limits, unlike most programmers.....)
Don't put down the knowledge of the nurses and technicians. Their knowledge is not less than the doctors and engineers, it is just different. The classes they go through are not always things that the doctors and engineers know about. I know, my daughter is a nurse and I was a technician before being an engineer.
One example is courses in logical troubleshooting. Technicians school has several of these, but engineering courses (last I checked) have none at all. Ask an engineer to fix something and see the "deer in the headlights" look just like what the salesmen get when you try to explain something. Same for a lot of programmers, when confronted with bugs. Note how few programmers know how to use a debugger!
... If, as you suggest, all we did was implement "Hello, World!" over and over again, yes, it would be like mechanical engineering, something that could be done in an assembly line factory. Add the complexity required by ambiguous business, and the real-world limitations of time and money, and you're in a whole different world again.
Mechanical engineering is not like that either, of course. Software -is- like an assembly line factory: it's the compiler and linker or what ever you do to "make" it. The programming, on the other hand is the generation of the detail specification and design, for use by the Make. Manufacturing of software is already about as automated as it could be, it's just that programming is not part of "manufacturing". No one would want to walk across a bridge only designed by an automated system. See "Tacoma Narrows Bridge".
Well, 200 is high, but most successful software products in the world have dev teams of about 100. And with a good toolchain that's not a problem.
And then there are development teams running highly complex software over many years, with about three people. And some use of customer personel to assist with testing and troubleshooting. Successfully.
But they are not using Microsoft development products or any flavor of "C".
"How about the fact that on a quad core, 16 gigabyte, 2.4 gigahertz computer, it can't buffer a few keystrokes as I type *while* the google page loads?"
Almost everything is this fucked up, and nobody seems to notice it.
Because the standard keyboard and mouse hardware and drivers these days are from Microsoft inplementations for single-user DOS systems. And Microsoft assumed that the computer would never wait for anything but the user. I worked with, and even built, keyboards, control panels and other input devices back before that. They never lost characters or user inputs, and even had to have clearing functions for when previous input was irrelevant to the software.
Your personal devices have inputs that are effectivly single-pole-single throw switches, debounced with time delays. This is very crude and unreliable. They should be single-pole-double-throw switches with latching inputs to eliminate bounce completely. But it's a little cheaper and no-one knows to complain, so it continues.
... Spelling and "punctuation" errors are one thing, but if you can't even get your code to compile without mysterious trial-and-error then you obviously don't know what you're doing.
Or, you just have not worked long enough to encounter compiler/linker bugs... Um... I mean "Undocumented Features".
... People saying man will never walk on the moon in the 1600s may have felt safe in making that statement, but they would have been 100% wrong nonetheless.
"People saying man will never walk on the moon in the 1960s may have felt safe in making that statement, but they would have been 100% wrong nonetheless."
Fixed that for you. I was there and I heard them say it, repeatedly. Also, the was a phrase in very common use: "You could no more do that than fly to the moon!" After the moon landing, I never heard that said again.
This argument would hold if there weren't Americans working god-awful hours in their struggle just to get by and provide for their families. Or struggling to pay medical expenses/insurance. Or failing to pay medical expenses and, you know, dying preventable deaths.
What you are saying is no better than First world problems lol!.
Who's out of touch, you or me?
(For the record: I'm not American, and I'm not complaining about my own situation.)
But if you are speaking on behalf of people that you don't know, how do you know how they live or how they view it?
Many people that live around here are considered poor by the government statistics takers. But they have available large areas of land where they grow food and hunt wild game such as deer. They have electric pumps in their wells, have refrigerators and tv's, and do not consider themselves poor.
They do consider the large cities as evil places full of bad people, though. And have for many generations...
If you start making people responsible for their sucess in this country you will be moving us backwards.
We need to move forward. It does not matter if the move is good or not we just need to progress forward, for the children and the environment. You do care about the children and the environment, and the puppies. Do not kill the puppies!
Moving toward something that quite a lot of people in this country came here to get away from...
... It sounds like you're trying to say there's just not enough money in America for everyone to be rich, which simply isn't the case.
There actually is enough money in America for everyone to be rich.
And we are. Just ask any average person in most other countries. Like people that have no running water, no safe food, no sewer. Spoiled people should not complain...
Small businesses are very very different from large businesses. Most of them are barely scraping by and can not afford to pay somebody to "not work"....
But please, tell me again why every business should have to compensate everybody exactly the same. Running a small business is incredibly difficult. Starting one is even harder. 9 out of 10 small businesses fail from LACK of capital. Don't make this more difficult....
Consider this ^^. And consider that many people that push higher benifits and wages are in the pay of very large corporations that hate small businesses ! Small businesses represent freedom, and the "control freaks" hate that.
Of course, the original discussion was about Walmart, which is not exactly a small business...
... Crows don't "understand" water displacement. They only sense and react. "understanding" requires abstraction.
This is great research so I don't want to seem hypercritical but in their contextualization of the mental processes of the Crow they are projecting what ***humans*** would be thinking when they solve the problem.
Crows see cause/effect. Drop stone, thing gets closer. They sense that the thing is closer so just repeat what they did....
That might be true, but it also could describe most people, incuding the scientists !
...Bitcoin is a perfect example of how easy it is to create something out of virtually nothing. It's essentially bits & bytes with a digitally encrypted keylock, it's nothing physical, most governments won't even recognize it as a currency, at best - it's a shady way of transferring money anonymously.
You seem to think that "real" money is better than that. It is not, almost all transfers of "real" money are just as digital and even more shakey in their methods!
But did you account for....the California house wife who dies of stress related to the idea that radiation from Japan got into her organic cow milk soy blend?
..., in practice human nature doesn't cope well with this kind of crisis.
That is what training is for. Check with the military or the rescue services, they know how to cope with emergencies. That is how the plant operators should be trained. "Bureaucrats need not apply"...
Large wind farms cause changes in wind movement, because that is how they generate their power. That causes changes in weather that effects crops and wildlife. On beach areas with wind farms it causes the sand dunes to move to other places, which effects beach erosion. etc...
Microwave power spreads out too much. It would be like trying to read a magazine by flashlight, when your friend was holding the flashlight across the street! Plus, I don't think the scientists there would like to be irradiated by highpower microwaves, like a sandwich in the Microwave oven.
Slashdot Mirror
I think those were the ones they were trying to get away from.... both poor and rich.
Why not hot air? Surely they can mount an electric heat generator if it's going to be producing the stuff anyway. Then they can also regulate the balloons altitude on the fly.
The generators and equipment will get hot. The real problem will be getting rid of the heat. Putting the radiators in the airbag might be all that is needed.
Business can only tolerate simplification if they're willing to simplify the way they do business.
Unfortunately, that world simply doesn't exist. Business provides hard, difficult problems, with hidden internal inconsistencies that can only be sussed out through artful analysis.
Whenever someone works on something for an extanded time, it begins to seem easy to them. But try to teach it to a beginner, and you will see just how complicated it really is. That's why so many "experts" seem to think everyone else is stupid, if it is "easy" for them it should be the same for everyone else.
That applies as much to business operations as it does to programming.
... "Oh but it's difficult to do well!" cry the desperate and insecure. We can revisit that when "well" it's even potentially quantifiable. Until then, it's just pathetic empty rhetoric.
Must be a Manager ! ^^
... Sure, for the simpler things electricians and nurses are fine, but for tricky cases (and all architecture and design and most non-simple implementation is tricky) they will fail and often fail spectacularly. (This is not to put down electricians or nurses. They serve a necessary function and deserve good recognition and compensation for doing their job just as well. And most of them do understand their limits, unlike most programmers. ....)
Don't put down the knowledge of the nurses and technicians. Their knowledge is not less than the doctors and engineers, it is just different. The classes they go through are not always things that the doctors and engineers know about. I know, my daughter is a nurse and I was a technician before being an engineer.
One example is courses in logical troubleshooting. Technicians school has several of these, but engineering courses (last I checked) have none at all. Ask an engineer to fix something and see the "deer in the headlights" look just like what the salesmen get when you try to explain something. Same for a lot of programmers, when confronted with bugs. Note how few programmers know how to use a debugger!
... If, as you suggest, all we did was implement "Hello, World!" over and over again, yes, it would be like mechanical engineering, something that could be done in an assembly line factory. Add the complexity required by ambiguous business, and the real-world limitations of time and money, and you're in a whole different world again.
Mechanical engineering is not like that either, of course.
Software -is- like an assembly line factory: it's the compiler and linker or what ever you do to "make" it. The programming, on the other hand is the generation of the detail specification and design, for use by the Make. Manufacturing of software is already about as automated as it could be, it's just that programming is not part of "manufacturing".
No one would want to walk across a bridge only designed by an automated system. See "Tacoma Narrows Bridge".
Well, 200 is high, but most successful software products in the world have dev teams of about 100. And with a good toolchain that's not a problem.
And then there are development teams running highly complex software over many years, with about three people. And some use of customer personel to assist with testing and troubleshooting. Successfully.
But they are not using Microsoft development products or any flavor of "C".
"How about the fact that on a quad core, 16 gigabyte, 2.4 gigahertz computer, it can't buffer a few keystrokes as I type *while* the google page loads?"
Almost everything is this fucked up, and nobody seems to notice it.
Because the standard keyboard and mouse hardware and drivers these days are from Microsoft inplementations for single-user DOS systems. And Microsoft assumed that the computer would never wait for anything but the user.
I worked with, and even built, keyboards, control panels and other input devices back before that. They never lost characters or user inputs, and even had to have clearing functions for when previous input was irrelevant to the software.
Your personal devices have inputs that are effectivly single-pole-single throw switches, debounced with time delays. This is very crude and unreliable. They should be single-pole-double-throw switches with latching inputs to eliminate bounce completely. But it's a little cheaper and no-one knows to complain, so it continues.
... Spelling and "punctuation" errors are one thing, but if you can't even get your code to compile without mysterious trial-and-error then you obviously don't know what you're doing.
Or, you just have not worked long enough to encounter compiler/linker bugs... Um... I mean "Undocumented Features".
... People saying man will never walk on the moon in the 1600s may have felt safe in making that statement, but they would have been 100% wrong nonetheless.
"People saying man will never walk on the moon in the 1960s may have felt safe in making that statement, but they would have been 100% wrong nonetheless."
Fixed that for you.
I was there and I heard them say it, repeatedly.
Also, the was a phrase in very common use: "You could no more do that than fly to the moon!"
After the moon landing, I never heard that said again.
So you want people who dislike established society to go and establish society?
That is how the United States and many of the countries in the Americas got started. Not perfect, but it worked.
This argument would hold if there weren't Americans working god-awful hours in their struggle just to get by and provide for their families. Or struggling to pay medical expenses/insurance. Or failing to pay medical expenses and, you know, dying preventable deaths.
What you are saying is no better than First world problems lol!.
Who's out of touch, you or me?
(For the record: I'm not American, and I'm not complaining about my own situation.)
But if you are speaking on behalf of people that you don't know, how do you know how they live or how they view it?
Many people that live around here are considered poor by the government statistics takers. But they have available large areas of land where they grow food and hunt wild game such as deer. They have electric pumps in their wells, have refrigerators and tv's, and do not consider themselves poor.
They do consider the large cities as evil places full of bad people, though. And have for many generations...
If you start making people responsible for their sucess in this country you will be moving us backwards.
We need to move forward. It does not matter if the move is good or not we just need to progress forward, for the children and the environment. You do care about the children and the environment, and the puppies. Do not kill the puppies!
Moving toward something that quite a lot of people in this country came here to get away from...
... It sounds like you're trying to say there's just not enough money in America for everyone to be rich, which simply isn't the case.
There actually is enough money in America for everyone to be rich.
And we are. Just ask any average person in most other countries. Like people that have no running water, no safe food, no sewer.
Spoiled people should not complain...
Small businesses are very very different from large businesses. Most of them are barely scraping by and can not afford to pay somebody to "not work". ...
But please, tell me again why every business should have to compensate everybody exactly the same. Running a small business is incredibly difficult. Starting one is even harder. 9 out of 10 small businesses fail from LACK of capital. Don't make this more difficult. ...
Consider this ^^.
And consider that many people that push higher benifits and wages are in the pay of very large corporations that hate small businesses !
Small businesses represent freedom, and the "control freaks" hate that.
Of course, the original discussion was about Walmart, which is not exactly a small business...
... Crows don't "understand" water displacement. They only sense and react. "understanding" requires abstraction.
This is great research so I don't want to seem hypercritical but in their contextualization of the mental processes of the Crow they are projecting what ***humans*** would be thinking when they solve the problem.
Crows see cause/effect. Drop stone, thing gets closer. They sense that the thing is closer so just repeat what they did. ...
That might be true, but it also could describe most people, incuding the scientists !
Darmok was not about the universal translator. I think you are are wiping your hate for that over the rest of the story.
Tell me about it. I took a holiday to find out my "natural" clock. It's closer to a 28 hour cycle than a 24 hour one. ...
Which obviously means that your family is not originally from this planet !
(Just kidding... I think...)
...Bitcoin is a perfect example of how easy it is to create something out of virtually nothing. It's essentially bits & bytes with a digitally encrypted keylock, it's nothing physical, most governments won't even recognize it as a currency, at best - it's a shady way of transferring money anonymously.
You seem to think that "real" money is better than that. It is not, almost all transfers of "real" money are just as digital and even more shakey in their methods!
"Turned up missing."
People "turned up" the space where they were supposed to be, and it was empty.
It's a common phrase where I grew up...
But did you account for....the California house wife who dies of stress related to the idea that radiation from Japan got into her organic cow milk soy blend?
A candidate for the "Darwin Awards" ?
..., in practice human nature doesn't cope well with this kind of crisis.
That is what training is for. Check with the military or the rescue services, they know how to cope with emergencies. That is how the plant operators should be trained. "Bureaucrats need not apply"...
Large wind farms cause changes in wind movement, because that is how they generate their power. That causes changes in weather that effects crops and wildlife. On beach areas with wind farms it causes the sand dunes to move to other places, which effects beach erosion. etc...
... Surround somebody with an army of assistants for a decade and it seems like they forget how to put on their clothes in the morning.
If they have had a staff to do things like dress them in the morning, for the last ten years, that is plenty long enough to forget how!
Seriously, that's where the word "valet" comes from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
Microwave power spreads out too much. It would be like trying to read a magazine by flashlight, when your friend was holding the flashlight across the street!
Plus, I don't think the scientists there would like to be irradiated by highpower microwaves, like a sandwich in the Microwave oven.