All your arguments are circular nonsense and fact-free... A large mining operation will be too large for these? And a small mining operation will be too small for these?
So, it's not undeniable, it's only undeniable if you don't know crap about mining or work in the back country.
It's undeniable airships have FAR lower operating costs per mass of cargo than conventional aircraft, and your suggestion of Chinook helicopters is positively laughable. Airships certainly CAN do many things you baselessly claim they CAN'T.
Its use will be for places like northern Canada and the Australian outback where there's no airport and no landing strip and no infrastructure whatever but where there are a lot of resources like timber and minerals.
Northern Canada makes sense, but I'm having a hard time imagining its use in Australia... That's one of the FLATTEST countries on earth, with the EASIEST road construction possible. Building a road involves drawing a line on a map, cutting the brush, and dropping the asphalt, and you might even be able to skip the asphalt... There are exceedingly few areas of any terrain features that need to be bridged. While roads aren't cheap to construct, they can't be THAT expensive in the remote areas of Australia.
In fact they can. They talk about this exact scenario at the very bottom of TFA...
These craft have severely limited capacity for cargo
Their absolute cargo capacity doesn't matter... It's a question of cost per kg of cargo. Since airships need to consume extremely little fuel, they are extremely economical to operate, and the cost of shipping heavy materials will be vastly less expensive than flying them on conventional airplanes.
What's more, you'd be far, far better off just getting a Chinook, as those are much smaller and are designed to handle a substantial amount of cargo.
That's absolute nonsense. A helicopter will consume MORE fuel than conventional airplanes, has less range, and moves more slowly, all for the convenience of VTOL. An airship will be VASTLY more economical to operate.
Anybody with a mine doing substantial volume is going to have to have roads anyways, as miners do need to eat, and there's a tone of other supplies involved as well.
The diamond and oil mines in the arctic are operating without roads... Instead they truck in supplies at great expense only part of the year, over the ice. The Alaska pipeline was perhaps the most expensive engineering project in history, and the investment nearly bankrupted the whole US oil industry. Until recently, the South Pole McMurdo station was operating without a road over the 1,000 mile distance, and it was an incredible expense to develop, only profitable because conventional aircraft are so expensive to operate that it cost double the jet fuel for a given cargo weight to fly in supplies.
In short, there are MANY places that don't or perhaps CAN'T have roads, yet are profitable locations that need lots of bulk freight deliveries. Pretty much everything you've said in your comment is undeniably factually incorrect, and if these airships prove reliable, they may have a few incredibly profitable routes.
We have shows like Ice Road Truckers about dangerous, expensive, and time-limited freight delivery in the Artic circle because impassable terrain most of the year... And at the opposite end of the globe, the 1,000 mile-long McMurdo â" South Pole Highway constructed over 4 years at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars with lots of ongoing maintenance... And also consider the manifold poor remote villages that are often starving and suffering after natural disasters because they are accessible only by foot (or mule) due to mountainous terrain over which road construction would be astronomically expensive...
All these scenarios, because flying-in heavy items via conventional aircraft over long distance can consume twice their weight in jet fuel.
Airships can no-doubt fundamentally change the arithmetic of delivering supplies to these hazardous and remote locations. If these airships prove to be reliable heavy-lifters, that consume far, far less fuel, they could generate a LOT of cash from carrying cargo to such difficult destinations, no matter how slow they are to arrive at their destinations.
I did test using a (software) sine wave generator, and with hardware that should be good enough to faithfully reproduce it. I don't have an oscilloscope handy to really confirm a pure 20kHz sine wave, but I'll get around to verifying that at some point.
As in, if you have a sample rate of 48,000Hz, you can play back a frequency of 24,000Hz (already above the range of human perception). Higher sample rate = more high frequencies you can't hear.
I have to wonder how accurate the anecdotes we get about hearing are... 20kHz seems just too damn conveniently ROUND of a number to be the actual upper-limit. I'm middle-aged and I can hear 20KHz without a problem, though of course I shouldn't be able to do so... Sadly I don't have much in the way of reliable equipment that can substantially exceed 20KHz, so I can't even test the actual limits of my hearing.
There really are no mutually unintelligible varieties of English
There are plenty of mutually unintelligible TERMS in different variations of English. There just happens to be enough compatibility that foreign English speakers can take some time and explain (in English) the bits of the language you don't at all understand.
10 English terms/phrases you would not understand without explanation:
It's English...for better or worse international business and science is conducted in English.
That's true, but it leaves native English speakers with the dilemma of what second-language they should take-up, and Mandarin seems as good an option as any, though as you said, not NECESSARY in any sense.
It's certainly not settled that English will be the lingua-franca forever... Maybe we'll go back to Latin...
Did you see that happen with VP8? Because what you describe did not happen with it, despite its situation being same as of VP9.
The situation wasn't REMOTELY the same...
As I KEEP FUCKING SAYING to you:
"That's nonsense. VP8 was only released to the public MANY, MANY YEARS after H.264. Now VP9 is there right from the start, on equal-footing with H.265. This is a very different situation that EVER before, which was the point of my original post you apparently dismissed out of hand."
You seem to be so far biased that actual facts and information just don't penetrate your thick skull, so I'll stop wasting my time with your spouting baseless nonsense. Goodbye.
There is a single data point (blue cross), and it tells you that the quality curve of the encoder is probably going to be significantly better than VP9.
The author correctly called it: "a single (admittedly non-useful) data point."
it is consistent with previous results
I see no "previous results"...
That basically means the situation will repeat as with H.264 and VP8.
That's nonsense. VP8 was only released to the public MANY, MANY YEARS after H.264. Now VP9 is there right from the start, on equal-footing with H.265. This is a very different situation that EVER before, which was the point of my original post you apparently dismissed out of hand.
n the MPEG side, the competition will cause the actual practical quality of encoding to use much more of the theoretical potential of the format; whereas on the VP* side, there will be just one not very progressing encoder library,
This is utter nonsense. The development of MPEG encoders always follows the same path... There's innumerable proprietary ones, with absolute CRAP quality, and then ONE open source codec which gets all the development effort and blows the rest away. With MPEG-1/2 this would have been mjpegtools, with MPEG-4 ASP this was Xvid, with AVC this was x264, and with HEVC this looks to be x265, though that could change.
The fact that there's a single open source VP9 standard means there will almost certainly be less duplication of effort, and the single central open source standard will get all the high-quality coding improvements.
And you're basing your whole opinion on this completely flawed logic that flies in the face of reality?
It's certainly NOT "meaningless" to have an open source codec for a patented standard. They still get the benefits of multiple vendors focusiing all their efforts on a common code base. And let's not forget that not every country enforces software patents like the US.
That said, it's sad that here on/. We've had a couple of stories about H.265 with NO mention of VP9 which Google has frozen the bitstream on, claims matches or slightly exceeds H.265 across the board, and has a working decoder in Chrome... For the first time, EVER, the patent-free, open source codec is being released at the same time as the proprietary standard version, so it really has a good chance of upstaging the MPEG standard. Yet/. Of all places can't be bothered to mention it... With WebM adoption Opus for audio as well, the patent-free multimedia codecs may actually be superior.
Yeah, it's vastly easier to acquire a company when it is failing... People have been known to sabotage a company just to drop the stock prices to the point that they can buy a controlling interest in that company, then stop the bleeding and turn things around.
"Nokia has an identity spanning 150 years of heritage, innovation, excellence, and change. That ends today. By this evening those 150 years will be a rumor. They never happened. Think about that. Today is history. Today will be remembered. Years from now, the young will ask with wonder about this day. Today is history, and you are part of it..."
That limit should be hardwired into your vehicle, because legally, you have no reason *ever* to exceed it. If you have an emergency, you contact emergency services (police, ambulance, whatever) who are legally allowed to exceed that limit.
Right, when you notice the large vehicle barreling down on you, you call emergency services, and tell them you'll need a coroner in about 8 seconds. PROBLEM SOLVED without committing a minor legal infraction. Sounds like a good trade-off.
And when you've got an hour to live, and you're 200 miles from the nearest hospital, you SHOULDN'T dare to drive 100 MPH towards the coming ambulance, you should just lay there and die, waiting for the mythical 400MPH ambulance to reach you.
If everybody -- including the politicians and those tasked with enforcing (and making money out of) the speed limits are forced to abide by them too wherever possible, then we can be sure that irrationally slow speed limits will be raised to rational levels.
Sounds like a good enough reason to kill people, left and right...
We should send in the military to help out those poor oppressed people. Sure, an invasion is excessive and would look bad, but we could certainly send in a few "advisors" under the radar, and see how that goes...
I have been interviewing IT candidates for years. We don't have a shortage of applicants. We do have a shortage of good applicants.
So some idiot fooled you into believing a programmer in your area will work for $X. Then you find out $X gets you the bottom of the barrel, but you don't even consider that $X is too low, and attribute the poor pool of candidates to everything else but your own mistakes...
I am increasingly dismayed by the number of individuals who profess ten or even twenty years of IT experience on their resumes, yet who cannot solve the most basic design problem or answer questions about the fundamentals of the language they use daily.
When you insist on the qualifications a top-level expert might not even have, but you're paying entry-level wages, the only people you'll get are people who lie on their resume...
If you're only willing to pay entry-level wages, then remove the "lies on their resume" requirements, and you MIGHT well find a few people that are quite capable, but only just got into the IT job market.
Intel CPU prices were higher when AMD was competitive with them.
Intel used-to have a monopoly grip on the workstation and server markets. Intel's P4 debacle greatly loosened Intel's grip, and Opteron leap-frogged Intel, and the demand was such that even the most dedicated Intel OEMs started offering Opteron servers and workstations, and AMD isn't gone from that market by any means, so if Intel slips up just a bit, AMD will be there to take up the slack. So Intel has good reason to be much more careful about pricing than they were a decade ago.
ARM are Intel's real competitor at the moment, not AMD.
No. ARM is trying to kill both Intel and AMD, eventually, but for the forseeable future, ARM and Intel/AMD just don't compete in the same space...
Intel/AMD never made any headway into extremely low power, where ARM has a stronghold (rumors are that MIPS might come back to form in the near future as well, and compete with ARM), but in the high-power market, ARM has zero market, where Intel/AMD have a stronghold (after the faltering of all the single-source proprietary (-Unix) architectures.
If you want a workstation that runs Windows, Intel/AMD can do it for you, while ARM has NOTHING to offer you, and doesn't seem to be trying. If you want a phone with good battery life, Intel has one mediocre product offering, trying to threaten ARM more than actually compete, but really there's no question where to go.
Try living through a blackout when your home is on the upper floors of a TALL (30+ stories) apartment building. Walking up those stairs after a long work day (and an even longer commute) on a hot summer day was/not/ a fun experience
Okay, going UP is hard...
But you now have an excuse for going DOWN the stairs in a toboggan!!!
In the dark, no less.
Does the door-man seize all your electronics before letting you in, to ensure you don't bring a flashlight along with you, or anything else that might reduce the challenge?
According to this, the quality of the US poer grid is compareable to Slovenia.
That seems a very strange way to spin it... The chart clearly says the US power grid is near the top, and in the middle of EU states, so if the EU states were averaged so the population size was similar, they'd probably match-up similarly to the US.
With smaller countries, there will be more extremes and outliers. Some will be extremely reliable, while others will be extremely unreliable, and when their overdue big outage comes, it will far more drastically change the numbers.
But 8 hours power outage per year sounds more like a developing country to me. What the hell is wrong with you? YOU POSTED A LINK THAT INCLUDES NUMBERS FOR (ALL) DEVELOPING COUNTRIES, yet you still make idiotic statements like this one...
Go ahead, check the numbers for China, India, Brazil, or any other developing countries you can come up with. You'll note they're all WAY below the US. This indicates you have no real grasp of the reliability of services in a developing country.
Put in perspectives, that's one minute of power loss for every 1,000+, and a small of UPSes will ride you through the downtimes. As I've said elsewhere, no power grid will every be 100% reliable, so a modest $100 investment in a tiny portable gasoline fueled engine/generator is cheaper insurance to provide you all your modern conveniences even when the world is falling apart.
My point is, the northeast blackout proved just how unprepared most Americans are for a power outage. I understand the technical challenges of living on the 30th story of a building are much greater than for my house in the middle of no where, but there are some basic things you can do to function for a few days without power if need be.
IMHO, too few people know about CAMPING gear. Just think of it... crazy people VOLUNTARILY go off-grid, in extremely harsh conditions, yet get along quite well.
Slashdot Mirror
All your arguments are circular nonsense and fact-free... A large mining operation will be too large for these? And a small mining operation will be too small for these?
It's undeniable airships have FAR lower operating costs per mass of cargo than conventional aircraft, and your suggestion of Chinook helicopters is positively laughable. Airships certainly CAN do many things you baselessly claim they CAN'T.
Northern Canada makes sense, but I'm having a hard time imagining its use in Australia... That's one of the FLATTEST countries on earth, with the EASIEST road construction possible. Building a road involves drawing a line on a map, cutting the brush, and dropping the asphalt, and you might even be able to skip the asphalt... There are exceedingly few areas of any terrain features that need to be bridged. While roads aren't cheap to construct, they can't be THAT expensive in the remote areas of Australia.
In fact they can. They talk about this exact scenario at the very bottom of TFA...
Their absolute cargo capacity doesn't matter... It's a question of cost per kg of cargo. Since airships need to consume extremely little fuel, they are extremely economical to operate, and the cost of shipping heavy materials will be vastly less expensive than flying them on conventional airplanes.
That's absolute nonsense. A helicopter will consume MORE fuel than conventional airplanes, has less range, and moves more slowly, all for the convenience of VTOL. An airship will be VASTLY more economical to operate.
The diamond and oil mines in the arctic are operating without roads... Instead they truck in supplies at great expense only part of the year, over the ice. The Alaska pipeline was perhaps the most expensive engineering project in history, and the investment nearly bankrupted the whole US oil industry. Until recently, the South Pole McMurdo station was operating without a road over the 1,000 mile distance, and it was an incredible expense to develop, only profitable because conventional aircraft are so expensive to operate that it cost double the jet fuel for a given cargo weight to fly in supplies.
In short, there are MANY places that don't or perhaps CAN'T have roads, yet are profitable locations that need lots of bulk freight deliveries. Pretty much everything you've said in your comment is undeniably factually incorrect, and if these airships prove reliable, they may have a few incredibly profitable routes.
We have shows like Ice Road Truckers about dangerous, expensive, and time-limited freight delivery in the Artic circle because impassable terrain most of the year... And at the opposite end of the globe, the 1,000 mile-long McMurdo â" South Pole Highway constructed over 4 years at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars with lots of ongoing maintenance... And also consider the manifold poor remote villages that are often starving and suffering after natural disasters because they are accessible only by foot (or mule) due to mountainous terrain over which road construction would be astronomically expensive...
All these scenarios, because flying-in heavy items via conventional aircraft over long distance can consume twice their weight in jet fuel.
Airships can no-doubt fundamentally change the arithmetic of delivering supplies to these hazardous and remote locations. If these airships prove to be reliable heavy-lifters, that consume far, far less fuel, they could generate a LOT of cash from carrying cargo to such difficult destinations, no matter how slow they are to arrive at their destinations.
I did test using a (software) sine wave generator, and with hardware that should be good enough to faithfully reproduce it. I don't have an oscilloscope handy to really confirm a pure 20kHz sine wave, but I'll get around to verifying that at some point.
"ultrasonic sinusoids as high as 120 kHz have been reported as successfully perceived."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound
I have to wonder how accurate the anecdotes we get about hearing are... 20kHz seems just too damn conveniently ROUND of a number to be the actual upper-limit. I'm middle-aged and I can hear 20KHz without a problem, though of course I shouldn't be able to do so... Sadly I don't have much in the way of reliable equipment that can substantially exceed 20KHz, so I can't even test the actual limits of my hearing.
There are plenty of mutually unintelligible TERMS in different variations of English. There just happens to be enough compatibility that foreign English speakers can take some time and explain (in English) the bits of the language you don't at all understand.
10 English terms/phrases you would not understand without explanation:
http://travel.cnn.com/mumbai/life/10-indianisms-652344
So... it would be German?
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
That's true, but it leaves native English speakers with the dilemma of what second-language they should take-up, and Mandarin seems as good an option as any, though as you said, not NECESSARY in any sense.
It's certainly not settled that English will be the lingua-franca forever... Maybe we'll go back to Latin...
The situation wasn't REMOTELY the same...
As I KEEP FUCKING SAYING to you:
"That's nonsense. VP8 was only released to the public MANY, MANY YEARS after H.264. Now VP9 is there right from the start, on equal-footing with H.265. This is a very different situation that EVER before, which was the point of my original post you apparently dismissed out of hand."
You seem to be so far biased that actual facts and information just don't penetrate your thick skull, so I'll stop wasting my time with your spouting baseless nonsense. Goodbye.
The author correctly called it: "a single (admittedly non-useful) data point."
I see no "previous results"...
That's nonsense. VP8 was only released to the public MANY, MANY YEARS after H.264. Now VP9 is there right from the start, on equal-footing with H.265. This is a very different situation that EVER before, which was the point of my original post you apparently dismissed out of hand.
This is utter nonsense. The development of MPEG encoders always follows the same path... There's innumerable proprietary ones, with absolute CRAP quality, and then ONE open source codec which gets all the development effort and blows the rest away. With MPEG-1/2 this would have been mjpegtools, with MPEG-4 ASP this was Xvid, with AVC this was x264, and with HEVC this looks to be x265, though that could change.
The fact that there's a single open source VP9 standard means there will almost certainly be less duplication of effort, and the single central open source standard will get all the high-quality coding improvements.
And you're basing your whole opinion on this completely flawed logic that flies in the face of reality?
That test doesn't include H.265 at all...
"x265's development is currently too rapid for reliable testing, so I didn't want to focus on it"
It's certainly NOT "meaningless" to have an open source codec for a patented standard. They still get the benefits of multiple vendors focusiing all their efforts on a common code base. And let's not forget that not every country enforces software patents like the US.
That said, it's sad that here on /. We've had a couple of stories about H.265 with NO mention of VP9 which Google has frozen the bitstream on, claims matches or slightly exceeds H.265 across the board, and has a working decoder in Chrome... For the first time, EVER, the patent-free, open source codec is being released at the same time as the proprietary standard version, so it really has a good chance of upstaging the MPEG standard. Yet /. Of all places can't be bothered to mention it... With WebM adoption Opus for audio as well, the patent-free multimedia codecs may actually be superior.
Yeah, it's vastly easier to acquire a company when it is failing... People have been known to sabotage a company just to drop the stock prices to the point that they can buy a controlling interest in that company, then stop the bleeding and turn things around.
How I read the open letter:
"Nokia has an identity spanning 150 years of heritage, innovation, excellence, and change. That ends today. By this evening those 150 years will be a rumor. They never happened. Think about that. Today is history. Today will be remembered. Years from now, the young will ask with wonder about this day. Today is history, and you are part of it..."
Right, when you notice the large vehicle barreling down on you, you call emergency services, and tell them you'll need a coroner in about 8 seconds. PROBLEM SOLVED without committing a minor legal infraction. Sounds like a good trade-off.
And when you've got an hour to live, and you're 200 miles from the nearest hospital, you SHOULDN'T dare to drive 100 MPH towards the coming ambulance, you should just lay there and die, waiting for the mythical 400MPH ambulance to reach you.
Sounds like a good enough reason to kill people, left and right...
However warning must be heeded. While they do startle easily, they usually come back, and in greater numbers.
We should send in the military to help out those poor oppressed people. Sure, an invasion is excessive and would look bad, but we could certainly send in a few "advisors" under the radar, and see how that goes...
So some idiot fooled you into believing a programmer in your area will work for $X. Then you find out $X gets you the bottom of the barrel, but you don't even consider that $X is too low, and attribute the poor pool of candidates to everything else but your own mistakes...
When you insist on the qualifications a top-level expert might not even have, but you're paying entry-level wages, the only people you'll get are people who lie on their resume...
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-02-29/
If you're only willing to pay entry-level wages, then remove the "lies on their resume" requirements, and you MIGHT well find a few people that are quite capable, but only just got into the IT job market.
Intel used-to have a monopoly grip on the workstation and server markets. Intel's P4 debacle greatly loosened Intel's grip, and Opteron leap-frogged Intel, and the demand was such that even the most dedicated Intel OEMs started offering Opteron servers and workstations, and AMD isn't gone from that market by any means, so if Intel slips up just a bit, AMD will be there to take up the slack. So Intel has good reason to be much more careful about pricing than they were a decade ago.
No. ARM is trying to kill both Intel and AMD, eventually, but for the forseeable future, ARM and Intel/AMD just don't compete in the same space...
Intel/AMD never made any headway into extremely low power, where ARM has a stronghold (rumors are that MIPS might come back to form in the near future as well, and compete with ARM), but in the high-power market, ARM has zero market, where Intel/AMD have a stronghold (after the faltering of all the single-source proprietary (-Unix) architectures.
If you want a workstation that runs Windows, Intel/AMD can do it for you, while ARM has NOTHING to offer you, and doesn't seem to be trying. If you want a phone with good battery life, Intel has one mediocre product offering, trying to threaten ARM more than actually compete, but really there's no question where to go.
Clearly you've never see the farce of a household wiring system that the UK uses...
Okay, going UP is hard...
But you now have an excuse for going DOWN the stairs in a toboggan!!!
Does the door-man seize all your electronics before letting you in, to ensure you don't bring a flashlight along with you, or anything else that might reduce the challenge?
Yup.
That seems a very strange way to spin it... The chart clearly says the US power grid is near the top, and in the middle of EU states, so if the EU states were averaged so the population size was similar, they'd probably match-up similarly to the US.
With smaller countries, there will be more extremes and outliers. Some will be extremely reliable, while others will be extremely unreliable, and when their overdue big outage comes, it will far more drastically change the numbers.
IMHO, too few people know about CAMPING gear. Just think of it... crazy people VOLUNTARILY go off-grid, in extremely harsh conditions, yet get along quite well.
They have:
* good food ($100),
* plenty of clean water ($40),
* get hot showers ($10),
* have an ample supply of power $10,
* lots of light ($10),
* plenty of news and entertainment. ($20),
* modern conveniences ($30),
etc., etc.
They even sleep comfortably in -30F degree weather (if you don't mind lugging around a punching bag).