Architectural blueprints will show you the layout of the rooms, the way that the windows have waterproofing, and the cladding system. They wont show you how the building is held up, or allow an intelligent mind to devise a way of bringing down the building beyond what a calibrated eyeballing of the building could not provide.
If you want to know how to pull down a building in an elegant manner, you'll be looking at the structural engineer's plans. There is some merit in limiting access to these for sensitive buildings (Joe six-pack or his engineer are not likely to need to look at pentagon structural plans to do alterations), but for the vast majority of buildings these plans are used after the building's completion to allow alterations to proceed more intelligently, knowing what the existing structure looks like without the concrete.
Heck. The standard weak points in a building are not that hard to find, not that secret, and if you were of that nasty disposition, exploit for nasty purposes.
I would not see merit in limiting access to building plans for buildings that are not used for sensitive government / diplomatic purposes.
However, common sense has never stopped the restriction of information once the magical "T" word gets bandied around
What on earth is wrong with waiting until a sale is on til you buy whatever it is that you have your heart set on?
If it is an urgent purchase that can't wait, then buy it then and there, but if you're happy to wait until whatever it is goes on sale due to it no longer being the newest and shiniest widget, what is wrong with that?
This is penalising people who are swimming against the tide of instant gratification that our credit driven society has pushed.
People have done this from time immemorial in raiding the new years and mid year sales at department stores they don't otherwise shop at
I'm sure these were the same people who objected to the ents in LOTR as trees seldom pick up roots and walk, or pointed out the time travel anomalies in Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban (sp?) with respect to special relativity.
It's called suspending disbelief, and some people, it would appear, are incapable of doing it.
It's a novel idea to brew up your own fuel for the mower (sugar + yeast), along with the alternative "trial runs with various liquors" when not brewing for mower fuel, but the alcohol content in homebrew beer just isn't enough to sustain an internal combustion engine.
mostly as english is a bastardised language with many different roots, and the different spellings for words with the same pronunciation come from the different languages.
There is just as much cringe from non-USians at how they mangle many words.
I'm not sure how americans avoid confusion between their meters (which are used to measure things, like a volt-meter or speedometer) and their meters (which are used as a unit of length).
I'm sure someone can come up with some equally odd spelling that the rest of the world uses, but sometimes american spelling makes me smile.
(and I'm fully expecting any typos in this comment to be suitably flamed)
I doubt that this would provide much assistance in FEA as there is the need to keep similar mesh sizes (with localised refinements for extra detail as needed). It has been too long since my analysis courses at university but I don't think this is the silver bullet for making FEA quicker. Most respectable FEA packages are good at meshing in a reasonably sensible manner.
Then again, I'm a structural engineer and most of our stuff is reasonably planar, or curved in a steady fashion with few fiddly bits which would need far more care with meshing.
I do know what you mean though about file sizes. A colleague of mine had a FEA model of a high rise that needed one gig of RAM to run it, without having it going into hard disc swapping.
I agree with your point. As annoying as it would be to see teeny boppers waving their arms around madly to get the latest ascii art up in the air to their buddies, it is not as annoying as people speaking loudly into their phones (what is with the bad design of the microphones in these things that require such raising of the voice?)
If you wanted to communicate to someone in a discrete manner you would sms them or phone them. If you wanted to make an indiscrete communication that would get their attention you could shout to them (they are still within vision range and i doubt that you can read the little LED's at 100 metres), so what void does this feature fill?
I may not be the target market for this, so it could just be my not seeing how these things tend to take on a life of their own beyond the original use.
Given that there are the reports of high percentages of windows installations in Asia are pirated (not govt installations you would have to hope though), going from a situation where the end user pays nothing (or next to nothing in the markets for their Windows OS CD) to having to pay something for a legit OS is not gonig to be popular.
This should be a great selling point for the Asian markets for OSS - pay the same price as you've always paid for your software, but get legitimate software.
I would be interested in seeing the extent to which people with similar training come up with similar solutions based on using the standard toolkit they are accustomed to hauling out for any problem. The other outcome would be of people are sparked into thinking outside the box by the competition not being tied to the "this is the way the company does this sort of thing and so you shall follow this methodology".
Thinking in my own field of engineering, if you gave people problems to solve outside of the work environment you would probably get a far more creative set of solutions than you would if people were set the same problem at work in the context of a project.
I too love the rugged build of the HP32S, and for me it is sad that the replacement HP33S goes so far from the rugged build quality, large enter button, and sensible layout that made it a personal favourite.
Used HP32SII are now going on ebay for far more than they ever sold new
But, if planes had already been invented, any development work on a new model of plane, would be weighed against the economics of the plane, not just the ability to fly or not fly.
Given that fusion is not the only way that we have to generate electricity (and granted that it will take time for economies of scale to be realised) it is not unreasonable to hold up the economics of the generation methodology.
The cost of the lasers and the associated ancillary paraphernalia associated with the fusion plant. If the cost per kWh from the setup and maintenance of the equipment needs to be x cents / kWh and using renewable / clean sources of electricity can generate at x/5 cents / kWh then it wont fly.
Great to see that it is now thought probable that fusion can actually be an energy producer though.
Your points on the home usage of this hard drive make sense in terms of isolating "work" data from "home" data.
I think that this same outcome could be achieved with a standard outboard USB hard drive though, and probably at lower cost.
Nobody took it seriously. They had cellphones going off all over the show, including bosses. People even lacked the discretion to use vibrate mode so that it was a discreet breaking of the rules. I think it was instituted due to some localised abuse (people using it excessively on company time), which is fair enough, but could have been dealt with more diplomatically.
They also had a policy that you were not permitted to have music going at your workstation, be it with headphones, or whatever. I work far better when I can shut out the ambient noise of an office. I felt naked without headphones on and it reduced my productivity, but went along with the rules for a while til i noticed nobody really cared if I had my sounds going or not.
Find out why this rule was introduced, and make a judgement call as to whether it is a BS rule that you are happy to break, or if there is a serious reason behind it that would mean you should get formal permission for not following it.
I read of a similiar anecdote with a hewlett packard calculator that got coked, the guy shampooed it, rinsed it out and left it for a few days to dry. Worked fine.
Didn't recount any cat / dog hair problems though:-)
I stand corrected. I was thinking more of pools where the pool is not cut into the ground or is part of a hotel and is parked a dozen or so stories up. Your points re shotcrete are on the money. The one problem I've encountered with shotcrete is that the quality is very dependent on the applicator, and can be patchy at times.
The pool wall that sprung to mind and got me thinking about this application being useful was for an aquarium I commented on with respect to other details where the walls were highly curved.
I just spoke with a colleague and he pointed out that with the development of composite concrete design (carbon fibre, glass fibre, short steel fibres even) that the present use of steel reinforcement in concrete as we know it may well become redundant and this technology become a serious contender for structures larger than domestic sized units.
It may take 10 years + for this to take off, but if you could remove the need for steel reinforcement to be placed (and more often than is desirable placed incorrectly) construction could occur more quickly and with more freedom. If you could mix the composite material with the concrete on the fly rather than batching it at a plant, you could dose the concrete accurately with the appropriate levels of composite for the item being "printed".
This is the sort of technology that will take off once fibre composite (fibre glass, carbon fibre) design of concrete is more commonplace. It would largely make reinforcement redundant.
(speaking as one whose working day involves lots of concrete) It may not happen this year, or the next five, but this is where concrete is likely to be headed in the next 20 years.
The desire to have curved pool walls, which cost a fortune in concrete formwork would be where this could make in-roads if it were able to work around reinforcing steel(unreinforced concrete isn't that crash hot for any serious structural works, especially in any areas of seismicity).
Curved walls may well look pretty, but are a nuisance to work around if you are trying to fit beds, couches, tables against them. One of the bonuses of straight walls iwth square corners.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh.
I'm a structural Engineer.
Architectural blueprints will show you the layout of the rooms, the way that the windows have waterproofing, and the cladding system. They wont show you how the building is held up, or allow an intelligent mind to devise a way of bringing down the building beyond what a calibrated eyeballing of the building could not provide.
If you want to know how to pull down a building in an elegant manner, you'll be looking at the structural engineer's plans. There is some merit in limiting access to these for sensitive buildings (Joe six-pack or his engineer are not likely to need to look at pentagon structural plans to do alterations), but for the vast majority of buildings these plans are used after the building's completion to allow alterations to proceed more intelligently, knowing what the existing structure looks like without the concrete.
Heck. The standard weak points in a building are not that hard to find, not that secret, and if you were of that nasty disposition, exploit for nasty purposes.
I would not see merit in limiting access to building plans for buildings that are not used for sensitive government / diplomatic purposes.
However, common sense has never stopped the restriction of information once the magical "T" word gets bandied around
And just like vegas, you can count the cards / raid the sales, but don't get caught at it
In other words, people who have the brains to work out how the system works should be banned from using it.
Sounds like a variation on the DMCA where you can't reverse engineer the marketting strategy of the shop to your benefit *grin*
What on earth is wrong with waiting until a sale is on til you buy whatever it is that you have your heart set on?
If it is an urgent purchase that can't wait, then buy it then and there, but if you're happy to wait until whatever it is goes on sale due to it no longer being the newest and shiniest widget, what is wrong with that?
This is penalising people who are swimming against the tide of instant gratification that our credit driven society has pushed.
People have done this from time immemorial in raiding the new years and mid year sales at department stores they don't otherwise shop at
I'm sure these were the same people who objected to the ents in LOTR as trees seldom pick up roots and walk, or pointed out the time travel anomalies in Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban (sp?) with respect to special relativity.
It's called suspending disbelief, and some people, it would appear, are incapable of doing it.
It's a novel idea to brew up your own fuel for the mower (sugar + yeast), along with the alternative "trial runs with various liquors" when not brewing for mower fuel, but the alcohol content in homebrew beer just isn't enough to sustain an internal combustion engine.
mostly as english is a bastardised language with many different roots, and the different spellings for words with the same pronunciation come from the different languages. There is just as much cringe from non-USians at how they mangle many words.
I'm not sure how americans avoid confusion between their meters (which are used to measure things, like a volt-meter or speedometer) and their meters (which are used as a unit of length).
I'm sure someone can come up with some equally odd spelling that the rest of the world uses, but sometimes american spelling makes me smile.
(and I'm fully expecting any typos in this comment to be suitably flamed)
I doubt that this would provide much assistance in FEA as there is the need to keep similar mesh sizes (with localised refinements for extra detail as needed). It has been too long since my analysis courses at university but I don't think this is the silver bullet for making FEA quicker. Most respectable FEA packages are good at meshing in a reasonably sensible manner.
Then again, I'm a structural engineer and most of our stuff is reasonably planar, or curved in a steady fashion with few fiddly bits which would need far more care with meshing.
I do know what you mean though about file sizes. A colleague of mine had a FEA model of a high rise that needed one gig of RAM to run it, without having it going into hard disc swapping.
This is true and can be found at NZ herald story
I agree with your point. As annoying as it would be to see teeny boppers waving their arms around madly to get the latest ascii art up in the air to their buddies, it is not as annoying as people speaking loudly into their phones (what is with the bad design of the microphones in these things that require such raising of the voice?)
If you wanted to communicate to someone in a discrete manner you would sms them or phone them. If you wanted to make an indiscrete communication that would get their attention you could shout to them (they are still within vision range and i doubt that you can read the little LED's at 100 metres), so what void does this feature fill?
I may not be the target market for this, so it could just be my not seeing how these things tend to take on a life of their own beyond the original use.
Given that there are the reports of high percentages of windows installations in Asia are pirated (not govt installations you would have to hope though), going from a situation where the end user pays nothing (or next to nothing in the markets for their Windows OS CD) to having to pay something for a legit OS is not gonig to be popular.
This should be a great selling point for the Asian markets for OSS - pay the same price as you've always paid for your software, but get legitimate software.
I would be interested in seeing the extent to which people with similar training come up with similar solutions based on using the standard toolkit they are accustomed to hauling out for any problem. The other outcome would be of people are sparked into thinking outside the box by the competition not being tied to the "this is the way the company does this sort of thing and so you shall follow this methodology".
Thinking in my own field of engineering, if you gave people problems to solve outside of the work environment you would probably get a far more creative set of solutions than you would if people were set the same problem at work in the context of a project.
I too love the rugged build of the HP32S, and for me it is sad that the replacement HP33S goes so far from the rugged build quality, large enter button, and sensible layout that made it a personal favourite.
Used HP32SII are now going on ebay for far more than they ever sold new
But, if planes had already been invented, any development work on a new model of plane, would be weighed against the economics of the plane, not just the ability to fly or not fly.
Given that fusion is not the only way that we have to generate electricity (and granted that it will take time for economies of scale to be realised) it is not unreasonable to hold up the economics of the generation methodology.
The cost of the lasers and the associated ancillary paraphernalia associated with the fusion plant. If the cost per kWh from the setup and maintenance of the equipment needs to be x cents / kWh and using renewable / clean sources of electricity can generate at x/5 cents / kWh then it wont fly.
Great to see that it is now thought probable that fusion can actually be an energy producer though.
Your points on the home usage of this hard drive make sense in terms of isolating "work" data from "home" data. I think that this same outcome could be achieved with a standard outboard USB hard drive though, and probably at lower cost.
Nobody took it seriously. They had cellphones going off all over the show, including bosses. People even lacked the discretion to use vibrate mode so that it was a discreet breaking of the rules. I think it was instituted due to some localised abuse (people using it excessively on company time), which is fair enough, but could have been dealt with more diplomatically.
They also had a policy that you were not permitted to have music going at your workstation, be it with headphones, or whatever. I work far better when I can shut out the ambient noise of an office. I felt naked without headphones on and it reduced my productivity, but went along with the rules for a while til i noticed nobody really cared if I had my sounds going or not.
Find out why this rule was introduced, and make a judgement call as to whether it is a BS rule that you are happy to break, or if there is a serious reason behind it that would mean you should get formal permission for not following it.
I read of a similiar anecdote with a hewlett packard calculator that got coked, the guy shampooed it, rinsed it out and left it for a few days to dry. Worked fine.
:-)
Didn't recount any cat / dog hair problems though
I stand corrected. I was thinking more of pools where the pool is not cut into the ground or is part of a hotel and is parked a dozen or so stories up. Your points re shotcrete are on the money. The one problem I've encountered with shotcrete is that the quality is very dependent on the applicator, and can be patchy at times. The pool wall that sprung to mind and got me thinking about this application being useful was for an aquarium I commented on with respect to other details where the walls were highly curved.
I just spoke with a colleague and he pointed out that with the development of composite concrete design (carbon fibre, glass fibre, short steel fibres even) that the present use of steel reinforcement in concrete as we know it may well become redundant and this technology become a serious contender for structures larger than domestic sized units. It may take 10 years + for this to take off, but if you could remove the need for steel reinforcement to be placed (and more often than is desirable placed incorrectly) construction could occur more quickly and with more freedom. If you could mix the composite material with the concrete on the fly rather than batching it at a plant, you could dose the concrete accurately with the appropriate levels of composite for the item being "printed".
This is the sort of technology that will take off once fibre composite (fibre glass, carbon fibre) design of concrete is more commonplace. It would largely make reinforcement redundant.
(speaking as one whose working day involves lots of concrete) It may not happen this year, or the next five, but this is where concrete is likely to be headed in the next 20 years.
The desire to have curved pool walls, which cost a fortune in concrete formwork would be where this could make in-roads if it were able to work around reinforcing steel(unreinforced concrete isn't that crash hot for any serious structural works, especially in any areas of seismicity).
Curved walls may well look pretty, but are a nuisance to work around if you are trying to fit beds, couches, tables against them. One of the bonuses of straight walls iwth square corners.