If youâre curious about web development, then youâve likely encountered the abbreviation MVC, which stands for Model-View-Controller. You may know that itâs a common design pattern thatâs fundamental to many Python web frameworks and even desktop applications.
But what exactly does it mean? If youâve had a hard time wrapping your head around the concept, then keep on reading.
In this tutorial, youâll:
Approach understanding the MVC pattern through a Lego-based analogy
Learn what models, views, and controllers are conceptually
Tie your conceptual understanding back to concrete web development examples
Investigate Flask code snippets to drive the point home
Maybe you built things with Lego as a kid, or maybe youâre still a Lego-aficionado today. But even if youâve never pieced two Lego blocks together, keep on reading because the analogy might still be a good building block for your understanding.
Take the Quiz: Test your knowledge with our interactive âModel-View-Controller (MVC) in Python Web Apps: Explained With Legoâ quiz. Upon completion you will receive a score so you can track your learning progress over time:
Explaining the Model-View-Controller Pattern With Lego
Imagine that youâre ten years old and sitting on your family room floor. In front of you is a big bucket of Lego, or similar modular building blocks. There are blocks of all different shapes and sizes:
ð¦ð¦ð¦ Some are blue, tall, and long.
ð¥ Some are red and cube-shaped.
ð¨ð¨ Some are yellow, big, and wide.
With all of these different Lego pieces, thereâs no telling what you could build!
Just as your mind is filling with the endless possibilities, you hear something coming from the direction of the couch. Itâs your older brother, voicing a specific request. Heâs saying, âHey! Build me a spaceship!â
âAlright,â you think, âthat could actually be pretty cool.â A spaceship it is!
So you get to work. You start pulling out the Lego blocks that you think youâre going to need. Some big, some small. Different colors for the outside of the spaceship, different colors for the engines.
Now that you have all of your building blocks in place, itâs time to assemble the spaceship. And after a few hours of hard work, you now have in front of youâa spaceship:
[ Improve Your Python With ð Python Tricks ð â Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]
Power BI services offer unmatched capabilities for gaining actionable and impactful business insights in today’s data-driven world.
As organizations contend with ever-growing data volumes, Power BI empowers them to visualize complex data, uncover meaningful patterns, and make informed strategic decisions.
With intuitive dashboards and interactive reports, Power BI brings data to life – enabling anyone to derive insights without specialized data skills.
This blog post explores the top Power BI services that make data analytics accessible, collaborative, and mobile-friendly. We discuss how Power BI integrates with various data sources, gets enhanced by third-party tools, and streamlines data workflows for organizations.
Additionally, we provide:
Best practices for adoption.
Real-world examples of Power BI success.
Future capabilities like AI integration.
In short, Power BI is the defining analytics solution for forward-thinking businesses looking to amplify the value of their data and transform decision-making. Read on to learn how leading Power BI services can empower your organization with impactful business insights.
Understanding Power BI
Power BI services, offered by Power BI development companies, provide next-generation business intelligence solutions for modern data analytics. It is a compilation of software services, apps, and connectors that allow organizations to easily access, visualize, and analyze data from various sources.
Some critical capabilities of Power BI services include:
Interactive Data Visualization: Create dynamic reports and dashboards to gain data-driven insights. Customize visuals with the latest design features.
Self-Service Analytics: Enable business users to derive insights independently without IT involvement. Simple drag-and-drop report building.
Augmented Analytics: Leverage AI to generate insights automatically. Natural language queries via voice or text.
Unified View of Data: Connect, transform, and combine data from disparate sources, like Excel, SQL databases, etc., into a unified model.
Mobile Business Intelligence: Access analytics via intuitive apps on any device, even offline.
Collaborative Workspaces: Securely share dashboards and reports with other BI users in your organization.
With this potent mix of features for quick, automated, and collaborative insights, it’s clear why Power BI services from a Power BI development company are critical for data-driven decision-making.
In today’s highly competitive and complex business landscape, leveraging data visualization services for advanced analytics is no longer an option but a necessity.
Without the ability to garner meaningful insights from their ever-increasing data, organizations struggle with critical activities like:
Interactive dashboards provide a single source of truth.
AI-powered predictions to guide strategies.
Democratized self-service analytics, reducing dependency on IT.
Unified view of organizational data.
Custom analytics consulting for maximized RoI.
In essence, Power BI services empower every business user with data-driven decision-making – be it senior executives charting growth strategies or field managers monitoring daily operations.
The insights unlocked lead to tangible outcomes like increased productivity, entry into new markets, and achievement of innovation goals.
The Power BI platform offers interconnected services that enable organizations to leverage data analysis and visualize insights with compelling interactive reports. Below are the top Power BI services used by leading businesses:
Power BI Desktop: This free desktop application allows power users to connect data from 100+ sources, transform and cleanse data as well as design rich dashboards and reports. The drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to analyze millions of rows of data with in-memory performance and create polished visuals without coding.
Power BI Service: A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to share interactive reports/dashboards created on the Desktop with users across the organization. This collaborative business intelligence environment allows discussion of insights through commentary. Advanced security features protect sensitive data as users access analytics securely on the web and mobile.
Power BI Mobile: With cross-platform apps for iOS and Android, key business insights can be monitored on the go with optimized dashboards for touch and smaller form factors. Alerts and push notifications enable quick decision-making and field workforce productivity.
Power BI Gateway: This agent can be installed on-premise to access the organization’s data warehouses and other data sources without moving the data. The gateway acts as a bridge to surface internal data securely to the Power BI cloud.
Power BI Paginated Reports: For pixel-perfect, printable, and operational reports, Power BI paginated reports provide flexibility to match specific business needs where interactive exploration may not be required.
To maximize the adoption and ROI of these services, smart businesses hire Microsoft Power BI developers to build tailored solutions aligned with strategic goals.
A key strength of Power BI lies in its extensive connectivity and integration capabilities with various data platforms. Power BI provides standard connectors to import, transform, and enrich data from myriad sources like:
SQL Server
Excel
Analysis Services
Azure Data Lake
Dynamics 365
Google Analytics
Facebook
More than 100 other data sources
Power BI enables a consolidated view by mapping relationships across these multiple data sources. Further, it integrates tightly with other Microsoft analytics services like Azure Analysis Services and SQL Server Reporting Services for enhanced modeling and governance.
Power BI also offers rich capabilities to embed visuals and reports in custom applications through comprehensive APIs. Whether building internal BI portals or client-facing analytics products, technology partners help extend Power BI for specific use cases.
Leading business intelligence consulting company accelerates Power BI adoption by handling complex integration scenarios like migrating from legacy tools or blending data from on-premise and cloud. Smooth data orchestration minimizes disruption while providing users with a unified lens for data-driven decision-making.
With the ability to tap into virtually any data source and build custom extensions, top Microsoft Power BI development companies help future-proof BI investments for the long term.
Best Practices for Maximizing Power BI’s Potential
While Power BI offers a market-leading business analytics platform, thoughtful design and governance are vital to extract the total value. Below are some best practices BI experts share for optimized Power BI deployments:
Establish Clear Roles: Carefully classify personas into consumers who mostly view reports, creators who build visualizations, and administrators who govern data access. Define permissions and capabilities appropriate for each user type to promote self-service insights while managing risk.
Standardize Data Models: Conform dimensions, measures, and parameters using consistent naming conventions and formatting rules for easier discoverability and usability across multiple reports and workspaces. Maintain reusability and consistency.
Promote Reuse: Encourage using certified datasets and templatized reports to accelerate development and adoption. Maintain a centralized repository of approved visuals, custom visuals, and data connections.
Apply Query Reduction Techniques: Leverage innovations like query folding, query caching, incremental refresh, and aggregation to optimize dataflows and workload management. Minimize refreshes.
Set Optimal Refresh Cadence: Balance most current and acceptable stale data depending on evolving business needs. Schedule refreshes during off-peak usage times.
Embrace Continuous Performance Testing: Rigorously load test dashboards and reports early in development and repeatedly uncover and fix issues. Profile usage patterns and data volumes for right-sizing capacity.
Power BI undoubtedly delivers immense data-driven benefits, but working with a competent BI consulting partner to craft thoughtful solutions centered on these best practices unlocks its potential for significant ROI.
The true measure of any technology ultimately lies in tangible outcomes delivered for real-world businesses. Power BI services have helped leading organizations across industries transform decision-making, unify reporting, and reduce costs. Below are some stellar examples:
Microsoft leveraged Power BI to gain deep customer intelligence and product insights. By embedding interactive reports and dashboards into internal portals, they reduced time spent in manual reporting by over $250K yearly. Optimized business discovery accelerated decision-making across the organization.
DHL Supply Chain unified operational visibility and transformed management insights using Power BI dashboards blending data from multiple legacy ERP, WMS, and IoT systems. Integrated logistics monitoring reduced order processing time by 16% while increasing warehouse throughput by 13% globally.
Coca-Cola European Partners consolidated scattered sales metrics into an automated self-service Power BI experience. Streamlined analytics strengthened its customer relationships and inventory management, resulting in an 18% sales growth in 2 years.
Adobe tapped into Power BI’s AI capabilities to analyze marketing campaign performance and audience engagement data. Data-driven campaign optimization helped increase conversion rates by 25%, translating to over $60 million in annual revenue.
As these industry leaders exemplify, Power BI services deliver material benefits when leveraging its vast data connectivity and compelling visualization capabilities – turning reports into strategic assets.
Behind these Power BI wins have been competent top BI implementation services specialists driving end-to-end solution delivery aligned with business strategy. Their expertise in data modeling, visualization best practices, and performance optimization unlocks maximum business value.
Indeed, with the right deployment guidance, Power BI data visualization services and analytics consulting unlock data-driven growth opportunities, offering very tangible and industry-leading RoI.
The Business Intelligence market is forecasted to achieve a worth of $33.3 billion by the year 2025, according to Markets and Markets projections.
The innovation pace at Microsoft ensures Power BI continues its market dominance in analytics and business intelligence. Some exciting areas where Power BI services are headed:
Augmented BI: Instead of just visualization, expect AI-powered solutions that provide deeper and automatic insights, recommend data-backed actions, and guide users to optimal business outcomes.
Conversational experiences through natural language and voice-first interactions will gain prominence, allowing business users to ask questions in plain language and receive automated responses and supporting visuals.
Enhanced Collaboration: Real-time co-authoring capabilities, @mentions, and richer commenting features will integrate Power BI workflows with Microsoft Teams and Office 365 experiences, enabling frictionless analytics sharing. This will break down silos and amplify user-generated insights.
Big Data Integration: First-class support for emerging data sources like Spark, Hadoop, and streaming datasets will empower tapping into vast volumes of structured and unstructured data for patterns and correlations without requiring data movement. Power BI will continue democratizing big data analytics for business users.
Hybrid and Embedded Analytics: The gateway and dataflow architecture will continue maturing to simplify access and unification of cloud and on-prem data sources, especially dynamic operational data. Standardization of Power BI embedded analytics, and APIs will accelerate the development of custom BI solutions.
As Microsoft invests billions in cloud and AI research annually, organizations will gain exponentially from combining Power Platform strengths like Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate to solve business problems innovatively.
Partners skilled in the latest analytics methodologies and dashboard best practices help maximize these data-driven benefits.
Conclusion
Due to its uncompromising capabilities, power BI has rapidly become the defining business intelligence and analytics platform. With intuitive visualizations, augmented analytics, and collaborative workspaces, Power BI services empower organizations to uncover game-changing insights from data.
Unlock your enterprise’s potential for Power BI by leveraging Power BI services like Power BI Desktop, Mobile Reports, and AI Insights.
Ensure success by partnering with competent Microsoft Gold Partners, which offers full-spectrum analytics consulting and development.
Future-proof your analytics investments with innovative BI solutions integrated with Dynamics 365, Azure ML, and Power Platform.
Power BI services offer unmatched capabilities for gaining actionable and impactful business insights in today’s data-driven world.
As organizations contend with ever-growing data volumes, Power BI empowers them to visualize complex data, uncover meaningful patterns, and make informed strategic decisions.
With intuitive dashboards and interactive reports, Power BI brings data to life – enabling anyone to derive insights without specialized data skills.
This blog post explores the top Power BI services that make data analytics accessible, collaborative, and mobile-friendly. We discuss how Power BI integrates with various data sources, gets enhanced by third-party tools, and streamlines data workflows for organizations.
Additionally, we provide:
Best practices for adoption.
Real-world examples of Power BI success.
Future capabilities like AI integration.
In short, Power BI is the defining analytics solution for forward-thinking businesses looking to amplify the value of their data and transform decision-making. Read on to learn how leading Power BI services can empower your organization with impactful business insights.
Understanding Power BI
Power BI services, offered by Power BI development companies, provide next-generation business intelligence solutions for modern data analytics. It is a compilation of software services, apps, and connectors that allow organizations to easily access, visualize, and analyze data from various sources.
Some critical capabilities of Power BI services include:
Interactive Data Visualization: Create dynamic reports and dashboards to gain data-driven insights. Customize visuals with the latest design features.
Self-Service Analytics: Enable business users to derive insights independently without IT involvement. Simple drag-and-drop report building.
Augmented Analytics: Leverage AI to generate insights automatically. Natural language queries via voice or text.
Unified View of Data: Connect, transform, and combine data from disparate sources, like Excel, SQL databases, etc., into a unified model.
Mobile Business Intelligence: Access analytics via intuitive apps on any device, even offline.
Collaborative Workspaces: Securely share dashboards and reports with other BI users in your organization.
With this potent mix of features for quick, automated, and collaborative insights, it’s clear why Power BI services from a Power BI development company are critical for data-driven decision-making.
In today’s highly competitive and complex business landscape, leveraging data visualization services for advanced analytics is no longer an option but a necessity.
Without the ability to garner meaningful insights from their ever-increasing data, organizations struggle with critical activities like:
Interactive dashboards provide a single source of truth.
AI-powered predictions to guide strategies.
Democratized self-service analytics, reducing dependency on IT.
Unified view of organizational data.
Custom analytics consulting for maximized RoI.
In essence, Power BI services empower every business user with data-driven decision-making – be it senior executives charting growth strategies or field managers monitoring daily operations.
The insights unlocked lead to tangible outcomes like increased productivity, entry into new markets, and achievement of innovation goals.
The Power BI platform offers interconnected services that enable organizations to leverage data analysis and visualize insights with compelling interactive reports. Below are the top Power BI services used by leading businesses:
Power BI Desktop: This free desktop application allows power users to connect data from 100+ sources, transform and cleanse data as well as design rich dashboards and reports. The drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to analyze millions of rows of data with in-memory performance and create polished visuals without coding.
Power BI Service: A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to share interactive reports/dashboards created on the Desktop with users across the organization. This collaborative business intelligence environment allows discussion of insights through commentary. Advanced security features protect sensitive data as users access analytics securely on the web and mobile.
Power BI Mobile: With cross-platform apps for iOS and Android, key business insights can be monitored on the go with optimized dashboards for touch and smaller form factors. Alerts and push notifications enable quick decision-making and field workforce productivity.
Power BI Gateway: This agent can be installed on-premise to access the organization’s data warehouses and other data sources without moving the data. The gateway acts as a bridge to surface internal data securely to the Power BI cloud.
Power BI Paginated Reports: For pixel-perfect, printable, and operational reports, Power BI paginated reports provide flexibility to match specific business needs where interactive exploration may not be required.
To maximize the adoption and ROI of these services, smart businesses hire Microsoft Power BI developers to build tailored solutions aligned with strategic goals.
A key strength of Power BI lies in its extensive connectivity and integration capabilities with various data platforms. Power BI provides standard connectors to import, transform, and enrich data from myriad sources like:
SQL Server
Excel
Analysis Services
Azure Data Lake
Dynamics 365
Google Analytics
Facebook
More than 100 other data sources
Power BI enables a consolidated view by mapping relationships across these multiple data sources. Further, it integrates tightly with other Microsoft analytics services like Azure Analysis Services and SQL Server Reporting Services for enhanced modeling and governance.
Power BI also offers rich capabilities to embed visuals and reports in custom applications through comprehensive APIs. Whether building internal BI portals or client-facing analytics products, technology partners help extend Power BI for specific use cases.
Leading business intelligence consulting company accelerates Power BI adoption by handling complex integration scenarios like migrating from legacy tools or blending data from on-premise and cloud. Smooth data orchestration minimizes disruption while providing users with a unified lens for data-driven decision-making.
With the ability to tap into virtually any data source and build custom extensions, top Microsoft Power BI development companies help future-proof BI investments for the long term.
Best Practices for Maximizing Power BI’s Potential
While Power BI offers a market-leading business analytics platform, thoughtful design and governance are vital to extract the total value. Below are some best practices BI experts share for optimized Power BI deployments:
Establish Clear Roles: Carefully classify personas into consumers who mostly view reports, creators who build visualizations, and administrators who govern data access. Define permissions and capabilities appropriate for each user type to promote self-service insights while managing risk.
Standardize Data Models: Conform dimensions, measures, and parameters using consistent naming conventions and formatting rules for easier discoverability and usability across multiple reports and workspaces. Maintain reusability and consistency.
Promote Reuse: Encourage using certified datasets and templatized reports to accelerate development and adoption. Maintain a centralized repository of approved visuals, custom visuals, and data connections.
Apply Query Reduction Techniques: Leverage innovations like query folding, query caching, incremental refresh, and aggregation to optimize dataflows and workload management. Minimize refreshes.
Set Optimal Refresh Cadence: Balance most current and acceptable stale data depending on evolving business needs. Schedule refreshes during off-peak usage times.
Embrace Continuous Performance Testing: Rigorously load test dashboards and reports early in development and repeatedly uncover and fix issues. Profile usage patterns and data volumes for right-sizing capacity.
Power BI undoubtedly delivers immense data-driven benefits, but working with a competent BI consulting partner to craft thoughtful solutions centered on these best practices unlocks its potential for significant ROI.
The true measure of any technology ultimately lies in tangible outcomes delivered for real-world businesses. Power BI services have helped leading organizations across industries transform decision-making, unify reporting, and reduce costs. Below are some stellar examples:
Microsoft leveraged Power BI to gain deep customer intelligence and product insights. By embedding interactive reports and dashboards into internal portals, they reduced time spent in manual reporting by over $250K yearly. Optimized business discovery accelerated decision-making across the organization.
DHL Supply Chain unified operational visibility and transformed management insights using Power BI dashboards blending data from multiple legacy ERP, WMS, and IoT systems. Integrated logistics monitoring reduced order processing time by 16% while increasing warehouse throughput by 13% globally.
Coca-Cola European Partners consolidated scattered sales metrics into an automated self-service Power BI experience. Streamlined analytics strengthened its customer relationships and inventory management, resulting in an 18% sales growth in 2 years.
Adobe tapped into Power BI’s AI capabilities to analyze marketing campaign performance and audience engagement data. Data-driven campaign optimization helped increase conversion rates by 25%, translating to over $60 million in annual revenue.
As these industry leaders exemplify, Power BI services deliver material benefits when leveraging its vast data connectivity and compelling visualization capabilities – turning reports into strategic assets.
Behind these Power BI wins have been competent top BI implementation services specialists driving end-to-end solution delivery aligned with business strategy. Their expertise in data modeling, visualization best practices, and performance optimization unlocks maximum business value.
Indeed, with the right deployment guidance, Power BI data visualization services and analytics consulting unlock data-driven growth opportunities, offering very tangible and industry-leading RoI.
The Business Intelligence market is forecasted to achieve a worth of $33.3 billion by the year 2025, according to Markets and Markets projections.
The innovation pace at Microsoft ensures Power BI continues its market dominance in analytics and business intelligence. Some exciting areas where Power BI services are headed:
Augmented BI: Instead of just visualization, expect AI-powered solutions that provide deeper and automatic insights, recommend data-backed actions, and guide users to optimal business outcomes.
Conversational experiences through natural language and voice-first interactions will gain prominence, allowing business users to ask questions in plain language and receive automated responses and supporting visuals.
Enhanced Collaboration: Real-time co-authoring capabilities, @mentions, and richer commenting features will integrate Power BI workflows with Microsoft Teams and Office 365 experiences, enabling frictionless analytics sharing. This will break down silos and amplify user-generated insights.
Big Data Integration: First-class support for emerging data sources like Spark, Hadoop, and streaming datasets will empower tapping into vast volumes of structured and unstructured data for patterns and correlations without requiring data movement. Power BI will continue democratizing big data analytics for business users.
Hybrid and Embedded Analytics: The gateway and dataflow architecture will continue maturing to simplify access and unification of cloud and on-prem data sources, especially dynamic operational data. Standardization of Power BI embedded analytics, and APIs will accelerate the development of custom BI solutions.
As Microsoft invests billions in cloud and AI research annually, organizations will gain exponentially from combining Power Platform strengths like Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate to solve business problems innovatively.
Partners skilled in the latest analytics methodologies and dashboard best practices help maximize these data-driven benefits.
Conclusion
Due to its uncompromising capabilities, power BI has rapidly become the defining business intelligence and analytics platform. With intuitive visualizations, augmented analytics, and collaborative workspaces, Power BI services empower organizations to uncover game-changing insights from data.
Unlock your enterprise’s potential for Power BI by leveraging Power BI services like Power BI Desktop, Mobile Reports, and AI Insights.
Ensure success by partnering with competent Microsoft Gold Partners, which offers full-spectrum analytics consulting and development.
Future-proof your analytics investments with innovative BI solutions integrated with Dynamics 365, Azure ML, and Power Platform.
Databricks CTO Matei Zaharia "said that Databricks had to keep track of scheduling a million things," remembers adjunct MIT professor Michael Stonebraker. " He said that this can’t be done with traditional operating system scheduling, and so this was done out of a Postgres database. And then he started to whine that Postgres was too slow, and I told him we can do better than that…." This resulted in DBOS — short for "database operating system" — which they teamed up to build with teams Stanford and MIT, according to The Next Platform:
They founded a company to commercialize the idea in April 2023 and secured $8.5 million initial seed funding to start building the real DBOS. Engine Ventures and Construct Capital led the funding, along with Sinewave and GutBrain Ventures… "The state that the operating system has to keep track of — memory, files, messages, and so on — is approximately linear to the resources you have got," says Stonebraker. "So without me saying another word, keeping track of operating system state is a database problem not addressed by current operating system schedulers. Moreover, OLTP [Online Transaction Processing] database performance has gone up dramatically, and that is why we thought instead of running the database system in user space on top of the operating system, why don’t we invert our thinking 180 degrees and run the operating system on top of the database, with all of the operating services are coded in SQL…?" For now, DBOS can give the same kind of performance as that full blown Linux operating system, and thanks to the distributed database underpinnings of its kernel, it can do things that a Linux kernel just cannot do… One is provide reliable execution, which means that if a program running atop DBOS is ever interrupted, it starts where it left off and does not have to redo its work from some arbitrary earlier point and does not crash and have to start from the beginning. And because every little bit of the state of the operating system — and therefore the applications that run atop it — is preserved, you can go backwards in time in the system and restart the operating system if it experiences some sort of anomaly, such as a bad piece of application software running or a hack attack. You can use this "time travel" feature, as Stonebraker calls it, to reproduce what are called heisenbugs — ones that are very hard to reproduce precisely because there is no shared state in the distributed Linux and Kubernetes environment and that are increasingly prevalent in a world of microservices. The other benefit of the DBOS is that it presents a smaller attack surface for hackers, which boosts security, and that you analyze the metrics of the operating system in place since they are already in a NoSQL database that can be queried rather than aggregating a bunch of log files from up and down the software stack to try to figure out what is going on… There is also a custom tier for DBOS, which we presume costs money, that can use other databases and datastores for user application data, stores more than three days of log data, can have multiple users per account, that adds email and Slack support with DBOS techies, and that is available on other clouds as well as AWS. The operating system kernel/scheduler "is itself largely a database," with services written in TypeScript, according to the article. The first iteration used the FoundationDB distributed key-value store for its scheduling core (open sourced by Apple in 2018), according to the article — "a blazingly fast NoSQL database… Stonebraker says there is no reason to believe that DBOS can’t scale across 1 million cores or more and support Java, Python, and other application languages as they are needed by customers…" And the article speculates they could take things even further. "There is no reason why DBOS cannot complete the circle and not only have a database as an operating system kernel, but also have a relational database as the file system for applications."
We’ve covered some of this before, but here’s a nice roundup of why Russia’s major weapons systems suck. It’s a handy tour through the world of over-promised, under-performing vaporwear.
“Before February 24th, 2022, the Russian Federation looked like it would deploy or soon be able to field some pretty formidable new weapons.” At least among those who hadn’t noticed Russia’s previous vaporware claims.
“In everything from fifth generation fighter jets to modern tanks, to new body armor and even tsunami-causing nuclear torpedoes, there was enough hype to make even informed Western national security experts worry about what they were seeing.”
“Little wonder that they believed Ukraine would fall in days in the months prior to the invasion. Those predictions did not turn out to be the case. And now two years later, Russia still finds itself fighting a war of attrition with no end in sight.”
It covers Russia’s one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, how it’s been under repairs since 2018, is markedly less technologically advanced than American carriers, and how it has a history of corruption as well. It”s supposed to enter service again this year. I wouldn’t count on it.
Admiral Kuznetsov isn’t Russia’s only naval problem. “It is steadily retiring its Soviet-era ships and replacing them with lighter, less combat-worthy vessels.”
There’s the new, formidable (on paper) Lider-class destroyers, first unveiled in 2015 and capable of using a host of advanced new weapons. Tiny problem: “On paper” is the only place you can see them, since they haven’t started building them yet.
Then there’s “the Belgorod submarine, and particularly its Poseidon Torpedo, are two other items of hype in the Russian Navy that don’t seem to stand up to scrutiny. The Belgorod and Poseidon have often been items of fear in Western media and national security circles, which have nicknamed the former Russia’s ‘Doomsday Submarine.’”
“According to the Kremlin’s hype, the submarine and its arsenal of smart drone Poseidon torpedoes can unleash a 100 megaton yield capable of creating radioactive tsunamis that would inundate coastal communities and make them unlivable.”
“However, tests of the Poseidon have seemingly proven less than satisfactory. That shouldn’t be too surprising, because for the Poseidon torpedo to work as the Russians claim, it would need to be able to house all of the equipment needed for a nuclear reactor to convert atomic fission into electricity and propulsive force, while ensuring negligible waste heat (to avoid detection). It would also need the hardware to shield its sensitive electronics from the nuclear fission process.”
“Unfortunately for Moscow, the torpedo is too small to do this, meaning that it is either an object of hype or Russian engineers have come upon a technological leap enabling exotic engineering methods. We’ll let you decide which of the two scenarios is likelier.”
“The likeliest scenario is a yield of about one to two megatons per torpedo, which would be enough to inundate a coastal area with dangerous radioactive waters, but not to create a tsunami.” And the hundred knot speed is also bunk for numerous technical reasons.
“We now journey from the sea to the skies and look at the Russian answer to the American fifth generation F-22 and F-35 fighter jets – the Su-57 Felon. To be fair, the Su-57 does have some impressive features, like its 3D thrust vectoring engines, climb rate of 64,000 feet per minute, 66,000-foot service ceiling, Mach 2 speed, and range of 2,186 miles without refueling. In a plane vs. plane battle, the Su-57 should be a capable opponent against almost any fighter jet on the planet.”
“However, the Su-57 has a big drawback – its comparative lack of stealth. Aviation experts regard the Su-57 as being by far the least stealthy of the fifth generation fighters currently in service. For example, the F-22 Raptor is detectable at a range only under 10 miles, while the Su-57 would be detectable at a range of 35 miles.”
“Its stealth features are also concentrated in the front of the plane, meaning that if it turns or maneuvers, it is far more detectable.” Good thing fighter aircraft never need to turn or maneuver…
“Some aviation experts are even less kind and believe the Su-57’s radar cross section is similar to that of the F/A-18 Super Hornet, which is 1,000 times less stealthy than the F-35 Lightning II.”
“The Su-57 has played little part in the war in Ukraine, as the Russian aerospace forces have refused to field it in Ukrainian airspace. Instead, it has only attacked targets at long range from within Russian airspace.”
Then there’s the ridiculously low production rate. “The Kremlin ordered 76 Su-57s in 2019. 22 are in service as of December 2023, after several years of delays.” And we only have Russia’s word that they’ve produced that many. The real total could be lower. By contrast, Lockheed Martin has produced over 1,000 F-35s.
Next it’s a familiar punching bag, the T-14 Armata. “To be fair, the T-14 Armata does have significant improvements over the tanks Russia has usually fielded in Ukraine – the T-72, T-80, and T-90. These tanks have been lost in their thousands during the fighting in Ukraine, thanks to bad doctrine and their own design flaws. Because they do not segregate their ammunition magazines in a sealed compartment, they have often suffered from complete destruction with jack-in-the-box explosions.”
“The T-14 Armata mitigates this flaw with a protective capsule isolating the crew from their vehicle’s ammunition magazine.”
Unfortunately, the video goes on to say the T-14 has a low profile, which simply isn’t true. As I’ve noted before, the T-14 is 3.3 meters high vs. 2.44 meters for the M1A2, 3 meters for the Leopard 2, and 2.49 for the Challenger 2. 3.3 meters is higher even than the World War II M3 Lee tank the Soviets (who got them via Lend-Lease) called “a coffin for seven brothers.”
“The Armata’s main weapon is a 125mm 2A82-1M smoothbore gun which can fire related rounds and laser-guided missiles. This weapon would be a significant threat to the Western main battle tanks that Ukraine began fielding in larger numbers last year.” The “large numbers” are pretty small numbers.
“Unfortunately for Russia, this gun is not backward-compatible with its older tanks, which means only the Armata can field it, and that’s a problem, because there has never been a confirmed sighting of the T-14 in Ukraine. Russia has even fewer T-14 Armata tanks than it does Su-57 fighter jets.”
There follows a discussion of the T-14’s X-shaped engine that has evidently engendered a lively debate online, so I’m not going to get into it here.
“Meanwhile, the electronics for the Armata’s sensory and fire control systems are no longer as widely available due to the sanctions put in place as a result of its invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, there has not even been an assembly line built for the Armata and all of the prototypes have been made by hand. Given all of these problems, don’t expect to see the Armata fielded in large numbers, if at all, anytime soon.”
“Russia’s body armor has also been a subject of embarrassment. Many of Russia’s soldiers, especially the conscripts Putin mobilized in the autumn of 2022, have lacked proper protection. Infamously, some Russian troops were issued airsoft versions of the Ratnik body armor. Despite its problems in this area, Russia has made bold claims about what it has coming down the pike – its next-generation Sotnik body armor, which it says will be able to stop a .50 caliber Browning Machine Gun round.” Yeah, no.
We’re not even going to bother with the MiG-41, which doesn’t exist yet. Vaporware all the way down.
It’s always safest to assume that the latest Russian wunderwaffen is vaporware unless proven otherwise.
Longtime Slashdot reader ahbond shares a report from VentureBeat: Today, Cognition, a recently formed AI startup backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and tech industry leaders including former Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu, announced a fully autonomous AI software engineer called "Devin." While there are multiple coding assistants out there, including the famous Github Copilot, Devin is said to stand out from the crowd with its ability to handle entire development projects end-to-end, right from writing the code and fixing the bugs associated with it to final execution. This is the first offering of this kind and even capable of handling projects on Upwork, the startup has demonstrated. […]
In a blog post today on Cognition’s website, Scott Wu, the founder and CEO of Cognition and an award-winning sports coder, explained Devin can access common developer tools, including its own shell, code editor and browser, within a sandboxed compute environment to plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions. The human user simply types a natural language prompt into Devin’s chatbot style interface, and the AI software engineer takes it from there, developing a detailed, step-by-step plan to tackle the problem. It then begins the project using its developer tools, just like how a human would use them, writing its own code, fixing issues, testing and reporting on its progress in real-time, allowing the user to keep an eye on everything as it works. […]
According to demos shared by Wu, Devin is capable of handling a range of tasks in its current form. This includes common engineering projects like deploying and improving apps/websites end-to-end and finding and fixing bugs in codebases to more complex things like setting up fine-tuning for a large language model using the link to a research repository on GitHub or learning how to use unfamiliar technologies. In one case, it learned from a blog post how to run the code to produce images with concealed messages. Meanwhile, in another, it handled an Upwork project to run a computer vision model by writing and debugging the code for it. In the SWE-bench test, which challenges AI assistants with GitHub issues from real-world open-source projects, the AI software engineer was able to correctly resolve 13.86% of the cases end-to-end — without any assistance from humans. In comparison, Claude 2 could resolve just 4.80% while SWE-Llama-13b and GPT-4 could handle 3.97% and 1.74% of the issues, respectively. All these models even required assistance, where they were told which file had to be fixed. Currently, Devin is available only to a select few customers. Bloomberg journalist Ashlee Vance wrote a piece about his experience using it here.
"The Doom of Man is at hand," captions Slashdot reader ahbond. "It will start with the low-hanging Jira tickets, and in a year or two, able to handle 99% of them. In the short term, software engineers may become like bot farmers, herding 10-1000 bots writing code, etc. Welcome to the future."
Leaders of the Buckeye Firearms Association will be on hand this weekend at the Open Seasons Sportsman’s Expo.
The weekend-long expo, to be held inside the Bricker Building at the Ohio Expo Center & State Fair, will feature the latest in outdoor gear from national and regional exhibitors, hands-on demonstration opportunities, numerous entertainment and educational seminars with industry experts, and special guests.
Other attractions include deer exhibits, archery trick shooting, field-to-fork cooking demos, and a 3D archery competition.
Look for BFA leaders at booth 514, between Benning Distributing and Deer IQ.
Event hours are 2 to 7 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday. The expo center is at 717 E. 17th Ave. in Columbus.
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Blue lasers
I spend too many hours a day watching YouTubes. Many of the channels I subscribe to produce content as good as or better than anything produced by PBS, cable TV, and your average documentary. For free. For a fantastic example of world class content on YouTube watch this Veritasium episode on Blue Lasers. Turns out blue lasers were “impossible” to create, but after decades of an insane amount of work by one crazy guy in Japan, they are now possible and all the cheap screens we have in our lives now are due to him. Veritasium tells this amazing human story, with heaps of illuminating technical detail on why blue lasers were nearly impossible and how they work, all in a brilliant 33 minutes.— KK
Pocket guide to understanding a camera
I gave my wife a camera for Christmas. It has an auto-setting, but she wanted to learn how to operate it manually. We were initially puzzled by terms like ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. Then I stumbled upon a PDF guide from Humburger Fotospots that demystifies these concepts with simple icons and explanations. I printed it out and stored it in the camera case. — MF
View images of Earth in real time
The GOES Image Viewer hosts the most up-to-date real time images of Earth available to the public. You can view and download satellite images that capture the entire visible disk of Earth and are updated every 10 to 15 minutes. I don’t know much about meteorology or geoscience, but I am an Earth lover, and it’s fascinating to be able to visualize weather patterns on a global scale. — CD
Galactic compass
If you train yourself to pay attention to your surroundings you should be able to immediately point north without too much thinking. The next-level awareness is to point to the center of the galaxy at any time. Because the earth rotates during the day and orbits during the year, this direction changes constantly. You’ll need an app to help you. Galactic Compass is a free iPhone app that does only one thing: points toward the center of the galaxy. — KK
Typography Guide
If you’re like me and would like to know more about fonts than just serif and san-serif, here is a cool guide to check out: The Logo Company’s Guide to Typography and Fonts. It breaks down the entire anatomy of fonts. — CD
Ryan Holiday’s career wisdom
Writer and entrepreneur Ryan Holiday has had a varied career, from Hollywood agent assistant to marketing director for American Apparel. He’s put together a list of 37 pieces of hard-fought career advice that’s useful for anyone who works. Examples:
Find what nobody else wants to do and do it. Find inefficiency and waste and redundancies. Identify leaks and patches to free up resources for new areas. Produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away.
Always say less than necessary. Saying less than necessary, not interjecting at every chance we get — this is actually the mark not just of a self-disciplined person, but also a very smart and wise person.
Your creative output, your personal relationships, and your social life—balancing all three is impossible. You can excel in two if you say no to one. If you can’t, you’ll have none.
When people compete, somebody loses. So go where you’re the only one. Do what only you can do. Run a race with yourself.
