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World's Worst Dog'n'Pony Shows
Thanks to coli for passing along last Thursday's press release from VisuaLABS. This is a company that has been telling investors that they have what they call "GroutFree(tm)" technology, which joins multiple LCD screens invisibly into one, large, flat screen.
On July 3rd, investors were wowed by the demo of the company's "42 inch diagonal flat screen display" prototype. Sheldon Zelitt, VisuaLABS' Chairman and Chief Scientist, said, "It was our great pleasure to share an early look at that technology with our loyal shareholders at the Shareholders' Meeting."
And on July 26th, we got another press release -- this one titled "VisuaLABS Announces That Its Primary Technologies Are Not As Represented And Dismisses Sheldon Zelitt." It turns out that "the large screen GroutFree prototype demonstrated at the Annual Meeting was, in fact, a standard 42 inch plasma television purchased by Sheldon Zelitt ... at a local Calgary consumer electronics retailer ... The Committee believes that no working prototype of a device incorporating the GroutFree technology exists."
While all this was going on, the Pentagon was busy launching two missiles and making them smack into each other. This is the missile defense justification, the one scientists say can't be done, the umbrella that will protect the U.S. and its allies from all those Third World dictators who just have to deliver their nuclear warheads the hard way.
The big test came on July 14, when a target missile (avoiding mishaps) was launched and successfully blown to pieces by its interceptor. Bush was "pleased." CNN showed us the debris radar. And Michael Kelly of the Washington Post stuck it to the "liberal critics," pointing out that "The 'Smart People' Were Wrong." As he wrote:
"In the blink of a video screen going blinding white on July 14, it became impossible to offhandedly disdain a missile defense system as 'weapons that don't work.' It does work."
Yep! So phase one of our missile defense plan is complete. Now we go on to phase two, which is to convince all our enemies to install GPS transmitters in all their missiles.
Oh, you didn't know the test missile had a GPS transmitter on board? Well, you do now.
My favorite part is that the test missile actually launched a Mylar balloon as "chaff" to try to fool the "kill vehicle." Luckily, the balloon didn't have GPS.
So what's your favorite dog'n'pony story? Ever had a demo fail in some especially embarrassing way? Ever cheated? Ever get caught? C'mon, you can tell us...
Update: 08/01 08:00 PM by J : I'm seeing a lot of discussion of the relevance of the GPS. Here's Defense Week which claims the "prototype interceptor was able to find a target warhead partly because the target signaled its location to the interceptor for much of the flight, and the transmissions formed the basis of the targeting orders."
And thanks as always to Slashdot readers for posting more information. monopole points out this link, or take your pick, this one -- they're plans from last year, but still interesting:
SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: And we take the GPS data, and we fuzz it up quite honestly, because GPS is a lot more accurate than radars. Okay? [...]
Q: Well, actually, would you then use the degraded GPS, or would you just the regular GPS that you use as a fallback -- (inaudible word)?
SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: (Inaudible.)
STAFF: Use the regular GPS.
SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Regular GPS.
So, I guess that is close but is better put in the 'pathetically lied to all its fans for close to a year' and 'stupidly whined about market saturation of MMORPG's but yet switched to the uber-saturated RTS market'
I was poking at the Grade servers at my school a while ago and found that if I set my username as the idiot from the school board I could connect to all of the Admin and System shares on the NT servers and have administrative privileges. I hollered at our CompSci instructor (a real hoopy frood) and, after a hearty laugh, we decided to call up said idiot. He came with a friend, I started my demo and it failed. He grinned, I cursed softly, and CompSci ran Idiot off......Later I found that I had mistyped the domain (PLAIO instead of PLATO[connecting via a W95 x-server, the text was fuzzy]), we showed this to the other guy and he took care of it. Idiot left his password blank. BTW, Idiot is the county technology director....
Best I ever saw was for Newtek at a Macworld show. I kept asking about the hardware but they kept hedging. I told them I know there was some because the Amiga had it. They finally showed me the Amiga with a serial cable to the Mac running the show. th
Oh man that is classic - will have to remember that one! I sure hope he got a promotion out of it :)
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
If that's true then
1. Why did the military apparently try to hide it?
2. What is the production model going to use to get an initial trajectory?
Not looking for flames, just responses thanx.
This is a bowel disruptor, and you are just full of shit. - Spider Jerusalem
I had built a 4 legged robot with 2 motors on each for a total of 8 motors. It was controlled by an HC11 with some 1000+ lines of assembly. By all debugging information I had it was thinking the right things and trying to make the legs move in a way that should walk. All that it did was move incoherently.
So, I told all the judges that it was thinking the right thing and I just couldn't figure out what was wrong and it probably needed just a little more debugging.
After the fair I took it home, unscrewed all the wires and re-connected the motors to controllers and suddely it worked. I had just had a few motors connected to wrong controllers or backwards.
Doh!
Start Running Better Polls
Over Macho Grande?
Hey, as long as we're on the topic of Microsoft, who remembers the infamous X-Box screenshots brought to you by the good folks at Adobe? :P
The original source of the GPS Beacon information is here (http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2000/x01142000 _xbck0114.html) and http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/security/has1 80000.000/has180000_0.htm ) in essence a turbocharged Automatic Position Reporting System (APRS) is incorporated and supposedly "fuzzed up" to simulate X-Band radar that is not deployed at Kuaj.
m l) and that is not using military p-code (the encrypted precision code available to the DOD) sequences. When you consider relative positioning it gets even better in that systematic errors in the carrier signal can be eliminated.
NASA Blackjack GPS recievers can achieve 1 in accuracy (as per http://slashdot.org/articles/00/12/18/0023230.sht
Even if we limit ourselves to a fast APRS beacon operating with P-Code accuracy we can construct a very accurate Kalman filter model once the test vehicle has exited the atmosphere. Remember, once we get out of the atmosphere the trajectory is purely deterministic, and each position and velocity fix derived from the GPS reciever refines the overall estimate of the trajectory (Check out section 9.7 of Fundamentals of Astrodynamics and Applications by D.A. Vallado for details). In this case, each fix refines the estimate of the trajectory and thus the predicted location of the target at the intercept point. This narrows the targets position to a very small range of positions and velocities for the kill vehicle to search (much smaller than that provided by x-band radar) to direct the kill vehicle towards. Does the kill vehicle have to handle the last few hundred meters? Probably so, but only after a huge leg up from the GPS beacon.
BTW: A related comment speculated that the target contained a GPS transmitter effectively making the unit a pseudolite. But then rejected the possibility since that would require an atomic clock. While I suspect that mouning a pseudolite beacon on the target would be guilding the lily, compact and lightwieght rubiduim atomic clocks are commonly available on the commercial market(http://www.temex.ch/mcmanu.htm)
oh, please. SCUDs are not IBMs.
They aren't Dells, Compaqs, Suns or SGI's, either. I'm pretty sure they are a Russian thing.
Or did you mean ICBM?
Since when do we trust salon.com to post valid, technical information. Here is the truth about it.
.000045 second per foot of target diameter to hit it.
Consider the fact that at 15000 miles per hour (22000 feet per second) that the interceptor has just
No matter how you predict the coordinates of the target, you will have to be exactly at x, y, z at the exact time required to hit it.
Remember that we hit the target at almost a 90 degree angle.
The transmission loop time for the GPS to tell where the target was "X" time ago will become too large.
We have a GPS satellite watching the launch and telling us its trajectory. However the interceptor has all kinds of radar, infrared, abc, xyz, and visual detectors to see the target anyway.
We don't need no stinking GPS to hit it.
That would be like using GPS to parallel park your car. It is nuts.
We do want the data from GPS after the hit to analyze each data point of the intercept.
Since when do people conduct experiments without collection massive amounts of data? Anything within reason is collected.
Bzzt Whir Click
You're missing the point -- it's not designed to protect against "full-scale nuclear attacks".
Think a) accidental launches, which aren't terribly implausible from the ex-Sovs (they came darn close a few times), b) unauthorized launches (local commander has a personal vendetta -- the Jack Ripper scenario, only with missiles instead of bombers), and c) terrorists, who generally can't buy hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles, as they're not exactly sold in bulk.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
When you do a test like this, you don't do it just to get the binary answer of "did it hit?" You want complete telemetry on both missiles to find out exactly what happened, what went right, what went wrong. That the seeker missile would get to take advantage of the telemetry would be ridiculous and a grand scandal.
But YOU know and I know that there were BILLIONS of dollars on the line and the only thing getting reported in the national media was "success" or "failure".
There are dozens of parts to a system like this. Quick: which ones were tested?
We don't know. We don't care. USA Today says "It's GOOD!" and we believe them.
I wouldn't put it past anyone to falsify these tests.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
At the risk of flogging this horse... I could see this being a reasonable thing to try, since historically a number of air-to-air missiles have been converted into surface-to-air ones (the MIM-72 Chaparral, an adaptation of the AIM-9 Sidewinder; and the RIM-7 Sea Sparrow, an adaptation of the AIM-7 Sparrow). Also, there is a version of the humvee called the Avenger that ships with a radar and a small turret with four Stinger surface-to-air missiles on it. This is a good page on the Avenger system.
The only thing is, an AIM-120 AMRAAM is 12 feet long and weighs about 350 lbs, while the humvee is about 15.4 feet long, and with all the required acquisition gear, motorized rotating/elevating mounts, etc, etc, the humvee would get a little top-heavy. By comparison a Stinger missile is 5 feet long and weighs 22 lbs.
So, I guess it could have happened, but I don't see why anyone would want to try that.
That's right, it uses infrared sensors. And unless they can show 80% success at shooting down warheads that are pre-chilled with liquid nitrogen and escorted by dozens of decoy flares, balloons and swarms of chaffe, then they are just wasting money with talks of early deployment.
Even the most rudimentary countermeasures make this problem an order of magnitude harder than what they have been testing so far. That's bad, because this system barely works even under ideal conditions.
They'll probably build it anyway, sold to the public the same way that insecure snake oil cryptography products are sold: buyer's ignorance.
It may be that the test was meant to test some other capability of the system than acquisition. I've hardwired dynamic capabilities as static into programs plenty of times when a demo of another feature was called for. It may be that this was a test of some other component for which the acquisition capability was assumed.
If, on the other hand, this is an honest deception (love that), we need to hang those bastards out to dry...
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Of dogs and ponies I just don't know,
but when I entered my last show,
upon the cart sat one great Sun,
to spew forth info, games, and fun.
It was to be our wad of cash,
our retirement coming in a flash,
but when turned on for all to see,
vapor it was shown to be!
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
For those interested, the poem actually is a parody/spinoff/whatever of Mercedes Lackey's song/poem "Threes". For those interested in hearing the music that goes with it, just go your nearest distributed-net mp3 server and search for "Mercedes Lackey Threes". (Just don't forget to delete the mp3 within 24 hours, though *wink wink, nudge nudge*) It's ironic to find this parody on /., since I was listening to the real song just this morning.
Actually, I purposefully used inproper grammar in that statement for a comedic effect. I am actually very good at English, even though I do not do the homework, so good, in fact, that I recently scored a 730 out of a possible 800 on the Verbal section of the SAT. In short, do not judge a persons intelligence by their posts on a web forum, they may simply prefer using common vernacular.
"
Interesting. Al Gore *was* getting reamed, but not for anything that it was proven he actually did. All the stories and charges were lies. ALL of them.
Fox neutral? Don't make me laugh. No rational human can actually believe that.
"It was me against the world, I was sure that I'd win.... but the world fought back, punished me for my sins" - Social D
I'm a high-school (and a lazy dont do no homework one at that) student so I of course have some of the best stories, but I'll only share the ones that won't get me drawn and quartered if one of my teachers/enemy students happens to read this. I found out I had a health project due ten minutes before it was due (I don't listen in stupid classes), it was a collage on healthy food. On the way in the door I grabbed three projects out of the trash right outside the classroom, ripped off a few pictures from two of the posterboards they were on, licked them and slapped them on top of a few pictures on the third poster-board :) I got an A+.
"
Hitting a bullet with a bullet is indeed extremely imnpressive, but you completely miss the point about the criticism of this test
I'd have no trouble with calling this limited test a success if there had been no pretense made about it testing the ability of the system to discriminate between a true warhead and a dummy warhead. If any GPS telemetry was being used at all when the two objects were in view, that is sufficient to render that part of the test (discriminating between real and fake targets) completely meaningless.
The problem is that (if there really was a beacon of any kind on the target or telemetry generated from within it --like GPS) the target discrimination aspect of the test was 100% for public relations (precisely to counter criticism regarding the fact that the system is unable to discriminate real targets from fake ones). That is not honest! An honest test would not have deployed a decoy (since the ability to discriminate the real decoy was not being tested)
To paraphrase Asimov, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo".
I once saw a video of a rigged demo. I guess they couldn't trust the demo(!)
I would love to tell you guys about all the failed demos we have but unfortuantely I am under and NDA, that and the chances my stock will actually be worth something would be hurt. =(
Lets just say our software was specifically designed to know it was going to fail so we could use previous data to fake a success.
We also had a company wide meeting where our executives did a spin job to tell us when we go home to kiss our wives we should tell her everything went A-OK since even though the data wasn't real time, the older data we used was perfectly legit since it ran from a successful test 3 days before.
I just wish I could tell you more as it is too fucking funny (and sad in a very pathetic sort of way).
You can't just tar someone as unamerican because they disagree with you, Mr. McCarthy. In my opinion, star wars jeopardizes the safety of the U.S. more than MAD does, because the money spent on star wars won't prevent any real attacks on the U.S., but similar funds spent on nuclear nonproliferation would prevent attacks.
MAD has kept the peace against Russia for half of a century, and I don't see that it will stop working any time soon unless the U.S. does something to destabilize the balance of power. Star wars will be ineffective against large nuclear powers since it isn't a 100% kill guarantee, and ineffective against "rogue states" and terrorists because they'll use suitcase bombs, biological weapons, or other more intimate means of destruction.
Therefore I respectfully submit that your support of star wars is in fact unamerican, and that you are a traitor, because you support actions which would harm the safety of the U.S. See how easy it is to label someone as unamerican because they disagree with you? Doesn't feel so good now, does it?
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
You are Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, and the bastards still smacked you down for calling Gates and Co. on to task for it when they did it in court ;-)
Was the Amiga plugged into the Atari, or vice versa? Come on, its been 15 years!!!
Do you lock your doors at night? Why? Don't you know it'll only cause the thieves to use crowbars and sledgehammers or even dynamite to get in? Is that what you want? Explosions in your neighboorhood because you couldn't learn how to talk to the bad men. And then you'll spend all your time and money investing in bigger and bigger locks while your children go hungry and the robbers invent bigger and bigger lock-picks
Being secure doesn't bring harm, it prevents it.
I once worked at one of those companies which fools you during the interview by saying that once in a while you will be required to work overtime during a crisis and that your salary already contains a built-in margin for this. It turned out that they were permanently in a crisis. It thus often happened that we had to demo an 'under heavy construction' app to a client which flew half-way around the world to come and see what a salesrep (also half-way around the world in the opposite direction sold to him). The night prior to one such demo, me and a comrade at arms sat behind a Sun terminal and wanted to rebuild the app. Instead of doing a make clean he decided to rm *.o for some reason (which baffled even the Oracle from Alice in Wonderland). Only the . and the spacebar was dangerously close to each other and in the coding frenzy by very overworked saltminers, the space got hit instead of the . so naturally the shell came back after a while saying o not found leaving us with a blank directory and old backups. So, frenzy turning into panic we try to figure out where the backup version brings us (no CVS history to tap from as CVS is needed only by people which will at some stage need to rollback and we did not believe in living in the past). So this version turns out to have a bug which SEGV when the mouse is moved over some of the weather stations on a map. Come the next day and the demo with it, I was inevitably asked to visit a number of stations on the map. In order to minimize the chanecs of stepping on one of the mined stations, I zigzagged the cursor over the map avoiding stations as much as possible. There was never a quistion regarding this odd behaviour and fortunately no core dumps during the demo. Hectic stuff ...
About twelve years ago, my (several jobs ago) boss was demonstrating some software another company had written to a prospective customer. It was a design system for awnings or something, written by an associate of his. While not technically fraudulent (he had permission) it was highly deceptive since we would be writing similar software ourselves from scratch, and would not be supplying a modification of that product, nor would the company that wrote it have anything to do with it.
The software was actually already in use by several companies manufacturing custom awnings.
At one point, the customer asked just that question, if it was in use by any companies.
My boss replied, without missing a beat, "I have no idea." Oops.
I quickly piped up that, yes, it was in use (again, technically true.)
We never did get a contract to do that work, though.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
1.0 was frightful. And the Bill Gates demos, etc, all had to suck.
But I think that this guy definitely should be chalked up as "Demonstrating product, Shit goes wrong, Worst case scenario".
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Slice a single button mouse's button down the middle, that's precious!
It reminds me of these ads you used to see a few years ago in the Sunday comic pack for "satellite dish" TV antennae.
They were a regular TV antenna that you would plug into the back of your TV, complete with antlers, but they bolted on a plastic mini satellite "dish" that did absolutely nothing.
They actually got around fraud by portraying its defects as if they were features.
- Works with normal TV radio waves!
- Does NOT interfere with satellite reception!
- Does NOT require a clear view of the sky!
- Works with your existing TV, no special receiver needed!
Now those ARE some guys who are going to hell.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
That's pretty funny. I'll share a story I know secondhand, anonymously, for obvious reasons.
There once (and still is) a smallish company in the military contracting business. Their main product was, and still is, equipment to...well, to do military things. Anyway, this company was fast approaching a major deadline and had absolutely no way of meeting it. So, to bail themselves out, they essentially invented a former employee, and accused him of spying for a foreign government. Boom, deadline goes away, and time is gained to complete the project.
Funny thing is, it made the news and there was even mention of it in a magazine some time ago. And everyone, outside of a select few, still believes this "spy" bullshit.
So that's what I'm told, by someone who would know. My salacious rumor for the day...
http://www.kingpublishing.com/publications/dw/
And W's IQ is 167.
Not
Thanks for the heartburn...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
The Patriots failed to stop quite a few SCUDS and I don't recall if they had any devices designed to elude interception.
If IRAQ had decided to attach nuclear warheads, only one would have had to make it through.
I had been working at Apple for about one year and I was on the list of fast trackers (that's an Apple insider term for engineers who get the series A projects) which I would soon regret. I was put in charge of the project to port the two button mouse over to the Mac OS, due to a serious outcry by all the people who were buying Macs and found them to be utterly useless with only one mouse button.
I had my team working day and night to try to get a prototype ready for Comdex but we knew it was not going to be possible. All of our code was in C++ and it was too slow and buggy due to the flaws of the language, and we were looking at doing a total rewrite to try to get to right. That would be the first of many, by the way.
Well we told Steve what we needed to do and I suggested he cancel the big two button Comdex demo, and he went friggin nuts. I thought he was going to belt me right in the chopper. No, he insisted that we "just rig the fucking thing up" over and over. So I ended up taking a one button mouse and cutting it in half, right down the center, so it looked like there were two buttons. Of course you would get the same results reagrdless of which button you pressed, but Steve could work through that. Well, as it turns out, the demo got canceled anyways and we all breathed a huge sigh of relief. I think Steve never really liked me from then on though, he's a tough guy to get along with.
All the best,
--Bob
It's part of the prototype user friendly BSOD, because the user spends most of his time looking at the BSOD, they wanted to make it a pleasant experience. I hear that in XP you will be able to choose color of your SOD!
On my first paying software job, a summer intern position between freshman and sophomore years of college, I worked for a startup building process-control equipment for -- get this -- industrial butter churns. (This has been my working example of the phrase "niche market" ever since.)
I was building system diagnostic tools, working on a full system mockup. One of the system health indicators at my disposal was a set of 16 LEDs which indicated whether 'on' signals were being sent from each switch controller. One of my tools would just strobe these 16 in the best Star Trek rolling-marquee-lights fashion, and ask the user if all 16 were lighting up, and doing so in the right order.
Well, one day, a delegation from the Danish Dairy Council (I kid you not) was coming through on short notice, and wanted to see some demos. Needless to say, we didn't have a 12-ton industrial churn in-house, so a real demo couldn't be managed. My boss ran out, breathless, and asked if I could cook something visual in 15 minutes. "How about this?" I asked, running the LED sweeper app.
He nodded, started to walk away, and then asked, "Can you make them blink out of sequence?" I did, with five minutes to spare. The Danes were suitably impressed.
This was ten years before "Airplane II" came out. I nearly fainted when Shatner delivered nearly the same line to a Moonbase technician. :-)
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
This is....
Here's the story + video (QT)
While I don't have any stories (honest!) involving me, Bill Gates once got a round of applause during a Windows 98 pre-release demo for showing everyone the Blue Screen of Death.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
that science and engineering aren't a perfectly directed activity. You don't just magically 'build' Viagra in day. You don't just build the system and do a final test. You bite off pieces. When will they learn??!?!?!
Yes! In fact, they did it multiple times!
If there is one place where you don't want to be faking a demo it's in a court of law. If this doesn't show Microsoft's hubris, I don't know what does.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
My favorite story comes from my senior software engineering project. Our team of five programmers had been working for about a year on the project (we had been four for half the year, one of the team left the project after one semester). The day before the 'big demo' in Chicago, we work all evening, print off the 1000-page documentation bible, get it bound, and hop in a car for the 3 hour drive. The elder statesman, I am driving along, feeling pretty happy about the whole thing. Then I hear a bit of a ruccus (sp?) in the back seat. I ask what is going on, and I hear, 'We are trying to fix the last few bugs, and the battery is running out on the laptop!' So there we are, driving 75 or so, and my cohorts are actually adding features the night before the demo. We check into the hotel and I get some sleep. They, now with the laptop plugged into the wall, keep working all night. The presentation is early the next morning. But everything went well. My team was awesome. I never had a doubt.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
you didn't tell me about this!! haha see you on #LinuxHelp
Szarh
Possiby the target had a GPS receiver in it, either to keep it on track, or to transmit telemetry down to the ground so they could replay the results of the tests?
Now clearly, anything transmitting telemetry is easy to home in on if you seek to the frequency of the telemetry, but that's such a complete cheat I wuld need more evidence before believing it.
When you do a test like this, you don't do it just to get the binary answer of "did it hit?" You want complete telemetry on both missiles to find out exactly what happened, what went right, what went wrong. That the seeker missile would get to take advantage of the telemetry would be ridiculous and a grand scandal.
(NOt that it would make it easy. You couldn't hit something just from its GPS coordinates.)
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Years ago we had a cranky copy machine and an expensive service contract. So a service guy came out, pretty much tore the machine down to the frame, then rebuilt it. Took 2 days. For testing he ran an entire ream of paper through it copying a test pattern. It worked, he went off to finish his paperwork. I found all that paper in the trash, put it back in the feed tray, and made a couple copies. Then tracked down the repair guy and said "Hey, all my copies have this test pattern on them!". I was nice enough to start laughing before he started tearing the machine down again.
Or when the demo works so well that management thinks it's the final product and wants to start beta-testing it...
I've been working on a project for a year that never got to be re-written from it's "demo" beginnings because ever since the first demo we were going to start beta testing "next week"...
its totally different since a missle generates a really small reflection while an active transmission is easier to track in on
It's not a problem in principle. Whether the target has a beacon or is reflecting a continuous-wave guidance radar makes no difference to the receiver - if power is a problem, the ground station transmitting the radar can increase its power output without bound.
And as for HARM (and their Shrike prececessors), they are popular against surface targets because it's far more difficult to distinguish targets on the ground (or at sea), where there's plenty of clutter to confuse the signal. Not so in space, where there's nothing but the interceptor and target for thousands of miles.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I beleive that the game is now 'abandonware'. Google told me that some reckless fouls may be able to download frankly illegal amiga versions, called ShufflepuckCafe.zip, which may work with an emulator, like UAE. For which they'll need ROM, which may be legally bought on the net (see the UAE page for more info), or acquired by thew same mean. YMMV.
It is a such a pity that broderbund disapeared.
Cheers,
--fred
Well, needless to say that we hacked together a few, very intelligent FIXED-TIME traffic lights. Yup, those that turn green and red like a swiss clock at precise intervals. The funny part was fooling the teacher:
- "And now, we see, that the congestion levels are rising ...(time goes by)..., pavement sensors signal this condition to the traffic light...(time goes by)..., and (time goes by), voilá, the traffic light reacts and turns green."
- "Compared with fixed-time traffic lights, these agent-based artificial intelligent traffic lights show an increased effectivenes of (BIG NUMBER)"
Greatest laugh on a professors back.
--
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
A friend of mine was holding a very important 2 hour demo for an important customer in our office. The customer had sent several people so he decided to hook up the demo machine to the projector which created a 4 by 3 meter image of his screen.
As the demo was for several hours there was a 15 minute break in the middle. Being in our office he was connected to the network and during the break he decided to check his email. At that time someone had sent him the "You have been bearded" exe. As he had several windows on his desktop he never saw the x-rated image that the program placed on his desktop.
Client reps return after the break. The demo progresses smoothly. After the demo finished he shut down all windows while he is talking about the work etchics and dedication of our programmers. After shutting down the last window his desktop (with the heavily bearded girl as the desktop image) is displayed in 4 by 3 meters in front of the customer.
There is a 10 second silence after which he discovers why all eyes are staring at the image. His first reaction is to close the lid on his laptop. As we all know this does not remove the 4 by 3 meter image produced by the projector. His next reaction is to remove all cables attached to the laptop which eventually removed the 4 by 3 meter x-rated image.
The customer was very satisfied with the demo. One guy even asked if he could borrow the demo computer back to his office...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've always joked about putting in an Easter egg, and the only time I did, it showed up in a demonstration with management.
There was a lengthy e-mail exchange between the developers, complete with death threats, that ended with "Fine, I'll do it, bit this thread is going in as an Easter egg!" 400-500 lines later (it was a long thread), I had coded it so that it would display the message in a text box if you typed Alt-Shift-Ctrl-V. After testing it, everyone had a great laugh.
The big demo comes, and one of the developers is typing away. The client says, "Type 'Valid' in that field". Sure enough, I had left my brain at home and had used the | character, rather than &, which ORed the control codes. Control-V... or Alt-V... or... SHIFT-V would display the message. So up it pops, complete with death threats. The dev sure back-peddled well, with "Ah, I must have had this in my clipboard and hit paste...", while glaring at me.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
What do you think aircraft do, exactly, to escape missiles tracking them with radar? When the seeker is programmed to chase highly reflective metallic surfaces like aircraft wings and bodies?
That's right! The aircraft dumps little pieces of shiny Mylar film all over the place as it flies! And yes, it really is called "chaff." I'm so glad it amuses you that they simulated a real-world situation by having the test body launch a piece of Mylar.
A hefty amount of warhead seeker reasearch goes into defeating and otherwise ignoring chaff, and discerning the actual target instead. Of course, we can't make fun of that.
(I wonder what you think if you knew how the aircraft evade/confuse the heat-seeking missiles. Yes, they really are called "flares," and yes, it looks very impressive at a nighttime air show, for example.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Finagle's law dictates that the demo will fail, and at the worst possible time. The probability of the worst possible time occurring is is directly proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the number of cheats and hacks to make the demo look like it works.
What? That's not typical business practice??? We do that just about every time we ship a software package here. Matter of fact, I'm waiting on software to test RIGHT NOW that has already been promised to the customers that we will ship on Friday...and we are nowhere NEAR done. My boss's motto is, "Ship now, update later." As long as the software will accept an update, we'll ship it with jsut about any bug.
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Early in my WinDev days (c.1991) I carefully went through an app I had written and added additional error checking including a number of error/warning dialogs. Just to be safe, I tested for errors that could never occur. Feeling cocky (and a little tired) the title bar for one read "Dumb Shit User Error". There were some other silly ones, too. After several demos, none of them showed up. Then one day, during a demo to my boss's boss's boss the "Dumb Shit User Error" cropped up. To make it worse, the app was so stable they let him use it during the demo, which is when the error started to show. Needless to say, I no longer use silly text anywhere in my apps.
This comment needs a JATO pack -- Joke-Assisted Take Off, and badly.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Well, a few points to make:
1) Cooling is feasible - you have a huge tank of superchilled fuel. You can use that to keep the warhead cool.
2) There is a big difference in processing time available: the velocities for a ABM and an inbound ICBM is a lot higher than a missle chasing a plane. SO SURE - your little tank could see real good in the infra-red. How fast did it refresh? Fast enough to do the number crunching for a +Mach10 closure? I doubt it. And what processor do you use to do all the image analysis - there is a lot of data to manipulate, and very little time to do it.
3) Yes, I am calling it snake oil - I don't trust that they really had an effective test. It is better to be ignorant than a fool, 'cause the ignorant can learn. A fool is always a fool.
Of course Superman never carried a gun. He didn't live in the real world.
Finally, I do agree with you on the development and deployment concerns. But for different reasons.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
If anyone cares, it does exist in an obscure directory on the Win98 CD, but you have to find it and install it manually. The option doesn't appear during the install. But it's there...I've installed it for clients before.
Yesterday I had to present a scheduler for a hotel that I was supposed to have written. I sure as hell didn't finish.
I walked in with a notebook, asked a few questions, then said the CODE RED virus was the reason I couldn't get to my machine to show it off.
I'm supposed to be finishing it now... But i'm posting to slashdot...
A previous poster mentioned that the GPS was not used by the ABM missile to aim for the target, but was part of getting telemetry info for the test.
But even if it weren't true and the ABM missile was using the GPS signal for targetting, this is still a huge success. Getting two minute objects to fly that close to each other under computer control has been the biggest problem until now. Now that we've got the technology to do that we can move on to other methods of tracking the incoming missile. We need to remember that this is a complex system with several objectives. Every time we fail we learn something new, and when we meet one objective (even if the others are 'hard coded' or 'rigged') then we can move on to using real data for the hard coded or rigged objectives. This isn't far from programming a very complex application, and the techniques are surprisingly similar.
The cost and potential results, however, are far different and are what should really be discussed. It's not a matter of if it will work, but when, and the real problem is how does the gov't relationship with other countries and with our country's people change when we make it there.
-Adam
clearly it is English homework that you don't do
Okay, let's just get straight to it. Someone please tell me why missle defense will not work. Please tell me why we are no longer a nation that can achieve any goal we put our minds too. Why are we not allowed to protect our kids from nuclear missles? And I'm not talking about missles from the piss-ants of the world, I'm talking about swatting down every fucking missle China and the former USSR can throw at us. Why don't we want that? Why doesn't anyone want to try? These people saying we can never achieve it, can never develop it, it'll never work... HOW DO YOU FUCKING KNOW THAT???
I believe the only limitations to human invention are time and the will to do it. Could DiVinci ever imagine a pocket calculator? Did Mozart ever imagine DTS surround sound? Were they impossible? No.
I remember a lot of "impossible" things coming into their own during the Reagan administration. That was a time when the people with the will found a way. If the tree huggers hadn't shut everything down during the 90's, we'd have transporters, time machines and a deathstar in orbit by now.
Instead, we tell ourselves we can't do it anymore. Good for us, way to lay down and die. I'm glad we've reached the limit of our capabilities. We'll gladly step aside for whatever nation arises in our absense. Then they'll be the ones on the moon.
p.s. Is Mars impossible, Jamie? Is it?
They used GPS because they couldn't afford the very expensive tracking radar.
I was working on an opportunity management plug-in for a contact relationship management product. They wanted a graphical plug-in to go with it. (No idea of what the graphs should display, they just wanted cute graphs and pie-charts.) And, of course, there was an important demo coming up.
So I went home and banged off my best guess a demo in Delphi. (It was a C++ shop, but everything used COM interfaces -- no sweat!)
Management liked the demo, marketing liked the demo, I think the customer liked the demo.
So using feedback from the demo, we got a spec together, and I started on the real C++ version. Finished it even.
Marketing kept on using the demo. The demo that no security checking, the demo that used an obsolete method of finding its database, the demo that had to be installed manually.
So every month, I'd get an emergency request to install the demo at the last minute before someone headed off to the airport to a tradeshow or customer. (And I'd have remember how the demo worked.)
Next time I'll put a timebomb in the demo code!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
My team had a product demo that was pushed on us by the marketing department and we were not ready for it. We stayed up all night until about 30 minutes before the demo and then had the demonstrator come in so we could tell him exactly what not to do because it didn't work at that time. He goes on stage, everything is running smoothly and then he starts to ad-lib and get off the script. One of the things he does crashes the application and freezes the system but not before putting up a dialog box that says "Our application has calculated that you have been working far too hard and need to take a long break. Your system has been shut down and your boss has been notified of your incredible work ethic. Take the rest of the day off." This was put in at around 3 a.m. and at the time seemed funny, but we forgot to remove it. Without missing a beat our marketing guy sees this on the screen turns to the audience and says "Our product will even help with workplace ergonomics and efficiency." The crowd laughed heartily and all of our hearts started again. See even marketing people come in handy some times...
The ACME rental company's Rent-A-Rocket subsidiary has issued a an invoice for $253,828,938.96 to the United States Air Force for repeated and excessive violations of California speed limits. Apparently, the USAF did not notice the section of their contract pertaining to tracking via GPS and AirPAC.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
It would seem very atypical to test a complex system such as NMD without instrumenting every component. No one asks IBM or Intel to not use sensors in their manufacturing or QA tests.
Well... that or ``rebranding''
great one. =)
I bet he has some doozies.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
at a place I worked, of which will remain unnamed, there was a story of the time the clients (many of them) wanted to add a career web page to their sites (like they wanted an auction page and a classified page and whatever else was popular at the time). So the coders carefully and skillfully designed a page to accept ones resume and employment information--a 'gold' place--it would take your resume when you submitted the form, and as I understand it promptly dump it into oblivion and let you know 'your resume has been added to our database' i udnerstand the developers involved felt guilty for a short period of time...but the beer generally makes that guilty feeling go away....and soon the career product itself fell into oblivion
The only case I've experienced with this is at a medical dot com. They had invested heavily into some cryptographic technology: large amount of stock given, whole nine yards. The company producing the technology had nothing. So one group was asked to put together a demo for the share holders showing the medical application being used "through the technology" but faking the through part by writing out random data and claiming that was the data the decoder was receiving. Meanwhile, it passed through regular data.
It was all writen and in the soure control, but thankfully someone decided at the last minute to not have any technology showing at the investor meeting. That did not stop one of the VP's later showing another demo and claiming it was close to production.
I thought it was fake, since the blue screen shifted in "slowly" from the right insteat of just popping up, which it normally does. So, yet another setup to get some more publicity?
Nope, I used to set up video projectors for a living.
Next time you get a BSOD on a Windows 9x box, take a look at the sync rates. The blue screen, if I recall, runs at normal VGA - 640x480x16 with a horizontal sync of 31kHz and a vertical sync of about 60Hz. As far as a video projector is concerned, that's quite different from the scan rates most people keep their desktops at.
As the video scanning speeds change, it will take a moment for the horizontal and vertical oscillators in the video projector to lock onto the new rate. Hence the little burble and roll.
When you change the scanning rate on a normal monitor, you'll often hear little clicks from relays switching windings in and out of the flyback transformer and the deflection yoke. Since the flyback and yoke must resonate (like tuning forks) pretty closely to the vertical and horizontal frequencies, these relays cut windings in and out like cutting the end off a tuning fork, or adding length to it to change the resonant frequency.
Lots of cheap monitors don't do this. This is why they're cheap, why they often run hotter, and why they more often seem to blow flyback transformers and horizontal output transistors.
Finally, with a video projector - and in 1998 it would have been a three-tube CRT projector for a screen of that size - the deflection currents and second anode voltages are higher. Generally, that would mean bigger deflection yokes and flyback transformers, with more ferrite or iron laminate core to saturate with magnetic flux. When you change the sync rate, the hysterisis of the core will cause its magnetic properties to have a little bit of inertia to the change.
You can hire me! Imagine a computer geek who knows how to configure BIND and can also whip out a soldering iron and hack a monitor! www.glowingplate.com
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I think "missle defense" in this context is a metaphor for junk science, FUD, pointy-headed management, beauracracy, sheep mentality, obtuse obfuscation, downright cheating, and other topics that are sadly relevant to that sector of the geek population forced to have day jobs.
:-)
Anyway, I dig it. It's slapstick.
"Because I love Pat Benatar." -- Britney Spears, when asked why she covered Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'n' Roll"
Back when Quake1 was still played to the extent that it was a few years ago, there was a particular person who was trying out for a fun "clan."
Now this person wasn't a nice person AT ALL, but he had been trying hard to improve his game. About that time I had gotten an AutoAim client.. =)
When he went to play against the clan members he was applying for, I went spectator and used the autoaim client to make a demo of him (making it look like he was AutoAiming)...
Yes, it wasnt nice... and YES, AC to protect myself from bodily harm.
One of the funnier tests I've seen go wrong was the test launch of an AAMRAM air-to-ground missile from a Hummer. I'm not sure the point of the test, but it was interesting.
We were running some radar/countermeasure tests at an airforce base when this test was scheduled to happen. Not being a part of the test, we had to turn all our emitters off. But what is cool about these test radars is that they have very powerful cameras fixed on the boresight of the radar. This way, you can watch a tv and get a quick-and-dirty feeling for the radar track - that is, if the target is held steady in the center of the tv, the radar has good track. If the target is moving all around the tv, it is probably jamming you pretty well.
Anyhow, although we couldn't radiate, we could slew the radar over and watch the missile fired off the back of the Hummer about a mile away. We also had the base PA system tuned to listen to the test center, the missile launch guy, and the radar operator. It went something like this:
control: "T-10 seconds to launch"
control: "3, 2, 1, launch!"
launch: "missile away"
us: wow! big cloud of smoke...
control: "T+5 seconds. radar X, do you have track?"
radar: "Did you guys launch?"
us: "hahahahhahahahahaaahha"
The cost of the wasted AAMRAM is nothing compared to the cost of the 1 hour of rental for the entire radar base.
On the plus side, we got to see the same test again the next day. BTW, the Hummer was a charred hunk of metal afterwards.
-tim
I was demo-ing an electronic toll collection system we were developing for an agency, and pretty much everything was ready except for the touch-screen interface used by collectors in the tollbooth. We had to make some last minute adjustments the night before, and thought we'd covered everything. Unfortunately, we did miss a couple of things, and we had a slight bug in the interface. This wasn't a really serious bug in and of itself, and we instructed the guy operating the screen for the demo to hit the [RESET] pad on the screen if something went nuts.
Unfortunately, for our own testing purposes, we had the [RESET] pad reset the state of all the outputs from the system, not just the touch screen handler. And of course we forgot to change that back. And this particular bug happened as the third of three vehicles was entering the booth area, which meant the previous vehicle, an 18-wheeler, was departing, and therefore was next to the upraised toll gate. So the guy in the toll booth sees the problem on the touch screen, and obligingly taps the [RESET] panel, which resets the screen, and the red lights, and... the gate.
So, I'm standing on the left side, and all the suits are standing to the right of the lane, when all of a sudden, BAMM, the gate tries to close and hits the truck trailer. Fortunately, it bounces back, the truck keeps going, and nobody on the other side of the lane was any the wiser. I almost collapsed, but the show went on without any problems after that.
But I always think of how different that would have been if we'd sequenced that particular test so that a car was in that spot instead of a big truck.
There's always the anecdote about a company that was giving a demonstration of speech recognition in MS-DOS. (In one version I've heard it was Creative Labs; in another it was Microsoft.)
The marketing flack giving the presentation arrives at the most dramatic and impressive bit, where he demonstrates the system's capability to recognize a set of related commands. He keys the mike, preparing to speak a command, and someone in the front row of the audience shouts "FORMAT C COLON! ENTER!" Someone in the row behind him shouts "YES! ENTER!" and history is made.
In all fairness I have no source for the story, but I once used a DOS-based Creative Labs product that would easily have been capable of such a feat. I believe it was called Voice Commander, and I trained it to recognize the letters of the alphabet, plus some punctuation and DOS command words.
A friend of mine had a sign up in his cubicle that read, "Whenever you are in a demo situation, say nothing more predictive than 'Watch this.'"
For most purposes, 355/113 is close enough.
In the post Cold War world, the threat from ICBMs is pretty low on the list.
The Global Economy means that the US border is incredibly porous to freight, vessels, and shipping containers, not to mention suitcase-bearing tourists, etc. No hostile nation will run the risk of getting into a rocket war with the US. They'll stealth the weapons in, maybe piece by piece.
This way, when they detonate (admittedly lower yield than an airburst, but good enough, and possibly worse fallout), it's not even clear whodunnit. So the US public cries out for revenge, and the government picks one of the potential perps ("blow up the usual suspects") for a raid.
There's no space-based defense against this. Spending trillions of dollars doesn't make us any safer.
It's analogous to feeling while safe driving your car around through a dangerous neighborhood because you have power locks on the doors, when in fact, anyone wishing you harm can just break the window and drag you out.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Dual-frequency GPS receivers available to the public can achieve centimetre-level accuracy.
For those that might not know, one centimetre is just under half an inch.
Precisely. If I were the leader of China or Russia, I'd feign great consteration at the missile "shield" as well.
Oh No! I'd say. Violates treaties and destabilizes! I'd protest.
All the while, I'd be gloating about the stupid Yanks spending themselves into a bottomless abyss of debt, while I perfected the art of concealing suitcase-sized bombs in shipping containers.
(Of course, the point's not really that the policy-makers in the US government are stupid either. They don't care if the system works. It's totally secondary to the real goal. They're aiming at a different target altogether: making all their buddies in the Defense Industry rich.)
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
dude - mod this up.
I read that this morning.
Let's see...what's the CEP of GPS? A couple meters in the best of conditions?
"The rocket fired from Vandenberg was carrying a global positioning satellite beacon that guided the kill vehicle toward it."
1. WTF is a globla positioning satellite beacon? I thought GPS needed an atomic clock to work. Sounds like FUD to me.
"While the missile launched from Vandenberg on July 14 did spit out a single Mylar balloon as a symbolic decoy, that scarcely challenged the kill vehicle's capacity to select the correct target -- particularly because there was no GPS beacon on that shiny balloon."
2. From what I've seen about decoys...they are usually Mylar or another metalic fabric in the size and shape of the warhead they are covering for. If I remeber right, it wasn't till the late 60s that the US and Soviets even had the tech to send up decoys.
And this is not a flame, just observation. It took Clinton almost 8 years to get as much bad will generated as Bubba has gotten in 8 measle months.
Actually the "kill vehicle" that is supposed to destroy the missile does not destroy by detonating within a certain proximity. It actually does hit the target. No explosives, just kinetic energy.
Play no games, say no names
Sometimes a little deception can save a ton of explanation.
- Saki, "The Square Egg" (not sure that's the verbatim quote)
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
They're only cheating if they're homing in on that beacon. The purpose of the beacon was for the -base- to track the missile during the test.
How else do you expect them to track the missile during the test? A guy sitting on the ground with a telescope and a sextant or something?
Of course. I've lost track of the numbers of times that my boss has told me to add in a screen with a progress bar that slowly fills up while accessing random bits on the hard drive, and then going straight to the pregenerated data we had sitting around.
The sad thing is that it works so well. Quite the demotivator.
That's bull and you know it. The TRUE test of the system was the ability to differentiate real warheads from fake ones. Missile collision ability has already been proven and used in the field successfully for years.
This is definitely a dog'npony example because it shows how are elected officials are trying to pull a fast one on the American Public by rigging the system to succeed - making it as easy as possible, just so they can prove that they were right and the other guy was wrong. Notice all the cable TV pundits yelling "nah, nah, you suck" to the missile defense opponents.
If Salon knows about this transmitter, the test PLANNERS knew about it years ago, and payed (sic) particular attention to whether or not that transmitter might have ANY effect on the real data being collected.
The difference between Salon and the Planners is that the planners pushed the knowledge of bias aside as inconsquential to the test, while Salon, and most of the smart people in this country, asked harder questions about that fact. Why is it inconsequential to the test? And how can a test that is rigged to succeed help us determine the true future of the project? It's weighted in favor of one outcome and isn't a balanced approach to determining whether this technology is capable, feasible or NECESSARY to the protection of our country.
You know what the sad thing about this whole scenario is? It's that the United States is too dumb in world affairs to help combat terrorism except with violence and warpower. Violence is the only solution the Republican politicians and pundits know, and as I've always quoted, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." The United States would be far better off averting disaster by not withdrawing from Global affairs and trying to push itself around like the bully on the playground. It's just sad that this country has so much going for it but is being pulled to destruction by childish politicians with penis envy. I love living IN this country, just not WITH this country.
One more post on the journey to negative Karma history!
Somewhere along Interstate 90 there is a 300 yard concrete monument to poor preventative maintenance.
I worked for a small company in west Iowa that manufactured concrete paving equipment. Big machines. This particular baby was about 60,000 pounds of steel and hydraulics.
A contractor purchased one of our machines second hand. Since we were a small company, we generally would bend to the wishes of the customer to help with bringing the equipment online. And in this case, this contractor had scheduled a demo of this machine to the Minnesota DOT so we wanted our equipment to look good.
We had spent several days pouring concrete, making road and adjusting the machine and controls. I was involved with the design of the crown adjusting computer. Every time something wasn't quite right, the contractor blamed the crown computer. While fiddling with the controls to satisfy his ego, I noticed one of the hydraulic pressure guages was madly wiggling. I pointed this out to the contractor. I was told it didn't matter and that I didn't know anything about hydraulics. Side note: I am a mechanical engineer ;)
Next day bright and early half of MDOT showed up for the demo. The dump trucks were lining up in front of the machine. Each truck carried approximately 10 yards of concrete. Well there was quite a line of trucks when the machine *sucked* a hydualic pump and destroyed the whole system. It stopped, shook and then just sat down on the gound squeezing concrete out like toothpaste. So much for the show. It lasted maybe 45 minutes.
MDOT left. The trucks dumped the their loads to the side of the road and I went home.
Inhanbla Gmunka
What is probably behind this is that Steve was using Mac OS X Server, not Mac OS X Consumer. Only OS X Server (which was not, at the time, a fork off of OS X Consumer) can be used as a netboot server.
The server would not have to run a copy of OS X for each machine, the machines run it locally. They are merely loading the OS off the server's remote disk.
Phase 3: Convince terrorists that trucks, boats and planes are in fact more expensive, riskier, and have much lower chance of success than a jury-rigged ICBM.
Phase 4: Come up with convincing, non-hypocritical argument that welfare for single mothers breeds dependency and people need to take care of themselves, but a taxpayer giveaway for multi-billion dollar corporations like Raytheon and Boeing for a product that doesn't work is in our best interest.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a $300 check to spend. Thanks, Dubya!
Big brass was on the way to to see the system, running when some column changes were made in in a rather important database we used back in D.C. causing the system to go a little crazy with NULL data.
Our savvy manager asks me if I can get the Candian machine running. If so, he can work it where he shows one part (a working) part of the system on the U.S. side, buying us 30 minutes of programming time.
So there I am, on the border, at the Canadian check-point, with all sorts of tourists gawking at me, as I code my butt off while an associate keeps an eye on the bridge. I'm just about done when he yells "They're Coming" ... I yell back ... tell me FEET as I kick in the compiler and pray there are no syntax errors.
Sure enough a typo gags the compile and my assoc. is yelling 100 feet ... 75 feet. Meanwhile I fix the errant code, get it to compile, get the kiosk closed and the system running by the time my associate jumps down from the window at the guard's desk and runs up to tell me 10 feet.
With the system up, I race into Canada so they don't see a nervously sweating and rather disheveled programmer ... and perhaps to avoid any prosecution if things fail ... fortunately enough though everything went as planned.
I love it when a plan comes together.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
reminds me of when I was a kid, a local toy company used to give kids I think $10 or $20 or so to come play with their new toys they've developed, tell them how you like them, etc.
So once when it was my turn to play with their toys, one of them consisted of the GI Joe ocean platform action playset transformed into some sort of space-based toy. But it was the exact same thing as the GI Joe toy, and when I pointed it out to the person conducting the test, she got all flusted and she denied it! Lady, I'm a kid but I'm not stupid, and if there's one thing I know it's toys. And if there's one kind of toy I know, it's GI Joe toys.
It wasnt even the same manufacturer who made GI Joe.
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
When I was working on interactive movies a number of years ago, we had arranged a demo of our technology to be shown live on the Today show.
The video feed was broadcast by satellite live from our theater, and Bryant Gumbel was given a controller, which was linked back to the theater through a modem link.
On cue, the very moment we went live, the modem link dropped. It was horrifying. Bryant was in the studio, pressing the buttons, saying "why isn't anything happening?"... I was back at the theater, redialing the modem, only to get... a busy signal.
We finally got it straightened out after the next commercial break, as our technology was fine, but it was damned embarassing.
Never did live TV again.
I can vouch for this...what else would explain the fact that my laptop, with this XP-a-like OS, has been up for 14 days, can login to 3 different LAN configs w/o a reboot, and has not had a SINGLE app error (using Visual Studio to do DB stuff)...
XP HAS to be fake...
Read the reports closely. They were also testing the radar used. You would need GPS to verify the accuracy of the radar information received about the target. The interceptor is self-guided at the end. The controllers tell it where to look, but it optically searches for the target.
Back when our company was younger, our first laptop was purchased by the president at a local computer store. It was widely hated for its massive crappiness. I mean, this thing was terrible. So, following our company motto, 'it's easier to get forgiveness than to get permission', the laptop was 'accidently' left on the front of a truck in the field before the truck drove off.
So, it crash landed on a gravel road.
And it survived. Our IT manager resurrected it and put it back into service.
Shortly afterwards, one of our marketoids took the laptop to do a demo across town of some of our software. She was showing off the software, and a bunch of gathered engineers were impressed. One of them offered up a disk containing some data that he wished to try to import into the software and see how it works. The disk went into the laptop, and was happily mangled to hell by gravel left in the floppy drive.
Marketoid: '... I'm so sorry. I hope you had another copy of that.'
Engineer: '*cry*'
I believe we made the sale anyways though.
Don't get out much, do ya?
A lot of these concepts were discussed in a Scientific American article about star wars that came out 5 or so years ago. They also had interesting anti-laser countermeasures such as chrome plating the warheads. The conclusion was that countermeasures are so much cheaper than missle defense capabilities that it's futile to build these systems.
Years back our sales guy sold a website idea to a tv-commercial production company. He got the job by telling them we would provide full-screen animation "no problem!" Well, it was a BIG problem. Luckily, Macromedia had bought Futurespash, so we just had to delay the client a few months until they released Flash. On the bright side, they had one of the first fullpage flash sites on the net.
ya, I tend to take everything from salon.com just like I take everything from indymedia.org, with a VERY large grain of salt.
Check up on some of Joe Conason's other writings.
nuf said
Sanchi
"They said we couldn't do it [Athlon]... but we built it, we shipped it... and we didn't have to recall it." Rich Heye
A legal company had hired us to build an application that they were going to pitch to their biggest client.
We go in to the demo, with my partner and I running the server/application on our laptops. So far, everything was running well.
Anyway, there were two wiseguys in the back (who we'd been warned about) who started asking for minor enhancements to the product. Nothing big, just annoying stuff - moving fields around, changing colors, confidentiality warnings, etc.
So I decided to have a little fun and fired up the development environment while my partner was running the demo and made the changes. (Without telling anyone - even my partner.) The first time he went back to those screens he was a bit nonplussed, but he recovered well...
I once wrote a program for my lab group to randomly assign partners. I rigged it to assign partners the way I wanted them to be. Then I put in all this random generation hocum to make people think it was a super powerful program capable of 128K encryption to "randomly" assign partners. I just wanted to work with this girl. I also knew another girl hated someone in the lab. I told her my plan and had the program not pair those two up. She supported my program over pulling names out of the hat. No one else knew my nefarious plan and it worked like a charm.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Their Australian web server's went down. When we checked who ran it, we discovered it had been outsourced to a PR agency that then subsequently outsourced it to a web agency that then outsourced it to some freelance coders who couldn't be contacted.
As it turned out, the woman in our Australian marketing team was called [Smith]. The PR agency she used was [Smith] and [Jones] (run by her and her husband). They then contracted [Blah Interactive] which was run by her husband who then employed some freelancers to do the actual work. Every step of the way, the delightful Miss [Smith] paid herself 50% of the money, then contracted herself, paid herself 50% of the remaining, contracted herself... etc. The end result was that the company paid her a salary to contract some freelancers for many times the going rate and pay herself the difference.
Despite our best efforts to have her fired, she [as far as we know] remains in her job as the company was more concerned about announcing (read lying) to the world that it had no Y2K issues.
That would be the worst mistake Iraq could ever make. I seem to remember a threat made that if Iraq even tried biological weapons, the US would wipe the whole country off the face of the earth. A nuclear launch would have kept them 'hot' for about 10,000 years. You also assume they have the capability to build a nuclear weapon. It's not exactly easy.
Have you noticed how many successful foreign terrorist attacks have taken place on US soil?
Has it sunk in that 99% of them are caught BEFORE the attack takes place? Building or stealing a nuclear warhead would be almost impossible to pull off without generating a lot of traffic for Echelon to see and thus would be stopped. It's not just as simple as mailing a package from Afganistan to NYC.
Regardless of what a lot of liberals like to think, the folks who are defending the country aren't all idiots. The ONLY nuclear attacks we really have to worry about now are ICBM based ones. We've got one nuclear defense hole and we are trying to close it, end of story. Why have ANY US citizens die from nuclear attacks if we don't need to?
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
Actually, I have no idea if that's true or not... I said it not be funny, not to be trolling, flame-baiting, or whatever.
(+1 Tries to be cute)
(-1 Fails)
(-1 Fails Miserably)
Wait! Does that mean my attempt above was a prime example... trying to get in something good while it's nice and early?
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
You know your shit, Lawrence. :)
Man, you are really dredging up some bad memories for me... It went kinda like this:
Boss: Can you do [this that and the other]
Me: Lemme see what I can do...
[two weeks pass]
Me: Here is some proof of concept code to show that we can do it. Here is a mockup of the interface we may want to consider. Also might want to consider these features and these capabilities.
Boss: Great, thanks!
[1 day passes]
Boss: We sold it to our first customer! Here is his phone number, could you call him and tell him where to download it? Also, our investor are ready to send us some money, send them a copy as well. Maybe we need to get some screen shots and a demo up on the web site.
Me: [stunned silence and my jaw hitting the desk]
He never quite got it. To this day he thinks we had a product and that I just didn't want to ship it out because it wasn't "perfect" yet.
...and no, I don't work there any more.
I've never had a demo go right. They always want them too early, and I've never had time to perfect and test everything so something always goes wrong. Usually something out of my control, like a network server. But, if Gates and Jobs can have the occasional screw-up on stage and keep their jobs, I guess I'm okay.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Interesting point about the difference between a GPS transmitter, and a GPS beacon.
I assume that tracking a GPS signal beacon is no different than getting a GPS feed and doing the triangulation (2 satts from the constellation needed to get a rough fix, 3 for accuracy, right?) on the fly.
So as a single emitter, the target couldn't be tracked unless the kill vehicle was doing some sort of triangulation... which is doubtful, given that the recievers for doing that would have to be pretty far apart.
The way HARM works is that it follows the signal of a directed energy source (the RADAR radio waves), but a beacon is broadcast...
I doubt very seriously that a missile, homing in on a beacon, passively, could connect for a kill at those relative speeds.
I suspect that the target missile actually had a GPS reciever on it to track itself in case of mishap.
Even if the target were transmitting telemetry that included it's GPSd location, that signal would have to be interpreted either on the ground and beamed back to the kill vehicle, or by the kill vehicle itself, and then compared to it own postion. This isn't gonna offer the accuracy that you'd get from a fast scanning and processing radar/IR seeker.
I think that the GPS oversite was either unintentional, or engineered to not give ammunition to critics (even though I suspect that they would be blanks).
I was busy writing code on my computer which was hooked up to a robot. This robot picks up chemicals and moves them around with syringes on its arms. The head of the company comes around with a bunch of potential customers. He says "Show them the new software running". I quietly say "I just changed something I just compiled it but I haven't run it yet". He makes me run it anyway. The robot promptly raises its arm and sprays the customers with Alcohol. I was testing with alcohol instead of the real stuff for good reason. Needless to say we did not get the sale.
The city is being overrun by a herd of Lucy Liu's.
Prehaps a somwhat better question would be how much error is allowed before a product demo is considered a flop, rather than simply new and buggy. Remember Steve Job's recent demonstration of the Mac OS X dvd player, which quit the first time he opened it, and worked the second time. He got his point across, while at the same time reminding people why the software hadn't been released yet. Prehaps it would simply be easier to record the presentation before and, and 'mouse sync' to a video re-broadcast of it, with mistakes edited out, of course
Hmm... I wonder if Win95 will stop crashing if I somehow ground it too.
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
Take a while to research the system, and think about the technologies involved and the operational capabilities of each, and you'll quickly realize this story is pure propaganda.
Whether Joe Conason was correct is open to debate; for you to call it "progaganda" seems to color your own comments. It's a valid question, and as the public has been sold a bill of goods on more than one occasion we have the right to vigilant in questioning how these tests are done.
I can tell you with some authority that the government pays particular attention to the
conditions of the test.
Hmm, ok, so what about the Sgt York tank specs that went from shooting down high-speed fighters on a foggy night to shooting down a hovering helicopter at 500 yards in the middle of the day? What happened on that one?
Sorry, but I've personally seen military guys (supported by well-meaning procurement guys like yourself) sign off on software that didn't even exist, much less work.
The fact that this test is being conducted "in the clear" should calm the fears of the most ardent conspiracy theorist.
Oh I see, they're going to put all the test data on the web so we can all look and verify, right? That'll scare those terrorists silly. No, something tells me they tell us just what they want us to know. Some things never change.
They may have got it right, but let's face it, there's no way for us to really verify anything.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
You don't need to decode the GPS transmission. Just home in on it.
Again, only trivially different from homing in on a radar reflection.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
If you beleive (sic) the former, you are simply un-American, and arguing is a waste of time. If you believe the latter, then perhaps you would like to remember that one of the only spending provisions outlined in the American Constitution is funding of a military.
I don't know whether you are a fool or a liar; probably both. But the doctrine of M.A.D. was accepted by prominent Republicans for a very long time. It was only with Reagan that the Republican party abandoned it. Henry the K pushed the idea hard enough that many referred to him as Dr. Strangelove
Of course, your two alternatives claim is a fantasy; the reality is that there are more than two, the most obvious being that he simply doesn't believe that it will ever work.
I'd also like to know who has been proposing a system large enough to defend against a spasm attack. Certainly everything that was discussed after the original Star Wars died was lobbied for as a limited defense against rogue states, not as a defense against states with massive arsenals.
Whether or not Jamie is full of BS, your comments are despicable. Criticism of the President's policies is not un-American, and the Founding Fathers would be appalled if they could read your comments.
The Arms Race has already begun with the transfer of technology to China during the last U.S. president's term. The test we have seen is the first step one in a proof of concept. Those who poopoo it are of the same ilk as those who suggested that brothers Wilbur and Orville get real and stick with bicycles. Hell with that kind of attitude, NASA could never have faked multiple successful moon landings. That kind of attitude is fine fine for a trailing edge nation, but not for the leader of the Free World.
I was working for Harvey's Pro Audio and we had a SMPTE timecode-based audio/video editing system using BTX synchronizers. Harvey's was trying to sell us to BTX, so the BTX company president, chief sales guys, and heads of engineering were there to watch us demo the program. It was running on a PDP-11 with the debugger under control of a 2nd PDP, which is where I had started it up.
When it crashed (as we surely knew it would) I said "Oops, sorry guys I must've hit the debugger halt key over here" and we re-started and completed the demo. BTX eventually hired me even though they didn't take the rest of the company or program. When I went to work for BTX in Boston my new boss, the head of engineering, said "By the way, nice move with the debugger during the demo".
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The entire big launch for Win95 was done on Macs!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Agreed. (author's page is here)
Not on record anywhere as far as I know.
I've bought it on a tape called St Elmo's Fire and I believe you can still get the same tape here: www.firebirdarts.com. Worthwhile (well, if you like filk... one of my friends claims to be allergic to the stuff; no accounting for taste ;-)
"The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life"
The way that I see it, the proper path to head upon is continuing nuclear disarmament. It hardly seems "un-American" to believe that there are better diplomatic paths to pursue than ones that focus on our offensive and defensive capabilities.
In a world in which exists increasing communication between the peoples of various nations (If not perhaps their governments...) I think that it is far more feasible than ever to imagine someplace, eventually, where for the most part the weapons of mass distruction can be discarded.
True, I am utterly idealistic. True, there will always be someone, somewhere who believes that "might makes right". But I really think that the fundamental changes in the world in the past 10 years or so (particularly with respect to the internet and international communications) make total nuclear disarmament possible. Yes, there would always be the threat of terrorists... But you can't use a nuke to enact revenge against them.
Ya know, this world of ours actually has some potential, if we can just not kill each other in the next decade or so...
"You can take our lives, but you can never take our Flerbage!!!!"
The game consists of a 3d battlefield of, say, 1600 pixels cubed. There is a missile which is launched somewhere in that space which is guranteed to hit above a certian height before heading back down. Your job is to code a script or program (which the game will interpret and run) that has access to:
The truth is, Adam, I had exactly the same thought: Code this up in a simulation. In one version of the simulation, you have access to x(t), y(t), z(t) for the incoming missile, in the other version, you have noisy sensors and possibly stealth warheads - there's a big difference in the two.
In the GPS-assist case, since ballistic missiles pretty much "coast" all the way down, the future trajectory of the missile is pretty much known. Sure, it's not quite as simple as modeling the earth as a uniform sphere with a small projectile in orbit, but the Military has already solved the additional complications (e.g. non-uniform earth, atmospheric drag during final approach, etc.) - that's how they can land a missile on top of an enemy silo with 10 meters to spare.
The point is, hitting that known trajectory with another missile is absolutely trivial in a simulation. Hitting the missile in the test with the known trajectory, while impressive, is more a matter of your rockets going where you want them to go.
The real challenge is, what do you do with your noisy sensor data when that missile releases 20 metallic coated balloons - perhaps one enshrouding the actual warhead? How about if the warhead is outfitted with a stealth hull. You can't differentiate them with radar, and since they're traveling in a relative vacuum, they're all moving with the same speed.
Net result: It would take a massively redundant system and a lot of wasted missiles to take care of all the decoys, never mind the backups for if you miss the real thing.
Surely there's a cheaper way to eliminate the threat from North Korea and Iraq. If we want to spend a ton of money on self-preservation, why don't we just buy these countries?
Any way we can decide for ourselves about this information? Or is it classified too?
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
So we rigged the program so that when it should have faxed, it instead secretly emailed the document along with the destination fax number to a fixed email address -- the email address of the guy we had sitting in the next room. So when the client wanted to fax something themselves to see it work, it really got emailed to our guy, who then faxed it manually. The client went away happy, thinking the program was fully functional. I got the fax functionality working using Symantec WinFax the next week, so no major harm was done. But I got a great story out of it.
---
Geoffrey Wossum
Project AKO - http://ako.sf.net
Maybe they just want us to spend a lot of money on a missile defense, so that it's easier for them to develop and deploy a suitcase nuke :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
lol
Alas, I can't find the original, but the dialog went approximately:
:)
"We can't sell it, we only have the prototype."
"Can't we sell the prototype?"
"The prototype is our competitor's model with duct tape over the label."
Actually, as I remember it it was a little worse,
Salesman: That mockup of the new product you did was perfect, the customer purchased 1000 of them to be shipped next quarter.
Dilbert: That was a mockup, the product wont be ready for another 2 years.
Salesman: Well the mockup worked perfect, we just need to make 1000 of those.
Dilbert: The mockup was our competitors product with Duct Tape over their label!
Obviously this is coming from my memory, but I thought it was made funnier by the fact that the salesman (bastards) had already sold a bunch of them based on the mockup!
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
The developed a terminal, which was a copy of one from another company. They didn't have time to finish, in time for a tradeshow, so they took a couple of boards from the system they were copying from and use that in their system. At the tradeshow, a copy of engineers saw the new terminal and said it looked just like theirs. The president of the company said, the exterior design was good, but the internals were completely different, and better. One of the engineers hit a few keystrokes, and the competing company's diagnostic display displayed.
Fight Spammers!
I hate it when the boss walks in to check up on me and I have to frantically close all my Slashdot windows.
Deadlines are tight. Requirements have been creeping. Everything is on its way, but you're not quite there yet. So you cheat. You say, "Hey, this is alright, because it will work this way soon." If you get away with it (long term, that is), then that's probably true.
Our sales group here is pretty aggressive. They always want to show off a new product before it's completely done. Generally, what we do is set up a demo script: a set of steps that we know will avoid the bugs that are still in the product. So the customer won't know it doesn't all work. Of course, sometimes that's not enough, so we might fake it a little, just to show them what it will look like. After all, we'll have it all fixed before they get it. So that's okay. Isn't it?
God bless stupidity.
I WAS heading up the development team for the USB support in Windows 98. We all know how well that went...
The "GPS Transmitter" concept is probably a short way of saying: a GPS receiver that continuously transmits it's updated coordinates so that the anti-missle missle can smack into it.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I'm afraid they're right, a missile defense system is not feasible: word has it Iraq had GPS receivers in all the SCUDs the Patriots shot down. ;-)
Small web company with sleazy redneck management.
For farts and giggles, one of the programmers brings in his old (working!) Apple ][. For fun we decide to see how it stacks up to a modern system. Having no system software for it, we use good-ole BASIC and write a simple 20 goto 10 program that counts up by one digit. Write the same program on one of the production servers, it takes only a few seconds to reach the billions. How long will it take the Apple? Sloooowly it progresses.. finally we just let it run and go to lunch.
After returing to lunch we hear the redneck.. er.. boss wants to know who has brought in an unauthorized computer and is "hacking" with it. Great belly laughs are had by all.. until we realize this is the idiot who signs our paychecks.
Sometime later some joker fires up the same Apple with a similar program, this time printing the message "Number of Yahoo Websites Cracked: $I".. just in time for some new investors who are visiting the office to see it in all its glory.
You can guess what happened to the company.
Praise the Force Field! Praise the Laser Project! Slackware Loon #19830573
Oh, you didn't know the test missile had a GPS transmitter on board? Well, you do now.
Oh, you didn't know that MOST THIRD WORLD NATIONS WOULD USE THE GPS SYSTEM TO GUIDE THEIR MISSLES?
Well, you do now.
Knowing we may have the technology to provide a worthwhile alternative to M.A.D.,
there is no such thing. MAD is based on the reality that we cannot be 100% certain of the reaction and outcome from a given set of provocations.
We cannot know with certainty the counter and counter-counter measures of the opposing sides.
We can build missile defense systems for the next thousand years, but we cannot be confident enough that they will provide sufficient protection to eliminate the real threat of mutual destruction.
I must say that any person who exclusively supports M.A.D., whether military or political, is betraying the safety of American lives. Thus, they are un-American.
Or, they recognixe that with limited resources the research and construction dollars would be better placed elsewhere.
If we were talking about billions for theater-defense systems (which are very likley to be used in most every non-trivial conflict) I'd be fully in support. Building a boondoggle defense system from an attack that will never come seems a foolish waste of resources that could be going to genuine protection of American (and allied) lives.
Putting more Aegis cruisers in the South China Sea will do far more to protect american interests than SDI (and at a far lower cost)...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Didn't Bill Gates and company put on a fake demonstration for Judge Jackson?
I'm not in software, and I don't code, so sometimes I'm left scratching my head. This time, however, I definately understand. I work for an automotive supplier (I won't say whom) and the same things happen with parts we design. Our customer(also won't say whom) gives us requirements for any given part which are subject to change at any given time, and may or may not be physically possible.
Okay, time to model the part into 3D, and try and package the part in the car. Oh, wait, we don't have packaging information for half the parts in that part of the car. Time to go to the customer and find either a car or an engineer to give us some answers. Hey! We're in luck, they have a prototype car we can look at! Oops, our camera go confiscated. Oh, and by the way, three of the attachment points have changed, and the part has to be thinner because the customer thinks it will crash with part X, Y and Z. And it had to be kicked off last week to have parts in time for the prototype vehical build.
At this point, our engineers usually start random arguments for fun. (The last one was about whether "automobile" and "car" are equivilant, or if one is a subset of the other. Automobile is a subset of car.) If this fails, there is usually a rubberband fight.
Ahh, the life of an engineer.
Zeus_tfc
"...At the end of the day"..."when everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself." RIP Layne Staley
"The probability of a successful demo is inversely proportional to the number of people watching it."
We've got one coming up on Friday.
Shit, why am I replying to SlashDot? I have bugs to fix...
You obviously never look/listen/read any non-liberal media. There was plenty for republicans to make fun of Clinton. Al Gore was getting reamed every day, even before he was almost elected. Do me a favor and watch FOX news sometime and see what a neutral news agency covers.(they are slipping towards the norm of left-wing stories)
You never saw anything bad about Clinton because you weren't looking for it. At least with Bush I get the truth instead of a bunch of BS (B as in B, S as in S) about drinking too much iced tea.
good luck,
sopwath
My guess is, they just didn't want to pay for a large air-defense radar for a small island that's twice the size of a golf course. The heat-up-the-reentry vehicle bit in an earlier test was, I think, actually legitimate, but on the whole I'm suspicious of this actual implementation of missile defense (although I like the idea of missile defense). Unfortunately, we've reduced the number of defense contractors to the point where we have much less of a choice for alternative systems. Which is a real scandal that isn't really being covered anywhere. With the design bureaus we have now, I'm not sure strategic defense is possible.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
god-damn homophobes!
I work for a shadowy conspiracy group working to bring down the US government.. We've been working on a Worm/Virus to accomplish this task. We gave it a snappy name, hired the best shadowy hackers to put it all together, but our investors were pushing for results.. Imagine our embarrasment when we realized we released it with the Whitehouse IP address instead of the domain name.. They changed their IP and I'm looking for work again..
air and light and time and space
The team ignored him and tried to fix the demo in the hour before we went onstage. They completely messed up the machine. The sales guy came in looking confident, asked if the machine was still broken, and then took the machine up to the stage. On his way to the podium, he "dropped" the machine to the horror of everyone in the audience except our engineers.
We later learned he was not too eager to show off the beta code either, and would probably have done the same thing regardless of what happened in the prep room.
Non-liberal media? Everytime I see a comment about the "liberal media" my racist, gun nut, government hating, intolerant idiot radar goes off. God, when will all the right winger retards go away and form their own little country? (of course soon it would turn into a facist state, then declare war on the US, lose, then for the next 200 years talk about how it was a war on states rights! hehe
This is not a Sig.
The best one of these I remember was when Nolen Bushnel's "Androbots" company was demoing at the Consumer Electronics Show. They wanted to show how their robot could be used in an average home and had setup a mock-up living room and kitchen. The kitchen was equipped with a "robot fridge" which could dispense cans of beer down a chute and into special "arm" attached to the robot's shoulder that could hold about 4 cans.
So the demo is, the guy is watching the superbowl and wants a cold beer. Instead of getting up he sends his trusty robot to get it for him. The robot trundles through the door to kitchen and rolls up to the fridge which obediently dispenses a can of beer. The can rolls down the chute and BREAKS THE ROBOT'S ARM CLEAN OFF at the shoulder. The second beer is dispensed, bouncing off the robot's body and rolling across the kitchen floor.
The poor spokesman is still sitting in his easy chair and wondering why the crowd is laughing so hard...then the robot rolls back into the living room and the guy reaches for his beer.....
Milo from Kangaroo Koncepts
My orders came through. My squadron ships out tomorrow, we're bombing the storage depots at Daiquiri at 18:00 hours. We're coming in from the North, below their radar. Elaine : When will you be back? Striker : I can't tell you that. It's classified.
If they put a GPS transmitter in a missile, didn't that fux0r the GPS system in that region? I thought GPS relied on signals transmitted from satellites in precise orbits.
A company I worked for in a former life made Video Inspection systems for the printing industry. I was a design engineer there, and they decided one day to fire my boss (and friend), the Director of Engineering there. The new director was a smug bastard and he and I didn't see eye-to-eye, so, eventually, he had me fired. Talking to a former co-worker about 6 months later, I heard that the wonderful new hardware system that this new director had designed to replace all the stuff I had designed DIDN'T WORK! The new director couldn't fix some major bug in his new system, and he B.S.'ed the owner of the company that all was well right up to the morning of a MAJOR industry trade show. From what I heard he was fired on the spot! Sometimes the karmic wheel turns slowly...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
The missile defense is based on the assumption that America's adversaries will make the worst possible decisions about how to attack the US. Very few states have access to heat shields, multi stage rockets, sophisticated guidance systems and the ability to miniaturize nuclear weapons. The latter is particularly difficult to achieve. So why bother?
If I wanted to kill Americans with a weapon of mass destruction, it would be an old freighter, a bomb in a shipping container and a trigger set to go off when US Customs opens the container looting for pot. Or, if you prefer, the far cheaper alternative of the same shipping container with breakaway sides, four guys, an old howitzer and a stack of nerve gas shells. Make sure that the shell they are instructed to fire last has a big crack in it to eliminate these four brave err, witnesses.
Even if it was worth the technological effort, why would any world leader fire an easily tracked missile at the world's most powerful military power?
Can you imagine political circumstances in which the US would not respond with force of near genocidal proportions?
I would love to make render weapons of mass destruction no threat to anywhere I or my loved ones live, but NMD just won't do that.
Macho Grande....
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
- Chemistry Teachers: It doesn't matter what the answer is, as long as you follow the correct procedure.
- Physics Teachers: It doesn't matter how you get the answer,as long as it's close enough to what it's supposed to be.
- Math Teachers: They just tell you a lot of war stories.
I laughed and I got a B.good luck, sopwath
Yes it's the the DMMDA! By requiring all reentery vehicles to have GPS beacons and outlawing the use of missle defense circumvention devices or the very discussion of such devices, the DMMDA ends the debate over the effectiveness of missile defense by definition!
Remember when missile defense circumvention devices are outlawed, only outlaw nations will have missile defense circumvention devices.
In the first article, it is obvious that this was faked, because the company admitted it and released a press statement. It comes straight from the company. On the other hand, the thing with the missle defense article is written by someone at salon who said that someone at MIT got some papers from someone and on and on. If this is true that it actually is faked, i want to see a press release by MIT saying that there was GPS in the system and they're dismissing the guy that was working on it. Slashdot always seems so quit to criticize the republican government. An article written about the past government that was a "He said that he said that he said" article would not have been published on slashdot.
No highs, no lows! Must be BOSE!
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
What irks me about the whole "Missile Defence Shield" concept is the absence of discussion of the effect of vapourizing pounds or even tons of highly radioactive plutonium into a fine particulate dust which would probably be carried on air currents and distributed around the globe, trading instant vapourization for long, drawn out radiation sickness doesn't seem that great to me... Or for that matter how it would protect the US from a device in a Beechcraft twin engine flown in low from Mexico, the Carribean or even say, Canada?...
I had an opportunity to participate in a visual tracking system demonstration that was being given to Lucent Tech. Our notebook computer/video capture problems were kinda getting us down. Ultimately, one of the guys from Lucent said, "Oh, that's ok. None of our demos work either." Kinda makes ya wonder...
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
I think it's un-American to risk initiating another arms race by implementing a system that won't work if overwhelmed and won't work if bypassed. The system simply won't work if enough missiles are fired, thus ensuring the need for more nuclear arms for other nations, and the system does nothing to protect against the true threat in nuclear warfare, namely a terrorist taking a nuclear bomb into a well-occupied city and detonating it.
Pax Digitalia
It doesn't matter how many we can destroy before they hit us, because when we strike back, and we WILL strike back, it will eventually come back to us in the form of nuclear radation. Here's a map for ya, and some more info on the effects of a nuclear bomb here
Your point that MAD is "Un-American" is completely untrue. I personally believe in Mutally Assured Destruction. My opinion is an American one because I can be proud say it out loud, cause that's what Americans do
which is the hard part anyway
Seems like dealing with decoys is a pretty hard problem, too, no?
Right, and Missile defense will do nothing to alter the brinksmanship of MAD. MAD presumes large numbers of warheads on each side, such as the US and russia. Take out 90% of either sides warheads using NMD and there are still more than enough to destroy both countries.
It would be foolish to assume every incoming warhead would be destroyed. It would be just as foolish to consider the destruction of the vast majority (or even a large minority) of warheads a failure.
A success yes, but quite the phyrric victory. Say 100 Warheads are launched at the US, and the interceptor system is 99% accurate (which im sure you would consider very sucessful) That still leaves 1 warhead that strikes its intended target, or nearby (close counts in nuclear war). Granted, you are saving millions of lives, but you are still losing all the lives and property from the one that got away. Not only that, but multiple missiles target the same place, so that taking down several can still mean the target is destroyed. The difference between ten warheads hitting the pentagon and 1 is not that much, you are still equally dead.
The purpose of a missile defense shield is not to protect us from terrorism. It is to protect us from being Saddam Hussein's bitch.
Heres a valid point, yes NMD will prevent us from being saddam husseins bitch. Knowing saddam, however, it will encourage him to actually launch, in order to "test" our NMD Since any NMD system will have a finite amount of missiles, why wouldnt saddam simply launch hundreds of fake warheads. Warheads that look like the real thing, but lack any nukes. The US is compelled to launch NMD against each launch due to "what if" Finally, when our defensive missiles are depleted, saddam launches the real thing, or not. Even showing he can do so puts the gun right back to our heads. Even if NMD is 100% effective, the finite nature of interceptors means that we are back in the same boat we were before we started.
Well, unlike you, I actually care about what the rest of the world is thinking and want to take an active part in its development. I think of our friends AND our enemies as neighbors who we need to talk to, sort out our differences and come to an understanding as to how we should work together in this world. Russia used to be our enemy. Japan used to be our enemy. But because we opened our arms to them and created connections rather than cut them, they are now our friends, or at least our partners.
Taking an isolationist position does not help anyone and just shows America as an elitist and aloof country who doesn't care if the rest of the world goes to hell. Well, I take issue with that.
A weapon is a weapon. Whether it destroys people or it destroys missiles, it's still a meeting of force with force and a glorification of violence and fighting to solve problems.
Well, I believe humans are smarter than that, and when you offer them olive branches, they will put down their guns and join you in peace. But as long as you show your teeth, they will continue to attack you.
You may say you have a sense of history, but you sure as hell don't have a sense for the future. Where has our history gotten us? Exactly where we're at today, and I for one would rather not repeat that.
One more post on the journey to negative Karma history!
Well, the new facility was all cubicles, with no closets designed in... no place to put junk, so we shoved boxes full of junk under desks and in out of the way corners. We were working on a lab, and the VP of Engineering decided that the test leads on the oscilliscope looked untidy, so those were removed and hidden as well.
When that was done, the VP looked around the lab and said "Now, this looks like a productive lab!" Yeah, a scope with no test leads... that's real productive.
I sent this story to Scott Adams. I don't think he ever used it in Dilbert, but he did send me a reply saying he found the story amusing.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I didn't like your story so much.
Science fair.. heh.. the whole point is to see who can BS the best.
/.) had written an "operating environment". Basically, you boot the computer, their logo "interOS" is displayed, and then you're dropped to a nice little file-manager-type tool to manipulate files.
.dlls". Also, it crashed once and I noticed that ScanDisk started up automatically (hrmm...). So, actually, it's really just running Windows.
I went to the International Science and Engineering Fair (it's sponsored by Intel.. the prizes are HUGE (i.e. 10-50k$)) in May '98. I had some lame-ass project (but that's not the point).
The team next to me (I wouldn't be suprised if some of them read
Basically, all they had done was written a proggy in one of MS's nice Visual languages (C++ or Basic) that allowed them to move/copy/rename/delete files on the system. It was out a little before win98 was released and had a feature that was similar to activeDesktop (i.e. the desktop looked like a webpage, etc.)
It also supported voice recognition, and was compatible with all windows-based software programs... (sounds pretty impressive so far...)
Oh, they also had a few really thick notebooks worth of code...
All the judges that came by were amazed (and to tell you the truth, I was very impressed at first).... But after listening to their pitch about 30 times (my booth was next to theirs), I started noticing things.
Firstly, they stated that "it used MS
Their voice recognition was just IBMs voice-rec software. Kinda getting lame...
Basically, what they'd done is written a small app that they were running as their shell (instead of explorer.exe).
It really didn't do to much... but they could sell the hell out of it... the judges were in awe.
In the end, they won the grand-prize (a shitload of cash, free trip to see the nobel prize ceremony, etc, etc). And all for what? There were _tons_ of projects there... certainly there were more deserving projects. (not that mine was any good... but that's another story)
So, moral of the story... He who BSes best, wins.
-Andy
Damn it, stop letting facts get in the way of a sensationalist conspiracy theory!
I grant you that a GPS transmitter on the target warhead would help you to get close to it. But that isn't the hard part. The hard part is hitting the missile. If GPS has an accuracy measured in anything more than inches, it would be useless for terminal guidance. Furthermore, even ground-based radar will tell you where the warhead is, with arbitrary accuracy, following which you can uplink this data to the interceptor. The hardest part of the task is guiding the interceptor to intersect with the missile at a closing velocity of of around 20,000 mph, even when it knows exactly where it is, and this was in fact accomplished. I still think this was a success.
And as for "liberals" being the ones opposed to NMD, let's not forget that it was a Democratic president who revived the notion.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
And have been for quite a while. The rubidium frequency standards that Stanford Telecommunications (hmm, are they still around?) used in their rack-mounted time transfer receivers back in the mid-'80s weren't any bigger than about 3x3x4 inches. (Maybe a little bigger. I'm going from memory here.) I suspect the original poster probably had seen pictures of the atomic clocks at the USNO or something and thought that atomic clocks were all room-sized. Efratom was working on a 19-inch rack mounted hydrogen maser back in the early '80s but even that might have come down in size. Now, whether it'd fit in an ICBM...
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
ah yes.. any mailing list software is "spamware"
and rot13 is a "circumvention device"
I got ya.
Controlling variables is the key to any scientific experiment. The first tests are almost always 'rigged.' To do otherwise would be a waste of time. Likewise, most experiments fail. Its a fact of life.
RADAR isn't anywhere near as accurate as GPS for measurements. Sure, you can follow something with RADAR, but you can't get its position to within a couple of cm.
The big flaw in the argument about the Nuclear Missle test being rigged is that it doesn't matter. It was the third test. This is like cheering because while Los Angeles and New York are toast, we managed to save Houston! Let's be honest. They don't have a missile defense system. Until they prove otherwise they have a missle system that accidentally hit another missle during a test.
I actually used a demo to obtain funds that had repeatedly been flatly refused. I was running an NIH funded study that involved over 8,000 leukemia patients and we only had 2 IBM XT computers. You try running a database with 5 million data points on a 2mb 8088 computer sometime!
Well, no matter how nicely or loudly I asked, there was just no money in the budget for a new computer. So when the big shots from NIH came for a site visit, I showed them our labs and all the nice equipment, and then proceeded to show them where all of the data for this 8.5 million dollar study lived. It took 15 minutes for the first record to load, and about 10 seconds to flip from one record to the next. Well, needless to say, before they left the building they had committed an additional $2500 for a spanking new 486/33. Nothing like making a bunch of higher-ups cool their heels for 15 minutes waiting on something to happen to make them really appreciate how important that new piece of equipment is. I used the same technique a few years later when compile times started running into the half-hour range on a project I was working on. Make the boss wait around for a half hour while you recompile and he'll start to see why that 3 year old PC might be due for a replacement!
In an early demo of Lernout & Hauspie's speech recognition software it didn't really work too well so they pre-programmed a sequence of words for the demonstrator to use. The operator accidentally pressed the button too many times and it started recognizing the NEXT word he was going to say.
The audience was truly impressed by the speech recognition software that can also tell the future.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Back around 1991-1992 a Company I worked for was making a Warehouse Database Management Control System for a very large cigarette company. They spent something like seven maybe eight months working on it and they had a pretty nice demo for the customer to show them how on-track they were for installation a mere month or three away.
There was only one problem. The design team hadn't actually coded in the database portion of the DBMS. They just used flat files and convinced both their own employer as well the customer that everything was working just fine.
I don't know how anybody found them out but by the time they were done they fired the whole development team and started over again. The second time they actually instituted oversite into the project. What a novel concept.
Beware the wood elf!!!
My systems programming professor told us about the time he had to demo a buggy program. He added an interrupt handler which caught SEGV signals and printed "NFS server not responding".
-- Sigs are for losers
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/30/155822 7&mode=flat
My favorite part is the 16 million dollar party featuring the WHO in Las Vegas. Sure they didn't have a product, but they did have a great time while it lasted!
Wasn't this already reported a while ago at Fucked Company?
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I worked for a company that would go to meetings with our current client and show photoshop mock ups of what the program supposedly looked like rather than what had actually been completed so far. While I was back at the office busily writing the user interface code.
You didn't read the article. The target missle had a GPS TRANSMITTER on it, not a receiver. The receiver was on the ground, using the sats as reference points - thus they coudl track the missle based of it's stream.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
If a few pounds of plutonium were any sort of problem, we'd already be dead. They blew so many *tons* of plutonium (and worse) into the air in the 1950s that we'd have died off before SDI was even a dream...
There are probably two really difficult parts of one of these test: sensing where the target is, and accurately navigating an intercept. Even with perfect sensor data, which the GPS beacon cannot provide, the navigation to intercept problem is extremely difficult. Even if the interceptor was using the GPS beacon data to navigate to the target, this would NOT be a cakewalk.
Regarding your mention of HARM missiles: what speed are the targets moving at? Is it anywhere near the speed a ballistic missile (or target, in this case) is moving at? No it is not, making it a much easier intercept.
...and does it have to work?
...at least from a layman's standpoint. A dumb interceptor has a 50/50 chance of hitting the right target in such a test. They've only done 1 test with the decoy. I wouldn't say that they've proved that the decoy avoidance test has worked. (At least to the public, I'm sure their scientists are analyzing the data to see if the detection scheme they're using is actually up to snuff.)
For me to be convinced, they'd need to either do a 100 more similar tests, or a few more tests where they had more decoys along with the single warhead. But the fact that they hit anything AT ALL is still pretty impressive, if the test wasn't rigged.
This
I have traveled this thread from top to bottom, and it has been an emotional rollercoaster. I laughed, I wanted to cry, but most of all, I GOT FRICKEN PISSED!
tree-hugging feel-good fuzzy-fruitcake motherfunkers!
HOW DARE YOU say that the engineers in my great nation "CANT" do something, or the military "shouldnt" protect us!!!!! How-fucking-dare-you!!!
Just know this: in this great nation where we can do ANYTHING we put our minds to, the missile defense system WILL WORK. period.
One day, your little panzy asses, all snug in your "touched by an angel"-TV-watching-bedrooms, you will still be ALIVE !!
know why?
Well, because some idiot in the 3rd 4th or 5th world spent his country's life savings on a pair of slightly-used low mileage missles, and then, well, some hooker in red-city called his pecker small, so he decides to raise the launcher and push the big RED button...aiming at your little insense-burning-crib-yo!!!
AND A MISSLE DEFENSE SYSTEM BASED OFF THE COAST OF THE GREAT U.S. OF A WILL BLOW THE SH!T OUT OF THE MISSLES AS THEY TRAVEL TOWARD YOUR 2.5 CHILD HAVING HOUSEHOLD. THEY *WILL* WORK!! AND YOU WONT EVEN HAVE THE DECENCY TO WRITE YOUR LOCAL MILITARY BASE COMMANDER AND THANK (KISS) HIS WONDERFUL ASS... YOU WILL BE TOO BUSY BITCHING...OR JUST TOO IGNORANT TO CARE. while you should be out there offering FREE reach-arounds to the soldiers and missile defense designers!
THEN, and this is the scary part, EVEN when you DO hear of it, because your liberal buttbuddies on CNN decide to share it with you minutes later, you STILL wont appreciate the DEFENSIVE CAPABILITIES YOUR GREAT NATION HAS - AND THE MEN WHO ARE DESIGNING AND MANNING THEM!!!!
wake the funk up! and quit protesting things just because they are in one of 4 "catch-phrase" categories: a) military b) animals c) money or d) oil
remember, it's all 4 of THOSE things which keep your pretty asses alive and well and warm every fricken day!
damn - you liberal freaks scare me. if you get your way, we're all going to die wearing loin cloths, holding hands, starving on veggies, surrounded by bunnies... when achmelli muhammed muhhamed ali decides to funk with us.
waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake up, crush out that joint, and go out and help defend this great country you pussies. and NEVER...EVER...SAY THE WORD "CANT" AGAIN.
-oliver p.
"God Bless America and the ingenuity, strength, and patriotism of its great people!" - me
"I think, therefore I get paid."
3 years later he is TAing the same course. He gets a report that looks awfully familiar. He grabs his finished lab report and realizes that the student had copied his report from 3 years ago.
Needless to say the student did not pass that lab.
Alas, I can't find the original, but the dialog went approximately:
"We can't sell it, we only have the prototype."
"Can't we sell the prototype?"
"The prototype is our competitor's model with duct tape over the label."
I don't know anything about the particular situation you are talking about, but I do know that you can netboot a very large number of machines from a single boot server in very little time given a UNIX like OS, a shell, and gigabit connectivity. All of which the G4 Macs have. Just run a TFTP server and change the environment variables in Open Firmware. Though they may have faked it, I don't see why they would have. It seems trivial to implement. (I do it here, but I have Linux on my Macs instead of OSX of course :)
This is from comp.risks (20.47), which says it originally came from rec.humor.funny:
This is supposedly a true story from a recent Defence Science Lectures Series, as related by the head of the Australian DSTO's Land Operations/Simulation division.
They've been working on some really nifty virtual reality simulators, the case in point being to incorporate Armed Reconnaissance Helicopters into exercises (from the data fusion point of view). Most of the people they employ on this sort of thing are ex- (or future) computer game programmers. Anyway, as part of the reality parameters, they include things like trees and animals. For the Australian simulation they included kangaroos. In particular, they had to model kangaroo movements and reactions to helicopters (since hordes of disturbed kangaroos might well give away a helicopter's position).
Being good programmers, they just stole some code (which was originally used to model infantry detachments reactions under the same stimuli), and changed the mapped icon, the speed parameters, etc. The first time they've gone to demonstrate this to some visiting Americans, the hotshot pilots have decided to get "down and dirty" with the virtual kangaroos. So, they buzz them, and watch them scatter. The visiting Americans nod appreciatively... then gape as the kangaroos duck around a hill, and launch about two dozen Stinger missiles at the hapless helicopter. Programmers look rather embarrassed at forgetting to remove *that* part of the infantry coding... and Americans leave muttering comments about not wanting to mess with the Aussie wildlife...
As an addendum, simulator pilots from that point onwards avoided kangaroos like the plague, just like they were meant to do in the first place...
It's true - my officemate was at that show (he used to do Atari 2600 stuff when he first started out).
It was Sierra hiding the C-64 under the table running Frogger.
- MaineCoon
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
My (former) company at the time was working on a trusted X server to run atop a partner's trusted operating system. For those who've never used a trusted X server, each window runs at its own security level, and a small stripe on the top of the screen displays the security of whatever window has the current focus. Well, our programming team fell behind schedule (way, way behind) and we had a demo coming up for some high-level military types.
So the lead programmer hacked together a quick program where the screen stripe would change at a preset interval. The idea was that the demonstrator would move the mouse around and hopefully hit each window border just as the stripe changed. Our demoer practiced nonstop for three days before the demo, but the demo was much too long, and he could never get the timing exactly right. We couldn't cancel the demo because our CEO had pretty much bet the house on getting this government contract.
We went to the demo, and the demoer was very nervous, with the fate of the company riding on the next ten minutes or so. He was so nervous, his hand shook, and he was worried about moving through the demo too quickly, so he slowed down on purpose. Sure enough, he slowed down a little too much, and was just slightly behind changing the window focus, so the stripe changed just ahead of the focus change.
At the end of the demo, in a suspicious tone, one of the brass asked why the stripe changed slightly before the focus. The demoer opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out. The lead programmer, who had been standing behind the demoer, jumped in and said:
"The X server tries to predict when a focus change is about to occur and attempts to update the stripe ahead of time. We did it this way because of the high overhead of determining what the contents of the stripe are. Otherwise, the overhead would be too much, and the stripe would change long _after_ the focus shift. Unfortunately, that code is extremely optimized, and we just need to shorten the time before it begins its prediction cycle."
The brass was very impressed and we ended up getting the contract. We later found out that our competitor's product actually did take a while to update their screen stripe after a focus shift, and during their demo (which actually worked) they were asked why they didn't try to predict focus shifts to syncronize with the stripe updates.
My favorite tech cheat was in high school. A few friends and I were taking an AP programming course, at the time my friends and I had just bought brand new 486's while the school had just bought 2 new 286's with no hard drives and thought they got an amzaing deal paying twice what we did for our 486's. But that's just to give you an idea for how non tech savvy the school was.
:)
:) I really wanted to see the teachers reaction to him getting an answer like "orange cat" for "45*(23^4/5)" and yes it was worth screwing my friends grade to see that reaction.
My friend and I always seemed to finish our projects before most of the class even got started, so we had a lot of spare time on our hands and having the highest grades in class got to use the 286's (oh joy). We were just getting into the joys of networking and had just discovered the internet though a dialup at a local college. So we decided to make our own lan between the 286's without telling our prof.
We ended up with basically a homemade version of LapLink that ran over parallel and let us do chat and share files. Not much but we were impressed that we pulled it off at all.
Unfortunatly my friend had slacked off on the current official project to finish our mini-lan. So we decided to use the lan to fake his project.
I sat on one end of the room pretending to be the computer and my friend sat with the prof at the other inputting math formulas for the program to solve. You should have heard my friends excuses for why the 'computer' was so slow to come up with responses
Finally he admitted what was up to the prof in hopes of saving his grade by showing off the program he did write after I started giving unbelievable wrong answers
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
I work for microsoft. Trust me, windoze XP is pure vaporware and is nothing more than a bunch of bitmaps. Just try click on that "Start" menu and see what happens. Nothing! It's just a bitmap! Oh, and windoze doesn't multitask or have a kernal.
Well, you can imagine my surprise when I got a call from a trade-show, some marketing-type threw all kinds of insults at me because the software was failing while he demonstrated it for customers.
I think they should have told me they where going to use the test-environment for some critical demo. If I had known I wouldn't have killed the database servers for that small schema update ... :-)
karma capped
And yet, at MacWorld NY, which took place July 18-21, they showed off, on the exhibition floor, Mac OS X doing NetBoot for client Macs, so no, this tech isn't on PCs behind curtains, and no, it isn't abandoned.
You must be a FUDboy.
Never show the live site. Ever. Even if you're in the same room physically as the servers, don't do it. ALWAYS make a local copy for an HTML "slideshow", never ever ever allow your sites to be shown "live". Especially on TV, national TV. They will break. Badly.
I like music
For the same reason why no one has ever fired an ICBM.
I know Slashdot is run by a bunch of young skulls full of mush right out of college so some socialist indoctrination is expected. And missle defense has been politicized almost to death by the hate america first crowd so I could ALMOST excuse Taco & Co for not knowing shit from shinola about it because almost all coverage is so one sided.... but phlease!
The pentagon was very up front about the transponder on the target. They didn't yet have the new super duper high res radar installed that they will need to guide the interceptor missle into the ballpark with it's target so they kludged it. They KNOW they can build that part, it's just a really good radar installation. What they needed to test was whether it, if put near a hostile missle, could indeed home in on a fast moving target and blow it up. That part was the new tech being tested and it worked as advertised.
Missle defense is something we have needed for thirty or more years, 'bout damn time we actually started getting close to building one.
MAD at least made a perverted kind of sense in teh old Cold War days, when it was just two sides who were both clueful enough to understand that winning was not a real option. But trusting madmen like SoDamn Insane not to EVER launch one at anybody is not just MAD, it's crazy.
And before anybody starts going on about suitcase nukes, ask yourself a question. Why hasn't anybody tried it yet? There has to be scads of material running loose in the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union and lots of terrorists who would love to try it. So why?
My pet theory is that the spooks thought of that and stuck neutron detectors and such along enough of the border that they get tipped off.
Democrat delenda est
Inevitably there came a time when I had forgotten to write the paper the night before, so I had to use the study hall I had before the class to type up a quick paper. Now YMMV, but I find it very difficult to type more than 2 coherent pages in the space of half an hour or so. The requirement was much longer than the time I had to write it.
The obvious answer: do not type coherent pages. I wrote out the inroduction and conclusion paragraphs and the first and last sentence of each other paragraph. I then proceeded to fill in between with utter nonsense, including some capitalized, italicized, sized up a half point, or otherwise emphasized key words and phrases.
I got the same grade on that paper as on all the others.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
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This brings to mind a CLASSIC dog'n'pony affair... back when I was in senior year high school physics, we had to do this lab where we measured double slit diffraction by shining lasers through filters and doing various measurements. We had to enter our data into an excel spreadsheet ... our mark would be instantly calculated in the last column as the data was entered.
I'm sure you can see where this is going.
One guy (a genuinely really smart guy) did the inevitable and sat down at the machine at lunch when nobody was looking. He tweaked his numbers till his mark reached the max. But he didn't know 2 things:
1. The teacher was in the hall and peeking in the window of the door. (The computer was next to the door.)
2. The spreadsheet calculations were deliberately skewed so that the mark output would be wrong. The teachers were going to put in the right calculations afterwards.
Needless to say, it made for a good story when I was taking that course next semester. :P
Or, you are highly suspicous of a system that has not ever worked, is threatening to throw 30-year old treaties into disarray, and appears to exist only for the purpose of forking over huge wads of my cash to defense contractors.
Face it, if there was a GPS transmitter on the missile, the test was rigged, rigged, rigged. No other assumption can be made. If they can do the test without the transmitter, it would pass a bullshit detector. But as it stands right now, it stinks.
I do not feel like paying any amount of my tax money for a system which promises so little and is guaranteed to cause so much additional distress and unpleasantness. We were de-commissioning nukes before this, were we not? Dumbya is simply cashing the check the defense industry wrote for him. He's not interested in the long-term effects at all.
Oh, nice argument, by the way. You accuse Jamie of producing a red herring, and then proceed to funnel five paragraphs of your straw-man reasoning into his mouth. Cute.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
I assume the GPS information was transmitted with other telemetry, the GPS mechanism itself does not involve transmitting data - but who cares.
Hey,
not only is GPS too innacurate for a missile intercept
In addition to DavidBro's comments, I would point out that 'military grade' GPS is (supposedly) accurate to a couple of meters.
When you are trying to destroy a flying thing, you don't have to aim to hit it. That would make air to air missiles unworkable, unless they were launched from right behind the enemy plane.
How many air-to-air munitions work is by proximity. You shove a big load of explosives into your rocket, then give it a radar, and you twll it to blow up when it gets within, say, 5 meters of your target. Then the explosion and flying hunks of missile hit into the plane, and (hopefully) destroy it.
If you have pleanty of explosives (And you can get a lot of explosives for $100 million), you just fly to within 10 meters or so of the rocket, and detonate. Kaboom!
Well, that's what I'd do. After all, this is only rocket science, not brain surgery!
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
This is sort of related, vaguely. Remember those old scantron tests where you had to fill in a bubble for the correct answer? I had one teacher who would grade them right after the test using a piece of cardboard or something with the correct holes cut in it, so he could immediately see if you got the answers right. So whenever I didn't know the answer to a question, I just filled in all 4 of the answers, or the most likely 2. It worked every time :)
The marketting guys had to had to had to show this box off. Couldn't we just bolt a box together and make the lights blink on and off?
Well, I couldn't resist. Being microprocessor controlled. it was easy to make the lights blink on and off, but what fun would that be? So I wrote a program which would flash the lights on and off by sending morse code.
RX: Who's there?
TX: Milgo
RX: Milgo who?
Milgo who? Get it? (Milgo was one of the big modem companies back then and one of our competitors.)
I didn't get to go to the trade show, and I never heard anything back from our marketting guys, so I'll never know whether anyone even noticed. I often imagine how it might have gone though...
Customer: Shhhhhhh...
Salesman: It has eleven thousand new features...
Customer: SHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
After a few seconds of silently staring at the demonstration units, the customer laughs out loud and walks away.
Alas, I'll never know...
Thats what they say anyway - ANY signal being emitted from a device can be homed in on. Now I tend to believe the Air Force - they WANT to know where the missle is and GPS helps them do that. But given that previous tests of Star Wars involved heating up the missle with infrared so it was obvious to the interceptor - you take the claims with a grain of salt. Sure, the test was probably legit, but the pressure on this test was huge and it would NOT shock me to learn they homed in on the GPS or some other signal coming frmo teh missle.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Heh, I knew all this Cold War stuff was good for something. :)
Consider that what we're trying to knock down is an ICBM - an InterContinental BALLISTIC Missile.
Key word here being "ballistic".
These missiles do not fly to the target under power, like a cruise missile does. These are more like really really big artillery shells. The booster rocket gives them a big kick up, and then the rocket motor falls away, leaving the warhead to coast to it's destination. They can do some course corrections on the way down, but all the impetus to reach the target comes from the initial boost.
Well, as nuclear warheads got smaller and smaller (while keeping the amount of bang constant) some smart SOB figured out that they had all kinds of reserve capacity in the boosters. So instead of 1 warhead, why not 2? Or 3? Or 15?
Small course corrections taken at the edge of space can add up to big distances on the ground. They could squeeze enough fuel into each warhead to separate them by a couple of hundred miles downrange.
Thus was born MIRV, Multiple Independant Re-Entry Vehicles. Ever play the old Atari Missle Command game? Remember how somtimes the missles would "break up"? That's our buddy MIRV.
So imagine that you don't have a lot of warheads, but you do have a big honkin' booster. If you pack some mylar balloons in there, and have them inflate at booster separation, you'll have something that looks like (on radar) a MIRV separation. Which warhead do you chase? They might all be warheads, or they might be a mixture of warheads and decoys - and the penalty for getting it wrong is mighty stiff....
The radar can't tell the difference, so it's up to the interceptor to make the call. THAT's why the big deal.
But even then, just telling the warheads from the decoys is NOT the hardest part. The hardest part is getting your multiple-Mach kinetic interceptor (read: cannonball) to hit your Mach 15, man-sized MIRV warhead center of mass.
That's like you standing behind a hill, shooting a rifle bullet straight up in the air (angled so it will arc down and hit me) and I shoot the bullet with my Colt 45 pistol before it hits me.
VERY impressive!
Now, if this can be transformed into a system that is reliable enough to see active duty is another question entirely. The fat lady ain't sung on this yet. But what they've accomplished so far is nothing short of incredible. Give them boys their props.
DG
Posting from Home
Do you know anything about when we might begin to see some kind of python/objc bridge that would allow Cocoa to be used in python apps? Is there one already?
:) Thanks.
Or by "porting to os x", do you mean that you ported your python application to Carbon?
I am just curious. I figure, on those rare occasions you can find someone knowledgeable on slashdot, you need to clamp yourself to their leg as quickly as possible
US Marine Corps awards CLAWS contract to Raytheon - 18 April 2001 The US Marine Corps has selected Raytheon to develop its Complementary Low-Altitude Weapon System (CLAWS), a ground-launched AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile configured for use against low-level airborne threats such as cruise missiles, unmanned air vehicles and aircraft. http://www.janes.com/defence/naval_forces/news_bri efs/jdw010418_01.shtml
Must have been a bitch to hide its infra-red signature...
karma capped
My favorite is Pixelon. Among other things, they skinned Windows Media Player and passed it off as their superior video compression technology.
What's next, skinning an existing browser and passing it off as a product?
The Maginot line was a superb fortification built by the French between the world wars. It covered most of the border between Germany and France, and was as modern and effective a defense-in-depth as could be built at the time. (See Steven Ambrose's "Citizen Soldiers" for one evaluation.) Attacking it directly would entail a bloodbath for the Germans. Tactically and strategically, it was an almost total success: the Germans dared not assault it until the winter of '44-'45, when it proved very effective indeed.
Instead, the Germans blitzkrieged through Belgium and took Paris in something like fourty days.
While the Maginot line itself was a success, the policy behind it was not. Trusting that the Germans would respect Belgium's neutrality, and that they couldn't attack through the Ardennes even if not, France neglected her mobile forces. These were, when the moment came, not up to the task of stopping the Germans.
So are we repeating history? I think so. Even if we develop an impervious shield against ballistic missle attack, other routes for attack abound. Thinking that NMD solves the rogue-state problem is like thinking a firewall appliance protects your network. It's true as far as it goes... which isn't all that far.
Not only do these other options exist, they're a helluva lot easier than cobbling up a working ballistic missle. (Can you say "Containerized Freight"?) What's worse, such attacks will be MUCH harder to track to their origins than a ballistic missle. What good is a deterrent force if you don't know whom to hit back?
I don't disparage the technical accomplishments of NMD so far... the collision they managed was a darn difficult task even if it turns out that they did cheat. (Why, by the way, do you need to broadcast GPS once the target is on a ballistic track? Gravity is pretty darn predictable...)
I think it's clear that this is a dubious allocation of resources. It's very expensive insurance against a very unlikely event. Those billions of dollars could do a lot more good doing other things, even if they never left the defense budget. This limited defense gives every appearance of being a PR device and a boon to the military-industrial complex.
Now if we really mean to abandon MAD, we'd unilaterally proclaim that we will bring NMD on-line with all due haste, and cut offensive weapons one-for-one until we had only a couple hundred SLBM warheads left. We'd still have credible retaliatory power, we'd still be vulnerable to a backpack nuke, and we'd impress the hell out of the rest of the world. If NMD is worth doing at all, why not go all the way?
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
In the article, they don't talk about using GPS to find the target, they talk about the target using a GPS BEACON. This means the target was transmitting. Doesn't matter what it's transmitting. You just need to home in on the signal. Don't even need to decode it.
This is the same way that HARM missles work, so it's not like it's really cutting edge technology.
They cheated.
I believe that we should listen to other countries' concerns on the project, and we should question ourselves on the project every step of the way. This is what I believe to be going on in Congress (cut below the surface of the rhetoric, and you'll tend to believe this too), as Democrats and Republicans tangle over the expenditures and sciences of the project.
What I don't believe is that a Missle Defense is essential to the safety of the United States, but that doesn't make me a traitor. It just makes me an opinionated American.
The way I see it, the moment anyone drops or fires a nuclear bomb at us or anyone else, we will all die from the nuclear radiation driven by the jet stream as retaliations are made by us and whomever else.
I've now counted 5 posts on both sides of the "missle" defense issue, and I'm only halfway through. If you'd like to convince me that you know something about "missles" then please spell "missile" correctly.
Thank you, I feel much better now.
Agreed. Not just for the bad PR, but because it also hurts the troops when the weapons don't work.
> What really sucks about this case is that they were open and proactive about admitting what parts of the test were not the same as the proposed operational system, and they're STILL getting beaten up over it.
Amen, brother. Chalk up another "victory" for the media using the public's ignorance in order to further its own agenda.
> the successful destruction of that missle (plus the decoy avoidence) is impressive - and legit.
Amen again. The test demonstrated that if you have a functioning tracking system, you can pull off kinetic kill. The next step is to build a tracking system while simultaneously refining your kinetic kill capabilities.
(Yeah, if it were me designing the thing, I'd go for "blows up somewhere near the target with sufficient force that 'close enough' is good enough to destroy the missile", as opposed to a pure kinetic kill approach. But it doesn't take away from the fact that the ability to do KK means you've built some fscking impressive tech.)
1. Why did the military apparently try to hide it?
Sorry, that's classified.
2. What is the production model going to use to get an initial trajectory?
Sorry, that's classified.
What? You say it isn't classified? Ok, now it is.
I think that's correct.
Everyone remember when Steve Jobs impressed MacWorld by booting a big wall of macs from a single OS X server? turns out that they were using a forked version of OS X that was abandoned right after the show, so those features aren't present in today's version. But more than that, rumour has it that the OS X server machine was using PC hardware to accomodate ungodly amounts of RAM so it could run a copy of MacOS for each one of the machines.
I always thought that was funny.
chris
So spam and junk faxes aren't the first things to pop into your head when you see "CRM" and "bulk email and faxes" in the same sentence?
It is likely this was a GWG (==General Windows Gayness) error, that had nothing to do with the software. With a few exceptions for driver-level code, API calls shouldn't solid-freeze the OS (even Windows).
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Heard a story from a trade show developer about a big autoshow back in the last 80s. The client wanted a heavy industrial robot (Fanuc style robotic arms) with a video camera to fly around an actual car, go inside, etc. and people around the booth could watch large screen monitors of the action. The first day, everything works beautifully. That night, the cleaning crew goes in and dusts/cleans the car. Only problem is someone leaves the seat up. Next morning the crowd gathers and nobody from the booth bothers to check before starting the robotic flyaround. The crowd then gets to watch as the robotic arm smashes through the seat (actually tore it out) and destroys the door. Not to mention an expensive camera turned to pulp.
Why not a completely dummied up program? It's happened to me. None of the real code was demoed.
Worst Part? They then made me turn the "Demo Code" into the real product. Ouchie. So much for "design" or "testing".
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Much mention of suitcase nukes being carried into place has taken place in various media. But that requires an agent to smuggle in a nuke. Now, chances are any group capable of making a nuke can also make a submarine and bring in an agent on pretty much any bit of unattended coastline. But why bother with a fallible agent?
A ballistic missile *might* be shot down (eventually...) and would certainly get attention. Launch would be seen right away. And that's a level of technology that maybe isn't so easy (but again, if you can make a nuke, chances are you can make a ballistic missile.. but look at history, when was each developed?)
So what about a bomber? Slow, noticeable, and has that human element. This ain't 1945 anymore. But the idea is workable.
How about a cruise missile? Now the technology problem comes again.
But how about doing it 'cheap and dirty'? Load the nuke on a 'small' (recreational? Older commercial liner?) aircraft or a boat (sub running at snorkel?) and add as much fuel as it'll hold, a computer & some servos, and a GPS. Poor man's cruise missile.
Not what I recommend anyone do, of course, but this does show a failing in the idea of a missile defense system -- you don't know for sure what the "missile" will really be like. It might be nice to have a ballistic missile sheild... but there's so much it will be useless for.
--
The Coward
"Guaranteed Positive Shot"
Nobody said it had to stand for Global anything.
But masters, remember that I am an ass: though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.
It's about time someone pointed out that this is exactly the kind of useless fact-spouting without true understanding that the /. crowd likes to complain about - but only when it's coming from someone writing about hackers.
Take a while to research the system, and think about the technologies involved and the operational capabilities of each, and you'll quickly realize this story is pure propaganda.
The useful update rate on GPS technology is rather low. It's impossible to use it to do final homing on a target moving thousands of feet per second. Sure, it MIGHT help you spot it a few miles away at best, but the real test of this system was the ability to HIT the target.
Second, the interceptor system does not use anything remotely LIKE a GPS system to home in - it's using radar and infrared. Radar systems only listen to a preselected frequency - for bistatic systems (where the rx and tx are in two locations) the rx may be frequency-agile. But a monostatic system listens only to its own frequency. To get the resolution required to pick out and hit a several-foot-diameter target, the frequency in use is nowhere near the GPS frequency.
Don't be foolish enough to assume that the decision makers are not aware of these issues. As a civil servant in a procurement-related position, who evaluates contractor systems for suitability for the tasks for which they are designed, I can tell you with some authority that the government pays particular attention to the conditions of the test. If Salon knows about this transmitter, the test PLANNERS knew about it years ago, and payed particular attention to whether or not that transmitter might have ANY effect on the real data being collected.
Finally, bear in mind that logically, if anybody had anything to hide, the test and results would NOT be anywhere near so public. It doesn't matter how high-level the test is. Many many very important tests have been quite secret over the years, and no report had a clue the government was even thinking about such a test. The fact that this test is being conducted "in the clear" should calm the fears of the most ardent conspiracy theorist.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
(Score:-1, Failure To Blindly Criticize The Bush Administration)
Well, duh.
The "Missle Defense" system is designed to halt the Chinese threat, whom are sorely pissed about Taiwan, and there 100 mile territorial waters, etc.
The secondary purpose is to halt any Soviet threat (In about 10 years we will have enough "Missle Defense" to halt 90-100 missles, which is what the Soviets would have left if:
The current stockpile decays as expected.
The US initiates a 'first strike' which knocks out ~90% of the remaining 500 serviceable ICBMs.
The only thing this "Missle Defense" is not expected to defend against is "rogue" nations with stolen/purchsed/made nuclear/chemical/biological weapons.
I used to work at a games company. For prototypes our 3d artists would provide video mockups of gameplay and overall look and feel. Of course we displayed this video with a simple code wrapper with a few doo-dads to punch it up. Publishers always thought we were using a great real-time 3d engine. Eventually we would deliver a game with all pre-rendered images/video or a real-time 3d game with a MUCH lower polygon count. That was always a difficult D&P show. I just worked there. I'm not the one going to hell.
Yes. And I had to look at the source code to beat some of the opponents :-)
Cheers,
--fred
I worked at a leading Hifi shop in Boston back in the 80s. One night a gentleman came in looking for a good sounding pair of speakers. The salesman (not me thank goodness) demoed KEF, ADS, Klipsch, everything we had, almost. The customer inquired about the Bose speakers he saw sitting in the corner. "Oh", the salesman responded, "those are crap." Turned out that the customer was Dr. Bose himself. We weren't a Bose dealer after that.
On the sats, yes since GPS depends on that time to calc the time shift to calc position. But thats on satellites in use for years. FOr the beacon, as long as it had a fairly accurate clock on it that was synced to a atomic std clock before launch, it woudl be fine since the missle would only be in use for minutes. Not enough time for any clock drift to have a huge impact. All GPS needs is a time source, however if its not accurate it throws everything off, but in this case it wouldn't matter because it wouldn't have a chance tro drift much if at all given that missles life span once it was launched
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Idiot. You don't let facts get in the way of a snide Salon.com column. See, because some people think it won't work, it won't -- and therefore those people who think it will work are fools, and should be made the object of derision.
I was at a BOSE show when i was selling electronics in college and the guy I went with and I both hated BOSE speakers b/c they didn't have any bass (ie when we played Jane's Addiction our genitals didn't itch.)
At the show the BOSE 901s were literally pounding with bass, almost too much bass. Then I noticed that the curtain they were in front of was moving. When the BOSE rep was done we walked up to the curtain and pulled it back... 8 Cerwin Vega (8!) subs were sitting on the floor POINTING at the crowd.
This
2. The attacker would not need to receive and decode a GPS signal, just that simple carrier saying "this is my X/Y/Z"...
3. Go find it. Solve a path to ***WITHIN THE BLAST RADIUS OF THE ATTACKER*** Good GPS can do this. The miliary has the best.
EVEN SIMPLER, the beacon doesn't have to broadcast GPS coordinates. It could be singing "My Dog Has Fleas" and you could find it at certain speeds. Nobody has said what the speeds are yet. "Vas this zee slow fuse, or zee fast fuse?"
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I was working on a program that accessed a MS Access database. The database was encrypted so that the customer's valuable information would only be accessable to the program. We sent them a demo, and one of the comments that came back was "you can open the database by double-clicking on it".
My boss argued with them, saying you can open it but everything is encrypted, so you can't actually see anything in it w/o the password. They said, "no, it needs to be encrypted" (I have no idea what their idea of 'encryption' was).
So I just changed the file extension of the database to my initials, and changed the filename in the program to the same thing, and sent that out to them for the next demo. They came back and said "Thanks for encrypting the database!".
Most current anti-missile defense systems (such as Patriot B) don't strike their target, they do exactly as you say - they have a high fragmentation charge explode close enough that the probability that a piece of shrapnel will destroy the target is acceptable.
In the days of the cold war, when the probability of destroying an incoming bomber needed to be as close to 100% as possible, we had nuclear tipped long ranged air to air missiles. I don't think those relied on shrapnel though :) Heck back then every anti-something was nuclear tipped. We even had anti submarine missiles that would launch from one sub, fly through the air, dive into the water and explode. They worked because they only needed to detonate within 3 miles of the target sub.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
The problem was eventually solved by running a ground wire from the keyboard to the unit chassis.
snotnose
Sorry to nitpick, but how do
and go together? If you never replicated the bug, how do you know you eliminated it?One time we "kind of" cheated was for a project where we completely rewrote an existing application for a client. The original coder must have been on a huffing binge because the entire calculation process would take more than a day. Our version, which had results that checked out perfectly, took less than one second. As you can imagine, the client immediately accused us of mocking-up the results. After hours of trying to convince the client that we weren't full of crap, we finally relented and added a loop that simply updated a useless progress display. After playing with the delay, we finally got the client to approve it as a ten minute process! It is the only time I had to de-optimize a piece of software for a client.
My second item concerns a botched demo. We wrote a program that controlled vacuum chucks that moved hard drive media between containers moving on conveyour belts. The client, knowing full well that it was supposed to be a demo and not the final version, decided to start tweaking things like the conveyor speed, the height of the belts in relation to the device, and then pulled the plug on the computer during the demo! After the demo was finished, the client didn't complain about the system and we were able to finish it. We never did discover what the hell the guy was trying to find out since the contract never stated that the system was supposed to account for such circumstances.
Once I worked as a sysadmin in a place that did some work for
a hospital system, and they hired a doctor to come
in and host an online chat session. When there was
no one in the chat queue before we started, I was told to go into the next room and make fake accounts while people slipped me post-it notes
with medical questions on them.
The trouble is when the doctor asked me to elaborate, and I am somehow supposed to imagine how some middle-aged woman with some disease I have never heard of feels...
Wasn't there an old story in the book Hackers about a convention/conference where one of the video game development companies was showing off their new game for the Apple II, except because the graphics weren't that good they hid a C=64 under the table to run it?
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
My favorite demo-gone-bad comes courtesy of Computer Stupidities' Nice Try page:
My old boss spent some time writing statistical analysis packages for the Archimedes. One of them got fairly popular for Archie software, and he started a small business selling it. For those who don't know, Archie software usually came as source code and was executed through an interpreter.One day at a scientific meeting, he noticed that another company was showing Archie software with remarkably similar functionality to his own, so he wandered over. The longer he watched, the more familiar it looked. Eventually, when the sales representative had gathered a good crowd, he asked in a loud voice:
The screen displayed my boss' copyright notice. All they'd done was remove the front end.
It widely accepted as the biggest laugh of the show.
For more information, click here.
I have GOT to be an AC on this story. It was about fifteen years ago. We were working on our new platform and the execs really wanted to WOW the people at COMDEX with what we were working on.
The only problem was that it wasn't even close. But senior management put the heat on us very badly to go to the show with something.
We ended up using our COMPETITOR's product (but controlled in a tight loop) to do the demonstration with. And our platform was sitting on the table, with wires and all, pretending to be generating it.
And if you would have traced the cables (which one person DID!), you would have seen that they would have gone into our box. Only, it wasn't our box on the inside. Just the outside.
We really should have been caught for doing this, but we got away with it.
But - assuming the missle launched from California is unguided and hence following a straight line of flight, can you use the limited amount of data from the GPS to predict where the missle is going, then adding in trajectory and wind resistance and such in order to the calculate the path of the missle?
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
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Geez...hope you got a nice bonus for that save!
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
The first is only marginally related to computers:
When I was in the 10th grade, we had a science fair project due a week after xmas/new year's vacation. We had several months notice to do it. But me, being my usual self, procrastinated until that last week...
Hmm - what should I do, what should I work on...
Quick! Decide what to do!
I had a computer - I had just read about Conway's Life program - there it is! - I will write a modified form of Life, compare it to regular Life (control group?), and chart performance vs. starting colony types for both versions of Life (slap a title of "Artificial Life" on the sucker)...
I quickly coded up both programs in BASIC on my TRS-80 Color Computer, dropped in the high speed pokes, turned the printer on, and let it churn. At the end of the week, with a nice presentation display completed, neatly printed pages and a report done in SCRIPTSIT - I was ready...
Not only did I get an A+ on the project, but I also won the "grand prize" and went on to display at the county science fair (not that I got very far there, mind you - though hind sight being 20/20 and all, I tend to wonder WTF happened to my brain there when the judges came around)...
The second demo I know about happenned to a friend of mine, for a final project report we had to give in American History class senior year...
The report had to cover anything up to 1900 in American History - and we had about a month to do it all. Fortunately for me, that period allowed me to speak of Herman Hollerith and the 1890 census (this time, I didn't procrastinate, and actually did the work). No problem, and my report went smoothly...
My friend, on the other hand - procrastinated until the morning of the day we had to give the reports - we had already picked out what we were to do at the beginning - he had chosen the "Building of the Railroads" - or something like that. That morning, he grabbed a piece of 2x4, some coat hanger wire, and a hammer (which no doubt today would be considered a weapon - ahem), and took them to school.
Now, you got to understand - our history teacher was a man who never smiled, never joked - a very stern individual, so we all thought...
My friend was called, and so got up to do his report - no note cards, nothing - winging it all the way. He regurgitated what info he could remember from our history book, plus a little bullshit he no doubt made up. All the while trying to nail coat hanger wire onto a 2x4, in order to "demonstrate" the building of the railroad...
Let's just say things didn't go that smoothly - nails flew everywhere, the hammer hit his fingers - you know the bit. The whole class was laughing at the antics...
...including our history teacher....
In the entire year we were there, we had never seen this man so much as crack a smile - but there it was. My friend concluded his report (which was actually accurate on the "report" part, if not the demo piece), and sat down.
My friend later learned he had gotten a B+ for that report and demonstration - and was told by our teacher that his report was by far the most entertaining example he had ever seen.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The spokesperson at the initial "success" press conference was very open and forthcoming about the GPS beacon placed on the target vehicle. They didn't try and hide it at all - in fact, its existence was part of the presentation. The test was of the final-stage-to-intercept section, which includes a decoy-detection function. However, this part of the system needs an initial lanch vector from a launch-detect radar system. the radar picks up the launch, feeds the missle trajectory into the intercept stage, and then the interceptor carries out the actual intercept. The launch-detect radar portion of the system is not yet finished, so the GPS beacon was placed on the target to supply the missing information that the intercept stage requires. Note, however, that the data from the beacon was presented in the same manner as it would have existed if it came from the radar system. It supplied no additional information. If one assumes that the radar works as designed, then the test is perfectly valid. The military learned a lot about faking demos from the Sheridan "tank" and the Sgt York gun air defense system. They don't do that any more. It hurts too much when they get caught. What really sucks about this case is that they were open and proactive about admitting what parts of the test were not the same as the proposed operational system, and they're STILL getting beaten up over it. Dammed if you do, dammned if you don't. No matter what one may think about Bush's politics, the successful destruction of that missle (plus the decoy avoidence) is impressive - and legit.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
They knew in advance the size of the decoy, and programmed the interceptor to discriminate accordingly, from what I've read. Otherwise (like in real life) they'd have had a 50-50 chance of failure.
I was pleased to see that Jamie chose the words: "dictators who just have to deliver their nuclear warheads the hard way." I've been ranting about missiles only being warhead DELIVERY SYSTEMS for YEARS, while the military "experts" on TV prattle-on as if all future opponents will of course box only according to the Marquis of Queensbury rules and never use an unconventional warhead delivery system (say, diplomatic pouches, which can't be searched?). My respect for these "experts" is low, and I'm surprised when countries like Russia act scared of their projects (US citizens are who should be scared, since we're going to pay the taxes to spawn this make-work jobs program for the military industrial complex).
All's fair in war, anyway. If I were (Saddam, Hussein, Khadaffi, insert favorite dictator) and I has plans to turn Washington, DC into a few square miles of smoking glass, I don't think I'd want a missile's obvious physical trail back to (insert dictator's nation) anyway, and it's a lot easier to aim the trunk of a rental car, or an old freighter, or even a backpack(!) to directly hit a city than it is to make an intercontinental ballistic missile work accurately the first time you try it. IMO.
JMR
Speaking ONLY for myself!!!!
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
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"Ultimately, a briefcase nuke or even a shipping crate nuke on a ship going into NY harbor would be much better" Finally! Now I understand why crates are SO ubiquitous in FPSers!
The Patriot system actually couldn't track Scuds for more than a few seconds - want to know why? They didn't use enough bits for the numbers in the internal calculations, and they didn't check for overflows, which means that on every confirmation-of-missile pass the view window was 60 or so feet closer to ground than where it should have been, and the Patriot wouldn't launch, beliving it to be a false alarm.
Paraphrased from a recent college text on number representation in binary and computer arithmetic.
Uh, no. The target had a GPS transmitter that produced a signal the interceptor homed in on. This has nothing to do with either of them using (or not using) the GPS sats for locating themselves. The target had a transmitter, the interceptor had a reciever. The books were cooked.
See Salon's coverage
I was working for a software firm writing a custom ActiveX control to add to MS Word. We needed to demo the system to the clients so we rushed to put together a prototype of the screens. Since we thought the sales team would run the demo, we didn't add any error correction code.
During the demo, the sales team invites the CTO to use the software and gander at our handiwork. While the CTO is coming to the front of the room, the sales rep explains that this is demo code, so it won't work exactly like the finished product. The CTO sits down and the first button he clicks on is to create a new document from an XML template. The machine instantly froze. No blue screen, no error messages. And then get got the machine to go through a cold boot.
We still got the contract and delieverd the control on time with zero defects. To this day, we are still trying to duplicate the error.
The team I was on once had a very funny thing happen during a demo for some VIP's.
.au's we found on the net. They were Homer Simpson with all his "Mmmmmm cheeseburger... Mmmmmmmm cake with sprinkly things... Mmmmm beer.." etc.. It was in a cron to start playing at 11:45 each day. All the .au's together were about 4 minutes of Homer reminding you to eat.
You need a little background for this story. We all worked in a lab most of the time. It was common to get caught up in your work, and work right through lunch. So to fix this, we had an old sun sparc station 20 with the sound kit play a bunch of
Well, we had worked the whole weekend and had a demo at 10am on Monday. No problem. We got all the code finished and working around 8:30am Monday morning. Then we got a call from the VIP's. The plane they were flying was delayed. They told us they would get to us around 11 they said. So they show up at 11. The PHB's do thier thing with the VIP's and then it was time for the demo. Due to some special hardware needed for the demo, the demo was in the lab. So it is now 11:40..
Since we had been up for 3 days, we didn't even think about Homer. About 5 minutes into the demo, Homer started up. Our PHB was moritfied. One of the VIP's says, "You know I am getting hungry."
I did a fun little demo once. I was working for a certain government agency, building a website to make a whole lotta data accessible via interactive queries on the web. The data was in an Oracle DB, and we had a few Oracle contractor DBAs. The brass decided to send me to do a demo, so I travelled across a few states, got up in front of several hundred people, and showed them how every time you submit a query the whole thing would just hang. Turned out the DBAs picked that day to take the DB down for maintenance. No one told them I was doing a demo. Sigh. Ahhhh, those were the days...
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
OSX Server doesn't ned ungodly amounts of RAM to get a load of machines to NetBoot from it. Those machines are running the OS, the server just dishes out the files.
right. but to do it quickly for the show, the server actually loaded up MacOS for each machine. in the topic of this story, it was nothing like what they were actually advertising.
Just as long as you take any pro-Missile Test writings with similar grains of salt. Any news source with an agenda is going to be biased.
0 _xbck0114.html - I'm not sure, exactly, what test it's for, but it describes the use of the GPS systems.)
This test was a successful test of the interceptor hitting a target - assuming that the target is accurately tracked. The GPS substituted for a yet-to-be-finished ground-based radar which would be providing the tracking information. (http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2000/x0114200
So anyone who says "the test was a rigged failure" is lying or uninformed. Similarly, anyone who says "the test shows the system works" is lying or uninformed. The test was a successful test of part of the system in ideal conditions - a necessary step, to be sure, to creating a complete system, which is still a long way from being successfully built and tested.
It took 15-odd years and however many billions of dollars to get this far. I don't know how many more it'll take to get to working system... but, juding by any other military or space project, it'll take longer and cost far more than whatever the estimates are. Whether it's worth it depends on a whole lot of factors...
I've met the major who commanded the two Patriot batterys (err, whatever formations they were). His firsthand observation was that the Patriots were effective about 50% of the time. However, there was a FUD effort going on from the Israelis, who wanted to sell the US their own anti-missile missiles. Hence, the "evidence" to the effect that they failed miserably.
That's the way the system is designed to work:
1) A radar system detects the launch
2) The radar tracks the target to determine trajectory
3) The tracking signal is fed to the interceptor missle
4) The interceptor is launched along the track of the incoming warhead
5) When the interceptor is close enough, it switches to it's own seeker systems and homes in on the warhead
The problem is that the radar portion isn't done yet - but they wanted to test the final-interecept stage (which is the hard part anyway)
So they configured a GPS system to transmit the _same information that the radar would have provided_ using the same formats and same systems. the interecptor got no information that the radar would not have provided - so the test is perfectly valid.
At least, as long as one assumes that the radar will work as designed.
The intereceptor did NOT "home in on the beacon" as some people would have you believe. Everything here was completely above board.
They learned their lesson back in the Sgt York days. Faking Isn't Worth It.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
One of the early demos of "Windows 95" was rolling right along, when there was a short power failure backstage, taking out the computers (but not the projectors). When the machines were brought back up, you saw a Happy Mac, instead of anything W95-related. Turns out the "W95 demo" was Director running on a Mac.
Good call. If the intent was to trace the path or even provide a firm signal to track it really doesn't matter. They hit a missile with another missile fired from thousands of miles away.
OSX Server doesn't ned ungodly amounts of RAM to get a load of machines to NetBoot from it. Those machines are running the OS, the server just dishes out the files.
A jacket can be removed and placed over the modem, whose blinking lights would otherwise indicate some helpful programmer back in the office is "aiding" the demo at the site... The system actually worked great, it was just that the reboot test had an Emulex Eprom that had a bug in it which required the hitting of a return keystroke to get the 11/23 to proceed through its boot.
John 17:20
I think this was the biggest ego blow of my career.
Another guy and I had been working on a java application to create ringtones. Our client had a timeline of about a month, and it was met pretty easily. Anyway, to make a long story short, the final deliverable meeting consisted of Me, the other developer, our client, and the PM for our project.
It was the normal walkthrough of functionality, and the client was very pleased with the results. He was so pleased in fact, that he asked our PM to tell him what language it was written in. And he said:
"These two guys are the best damn javascript developers in the market!".
What an embarrasment
arcane for life
"Tell us your best demo war stories."
What? Are you kidding... have you heard of a type of institution called "university"..??
Demo disasters hurt a lot more when you know the stuff is really almost done as opposed to when you're just showing flashing lights that don't do anything.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
New York Times by Tim Weiner, August 27, 1993 "Last year, the GAO audited
seven "Star Wars" tests between 1990 and 1992. The auditors found that
three of the tests were accurately described to Congress. Those three tests
were complete or partial failures. The missile defense program's officials
told Congress the other four tests were successes. That was untrue, the
auditors said.
The inaccurate claims included the success rate of experiments, the
progress of the programs, the sophistication of the tests, the ability of
interceptor missiles to distinguish between a target and a decoy and the
missiles' achievement of accuracy and altitude goals, the GAO reported.
'They have lied about certain functions that their missiles are supposed to
perform,' said a Federal investigator who agreed to speak only if he was
not identified. 'They've used things to enhance the target. The fact is
that you've got something up there solving your guidance problem. And
you've got an incentive to deceive. That's how you keep your program
going.'
A former Reagan administration official, a nuclear physicist who closely
studied the missile defense program in the 1980s, said it was characterized
by 'secrecy, greed, self-deception, deception of Congress and actually even
of the President.' The former official, who remains a Pentagon consultant
and who spoke on condition of anonymity, is not among the accusers in the
debate."
New York Times by Tim Weiner, August 18, 1993 "Officials in the 'Star
Wars' project rigged a crucial 1984 test and faked other data in a program
of deception that misled Congress as well as the intended target, the
Soviet Union, four former Reagan administration officials said."
Do you know anything about how anti-radiation missiles work? It's a completely different technology than what is used in the interceptors. It would actually be much more difficult to use a signal like this as the targetting mechanism than it would be to use a passive guidance system.
Anyway almost nothing used in the interceptor missiles are based on cutting edge technology, only application of existing technologies.
Very sad. I hope the peoples of the world quickly grow up and stop this kind of backward, us vs them thinking.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
You can't get that accuracy with GPS either unless the object stays still for a long time and takes lots of readings. There's a GPS FAQ around that explains all of this.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
One question: Does the SMD intercept at the forign warehouse, or domestic, when shipping a nuke FedEx?
'Nother for ya: You know how many TONS of drugs cross the border every week. So how does SMD intercept nukes being ported over the border by "mules"? And can it be adapted to target drugs?
If you don't want to spend money like water, and don't care if your delevery system is photogenic and phallic, then missles as platforms don't make sense - Spider Robinson
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Argh. Reminds me of the time I was given the task of creating a multiple choice test generator for a client's site. Since I wasn't given any actual questions to use, I just made up my own, including the following:
Who is Al Gore?
the Vice-President
I don't know
some fag
I thought, "I'll just change the data when they give me the real questions. It should be out of there well before the actual demo." Ha!
It was at Comdex in Chicago a few years ago. It was funny as hell. Bill plugged in a printer to a USB port on Win98 to demonstrate the USB plug and play capabilities and as soon as he plugged it in it went Blue Screen. The crowd just died laughing, it was awesome. Bill said something to the effect of "Obviously that's why we haven't released it yet..."
One of the funniest things I've ever seen.
-jay
Dinky third-world countries use suitcase nukes delivered by suicide bombers. They're already not planning to spend any money on ballistic missiles; star wars isn't going to dissuade them any further.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Do you have any idea where I could fine this terrific game for Linux?
I would greatly appreciate any information.
Looking for a great online backup: Green Backup
why wouldnt saddam simply launch hundreds of fake warheads.
What do you think would be the most likely consequences of Saddam (or anyone) launching ICBMs at an NMD-equipped USA with "just kidding" warheads on them. Do you think we would wait for the forensic analysis of the shrapnel before counterattacking every missile silo and military installation we could target? A 90% effective NMD might convince us not to retaliate by nuking cities, but there would still be hundreds of thousands of military and unlucky civilian casualties. And, even when it was all over and someone discovered that those incoming warheads were fakes, do you think the scared-witless American public would shed any tears for those casualties?
There was a fairly notorious incident in (I think) the 80's where a then-prominent datacommunications company staged a demo of equipment that included link encryptors. The link encryptors were exposed as boxes with flashing lights and no encryption at all. Big stink.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
BreX: "Yep, trust us. There is gold in dem dare hills. We got the samples to prove it...."
And for those who don't know about BreX it was probably one of the biggest gold mine scandals in history. After salting their core samples with gold their stock went from pennies a share to high of $200. Last I heard you could buy shares as novelty items.
Bill Gertz, a reporter for the Washington Times, uncovered a file (translated) known as Document 65, which details the Chinese militaries stance on the reconquering on Taiwan. Searching for "United States" or "U.S." in the file makes for some very disturbing reading. Of particular interest was this quote:
The Chinese spend a great deal of time considering the possibilities of nuclear war with the U.S.Another quote, from an article by Gertz, shows a statement from a Chinese newspaper, the Liberation Army Daily, which mirrors the views Central Military Commission Chairman Jiang Zemin and other senior military leaders:
Sydney Morning Herald reporter David Lague, confirmed Chinese threats against the U.S. his August 1999 piece on the Chinese threat to the U.S. He relayed the following threat from the Chinese military:
This missile defense shield is not to protect those of us who live in rural farming communities, it is to protect Los Angeles, Seattle, and the like. It is an oddity that the very demographic (city dwellers) that this shield is drawing the most attack from is the very demographic that this shield will hopefully help to protect.Actually, this brings up a question: if suitcase bombs are so much cheaper than ICBM's and IRBM's, why are countries like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea spending so much money in ICBM's and IRBM's instead?
Maybe they know something we don't, or thought through the whole "smuggle the bomb in" scenario and thought it less likely than everyone who believes in it.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Plus, any creature with the smallest ability to think rationaly and with logic will see through theory and historical proof that this method does NOT WORK on terrorists. It is after all, based on what is called the 'threat of mutual destruction'. Someone who would happily strap dynamite to their chest to take out a couple of clerks in some government accounting office (or even better, some small children on a bus) would find this very amusing.
While I believe that there is little to no true rational thought in the world and along with hypocricy and hate, we have war and terror... lets look at things logically. If the world currently has the ability to destroy itself, then it is wise to get rid of that... but how to you let your guard down if your opponent has a history of using such 'signs of weakness' to attack you? Easy, you show him that you have nothing to fear from him, but that he has nothing to fear from you as well... by destroying your weapons of mass destruction that you have aimed at him.
Try not to let yourself be led around and manipulated by politicians who care nothing of you, peace or the prosperity of the world, but only care for their own power.... all in the name of 'for the children'. Be proactive, not reactive... and perhaps you should read your history books instead of burning them. They will show that a healthy defense coupled with an isolationist (as far as governments are concerned) approach affords the best results. However, if the US were to make a working missle shield and then take the bully approach, then yes it would be bad. But like with guns, alcohol and drugs... I don't ever recall the tools lashing out of their own to create harm... it is always the dumbass on the other end.
Deep in engineering, down where mortals seldom go,
A manager and customer go looking for a show,
They pass amused among us, and they sign in on the log;
They've come to see our pony and they've come to see our dog.
Not on record anywhere as far as I know.
Serves you right for writing spamware, though. I don't blame you for not admitting what crook you worked for.
A guy I worked with once (he was later fired) was supposed to demonstrate the functionality of a database-driven website that he had written (an online community sort of thing) back when this was still a relatively new concept. His resume listed this sort of thing as his specialty. The client arrived, and he started demonstrating by logging in, and voila, the home page customized itself to his account. He went to the preferences page and clicked a few options, and voila, the home page was different now. That's when the client noticed that his name was misspelled. "Oops, must have typed it in to the database wrong, hehe." He started showing the pages again, and each time the client would ask to see a particular link, he'd blow it off and click somewhere else instead. My co-workers and I were passing around looks. Then I noticed that his name was once again spelled correctly at the top of the page.
The clients eventually left, only mildly impressed since he follow any of their suggestions on using the site while in the meeting, and I got suspicous. I tapped in to his computer (honestly, if you're wearing a Flyers tie, don't make your password "Flyers") and grabbed the files. I realized there was no database connectivity in here at all! It was all static pages that could only be browsed in one path, and the changes you made just actually linked you to a page statically programmed to show the changes. That's why his name had changed spelling!
Ok, not too impressive, but true =)
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Stolen nuke material would pose a slightly different case, but the country that originally refined the plutonium/uranium will have to be really clear really fast about how their materials got into the hands of a "terrorist."
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
zero. just dump enough flares to bury it with all the other heat sources.
Reminds of a company I used to work for, we developed ERP software. The president and CEO would go out to do demos and they had spent the last couple of days writing batch files to make it look like the software really worked! The only sad thing is that by the time the software REALLY did work the investors were so pissed they dissolved the company... I can understand a few "tweaks" to make things look good, but not a whole set of code behind the code to make it look like the base code really works!!
*narf!*
Then someone filled me in on some details. I was to be a very small part of a much larger demo. The Assistant Secretary of Defense (#2 guy in the Pentagon), the guy in charge of DoD C4I, the general in charge of the USMC C4I, Navy Admirals, USAF Generals, etc... were going to be the guests of honor. Oh shit! Oh freakin shit! Please can I go home now? I have to change my underwear. Remember, I know nothing about this network at this time.
Well, my buddy and I scrambled to kludge up a presentation and finally (barely) had things working. Then 30 minutes before the demo, someone on the other end decides to reboot the server that we are using. We lose our network connection after the reboot and can't log on to restart our demo programs. We frantically call up people on the other end and politely ask them, WTF are you guys doing!? Eventually, someone at the other end had to log in for us, start the programs and re-establish the X11 connection. Hmmm, remote computing. Phone someone, and have them log in for you.
Eventually all went well. We had our five minutes of fame and glory. The USMC Major General told us that we were doing a great job! Then he slapped me on my back when I wasn't ready and nearly knocked me over. I looked at his assistant, and saw that he was having a very hard time suppressing a laugh.
I had a beer or two (or maybe more) when I got home.
Now, I happen to be very much in favor of the development of a national missile defense system. However, I do not agree that the only ways to argue against it are the two you mention.
For starters, in spite of the last test, the NMD still isn't regarded as functional (even at the Pentagon). I hope that it will be soon. But if we can't make it work, we shouldn't deploy it.
Your analysis of mutually assured destruction is glib; the concept has assured that Hiroshima and Nagasaki saw the only atomic weapons ever loosed in anger. MAD has its place in international politics. With the development of largely indestructible strategic weapons (in the case of the US, Ohio/Trident D5 submarines), MAD prevents a rational actor from unleashing a powerful nuclear arsenal. The Russians, in particular are very concerned about a NMD that could render their arsenal impotent (hence Putin's comments that a large-scale NMD would spark a new arms race) and render MAD obsolete. If we could launch a nuclear attack without fear of nuclear annihilation ourselves, it might suddenly be considered a rational decision. It is important to me that this never be the case. You posit that a nuclear attack on the United States would earn an overwhelming response, but it is not clear to me that this is or should be the case. If Iraq (strictly an example to illustrate my point) manages to hit Manhattan with a small cobbled together missile and kills 100,000 people, it is not clear to me that we ought to fire dozens of warheads at Iraq killing millions and causing an environmental nightmare that we can't even fathom, as well as irradiating a great deal of the Middle East. Worse, what if Osama bin Laden manages to launch a missile from the mountains of Afghanistan. Are we to destroy all of Afghanistan (with which bin Laden is not, technically, affiliated)? How do you think the Russians would feel (hint: how would the US feel if the Russians decided to destroy Mexico with ICBMs?)?
In fact, the NMD is designed to prevent rogue states from launching one (or a few) missile at the United States or her allies. I regard this as a worthwhile goal, to the extent that we can achieve it. But it is not yet clear to me that we can.
-db
Knowing the facts, there are only two ways to argue against missile defense: you are either in favor of M.A.D., or you believe that taxpayer dollars shouldn't pay to protect us from a very likely threat of nuclear devestation.
If you beleive the former, you are simply un-American
Thank you for implying that EVERY military and political leader for the past 50 years has been un-American.
I could pay an extra $2 to prevent my face turning into what a french fry from dropped into a deep fryer looks like, I think I'll pony up the cash.
I would, too. What I don't want to do is to spend $2/paycheck to make weapons manufacturers rich.
We should take the Israeli approach and start blowing up any facility among our potential enemies that looks like it might be used to create weapons of mass destruction. If you suggest otherwise, then you are UN-AMERICAN. And an ANTI-SEMITIC. And a NAZI.
This was told to me by a Burroughs employee who claimed to have witnessed the middle part.
Back in the olden days, oh my precious, tapes were nothing like they are now. None of the other things in computing were was like they are now, but that's irrelevant.
Burroughs sold an interesting little (well, big) device called a `key to tape' system. It was designed for data entry clerks to do keypunching without actually producing punch cards. Instead, a set of keypunch operators would type away at things that looked like keypunch machines (Eh? Punch cards. We're talking punch cards here.) but the data was actually written (one card image at a time) to a tape.
This was considered a major advance, which will kind of put things into perspective.
There was a central station with a Real CRT (oooooooo) for the master operator. When the tape was full, the operator was prompted to put in the next one. This had to be done fairly quickly, as keypunch operators were cheap and fast, but memory was expensive and tapes were slow.
The system had been optimized and made `user friendly' in the best possible way, and was ready to go. The salesman set up a demo for A Major Customer at the customers site. The demo was extremely well-controlled. Keypunch operators entered pre-assembled data in a controlled way. When the tape filled, up popped the prompt:
Insert next tape, asshole.
The salesman adroitly stepped in front of the machine, blocking the monitor from view, while the master operator inserted next tape. The demo concluded without further incident, and the salesman returned to the plant. . .
Where he went on a rant which can only be imagined. Some skepticism was expressed. To prove the case, the offending machine was set up, the operators were brought in, the same data was entered and written to the same tape, and the prompt came up:
Insert next tape, please.
The salesman was treated with general derision, and people wandered away with another fine story to tell.
Needless to say, this story got around. And not too long after that, a software patch came out. It seems that there was a little joke embedded in the control system. If the number of records on the tape modulo this number times that number equaled some other number, the tape insertion prompt was, well, different. The patch removed this feature.
This left open the question, tho, of why using the exact same data and exact same tape did *not* result in the exact same prompt. It should have, and maybe if they'd used a *new* tape, it would have. You see, back in those days tapes stretched when used. This one stretched enough that the second use got one more record onto the tape.
Back in ?1995? or so, the university that I was going to/working at (whose name I'd publish, if it weren't for the fact that I'm working there again, and our webserver already took one tanking this week, but I will say that the VP of the USA is very familiar with our hospital) wanted to try to get a grant to put together an achive of World World II related data.
I was told that it was just for a presentation, and someone else filled in a crapload of extraneous text later, but the supposed selling point of the project would be some big search engine. We spent the better part of a week trying to figure out the real media encoder, running on a Mac Centris 650, to get just one item of data for the 'archive'.
In the end, the search engine was a complete hack that worked fine, although it always assumed that you searched for 'hitler', and returned a static page of results. The file in the end was pre-loaded onto the machine they'd be using for the presentation, so that it didn't have to stream.
In the end, they never got the grant, three of us wasted a week or more on the whole damned thing, and 6 years later, the mock web site's still up. (I only know that, because someone mailed me last year, asking if it was okay to copy a picture.)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Yes, I can see now. Anyone who disagrees with you is either stupid or evil. There is no other possible explanation. Thank you.
A hand held Civilian GPS is far too innacurate to do that kind of stuff. A good GPS is about the size of a full tower case and can track at extreme high speeds within inches. They have been used to land 747s with extreme precision, as well as map topography.
The GPS was used only to put the target on the test trajectory -- not only is GPS too innacurate for a missile intercept where the spped of both objects can be measured in miles per second, but the intercepting missile did not use GPS to find its target anyway.
Wanna give me some back-of-the-envelope calculations on how much liquid nitrogen it takes to eliminate the infrared signature of a reentry vehicle moving at Mach 15?
Damn default button. Anyway, this reminds me of project where I was in a group that had to demo of some user interface for a UI class.
Anyway, after the demo, the instructor was expecting a working program and kept asking questions like "What Database?" and "How did you login?" The truth was, since we thought it was a UI demo, not a product demo, we cheated and hard coded the thing to do what we wanted it to. We should have done what the other groups did and just stuck with Screenshots instead of trying to show something working.
at the software company i work at, i know first-hand we've landed a number of large clients for our software simply by demoing this feature or that feature that was really just a good animation of what we thought it would be like. because the the time to setup a new client is typically anywhere from 6-8 weeks after a signed contract, we always seem to be able to lock our programmers in an office for weeks on end and have them some magically pull it outta their butts. Granted, I don't think we've ever had a blunder like these fools where we couldnt produce what we promised within time but we certainly are familiar with the game of demoing features and products that don't exist yet.
Dear Shadowy Conspiracy, Inc.:
We've tried your demonstration program, and have been disappointed to learn that it only runs on MS IIS.
We'd like to point out para. 3, of section 23 of our contract, which states the the entire internet is to be brought under our dominion.
We presume that you will be fixing this oversight soon, as the consequences of failure would be... unpleasant.
Regards,
Us
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
If you didn't know about this, then you don't know about the biggest, costliest demo failure in world history (I think). :)
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Good mfences make good neighbors.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Long enough ago that it was the AI winter rather than the dotcom bubble, a company I worked for had a big press demo/debut - invited several hundred of the technology press to the UCLA faculty club, fed them lunch, etc.
Being the AI glory days, we used specalist hardware, in this case a TI explorer. Someone at TI had the bright idea of using fiber opitcs between the box and the head end (tube,keyboard,rat), and jacketed them in plastic. It also had one of the earliest high resolution displays, which meant a one-of-a-kind 175lb projector, and a specially hacked display board to feed it, one which featured coaxial cables soldered to the board, and minimal strain relief.
So I fire the thing up, and no display. So I put in my spare board. Now the regular display is working, but the projector isn't. Out comes the soldering iron, and the cracked joint gets fixed. Ok, we are up and running. The machine finishes booting, and I get the demo loaded and ready. (the process made "easier" by having the keyboard/etc up at the podium, and the box and projector at the back of the hall.) A bit of cardboard in front of the projector, and its time for the fourth estate to get fed.
I am chilling out at the back of the hall, when I hear the squall of a Maxtor 140 doing its power-on init. Some helpful person had "borrowed" an outlet for his luggable, and popped the breaker on the outlet strip. Oh well, it will auto start the application, and Phill will just have to load the data... Word gets passed to warn him.
Lunch is over, and on cue, I pull the "shutter" away from the projector. Up there is the "self test (keyboard) failed". Pop the box's rear door open, pull the fiber cable out of the special connector, and do the "wave" test. Seems someone parked a chair on the cable, and the layer of duct tape wasn't sufficent protection. Out comes the spare cable, and the company president makes comic relief as I back my way thru the tables, unspooling cable.
Plug the new cable in, and get the machine booted, demo loaded, etc (the software was actually ready). The actual demo was an anti-climax. I was relieved of booth duty that afternoon, and taken to some very fancy place for drinks.
Watch my team build a steam race car on Sunday Aug 5. (TLC, 7PM et). Watch us cut a Land Rover in half in the Fireboat final round Monday Aug 6 (8 E/P) or Aug 12 (7 ET).
Organizer:New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society;The NERDS,first US team in the UK Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars
Back in my early college days I was working as a on-site residential PC troubleshooter. I have all kinds of interesting stories, but my favorite is this one lady who just kept hovering over me and generally aggravating me to distraction. After an hour or so of her staring over my shoulder and asking questions every time I clicked on anything I finally figured out what the problem was and fixed it(don't remember what it was, doesn't matter to the story). At this point my stress level had been climbing steadily for an hour and I was just ready to leave. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that proclaiming to have found the problem will necessitate a lengthy explanation of what was wrong and how I fixed it, which would in turn necessitate a lengthy background build up on the workings of Windows. So after a minute of thought, I stood up and said I figured out what the problem was. I picked up the potted plant she had on one side of her monitor, and moved it to the other. At this point she is pretty sure I'm bullshitting her, but I tell her to try the computer now. Sure enough, it works great. She's still not buying it, so I come up with some story about the minerals in the plant and electromagnetic radiation, and I throw in some terms I had heard on Star Trek the night before. As I'm walking out the door I remind her to rotate the plant once a month to prevent further buildups.
Until recently, I worked as an intern programmer for a web design house in Boulder, CO. It was a small company (~15 employees), and my desk was right next to the CEO's desk. (No windows, partitions, or anything like that).
... and that's the story.
So, one afternoon, the CEO leans over and tells me that he's leaving to demo a client's new website for them (at their office). He also tells me that he has just "accidently altered" some significant CFML code on their site, and that he didn't have time to finish adding a few graphics and other niceties.
The conversation pretty much went like this:
CEO: I will be in a meeting in 20-30 minutes. I just broke our client's website. Your job is to fix it so we don't all look like nimrods.
Me: Ummm....
CEO: Don't worry, I'm sure you'll figure it out!
And he scooted out the door. Somehow, I fixed the broken code, made some graphics, and threw it all on the Internet before he made the presentation. Phew.
I used to belong to a newsletter that had a weekly mailing with news in the electronic components industry. At the end they usually had an interesting or funny story. They claimed this one was true. I cannot support it one way or the other.
A salesman was running a demo for some voice recognition software at a trade show. After a bit of a delay from his starting time, he was able to finish setting up and get the crowd calmed down. Just as he started his demo, someone in the crowd yelled, "FORMAT C: RETURN!". Then, a quick thinking accomplace yelled "YES RETURN!". Needless to say, the software worked...
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
What was great was how pissed off the prep girls got at us, not b/c we were "massaging" the numbers, but dispite the fact they were in our calculus classes, they couldn't figure out how to do it as well!
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
I was developing a prototype database system for a client. The code was very pre-alpha, but there was a copying running at the client site. The specs kept changing every other week as the client and my manager came up with ideas during meetings.
I was on site one day to load in the new batch of changes when I looked up and standing there was the management of the company, ceo's from 2 other companies and a few other unidentified people.
I was asked "When is the demo due to start?". Internally I paniced, but I replied, "Well I've just installed the new system, and it will take me about 15 minutes to get it ready".
They went off for coffee and I hid in an office and rang my manager. "They want me to do a demo!" I screamed.
There was a few seconds silence from the other end of the phone, and my manager said "I knew there was something I forgot to tell you"
I can't remember much about the demo, apart from a few well covered-up crashes. The other programmer who had come along to fix another problem on the site said it was the best demo he'd ever seen.
That demo made the company it's only sales for about 2 years and kept it afloat in the middle of the 80's recession.
I did cheat on a demo when I used some Java applets running on our server to "generate" transactions that were supposed to be from client workstations (which we did not have fully working at the time). I set up the client stations with quick/dirty front end forms with no functionality and jury rigged it to simply generate a connection when you pushed the appropriate buttons. My boss knew that we were still on track and we used the demo to please some visiting dignitaries.
Not quite the cardboard box with duct tape and a picture inside, but close enough...
We're sorry, the phone number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try your call again
Having a fair amount of hands-on experience with military hardware, I think you're greatly underestimating how good these systems really are.
We're long past the days of where an infrared seeker was a "hot blob" device. Modern seekers have high enough resolution to act as HDTV cameras. The NODLR camera on my LAV-RECCE was sensitive enough to tell the temperature difference in clothing worn next-to-skin and over clothing - meaning that you could "see" right through someone's clothing to tell who was wearing boxers or briefs - at several hundred meters.
Missle seekers have been good enough to pick up heat from atmospheric friction on subsonic aircraft for at least 15 years, and the more modern varients on the AIM-9 Sidewinder can distinguish between an aircraft and a flare with no trouble at all.
Your "pre-chilled" scenario is totally bogus. Air friction at launch would defeat it in seconds.
Defeating countermeasures is a sticky problem to be sure, but it is entirely solvable, as the past 50 or so years of homing torpedoes and anti-air missles shows. And the stakes are VERY high. These are NBC weapons you're shooting at, not piddly little high explosives. If one of these things gets through, there is real and serious pain to be had.
Their effectiveness against the "mass launch" Soviet-style attack scenario may be dubious (so instead of 5 warheads per city, you get 1. Oh well.) but against less affluent states who don't have those kinds of stockpiles, it's entirely reasonable to expect to neutralize the attack. That adds a powerful deterrent factor - I've got 5 warheads. If I mount them on my Long March and fire them at the US, none of them may get though, and then I've kicked the hornet's nest for nothing.
The nice thing, technically, from a missle defense system is that it gives you and added response to an agressor. If every ABM gets through and delivers a payload, then your only real response is retaliation in kind - hello MAD! If the bad guys nuke LA... well, if they nuke LA they might get applause... if they nuke Daytona Beach, then you're pretty well forced to nuke a city back, and if the nuke-er has sufficiant capacity, you start escalating. With a defense system, you can absorb the attack without harm, and possibly use a less destructive form of retaliation.
Ever notice that Superman never carried a gun?
Politically, there are other issues that go along with developing and deploying a missle defense system that make it a less attractive option. i find it odd that the current administration is pushing so hard for it - better, I think, to develop the technology quietly. But that's a discussion for another day.
To call it "snake oil" though, as if it couldn't possibly work, is to reveal a great deal of ignorence.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
While I don't entirely disagree with your post, I implore you and the moderators to consider another viewpoint concerning this statement. Logically it is easier to think of it as a "welfare program" for the defense industry. When people talk about the missile defense shield they think, "why build it if it costs so much and isn't going to stop all forms of nuclear attack and maybe won't work in the first place?" Enter the knee-jerk response - "Don't make it with MY money!" Okay, this is actually rational I must admit. But there's more to it than that:
First, we had a lot of technology developed during the Cold War. You can't uninvent Nukes. Likewise, scientific knowledge is another genie that cannot be put back in the bottle. You can't make a person "forget" that he/she knows how to develop high-end missile guidance systems without physically harming them in some way (killing, lobotomizing, etc.). It really only takes one well educated and trained high-energy nuclear physicist/rocket scientist to move to China and help them out. That figure that people keep throwing around about them being only twenty or so years behind us would be reduced to maybe only ten. Why don't we just give them high paying jobs as high-school teachers instead? Unfortunately, that concept goes flying out the window when taxpayers decide that they are getting ripped off by having to pay a half a mil a year to teach their kids algebra. I think it's a much harder sell to the public than a high-tech defense project. At least they'll be getting something for their money.
So that leads to the next point. At least they'll be getting something for their money. You can argue for or against that point all day. The truth is, it doesn't matter if the missile shield can actually shoot down other missiles. We just need everyone to THINK that it does. Let me explain that. One of the most ancient and well-known principles of war/conflict/politics/dealing with kids and so on, is that you always offer your opponent choices and make one of them seem the most attractive. BTW, I don't look at kids as enemies but if you have one, I'm sure you can relate
Great! So if a bad guy attacks, it will be with a briefcase instead! What's the difference? The difference is that missiles can be launched within minutes in an irrational fit of rage by a dictator with a button, arrive at their target in minutes, and cannot be stopped. A freighter takes days to arrive at the target, someone can change their mind, and it can be stopped if detected. I know, we can't stop illegal aliens from entering the country so how are we gonna stop one briefcase? Simple. People don't have radiation signatures. At least not the same signature as fissile material does anyway. Okay, so just hide the radiation signature. It's not that easy. But I'm not saying it can't be done. Read "The Sum of All Fears" by Tom Clancy. There's actually a whole bunch more to this subject. But I don't like reading super-long posts so I'll digress.
I dont know about everyone else but im getting sick and tired of every single thread having an anit MS comment (or 300) - i mean come on people grow up - if i posted a story about breast enlargement someone out there would relate it back to MS - if i posted one about cars - yup MS
.Net or Bill is evil bullshit story link, how about some articles on real world issues like the medias treatment of the code red wank etc etc
Do some of you just sit at your computers obsessing about MS and the evil that is bill ?
In that case may i say get a grip for christs sake and think past it - i read slashdot for the intelligent comments (and there used to be a lot more ) and insightful stories (ditto) and i for one dont care to see one more fucking anti MS or anti
PS for those of you who cant get past microsoft try http://www.thehun.net - the perfect thing for one track minded wankers.
Grow up children
PS yeah i know im a coward but the massive intellect of the average slashdot moderator means anyone who wont criticise MS and proclaim linux to be the answer to everything gets modded down and attacked as a troll in about 10 secs and i have earned the karma i have by posting intelligent comments and dont want to give some 12 year old the chance to rate me based on his/her/its personal opinions.
GROW UP PEOPLE
Sure enough, it crashed on-stage. A few times. But they were so adept at moving the crash boxes out of the way and dismissing them that nobody really noticed. That, and the software was so impressive that it netted them a standing ovation at Agenda '95 - supposedly the first in years.
I believe in both and AM an American. Missle defense is nothing but a gift to the defense contractors. WIll it work? Maybe, but just like most other miltary systems, there are sizable margins of error. In this case I'm sure it'll be high - I figure if the Air Force can say they have a 75% chance of hitting a missle it'll be deployed - I just don' tthink its worth hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars for a threat that isn't very real. Hell, there aren't many countries that can reach our shores with a missle that would be considered 'rogue'
Do I think terrorists will try to nuke the US - hell yes. But they won't use a missle, they'll build it here and drive it to the target and set it off. End of story and city. An dthe missle defense won't get you a damned thing.
SO don't get so high and mighty. People have different beliefes. I think 100 Billion or more can be put to much better uses than trying to shoot down missles that will likely never come.
Remember, MAD assumes BOTH countries can destroy each other. If Sadddam managed to get his hands on a Russian or CHinese ICBM he'd never use it. Why? Because it would cause minial damage to our country as a whole (but would suck major for wherever it hit) and Iraq qould cease to exist as we launched a couple of the thousands of missles we have in their direction. So its not MAD in this case - what they are trying to sell missle defense for. Its raging stupidity and most despots are evil and egomaniacs but they usually are smart. Saddam knows now bunker would protect him if he nuked a US city because we'd turn IRAQ into a freaking crater.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
You know your shit, Lawrence.
Thanks! So do you, apparently, judging from the cute little workshop fire.
I've yet to have one of those. Anywhere I break out breadboards, so too do I break out the fire extinguisher. :)
www.glowingplate.com
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I think this is the definition of a dog and pony show, on both sides! One side fudges numbers so that they can get justification to spend billions of dollars (and make billions of dollars if you are the contractor), and the other side fudges their info to get justification to keep themselves in the anti-missile defense business. Its dog and pony at its finest.
Here's the big question: Why do we need this? If terrorists can nuke us with missiles now, why don't they? If China and North Korea can hit us with missiles now, why don't they? My answer for this, they can't and won't. Its not like terrorists are gonna get any crazier in the coming years. They either can't nuke us, or won't. Hell, look at it from Osama's position, he can bomb us all to hell, and what do we do? Nothing. If he wheeled a nuke into New York? We'd have justification to walk through Afghanistan and level the whole place until we got him. Look at it from the perspective of the rest of the world. America is the only country crazy enough to ever use nuclear weapons on anyone, can we blame them for being upset that we want to make this "perfect missile shield"? MAD is more useful in protecting the rest of the world from us! Especially when we've got someone in teh White House who is amused by flashing lights, let alone a briefcase that has big flashing lights and buttons. Hell, I wouldn't trust Dubya with the remote control to my TV, let alone control of our country's nuclear weapons.
"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong" - Dennis Miller
I used to work for a genetics company that produces hardier plants and livestock to feed disadvantaged nations. Our project was to create a new horse that was more resistant to disease and stronger. We were supposed to have a new specimen months ago, but we didn't tell our investors about unexpected delays. To make matters worse, we didn't have any 3-week old ponies around. So, I brought in my Doberman and we passed it off as a young super-pony. this was my dog and pony show...
When I started setting up on stage I realized that I had blown away all the changes I made to one critical file (the app is in Python and doesn't have a single compiled binary.) Instead of going through my well rehearsed talk I had to re do the changes up at the podium while my colleagues stammered through an impromptu presentation.
I got it working in time and was able to give a cool demo! Talk about stress though. Good thing I wasn't demoing for investors.
Burris
One day there's a tour of the company being given (customers, venture capitol, who knows) and one of the Tech Support staff is asked to show off the faxing feature. She obliges, sends a short note with an attachment to the fax machine down the hall. Folks stand around chatting about this 'n that waiting for the fax to pop out - it's taking several minutes.
One of the other TS'ers notices the delay which shouldn't happen so he quietly wanders down the hall to check the hardware. There's a problem with the email server so the TS'er runs an abbreviated checklist, identifies the blockage, clears it than as a shortcut to make the demo look good points the outgoing queue to the fax machine.
A few seconds later the back-up of email starts to pour out of the fax machine - the first item being a senior sales person's resume, followed by another senior persons resume off to a different company, then an off-color joke, then a second resume from the first senior sales person to a different address...
The tour moved on very quickly to a different part of the company, several staff were missing the next day.
One day the Director is giving a tour to someone or other and wanders into the effects lab. There he proudly details the various statistics, the quality of the work, and how he hasn't a clue of how any of it gets done (a source of pride?) In order to demonstrate the impressive technologies we use & his distance from the actual work he reaches out to a partially completed assembly, grabs a random part, and asks the senior lab employee what it is.
The laconic answer: "...That's the plug Jack..." The Director pauses his babbling to actually look at what he's holding, realizes it's a standard 3-prong electrical plug, drops it and moves along embarrassed he's just picked the one item that anyone would recognize.
Recent-MBA is clearly dismayed I'm not his peer ('cause I'm not wearing a shiny suit like his) but can't contain his excitement at his flight. He's on his way to interview at a prestigious company for an important role in a new project of theirs. It's all very hush-hush but the company is planning to etc. & then etc. and the competition will be surprised because etc...
The next day I make a point of wandering by the conference room as my former seatmate comes out from his interview, is introduced to me as one of the key people making the project he's interviewed for happen, etc. It was cruel but the look on his face when he realized I'm the stranger he'd spilled our confidential details to the day before...
Policy about what to tell employee candidates was reiterated soon thereafter.
One day a number of folks are in from some alphabet-organization and are to be given a demo of one of our new whatsits. Due to building renovations the fancy conference room with the deluxe seating and controlled-environment demo facility (local network with only the relevant hardware on it) isn't available. Therefore the demo is simply made standing around in a part of the manufacturing facility that will be used for this product, there's also a setup here for it to be tested with when it goes into production.
Everyone is standing around, Marketing has explained how medical equipment looking half-melted would change our paradigm, QA folks have just explained how a failure-states of the product are all safe, blah blah blah.when the whatits is plugged in, hooked up & turned on. Some drone is assigned to have his relevant medical stats recorded as everyone watches the screen and a server in the corner presumably makes a record - but it doesn't.
Indeed upon examination it appears that the networking side of the whatsits isn't working at all. Ahh - it's a prototype, must have put a bad one of the hand-modified network-support cards in. Several more are plugged in but none work either. Folks are looking very nervous, it appears that there's something substantially wrong, the guests are being polite but tension is in the air...
Finally a certain IT contractor (ahem) has the idea to plug in a local PC and see if it can log in to the demo server properly. It can't either. Quickly fingers are pointed at a bad server, folks grin and talk about the luck of the demo, etc. and the party moves on to tour some other part of the project. Unlucky IT staff on hand for the demo are given charge of making this damn thing work ASAP, preferably before these folks leave at the end of the afternoon. They play with the server, fiddle with settings, try various inane things. Then try the same with the local PC. Still no go -it's all hosed. Eventually the IT Contractor escapes the tour and makes it back, starts troubleshooting in a more structured way.
There's a problem with the network. There's a problem with the impedance (thin-net.) There's a break somewhere. An examination of the cable is made tracing it through the area's ceiling. Suddenly a mysterious white wire is discovered jammed into an unused T-connector. It's followed along into an engineering office, along a bench of test equipment, behind a number of large instruments, and onto... a radio antenna. Some engineer has decided to get better reception by hooking into the unused-as-yet network in that part of manufacturing; it's enough to bollix everything.
The wire is yanked loose from the connector, the tour circles back around for a successful for the demo and our intrepid Contractor announces he's taking three days off, suddenly confident his contract will be renewed.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I don't work in software or really anything computer related. I work for a consulting engineering company that builds oil refineries and chemical plants. For us, a dog & pony show is taking a potential client on a tour around the office to razzle dazzle them with our huge staff and sparkling technology.
Last year, we decided to expand into a new region and opened an office out there. Hired about a half dozen people and started trolling around for projects. We got a couple of nibbles, and next thing you know I'm on a plane with an arm load of obselete drawings and a multi k$ shipment of any workstation that wasn't nailed down. My job, to make an office with 6 people look like it has the 100 people we needed to do the job we were bidding for. 2 days of setting up workstations, putting drawings on desks, pictures on desks, coffee cups, garbage in the cans. It was amazing. The VP takes the visitors on a tour about 10 minutes before lunch and then right back to the boardroom.
I guess the client figured 100 people buggered off for lunch early, cause we got the job.
Posting anonymously, for obvious reasons.
Back before the NMD, back before Star Wars, there was the ABM: Anti-Ballistic Missile. Same idea, same weaknesses, 70's technology. It's what eventually led to the ABM Treaty, which is what we would have to abrogate to deploy NMD. But that's not the story.
When ABM was being debated, the CS types were, as usual, pointing out that there needed to be a way to test and debug it. As a fresh-faced undergrad, I went to a lecture by Daniel D. McCracken, who at the time was well known for several good Fortran texts.
McCracken postulated a test scenario:
GPS works by receiving signals from the GPS sats, not by transmitting signals to them.
I worked on the embedded code for one component of an 4-makes-1 LCD Panel like the one described. Except, our customer, who would then be the manufacturer of the panel, was called 'Harmony' not 'VisuaLabs'. Anyway, the prototype worked just fine then, so -someone- out there has this technology. It may not be VisuaLabs though.
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
These two sentences are logically inconsistant with each other. The Principle of Mutually Assured Destruction is that the other nation has so many missiles, that you cannot knock them all out with your own missiles without some of them launching and destroying your own country. China, at present, does not have the capability for MAD. If we had the inclination to first strike, we could concievably wipe out the 20-30 missiles that China has without them being able to fire off a shot. Not so with The Soviet Union, and now Russia. Were either we or they to launch all the missiles in their posession at the other, the other side would have enough missiles left to still destroy everyone. The Missile shield EXPLICITLY does not protect us from a MAD scenario It would only protect us in a limited exchange scenario, and not very well even then. Ultimately, a briefcase nuke or even a shipping crate nuke on a ship going into NY harbor would be much better. Instead of having to develop both missile and nuclear weapons technology, a rogue nation only has to develop Nuclear weapons technology. And i didnt see any "how to build an ICBM" chapters in the anarchists cookbook. If somone did send us a briefcase nuke, it is doubtful that we would be able to retaliate. First of all, all physical evidence would be obliterated. Second, any group that new the response would not claim responsibility. third, what if its a domestic terrorist? would we nuke ourselves?
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this exactly backwards? If a foreign country launches an ICBM at us, our satellites will tell us exactly where it was launched from and we can retaliate. If a country smuggles in a briefcase nuke, all we'll know is that New York was there yesterday and isn't there today... the destruction will wipe out most any evidence regarding who did it.
Given that, I don't think any (non-suicidal) foreign countries will be launching nukes at us, Star Wars or no Star Wars. Hence it appears Star Wars' only use is as another welfare program for the defense industry.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Well, it didn't work. But, the death throes took more than a year, 'cause little munchins faked data for their dog and pony shoes...and so it went up the ladder until heavyweights were sitting in front of Congressional committees mouthing the same lies. (Maybe unwittingly, maybe not.)
Faking it in those days was easy: Just put some phony numbers on a dot matrix printout.
Still, it was fun playing Lunar Lander on on a paper display, and using one of the first real CRT displays to send email.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
My manager was sitting down with our group discussing getting a small demo of a small portion of our application running. Our application was in the very early stages of development so even the small demo we were talking about would have been a herculean effort so to motivate us he promised he'd take us all out for dinner. Being a somewhat crazy bunch we upped the offer by saying we'd deliver a more complete demonstration. To that he promised if we could deliver then he'd take us and to dinner and eat whatever we put down in front of him. The challenge was set!
A day or so after the challenge one of the developers in another group was talking about having had is male cat "fixed" and receiving the cats balls (in a vial of some sort of preservative) from the vet. Being possessed of an evil streak we decided that if we succeeded with the challenge then our managers meal would be the cats balls!
He wasn't particularly worried by this when we told him. After all, in his (and our) opinion the task at hand was impossible.
As it turned out, it was impossible to deliver what we promised. Devious minds however decided it wasn't impossible to cheat which we did, creating a brilliant concoction of smoke and mirrors, finishing it a few moments before the delivery date.
With bated breath we all watched on as our manager sat down at the fake demo and proceded to test it out. After 10 minutes he turned around and told us he didn't know how we did it.
With great ceremony the owner of the cat brought forward a plate with two small cooked balls of meat on them surrounded by a garnish of carrot strips (of course).
I have never seen anyone grimace so much as our manager did that day. After much procrastination and excuses he picked up the knife and fork and managed to cut the smallest possible sliver he could. No matter how much we cajoled him though he wouldn't put it in his mouth.
Then a brave member of our group proclaimed, "Don't be such a wuss" and grabbed a whole ball and popped it in his mouth, chewed and swallowed before saying "Yum!"
Well our manager couldn't stand by after that and ate ate his portion (it was so small I swear it wouldn't feed an ant).
After we recovered from the hilarity and picked ourselves up from the floor the owner of the cat pulled the jar still containing the cats balls from his pocket and told everyone the balls were only ground beef. The guy who'd eaten the first one looked shocked and said "What, now you tell me?"
I think you have read "The Lazlo Letters" a few more times than necessary.
- Don N.
A single channel GPS receiver is accurate to 15 feet, with a time on station of 10 seconds. The time frame on even a 'slow' vehicle is a bit faster than that. Once again, it was a kinetic kill vehicle. They have been blowing crap out of the sky with exploding vehicles for years. An early anti-ICBM prototype had a nuclear device. That is a wide margin error.
I was working as an intern for a telecomm. company back in 1993 doing enhancements/rewrites for their cross-connect's database management. One day I was working in the open lab area on the only fully populated lab system we had when an upper manager walked in with a few prospective (and major) customers. We'd been warned about it ahead of time so that our "lab attire" would be slightly more appropriate for a customer visit. No more than 10 seconds before they had arrived, I had started a test of a performance feature I was adding. The manager brought them in and introduced me, saying that I was working on database upgrades for the next software release. No sooned had he finished my introduction than my "upgrade" hit a snag, and the database on the entire system failed, resulting in 4,000 red LED's all going on along with two of the most critical master alarms. Basically, the system was terminal and it was rather obvious. I could see the manager stiffen a bit, and the customers becan looking at one another in apprehension. Luckily, I didn't miss a beat and with a couple key strokes disabled my database version and restored the original. The alarms cleared and green LED's came back on all over the system. My only verbal response was, "Well, the auto-recovery seems to work pretty well now." The manager smiled in feigned confidence, and the customers nodded approvingly at the recovery. Too bad I hadn't been working on auto-recovery or on system synchronization. I later had my direct manager stop by and ask about the incident. Aparrently, the "auto-recovery" feature wasn't on the list of fetures the customers had been given for the next software release and they wanted to know more about it.. and so did management. After I explained the situation he departed, most likely to tell marketing thet they had to put some spin into explaining on they "auto-recovery" wasn't going to be available. I never did hear back about how that turned out, but I do know that we wound up making some sales to those customers. Dave
Raving, incoherent zealotry. Buy a dictionary.
Hopefully this will put a smile on the face of anyone who's ever been busted...
In the college I went to, there was a class called "Fundamentals in Programming", which used C at the time; required for all CS majors. The class was a ridiculously low level though, something in the 200's. Well, all us CS majors figured what the heck, it's an easy A, and it's not like we had a choice anyway.
Turns out the class was easy to accomodate the school's M-Tech students, which was a huge department on campus. Seems they all wanted to be able to put, "fluent in X programming language" on their resume's, to help them land cushy C&C jobs.
Predictably, the class is full of programming "challenges" like "Write a program to calculate Mr. Smith's income tax based on input" and the like. Halfway through the semester, the prof starts handing out homework at the end of the hour, because us CS guys are handing in the assigned homework before class is over. The final project of the year, though, was a non-trivial program, a very simple inventory system, which required you to actually do a little work with file reads and writes. The class was fairly small, so everyone had to get up in front of the class and demonstrate their working program on the overhead (cross-learning with Speech class I guess).
So we all do our little demos over the last 2 weeks, and I become somewhat suprised when the M-Tech guys all start demonstrating working programs. After about the 5th M-Tech one worked flawlessly, the prof evidently got suspicious too, and deviated from the given look-up data (We had been given a list of 5 seperate things the program had to accomplish, with specific data). Of course, the program blows up: turns out one of the M-Tech guys had found it easier to draw up some mock-screens rather than to actually do the file reads/writes, and shared with his buddies.
The best part was when the prof asked, "You guys do realize you were supposed to hand in source with this project, right? Did you think I wouldn't notice this obviously flawed code?" One of the M-Tech's then says (I swear with a straight face), "Hey, it works, I don't see why it matters how we did it!" One discussion on the difference between the classroom and the real-world later, they were all taking the class again next semester.
(Note: This have little in common with what the article talks about, as we didn't cheat for the demo)
f 1.gif
f l2.gif
The best demo I recall was back in time when I worked in porting games, mostly from Atari/Amiga to Macintosh/Apple IIGs
We were 4 developers, living in a big flat, with shitload of hardware and documentation around us, working days and night with weird deadlines.
One of my friend was porting Shufflepuck Cafe from the Mac to the IIGs. This guy was a very organised man, not a hack/compile/run/crash/hack kind of guy (and back in those times cross-compilations were pretty costly, in term of time). I always was amazed that he could code for 2 or 3 days, compile, get 3 or 4 compilation errors, fix them and add some other features, compile again, etc, etc. When the app ran and crashed, he fixes the code, and add some other features (at least, that's how I remember him). So, he did the things well, and had almost finished the port (it was about 70% done), when Broderbund software asked to be shown the avancement of the port.
The only thing they did not realize was that almost everything was made, except graphic output routines.
For the one that don't know about it (ie: most people), Shufflepuck cafe was supposed to look like:
(Remove the slashspaces after 'shuff', and yes that's 'shuff1' and 'shuffl2')
* http://macjeux.free.fr/TheSite/lesinfossuite/shuf
* http://macjeux.free.fr/TheSite/lesinfossuite/shuf
(yes, this was more or less cutting edge at the time) and you may understand that, without graphics, there much less to show.
We smacked a Couple of RectFrame to represent players paddles, and showed the game that way (no ball, only the paddles). The app was mostly complete, with sound, etc. Just no output. We demoed an app, with a nice black opening screen, choosed an opponenent by clicking in the black, which gave us two rectangles moving on the screen, and even managed to mark a few points against one of the opponent...
Cheers,
--fred
The bizarre thing about that joke is that you can already do that in Win9x (either by Registry hacking, or with X-Setup by XTeq <http://www.xteq.com>). You're stuck with the standard 16-colour palette though.
As a former BBC Micro user, I switched to a retro green-on-black screen of death as soon as I found this out :-)
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day - unless he's on IRC, in which case he'll just slap you with it.
Jamie:
Jesus Christ, this isn't the place for bitching about the Bush administration. I mean, I know Slashdot is as much of a political forum as it is a technical forum, but the idea is to incite original and thoughtful commentary. You're just parrotting propaganda (don't bullshit yourself-- it's still propaganda, even if you agree with it).
(For the record: I don't agree with the Bush administration's position on missile defense. I didn't vote Republican. I don't even like Bush's policies. I just get sick of Jamie's unoriginal re-packaging of pure rhetoric.)
That said, here's my favorite story:
When I was in 9th grade, I was assigned the task of developing a new programming language, then implementing a compiler for it in C. I had two months to do it.
It wasn't much, but I actually did get the job done. The language was very FORTH-like-- stack based, a small set of basic commands, a few primitives for defining subroutines. The compiler generated assembly code (nasm was used to assemble it), and I had implemented a rudimentary peep-hole optimizer program that could be run as a second "pass".
My computer teacher was rather impressed with it-- he had never programmed in C, so it was a new experience for him to audit my code. After I put on a miniature dog'n'pony show for him, he decided to show it off to the principal and school district superintendent (I lived in rural PA-- the superintendent looked over 3 schools, so it wasn't as big a deal as it seemed).
The day before the principal and superintendent came to see the compiler, my workstation at school crashed, and all my data was lost. The backups we had were more than a month old-- and definitely not functional.
Rather than cancel the presentation, my teacher wrote me a note, excusing me from classes. I was to work on getting the program re-written-- or, failing that, to get some suitable phony in place.
The next day, the superintendent showed up. We ran him through the process of developing a program, then running it through the compiler and using the executable. We showed him a few demo programs, then showed him the output assembly files. He was very impressed that a 9th grade student could do so much. He left happy, and I actually got a neat write-up in the school paper.
To this day, I thank heaven that he never hit Ctrl-Break and stopped that QBASIC mock-up from executing.
My absolute favorite story along these lines resulted from actions of a former coworker and current friend.
At my former consulting company, we had the pleasure of working as one of many similarly specialized contractors to an entity that will remain nameless. As each of the contractors were constantly jockeying for position and work, oneupsmanship and behind the scenes backstabbing was the name of the game. However, on the surface, we were all good little people, playing nice, and sharing our toys.
In this particular instance, my former company was working along-side another company to create a database management system and to populate the database with data that had been QA'ed (our part was the data). Since the chunk we had employed more people, it was the most lucritive - which meant is was enormously attractive to our development partner. In an attempt to try to "take the work off our hands," our playmate started making a lot of noise about the fact that our data effort was falling behind schedule and that, as a result, the delivery of the system was being delayed.
Well, it was true the data reduction was taking longer; some of the data was real junk and had to be analyzed ad nauseum. However, what our buddies across the way weren't telling was that they hadn't been working on the stuff that hard and weren't ready themselves (though, they had been charging). We knew it, but we were holding the wrong end of the stick. At the weekly project review meeting, we were going to get smacked around for delaying things and needed to be able to deflect some of the blame back to our amigos across the tables.
On the day of the meeting, the criticism starts as usual. But, just as it begins, my coworker whips out a 9-track tape and says, "Well, we've finally overcome the difficulties. Here's the tape for you to populate your tables with." Immediately, the tables turn and our buddies are giving details of when things will be ready for review.
After the meeting, I am talking with my friend. "We aren't finished with the data analysis yet. What gives?"
"Oh, I know," he replies. "But, they don't know that. And, now, we'll see if they are actually finished or if they are blowing smoke. The tape is blank. If they come back saying that that can't read the tape, we know their further along than we thought. But, if we don't hear anything, we'll know they're too busy trying to make up for lost time than to try to read the tape."
Sure enough, two months goes by - not a word. "Is everything all right," we ask. "Fine, still working on getting the data in the system," they reply.
In the meantime, we keep working on the analysis. By the time they are to the point of attempting a tape read, we are done. As soon as we hear, "we are having trouble reading your tape," we have a new legitimate one ready to go and they've been on the spit for two months.
You gotta love it!
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
The atmosphere extends a lot higher than you think. For most a ballistic missile's flight (all of it for some missiles) it is in the atmosphere. And, interception occurs during all phases of flight with a multi-tiered defense system. Even in vacuum, particle beams can be used to detect the mass of targets and sort out chaff and balloons from warheads.
How exactly is chrome plating the warheads going to protect them against a kinetic energy interceptor? Which is what was being proposed as an antimissile system, both then and now. FWIW, it woudn't protect them against a high-powered laser, either: the coating would vaporize in microseconds. Spinning them doesn't work either, that was another of the bogus arguments that got published. It's like spinning a vollyball to protect it from a rifle bullet.
Frankly, there was a lot of total crap that got published about the SDI program. Back in the SDI years, I was reading the official releases that were in the NTIS system. NONE OF THE NATIONAL NEWS MEDIA WERE. Newsweek published an issue in 1987 whose cover story was "SDI Changes Course" that was totally created by their own lack of research: the Brilliant Pebble interceptors which were the primary system being developed all along were being publicised because they were acing their tests, and the Newsweeklings wrote a story about "I guess the lasers didn't work out." Shitheads.
Then there was the Union of Concerned Scientists report, which was a perfect example of why scientists working outside their field aren't any smarter than anyone else. It had huge gaping errors in it, like a mathematical model that predicted all the enemy ICBMs being launched from a single mathematical point on the globe, instead of across an arc of thousands of miles like they were in reality. This caused errors that were multiple orders of magnitude in size.
Then there were the "experts" that claimed the software would never work because it was too big and complex. Why, it would need to contain "millions of lines of code!" You know, like Linux and Windows 2000 do now. FWIW, the software has been reused and tested, and it works.
The moral: never do all your research in one place. And follow up on a subject to see what peer review turns up.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
is this the same Felten of the RIAA watermarking controversy?
Is it me or has missle defense turned into the redheaded stepchild of slashdot? I am really sick of the editorializing, every third article has a dig at missle defense, which is neither news for nerds or stuff that matters. I can get enough editorializing about national defense on CNN or NPR, I don't need to read about Jaimie's lame-ass political agendas too; nor the political agendas from any of the other slashdot crew.
oil rigs are not geeky.
endangered speicies are not geeky.
third world sweatshop workers are not geeky.
and SDI political ranglings are not geeky!
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
I was impressed with the quick thinking of a friend of mine years ago during a demo. He was demoing a system he'd built and been working with a long time. Near the end of the demo, there was a delay in the system's response, and he could smell that it was crashing. So he moved the mouse cursor over to the "Quit" button on the screen, and when the program quietly died everyone thought he'd pressed "Quit" instead.
If the US DOD can pay Sony to put the same GPS devices in their PS2's then the US will be safe from the next generation of Iraqi missiles.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
The game consists of a 3d battlefield of, say, 1600 pixels cubed. There is a missile which is launched somewhere in that space which is guranteed to hit above a certian height before heading back down. Your job is to code a script or program (which the game will interpret and run) that has access to:
3 radars that can be simultaneously pointed and operated
1 or more missiles which have a certian thrust (possibly variable), and a variable amount of deflection, as well as the ability to explode on command, sending lethal shrapnel up to 2 pixels away from its current location. This missile also has a limited radar.
Optionally you can also use a script or program to control the target missile, since enemies are obviously going to be upgrading their technology as we upgrade ours. The enemy missile might have to be more complex, though, sending dummy junk, using heat or radio/radar jamming, etc.
It might show people how difficult it really is to do, but that things are still within the realm of possibility.
-Adam
I agree with you. Seatbelts and Airbags are a complete waste because they don't prevent every single death in a vehicular collision. They shouldn't even be allowed since they aren't 100% effective. I'm just glad there is someone else out there as smart as I am.
I think you missed my point. The Patriot is at least somewhat effective. (Unless the MIB doctored the CNN news footage I saw.) Someone must've said the Patriot would never work just like they say a missile defense system won't. Someone also must've said *ICBMs* would never work. Some people wanted to have Robert Goddard committed because he suggested that it might one day be possible to land a rocket on the moon. *Never* tell an engineer something can't be done. Oh, and why do you suppose Russia and China are so P.O.'d about the missile defense system? Because they think it can't work? Sheesh.
The hard part with this missle defence scheme is NOT hitting something with a kill vehicle (that is just a high-bandwidth tracking servo), it's figuring out what to aim for in the first place. The deep, dark secret in the defence community is that we'll be relying on the X-band radar to do that, and we don't have the faintest clue how to do so reliably.
By using GPS to completely bypass the radar portion of the system, the project is being disingenous in the extreme. All it shows is that the part that is easy (in the sense that it is an engineering challenge, not a question of fundamental principle) can be done. You all think the hitting part is the hard part, and if you belive that then I have a bridge I want to sell you.
In 1979 word processing mostly meant typewriters with a few very high end electronic word processing units. I worked for one of the word processing companies with the job to build a central file server. Such a simple idea today, but the issues of hooking up what were essentially electric typewriters with cassette or diskette storage to a computer was daunting back then.
As always happens, half-way into the job we had a huge trade show. The CEO wanted to show 16 wordprocessing units hooked to one file server. This was the sort of company where you got fired if you said no. Our VP dutifully set up the hardware on a stage. There were 16 young attractive ladies at the keyboards instructed to run a cheat script where they would bring up a document, make changes and save it on the server. On another station the changed document would magically appear.
It was amazing to see the whole demo going well in front of a standing-room only crowd. Unfortunately, no one told the CEO that it was all fake. In a burst of huge enthusiasm he took a big hedge clippers out of his briefcase and cut the (dummy) cords to demonstrate the multi-user nature of the product.
Naturally, all 16 operators continued to perfectly run their scipts, busily typing away.
Will America be safer in a post-NMD world? That is the big question that needs answering. I think a lot of the doubters of missile defense (I count myself as one of them) don't believe we will be any safer. For NMD to work, our enemies would have to stand still for 20 years while we test, build and deploy this system. Rather than continue to concentrate on the ICBM option, I think they will explore other avenues which will be more effective.
I would classify the nuclear threats the nation faces into five categories:
1. Attack from a large nuclear power (Russia)
2. Attack from a medium nuclear power (China)
3. Attack from a small nuclear power (North Korea, Iraq)
4. Isolated, accidental launch
5. Attack from a terrorist organization
We won't be any safer from a case 1 attack. Even in it's decrepit state, the Russian nuclear arsenal would easily overwhelm any NMD system that we would hope to deploy. And if Putin's threats to MIRV all his nation's missiles have any credibility, we're in deeper shit than we are now. The reason we can have MAD without an arms race is because we have a rough estimate of how many warheads the Russians based on the number of platforms they have to launch. The number of MIRV-capable platforms each nation can possess is limited by the START II treaty. Although not ratified, each nation has pledged to stay under the limit.
If Russia MIRVs all Russian missiles, or even says it's MIRVing all its missiles, US strategic planners have no idea how many warheads are in the Russian arsenal. Since we will have to plan for the worst case if we are to have a credible second strike, we would go MIRV. Now neither side knows how many missiles the other have and, boom! - another arms race. Arms races are bad for the safety of Americans. Not to mention we lose any protection we may have had from an accidental Russian launch. How many interceptors do you send up for a MIRV missile? How much more damage will an accidental MIRV launch do as opposed to a one warhead launch?
Now let's move on to case 2. The reason China doesn't have more missiles now is because it doesn't need to. China has the force it has now because as small as it is, it gives it more respect in Washington. And even though conceivably we could wipe out their nuclear capability in a first strike, there's no guarantee. It makes the United States think twice about bullying them around, like MacArthur tried to do in the Korean war.
If we built NMD, I'll guarantee China will build enough ICBM's to overcome it and put it right back where it is now - nowhere near competitive but still relevant. And keep in mind China does not operate in a vacuum. One of the two reasons India has a nuclear arsenal is as a check against Chinese hegemony. It will see China building up its arsenal, and build more as a response. Which will trigger Pakistan to build more nuclear missiles. End result - more nuclear missiles in the world. More nuclear missiles in the world is not in the United States' best interest. Besides, didn't Dubya say NMD wasn't directed towards China?
As for case 3, I think this an attack is not likely to come via ICBM from North Korea or Iraq. Dictators are obsessed with two things: power and survival. Why would they launch an unprovoked attack against the United States via 1 or 2 ICBMs, if the American response is certain to rob them of the things they value the most? The only reason any of them would launch a nuclear attack via ICBM against the US would be if we were about to rob them of both.
If they wanted to hurt the United States, they'd send over a bomb via truck, plane or boat. It's easier and less traceable. If they weren't planning to before, they will in a post-NMD world. Even with these delivery mechanisms, I think that the risk that someone would blab, that the United states would find out about it, and the response that would entail would deter these small nuclear states from launching a retaliatory attack would deter these smaller nuclear nations from trying this tactic.
Now case 4, accidental launches is where I think NMD has the most benefit. An accidental launch is most likely to come from Russia. The United States is safer if Russia doesn't MIRV its missiles, simply because I think the system will use overkill in order to defend against the launch. If Russia does MIRV its missiles, then it is likely that an NMD system would not shoot down all the warheads. If one warhead gets through, we're right back where we were. If more than one gets through, it's a worse situation than the status quo. I think it would be more cost-effective to give nuclear nations US PAL technology than to build NMD to defend against accidental launches.
Let's move on to case 5. I doubt terrorists are building ICBMs. The expertise required to build a system is rare, the expense prohibitive, and they can't just steal one and make it work. Any missile technology they are using is likely to be short to mid-range missiles, which NMD will have trouble defending against. Or they'll go with the truck/plane/boat option.
My conclusion: We're arguably much worse off with cases 1 and 2, and arguably a little better off with cases 3,4 and 5. In my mind, the world is a much more dangerous place for Americans with missile defense than the status quo, and our energies and money would be better spent on negotiating arms control agreements, increased funding for intelligence operations, and doing our best to increase good will towards our country around the world while maintaning our interests. Feel free to disagree with me if you like. The point I'm trying to make is that it's possible to feel that national missile defense is a bad idea and still be a patriot.
This
My HTML sucks
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010727/ts/arms _u sa_missile_dc_3.html
I was at VBITS in 2000 when Steve Ballmer was demonstrating Visual Studio 7 (now VS.NET). While demonstrating how easy it was to build a Web Form, VS crashed. The engineer then came in and fixed it, making the demo eventually work.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
As for it being "spamware", I would be shocked if it was ever used for spam. First, companies using real CRM software (not ACT!) aren't likely to be spamming in the first place. CRM software is partly intended to help target marketing campaigns. The software I wrote interfaced with the query and report packages in the CRM system to generate the distribution list for a document. It would then mail merge the document to be sent, based on the queries and reports.
Here's a typical usage scenario: You're company makes widgets. You have recently introduced the "Green Widget Extender", for use with green widgets. You want to send a press release, but only to the clients using green widgets already. So you create the press release, complete with mail merge fields. You then enter a query for all clients using green widgets. The fax/email server then mail merges the press release, and sends it onto the receivers fax or email box. The receiver gets a document:
Ms. Purchases Everything ...
Head of Purchasing
SomeCompany
Dear Ms. Everything:
Increase the productivity of your green widgets with the new green widget extender!
Furthermore, the software had a field in the database specifying the preferred delivery method for a contact: fax, email, or snail mail. If the preferred method was fax or email, the message server would distribute it electronically. But if the preference was snail mail, then the message server would mail merge the document, and spool it for printing along a mailing label so it could be snail mailed. So the contact only received faxes or emails if that's what they preferred. Assuming of course that the correct information was in the database!
Finally, an inexpensive install of the software, including the base packages, message server, and all the configuration, was usually over $50,000 usd. Most of the clients who purchased the message server had installs that cost in excess of $200,000 usd. People that have this kind of money to blow on CRM software aren't wasting their time spamming people.
---
Geoffrey Wossum
Project AKO - http://ako.sf.net
At a former company, we gave away a whole Superbowl package: tickets, hotel, etc. at a trade show. During the whole show, we collected business cards from interested prospects and put them in a bowl. The goal being to give the expensive package to a potential customer. We had the drawing during an expensive party after the show. The hired talent MC dude gets around to the drawing and decides to say "last chance to enter the Superbowl drawing!" Our mortified marketing people watch as everyone in the room rushes the stage to throw their cards into the bowl. Then the MC has our CEO draw the name. He glances at the card before he even gets it out of the bowl. It's one of the top level people from our closest competitor. He desperately wants to drop the card and draw another, but the MC pulls the bowl away.
The girl from marketing that set the whole thing up said she started looking for a new job before the CEO even got off the stage.