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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.
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.
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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)
Here's the story + video (QT)
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.
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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)
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.
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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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
Uhhh, not to rain on your parade or anything, but the AAMRAM (Air-to-Air Medium-Range Missile) is an air-to-air missle, the replacement for the AIM-7 Sparrow. It is highly unlikely that one would be fired at a ground target. I'm guessing it was something in the AGM series, possibly one of the many variations of the AGM-65 Maverick?
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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!
Wasn't this already reported a while ago at Fucked Company?
There are quite a few software companies that do this as well as Microsoft, mainly because the marketing department says the the promo has to happen on a date well before all of the bugs are worked out.
Bow before my sig, for it is good.
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.
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.
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Maybe this is what you are looking for?
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...
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.
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Serves you right for writing spamware, though. I don't blame you for not admitting what crook you worked for.
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.
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.
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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?
Err... you do realize that there's doubt that Patriots shot doubt down any SCUDs at all, don't you? The report from the U.S. House of Representatives is here.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes