World's Worst Dog'n'Pony Shows

A dog'n'pony show is that delightful moment where some $1000 suits and the investors wearing them politely demand to be shown why they've paid you a salary for the last three months without hearing anything back except "we're all working hard here" and "stop bothering us and it'll get done faster." You pray the software works as well now as it did at 5AM when you finally killed the last display bug and headed home for a quick shower. Just two words of advice: don't cheat. Like VisuaLABS did with its "tiled LCD screens," or the Pentagon with its "missile defense test," you'll get caught. ...or will you? Tell us your best demo war stories.

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.

Comments

Two notes about the missile test

[stienman]

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

Re:Are you for M.A.D.?

[cybercuzco]

Mutually Assured Destruction is the concept of discouraging war by the promise that the two parties involved would be mutually obliterated. There is no purpose is destroying the other person if there is nobody left to enjoy it.

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.

Re:I have a couple...

[whydna]

Science fair.. heh.. the whole point is to see who can BS the best.

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 /.) 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.

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 .dlls". Also, it crashed once and I noticed that ScanDisk started up automatically (hrmm...). So, actually, it's really just running Windows.

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

How does GPS make a difference?

[s20451]

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.

Re:How does GPS make a difference?

[s20451]

if i have a warhead that will obliterate anything within, say, a 100-ft. radius, then all i have to do is get within 100 feet of my target.

Most SAMs and AAMs use fragmentation-type warheads, so as you get further away, damage is less likely -- there's no blast radius of guaranteed destruction as you imply. Besides, you would have to use a hell of a lot of explosive for a 100 ft radius -- probably 100 lbs or more. Most AAMs carry 5-10 lbs, SAMs carry a little more but not much.

Furthermore, the NMD kill vehicle is designed for "kinetic kill", that is, interception via impact. This is the lesson from the Gulf War, when Patriot SAMs were ineffective against incoming scuds in spite of scoring several "hits" - they simply managed to randomly redirect a randomly fired missile. With "kinetic kill", the collision energy completely vaporizes the warhead and (hopefully) neutralizes any enclosed chemical and biological agents -- due to the huge closing velocity, no explosives are needed.

Re:Missile Test was not a cheat

[davidbro]

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.

Decoy avoidance wasn't impressive at all

[e-gold]

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!!!!

Yup - just not well enough to intercept it

[DG]

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.

Re:Missile Test was not a cheat

[StaticLimit]

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?

Oh I don't know... maybe... radar? How do you think NORAD tracks missles? How do AEGIS cruisers track missles (the Iraqi airliner incident notwithstanding)?

-StaticLimit

Re:Are you for M.A.D.?

[baptiste]

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.

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.

Let's make this into a programming game...

[stienman]

In fact, we can find out how hard this is by making a game for programmers, much like CRobots and Core Wars.

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