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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.
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.
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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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
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.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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Geoffrey Wossum
Project AKO - http://ako.sf.net
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.
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 (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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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?
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?"