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Roller Coaster Data Center
stienman writes "The Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point Amusement Park may have more technology than your data center. From the article: "The parameters within which the Dragster has to operate are so finely tuned that variable load weights from people, wind speed and out-side temperature affect its performance. ... After every third launch, the data are averaged and compared with historic launch data in an effort to create that perfect ride - the roller coaster must go fast enough to clear the top of the tower, but slow to between 7 and 15 mph in order to give riders the maximum lift effect at the top."
Explains why TTD always closes at the WORST possible times ;-)
FWIW, I actually know someone for whom the Dragster didn't launch QUITE quickly enough - it only hit 112MPH...
When I rode it the one time, it was DAMN smooth, DAMN fast, and that was one DAMN steep descent. However, it was over WAY too quickly, and WAS actually boring. Besides, I'm not going to wait 1.5 to 3 hours in line for something that boring. I'd rather have a 2 minute wait (the time it takes to get from the exit to onboard a coaster) for something like Gemini - more fun, BECAUSE it's less smooth, and runs for plenty of time.
It's fail safe. In the event of a system failure, it can only fail to launch. Once started, it can stop even if it loses power completely, according to this article.
How am I supposed to enjoy a roller coaster if I know that sophisticated computers are monitoring the experience and ensuring my safety? That's just being fed stimulus. Now, the Cyclone in Coney Island... that's a roller coaster! You experience a genuine fear of death, not because the ride is particularly scary, but because the roller coaster is about a hundred years old and feels like it is going to collapse at any moment! Woo!
Define 'fail'. The software is not perfect, the ride still occasionally fails to reach optimal velocity and the riders are shot to the top only to ride backwards down the ascent hill, a rather harrowing experience for riders and obervers who are not aware that its a perfectly normal mode of operation. More importantly, it spends a lot of the time completely disabled, hurting the parks reputation and incidentally costing them lots of money.
The acceleration and braking systems all contain many mechanical fail-safes, the sort that do NOT fail EVER, thanks to superb engineering. Its the same old story, hardware runs forever, if they could only get the dang software right.
For a moment I thought it was an article about my career.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
I really don't intend to go to that amusement park again though.
Got on the Saturday or Sunday before Labor Day. The park is nearly empty on the Saturday and only a little more crowded on the Sunday.
We would go every year on that weekend and not have any wait over 20 minutes.
Cedar Point, while being the best amusement park in the world, has ruined me for the rest of my life... I cannot go to any other amusement park and enjoy myself like I would at Cedar Point. I have been to several other Cedar Fair parks (Valleyfair, Dorney Park, Michigan's Adventure, etc) but none are even close.
I miss Cedar Point, lines or not. It's their ingenuity in rides that make it amazing. They don't worry about themes and characters and instead worry about thrilling you!
One of my friends took two pictures of a roller coaster ride that had a loop. The first picture showed someone throwing up (actually down) from the top of the loop. The second picture showed someone being hit by the vomit at the bottom of the loop. We could never figured out if it was the same person who hurled was on the receiving end. This why I stay on the water rides.
The imperfections can help make a ride great. The Revolution at Great America in San Jose, a spinning boat ride that goes over the top, sometimes goes over forwards, and sometimes goes over backwards. You really don't know when it will, or why. Compare that to Superman, the Escape at Magic Mountain, which does exactly the same thing every time, and Superman just seems less interesting.
I must admit, my favorite rides skew to the less predictable. At the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk, there is (was) a ferris wheel which consisted of little egg-shaped cages. The rider was given a bar they could pull on to lock the cages in relationship to the wheel, so that they would very slowly spin over the top. No seat belt, mind you, or safety bar or anything, just a little egg-shaped cage with a small bench and a rider flipping around inside, holding their head off the metal with a well-placed, frequently panicked arm. Drop Zone at Great America has a random timer, to ensure that nobody will know when it is about to fall. It's surprisingly good at catching you when you're not expecting it, no matter how many times you ride it. Even The Pirates of the Carribean at Disneyland has people concurrently going through lengthy looped scenes, so that certain boats see the beginning of the loop, others see the middle, and others the end. The rides at California Adventure seemed too controlled and soulless to be a lot of fun, even if they did do so with a bit of showmanship. The best ride there is the white water raft, because it combines the freeform risk of most raft rides with a lot of little technical controlling tricks (like artificially spinning you up).
Personally, I would want to go on the ride when it fell back. That sounds like a lot more fun than just going forwards for 20 seconds. That sounds really, really thrilling. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was left in on purpose, and I'm sure it helps the ride's reputation.
The ______ Agenda
Just out of curiosity, what makes you think you "know" anything about embedded software engineering? Judging from your statements you clearly have no experience with the matter, and you have never spoken with anybody with any experience in the matter.
Most embedded systems are written in either C or assembler and they do just fine. Most real-time OSs are written in either C or assembler and they do just fine. For both of these statements I am including everything from the systems that run on space and planetary probes down to the processor running in the keyboard you were just typing on. I just saw a job posting today for a medical device software engineer requiring experience with WinCE, C++, and C#. Guess what language(s) WinCE was written in. It sure wasn't Pascal, PerfectScript, Perl, PHP, Pict, Pike, Pilot, PL/C, PL/I, Postscript, Prolog, or Python.
Embedded systems don't normally need the absurd amounts of error checking that user level programs do. Thermocouples aren't normally in the habit of randomly generating buffer overflows. Physics is sufficient to deal with most situations, and I'm not just talking about the physics of the real, such as the expected temperature variation over time that said thermocouple would be experiencing. The physics involved in a thermocouple wire breaking will also not overwrite the stack into the code space. I have never heard of a network buffer overflow problem in VxWorks, and that was written in C.
What language would you suggest for embedded systems? Something that will randomly shut down randomly for milliseconds at a time to do garbage collection? Something where the first pass through a section of code takes a radically different different amount of time than the second pass, or the third? Even ladder logic is unsuited to many tasks because the PLCs that are normally used to run it often have loop times dependent on the input states.
C was designed for system level work. It is predictable, which is the single greatest criterion for embedded and real-time systems. It is really quite adequate for the task as long as the people working with it are used to designing embedded systems. Or else they have their work reviewed by those who do have the experience. Any real engineering office would be run this way.