As an engineer who designs and integrates RF systems every day, all day, I have two impressions. And as a systems engineer, I'll describe them in terms of the two elements of risk: probability and impact.
FTFA: "In other events described in the report, a clock spun backwards and a GPS in cabin read incorrectly while two laptops were being used nearby."
First: Crap like that ain't supposed to happen. An airplane designed and built to standards for commercial passenger service must meet standards for electromagnetic susceptibility, interference tolerance, workmanship, etc. It's not the passengers' fault that things like that happen. Nor is it the direct fault of the manufacturer of the electronics that passengers carry. If something is that mission critical, and the cost of failure is measured in human lives, then engineers, inspectors, regulators, and operations crew damn well better make sure the likelihood of failure is as close to zero as can be.
Second: I know damn well that grounding and shielding is one of the most difficult aspects of any high-frequency electronics system. It's difficult to design, grounding and shielding design rules aren't generally taught as part of undergraduate EE curriculum (much less Aeromechanical, CS, etc.), and the manufacturing techniques are prone to failure and not easy to inspect and test. Therefore, statistically, a passenger that travels one or two times a year is likely to board a plane with a design flaw or manufacturing/maintenance flaw at some point in their lifetime. This doesn't mean they're going to notice it, or even have any effect on the flight, much less cause an emergency by forgetting a powered-up iPhone in their carryon. But the likelihood of failure will never be zero unless the passenger obeys the rules and turns off their devices.
So, turn your shit off when so instructed.
And consumer electronics designers: please give the consumer a switch that allows them to turn their shit off... not standby, but OFF.
Hmm, let's see how accurate that statement is by using a little political gedankenexperiment.
Wife: "Does this dress make me look fat?"
Husband: "I'm sorry... that information is classified." Wife: "If you are right, then you have nothing to hide." Husband: "OK, since you put it that way, that dress reveals exactly how overweight you are."
Do you think the outcome of this scenario will make the Husband happy that he was open and honest?
See that hood? That's so you can a) see the screen in daylight, and b) operate at night without illuminating yourself. They're standard issue with the most common SUAV in service, and the hoods are used more often than not. You can't use a touch screen with that hood on there. And you sure as hell can't ask your customer to abandon the hood.
When we solicited requirements for new versions of UAV and UGV hand controllers, every customer suggested a touchscreen. But everytime we proposed one, we learned that it was the administrators that wanted the touchscreens. When the actual users, the soldiers who need to operate them in real world conditions, learned of the feature, they insisted that they can't use them and asked us to keep the joysticks, directional pads, and buttons.
We got a lot of people proposing features because they seem cool, or sexy, or they were the pet idea of some wannabe engineer. But when the rubber hits the road, you need to do proper systems engineering and HI design to optimize the feature set, or you're gonna get a dunsel that nobody will use under real conditions. Operating a drone is not the same as playing Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja. (If you want a better comparison, it's more like Starcraft using nothing but Protoss Observers.)
There are ways, with improvements in touchscreens, that they might be able to work, but I'm not free to talk about that. Suffice it to say that the technology isn't ready yet.
A lot of work goes into the ergonomics of these things, because soldiers spend a lot of time using them, so there's a reason they all look very similar. Several ergonomic factors, obvious from the convergence of these designs, appear to be universal:
- Touchscreens are sexy but impractical. They're imprecise without a stylus, awkward to hold, and you have to obscure your view of the action to effect a control. - It's nearly impossible make the screen too large. There's a reason the screen is big and dominates the faces of all of these units. - Controls are arranged on the sides so that the fingers can take the weight while the thumbs work the controls without requiring the user adjust his grip. - Control paradigms are borrowed from the original Playstation hand controllers because most users have prior experience with them. - Light weight tradeoff against battery life, screen size, and ruggedness.
Looks like the convergence is happening from both directions. And it's not surprising because the human interface requirements are very similar in both applications.
Both the "dirty old man" and the "innocent pubescent girl" of urban lore are likely to be law enforcement officers, and possibly even colleagues at neighboring desks.
For some reason, this scenario brought to mind the occasions on which, as Dungeon Master, I've caught myself roleplaying both sides of an exchange between two NPCs. I try to avoid that whenever possible because it's seldom entertaining for the players, usually pointless, and more than a little bit disturbing...
Well...that is the Congressman's current explanation.
It's not the Congressman's explanation, it's the evidence found by two bloggers. Read the post here.
Looking at all the facts...
I've twice linked to a page that provides necessary and sufficient proof to exonerate the Congressman for anyone not filtering facts that don't support their favored conclusions.
I joined just before the Operation Sundevil raid, and remember it fondly. Online roleplaying, beta testing SJ Games products, and brainstorming new games were awesome fun for a 20-something geek with too much free time on his hands. I even got a few of my ideas published in the Hacker and GURPS Illuminati products, and a free copy of GURPS Magic Items just for providing one of the staff with the lyrics to Monty Python's Dead Philosopher song.
Once the web emerged, and I got an ISP with NNTP service, a two-line BBS with a 30-minute per day time limit became passe. But from time to time I did poke back in the web presence.
And I still use the same handle now, just about everywhere, that I used then on IOBBS.
Shame that the regulars who stuck it out this long had to see it end this way. May I suggest you seek refuge in the Kenser & Co gazebo? Those guys are cut from the same cloth.
Why should I buy a 400hp car when a 80hp car gets me from point A to point B[?]
Using your analogy, I have about 250 horses under the hood, and if I had more, I really wouldn't use them 90% of the time.
And inverting it, my CTO has a Lotus Exige S and a Chevy Corvette Z06, and drives one of them to work nearly every day, both very nice toys. But he doesn't need over 500 HP to drive the 1.5 miles from his home to the office.
So again, I ask, why do I *need* one of these hybrid drives?
Explain to me why I need this instead of spending that $300 on a 7200 or 10000 rpm drive with two to four times the capacity and far, far more reliability and service life.
Is it just to extend the time I can operate on battery power? A second battery will double my time at far less cost.
Aye, similar to my reaction, which was, "The real story here is that there is a market for this kind of cheating assistance. How many unqualified people have made it past MCAT screening this way? Have any of them provided care for me or my loved ones?"
SET-1 failed on the pad at VAFB, also due to a frozen LOX valve. There's a good account of the Oct 1989 vehicle accident attached to the Original Post here. I'll summarize from my experience.
All of the engine testing took place at Edwards AFB, where the humidity was approx 10% on average. At Vandenburg, humidity was more like 100% during cryo fill/drain operations in the mornings. I suspect that similar condensation and freezing problems affected the Copenhagen Sputnik valve.
After two days of dry-run fill/drain ops, there was a nice casing of ice around the 4" gate valve that separated the He-pressurized LOX tank from the polybutadeine rubber fuel cast into the combustion chamber, so it only opened about 10% of full -- just enough to ignite the engine but not enough to produce any effective thrust.
The LOX valve failure was listed as the "cause," but it was only the proximate cause, and could have been predicted and/or mitigated. But a number of other contributing factors (human error, subcontractor interference from competing companies, and design shortcomings) led to the thrust vector control fuel, 60% hydrogen peroxide, pooling in the flame bucket and catching fire. As a result, the outside of the vehicle caught fire, and eventually the whole thing became a burning mess on the pad, sending a huge black cloud of smoke over Santa Maria, CA.
The proof of concept failure was the direct cause of the failure of the AMROC startup. I joined in Feb 1989 when the staff was about 50. By the time of (company President and chief inspirational figure) George Koopman's death in July, the staff was four times as large. By the end of the year, the company was only 25 people, and closed its doors a year or so later, selling its IP to Westinghouse, which then transferred it to SpaceDev. So some of the work we performed did prove useful, eventually. And we succeeded in proving that hybrid rockets were "safer" than solid -- during SET-1 development, some Rocketdyne folks down the road at EAFB dropped a solid rocket section from a crane. The resulting explosion killed 2 people iirc. The SET-1 accident caused only $2000 of minor damage to the pad at Edwards.
I was a young engineer just out of college. It was an awesome experience to work at a startup like that, and I have dozens of entertaining stories to tell as a result, and learned many lessons I used regularly over the next two decades. I'll never forget it.
When did we let this word weasel into our collective vocabulary?
When corporate types grew intolerant of being reminded of the phrase "the customer is always right." The word 'customer' has a connotation of an individual, with requirements and preferences that need to be met, with a sense of discrimination based thereupon.
No one ever says "the consumer is always right." The word 'consumer' connotates a faceless, indiscriminate member of a large homogenous group who is expected to purchase whatever crap product or service is produced.
Corporations love 'consumers.' They'd prefer 'customers' would just go away.
Unfortunately, though, the signal controller is only aware of the sensor states at its given intersection, so in practice you have two results worse than simple sync'ed lights: a) whole lines of dozens of cars stopping and accelerating at each intersection due to the influence of single cars tripping sensors with low latency, and b) single cars stopped at intersections with high latency for multiple minutes where no cross traffic occurs. (Latency being the time it takes for the light to change after you roll up on the sensor.)
Why don't we have distributed sensor networks yet? It's not like they're frickin' flying cars. How much fuel would we save and pollution would we prevent if we eliminated the first result, a) above? Every day on my commute I see fifty cars forced to stop at every light, many times for just one car on a cross street that has just arrived at the intersection, and then accelerate when it turns green. And I also sit for 4 or 5 minutes at lights that are red where there is no cross traffic for intervals 30 seconds or more, every day; if it were a stop sign I could cross easily, but to cross against a red would be illegal.
Both events are routine on every pass thru the system. Clearly it's the norm. And it's a huge waste of fuel, and clean air.
CPU cycles are cheap. The kind of bandwidth necessary is cheap. Why can't we build a network of these sensors and have them manage groups of traffic thru the system? And let them allow single cars to cross the main roads in the gaps? As an engineer, it's very frustrating to drive in these systems, knowing that it could be made so much better by the attention of just one smart person in city government.
The Usenet is still there, nothing has changed. Just a lack of users
Perhaps you're unaware that Usenet predates this thing called 'spam?'
The GP is bemoaning the current sub-unity Signal to Noise Ratio. For every article worth reading, there are many spam adverts.
Back in the day (pre-Endless September), there were no adverts. Spamming a newsgroup was posting the same (non-commercial) article repeatedly, and was very, very poorly received.
Sometimes, i go into google's news archives and relive the glory days of the Usenet in the early nineties. It's like reading old newspapers and magazines...
Slashdot Mirror
As an engineer who designs and integrates RF systems every day, all day, I have two impressions. And as a systems engineer, I'll describe them in terms of the two elements of risk: probability and impact.
FTFA: "In other events described in the report, a clock spun backwards and a GPS in cabin read incorrectly while two laptops were being used nearby."
First: Crap like that ain't supposed to happen. An airplane designed and built to standards for commercial passenger service must meet standards for electromagnetic susceptibility, interference tolerance, workmanship, etc. It's not the passengers' fault that things like that happen. Nor is it the direct fault of the manufacturer of the electronics that passengers carry. If something is that mission critical, and the cost of failure is measured in human lives, then engineers, inspectors, regulators, and operations crew damn well better make sure the likelihood of failure is as close to zero as can be.
Second: I know damn well that grounding and shielding is one of the most difficult aspects of any high-frequency electronics system. It's difficult to design, grounding and shielding design rules aren't generally taught as part of undergraduate EE curriculum (much less Aeromechanical, CS, etc.), and the manufacturing techniques are prone to failure and not easy to inspect and test. Therefore, statistically, a passenger that travels one or two times a year is likely to board a plane with a design flaw or manufacturing/maintenance flaw at some point in their lifetime. This doesn't mean they're going to notice it, or even have any effect on the flight, much less cause an emergency by forgetting a powered-up iPhone in their carryon. But the likelihood of failure will never be zero unless the passenger obeys the rules and turns off their devices.
So, turn your shit off when so instructed.
And consumer electronics designers: please give the consumer a switch that allows them to turn their shit off... not standby, but OFF.
This is the first page of the story, summary links to page 2.
If you are right, then you have nothing to hide.
Hmm, let's see how accurate that statement is by using a little political gedankenexperiment.
Husband: "I'm sorry... that information is classified."
Wife: "If you are right, then you have nothing to hide."
Husband: "OK, since you put it that way, that dress reveals exactly how overweight you are."
Do you think the outcome of this scenario will make the Husband happy that he was open and honest?
And, in fairness, it is practically insane.
I would come to the same conclusion.
And then immediately put a sticker over the camera lens.
There are plenty of people out there who don't have any problem using touch screens.
Yep. And they aren't soldiers operating UAVs. The iPad and iPhone make poor UAV controllers. Don't doubt that people have tried.
Here's another reason: GIS for Raven Hand Controller
See that hood? That's so you can a) see the screen in daylight, and b) operate at night without illuminating yourself. They're standard issue with the most common SUAV in service, and the hoods are used more often than not. You can't use a touch screen with that hood on there. And you sure as hell can't ask your customer to abandon the hood.
When we solicited requirements for new versions of UAV and UGV hand controllers, every customer suggested a touchscreen. But everytime we proposed one, we learned that it was the administrators that wanted the touchscreens. When the actual users, the soldiers who need to operate them in real world conditions, learned of the feature, they insisted that they can't use them and asked us to keep the joysticks, directional pads, and buttons.
We got a lot of people proposing features because they seem cool, or sexy, or they were the pet idea of some wannabe engineer. But when the rubber hits the road, you need to do proper systems engineering and HI design to optimize the feature set, or you're gonna get a dunsel that nobody will use under real conditions. Operating a drone is not the same as playing Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja. (If you want a better comparison, it's more like Starcraft using nothing but Protoss Observers.)
There are ways, with improvements in touchscreens, that they might be able to work, but I'm not free to talk about that. Suffice it to say that the technology isn't ready yet.
That Wii U photo makes it look a whole lot like one of several makes of Small UAV hand controllers.
A lot of work goes into the ergonomics of these things, because soldiers spend a lot of time using them, so there's a reason they all look very similar. Several ergonomic factors, obvious from the convergence of these designs, appear to be universal:
- Touchscreens are sexy but impractical. They're imprecise without a stylus, awkward to hold, and you have to obscure your view of the action to effect a control.
- It's nearly impossible make the screen too large. There's a reason the screen is big and dominates the faces of all of these units.
- Controls are arranged on the sides so that the fingers can take the weight while the thumbs work the controls without requiring the user adjust his grip.
- Control paradigms are borrowed from the original Playstation hand controllers because most users have prior experience with them.
- Light weight tradeoff against battery life, screen size, and ruggedness.
Looks like the convergence is happening from both directions. And it's not surprising because the human interface requirements are very similar in both applications.
Both the "dirty old man" and the "innocent pubescent girl" of urban lore are likely to be law enforcement officers, and possibly even colleagues at neighboring desks.
For some reason, this scenario brought to mind the occasions on which, as Dungeon Master, I've caught myself roleplaying both sides of an exchange between two NPCs. I try to avoid that whenever possible because it's seldom entertaining for the players, usually pointless, and more than a little bit disturbing...
Hm. That's analogy actually holds up.
Well...that is the Congressman's current explanation.
It's not the Congressman's explanation, it's the evidence found by two bloggers. Read the post here.
Looking at all the facts...
I've twice linked to a page that provides necessary and sufficient proof to exonerate the Congressman for anyone not filtering facts that don't support their favored conclusions.
He has come out and said that it could be a photo of him, but if so, it was distributed without his knowledge or permission.
Considering the evidence that the photo was a plant, there is more than the necessary minimum reasonable doubt as to its origin.
I admit Weiner showed poor judgment his response to the situation. But just because he's inept at dealing with the situation doesn't mean he's guilty.
It wasn't him. He was set up using a "feature" of Yfrog that leaves a gaping security hole.
I submitted the story from CannonFire yesterday, but it's still pending.
OK - thank you for an honestly informative explanation. Speeding Outlook database management might indeed be something I would need...
I joined just before the Operation Sundevil raid, and remember it fondly. Online roleplaying, beta testing SJ Games products, and brainstorming new games were awesome fun for a 20-something geek with too much free time on his hands. I even got a few of my ideas published in the Hacker and GURPS Illuminati products, and a free copy of GURPS Magic Items just for providing one of the staff with the lyrics to Monty Python's Dead Philosopher song.
Once the web emerged, and I got an ISP with NNTP service, a two-line BBS with a 30-minute per day time limit became passe. But from time to time I did poke back in the web presence.
And I still use the same handle now, just about everywhere, that I used then on IOBBS.
Shame that the regulars who stuck it out this long had to see it end this way. May I suggest you seek refuge in the Kenser & Co gazebo? Those guys are cut from the same cloth.
Actually, a Hitachi 7200 is what I have. Boots 10.6.7 to the desktop in under 20 seconds.
As you suggest, I didn't see any value in paying the 100krpm price.
And I had a series of Seagate drive failures, so I thought I'd try Hitachi this time.
Why should I buy a 400hp car when a 80hp car gets me from point A to point B[?]
Using your analogy, I have about 250 horses under the hood, and if I had more, I really wouldn't use them 90% of the time.
And inverting it, my CTO has a Lotus Exige S and a Chevy Corvette Z06, and drives one of them to work nearly every day, both very nice toys. But he doesn't need over 500 HP to drive the 1.5 miles from his home to the office.
So again, I ask, why do I *need* one of these hybrid drives?
I'm honestly confused. And still open-minded.
Explain to me why I need this instead of spending that $300 on a 7200 or 10000 rpm drive with two to four times the capacity and far, far more reliability and service life.
Is it just to extend the time I can operate on battery power? A second battery will double my time at far less cost.
Aye, similar to my reaction, which was, "The real story here is that there is a market for this kind of cheating assistance. How many unqualified people have made it past MCAT screening this way? Have any of them provided care for me or my loved ones?"
I worked on the American Rocket Company's proof of concept hybrid launch vehicle in 1989, which went under various names in the press, but the working name in house was Single Engine Test One (SET-1).
SET-1 failed on the pad at VAFB, also due to a frozen LOX valve. There's a good account of the Oct 1989 vehicle accident attached to the Original Post here. I'll summarize from my experience.
All of the engine testing took place at Edwards AFB, where the humidity was approx 10% on average. At Vandenburg, humidity was more like 100% during cryo fill/drain operations in the mornings. I suspect that similar condensation and freezing problems affected the Copenhagen Sputnik valve.
After two days of dry-run fill/drain ops, there was a nice casing of ice around the 4" gate valve that separated the He-pressurized LOX tank from the polybutadeine rubber fuel cast into the combustion chamber, so it only opened about 10% of full -- just enough to ignite the engine but not enough to produce any effective thrust.
The LOX valve failure was listed as the "cause," but it was only the proximate cause, and could have been predicted and/or mitigated. But a number of other contributing factors (human error, subcontractor interference from competing companies, and design shortcomings) led to the thrust vector control fuel, 60% hydrogen peroxide, pooling in the flame bucket and catching fire. As a result, the outside of the vehicle caught fire, and eventually the whole thing became a burning mess on the pad, sending a huge black cloud of smoke over Santa Maria, CA.
The proof of concept failure was the direct cause of the failure of the AMROC startup. I joined in Feb 1989 when the staff was about 50. By the time of (company President and chief inspirational figure) George Koopman's death in July, the staff was four times as large. By the end of the year, the company was only 25 people, and closed its doors a year or so later, selling its IP to Westinghouse, which then transferred it to SpaceDev. So some of the work we performed did prove useful, eventually. And we succeeded in proving that hybrid rockets were "safer" than solid -- during SET-1 development, some Rocketdyne folks down the road at EAFB dropped a solid rocket section from a crane. The resulting explosion killed 2 people iirc. The SET-1 accident caused only $2000 of minor damage to the pad at Edwards.
I was a young engineer just out of college. It was an awesome experience to work at a startup like that, and I have dozens of entertaining stories to tell as a result, and learned many lessons I used regularly over the next two decades. I'll never forget it.
[makes shadow puppets in the projection from parent AC]
Look! An eagle!
When did we let this word weasel into our collective vocabulary?
When corporate types grew intolerant of being reminded of the phrase "the customer is always right." The word 'customer' has a connotation of an individual, with requirements and preferences that need to be met, with a sense of discrimination based thereupon.
No one ever says "the consumer is always right." The word 'consumer' connotates a faceless, indiscriminate member of a large homogenous group who is expected to purchase whatever crap product or service is produced.
Corporations love 'consumers.' They'd prefer 'customers' would just go away.
The real test for the Kopf-Lischinski algorithm will be how it can handle Nethack.
Whatever happened to the 'Green Wave'?
Sensors. Roadway sensors happened.
Unfortunately, though, the signal controller is only aware of the sensor states at its given intersection, so in practice you have two results worse than simple sync'ed lights: a) whole lines of dozens of cars stopping and accelerating at each intersection due to the influence of single cars tripping sensors with low latency, and b) single cars stopped at intersections with high latency for multiple minutes where no cross traffic occurs. (Latency being the time it takes for the light to change after you roll up on the sensor.)
Why don't we have distributed sensor networks yet? It's not like they're frickin' flying cars. How much fuel would we save and pollution would we prevent if we eliminated the first result, a) above? Every day on my commute I see fifty cars forced to stop at every light, many times for just one car on a cross street that has just arrived at the intersection, and then accelerate when it turns green. And I also sit for 4 or 5 minutes at lights that are red where there is no cross traffic for intervals 30 seconds or more, every day; if it were a stop sign I could cross easily, but to cross against a red would be illegal.
Both events are routine on every pass thru the system. Clearly it's the norm. And it's a huge waste of fuel, and clean air.
CPU cycles are cheap. The kind of bandwidth necessary is cheap. Why can't we build a network of these sensors and have them manage groups of traffic thru the system? And let them allow single cars to cross the main roads in the gaps? As an engineer, it's very frustrating to drive in these systems, knowing that it could be made so much better by the attention of just one smart person in city government.
Right.
Stop being obtuse.
Yes, please do try to be at least a little bit acute.
Isosceles what you did there.
The Usenet is still there, nothing has changed. Just a lack of users
Perhaps you're unaware that Usenet predates this thing called 'spam?'
The GP is bemoaning the current sub-unity Signal to Noise Ratio. For every article worth reading, there are many spam adverts.
Back in the day (pre-Endless September), there were no adverts. Spamming a newsgroup was posting the same (non-commercial) article repeatedly, and was very, very poorly received.
Sometimes, i go into google's news archives and relive the glory days of the Usenet in the early nineties. It's like reading old newspapers and magazines...
the past, [...] I've never really been into it
Just wait.
You are now being in what will have been in the future. And you'll miss it.
Now, unless you are here to return my hair, get off my lawn.