A big issue to be aware of for information management systems is the large training effort to use them and the effort to move your documentation into them. We have had problems that a new system is brought in. It takes literally a few years for employees to get their work in the new system and get comfortable with it - then a newer latest and greatest system comes out. We now have 20 years of documentation in half a dozen different places - each of those places originally declared as our "permanent solution".
You need to budget a lot of training and content transfer time. If you just hope it happens naturally, you will be very disappointed.
If you don't want to spend time and $ on training and moving documents, your best bet IS just files in a directory tree with a normal OS provided content search. If people use keywords in documents, that is good enough for 95% of all documentation uses, and its free.
There are two parts to "science". There is learning some of the vast amount of science that has already been done, and there is learning how to do science. Both are important, and both can be made interesting by a good teacher and dull by a bad one.
I think a manager needs to understand enough of the technology to make good decisions, and to know if their employees are technically competent.
I manage a small RF group. We recently had to decide on doing and I/Q or DDC based system for a high channel count receiver. I feel that I need to know enough about both of those to understand the trade-offs. Since this is an unusual application; a sensor system, not a data system, its important to know if the most commonly used solution for most applications applies here. The trade-off is not simple, there are differences in firmware complexity, calibration systems, hardware costs and flexibility.
Estimates are useless as a measure of how well an engineer is performing. How far he is ahead or behind schedule only indicates the extent to which he was able to get away with padding his estimate in the first place.
That said, estimates ARE very valuable when you have a complex set of interlocking projects and resources that can be tasked in different places. This is especially true if external pressure require that a project be done on an exact date.
To take an extreme example, if the launch window for Europa is at a known date, the spacecraft firmware must be fully tested and installed by that date. Working backwards that says when the first version must be ready. The estimate helps decide what resources should be applied, and later it lets you know if you are so far behind that you need to change the launch date to the next window (over a year away). That affects budget etc.
At SLAC we have complex projects that require the work of lots of people to all come together. This results in very rigid schedules - There is typically a 2 month window for major upgrades, if you miss it, you wait a year. If someone working for me doesn't like doing estimates, I basically say "we need a guess. I can guess or you can, but since you are doing the work, your guess will be better than mine".
GR requires them to exist. I don't know if there are other gravity theories that are consistent with all other observations that do not.
We do see spin-down of binary neutron stars that is consistent with gravitational wave radiation, so its pretty darn clear that they do exist - we just don't have direct detection.
In the future LISA ( http://lisa.nasa.gov/ ) and other more advanced instruments may be able to to gravity wave astronomy. Ultimately we could imagine detecting gravitational radiation from the very early universe - long before any other signals are available.
Tricky as it is to create a gravitational detector, a gravitational radiator the emits significant power is a lot tougher. I seem to remember that thermonuclear bombs and asymmetric explosions generate a trivial amount of gravitational wave energy.
LIGO is looking for supernova scale sources - probably not a good idea to build one in our solar system.
I think it is considered very likely the gravitational waves exist. The previous instrument didn't have enough sensitivity X luck (close source) to pick them up.
I worked on a precurser LIGO in 1981, long before it was called LIGO.......
Intent will be a big issue here. If the code "happens" to provide better emissions during the driving test it may not look so bad. If the code clearly cheats (looks for a lack of steering input, or no passengers, or detects a certain sequence of settings, then it will look like deliberate fraud.
I wonder who at the company was aware of this. It could have been anything from a high level decision. to an overly clever firmware developer who thought he had a really clever idea.
Of course the company is responsible for their products, but it might be the difference between negligence and fraud .
(not disagreeing with your conclusions) Depends on how you define efficiency. For an ideal jet engine the power to produce a given thrust goes up with airspeed, but since you are moving faster, the energy per distance remains the same. (distance * Weight / (L/D) = energy_use. ),.
For a real engine though the efficiency does go down. Conventional ram jets don't work well at high speed because slowing down the inlet air to subsonic heats it too much, and involves aerodynamic losses.
Supersonic Combustion Ram Jets can work - there you never slow down the air so there isn't much loss in efficiency. (see the X-51 for example). Still, its difficult for many reasons. You do need to slow the air some - and the aerodynamic efficiency of the inlet decreases for much the same reason the wings get less efficient at high speeds. Its tricky to mix the hydrogen in at high speeds - you need lots closely spaced injectors, and that can add drag. The flame speed in hydrogen is subsonic, so you need some way to keep it from blowing out the back of the engine - constant ignition, or detonation wave combustion (mostly a concept for >mach12), or some other trick.
Noting violates basic physics but this is a LONG way from being practical for a passenger aircraft.
Agreed. Its also very difficult to make efficient scramjets which makes the problem even worse. The best scram jets so far have barely been able to maintain steady flight at a single mach number and in a short range test vehicle.
I think there is a good chance that you want to jump from supersonic all the way to mostly ballistic sub-orbital. It also completely avoids the noise footprints except (and its a BIG except) at the launch and landing points.
As several people have also said, I'll take hyper-sonic travel seriously only after we have supersonic commercial flight again. Existing airliner speeds haven't changed significantly in 60 years. (!!!). (the same time it took to go from the Wright brothers to near mach-1 travel).
I see no reason to limit companies to cyber weapons. Once they have located an attacker, having privately owned armed drones would be very handy. if the attacker is a nation state, even more aggressive measures could be used. I can see aircraft carriers, and maybe even ballistic missile subs with corporate logos.
I was unable to validate the license for my office account without installing a local outlook account. Win 10 popped up a login app, but it always hung. Spent an hour and final gave up and installed an outlook account/
Yes I could have probably eventually figured it out, but I have other things to do with my life.
Sadly 1 is pretty unlikely, Its difficult to imagine anything of enough value that only exists in space
2 could happen, but as a society we are moving away from high energy density technology like nuclear because there are better options on earth. Rockets already make pretty efficient use of chemical energy. Other schemes like space elevators seem really improbable. (I hope I'm wrong).
So 3 seems the most likely.Eventually maybe some space-faring race will discover and catalog the ruins we left behind.
The important technologies haven't advanced very much - there is little difference between a 2015 rocket engine and a 1965 rocket engine. Also, lots of technical details can be lost, so its expensive to rediscover them.
Space was societal focus in the 60's the best and brightest worked on it. Now it is a niche.
The reason is to learn how to do it again. Right now the US can't even put astronauts in orbit.
We like to think we *can* but just don't want to. Its a very comforting thought.
Of course if we don't want a future that includes space colonization, then I agree, there is no reason to go. Its nice up here in the trees - we can let someone else climb down and worry about the predators.
There is some loss of laminar flow, but 5% seems wildly optimistic for eliminating bugs under any normal sort of operation. I only fly piston planes so maybe someone flying jets can comment, but 5% is enough to affect your fuel reserve calculations and I've never heard of a "bug" correction.
Looks like they have seen 99% reflectivity. Q must be on the order of 100 (give or take a pi and a 2). That is OK, but mirrors above 99.99% are commonly available at a single wavelength and I think they can get down to a few ppm with enough effort (and in clean conditions). I haven't worked with low loss mirrors in decades, so I don't know where the state of the art is now.
Since you pay the salaries of govt employees, you probably don't want them to demand more money when they discover that OTHER govt workers are earning more than they are....
Good presentations are valuable. They convey important information. Bad presentations are a waste of time.
Powerpoint makes it easy to produce bad presentations, but it allows you to produce good ones.
Bullet points are useless if they contain no information "Improve product market share!". "Reduce failures".
Bullet points are valuable if they remind the audience of specific points: "Balance IP3 and Noise at each stage of the RF chain". "Using too high a gain in the first stage of a RF receiver is the most common mistake".
Used incorrectly, fancy graphics can be useless or distracting.
Used correctly, fancy graphics can illustrate a complex process such as the operation of a transverse deflection cavity for femtosecond timing measurements .
Slashdot Mirror
A big issue to be aware of for information management systems is the large training effort to use them and the effort to move your documentation into them. We have had problems that a new system is brought in. It takes literally a few years for employees to get their work in the new system and get comfortable with it - then a newer latest and greatest system comes out. We now have 20 years of documentation in half a dozen different places - each of those places originally declared as our "permanent solution".
You need to budget a lot of training and content transfer time. If you just hope it happens naturally, you will be very disappointed.
If you don't want to spend time and $ on training and moving documents, your best bet IS just files in a directory tree with a normal OS provided content search. If people use keywords in documents, that is good enough for 95% of all documentation uses, and its free.
Almost
The correct plan is to find some other company stupid enough to believe the above and buy out the one that proposed this idea......
Getting rich on the internet doesn't require that you have a good business plan, it only requires that you convince someone else that you do.
There are two parts to "science". There is learning some of the vast amount of science that has already been done, and there is learning how to do science. Both are important, and both can be made interesting by a good teacher and dull by a bad one.
I think a manager needs to understand enough of the technology to make good decisions, and to know if their employees are technically competent.
I manage a small RF group. We recently had to decide on doing and I/Q or DDC based system for a high channel count receiver. I feel that I need to know enough about both of those to understand the trade-offs. Since this is an unusual application; a sensor system, not a data system, its important to know if the most commonly used solution for most applications applies here. The trade-off is not simple, there are differences in firmware complexity, calibration systems, hardware costs and flexibility.
Estimates are useless as a measure of how well an engineer is performing. How far he is ahead or behind schedule only indicates the extent to which he was able to get away with padding his estimate in the first place.
That said, estimates ARE very valuable when you have a complex set of interlocking projects and resources that can be tasked in different places. This is especially true if external pressure require that a project be done on an exact date.
To take an extreme example, if the launch window for Europa is at a known date, the spacecraft firmware must be fully tested and installed by that date. Working backwards that says when the first version must be ready. The estimate helps decide what resources should be applied, and later it lets you know if you are so far behind that you need to change the launch date to the next window (over a year away). That affects budget etc.
At SLAC we have complex projects that require the work of lots of people to all come together. This results in very rigid schedules - There is typically a 2 month window for major upgrades, if you miss it, you wait a year. If someone working for me doesn't like doing estimates, I basically say "we need a guess. I can guess or you can, but since you are doing the work, your guess will be better than mine".
GR requires them to exist. I don't know if there are other gravity theories that are consistent with all other observations that do not.
We do see spin-down of binary neutron stars that is consistent with gravitational wave radiation, so its pretty darn clear that they do exist - we just don't have direct detection.
In the future LISA ( http://lisa.nasa.gov/ ) and other more advanced instruments may be able to to gravity wave astronomy. Ultimately we could imagine detecting gravitational radiation from the very early universe - long before any other signals are available.
Tricky as it is to create a gravitational detector, a gravitational radiator the emits significant power is a lot tougher. I seem to remember that thermonuclear bombs and asymmetric explosions generate a trivial amount of gravitational wave energy.
LIGO is looking for supernova scale sources - probably not a good idea to build one in our solar system.
Surely someone must have built a LEGO LIGO. If not someone should....
I think it is considered very likely the gravitational waves exist. The previous instrument didn't have enough sensitivity X luck (close source) to pick them up.
I worked on a precurser LIGO in 1981, long before it was called LIGO.......
Intent will be a big issue here.
If the code "happens" to provide better emissions during the driving test it may not look so bad. If the code clearly cheats (looks for a lack of steering input, or no passengers, or detects a certain sequence of settings, then it will look like deliberate fraud.
I wonder who at the company was aware of this. It could have been anything from a high level decision. to an overly clever firmware developer who thought he had a really clever idea.
Of course the company is responsible for their products, but it might be the difference between negligence and fraud .
(not disagreeing with your conclusions) Depends on how you define efficiency. For an ideal jet engine the power to produce a given thrust goes up with airspeed, but since you are moving faster, the energy per distance remains the same. (distance * Weight / (L/D) = energy_use. ) ,.
For a real engine though the efficiency does go down. Conventional ram jets don't work well at high speed because slowing down the inlet air to subsonic heats it too much, and involves aerodynamic losses.
Supersonic Combustion Ram Jets can work - there you never slow down the air so there isn't much loss in efficiency. (see the X-51 for example). Still, its difficult for many reasons. You do need to slow the air some - and the aerodynamic efficiency of the inlet decreases for much the same reason the wings get less efficient at high speeds. Its tricky to mix the hydrogen in at high speeds - you need lots closely spaced injectors, and that can add drag. The flame speed in hydrogen is subsonic, so you need some way to keep it from blowing out the back of the engine - constant ignition, or detonation wave combustion (mostly a concept for >mach12), or some other trick.
Noting violates basic physics but this is a LONG way from being practical for a passenger aircraft.
Agreed. Its also very difficult to make efficient scramjets which makes the problem even worse. The best scram jets so far have barely been able to maintain steady flight at a single mach number and in a short range test vehicle.
I think there is a good chance that you want to jump from supersonic all the way to mostly ballistic sub-orbital. It also completely avoids the noise footprints except (and its a BIG except) at the launch and landing points.
As several people have also said, I'll take hyper-sonic travel seriously only after we have supersonic commercial flight again. Existing airliner speeds haven't changed significantly in 60 years. (!!!). (the same time it took to go from the Wright brothers to near mach-1 travel).
I see no reason to limit companies to cyber weapons. Once they have located an attacker, having privately owned armed drones would be very handy. if the attacker is a nation state, even more aggressive measures could be used. I can see aircraft carriers, and maybe even ballistic missile subs with corporate logos.
I was unable to validate the license for my office account without installing a local outlook account. Win 10 popped up a login app, but it always hung. Spent an hour and final gave up and installed an outlook account/
Yes I could have probably eventually figured it out, but I have other things to do with my life.
Unfortunately I agree.
Sadly 1 is pretty unlikely, Its difficult to imagine anything of enough value that only exists in space
2 could happen, but as a society we are moving away from high energy density technology like nuclear because there are better options on earth. Rockets already make pretty efficient use of chemical energy. Other schemes like space elevators seem really improbable. (I hope I'm wrong).
So 3 seems the most likely.Eventually maybe some space-faring race will discover and catalog the ruins we left behind.
The important technologies haven't advanced very much - there is little difference between a 2015 rocket engine and a 1965 rocket engine. Also, lots of technical details can be lost, so its expensive to rediscover them.
Space was societal focus in the 60's the best and brightest worked on it. Now it is a niche.
The reason is to learn how to do it again. Right now the US can't even put astronauts in orbit.
We like to think we *can* but just don't want to. Its a very comforting thought.
Of course if we don't want a future that includes space colonization, then I agree, there is no reason to go. Its nice up here in the trees - we can let someone else climb down and worry about the predators.
Even some sort of peer review to say that you have at least solved the key problems.
In today's competitive marketplace you need to do everything you can to generate more business.
Used an ultrasonic rangfinder part for cheap cameras to echo-locate breakdowns in high gradient accelerator structures.
There is some loss of laminar flow, but 5% seems wildly optimistic for eliminating bugs under any normal sort of operation. I only fly piston planes so maybe someone flying jets can comment, but 5% is enough to affect your fuel reserve calculations and I've never heard of a "bug" correction.
Looks like they have seen 99% reflectivity. Q must be on the order of 100 (give or take a pi and a 2). That is OK, but mirrors above 99.99% are commonly available at a single wavelength and I think they can get down to a few ppm with enough effort (and in clean conditions). I haven't worked with low loss mirrors in decades, so I don't know where the state of the art is now.
Since you pay the salaries of govt employees, you probably don't want them to demand more money when they discover that OTHER govt workers are earning more than they are....
Good presentations are valuable. They convey important information. Bad presentations are a waste of time.
Powerpoint makes it easy to produce bad presentations, but it allows you to produce good ones.
Bullet points are useless if they contain no information "Improve product market share!". "Reduce failures".
Bullet points are valuable if they remind the audience of specific points: "Balance IP3 and Noise at each stage of the RF chain". "Using too high a gain in the first stage of a RF receiver is the most common mistake".
Used incorrectly, fancy graphics can be useless or distracting.
Used correctly, fancy graphics can illustrate a complex process such as the operation of a transverse deflection cavity for femtosecond timing measurements .