The statistics currently being tracked is more offense focused. Bad Boys of Detroit, the Bulls, and the Spurs had solid defense that helped them win but not necessarily show up in statistics unless you do a game-to-game analysis of the opponent's average offense performance vs performance against a specific team.
Other than that, it's a pretty interesting thought/analysis... Just incomplete... but I'm sure someone can do a much more complete PhD thesis on this and get funded by some NBA team:-P
it's a matter of attempts. Blackberries and iPhones (don't know about Android) has the ability to erase all data after 10 failed attempts to log-in. So unless they can bypass the counter entirely, I'm not too concerned about the security level of 4 numbers (assuming you don't use 0000 1111 1234 or some other common ones).
I have a LoJack installed on my motorcycle, and it sends me text messages whenever it gets moved... not sure about cheap though... anti-theft will usually reduce your insurance premium.
there are plenty of Geo satellites with commercial off the shelve semiconductor parts that last 15+ years... Being in MEO and "only" lasting 12 or so years is no big deal...
Having once worked on GPS Satellite's clocking system, I was surprised that the AF was so against usage of atomic clocks phased-locked to crystals for accurate timing. Maybe the latest news about Galileo using atomic clock changed their mind?
Most satellites are still simple "bent-pipe" kind, send data up in one frequency, translate, send it down in another frequency.
Boeing SDC (formerly Hughes Space and Comm) was (and probably still is) the leading company in DSP payloads and only one with the expertise to space qualify an IBM ASIC, but they have a broken business model and a hard time selling it to their customers. That and they have a very out-dated bus led to market deterioration over the years.
That aside, bigger satellites are just like bigger processors: it will become prohibitively expensive to develop and produce at some point. DARPA has been funding research in microsats with absolutely no redundancy and minimal radiation shielding, so you can build a Beowulf cluster with graceful degradation and a giant transmission relay (like TDRSS)
I was first hearing warnings about this years ago.
Hmm... years ago, Boeing wasn't 3 years behind on launch schedule, and we wouldn't have this issue. If the AirForce had known 3 years ago, they would've exercised some option to build more IIMR builds. Boeing kept on pushing the launch date back, 3 months at a time, and here we are.
solar event will cause transient events that will recover in a few seconds.
GPS2F was awarded in the early 90s with a launch date of more than 10 years out. This caused parts issues that significantly magnified design issues. Without going into company secrets, let's just say that bean-counters and engineers fought long and hard. I wonder why Boeing lost GPS3...
If LockMart can't deliver as promised, Airforce can always buy more IIF. After 12-or-so builds currently on contract by Boeing, you figure even the incompetent can get their bugs worked out by then (sans part issues)
along that line, it's trivial to configure an USB controller such that it acts as a hub, 2 more controllers, 1 as HID, 1 as storage device. Then the HID device can just go willy-nilly and try to run d:\ or e:\ or whatever drive. USB controllers are cheap these days, most users won't know what hit them.
take any USB controller, have it emulate a Human Interface Device (aka keyboard), use it for the keystrokes of "windows, up, up, up, enter, virus-website, enter" and it's game over. you can do the same on Mac, just a tad more difficult.
thank you. I've spent 2 grand out of my own pocket so far, and will probably spend more if we continued on. what if by the end, after we find a sponsor who puts up all that money, and ready to launch, and have the X-Prize foundation tell us "even though your design meets all our requirements, it's not what we had in mind, thus you are disqualified", what then?
almost every part that's more complex than a transistor, when applied with "space qualified" label, can easily cost $10k, and the cheapest transponder cost $500k, and the cheapest launch vehicle we know and available today cost something like $20m, once you factor in salary, it's pretty each to get beyond that $100m mark. For the purpose of this competition, we can cut some corners, not take any salary, but we do have to launch something that has a prayer's chance of working, somehow -_-
Did you know that if a solar flare had occurred during the original Lunar Landing, everyone would've died? It only takes 50 rads to kill a person, and even with the latest advance in medicine which helps alleviate the radiation problem, 50 rads is a very small number. Not to mention that space also wrecks havoc on the immune system, which obviously nobody is too keen on publicizing.
Until we have a good solution for the aforementioned problems, human space mission should not be considered.
the camera design requirements are silly at best. my impression is that the X-Prize Foundation found some guy who wrote imager requirements for ESA or NASA, and slapped it onto this competition without in-depth understanding of what they truly meant.
Bingo. While it's not difficult to come up with an alternative design, the fact that our initial design was dismissed so easily and without reason, makes us wonder what other disqualifications are hidden down the road.
I'm pretty confident in Harold and co's ability to send the payload to the moon, the question is how much would it cost. Being a team in the US, there are also significant issues with ITAR if we were to choose a foreign launcher (ie Russians or Chinese or even the Europeans). As for a US launch, Falcon 1 is too small for any team to use, Falcon 1e could be phantom hardware, or not be ready on-time, and things doesn't get better from there.
only people not allowed to work on it are the direct family of the X-Prize foundation.
As mentioned in one of the replies, to perform this kind of mission requires a significant amount of investment. the restriction comes from the source of that investment, no more than 10% can come from government sources.
If you look over the bios of SCSG, their members are (almost) all experienced in space-specific design, and understand the cost and difficulties involved. Even a highly funded team probably don't realize that just because something is claimed to be "space qualified" doesn't mean you can actually use it in space.
first, the tanks can be purchased on the open market if you know the proper vendor.
second, the tanks in question was not the first choice, was not even the second choice. it just happens that we were able to get our hands on some, and may consider using them when the stars aligned.
third, something novel WAS disallowed due to vagueness of the rule.
fourth, to our knowledge we are the only team who's even trying to achieve the goal within the stated prize money. everyone else is doing it for the publicity, especially the CMU team.
4.1 - I wonder where does the CMU team's student's stipend come? research grants? university? or they truly do all their work AFTER they fulfilled their obligatory research.
the CPUs may consume less power, but it'll be much harder to design the power supply. not only will the voltage tolerance be much tighter, it's also much harder to design highly efficient regulators.
if you decrease a 10W CPU to 5W while the power-supply wastes an extra 3W to get there, and cost of designing such a power supply means lower reliability and higher cost, is it worth it?
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The statistics currently being tracked is more offense focused. Bad Boys of Detroit, the Bulls, and the Spurs had solid defense that helped them win but not necessarily show up in statistics unless you do a game-to-game analysis of the opponent's average offense performance vs performance against a specific team.
Other than that, it's a pretty interesting thought/analysis... Just incomplete... but I'm sure someone can do a much more complete PhD thesis on this and get funded by some NBA team :-P
it's a matter of attempts. Blackberries and iPhones (don't know about Android) has the ability to erase all data after 10 failed attempts to log-in. So unless they can bypass the counter entirely, I'm not too concerned about the security level of 4 numbers (assuming you don't use 0000 1111 1234 or some other common ones).
with Apple's release of Messages and maybe some scripting or Automator knowledge, it just became infinity easier to spam cell phones...
I have a LoJack installed on my motorcycle, and it sends me text messages whenever it gets moved... not sure about cheap though... anti-theft will usually reduce your insurance premium.
there are plenty of Geo satellites with commercial off the shelve semiconductor parts that last 15+ years... Being in MEO and "only" lasting 12 or so years is no big deal...
Having once worked on GPS Satellite's clocking system, I was surprised that the AF was so against usage of atomic clocks phased-locked to crystals for accurate timing. Maybe the latest news about Galileo using atomic clock changed their mind?
Most satellites are still simple "bent-pipe" kind, send data up in one frequency, translate, send it down in another frequency.
Boeing SDC (formerly Hughes Space and Comm) was (and probably still is) the leading company in DSP payloads and only one with the expertise to space qualify an IBM ASIC, but they have a broken business model and a hard time selling it to their customers. That and they have a very out-dated bus led to market deterioration over the years.
That aside, bigger satellites are just like bigger processors: it will become prohibitively expensive to develop and produce at some point. DARPA has been funding research in microsats with absolutely no redundancy and minimal radiation shielding, so you can build a Beowulf cluster with graceful degradation and a giant transmission relay (like TDRSS)
I was first hearing warnings about this years ago.
Hmm... years ago, Boeing wasn't 3 years behind on launch schedule, and we wouldn't have this issue. If the AirForce had known 3 years ago, they would've exercised some option to build more IIMR builds. Boeing kept on pushing the launch date back, 3 months at a time, and here we are.
solar event will cause transient events that will recover in a few seconds.
GPS2F was awarded in the early 90s with a launch date of more than 10 years out. This caused parts issues that significantly magnified design issues. Without going into company secrets, let's just say that bean-counters and engineers fought long and hard. I wonder why Boeing lost GPS3...
If LockMart can't deliver as promised, Airforce can always buy more IIF. After 12-or-so builds currently on contract by Boeing, you figure even the incompetent can get their bugs worked out by then (sans part issues)
along that line, it's trivial to configure an USB controller such that it acts as a hub, 2 more controllers, 1 as HID, 1 as storage device. Then the HID device can just go willy-nilly and try to run d:\ or e:\ or whatever drive. USB controllers are cheap these days, most users won't know what hit them.
take any USB controller, have it emulate a Human Interface Device (aka keyboard), use it for the keystrokes of "windows, up, up, up, enter, virus-website, enter" and it's game over. you can do the same on Mac, just a tad more difficult.
thank you. I've spent 2 grand out of my own pocket so far, and will probably spend more if we continued on. what if by the end, after we find a sponsor who puts up all that money, and ready to launch, and have the X-Prize foundation tell us "even though your design meets all our requirements, it's not what we had in mind, thus you are disqualified", what then?
Government are inherently risk averse in fear of political backlash. Look at the recent shuttle explosion.
What can the astronauts do better than the autonomous systems we've put on Mars? It's more vanity and publicity at this point.
death is a unit-step function. either you are dead or you are not.
radiation accumulation is like HIV slowly turning to AIDS.
if you can't understand the difference, i suggest you learn.
rogue wave doesn't accumulate inside the body and does permanent and irreparable damage like radiation.
There's nothing in our camera design that doesn't meet the rules. It's just that simple.
almost every part that's more complex than a transistor, when applied with "space qualified" label, can easily cost $10k, and the cheapest transponder cost $500k, and the cheapest launch vehicle we know and available today cost something like $20m, once you factor in salary, it's pretty each to get beyond that $100m mark. For the purpose of this competition, we can cut some corners, not take any salary, but we do have to launch something that has a prayer's chance of working, somehow -_-
Did you know that if a solar flare had occurred during the original Lunar Landing, everyone would've died? It only takes 50 rads to kill a person, and even with the latest advance in medicine which helps alleviate the radiation problem, 50 rads is a very small number. Not to mention that space also wrecks havoc on the immune system, which obviously nobody is too keen on publicizing.
Until we have a good solution for the aforementioned problems, human space mission should not be considered.
the camera design requirements are silly at best. my impression is that the X-Prize Foundation found some guy who wrote imager requirements for ESA or NASA, and slapped it onto this competition without in-depth understanding of what they truly meant.
but there IS no budget limit. One team stated their estimate will be over $100m!
the tanks are available for purchase from somewhere otherwise.
Bingo. While it's not difficult to come up with an alternative design, the fact that our initial design was dismissed so easily and without reason, makes us wonder what other disqualifications are hidden down the road.
I'm pretty confident in Harold and co's ability to send the payload to the moon, the question is how much would it cost. Being a team in the US, there are also significant issues with ITAR if we were to choose a foreign launcher (ie Russians or Chinese or even the Europeans). As for a US launch, Falcon 1 is too small for any team to use, Falcon 1e could be phantom hardware, or not be ready on-time, and things doesn't get better from there.
only people not allowed to work on it are the direct family of the X-Prize foundation.
As mentioned in one of the replies, to perform this kind of mission requires a significant amount of investment. the restriction comes from the source of that investment, no more than 10% can come from government sources.
If you look over the bios of SCSG, their members are (almost) all experienced in space-specific design, and understand the cost and difficulties involved. Even a highly funded team probably don't realize that just because something is claimed to be "space qualified" doesn't mean you can actually use it in space.
Being a former member of the team...
first, the tanks can be purchased on the open market if you know the proper vendor.
second, the tanks in question was not the first choice, was not even the second choice. it just happens that we were able to get our hands on some, and may consider using them when the stars aligned.
third, something novel WAS disallowed due to vagueness of the rule.
fourth, to our knowledge we are the only team who's even trying to achieve the goal within the stated prize money. everyone else is doing it for the publicity, especially the CMU team.
4.1 - I wonder where does the CMU team's student's stipend come? research grants? university? or they truly do all their work AFTER they fulfilled their obligatory research.
the CPUs may consume less power, but it'll be much harder to design the power supply. not only will the voltage tolerance be much tighter, it's also much harder to design highly efficient regulators.
if you decrease a 10W CPU to 5W while the power-supply wastes an extra 3W to get there, and cost of designing such a power supply means lower reliability and higher cost, is it worth it?