Hmm... How about a floating-yet-submerged pipeline?
Water flowing through plastic tubes anchored offshore... (still submerged mind you - but not laying the seabed).
It could start small -- say two 12 inch pipes, then more, or larger, pipelines added once the concept was proved.
Why does this work? For one thing, eminent-domain, right-of-way issues pretty much go away. And the problem of structural support turns into keeping pipeline sections from _rising_, rather than falling (caused by the natural bouyancy of the pipeline and its contents)
2 12 inch pipes? They might as well be pipe cleaners because you are not going to get enough water though them to make *any* kind of difference. I'll be that we loose more water in Torrance CA though dripping faucets than you could get though those pipes.
Have you seen what they have in New York City? You think 2 12 inch pipes will be of any use? NTMWD where I get my water in North Texas gets 10% of it's supply though ONE 96 inch pipeline from Lake Texoma and where they are not running the pumps flat out, I don't think they could do more than about 40% of our daily need though that with the pumps funning full blast. And that's just for a couple of counties north and east of Dallas.
No, you are going to need pipelines measured in tens of feet to be of much use...
For $30B, you can build a LOT of desalination plants.
Ah, but can you then afford to power them? The ongoing power demands, plus maintenance, are the reason we don't see more desalination plants in use.
And a $30B pipe is cheaper to run? Maybe, but it still takes power to run the pumps.
I vote for the desalination plants myself. Yea, you might need to build a few power plants to run those pumps too, but if you go with some modern nuclear plants and collocate them along the coast you get two birds with one set of stones. Water AND power, both things sorely needed in Cali bout now...
This plan is *cheaper* and less environmentally costly than running pipes from Washington state... Plus, when you don't need the water (like after it starts raining someday again) you will still have the power plants to use...
Yes, I'm sure rogoshen1 has lots more experience at effectively and successfully running companies that generate multi-millions in profits than any MBA or other business school graduate ever possibly could (assuming bobbied even is one, which we don't know).
I'm not an MBA, though in my 25 years of working in the technology business, I've worked for a bunch of them and know a few more besides.
What I am is an observer. I've seen what they do and the common mistakes they make. I've heard how they think and although I've not been formally trained, I can usually identify WHY they made the decisions they make and what parts of their reasoning I agree with, and what parts I do not.
There is one think that all this observation has taught me. MBA's generally mean well, although they sometimes don't fully understand the situations (especially the technical issues) and their training leads them to generalize about things like labor costs and schedules. As an engineer I've had to live with the consequences of their mistakes on technical grounds, but I also respect what they do. I don't want to worry about the cash flow or profit margin, I just want to do the right thing and build cool technical solutions the our customers need and want. But we'd go broke without the MBAs worrying about the financial details, then where would we be? Unemployed....
I've been unemployed, it's not very much fun, so bring on the MBA, especially the one who can stop with the spreadsheets long enough to come talk to me about the project, the budget and the schedule and trusts me to make the technical calls for them.
Here is a fun fact about avionics engineers: they don't know shit about security. They are highly educated, trained, and have experience at making things work. They never even touch on how to intentionally make things work in ways not intended. The only people that are experts in security are those that do it full time for their whole career.
If you believe otherwise you belong in a can of planters.
I KNOW otherwise... I've done avionics work in the past, and where I'm not saying ALL or even MOST of the engineers involved in this understand network security, the system engineering that goes into these designs is done by engineers who ARE good at network security.
However, you miss my point. This self proclaimed security expert doesn't know about avionics, has never really demonstrated his alleged hacks on any actual hardware/software. All he has is the following: 1. A theory, 2. Some power point slides, and 3. a big mouth. Well, and he now has 4. Some national news coverage.
If this guy doesn't get himself arrested for tampering with a real airliner while in flight, all I expect from him is 10 min of fame and some speaking gig fees. He will be old news in about 2 weeks, unless he really did do the hacking he claimed, in which case he will be lucky to stay off the "do not fly list" and not end up behind bars.
What part of "cost money" to wipe didn't you understand.
Why would the government spend *more* money to repurpose something for civilian use, so they could sell them for pennies? There comes a time to just call it junk and be done with it and personally I figure that point is where what you can get is less than what it costs you to sell, maybe even a few dollars per unit above that...
In this case, the number of useable units was twice the number of possible buyers who could legally use the units. I'm in the pool of people who could legally use these things and I know I'd not likely be interested in even ONE of them unless they are giving them away, then one would likely be my limit. Who's going to take more than their allotted 2 to make up for that?
These things are outdated junk. Maybe they should wipe and sell 10K of them, but not a million. Most need to be trashed (or chipped up and recycled for the metal in them).
A twice bombed WW2 Aircraft Carrier which we sunk is valuable to the North Koreans for the technology it may have on board? Who bombed them back to the stone age when I wasn't looking?
They don't do anything because it is not cost effective.. Actually they DO make efforts to keep turn over down in most cases, they just realize that just like all other things in business there are limits to what you can do based on cost and efficiency.
And rightly so, it likely would have cost more than what they could get for them to wipe them... With 600K hams out there, if you dumped millions of radios onto the market, I can only guess what the price would fall too... I know I can only use one radio at a time, even if I have 4 or 5...
Sometimes junk is just junk, even if it is mil-standard junk...
He has no experience with aircraft systems, only theories about them based on his network security experience over the last 5 years? Now if he was an actual avionics engineer with experience on any kind of avionics system, or had actually performed tests of his theories on actual hardware in the lab, I'd be a bit less condescending towards him and his theories. However, as this stands, he's no more qualified than the GAO when they made their claims about the FAA sacrificing flight safety for similar reasons.
This nut is basically the same as some registered nurse who knows how to administer chemotherapy drugs trying to come across as an expert in treating cancer with radiation and calling the local cancer treatment center on the carpet for doing it wrong. Yea that nurse may have power point slides and research to back up the claims, but they are no expert and have no credibility in the field, the slides may even fool the untrained masses, but that's not proof that that nut job's theory has anything real behind it.
If you want to construct a conspiracy theory about this guy and the government trying to hush all this up, what can I say but "you are nuts!"
He doesn't know anything, he just has a good story, a big mouth and some power point slides.
IF he actually DID try something, I have visions of him running the IIS hack scripts from 10 years ago or port scanning whole network segments while sitting back in a 23B trying to keep the guy in 23A from watching the screen...
This guy who fancies himself a "aviation hacking expert" goes around the country giving lectures on all sorts of things he sees as "risks" in all sorts of things just got himself in trouble by saying stupid things at the wrong time. It's like a security expert who gave talks about preventing Hijacking was talking about his presentation as he goes though the TSA checkpoint or with the flight attendant. Somebody took exception to the topic being discussed because of the context (he was actually ON an airplane at the time) and in the abundance of caution he was detained and questioned. I'll bet he never attempted any hacking, much less validated any of his perceived risks, most likely he made some inane statement like "I could hack into this plane and cause.... to happen" which got the attention of the flight crew who called the FBI who stops him as he gets off the plane.
But NOW this guy has a PR angle to play. And why not? Here is some self proclaimed "expert hacker" who has even been questioned by the FBI about possible hacking attempts and had his electronic devices taken in the process while he was on his way to give a talk on the very subject. Play that up, get more speaking gigs by playing up your qualifications.
This guy has nearly zero credibility with me. He's never really tested any of his theories on real equipment, doesn't work for anybody who would have access to the actual design specifications. Never worked for Boeing, Airbus or any avionics manufacturer. Has never demonstrated any successful attack and to my knowledge hasn't even attempted to hack anything. About all he has are a series of power point presentations that outline a lot of perceived risks he's come up with, but never verified, yet now he's the subject of international news? I sure hope he wasn't stupid enough to actually have tried his theories out on an actual commercial flight because the FBI is going to make an example of him if he did.
This guy's angle is all about milking the PR now. He's hit the short term jackpot and will be the featured speaker at "aviation security" conferences and I hope he makes some money. He's going to need it to pay the lawyers. However, IMHO, he's a nut job with power point skills and very little actual knowledge. He's just some lucky nut with a big mouth who fancies himself an expert on some issue that happens to be the news story of the day.
But it's not all about density, but power consumption starts being the issue of the day. Anything to compete with the other guy and make a name in the market that really doesn't have any differences in product...
But as another poster noted, there isn't any difference in how AMD and Intel processors operate in a data center. If the machine runs the software you want, most of us who are buying servers don't really care all that much. Today's machines are faster, smaller, and consume less power so they fit in the hole left by the server we just replaced without running any new wires, such operators don't care about the CPU vendor, they are just happy the new server fits easily so we will buy the cheapest hardware that fills the need and fits in the space.
The only players that care about any of this are the server farm operators, but even then, getting another two CPU's in a 128 CPU rack is but a marginal improvement. What they really care about is cost, and there are only a few areas where real estate has pushed floor space costs high enough to really make the marginal density improvements worth the investment.
So density is way overrated as a differentiator in the server market. It doesn't really matter to the bulk of the customers anyway and people that fall for the whole blade server thing but buy server chassis that are not totally full to start, are nuts. IF you cannot afford the blades now, trust me, you won't be able to get them in 2 years after they are EOL'ed by the vendor. Just buy separate servers and keep the upgrade path as simple as possible. So none of this has anything to do with the CPU vendor in the first place and AMD was barking up the wrong tree trying to play in this market.
...we need AMD. Because if AMD goes away, Intel has zero competitors in the x86/64 market.
I used to think this too, but I'm not so sure this is totally true today. There are more CPU makers than Intel and AMD, although these are the two players in the PC/server market, the PC/server market is starting to show a decline. People are moving away from the desktop/laptop in favor of their smartphones and handheld devices and the CPU's in these devices are usually not AMD or Intel made.
I used to think that Intel had to keep AMD going to avoid anti-trust problems, but these days that issue is really less and less important. If AMD went away, I think you would see the rise of the companies doing mobile processors as these devices got cheaper and laptops/desktops got more expensive. Push this far enough and these manufacturers could easily step up and into the small server market and hold Intel's prices in check. Yea, Intel would dominate in the "large iron" CPU market where absolute single thread performance was paramount, but this market segment is vanishingly small because most server farm operators are about footprint and power consumption, not brute force and if you have enough power to run a few virtual machines on a host, it's enough.
Of course the fly in all this ointment is Microsoft and the Windows operating system and it is their choices which really drive this market. If we start to see their server offerings being offered on alternate architectures, you can bet the end is near for AMD. But as long as Microsoft keeps AMD support alive, they will at least have a subsistence market to keep them alive. Well, unless this really *is* the year of the Linux Desktop and Microsoft goes bankrupt, but a snowball in a really hot place has a better chance than that.
Although I'm willing to take it on faith that it might be 'stiction' on the actuator side, I'm pretty sure extreme variations which can cause unanticipated phase lag from a measurement system (say a gyro or a flow meter) is equally disruptive to a control system and can generically explain control system oscillation events as well.
Sometimes you never really know until you set up the conditions and simulate the crap out of it in an controlled testbed as it is much harder to distinguish the difference in a "live" situation.
True, but if you have good enough instrumentation and data collection built into your system it's not *that* hard to figure out what exactly happened. I'm sure they have this system well instrumented so it won't take them long to narrow down on a solution to the problems they are seeing. My guess is that they just need to tune their control systems a bit to account for the valve movement delays and all will be better. They might need to work on the actuators for the valves some if they cannot smooth things out in the software, but it looks like a small software change is all they need IMHO.
I'm not trying to fix the wrong problem, I'm trying to add a backup for the fix. Shit happens. Parts will fail, valves will stick, unexpected winds or waves will occur.
And when they happen, you loose the vehicle...I think you are trying to address the wrong problem. IMHO the smart money is on making what they have work though some software adjustments or if they really can't do it that way the minimum adjustments in the hardware to smooth out the valve responses. They are really close here, and from what I just was reading they are a software change away from making this work. Just remove the oscillation problem in software by tweaking the delay calculations in the feedback and I'll bet it's near perfect...
You seem to want to redesign the whole thing to increase the system's thrust and overcome it by brute force... I think a small bit of tweaking would be enough and cost a lot less.. But what do I know, I'm not a rocket scientist, just a EE software guy...
"The reason Boeing went for this was to reduce weight, power consumption and complexity."
No, it's not. They most certainly are not running the entertainment system on the same wires as the avionics. The avionics system is a real-time network that is different at a very low level. The FAA exception allowed Boeing to connect the two networks at a single point, using a "network extension device."
Ok, replace "and" with "or" and read it again.. But EVERYTHING Boeing does fits into one of these areas in some way... Well that stuff with safety and regulations too.
They have touch points physically... There are some things the WiFi systems just need to know that come from the flight control systems, or systems which are attached to systems which are attached to... (You get the idea)
Where I seriously doubt there is a direct logical connection, where some hacker just needs to know the right IP address to adjust the auto pilot or something, there are physical data connections between the wifi network and the flight controls.
Physical separation does make a logical connection harder, but it still does not mean a logical connection is impossible. But my point that network security is about logical connections is still valid. You can have two networks that are not physically separated, that are not logically connected, and that's all you need for security. Yea it's harder when you don't have physical separation, but not impossible.
The reason Boeing went for this was to reduce weight, power consumption and complexity. You can save a boat load of wiring if you can use the same ones for multiple networks. Wires are heavy, especially when you add in all the connectors, lacing and clamps required in an aircraft. So you use the minimum number of wire runs that gets you the required redundancy, bandwidth and latency, put everything going from point a to point b on the wires going that way and then keep the networks that go over the wires logically separate. It also reduces the complexity of the wiring, making it easer to install, maintain as well as allow more flexibility in the future for avionics changes.
All of the reasons Boing would do this are related to the cost to purchase and operate the aircraft. Less weight = less fuel burn. Less power = Less fuel burn. Less complexity = easier to maintain = less maintenance costs PLUS lower NRE costs for new components you want to integrate in the future. Need data to flow between here and there for that new package? Configure the back planes like this, use these IP addresses and slap'm into the empty spot in the rack and you got data. Oh I see plenty of reasons for Boeing to do stuff like this... Not that any of this is really new, except for perhaps using TCP/IP as a transport protocol...
Slashdot Mirror
Never let a good crisis go to political waste.. That's what I always say.... (sarcasm off)
That's what the co-located Nuke plant is for... OR if you don't like that, how about a Natural Gas one?
Hmm... How about a floating-yet-submerged pipeline?
Water flowing through plastic tubes anchored offshore ... (still submerged mind you - but not laying the seabed).
It could start small -- say two 12 inch pipes, then more, or larger, pipelines added once the concept was proved.
Why does this work? For one thing, eminent-domain, right-of-way issues pretty much go away. And the problem of structural support turns into keeping pipeline sections from _rising_, rather than falling (caused by the natural bouyancy of the pipeline and its contents)
2 12 inch pipes? They might as well be pipe cleaners because you are not going to get enough water though them to make *any* kind of difference. I'll be that we loose more water in Torrance CA though dripping faucets than you could get though those pipes.
Have you seen what they have in New York City? You think 2 12 inch pipes will be of any use? NTMWD where I get my water in North Texas gets 10% of it's supply though ONE 96 inch pipeline from Lake Texoma and where they are not running the pumps flat out, I don't think they could do more than about 40% of our daily need though that with the pumps funning full blast. And that's just for a couple of counties north and east of Dallas.
No, you are going to need pipelines measured in tens of feet to be of much use...
Yeah there you go. A solar desalinization plant would cost a shitload less than $30bn, and would work better.
It would also create a boat load of shade and only work during the day.... I'm not so sure that's a viable path n Cali...
For $30B, you can build a LOT of desalination plants.
Ah, but can you then afford to power them? The ongoing power demands, plus maintenance, are the reason we don't see more desalination plants in use.
And a $30B pipe is cheaper to run? Maybe, but it still takes power to run the pumps.
I vote for the desalination plants myself. Yea, you might need to build a few power plants to run those pumps too, but if you go with some modern nuclear plants and collocate them along the coast you get two birds with one set of stones. Water AND power, both things sorely needed in Cali bout now...
This plan is *cheaper* and less environmentally costly than running pipes from Washington state... Plus, when you don't need the water (like after it starts raining someday again) you will still have the power plants to use...
Yes, I'm sure rogoshen1 has lots more experience at effectively and successfully running companies that generate multi-millions in profits than any MBA or other business school graduate ever possibly could (assuming bobbied even is one, which we don't know).
I'm not an MBA, though in my 25 years of working in the technology business, I've worked for a bunch of them and know a few more besides.
What I am is an observer. I've seen what they do and the common mistakes they make. I've heard how they think and although I've not been formally trained, I can usually identify WHY they made the decisions they make and what parts of their reasoning I agree with, and what parts I do not.
There is one think that all this observation has taught me. MBA's generally mean well, although they sometimes don't fully understand the situations (especially the technical issues) and their training leads them to generalize about things like labor costs and schedules. As an engineer I've had to live with the consequences of their mistakes on technical grounds, but I also respect what they do. I don't want to worry about the cash flow or profit margin, I just want to do the right thing and build cool technical solutions the our customers need and want. But we'd go broke without the MBAs worrying about the financial details, then where would we be? Unemployed....
I've been unemployed, it's not very much fun, so bring on the MBA, especially the one who can stop with the spreadsheets long enough to come talk to me about the project, the budget and the schedule and trusts me to make the technical calls for them.
Here is a fun fact about avionics engineers: they don't know shit about security. They are highly educated, trained, and have experience at making things work. They never even touch on how to intentionally make things work in ways not intended. The only people that are experts in security are those that do it full time for their whole career.
If you believe otherwise you belong in a can of planters.
I KNOW otherwise... I've done avionics work in the past, and where I'm not saying ALL or even MOST of the engineers involved in this understand network security, the system engineering that goes into these designs is done by engineers who ARE good at network security.
However, you miss my point. This self proclaimed security expert doesn't know about avionics, has never really demonstrated his alleged hacks on any actual hardware/software. All he has is the following: 1. A theory, 2. Some power point slides, and 3. a big mouth. Well, and he now has 4. Some national news coverage.
If this guy doesn't get himself arrested for tampering with a real airliner while in flight, all I expect from him is 10 min of fame and some speaking gig fees. He will be old news in about 2 weeks, unless he really did do the hacking he claimed, in which case he will be lucky to stay off the "do not fly list" and not end up behind bars.
What part of "cost money" to wipe didn't you understand.
Why would the government spend *more* money to repurpose something for civilian use, so they could sell them for pennies? There comes a time to just call it junk and be done with it and personally I figure that point is where what you can get is less than what it costs you to sell, maybe even a few dollars per unit above that...
In this case, the number of useable units was twice the number of possible buyers who could legally use the units. I'm in the pool of people who could legally use these things and I know I'd not likely be interested in even ONE of them unless they are giving them away, then one would likely be my limit. Who's going to take more than their allotted 2 to make up for that?
These things are outdated junk. Maybe they should wipe and sell 10K of them, but not a million. Most need to be trashed (or chipped up and recycled for the metal in them).
A twice bombed WW2 Aircraft Carrier which we sunk is valuable to the North Koreans for the technology it may have on board? Who bombed them back to the stone age when I wasn't looking?
They don't do anything because it is not cost effective.. Actually they DO make efforts to keep turn over down in most cases, they just realize that just like all other things in business there are limits to what you can do based on cost and efficiency.
You mean the one glowing blue?
And rightly so, it likely would have cost more than what they could get for them to wipe them... With 600K hams out there, if you dumped millions of radios onto the market, I can only guess what the price would fall too... I know I can only use one radio at a time, even if I have 4 or 5...
Sometimes junk is just junk, even if it is mil-standard junk...
73's
Asbestos is safe as long as you don't disturb it when it is dry, so yes, sinking nasty stuff works great for a lot of it.
Well, Only because it is a long term commitment with the stuff and who knows what will be recoverable by the "bad guys" in 2 thousand years...
He has no experience with aircraft systems, only theories about them based on his network security experience over the last 5 years? Now if he was an actual avionics engineer with experience on any kind of avionics system, or had actually performed tests of his theories on actual hardware in the lab, I'd be a bit less condescending towards him and his theories. However, as this stands, he's no more qualified than the GAO when they made their claims about the FAA sacrificing flight safety for similar reasons.
This nut is basically the same as some registered nurse who knows how to administer chemotherapy drugs trying to come across as an expert in treating cancer with radiation and calling the local cancer treatment center on the carpet for doing it wrong. Yea that nurse may have power point slides and research to back up the claims, but they are no expert and have no credibility in the field, the slides may even fool the untrained masses, but that's not proof that that nut job's theory has anything real behind it.
If you want to construct a conspiracy theory about this guy and the government trying to hush all this up, what can I say but "you are nuts!"
He doesn't know anything, he just has a good story, a big mouth and some power point slides.
IF he actually DID try something, I have visions of him running the IIS hack scripts from 10 years ago or port scanning whole network segments while sitting back in a 23B trying to keep the guy in 23A from watching the screen...
This guy who fancies himself a "aviation hacking expert" goes around the country giving lectures on all sorts of things he sees as "risks" in all sorts of things just got himself in trouble by saying stupid things at the wrong time. It's like a security expert who gave talks about preventing Hijacking was talking about his presentation as he goes though the TSA checkpoint or with the flight attendant. Somebody took exception to the topic being discussed because of the context (he was actually ON an airplane at the time) and in the abundance of caution he was detained and questioned. I'll bet he never attempted any hacking, much less validated any of his perceived risks, most likely he made some inane statement like "I could hack into this plane and cause .... to happen" which got the attention of the flight crew who called the FBI who stops him as he gets off the plane.
But NOW this guy has a PR angle to play. And why not? Here is some self proclaimed "expert hacker" who has even been questioned by the FBI about possible hacking attempts and had his electronic devices taken in the process while he was on his way to give a talk on the very subject. Play that up, get more speaking gigs by playing up your qualifications.
This guy has nearly zero credibility with me. He's never really tested any of his theories on real equipment, doesn't work for anybody who would have access to the actual design specifications. Never worked for Boeing, Airbus or any avionics manufacturer. Has never demonstrated any successful attack and to my knowledge hasn't even attempted to hack anything. About all he has are a series of power point presentations that outline a lot of perceived risks he's come up with, but never verified, yet now he's the subject of international news? I sure hope he wasn't stupid enough to actually have tried his theories out on an actual commercial flight because the FBI is going to make an example of him if he did.
This guy's angle is all about milking the PR now. He's hit the short term jackpot and will be the featured speaker at "aviation security" conferences and I hope he makes some money. He's going to need it to pay the lawyers. However, IMHO, he's a nut job with power point skills and very little actual knowledge. He's just some lucky nut with a big mouth who fancies himself an expert on some issue that happens to be the news story of the day.
But it's not all about density, but power consumption starts being the issue of the day. Anything to compete with the other guy and make a name in the market that really doesn't have any differences in product...
But as another poster noted, there isn't any difference in how AMD and Intel processors operate in a data center. If the machine runs the software you want, most of us who are buying servers don't really care all that much. Today's machines are faster, smaller, and consume less power so they fit in the hole left by the server we just replaced without running any new wires, such operators don't care about the CPU vendor, they are just happy the new server fits easily so we will buy the cheapest hardware that fills the need and fits in the space.
The only players that care about any of this are the server farm operators, but even then, getting another two CPU's in a 128 CPU rack is but a marginal improvement. What they really care about is cost, and there are only a few areas where real estate has pushed floor space costs high enough to really make the marginal density improvements worth the investment.
So density is way overrated as a differentiator in the server market. It doesn't really matter to the bulk of the customers anyway and people that fall for the whole blade server thing but buy server chassis that are not totally full to start, are nuts. IF you cannot afford the blades now, trust me, you won't be able to get them in 2 years after they are EOL'ed by the vendor. Just buy separate servers and keep the upgrade path as simple as possible. So none of this has anything to do with the CPU vendor in the first place and AMD was barking up the wrong tree trying to play in this market.
...we need AMD. Because if AMD goes away, Intel has zero competitors in the x86/64 market.
I used to think this too, but I'm not so sure this is totally true today. There are more CPU makers than Intel and AMD, although these are the two players in the PC/server market, the PC/server market is starting to show a decline. People are moving away from the desktop/laptop in favor of their smartphones and handheld devices and the CPU's in these devices are usually not AMD or Intel made.
I used to think that Intel had to keep AMD going to avoid anti-trust problems, but these days that issue is really less and less important. If AMD went away, I think you would see the rise of the companies doing mobile processors as these devices got cheaper and laptops/desktops got more expensive. Push this far enough and these manufacturers could easily step up and into the small server market and hold Intel's prices in check. Yea, Intel would dominate in the "large iron" CPU market where absolute single thread performance was paramount, but this market segment is vanishingly small because most server farm operators are about footprint and power consumption, not brute force and if you have enough power to run a few virtual machines on a host, it's enough.
Of course the fly in all this ointment is Microsoft and the Windows operating system and it is their choices which really drive this market. If we start to see their server offerings being offered on alternate architectures, you can bet the end is near for AMD. But as long as Microsoft keeps AMD support alive, they will at least have a subsistence market to keep them alive. Well, unless this really *is* the year of the Linux Desktop and Microsoft goes bankrupt, but a snowball in a really hot place has a better chance than that.
So the grammar police are still out in force.... OK, what ever floats your boat.
Although I'm willing to take it on faith that it might be 'stiction' on the actuator side, I'm pretty sure extreme variations which can cause unanticipated phase lag from a measurement system (say a gyro or a flow meter) is equally disruptive to a control system and can generically explain control system oscillation events as well.
Sometimes you never really know until you set up the conditions and simulate the crap out of it in an controlled testbed as it is much harder to distinguish the difference in a "live" situation.
True, but if you have good enough instrumentation and data collection built into your system it's not *that* hard to figure out what exactly happened. I'm sure they have this system well instrumented so it won't take them long to narrow down on a solution to the problems they are seeing. My guess is that they just need to tune their control systems a bit to account for the valve movement delays and all will be better. They might need to work on the actuators for the valves some if they cannot smooth things out in the software, but it looks like a small software change is all they need IMHO.
I'm not trying to fix the wrong problem, I'm trying to add a backup for the fix. Shit happens. Parts will fail, valves will stick, unexpected winds or waves will occur.
And when they happen, you loose the vehicle...I think you are trying to address the wrong problem. IMHO the smart money is on making what they have work though some software adjustments or if they really can't do it that way the minimum adjustments in the hardware to smooth out the valve responses. They are really close here, and from what I just was reading they are a software change away from making this work. Just remove the oscillation problem in software by tweaking the delay calculations in the feedback and I'll bet it's near perfect...
You seem to want to redesign the whole thing to increase the system's thrust and overcome it by brute force... I think a small bit of tweaking would be enough and cost a lot less.. But what do I know, I'm not a rocket scientist, just a EE software guy...
"The reason Boeing went for this was to reduce weight, power consumption and complexity."
No, it's not. They most certainly are not running the entertainment system on the same wires as the avionics. The avionics system is a real-time network that is different at a very low level. The FAA exception allowed Boeing to connect the two networks at a single point, using a "network extension device."
Ok, replace "and" with "or" and read it again.. But EVERYTHING Boeing does fits into one of these areas in some way... Well that stuff with safety and regulations too.
They have touch points physically... There are some things the WiFi systems just need to know that come from the flight control systems, or systems which are attached to systems which are attached to... (You get the idea)
Where I seriously doubt there is a direct logical connection, where some hacker just needs to know the right IP address to adjust the auto pilot or something, there are physical data connections between the wifi network and the flight controls.
Physical separation does make a logical connection harder, but it still does not mean a logical connection is impossible. But my point that network security is about logical connections is still valid. You can have two networks that are not physically separated, that are not logically connected, and that's all you need for security. Yea it's harder when you don't have physical separation, but not impossible.
The reason Boeing went for this was to reduce weight, power consumption and complexity. You can save a boat load of wiring if you can use the same ones for multiple networks. Wires are heavy, especially when you add in all the connectors, lacing and clamps required in an aircraft. So you use the minimum number of wire runs that gets you the required redundancy, bandwidth and latency, put everything going from point a to point b on the wires going that way and then keep the networks that go over the wires logically separate. It also reduces the complexity of the wiring, making it easer to install, maintain as well as allow more flexibility in the future for avionics changes.
All of the reasons Boing would do this are related to the cost to purchase and operate the aircraft. Less weight = less fuel burn. Less power = Less fuel burn. Less complexity = easier to maintain = less maintenance costs PLUS lower NRE costs for new components you want to integrate in the future. Need data to flow between here and there for that new package? Configure the back planes like this, use these IP addresses and slap'm into the empty spot in the rack and you got data. Oh I see plenty of reasons for Boeing to do stuff like this... Not that any of this is really new, except for perhaps using TCP/IP as a transport protocol...