Military purchasing is a nightmare. I work for a software company and one of the services wanted to buy our software. Okay fine how many do you you want. $200 copies fine we will even give you a discount on them... Yea right. First they spent a year testing it. This was none mission critical admin type stuff not a flight control system or anything. After the test they decided they like our software the best and wanted it but they had to put it out to bid. Well they tried to make it a single supplier for this bid but a senator from California made a call and put a stop to that. So here comes the bid the paper work arrives in a box and weighs no less then 50 lbs... We fill out all that paperwork and place our bid. Our software was the only one that could meet the specs but we still gave a good price per unit. We lost the bid. a company in California lied about the meeting the specs and under cut our bid by $2 a unit. Oh but their annual updates and support contract was $100 per unit more than ours. Four years later we get call from the DOD. It seems that the company in California went out of business and on top of that they software didn't do what they claimed. So it started all over again. We won the bid but it took a total of six years and thousands of dollars to do it. I hear that now the DOD has better systems for buying COTS systems but I can honestly say that I too would charge $500 for a hammer if I knew how the system worked.
Sorry about not catching the math error. It has been way too long since I have been willing to that kind of math just for fun. As I said I agree that an intercept is possible just not likely or practical. BTW clouds messing up a recon mission? You really think they would be using just optical sensors? Never heard of SAR? Often SAR imagery or ESM data is just as important as pictures.
It is possible to maneuver at 10+gs at Mach 3. Several Soviet SAMS do it now. I never said that it would be impossible to intercept. Heck F-105s and F-4s during Vietnam where taken down by AK-47s. It only takes a magic BB. I was thinking in the sense that is would be practically impossible to intercept this drone right now. The sensor grid you describe would be expensive in the extreme. I agree about spy planes vs missiles but frankly this drone is a missile just a reusable one and of course the read advantage is that the drone doesn't have to overfly the target to get the data. Basically we agree I was speaking practically while you where talking in absolutes. I still say that today any intercept of this drone would mostlikly end up as a tail chase.
I do disagree with attacker vs defender. The attacker has the an advantage in that they can chose accept or decline combat while the defender always has to react. Yes optical sensor triangulation can be very accurate but all it takes is cloud cover to make it useless while the drone could use radar to image it's target or GPS to guide it's weapons. Clouds do block a lot of IR after all. If it is going to attack the target it could use roll back to take out the sensor sites or even attack the defending launchers. Since this is a drone acceptable looses are only a matter of dollars and cents.
"I suggest you begin by googling "hypersonic IR seeker"...you'll see there is a wide body of research in the field for just this type of scenario." You mean like this? Read the first line http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001SPIE.4369..662H ". Infra-red (IR) seekers on missiles at high Mach-numbers in the lower tier air defense often suffer from degradation in performance due to aerothermodynamic effects. Yes there has been a lot of research but they are not in production yet. THAAD is radar guided and uses a shroud to protect the IR terminal guidance sensor widow. "You don't need to fly at Mach 8 to intercept a Mach 6 vehicle...simply standing still and letting it fly into you is enough." That is true for a none maneuvering target. But when dealing with a maneuvering target traditionally you want a 30% to 50% speed advantage. This aerovehicle will be capable of maneuvering. A laser might work but even that will be difficult since a Mach 6 vehicle will be by definition heat resistant and will be a very hot air flow around it. Then you have the problem of a limited accusation time since you will be limited to line of sight and it will have a low radar cross section. What it comes down to is it will be a hard target to hit. Nothing is impossible but this will be very tough. Here are the problems From the time you acquire the target you will have a very short time to launch an interceptor of any kind. In that time your interceptor must reach reach 100,000 ft of altitude and a pretty high velocity. The UAV will have probably detected the launch and started to jink so just popping up in front of it will not work. Not only that but odds are very good that any interceptor will be large and in a fixed position so the drone will be routed to avoid those that it can and possible destroy those that it can not if it is on an attack mission. To reach 100,000 in a few seconds is not a small task to start with since it is around 20 miles straight up! So let's do some simple math. Let's give a generous detection range of 100 miles to your intercept sight. At 4000 mph or Mach 6 they will have around 1.5 minuets from the time they detect the drone to launch an interceptor and get it 20 miles straight up. And that is only if it is coming right at the launch site! So give a really fast 30 seconds to decide to launch you have a total of one minute to reach 100,000 feet. So the interceptor will have to climb at better than 1100 mph and that isn't allowing for acceleration! That is a very good clip going straight up by anyone's standards. If the drone isn't overflying the launch site then you have to deal with the slant range And then you will still need time to maneuver! After all the interceptor will not stop climbing instantly. Now throw in the drone making a 10 g turn after it detects the launch and you can see the numbers get very ugly. This would almost always turn into a tail chase and that becomes very difficult.
A Mach 6 maneuvering target at FL100 is a nightmare intercept target. Lasers are still a big maybe.
Mass a lot of Mass. But then you are just as likely to have radio active isotopes in that shielding mass that may or may not cause a problem. The really big question is if this just a myth or not. Yes radiation will fog film but is this film that sensitive and is your 30 year time frame long enough to make a difference? My best suggestion and it really is off the top of my head is put your freezer in a well ventilated basement. You could put some lead and polyethylene sheets around it just to be sure and best of all put a water bed on the floor above it. Then you have the problem of secondary particles. Very high energy cosmic rays will hit your shielding and then cause a reaction like spaling. The one very high energy particle will create many lower but still energetic particles. You could also use some really big rare earth magnets to setup a magnetic field that will deflect a few particles. The simple answer is you will never shield it from all radiation but frankly just sticking it in the freezer may be good enough.
"I guess you wouldn't necessarily need to download software via P2P if it was actually free to begin with." Actually yes you do. Things like Linux ISOs are BIG. And not every distribution has the luxury of deep pockets for band width. Even distros like Fedora offer torrents of the ISOs the save bandwidth and to speed up downloads. I have only used bit torrent to download Linux ISOs.
Modern IR missiles are all aspect. They are sensitive enough to track head on as well as a tail chase. You do need to be faster than the target to intercept a maneuvering target.
The THAAD makes it's interception at a much higher altitude than 100,000 feet. Take a look at the THAAD and you will see that the seeker window is protected by a shroud during the boost phase. To intercept a Mach 6 vehicle the missile will need to to fly at around Mach 8. Just think about how hot the seeker window will get at that speed and that low of an altitude. And yes at Mach 6-8 100k feet is low altitude.
They might have a chance at detecting it how do you use IR to guide the weapon? Kind of hard since the weapons own IR will probably blind it's sensors. Then add in that it will take a big missile to intercept a mach 6 vehicle at 100,000 that can maneuver.
I will try to explain it. The improvements really are not improvements for most people. What can I do on Vista that I can't do on XP? For Example the UAC you call annoying but you get used to it. Well some programs will not work with the UAC on at all and why be annoyed? Security? Users don't want to trade convince for security. I have never had any security issues with my XP box because I already make an effort to secure it. The GUI. Just eye candy. DX10 no games for it yet and the ones that have patches run slower then the DX9 versions. Other features of Vista have been back ported to XP in.NET or programmers will not use because they will not toss the XP market away.
Why not to like Vista? Too many versions. Apple did that right. One version. Too expensive. Apple is doing that right as well $149. Why spend a lot of money for no significant return.
I think that the people that have formated their HDs and put XP on new computers are the most damming statments. From your post I get that Vista isn't that bad. So why pay for something that isn't that bad?
"On the other hand, they have the old and busted but very compatible XP. " That is the real problem XP isn't that busted. It works just fine for most people. People don't feel the need for a new computer right now. Why shoud they? Most home users use their computers for email, surfing the net, digital music, and playing games. They don't need a new PC because most of the activites are limited by their Internet connection. A modern X2 or even Pentium D will spend 90% or more of it's life at idle. The only people that really need a lot more CPU power are those that do digital video and hard core gamers. When you look at business things are even worse. 99% of those systems are used for email,word proccesing,CMS, and light spreadsheets. Frankly they where just fine with P3s and Athlons. People don't need new PCs so they are not buying new Windows licences. Dear computers industry, If you want a big jump in sales increase the availableity of low cost high speed internet access and lower the cost of HD Camcorders. Other than that most people are fine with what they have right now and the Geek Squad is making money cleaning off spyware so people are no longer tossing PCs when they get "slow".
We are have been running a 3ware controller for years on our Linux file server with uptimes of months. I am in south FL so every once and awhile we get a power outage that is longer than our UPS time. I have never used 3ware under Windows but ours has been rock solid for like 7 years.
Take a modern TDI engine from Europe and add it to a plug in hybrid. Run it on biodiesel when available and put solar cells on the roof of it. Ok the solar cells may just be for cute factor but my car sits in my office parking lot all day in Florida. It might give me enough power to run the AC on the trip home.
Oh there are some other things that are interesting... Why two batteries? Why not one bigger one. I know so that you can not run down the main battery by listening to music but that is just silly. One big battery would have more capacity than two smaller batteries and would allow the user to trade media time for talk time. If you want to be cute then just turn off the media system if you have less than two hours of talk time. A five mega pixel camera is also cute but it only points one way. You can not use this phone as a video phone like some because you can not swivel the camera towards you. So it is perfect for him phone.
Actually if you take a look you will see that NTFS-G under Fuse is actually faster then XFS. There seems to be some memory fragmentation issues with ZFS currently. I am a big fan of Microkernels. I keep hoping that Minix 3 will really start to take off soon. I love the idea of self healing systems and that can really only be done with a Microkernel. I don't think Vista is slow because of any moves into user-space. I think it is more an issue of memory usage and DRM. Let's face it if you are "managing rights" for all sorts of files that takes CPU cycles. Also if you have to keep hitting swap all the time that will also slow you down.
Actually BSD doesn't use as much GNU stuff as Linux does otherwise RMS would be screaming that you should call it GNU/BSD. For a while commercial Linux developers where using the BSD libc so they could statically link it to get around some major library problems Linux was having. There are difference between BSD and Linux. For one BSD tends towards stability over features. It is a different set of trade offs.
I am not a kernel hacker but I believe you are confusing loadable kernel modules with user space code. I am pretty sure that kernel modules run at the kernel level and can access all the same structures that a driver compiled into the kernel can. FUSE file systems run at the same privilege level as a user program does. In theory it is a slower but more robust system. If a FUSE file system crashes you can just restart the filesystem and remount the drive. If a kernel level file system crashes it can cause a kernel panic and bring down the entire system. So the distinction between user-land and kernel drivers is anything but arbitrary.
You have hit on a big grey area that worries me. If EVERYBODY knows and accepts that email is the the same as yelling at one another in a public street then they are less likely to make errors in judgment. I hadn't thought about virus scanning as "reading" peoples emails but it really is. There are many maintenance issues that could involve seeing emails. Things like "expectations" of privacy will only stop law abiding people from doing their jobs. People that want to do it for unethical reasons will still do it.
"Furthermore, the only time it can lawfully be captured is by a representative of the owner of the network" But is that protected or will trouble shooting a network become a crime?
But BG/L is exactly the type of hardware that Plan 9 is designed for. Plan 9 could allow Blue Gene to be used for different problems than it is currently being used for. Yes it is currently are research project but it is far from a waste of time. I disagree that BG/L isn't the type of system that Plan 9 is targeted at. The current problem set that BG/L is being used for isn't one that Plan 9 is a good tool for. The hardware probably isn't ideal but it is close enough for useful research.
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Umm. More likely for a British audience. Hale Britannia, where memories of empire die hard.
Military purchasing is a nightmare. I work for a software company and one of the services wanted to buy our software. Okay fine how many do you you want. $200 copies fine we will even give you a discount on them...
Yea right.
First they spent a year testing it. This was none mission critical admin type stuff not a flight control system or anything. After the test they decided they like our software the best and wanted it but they had to put it out to bid. Well they tried to make it a single supplier for this bid but a senator from California made a call and put a stop to that. So here comes the bid the paper work arrives in a box and weighs no less then 50 lbs...
We fill out all that paperwork and place our bid. Our software was the only one that could meet the specs but we still gave a good price per unit. We lost the bid. a company in California lied about the meeting the specs and under cut our bid by $2 a unit. Oh but their annual updates and support contract was $100 per unit more than ours. Four years later we get call from the DOD. It seems that the company in California went out of business and on top of that they software didn't do what they claimed. So it started all over again. We won the bid but it took a total of six years and thousands of dollars to do it. I hear that now the DOD has better systems for buying COTS systems but I can honestly say that I too would charge $500 for a hammer if I knew how the system worked.
Sorry about not catching the math error. It has been way too long since I have been willing to that kind of math just for fun. As I said I agree that an intercept is possible just not likely or practical.
BTW clouds messing up a recon mission? You really think they would be using just optical sensors? Never heard of SAR? Often SAR imagery or ESM data is just as important as pictures.
It is possible to maneuver at 10+gs at Mach 3. Several Soviet SAMS do it now. I never said that it would be impossible to intercept. Heck F-105s and F-4s during Vietnam where taken down by AK-47s. It only takes a magic BB.
I was thinking in the sense that is would be practically impossible to intercept this drone right now. The sensor grid you describe would be expensive in the extreme.
I agree about spy planes vs missiles but frankly this drone is a missile just a reusable one and of course the read advantage is that the drone doesn't have to overfly the target to get the data. Basically we agree I was speaking practically while you where talking in absolutes. I still say that today any intercept of this drone would mostlikly end up as a tail chase.
I do disagree with attacker vs defender. The attacker has the an advantage in that they can chose accept or decline combat while the defender always has to react. Yes optical sensor triangulation can be very accurate but all it takes is cloud cover to make it useless while the drone could use radar to image it's target or GPS to guide it's weapons. Clouds do block a lot of IR after all. If it is going to attack the target it could use roll back to take out the sensor sites or even attack the defending launchers. Since this is a drone acceptable looses are only a matter of dollars and cents.
"I suggest you begin by googling "hypersonic IR seeker"...you'll see there is a wide body of research in the field for just this type of scenario." You mean like this? Read the first line http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001SPIE.4369..662H ". Infra-red (IR) seekers on missiles at high Mach-numbers in the lower tier air defense often suffer from degradation in performance due to aerothermodynamic effects. Yes there has been a lot of research but they are not in production yet. THAAD is radar guided and uses a shroud to protect the IR terminal guidance sensor widow.
"You don't need to fly at Mach 8 to intercept a Mach 6 vehicle...simply standing still and letting it fly into you is enough."
That is true for a none maneuvering target. But when dealing with a maneuvering target traditionally you want a 30% to 50% speed advantage. This aerovehicle will be capable of maneuvering. A laser might work but even that will be difficult since a Mach 6 vehicle will be by definition heat resistant and will be a very hot air flow around it. Then you have the problem of a limited accusation time since you will be limited to line of sight and it will have a low radar cross section.
What it comes down to is it will be a hard target to hit. Nothing is impossible but this will be very tough.
Here are the problems
From the time you acquire the target you will have a very short time to launch an interceptor of any kind. In that time your interceptor must reach reach 100,000 ft of altitude and a pretty high velocity. The UAV will have probably detected the launch and started to jink so just popping up in front of it will not work. Not only that but odds are very good that any interceptor will be large and in a fixed position so the drone will be routed to avoid those that it can and possible destroy those that it can not if it is on an attack mission. To reach 100,000 in a few seconds is not a small task to start with since it is around 20 miles straight up!
So let's do some simple math.
Let's give a generous detection range of 100 miles to your intercept sight.
At 4000 mph or Mach 6 they will have around 1.5 minuets from the time they detect the drone to launch an interceptor and get it 20 miles straight up. And that is only if it is coming right at the launch site! So give a really fast 30 seconds to decide to launch you have a total of one minute to reach 100,000 feet. So the interceptor will have to climb at better than 1100 mph and that isn't allowing for acceleration! That is a very good clip going straight up by anyone's standards. If the drone isn't overflying the launch site then you have to deal with the slant range And then you will still need time to maneuver! After all the interceptor will not stop climbing instantly. Now throw in the drone making a 10 g turn after it detects the launch and you can see the numbers get very ugly.
This would almost always turn into a tail chase and that becomes very difficult.
A Mach 6 maneuvering target at FL100 is a nightmare intercept target. Lasers are still a big maybe.
Mass a lot of Mass.
But then you are just as likely to have radio active isotopes in that shielding mass that may or may not cause a problem.
The really big question is if this just a myth or not. Yes radiation will fog film but is this film that sensitive and is your 30 year time frame long enough to make a difference?
My best suggestion and it really is off the top of my head is put your freezer in a well ventilated basement. You could put some lead and polyethylene sheets around it just to be sure and best of all put a water bed on the floor above it.
Then you have the problem of secondary particles. Very high energy cosmic rays will hit your shielding and then cause a reaction like spaling. The one very high energy particle will create many lower but still energetic particles. You could also use some really big rare earth magnets to setup a magnetic field that will deflect a few particles.
The simple answer is you will never shield it from all radiation but frankly just sticking it in the freezer may be good enough.
"I guess you wouldn't necessarily need to download software via P2P if it was actually free to begin with."
Actually yes you do. Things like Linux ISOs are BIG. And not every distribution has the luxury of deep pockets for band width.
Even distros like Fedora offer torrents of the ISOs the save bandwidth and to speed up downloads.
I have only used bit torrent to download Linux ISOs.
Modern IR missiles are all aspect. They are sensitive enough to track head on as well as a tail chase. You do need to be faster than the target to intercept a maneuvering target.
The THAAD makes it's interception at a much higher altitude than 100,000 feet. Take a look at the THAAD and you will see that the seeker window is protected by a shroud during the boost phase. To intercept a Mach 6 vehicle the missile will need to to fly at around Mach 8. Just think about how hot the seeker window will get at that speed and that low of an altitude. And yes at Mach 6-8 100k feet is low altitude.
They might have a chance at detecting it how do you use IR to guide the weapon? Kind of hard since the weapons own IR will probably blind it's sensors. Then add in that it will take a big missile to intercept a mach 6 vehicle at 100,000 that can maneuver.
I will try to explain it. .NET or programmers will not use because they will not toss the XP market away.
The improvements really are not improvements for most people.
What can I do on Vista that I can't do on XP?
For Example the UAC you call annoying but you get used to it. Well some programs will not work with the UAC on at all and why be annoyed? Security? Users don't want to trade convince for security. I have never had any security issues with my XP box because I already make an effort to secure it.
The GUI. Just eye candy.
DX10 no games for it yet and the ones that have patches run slower then the DX9 versions.
Other features of Vista have been back ported to XP in
Why not to like Vista?
Too many versions. Apple did that right. One version.
Too expensive. Apple is doing that right as well $149.
Why spend a lot of money for no significant return.
I think that the people that have formated their HDs and put XP on new computers are the most damming statments. From your post I get that Vista isn't that bad. So why pay for something that isn't that bad?
Well user space is different these days.
Is Samba, Apache, PHP, Perl, KDE, and or Gnome part of the user space or not.
I do agree with you I would love to see the BSD user space ported to Linux just to shut up RMS.
"On the other hand, they have the old and busted but very compatible XP. " ,word proccesing ,CMS, and light spreadsheets. Frankly they where just fine with P3s and Athlons.
That is the real problem XP isn't that busted. It works just fine for most people. People don't feel the need for a new computer right now. Why shoud they? Most home users use their computers for email, surfing the net, digital music, and playing games.
They don't need a new PC because most of the activites are limited by their Internet connection. A modern X2 or even Pentium D will spend 90% or more of it's life at idle. The only people that really need a lot more CPU power are those that do digital video and hard core gamers.
When you look at business things are even worse. 99% of those systems are used for email
People don't need new PCs so they are not buying new Windows licences.
Dear computers industry, If you want a big jump in sales increase the availableity of low cost high speed internet access and lower the cost of HD Camcorders.
Other than that most people are fine with what they have right now and the Geek Squad is making money cleaning off spyware so people are no longer tossing PCs when they get "slow".
My commute is only 20 minutes each way.
notice I said when available. Not a problem if you use waste oil.
We are have been running a 3ware controller for years on our Linux file server with uptimes of months. I am in south FL so every once and awhile we get a power outage that is longer than our UPS time.
I have never used 3ware under Windows but ours has been rock solid for like 7 years.
Take a modern TDI engine from Europe and add it to a plug in hybrid.
Run it on biodiesel when available and put solar cells on the roof of it.
Ok the solar cells may just be for cute factor but my car sits in my office parking lot all day in Florida. It might give me enough power to run the AC on the trip home.
Oh there are some other things that are interesting...
Why two batteries? Why not one bigger one. I know so that you can not run down the main battery by listening to music but that is just silly.
One big battery would have more capacity than two smaller batteries and would allow the user to trade media time for talk time. If you want to be cute then just turn off the media system if you have less than two hours of talk time.
A five mega pixel camera is also cute but it only points one way. You can not use this phone as a video phone like some because you can not swivel the camera towards you.
So it is perfect for him phone.
Actually if you take a look you will see that NTFS-G under Fuse is actually faster then XFS. There seems to be some memory fragmentation issues with ZFS currently.
I am a big fan of Microkernels. I keep hoping that Minix 3 will really start to take off soon. I love the idea of self healing systems and that can really only be done with a Microkernel.
I don't think Vista is slow because of any moves into user-space. I think it is more an issue of memory usage and DRM. Let's face it if you are "managing rights" for all sorts of files that takes CPU cycles. Also if you have to keep hitting swap all the time that will also slow you down.
Actually BSD doesn't use as much GNU stuff as Linux does otherwise RMS would be screaming that you should call it GNU/BSD.
For a while commercial Linux developers where using the BSD libc so they could statically link it to get around some major library problems Linux was having.
There are difference between BSD and Linux. For one BSD tends towards stability over features. It is a different set of trade offs.
I am not a kernel hacker but I believe you are confusing loadable kernel modules with user space code.
I am pretty sure that kernel modules run at the kernel level and can access all the same structures that a driver compiled into the kernel can.
FUSE file systems run at the same privilege level as a user program does. In theory it is a slower but more robust system. If a FUSE file system crashes you can just restart the filesystem and remount the drive. If a kernel level file system crashes it can cause a kernel panic and bring down the entire system.
So the distinction between user-land and kernel drivers is anything but arbitrary.
You have hit on a big grey area that worries me. If EVERYBODY knows and accepts that email is the the same as yelling at one another in a public street then they are less likely to make errors in judgment.
I hadn't thought about virus scanning as "reading" peoples emails but it really is. There are many maintenance issues that could involve seeing emails. Things like "expectations" of privacy will only stop law abiding people from doing their jobs. People that want to do it for unethical reasons will still do it.
Well on Windows anyway Firefox is better than Safari. Safari will need a lot of work to compete with IE and Firefox on Windows.
"Furthermore, the only time it can lawfully be captured is by a representative of the owner of the network"
But is that protected or will trouble shooting a network become a crime?
But BG/L is exactly the type of hardware that Plan 9 is designed for.
Plan 9 could allow Blue Gene to be used for different problems than it is currently being used for. Yes it is currently are research project but it is far from a waste of time.
I disagree that BG/L isn't the type of system that Plan 9 is targeted at. The current problem set that BG/L is being used for isn't one that Plan 9 is a good tool for. The hardware probably isn't ideal but it is close enough for useful research.