Yes. YEARS ago (probably more years than most/. readers have been alive), I was at a conference, and there were talking about one of the HUGE differences in the F15-A and the F-15C that almost no one talks about. It seems THE most common failure part on the A was a fuel pump (or something similar) that took HOURS to replace - you had to take down the center line fuel tank, open lots of panels etc. When the did the C, they put it in a spot to make it easy to get to - instead of something like a 20+ hour job, it became something like a 1-2 hour job. THAT is the kind of thing you learn as you build enough of an airplane for a long enough time to say "Hey, lets change X"
Most of Physics has been working with the model that it does exist for decades now. There would have been a LOT of impact if it didn't exist. This is a "OK, it looks like what we thought was true"
Folks, you don't need a local/wide area disaster to cause these problems. How many houses burn down every day? Keeping your 'stuff' off the floor helps, but the only thing that REALLY works is some form of off site backup. Be that "swap the USB drive with the one kept in the bank once a week" (then you only lose a weeks worth of stuff) to automated backups. The DISADVANTAGE of 'swap to the bank' is that MOST folks have their bank close to home, and whatever takes out "home" could prevent you from getting to your backup
That said, backup plans can get a tad 'extreme'. Back when I was a kid, and just getting interested in computers (aka I think this was circa 1972) I got a tour of a data center where the folks were truly paranoid (but they were also using it for load sharing)
The had 2 redundant mainframes at each data location. The location I toured was in Downtown Manhattan. There was another center in Midtown, then there was one outside Boston, One in Chicago, One in California, London, Munich, Paris, and Tokyo. The LAST data center was in Alice Springs. Yes - their disaster plan DID figure in Nuclear War
Well, we go one step further - to WHOM is the cleanup valuable? Why shouldn't the people who value the cleanup PAY for the cleanup. The owner can say "I'm happy the way it is, YOU are the one who wants it cleaned, YOU pay to clean it"
True, but we looked at it as "This is what we do" vs "I'm a police officer stuck doing calibrations"
It's a wierd thing, we did our jobs because well, it was our job, so we did them as best as we could. I know when I was tuning a box to go out, my goal was the box went out with every number nominal, all it took was a little pride and skill
Wow! Back in the 80s, when I worked for a contractor, the rule (which was a RELAXED version) was You calibrate at the Mfg recomendation. If found Out of Cal (OOC), you HALVED the calibration period for that unit. If found IN cal for two or more consecutive cal cycles with NO adjustment, you got to increase the calibration period 50% (making a unit that had been OOC 75% of the Mfgs recomedation). Eventually, the units tended to settle into being just in cal, but way off nominal and getting calibrated at the end of cycle. Units that were lightly used tended to move to 200% Mfg recomended (which if I remember right was the max you were allowed to go), and heavily used units were somewhat lower, depending on how conservative the Mfg was in setting their unit There was also a max cal time - if I remember right, it was 5 years, and that's where standards were (you know, the stuff the cal lab used for reference) A real fun story. Rule of thumb was you had to have a calibrator that was one significant figure BETTER than the unit under calibration to calibrate it. Easy enough, until you start calibrating what is the most accurate unit of it's kind ever made (which we did - even NIST used one of our units for calibration). We had to go back to first principals to calibrate that unit. It was fun, and took circa 2-3 weeks to do that calibration (I know, I helped on that one). Joke? We NEVER found one out of calibration. The unit was all ratio transformers, and the ratios just don't change on potted transformers. You can make them FAIL (too much power), but you CAN'T make them drift. That said, we never gundecked (read pencil whipped/lick and sticked) those units. We were getting paid to do it, so we did it
OK, yes, I know I'm a LOT older than the average/. reader (Hint, I'm starting to get mailings from AARP), but when I was a kid, when you needed to replace a set of pistons on an engine, your FIRST job was to measure the cylinders, and see if you needed 0 +5, +10 +20 etc pistons. Yep, the Mfg tolerances on the engines was such that car A's parts were NOT necessarly interchangable with car B's.
Modern machining, and in particular modern carbide tooling (one of the first real nano technologies - the particles use to make them are nano sized), and probably more interesting to the/. crowd cutter ware compensation build into CNC machine tools have allowed Mfgs to hold tolerances that are WAY WAY tighter than they were
BTW by tighter tolerances, I don't mean FITS, I mean tolerances - if I put a 0.50000 pin into a 1.00000 hole, I've spec'd a TIGHT tollerance, but a VERT loose fit
I know a guy who was a Crew Chief of the 135Qs (mostly out of Beale), and he said even when he was in (about a decade before they took them OOS) they were beat. Has some interesting stories, including what happens when you have you boom box (dating the era there) sitting up on the top of the Vertical stab, and you knock it off, and how much trouble you end up in
One of my regrets is never seeing an SR-71 in the air
I used to encrypt my emails to the few people I knew who supported PGP, but guess what? Most folks don't have PGP and frankly, they don't care, and most emails I write you can read - if you really want to know where my daughter's cell phone was, or what I was planning on making for dinner....
Yeah - I had one (no details) where I was calling a 8, when they realized what I HAD, they were saying most people call it a 9-10, and I said I could imagine worse. 12 days of high doses of morphine. What fun. I'd rather NOT go through that again. Something about being in too much pain to even scream, just moan, BP and heart rate spiked, curled up, semi concious. They told me that if I had come to the hospital 12-24 hours later, I would not have come home
Yep, been there, done that with the kidney stones. I have a very bad leg, that sometimes requires pain management, but luckly on the rough order of 2x/week (usually when the wounds are going to be debrided - yes folks, we're talking them taking a knife to my leg and cutting off all 'non viable' tissue - hurts a tad). I know from experience that if I wait till I hurt, I know that for the next 45 minutes (30-60 actually depending on what I've had to eat/drink), I'm going to be one hurting computer programmer, and THEN the pain relief kicks in over a period of oh, 5 minutes or so, and I'll be good till the pill wears off. The good news is by then, usually my body has decided to cope with it, and I don't hurt enough to take another pill. Yeah, I'll ache, but...
Just remember, they make a copy FIRST, and they work on the COPY - they don't work on the actual drive - so you just erased the copy, NOW they go to the judge with the info you provided a false password...
I'd say close, but today, I don't know if I'd actually look at a potentiometer (pot). Pots tend to be noisy (or get that way) and you have the A/D issues that go with it - there are encoders that look/feel like good pots (sliders or rotary), just get one with the right number of counts, and go at it - of course, you'll have to play with "do I want to mimic linear or audio taper" and the like, but it's really just "a small matter of code"
velcro is "OK" for some uses - The HUGE issue is that the computer industry doesn't seem to have REALLY learned from the telco industry - The main cables all come in permenantly bundled to a rack for distribution - thing that need to change are patched - EVERYTHING goes via patchbays - for that matter, go visit your local TV station, explain it, see if you can get a tour - or ask the telco Oh, and wire ties/lacing cord is disposible - don't be afraid to cut them/it - heck, when straitening a bay, you might tie something, KNOWING it's wrong (power with data), just so it's out of the way, so you can start to actually SEE what's there, then MOVE it, again, to what you think is the right spot, then move it again, and again - this is particularly true when cleaning up stuff that just 'grew' over time, and was not planned
Rufoss - all you need is an M2, thank you VERY much, and similar rifles have been made for 20mm. If an M2 costs 1.5m per, someone is way way overpaying. I'll bet you an M2 costs less than the laser system
Of course, the idea - don't snipe the idiots, a few rounds of RUFOSS of even 20mm HE into the BOAT would tend to make the pirates job a heck of a lot harder - even if you MISSED every pirate - sinking has a tendency to do that. Oh, and don't BOTHER throwing them life rings...
As for military history - three words "Capt Edward Preble"
I didn't say it was a mathematically easy frame of reference, and a non chaotic one, but it IS a frame of reference that is at least, in theory, useable, particularly for taking data, not so much for predicting data - I can then reduce the data to a different frame of reference for data interchange/easier modeling - in fact, if you really think about it, when you setup a telescope, you have to correct from the telescopes frame of reference (RA and elevation, or alt/az, depending), and location to know where you are pointing, it's just that we do it so often, we don't think about the fact that we are really doing a transformation of frames of reference
Basically, what I'm trying to point out is that you can use anything as a frame of reference (in theory), it's just a heck of a lot easier to use some than others (aka using ME as a frame of reference)
Leads back to my old joke that there are no polar bears, just cartessian bears after a coordinate transfer
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Yes. YEARS ago (probably more years than most /. readers have been alive), I was at a conference, and there were talking about one of the HUGE differences in the F15-A and the F-15C that almost no one talks about. It seems THE most common failure part on the A was a fuel pump (or something similar) that took HOURS to replace - you had to take down the center line fuel tank, open lots of panels etc. When the did the C, they put it in a spot to make it easy to get to - instead of something like a 20+ hour job, it became something like a 1-2 hour job. THAT is the kind of thing you learn as you build enough of an airplane for a long enough time to say "Hey, lets change X"
Also forgot that the F-15E is called a Mud Hen
F-16 "Lawn Dart" (early version, when they crashed a lot)
Most of Physics has been working with the model that it does exist for decades now. There would have been a LOT of impact if it didn't exist. This is a "OK, it looks like what we thought was true"
Folks, you don't need a local/wide area disaster to cause these problems. How many houses burn down every day? Keeping your 'stuff' off the floor helps, but the only thing that REALLY works is some form of off site backup. Be that "swap the USB drive with the one kept in the bank once a week" (then you only lose a weeks worth of stuff) to automated backups. The DISADVANTAGE of 'swap to the bank' is that MOST folks have their bank close to home, and whatever takes out "home" could prevent you from getting to your backup
That said, backup plans can get a tad 'extreme'. Back when I was a kid, and just getting interested in computers (aka I think this was circa 1972) I got a tour of a data center where the folks were truly paranoid (but they were also using it for load sharing)
The had 2 redundant mainframes at each data location. The location I toured was in Downtown Manhattan. There was another center in Midtown, then there was one outside Boston, One in Chicago, One in California, London, Munich, Paris, and Tokyo. The LAST data center was in Alice Springs. Yes - their disaster plan DID figure in Nuclear War
Well, we go one step further - to WHOM is the cleanup valuable? Why shouldn't the people who value the cleanup PAY for the cleanup. The owner can say "I'm happy the way it is, YOU are the one who wants it cleaned, YOU pay to clean it"
I guess being way older than most /. readers, I still remember when it was fairly common
True, but we looked at it as "This is what we do" vs "I'm a police officer stuck doing calibrations"
It's a wierd thing, we did our jobs because well, it was our job, so we did them as best as we could. I know when I was tuning a box to go out, my goal was the box went out with every number nominal, all it took was a little pride and skill
Wow! Back in the 80s, when I worked for a contractor, the rule (which was a RELAXED version) was
You calibrate at the Mfg recomendation. If found Out of Cal (OOC), you HALVED the calibration period for that unit. If found IN cal for two or more consecutive cal cycles with NO adjustment, you got to increase the calibration period 50% (making a unit that had been OOC 75% of the Mfgs recomedation). Eventually, the units tended to settle into being just in cal, but way off nominal and getting calibrated at the end of cycle. Units that were lightly used tended to move to 200% Mfg recomended (which if I remember right was the max you were allowed to go), and heavily used units were somewhat lower, depending on how conservative the Mfg was in setting their unit
There was also a max cal time - if I remember right, it was 5 years, and that's where standards were (you know, the stuff the cal lab used for reference)
A real fun story. Rule of thumb was you had to have a calibrator that was one significant figure BETTER than the unit under calibration to calibrate it. Easy enough, until you start calibrating what is the most accurate unit of it's kind ever made (which we did - even NIST used one of our units for calibration). We had to go back to first principals to calibrate that unit. It was fun, and took circa 2-3 weeks to do that calibration (I know, I helped on that one). Joke? We NEVER found one out of calibration. The unit was all ratio transformers, and the ratios just don't change on potted transformers. You can make them FAIL (too much power), but you CAN'T make them drift. That said, we never gundecked (read pencil whipped/lick and sticked) those units. We were getting paid to do it, so we did it
OK, yes, I know I'm a LOT older than the average /. reader (Hint, I'm starting to get mailings from AARP), but when I was a kid, when you needed to replace a set of pistons on an engine, your FIRST job was to measure the cylinders, and see if you needed 0 +5, +10 +20 etc pistons. Yep, the Mfg tolerances on the engines was such that car A's parts were NOT necessarly interchangable with car B's.
Modern machining, and in particular modern carbide tooling (one of the first real nano technologies - the particles use to make them are nano sized), and probably more interesting to the /. crowd cutter ware compensation build into CNC machine tools have allowed Mfgs to hold tolerances that are WAY WAY tighter than they were
BTW by tighter tolerances, I don't mean FITS, I mean tolerances - if I put a 0.50000 pin into a 1.00000 hole, I've spec'd a TIGHT tollerance, but a VERT loose fit
I know a guy who was a Crew Chief of the 135Qs (mostly out of Beale), and he said even when he was in (about a decade before they took them OOS) they were beat. Has some interesting stories, including what happens when you have you boom box (dating the era there) sitting up on the top of the Vertical stab, and you knock it off, and how much trouble you end up in
One of my regrets is never seeing an SR-71 in the air
THAT explains the Citytime fiasco, eh - maybe he's looking to get in on the Nth version
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/nyregion/bloomberg-administration-admits-mishandling-citytime-and-nycaps-programs.html
I used to encrypt my emails to the few people I knew who supported PGP, but guess what? Most folks don't have PGP and frankly, they don't care, and most emails I write you can read - if you really want to know where my daughter's cell phone was, or what I was planning on making for dinner....
Yeah - I had one (no details) where I was calling a 8, when they realized what I HAD, they were saying most people call it a 9-10, and I said I could imagine worse. 12 days of high doses of morphine. What fun. I'd rather NOT go through that again. Something about being in too much pain to even scream, just moan, BP and heart rate spiked, curled up, semi concious. They told me that if I had come to the hospital 12-24 hours later, I would not have come home
Yep, been there, done that with the kidney stones. I have a very bad leg, that sometimes requires pain management, but luckly on the rough order of 2x/week (usually when the wounds are going to be debrided - yes folks, we're talking them taking a knife to my leg and cutting off all 'non viable' tissue - hurts a tad). I know from experience that if I wait till I hurt, I know that for the next 45 minutes (30-60 actually depending on what I've had to eat/drink), I'm going to be one hurting computer programmer, and THEN the pain relief kicks in over a period of oh, 5 minutes or so, and I'll be good till the pill wears off. The good news is by then, usually my body has decided to cope with it, and I don't hurt enough to take another pill. Yeah, I'll ache, but...
Just remember, they make a copy FIRST, and they work on the COPY - they don't work on the actual drive - so you just erased the copy, NOW they go to the judge with the info you provided a false password...
I'd say close, but today, I don't know if I'd actually look at a potentiometer (pot). Pots tend to be noisy (or get that way) and you have the A/D issues that go with it - there are encoders that look/feel like good pots (sliders or rotary), just get one with the right number of counts, and go at it - of course, you'll have to play with "do I want to mimic linear or audio taper" and the like, but it's really just "a small matter of code"
So, did you get it from RAdm Hopper? I regularly wish I had gotten to see her talk
velcro is "OK" for some uses - The HUGE issue is that the computer industry doesn't seem to have REALLY learned from the telco industry - The main cables all come in permenantly bundled to a rack for distribution - thing that need to change are patched - EVERYTHING goes via patchbays - for that matter, go visit your local TV station, explain it, see if you can get a tour - or ask the telco
Oh, and wire ties/lacing cord is disposible - don't be afraid to cut them/it - heck, when straitening a bay, you might tie something, KNOWING it's wrong (power with data), just so it's out of the way, so you can start to actually SEE what's there, then MOVE it, again, to what you think is the right spot, then move it again, and again - this is particularly true when cleaning up stuff that just 'grew' over time, and was not planned
Who needs incandescent lamps? So long as they keep selling 100w Inductive heater balls that fit in standard Edison Base fixtures
"Food Salary"
Egg white omlet in the morning, please.... (I hear the food at Quilted Girraffe is good....)
Rufoss - all you need is an M2, thank you VERY much, and similar rifles have been made for 20mm. If an M2 costs 1.5m per, someone is way way overpaying. I'll bet you an M2 costs less than the laser system
Of course, the idea - don't snipe the idiots, a few rounds of RUFOSS of even 20mm HE into the BOAT would tend to make the pirates job a heck of a lot harder - even if you MISSED every pirate - sinking has a tendency to do that. Oh, and don't BOTHER throwing them life rings...
As for military history - three words "Capt Edward Preble"
AH, Malthus
Sigh
I didn't say it was a mathematically easy frame of reference, and a non chaotic one, but it IS a frame of reference that is at least, in theory, useable, particularly for taking data, not so much for predicting data - I can then reduce the data to a different frame of reference for data interchange/easier modeling - in fact, if you really think about it, when you setup a telescope, you have to correct from the telescopes frame of reference (RA and elevation, or alt/az, depending), and location to know where you are pointing, it's just that we do it so often, we don't think about the fact that we are really doing a transformation of frames of reference
Basically, what I'm trying to point out is that you can use anything as a frame of reference (in theory), it's just a heck of a lot easier to use some than others (aka using ME as a frame of reference)
Leads back to my old joke that there are no polar bears, just cartessian bears after a coordinate transfer