I remember first seeing an F-117 as a child right around when it was declassified. I vividly remember my world slowing down as I stared at it flying in awe, and my technophobe mother ran screaming to find somewhere to hide. Fast forward to today, and here I am, staff engineer and resident computer guy for an aerospace R&D company. Over the years I've had the privilege and honor of meeting and working with some incredible folks: designers, engineers, and pilots for aircraft such as the Beech Starship, Piaggio P-180 Avanti, A-12, SR-71, U-2, F-22, F-35, XB-70, X-29, F-104, and of course the F-117.
Today I'll think of the stories and jokes from old and retired Lockheed friends. I've already seen one today and you could see the pained look on his face as he fondly reminisced about his days working on the 117 program. Its a lovely day here in town, and I think at the end of the day I'll head to the local brewery and have a toast to the engineers who dared to dream up such a contraption, and to an aircraft that inspired many.
Sure, I worked on "fully autonomous" guidance and navigation as a 3rd party upgrade to the SWORDS/TALON robot. This was so the robot could navigate through adverse visual conditions. For example, if a TALON was going into an area of heavy smoke where a firefighter was hurt, the operator would have a hard time seeing anything since the views from all the cameras would be smoke. With autonomous navigation and knowing the location of the hurt firefighter, it could optimize a route to him and pull him to safety.
Don't worry, the robot wasn't going to go berserk or anything. The operator was still kept in the loop and had full control authority if needed at the OCU. Basically, we designed a system where you could specify a destination for the robot, and it would figure out how to get there on its own using GPS, INS, LIDAR, and visible/IR photogrammetry. It would be capable of obstacle avoidance, speed control based on terrain and grade (some of which are standard options on the TALON), and continued navigation in case of GPS satellite signal loss. We did our development on the search and rescue version of the robot. Our technology never left the prototype stage, and to the best of my knowledge the project was scrapped. But it was certainly fun to watch that little guy driving itself around a huge parking lot trying to figure out how to get out.:)
"Perhaps the real reason it's being pulled is that it is designed for urban combat in non-sandy areas? Like say... oh... fucking main street in your home town?"
No. I worked on a contract for developing a fully autonomous guidance system for the SWORDS/TALON robot. I didn't even have the high-end military treads on mine, and it could go wherever it damn well pleased. FYI, a TALON was stored on the roof of a HMMWV in Iraq. The vehicle was on a bridge over a river and swerved, and the TALON fell off, into the river. One of the troops pulled out the operator control unit, and was able to communicate with the submerged robot. The soldier proceeded to get the robot to drive itself out of the river.
For the sake of nostalgia, I'm going to play with my Power Computing PowerCenter Pro 210 and Motorola Starmax 4000/160 tonight. Even though I have a 420MHz G3 CPU in the PowerCenter, I'm not brave enough to attempt to install OS X on it yet.
Its a good thing I protect the crap out of my workstation. I mean, I don't do anything illegal, the worst I do during the day is read slashdot, but I am in charge of IT and thus have rights and powers that nobody else in the office (except maybe the CEO) should have. My workstation is well defended from any employees (including the CEO) and for doing so they haven't fired m(#@%$G@#%JH@$^QM%G ahem, we're sorry, Mr. CompMD will be taking a lengthy vacation, can we help you?
What, you didn't know that Denzel Washington movie where there was a secret government time warp machine that could look into the past was a documentary?!?
Working in the aerospace field has exposed me to tons of interesting surplus. I have an F-14 canopy, various B-57 parts, and a ton of clothing and tools. A friend of mine owns a P-51 fighter that he keeps hangared at our local airport. It replaces another fighter from his collection, one of the last surviving F4F Wildcats that he sold to a museum. There are tons of Aero Vodochody fighter trainers flying around the US. And if you've ever flown in a Cessna Citation, that's technically a dual use aircraft; some eastern European countries have retrofitted Citations with missile pylons. Heck, the Learjet 25 was *designed* to be a fighter.
If you count foreign military surplus, all of my firearms are military surplus, including Mosin-Nagant rifles, a Nagant revolver, a Romanian AK-47, and Sig Sauer and Tokarev pistols.
There's a good story about a rich guy who bought a MiG-23 from Poland (I think) and had it imported. It would have been totally legal except for one problem: when the aircraft was pulled off the flightline, it wasn't disarmed. In the shipping crate, were armed air-to-air missiles, the Russian equivalent of a Sidewinders, and in the nose section the gun was still loaded and armed. US Customs took exception to this and confiscated the aircraft. Shortly thereafter it was given to the Air Force and is now on display at Wright Patterson AFB.
So, bottom line, is there are legal ways to own all kinds of military equipment.
The large corporations and engineering companies that have *THOUSANDS* of high-end workstations need graphics hardware compatible with complex, specialized software. I'm talking Unigraphics, CATIA, Patran, Femap, etc. You need to use the hardware certified by the software publisher otherwise you don't get support and you can't trust the work you are doing to be correct. And the vast majority of the cards that are up to the challenge are nvidia cards.
I have done CAD/CAM for ages, and my P3-750 with a Quadro4 700XGL isn't noticeably slower than a P4-3.4 with a Radeon X300SE running Unigraphics NX 5. I have a P3-500 with a QuadroFX-1000 card that freaking flies running CATIA V5. Again, in contrast, my 1.8GHz P4 laptop with integrated Intel graphics sucks balls running either UG or CATIA.
Speaking for the workstation users out there, please keep making high performance GPUs, Nvidia.
We have a "destination tax" in Kansas. Anything we buy we're supposed to pay tax on, regardless of where it comes from. We're supposed to pay tax on online purchases when we do our taxes every year. If you make a mail order purchase from a company that has no existence in Kansas and is aware of Kansas destination tax, they will charge you Kansas sales tax based on your location, not theirs.
Now, does anyone actually volunteer to pay those taxes? That's a different story...
...the program will have a special function designed to find something nasty to say about Kansas and the computer will begin making sounds like Dick Vitale on amphetamines screaming about North Carolina, and just for good measure, Duke, even though they aren't playing.
These same parents will then go to Walmart and buy their 10 year old daughters neon pink tube tops and hot pants. Just look around sometime and you'll realize what hypocrites some people are. Oh, but then again, people might label you a pervert if you so much as visibly notice a minor.
I, for one, will be proposing an ordinance at my next city commission meeting that would authorize the concealed carry of a hammer or mallet for the purpose of bludgeoning, smashing, or otherwise destroying these devices when used as a nuisance in public places. Ownership of the projector in this city will provide implicit acceptance of this ordinance, and should the projector owner resist your attempts to smash his projector, you will be permitted to smash the owner of the projector. Problem solved.:)
I can't believe someone modded you insightful. Don't complain if you don't understand semiconductors and quantum physics, its annoying to those of us who do understand them.
I still use tar for its original purpose. I have a pair of huge Sun Enterprise servers that only have a couple directories that need to have data backed up. Each server has a tape drive. A cron job runs a script calling tar to create daily backups of those directories, and every week I put in a new tape in the 18 week cycle of tapes. Its nice and easy.
I also have old engineering software that is only on tape. I have a program on a 67MB 620ft tape, and the installation instructions are simply "mkdir/usr/installdir; cd/usr/installdir; tar -xvf/dev/tape". Interestingly, the tape isn't as old as you might think, it is from 1994.
Agreed, I purchased a pair of 1TB "green" drives from WD, and they are unbelievably silent when running. Which is good, because I knew that I had a bad drive when I suddenly heard horrendous noises emanate from one of them.:)
"Community and city-wide wifi projects everywhere are failing."
I'm sorry, but those of us who have succeeded don't like being lumped in with the rest.
Its too bad that people don't learn from their own mistakes or the mistakes of others. Likewise, its even more of a shame that they do not learn from the successes of others.
I live in Lawrence, Kansas, and just about anywhere I go within the 28.7 square miles of city, I can get a wireless signal from our local wireless ISP, Lawrence Freenet. The service is dramatically cheaper than the local cable company, and speeds are equivalent to DSL. There are routers on lightposts that you can communicate with either directly from your computer (if the signal is strong enough) or you can use a wireless bridge (which they rent and sell) to ensure a good connection. To top it off, you aren't fixed to one location with their service, you can take a laptop with you anywhere in the city, and if you see an access point, you can sign on. How much money did the city spend on this service? Zero. Nothing. This was completely financed by people who believed in it, and that is why it has been successful. With over 1300 current customers after only two years of existence, they are certainly doing things right.
Oh, and I'm posting this from a laptop connected to a Lawrence Freenet access point.
I suppose I could perform a full scale impact analysis of the Titanic hitting an iceberg in NASTRAN and then perform the CFD analysis to determine how fast it sank based upon fluid ingress flow rate.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember first seeing an F-117 as a child right around when it was declassified. I vividly remember my world slowing down as I stared at it flying in awe, and my technophobe mother ran screaming to find somewhere to hide. Fast forward to today, and here I am, staff engineer and resident computer guy for an aerospace R&D company. Over the years I've had the privilege and honor of meeting and working with some incredible folks: designers, engineers, and pilots for aircraft such as the Beech Starship, Piaggio P-180 Avanti, A-12, SR-71, U-2, F-22, F-35, XB-70, X-29, F-104, and of course the F-117.
Today I'll think of the stories and jokes from old and retired Lockheed friends. I've already seen one today and you could see the pained look on his face as he fondly reminisced about his days working on the 117 program. Its a lovely day here in town, and I think at the end of the day I'll head to the local brewery and have a toast to the engineers who dared to dream up such a contraption, and to an aircraft that inspired many.
Sure, I worked on "fully autonomous" guidance and navigation as a 3rd party upgrade to the SWORDS/TALON robot. This was so the robot could navigate through adverse visual conditions. For example, if a TALON was going into an area of heavy smoke where a firefighter was hurt, the operator would have a hard time seeing anything since the views from all the cameras would be smoke. With autonomous navigation and knowing the location of the hurt firefighter, it could optimize a route to him and pull him to safety.
:)
Don't worry, the robot wasn't going to go berserk or anything. The operator was still kept in the loop and had full control authority if needed at the OCU. Basically, we designed a system where you could specify a destination for the robot, and it would figure out how to get there on its own using GPS, INS, LIDAR, and visible/IR photogrammetry. It would be capable of obstacle avoidance, speed control based on terrain and grade (some of which are standard options on the TALON), and continued navigation in case of GPS satellite signal loss. We did our development on the search and rescue version of the robot. Our technology never left the prototype stage, and to the best of my knowledge the project was scrapped. But it was certainly fun to watch that little guy driving itself around a huge parking lot trying to figure out how to get out.
"Perhaps the real reason it's being pulled is that it is designed for urban combat in non-sandy areas? Like say... oh... fucking main street in your home town?"
No. I worked on a contract for developing a fully autonomous guidance system for the SWORDS/TALON robot. I didn't even have the high-end military treads on mine, and it could go wherever it damn well pleased. FYI, a TALON was stored on the roof of a HMMWV in Iraq. The vehicle was on a bridge over a river and swerved, and the TALON fell off, into the river. One of the troops pulled out the operator control unit, and was able to communicate with the submerged robot. The soldier proceeded to get the robot to drive itself out of the river.
It can take sand.
Thanks, I didn't know if a non-Apple PPC machine would run OSX, I'll have to give it a try!
For the sake of nostalgia, I'm going to play with my Power Computing PowerCenter Pro 210 and Motorola Starmax 4000/160 tonight. Even though I have a 420MHz G3 CPU in the PowerCenter, I'm not brave enough to attempt to install OS X on it yet.
In English, the word "cease" does not start with the letter "S."
Its a good thing I protect the crap out of my workstation. I mean, I don't do anything illegal, the worst I do during the day is read slashdot, but I am in charge of IT and thus have rights and powers that nobody else in the office (except maybe the CEO) should have. My workstation is well defended from any employees (including the CEO) and for doing so they haven't fired m(#@%$G@#%JH@$^QM%G ahem, we're sorry, Mr. CompMD will be taking a lengthy vacation, can we help you?
What, you didn't know that Denzel Washington movie where there was a secret government time warp machine that could look into the past was a documentary?!?
Working in the aerospace field has exposed me to tons of interesting surplus. I have an F-14 canopy, various B-57 parts, and a ton of clothing and tools. A friend of mine owns a P-51 fighter that he keeps hangared at our local airport. It replaces another fighter from his collection, one of the last surviving F4F Wildcats that he sold to a museum. There are tons of Aero Vodochody fighter trainers flying around the US. And if you've ever flown in a Cessna Citation, that's technically a dual use aircraft; some eastern European countries have retrofitted Citations with missile pylons. Heck, the Learjet 25 was *designed* to be a fighter.
If you count foreign military surplus, all of my firearms are military surplus, including Mosin-Nagant rifles, a Nagant revolver, a Romanian AK-47, and Sig Sauer and Tokarev pistols.
There's a good story about a rich guy who bought a MiG-23 from Poland (I think) and had it imported. It would have been totally legal except for one problem: when the aircraft was pulled off the flightline, it wasn't disarmed. In the shipping crate, were armed air-to-air missiles, the Russian equivalent of a Sidewinders, and in the nose section the gun was still loaded and armed. US Customs took exception to this and confiscated the aircraft. Shortly thereafter it was given to the Air Force and is now on display at Wright Patterson AFB.
So, bottom line, is there are legal ways to own all kinds of military equipment.
The large corporations and engineering companies that have *THOUSANDS* of high-end workstations need graphics hardware compatible with complex, specialized software. I'm talking Unigraphics, CATIA, Patran, Femap, etc. You need to use the hardware certified by the software publisher otherwise you don't get support and you can't trust the work you are doing to be correct. And the vast majority of the cards that are up to the challenge are nvidia cards.
I have done CAD/CAM for ages, and my P3-750 with a Quadro4 700XGL isn't noticeably slower than a P4-3.4 with a Radeon X300SE running Unigraphics NX 5. I have a P3-500 with a QuadroFX-1000 card that freaking flies running CATIA V5. Again, in contrast, my 1.8GHz P4 laptop with integrated Intel graphics sucks balls running either UG or CATIA.
Speaking for the workstation users out there, please keep making high performance GPUs, Nvidia.
We have a "destination tax" in Kansas. Anything we buy we're supposed to pay tax on, regardless of where it comes from. We're supposed to pay tax on online purchases when we do our taxes every year. If you make a mail order purchase from a company that has no existence in Kansas and is aware of Kansas destination tax, they will charge you Kansas sales tax based on your location, not theirs.
Now, does anyone actually volunteer to pay those taxes? That's a different story...
They are very good at remembering which congressmen have the Snow White fetish and which prefer Cinderella.
As a Triangle, I will happily assist in the beating of Theta Taus. :)
...the program will have a special function designed to find something nasty to say about Kansas and the computer will begin making sounds like Dick Vitale on amphetamines screaming about North Carolina, and just for good measure, Duke, even though they aren't playing.
Only then can it be true to life.
These same parents will then go to Walmart and buy their 10 year old daughters neon pink tube tops and hot pants. Just look around sometime and you'll realize what hypocrites some people are. Oh, but then again, people might label you a pervert if you so much as visibly notice a minor.
"I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free..."
I, for one, will be proposing an ordinance at my next city commission meeting that would authorize the concealed carry of a hammer or mallet for the purpose of bludgeoning, smashing, or otherwise destroying these devices when used as a nuisance in public places. Ownership of the projector in this city will provide implicit acceptance of this ordinance, and should the projector owner resist your attempts to smash his projector, you will be permitted to smash the owner of the projector. Problem solved. :)
I can't believe someone modded you insightful. Don't complain if you don't understand semiconductors and quantum physics, its annoying to those of us who do understand them.
There is no single Microsoft based system that can replace the AS/400 I use as a TV stand/space heater in my living room.
I still use tar for its original purpose. I have a pair of huge Sun Enterprise servers that only have a couple directories that need to have data backed up. Each server has a tape drive. A cron job runs a script calling tar to create daily backups of those directories, and every week I put in a new tape in the 18 week cycle of tapes. Its nice and easy.
/usr/installdir; cd /usr/installdir; tar -xvf /dev/tape". Interestingly, the tape isn't as old as you might think, it is from 1994.
I also have old engineering software that is only on tape. I have a program on a 67MB 620ft tape, and the installation instructions are simply "mkdir
Agreed, I purchased a pair of 1TB "green" drives from WD, and they are unbelievably silent when running. Which is good, because I knew that I had a bad drive when I suddenly heard horrendous noises emanate from one of them. :)
Community Wireless Communications is working on its second city-wide wifi project, the first being a major success in Lawrence, Kansas.
"Community and city-wide wifi projects everywhere are failing." I'm sorry, but those of us who have succeeded don't like being lumped in with the rest.
I live in Lawrence, Kansas, and just about anywhere I go within the 28.7 square miles of city, I can get a wireless signal from our local wireless ISP, Lawrence Freenet. The service is dramatically cheaper than the local cable company, and speeds are equivalent to DSL. There are routers on lightposts that you can communicate with either directly from your computer (if the signal is strong enough) or you can use a wireless bridge (which they rent and sell) to ensure a good connection. To top it off, you aren't fixed to one location with their service, you can take a laptop with you anywhere in the city, and if you see an access point, you can sign on. How much money did the city spend on this service? Zero. Nothing. This was completely financed by people who believed in it, and that is why it has been successful. With over 1300 current customers after only two years of existence, they are certainly doing things right.
Oh, and I'm posting this from a laptop connected to a Lawrence Freenet access point.
I suppose I could perform a full scale impact analysis of the Titanic hitting an iceberg in NASTRAN and then perform the CFD analysis to determine how fast it sank based upon fluid ingress flow rate.