It is not just the 555 timer, there are in fact MIL versions (high reliability) of this IC, so it cannot be that bad (it depends who made it).
The big issue from cheap products is counterfeiting. In the past few years the American DOD and the CAA have warned Aerospace companies not to source electronic components from Chinese distributors and supplies, as counterfeiting is rife. Fit these to avionics for a passenger jet, and you are in [deep] trouble.
The problem is that everybody expects cheaper electronics these days, as microprocessors get more powerful. Unfortunately, this is still true when some people look into the costs of running an aircraft they think that the costs of electronics can be lowered. Due to demand, most electronic component manufacturers now go for the big market, dropping the niche high reliability market. This means that professional electronic equipment that requires high reliability is put is a situation of relying on the unreliable.
The irony is, without highly reliable transport systems (many of which require reliable electronics), Globalisation does not work.
The Internet is a very useful tool in getting businesses with common goals and objectives talking to each other. This can only be a good thing, especially when they are not working in directly competitive markets.
However, the one major problem with the Information Technology Industry and the electronics industry is that they are constantly trying to re-define themselves with ever increasing speed. This is a major headache for service industries and industrial engineering firms alike, as they are often left in the lurch when they can no longer provide a particular service or product as a certain electronic component or piece of software is no longer available.
This brings in the requirement for Obsolescence Management, where a dedicated team or company helps to solve these obsolescence issues, before they become a problem and start to have an effect on business.
For example, there have been a number of comments about the recent removal from production/service of the Sun Cobalt system. I don't know enough about the particular features of this system, what I do know is if I (assuming that I was a CEO of a company) had invested heavily into this product, I would like to get as much out of it as possible before I have to pay for a replacement. The problem with replacing computer systems is that there is so much to loose by transferring to another technology or platform, as there may be risks of delays and additional costs from staff training, transfer of data etc...
An example of a potential obsolescence tool is Ebay. A few years ago NASA needed supplies of 8-inch floppy disk drives and space certified Intel 8086 microprocessors. The problem with safety critical applications is that upgrading software and hardware may cost more than trying to build a new product from scratch. It might cost several million dollars to change two lines of code in qualified software just to allow a slightly different version of microprocessor to be used. So the best way to avoid it is to scan Ebay (like NASA did) and buy up any suitable floppy drives and microprocessors on offer.
When you consider that some electronic products being developed now for professional systems such as avionics or transportation systems, may have a product life cycle of 25 years, the business opportunities for ensuring the correct supply of suitable components in the future are immense, especially as the average lifecycle of a commerical electronic component now stands at about 18 months.
I think the Commodore Vic-20 was the first home computer to sell 1 million units, the C64 sold 2 to 3 million units and the Amiga 500 sold something like 5 million units. These computers were in production for years, rather than the days of you average PC Box.
Commodore's big mistake was that it did not understand that Amigados was one of the best operating systems ever written and turned down an opportunity from Hewlett Packard to License it out. It could multitask using floppy drives, without a hard drive or a dedicated virtual memory hardware, in as little as 1mB of RAM.
Imagine if the system accidentally told the wrong car to stop; a car in a different area, travelling quite normally at 70mph on a motorway for example. Couldn't this alone make the concept of this system just a tad dangereous, as it could put all road users in danger, not just the driver deciding to do a bit of "death riding"?
Surely the best way to get drivers to slow down is to get them to driver slower cars in the first place? (it also would do wonders for fuel economy!)
The day when a car drives itself cannot come soon enough. Although if it did happen I can confidently predict complete gridlock in the UK within two hours as the auto pilots on all the cars ridgidly stick to the highway code and find that there isn't enough roadspace left anymore.
Concorde had a large number of design flaws, they were as follows:
1 - Size, 100 passengers, too small. In the days the concept was designed, most passenger jets were of this size. The Boeing 747 was designed about the time the first Concorde flew.
2 - Engines - too thirsty. Concorde used about the same amount of fuel as an early Boeing 747 to get across the Atlantic. However, carrying 1/4 of the payload was always going to be a problem. The reason was at the time Concorde was designed, the only engines capable of supersonic speed (with any reliability) were straight jets. All modern jet engines are bypass, which are a lot more fuel-efficient.
3 - Range, too short. Concorde could not make New York from Paris when the winds were in the wrong direction. Although the plane was designed for this function, a problem found early on in the development meant that Concorde had to land with 10% of its fuel load on board.
4 - Too Noisy. Concorde's engines were compared with a Boeing 707 when permission to use JFK airport was granted. In modern terms the planes were too noisy. Add to that the effect of the "Sonic Boom", which restricted use to over sea and the market for the plane became very limited. It was also worth noting that unless Concorde flew supersonic, it did not have the range to fly across the Atlantic, so overland use was very costly in fuel.
5 - Wing Design - Too complex. All the 16 Concordes in service were effectively hand built in an age before high power computers. The Russians found this out when developing the TU144 (Concordski), and found the solution in using Canards (winglets on the front of the aircraft) that allow a less complex wing. Canards can be found on all modern jet fighter aircraft including JSF and EJ200 Eurofighter Typhoon.
6 - Service Costs - too high. Concorde required 3 times more servicing that any other passenger jet airliner in service. When it was estimated that in the region of 5 million worth of work was required on each jet to keep them in service for the next 10 years, that was the final nail in the coffin. There was no way that passenger number would re-coup the costs. May I add that the company I work for had bid for a contract worth 500000 to upgrade the engine controllers on Concorde.
The about design flaws are due to the age of the aircraft and the era it was designed (late 1950's!). If many of the design rules for the modern jet airliner were applied to the next generation of supersonic passenger jets, then there is no reason why a plane almost as commercially viable as a 747 could be developed.
I have actually asked the managing director of Virgin Atlantic (Sir Richard Branson - the man who wanted to buy Concorde and keep it flying) on a live TV show the day before Concorde was withdrawn when he thought that the next Supersonic Passenger Jet would enter service. He replied (I feel rather disappointingly for us both) not for another 30 to 40 years.
Knowing a few things inside the aerospace industry, I feel that 15 to 20 years is a more likely timescale, although I understand that there may be small and affordable private jets just capable of supersonic cruise within the next five years. EDAS (the company that own Airbus) has plans for a new hypersonic jet on the table, but they are probably going to wait until the Super Jumbo A380 enters service in the next 3 years before deciding whether the market is right.
At the end of the day, it is all down to how quickly people (or goods) need to arrive at their destination. Living in the UK, one of my favourite past times is canal boating. The UK canal network is one of the most under-utilised resources we have. Yet transportation of goods by canal may be slow, and it requires more manpower, but overall the costs to transport are about the same as by road. And the impact on the environment is far less.
Concorde was the most beautiful aircraft ever developed, and I was sad to see it go. Now that it has gone, there will be enough
Concorde, the Boeing 747, the Hawker Harrier (AV8) and the Apollo misions are all from the same era, and to date none of these projects have really been bettered (OK, the Airbus A380 and JSF are in development).
Only the Space Shuttle has come later, and we all know too much about that.
As someone who works in the Aerospace industry I would love to work on a project that breaks these standards and come up with something that really will redefine engineering progress in the 21st Century.
The Boeing "Sub-sonic" crusier was abandoned because it only cruised just below the speed of sound, only shaving 30 minutes off a flight between London and New York. Since Air-traffic control can easily delay planes by more than this margin, there was no point in an aircraft that might get you there 30 minutes early!
The supersonic Boeing jet would have been a development of the "sub-sonic" cruiser. While this project has been dropped for the time being, when the X-Prize is finally won, there may be more than a little interest in supersonic aircraft again.
Jet Engine technology has come a long way since Concorde. Development of a new supersonic passenger jet is only hindered by the development costs, not the operational benefits, that was Concorde's downfall.
PC with Intel Pentium 4 (Da Da Dum) is more like a Ford Model T with a V24 Twin Turbo 3000BHP engine fitted, with no modification of the brakes and only minor changes to the chassis.
Good job that Microsoft provides Windows to act as an air brake then!
Look at your Bios settings and you will see what I mean.
At least on the AMD64 based PC, an extra set of wheels have been provided, along with a kedge anchor (called X86 compatibility) just in case!
The reason why Intel probably don't want to integrate the Micoprocessor with the actual WiFi transmitter and receiver is quite simple. If they add it inside the IC, they will have to go through radio use approval for every different potential market in the world, before they sell a single component. By letting the motherboard/add on card manufacturer's do this instead, they can concentrate on developing better microprocessors.
As somebody in the know, I do worry that these new WiFi enabled equipment could be the next mobile phone when it come to interference of avionic systems; especially as many modern microprocessors are prone to soft faults at altitude due to the effects of the upper atmosphere.
The documents have much wider implications than is realised. The problem that is trying to be addressed applies just as much to databases and electrical equipment.
When people talk about engineers (by the way I am electronic engineer), they talk about somebody that is always trying to take a particular product or service and improve it in some way. In a way, webmasters perform a similar function. However, engineers have to work to guidelines before they can sell equipment due to quality control, health and safety legislation. These documents are written by International organisations, many of which are financed by Governments.
Without these guidelines, you would end up with the kind of chaos the Internet is generally now in. For example, if these agreements were not in place, you could purchase a mobile phone in the United Kingdom, but then you decided to visit France you would find that the phone wouldn't work, not because they had different phone operators, but because they used a completely different phone system. I know the USA uses a different phone system from the GSM used across most of the world, but at least many Tri-band phones are available that will work with both systems. Just imagine if there were 50 different incompatible standards across the world.
So what the document is trying to do is to tell uses of the Internet that they should wake up to the fact that companies that don't provide high quality concise information over the Internet, that is easy to use and understand, will not sell the goods.
There is a very good saying - K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple Stupid.
Oh and a big Red PANIC!! button may not go a miss either, if somebody doesn't understand what is going on.
Being an engineer, who has worked on Aerospace engine controllers and Automotive test equipment (rolling roads), you appear to have found the real reason why other operating systems like Linux, Unix and Lynxos exist.
Let's face it, if a virus got onto your engine controller and shut down all the engines on a aircraft, producing a bit more than just a "crash", then the software programmer would be liable for a little more than a patch.
The market potential in the near future is for more embedded computing, which is much more critical than simple business/home/game computing. So the software programming techniques used by real software engineers will be required more than artists that many software houses currently employ.
There is an old saying, If computer programmers were civil engineers, then the whole of civilisation would be destroyed by the world's first woodpecker.
Take a 486 processor and the latest pentium 4 and then run them for 4 or 5 years. Due to the way that modern processors are manufactured as the die features are much smaller, then there is a high probability that the Pentium 4 has now stopped working:- The 486 is still likely to be going strong.
The problem is this, it is fine having the latest technology fitted in the a piece of equipment. However, if you expect that piece of equipment to be operational for an extended number of years, don't select the most powerful processor avialable. Fit one that is reliable and is likely to still be in production for the foreseable future.
Ahh, some of you would say, surely you can emulate an old microprocessor in the future if you need to. Good premise, but if you are building for an application that is incorporated into a safety device on an aircraft or even a car, you will spend an absolute fortune re-qualifing the replacement software. An if you are only building a a few units for spares, it is one easy way of going bunkrupt.
and this is before I start talking about whether the microprocessor will operate in the temperature, vibration environment and the effects of atmospheric radiation at altitude.
Working outside the PC industry, there is a lot more to consider than you would think....
Linux can be turned into a very efficient real time operating system, Windows can't, but ironically MSDOS is a real-time operating system.
To be term real time, an operating system must be able to control itself to very tight schedule. This is the domain of safety critical systems that must have fail safe routine to ensure lives are not in danger. Welcome to the real world application.
You wouldn't drive a car that had wheels that would fall off at any moment, nor would you build medical equipment that could turn itself off if you press the wrong combination of keys. In these applications you would dream of using Windows, in fact you would want to use the most reliable technology you can get your hands on.
Amazingly the most reliable technology isn't exactly the newest, and it does depend on what you are building. But for the most part operating systems like Linux are ideal, as they can be tailored to fit the space available, removing all the fancy stuff that is unnecessary.
If you think about, in the near future, this is where the real money will be.
For example, you can now purchase an electrical box that can be retro fitted to a diesel engine. This device contains an micro controller that reduces the speed of the fuel pump when you lift the throttle (or gas pedal), thus reducing the fuel consumption of the engine. Devices like these really can make the money and save it too.
So comparing Linux with Windows is like comparing a diesel engine with a steam engine. In twenty years time we will all get romantic about Windows, like a stream train. But in reality they take a long time to stoke, need constant overhaul and are not as economical as they make out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
James is on the case...
It is not just the 555 timer, there are in fact MIL versions (high reliability) of this IC, so it cannot be that bad (it depends who made it).
The big issue from cheap products is counterfeiting. In the past few years the American DOD and the CAA have warned Aerospace companies not to source electronic components from Chinese distributors and supplies, as counterfeiting is rife. Fit these to avionics for a passenger jet, and you are in [deep] trouble.
The problem is that everybody expects cheaper electronics these days, as microprocessors get more powerful. Unfortunately, this is still true when some people look into the costs of running an aircraft they think that the costs of electronics can be lowered. Due to demand, most electronic component manufacturers now go for the big market, dropping the niche high reliability market. This means that professional electronic equipment that requires high reliability is put is a situation of relying on the unreliable.
The irony is, without highly reliable transport systems (many of which require reliable electronics), Globalisation does not work.
The Internet is a very useful tool in getting businesses with common goals and objectives talking to each other. This can only be a good thing, especially when they are not working in directly competitive markets.
However, the one major problem with the Information Technology Industry and the electronics industry is that they are constantly trying to re-define themselves with ever increasing speed. This is a major headache for service industries and industrial engineering firms alike, as they are often left in the lurch when they can no longer provide a particular service or product as a certain electronic component or piece of software is no longer available.
This brings in the requirement for Obsolescence Management, where a dedicated team or company helps to solve these obsolescence issues, before they become a problem and start to have an effect on business.
For example, there have been a number of comments about the recent removal from production/service of the Sun Cobalt system. I don't know enough about the particular features of this system, what I do know is if I (assuming that I was a CEO of a company) had invested heavily into this product, I would like to get as much out of it as possible before I have to pay for a replacement. The problem with replacing computer systems is that there is so much to loose by transferring to another technology or platform, as there may be risks of delays and additional costs from staff training, transfer of data etc...
An example of a potential obsolescence tool is Ebay. A few years ago NASA needed supplies of 8-inch floppy disk drives and space certified Intel 8086 microprocessors. The problem with safety critical applications is that upgrading software and hardware may cost more than trying to build a new product from scratch. It might cost several million dollars to change two lines of code in qualified software just to allow a slightly different version of microprocessor to be used. So the best way to avoid it is to scan Ebay (like NASA did) and buy up any suitable floppy drives and microprocessors on offer.
When you consider that some electronic products being developed now for professional systems such as avionics or transportation systems, may have a product life cycle of 25 years, the business opportunities for ensuring the correct supply of suitable components in the future are immense, especially as the average lifecycle of a commerical electronic component now stands at about 18 months.
I think the Commodore Vic-20 was the first home computer to sell 1 million units, the C64 sold 2 to 3 million units and the Amiga 500 sold something like 5 million units. These computers were in production for years, rather than the days of you average PC Box.
Commodore's big mistake was that it did not understand that Amigados was one of the best operating systems ever written and turned down an opportunity from Hewlett Packard to License it out. It could multitask using floppy drives, without a hard drive or a dedicated virtual memory hardware, in as little as 1mB of RAM.
Imagine if the system accidentally told the wrong car to stop; a car in a different area, travelling quite normally at 70mph on a motorway for example. Couldn't this alone make the concept of this system just a tad dangereous, as it could put all road users in danger, not just the driver deciding to do a bit of "death riding"?
Surely the best way to get drivers to slow down is to get them to driver slower cars in the first place? (it also would do wonders for fuel economy!)
The day when a car drives itself cannot come soon enough. Although if it did happen I can confidently predict complete gridlock in the UK within two hours as the auto pilots on all the cars ridgidly stick to the highway code and find that there isn't enough roadspace left anymore.
The Plusser
Concorde had a large number of design flaws, they were as follows:
1 - Size, 100 passengers, too small. In the days the concept was designed, most passenger jets were of this size. The Boeing 747 was designed about the time the first Concorde flew.
2 - Engines - too thirsty. Concorde used about the same amount of fuel as an early Boeing 747 to get across the Atlantic. However, carrying 1/4 of the payload was always going to be a problem. The reason was at the time Concorde was designed, the only engines capable of supersonic speed (with any reliability) were straight jets. All modern jet engines are bypass, which are a lot more fuel-efficient.
3 - Range, too short. Concorde could not make New York from Paris when the winds were in the wrong direction. Although the plane was designed for this function, a problem found early on in the development meant that Concorde had to land with 10% of its fuel load on board.
4 - Too Noisy. Concorde's engines were compared with a Boeing 707 when permission to use JFK airport was granted. In modern terms the planes were too noisy. Add to that the effect of the "Sonic Boom", which restricted use to over sea and the market for the plane became very limited. It was also worth noting that unless Concorde flew supersonic, it did not have the range to fly across the Atlantic, so overland use was very costly in fuel.
5 - Wing Design - Too complex. All the 16 Concordes in service were effectively hand built in an age before high power computers. The Russians found this out when developing the TU144 (Concordski), and found the solution in using Canards (winglets on the front of the aircraft) that allow a less complex wing. Canards can be found on all modern jet fighter aircraft including JSF and EJ200 Eurofighter Typhoon.
6 - Service Costs - too high. Concorde required 3 times more servicing that any other passenger jet airliner in service. When it was estimated that in the region of 5 million worth of work was required on each jet to keep them in service for the next 10 years, that was the final nail in the coffin. There was no way that passenger number would re-coup the costs. May I add that the company I work for had bid for a contract worth 500000 to upgrade the engine controllers on Concorde.
The about design flaws are due to the age of the aircraft and the era it was designed (late 1950's!). If many of the design rules for the modern jet airliner were applied to the next generation of supersonic passenger jets, then there is no reason why a plane almost as commercially viable as a 747 could be developed.
I have actually asked the managing director of Virgin Atlantic (Sir Richard Branson - the man who wanted to buy Concorde and keep it flying) on a live TV show the day before Concorde was withdrawn when he thought that the next Supersonic Passenger Jet would enter service. He replied (I feel rather disappointingly for us both) not for another 30 to 40 years.
Knowing a few things inside the aerospace industry, I feel that 15 to 20 years is a more likely timescale, although I understand that there may be small and affordable private jets just capable of supersonic cruise within the next five years. EDAS (the company that own Airbus) has plans for a new hypersonic jet on the table, but they are probably going to wait until the Super Jumbo A380 enters service in the next 3 years before deciding whether the market is right.
At the end of the day, it is all down to how quickly people (or goods) need to arrive at their destination. Living in the UK, one of my favourite past times is canal boating. The UK canal network is one of the most under-utilised resources we have. Yet transportation of goods by canal may be slow, and it requires more manpower, but overall the costs to transport are about the same as by road. And the impact on the environment is far less.
Concorde was the most beautiful aircraft ever developed, and I was sad to see it go. Now that it has gone, there will be enough
Concorde, the Boeing 747, the Hawker Harrier (AV8) and the Apollo misions are all from the same era, and to date none of these projects have really been bettered (OK, the Airbus A380 and JSF are in development).
Only the Space Shuttle has come later, and we all know too much about that.
As someone who works in the Aerospace industry I would love to work on a project that breaks these standards and come up with something that really will redefine engineering progress in the 21st Century.
The Plusser
The Boeing "Sub-sonic" crusier was abandoned because it only cruised just below the speed of sound, only shaving 30 minutes off a flight between London and New York. Since Air-traffic control can easily delay planes by more than this margin, there was no point in an aircraft that might get you there 30 minutes early!
The supersonic Boeing jet would have been a development of the "sub-sonic" cruiser. While this project has been dropped for the time being, when the X-Prize is finally won, there may be more than a little interest in supersonic aircraft again.
Jet Engine technology has come a long way since Concorde. Development of a new supersonic passenger jet is only hindered by the development costs, not the operational benefits, that was Concorde's downfall.
The Plusser
PC with Intel Pentium 4 (Da Da Dum) is more like a Ford Model T with a V24 Twin Turbo 3000BHP engine fitted, with no modification of the brakes and only minor changes to the chassis.
Good job that Microsoft provides Windows to act as an air brake then!
Look at your Bios settings and you will see what I mean.
At least on the AMD64 based PC, an extra set of wheels have been provided, along with a kedge anchor (called X86 compatibility) just in case!
The reason why Intel probably don't want to integrate the Micoprocessor with the actual WiFi transmitter and receiver is quite simple. If they add it inside the IC, they will have to go through radio use approval for every different potential market in the world, before they sell a single component. By letting the motherboard/add on card manufacturer's do this instead, they can concentrate on developing better microprocessors.
As somebody in the know, I do worry that these new WiFi enabled equipment could be the next mobile phone when it come to interference of avionic systems; especially as many modern microprocessors are prone to soft faults at altitude due to the effects of the upper atmosphere.
The documents have much wider implications than is realised. The problem that is trying to be addressed applies just as much to databases and electrical equipment.
When people talk about engineers (by the way I am electronic engineer), they talk about somebody that is always trying to take a particular product or service and improve it in some way. In a way, webmasters perform a similar function. However, engineers have to work to guidelines before they can sell equipment due to quality control, health and safety legislation. These documents are written by International organisations, many of which are financed by Governments.
Without these guidelines, you would end up with the kind of chaos the Internet is generally now in. For example, if these agreements were not in place, you could purchase a mobile phone in the United Kingdom, but then you decided to visit France you would find that the phone wouldn't work, not because they had different phone operators, but because they used a completely different phone system. I know the USA uses a different phone system from the GSM used across most of the world, but at least many Tri-band phones are available that will work with both systems. Just imagine if there were 50 different incompatible standards across the world.
So what the document is trying to do is to tell uses of the Internet that they should wake up to the fact that companies that don't provide high quality concise information over the Internet, that is easy to use and understand, will not sell the goods.
There is a very good saying - K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple Stupid.
Oh and a big Red PANIC!! button may not go a miss either, if somebody doesn't understand what is going on.
The Plusser
Let's face it, if a virus got onto your engine controller and shut down all the engines on a aircraft, producing a bit more than just a "crash", then the software programmer would be liable for a little more than a patch. The market potential in the near future is for more embedded computing, which is much more critical than simple business/home/game computing. So the software programming techniques used by real software engineers will be required more than artists that many software houses currently employ.
There is an old saying, If computer programmers were civil engineers, then the whole of civilisation would be destroyed by the world's first woodpecker.
Take a 486 processor and the latest pentium 4 and then run them for 4 or 5 years. Due to the way that modern processors are manufactured as the die features are much smaller, then there is a high probability that the Pentium 4 has now stopped working:- The 486 is still likely to be going strong.
The problem is this, it is fine having the latest technology fitted in the a piece of equipment. However, if you expect that piece of equipment to be operational for an extended number of years, don't select the most powerful processor avialable. Fit one that is reliable and is likely to still be in production for the foreseable future.
Ahh, some of you would say, surely you can emulate an old microprocessor in the future if you need to. Good premise, but if you are building for an application that is incorporated into a safety device on an aircraft or even a car, you will spend an absolute fortune re-qualifing the replacement software. An if you are only building a a few units for spares, it is one easy way of going bunkrupt.
and this is before I start talking about whether the microprocessor will operate in the temperature, vibration environment and the effects of atmospheric radiation at altitude.
Working outside the PC industry, there is a lot more to consider than you would think....
Plusser
Linux can be turned into a very efficient real time operating system, Windows can't, but ironically MSDOS is a real-time operating system. To be term real time, an operating system must be able to control itself to very tight schedule. This is the domain of safety critical systems that must have fail safe routine to ensure lives are not in danger. Welcome to the real world application. You wouldn't drive a car that had wheels that would fall off at any moment, nor would you build medical equipment that could turn itself off if you press the wrong combination of keys. In these applications you would dream of using Windows, in fact you would want to use the most reliable technology you can get your hands on. Amazingly the most reliable technology isn't exactly the newest, and it does depend on what you are building. But for the most part operating systems like Linux are ideal, as they can be tailored to fit the space available, removing all the fancy stuff that is unnecessary. If you think about, in the near future, this is where the real money will be. For example, you can now purchase an electrical box that can be retro fitted to a diesel engine. This device contains an micro controller that reduces the speed of the fuel pump when you lift the throttle (or gas pedal), thus reducing the fuel consumption of the engine. Devices like these really can make the money and save it too. So comparing Linux with Windows is like comparing a diesel engine with a steam engine. In twenty years time we will all get romantic about Windows, like a stream train. But in reality they take a long time to stoke, need constant overhaul and are not as economical as they make out to be.