Agreed - the Blackbird is obsolete for its original purpose, drones provide a better solution in many cases. My main point was the Blackbird and X-15 weren't just useless "ego projects". The technologies were valuable, and missions performed by the Blackbirds had significant national security value at the time they were deployed.
Let's not forget the Blackbirds were brought back out of retirement at considerable cost too.
Characterizing a platform which provided a way to de-escalate conflict through timely intelligence an "ego project" is crazy. It's the kind of thinking that results in minimizing the very capabilities that you need to avoid ending up in a hot war.
There is no publicly acknowledged air-vehicle with the flight envelope of either the X-15 or the SR-71 in routine operation. Period. There are other platforms that can perform SOME of the operational capabilities of the Blackbird.
I agree 100% on the air-breathing, hypersonic air-breathing being hard - but if we had continued working on air-vehicles like the X-7 "Flying stove pipe" who knows where we would be now.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "ego projects". Many projects that critics would throw those terms at gave us useful everyday technologies. The X-15 was an early example of fly-by-wire. High temperature ceramics and plastics have many uses too.
I myself wouldn't call the Blackbird and OXCART an ego related exercise at all. The entire aim was to provide a survivable rapidly re-targettable (faster than spy birds) recon platform. Knowing what the other guy has is valuable. It's especially valuable if that guy detonated the largest hydrogen-bomb ever in the atmosphere and has an ideology based around crushing you and your allies.
I'd end by saying there is no acknowledged replacement for OXCART. The black budget is big. Secrets can be kept. If there's a successor to OXCART that's fine by me. I hope they keep it secret too, and I hope it provides intelligence that could allow the deployment of assets to dissuade any potential parties from rolling tanks into countries -"To save their ethnic countrymen" possibly triggering a wider conflict with potentially horrendous consequences.
Frankly I wish relations were better with Russia, but that's another story/post.
OK - again, it's been a while but here's the why you don't hear so much about this IMHO.
Operators tie down the SIM a fair degree - the last thing they want is somebody being able to remotely brick a customers SIM or spam the network with SMS. An alternate view is: Why not let the customer do what they want with their SIM? It's their SIM, so why not let them do what they want with it? If they brick it, that's their problem!
Then you have the handset manufacturers. They don't want to be glorified terminals to the SIM either. They want to lock users into their handset ecosystem. That's gotten even more prevalent now with iPhones etc. Back when I was working with it, you could pop a SIM with the WIB in a handset and use the browser. On a handset with a larger screen - you got more stuff displayed. It was cool.
You have all these factors competing. You can *totally* technically issue customers with SIM that have a full operating system with loadable apps running on the SIM chip. It's entirely doable. You can put apps on smart-cards - there's standards for loading apps, activating them and doing stuff. I haven't kept up with where it's all at nowadays.
You can actually buy smart-card SDK's (or at least used to be able to). If you want to try that, there's stuff like Java Card. One way to think of the SIM is it's just a smart card with a bunch of telecom apps / services.
There's loads of SIM chips out there, and with all the problems with credit card hacking we are seeing wider adoption of smart-cards too, so if you are interested it's definitely an area which will need people who know how these things work.
Thanks! The browser everyone called the WIB - I think that stood for Wireless Internet Browser (It's been a while). It always talked to a WIG (Wireless internet gateway). If you google for WIB 1.3 you will find stuff. There's also the USIM Application Toolkit. To read about that 3GPP TS 31.111. For details on SMS you could try3GPP TS 23.040. It's been over a decade - but I think those will get you started. One thing to watch for is this stuff is not WAP. That was totally different, a walled garden approach. The WIB would talk to whatever website you pointed it to.
In a prior life I spent many hours working with SMS. Both text and binary mode, and interestingly a browser that ran in the SIM chip that used binary-mode SMS as a transport. It was a fascinating thing to use, transferring small pages back and forth all via SMS. It wasn't actually that horrible, and had some nice features - the big one being you could keep everything on the SIM which had advantages.
Most people don't realize that the SMS standard includes binary mode, and you can also request delivery receipt, where you get notified that your message was delivered. The browser I mentioned above didn't use delivery receipt, and sometimes for BIG pages (say 600 bytes of tokenized stuff) it would need four messages, and it still worked decently fast. I'm guessing five to ten seconds for a response. Sounds terrible, but you got used to vi dsecond or so delays. I suspect consistency is what counts.
I used to talk to folks who developed the 'message servers' and network control stuff for GSM networks. I remember hearing about one vendor on-site at a U.S. carrier with a mis-configured server. SMS was queuing up. Apparently the solution the operator devised was to just delete a massive queue of SMS messages when they queued up. Didn't inspire much hope.
Still, beats the whole Telecom NZ fiasco where they literally had people typing messages they read from GSM customers into a new message. When word of this got out people would purposely text their Telecom mobile friends the most insane text messages they could think of.
You missed your chance to ask the parent how their ALOHAnet implementation was working out? Maybe by tweaking the carrier-sense and timing they could achieve better performance in that environment.
Actually, I wonder if they considered going for a slower bit-rate, at a lower frequency. VLF may well work. Failing that, there's always ELF and CW if the message simply must get through.
The dusty file-cabinet creaks open revealing the secret plan.
Shadowy figure one: "It's taken a few more years than we originally expected, but the day is drawing near. All this virtualization, exo-kernel, uni-kernel crap is just garbage compared to this baby!" Shadowy figure two: "But we will need to make it 64 bits..."
Shadowy figure one: "No problem, that'll take a few weeks, plus we can fit ALL of it on one die with plenty of cache. GDP, IP, plus we always planned the IO Processor to be x86 compatible, so we have x86 - no problem! It'll be fault-tolerant and run circles around the competition plus we can bolt on that fast vector unit"
Shadowy figure two: "But what about marketing?" Shadowy figure one: "Are you kidding me,they'll love it, they can re-use some of the the original stuff too."
iAPX 864 - MICRO SUPER COMPUTER.
In a stunning development Intel has released a new 64 bit microprocessor architecture designed to radically address the serious issues with virtualization, containers and other security mechanisms.
I know to many it's probably boring, but having grown up as a kid seeing the amazing images from Voyager, seeing these is a real treat, I feel lucky to live in an age where such things are possible.
It's cool on so many nerd levels too. It's cool to be able to see these images, but it's also awesomely cool to be able to dig into the details of how it all works, from communication link budgets to the software to the RTG's etc.
Dyson has said lots of interesting things and it's worth listening to him IMHO. I'm in the camp that believes the more strongly you believe something in science, the closer it is to dogma, the more you should be willing to throw a little money to the heretics who say you are all completely wrong. Assuming they have a testable theory.
It's a small investment for a possibly huge pay-off. For example - if someone said - "I've found a fairly cheap test based on some of stuff like what Petr Beckmann said that would diverge from Einstein's predictions" -- well why not give it a try?
Actually physics now seems more like current banking schemes where we have a depression but nobody wants to call it that. So they call it the "Great Recession", fiddle the statistics, don't count all the people under-employed and just kind of say 'Things are great!'.
We prop up the physics community with stuff like CERN and ITER - mega projects too big to fail. Sort of like the big banks and GM and other stuff.
Early 20th century physics was way more like the old economy with boom and bust cycles.
Right. Aether theory was falsifiable. Big difference. These physicists are at least trying to do a test while some of the String theorists even bitch about it. The String theorists have had decades to come up with a decent test and failed. String theory is indistinguishable from 'turtles all the way down' at this point. Oh, except it's not. Turtles all the way down is at least falsifiable.
String theory is no different from Astrology at this point, except Astrology is falsifiable because I can go and ask a bunch of Astrologers for a horoscope and actually compare them and say "Hey they all predict different things, this theory sucks!", or "WOW they all predicted the same thing and it happened!"
The excuse that "It's complicated and weird" is ok for a few minutes, but not a good excuse and an utter failure when decades have passed. Relativity had plenty of weird predictions, but we could (and did) test them. Quantum mechanics has piles of very weird predictions which we not only tested, we actually use them daily in all kinds of devices all around us.
So MASSIVE KUDO's to these physicists for having the temerity to try and test the damn thing. Even if their experiment produced a null result, it may well lead them to an experiment that wont.
Science is falsifiable. Anyone who sells you a theory, no matter how beautiful, that is un-falsifiable (by design), and can't produce any way to prove or disprove their theory is at best the equivalent of a well meaning Astrologist.
Democrat - Cite the fact the launch vehicle was Government funded.
Socialist - Cite the fact that the mission is peaceful and Government funded.
Libertarian - Cite the fact that you can choose if you want to read the article or not.
Capitalist - Cite the fact that the planets are new markets just waiting for buy refrigerators and huge untapped market.
Old Slashdot - Cite the fact that the featured article is kinda crappy, has crappy thinking, and that in your day you could have figured this out on an HP-35 quicker and more accurately, but you have used your HP-35 as a controller for a Beowulf cluster of MIPS processors you desoldered from old crappy routers.
New Slashdot - Cite the fact that citing facts is a micro-aggression against everyone else who might disagree with any of the facts, and complain that MIPS is unfairly represented and RPN is an elitist system hardly better than the slide-rules which killed trees that it replaced. Start the reply with "TLDR - Micro-aggressions from old calculator RPN using nerds harmful to community cohesiveness."
Even if 99% of the 2000+ exo-planets are not exo-planets, that's still 20 detected. Which isn't half-bad considering how long we've been seriously (space based telescopes etc) looking for them.
The conclusions in the article are weird to me. They are saying 52% of the exoplanets may not be exoplanets for this Kepler system example. Even if that holds, given the 2000+ exoplanets, if 48% are still probably exoplanets, that's 960 of them.
I'm assuming that Wikipedia's exoplanet count is sort-of right, and that it hasn't been already halved because we think 50%ish of them are probably other things.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed - the Blackbird is obsolete for its original purpose, drones provide a better solution in many cases. My main point was the Blackbird and X-15 weren't just useless "ego projects". The technologies were valuable, and missions performed by the Blackbirds had significant national security value at the time they were deployed.
Let's not forget the Blackbirds were brought back out of retirement at considerable cost too.
Characterizing a platform which provided a way to de-escalate conflict through timely intelligence an "ego project" is crazy. It's the kind of thinking that results in minimizing the very capabilities that you need to avoid ending up in a hot war.
There is no publicly acknowledged air-vehicle with the flight envelope of either the X-15 or the SR-71 in routine operation. Period. There are other platforms that can perform SOME of the operational capabilities of the Blackbird.
I agree 100% on the air-breathing, hypersonic air-breathing being hard - but if we had continued working on air-vehicles like the X-7 "Flying stove pipe" who knows where we would be now.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "ego projects". Many projects that critics would throw those terms at gave us useful everyday technologies. The X-15 was an early example of fly-by-wire. High temperature ceramics and plastics have many uses too.
I myself wouldn't call the Blackbird and OXCART an ego related exercise at all. The entire aim was to provide a survivable rapidly re-targettable (faster than spy birds) recon platform. Knowing what the other guy has is valuable. It's especially valuable if that guy detonated the largest hydrogen-bomb ever in the atmosphere and has an ideology based around crushing you and your allies.
I'd end by saying there is no acknowledged replacement for OXCART. The black budget is big. Secrets can be kept. If there's a successor to OXCART that's fine by me. I hope they keep it secret too, and I hope it provides intelligence that could allow the deployment of assets to dissuade any potential parties from rolling tanks into countries -"To save their ethnic countrymen" possibly triggering a wider conflict with potentially horrendous consequences.
Frankly I wish relations were better with Russia, but that's another story/post.
Maybe we could use a name hack to come up with a new name for people who "maker" things?
X10 controlled ponies, programmed in postscript on a NeWS system.
That's an article for /.
Epic. Mention postscript; mention X10 (Not a language), don't mention Forth.
OK - again, it's been a while but here's the why you don't hear so much about this IMHO.
Operators tie down the SIM a fair degree - the last thing they want is somebody being able to remotely brick a customers SIM or spam the network with SMS. An alternate view is: Why not let the customer do what they want with their SIM? It's their SIM, so why not let them do what they want with it? If they brick it, that's their problem!
Then you have the handset manufacturers. They don't want to be glorified terminals to the SIM either. They want to lock users into their handset ecosystem. That's gotten even more prevalent now with iPhones etc. Back when I was working with it, you could pop a SIM with the WIB in a handset and use the browser. On a handset with a larger screen - you got more stuff displayed. It was cool.
You have all these factors competing. You can *totally* technically issue customers with SIM that have a full operating system with loadable apps running on the SIM chip. It's entirely doable. You can put apps on smart-cards - there's standards for loading apps, activating them and doing stuff. I haven't kept up with where it's all at nowadays.
You can actually buy smart-card SDK's (or at least used to be able to). If you want to try that, there's stuff like Java Card. One way to think of the SIM is it's just a smart card with a bunch of telecom apps / services.
There's loads of SIM chips out there, and with all the problems with credit card hacking we are seeing wider adoption of smart-cards too, so if you are interested it's definitely an area which will need people who know how these things work.
Thanks! The browser everyone called the WIB - I think that stood for Wireless Internet Browser (It's been a while). It always talked to a WIG (Wireless internet gateway). If you google for WIB 1.3 you will find stuff. There's also the USIM Application Toolkit. To read about that 3GPP TS 31.111. For details on SMS you could try3GPP TS 23.040. It's been over a decade - but I think those will get you started. One thing to watch for is this stuff is not WAP. That was totally different, a walled garden approach. The WIB would talk to whatever website you pointed it to.
In a prior life I spent many hours working with SMS. Both text and binary mode, and interestingly a browser that ran in the SIM chip that used binary-mode SMS as a transport. It was a fascinating thing to use, transferring small pages back and forth all via SMS. It wasn't actually that horrible, and had some nice features - the big one being you could keep everything on the SIM which had advantages.
Most people don't realize that the SMS standard includes binary mode, and you can also request delivery receipt, where you get notified that your message was delivered. The browser I mentioned above didn't use delivery receipt, and sometimes for BIG pages (say 600 bytes of tokenized stuff) it would need four messages, and it still worked decently fast. I'm guessing five to ten seconds for a response. Sounds terrible, but you got used to vi dsecond or so delays. I suspect consistency is what counts.
I used to talk to folks who developed the 'message servers' and network control stuff for GSM networks. I remember hearing about one vendor on-site at a U.S. carrier with a mis-configured server. SMS was queuing up. Apparently the solution the operator devised was to just delete a massive queue of SMS messages when they queued up. Didn't inspire much hope.
Still, beats the whole Telecom NZ fiasco where they literally had people typing messages they read from GSM customers into a new message. When word of this got out people would purposely text their Telecom mobile friends the most insane text messages they could think of.
You missed your chance to ask the parent how their ALOHAnet implementation was working out? Maybe by tweaking the carrier-sense and timing they could achieve better performance in that environment.
Actually, I wonder if they considered going for a slower bit-rate, at a lower frequency. VLF may well work. Failing that, there's always ELF and CW if the message simply must get through.
A working MR. FUSION HOME ENERGY REACTOR is likely within 20 years.
The dusty file-cabinet creaks open revealing the secret plan.
Shadowy figure one: "It's taken a few more years than we originally expected, but the day is drawing near. All this virtualization, exo-kernel, uni-kernel crap is just garbage compared to this baby!"
Shadowy figure two: "But we will need to make it 64 bits..."
Shadowy figure one: "No problem, that'll take a few weeks, plus we can fit ALL of it on one die with plenty of cache. GDP, IP, plus we always planned the IO Processor to be x86 compatible, so we have x86 - no problem! It'll be fault-tolerant and run circles around the competition plus we can bolt on that fast vector unit"
Shadowy figure two: "But what about marketing?"
Shadowy figure one: "Are you kidding me,they'll love it, they can re-use some of the the original stuff too."
iAPX 864 - MICRO SUPER COMPUTER.
In a stunning development Intel has released a new 64 bit microprocessor architecture designed to radically address the serious issues with virtualization, containers and other security mechanisms.
"TSA officers screened 708,316,339 million passengers (more than 1.9 million per day), 40,780,330 million more than for the same timeframe in 2014."
That's a big number.
Any idea when an estimate for the perihelion for V774104 will come in? Would LSST help? This is all fascinating stuff - thanks for posting it.
I know to many it's probably boring, but having grown up as a kid seeing the amazing images from Voyager, seeing these is a real treat, I feel lucky to live in an age where such things are possible.
It's cool on so many nerd levels too. It's cool to be able to see these images, but it's also awesomely cool to be able to dig into the details of how it all works, from communication link budgets to the software to the RTG's etc.
How so?
Oh come on. Astrology is way more testable than String theory.
Just admit it. You are already an AC. It's OK I won't tell on you.
You are parsing my spelling from the wrong multiverse.
Dyson has said lots of interesting things and it's worth listening to him IMHO. I'm in the camp that believes the more strongly you believe something in science, the closer it is to dogma, the more you should be willing to throw a little money to the heretics who say you are all completely wrong. Assuming they have a testable theory.
It's a small investment for a possibly huge pay-off. For example - if someone said - "I've found a fairly cheap test based on some of stuff like what Petr Beckmann said that would diverge from Einstein's predictions" -- well why not give it a try?
Actually physics now seems more like current banking schemes where we have a depression but nobody wants to call it that. So they call it the "Great Recession", fiddle the statistics, don't count all the people under-employed and just kind of say 'Things are great!'.
We prop up the physics community with stuff like CERN and ITER - mega projects too big to fail. Sort of like the big banks and GM and other stuff.
Early 20th century physics was way more like the old economy with boom and bust cycles.
They should put up a big sign outdoors that says "The particle accelerator that DIDN'T destroy the world!", and sell T-Shirts too.
Right. Aether theory was falsifiable. Big difference. These physicists are at least trying to do a test while some of the String theorists even bitch about it. The String theorists have had decades to come up with a decent test and failed. String theory is indistinguishable from 'turtles all the way down' at this point. Oh, except it's not. Turtles all the way down is at least falsifiable.
String theory is no different from Astrology at this point, except Astrology is falsifiable because I can go and ask a bunch of Astrologers for a horoscope and actually compare them and say "Hey they all predict different things, this theory sucks!", or "WOW they all predicted the same thing and it happened!"
The excuse that "It's complicated and weird" is ok for a few minutes, but not a good excuse and an utter failure when decades have passed. Relativity had plenty of weird predictions, but we could (and did) test them. Quantum mechanics has piles of very weird predictions which we not only tested, we actually use them daily in all kinds of devices all around us.
So MASSIVE KUDO's to these physicists for having the temerity to try and test the damn thing. Even if their experiment produced a null result, it may well lead them to an experiment that wont.
Science is falsifiable. Anyone who sells you a theory, no matter how beautiful, that is un-falsifiable (by design), and can't produce any way to prove or disprove their theory is at best the equivalent of a well meaning Astrologist.
They had that groovy computer too.
The "Giant science lever" settings guide.
Republican - Cite crappy statistics.
Democrat - Cite the fact the launch vehicle was Government funded.
Socialist - Cite the fact that the mission is peaceful and Government funded.
Libertarian - Cite the fact that you can choose if you want to read the article or not.
Capitalist - Cite the fact that the planets are new markets just waiting for buy refrigerators and huge untapped market.
Old Slashdot - Cite the fact that the featured article is kinda crappy, has crappy thinking, and that in your day you could have figured this out on an HP-35 quicker and more accurately, but you have used your HP-35 as a controller for a Beowulf cluster of MIPS processors you desoldered from old crappy routers.
New Slashdot - Cite the fact that citing facts is a micro-aggression against everyone else who might disagree with any of the facts, and complain that MIPS is unfairly represented and RPN is an elitist system hardly better than the slide-rules which killed trees that it replaced. Start the reply with "TLDR - Micro-aggressions from old calculator RPN using nerds harmful to community cohesiveness."
Even if 99% of the 2000+ exo-planets are not exo-planets, that's still 20 detected. Which isn't half-bad considering how long we've been seriously (space based telescopes etc) looking for them.
The conclusions in the article are weird to me. They are saying 52% of the exoplanets may not be exoplanets for this Kepler system example. Even if that holds, given the 2000+ exoplanets, if 48% are still probably exoplanets, that's 960 of them.
I'm assuming that Wikipedia's exoplanet count is sort-of right, and that it hasn't been already halved because we think 50%ish of them are probably other things.