Follow on to the Russian Anti Missile Radar

Another interesting detail from the same Av Week article. "Russian officials say it can locate missile launch sites and predict trajectories by transmitting data to computing complexes near Moscow."
Wow. A multi million ruble system doesn't have the on site computing power to compute trajectories, launch points and impact points? In the year it was built (1985) or today? Russian anti ballistic missile defense relies upon the phone lines from Azerbaijan to Moscow staying up under nuclear attack? Is a system that vulnerable to enemy action even worth building?
Could it be that the Russians were incapable of providing the necessary on-site computer power back in 1985? Did the Russians only have one main frame computer in Moscow to serve the entire anti ballistic missile system?
By way of comparison, the US had a mobile anti artillery radar project in 1975 (ten years earlier) that detected and tracked artillery shells in flight, and computed launch and impact points all using a smallish 16 bit mini computer (AN/UYK-20). ICBM re entry vehicles move the same way as artillery shells; the trajectory computations are exactly the same for both objects. I programmed this beastie and the software could aim the phased array radars and do trajectory computation at the same time. The whole computer was the physical size of three modern desktops and was in the IBM PC class (4.77 Mhz 8088, 128K bytes ram) for computing power.
In short, an small mobile American system from 1975 could compute trajectories, and a larger stationary Russian system from 1985 could not.

Send 'em back for remedial marketing

The usual load of Christmas mail order catalogs is gladdening the hearts of marketers and straining the backs of "letter carriers" (can't call 'em mailmen anymore, that's sexist :-). Today I am thumbing thru "Historic Rail" , full of model trains, railroad posters, and rail fan books. Nicely printed, 63 pages, full color on every page. Not too shabby.
Just one problem. The catalog seldom mentions the maker's name. In the model train business there are some good makers ( e.g. Kato, Atlas, Broadway Limited). And there are some not so good maker's names (e.g. Tyco, Bachmann). Products from the good makers cost two or three times as much as product from the not so good makers.
So, reading the fine print underneath the nicely photographed products and mostly no maker's name. If one was to order this product what would be delivered? Kato or Atlas? Or Tyco. It does make a difference to us customers.
Where did these guys learn the fine art of selling?

First snow of the season

Winter got here. Started yesterday with rain. Cooled down over night and we had an inch of snow down by first daylight. Then the electricity went out. I called the PSNH service number and the usual voice mail thingie took the call. It was relatively sophisticated, it had caller ID and a reverse phone book and was able to figure out my street address correctly just from the phone number. Then it promised me the power would be back within two hours. Okay...
The voice mail thingie had it right, power came back just exactly two hours after I called. Not bad at all. By this time we have six inches down on the porch, the town plow has plowed the road, and Ken King has plowed the driveways. Ken, bless his soul, took a hellova bite out of my hand planted, hand weeded, hand watered and cherished grass. He thinks he is creating more room to plow the rest of the winter's snow. I think he is committing herbicide upon my grass.

Iran may get the bomb by 2009

Israeli Brig. Gen Yossi Baidatz, chief of Israel's military intelligence research division, made the prediction to the full Knesset recently. I have more confidence in Israeli intelligence than anything coming out of CIA.
Backing this up, Amadinejad boasted that he has 3000 uranium enrichment centrifuges running. That's not a pilot program, that's a production setup.

Russian Anti Missile radar runs on vacuum tubes. (Av Week)

You may have heard of US plans to install an antimissile system in Europe. Talk is going round about locating radars and missiles in Poland. Naturally the Russians are unhappy about an American mini-star wars anti missile system right on their border. After huffing and puffing for a while, Putin made a counter offer of access to a Russian anti missile radar in Azerbaijan. He must have figured it's better to Americans snooping around inside a Russian radar site than have the Americans setting up their own radars.
Putin recently allowed a team of Americans into the Azerbaijan site to assess it's suitability. The Americans were not impressed. The 1985 radar runs on vacuum tubes. This is a big step backwards. In 1973 I designed sections of the American ABM radar and it was all solid state, not a tube to be seen. To learn that the Russians were still using vacuum tubes 12 years later indicates that Russian cold war technology was neolithic.
The basic problem with vacuum tubes is they burn out, rapidly, like light bulbs, for the same reasons (hot filament eventually fails). Tube reliability was so bad that 1960's USAF aircraft required replacement of the UHF voice radio after merely four missions. The solid state radios in later aircraft would last forever. Going to solid state, from vacuum tubes changed a flaky unreliable device into something that lasted the life of the plane. A UHF voice radio is pretty simple compared to a radar. The real reason the Azerbaijan radar used tubes has gotta be that the Russians couldn't make decent transistors as late as 1985. The article didn't say what the mean time between fail (MTBF), and mean time to repair (MTTR) is on that radar, but it's gotta be horrible.
The Russians made the excuse that vacuum tubes could better withstand the electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) from the detonation of nuclear weapons. Right. When the EMP is strong enough to damage transistors, the blast has already leveled the place.

Glenn Reynolds pointed to this story in Popular Mechanics.
Anti IED laser armed Hummer pictures.

I posted about a story here in Aviation Week concerning the same laser vehicle last month. The Popular Mechanics story had good pictures, which the Aviation Week story lacked. Looks like it's real. A first step toward a science fiction laser death ray.

Words of the Weasel Part 5

ISSUE:

Often used by computer people as a neutral sounding replacement for “bug”. Issue is favored because it holds out the hope that the “issue” can be negotiated away, rather than requiring the programmers to get off their duffs and fix the problem. Also used as a replacement for “problem” and “malfunction”