Throughput

[jay]

I'm sitting here late at night, for the eighth night in a row... the paper went off to Japan last night, tonight I'm catching up on entirely mundane air traffic management visuals.

One stark moment at this afternoon's air traffic technology planning meeting... a colleague from NASA-Dryden was discussing their incipient shift from classical pulse-code modulated telemetry to a network structure, and added that they'd used 802.11b. Out to an aircraft 20 miles distant. I was impressed, as we're lucky to get a quarter of that on the ground on Devon Island.

Then the Dryden guy said, "that's nothing... the Army has their training ground at Yuma completely saturated. They can fire tanks remotely from their desktops." Okay.... I imagine something like a real-life video game... wondering vaguely what defines "work-safe" in that context.

Then he added," and they've been putting it on ordnance, too, like shells. 802.11b packets can handle the Doppler shifting up to Mach 10." That gives new meaning to throughput... I'm sure that the details are classified, but I can't help wondering what they're doing with 2-way digital communication with unguided shells...

Comments

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

for the eighth night in a row ...entirely mundane air traffic management visuals...

Eight working nights in a row do not exist for mundane work. And you wonder why we tell you that you work too much? Go home, child!

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Mundane tasks in an overall non-mundane context, perhaps... what occasionally annoys me is the right-wing supposition that anyone working for the government must be a clock-watching slacker (that probably couldn't find "real" employment elsewhere). I work longer hours than most people that I know in private industry, for typically less money. And we don't get stock options... but there are more important things in life than getting rich.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Quite so.

There are clock-watching slackers throughout society, just as there are selfish idiots travelling about by every means of transport :-)

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

True... I've seen inconsiderate road behaviour from cyclists as well as drivers of monster SUVs. Granted, the former are much less likely...

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Pedestrians, drivers of semis...

There probably are some statistical trends in personality types, but inconsiderate behaviour is a universal human thang. However, the damage which results goes as the fourth power of the axle weight, approximately... So, the social obligation to be considerate, and the penalties for selfishness, ought to have the same functional form :-)