New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!
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Agile Software! Cloud! Virtual Testing!
10 Facts About Northrop Grumman’s B-21 Raider
Northrop Grumman’s B-21 Raider will be unveiled Dec. 2 at the company’s site in Palmdale, Calif., marking the first time the world’s first sixth-generation aircraft will be seen by the public. When delivered to the Air Force...
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Question: Does this belong in Code Sod, Sidebard WTF, Coder Challenge?
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@CHUDbert said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
Question: Does this belong in Code Sod, Sidebard WTF, Coder Challenge?
More like user challenge since that url contains formatting codes.
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- Sixth Generation.
Remember how generations used to mean something? Not just in military aircraft but in general. Virgin 9th gen game consoles that added nothing vs. chad 5th gen game consoles that literally added a new dimension.
- Stealth.
I'm sure that sounded impressive once upon a time. Like when they unveiled the bomber that B-21 is replacing, 34 years ago.
- Backbone of the Fleet.
I don't think B-21 is carrier-capable.
- A Digital Bomber.
I don't even have any joke that could poke fun at it. It's too ridiculous by itself.
- Cloud Technology.
God fucking dammit.
- Open Architecture.
Inigo Montoya would like to have a word.
- A National Team.
Now you're just taking a piss.
- Sustainment.
- Global Reach.
For this price, it would be kinda embarrassing if it didn't!
- Raider. The B-21 Raider is named in honor of the Doolittle Raid of World War II when 80 airmen, led by Lt. Col. James “Jimmy” Doolittle, and 16 B-25 Mitchell medium bombers set off on a mission that changed the course of World War II.
According to Wikipedia, "the raid caused comparatively minor damage" and "the consequences of the Doolittle Raid were most severely felt in China: in reprisal for the raid, the Japanese launched the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign, killing 250,000 civilians and 70,000 soldiers."
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@Gustav said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
Cloud Technology.
I would expect a military air plane to be cloud-capable.
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@cvi But if it was not, even
would not be such surprised either.
We live in a modern software-dominated world. We ought to know what that means...
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Military software should be managed to minimize LOC aggressively. Someday they may start doing this.
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@cvi said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@Gustav said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
Cloud Technology.
I would expect a military air plane to be cloud-capable.
Since this is supposed to carry nukes, I take this to mean: “the password to the AWS based control center is
000000.”
More seriously, though: can this thing do anything the Spirit can’t?
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@topspin said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
can this thing do anything the Spirit can’t?
That's not how this whole business works,
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@topspin said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
More seriously, though: can this thing do anything the Spirit can’t?
Depends. Some of the new features are paywalled behind a monthly subscription.
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@topspin said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
can this thing do anything the Spirit can’t?
Probably, but I kind of doubt we’ll hear about the details of that any time soon. But at the same time: it could well be that it’s about as capable but more technologically advanced, and that’s all the reason the US Air Force needs to buy it.
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@Gurth
"Military-grade": supposed to work a bit longer than normal stuff while being shot at.
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I thought "Military-grade" meant "sold for 20x more than the equivalent civilian version"
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@Zerosquare Well, that doesn't mean that it's not also 20X as resistant to being shot at.
(Of course, in some cases, this just shows that 20*0 is still 0.)
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@Zerosquare As a child, I had a military-grade entrenching tool (army surplus) and it was a very good small folding spade. Far better for making sandcastles than the usual plastic crap.
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@Zerosquare said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
I thought "Military-grade" meant "sold for 20x more than the equivalent civilian version"
That, too, but in this case, at least part of that would be because the electronics are hardened against EMPs. In addition to the usual cushions for mission creep, featherbedding, goldbricking and graft.
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@dkf said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@Gurth
"Military-grade": supposed to work a bit longer than normal stuff while being shot at.This can have real implications, if the incoming fire is EM or harder radiation. I have never really had to make a NOP slide in a business program.
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@dkf said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@Zerosquare As a child, I had a military-grade entrenching tool (army surplus) and it was a very good small folding spade. Far better for making sandcastles than the usual plastic crap.
Damn, why did you have to bring that up. I did too, it was awesome, I miss it terribly.
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@boomzilla said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@Zerosquare said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
I thought "Military-grade" meant "sold for 20x more than the equivalent civilian version"
That, too, but in this case, at least part of that would be because the electronics are hardened against EMPs. In addition to the usual cushions for mission creep, featherbedding, goldbricking and graft.
There's also hardening against intense radiation in some cases (mostly for deep space applications) where you have to make the electronics out of something like gallium arsenide instead of silicon. That works because it is an ionic crystal structure instead of a covalent one (so most radiation induced displacement of atoms gets pushed back into place) but makes the electronics behave differently (which is the main reason GaAs is used on Earth) and cost a lot more.
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Yeah I know, but
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@dkf said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@Zerosquare As a child, I had a military-grade entrenching tool (army surplus) and it was a very good small folding spade. Far better for making sandcastles than the usual plastic crap.
This is why I prefer military bags, backpacks, winter coats etc. over ones you buy in high-street stores. They last almost forever if you just take normal care, and are often far more practical in actual use.
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@Gustav said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
- Raider. The B-21 Raider is named in honor of the Doolittle Raid of World War II when 80 airmen, led by Lt. Col. James “Jimmy” Doolittle, and 16 B-25 Mitchell medium bombers set off on a mission that changed the course of World War II.
According to Wikipedia, "the raid caused comparatively minor damage" and "the consequences of the Doolittle Raid were most severely felt in China: in reprisal for the raid, the Japanese launched the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign, killing 250,000 civilians and 70,000 soldiers."
My understanding is that the Doolittle Raid wasn't a military victory as much as it was a psychological and economic victory: the Japanese homeland was bombed, and that was a scary thought. So the Japanese diverted a decent chunk of effort into defending Japan when it was pretty much wasted effort: we weren't about to do the Doolittle Raid again any time soon.
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@PotatoEngineer and if the purpose of this new strategic bomber is to keep morale high and not actually do any strategic bombing, then it's a perfect name.
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@cvi said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@Gustav said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
Cloud Technology.
I would expect a military air plane to be cloud-capable.
Yeah, cloud deployment is quite standard. But having cloud storage would be quite nifty.
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@topspin said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
More seriously, though: can this thing do anything the Spirit can’t?
Yes. It has the ability to be manufactured. The Spirit likely cannot, for lack of components.
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@acrow said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@topspin said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
More seriously, though: can this thing do anything the Spirit can’t?
Yes. It has the ability to be manufactured. The Spirit likely cannot, for lack of components.
So it costs a few billion dollars to exchange a 286 for a 586? Buying a fab would’ve been cheaper.
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@topspin I once asked why the ancient logic in this building's cargo elevators wasn't changed to a modern PLC already. By way of answer, I got a long refrain on the sensors and tolerances and motor timings and whatnot. The gist being, it would be easier to re-sensor and re-wire the whole elevator, leaving just the motor and mechanicals there. But that would still be a semi-custom job. It would be cheaper still to just swap out the whole elevator. For values of "cheap".
If you're re-designing the internals of an aircraft, the maintenance manuals will have to be rewritten anyway. Logistics will have to be retooled. So you might as well swap the engines for more efficient ones, and implement the laundry list of small changes and gripes over the previous plane. And suddenly you're making a completely new design. Nothing new about that.
Also, do bear in mind, even if they were just exchanging a 586 for a 286, what do you imagine that 286 had been programmed with? In this category and age bracket, MUMPS could be a strong contender. Finding someone to port the tooling (if still available) would be challenging. Someone bright enough to be able to pull it off, but desperate enough to be willing to do it...
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@topspin said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
So it costs a few billion dollars to exchange a 286 for a 586?
I was semi-joking about the chips — but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was actually fairly accurate. NASA, for example, used original-production 8086 chips (IIRC) for decades, because of fears that more modern versions might have minor differences that could cause unforeseen problems with spacecraft.
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@acrow said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@topspin said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
More seriously, though: can this thing do anything the Spirit can’t?
Yes. It has the ability to be manufactured. The Spirit likely cannot, for lack of components.
OTOH we manage to come up with more TI-83s every year.
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@Gurth said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
minor differences
Particularly, the interaction of finer chip design methods with cosmic rays.
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Not enough blockchain.
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@Gribnit said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@dkf said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@Gurth
"Military-grade": supposed to work a bit longer than normal stuff while being shot at.This can have real implications, if the incoming fire is EM or harder radiation. I have never really had to make a NOP slide in a business program.
You're obviously in the wrong business
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@PleegWat said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@Gurth said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
minor differences
Particularly, the interaction of finer chip design methods with cosmic rays.
Electronics for high-radiation environments are a whole different ballgame to the usual stuff.
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@Gribnit said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@acrow said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@topspin said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
More seriously, though: can this thing do anything the Spirit can’t?
Yes. It has the ability to be manufactured. The Spirit likely cannot, for lack of components.
OTOH we manage to come up with more TI-83s every year.
The same consortium makes the calculator and the chips. The sales of those calculators are in the millions of units. At a unit price that's outright ridiculous.
And the TI-83 has, in fact, gone through changes over the years. Probably to accommodate parts availability.Compare and contrast to e.g. the world's most popular short-range air-to-air missile, of which only 110,000 have been produced. Or the Apache gunship with 2,400 units, or the B-2 Spirit with 21 units.
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@PleegWat said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@Gurth said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
minor differences
Particularly, the interaction of finer chip design methods with cosmic rays.
Also, as I recall, unexpected behaviour that might result from running the same code on chips of a different manufacturer of the same era, even if they’re supposed to be 100% compatible.
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@Gustav said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@PotatoEngineer and if the purpose of this new strategic bomber is to keep morale high and not actually do any strategic bombing, then it's a perfect name.
Well, it is. Strategic bombing never won any war yet despite having been tried in all of them since the invention of a bomber.
That said, sometimes it might be tactically useful to strike deep into the enemy territory, so there is some use for such bomber.
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@Gustav said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
- Cloud Technology.
God fucking dammit.
Reading TFA (
), they mention "digital twin" which is the latest (??) buzzword but does actually make some sort of sense, in particular wrt. predictive maintenance (i.e. trying to guess when to change each specific piece of the aircraft based on its specific service history, using all other aircrafts as data points). To properly share all information between all aircrafts and thus build a usable model for that, you need, well, to share all information, which means some sort of remote system where everything from everywhere comes together. Which is exactly what a "cloud" is.So that one is probably not as outrageous as it sounds.
- Raider. The B-21 Raider is named in honor of the Doolittle Raid of World War II
"the consequences of the Doolittle Raid were most severely felt in China
So the new bomber is designed to fuck with China. That seems right to me.
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@Gurth said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@topspin said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
So it costs a few billion dollars to exchange a 286 for a 586?
I was semi-joking about the chips — but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was actually fairly accurate. NASA, for example, used original-production 8086 chips (IIRC) for decades, because of fears that more modern versions might have minor differences that could cause unforeseen problems with spacecraft.
WTF Aerospace used a specific Intel chip for some of their devices from "a while" ago. When Intel announced they were going to stop production of that chip we bought the entire final production run for spares.
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@Bulb said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
That said, sometimes it might be tactically useful to strike deep into the enemy territory, so there is some use for such bomber.
It's super useful for taking out air defense in the initial stages, which enables all those things that allow you to later do all sorts of other things.
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@remi said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
"digital twin" which is the latest (??) buzzword
We use that crap too. Makes me wonder if their use of it is also 100% marketing bullshit, like ours.
But then, their budget is like 5 orders of magnitude bigger, so maybe not.
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@topspin said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
Makes me wonder if their use of it is also 100% marketing bullshit, like ours.
I have no idea what you're talking about...Though now that I'm finally succeeding in getting other people to say "Machine Learning" when they would have said "regression," I feel like the effort to get them to say "digital twin" when they mean "any sort of model" won't be too high.
I've found that a little bit of
goes a long way to keep the managers happy, which means I can keep on doing what I want while looking hipster and trendy.
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@remi said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
getting other people to say "Machine Learning" when they would have said "regression,"
"Regression" is badly misused in the semiconductor world. Instead of meaning "regression", our use of it derives from "regression testing". However, instead of meaning "tests to detect regressions", the usage expanded to mean the full test suite — not just regression tests, but tests for basic functionality (which might fail if a bug was introduced in some key part of the chip, like power control, although there wasn't necessarily a previously-fixed bug there) and new features in which no bugs have yet been found. It is also used to refer to the results of a specific run of the test suite: "That test failed in last night's regression."
There are also derivative terms such as "nightly regression", "weekly regression", "short regression", "mini regression" and "gate regression", referring to abbreviated or augmented versions of the test suite which take less or more time to complete. Depending on the stage of the project, as more features and tests for them are added, the nightly regression (which is the implied version if the term "regression" is used without a qualifier) may take ~24 hours to run. The weekly regression adds longer-running tests that take more compute resources and may 48–72 hours over the weekend. Short and mini regressions might take a few hours. A gate regression is a test suite that is intended to be run on a more detailed software model of the chip — in which the high-level description of the behavior (e.g., a[63:0] = add ? b[63:0] + c[63:0] : a[63:0]) has been replaced by all of the AND gates, XOR gates, muxes, etc. needed to implement that behavior, which is much slower and often has to run on more powerful compute servers — or the results of running that test suite; since this is much slower than running tests on the high-level model, this is a much smaller set of tests.
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@HardwareGeek do you run the nightly regression nightly even though it takes 24 hours to run, meaning that you're always a step behind?
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@HardwareGeek said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
"Regression" is badly misused in the semiconductor world.
A branch that of necessity (and inclination) consists nearly entirely of cargo-culting, misusing the terms?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@HardwareGeek do you run the nightly regression nightly even though it takes 24 hours to run, meaning that you're always a step behind?
That's why you start it in the early morning instead.
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@HardwareGeek oh, you're talking about temporal and non-temporal bugs? As opposed to finding the smallest regular quadrilaterals?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@HardwareGeek do you run the nightly regression nightly even though it takes 24 hours to run, meaning that you're always a step behind?
Generally, yes. Note that early in a project, when a lot of features (and their corresponding tests) haven't been implemented yet, it might take 8 or 10 hours, and overnight is plenty of time. As features get implemented and tests added, the run time might creep up significantly beyond 24 hours, and "nightly" might become in reality only every other night, because there might not be enough compute resources available to have more than one running concurrently. But generally every night.
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@HardwareGeek said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
There are also derivative terms such as "nightly regression", "weekly regression", "short regression", "mini regression" and "gate regression"
What's the industry term for "we know the silicon is badly broken, but we'll ship it anyways, and pretend there are no known errata for months"?
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@Zerosquare said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@HardwareGeek said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
There are also derivative terms such as "nightly regression", "weekly regression", "short regression", "mini regression" and "gate regression"
What's the industry term for "we know the silicon is badly broken, but we'll ship it anyways, and pretend there are no known errata for months"?
SNAFU.
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@Zerosquare said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
@HardwareGeek said in New B-21 Stealth Bomber... Buzzword Bingo!:
There are also derivative terms such as "nightly regression", "weekly regression", "short regression", "mini regression" and "gate regression"
What's the industry term for "we know the silicon is badly broken, but we'll ship it anyways, and pretend there are no known errata for months"?
FAA investigation.
