EBME Forums Forums Free discussion Out of Hours Technology How's It Done?

OK ... the operator notices something on the screen that he needs to respond to.

That's camera signal to satellite -> satellite to operator. How long does that take?

Then operator to satellite -> satellite to aircraft. How long?

All at the speed of light. If we can agree typical distances involved, then we can "do the math" (as they say).

Meanwhile, I'm guessing at results in milliseconds (or tens of milliseconds).

On the other hand, I have also been lucky enough to work with guys who had an intuitive grasp of practical electronics (as in, actually finding faults - then repairing them) that I have never been able to equal myself. And (two guys come immediately to mind) in *both cases, they were - as far as I could ever work out - entirely self-taught!

* In case anyone is wondering, one was Turkish, the other a Filipino.[/quote]

Getting to know this makes me proud of being a Filipino Geoff...I am an Engineer in Profession but a dedicated Technician too...There is no such way to split this two field...Engineer in mind without Technician in Heart is nothing...

I hear what you're saying there, Charles.

As Neil in Jeddah says, most of us Old Timers don't really care too much about job titles and stuff like that, but rather with getting the actual work done (and we all know there is always plenty of that).

But, in passing, I can confirm that I worked with many Filipino biomeds during my days in the Middle East, and am happy to report that almost all were not only good techs, but decent people as well.

Although it saddens me to remind myself that the particular guy I had in mind died in a pickup truck accident 21 years ago yesterday.

Meanwhile, back at "How's It Done?":-

I hear that the Lockheed F-35 is now up to 24 million lines of code.

Not to mention almost US$ 400 billion, and counting!

How many man-years of work would that represent, I wonder (quite a few "all-nighters", for sure). And ... how many bugs?

To put things into some sort of perspective, Windows 95 contained around 10 million lines of code (mostly written in C). I always reckoned that amounted to more than one life's work (at over 50 man-years). So even allowing for the fact that some (much?) of the Win-95 code was inherited from legacy work (eg, good old MS-DOS), it obviously wasn't just the output of a single lonely hacker with rings under his eyes! And not exactly "mission critical" either.*

So ... how many coders are there cranking out the code for the F-35? Just imagine trying to manage (control) that lot ... and then merging all that code into a seamless, bug-free, system (not to mention testing it all).

Sounds like the stuff of nervous breakdowns to me.

* I wonder if the F-35 includes Ctrl-Alt-Delete?

To original post, this month's E&T magazine has a 6 page spread on UAVs.

Nice one, Mate.

Why do I pay my exhorbitant subs when it is available for free?
Robert

Could it be worth it for that nice glow of superiority you feel when adding those "letters" after your name, Robert?

Surely everyone knows that almost all of the useful magazines* are available on line these days? Even The Economist!

Gone are those happy times of yore when I used to drive all the way into town (Al-Khobar, Riyadh et al) in the hope of picking up a copy of Wired magazine.

* Presumably, they make their money from advertising.

I had intended to include The Engineer in the above post as well, but got caught up in other stuff (you know, the way you do).


Meanwhile, it looks like this domain name is up for grabs.

OK guys, form an orderly queue!

Yeah right Starting at what? $300K (That's my guess.)