3 ms·

Have you ever designed or architected similar hardware?

jiggawatts 3y ago
Yes. I've worked with "non-stop" (lockstep dual-redundant) hardware and the like, and I'm reasonably familiar with what it takes to get hardware space-rated. It's specialised and more expensive, sure, but not that much. Having a cost or some spec be worse by a factor of 5x or 10x as a consequence is within reason. 100,000x... not so much. I've seen this play out many times with government tender processes. They write the requirements months or even years before the tender officially begins. They write about established technologies at the start of this authoring process. Then it takes a year or more for a vendor to be selected, years more for development, years for acceptance testing, years for production and rollout, etc... That's how you end up with a 10-20 year delay between the current-gen technology and what is contractually required, by a legal document literally mandating that the technology be hilariously outdated by the time it is actually used. The more exponential the growth curve of some technology, the worse this is. If the Army is putting out a tender for uniforms, tents, or MREs, this is no big deal. If the Air Force is building "high-tech flying supercomputers", it is crazy bad. Government agencies, especially big ones, simply have no concept of aiming for where the puck will be, not where the puck was. Combine that with requirements that tie the hand of the vendor behind their back, such as mandating 100% US-made parts, then costs can go into the stratosphere while the technical capability lags behind by decades. You can keep trying to rationalise and defend this madness, but it's your taxpayer dollars being heaped into a giant pile and set on fire.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  Dual redundant hardware, sounds like a server or IT equipment. Airliners and the like are triple, sometimes quad. Designing a Dell server for high uptime with dual power supplies is one thing. Designing stuff where it falls out of the sky and crashes into a high-school if the computer signal from one sensor to one actuator takes 2 milliseconds too long to traverse.

Yes. I've worked with "non-stop" (lockstep dual-redundant) hardware and the like, and I'm reasonably familiar with what it takes to get hardware space-rated. It's specialised and more expensive, sure, but not that much. Having a cost or some spec be worse by a factor of 5x or 10x as a consequence is within reason. 100,000x... not so much. I've seen this play out many times with government tender processes. They write the requirements months or even years before the tender officially begins. They write about established technologies at the start of this authoring process. Then it takes a year or more for a vendor to be selected, years more for development, years for acceptance testing, years for production and rollout, etc... That's how you end up with a 10-20 year delay between the current-gen technology and what is contractually required, by a legal document literally mandating that the technology be hilariously outdated by the time it is actually used. The more exponential the growth curve of some technology, the worse this is. If the Army is putting out a tender for uniforms, tents, or MREs, this is no big deal. If the Air Force is building "high-tech flying supercomputers", it is crazy bad. Government agencies, especially big ones, simply have no concept of aiming for where the puck will be, not where the puck was. Combine that with requirements that tie the hand of the vendor behind their back, such as mandating 100% US-made parts, then costs can go into the stratosphere while the technical capability lags behind by decades. You can keep trying to rationalise and defend this madness, but it's your taxpayer dollars being heaped into a giant pile and set on fire.

iancmceachern 3y ago
Dual redundant hardware, sounds like a server or IT equipment. Airliners and the like are triple, sometimes quad. Designing a Dell server for high uptime with dual power supplies is one thing. Designing stuff where it falls out of the sky and crashes into a high-school if the computer signal from one sensor to one actuator takes 2 milliseconds too long to traverse.