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While waiting in line for rollercoasters, my dad used to loudly talk at my mom about how “it’s amazing when you think about how these things are built by the lowest bidder,” etc…
I mean he’s not wrong, but the list of contractors capable of building roller coasters is very short and pretty well regulated. It’s not like Joe Shmoe from down the street is rolling steel forms.
Now I’d be curious to see what kind of roller coaster Joe Shmoe from down the street would come up with. https://youtube.com/shorts/hNOBJ6Woal4
There have been a number of wooden ones with very poor engineering
Big ones sure but what about the road-style ones you find at the small village funfairs?
He just liked messing with the people in line who took the bait.
“…wait, what do you mean?”
“Well, think about it. When they decide who’s going to build it, they’re not going to pay more than necessary. They’ll pay as little as possible. I was looking at those bolts up there…”
“lowest bidder and manufactured as shittily as possible without violating the contract” doesn’t roll off the tongue quite the same.
So exactly like every commercial product ever?
At least mimitary grade has a contract with defined specs they need to deliver. Commercial doesn’t even have that.
So yeah, military grade may suck, but it is still a lot better than the normal shit they sell to the public.
Absolutely not, take AR triggers for example. The shit they ship with palmetto state builds is “military grade” (read mil-spec) and functional, but is garbage compared to something like a geissele SSAE, or a trigger tech.
Which is the point. It’s not good, it meets the spec.
Sometimes the spec means it’s overbuilt compared to a civilian version. A lot of the time someone not-the-government is willing to pay more for different features than the spec.
An AR trigger going to a 19 year old just out of basic does not need to be match quality. Most of them suck as marksmen. Most of them will rarely shoot a rifle after basic because their MOS doesn’t require it, and they don’t need a good (read: more expensive) trigger to qualify for basic competence.
The person in replying to is saying the civilian market’s quality is worse than mil spec. But I’m saying that is absolutely not true. The civilian market is wide ranging.
COUGH F-35 RAPTOR COUGH
Quite the embezzlement.
Omg give me the jet pack!!!
Its only good for one trip at a time and costs a jet to use, but hell yeah!
Also a concussion or sprained neck, but if I ain’t paying for the plane, hell yeah sign me up!
I was informed that woobies and silkies both used to be very nice military grade gear.
One notable exception: temperature ranges for electronics. The electronics may be shit, but they will still work when the soldier is an ice popsicle or a roasted piece of meat.
Military or automotive grade electronics go hard
Smoke you!
Affirmative!
or attempts at water proofing… I didn’t say it worked I said attempts were attempted.
The cheapest possible product that meets the requirements.
This describes most of the Internet. Which, naturally, was a orginally a (D)ARPA project.
As opposed to the vast majority of consumer products?
Exactly the point. Military grade means nothing in regard to its actual quality. It’s just another inane marketing tactic.
It actually does mean something, most of the contracts for anything you can buy surplus are now public. So you can look up that exact specs the military required and can be ensured you’re getting that.
Consumer specs can often times be buzzwords or misleading.
It means something in regard to military contracts, though it’s still the bare minimum. For consumer products, though? No. There’s no law, as far as I know, against ‘misuse’ of the term. That means companies can freely market their consumer products as military grade, even if it wouldn’t actually meet the specs. Nevermind the fact that it’s misleading. They know people see ‘military grade’ and think that it’s top quality, despite that not actually being the case.
Oh, I thought we were talking about military surplus. Yeah, it doesn’t mean anything in the general consumer world.
that…sounds good?
It’s more like “meets” requirements
And usually it’s specifically functional requirements. Unless it was spelled out, it was considered and or was designed out / shitty to save cash
Unfortunately in this case meets requirements just means it ticks a box. The meme is talking about people thinking military grade is top of the line. Like how the cheapest tire you can buy is legal and meets regulations, but it doesn’t mean it’s good.
The same way building contractors advertise their work with “everything built to code”. Yeah, building code is the bare minimum requirement for something to be legally put on the market. Building to code isn’t a brag. It’s saying “we do everything as cheaply as possible. If we cut any more corners, the house would literally be illegal to sell.”
And even then entirely too many new home builders here in the US cut corners and try to wiggle out of code requirements.
It depends on how well you specified the requirements. Like not leaving out things you might consider obvious. Eg if you’re specifying a sight that includes a range scale, make sure you include that the ranges should be calibrated such that calibrating it at one range will make it accurate at the others instead of just adding random lines and numbers that look like it shows correct range dropoff, and that the ranges correspond to the ammunition that will be fired instead of just copy/pasting from a .22 range sight.
Think of it like making a wish from a genie (folklore genie, not disney).
I review bids for government frequently. The requirement is to accept the lowest bid that meets all the requirements. The thing is, if the requirements aren’t written well, it can be a very, very bad deal.
For instance we bid out for a janitorial contract where the bid did not include refilling cleaner bottles from the dispenser in the janitorial closet, so we had to accept a bid where that wasn’t included, and they charged us $60 every time they topped off the bottles.
I guess cheapest to manufacture, but not necessatily cheapest to buy
Green paint will be extra $2000.
I worked on a green missile system. This is very accurate
As someone who works in defence & surveillance as a systems engineer (so by every measure a civilian), I’m still the one on the right… military grade hardware is a fucking nightmare to integrate into larger systems.
I believe you but can you explain why?
Allow me to explain with a practical example: you have a camera on the network, and you want to automate taking snapshots in response to some arbitrary trigger (e.g. every minute, or whenever a separate motion sensor is activated). There are standards and conventions for type of integration, but military grade hardware often wants you to do things from first principles.
Typical consumer/IP camera: the camera has a REST API for its command set, so you can formulate a HTTP request like
GET http://my-camera-ip/command/snap?stream=0and the server will respond with image data. You can knock this out in maybe < 30 mins and < 100 lines of code. If you’re a bit crafty, you can add support for multiple different camera models, which may vary in URI formation and authentication.On the other hand, trying to do this with a military grade camera, the experience is usually something like this: The camera comes with proprietary client software that is closed source. In UI you can click a ‘snap’ button to take an image, but no viable route for automation. You try to reverse engineer it with WireShark, but it appears to be a WebSocket connection with constant data transfer, which makes dissecting the ‘snap’ command difficult.
You check the manual, and the only mention of how to directly command the camera is via a serial line. That’s the first problem: you don’t want to run a long cable from the server running your automation, to the camera itself. So you buy a small serial device server, and run a serial cable between it and the camera. It will forward any byte sequence that is sent to it over your LAN, to the camera’s serial input.
The manual references a separate document that explains the communication protocol, which should explain what byte sequence to send to ‘snap’ an image. You hunt down this document, and. Uh-oh. It’s 344 pages long. Ctrl+F, you look for “snap” and find it’s in section 17. It references some earlier sections about sync bytes, message headers, and checksums. You finally work out that the full byte sequence you need to send to trigger a snapshot is
00 7E 11 3D 01 00 0E 0D 0A. You write code that sends that sequence over TCP to the serial device server. But there’s a problem: you’re not receiving any bytes back. Where is the resultant image?You go back to the manual and it mentions that “snapshots and recordings are stored on the internal SD card” and “SD card contents are available via FTP”. It doesn’t give a spec, or even a filesystem, for the SD card. After trying a bunch of different ones, the camera finally detects your SDXC card formatted as exFAT: the magic combo.
There is no explanation of the FTP functionality in the manual, so you try the default FTP port, and make some educated guesses for the right username/password combo. None of them work, so you contact the manufacturers for help. 2 weeks later, they respond with the credentials. Finally, you’re in, and you’re seeing new image files showing up whenever you send the byte sequence. Success! Now, your code does something like this:
- Send
00 7E 11 3D 01 00 0E 0D 0Avia TCP to serial device server - Wait a moment
- Connect to camera FTP server and download image file from SD card
A week later, your boss walks in and says that a new competitor, manufacturer B, has cameras with much more impressive IR sensors for nighttime surveillance. The existing cameras will be replaced starting next week. None of what you have built is reusable for manufacturer B cameras; it’s time for a new adventure.
It’s mind-boggling. It’s like the manufacturers’ engineers have not spoken to anyone who has written any software in the last 20 years.
I understand. However, I’ve had very similar experiences with industrial cameras and sensors in a research setup.
Taking snapshots was ok, once you had setup everything (it only worked with GigE Network cards supporting jumbo packets and some other specific settings) and used their “acquisition” software (which could be automated). However, triggering multiple cameras at once at the exact same time was a similar experiences with additional trigger lines and multiple discussions with the manufacturers application engineers.
Even worse where non standard sensors line photosynthesis sensors or other industrial sensors used in a non standard setup. For the lidar I also had to read their hundreds of pages long documentation of their serial interface but send it via TCP in special packets which had almost no documentation. Depending on the command the byte order also had to be swapped which was not documented at all and I had to find it by trial and error.
For a different laser sensor that produces point clouds there was a simple interface to get preprocessed images but we wanted the raw point cloud data which also required to download the files from an on-device FTP server which also required so some guess work.
Later I worked in industrial settings with PLCs and these guys sometimes also go overboard with complex setups (I’m looking at you, Siemens RFID reader…)
So I’m not sure if it’s the military grade that makes it such an experience. Industrial grade seems like a similar experience. I guess a lot of consumer devices also do shit like that under the hood but hide it in firmware and drivers.
- Send
Are we getting a schematic of proprietary technology on Lemmy? Let me get my notebook.
No, you’re thinking of the War Thunder forums.
I’m guessing poor documentation exacerbated by security clearance checks.
I saw “military grade” phone screen protectors at the charity shop today (made me lol), so this is quite timely!
Well ATAK is a thing, so it better have a mighty hinge or else it’s not fit for combat
How the bots aggregate upvotes that are likely veterans.
Lemmy is public, y’all. Be careful.
What perceived risk are you trying to imply?
That since voting is public, profiles which tend to upvote posts about the military greater than average would be doxxing themselves a bit, even if not commenting.
Ah you’re one of those “I’m a soldier so everything in life is always a threat to me” kind of people.
I’m a privacy advocate.
The exact same thing can be done with femcel memes or Pride Month posts for people who live in a county where equality is illegal. Or anything not glowingly in love with ICE.
Anyone here that pings a probable for military that also likes a few .ml socialist posts, or femcel memes, or pride month posts, would instantly get put on a watch list.
If you’ve never watched police gladly and publicly hunt someone down because of a single picture on Facebook, then you don’t understand how quickly someone can become a target of state harassment.
That is an Olympic level leap you made there.
I think he is trying to imply that anyone upvoting is feeding data into a profile. Which yeah, I assume all my comments and updoots are. That’s why I updoot everything that isn’t spam.
Really depends on what you want and expect. “Military Grade” or real military surplus? I’ve been happy with my diesel generator and the jerry cans are definitely better then civilian stuff. I managed to get a military surplus 6.2L diesel engine for a engine swap, which has a few advantages over the civilian version. Water proof, steel ammo cans are definitely plastic shoe boxes from walmart.
Veritasium(?) has a video about jerry cans that boils down to “Surprise! The Germans over-engineered the crap out of these!” and how most modern ones aren’t as good because its significantly cheaper to make ones that just look similar.
Still better than the plastic ones usually but you kind of have to hunt for the older style at this point to get the best of the best.
These are the types I use. I’ve get them at swap meets used. They use 2in fnpt thread and have a vent that covered by the cap. I have a home made spout made from pvc bushing, a steel hose barb and about 18inchs of pvc hose. These are “new” style, but very thick plastic and very simple. No overengineered vents and valves to break.
Not sure about US but UK Surplus clothing is the best. I have tropic trousers and they’re not only super comfortable, they’re the most practical with insane amount of pockets and will survive whatever i do in them… and they cost 1/4 of a store brand jeans.
Tops are also super cheap but you can get away with camo pants, camo long sleeves makes you stand out. But the bug repellant treated tops are awesome in the summer.
Man I want to get military surplus too just to date curiosity but I am afraid of getting yeeted into the Larpers’ group.
The pants are REALLY nice, but I totally understand your vibe as I almost never wear them unless I am hiking alone.
Why are they making a 3rd movie? Pixar needs to stop.
It’s not Pixar, it’s Disney.
Pixar got its animation start when John Lasseter got fired from Disney for promoting CG animation over the traditional hand-drawn animation. He moved over to the Lucasfilm CG studio, which was later renamed “Pixar.”
Through Pixar (after Steve Jobs bought it from George Lucas), Lasseter and his team proceeded to not only revolutionize CG animation, but to create incredible unique stories with it. They were seen as a real competitor to Disney for a while. They only started making sequels when they started collaborating with Disney.
Eventually, Disney realized the money to be made from CG animation, so they bought out Pixar. Now it’s a Disney product and their ideas are bankrupt once again. We don’t get original stories anymore, just a bunch of unnecessary sequels and garbage films that were probably written by AI.
