We are the Romulans. We have Camouflage

In a late follow up to an older story on ultimative weapons I pray, consider this:

Last year while flying to I do not remember where I got myself #3 of Volume 9 of "Flight Journal", an American magazine on - guess - aeroplanes. It had interesting stuff on the F/A 22, ahem "Raptor", the most powerful fight/attack craft in operation today. One paragraph nicely confirmed what I had read earlier and did not remember where. I quote:

"Most losers in air-to-air combat never see their end coming. Since the very beginning in WW I, the majority of most engagements have been decided not by the raw performance of the fighters or their pilots' dogfighting skills but by who saw whom first. One study estimates that in approximately 80 percent of all air-to-air fights, the victor scores the kill before the victim even knows he's under attack." and later on "To defeat an opponent without getting into a close-in dogfight, a fighter pilot needs to do three things: detect the oponnent first, avoid being detected and get into killing range and shoot before the enemy can react."

These are actually 4 things if you don't count getting into killing range and (automatically) shooting as one.

So much for the schoolyard ethics presented in the "topgun" air- and spacefight movies we (most of boys and some of the girls) like.

The stuff I read years ago had the figure at "above 85%", if I remember rightly. Computer Aided Prosthetics is what counts nowadays and nobody can afford to let them beat up thrice before pinning the bad guy on a stalagtite.

Sophie Wilson, ARM ArchArchitect

This is Sophie (R.) Wilson, a logic, software and ISA designer and erstwhile BBC-Micro and Acorn Archimedes heroine.

While looking back into ARM history the only surviving, thriving and competitive European processor architecture I got back to her, all of her deeds and feeds.

At least now she's got a little more than a stub in Wikipedia. Among other things she codesigned the first Acorn micro, wrote the BBC Basic, co-wrote the BBC Micro OS and did the ARM ISA (instruction set architecture), most of it in cooperation with colleague Steve Furber. From ARM came StrongArm and a host of processors, one of which is in every iPod and PSP f.e.. No small feat.

Read an interview at this Acorn 6502 kit site.

This Lady is in many ways in a league of her own and a follower in the footsteps of Lynn Conway. In terms of taking up challenges and following the opportunities of silicon and life. She also reminds me of Frances Holberton in terms of logical language design.

One paper on ARM history I found has it like this: Furber designed the architecture and Wilson the instruction set – the list of machine-code commands that the processor would understand. While Intel used mainframes to debug their CPU’s innards, Furber claims that Wilson did it all in her head. In creating a piece of technical wizardry with no resources that worked first time when plugged in, the two were in some ways merely repeating what they’d done with the BBC Micro.

Here is one more file armstory (text/rtf, 22 KB) (from the caches of google where they place the results of robbing limited access websites), 'f course we will not know where from and how long this URL will work, probably not too.

Ms. Wilson works for Broadcom now and her homepage is at sophie.org.uk.

She's still in the trade of processor designing and seems to have delivered yet another seminal processor design, named Firepath.

Ms. Wilson shares my love and admiration for the 6502 and its assembly language. Made me feel smart and good.

Longtime coworker Steve Furber has written a book on the ARM architecture, if you prefer books over surfing.