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Domain: ais.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to ais.org.

Comments · 5

  1. Umm.. the Soviets Have Had This For Years by SkewlD00d · · Score: 2 · on When Looks Can Kill

    The AIM-9X / look-n-shoot is a direct response to the Cold War developments by the Soviets that was above and beyond any technology we had. The system used in the MIG-29 and SU-27, comprised of slaving the targeting computer to the helmet display and using FLIR as well, similar to the Apaches'. But the neat thing about the Soviet's system is that it was completely passive, with use of a variety of missles IR or radar: AA-10b/d "Alamo" or AA-11 "Archer". Also, the field of view of the IR seekers and the maneuverability of their missles had much wider envelopes than ours (US). The AA-11 uses thrust-vectoring to maneuver in such a way as to be able to pull over 12 Gs and has a range of 40 km, compared to our AIM-9M max range of about 15-20 km and maneuverability of about 9-10 Gs.

    (link to Soviet missles)

  2. Re:Interesting historical note... by frankie · · Score: 3 · on The Tenth Birthday Of The World Wide Web
    public at large had not truly begun to adopt the technology until perhaps 1996.

    1996, you say? Interesting. The High Performance Computing Act of 1991 paid for increasing network backbone infrastructure over the next 5 years. Perhaps there's a connection? However, I seem to remember some guy getting a whole lot of shit for taking credit.

    TCP/IP. HTTP. graphical web browsers. What do these things have in common? Answer: they were all created with government funding.

  3. paper on usenet early days by J.J. · · Score: 3 · on Usenet Archive from 1981
    There was a researcher from Columbia that used this archive as one of the major sources for her paper Early Usenet. It's not the most well-researched article, and if it was written by a techie I'd be surprised, but it's a good job of collecting together a lot of the gems from the archive.

    For instance:

    Often queries would be posted on Usenet asking others for
    information or advice. This would make it possible to build on
    other's experience. For example, one poster wrote, "does anybody
    know of an Arpanet (BBN-1822) interface for the Intel Multibus
    IEEE standard 796. We could always back up Ron Crane's old
    parallel port interface, but would prefer something already done
    on the slim chance that it happens to exist." (9) Hoping to work
    collaboratively with others who were interested, the poster
    continued, "It just occurred to me that a SUN workstation would
    make a dandy Arpanet Ethernet gateway. Is there anybody else out
    there in internet land who might want to share efforts." (10)


    Enjoy.
    J.J.

  4. You need to read the treaty I think.. by Medievalist · · Score: 1 · on Anti-Ballistic Missile Weapons?

    Check out an overview of the treaty at European Parliament. Informed (if somewhat alarmist) commentary can also be found at the Federation of American Scientists.
    Basically, the treaty limits the signatories and their sucessors (the former SSRs) to a pair of anti-missile defense batteries apiece. When the US signed we were already planning to decomission Talos anyway, and funding had dried up for further ABM systems, so the US Gummint figured they'd gotten something for nothing. Later, Ronald "Ronnie Raygun" Reagan decided to play fast and loose with the terms of the treaty in order to develop the so-called "Star Wars" programs. The strapped chicken fiasco discredited Reagan's plans, but the KEW systems are still eminently viable and would probably be in production today if Bush hadn't reneged on paying the companies who sank millions into developing the old "flying crowbars" concept.
    Hey, you asked. Kind of a sore spot with me since I was peripherally involved in KEW 2.x.
    --Charlie

  5. Nipper Fans Unite! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on New portable MP3 player from RCA

    We love RCA's Nipper. Here is a little more about Nipper.