Slashdot Mirror
Military Grade Laptops
bllb writes "Slate has an article about the "waterproof, vaporproof, shockproof" laptops the military is using. It's not at the cutting edge of performance, but it's nice to see some bombproof hardware." Most of the laptops I've owned over the years died through dropping or drowning, so maybe I should look into something a little more sturdy ;)
Some rugged / military notebooks or other systems subject to shock have dampening systems for their hard drive mountings.
e rgSecurityAssociates.com
But, you probably don't want to shell out the $$$ for most civilian uses.
Sam Nitzberg
http://www.iamsam.com
http://www.Nitzb
"We drop each one 54 times from one meter, bake it in an oven, chill it in a freezer, vibrate it, and submit it to a shower of hurricane proportions,"
Apparently so.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
My wife used to work for Itronix and these will run indefinetly at 140 degrees (the official numbers.) While I was in the infantry I once spent the month of August in Death Valley and I can tell you we NEVER hit 140, 127 with MOPP4 and kevlar is no picnic, but it wouldn't of phased this laptop. They don't have the high end horse power of the p4 laptop I am on right now, but knowing what these things can go through, they are amazing.
That is what the Canadian Army uses. Rugged especially the CF-27 although the 28 is a bit less rugged.
http://www.gobookmax.com/gobookmax/images/gobookma x.pdf
Mobile Pentium III/700, 256 MB of PC100 SDRAM, 20 GB IBM DJSA-200 hard disk, external 10x TEAC USB CD-ROM, external USB floppy, 4MB Silicon Motion LynxEM+ graphics, 10.4in SVGA touchscreen TFT, ESS Allegro PCI audio, integrated mono speaker, V.90 modem, integrated CISCO Wirelsss LAN PC Card, one Type II PC Card slot, plus support for VGA, serial and two USB, Windows 2000 Professional. Dimensions: 284 x 233 x 62mm (W x D x H) excludion handle. Weight 3.3 kg. [7.28 pounds]
Note: The PDF wouldn't let me copy and paste the text, but I think I got it all right.
Dolch has been making these sorts of things for years now. Mostly aimed at scientific, construction, and engeneering field work (the military only started widely deploying laptops fairly recently). Their laptops can handle 15G's while running and 50 when turned off.
To anser all the people asking if the ibook can stand up to more than 1 fall, the anser is yes
there are currently 3 ibooks in my immediate family, and all have been dropped several times(usually resulting from younger siblings wanting a turn). The highest drop mine has taken was about 2.5 meters and there is no notable damage aside from a few scratches here and there.
while I haven't tried myself I do remember reading that ibooks can survive some time in an oven, being run over by trucks, being hit in the screen w/ a baseball bat, in fact I'm fairly certain they can survive water, altho not when on(apples old 5300's could)...
Don't save your orgasms for Heaven; Heaven knows we need them here.
But I've always dropped my laptops while carrying or transporting them, never while actually using them... so I went a different route.
Try getting a regular laptop, and putting it in one of the cases made by these guys (No, I don't work for them)
I've taken my laptop to all kinds of places, including some inhospitable places in the very area of the world where lots of bombs are currently being dropped; no problems. Those cases come with a lifetime warranty... they're waterproof, shock-resistant, dustproof (VERY important in the desert), and have automatic pressure relief valves for that unpressurized tactical airlift you're sometimes required to use.
They cost about 150$, but that's chump change compared to the price of a Mil-Spec computer; the money difference is much better spent upgrading the actual laptop.
YMMV, but that's the way I solved the problem.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I'm a professional soldier, so here's what I have to say.
:)
If I'm called on to go to visit my colleagues who are already in Iraq, I'll be carrying over 130 lbs of protective gear, weapons, ammo, rucksack and equipment, and the bulk of it goes on my back. A plane and a parachute gets me to my DZ and I walk from there.
Military equipment is bulky and heavy. Take the PLGR (Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver). The last picture shows it's size. This puppy weighs 2.75 pounds and is huge. Compare to any Garmin, Magellan, Lowrance and others whose products weigh less than a pound and are a quarter of the size. (Blah, blah, Selective Availability. Another discussion.)
Another example: The Mortar Ballistic Computer weighs 7 lbs and makes my Gameboy Advance (cheap entertainment in the field) look like a Cray Supercomputer. Oh, and it's roughly 20x larger than the GBA.
So if I had the room in my ruck for a laptop (I don't), and I could justify spending $4500 on it - four months' pay (I took a slight paycut when I quit my sysadmin job in Silicon Valley for the opportunity to get gassed in Iraq), you could bet I'd be buying one of these and not FOUR pieces of crap that are going to break when I hit the DZ.
Cheers!
I've been in the Marines for about 8 years and I've never seen these. I've seen some Panasonic Toughbooks but nowadays all we use are Dell latitudes. Of course, the Air Force has infinitely more $$$ than the Corps.
This guy is way out there
Supposedly before the M1 Garand rifle was accepted as the primary service rifle, immediately before World War II, the Army finished it's "scientific" testing and thought they would let the Marines check it out. The Marines soaked a couple of rifles in seawater, attached ropes and dragged them back and forth across sand, and then tried to fire the rifles. Gotta love pracical folk.
I somehow envision the Marine laptop evaluation to replace the 1 meter drop onto concrete test with bash-an-enemy-on-the-head test.
Anyway, Apple's "wonderful" repair centers are refusing to fix it under warranty because it is "accidental damage or mistreatment." Since iBooks do not have PCMCIA ports, and usb ethernet devices only work with Macs, she has two choices. She can either pay the outrageous $775 that Apple is charging to repair an ethernet jack with a few broken pins, or else buy an AirPort card and 802.11b base station.
It should also be mentioned that the power connector is very fragile. Being stepped on can bend it completely out of shape, and it is very difficult to get back in the right shape, because it has to be basically a perfect circle.
The test of laptop sturdiness, IMHO, is not whether it can survive the dramatic falls, but whether it can survive the minor, day to day damage over a prolonged period. Can it survive being tripped over, carried around in a backpack, etc? I have a 4 year old Dell laptop that I have treated far more roughly than my girlfriend has treated her 6 month old iBook. The Dell looks a little worse for the wear, but works perfectly. The iBook still looks shiny and new, but has been completely crippled.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
You can pick up a nice magnesium shell ToughBook for cheap, if you are willing to put up with some sloth. They would make an excellent war driving box! Here is one source: (I am not affiliated, and I have never ordered from them)
TelePro PC Store
"Life is life." --Laibach
In Antarctica, 1997. I had two rugged military laptops (Kontron) for data acquisition and an HP Vectra desktop for use indoors. One of the laptops video fried when a snow machine started a few feet from it and the other didn't have the right connectors. I had to program an eprom on some equipment outside and just put the Vectra+Monitor on a box. For 4 hours at -45C and it worked fine. I even have a picture. So it's not because there's a thicker case around a motherboard that it makes it more reliable...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
OTOH, I dropped my PLGR once and accidentally kicked it into the path of a pickup truck and it was promptly run over. Dug it out of the dirt, smacked it a few times, and it ran fine.
Try that with a gameboy.
On the gripping hand, the amount of crap we're expected to carry nowadays is ludicrous. Someone tell the boys in R&D that we're not ALL mechanized.
Even that site has errors.
It decides to apply english to computer terms. That's a big mistake.
A list of his errors:
CD-ROM. A CD-ROM is a DRIVE, not a DISC. A CD is a disc, or, if one wants to use the long form, a CD-ROM disc is a disc that fits in a CD-ROM. This is extremely common usage by those in the know, therefore the author is de-facto wrong.
UFO. While I'm not a Raelian, I'm very sure the common usage of the word UFO by such people is to mean anything that is unidentifiable as human.
OK. Flat out stupid griping by a person who has nothing to gripe about. OK is a valid acronym, spelt without periods. Don't like it? TS. Yeah, that's an acronym too. Look it up and be amazed! Oh, and on the internet we rarely put periods in acronyms. Common usage and all that again...
Drive. Please gripe more! Not! What the hell is this all about? Common usage by Billions and Billions (served) is Hard Disk. Don't like it? TS again!
Lite. Hey asshole, I'm a humanist and I spell it analog. Nice job putting words in people's mouths and ignoring how 300 million people spell things. Also good job ignoring entire dictionaries worth of information telling you you're wrong. I'll say it again: Asshole.
How can I trust a site that doesn't accept the common usage of words in their respective fields? Stop treading on people's toes, lest you be trodden on, pretentious grammarian.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Walkabout (who make a lot of 'hardened' laptops') have a few slower, but very versatile books that have IR ports that can be rigged to be used over packet radio for network connectivity. They have a stylus that you have to use as a pointer device, but they're small, not terribly heavy for a milspec laptop.
.. and you can get them with a gigahertz proc, which is nice. They can come with a DVD drive, and the media bays are swappable. They might have a CDRW or something like that. They're -hardy- little machines, too, and fast. You hardly notice that 'slightly slower' processor.
Now, Panasonic Toughbooks are NICE. They're completely touchscreen, you can use fingers, pencils, pens, the provided stylus.. just about anything. They have onboard peripherals that are in air-tight / waterproof compartments
March 2003, Texas Jeff Bezos injured in helicopter crash
March 2003, Fort Drum, New York11 army soldiers killed in Blackhawk training accident
March, 2003, Jakarta 3 killed when helicopter crashes into hotel swimming pool
January, 2003, Afghanistan4 killed in Army helicopter crash
January 2003, Mexican/Texas border4 Marines killed in helicopter crash
Dec 2002, Kabul5 German peacekeepers killed in helicopter crash
December, 2002, HondurasFive die in army helicopter crash
Nov, 2002, ArizonaTV crew for the show "Ripley's Believe It Or Not!" crash while trying to film the bounce of the world's largest rubber band ball
August 2002, Fort Polk, Louisiana2 Army soldiers die in Kiowa Warrior crash
August 2002, Grozny 114 Russian servicemen killed in a single helicopter crash (they were shot down by the Chechens).
Think about it...this isnt just for the military.
A student in one of my classes works as a foreman at a local construction company. They just happen to be testing these things out for use in place of blueprints. i.e. He and the onsite Engineer look at the actual CAD designs of the architect, and are able to hook up a live "point by point" discussion with the Architect moving the CAD design around and highlighting things in real time.
Mariners and Campers should find this useful. Mechanics maybe.
All kinds of places.
McDoobie