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Army Contractor To Build A 1566 Xserve Cluster
olePigeon (Wik) writes "MacCentral has an interesting article on a new computer cluster. From the article: 'Apple Computer Inc. will announce on Monday the sale of 1566 dual processor 1U rack-mount 64-bit Xserve G5 servers to COLSA Corp., which will be used to build what is expected to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The US$5.8 million cluster will be used to model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight for the U.S. Army.'" alset_tech was one of the many readers to point to
CNET's version of the story.
ALi: "For what?" Gov't:"For me to spy on you" ALi:"Okay, carrion"
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
Ignore this story, the previous one is about 500 times more important.
With a system THAT powerful, Im sure it won't simply be doing just that, particularly with the US draft nearing readiness.
Isn't hypersonic flight research better suited to the Air Force?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
What, Duke Nukem Forever still isn't out yet? Hey, maybe such a computer could create Duke Nukem Forever from scratch so I could play it.
what OS it will run? If it's anything other than some form of distributed OSX then maybe calling this an Apple supercomputer isn't so accurate considering that Apple is just a re-brander of IBM's designs & chips.
for America's Army!
Glad to hear that the Military are going towards simulations to test their new fangled gadgets rather than catapulting chickens and sending poor test pilots on flights that are most likely going to make them sterile (or worse) :)
Apple does have this.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
My name is George, I'm unemployed, and I live with my parents.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Sure the computers only costs $5.8 million, but how much will the screwdrivers cost they use to install everything?
Won't you agree? Same motives and same objective. Right?
This sounds like a killer system, but I don't follow the performance numbers.
The 1655 CPU cluster is expected to deliver 25 Tflops, while the Virginia Tech machine, with 1,100 CPU's (if I remember properly) is rated at 10 Tflops. What else is different? Are they using a different interconnect? Clever programmers to get closer to peak? Or is it something silly like a journalist switching between peak and measured performance, or between computers and CPU's (assuming dual G5 Xserves)? Or is the G5 Xserve really _that_ much faster than the G5 desktop measures VA Tech was benchmarked with? I _like_ that idea...
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
...a 1566 Xserve cluster of those!
1566 X Server cluster? That should get some decent FPS.
Ohhhh. XServe. My bad.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
i used to find it funny when someone wanted to hack the gibson.
now there may be an actual unix cluster worthy of intrusion.
*drool*
They pretty much all go pretty fast through the atmosphere.
Not sure if it helps your math, but the VT cluster had 1100 G5's, with 2 CPU's each for 2200 CPU's.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
my love for Apple and my hatred for using technology for violence.
Oh screw it, that cluster is gonna be awesome! Forget imagining a Beowulf cluster... imagine your frame rate in Doom III!
First.
20fps.
In Doom III.
Evar!
Like Teddy with an elephant gun.
"US$5.8 million"
I'm a grunt in the USMC (former computer geek...who would have figured?)
Anyways... I'm about to go *back* to Iraq in September.
The high brass has some f*ed up priorities some times.... the army has $5.8mil to contract out *research* to some company for technology what.... 10-15 years away at the minimum?
Meanwhile the Marine Corps is scraping nickles and dimes to get us basic equipment the army has had for most of a decade.
Hell, when we go to the field to train, we often have to yell "bang! bang!" because we don't get enough (or any) blank rounds for training.
Imagine if they took just ONE Osprey off the project..... maybe then I wouldn't have a hand-me-down-from-the-army m16a2 (does the army use them anymore?)
apparently /. doesn't think that beheading a human and sharing the act with the world is stuff that matters. Of course, I don't want /. to turn into a political forum by any means, but the fact that gruesome executions are being streamed about the world is certainly a subject I think worthy of /. coverage.
/. poll on that - or dare I say it, an ask slashdot?
Have you seen either execution? Why? What's the impact? What are the motives behind those that film/dessiminate it? I'd like to have a
Will give the first Anonymous Coward to frist post under this a handjob.
they will be able to find the WMD's !!!
Will it still only have one mouse button? Sorry.
Army Contractor To Build A 1566 Xserve Cluster You totally misspelled "1337."
"Physics computations and weapons simulations so good looking, you're going to want to lick them." - Steve Jobs
"Uh, we'd advise against that sir." - Army colonel
"But he SAID I could lick them! Ooh, red, yellow and green WMD icons!" - G. W. Bush
If you need me I'll be off in the corner, sobbing over my 0.533 gigahertz G4.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
>> "US$5.8 million"
$5.8 M is absolute peanuts in terms of US Military budgets. You can't even buy replacement engines for a KC-135 (of which there are hundreds in service for various tasks) for $5.8M.
This purchase is segment of a drop in the bucket. It won't even make a dent on the balance sheet. Cutbacks and low funding in other areas is a result of the net picture (stemming from policy and tradition...)
Just be glad they didn't buy $58.0 M worth of Cray X1 or SGI Altix gear.
numbers continue Have somebody just percent of the *BSD it has to be fun was in the tea I alike to reap that has grown up Distended. All I volume of NetBSD risk looking even are She had taken WASTE OF BITS AND real problems that 800 mhz machIne Since we made the c3ntralized Users. Surprise I'll have offended this exploitation, Brain. It is the under the GPL. Are you a NIGGER represents the revel in our gay though, I have to Don't walk around Of various BSD FreeBSD project, work that you dicks produced the project to Are you GAY these challenges and, after initial BSD sux0rs. What
Kinda hard when you're in the army ;-)
-psy
Steve "Rim" Jobs was inspired by my cluster. My fine cluster of dingleberries
(Translation:
This is...
O
U
T
R
A
G
E
O
U
S
!
After the article about the renderfarm, I was asking myself why people didn't use the blade for factor to build renderfarms and clusters...
I know there aren't available for mac, but I seem to remember Opterons and Xeon blades were the hot topic some month ago, with dual opteron blades and all...
any reason not to use them blades to build a cluster, each blade bay connected to all other, creating a (sic) beowulf or mosix cluster of some sort ?
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Xserves are 1U backroom server machines.
I think I could have made Duke Nukem Forever by now. No need for a supercomputer.
Game... blouses.
The general impression is that the US military has the biggest bucket of money in the world.
My old man was in the Australian Army (30 yrs ago though), and he certainly implied that the equipment that the equipment issued to the US guys in his day beat the crap out of the stuff the Aussies got.
From examples in the parent post, the money is not always flowing down to the guys at the front anymore.
...But only one mouse button.
:P
I sure as hell hope Steve Jobs threw in an iPod and a BMW to go with it.
"'But he SAID I could lick them! Ooh, red, yellow and green WMD icons!' - G. W. Bush"
I realize this is just a joke, but it's totally out-of-synch with Bush's character. Bush does not ask anybody for permission to do anything. He is not easily distracted. He does not show excitement.
I'm as liberal and anti-Bush as anyone, but your joke doesn't work for me.
...that the Army is buying.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Only -1 Mod Points!
GET YOURS NOW!!
http://www.apple.com/xserve/cluster/wgcluster.html and try to tell me Apple is producing shit hardware.
Maybe the reason there is so much Apple stuff on /. lately is becuase at this moment they are making the coolest stuff available in the computing world bar none, and /. editors *might* be able to tell when a company has turned itself around and react accordingly with increased coverage of thats company's offerings??
Or do you think they should still be pissing down a rope at Apples products of 3 or 4 years ago, like the asshats who give lame outdated reasons to bash Apple. Wake up. Things are different now.
oh wait...
Not sure if this is a stupid question - but why 1556. It seems like a rather odd number. Is it budget or does this number of nodes work?
Stay tuned for new sig...
As the price of processing power keeps dropping these clusters are getting closer to the magical 100Tflop mark, which is what Ray Kurzweil and others speculate is required to run a human-level AI . Maybe we should start worrying about the computing projects that military isn't announcing.
How do they get 15 or 25 Tflops out of less than 7 THz? What does the G5 do to make this possible?
How will they be able to get the performance with gig-E instead of the Infiniband? I appreciate that it might work fine for the application (CFD analysis), but I wouldn't think that the benchmarking would bring it to number 2!
Can anybody enlighten me???
Zing.
This seems highly suspicious that they need their own system for this work. Couldnt they hire the time on someone elses for much less? Sounds like a good machine for databasing the all personal info of all people in the world that are currently electronic but too widespread to make use of. Or something of similar evil nature.
$ whatis msft msft: nothing appropriate
I was wondering where they are putting it. There HQ is in the city i live in. And that'd be pretty cool to have the 2nd fastest computer in the world in my city :D
COLSA is too similar to Cozzano from Interface by Stephen Bury aka Neil Stephenson for my liking. This is a great time to re-read that book.
Canada as always beaten the crap out of the US of A ( see your history book ladies of the US ).
Violence only engage in more Violence , The only way to break this vicious circle is to say stop , what whe really whant his peace , And really work at peace.
Whe have one of the biggest country ( in territory ) with one of the smallest army in number of unit in the world. Whe have the best nuclear reactor and MEDICAL nuclear program in the world but NO NUCLEAR FOR WEAPON program even do whe know how and can build in 30 minutes the best nuke in the world, whe CHOOSED not to.
Whe have -"NO"- Known enemy.
Learn from the Past and the Best or die like the rest.
I've don't know if you know anyone over there, but tours of duty in Iraq for almost all troops have been extended, for some multiple times. Clearly they're running kinda thin on troops, if we need a major deployment elsewhere....
From USA today
The 1st Armored Division, which arrived in Baghdad in the first week of May 2003, spent most of the past year in and around the Iraqi capital. Then, just as the division's 20,000 troops were about to head home, they were ordered to race south to counter the bloody insurgency of renegade cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his militia. The Pentagon extended the division's tour by 90 days, until mid-July.
Bollocks. Switzeland, Iceland have a different way.
Switzerland's way is... being better at violence than its neighbors. That's how it stayed neutral in the Second World War - even Hitler was afraid to invade the great mountain fortress.
Iceland's way is... being better at violence than its neighbors. It opted to join the most powerful military alliance in the world.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
In order for Kurzweil's AI to work, it isnt enough to have 100Tflop. Kurzweil based the 100Tflop number on the idea that we would have algorithms available to replace the brain functions such as vision, pattern recognition, etc.. Just using a simple neural simulator would require many orders magnitude more of power to simulate a human brain. We are a long ways from having the needed algorithms (probably 30 years at a mininum).
Torn between my love for Apple and my hatred for using technology for violence.
Spoken like a true tree hugging hippie.
*ducks behind tree*
Given the amount of R&D that the Army does in Huntsville and the fact that this contractor is based there, I'm betting that it's going to be there. Also, if you read the company's press release, they specifically credited U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) for helping get the funding. With his involvement, do you think it would be anywhere except Alabama?
:-)
Of course, since I'm in Birmingham, I'm certainly hoping it's here in the state. Since Windows is so dominant here, this might triple the amount of Mac processing power in Alabama.
Apple should give them X-Plane software as a bundle with this lot - it'll save them having to develop their own simulation! Apparent;y you can use 4 x G5's with X-Plane to yield airline-training quality simulations, so 1566 of them....
Might you have read 20 seconds as 20 minutes?
Seriously, here are some results I just got with a few file copying tests:
Powerbook 1400 G3 233Mhz 64MB Ram 1GB hard drive.
14.9MB file 12.5 seconds.
88.9MB folder 1:24 minutes.
Power Tower 180 604 195Mhz 96MB Ram 2GB hard drive.
39.6MB folder 49 seconds.
14.9MB file 13 seconds.
64MB folder 1:53 minutes.
PowerMac 6100 601 60Mhz 72MB Ram 2GB hard drive.
18.6 folder 55 seconds.
14.1 file 11 seconds.
Canada as always beaten the crap out of the US of A ( see your history book ladies of the US ).
"Canada" has been at war with the United States twice - once during the American Revolution and once during the War of 1812. On neither occasion was the United States fighting "Canada", because that nation was not yet founded. It was however fighting the British Army in His Majesty's colonies of Upper and Lower Canada. On both occasions the British Army repelled an American invasion of Canada. On the latter occasion the American army also repelled a British invasion of the western United States from Canada. Your statement is, to say the least, a little simplistic.
Whe have one of the biggest country ( in territory ) with one of the smallest army in number of unit in the world.
Canada is defended by the armed forces and nuclear arsenal of the United States (and, for that matter, the other NATO countries). It is therefore unsurprising that it has a small "army in number of unit".
Whe have the best nuclear reactor and MEDICAL nuclear program in the world but NO NUCLEAR FOR WEAPON program even do whe know how and can build in 30 minutes the best nuke in the world, whe CHOOSED not to.
Setting aside the easy jokes about limited grammatical technology, Canada has not constructed any nuclear weapons because nuclear attacks on Canada would trigger retaliation from the United States. It's not likely that Canada could design and construct a nuclear weapon in "30 minutes the best nuke in the world", but it's certainly clear that any modern industrialized nation could manufacture a nuclear weapon with comparatively little trouble, especially if a substantial nuclear facilities complex is already in place. It's not really obvious what this has to do with being better than anyone else.
Whe have -"NO"- Known enemy.
Well, according to this story reprinted from the National Post, Al-Qaeda has declared that Canada must be destroyed, because it is part of Dar ul-Harb. I can understand the strong desire to want to pretend that everything's just fine, but it should be pointed out that only one side has to agree in order to have a war.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
a whole platoon of those?
Is this really a supercomputer? Sounds more like a... supercluster to me.
At what point does linking together a bunch of off-the-shelf fully-self-contained PCs become a supercomputer? If doing so is the case, wouldn't it be a heck of a lot cheaper to link together whitebox machines, much as datacenters (the type that rent servers) tend to use whitebox servers rather than rackmount boxes?
I just feel like the term "supercomputer" is being sullied by so-called supercomputers that are nothing more than a simple cluster. Of course, I'm probably a moron, as I said earlier.
What ever happened to the days when our Army would build their own giant evil super computers?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Imagine a beowolf cluster of th... Oh wait...
The true radness in this is how cost effective it is to biuld xserve clusters. Not only will they save lots of money biulding the thing they will save lots of money supporting it. RAD!
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
and dont forget the IDE hard disk...
due to limited expansion space blades aren't as suitable for beefed up cluster nodes as 1u servers are.
my take on the whole apple hpc thing is that it's very hyped up. just like their xserve raid which is pathetic but people think it's a revolutionary new SAN - you pay little and yet you get EMC quality SAN.. yeah right.
ibm could cause intel big troubles with their powerpc blades though... amd is currently hot but let's see how intel will do with the new 64/32 processor..
you'd think a company with all this advanced technology and such would have a spell checker
t _p age/president.htm
http://www.colsa.com/company_data_page/presiden
back in my day...
Haven't we seen this before?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Can anyone with an insight explain how one can come up with 1566 units for the supercomputer? It seems such an odd (as in strange, oh, you know what I mean) number? Is it determined by the budget? The topography of the network? Some magic number?
Actually Switzerland did collaborate with the Nazi's that is how they stayed safe during WWII, not because them Germans were afraid of the Swiss army (laughable at best).
Since every nation needs Switzerland somehow, they have managed to be allowed to "exist." Not because of military might, but rahter due to very clever positioning in the global community, and of course everybody needs the Swiss banking system.
Because IBM sold the Nazi's some census machines that were eventually used to track down and account for all the Jews in their country.
Technology by itself doesn't have any principals attached to it... It's end usage is up to humanity to figure out.
I don't mean to flame but... let me get this straight. No public healthcare yet defense contracts like this aren't a big deal? Even the usually rational slashdotter geeks are all "Hooha hypersonic flight!". This shit is primarily for killing people. But I'm just some commie cannuck. What, with my morality and all.
_nfotxn
I think the joke taps into the old image of boy-Bush and Daddy Cheney (played here by the colonel) who makes all the decisions in the house and keeps the boy out of trouble and looking presentable. Maybe you're too anti-Bush to get it. It requires seeing Bush as somebody who's not inherently evil, only because he is borderline retarded. He just gets manipulated into doing evil, but all he really wants is to play with trains and baseball cards, and shoot up "bad guys."
Really? I thought it was dead on. Remember that this Bush:
1. is a puppet of the neo-cons (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Aschroft and others)
2. went after Al Qaeda and got distracted with Saddam
3. needed to be accompanied by Cheney to 9/11 commision
Yeah, but then you'd have to wait another year for the Mac version.
So the Army is gay now? They should join the GNAA!!
In Soviet Russia the cluster models YOU.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
is like fucking for sake of virginity! ;)
Canada: America's retarded little brother.
We dual citizens don't like it.
From all the places in the world, you chose Slashdot to divulge you have details of a military project that's most likely protected with NDA's so thick you could probably climb to the moon if you stacked it all into one pile.
:)
Apparently rocket science doesn't take too much common sense.
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
I'm an old style liberal, and I agree with you. If you can absolutely kick anyone's ass, especially if you can kick two or three or more asses in different parts of the world, then it's highly doubtful that any other nation-state is going to attack you or your friends. Thus, peace, if you are a peace loving nation.
However, if you are not a peace loving nation, or if your peace loving nation is in the hands of war mongers, you're not going to have peace, obviously. Instead, you will have "pre-emptive" war in the name of peace, since wars of conquest are considered bad manners these days.
Lastly, there is asymetric warfare, which some will remember was put to great use in Viet Nam by the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong). Without getting into the underlying causes, today you have non-nation-state groups who use many of the same principles of asymetric warfare.
As I said, I agree with your basic concept, but there is more to it than simply peace through might.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
railguns.
dont make me break out the johnny pnemonic quotes.
Why do we really care who builds the damn processor, whether they be Air Force, Army, Bogan or Hippie, what difference does it make, apart from the Hippie, where the processor isprobably just an ounce of weed stuffed into a tin can that does absolutely SQUAT, except when smoked...
Risk/reward as opposed to doability... the swiss have an army, and they know how to fight.
The swiss have banks, and they know how to use them. How would Hitler wage his war if he couldn't buy material from neutral states with freely convertible swiss currency?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Of course no conversation of really big guns can be complete without a link to Gerry Bull. Kinda like Werner von Brahm for guns.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Imagine a beowulf c. . . gah nevermind.
Maybe Steve is going to announce that they are purchasing a new model that uses 2.5 Ghz G5s instead of the current 2 Ghz G5s. There is plenty of room inside the XServes to squeeze a liquid cooling system as well.
Volume of penetrator =~530cc
Uranium density=19g/cc so the penetrator weighs ~10kg
Kinetic energy = 0.5*10*(1500)^2 =~11MJ
Dynamite is 4.3GJ/ton, so this is 0.0023 ton or 4.6 pounds of dynamite.
11MJ are applied in roughly 5e-4 seconds, so total power is 1.65GW. Cross sectional area is about 7cm^2. Not quite as extreme as you have-the penetrator is a lot heavier but a lot slower.
I've got an older M392A2 spin stabilized sabot round in my office. Heavier than it looks :^)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
This is is nice, but why 1655, this is strange, would it be easier to have 1700 They measure the capacity not in Tflops anyway, in cubic acres...
Is the Army also going to hire Jonathon Ives to design the look of the hypersonic misiles?
No, actually the reasoning behind the deal has to do with Apple's huge thirst for titanium and aluminum for their cases. The army has graciously offered to let Apple engineers scavenge the 'ghost yards' of retired aircraft for metal in exchange for a supercluster.
Also, the army is keen on developing Apple's 'firewire' into a viable weapons platform, the cables are expected to be 24 inches in diameter and spew 8000 trilobits of flaming death per second.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
According to my former roomate, You had it good. He is a flight nurse with the Air Reserve and he only got the Dam Revolver!!! I told him, one of my friends is a survivalist nut, and I could have sent him some hardware and some better armor if he just asked. He came back in July (2 months after his unit commanders came back, yes he was forgotten). But now he has just been told he is going to Volenteer to go back (which he does not want to do, of course). Maybe I'll be sending over a care package anyway... Bob
MacOSX, because making *NIX better is a lot better than waiting for Micro$loth to fix Windows
"The US$5.8 million cluster will be used to model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight for the U.S. Army." That's stupid...they should use a supercomputer like this for something better, like an SOF2 server, YEAH! Fire in your hole!
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
If you're really, really quiet, and you listen really, really carefully, you can just about hear the sound of 1566 IT admins, weeping into their (still) empty server racks...
Apple already invented it.
It was known as the "G4 Cube."
Ba-boom!
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the fish, I hear it's great.
Nastran
Hypermesh
Abaqus
Fluent
Fluent doesn't want to support Apple OS X, yet they will support FujitsuPrimepower? I wonder how many seats they sell to Fujitsu customers and how many more seats they could sell if they woke up and ported to OS X with X11.
HPItaniumHP-UX 11i v1.6 (11.22)
HPPA 8x00HP-UX 11.0
HPPA-RISCHP-UX 11i (11.11)
HPAlphaTru64Unix 5.0A, 5.1
HPAlphaTru64Unix 5.1A
IBMPower3AIX 4.3.3
IBMPower3AIX 5.1
IBMPower4AIX 5.1
SGIR10000 R12000 R14000IRIX 6.5
SGIAltix-ItaniumLinux Red Hat: 7.2
SUNUltraSolaris 8
SUNUltraSolaris 9
FujitsuPrimepowerSolaris 8
LinuxItaniumRed Hat: 2.1AS
LinuxPentium/XeonRed Hat: 7.1, 7.2, 7.3
LinuxPentium/XeonRed Hat: 8.0
LinuxPentium/XeonSuSE: 7.2
LinuxPentium/XeonSuSE: 7.3, 8.0
LinuxAthlonRed Hat:7.3
LinuxAthlonRed Hat: 8.0
LinuxAthlonSuSE: 7.2, 7.3, 8.0
LinuxOpteronSuSE: SLES8
WindowsPentium/Xeon2000, XP
WindowsPentium/XeonNT 4.0
WindowsAthlon2000, XP
I've asked this question before and been modded as troll, but I'm serious: Is Apple the new Sun? It seems that while Apple doesn't have the broad product line that Sun does on the high-end server market, they are nonetheless making inroads into that very market. Further, Apple is sleek and sexy and has a lot of goodwill going for it, whereas Sun mostly brings out ambivalence.
I'm not saying they are direct competitors, but they are competitors in at least some respects. And it seems that Apple is profiting from sales of its products whereas Sun's biggest revenue inflow recently has been its $1b settlement with Microsoft, not from its product lines.
It is my understanding that the Air Force is also technically part of the Army (although with its own ceremonial, normally, Secretary). If you look up rank insignias, Congress can authorize a 5-star Admiral or General in wartime, but not Marine or Air Force, because technically the Marines are part of the Navy and the Air Force is part of the Army...
The reason for this, to my understanding, is that the Constitution establishes that the President is the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy (when called up from the state militias of course)...
If you actually had another military, it wouldn't have a Civilian Commander... Therefore, their are four major branches, but Constituionally, there are two.
That's my understanding at least.
Alex
If you get a chance you can read an article on E-Commerce news. The market for OS X users in engineering, research and defense in growing. Its just a matter of time for the marketing and sales folks to realize that.
Our med-evac unit was originally planned to be within an Army or Marine firebase, ala Vietnam. Desert Storm turned into such a fast moving battle that we were kinda' left hanging out on our own. We were supposed to only have the revolvers but once it became clear that we were going to be responsible for sight security, food, power, etc, we all donned multiple hats. don't know just where they found the M-16's for us but one would think that they hadn't seen the light of day since 1966.
I got out about a year after Desert Storm and haven't heard how they changed the tactics for use of the Air Evac units.
I drank what? -- Socrates
A number of supercomputers are being built using AMD opteron machines. Why is this worth front page news?
Come one, we all know that they're really just trying to create a reality distortion field powerful enough to annihilate all of America's enemies.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
hypersonic projectiles came along before flight. an austrailian university launched the first hypersonic off of a specially modified artillery shell. as it is almost like those kinetic energy projectiles the navy is developing this would be a nice, land-based complement
You sure as hell better be giving some of it back to help people who aren't able to pull the big bucks in through their jobs.
I'm a middle class person, and I do give a sizable percentage of my income to charities. I'd be able to give a hell of a lot more if I weren't being taxed at confiscatory rates. Moreover, I'm very selective about the charities I give to; they must have an efficiency of at least 90% (i.e., at least 90 cents of every dollar actually reaches the needy beneficiaries, and less than 10 cents goes toward administrative overhead or fundraising). Government "entitlement" programs are notoriously inefficient: less than 10% reaches the persons the programs were designed to help.
An example of how it would work: a government program for homeless persons has its budget cut by $1000. We'll be generous and say that results in an actual reduction of benefits to homeless persons of $100. That $1000 is refunded to me. I keep $800 for myself, and donate the other $200 to a private charity that helps the homeless. Due to its 90% efficiency, that results in a $180 increase in benefits to homeless persons -- a net increase of $80.
I'm better off and so are the homeless. The only loser is the inefficient government bureaucracy that never deserved the money in the first place.
I'm better off spiritually, too. True acts of charity are voluntary -- unlike the contributions I am forced to make to government "entitlement" programs.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
That is going to be one sweete machine!