Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

B-2 Stealth Bomber Gets Upgrade, Joins the '90s

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the decade-late dept.

WmHBlair writes "Flightglobal has a report about the upgrades being made to the B-2A Stealth Bomber, which include Pentium class processors, JOVIAL code rewritten in C, and fibre channel hard drives. The Register, as usual, makes light of this event with a tongue-in-cheek news item noting that the upgrade drags Stealth Bomber IT systems into the '90s."

18 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. Bitchin' by Etrias · · Score: 5, Funny

    Can't wait to see it fire up and have the screen print out: It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

    1. Re:Bitchin' by Atario · · Score: 5, Funny

      More likely "It is pitch black, which is correct for a Stealth Bomber.".

      --
      "A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
    2. Re:Bitchin' by mangastudent · · Score: 5, Funny

      Nah, even more likely:

      It is pitch black. You are the grue.

  2. Don't you mean? by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...upgrades ... include Pentium class processors ... "drags Stealth Bomber IT systems into the 90s"

    89.999997612?

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
    1. Re:Don't you mean? by chrispatch · · Score: 5, Funny

      I am Pentium of Borg. Division is futile! You will be approximated.

  3. Re:There's a Reason for That by ArsonSmith · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Ultimate reliability" and "Pentium class from the 90s" just doesn't really go well together.

    --
    Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
  4. Pentiums are well suited to a stealth craft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Pentium 4 chips and Athlons just get shot out of the sky by heat seeking missiles.

  5. Re:Not surprised, even if I am amused by ArsonSmith · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yea, at least dealing with the private sector and private contracts you don't have to worry about any of those issues.

    --
    Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
  6. Exactly right. It's obsolete by heroine · · Score: 5, Funny

    They should have written all the flight control in Ruby & made it an AJAX web application that runs on Firefox on an iPhone. That would make it zillions of times faster than that old C code & Pentiums, right?

  7. Regarding that Mars lander... by jd · · Score: 3, Funny

    How are you expecting to Martians to communicate with it, if it doesn't have Bluetooth support, eh? Hadn't thought of that, had you?

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    1. Re:Regarding that Mars lander... by gbjbaanb · · Score: 4, Funny

      Dude, its on Mars. Everythings infrared.

  8. Re:maybe they should have stayed in the '60s by Fear+the+Clam · · Score: 5, Funny

    If JOVIAL is anything like ALGOL 60, it's arguably a better programming language than C.

    It's HAPPIER.

  9. well it's not as if they want Vista on it by advocate_one · · Score: 4, Funny

    You wish to drop the bomb: Cancel or Allow?

    --
    Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
  10. Re:There's a Reason for That by fyoder · · Score: 3, Funny

    Oughta run the latest version of Ubuntu on the latest processor from AMD. Going with OSS, if there's a bug which causes a nuclear disaster, the open source community will have a patch out within 24 hours.

    --
    Loose lips lose spit.
  11. Re:Exactly right. It's obsolete by smoker2 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Well if it's running on an iphone, at least it'll know which way up it is !

  12. Re:cue the fpu jokes by Dogtanian · · Score: 4, Funny

    Anyone have an over/under on how many Pentium FPU jokes there will be?

    Exactly 24.9999998999997...

    Sorry, but you walked into that one :-P

    --
    "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
  13. Re:I hate to break it to anybody by Profane+MuthaFucka · · Score: 5, Funny

    >South Park Lemmiwinks game.

    The B-2 is operated by the Air Force. Surely you must have been thinking of the Navy when you wrote that comment.

    --
    Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
  14. Re:I hate to break it to anybody by Nethemas+the+Great · · Score: 4, Funny

    They were playing "Global Thermonuclear War" back in the early 80's on much less than Pentiums...

    --
    Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once ... with negative results.