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British Royal Navy Submarines Now Run Windows
meist3r writes "On his Government blog, Microsoft's Ian McKenzie announced today that the Royal Navy was ahead of schedule for switching their nuclear submarines to a customized Microsoft Windows solution dubbed 'Submarine Command System Next Generation (SMCS NG)' which apparently consists of Windows 2000 network servers and XP workstations. In the article, it is claimed that this decision will save UK taxpayers £22m over the next ten years. The installation of the new system apparently took just 18 days on the HMS Vigilant. According to the BAE Systems press release from 2005, the overall cost of the rollout was £24.5m for all eleven nuclear submarines of the Vanguard, Trafalgar and Swiftsure classes. Talk about staying with the sinking ship."
Summary fails to mention, and sort of implies the opposite; The cost saving is down to using off the shelf hardware, not switching to windows.
Microsoft do have source sharing programs with some partners. This sort of project would be one example of that.
The reason the Windows 2000 source code got leaked a few years back is not because of lack of security at Microsoft itself but because a partner leaked it.
Even Microsoft realises that the source code needs to be available for some projects and they have a choice of either allowing just that or losing some of the most high paying contracts.
It's mature and stable by now - unlike any newer MS server OS.
I am trolling
If the UK no longer responds to messages and they have reason to believe this is due to war damage, they open their sealed, handwritten letter from the Prime Minister. This contains their instructions. There is of course much speculation as to what it contains, ranging from "Hi, welcome to the US Navy" to "I told them Iraq had WMDs, but would they listen?". Sadly, barring a takeover of the UK by pacifists, we will never find out.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It's often called Hanlon's razor because he quoted that in a 1980 book, but it was originally used by Robert Heinlein in his 1941 short story "Logic of Empire".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
The real failure here is in not teaching graspable examples and estimates.
For everyday tasks, simple but rough conversions convey a lot more understanding than tables of four-digit factors. And so here it is, from a native metric user who has had to parse some imperial in his time, unsuitable for exacrt measurements, but helps you understand your world:
The rough imperial/metric survival guide
Basic equivalences:
* A litre and a quart is roughly the same
* A yard and a meter is roughly the same
* A imperial ton and a metric tonne (1000kg) are almost exactly the same.
Rules of thumb:
* A US quart is almost one liter.
* A UK quart is a bit more than a liter.
=> a pint is about half a liter a liter is about 2 pints
=> a gallon is about 4 litres
=> a cup is about a quarter liter
* A pound is almost half a kilo
* A stone is just over 6 kilos
* An ounce of weight (any kinds) is almost 30 grams
=> there are about 35 ounces in a kilo
=> 100grams is between 3 and 4 ounces.
* A CD is 12cm wide
* The hole in the CD can contain a 1cm square
* A foot is about 30cm. A metric desk ruler is typically 30cm long.
=> an inch is about 2.5cm.
=> 10cm is about 4 inces
=> 1m is about 40inches
* A yard is about a meter
=> There are about 3 feet to a meter
=> A fathom is almost 2 meters
* An imperial mile is about one and a half kilometer
* A league is almost exactly 5555m.
* A league is roughly five and a half kilometers
* For typical oven temereatures Fahrenheit is roughly Celsius * 2
This is less than 10% off from 150C through 300C, but possibly not exact
enough for sensitive baked goods.
* For typical weather temperatures, don't even bother beyond some selcted
datapoints, choose the ones you feel are handy:
F and C equal. Awfully, fiercely cold weather, but can be found:
-40F = -40C
Temperature of a good home freezer. Skiing starts getting chilly:
0F = -18C
Reliably thaw-free. Lasting good skiing conditions:
25F = -4C
Water freezes/melts:
32F = 0C
Maximum density of water, commonly the temp of water below the ice:
39F = 4C
Standard "room temperature" in chemistry. A bit too cold for T-shirts though.
68F = 20C
Perfect balmy weather IMO, but then I am a northerner:
77F = 25C
Body temperature, or bloody hot weather:
100F = 37C
I can't really grasp how far a kilometre or mile is
If you do any walking, running, or cycling: measure your most common route on
a map in kilometers or miles, that should give you a very intuitive scale on
those.
And remember: Google is your friend! You can type straight in stuff like:
"2.4 us pints in l"
sudo ergo sum
Notice that if you lay out a square field such that an ox team can plow one furrow across then rest, you get a square with sides of exactly one furlong or 660 ft. The area of that field 43,600 square feet, which is nearly exactly one acre (43,560 ft).
Sorry, but that's off by a factor of ten. A traditional farmers acre is indeed 660 feet long, but only 66 feet wide. (That is, one furlong by one chain). A furlong square field would be ten acres.
Long, narrow fields allow the farmer to plow the field with the minimum number of turns. Turning an ox team around is not quite as easy as you might expect.
The same reason for long-narrow fields still applies to tractors, which also take time to turn. Of course, tractors do not need to rest, so the fields can be longer. Fields of a mile or more in length or not uncommon in the US and Canada.