It has long appeared to me that all the best talent at Cupertino is being assigned to work on iOS, and OSX is suffering as a result.
One upon a time, a new MacOSX release meant you might need to put more RAM in the box, but even some seven-year-old piece of hardware would go faster, and there would be fewer bugs or crashes. [Consider a late G3 iMac, upgraded all the way from Public Beta to Tiger.] These days, you put more RAM in (if you can if you have a machine old enough that Apple didn't solder all the memory in during manufacture) just to make it less sluggish.
Drawing performance seems especially poor, which makes me wonder: if I bought a top-end top-of-the-range Mac Pro, would it be any better at being a desktop computer than what I have now? I'm not sure it would.
AOL is indeed the ISP of other people's grandparents, and in general an @aol.com email address indicates cluelessness. I got used to that idea a long time ago, and all the evidence at hand very strongly supported it.
Except for a cluster of outliers, significant folks. All of the folks, and it seems all their spouses, that I know that are highly-specialised engineers doing contract work for the government [UK or US? yes, both], and the phrase "developed vetting" comes to mind, have AOL addresses. Not Gmail Hotmail Outlook Yahoo or some pet ISP or other, but AOL. One of these guys allegedly has an RF-shielded room in his house from the CRT days because of concerns about tempesting and the like.
Not secret. Just forgotten and unimportant and not a priority.
Why underground? As has has been pointed out elsewhere, during the Great War Adolf was an infantryman on the Western Front, who associated safety with being in a bunker underground. So the Nazis wasted much effort constructing vast underground complexes in which to do all sorts of things.
Let's assume there are elevated radiation levels at this site, which is 75 acres. Compared to many industrial sites, that's big; compared to the Hanford estate, or Windscale, or Chelyabinsk 65, or Oak Ridge, or... it's tiny. Probably not a bomb project, then. What else nuclear-related might Adolf's minions have been up to?
How about: processing pitchblende to recover interesting metals? Such as... [1] Uranium. Principal metal to be had from pitchblende. The oxide can be used to make fancy yellow glass. If you're one of Adolf's minions, it's a waste product. [2] Polonium. Also a waste product. [3] Radium. Which can be used to make luminous paint for instrument dials, for use in eg aeroplanes. It's not like the Nazis built any aeroplanes, is it?
I did misread the post, but not the day/night thing... the clue was in the article's title, "Martian Windchill in Terrestrial Terms"... in the absence of windchill, subjectively it should feel far warmer because of reduced heat losses.
Dear Lord... so I followed the link. It even says "Summer afternoons in the tropics of Mars might even feel as comfortable as an average winter day in the south of England" in the paper's abstract. Tsk.
Mmmm no. Southern England may be at the same latitude as Minneapolis, but because of the North Atlantic Drift (branch of the Gulf Stream) the climate is very different. -20C is generally not encountered in Southern England even on a very cold night in a very harsh winter.
Making duplicate plates is hard work. What those people do is mostly steal your plates. It is vital to report such thefts immediately to avoid being held accountable oneself for assorted traffic offences committed by the thieves.
In principle, one ought to be able to demand in court that the prosecution's images be shown, and then contest them. In the UK, this causes the prosecution to allege that you have modified your vehicle in an attempt to avoid conviction. This sort of thing continues in spite of high profile cases where someone is charged with speeding offences in a part of the country entirely different to the remote location where one uses one's tractor.
So yes, it is entirely possible both to obey the law and fulfil your social responsibilities, and yet still get prosecuted.
Automatic numberplate recognition is wonderful -- but it should be an addition to policing, not a replacement.
I recall being taught at university over twenty years ago that neither the ionic bond nor the covalent bond were real; rather, that they were occasionally convenient approximations of how some linear combinations of atomic orbitals often behaved.
The idea that for some elements, especially the lighter ones, electrons other than those in the outermost shell do contribute significantly to LCAO should surprise nobody competent.
Because of prior expertise in VSTOL and STOVL aircraft acquired by British (or nominally British) defence contractors with the Harrier and the Rolls-Royce Pegasus vectored-thrust engine, it was inevitable that there would be some British involvement in JSF. Depending on whether the Boeing-led consortium or the Lockheed-led consortium won the contract, this was looking to be either 12% or 8% of the value of the program contracts.
There are five principal customers for JSF. They are, in my understanding of the size of their prospective order, the USAF, USN, USMC, RAF and the Fleet Air Arm. The USAF want a conventional aircraft, the USN want something with a catapult shoe and a tailhook, and the others want STOVL. From my point of view, building any variant other than the STOVL one is insane, but what do I know?
If the MOD cancels the orders for the Royal Air Force and Fleet Air Arm, it will save itself money -- and more money when it realises it can cancel the proposed two conventionally powered aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince Of Wales. Eventually Her Majesty's armed forces will be reduced to a single Somali mercenary armed with a board with a nail through it. In the meantime, the DoD will order the 3000 or so units it wants, and they will still get built at $50m per unit or whatever, and British defence contractors will get about 4% of that, down from the forecast 8% because of effective lobbying done in Washington to re-award some contracts.
What sticks in HM Goverment's craw with regard to the Pentagon refusing to release source code for this weapons platform is that British defence contractors will not be able to maintain the aircraft. Only Pentagon-approved -- ie US -- companies will be able to do this, and awarding defence contracts of any kind to foreign companies is as politically unpalatable in the UK as it is in the US. [Which is why the British Army's AH-64D's cost about $40m per unit instead of about $12m; built under licence by Westland, and then the US manufacturer refused to supply flight simulator software etc, so British contractors had to develop their own.]
The supposed danger that the US might be able to use the weapons platform software to veto British military action is ridiculous -- the last time any Prime Minister defied the US Goverment in defence matters was when Harold Wilson publicly endorsed LBJ's position on Vietnam but refused to send any troops.
OK people let us consider this from the Cryptonomicon perspective.
When Enoch Root and Randy Waterhouse are in the jail in Manila, Root comes out with this lecture about how the Second World War was a conflict between worshippers of Ares and of Pallas-Athene -- the Ares-worshippers built bigger guns and tanks, while the Athenians used their knowledge to make the same guns and tanks, which may have been inferior to the Ares-worshippers' ones, but they were mass-produced and covered in superior electronic sensors. The physically-strong were defeated by the mentally-strong. Knowledge is power, sensors are good, and surely this man-portable battlefield radar-scope is... wholesome. Western armies need such things, as more and more conflicts are likely to be urbanised insurgencies rather than wars between nation-states.
But consider also Bobby Shaftoe. He relies not on decrypted communications intercepts and on fancy sensors, but on his eyes and ears and his brain and his training and he displays adaptability.
Shaftoe is inserted into Luzon with a team ahead of the main invasion, and given boxes of spare parts for Thompsons he is soon handing out assembled "trench brooms" to the Filipino soldiers with him. And when the Filipino lieutenant identifies an aircraft above them as a P-51, Shaftoe is taking cover, and any other soldier with sense follows his lead, because he has identified the aircraft as a US Army artillery spotter plane.
Shaftoe would take a dim view of this man-portable battlefield radar-scope. He doesn't need it. What would happen to anybody who is trained to use it and relies on it when they don't have it? At the first wall on the battlefield, they'll just... stop.
Toys are fun but they are no substitute for competence. I am gravely concerned at the extent to which various militaries can no longer navigate because of their apparent dependence on GPS.
So you'd also need to built a transport route between the northerly moon base and the equatorial lunar elevator. I suppose that would be a lot less effort than building a bloody lunar elevator though, given that we haven't even been to the place in around 30 years. Northerly moon base? The best-argued location I ever saw was for the lunar south pole; permanent sunlight, water, and constant ambient temperatures of -20degC.
But, yes, a lunar space elevator would have to have an equatorial ground station, and the lunar equator is far from the best place for a moonbase.
I have a policy of taking on Windows support jobs from my family, extended family, friends, mates down the pub, and so on. These people are required to accept that:
I *might* not be able to fix their Windows PC's problems
These people are required to accept that I may do a better job than the local PC World, for example backing up *all* their documents before wiping the hard disk.
What's in it for me?
You do actually get respect and thanks; on the first cleanup you complete for someone, at least.
I'm a software development guy -- having a knowledge of Wintel diseases, both symptoms and remedies, that in places exceeds that of the hardware support guys whose designated responsibility this is, is a big career advantage. [And hey, those guys still have to speak on the phone to the customers with the broken Wintel boxes, and I don't.]
I'm in the UK, where we do not celebrate the successful emigration of a bunch of religious dissidents -- even if they may have been Daniel Waterhouse's co-religionists, and even if there is a considerable probability that the Mayflower was built in an Elizabethan shipyard two to three miles away from here. But s/Thanksgiving/Christmas/gp , and the question remains good.
I have a Mac. My mum has a Mac. I have a Wintel box, but's got Win95 installed, and I generally vacuum out the dustbunnies before booting it. My mum hears tales of woe from her bridge-playing cronies about 'worms' and 'viruses' and 'my computer broke, and I have a man in once a month to clean it up, how about you', and after two years still doesn't quite understand what's going on well enough to have developed MacOSX smugness.
[1] Installing *on* Windows? Generally by the time I get called in, any machine I get to see is so smashed by viruses, worms, spyware, descents into DLL hell and so on, that the fastest way to clean it up is to back up, wipe, and reinstall. Sometimes I add a bigger hard disc. (Tip: Ma/Pa has probably lost their Windows CD key. I found you can get these back using Belarc Advisor, http://www.belarc.com/ -- but this won't help unless Ma/Pa still has the original CDs.]
I also generally nag about keeping antivirus software up-to-date, and also point out how many ways their USB ADSL modem can stop working; far better to fit an ethernet card if necessary, and get a combined modem/router/hub/hardware firewall. But I'm usually flogging a dead horse by this point.
The Royal Navy led the world in the mid-19th century in adopting steam propulsion, with ships proceeding in formation at constant speed, with evolutions being carried out as per flag signals from the flagship. Signal books became more complicated; signalling became a job for the brightest and best, among both officers and seamen. New signalling mechanisms such as Morse code over wireless, or Morse over signal lamp, were adopted with alacrity. People sent signals because they could, and having sent signals to the commander, whose orders they were supposed to follow, they expected replies.
Consequently, after a couple of decades of this, the Royal Navy couldn't fight worth shit.
There are two anecdotes involving Nelson and signalling -- the "blind eye" at Copenhagen, and the "England expects" before Trafalgar. These weren't tactical signals. These were Nelson having a laugh. Nelson had no truck with centralised command and this signalling malarkey; he trained his commanders as he was trained, to understand their job and to get on with it as they saw fit. Nelson and his like put the fear of God (or rather, the fear of the Royal Navy) so thoroughly that it lasted a century.
This "the soldier is the network" business means that a soldier is going to get flooded with urgent requests for tax records at a moment when he might expect to be being given information about at which window to point his grenade launcher. But then, that information would probably be coming from a major in a bunker in the Pentagon who's never handled a grenade launcher, and whose orders are going to be at best meaningless and at worst horribly counterproductive.
Maybe the DoD should consult at the militaries of other nations, that have efficient armed forces and smaller budgets, and see what'd spend the money on, given the choice. Wouldn't be this. But it might be a smaller, lighter, more reliable, more powerful, strongly-encrypted radio comms system with extensions for a whiteboard mode.
... is a bad idea as a retrofit. Assuming you can obtain a suitable reactor design and a supply of close-to-bomb-grade fuel pins, and you can build this thing, and you have technicians to drive it in three-shift operation, you still keep getting stuck with extra costs -- disposing of spent fuel, the emergency defuelling shed, etc etc. USN skimped on some of these sort of things even for the Nimitz class.
Of course, nuclear propulsion is of interest to the Navy of the United States of Brazil (er... USB. Not sure if they're running the 1.1 or the 2.0 constitution, but what the heck). They have had an ongoing SSN (nuclear-powered attack submarine) programme running for many years, so it's not like they're planning to exploit the sea flank in some local aggression in Latin America, they plan to be a blue-water navy.
Good luck to 'em. It's expensive. That's why Her Majesty's MOD entertained nuclear propulsion for a few seconds at most for the two aircraft carriers ordered from a Thales-led consortium. That's why the Royal Navy likes two (or preferably three, or four, or more, of everything) -- if somebody knows the maintenance schedule of your better assets, then they can pencil in several sets of prospective invasion dates straight away. Aircraft carriers are not much use without aircraft, either.
Digression: roll your own aircraft carrier? You're probably going to need steam catapult and arrester wires to launch and recover aircraft. Nobody's ever built a dependable steam catapult; the US, UK and France tried and close enough, others have tried and failed. But the spend-the-money-in-your-own-economy aspects of building your own aircraft carrier are compelling.
What aircraft do you need? Fighters or fighter-bombers; bombers; transports; search-and-rescue helicopters; Airborne Warning And Control System; airborne tankers; antisubmarine warfare aircraft. I maintain that the catapult-shoe-plus-tailhook variant of the JSF that the USN has demanded is a waste of time and they should be running the Marine Corps' STOVL one instead. But all of these aircraft, and crew, and training, cost money. The way forward is to share costs.
So if the Brazilians, or whoever, really cared, they'd buy into several consortia, for aircraft purchases and crew training, and for the ship construction programme.
Buy someone else's 60-year old castoff? I don't care how many refits it's had, it's fit only for razor blades.
... so we get the word that some someone, somewhere, is going to launch against someone else. We give the order, and the self-propelled missile-defence laser takes off, lands on an airfield in the supposed target area, and shuts down three engines: a fourth remains running to supply bigawatts, as required.
Having a static platform like this makes fire-control a little easier, too.
But I think having the system mounted on an aeroplane is more to do with rapid deployment than Cold-War-style not-being-caught-on-the-ground.
I wrote lots of code for NEXTSTEP3.3/OPENSTEP4.2, and I needed it to run on all supported architectures, and it did.
MacOS, even X, has never gone into public deployment on anything but bigendian hardware. This means that alls sorts of apps, and system software, is going to break horribly, or at least lose document compatibility, if built for Intel, because way too many people have not contemplated endianity.
The MacOSX Darwin stuff is another matter; that's publicly available for x86, and I'm guessing maintainers have diligently preserved/re-introduced/introduced hton...() and ntoh...() to keep it endian-neutral. Cocoa should be completely (or almost completely) architecture-neutral for the same historical reasons.
If Apple really wanted to deploy MacOS on x86, and they wanted it to work, it would take many man-years of reviewing legacy code, and too many third-parties would not have their apps or system software ready for the flag day.
Whatever plans Apple may have involving x86, it doesn't involve my desktop anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. Remember the irregular verb:
I give confidential briefings
You leak
He is breach of Section 2a of the Official Secrets Act
It has long appeared to me that all the best talent at Cupertino is being assigned to work on iOS, and OSX is suffering as a result.
One upon a time, a new MacOSX release meant you might need to put more RAM in the box, but even some seven-year-old piece of hardware would go faster, and there would be fewer bugs or crashes. [Consider a late G3 iMac, upgraded all the way from Public Beta to Tiger.] These days, you put more RAM in (if you can if you have a machine old enough that Apple didn't solder all the memory in during manufacture) just to make it less sluggish.
Drawing performance seems especially poor, which makes me wonder: if I bought a top-end top-of-the-range Mac Pro, would it be any better at being a desktop computer than what I have now? I'm not sure it would.
AOL is indeed the ISP of other people's grandparents, and in general an @aol.com email address indicates cluelessness. I got used to that idea a long time ago, and all the evidence at hand very strongly supported it.
Except for a cluster of outliers, significant folks. All of the folks, and it seems all their spouses, that I know that are highly-specialised engineers doing contract work for the government [UK or US? yes, both], and the phrase "developed vetting" comes to mind, have AOL addresses. Not Gmail Hotmail Outlook Yahoo or some pet ISP or other, but AOL. One of these guys allegedly has an RF-shielded room in his house from the CRT days because of concerns about tempesting and the like.
Why are all those folks on AOL?
Not secret. Just forgotten and unimportant and not a priority.
Why underground? As has has been pointed out elsewhere, during the Great War Adolf was an infantryman on the Western Front, who associated safety with being in a bunker underground. So the Nazis wasted much effort constructing vast underground complexes in which to do all sorts of things.
Let's assume there are elevated radiation levels at this site, which is 75 acres. Compared to many industrial sites, that's big; compared to the Hanford estate, or Windscale, or Chelyabinsk 65, or Oak Ridge, or ... it's tiny. Probably not a bomb project, then. What else nuclear-related might Adolf's minions have been up to?
How about: processing pitchblende to recover interesting metals? Such as ...
[1] Uranium. Principal metal to be had from pitchblende. The oxide can be used to make fancy yellow glass. If you're one of Adolf's minions, it's a waste product.
[2] Polonium. Also a waste product.
[3] Radium. Which can be used to make luminous paint for instrument dials, for use in eg aeroplanes. It's not like the Nazis built any aeroplanes, is it?
I did misread the post, but not the day/night thing ... the clue was in the article's title, "Martian Windchill in Terrestrial Terms" ... in the absence of windchill, subjectively it should feel far warmer because of reduced heat losses.
Dear Lord... so I followed the link. It even says "Summer afternoons in the tropics of Mars might even feel as comfortable as an average winter day in the south of England" in the paper's abstract. Tsk.
Mmmm no. Southern England may be at the same latitude as Minneapolis, but because of the North Atlantic Drift (branch of the Gulf Stream) the climate is very different. -20C is generally not encountered in Southern England even on a very cold night in a very harsh winter.
Er, no.
Making duplicate plates is hard work. What those people do is mostly steal your plates. It is vital to report such thefts immediately to avoid being held accountable oneself for assorted traffic offences committed by the thieves.
In principle, one ought to be able to demand in court that the prosecution's images be shown, and then contest them. In the UK, this causes the prosecution to allege that you have modified your vehicle in an attempt to avoid conviction. This sort of thing continues in spite of high profile cases where someone is charged with speeding offences in a part of the country entirely different to the remote location where one uses one's tractor.
So yes, it is entirely possible both to obey the law and fulfil your social responsibilities, and yet still get prosecuted.
Automatic numberplate recognition is wonderful -- but it should be an addition to policing, not a replacement.
I recall being taught at university over twenty years ago that neither the ionic bond nor the covalent bond were real; rather, that they were occasionally convenient approximations of how some linear combinations of atomic orbitals often behaved.
The idea that for some elements, especially the lighter ones, electrons other than those in the outermost shell do contribute significantly to LCAO should surprise nobody competent.
Yes, these Pork Barrel watch-dogs need to be replaced with automated watch-hogs, ASAP. Can I have a Government contract to develop them please?
... and I'm not the only one, see paragraph 6: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/15/star_wars_ tv_spin_off/
Because of prior expertise in VSTOL and STOVL aircraft acquired by British (or nominally British) defence contractors with the Harrier and the Rolls-Royce Pegasus vectored-thrust engine, it was inevitable that there would be some British involvement in JSF. Depending on whether the Boeing-led consortium or the Lockheed-led consortium won the contract, this was looking to be either 12% or 8% of the value of the program contracts.
There are five principal customers for JSF. They are, in my understanding of the size of their prospective order, the USAF, USN, USMC, RAF and the Fleet Air Arm. The USAF want a conventional aircraft, the USN want something with a catapult shoe and a tailhook, and the others want STOVL. From my point of view, building any variant other than the STOVL one is insane, but what do I know?
If the MOD cancels the orders for the Royal Air Force and Fleet Air Arm, it will save itself money -- and more money when it realises it can cancel the proposed two conventionally powered aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince Of Wales. Eventually Her Majesty's armed forces will be reduced to a single Somali mercenary armed with a board with a nail through it. In the meantime, the DoD will order the 3000 or so units it wants, and they will still get built at $50m per unit or whatever, and British defence contractors will get about 4% of that, down from the forecast 8% because of effective lobbying done in Washington to re-award some contracts.
What sticks in HM Goverment's craw with regard to the Pentagon refusing to release source code for this weapons platform is that British defence contractors will not be able to maintain the aircraft. Only Pentagon-approved -- ie US -- companies will be able to do this, and awarding defence contracts of any kind to foreign companies is as politically unpalatable in the UK as it is in the US. [Which is why the British Army's AH-64D's cost about $40m per unit instead of about $12m; built under licence by Westland, and then the US manufacturer refused to supply flight simulator software etc, so British contractors had to develop their own.]
The supposed danger that the US might be able to use the weapons platform software to veto British military action is ridiculous -- the last time any Prime Minister defied the US Goverment in defence matters was when Harold Wilson publicly endorsed LBJ's position on Vietnam but refused to send any troops.
When Enoch Root and Randy Waterhouse are in the jail in Manila, Root comes out with this lecture about how the Second World War was a conflict between worshippers of Ares and of Pallas-Athene -- the Ares-worshippers built bigger guns and tanks, while the Athenians used their knowledge to make the same guns and tanks, which may have been inferior to the Ares-worshippers' ones, but they were mass-produced and covered in superior electronic sensors. The physically-strong were defeated by the mentally-strong. Knowledge is power, sensors are good, and surely this man-portable battlefield radar-scope is ... wholesome. Western armies need such things, as more and more conflicts are likely to be urbanised insurgencies rather than wars between nation-states.
But consider also Bobby Shaftoe. He relies not on decrypted communications intercepts and on fancy sensors, but on his eyes and ears and his brain and his training and he displays adaptability.
Shaftoe is inserted into Luzon with a team ahead of the main invasion, and given boxes of spare parts for Thompsons he is soon handing out assembled "trench brooms" to the Filipino soldiers with him. And when the Filipino lieutenant identifies an aircraft above them as a P-51, Shaftoe is taking cover, and any other soldier with sense follows his lead, because he has identified the aircraft as a US Army artillery spotter plane.
Shaftoe would take a dim view of this man-portable battlefield radar-scope. He doesn't need it. What would happen to anybody who is trained to use it and relies on it when they don't have it? At the first wall on the battlefield, they'll just ... stop.
Toys are fun but they are no substitute for competence. I am gravely concerned at the extent to which various militaries can no longer navigate because of their apparent dependence on GPS.
Northerly moon base? The best-argued location I ever saw was for the lunar south pole; permanent sunlight, water, and constant ambient temperatures of -20degC.
But, yes, a lunar space elevator would have to have an equatorial ground station, and the lunar equator is far from the best place for a moonbase.
What's in it for me?
I have a Mac. My mum has a Mac. I have a Wintel box, but's got Win95 installed, and I generally vacuum out the dustbunnies before booting it. My mum hears tales of woe from her bridge-playing cronies about 'worms' and 'viruses' and 'my computer broke, and I have a man in once a month to clean it up, how about you', and after two years still doesn't quite understand what's going on well enough to have developed MacOSX smugness.
[1] Installing *on* Windows? Generally by the time I get called in, any machine I get to see is so smashed by viruses, worms, spyware, descents into DLL hell and so on, that the fastest way to clean it up is to back up, wipe, and reinstall. Sometimes I add a bigger hard disc.
(Tip: Ma/Pa has probably lost their Windows CD key. I found you can get these back using Belarc Advisor, http://www.belarc.com/ -- but this won't help unless Ma/Pa still has the original CDs.]
[2] Ad-Aware SE is my favourite spyware killer -- http://www.lavasoftusa.com/
I also generally nag about keeping antivirus software up-to-date, and also point out how many ways their USB ADSL modem can stop working; far better to fit an ethernet card if necessary, and get a combined modem/router/hub/hardware firewall. But I'm usually flogging a dead horse by this point.
I bet George doesn't know the difference. It would explain a lot.
http://www.skintwo.com/
Although why the fact that TBL has got himself a night hood is deemed newsworthy eludes me entirely.
Moreover, a can that until recently contained beer of almost homeopathic strength, probably with a picture of a kangaroo on the label.
What is being proposed has been tried before.
The Royal Navy led the world in the mid-19th century in adopting steam propulsion, with ships proceeding in formation at constant speed, with evolutions being carried out as per flag signals from the flagship. Signal books became more complicated; signalling became a job for the brightest and best, among both officers and seamen. New signalling mechanisms such as Morse code over wireless, or Morse over signal lamp, were adopted with alacrity. People sent signals because they could, and having sent signals to the commander, whose orders they were supposed to follow, they expected replies.
Consequently, after a couple of decades of this, the Royal Navy couldn't fight worth shit.
There are two anecdotes involving Nelson and signalling -- the "blind eye" at Copenhagen, and the "England expects" before Trafalgar. These weren't tactical signals. These were Nelson having a laugh. Nelson had no truck with centralised command and this signalling malarkey; he trained his commanders as he was trained, to understand their job and to get on with it as they saw fit. Nelson and his like put the fear of God (or rather, the fear of the Royal Navy) so thoroughly that it lasted a century.
This "the soldier is the network" business means that a soldier is going to get flooded with urgent requests for tax records at a moment when he might expect to be being given information about at which window to point his grenade launcher. But then, that information would probably be coming from a major in a bunker in the Pentagon who's never handled a grenade launcher, and whose orders are going to be at best meaningless and at worst horribly counterproductive.
Maybe the DoD should consult at the militaries of other nations, that have efficient armed forces and smaller budgets, and see what'd spend the money on, given the choice. Wouldn't be this. But it might be a smaller, lighter, more reliable, more powerful, strongly-encrypted radio comms system with extensions for a whiteboard mode.
... is a bad idea as a retrofit. Assuming you can obtain a suitable reactor design and a supply of close-to-bomb-grade fuel pins, and you can build this thing, and you have technicians to drive it in three-shift operation, you still keep getting stuck with extra costs -- disposing of spent fuel, the emergency defuelling shed, etc etc. USN skimped on some of these sort of things even for the Nimitz class.
Of course, nuclear propulsion is of interest to the Navy of the United States of Brazil (er... USB. Not sure if they're running the 1.1 or the 2.0 constitution, but what the heck). They have had an ongoing SSN (nuclear-powered attack submarine) programme running for many years, so it's not like they're planning to exploit the sea flank in some local aggression in Latin America, they plan to be a blue-water navy.
Good luck to 'em. It's expensive. That's why Her Majesty's MOD entertained nuclear propulsion for a few seconds at most for the two aircraft carriers ordered from a Thales-led consortium. That's why the Royal Navy likes two (or preferably three, or four, or more, of everything) -- if somebody knows the maintenance schedule of your better assets, then they can pencil in several sets of prospective invasion dates straight away. Aircraft carriers are not much use without aircraft, either.
Digression: roll your own aircraft carrier? You're probably going to need steam catapult and arrester wires to launch and recover aircraft. Nobody's ever built a dependable steam catapult; the US, UK and France tried and close enough, others have tried and failed. But the spend-the-money-in-your-own-economy aspects of building your own aircraft carrier are compelling.
What aircraft do you need? Fighters or fighter-bombers; bombers; transports; search-and-rescue helicopters; Airborne Warning And Control System; airborne tankers; antisubmarine warfare aircraft. I maintain that the catapult-shoe-plus-tailhook variant of the JSF that the USN has demanded is a waste of time and they should be running the Marine Corps' STOVL one instead. But all of these aircraft, and crew, and training, cost money. The way forward is to share costs.
So if the Brazilians, or whoever, really cared, they'd buy into several consortia, for aircraft purchases and crew training, and for the ship construction programme.
Buy someone else's 60-year old castoff? I don't care how many refits it's had, it's fit only for razor blades.
Having a static platform like this makes fire-control a little easier, too.
But I think having the system mounted on an aeroplane is more to do with rapid deployment than Cold-War-style not-being-caught-on-the-ground.
I mean, if you can't drop a quarter billion on selling next year's boat anchor, what's the point of getting out of bed in the morning?
I wrote lots of code for NEXTSTEP3.3/OPENSTEP4.2, and I needed it to run on all supported architectures, and it did.
MacOS, even X, has never gone into public deployment on anything but bigendian hardware. This means that alls sorts of apps, and system software, is going to break horribly, or at least lose document compatibility, if built for Intel, because way too many people have not contemplated endianity.
The MacOSX Darwin stuff is another matter; that's publicly available for x86, and I'm guessing maintainers have diligently preserved/re-introduced/introduced hton...() and ntoh...() to keep it endian-neutral. Cocoa should be completely (or almost completely) architecture-neutral for the same historical reasons.
If Apple really wanted to deploy MacOS on x86, and they wanted it to work, it would take many man-years of reviewing legacy code, and too many third-parties would not have their apps or system software ready for the flag day.
Whatever plans Apple may have involving x86, it doesn't involve my desktop anytime soon.