The historic analogy here is ninja vs samurai. If a ninja could get a sneak kill, he would win. But a frontal fight against a heavily armoured and armed samurai is a suicide for a ninja.
And then the pirates come sailing in, and blow them both up with their long guns...
And its all because of that damned stealth which cripples the HELL out of the aircraft! The ONLY advantage it gives you is on sneaking up, that's it, and in return for the sneaking up?
Being somewhere else, when the hundreds of radar-guided missiles blow-up, is quite an advantage, and that has nothing to do with "sneaking up".
They want a stealth figher for 6 billions. Check the R&D cost for the F22 and then come back.
The F-22 and F-35 unit cost is about $150m per. That's not much worse than the $100m unit cost of the Indian T-50.
And they're paying much more than the $6 billion you're quoting...
"The Russian and Indian air forces each plan to build about 250 FGFAs, at an estimated cost of $100 million per fighter. That adds up to $25 billion each, in addition to the development cost."
India is potentially a rising power and with their experience with China, the Russians may be uneasy about providing the Indians with a powerful weapon.
Except the Russians are motivated by money, here. If they don't provide what they promised, the Indians will merely go to the next major suppliers, which may either be technically superior and/or less expensive, and as a result, Russia will only lose billions of dollars.
But what happens when supplies of natural gas either radically go up in price or become limited due to some other distribution problem?
Well, then a 60% air to 40% propane mixture (IIRC) can easily be substituted. Or natural gas utilities can pump their cryogenic LNG from their huge storage tanks into the local lines when the national pipeline gets cut off (and put out the call for more LNG ships to start heading to their terminals). Or on a local level, users of natural gas can draw from their big CNG tanks, that they've filled-up from the pipeline when everything was working properly, using the ~$5000USD compressor they purchased to convert NG into CNG in their tanks.
Or natural gas powered electrical plants can simply shut-down, leaving utilities to request more power from hydro and any other sources they have, and perhaps perform rolling blackouts if supply still can't meet demand. Or the natural gas industry can see the projections of rising demand, and finally decide to commit the resources to building a second, parallel pipeline across the US, which will meet high demand, and provide redundancy in the event of damage to either one.
There are far more options than just keeping an old, polluting mess of a coal-fired power plant around and running. And they probably cost less than the medical expenses caused by the pollution. The long-term solution may be increasing use of renewable energy (like solar and wind), which doesn't need any infrastructure to supply fuel, and isn't subject to input/fuel price fluctuations.
Yeah, I miss not having two global warming stories every single day... Or a mundane story about Apple daily... Google may have partially taken their place.
I wonder when they'll get back around to that whole hard science and technology thing. Stuff that matters.
Go back a few years, and the stuff you listed would be the middle of the road, bulk pablem. Seriously, another comic book movie? You didn't list a thing with a new and original story line... I'd put something like Inception ahead of all of those. Hell, i'd put low budget films like The Big Empty above any thing you listed.
HBO doesn't want your money, because they earn a billion dollars a year from the middle-men you want to snub. They have enough competition that those middle men would happily drop HBO if they saw signs that they will soon threaten their traditionally profitable business model. Customers would complain a bit, get a few free months of Cinemax, Starz, Showtime, etc., and then HBO would lose their billion dollars, and forced to be nothing but another Netflix competitor with the same slim margins.
Cubeville is bad enough. I'm having to overhear folks politics the next row over right now (not my politics...).
Never mind politics... It's the guy 3 cubes down ALWAYS making personal calls for mundane crap, like getting his car's oil changed, getting his house cleaned, arguing with his wife about who's going to pick up the kids, etc.
I *DON'T* want to use "old stuff". I want to use all the new stuff, WITHOUT needing to have a computer around to set it all up!
Ethernet is nice, but not necessary
Again, your myopia is showing, and you're telling ME off for telling other people how they should be using their tablets? Are you sure you don't have a learning disability?
Tell me, how do you get internet access in a building with wired ethernet ports everywhere, but no wifi in-range? How do you get your tablet onto private networks that they wouldn't dare hook up to WiFi? How do you justify your unnecessarily crippled tablet, for the lack of a $1 design change?
And why would you want a different port, except to interface with older peripherals?
Umm... To interface with NEW peripherals, perhaps?
Moreover, the market for tablets and smartphones that replace conventional computers rather than supplement them is for people who aren't that demanding of their computers, for obvious reasons
The "obvious reasons" are ONLY the lack of those two ports (which you keep telling me nobody wants or needs). Once you've got them, you can replace Android with Ubuntu or other Linux distro, and then tablet becomes a fully capable laptop/desktop replacement.
The replacement for USB thumb drives is either micro-SD cards
Most tablets don't accept them, and you certainly can't connect more than one, in order to copy files between them (and tablets don't have enough local storage).
or just keeping things in the cloud so they don't have to be passed around.
With large files, that works like crap. Limited data plans, poor signal, slow speeds, etc. And what's more, with TVs, DVD Players, and other STBs coming with USB ports that they can play videos off of, they can't access the "cloud", and once again you need to resort to pulling out your laptop/desktop to do the simplest task in the world that any phone or tablet should easily be able to manage...
I think I've wasted more than enough time on your mind-numbing ignorance.
The dot.com boom made LOTS of people multi-millionaires on paper, but in the form of stock options they couldn't sell for a decade. The bubble burst long before most could even potentially have cashed-in.
what I see as your main problem is your insistence that tablets and phones hook up to old-fashioned peripherals.
USB isn't going away, and it's idiotic to say so. Hell, you ALREADY have a USB port on your phone and your tablet. I just want to make it easier to use, without needing a dammed dongle.
Ethernet isn't going away, either. The whole world isn't going switch everything to wireless, so there will forever be a need to connect via networking cable. Hell, most devices that you can access from you phone, NEED to be set-up via wired ethernet FIRST. And until tablets get these ports, they won't really be alternatives to desktops or laptops, as you'll still need to keep one of those around to pick up after your crippled tablet.
Newer peripherals have different I/O methods, designed to fit with phones and tablets.
Okay. Point me to your replacement for USB thumb drives. Point me to a printer you can use without a WiFi AP anywhere nearby. Point me to a TV tuner for your tablet.
When was the last time you bought a computer or motherboard with an RS-232 or Centronics parallel port? I used to use those things heavily, and that's how my printer and modem talked to my computer
Computers had serial and parallel ports *PLUS USB* for many years, before the older interface disappeared. Tablets skipped an important step, and as I said, some things won't or can't ever switch to bluetooth.
For example, your bullshit point that a replacement drive is refurbished. Every time I get a drive I record the manufacture date, serial #, etc. None are refurbished.
Either you've been unbelievably lucky, you're horribly mistaken, or you're lying through your teeth. I don't really care which.
commodity x86 server market is not the place to make money
The x86 server market doesn't have to be all "commodity". Look at a company like HP, who's NonStop and Tandem systems look likely to switch over to x86-64 processors in the near future.
As long as you can maintain some simple value-add on your servers, the CPU architecture really doesn't matter. Apple figured that out on their desktops/workstations. Cray has that figured out in their supercomputers. And IBM... Wants as much vendor lock-in as they can get, to keep people from fleeing from their support contracts, that amount to permanent hardware and software rental agreements.
In short, and with all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
I've got a few thousand servers that say you're utterly and totally wrong, and your little rant here shows profound ignorance and myopia, yet you insist your little superstitious rabbit's foot of a hard drive buying policy will keep you safe from tigers...
Things like fever and coughing are part of the body's immune response, and letting them do their work will result in a faster recovery
Things like coughing, runny nose, and sneezing, are also how your viral infection spreads to other people. Even if you are sick slightly longer, not infecting those around you is still a positive outcome.
Always buy whatever drive is warranted for 5 years. I pay 50% more for this! It's worth every penny. My terabyte-years are the cheapest.
You're making a big assumption that manufacturers make any attempt to ensure their drives will exceed their warranties. In fact that may be banking on the fact that:
A) Most people won't use their hard drives that long. B) If they fail, people usually won't bother with the hassle of a warranty return. C) The cost of return shipping can make buying a new drive nearly as economical as a warranty return. D) Warranty replacements are dirt-cheap refurbished drives, not new ones. E) The price of a 2TB drive will crash through the floor over the next 5 years. F) People won't want a direct 2TB replacement in 5 years, they'll want to upgrade to the latest, fastest 20TB drives...
And more...
You might even find that the company with the shorter warranty will cross-ship a replacement drive and return shipping label for free, while the company with the longer warranty may require you to pay shipping, and wait weeks for the replacement drive.
I have a 1.5GHz quad-core tablet with 2GB of RAM. And no, it's not 'enough to serve most people's needs'. It still feels like running Windows XP on a 90MHz Pentium.
Sounds like you bought a cheap crap tablet, with a touchscreen that barely works. With those specs, your software should be flying.
It can, but it's not "free". You need a lot of heavy equipment to use that thin atmosphere to slow down. Landing on something without an atmosphere, and with low gravity, might only take a tiny fraction as much weight in fuel.
I remember when WD caviar drives were the most replaced component on systems I serviced
Yeah, it seems that WD was the first of the HDD makers to crank up their power draw, and the excess heat in cases expecting older, cooler drives caused rampant failures. I don't think it's a coincidence that they've learned a lesson from that, and gone the other way... WD was the first offering "green" drives, and they do run cold and quiet.
Personally, with the failure rates being reasonably close, there's one minor thing that influences my decision. WD drives (for many years) honor the acoustic noise management flag, passed by hdparm or other software, practically eliminating seek noise. Seagate drives ignore that flag, so in something like my HTPC, the Seagate drives are always randomly making distracting noises, while my WD green drives (passed the right flags) are quiet enough to go into a fan-less, silent HTPC system.
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Except for the many devices that do not...
That also doesn't help 802.11g or 802.11n devices that are 2.4GHz only, but hobbled by 802.11b backwards compatibility.
Hell, I'd say just do something to stop people from selecting overlapping channels in the 2.4GHz band, and things will improve greatly.
And then the pirates come sailing in, and blow them both up with their long guns...
Being somewhere else, when the hundreds of radar-guided missiles blow-up, is quite an advantage, and that has nothing to do with "sneaking up".
The F-22 and F-35 unit cost is about $150m per. That's not much worse than the $100m unit cost of the Indian T-50.
And they're paying much more than the $6 billion you're quoting...
"The Russian and Indian air forces each plan to build about 250 FGFAs, at an estimated cost of $100 million per fighter. That adds up to $25 billion each, in addition to the development cost."
Except the Russians are motivated by money, here. If they don't provide what they promised, the Indians will merely go to the next major suppliers, which may either be technically superior and/or less expensive, and as a result, Russia will only lose billions of dollars.
Well, then a 60% air to 40% propane mixture (IIRC) can easily be substituted. Or natural gas utilities can pump their cryogenic LNG from their huge storage tanks into the local lines when the national pipeline gets cut off (and put out the call for more LNG ships to start heading to their terminals). Or on a local level, users of natural gas can draw from their big CNG tanks, that they've filled-up from the pipeline when everything was working properly, using the ~$5000USD compressor they purchased to convert NG into CNG in their tanks.
Or natural gas powered electrical plants can simply shut-down, leaving utilities to request more power from hydro and any other sources they have, and perhaps perform rolling blackouts if supply still can't meet demand. Or the natural gas industry can see the projections of rising demand, and finally decide to commit the resources to building a second, parallel pipeline across the US, which will meet high demand, and provide redundancy in the event of damage to either one.
There are far more options than just keeping an old, polluting mess of a coal-fired power plant around and running. And they probably cost less than the medical expenses caused by the pollution. The long-term solution may be increasing use of renewable energy (like solar and wind), which doesn't need any infrastructure to supply fuel, and isn't subject to input/fuel price fluctuations.
Yeah, I miss not having two global warming stories every single day... Or a mundane story about Apple daily... Google may have partially taken their place.
I wonder when they'll get back around to that whole hard science and technology thing. Stuff that matters.
Entirely, yes, but that whole *story* thing is and should be the single biggest contributing factor to the quality of a film.
Only true if you vastly oversimplify every story to a ridiculous degree, to make it fit your silly dogma.
Go back a few years, and the stuff you listed would be the middle of the road, bulk pablem. Seriously, another comic book movie? You didn't list a thing with a new and original story line... I'd put something like Inception ahead of all of those. Hell, i'd put low budget films like The Big Empty above any thing you listed.
HBO doesn't want your money, because they earn a billion dollars a year from the middle-men you want to snub. They have enough competition that those middle men would happily drop HBO if they saw signs that they will soon threaten their traditionally profitable business model. Customers would complain a bit, get a few free months of Cinemax, Starz, Showtime, etc., and then HBO would lose their billion dollars, and forced to be nothing but another Netflix competitor with the same slim margins.
"No news is... Slashdot News."
Never mind politics... It's the guy 3 cubes down ALWAYS making personal calls for mundane crap, like getting his car's oil changed, getting his house cleaned, arguing with his wife about who's going to pick up the kids, etc.
I *DON'T* want to use "old stuff". I want to use all the new stuff, WITHOUT needing to have a computer around to set it all up!
Again, your myopia is showing, and you're telling ME off for telling other people how they should be using their tablets? Are you sure you don't have a learning disability?
Tell me, how do you get internet access in a building with wired ethernet ports everywhere, but no wifi in-range? How do you get your tablet onto private networks that they wouldn't dare hook up to WiFi? How do you justify your unnecessarily crippled tablet, for the lack of a $1 design change?
Umm... To interface with NEW peripherals, perhaps?
The "obvious reasons" are ONLY the lack of those two ports (which you keep telling me nobody wants or needs). Once you've got them, you can replace Android with Ubuntu or other Linux distro, and then tablet becomes a fully capable laptop/desktop replacement.
Most tablets don't accept them, and you certainly can't connect more than one, in order to copy files between them (and tablets don't have enough local storage).
With large files, that works like crap. Limited data plans, poor signal, slow speeds, etc. And what's more, with TVs, DVD Players, and other STBs coming with USB ports that they can play videos off of, they can't access the "cloud", and once again you need to resort to pulling out your laptop/desktop to do the simplest task in the world that any phone or tablet should easily be able to manage...
I think I've wasted more than enough time on your mind-numbing ignorance.
Because infecting your whole family is okay? Not everyone lives alone, under a bridge.
The dot.com boom made LOTS of people multi-millionaires on paper, but in the form of stock options they couldn't sell for a decade. The bubble burst long before most could even potentially have cashed-in.
USB isn't going away, and it's idiotic to say so. Hell, you ALREADY have a USB port on your phone and your tablet. I just want to make it easier to use, without needing a dammed dongle.
Ethernet isn't going away, either. The whole world isn't going switch everything to wireless, so there will forever be a need to connect via networking cable. Hell, most devices that you can access from you phone, NEED to be set-up via wired ethernet FIRST. And until tablets get these ports, they won't really be alternatives to desktops or laptops, as you'll still need to keep one of those around to pick up after your crippled tablet.
Okay. Point me to your replacement for USB thumb drives. Point me to a printer you can use without a WiFi AP anywhere nearby. Point me to a TV tuner for your tablet.
Computers had serial and parallel ports *PLUS USB* for many years, before the older interface disappeared. Tablets skipped an important step, and as I said, some things won't or can't ever switch to bluetooth.
Either you've been unbelievably lucky, you're horribly mistaken, or you're lying through your teeth. I don't really care which.
The x86 server market doesn't have to be all "commodity". Look at a company like HP, who's NonStop and Tandem systems look likely to switch over to x86-64 processors in the near future.
As long as you can maintain some simple value-add on your servers, the CPU architecture really doesn't matter. Apple figured that out on their desktops/workstations. Cray has that figured out in their supercomputers. And IBM... Wants as much vendor lock-in as they can get, to keep people from fleeing from their support contracts, that amount to permanent hardware and software rental agreements.
I've got a few thousand servers that say you're utterly and totally wrong, and your little rant here shows profound ignorance and myopia, yet you insist your little superstitious rabbit's foot of a hard drive buying policy will keep you safe from tigers...
Things like coughing, runny nose, and sneezing, are also how your viral infection spreads to other people. Even if you are sick slightly longer, not infecting those around you is still a positive outcome.
You're making a big assumption that manufacturers make any attempt to ensure their drives will exceed their warranties. In fact that may be banking on the fact that:
A) Most people won't use their hard drives that long.
B) If they fail, people usually won't bother with the hassle of a warranty return.
C) The cost of return shipping can make buying a new drive nearly as economical as a warranty return.
D) Warranty replacements are dirt-cheap refurbished drives, not new ones.
E) The price of a 2TB drive will crash through the floor over the next 5 years.
F) People won't want a direct 2TB replacement in 5 years, they'll want to upgrade to the latest, fastest 20TB drives...
And more...
You might even find that the company with the shorter warranty will cross-ship a replacement drive and return shipping label for free, while the company with the longer warranty may require you to pay shipping, and wait weeks for the replacement drive.
Sounds like you bought a cheap crap tablet, with a touchscreen that barely works. With those specs, your software should be flying.
It can, but it's not "free". You need a lot of heavy equipment to use that thin atmosphere to slow down. Landing on something without an atmosphere, and with low gravity, might only take a tiny fraction as much weight in fuel.
Yeah, it seems that WD was the first of the HDD makers to crank up their power draw, and the excess heat in cases expecting older, cooler drives caused rampant failures. I don't think it's a coincidence that they've learned a lesson from that, and gone the other way... WD was the first offering "green" drives, and they do run cold and quiet.
Personally, with the failure rates being reasonably close, there's one minor thing that influences my decision. WD drives (for many years) honor the acoustic noise management flag, passed by hdparm or other software, practically eliminating seek noise. Seagate drives ignore that flag, so in something like my HTPC, the Seagate drives are always randomly making distracting noises, while my WD green drives (passed the right flags) are quiet enough to go into a fan-less, silent HTPC system.