This would be the first weapon mounted on aircraft/heavy machinery that the pilot/operator wouldn't have to worry about running out of ammo in combat! That's a pretty serious advantage, no matter what other shortcomings the weapon may have.
Assuming he has an infinite energy source on board too, of course. Otherwise firing the weapon will decrease range/endurance by increasing fuel consumption. Currently the opposite it true, because it reduces weight.
But then there is that overly logical Marine in me that says sounds unreliably. Much rather have a tried and true missile.
I've no doubt that the first laser weapons will be pretty poor. But back in the 50s there were probably overly logical Marines just like you saying they'd rather have a tried-and-true machine gun fitted to their planes. Once a concept has been proved to work, the military have a history of being quickly able to turn it into something practical.
I would like to know how such a weapon will acquire/track/target an incoming projectile. (That was not sarcasm; I really would like to know.) Mortar rounds generally travel in a high parabolic path - think of the St. Louis arch. Larger artillery shells - such as those fired from a battleship - follow a flatter trajectory. The targeting system would have to acquire a small incoming object, predict the path it will follow, and fire within a few seconds. That looks like a daunting task.
It's a solved problem. The Sea Wolf point defence system can shoot down 4.5-inch shells as well as supersonic missiles. Sea Wolf was first deployed in combat in 1982. Of course, you are likely to run out of missiles before they run out of cannon ammo, but maybe you can buy enough time to hit them with an Exocet.
Warships are expensive, so a lot of money has been spent on ways to protect them!
I think the Sex Pistols did the UK a lot of good. Back at the end of the 70's, society was still *very* conservative. The Sex Pistols were extremely shocking to a lot of people.
Shocking is too easy. Take South Park for example: once the initial joke of small children swearing wears off, it's just not funny anymore. There's no actual creativity or talent there, so it's just boring once it's no longer novel. Or Guns'n'Roses: once people got used to Axl Rose saying "Motherfucker" in every sentence, the band faded out of existance. Maybe they are still recording today, but who cares?
Really the only people who are interesting in the Sex Pistols these days are sold-out baby-boomers with jobs in PR or media and grey ponytails desperate to pretend that they're still young and "edgy". The Sex Pistols aren't remembered for their music at all. In another 25 years there's probably be a/. story about the Spice Girls...
Re: theory, schmory
on
One of Many
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Do today's highschool physics students laugh at the scientists of 50 years ago?
They might, if they could count to 50. Kids these days...
Happily I had pause for thought because the site went big and decided to go with file system storage for the images instead, and I'm glad I did
Why not do both? Oracle has a datatype called BFILE, in which the actual data is stored in the filesystem, and the row in the table contains a pointer to it. You have the best of both worlds, filesystem access to the image if you want it, or database access, and you can very easily integrate the image with the rest of your relational data.
he is relocating to LA to be back with his family (a bit like Anthony Head (Giles in Buffy) returning to England for over a year. But he might rough it and do a hotel stint for the 7th season (if it does go ahead)
Why did Apple choose to go out and start a new kernel project when they could have just based OS X on the Linux kernel instead? They could have gained so much ground and lost so little. It's worked for so many other companies--why not Apple?
Because NeXTStep was BSD-on-mach, and MacOS X on Xserve is essentially the next (forgive the pun) iteration of the NeXT Cube. (I am posting this from OmniWeb 2.0 running on NeXTStep 3.3 on an original Color Turbo).
And the raw graphics performance of the OS X display server is behind X11 in my experience (but do your own measurements if you don't believe me).
I would expect this to change in 10.2 with Quartz Extreme, which adds hardware acceleration. The Xserve's have graphics hardware onboard unlike most dedicated servers.
Maybe I'm just naive, but can someone explain a believable situation where four slower CPUs (say, 100mhz) would beat two faster ones (200mhz)? There's loads of overhead in an SMP system, so I find it hard to imagine that having more chips would be better. (I don't know about the special weird requirements of a big SQL system, though
Assume that all other things (bus speed, memory size and access speed, disk i/o speed) on your two systems are the same. The question is, how much work needs to be done to switch the running thread on a CPU? If it's a lot - and it might be, if you're working on large resultsets for your queries, and have lots of queries running concurrently - then the less you have to do it, the better. On systems like this, many slower processors give you more throughput and lower latency than a single faster one, even if (num cpus * clock speed) is the same on both.
Next I suggest you go here for a definition of capricious. How is Superman "impulsive and unpredictable?" Boring would be fair, a bit naive perhaps... but capricious? Still, superficially it sounded clever eh?
Guess you didn't see that movie where he whimsically holed an oil tanker, damaged monuments, trashed a bar and so forth?
According to Silicon Strategies, a group called "TV Linux Alliance" is creating a spec for digital set-top boxes using Linux.
The way to develop a product is to work out what you want to do, then look for a technology that can do it. Choosing the technology first then designing the product to fit the technology is backwards. Is the objective here to sell an STB, or is it to further the Linux cause? Because a for-profit company should prioritize the former over the latter.
Sorry, but your post reeks of "armchair CPU designer" : It's all so clear and so obvious. I mean, it's not like Intel and AMD have a lot of extremely clever people who seek the best balance between all of the systems...is it?
Yes, they are slowly improving, but modern PCs are still behind where workstations were years ago, and a modern Intel based server is well behind a SPARC based machine.
Intel and AMD will spend their money on whatever generates the most ROI. They have collectively spent literally billions of dollars convincing Joe Public that CPU Mhz is the best way to measure the speed of a system - they aren't going to throw that away. A competent manager with R&D dollars to spend will therefore spend them on increasing Mhz.
Oh, and your post reeks of being underexposed to any architecture other than x86.
though the cost/benefit is out of whack. A P2 2.4Ghz with 2MB of L2 would get trounced by a 2.6Mhz with 512MB of L2 cache, disputing your claims that CPU speed doesn't matter. Large cache chips only make sense if you can't get a faster CPU:
Yes, assuming the code to run is 512k in size. If the code is ~2M, so it fits into L2 on the slower processor, then it will have the advantage, because the faster one will have to waste cycles moving the cache back and forth to main memory. Cache size is related to CPU speed only in terms of memory bandwidth: if your CPU cannot get data from main memory fast enough to keep it occupied, then you need faster memory closer to the CPU, which is what a cache is. If you are context switching, then you will have to keep dumping the cache and reloading it, which puts larger caches at a disadvantage.
Ultimately, caches are a hack; an elastoplast solution to the fundamental problem, which is the mismatch between the rate at which a modern CPU can process data, and the rate at which memory can supply it. In an ideal system, there would be no CPU caches at all, because the CPU could get data from main memory fast enough to keep it fully occupied. Systems used to be built like this, before the current obsession with clock speeds.
Superman by a mile... Batman is a highly skilled human, while Superman is a endowed with superhuman strength, speed, intelligence, etc...
In the Superman world, I would always root for Lex Luthor. Superman is nearly indestructible, has literally superhuman strength and speed, can see through walls, can fly, can cause solid objects to burst into flame just by looking at them. Superman doesn't have to be brave, or subtle, or creative; all he has is overwhelming brute force.
But Lex Luthor is just an ordinary human like you or I. Superman has all the advantages, but Lex still almost wins. Lex Luthor is a modern-day Prometheus, and Superman is a capricious god.
So I'm backing Batman, or any other human. As a race, we've destroyed gods in the past by outgrowing them, and we're the better for it.
Maybe you don't want 3.06 GHz for what you're working on, but our "Enterprise Class Systems" (Win2k application servers) can use all the CPU we can throw at them. Everyone has different needs, and for a lot of folks, faster processors are a good thing.
Are they actually CPU bound, or are they slowed by memory access and bus bandwidth? Apart from certain numerical computations, I have rarely seen cases in which the CPU is really fully occupied, altho' the tools often report that it is. For example, tools will report if the CPU is idle waiting for a page fault to the swapfile, but not if it's waiting for data to get to or from main memory, it just looks like the CPU is occupied.
Knowing what I know of Citrix, it alone is far bigger than the L2, and that's before even considering the user applications. It requires the CPU to switch context heavily, and constantly flush and reload its L1/2/3 caches. After all, if you need 4G of RAM to run the applications you are using, and you have say an 8M cache, the CPU is going to be spending a lot of time managing its cache rather than doing useful work. Given that, it is bound by memory access, not raw CPU.
Manufacturers, driving by consumer marketing which believes that higher Mhz == better product, are optimizing in the wrong areas. If they want to talk numbers, they should be pushing fast memory and buses which are actually a useful measure of a machine's performance, not CPU Mhz which isn't.
If I use an O(N^2) algorithm instead of an O(N) algorithm I dont care how fast hardware gets, O(N) will always win on a suffiently sized data set.
The point of a highly abstract language is that you don't need to care about the algorithm, because an algorithm expert at the vendor has already done that and provided a package for you to use. Example: if I want to to retrieve a sorted set of rows from a database, I just add an "ORDER BY" clause and I don't care how it's done, because Oracle probably have a PhD computer scientist whose only job it's been for the last 20 years has been optimizing sorting algorithms. I certainly would no retrieve an unsorted result set and try to sort it myself, since there's no way I could do it any better.
I visited a nameless college campus recently and was shocked at the degree of specialization within the student body. Of the many CS and other IT-related majors that I talked to, not a single one had any real breadth of experience.
They're undergrads. They have no experience, and they aren't expected to have any experience. You don't do a CS degree to learn specific languages and applications, you do it to learn about algorithms and data structures and discrete math.
No-one expects a fresh CS graduate to be immediately capable of writing production quality code, that's why major firms have graduate training programmes to teach them how to put the theory they've learnt into practice. That's also why starting salaries are usually quite low, but pick up quickly after a few years and the 2nd job - because now the raw recruit can actually do something useful without constant supervision.
What you're saying is like someone walking into a Civil Engineering department and being horrified that none of the students had ever built a real bridge!
Apple works on a partial x86 port of OS X (Darwin x86). Not that they are ever going to deploy a full x86 OS X, but they want to let microsoft know they can do so at any moment.
More likely it is to keep Motorola/IBM on their toes. They could have Apple over a barrel because they control the PowerPC supplies. Apple screwed Motorola royally over Mac clones, and Moto would love to get its revenge.
Visual camouflage works by fooling your eye into thinking the object is part of the background. This is done by breaking up profile, matching background colors, and various other tricks.
Or "shape, shadow, silhouette, surface, spacing" as they drilled into us when I was a cadet. Along with "proper planning prevents poor performance".
Another toy for the military to spend millions of dollars on while people remain unemployed, homeless, or just plain poor here.
Uhh, the military isn't spending any money owned by the unemployed, homeless or poor. It's spending the ordinary taxpayer's money. If anyone's complaining, it should be them.
Make a list of countries which have threatened nuclear war another country and it will only contain one name "United States of Amrica".
Not quite true, look at India and Pakistan, both have whom have recently detonated nuclear devices just to prove to the other that they could. It's also arguable that Israel's nukes have been a sufficient deterrent to numerically-superior and chemically-armed Arab states.
The only country which will ever use nuclear weapons is the US. All other countries are trying to get them to fend off an attack from us.
I've mentioned India and Pakistan, but the danger we face is not from a nuclear-armed country but from a nuclear-armed non-country, like a terrorist network for example. After the breakup of the Soviet Empire, it's not even necessary to have the technological infrastructure to manufacture your own weapons these days.
Just who do you think they would be able to recruit. It is still a ship and needs to be run as such. This means that you will be pulling your candidates from the ranks of military officers. Compared to that lot, Archer is light, fruity and raspberry.
Well, compare Archer to a modern-day senior military officer, like Colin Powell. He's a skilled military commander who is equally at home with diplomacy, and understands the subtleties of dealing with other cultures both on the battlefield and in the conference room. Even a green Lieutentant would have more gravitas and competence than Archer.
Who would use Solaris/x86 ? I mean, as a previous post mentioned, a default install is basically useless, furthermore there are very few apps precompiled for it (and I don't think it does well in terms of hardware support either).
It used to be effectively free back in the day, so it was good for providing developers with cheap workstations for building applications to run on real Sun servers. Maybe at a startup, maybe for students, etc. In many cases, it's more valuable to use platform-specific features than to code for maximum portability. But these days, you can get an Ultra 5 (I think it's being replaced by the Ultra 60 now) for the price of a PC, and it's a real SPARC, so Solaris x86 is less useful for that purpose.
Also, I guess people could use them for EPOS applications - loads of people ran SCO on x86 for that purpose.
The default install is "useless" because Solaris is used for so many different things. Sun's attitude is pragmatic. It's expected that anyone buying Sun kit is going to have their own strong opinions about how things should be, so there's little point in trying to shoehorn them in. You can get anything you want from the freeware CD that ships with Solaris, from sunfreeware.com, etc, then you can set up JumpStart to install all your machines that way automagically.
It's usually Linux eating up Solaris' market share, not the other way around.
Solaris shares the advantage of FreeBSD in that it's a known platform. People say "Linux" as if it's one thing, but there are a dozen or more distributions and they're all configured differently, all ship with slightly different libraries, all have different filesystem layouts, etc. If you are writing software that requires specific versions of specific things to be in specific places, then it's much easier to go with a known platform (even vendors like Oracle only support certain Linux distros for this reason). If you have your heart set on x86 hardware, Solaris can be a better choice than Linux for that reason.
You know, I can't help but thinking that in another time and another place, Saddam and Dubya would have been good buddies, probably frat brothers. They both have an insatiable appetite for the good life, they both make all their money from oil, they both affect a religious piety when it suits them, they both love to be a "man of the people". This isn't as unlikely as it sounds, George Bush junior once owned a company (Arbusto Energy) jointly with one of Osama bin Laden's many brothers.
What the world really needs is for one of Dubya's daughters (not Jenna, the other one) and one of Saddam's sons to fall in love. Then, after many Baz Luhrmann-esque antics their fathers can be reconciled, and live happily ever after on a ranch in the sovereign state of Texraq.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be the first weapon mounted on aircraft/heavy machinery that the pilot/operator wouldn't have to worry about running out of ammo in combat! That's a pretty serious advantage, no matter what other shortcomings the weapon may have.
Assuming he has an infinite energy source on board too, of course. Otherwise firing the weapon will decrease range/endurance by increasing fuel consumption. Currently the opposite it true, because it reduces weight.
But then there is that overly logical Marine in me that says sounds unreliably. Much rather have a tried and true missile.
I've no doubt that the first laser weapons will be pretty poor. But back in the 50s there were probably overly logical Marines just like you saying they'd rather have a tried-and-true machine gun fitted to their planes. Once a concept has been proved to work, the military have a history of being quickly able to turn it into something practical.
I would like to know how such a weapon will acquire/track/target an incoming projectile. (That was not sarcasm; I really would like to know.) Mortar rounds generally travel in a high parabolic path - think of the St. Louis arch. Larger artillery shells - such as those fired from a battleship - follow a flatter trajectory. The targeting system would have to acquire a small incoming object, predict the path it will follow, and fire within a few seconds. That looks like a daunting task.
It's a solved problem. The Sea Wolf point defence system can shoot down 4.5-inch shells as well as supersonic missiles. Sea Wolf was first deployed in combat in 1982. Of course, you are likely to run out of missiles before they run out of cannon ammo, but maybe you can buy enough time to hit them with an Exocet.
Warships are expensive, so a lot of money has been spent on ways to protect them!
CAUTION: DO NOT STARE DIRECTLY INTO LENS
Heh, like Claymore mines are labelled "FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY".
I think the Sex Pistols did the UK a lot of good. Back at the end of the 70's, society was still *very* conservative. The Sex Pistols were extremely shocking to a lot of people.
/. story about the Spice Girls...
Shocking is too easy. Take South Park for example: once the initial joke of small children swearing wears off, it's just not funny anymore. There's no actual creativity or talent there, so it's just boring once it's no longer novel. Or Guns'n'Roses: once people got used to Axl Rose saying "Motherfucker" in every sentence, the band faded out of existance. Maybe they are still recording today, but who cares?
Really the only people who are interesting in the Sex Pistols these days are sold-out baby-boomers with jobs in PR or media and grey ponytails desperate to pretend that they're still young and "edgy". The Sex Pistols aren't remembered for their music at all. In another 25 years there's probably be a
Do today's highschool physics students laugh at the scientists of 50 years ago?
They might, if they could count to 50. Kids these days...
Happily I had pause for thought because the site went big and decided to go with file system storage for the images instead, and I'm glad I did
Why not do both? Oracle has a datatype called BFILE, in which the actual data is stored in the filesystem, and the row in the table contains a pointer to it. You have the best of both worlds, filesystem access to the image if you want it, or database access, and you can very easily integrate the image with the rest of your relational data.
he is relocating to LA to be back with his family (a bit like Anthony Head (Giles in Buffy) returning to England for over a year. But he might rough it and do a hotel stint for the 7th season (if it does go ahead)
Parse failed... missing ).
Why did Apple choose to go out and start a new kernel project when they could have just based OS X on the Linux kernel instead? They could have gained so much ground and lost so little. It's worked for so many other companies--why not Apple?
Because NeXTStep was BSD-on-mach, and MacOS X on Xserve is essentially the next (forgive the pun) iteration of the NeXT Cube. (I am posting this from OmniWeb 2.0 running on NeXTStep 3.3 on an original Color Turbo).
And the raw graphics performance of the OS X display server is behind X11 in my experience (but do your own measurements if you don't believe me).
I would expect this to change in 10.2 with Quartz Extreme, which adds hardware acceleration. The Xserve's have graphics hardware onboard unlike most dedicated servers.
Maybe I'm just naive, but can someone explain a believable situation where four slower CPUs (say, 100mhz) would beat two faster ones (200mhz)? There's loads of overhead in an SMP system, so I find it hard to imagine that having more chips would be better. (I don't know about the special weird requirements of a big SQL system, though
Assume that all other things (bus speed, memory size and access speed, disk i/o speed) on your two systems are the same. The question is, how much work needs to be done to switch the running thread on a CPU? If it's a lot - and it might be, if you're working on large resultsets for your queries, and have lots of queries running concurrently - then the less you have to do it, the better. On systems like this, many slower processors give you more throughput and lower latency than a single faster one, even if (num cpus * clock speed) is the same on both.
Next I suggest you go here for a definition of capricious. How is Superman "impulsive and unpredictable?" Boring would be fair, a bit naive perhaps ... but capricious? Still, superficially it sounded clever eh?
Guess you didn't see that movie where he whimsically holed an oil tanker, damaged monuments, trashed a bar and so forth?
According to Silicon Strategies, a group called "TV Linux Alliance" is creating a spec for digital set-top boxes using Linux.
The way to develop a product is to work out what you want to do, then look for a technology that can do it. Choosing the technology first then designing the product to fit the technology is backwards. Is the objective here to sell an STB, or is it to further the Linux cause? Because a for-profit company should prioritize the former over the latter.
Sorry, but your post reeks of "armchair CPU designer" : It's all so clear and so obvious. I mean, it's not like Intel and AMD have a lot of extremely clever people who seek the best balance between all of the systems...is it?
Yes, they are slowly improving, but modern PCs are still behind where workstations were years ago, and a modern Intel based server is well behind a SPARC based machine.
Intel and AMD will spend their money on whatever generates the most ROI. They have collectively spent literally billions of dollars convincing Joe Public that CPU Mhz is the best way to measure the speed of a system - they aren't going to throw that away. A competent manager with R&D dollars to spend will therefore spend them on increasing Mhz.
Oh, and your post reeks of being underexposed to any architecture other than x86.
though the cost/benefit is out of whack. A P2 2.4Ghz with 2MB of L2 would get trounced by a 2.6Mhz with 512MB of L2 cache, disputing your claims that CPU speed doesn't matter. Large cache chips only make sense if you can't get a faster CPU:
Yes, assuming the code to run is 512k in size. If the code is ~2M, so it fits into L2 on the slower processor, then it will have the advantage, because the faster one will have to waste cycles moving the cache back and forth to main memory. Cache size is related to CPU speed only in terms of memory bandwidth: if your CPU cannot get data from main memory fast enough to keep it occupied, then you need faster memory closer to the CPU, which is what a cache is. If you are context switching, then you will have to keep dumping the cache and reloading it, which puts larger caches at a disadvantage.
Ultimately, caches are a hack; an elastoplast solution to the fundamental problem, which is the mismatch between the rate at which a modern CPU can process data, and the rate at which memory can supply it. In an ideal system, there would be no CPU caches at all, because the CPU could get data from main memory fast enough to keep it fully occupied. Systems used to be built like this, before the current obsession with clock speeds.
Superman by a mile... Batman is a highly skilled human, while Superman is a endowed with superhuman strength, speed, intelligence, etc...
In the Superman world, I would always root for Lex Luthor. Superman is nearly indestructible, has literally superhuman strength and speed, can see through walls, can fly, can cause solid objects to burst into flame just by looking at them. Superman doesn't have to be brave, or subtle, or creative; all he has is overwhelming brute force.
But Lex Luthor is just an ordinary human like you or I. Superman has all the advantages, but Lex still almost wins. Lex Luthor is a modern-day Prometheus, and Superman is a capricious god.
So I'm backing Batman, or any other human. As a race, we've destroyed gods in the past by outgrowing them, and we're the better for it.
Maybe you don't want 3.06 GHz for what you're working on, but our "Enterprise Class Systems" (Win2k application servers) can use all the CPU we can throw at them. Everyone has different needs, and for a lot of folks, faster processors are a good thing.
Are they actually CPU bound, or are they slowed by memory access and bus bandwidth? Apart from certain numerical computations, I have rarely seen cases in which the CPU is really fully occupied, altho' the tools often report that it is. For example, tools will report if the CPU is idle waiting for a page fault to the swapfile, but not if it's waiting for data to get to or from main memory, it just looks like the CPU is occupied.
Knowing what I know of Citrix, it alone is far bigger than the L2, and that's before even considering the user applications. It requires the CPU to switch context heavily, and constantly flush and reload its L1/2/3 caches. After all, if you need 4G of RAM to run the applications you are using, and you have say an 8M cache, the CPU is going to be spending a lot of time managing its cache rather than doing useful work. Given that, it is bound by memory access, not raw CPU.
Manufacturers, driving by consumer marketing which believes that higher Mhz == better product, are optimizing in the wrong areas. If they want to talk numbers, they should be pushing fast memory and buses which are actually a useful measure of a machine's performance, not CPU Mhz which isn't.
If I use an O(N^2) algorithm instead of an O(N) algorithm I dont care how fast hardware gets, O(N) will always win on a suffiently sized data set.
The point of a highly abstract language is that you don't need to care about the algorithm, because an algorithm expert at the vendor has already done that and provided a package for you to use. Example: if I want to to retrieve a sorted set of rows from a database, I just add an "ORDER BY" clause and I don't care how it's done, because Oracle probably have a PhD computer scientist whose only job it's been for the last 20 years has been optimizing sorting algorithms. I certainly would no retrieve an unsorted result set and try to sort it myself, since there's no way I could do it any better.
I visited a nameless college campus recently and was shocked at the degree of specialization within the student body. Of the many CS and other IT-related majors that I talked to, not a single one had any real breadth of experience.
They're undergrads. They have no experience, and they aren't expected to have any experience. You don't do a CS degree to learn specific languages and applications, you do it to learn about algorithms and data structures and discrete math.
No-one expects a fresh CS graduate to be immediately capable of writing production quality code, that's why major firms have graduate training programmes to teach them how to put the theory they've learnt into practice. That's also why starting salaries are usually quite low, but pick up quickly after a few years and the 2nd job - because now the raw recruit can actually do something useful without constant supervision.
What you're saying is like someone walking into a Civil Engineering department and being horrified that none of the students had ever built a real bridge!
Apple works on a partial x86 port of OS X (Darwin x86). Not that they are ever going to deploy a full x86 OS X, but they want to let microsoft know they can do so at any moment.
More likely it is to keep Motorola/IBM on their toes. They could have Apple over a barrel because they control the PowerPC supplies. Apple screwed Motorola royally over Mac clones, and Moto would love to get its revenge.
Visual camouflage works by fooling your eye into thinking the object is part of the background. This is done by breaking up profile, matching background colors, and various other tricks.
Or "shape, shadow, silhouette, surface, spacing" as they drilled into us when I was a cadet. Along with "proper planning prevents poor performance".
Another toy for the military to spend millions of dollars on while people remain unemployed, homeless, or just plain poor here.
Uhh, the military isn't spending any money owned by the unemployed, homeless or poor. It's spending the ordinary taxpayer's money. If anyone's complaining, it should be them.
Make a list of countries which have threatened nuclear war another country and it will only contain one name "United States of Amrica".
Not quite true, look at India and Pakistan, both have whom have recently detonated nuclear devices just to prove to the other that they could. It's also arguable that Israel's nukes have been a sufficient deterrent to numerically-superior and chemically-armed Arab states.
The only country which will ever use nuclear weapons is the US. All other countries are trying to get them to fend off an attack from us.
I've mentioned India and Pakistan, but the danger we face is not from a nuclear-armed country but from a nuclear-armed non-country, like a terrorist network for example. After the breakup of the Soviet Empire, it's not even necessary to have the technological infrastructure to manufacture your own weapons these days.
Just who do you think they would be able to recruit. It is still a ship and needs to be run as such. This means that you will be pulling your candidates from the ranks of military officers. Compared to that lot, Archer is light, fruity and raspberry.
Well, compare Archer to a modern-day senior military officer, like Colin Powell. He's a skilled military commander who is equally at home with diplomacy, and understands the subtleties of dealing with other cultures both on the battlefield and in the conference room. Even a green Lieutentant would have more gravitas and competence than Archer.
Who would use Solaris/x86 ? I mean, as a previous post mentioned, a default install is basically useless, furthermore there are very few apps precompiled for it (and I don't think it does well in terms of hardware support either).
It used to be effectively free back in the day, so it was good for providing developers with cheap workstations for building applications to run on real Sun servers. Maybe at a startup, maybe for students, etc. In many cases, it's more valuable to use platform-specific features than to code for maximum portability. But these days, you can get an Ultra 5 (I think it's being replaced by the Ultra 60 now) for the price of a PC, and it's a real SPARC, so Solaris x86 is less useful for that purpose.
Also, I guess people could use them for EPOS applications - loads of people ran SCO on x86 for that purpose.
The default install is "useless" because Solaris is used for so many different things. Sun's attitude is pragmatic. It's expected that anyone buying Sun kit is going to have their own strong opinions about how things should be, so there's little point in trying to shoehorn them in. You can get anything you want from the freeware CD that ships with Solaris, from sunfreeware.com, etc, then you can set up JumpStart to install all your machines that way automagically.
It's usually Linux eating up Solaris' market share, not the other way around.
Solaris shares the advantage of FreeBSD in that it's a known platform. People say "Linux" as if it's one thing, but there are a dozen or more distributions and they're all configured differently, all ship with slightly different libraries, all have different filesystem layouts, etc. If you are writing software that requires specific versions of specific things to be in specific places, then it's much easier to go with a known platform (even vendors like Oracle only support certain Linux distros for this reason). If you have your heart set on x86 hardware, Solaris can be a better choice than Linux for that reason.
Party on
You know, I can't help but thinking that in another time and another place, Saddam and Dubya would have been good buddies, probably frat brothers. They both have an insatiable appetite for the good life, they both make all their money from oil, they both affect a religious piety when it suits them, they both love to be a "man of the people". This isn't as unlikely as it sounds, George Bush junior once owned a company (Arbusto Energy) jointly with one of Osama bin Laden's many brothers.
What the world really needs is for one of Dubya's daughters (not Jenna, the other one) and one of Saddam's sons to fall in love. Then, after many Baz Luhrmann-esque antics their fathers can be reconciled, and live happily ever after on a ranch in the sovereign state of Texraq.