Stealth planes by virtue of their shape and RAM (radar absorbent material) will optimally absorb and reflect off certain frequencies. So they HAVE to be designed against optimal frequency radars- since the one country that could destroy us was the USSR, it made sense to design them to defeat USSR systems. And given the fact that Russian SAMs are still a huge threat (especially the S-300), we will probably continue to design with them in mind.
That having been said, even if one were using multifreq radars the fact remains that these shapes will make the stealth planes low-observable and thus darn hard to hit.
There is no such thing as infrared radar (used to be IR homing beams but that is a different beastie). There are IR sensors and IR targetting systems (which is probably what you meant), and defenses against that is built into the planes (note the exhausts are generally on top of the plane and the planes fly subsonic thus no afterburner to light up the sky).
There were those who claimed during the Gulf War that the F117s could be spotted by French radar. Turns out they were spotted when they had their gear down or otherwise made themselves visible for air safety reasons.
Stealth will be an expensive obsolesence, especially when LIDAR goes into wide use. Computing power also makes other opportunities possible as noted in other posts. Also, with enough cheap Mig-25/31s or UAVs airspace can simply be covered by enough eyeballs.
Consider the cost, however of the lost aircrews from 'cheaper' alternatives, or how some campaigns wouldn't happen at all if we were going to lose more of our pilots during aerial attacks (thus yielding more dead Kosovars, for instance), or the ultimate cost of a Soviet Union that did not have to spend itself into oblivion to deal with it's PVO paranoia. This is more like spending on battleships, it will be obsolete but it's done some good in the meantime and the alternative of not having them was unacceptable.
I'm not so sure this was a good idea to reveal the existence of this thing. Other then whatever fear we can place in the hearts of our enemies that we will not relinquish the lead on key warfighting tech, I wonder if this just gets other countries fired up to do research on how to cheaply produce similar airframes.
And unlike us they are far more likely to deploy something like this as a cruise missile, thus rendering Arrow/NBMD obsolete.
Let's not encourage or give America's enemies any more ideas.
There is a class of software that as far as I know only exists commercially on IBM mainframes. They are called Session Managers, and allow multiple sessions to multiple VTAM apps to one physical session with an optional centralized security authentication.
Each session can be swapped onto the screen as the primary Current session (sound familiar?), and the other sessions can be switched to at the touch of a button. One extra doodad we have even allows a list to be called up in the middle of ANY app and another session selected straight off that list.
In addition you can have instant messaging between any session manager sessions so authorized, cut-and-pasting between dissimilar apps, broadcast messages that can be targetted at different users on specific apps on different host machines, and all sorts of other spiffy things. Plus, to get really esoteric the Session Manager can be used as middleware (albeit kludgy).
Now mind you this is the well-defined very specific very character-only world of TN3270E as oppossed to X-GUI issues, so this is very much apples-and-microsofts, but the concept is well-defined and in production at mainframe sites all over, so any SCREEN fans ought to check them out.
The two primary products in this category are Multsess and Candle Supersession.
There is a big difference between ground SAMs and airborne missiles- namely that the ground-based missile has to get up to speed, and the air-based missiles are already launching at Mach 1+. Therefore the ground SAMs have to be much much larger to get the same job done, which also affects their maneuverability. And as you pointed out the plane is a far more mobile target then the missile and is being piloted by someone who very much wants to live.
Nonetheless, ask the air force how they feel about Russian S-300s. They are very very concerned about the latest SAMs from Putinville. And we keep putting off decent EW replacements, but that is another issue.
Lasers on the other hand are quite even in the speed department. It will make no difference to Mr. Laser how hot Maverick is flying his plane.
What's more, unlike SAM batteries that only have a few shots the truck laser can shoot dozens of shots with a chemical power source, and far more if hooked up to a local power grid.
Finally there is cost. Assuming the JSF laser and sensors are a wash between the two platforms, it's simply cheaper to build trucks then JSF planes, and really easier to hide the high value laser trucks amongst thousands of ordinary trucks. There is stealth in numbers.
I can lose three trucks to Iceman, kill your precious JSF with my fourth truck, and have enough left over for a conventional armor company that runs over your airbase protected by LAVs (guffaw!) and a month-long Spanish Riviera vacation for my generals.
Airpower has been a vital component of Pax Americana for decades now. I hate to see us throw it away- it will mean more American blood shed when duty calls.
I'm saying the ground-based unit can have greater range because it can carry more power around then a jet that is busy trying to not fall down.
Then the game turns to the sensor acquisition game. Can our postulated AA truck stay hidden from JSTARS and low-flying satellites, versus a plane that will be very stealth but ultimately will have to do something about all that exhaust.
Finally, there is economics. For the $35-50 million a laser JSF will cost, betcha I can build at least 7-10 trucks. I win on sheer numbers.
Yes they are. Chances are the Russians have a continuing active program, and I KNOW the Chinese are big on blinding laser systems so yes others are working at it. But when we chunk a couple billion at an engineering problem we often get results which would have taken the other countries decades to achieve. And a laser-filled world is not to our advantage.
This reminds me of Britain building the Dreadnaughts, obsoleting their battlefleets overnight, expending huge amounts of money, and when push came to shove the real threat was the sub. Yes they had control of the seas for 25 more years, but they would have been better off finding a cheaper solution for their maritime defense.
Beginning of the end of US aerial dominance
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More on JSF Laser System
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This project is utter foolishness. If we figure out how to operate a 1mW 6.2 mile laser on a fighter, that makes it portable enough to fit on a truck or tracked vehicle. With a greater percentage of a groud vehicle being able to be committed to power systems, a ground-based mobile laser will be ablt to outpower an airborne version, and likely be a LOT cheaper.
Outranged outgunned outnumbered airplanes are NOT what we want. We are trading decades or our airpower in for a few measly years of SAM and ground strike invulnerability. This direction is NOT smart for us.
Keep in mind that the value of such a simulation is NOT to play the game but to experience the decision-making cycle and understand the process of what comes at civic leaders with a potential pandemic on their hands.
Guys, this is an ancient practice dating from when IBM and alums would give away mainframes for market share and also writeoffs, all the way through to Apples in the classrooms to hook the little monsters on GUIs. This is so old hat, it's just a knee-jerk reaction story. Move along, nothing new to see here.
My particular MMG addiction is WWII Online. Many of the issues you note re: not mattering, things not changing and intelligent organized opponents are taken care of by creating an Us Vs. Them situation from the get-go. This setup creates meaning and teamwork.
There is nothing that alters a town quite like a battle ripping through it. Shell furrows in the ground, bullet holes in the wall, buildings ruined, oh yes the environment will tell you a battle took place.
And there are no magic powerups or twinkie bazookas- the closest thing to magic is a Char, an 88 or a Stuka and they can be taken down. Life is terrifyingly cheap in WWII, a typical day sees 5000+ deaths per side. You gain in rank due to successful missions but no one is going to have a Ring of Panzer Defense to sell.
And since it is a realistic battle you cannot win on your own. So teamwork is literally built into the game. Many are very passionate about their squad, and work on them like softball teams. And because the company is open to suggestions, the forums are crammed full of history nuts clamoring to get ideas in about how to make a realistic game fun.
So yes I'm sure there are nuts out there, but at it's best MMGs shouldn't be any more disruptive or 'wrong' then your bowling team.
My company, a major regional healthcare provider, is about to spend 8 figures on standardizing and upgrading our infrastructure- clinical apps, XP everywhere, mainframes, gobs of disk, and jobs jobs jobs for years.
We can do this because our organization watched the bottom line like hawks, IT helped them do that, and IT gained management's trust by doing more with less and cutting when the organization needed it. We even won accolades like Information Week Top 500 under fiscal duress (hint, we are in the top rankings).
We are also looking at the whole patient/doctor interaction with the hospital and will optimize our processes, not just the software (in other words what happens offline is more important then what happens with the boxes).
The competitive business world IS a bit different, and thanks to the greying of America healthcare will continue to be a growth industry, but doing the basics would work in any business.
Actually Niven was expounding (intentionally or not) on ideas expressed in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (1956). In it the individual power of teleportation by the power of the mind becomes an average joe's transport (known as jaunting). What happens to society when everyone can zip around? My fave are the driver's licenses adapted to a jaunting world.
In Bester's take the flash crowds are not there to gawk but to loot after a disaster.
The solution is so very obvious and simple it will never be done- the internet should only allow national domains to exist, the laws of that nation extend to sites within that domain, US laws cannot affect.UK or.RU unless there is a treaty with Britain or Russia or vice-versa, entire nations can cut themselves off or cut off other nations at the telecom border, and in all respects national sovereignty is extended into cyberspace.
All this hoohaw about the OS is fine and well, and the stealth characteristics of the F-22 are nice (although likely to be countered sometime before the end of program life by LIDAR, passive EMF bounce, UWB radar or some other technology), but the really big billy bad boy aspect of this plane is the supercruise (otherwise known as flying at cruise power at over Mach 1).
Supercruise gives this plane the ability to cover far greater distances in less time, with less refueling then would be required by F-15s running the same circuit at the same speeds. That translates to a far greater amount of territorial coverage for defense per plane, a terrifing capacity for a dash attack and an ability to have a lethal number of F-22s converge on a crucial position.
Simply put, fewer F-22s will be able to defend more space, threaten attacks to keep an opponent on the defensive across more territory, and concentrate for overwhelming superiority.
The F-22s' greatest capability is this operational superiority. Air forces across the world are trembling at the prospect of facing this beast.
Many people dismiss scifi as fantasy or power trips or sterile egghead thought games, which certainly it can be. But scifi is really more political then anything else. That facet is built into the very nature of the beast, as scifi is all about What Are The Consequences of This Technology/ Colonization/ Biochanges, etc. etc.
Lem wrote Memoirs and used the US CIA as backdrop, but really he was talking about the communist police state, and tweaked it right under their noses. Plenty of Lem's other works are political, but more about smashing the humanocentric world view then anything else.
Lem's spiritual scifi predecessor Karel Capek (the man who adapted the Czech word robot to it's current meaning) had a savagely funny book called War With The Newts that was a scathing indictment of the pre-WWII environment.
Asimov's Foundation series is very very political.
Star Trek has been political from day one.
The Dune series is nothing but politics- it may be CHOAM instead of GE/Microsoft, but the people are the same.
In general well-written histories can do the job better then scifi, but scifi can get you out of a mental rut and open your mind to other possible consequences that history just cannot deal with. A history book cannot tell you about what the DMCA or Homeland Defense can turn into like Fairenheit 451 or 1984 can.
In fact, speaking of 1984, scifi dystopias might even deter such evils from occuring and create history (or at least terminate them from happening). The reverse can be true though, a lot of British paranoia about the German WWI fleet was frothed up by the 1900s functional equivalent of a scifi/Clancy novel.
While Solaris is great stuff and the Cyberiad is the funniest scifi novel in existence, I think the masterwork is The Star Diaries, a collection of very loosely connected stories (called Voyages) about humanity's arrogance, stupidity, and how these are universal attributes.
Lem's hero, Ijon Tichy (kind of an interstellar Candide), gets farther and farther from Earth and runs into more and more bizarre planets. On one voyage he is Earth's representative to being admitted to the galactic UN, but humanity is barred because we evolved from garbage and a germ-laden cough, and another planet takes bioengineering to it's illogical extreme.
Any one of these stories could have been a novel in a moneygrubber's hands, but Lem keeps the ideas flowing thickly and densely (in Rucker's sense of the word). The Star Diaries is an intense read.
Unlike the holy trinity usually espoused (Heinlein, Asimov,Clarke), the real ruling triumverate of scifi is Lem, PKD and Cordwainer Smith.
There have been plenty of posts on the first two so I'll just expound on the latter. CS was the man who wrote the Army's Psychological Warfare book (real name Col. Paul Linebarger). He already had a career as a Chinese studies professor, and was given a Chinese name by Sun Yat Sen. Obviously he had a full career outside of scifi but chose to write it as a hobby.
His stories revolved around a future government called the Instrumentality. No one messes with the Instrumentality- they are so way more dangerous then any other scifi government it's not funny.
The Instrumentality has been so successful at making people 'happy', using a slave race of bio-engineered ehanced humanoids from animal stock for economic activity and defending humanity that everyone is stagnating. So a lot of the main timeline stories have to do with the Rebirth, in which disease, accidental death, and misery is intentionally reintroduced and the slave races are treated right.
He also had non-Instrumentality stories, including two bizarre communist science stories, and War No. 81-Q in which wars are settled by fighting robotic zeppelins on TV (this was written in 1928!).
Most of his stuff was short stories, but he did write a novel called Norstrilia, about a boy from a superwealthy planet selling a crucial drug found on no other planet, who buys Earth. All of it.
Norstrilia and Dune came out the same year. Norstrilia is better.
Vance, LeGuin and Silverberg come close, but everyone else is an acne-pocked teenager compared to these folks.
Take some time reading about the B5000. Please note that it did multiprocessing, compilers into machine language, system reconfiguration without reprogramming resource defines, etc.
And all of it written in ALGOL, the great grandfather of C and the first machine-portable language.
Then consider the B6700, which among other things brought us virtual memory and the aforementioned resource stacks. Add in CANDE, WFL and a system that can restart it's jobs in recovery mode right after a Halt/Load (reboot/IPL), a database that could do online backups in the 1980s, and you have THE mainframe. This stuff was so far ahead of IBM that IBM kind of caught up somewhere in 1989, after Burroughs was busy shooting itself in the foot becoming Unisys.
Alas, the same magnificent engineers created an I/O bottleneck monster with their design that they never quite got fixed. That, and Burroughs never built a sales force like IBM. So IBM continued to whack them even though Burroughs had an utterly superior product. Then the Unisys merger disaster occurred, and Burroughs never recovered. Now they sell A-series MCP emulators running on souped-up superservers, but really sell those 20-way NT boxes.
And so like the Amiga, we must salute a superior design that never dominated like it should have.
I am writing to you because there are clearly evil BOFHs on this site that in the old days told people to Format C:. Do not listen to their evil ways, or go to the dark side you will.
Any of these people who are suggesting purposely destroying data are lunatics, are highly unprofessional, and should be in violation of an IS code of ethics. First Do No Harm should be your motto.
That having been said, I would perform an amalgamation of what others have suggested-
*Create a base ghost image that is bootable on your site's PC models,
*Create application 'drives' and user drives, apps and shared data goes with the app, users have their own personal space,
*Get users converted to these shares and beat into their heads that if it's on the server it's forever, HDD data can be gone tomorrow,
*Get your backups set and tested waaay before the Big Day,
*Big Day -1, backup the workstations,
*Big Day, ghost the user's hard drive, recover any missing data to their network share,
*Big Day +1 on, all apps always go to the network drive, and reghost their workstations if any problems and take no crap if they foolishly left anything on the PC that was important to the business.
Of all the difficulties for your situation, the last one is most troublesome- the ghost image will clean out any problem and enforce the network drive rule, but many Windows apps absolutely require an install on C:. In this case you need a server deliverable workstation install- most packages should allow it.
WARNING- This is going to sound like an '... and we liked it that way' rant, but here goes-
I was playing D&D back when we were poring over Dragon Magazine #4 to try and glean anything at all about the maddening frustrating lack of rules. So we created a lot of stuff on our own, some of which got duplicated by TSR when later editions came out. Kind of hacking an RPG in a time when no one knew what an RPG 'should' be.
So I may be an old fuddy duddy, but you just can't be as creative when the code (by it's very nature) limits the actions of the characters and the creativity of the DM.
And so help me I have NEVER gotten into the MUDs and their graphical descendants, because there is no substitute for face-to-face gaming.
I'll pass on this D&D gimmick just like everything else, and let everyone else allow their imaginations to be dictated to by the game company.
Come to think of it I actually remember porches and playing outside without benefit of a video game. Lord I AM old.
This technology sounds just like Stephenson's Diamond Age, where the nanobook had a vast amount of data and programming in it for the entire education of a child, and only the human voice readers weren't stored.
To me the value of the password is predicated on the value of what I am gaining access to, and all the bytes therein. So really you would have to include the per-byte cost of the entire EverQuest environment and all players, without which the kickass character being auctioned off has no value.
So the per-byte cost is probably not very good in this case.
The real per-byte value would probably be some online email/data to get at a meatworld commodity- insider stock information or location of drug stashes would be good examples.
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Some of your points have merit, others don't.
Stealth planes by virtue of their shape and RAM (radar absorbent material) will optimally absorb and reflect off certain frequencies. So they HAVE to be designed against optimal frequency radars- since the one country that could destroy us was the USSR, it made sense to design them to defeat USSR systems. And given the fact that Russian SAMs are still a huge threat (especially the S-300), we will probably continue to design with them in mind.
That having been said, even if one were using multifreq radars the fact remains that these shapes will make the stealth planes low-observable and thus darn hard to hit.
There is no such thing as infrared radar (used to be IR homing beams but that is a different beastie). There are IR sensors and IR targetting systems (which is probably what you meant), and defenses against that is built into the planes (note the exhausts are generally on top of the plane and the planes fly subsonic thus no afterburner to light up the sky).
There were those who claimed during the Gulf War that the F117s could be spotted by French radar. Turns out they were spotted when they had their gear down or otherwise made themselves visible for air safety reasons.
Stealth will be an expensive obsolesence, especially when LIDAR goes into wide use. Computing power also makes other opportunities possible as noted in other posts. Also, with enough cheap Mig-25/31s or UAVs airspace can simply be covered by enough eyeballs.
Consider the cost, however of the lost aircrews from 'cheaper' alternatives, or how some campaigns wouldn't happen at all if we were going to lose more of our pilots during aerial attacks (thus yielding more dead Kosovars, for instance), or the ultimate cost of a Soviet Union that did not have to spend itself into oblivion to deal with it's PVO paranoia. This is more like spending on battleships, it will be obsolete but it's done some good in the meantime and the alternative of not having them was unacceptable.
I'm not so sure this was a good idea to reveal the existence of this thing. Other then whatever fear we can place in the hearts of our enemies that we will not relinquish the lead on key warfighting tech, I wonder if this just gets other countries fired up to do research on how to cheaply produce similar airframes.
And unlike us they are far more likely to deploy something like this as a cruise missile, thus rendering Arrow/NBMD obsolete.
Let's not encourage or give America's enemies any more ideas.
There is a class of software that as far as I know only exists commercially on IBM mainframes. They are called Session Managers, and allow multiple sessions to multiple VTAM apps to one physical session with an optional centralized security authentication.
Each session can be swapped onto the screen as the primary Current session (sound familiar?), and the other sessions can be switched to at the touch of a button. One extra doodad we have even allows a list to be called up in the middle of ANY app and another session selected straight off that list.
In addition you can have instant messaging between any session manager sessions so authorized, cut-and-pasting between dissimilar apps, broadcast messages that can be targetted at different users on specific apps on different host machines, and all sorts of other spiffy things. Plus, to get really esoteric the Session Manager can be used as middleware (albeit kludgy).
Now mind you this is the well-defined very specific very character-only world of TN3270E as oppossed to X-GUI issues, so this is very much apples-and-microsofts, but the concept is well-defined and in production at mainframe sites all over, so any SCREEN fans ought to check them out.
The two primary products in this category are Multsess and Candle Supersession.
Yes I was bad for putting in the small m.
There is a big difference between ground SAMs and airborne missiles- namely that the ground-based missile has to get up to speed, and the air-based missiles are already launching at Mach 1+. Therefore the ground SAMs have to be much much larger to get the same job done, which also affects their maneuverability. And as you pointed out the plane is a far more mobile target then the missile and is being piloted by someone who very much wants to live.
Nonetheless, ask the air force how they feel about Russian S-300s. They are very very concerned about the latest SAMs from Putinville. And we keep putting off decent EW replacements, but that is another issue.
Lasers on the other hand are quite even in the speed department. It will make no difference to Mr. Laser how hot Maverick is flying his plane.
What's more, unlike SAM batteries that only have a few shots the truck laser can shoot dozens of shots with a chemical power source, and far more if hooked up to a local power grid.
Finally there is cost. Assuming the JSF laser and sensors are a wash between the two platforms, it's simply cheaper to build trucks then JSF planes, and really easier to hide the high value laser trucks amongst thousands of ordinary trucks. There is stealth in numbers.
I can lose three trucks to Iceman, kill your precious JSF with my fourth truck, and have enough left over for a conventional armor company that runs over your airbase protected by LAVs (guffaw!) and a month-long Spanish Riviera vacation for my generals.
Airpower has been a vital component of Pax Americana for decades now. I hate to see us throw it away- it will mean more American blood shed when duty calls.
I'm saying the ground-based unit can have greater range because it can carry more power around then a jet that is busy trying to not fall down.
Then the game turns to the sensor acquisition game. Can our postulated AA truck stay hidden from JSTARS and low-flying satellites, versus a plane that will be very stealth but ultimately will have to do something about all that exhaust.
Finally, there is economics. For the $35-50 million a laser JSF will cost, betcha I can build at least 7-10 trucks. I win on sheer numbers.
Yes they are. Chances are the Russians have a continuing active program, and I KNOW the Chinese are big on blinding laser systems so yes others are working at it. But when we chunk a couple billion at an engineering problem we often get results which would have taken the other countries decades to achieve. And a laser-filled world is not to our advantage.
This reminds me of Britain building the Dreadnaughts, obsoleting their battlefleets overnight, expending huge amounts of money, and when push came to shove the real threat was the sub. Yes they had control of the seas for 25 more years, but they would have been better off finding a cheaper solution for their maritime defense.
This project is utter foolishness. If we figure out how to operate a 1mW 6.2 mile laser on a fighter, that makes it portable enough to fit on a truck or tracked vehicle. With a greater percentage of a groud vehicle being able to be committed to power systems, a ground-based mobile laser will be ablt to outpower an airborne version, and likely be a LOT cheaper.
Outranged outgunned outnumbered airplanes are NOT what we want. We are trading decades or our airpower in for a few measly years of SAM and ground strike invulnerability. This direction is NOT smart for us.
Keep in mind that the value of such a simulation is NOT to play the game but to experience the decision-making cycle and understand the process of what comes at civic leaders with a potential pandemic on their hands.
Greetings, oh mortal enemy!
Kilemall, 4RCA, ArFr.
Guys, this is an ancient practice dating from when IBM and alums would give away mainframes for market share and also writeoffs, all the way through to Apples in the classrooms to hook the little monsters on GUIs. This is so old hat, it's just a knee-jerk reaction story. Move along, nothing new to see here.
My particular MMG addiction is WWII Online. Many of the issues you note re: not mattering, things not changing and intelligent organized opponents are taken care of by creating an Us Vs. Them situation from the get-go. This setup creates meaning and teamwork.
There is nothing that alters a town quite like a battle ripping through it. Shell furrows in the ground, bullet holes in the wall, buildings ruined, oh yes the environment will tell you a battle took place.
And there are no magic powerups or twinkie bazookas- the closest thing to magic is a Char, an 88 or a Stuka and they can be taken down. Life is terrifyingly cheap in WWII, a typical day sees 5000+ deaths per side. You gain in rank due to successful missions but no one is going to have a Ring of Panzer Defense to sell.
And since it is a realistic battle you cannot win on your own. So teamwork is literally built into the game. Many are very passionate about their squad, and work on them like softball teams. And because the company is open to suggestions, the forums are crammed full of history nuts clamoring to get ideas in about how to make a realistic game fun.
So yes I'm sure there are nuts out there, but at it's best MMGs shouldn't be any more disruptive or 'wrong' then your bowling team.
It's actually far worse then that. Our salaries are going to get smaller because our jobs will be moving to Bangalore.
Darn Brits taught the Indians how to speak English, it's the final revenge of the Redcoats.
My company, a major regional healthcare provider, is about to spend 8 figures on standardizing and upgrading our infrastructure- clinical apps, XP everywhere, mainframes, gobs of disk, and jobs jobs jobs for years.
We can do this because our organization watched the bottom line like hawks, IT helped them do that, and IT gained management's trust by doing more with less and cutting when the organization needed it. We even won accolades like Information Week Top 500 under fiscal duress (hint, we are in the top rankings).
We are also looking at the whole patient/doctor interaction with the hospital and will optimize our processes, not just the software (in other words what happens offline is more important then what happens with the boxes).
The competitive business world IS a bit different, and thanks to the greying of America healthcare will continue to be a growth industry, but doing the basics would work in any business.
There is already a bioengineered solution to this problem- it's called an elephant.
Actually Niven was expounding (intentionally or not) on ideas expressed in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (1956). In it the individual power of teleportation by the power of the mind becomes an average joe's transport (known as jaunting). What happens to society when everyone can zip around? My fave are the driver's licenses adapted to a jaunting world.
In Bester's take the flash crowds are not there to gawk but to loot after a disaster.
The solution is so very obvious and simple it will never be done- the internet should only allow national domains to exist, the laws of that nation extend to sites within that domain, US laws cannot affect .UK or .RU unless there is a treaty with Britain or Russia or vice-versa, entire nations can cut themselves off or cut off other nations at the telecom border, and in all respects national sovereignty is extended into cyberspace.
There. Now shush.
All this hoohaw about the OS is fine and well, and the stealth characteristics of the F-22 are nice (although likely to be countered sometime before the end of program life by LIDAR, passive EMF bounce, UWB radar or some other technology), but the really big billy bad boy aspect of this plane is the supercruise (otherwise known as flying at cruise power at over Mach 1).
Supercruise gives this plane the ability to cover far greater distances in less time, with less refueling then would be required by F-15s running the same circuit at the same speeds. That translates to a far greater amount of territorial coverage for defense per plane, a terrifing capacity for a dash attack and an ability to have a lethal number of F-22s converge on a crucial position.
Simply put, fewer F-22s will be able to defend more space, threaten attacks to keep an opponent on the defensive across more territory, and concentrate for overwhelming superiority.
The F-22s' greatest capability is this operational superiority. Air forces across the world are trembling at the prospect of facing this beast.
Many people dismiss scifi as fantasy or power trips or sterile egghead thought games, which certainly it can be. But scifi is really more political then anything else. That facet is built into the very nature of the beast, as scifi is all about What Are The Consequences of This Technology/ Colonization/ Biochanges, etc. etc.
Lem wrote Memoirs and used the US CIA as backdrop, but really he was talking about the communist police state, and tweaked it right under their noses. Plenty of Lem's other works are political, but more about smashing the humanocentric world view then anything else.
Lem's spiritual scifi predecessor Karel Capek (the man who adapted the Czech word robot to it's current meaning) had a savagely funny book called War With The Newts that was a scathing indictment of the pre-WWII environment.
Asimov's Foundation series is very very political.
Star Trek has been political from day one.
The Dune series is nothing but politics- it may be CHOAM instead of GE/Microsoft, but the people are the same.
In general well-written histories can do the job better then scifi, but scifi can get you out of a mental rut and open your mind to other possible consequences that history just cannot deal with. A history book cannot tell you about what the DMCA or Homeland Defense can turn into like Fairenheit 451 or 1984 can.
In fact, speaking of 1984, scifi dystopias might even deter such evils from occuring and create history (or at least terminate them from happening). The reverse can be true though, a lot of British paranoia about the German WWI fleet was frothed up by the 1900s functional equivalent of a scifi/Clancy novel.
While Solaris is great stuff and the Cyberiad is the funniest scifi novel in existence, I think the masterwork is The Star Diaries, a collection of very loosely connected stories (called Voyages) about humanity's arrogance, stupidity, and how these are universal attributes.
Lem's hero, Ijon Tichy (kind of an interstellar Candide), gets farther and farther from Earth and runs into more and more bizarre planets. On one voyage he is Earth's representative to being admitted to the galactic UN, but humanity is barred because we evolved from garbage and a germ-laden cough, and another planet takes bioengineering to it's illogical extreme.
Any one of these stories could have been a novel in a moneygrubber's hands, but Lem keeps the ideas flowing thickly and densely (in Rucker's sense of the word). The Star Diaries is an intense read.
Unlike the holy trinity usually espoused (Heinlein, Asimov,Clarke), the real ruling triumverate of scifi is Lem, PKD and Cordwainer Smith.
There have been plenty of posts on the first two so I'll just expound on the latter. CS was the man who wrote the Army's Psychological Warfare book (real name Col. Paul Linebarger). He already had a career as a Chinese studies professor, and was given a Chinese name by Sun Yat Sen. Obviously he had a full career outside of scifi but chose to write it as a hobby.
His stories revolved around a future government called the Instrumentality. No one messes with the Instrumentality- they are so way more dangerous then any other scifi government it's not funny.
The Instrumentality has been so successful at making people 'happy', using a slave race of bio-engineered ehanced humanoids from animal stock for economic activity and defending humanity that everyone is stagnating. So a lot of the main timeline stories have to do with the Rebirth, in which disease, accidental death, and misery is intentionally reintroduced and the slave races are treated right.
He also had non-Instrumentality stories, including two bizarre communist science stories, and War No. 81-Q in which wars are settled by fighting robotic zeppelins on TV (this was written in 1928!).
Most of his stuff was short stories, but he did write a novel called Norstrilia, about a boy from a superwealthy planet selling a crucial drug found on no other planet, who buys Earth. All of it.
Norstrilia and Dune came out the same year. Norstrilia is better.
Vance, LeGuin and Silverberg come close, but everyone else is an acne-pocked teenager compared to these folks.
Take some time reading about the B5000. Please note that it did multiprocessing, compilers into machine language, system reconfiguration without reprogramming resource defines, etc.
And all of it written in ALGOL, the great grandfather of C and the first machine-portable language.
Then consider the B6700, which among other things brought us virtual memory and the aforementioned resource stacks. Add in CANDE, WFL and a system that can restart it's jobs in recovery mode right after a Halt/Load (reboot/IPL), a database that could do online backups in the 1980s, and you have THE mainframe. This stuff was so far ahead of IBM that IBM kind of caught up somewhere in 1989, after Burroughs was busy shooting itself in the foot becoming Unisys.
Alas, the same magnificent engineers created an I/O bottleneck monster with their design that they never quite got fixed. That, and Burroughs never built a sales force like IBM. So IBM continued to whack them even though Burroughs had an utterly superior product. Then the Unisys merger disaster occurred, and Burroughs never recovered. Now they sell A-series MCP emulators running on souped-up superservers, but really sell those 20-way NT boxes.
And so like the Amiga, we must salute a superior design that never dominated like it should have.
Bow to MCP!!!!
Dear Lux,
I am writing to you because there are clearly evil BOFHs on this site that in the old days told people to Format C:. Do not listen to their evil ways, or go to the dark side you will.
Any of these people who are suggesting purposely destroying data are lunatics, are highly unprofessional, and should be in violation of an IS code of ethics. First Do No Harm should be your motto.
That having been said, I would perform an amalgamation of what others have suggested-
*Create a base ghost image that is bootable on your site's PC models,
*Create application 'drives' and user drives, apps and shared data goes with the app, users have their own personal space,
*Get users converted to these shares and beat into their heads that if it's on the server it's forever, HDD data can be gone tomorrow,
*Get your backups set and tested waaay before the Big Day,
*Big Day -1, backup the workstations,
*Big Day, ghost the user's hard drive, recover any missing data to their network share,
*Big Day +1 on, all apps always go to the network drive, and reghost their workstations if any problems and take no crap if they foolishly left anything on the PC that was important to the business.
Of all the difficulties for your situation, the last one is most troublesome- the ghost image will clean out any problem and enforce the network drive rule, but many Windows apps absolutely require an install on C:. In this case you need a server deliverable workstation install- most packages should allow it.
WARNING- This is going to sound like an '... and we liked it that way' rant, but here goes-
I was playing D&D back when we were poring over Dragon Magazine #4 to try and glean anything at all about the maddening frustrating lack of rules. So we created a lot of stuff on our own, some of which got duplicated by TSR when later editions came out. Kind of hacking an RPG in a time when no one knew what an RPG 'should' be.
So I may be an old fuddy duddy, but you just can't be as creative when the code (by it's very nature) limits the actions of the characters and the creativity of the DM.
And so help me I have NEVER gotten into the MUDs and their graphical descendants, because there is no substitute for face-to-face gaming.
I'll pass on this D&D gimmick just like everything else, and let everyone else allow their imaginations to be dictated to by the game company.
Come to think of it I actually remember porches and playing outside without benefit of a video game. Lord I AM old.
This technology sounds just like Stephenson's Diamond Age, where the nanobook had a vast amount of data and programming in it for the entire education of a child, and only the human voice readers weren't stored.
Score another one for scifi.
To me the value of the password is predicated on the value of what I am gaining access to, and all the bytes therein. So really you would have to include the per-byte cost of the entire EverQuest environment and all players, without which the kickass character being auctioned off has no value.
So the per-byte cost is probably not very good in this case.
The real per-byte value would probably be some online email/data to get at a meatworld commodity- insider stock information or location of drug stashes would be good examples.