I see no implications for WiFi or iTunes in there. It may very well represent some bad patent law, but, it has nothing to do with anything in this article.
Do you think? This pissing contest between Europe and the US and Asia has been going on since last year and the BBC has run essentially the same friggin story every month in the intervening time.
Unguided missile weapons are typically termed "rockets." They would be useless against modern jet aircraft, and no ballistic SAM systems currently exist.
Not entirely correct. Most Soviet/Russian systems can be launched in a ballistic, ie unguided mode using the Mk 1 eyeball fire control system. Most SAMs are not hit-to-kill systems; they utilize proximity fused fragmentation warheads. Get one close enough and it will do the job. Some US B52 losses in 'nam were to SA-2s launched unguided. Old Saddam's boys tried this last year because they knew if they turned their radars on they'd be hosed. Didn't hit nothin', but they tried.
W-CDMA has basically been accepted as the 3g standard in Europe and Japan.
Gee, I suppose someone should tell all the network engineers at KDDI (who has more 3G customers than DoCoMo) they better rip out all that CDMA2000 equipment and replace it with WCDMA. Better tell the Koreans too. Oh, and the Chinese, they must be kidding with all that talk of using their own SCDMA standard.
A truly sublime April Fools article. It makes so much sense that a reasonable person with no knowledge of DHS (or US Gov't for that matter) would lap up like a hungry dog. Of course, if you know that Tom Ridge is Bill Gates' bottom, the proposterousness of the article is overwhelming.
Sadly, they pulled it at midnight... guess left coasters don't get a full day of April Fools.
The writing was understated, complete with some seemingly supporting links to real news. An excellent job. Much better than "PowerPod". I think I ate one of those once on at a health food store.
"Because, as Plato pointed out over 2000 years ago, democracy is a dangerous thing."
I really don't care to take pointers on democracy from a guy that's been dead for 2 millenia AT HIS OWN HAND because his government told him to drink the kool-aid. Gimme a break.
"The last thing we need is a nuclear nation of 1.2bn (last UN estimate) plunged into democracy."
So, you want a nuclear nation run by syphilitic madmen. I think if you lived in Taiwan and had the privilege of having over 500 Chinese medium range nuclear missiles pointed at you, with a hundred or so more coming on line every year, I think you'd have a different perspective on this.
Of course, if the PRC was really democratic and free, they'd have no problem with Taiwan, as I'm sure Taiwan would very quickly sign back on as a province of China. As it is, they're constantly harassed by the PRC, put under a nuclear cloud, and now that the PRC is serious about building an effective navy and airforce, a likely invasion target inside the next 15 or so years. Yeah, those totalitarian yutzes are really safe to have around the neighborhood, we wouldn't want to have them replaced with a democracy now would we.
"The populace can be taken advantage of - note the cultural revolution was supported by the majority when millions were killed"
What fricking kind of example is this. A totalitarian regime sells its populace, which sadly is far to pliable to such things because of its admirable but ultimately counter-productive respect for the aged (read the aforementioned syphilitic madmen in Beijing). Hell, the Russian people bought into the bullshit of collectivism for years. Neither is an example of a democracy deciding to do something DUMB. They're examples of oppressed peoples being beaten and lied into horrendous policies that ultimately cost them.
"A tyranny is never good, but a tyranny that sees its failures and is moving on is better."
You seem to have too much damned respect for tyrannies. Moving on?! Gee, the cultural revolution killed off hundreds of millions of people, let's not do that again. Yeah, let's find a more subtle way of controlling our population so we can all run around in Range Rovers while they're still struggling to feed themselves. Yeah, great progress.
I suggest if you don't already live there, you should move to China and report back in a year.
Actually, very little of our revolution was fought in any way as a guerilla war. We fought mainly as a standing army in uniform, albeit one on the run for much of the time. We had spies. The Brits had spies, but in all, it was a quite traditional war for the period in which it was fought.
As for the internet spreading ideas at a rapid pace, I'd point out that B.S. spreads as rapidly as the "truth" and the poster's point is FAR MORE VALID than it's rating as a TROLL! Like any media, the Internet is infinitely abuseable. When totalitarian regimes know how to use the media to their favor--Hitler's use of radio and poster art comes to mind--the media becomes a method of control rather than a method of freedom. I see the PRC getting very good at making the Internet work for them, and while it may not be nearly so easy to control as print, it can be controlled.
If you want the old men in Beijing gone, I suggest you start stockpiling guns and put down the mouse.
This is the third law firm which Infinium has used in this matter. Previously, the 'cease and desist' letters came from Morrison & Foerster (a large firm which does a fair amount of work in interactive entertainment) which I would imagine to be their primary corporate counsel and Icard, Merrill, Cullis, Timm, Furen & Ginsburg, P.A., a local Sarasota firm.
While it does make some sense that they would use a Texas firm for the countersuit as it HardOCP filed in Texas, exactly how many lawyers does a company without a product need?;)
how about installing an easy to learn language such as Scheme or PHP and getting them to write text based adventure games ?...where they engage in polygamy, have sex, lock the neighbors in their basement dungeons...
Huh? Yeah, until they lock your ass in jail for, oh, suggesting the government is wrong about anything, preaching [insert deity of your choice which isn't the party central committee], etc.
"free entrepreneurship takes root"
As long as you payoff the appropriate local and national party officials, organized crime bosses, and state-run businesses with whom you must deal for labor, capital, and materials.
Yeah, perhaps America in the cities circa 1850. The individual Chinese may think they're emulating capitalism, but I'm afraid "they're living in a dream world"--the Matrix of a fascist, oligarchist, socialist, polity of syphilitic wack jobs praying on Confucian reasoning to maneuver several billion souls into conforming to a morally and socially bankrupt system whose overriding current concern seems to be asserting its ownership of Taiwan (give it up already!) and in trying to destabilize as many other world economies as possible by exploiting its cheap labor pool while maintaining iron-fisted control of its currency and internal capital markets.
Ok, then how about a simple solution... blowers. Put a couple of small compressors on the thing to suck up some of that thin Mars atmosphere. Have each of 'em tied into a few nozzles in redundant locations so if one compressor goes down or a nozzle gets clogged you've got backups. Get some good pressure in the tank and let it rip. If one shot doesn't clean things up, fire up the compressor again and keep doing it until you've got a clean panel.
Or, heck, it's perhaps more moving parts but how about just a couple of those fans OC'ers like to use to keep their overclocked Radeon 9800s from exploding. Yeah, the air is thinner on Mars, but there's also a lot less gravity holding the dust on the panels--I bet a 7000 RPM fan on a good old oscillating base would fill the bill.
I bet when they were testing these things on Earth and a panel got a little dusty some engineer walked over to the thing with a can of dust-off. Anyone want to volunteer for a one way trip armed with a can of compressed air and a 512 MB CF card to plug into the thing. Oh, and you could sprinkle some water in front of it to; that would get everyone excited!
The Commanche supposedly had a radar cross section about 66% less than the current scout helicopter (OH-58D--Kiowa Warrior). Actually, in its original mission--back in '83--stealth made sense. The Commanche was supposed to scout ahead of the Apache Attack helos, locate the Soviet armored formations in Germany, and relay this info back to the Apaches who would pop-up from their hide positions and start spewing Hellfire's at the Ruskies. In this role, having some stealth could have saved them from rapid annihilation by Soviet radar-directed gunnery (ZSU-23s) which always accompanied Soviet advanced formations.
Trouble is, in today's conflicts, a scout helicopter doing it's job is going to be taking all sorts of fire from guerillas or terrorists jumping out of cars and buildings firing RPGs, MANPADS, and automatic weapons. This was a non-issue in a big conventional war in Europe (or Korea for that matter). There's no way to be stealthy flying over a city. Apparently the rotor and engine design was also very quiet, so it might of had some advantage in urban and/or guerilla environments over existing choppers, but you still can't sneak up on anyone in a helicopter (Blue Thunder does not exist).
At $59M a pop, there was no way the Commanche can be bought (if Congress fights this, I'll be spewing email at my Congress-critters to knock it off). You can't pay that much (nearly as much as a JSF is going to cost) for something that as a previous poster pointed out can be shot down by some phanatic with a cheap disposable rocket.
The reason it has taken this long to kill Commanche is that Congress, despite their protestations against a myriad of defense programs over the years, doesn't like to cancel projects because the military procurement budget is the single largest jobs program in the Federal budget. Hell, for two decades they've been trying to kill the B-1 bomber and now they're trying to get the AF to put 21 retired aircraft back in service! It's also a matter of prestige and getting their slice of the procurement pie for the services--what will the Army do to recruit kids without cool weapons to feature in commercials. Plus there's been an unhealthy career track in the military for program managers--instead of fighting for a living, alot of military now do R&D for a living. If your project goes down, there goes you chances for promotion (and perhaps even that lucrative private sector job with a defense contractor).
What the Army needs are some new medium and heavy transport helicopters; something that can get up into the mountains easier in Afghanistan. They can certainly do with some new OH-58s, perhaps with beefier engines and more armor to enable them to take some hits and keep flying. The poor Marine Corps is still flying 40+ year old SH-46 Sea Knights that are only flying because of the herculean effort of Marine mechanics to keep them stuck together. There are a lot of places to spend that $38B that would both increase lethality of our military and better protect our troops.
The trouble is that helicopters, like so many defense systems, have just gotten too expensive due to a combination of gold plating, constantly increasing requirements, and reduced procurement. We used to buy thousands of an aircraft, now we buy hundreds. Stated another way, we used to buy Camrys, now we buy Porsches. The Commanche was the ultimate in gold plating of a project. Ask a pilot over in Iraq or Afghanistan what they'd like and I'm sure they'd tell us something that's rugged, reliable, and easy to fly (oh, and has modern anti-missile systems on board). I'm not saying stop buying Porsches when they're called for, but helos are not the place to be spending that kind of scratch. Take that 38 billion and you can completely upgrade all the current helo inventory with modern anti-missile systems and replace the oldest in inventory with new airframes so our kids aren't flying planes twice as old as they are.
As sleepingsquirrel says, if you need to shoot RAW as most pro photogs do, that little 512MB card is going to net you only 25-40 images. If you're shooting a wedding... or sports... or a police booking, you don't want to be worrying about changing cards.
Now, perhaps wedding photogs might eschew hd based cards since if they lose a 100 images of a wedding they're screwed whereas the news stringer is just going to eat cereal for dinner that night.
I've heard Cray's make great couches to compliment modernist furniture--think Le Corbusier, Herman Miller, Eileen Gray. Hang a Kandinsky on the wall and you're all set.
The Earth Simulator (#1) and Asci Q (#2) were both completed in 2002, although I know planning on the Earth Simulator goes back to the mid-90s. No idea on when Asci Q was planned, but it's 8192 1.25GHz Alphas (SC45 servers) which is current technology for the Alpha line. But with TES you're talking about something that's nearly two orders of magnitude more expensive than VT's X. If you could build it today for the same price or perhaps 75-80% and get another 10-20% performance out of it it would still be way more expensive on a $ per GFlop basis.
More interestingly, #4 on the list in the NCSA's Tungsten with 2500 3Ghz P4s. It's about 15% slower with 300 more desktop procs than X and was also made operational in '03. I suppose if they were to run around plugging 3.2 GHz processors into their 1250 Dell boxes one could perhaps sneek up on X, but you'd likely have to wait for the 4 GHz P4e to actually steam past it.
Basically, the supercomputers which were completed most recently ARE the ones at the top of the list. X just happens to be insanely cheap compared to the ones above it.
Len Quam
Leaks seem to follow Michael Foale around
on
ISS May Have A Leak
·
· Score: 1
Poor Michael is 2 for 2 on pressure leaks in space stations he's been on. Time to start calling that fella a bad luck charm.
Except that even the expensive goods are produced offshore. My wife really likes Brooks Brothers wrinkle-free dress shirts. They're expensive, but the cloth and manufacture is very good and they last a long time. They cost $59.50. Not custom shirt prices, but much more than you'd pay at Wal-Mart. Where are they made? Malaysia. Now, I think it would be quite possible for Brooks Brothers to have that shirt made in the U.S. and still make money, but they're obviously interested in making tons of money. And that is of course what their stockholders want, so the hell with American manufacturing jobs.
My question is what jobs will be left except for burger flipping, construction (can't very well move pouring concrete offshore), and senior management munch butts. Take a woman from North Carolina who was an excellent seamstress who's out of work because almost no clothing is produced in the U.S. these days. She isn't going to go to Wharton for her MBA and become a manager; she's gonna end up flipping burgers if she's lucky! Free trade is fine, but when countries abandon a balanced economy where there is adequate opportunity for people of all levels of skill and education you wipe out the middle class. This has happened to farmers overseas when cheap U.S. food flowed in, and it's happening here as we exploit cheap manufacturing and now white collar labor overseas. So what is the middle class supposed to do for a living in 20 years. I have never heard a good answer for this from any of the 'free traders', just the same old babble about productivity, innovation, blah, blah, blah. The sad fact is that economic activity just can't grow fast enough to offset job losses like we've seen in the U.S. in manufacturing--Best Buy only needs so many washing machine salesmen.
Free markets can only be beneficial in the long term if they promote a levelling of economic opportunity and circumstance. We best hope that all those Indian call center personnel and Malaysian seamstresses start earning higher wages soon, else they become simply an unenfranchised underclass that continues to leach jobs away from developed nations while at the same time creating a huge wellspring of resentment towards same.
BTW, I'm a conservative free-trader type, but what I see going on now in the U.S. has nothing to do with free trade; it's mainly stock market driven greed and I really don't think you can candy coat it as anything but that.
CD prices have fallen surprisingly little in 20 years -- about a third in inflation-adjusted dollars. I don't remember prices like this with vinyl, and when CD's came along there was a hefty premium for them. Yes, they provided higher quality, but I bet their production costs are now far lower.
Actually, CDs were cheaper to produce than vinyl then as well as now. Of course nowadays, there is no correlation with the cost to produce a CD and its price--the cost of manufacturing is so low that if marketing et. al. was left out of the mix money could be made selling CDs at $2/pop.
As for quality, early CDs provided far lower quality than vinyl initially. Yeah, we got rid of the ticks, pops, scratches, and rumbles, but great violence was done to the music by the early digital recording and mastering technology which often couldn't muster more than 13 or 14-bits of resolution at best (and often far worse). To this day, many prefer vinyl and only the recent SACD and DVD-A technologies can give well produced vinyl a run for its money on sound quality. I'm not a luddite and most of my music is now on CD, but I'm not happy about it.
Better for convenience, yes. Better for sound, decidedly not.
Have a friend that in the mid-80s was working out at the Blue Cube rewriting the many millions of lines of SNOBOL they used to run the U.S.'s spy satellite network into Ada. I think they may still be working on it to this day.
All military orgs run by the maxim of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", especially when it comes to administration. And the farther you get from the tip of the sword the more backwards things get. I'm sure Wordstar does just what they want done in the applications it's used in. The tragedy would be to replace it with OfficeXP.
IANAL, but the EU directive doesn't mandate a 2 year warranty. It provides that if a consumer good suffers from "lack of conformity" (see Article 2 in link below for definition) the consumer has right of redress if said lack of conformity "becomes apparent" within 2 years (save some limits allowed for national laws).
The sticky clause seems to be 2(d), where it defines conformity as:
"show the quality and performance which are normal in goods of the same type and which the consumer can reasonably expect, given the nature of the goods and taking into account any public statements on the specific characteristics of the goods made about them by the seller, the producer or his representative, particularly in advertising or on labelling."
This is so nebulous, it could be a U.S. law! The "reasonably expect" bit is the sort of language you can drive a truck through and I have no doubt that much court time will be wasted in Europe deciding what is reasonable for all manner of products. I would think the HD manufacturers simply need to be careful about how they promote and market their products so as to no create 'expectations' which exceed their desired warranty period.
Full text here for those who just can't get enough American legalese and want to dive into some tasty fresh EU legalese: http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/pri/en/oj/ dat/1999/l_ 171/l_17119990707en00120016.pdf
Slashdot Mirror
What is it doing in this article?
I see no implications for WiFi or iTunes in there. It may very well represent some bad patent law, but, it has nothing to do with anything in this article.
--Len
Someone really needs to shove a few dozen 40G iPods in that man's cakehole.
And somehow, automagically, a M$ MP3 (nay Windows Media) player is going to determine what music on it has been stolen and what has not?
Sounds like a device that's not going to get used that much.
Idiot.
--Len
It looks incredibly hard to hold and operate with one hand. Why landscape? Why ATRAC? Sony has lost its way. I worry about PS3.
--Len
Do you think? This pissing contest between Europe and the US and Asia has been going on since last year and the BBC has run essentially the same friggin story every month in the intervening time.
Unguided missile weapons are typically termed "rockets." They would be useless against modern jet aircraft, and no ballistic SAM systems currently exist.
Not entirely correct. Most Soviet/Russian systems can be launched in a ballistic, ie unguided mode using the Mk 1 eyeball fire control system. Most SAMs are not hit-to-kill systems; they utilize proximity fused fragmentation warheads. Get one close enough and it will do the job. Some US B52 losses in 'nam were to SA-2s launched unguided. Old Saddam's boys tried this last year because they knew if they turned their radars on they'd be hosed. Didn't hit nothin', but they tried.
--Len
W-CDMA has basically been accepted as the 3g standard in Europe and Japan.
Gee, I suppose someone should tell all the network engineers at KDDI (who has more 3G customers than DoCoMo) they better rip out all that CDMA2000 equipment and replace it with WCDMA. Better tell the Koreans too. Oh, and the Chinese, they must be kidding with all that talk of using their own SCDMA standard.
W-CDMA zealots drive me batty.
--Len
A truly sublime April Fools article. It makes so much sense that a reasonable person with no knowledge of DHS (or US Gov't for that matter) would lap up like a hungry dog. Of course, if you know that Tom Ridge is Bill Gates' bottom, the proposterousness of the article is overwhelming.
Sadly, they pulled it at midnight... guess left coasters don't get a full day of April Fools.
The writing was understated, complete with some seemingly supporting links to real news. An excellent job. Much better than "PowerPod". I think I ate one of those once on at a health food store.
Cheers,
--Len
"Because, as Plato pointed out over 2000 years ago, democracy is a dangerous thing."
I really don't care to take pointers on democracy from a guy that's been dead for 2 millenia AT HIS OWN HAND because his government told him to drink the kool-aid. Gimme a break.
"The last thing we need is a nuclear nation of 1.2bn (last UN estimate) plunged into democracy."
So, you want a nuclear nation run by syphilitic madmen. I think if you lived in Taiwan and had the privilege of having over 500 Chinese medium range nuclear missiles pointed at you, with a hundred or so more coming on line every year, I think you'd have a different perspective on this.
Of course, if the PRC was really democratic and free, they'd have no problem with Taiwan, as I'm sure Taiwan would very quickly sign back on as a province of China. As it is, they're constantly harassed by the PRC, put under a nuclear cloud, and now that the PRC is serious about building an effective navy and airforce, a likely invasion target inside the next 15 or so years. Yeah, those totalitarian yutzes are really safe to have around the neighborhood, we wouldn't want to have them replaced with a democracy now would we.
"The populace can be taken advantage of - note the cultural revolution was supported by the majority when millions were killed"
What fricking kind of example is this. A totalitarian regime sells its populace, which sadly is far to pliable to such things because of its admirable but ultimately counter-productive respect for the aged (read the aforementioned syphilitic madmen in Beijing). Hell, the Russian people bought into the bullshit of collectivism for years. Neither is an example of a democracy deciding to do something DUMB. They're examples of oppressed peoples being beaten and lied into horrendous policies that ultimately cost them.
"A tyranny is never good, but a tyranny that sees its failures and is moving on is better."
You seem to have too much damned respect for tyrannies. Moving on?! Gee, the cultural revolution killed off hundreds of millions of people, let's not do that again. Yeah, let's find a more subtle way of controlling our population so we can all run around in Range Rovers while they're still struggling to feed themselves. Yeah, great progress.
I suggest if you don't already live there, you should move to China and report back in a year.
--Len
Actually, very little of our revolution was fought in any way as a guerilla war. We fought mainly as a standing army in uniform, albeit one on the run for much of the time. We had spies. The Brits had spies, but in all, it was a quite traditional war for the period in which it was fought.
As for the internet spreading ideas at a rapid pace, I'd point out that B.S. spreads as rapidly as the "truth" and the poster's point is FAR MORE VALID than it's rating as a TROLL! Like any media, the Internet is infinitely abuseable. When totalitarian regimes know how to use the media to their favor--Hitler's use of radio and poster art comes to mind--the media becomes a method of control rather than a method of freedom. I see the PRC getting very good at making the Internet work for them, and while it may not be nearly so easy to control as print, it can be controlled.
If you want the old men in Beijing gone, I suggest you start stockpiling guns and put down the mouse.
--Len
This is the third law firm which Infinium has used in this matter. Previously, the 'cease and desist' letters came from Morrison & Foerster (a large firm which does a fair amount of work in interactive entertainment) which I would imagine to be their primary corporate counsel and Icard, Merrill, Cullis, Timm, Furen & Ginsburg, P.A., a local Sarasota firm.
;)
While it does make some sense that they would use a Texas firm for the countersuit as it HardOCP filed in Texas, exactly how many lawyers does a company without a product need?
how about installing an easy to learn language such as Scheme or PHP and getting them to write text based adventure games ? ...where they engage in polygamy, have sex, lock the neighbors in their basement dungeons...
"Freedom of speech spreads"
Huh? Yeah, until they lock your ass in jail for, oh, suggesting the government is wrong about anything, preaching [insert deity of your choice which isn't the party central committee], etc.
"free entrepreneurship takes root"
As long as you payoff the appropriate local and national party officials, organized crime bosses, and state-run businesses with whom you must deal for labor, capital, and materials.
Yeah, perhaps America in the cities circa 1850. The individual Chinese may think they're emulating capitalism, but I'm afraid "they're living in a dream world"--the Matrix of a fascist, oligarchist, socialist, polity of syphilitic wack jobs praying on Confucian reasoning to maneuver several billion souls into conforming to a morally and socially bankrupt system whose overriding current concern seems to be asserting its ownership of Taiwan (give it up already!) and in trying to destabilize as many other world economies as possible by exploiting its cheap labor pool while maintaining iron-fisted control of its currency and internal capital markets.
--Len
Ok, then how about a simple solution... blowers. Put a couple of small compressors on the thing to suck up some of that thin Mars atmosphere. Have each of 'em tied into a few nozzles in redundant locations so if one compressor goes down or a nozzle gets clogged you've got backups. Get some good pressure in the tank and let it rip. If one shot doesn't clean things up, fire up the compressor again and keep doing it until you've got a clean panel.
Or, heck, it's perhaps more moving parts but how about just a couple of those fans OC'ers like to use to keep their overclocked Radeon 9800s from exploding. Yeah, the air is thinner on Mars, but there's also a lot less gravity holding the dust on the panels--I bet a 7000 RPM fan on a good old oscillating base would fill the bill.
I bet when they were testing these things on Earth and a panel got a little dusty some engineer walked over to the thing with a can of dust-off. Anyone want to volunteer for a one way trip armed with a can of compressed air and a 512 MB CF card to plug into the thing. Oh, and you could sprinkle some water in front of it to; that would get everyone excited!
--Len
The Commanche supposedly had a radar cross section about 66% less than the current scout helicopter (OH-58D--Kiowa Warrior). Actually, in its original mission--back in '83--stealth made sense. The Commanche was supposed to scout ahead of the Apache Attack helos, locate the Soviet armored formations in Germany, and relay this info back to the Apaches who would pop-up from their hide positions and start spewing Hellfire's at the Ruskies. In this role, having some stealth could have saved them from rapid annihilation by Soviet radar-directed gunnery (ZSU-23s) which always accompanied Soviet advanced formations.
Trouble is, in today's conflicts, a scout helicopter doing it's job is going to be taking all sorts of fire from guerillas or terrorists jumping out of cars and buildings firing RPGs, MANPADS, and automatic weapons. This was a non-issue in a big conventional war in Europe (or Korea for that matter). There's no way to be stealthy flying over a city. Apparently the rotor and engine design was also very quiet, so it might of had some advantage in urban and/or guerilla environments over existing choppers, but you still can't sneak up on anyone in a helicopter (Blue Thunder does not exist).
At $59M a pop, there was no way the Commanche can be bought (if Congress fights this, I'll be spewing email at my Congress-critters to knock it off). You can't pay that much (nearly as much as a JSF is going to cost) for something that as a previous poster pointed out can be shot down by some phanatic with a cheap disposable rocket.
The reason it has taken this long to kill Commanche is that Congress, despite their protestations against a myriad of defense programs over the years, doesn't like to cancel projects because the military procurement budget is the single largest jobs program in the Federal budget. Hell, for two decades they've been trying to kill the B-1 bomber and now they're trying to get the AF to put 21 retired aircraft back in service! It's also a matter of prestige and getting their slice of the procurement pie for the services--what will the Army do to recruit kids without cool weapons to feature in commercials. Plus there's been an unhealthy career track in the military for program managers--instead of fighting for a living, alot of military now do R&D for a living. If your project goes down, there goes you chances for promotion (and perhaps even that lucrative private sector job with a defense contractor).
What the Army needs are some new medium and heavy transport helicopters; something that can get up into the mountains easier in Afghanistan. They can certainly do with some new OH-58s, perhaps with beefier engines and more armor to enable them to take some hits and keep flying. The poor Marine Corps is still flying 40+ year old SH-46 Sea Knights that are only flying because of the herculean effort of Marine mechanics to keep them stuck together. There are a lot of places to spend that $38B that would both increase lethality of our military and better protect our troops.
The trouble is that helicopters, like so many defense systems, have just gotten too expensive due to a combination of gold plating, constantly increasing requirements, and reduced procurement. We used to buy thousands of an aircraft, now we buy hundreds. Stated another way, we used to buy Camrys, now we buy Porsches. The Commanche was the ultimate in gold plating of a project. Ask a pilot over in Iraq or Afghanistan what they'd like and I'm sure they'd tell us something that's rugged, reliable, and easy to fly (oh, and has modern anti-missile systems on board). I'm not saying stop buying Porsches when they're called for, but helos are not the place to be spending that kind of scratch. Take that 38 billion and you can completely upgrade all the current helo inventory with modern anti-missile systems and replace the oldest in inventory with new airframes so our kids aren't flying planes twice as old as they are.
--Len Quam
As sleepingsquirrel says, if you need to shoot RAW as most pro photogs do, that little 512MB card is going to net you only 25-40 images. If you're shooting a wedding... or sports... or a police booking, you don't want to be worrying about changing cards.
Now, perhaps wedding photogs might eschew hd based cards since if they lose a 100 images of a wedding they're screwed whereas the news stringer is just going to eat cereal for dinner that night.
--Len
I've heard Cray's make great couches to compliment modernist furniture--think Le Corbusier, Herman Miller, Eileen Gray. Hang a Kandinsky on the wall and you're all set.
--Len Quam
The Earth Simulator (#1) and Asci Q (#2) were both completed in 2002, although I know planning on the Earth Simulator goes back to the mid-90s. No idea on when Asci Q was planned, but it's 8192 1.25GHz Alphas (SC45 servers) which is current technology for the Alpha line. But with TES you're talking about something that's nearly two orders of magnitude more expensive than VT's X. If you could build it today for the same price or perhaps 75-80% and get another 10-20% performance out of it it would still be way more expensive on a $ per GFlop basis.
More interestingly, #4 on the list in the NCSA's Tungsten with 2500 3Ghz P4s. It's about 15% slower with 300 more desktop procs than X and was also made operational in '03. I suppose if they were to run around plugging 3.2 GHz processors into their 1250 Dell boxes one could perhaps sneek up on X, but you'd likely have to wait for the 4 GHz P4e to actually steam past it.
Basically, the supercomputers which were completed most recently ARE the ones at the top of the list. X just happens to be insanely cheap compared to the ones above it.
Len Quam
Poor Michael is 2 for 2 on pressure leaks in space stations he's been on. Time to start calling that fella a bad luck charm.
The girl who never wanted to go out with you in school
Jeez, and I thought it was playing D&D, reading books on the Civil War, or playing Trombone.
I had to save up for a year for my disks, muddling along with my cassette recorder. Boy, wasn't I styling once I got the 64K upgrade and the floppy!
The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, his follow-on to TMOTAB.
Except that even the expensive goods are produced offshore. My wife really likes Brooks Brothers wrinkle-free dress shirts. They're expensive, but the cloth and manufacture is very good and they last a long time. They cost $59.50. Not custom shirt prices, but much more than you'd pay at Wal-Mart. Where are they made? Malaysia. Now, I think it would be quite possible for Brooks Brothers to have that shirt made in the U.S. and still make money, but they're obviously interested in making tons of money. And that is of course what their stockholders want, so the hell with American manufacturing jobs.
My question is what jobs will be left except for burger flipping, construction (can't very well move pouring concrete offshore), and senior management munch butts. Take a woman from North Carolina who was an excellent seamstress who's out of work because almost no clothing is produced in the U.S. these days. She isn't going to go to Wharton for her MBA and become a manager; she's gonna end up flipping burgers if she's lucky! Free trade is fine, but when countries abandon a balanced economy where there is adequate opportunity for people of all levels of skill and education you wipe out the middle class. This has happened to farmers overseas when cheap U.S. food flowed in, and it's happening here as we exploit cheap manufacturing and now white collar labor overseas. So what is the middle class supposed to do for a living in 20 years. I have never heard a good answer for this from any of the 'free traders', just the same old babble about productivity, innovation, blah, blah, blah. The sad fact is that economic activity just can't grow fast enough to offset job losses like we've seen in the U.S. in manufacturing--Best Buy only needs so many washing machine salesmen.
Free markets can only be beneficial in the long term if they promote a levelling of economic opportunity and circumstance. We best hope that all those Indian call center personnel and Malaysian seamstresses start earning higher wages soon, else they become simply an unenfranchised underclass that continues to leach jobs away from developed nations while at the same time creating a huge wellspring of resentment towards same.
BTW, I'm a conservative free-trader type, but what I see going on now in the U.S. has nothing to do with free trade; it's mainly stock market driven greed and I really don't think you can candy coat it as anything but that.
--Len, flamebait, Quam
Actually, CDs were cheaper to produce than vinyl then as well as now. Of course nowadays, there is no correlation with the cost to produce a CD and its price--the cost of manufacturing is so low that if marketing et. al. was left out of the mix money could be made selling CDs at $2/pop.
As for quality, early CDs provided far lower quality than vinyl initially. Yeah, we got rid of the ticks, pops, scratches, and rumbles, but great violence was done to the music by the early digital recording and mastering technology which often couldn't muster more than 13 or 14-bits of resolution at best (and often far worse). To this day, many prefer vinyl and only the recent SACD and DVD-A technologies can give well produced vinyl a run for its money on sound quality. I'm not a luddite and most of my music is now on CD, but I'm not happy about it.
Better for convenience, yes. Better for sound, decidedly not.
--Len
Have a friend that in the mid-80s was working out at the Blue Cube rewriting the many millions of lines of SNOBOL they used to run the U.S.'s spy satellite network into Ada. I think they may still be working on it to this day.
All military orgs run by the maxim of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", especially when it comes to administration. And the farther you get from the tip of the sword the more backwards things get. I'm sure Wordstar does just what they want done in the applications it's used in. The tragedy would be to replace it with OfficeXP.
Hey, maybe they'll replace it with vi.
--Len
IANAL, but the EU directive doesn't mandate a 2 year warranty. It provides that if a consumer good suffers from "lack of conformity" (see Article 2 in link below for definition) the consumer has right of redress if said lack of conformity "becomes apparent" within 2 years (save some limits allowed for national laws).
/ dat/1999/l_ 171/l_17119990707en00120016.pdf
The sticky clause seems to be 2(d), where it defines conformity as:
"show the quality and performance which are normal in goods of the same type and which the consumer can reasonably expect, given the nature of the goods and taking into account any public statements on the specific characteristics of the goods made about them by the seller, the producer or his representative, particularly in advertising or on labelling."
This is so nebulous, it could be a U.S. law! The "reasonably expect" bit is the sort of language you can drive a truck through and I have no doubt that much court time will be wasted in Europe deciding what is reasonable for all manner of products. I would think the HD manufacturers simply need to be careful about how they promote and market their products so as to no create 'expectations' which exceed their desired warranty period.
Full text here for those who just can't get enough American legalese and want to dive into some tasty fresh EU legalese:
http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/pri/en/oj
--Len