FTFA "On Oct. 24, AEHF-1 reached its originally planned orbit. Testing began soon afterward. The Air Force expects to bring the satellite into service in March. Meanwhile, two more AEHFs are slated to launch in 2012."
They got it into the correct orbit over two months ago using the small thrusters. In other words... More sensationalistic headlines to get clicks and comments from the new Slashdot. Really? Oh and the answer is "no a dirty rag did not take out a 2 billion dollar commsat."
People really confuse making nuclear weapons with nuclear reactors for some odd reason. A light water nuclear reactor is not a good technology for making nuclear weapons. A thorium based reactor is even worse.
Actually you make an interesting point. A board like this but that connected to you PC with a USB interface could be very useful. With proper libraries and bindings for things like Python, Perl, Ruby, Lua, C, C++, and so on would be very cool tool for people to play with. Of course one could make such a device from a Pi and even have it be networked. Realtime control would be a challenge but for none realtime control it could be kind of cool.
Probably not. The CPU in the Pi is much more powerful than the Arduino. Throw in that the PI has a Keyboard and HDMI out as well and things change a bit. With the Arduino you must have PC to program it. With the Pi you just need the Pi with a keyboard and monitor. So lets say you wanted to make a video game with some custom controllers, the Pi would be a much better solution. If you want to make a small weather station that runs on solar power and talks over ZigBee or even a low power HAM radio link with morse code. Than an Arduino might be the best choice. If you want to use PSK over the radio link them back to the Pi. If you want a device to steam audio from your samba share on your NAS the Pi makes a lot of sense.
"You have the right to speak regardless of which medium you choose to exercise this right." But their is no write to the access to that medium.
You can not just walk into a TV station and demand a half hour of time, you can not walk into a print shop and demand they print your document. You can not demand access to the internet.
The internet like tv, radio, paper, and ink are resources not rights.
Of course they can deny your access. If you do not own a printing press you can be denied access to one. For radio and TV not only must you have the money to own, rent, or the permission of the owner you must also follow the FCC rules on profanity transmitting power and so on. For the Internet you must have the money to pay for access to it. That is where it is not a right. Freedom of speech means that you can say what ever you want but the available means of communication are not rights outside of using your own mouth and or writing with your own hand and resources. So internet access is not a right as covered under the 1st amendment of the constitution. It is just another tool of communication no different than a printing press. A tool that is used by both individuals and the press. Now what they can not do is remove your access to prevent of your exercise of free speech just as they can not take away a printing press that you own.
Interesting should then the government give it to you? Freedom of speech doesn't mean that your are provided access to a printing press, radio transmitter, or TV transmitter.
The Pet was on the way out by 1982. The B Macine was interesting. I am kind of sorry I never got one on Close out from protecto back in the day. It might have been fun to run a BBS on. My high school had Super Pet which where great machines. We also had 8050s I think interfaced with something called a muppet that allowed us to share the drives and printer. In a way it was like an early NAS. Those machines where so cool. I wish I had more time to play with them back in the day. It was a real shame. In many ways Commodore could have done so much better than they did. Things where so interesting back then. We had Atari, Commodore, Apple, Tandy, TI,and many more all doing really wild things. First in 8 bit with the Atari 800/400, TRS-80s, PETs, Vic 20s, C64s, Cocos, Apple IIs and the BeeBeb . And then into the 16/32 bit world with Amiga, Atari ST, Mac, AppleIIgs,Tandy Model 16, Tandy 1000, and on and on. Now we have Intel machines running Windows, Linux, BSD, or OS/X. At least the ARM stuff is kind of interesting. Oh and I didn't mean to leave out Sir Clive and Acorn. Thanks Acorn for ARM:)
If you want to roll your own then you have a LOT of options. The first question is what do you know? Single user or network? If you are going the network route and want to do client server I can think of a few ways to go. Backed MySQL or PostgreSQL I am a fan of PostgreSQL myself. For a small library a Pentium 3 machine that no one wants running say Ubuntu Server edition will work fine as a server. The data base will be tiny so so you could use a few drives that no one wants because they are too small and set up a RAID 1 with them. If it has a USB port a Flash drive will be big enough to hold the database so you could just stick a flash drive on the back and have it do nightly automated backups. People don't understand just how small a database that is just text can be compared to modern storage.
For the front end you again have a lot of options. Java is works well for this kind of application and Netbeans is a good free ide for it. Plus it will run on everything. You could use Python if you wish. Or you could make it all web based. HTML + Perl/Python/PHP/Ruby would also work. Single user? Well Java+SQLite, or VB, or C# or Python or Perl or Ruby with SQLlite on Windows or Linux will do as well. All of this is just if YOU want to do it. There are probably any number of FOSS packages out their on the market that you can use. Some times people do like to roll their own and this would be a pretty simple project yet fun project for someone that is interested.
I got one of the first that came out. The one thing I really feel Commodore screwed up on was the 1541. It was so slow.... Had the C64 had a faster floppy drive it might have done better with business users. Hey people ran businesses off of the Apple II. I also had a program that gave it a software 80 column display. It wasn't easy to read but it worked well enough with my terminal program on some of the CP/M based BBS that wanted 80 columns.
Good enough but possibly not needed. I have seen DOS systems used for CNC controllers for example. There are still good cheap dev tools for DOS as well. Would I pick DOS for any project? Well I can think of one maybe but even then I might pick Linux. But then I know of embedded systems that still run DOS to this day. Hey Freepascal and I think GCC both still support DOS so someone is using it.
I never said that Javascript was a clean language. I never said that no one should us PHP just that it really isn't a great language. I have used it myself and you can knock out some projects really fast but it was no fun.
We are talking desktops so server apps don't matter. Look at the apps you listed. All of them deal with huge data sets and are not "mainstream" apps. Sure if you edit video for a living, edit digital images for a living, even CAD for a living you need to update to at least W7 64. If you are just using word, excel, email, Quickbooks, turbotax and the web... Really not so much. For a huge number of people their is nothing but cost to be gained by going with Window7 today. In the future things will change but that is the whole point. They are not upgrading because XP is good enough.
Re:But what use would I have for it?
on
FreeDOS 1.1 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
Actually yes. I know of people that keep old dos computers around just to run one old program. Also Embedded systems. DOS is light and small and does not get into your way. If you have a crash you can almost bet money that the problem is 100 your code. Under DOS you can also bit bang hardware interfaces that would be difficult to do with anything else. As to uses let me give you an example. Their are some old devices that used 3.5" floppies but with a custom format. There are programs for dos that can read that data. If you have one of those devices then this is exactly what you need. And of course to flash bios.
I frankly do not think anything is as good. The combination of abrasion resistance and flexibility of leather I feel is unmatched at this time. Maybe someday but not today. For many riders ballistic nylon and kevlar are a good substitute. For road riding possibly better than leather at least in hot weather. But for racing leather is still the best choice. I don't know of anything even at 100x the cost that beats leather in that application. I also don't have a problem with using leather since it would otherwise go to waste. Now things like aligator and snake skin are not the leather I am talking about. However if you are going to eat the animal it is only right to use as much of it as possible IMHO and to not waste any of it.
Really? The fact that you can access global variables two different ways makes sense to you? I will give you that it is "slightly" better than Perl's scoping.
If your data requires more memory than you can get with 32 bit or it involves a lot of integer math with values greater then 32 bits it can be a lot faster. However it can also be slower if your data set is very small and you don't use values > 32 bits. A 64bit program will also use more memory because all the pointers are now 64bit. On the X86 most programs will get a slight speed increase because 64 bit code has access to more GP registers. This helps off set the performance hit you get from using more memory. The thing is that most software will not be recompiled for 64 bit code for a very long time under windows for the simple reason that windows runs 32 bit code just fine and why support two versions? And incase you have not noticed most computers are more than fast enough. CPU is rarely the bottleneck today. It is usually the network, mass storage, and for some memory. 64bit only helps with memory but most memory issues today are caused by malware and not even applications. Just remember I am talking about the "average " user. Gammers, CAD/CAM, Photoshop, and so on users can often use all the memory and speed they can get. But for one of the most demanding uses Transcoding you are going to be better off with a good Video card that can offload the transcodeing than a faster CPU or more memory.
"More to the point, can't better silk be synthetically produced on a large scale? Same question applies for other animal based textiles, such as wool, leather, fur, etc" No. and no. next question? Okay lets get a little real here. 1. leather. leather has some qualities that are not found in any other material. It is required for motorcycle racers to wear because it offers the best protection. Nothing man made can replace it. Also most leather is a by product of animals being killed for meat. Exceptions are for some of the exotics which if you want to boycot be my guest as they are nothing but an ego trip. So as long as people eat meat using the leather from that does not contribute to any suffering. 2. Wool. Sheep don't die to get wool folks. As far as I know sheep raised for wool are protected, feed, and cared for by humans. It is an actual advantage for the Sheep and is an almost symbiotic relationship. So what is wrong with wool? 3. Fur. Well unless you live in the arctic I see no reason to wear it. So boycot that all you want. Silk! if we could make it we would. So no there is no better way. Besides they are just bugs. Sorry folks but if you kill flys, ants, and roaches then you really shouldn't have an issue with this. I do not like "factory farms" and other forms of animal cruelty but when you go too far in your objections it marginalizes the argument. AKA Wool.
Some of the Russian anti ship missiles had an anti-radiation mode AKA anti radar. Those would be of little use going after a US task force and almost none for a carrier. In a high threat mode the ships would put their radars in standby and depend on E-2s and even F-18s to feed sensor data to them. They also have towed decoys that can put out a signal that looks like radar and has a radar signature of a ship. The radar would only go hot for terminal defense. AKA after the missile has locked on to the ships so they could fire their missiles in defense. That is one of the huge benefits a carrier group has over any task force without AEW aircraft. The Navy is even going to start deploying a new missile called the SM-6. It uses an active seeker derived from the AIM-120 so that it can be targeted from the E-2 or any other platform so that ships can now fire over the horizon at incoming missiles. The Russian anti-radiation cruise missiles where intended to take out land radar stations at a long distance so they where multi function. Most of the later anti-ship missiles added an IR system as well as the radar system to make them harder to decoy.
A. They will not have hundreds much less thousands of small craft with antiship missiles. You also can not launch and antiship missile from a John boat. B. The US does not need to be in the gulf to clear the gulf of the Iranian navy.
If they had thousands of anti ship missiles why even put them on boats? You can launch them from land and they would be easier to hide and defend. The US would have ships in the gulf but they would be DDGs. If they might even put a carrier in the gulf if they feel confident. However you live in a fantasy world of you think the that Iran has "thousands" of anti-ship missels and you are just nuts if you think you can fire them from a john boat.
Which ones? What apps do not have 32 bit support today? Office still runs on 32 bit. And I got news for you a lot of people will be happy to stick with their old apps until they get a new PC as long as those apps work for what they want to do.
I work for a software company and even though we offered a free update to our Windows program to all our customers with support contract well over a decade ago we still run into people using the DOS version of our software and paying for their support! They just didn't want to learn Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
You left out Slashdot summary failure.
FTFA
"On Oct. 24, AEHF-1 reached its originally planned orbit. Testing began soon afterward. The Air Force expects to bring the satellite into service in March. Meanwhile, two more AEHFs are slated to launch in 2012."
They got it into the correct orbit over two months ago using the small thrusters.
In other words...
More sensationalistic headlines to get clicks and comments from the new Slashdot.
Really? Oh and the answer is "no a dirty rag did not take out a 2 billion dollar commsat."
People really confuse making nuclear weapons with nuclear reactors for some odd reason.
A light water nuclear reactor is not a good technology for making nuclear weapons. A thorium based reactor is even worse.
Actually this is a plus for solar. Sunny and cold is the best possible combination for photovoltaics. The efficiency goes down as they heat up.
Or...
They will just buy electricity from France.
Actually you make an interesting point.
A board like this but that connected to you PC with a USB interface could be very useful.
With proper libraries and bindings for things like Python, Perl, Ruby, Lua, C, C++, and so on would be very cool tool for people to play with.
Of course one could make such a device from a Pi and even have it be networked. Realtime control would be a challenge but for none realtime control it could be kind of cool.
Probably not. The CPU in the Pi is much more powerful than the Arduino.
Throw in that the PI has a Keyboard and HDMI out as well and things change a bit. With the Arduino you must have PC to program it. With the Pi you just need the Pi with a keyboard and monitor.
So lets say you wanted to make a video game with some custom controllers, the Pi would be a much better solution.
If you want to make a small weather station that runs on solar power and talks over ZigBee or even a low power HAM radio link with morse code. Than an Arduino might be the best choice.
If you want to use PSK over the radio link them back to the Pi.
If you want a device to steam audio from your samba share on your NAS the Pi makes a lot of sense.
And what do you not understand.
The right to speak does not infere a right to the medium.
The medium is a resource access to which is not a right.
Fighters delicate?
Fighters are rated a +9Gs and I think -7Gs that is much higher than any airliner is rated.
"You have the right to speak regardless of which medium you choose to exercise this right."
But their is no write to the access to that medium.
You can not just walk into a TV station and demand a half hour of time, you can not walk into a print shop and demand they print your document. You can not demand access to the internet.
The internet like tv, radio, paper, and ink are resources not rights.
Of course they can deny your access. If you do not own a printing press you can be denied access to one. For radio and TV not only must you have the money to own, rent, or the permission of the owner you must also follow the FCC rules on profanity transmitting power and so on.
For the Internet you must have the money to pay for access to it.
That is where it is not a right. Freedom of speech means that you can say what ever you want but the available means of communication are not rights outside of using your own mouth and or writing with your own hand and resources.
So internet access is not a right as covered under the 1st amendment of the constitution. It is just another tool of communication no different than a printing press. A tool that is used by both individuals and the press.
Now what they can not do is remove your access to prevent of your exercise of free speech just as they can not take away a printing press that you own.
Interesting should then the government give it to you?
Freedom of speech doesn't mean that your are provided access to a printing press, radio transmitter, or TV transmitter.
The Pet was on the way out by 1982. The B Macine was interesting. I am kind of sorry I never got one on Close out from protecto back in the day. It might have been fun to run a BBS on. :)
My high school had Super Pet which where great machines. We also had 8050s I think interfaced with something called a muppet that allowed us to share the drives and printer. In a way it was like an early NAS. Those machines where so cool. I wish I had more time to play with them back in the day.
It was a real shame. In many ways Commodore could have done so much better than they did. Things where so interesting back then. We had Atari, Commodore, Apple, Tandy, TI,and many more all doing really wild things. First in 8 bit with the Atari 800/400, TRS-80s, PETs, Vic 20s, C64s, Cocos, Apple IIs and the BeeBeb . And then into the 16/32 bit world with Amiga, Atari ST, Mac, AppleIIgs,Tandy Model 16, Tandy 1000, and on and on.
Now we have Intel machines running Windows, Linux, BSD, or OS/X. At least the ARM stuff is kind of interesting.
Oh and I didn't mean to leave out Sir Clive and Acorn. Thanks Acorn for ARM
If you have Access which is not super cheap.
If you want to roll your own then you have a LOT of options.
The first question is what do you know?
Single user or network?
If you are going the network route and want to do client server I can think of a few ways to go.
Backed MySQL or PostgreSQL I am a fan of PostgreSQL myself. For a small library a Pentium 3 machine that no one wants running say Ubuntu Server edition will work fine as a server. The data base will be tiny so so you could use a few drives that no one wants because they are too small and set up a RAID 1 with them. If it has a USB port a Flash drive will be big enough to hold the database so you could just stick a flash drive on the back and have it do nightly automated backups. People don't understand just how small a database that is just text can be compared to modern storage.
For the front end you again have a lot of options. Java is works well for this kind of application and Netbeans is a good free ide for it. Plus it will run on everything.
You could use Python if you wish.
Or you could make it all web based. HTML + Perl/Python/PHP/Ruby would also work.
Single user? Well Java+SQLite, or VB, or C# or Python or Perl or Ruby with SQLlite on Windows or Linux will do as well.
All of this is just if YOU want to do it. There are probably any number of FOSS packages out their on the market that you can use. Some times people do like to roll their own and this would be a pretty simple project yet fun project for someone that is interested.
I got one of the first that came out. The one thing I really feel Commodore screwed up on was the 1541.
It was so slow.... Had the C64 had a faster floppy drive it might have done better with business users. Hey people ran businesses off of the Apple II.
I also had a program that gave it a software 80 column display. It wasn't easy to read but it worked well enough with my terminal program on some of the CP/M based BBS that wanted 80 columns.
Good enough but possibly not needed. I have seen DOS systems used for CNC controllers for example.
There are still good cheap dev tools for DOS as well.
Would I pick DOS for any project? Well I can think of one maybe but even then I might pick Linux. But then I know of embedded systems that still run DOS to this day. Hey Freepascal and I think GCC both still support DOS so someone is using it.
I never said that Javascript was a clean language.
I never said that no one should us PHP just that it really isn't a great language. I have used it myself and you can knock out some projects really fast but it was no fun.
We are talking desktops so server apps don't matter.
Look at the apps you listed. All of them deal with huge data sets and are not "mainstream" apps.
Sure if you edit video for a living, edit digital images for a living, even CAD for a living you need to update to at least W7 64.
If you are just using word, excel, email, Quickbooks, turbotax and the web... Really not so much.
For a huge number of people their is nothing but cost to be gained by going with Window7 today. In the future things will change but that is the whole point. They are not upgrading because XP is good enough.
Actually yes. I know of people that keep old dos computers around just to run one old program.
Also Embedded systems. DOS is light and small and does not get into your way. If you have a crash you can almost bet money that the problem is 100 your code.
Under DOS you can also bit bang hardware interfaces that would be difficult to do with anything else.
As to uses let me give you an example. Their are some old devices that used 3.5" floppies but with a custom format. There are programs for dos that can read that data. If you have one of those devices then this is exactly what you need.
And of course to flash bios.
I frankly do not think anything is as good. The combination of abrasion resistance and flexibility of leather I feel is unmatched at this time. Maybe someday but not today.
For many riders ballistic nylon and kevlar are a good substitute. For road riding possibly better than leather at least in hot weather. But for racing leather is still the best choice.
I don't know of anything even at 100x the cost that beats leather in that application.
I also don't have a problem with using leather since it would otherwise go to waste. Now things like aligator and snake skin are not the leather I am talking about. However if you are going to eat the animal it is only right to use as much of it as possible IMHO and to not waste any of it.
Really?
The fact that you can access global variables two different ways makes sense to you?
I will give you that it is "slightly" better than Perl's scoping.
If your data requires more memory than you can get with 32 bit or it involves a lot of integer math with values greater then 32 bits it can be a lot faster.
However it can also be slower if your data set is very small and you don't use values > 32 bits. A 64bit program will also use more memory because all the pointers are now 64bit.
On the X86 most programs will get a slight speed increase because 64 bit code has access to more GP registers. This helps off set the performance hit you get from using more memory. The thing is that most software will not be recompiled for 64 bit code for a very long time under windows for the simple reason that windows runs 32 bit code just fine and why support two versions?
And incase you have not noticed most computers are more than fast enough. CPU is rarely the bottleneck today. It is usually the network, mass storage, and for some memory. 64bit only helps with memory but most memory issues today are caused by malware and not even applications.
Just remember I am talking about the "average " user. Gammers, CAD/CAM, Photoshop, and so on users can often use all the memory and speed they can get.
But for one of the most demanding uses Transcoding you are going to be better off with a good Video card that can offload the transcodeing than a faster CPU or more memory.
"More to the point, can't better silk be synthetically produced on a large scale? Same question applies for other animal based textiles, such as wool, leather, fur, etc"
No.
and no.
next question?
Okay lets get a little real here.
1. leather. leather has some qualities that are not found in any other material. It is required for motorcycle racers to wear because it offers the best protection. Nothing man made can replace it. Also most leather is a by product of animals being killed for meat. Exceptions are for some of the exotics which if you want to boycot be my guest as they are nothing but an ego trip. So as long as people eat meat using the leather from that does not contribute to any suffering.
2. Wool. Sheep don't die to get wool folks. As far as I know sheep raised for wool are protected, feed, and cared for by humans. It is an actual advantage for the Sheep and is an almost symbiotic relationship. So what is wrong with wool?
3. Fur. Well unless you live in the arctic I see no reason to wear it. So boycot that all you want.
Silk! if we could make it we would. So no there is no better way. Besides they are just bugs. Sorry folks but if you kill flys, ants, and roaches then you really shouldn't have an issue with this.
I do not like "factory farms" and other forms of animal cruelty but when you go too far in your objections it marginalizes the argument. AKA Wool.
Some of the Russian anti ship missiles had an anti-radiation mode AKA anti radar. Those would be of little use going after a US task force and almost none for a carrier. In a high threat mode the ships would put their radars in standby and depend on E-2s and even F-18s to feed sensor data to them. They also have towed decoys that can put out a signal that looks like radar and has a radar signature of a ship. The radar would only go hot for terminal defense. AKA after the missile has locked on to the ships so they could fire their missiles in defense. That is one of the huge benefits a carrier group has over any task force without AEW aircraft.
The Navy is even going to start deploying a new missile called the SM-6. It uses an active seeker derived from the AIM-120 so that it can be targeted from the E-2 or any other platform so that ships can now fire over the horizon at incoming missiles.
The Russian anti-radiation cruise missiles where intended to take out land radar stations at a long distance so they where multi function. Most of the later anti-ship missiles added an IR system as well as the radar system to make them harder to decoy.
A. They will not have hundreds much less thousands of small craft with antiship missiles. You also can not launch and antiship missile from a John boat.
B. The US does not need to be in the gulf to clear the gulf of the Iranian navy.
If they had thousands of anti ship missiles why even put them on boats? You can launch them from land and they would be easier to hide and defend. The US would have ships in the gulf but they would be DDGs. If they might even put a carrier in the gulf if they feel confident.
However you live in a fantasy world of you think the that Iran has "thousands" of anti-ship missels and you are just nuts if you think you can fire them from a john boat.
Which ones?
What apps do not have 32 bit support today?
Office still runs on 32 bit. And I got news for you a lot of people will be happy to stick with their old apps until they get a new PC as long as those apps work for what they want to do.
I work for a software company and even though we offered a free update to our Windows program to all our customers with support contract well over a decade ago we still run into people using the DOS version of our software and paying for their support! They just didn't want to learn Windows.