"why do you people think a crash would have to result from a crappy 1945 design ancestral jetfighter shooting an alien craft i dont understand. " I left out that. 1. The P-80 wasn't a 1945 design. It was a 1943 deaign with first flight in 1944. 2. It wasn't crappy. The P-80 as the T-33 is still being used by some nations as a trainer. At the time of Roswell it was a world class fighter.
The ME-163 from just about any angle except form the top and the bottom will look a lot like a line with a bump in the middle, a classic flying saucer. A crashed one would look well like a crashed rocket because it is a crashed rocket. The body of the pilot would be well the fuel is nasty stuff even if you are not blown to bits. It always struck me as odd that the US would decide not to fly the fastest and most exotic captured German aircraft under power. I know the UK did some unpowered flights with it but frankly the History of US ME163s is a big black hole.
Most people can not tell one airplane from the next. Frankly a lot of people identify the Janet flights going into Area 51 as being UFOs. I don't trust these sitings as data points.
As to the UFOs that people claim to have seen of over Washington. The father of a friend of mine was a radar officer on a destroyer in the Med, he once saw a foo fighter on radar. It was moving very slow and then would vanish only to show up a few seconds later. It was a flock of birds that would bunch up enough to show up on radar only to disperse a little later and vanish. I have never seen any pictures that where not of UFOs that where a. not really bad fakes or b. remotely identifiable as anything. I love aircraft and spacecraft. I have since I was a kid. I can tell the difference between different models of the same aircraft. A friend of mine once said the would worry about UFOs if I saw one. Well even I was once tricked for a few minutes. I saw something flying in the night sky that really freaked me out. I waited and watched and it turned out to be a flying billboard. An airplane that had a huge set of lights suspended under the wing that spelled out messages. From a distance and at an angle it looked very much like a UFO. Lights in the night sky can fool the best of us.
I just don't see why a UFO would bother hiding badly. If they didn't want us to see them we wouldn't if they didn't care they would be impossible to miss.
The original post said that he could see the US military shooting down such a space craft. I was pointing out that odds of a shoot down where about zero. A crash due to mechanical failure of course possible but I would say unlikely but possible.
My best guess as to what was at Roswell if it wasn't weather ballon. I think it was a failed test of an ME-163. The US captured several but claim that they never did any powered tests of one. They where egg shaped. Could look like a saucer at the correct angle. And if you where flying one with fuel and it crashed you wouldn't look very human when they found you. The fuel was very nasty stuff.
Yea it actually is. 1. At this time the P-80 shooting star was the top of the line fighter the US had. It would have a very hard time shooting down a 737 much less a space craft of any type. 2. The US air defense network at that time was almost none existent. 3. SAM sites? The US didn't have them yet.
Also the US doesn't really have a history of shooting down aircraft over our air space. If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost you will see that the US really isn't that trigger happy.
You don't know many people in our military do you?
"Includes all world class standard setting programing tools at no extra charge." Not really. I used Linux and my office uses Linux for most of our servers and even our phone system. But your blanket statement sound like a heck of a lot more theory than practice. For example I use Eclipse CDT for development. Now I did just get the latest version so it might have changed but under the version I used before Friday the debugger couldn't easily view the data in and STL class. You can under Visual studio. I guess you don't consider C++ to be a "world class" programing tool. Maybe STL isn't enough of a standard for you. RAD under Linux isn't as easy as under windows and frankly LAMP isn't a good replacement for every application. Frankly I am not thrilled with AJAX+LAMP as a application development system. I feel that it has maintainability issues simply because it combines too many programing languages in each application. Then you must choose and enforce the P in LAMP or else you have a nasty mix of Perl, Python, and PHP code to maintain. Don't get my started on how bad PHP really is as a language. PHP just goes to show that no matter how bad the language is people can write very good programs with it. I use Netbeans and Java as the best RAD replacement for Linux. Mono + GTK may be a good option now but but not when I needed it and frankly that is a subset of a Windows development environment! I can can and do use PGP with my email under Windows. PGP and Thunderbird work just fine under windows and there is a PGP plug in for Outlook. Putty also works just fine for SSL under Windows although I have to admit that I only use SCP with my Linux system. So mister Linux just works fine with of Business tell me how do I sync a Treo with Thunderbird as easily as I do with Outlook? What about A Motorla Razer? How about a Samsung A900? Tell me what email calendering solution works as well as Outlook and Exchange? Oh and it does need to work under Linux as well as Windows since I would have to migrate people and can not just snap my fingers and have it all done at once. What about Shipping software from UPS with label printer for Linux? What about a CMS along the lines of Goldmine or Act. Oh and it does have to work off network as well as on network so sales reps can use it when they don't have an internet connection. Simple question do you work for a company with more than 50 employees and have you migrated them off of Windows to all Linux?
Unfortunately when most of the lock in happened Linux wasn't an option. Lock in doesn't happen overnight and getting out of it also takes time. It only seems so simple to people who haven't lived through it. Of course the other problem is frankly and I know people will hate me for saying it... Some of Microsoft's products really are very good solutions. I don't think that Outlook+Exchange+Blackberry has any FOSS equivalent for the enterprise. OO.org is very new compared to Office.
I have noticed that when you buy a system they often stick the cheapest ram possible in them. What people don't get is that it is a SYSTEM! People will put the cheapest RAM and as little as possible into a system , and then throw a big but slow drive on it and wonder why the new CPU isn't that much faster.
Mono will not run all.NET applications and WINE is hit or miss. For most business computers are NOT their business. They are just a tool. They don't want to try anything. They just want it to work. You also don't pay hackers to patch your ACCOUNTING SYSTEM! I work for a software development firm. We build our own servers. We set up our own DNS, Firewalls, Phone System. Mail servers, and database servers all running Linux. We paid a company to set up the accounting system and it runs on a Windows box. Why? Because we couldn't find a Linux accounting system that our accountant liked and none of us want to get blamed if it fails. Accounting is just too important to risk messing up. There are some new FOSS accounting stuff out that looks good but we have already bought and paid for what we have and frankly moving accounting systems is painful. As I said IT ISN"T THAT EASY TO JUST MOVE TO LINUX. Even for a software development firm like the one I work for. Even then a good 50% of the people here are none technical and probably 90% have no Linux experience yet.
But it will not run all those.NET apps that the company depends on. Or the accounting software. Or the latest version of Outlook that we all use. I am sad to say but just upgrading to any Linux or even Mac just isn't that simple.
I often see low end PCs with only 512 megs of ram. Which while usable isn't as nice as a gig. If I had a choice between an AM X2 3800+ with 1 gigabyte of ram and X2 5000 with only 512 I would go for the extra ram everytime.
I agree with you for the most part. I am compiling code on an X2 3800 every day. I use the Eclipse CDT and debug with it every day as well. It really is fast enough. I can compile the Kernel in a reasonable amount of time. It really is pretty freaking fast. For the average person the X2 3800 is more than good enough. The next machine I build will probably be an X2 with one of the new 45 watt X2s in it. I would say that for the average person they should get more ram before they worry about the CPU. Probably should get more video card speed also before worrying about getting more CPU.
I was going to say that the Intel motherboards where a little more expensive than AM2 motherboards but I am shocked that this is no longer so. However ever I will say that for a lot of people that extra CPU performance really doesn't matter. If you don't use it then it it valueless. For most people I would bet they would be better off spending that extra money on more ram then a faster CPU.
I left out the other big problem that Thunderbird and Sunbird have. Syncing with smart phones. One day I will get around too writing a Bluetooth extension for Thunderbird. But I wouldn't hold your breath I am married so my nights of all night hacking are a thing of the past.
I have an ATI card in my notebook and it works fine with Linux using the FOSS drivers. A little slow but it works. I love how I get blasted for this when people don't even both to read my post. I said maybe the the FOSS community could write better drivers. But I doubt that they could in as the grandparent posted do it in just a few months with just the specs. Frankly I doubt that it would happen in year unless ATI/AMD helped. Notice that the Intel's FOSS video drives have a lot of code written by and paid for Intel. Nothing wrong with that but it takes more than just handing over what the registers and memory locations do to get a good FOSS driver. FOSS isn't magic and does not always produce the best software in any field. It has produced some great software and some of it is absolutely top notch. But for every Firefox there are thousands of projects stuck at V0.8. Gimp is very good but Photoshop is better. There is nothing in the FOSS market that can touch Solidworks or Autocad or even TurboCad which is not even close to Solidworks in power and ease of use. Like I said FOSS isn't magic. It however often amazing.
Well I wouldn't call that an Open Source replacement for Exchange. "he only other option is something Web-based, such as Horde but at the end of the day, most business users don't care about the server. They just want the client they like (ie. Outlook) to work."
Yep that is why it would be easier to get ride of Exchange by replacing the server. Heck My office doesn't have an Exchange server and I would love to have a FOSS version of Exchange. The problem is it would have to work with both Outlook and Thunderbird.
"I'm pretty sure there's at least a couple hundred enthusiasts that could get these cards up to their maximum potential in a few weeks." Yea that is why GIMP is better than Photoshop and their are FOSS 3-D CAD software better then Soldworks and Autocad! Maybe but it is just possible that ATIs drivers where not written by idiots. Maybe it is that there hardware just isn't as good as nVidia or a heck of a lot harder to write for. I like FOSS as much as the next person but it really isn't magic.
The grandparent made the statement that the x86 performed better than a RISC chip. Yes the Power cpu is not a good notebook chip but there is a market where the highest performance no matter the cost does exist. The power does very well there. The Core doesn't You can not just add cache to the Core unless you are Intel and frankly even if you just stuck on more cache it wouldn't be faster then the Power unless you did a total redesign of the core to use the cache. The SparcT1 is a great chip for many integer parallel tasks. It is better for that market than the x86. Then you have a market where power consumption and heat are the biggest issues. And for that market you have the ARM. The Core is a hot power hungery pig compared to the ARM. Notice that Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony all picked PPC risk cpus for their consoles? The x86 isn't the idea universal computing solution that so many people think it is. It is a good compromise of price, performance, power, and cost. It is also very popular because of the pc so it has had a lot of resources thrown at it. The main reason that the x86 won the desktop has nothing to do with performance. On the contrary it's performance has everything to do with it's popularity. If IBM had picked the 68k over the x86 Motorola would be the number CPU producer in the world today. I bet IBM to this day wishes that it had not out sourced the CPU for the PC. But then they thought it was going to be a tiny market and not really worth spending much on.
"The number of people who are clueless to the point of being unaware of their cluelessness is staggering." Thanks for that bit of truth. When I am doing interviews I always push until I get the answer "I don't know". People that are too clueless to admit that they don't know will never go and find the right answer.
Sunbird doesn't need to work with Exchange. What we need is a Exchange server replacement that will work with Outlook and Sunbird. It is easier to migrate a single server than a thousand clients. Once you have a server that that supports Sunbird "and Sunbird+Thunderbird can do everything Outlook can" it will be easy to migrate people off of Outlook.
I would love an ARM notebook. I might get the one that Palm is selling. The ARM is a great CPU but it seems that they don't want to try and go anywhere but the embedded market. Why would they? They own it and are making money hand over fist.
No the real reason the that x86 has such good performance is that Intel and AMD have spent billions of dollars in R&D to make the x86 the fastest flying pig ever.
I think the latest Power series will give any Intel CPU a run for it's money as well the latest Sparc.
Code Density is nice since access to main memory is a bottle neck. CISC does have some advantages over RISC just as RISC has some over CISC. However the x86 as an ISA really does suck. x86-64 is a lot better but it could still be better.
Well Aircraft unlike computers are only operated by trained professionals. Since you can not make the wing infinitely strong you you put operating limits in it. One "neat" trick they use involves airspeed. When you start pulling Gs your stall speed goes up. Once a wing is stalled it stops generating lift so it unloads. Back in the day your airspeed indicator had arcs. The green arc means that your wing will stall before it breaks. The Yellow arc means that yes you can break the wing if you try. The Red line means bad things are going to happen. So when flying into storms the pilot can slow the the top of the green arc and be safe. BTW a stall at altitude isn't a terrible thing. It is better than breaking the wing.
With this wing it may have an all Green arc.
As to breaking the structure to learn things. Yes but that kind of testing is expensive. If the wings of the 787 pass with a bigger than average margin then I would much rather see them do repetitive tests to see how it does with multiple over stress conditions.
The thing about some of the composites I have dealt with is some don't fail gracefully. I have parts of aircraft deform from stress but not totally fail. In other words it will get you home but she isn't going to fly again without A LOT of work. I have seen carbon fiber get a good scratch in it and the next thing you know it is in a million part small parts.
"how can they make accurate judgments and calculations without knowing exactly how much stress the wings can take before snapping?" You don't need to. You test to 150% of the rated load factor. I think for for airliners it is +3 -2 Gs. It has been a few years since I needed to know it. So you would test the wing to 4.5 Gs. If it passes it is good to go. Testing to destruction is good data to have but not required. If they get to to a 9 g load and the wing doesn't break I really think they could stop. Any airliner pulling a sustained 3 Gs will end up on the nightly news.
It has Two USB host ports so you could add two USB Network adapters to it. Or you could put a USB network adapter and a USB wifi adapter. Or you could put a USB network adapter and USB bluetooth adapter. Or you cuuld put a USB network adapter and a USB drive for logging. Yep you could use it as an inline analysis tool with no problem.
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"why do you people think a crash would have to result from a crappy 1945 design ancestral jetfighter shooting an alien craft i dont understand. "
I left out that.
1. The P-80 wasn't a 1945 design. It was a 1943 deaign with first flight in 1944.
2. It wasn't crappy. The P-80 as the T-33 is still being used by some nations as a trainer.
At the time of Roswell it was a world class fighter.
I was just posting about the Roswell crash.
The ME-163 from just about any angle except form the top and the bottom will look a lot like a line with a bump in the middle, a classic flying saucer. A crashed one would look well like a crashed rocket because it is a crashed rocket. The body of the pilot would be well the fuel is nasty stuff even if you are not blown to bits. It always struck me as odd that the US would decide not to fly the fastest and most exotic captured German aircraft under power. I know the UK did some unpowered flights with it but frankly the History of US ME163s is a big black hole.
Most people can not tell one airplane from the next. Frankly a lot of people identify the Janet flights going into Area 51 as being UFOs. I don't trust these sitings as data points.
As to the UFOs that people claim to have seen of over Washington.
The father of a friend of mine was a radar officer on a destroyer in the Med, he once saw a foo fighter on radar. It was moving very slow and then would vanish only to show up a few seconds later. It was a flock of birds that would bunch up enough to show up on radar only to disperse a little later and vanish. I have never seen any pictures that where not of UFOs that where a. not really bad fakes or b. remotely identifiable as anything. I love aircraft and spacecraft. I have since I was a kid. I can tell the difference between different models of the same aircraft. A friend of mine once said the would worry about UFOs if I saw one. Well even I was once tricked for a few minutes. I saw something flying in the night sky that really freaked me out. I waited and watched and it turned out to be a flying billboard. An airplane that had a huge set of lights suspended under the wing that spelled out messages. From a distance and at an angle it looked very much like a UFO.
Lights in the night sky can fool the best of us.
I just don't see why a UFO would bother hiding badly. If they didn't want us to see them we wouldn't if they didn't care they would be impossible to miss.
1. That is a combat situation.
2. Most of the deaths have been caused not by US troops but by other forces.
As I said people like you don't know any military people. They are people not monsters. I suggest stop trying to feel superior and try to understand.
The original post said that he could see the US military shooting down such a space craft. I was pointing out that odds of a shoot down where about zero. A crash due to mechanical failure of course possible but I would say unlikely but possible.
My best guess as to what was at Roswell if it wasn't weather ballon.
I think it was a failed test of an ME-163. The US captured several but claim that they never did any powered tests of one. They where egg shaped. Could look like a saucer at the correct angle. And if you where flying one with fuel and it crashed you wouldn't look very human when they found you. The fuel was very nasty stuff.
Yea it actually is.
1. At this time the P-80 shooting star was the top of the line fighter the US had. It would have a very hard time shooting down a 737 much less a space craft of any type.
2. The US air defense network at that time was almost none existent.
3. SAM sites? The US didn't have them yet.
Also the US doesn't really have a history of shooting down aircraft over our air space.
If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost you will see that the US really isn't that trigger happy.
You don't know many people in our military do you?
"Includes all world class standard setting programing tools at no extra charge."
Not really. I used Linux and my office uses Linux for most of our servers and even our phone system. But your blanket statement sound like a heck of a lot more theory than practice.
For example I use Eclipse CDT for development. Now I did just get the latest version so it might have changed but under the version I used before Friday the debugger couldn't easily view the data in and STL class. You can under Visual studio. I guess you don't consider C++ to be a "world class" programing tool. Maybe STL isn't enough of a standard for you. RAD under Linux isn't as easy as under windows and frankly LAMP isn't a good replacement for every application. Frankly I am not thrilled with AJAX+LAMP as a application development system. I feel that it has maintainability issues simply because it combines too many programing languages in each application. Then you must choose and enforce the P in LAMP or else you have a nasty mix of Perl, Python, and PHP code to maintain. Don't get my started on how bad PHP really is as a language. PHP just goes to show that no matter how bad the language is people can write very good programs with it. I use Netbeans and Java as the best RAD replacement for Linux. Mono + GTK may be a good option now but but not when I needed it and frankly that is a subset of a Windows development environment!
I can can and do use PGP with my email under Windows. PGP and Thunderbird work just fine under windows and there is a PGP plug in for Outlook. Putty also works just fine for SSL under Windows although I have to admit that I only use SCP with my Linux system.
So mister Linux just works fine with of Business tell me how do I sync a Treo with Thunderbird as easily as I do with Outlook? What about A Motorla Razer? How about a Samsung A900? Tell me what email calendering solution works as well as Outlook and Exchange? Oh and it does need to work under Linux as well as Windows since I would have to migrate people and can not just snap my fingers and have it all done at once.
What about Shipping software from UPS with label printer for Linux? What about a CMS along the lines of Goldmine or Act. Oh and it does have to work off network as well as on network so sales reps can use it when they don't have an internet connection.
Simple question do you work for a company with more than 50 employees and have you migrated them off of Windows to all Linux?
Unfortunately when most of the lock in happened Linux wasn't an option. Lock in doesn't happen overnight and getting out of it also takes time. It only seems so simple to people who haven't lived through it.
Of course the other problem is frankly and I know people will hate me for saying it... Some of Microsoft's products really are very good solutions. I don't think that Outlook+Exchange+Blackberry has any FOSS equivalent for the enterprise.
OO.org is very new compared to Office.
I have noticed that when you buy a system they often stick the cheapest ram possible in them.
What people don't get is that it is a SYSTEM! People will put the cheapest RAM and as little as possible into a system , and then throw a big but slow drive on it and wonder why the new CPU isn't that much faster.
Mono will not run all .NET applications and WINE is hit or miss. For most business computers are NOT their business. They are just a tool. They don't want to try anything. They just want it to work.
You also don't pay hackers to patch your ACCOUNTING SYSTEM!
I work for a software development firm. We build our own servers. We set up our own DNS, Firewalls, Phone System. Mail servers, and database servers all running Linux. We paid a company to set up the accounting system and it runs on a Windows box. Why?
Because we couldn't find a Linux accounting system that our accountant liked and none of us want to get blamed if it fails. Accounting is just too important to risk messing up. There are some new FOSS accounting stuff out that looks good but we have already bought and paid for what we have and frankly moving accounting systems is painful.
As I said IT ISN"T THAT EASY TO JUST MOVE TO LINUX. Even for a software development firm like the one I work for. Even then a good 50% of the people here are none technical and probably 90% have no Linux experience yet.
But it will not run all those .NET apps that the company depends on. Or the accounting software. Or the latest version of Outlook that we all use.
I am sad to say but just upgrading to any Linux or even Mac just isn't that simple.
I often see low end PCs with only 512 megs of ram. Which while usable isn't as nice as a gig.
If I had a choice between an AM X2 3800+ with 1 gigabyte of ram and X2 5000 with only 512 I would go for the extra ram everytime.
I agree with you for the most part. I am compiling code on an X2 3800 every day. I use the Eclipse CDT and debug with it every day as well. It really is fast enough. I can compile the Kernel in a reasonable amount of time. It really is pretty freaking fast. For the average person the X2 3800 is more than good enough. The next machine I build will probably be an X2 with one of the new 45 watt X2s in it.
I would say that for the average person they should get more ram before they worry about the CPU. Probably should get more video card speed also before worrying about getting more CPU.
I was going to say that the Intel motherboards where a little more expensive than AM2 motherboards but I am shocked that this is no longer so.
However ever I will say that for a lot of people that extra CPU performance really doesn't matter. If you don't use it then it it valueless. For most people I would bet they would be better off spending that extra money on more ram then a faster CPU.
I left out the other big problem that Thunderbird and Sunbird have. Syncing with smart phones. One day I will get around too writing a Bluetooth extension for Thunderbird.
But I wouldn't hold your breath I am married so my nights of all night hacking are a thing of the past.
I have an ATI card in my notebook and it works fine with Linux using the FOSS drivers. A little slow but it works.
I love how I get blasted for this when people don't even both to read my post. I said maybe the the FOSS community could write better drivers. But I doubt that they could in as the grandparent posted do it in just a few months with just the specs. Frankly I doubt that it would happen in year unless ATI/AMD helped. Notice that the Intel's FOSS video drives have a lot of code written by and paid for Intel. Nothing wrong with that but it takes more than just handing over what the registers and memory locations do to get a good FOSS driver. FOSS isn't magic and does not always produce the best software in any field. It has produced some great software and some of it is absolutely top notch. But for every Firefox there are thousands of projects stuck at V0.8.
Gimp is very good but Photoshop is better.
There is nothing in the FOSS market that can touch Solidworks or Autocad or even TurboCad which is not even close to Solidworks in power and ease of use.
Like I said FOSS isn't magic.
It however often amazing.
Well I wouldn't call that an Open Source replacement for Exchange.
"he only other option is something Web-based, such as Horde but at the end of the day, most business users don't care about the server. They just want the client they like (ie. Outlook) to work."
Yep that is why it would be easier to get ride of Exchange by replacing the server.
Heck My office doesn't have an Exchange server and I would love to have a FOSS version of Exchange. The problem is it would have to work with both Outlook and Thunderbird.
"I'm pretty sure there's at least a couple hundred enthusiasts that could get these cards up to their maximum potential in a few weeks."
Yea that is why GIMP is better than Photoshop and their are FOSS 3-D CAD software better then Soldworks and Autocad!
Maybe but it is just possible that ATIs drivers where not written by idiots. Maybe it is that there hardware just isn't as good as nVidia or a heck of a lot harder to write for.
I like FOSS as much as the next person but it really isn't magic.
The grandparent made the statement that the x86 performed better than a RISC chip.
Yes the Power cpu is not a good notebook chip but there is a market where the highest performance no matter the cost does exist. The power does very well there.
The Core doesn't You can not just add cache to the Core unless you are Intel and frankly even if you just stuck on more cache it wouldn't be faster then the Power unless you did a total redesign of the core to use the cache.
The SparcT1 is a great chip for many integer parallel tasks. It is better for that market than the x86.
Then you have a market where power consumption and heat are the biggest issues. And for that market you have the ARM. The Core is a hot power hungery pig compared to the ARM.
Notice that Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony all picked PPC risk cpus for their consoles?
The x86 isn't the idea universal computing solution that so many people think it is.
It is a good compromise of price, performance, power, and cost. It is also very popular because of the pc so it has had a lot of resources thrown at it. The main reason that the x86 won the desktop has nothing to do with performance. On the contrary it's performance has everything to do with it's popularity. If IBM had picked the 68k over the x86 Motorola would be the number CPU producer in the world today. I bet IBM to this day wishes that it had not out sourced the CPU for the PC. But then they thought it was going to be a tiny market and not really worth spending much on.
"The number of people who are clueless to the point of being unaware of their cluelessness is staggering."
Thanks for that bit of truth.
When I am doing interviews I always push until I get the answer "I don't know".
People that are too clueless to admit that they don't know will never go and find the right answer.
Sunbird doesn't need to work with Exchange. What we need is a Exchange server replacement that will work with Outlook and Sunbird.
It is easier to migrate a single server than a thousand clients.
Once you have a server that that supports Sunbird "and Sunbird+Thunderbird can do everything Outlook can" it will be easy to migrate people off of Outlook.
I would love an ARM notebook. I might get the one that Palm is selling. The ARM is a great CPU but it seems that they don't want to try and go anywhere but the embedded market. Why would they? They own it and are making money hand over fist.
No the real reason the that x86 has such good performance is that Intel and AMD have spent billions of dollars in R&D to make the x86 the fastest flying pig ever.
I think the latest Power series will give any Intel CPU a run for it's money as well the latest Sparc.
Code Density is nice since access to main memory is a bottle neck. CISC does have some advantages over RISC just as RISC has some over CISC.
However the x86 as an ISA really does suck. x86-64 is a lot better but it could still be better.
Well Aircraft unlike computers are only operated by trained professionals.
Since you can not make the wing infinitely strong you you put operating limits in it.
One "neat" trick they use involves airspeed. When you start pulling Gs your stall speed goes up. Once a wing is stalled it stops generating lift so it unloads.
Back in the day your airspeed indicator had arcs. The green arc means that your wing will stall before it breaks.
The Yellow arc means that yes you can break the wing if you try.
The Red line means bad things are going to happen.
So when flying into storms the pilot can slow the the top of the green arc and be safe.
BTW a stall at altitude isn't a terrible thing. It is better than breaking the wing.
With this wing it may have an all Green arc.
As to breaking the structure to learn things. Yes but that kind of testing is expensive. If the wings of the 787 pass with a bigger than average margin then I would much rather see them do repetitive tests to see how it does with multiple over stress conditions.
The thing about some of the composites I have dealt with is some don't fail gracefully. I have parts of aircraft deform from stress but not totally fail. In other words it will get you home but she isn't going to fly again without A LOT of work.
I have seen carbon fiber get a good scratch in it and the next thing you know it is in a million part small parts.
"how can they make accurate judgments and calculations without knowing exactly how much stress the wings can take before snapping?"
You don't need to. You test to 150% of the rated load factor.
I think for for airliners it is +3 -2 Gs. It has been a few years since I needed to know it.
So you would test the wing to 4.5 Gs.
If it passes it is good to go.
Testing to destruction is good data to have but not required. If they get to to a 9 g load and the wing doesn't break I really think they could stop. Any airliner pulling a sustained 3 Gs will end up on the nightly news.
It has Two USB host ports so you could add two USB Network adapters to it.
Or you could put a USB network adapter and a USB wifi adapter.
Or you could put a USB network adapter and USB bluetooth adapter.
Or you cuuld put a USB network adapter and a USB drive for logging.
Yep you could use it as an inline analysis tool with no problem.
I get the exact same thing. I thought I was going nuts.