I think the Microsoft understand that the battle of the OS is not where the real money is - the real money spinner is beating HP OpenView in the server/desktop management space and also owning the signing-in credentials (Active Directory) - these two things are FAR more important than old wars against Linux and open source. They know that Linux boxes are always going to be in the enterprise so they've thought up a strategy to make sure that they are within the MS management pool. A caring & sharing attitude will also fix some of the perception of arrogance that MS have with the Office of Government Commerce in the UK and similar procurement organisations outside the USA.
for example: In most places I've been to, the customer has MS Active Directory in place. (I'm an enterprise TA specialising in Linux). That makes MS in a very strong position to be first choice for single sign on content management systems, document management platform and also system monitoring & management. The usual BS I hear is that AD makes it easier for the helpdesk to manage users and groups and so on.
MS have been quietly making big investments in enterprise management. remember SCO, how could you forget!, there was one product that SCO sold off to a management buy-out and was rumoured to have been heavily funded by MS - this is Vintela. Vintela sells a single sign on solution for multiple OS (including Linux) that will allow Linux users to sign in as AD citizens into Linux and be managed just like the MS users.
Another example is the new drive for MOM. MOM is essentially where HP Openview was some years ago. HP OpenView has never got the pervasive coverage in organisations because it costs a bloody fortune and HP have been too stupid to commodotise the HPOV server infrastructure into something cheaper. Also, having an enterprise OpenView system takes manpower to setup correctly. The result is a catch 22 - the companies that actually need it; don't have spare manpower - hence the reason they need an enterprise monitoring/management suite! MS MOM is a big step in the direction of Windows simple click (and break!) user interface that is convincing to management who will sign off procurement decisions. The MOM interface is surprisingly better than HPOV - plus MOM will also support Linux and Solaris boxes in the enterprise. I don't think it will be long before MS provides management hooks for JBoss, MySQL, Apache etc into MOM.
By entering the enterprise market like this; MS is targetting products at the areas that control the whole strategy or an organisation: authentication/authorisation and systems management. It is a way of taking control and ensuring that any Linux/otherNix server has MS branding on it because that's how it is looked after...
essentially; Microsoft *have* to include Linux in their plans for their big step into Enterprise domination - Linux is actually helping them in a way because the rapid growth of Linux servers has forced them to consider enterprise platforms that they have not really been competing against in the past.
it is not surprising for anyone in the EU because "computers" and "toys" attract different import duties. Anyone who bought an original playstation 2 in the UK got a programming language with the console so that Sony could say that it was a computer and not a toy; i.e. it was user programmable. I don't think they got away with it in the end and the folks who got Linux to work on the PS2 have saved Sony a lot of effort to prove it is a computer,
TFA alludes to this when Kutaragi says "...So even though we're making something that has the capability to be recognized as a supercomputer and requires paperwork when exporting or importing, the government sees it as a toy."
Computers do not have import tarriffs following the implementation of the WTO Ministerial Declaration on Trade in Information Technology Products (ITA).
In general, toys are subject to import tarriffs although, it is difficult to say when a toy is a toy and not sporting equipment or a computer in this case.
I have terrible problems exporting and importing mountain bike components.
several? hundreds of UXB's (Unexploded bombs) have been found in east London and the old industrial areas of the UK after blanket bombing during WWII.
If you drop hundreds of thousands of various types of ordnance onto an industrialised area then as much as 20% will not explode. Even ordnance flung into Baghdad some 60 years later didn't all explode on impact.
I've written a quick HOWTO on how the GNER system works with Linux. If you are interested then have a look here
What makes the GNER system so fun is that you don't need to pay to get onto the train network - so you could have a great big LAN party going at 125mph between London and Edinburgh!
It is very early days for humankind sending instruments to other planetary objects. Much the same as when the New Zealander built the first aircraft, shortly followed by the wright-brothers; there were lots of mistakes and dreadful failures so that today a pilot can jump into his A380 doubledecker super airliner and be rest assured that he has triplex systems to rely on.
The Cassini-Huygens mission has to balance scientific value versus system resilience. Every bit of extra science has a payload, an energy requirement, a bandwidth requirement and so on that usually will deprive something on board of extra resilience.
The team at my company are well pleased that Huygens landed because they also wrote the entry & descent software for Beagle2. They wrote Beagle2 *after* the Huygens project so didn't get the benefit of the Mars experience.
I sell spring kits and hydraulic disk brakes for Proflex and K2 mountain bikes. Been designing aftermarket parts for these lovely (and extremely nerdy in a cool way) machines for 8 years now.
Its amazing that a full suspension carbon mountain bike with 4 pot hydraulic disk brakes is just a little more sexy than my work where I have 100 HP Proliant DL380's running Linux.;-)
Slashdotters who are not into MTB's should have a look at the K2 Bike's that used to come with cpu enabled dampers. The processor would calculate the spring hit rate as the shock compressed over a bum and then using a piezo actuator inside the damper in the shock, control the damping oil flow in the rebound action of the shock. very very cool stuff.
I disagree with the parent post. Support contracts are very important for large enterprise customers. I have succeeded in putting in a largish server based network of Linux RedHat Enterprise in a UK government customer. I use a large organisation for support which can then back off to RH if needbe. It is very important in gov't project methodologies that individuals do not become a single point of failure in the system.
Farming out support to an organisation that has varied skillsets with people in different locations is very important to us.
So far, the Linux system has been a success largely due to Service Pack 2 for XP. The MS team are using the latest group policy options to lock down the XP clients with all the latest NTLM v2, SMB signing, schannel and so on and Samba 3.0.4 handles it beautifully, in fact, handles it better than other flavours of Microsoft Windows. Saying that, it did take us a while to figure out that Samba 3.0.0 had a bug in it to stop it working with NTLMv2 but thanks to open source, it was documented in the freely available developer mailing list archives.
This has really helped me sell free as in freedom to management. The Newham council debarkale has sent shockwaves round the UK gov't depts (like mine) who are using Linux and even though the whole thing stinks, procurement folks are asking us why Linux instead of MS now that Newham have proven it is cheaper!!!
This was an important win for Microsoft and a complete diaster for desktop Linux in UK councils.
Well this is very interesting because Sony got away with a punitive tax levy on the PS2 being imported to the UK because Sony proved that the PS2 was a customisable computer that could run user programs (not limited to Sony approved games). Thats why the UK versions came with PS2 Basic - to essentially make the console a home computer rather than a games console.
One of the main differentiations between a game console and a home computer is that a game console has a restriction on the software installed on it.
Games consoles imported into the UK from outside the euro zone attract a large import duty. I hope that Customs and Excise will now be retrospectively collecting import duty for every PS2 sold in the UK and interest on the late payment of that duty going back over time.
The Great North Eastern Railway that runs high speed trains between London and Edinburgh has WiFi on its trains for first and second class passengers. It uses a combination of GSM mobile relays and a satelite uplink to provide internet connectivity for passengers.
I ran kismet on a recent train journey and spotted the obvious Ap's called "train" on channels 1 and 6. A few passengers had left their centrino's on adhoc mode and I also picked up quite a few AP's as the train slowed for stations.
The interesting reason for this post is that they have handheld machines with WiFi to sell tickets and to take payment the till at the bar... for credit card authorisation.... arg.
I travel regularly on the train and the internet access doesn't always work. The train staff don't have a clue about the technology or how to make it work. The Ap's are poorly configured and I guess are hard to manage because they are always on the move!
Nanotechnology could well have a serious use in car tyres. The big tyre companys, rather surprisingly, want tyres to last for the lifetime of the car. The commercial advantage in being 'first' is enough to desire this technology.
The idea is that the tiny wee nanotubes can make a FAR stronger tyre compound than todays rubber solutions. Of course it would also be lighter - fantastic for unsprung mass of the wheel/hub/brakes improving ride quality. Except, one problem is static discharge. Tyres are black because they have carbon in the rubber mix to allow static discharge through to the road - nanotubes wouldn't conduct!!! bzzzzzzzzzp!
I've done some work for one of the major teams in the BTCC. These are 2.0 litre normally aspirated 1000kg cars that have been homologated from standard euro saloons. Even at this level, data is gathered from the car and analysed carefully to detect even the slightest dent in the power map. Most of the teams use the same off the shelf package for analysis.
However, the championship do not allow wireless data xfer anymore and only unencrypted voice is allowed to communicate with the driver. There is a sturdy DIN style plug that one of the engineers plugs a laptop into and downloads the data from the car when it is in the pits. A 20 minute race typically will see about 30Mb of data being retrieved. The organisers TOCA stopped wireless xfer because team managers were able to change the cars characteristics mid race and then reset them back before the scruitineers got a look in!
Most of the teams use windows xp on sturdy laptops with more powerful computing back at base - I guess because most of the software is off the shelf.
interestingly, Fujitsu used to own a company called Amdahl that actively sold and developed the primepower range of sparc servers.
it then became FTSI and I think has now been merged into the global Fujitsu empire.
I considered buying primepower - the 850 and 650 for middle tier J2EE and Oracle databases - certainly they outperformed the Sun vx880 easily and were much cheaper but in the end we didn't go with them because Oracle 9iRAC was not supported in PrimeCluster and went for itanic HP solution instead.
yes, the Aquaaa
is a UK based commercial company that makes a sports car boat thing that sort of looks like a Mazda MX-5/Eunos Roadster. Richard Branson has one so it must be good! The wheels tuck away into the body like the white lotus espirit turbo in (was it Live and Let Die?) the James Bond movie.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned the fujitsu primepower servers. I recently did a server procurement for a big organisation in the EU and tendered Sun against Fujitsu for lots of mid-range <8 cpu servers for a J2EE cluster and Oracle RAC databases.
The PrimePower 850 just blew away the V880, even with 2 less cpu. The PrimePowers use Sun Solaris and are 99.9999% * compatible because (I didn't realise this) that Sun do not own the Sparc design, Sparc Consortium do. I do not believe that Fujitsu will buy Sun outright because they simply do not have the money and have been doing lots of expensive merging of various subsidiary companies this year to save costs; e.g. the old ICL has become Fujitsu Services along with some other straggler companies including Fujitsu's Sun reseller company.
I would say that Fujitsu PrimePower are about 1 year ahead of Sun in terms of power & speed and in our tendering process were a lot cheaper as well.
Probably worth mentioning that I didn't buy Fujitsu in the end because the machines were not certified to use Oracle RAC - instead, I went for HP (linux) - the business benefits for linux outweighed the change from solaris.
* PrimePower won't run SunCluster - that scared me a bit about fujitsu's compatibility claims.
it is well worth bookmarking distrowatch. Very good for news on all the latest distro's with information on all major distros including live cd's, usb keys, big cd's wee cd's and all of that. Has a useful weekly roundup of distro news.
I wonder if people are becoming less distro-religous since most distros seem to work well. anyway, after reading distrowatch for a while you'll no doubt become a distro-tart and try all out 101 live cd's like L.A.S.
now would be a very good time to start the clocks to see how long it takes them to get a patch out. Should be a good case in point for the forrester research published last week.
rd
one of the things no one has mentioned is that it is all very well the US adopting rather shameful entry restrictions to her so-called allies - but I imagine that from now on all USA americans will be subject to the same sort of anal-retentive buracracy all over the world - except, we don't have the fancy finger print analysers and so it will all be done by hand. (didn't Brazil do this?)
The next thing will be inter-state passport control in the USA. Laugh now, but just wait a year or two. Reminds me of the old soviet union when tourists were routinely followed...
whilst compiling from source is fun - it is an action that does not scale well as the enterprise grows. I have just managed to get RedHat 3.1 AS into my customer site (woohoo!) who was a staunch windows/solaris shop. The reason I use package management is that it reduces risk, reduces management time and install time for our vast array of HP prollie DL380 servers. Our servers are built the same way using kickstart scripts and are hardened the same way.
For me, it was important to demonstrate to management that linux builds were consistant and good quality as well as not increasing the system management cost. I think they would have not gone for linux had we said that we would be building each one from source code. You've got to remember that these guys read Gartner reports that say the Linux distros are "fragmented" and no matter how many times i explain it; they don't get Linux versioning. "So is SUSE 9.1 newer than RedHat 3.1? Which one is Linux 2.6?"... arg!
The UK also has a radiation detection system called RIMNET that was built in 1988 and is currently in the process of being upgraded. There are lots of detectors all over the country that feed data back. Scotland was hit by the chernobyl radioactive cloud - I remember all the sheep being taken away from the fields to be culled!!!
rd
Citroen C2 in europe has this philosophy
on
Hack This, Please
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Citroen (a french car manufacturer) recently updated its small hatchback range, the Saxo. The Saxo was designed to be a small affordable car for teenagers and mums - however, quite unexpectantly, the fast and furious cruise crowd who modify cars really liked the cars adaptable engine and so it became, especially the VTR model - very popular.
So much so, the new replacement for the Saxo, the Citroen C2 GT has been designed so that enthusiasts can modify the car (and keep the warranty). there has even been talk of owners being able to share ECU maps and so on to have different performance characteristics. It is not a WRX fast car - but has been designed for the high-risk-insurance youngsters who want to modify their vehicle. It looks like some big consumer goods companies are beginning to look this way and let the end user tinker with the original format to make something unique and match the end users requirements.
This post is factually incorrect. There is no such thing as a British legal system. There is an English evolved traditional legal system and Scotland has a (superior) legal system that is derived from Roman Law (even today proceedings are in Latin). Scotland has fully adopted the EU Human Rights Act whilst England is lagging behind.
English law DOES NOT HAVE the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise thanks to the Criminal Justice Act in the early nineties. In Scotland, you cannot incriminate yourself - so responding to a traffic offence and identifying yourself as the culprit from a speed camera photo is illegal! Very different systems. Also the Anti-Terrorism act allows citizens to be held without charge for an indefinite time. This came about to combat the irish threat in the 80's, long before bush and his oddball war for oil/power.
Also in Scotland there are 3 verdicts - guilty, innocent and Not Proven.
Also, your example about the box of matches does not hold true in England. The 1996 offensive weapons act makes it illegal to carry any offensive object in a public place. this would include a pocket penknife (of any size). You *will* be charged for carrying a pocket penknife in London - even if you had no intention whatsoever of using it to garot someone. If you had a box of matches in one pocket and lighter fluid in the other then you could well be charged, or at least, receive a caution.
the international measure of liquid volume is "olympic sized swimming pools."
the international measure of interstellar comet size is VW's, although in the UK, the unit of "double decker buses" is useful when talking about flight length of a jumping vehicle.
the UK standard for the weight of anything a child can carry is measured in bags of sugar with anything that is very small being extressed as a fraction of the width of a human hair.
I was chatting to one of the software developers of the beagle2 who told me that they had tested the airbags but the test had been a failure because the airbags deflated on the first bounce. Due to the timescales - which were really really tight - they didn't test it again.
My friend also told me that they did not have much redundancy built into the computer systems either. It was always going to be a miricle if it landed safely...
rd
Slashdot Mirror
for example: In most places I've been to, the customer has MS Active Directory in place. (I'm an enterprise TA specialising in Linux). That makes MS in a very strong position to be first choice for single sign on content management systems, document management platform and also system monitoring & management. The usual BS I hear is that AD makes it easier for the helpdesk to manage users and groups and so on.
MS have been quietly making big investments in enterprise management. remember SCO, how could you forget!, there was one product that SCO sold off to a management buy-out and was rumoured to have been heavily funded by MS - this is Vintela. Vintela sells a single sign on solution for multiple OS (including Linux) that will allow Linux users to sign in as AD citizens into Linux and be managed just like the MS users.
Another example is the new drive for MOM. MOM is essentially where HP Openview was some years ago. HP OpenView has never got the pervasive coverage in organisations because it costs a bloody fortune and HP have been too stupid to commodotise the HPOV server infrastructure into something cheaper. Also, having an enterprise OpenView system takes manpower to setup correctly. The result is a catch 22 - the companies that actually need it; don't have spare manpower - hence the reason they need an enterprise monitoring/management suite! MS MOM is a big step in the direction of Windows simple click (and break!) user interface that is convincing to management who will sign off procurement decisions. The MOM interface is surprisingly better than HPOV - plus MOM will also support Linux and Solaris boxes in the enterprise. I don't think it will be long before MS provides management hooks for JBoss, MySQL, Apache etc into MOM.
By entering the enterprise market like this; MS is targetting products at the areas that control the whole strategy or an organisation: authentication/authorisation and systems management. It is a way of taking control and ensuring that any Linux/otherNix server has MS branding on it because that's how it is looked after...
essentially; Microsoft *have* to include Linux in their plans for their big step into Enterprise domination - Linux is actually helping them in a way because the rapid growth of Linux servers has forced them to consider enterprise platforms that they have not really been competing against in the past.
rd
TFA alludes to this when Kutaragi says "...So even though we're making something that has the capability to be recognized as a supercomputer and requires paperwork when exporting or importing, the government sees it as a toy."
Computers do not have import tarriffs following the implementation of the WTO Ministerial Declaration on Trade in Information Technology Products (ITA).
In general, toys are subject to import tarriffs although, it is difficult to say when a toy is a toy and not sporting equipment or a computer in this case.
I have terrible problems exporting and importing mountain bike components.
If you drop hundreds of thousands of various types of ordnance onto an industrialised area then as much as 20% will not explode. Even ordnance flung into Baghdad some 60 years later didn't all explode on impact.
I doubt this was intentional.
What makes the GNER system so fun is that you don't need to pay to get onto the train network - so you could have a great big LAN party going at 125mph between London and Edinburgh!
rd
It is very early days for humankind sending instruments to other planetary objects. Much the same as when the New Zealander built the first aircraft, shortly followed by the wright-brothers; there were lots of mistakes and dreadful failures so that today a pilot can jump into his A380 doubledecker super airliner and be rest assured that he has triplex systems to rely on.
The Cassini-Huygens mission has to balance scientific value versus system resilience. Every bit of extra science has a payload, an energy requirement, a bandwidth requirement and so on that usually will deprive something on board of extra resilience.
The team at my company are well pleased that Huygens landed because they also wrote the entry & descent software for Beagle2. They wrote Beagle2 *after* the Huygens project so didn't get the benefit of the Mars experience.
rd
Its amazing that a full suspension carbon mountain bike with 4 pot hydraulic disk brakes is just a little more sexy than my work where I have 100 HP Proliant DL380's running Linux. ;-)
Slashdotters who are not into MTB's should have a look at the K2 Bike's that used to come with cpu enabled dampers. The processor would calculate the spring hit rate as the shock compressed over a bum and then using a piezo actuator inside the damper in the shock, control the damping oil flow in the rebound action of the shock. very very cool stuff.
Farming out support to an organisation that has varied skillsets with people in different locations is very important to us.
So far, the Linux system has been a success largely due to Service Pack 2 for XP. The MS team are using the latest group policy options to lock down the XP clients with all the latest NTLM v2, SMB signing, schannel and so on and Samba 3.0.4 handles it beautifully, in fact, handles it better than other flavours of Microsoft Windows. Saying that, it did take us a while to figure out that Samba 3.0.0 had a bug in it to stop it working with NTLMv2 but thanks to open source, it was documented in the freely available developer mailing list archives.
This has really helped me sell free as in freedom to management. The Newham council debarkale has sent shockwaves round the UK gov't depts (like mine) who are using Linux and even though the whole thing stinks, procurement folks are asking us why Linux instead of MS now that Newham have proven it is cheaper!!!
This was an important win for Microsoft and a complete diaster for desktop Linux in UK councils.
rd
One of the main differentiations between a game console and a home computer is that a game console has a restriction on the software installed on it.
Games consoles imported into the UK from outside the euro zone attract a large import duty. I hope that Customs and Excise will now be retrospectively collecting import duty for every PS2 sold in the UK and interest on the late payment of that duty going back over time.
rd
I ran kismet on a recent train journey and spotted the obvious Ap's called "train" on channels 1 and 6. A few passengers had left their centrino's on adhoc mode and I also picked up quite a few AP's as the train slowed for stations.
The interesting reason for this post is that they have handheld machines with WiFi to sell tickets and to take payment the till at the bar... for credit card authorisation.... arg.
I travel regularly on the train and the internet access doesn't always work. The train staff don't have a clue about the technology or how to make it work. The Ap's are poorly configured and I guess are hard to manage because they are always on the move!
rd
The idea is that the tiny wee nanotubes can make a FAR stronger tyre compound than todays rubber solutions. Of course it would also be lighter - fantastic for unsprung mass of the wheel/hub/brakes improving ride quality. Except, one problem is static discharge. Tyres are black because they have carbon in the rubber mix to allow static discharge through to the road - nanotubes wouldn't conduct!!! bzzzzzzzzzp!
rd
would be to cover my car with this material to prevent getting snapped by one of the 20,000 GATSO speed cameras in the UK... rd
However, the championship do not allow wireless data xfer anymore and only unencrypted voice is allowed to communicate with the driver. There is a sturdy DIN style plug that one of the engineers plugs a laptop into and downloads the data from the car when it is in the pits. A 20 minute race typically will see about 30Mb of data being retrieved. The organisers TOCA stopped wireless xfer because team managers were able to change the cars characteristics mid race and then reset them back before the scruitineers got a look in!
Most of the teams use windows xp on sturdy laptops with more powerful computing back at base - I guess because most of the software is off the shelf.
Formula1 is another ballgame...
it then became FTSI and I think has now been merged into the global Fujitsu empire.
I considered buying primepower - the 850 and 650 for middle tier J2EE and Oracle databases - certainly they outperformed the Sun vx880 easily and were much cheaper but in the end we didn't go with them because Oracle 9iRAC was not supported in PrimeCluster and went for itanic HP solution instead.
rd
rd
The PrimePower 850 just blew away the V880, even with 2 less cpu. The PrimePowers use Sun Solaris and are 99.9999% * compatible because (I didn't realise this) that Sun do not own the Sparc design, Sparc Consortium do. I do not believe that Fujitsu will buy Sun outright because they simply do not have the money and have been doing lots of expensive merging of various subsidiary companies this year to save costs; e.g. the old ICL has become Fujitsu Services along with some other straggler companies including Fujitsu's Sun reseller company.
I would say that Fujitsu PrimePower are about 1 year ahead of Sun in terms of power & speed and in our tendering process were a lot cheaper as well.
Probably worth mentioning that I didn't buy Fujitsu in the end because the machines were not certified to use Oracle RAC - instead, I went for HP (linux) - the business benefits for linux outweighed the change from solaris.
* PrimePower won't run SunCluster - that scared me a bit about fujitsu's compatibility claims.
I wonder if people are becoming less distro-religous since most distros seem to work well. anyway, after reading distrowatch for a while you'll no doubt become a distro-tart and try all out 101 live cd's like L.A.S.
rd
now would be a very good time to start the clocks to see how long it takes them to get a patch out. Should be a good case in point for the forrester research published last week. rd
The next thing will be inter-state passport control in the USA. Laugh now, but just wait a year or two. Reminds me of the old soviet union when tourists were routinely followed...
rd
For me, it was important to demonstrate to management that linux builds were consistant and good quality as well as not increasing the system management cost. I think they would have not gone for linux had we said that we would be building each one from source code. You've got to remember that these guys read Gartner reports that say the Linux distros are "fragmented" and no matter how many times i explain it; they don't get Linux versioning. "So is SUSE 9.1 newer than RedHat 3.1? Which one is Linux 2.6?" ... arg!
rd
rd
So much so, the new replacement for the Saxo, the Citroen C2 GT has been designed so that enthusiasts can modify the car (and keep the warranty). there has even been talk of owners being able to share ECU maps and so on to have different performance characteristics. It is not a WRX fast car - but has been designed for the high-risk-insurance youngsters who want to modify their vehicle. It looks like some big consumer goods companies are beginning to look this way and let the end user tinker with the original format to make something unique and match the end users requirements.
rapiddescent (who owns a modified WRX turbo)
English law DOES NOT HAVE the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise thanks to the Criminal Justice Act in the early nineties. In Scotland, you cannot incriminate yourself - so responding to a traffic offence and identifying yourself as the culprit from a speed camera photo is illegal! Very different systems. Also the Anti-Terrorism act allows citizens to be held without charge for an indefinite time. This came about to combat the irish threat in the 80's, long before bush and his oddball war for oil/power.
Also in Scotland there are 3 verdicts - guilty, innocent and Not Proven.
Also, your example about the box of matches does not hold true in England. The 1996 offensive weapons act makes it illegal to carry any offensive object in a public place. this would include a pocket penknife (of any size). You *will* be charged for carrying a pocket penknife in London - even if you had no intention whatsoever of using it to garot someone. If you had a box of matches in one pocket and lighter fluid in the other then you could well be charged, or at least, receive a caution.
rd
Big Brother is no longer watching - he hasn't got the time; there are plenty of better channels.
rd
the international measure of interstellar comet size is VW's, although in the UK, the unit of "double decker buses" is useful when talking about flight length of a jumping vehicle.
the UK standard for the weight of anything a child can carry is measured in bags of sugar with anything that is very small being extressed as a fraction of the width of a human hair.
rd
I was chatting to one of the software developers of the beagle2 who told me that they had tested the airbags but the test had been a failure because the airbags deflated on the first bounce. Due to the timescales - which were really really tight - they didn't test it again. My friend also told me that they did not have much redundancy built into the computer systems either. It was always going to be a miricle if it landed safely... rd