The Pro version will include an insurance plan in case you go on vacation for a week and leave your XP box on and a new exploit surfaces while you're gone.
Vacation? I don't leave my win2k box on when I go to WORK, lest a new exploit surrface before I get home:-)
As of a little while ago (it is around 7:45 PM US Eastern on Mon 15 Sep 2003 as I write this), VeriSign added a wildcard A record to the.COM and.NET TLD DNS zones.
I see a number of ways in which we can 'fight' back(and no, i do not mean DDos). Here's an idea- why don't we(network admins) just configure all our routers to route that IP into a black hole, and/or set up our DNS servers to ignore the invalid responses? We can justify it to the PHB's very, very easily- we're "fixing" what Verisign has broken. Verisign will have thrown a party, and nobody will show up because we've ripped down the fliers.
I imagine it won't be long before many software packages are updated to have an option to detect Verisign's monkeybusiness, and/or various HOWTOs come out that tell you how to get your nameserver to ignore the silly bullshit. In fact, why don't we all work on a patch to bind to do just that?
It should be very easy to write code that handles any of a variety of blocking methods on this- all you'd have to do is do a DNS lookup on (insert random, long # of random letters+numbers).com, and Verisign will handily tell you exactly what IP to block. From then on, if any DNS lookup returns that IP, return no-such-record instead. Poof. Problem solved. I bet it would take all of an hour or two for someone to write the code to do this for bind.
Oh, and here's another idea- on your homepage, create a link called "Verisign" and point it to somebody's(anybody's) website describing what Verisign has done, why it's bad, etc- guess what will happen when people type in "verisign" into google?:-)
Bullhoey(energy conversion rates)
on
Solar Window Panes
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Energy conversion rates are 'way more than 50 percent'
Bullshit. Current conversion rates are about 18%, and haven't changed much in 20 years or more; they've slowly managed to squeek out more and more power getting up to the current 18-20%, but nowhere near 50%. Let's put this in perspective- it would be like someone claiming they could get 100mpg in their car, and "easily 200mpg".
The bullshit-o-meter goes off the scale at the claim they can get "100%"- and there's one very simple, indisputable reason; the glass itself blocks a significant amount of energy- ESPECIALLY at a low angle of incidence, where the outer glass is going to reflect a large percentage of the light hitting it. The modules inside the window may pivot, but the outer glass doesn't.
The bullshit-o-meter EXPLODES at the nice little bit about how they won't discuss specific energy conversion rates in detail. It doesn't help that this is being published in Science for People Who Think They're Trendy(aka Wired). Ring me when she's published results in Nature or (gasp) a professional journal.
Oh, and if I wasn't pessimistic enough:-)...if this actually DOES pan out...just wait until you see the price tag on 'em, because I'm sure she's going to patent absolutely everything out to wazoo, and one company will get exclusive rights. It'll also be years before we see 'em, as said company will want to protect its investment on current solar panel technology...
OSNews is reporting on Storage, an innovative project which aims to replace the traditional hierarchical filesystems with a new document store which is database-based (PostgreSQL).
I have a new way to get between point A and B. I call this product "Car". To fuel it, I've started a fuel company called "Gas". Of course, people will abuse "Car", so I've also created something to keep them in line, called "Fuzz". Fuzz will be powered by what I call "Donut".
Especially with all of the negative press that Microsoft has had recently, is this an attempt to do some good and help out those who cannot afford private school? Or is Microsoft just making sure that they secure themselves another generation of coders/admins/users?
Like every other corporation on the face of the planet, they don't blink unless (they think) it's in their best interests.
I hate it when people "support"(buy from) a corporation because they get warm fuzzies from that company "supporting"(tossing a measly hundredth or thousandth of a percent of their profits to) a cause. Does BMW give a crap about breast cancer? No. Like all the other corporations that support "breast cancer research", they're basically just looking to get women to buy stuff from them.
"Buy ________, we support ______ by donating* to the __________ foundation of America!"
(*1/10th of a percent of the net profit of this product, minus taxes, executive bonuses, kickbacks, and of course some good old fashioned book cooking)
PalmOS is just so much easier to deal with on such a small device.
I love the non-laptop-lookalive Zauruses- except I refused to buy one because it's basically impossible to sync them with Linux. That's pretty damn weak from a company which touts non-stop that the thing runs Linux.
What exactly is the point of a PDA that can't sync with OS X or Linux?
As I mentioned in that Ask Slashdot question a while back about handling this sort of thing, one could VERY easily set up VLANs on managed network equipment.
Joe User plugs in his desktop. His machine starts spewing garbage, which gets detected either at a border or by honeypots. Script runs, switches Joe User's network jack to a secure VLAN which is heavily firewalled and only allows him to get antivirus updates, removal tools, etc.
Of course, this requires you use managed hubs/switches. If you're not already, however, that means you're wasting substantial labor paying some poor schlep to, well, shlep, around campus, managing patch panels in network closets. Also means you can't diagnose connectivity problems very well, etc.
I went to news.google.com to search for the google partner link, but "IBM lawsuit" turned up all this shit about some company called SCO. Who are they, anyway? They say they've got some sort of Unix, but I've never seen or even heard of anyone who runs it.
Must be some two-bit company...wonder why they're getting so much press.
Another benefit of virtual machines are their logical separation from the host server. Each virtual server has their own users (including root), applications, file systems, IP address, etc. That means that if security is compromised on one, the others are unaffected. Ditto resources can be allocated to each virtual server according to need. And any mis-configuration on one doesn't affect the other. This compares to running multiple applications on the same server for different purposes (e.g. running HR and Account systems on one server, if email goes down them both systems are affected. In a virtual server setup, only one of the other would be affected.
Ahh yes, grasshopper, but when that one uber-box dies(hard disk, fan, power supply, whatever), gets powered off by accident, network cable unplugged, yadda yadda- it affects ALL the virtual machines.
Granted in the Big Iron, you've got lovely hot-swap capabilities and such(processors, memory, etc)...but nothing is foolproof or 100% reliable. It's the old joke with pilots about twin-engine airplanes; the door swings both ways and there's no such thing as a free lunch. On one hand, you've got a spare engine if one dies, but you're 2x as likely to have a failure, you've got a lot of added complexity, and sometimes it still won't save your bacon(twin engine planes have an abysmal survival rate for engine failure in part because of the really shitty way they fly with one engine down). This is VERY applicable- because managing this big IBM server is much more complex(the whole point of this article) than seperate hardware.
Best example I can think of in how hot-swap can still not save the bacon is with the Cisco PIX 5-something(The 1U pizza-box one). It has FULL failover- if you've got two, and one shits the bed COMPLETELY, the other one takes over absolutely everything, including active connections; they share ALL state information for what's called stateful failover. Aside from a momentary blip where things stop for a sec...nobody's the wiser that a piece of very expensive hardware just let the Magic Smoke out. The problem is that the PIX OS version we had was buggy and would crash randomly- and because they were sharing connection tables and everything, they'd BOTH die, which was REALLY bad since the boxes didn't have hardware watchdogs(!). We turned off fully-stateful failover, and the problem went away; we'd notice they'd ping-ponged(there's an 'ACTIVE' led to show you which is live) and we'd power-cycle the other.
So ask the tough questions; instead of asking what's N+1, ask what's NOT N+1, and do a very careful breakdown of what exactly it will cost to run this big huge box, and figure out what the 'per [virtual] machine' costs are...
How many people still consider a RAM based audio player when shopping?"
OK, I'm going to burn some of my karma here.
How many of you are not in the slightest bit fooled into thinking this is a legitimate ad, posted probably by the same likes as the geniuses who did that Gateway adver..I mean, uh, story, a few weeks back?
Still it could speed up Wine developement, which is always good.
Or it could hopelessly fragment Wine even further. I've run the commercial version of Wine, and it behaved completely differently from the open-source version, which I found to be massively broken(impossible to get set up correctly). It --appears-- that from a useability standpoint for the end user, none of the commercial stuff has made it back to the open-source project. Why would Aclerex have any interest in fixing the open-source version of Wine to work better? Talk about conflict of interest...
Cite where Bell in any way lied or otherwise acted improperly in regards the V22.
How about the 177 "flight critical" safety failures, or the 723 "critical component" failures?
http://www.insidedefense.com/public/special16.asp
That woulod be the "ignored the problems" part. How on earth could to ethically allow someone to use a plane which has such a staggering number of defects? Let's not even get into the gross incompetence aspect.
Bell could have spoken up at ANY time to say "this bird ain't ready to fly"...but as always, greed takes priority over safety.
No need for the V22? Hardly.
The V22 is _finally_ getting to the mature design stage. They removed the problems that killed people (mostly, no a/c is perfect) like the inability to handle the loss of ground effect under one rotor.
Your argument is all and well, except that aircraft ARE virtually perfect- it's the ones that are NOT perfect that we hear about. Second, when an aircraft is NOT perfect, you're supposed to fix it. The contractor involved and the armed forces instead outright lied through their teeth and ignored the problems while soldiers continued to die. Lastly, the problems were far more extensive than just one issue with ground effect.
There have also been plans for a gunship version of the V22, with a massive rotary cannon and the ability to fly very slow it's even going to make the A-10 look a bit lightweight
One of the warthog's best features is its heavy armour- some jokingly call it the 'flying bathtub' because of the cockpit reenforcement. I believe most hydraulic and electrical systems are also heavily armoured. It takes more than just a plane to make an effective way to shoot at people. Nevermind that the V22 looks to be completely intolerant of failure in either engine- and as any pilot knows, twin engined planes have twice as many engine failures because, surprise, you've got two of 'em:-) I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how someone would eject from the V22 without standing a good chance of being sliced to pieces.
As for the original poster's comment that this will replace the V22- I hardly see how. Ever notice that 'Ornithopters' in nature don't really exist above a dozen pounds or so? Sure, we had some big flying dinosaurs a while back, but even those weren't nearly big enough to weigh as much as a small plane.
LeMans? Racing? I own a 92 LeMans HB, that POS couldn't win a race against a metro.
Yeah, Pontiac has a habit for naming cars which are complete pieces of shit after famous races; it's an insult of the deepest kind to some truly great events, since Pontiac, for the last couple of decades, wouldn't have known perfomance if it bit them on the ass(everything after the mid-60's GTO was just downhill, sorry). I know you're making a joke:-), but for those who are interested:
http://www.americanlemans.com/
http://www.lemans.org/2003/24auto/index_gb.shtml
(by the way, the top 4 finishes at LeMans were all Audi cars; the Bentley cars are essentially Audi R8's.Champion Racing was a 'real' Audi R8, AudiSport Japan was also, of course.)
Oh, and so you don't sound like an idiot to any gear-head friends, it's "Lehmoh" with a nearly silent H, nearly an N. Not "Le Mans":-)
Slightly off topic, but this might be of interest to readers tonight, so what the hell!
This reminded me of the Mt. Washington Auto Road Race. To be a little more on-topic, one year they had a Geo Metro electric car 'do' the race- it looked really funny, because both driver and 'navigator' were required to wear helmets since it was a sanctioned race. Unlike some of the 600hp cars, the starter didn't exactly have to jump out of the way with them).
The hillclimb is the US's oldest motorsport event, believe it or not- however, it's also one of the most troubling. Despite attracting a healthy crowd every year, Audi pulled sponsorship after Frank Sprongl(driving an Audi S2 rally car) stopped winning, despite numerous VW and Audi entries.
The final straw for Audi, sponsorship-wise, was most likely the guy in the Legend car(motorcycle engine, 4 wheels, micro-sized chassis) who went off, clipped a rock, and was pulled from his car by a 16 year old cornerworker, right before the car burst into flames from a severed fuel line(the engine compartment was severed from the car by the rock). Long ago Audi had stopped their factory rally teams after a slew of deaths in the Group B category in various rallies; Piesch, now head of Volkswagon Audi Grouppe, declared at the time that he "never wanted to see rings stamped on a spectator's chest". Audi of America management were probably sneaking the Mt. Washington race under the radar of the parent company, but all that changed with the big crash(the kid even got a medal from the Governor).
Another factor is that Audi now considers rallying a been-there-done-that(Audi dominated rallying in the early 80's with the first Quattro Coupes and Sport Quattros), no-longer-cool kinda deal; their customer base just doesn't care, or so they think; guys who drive A8's don't like hanging out in the rain watching cars go by throwing rocks into their faces; they like sitting in a hospitality tent in cool comfort. So that's why Audi threw themselves into LeMans and ALMS(American LeMans Series), along with the Speedvision(er, SPEED Channel) SpeedGT(S4's, last year) and ProGT(RS6's, this year) races.
Mt. Washington management has given a variety of excuses for not continuing the race; first it was Audi, because they couldn't find another sponsor(rumor was they were looking for 1 million- an ABSURD amount of sponsorship money; it may be the oldest motorsports events, but it's also one of the lowest profile). Then it was because the road needed resurfacing(although honestly, having driven it myself three times as well, it WAS getting really bad). Then it was because the lodge, which had absolutely nothing to do with the race, burned to the ground and was 'behind schedule' on being rebuilt, or some such nonsense.
There are rumors going around that the race will continue next year. The local region of the Audi Club of America might attend(as it has for many, many years- we were the yahoos with all the Audis parked to the left of the starting area). Depending upon how solid the Audi+VW marques are represented, I'll be there- our little sub-event is a great family affair and I've always enjoyed myself; it's pretty gosh darn cheap, and getting there and back is half the fun(there are some GREAT roads in the area). Spectators can do whatever floats their boat- you can go up to any of several points on the mountain via van to watch the races(warning- you're limited as to when you can get back down!), you can hike the mountain(not for the inexperienced), you can watch from the start line and see trap speeds etc...and you can also watch from a nice point that's just a few minute's hike and gives you about 20 second's view per car.
The basic idea, if you're wondering, is simply to get up the mountain as absolutely fast as possible. Frank Sprongl was a regular winner, but his S2 is no longer competitive against some of the cars that started showing up- Jerry Driscoll(sp?) kept building meaner+meaner purpose-built tube-frame cars with insane engines in 'em until he started winning, despite not having all wheel drive(which is a MAJOR advantage, to the point that it's a seperate class in any sanctioned rally).
He continues his examination of a society where most manual labor is performed by machines, idling a large fraction of the current workforce.
You mean, say, a society where:
3-story high dumptrucks cart entire hill's worth of rubble
Automotive frames are almost entirely assembled(welded) by robots?
Construction sites have pneumatic nailguns, automatic laser levelling systems, GPS GIS survey equipment, bulldozers, cranes, etc? In Japan, robot use at construction sites is extensive(and unfortunately, every once in a while, someone gets flattened or pushed off a building by one)
Cars have automatic cruise control units, not to mention engine and climate control units smarter than their owners
Commuter trains are (almost) entirely controlled by computers
Supermarkets have automated checkouts
Robotic vacuums, lawn mowers are available on the open market to consumers for (fairly) reasonable prices
Guided missile heads can be strapped to virtually any bomb to enable it to drop on any 1m-square area your heart desires
Interesting that in almost every case, the robotics work WITH and ENHANCE the capabilities of the humans that operate them. Not 'take over their jobs'.
The author also makes the asinine assumption that robotic labor is always better- cheaper, more efficient, and so on. Maybe he should take a trip to some third world countries, where for the cost of one robot, you could employ a hundred factory workers for years upon years.
Oh, and all these robots-take-over-the-world philosophers always seem to forget:
Programming errors
Manufacturing/component defects
Maintenance needs
Mechanical breakdowns
Just like computers, robots aren't foolproof, they're not magical, and they're not going to simply save your business a shitload of money. They come with their own entire set of other problems, often many times worse.
The very concept of "machines which just 'work'" goes against the way almost every business in the world tries to keep their revenue stream- by forcing people to buy parts, hire company repair staff, and/or simply replace machines.
Nevermind that we still haven't made machines that can even approach understand human language as well as a human can, read handwriting as well, or move efficiently over ground as well as a human can...
Scientists have long grappled with the issue of creating silk; artificial silk is inferior to the real stuff, and the spiders can't be farmed (when you put them too close together, they eat each other)
I don't suppose it occured to any of these rocket scientists to put the spiders in seperate cages.
...or better yet, genetically modify the spiders to be nice! Perfect plot for a B-grade movie with LL Cool J; the spiders are only PRETENDING to be nice! Mwuahahahaha...
Ok, so let's get this straight- Apple just screwed 500 customers for the sake of getting their name on some supercomputer top-500 list? I know if I had ordered my G5 and found out my machine was a month further away than I thought it was, I'd be spitting mad; the only people who have that kind of dough are people who really need the speed for business purposes. Not to mention this could be the straw that breaks the camel's back WRT Apple executive credibility with analysts- Steve said the G5's would be shipping by the end of August, and this cute little Virginia Tech deal will push that up almost a month.
I'm a diehard mac fanatic, have been for years- I've bought something like 6-7 Macintoshes over the last 10+ years, and I'm about to buy another in a day or two...but sometimes Apple management just completely stuffs its head up its ass.
As for Virginia Tech, this couldn't possibly be an efficient choice for a cluster; AMD Opertons in rackmount configurations maybe- but not G5's. For about $1k less than the dual G5, you can get a dual opteron system similarly spec'd out, and you can fit a couple of them in the same amount of space as one G5. No, this sounds like a publicity stunt more than anything else...
Slashdot Mirror
How about partitioning your servers properly so they don't crash when they fill the logs?
Basic sysadmin 101, people. You're going to piss off customers by doing what the parent suggests.
I for one welcome our new DNS overlords! All our domain name are belong to THEM! Mwuhahahaha...
Vacation? I don't leave my win2k box on when I go to WORK, lest a new exploit surrface before I get home :-)
I see a number of ways in which we can 'fight' back(and no, i do not mean DDos). Here's an idea- why don't we(network admins) just configure all our routers to route that IP into a black hole, and/or set up our DNS servers to ignore the invalid responses? We can justify it to the PHB's very, very easily- we're "fixing" what Verisign has broken. Verisign will have thrown a party, and nobody will show up because we've ripped down the fliers.
I imagine it won't be long before many software packages are updated to have an option to detect Verisign's monkeybusiness, and/or various HOWTOs come out that tell you how to get your nameserver to ignore the silly bullshit. In fact, why don't we all work on a patch to bind to do just that?
It should be very easy to write code that handles any of a variety of blocking methods on this- all you'd have to do is do a DNS lookup on (insert random, long # of random letters+numbers).com, and Verisign will handily tell you exactly what IP to block. From then on, if any DNS lookup returns that IP, return no-such-record instead. Poof. Problem solved. I bet it would take all of an hour or two for someone to write the code to do this for bind.
Oh, and here's another idea- on your homepage, create a link called "Verisign" and point it to somebody's(anybody's) website describing what Verisign has done, why it's bad, etc- guess what will happen when people type in "verisign" into google? :-)
Bullshit. Current conversion rates are about 18%, and haven't changed much in 20 years or more; they've slowly managed to squeek out more and more power getting up to the current 18-20%, but nowhere near 50%. Let's put this in perspective- it would be like someone claiming they could get 100mpg in their car, and "easily 200mpg".
The bullshit-o-meter goes off the scale at the claim they can get "100%"- and there's one very simple, indisputable reason; the glass itself blocks a significant amount of energy- ESPECIALLY at a low angle of incidence, where the outer glass is going to reflect a large percentage of the light hitting it. The modules inside the window may pivot, but the outer glass doesn't.
The bullshit-o-meter EXPLODES at the nice little bit about how they won't discuss specific energy conversion rates in detail. It doesn't help that this is being published in Science for People Who Think They're Trendy(aka Wired). Ring me when she's published results in Nature or (gasp) a professional journal.
Oh, and if I wasn't pessimistic enough :-)...if this actually DOES pan out...just wait until you see the price tag on 'em, because I'm sure she's going to patent absolutely everything out to wazoo, and one company will get exclusive rights. It'll also be years before we see 'em, as said company will want to protect its investment on current solar panel technology...
Yeah. The world's first yearly-subscription laundry detergent.
I have a new way to get between point A and B. I call this product "Car". To fuel it, I've started a fuel company called "Gas". Of course, people will abuse "Car", so I've also created something to keep them in line, called "Fuzz". Fuzz will be powered by what I call "Donut".
(hey, it's Friday, gimme a break :-)
Like every other corporation on the face of the planet, they don't blink unless (they think) it's in their best interests.
I hate it when people "support"(buy from) a corporation because they get warm fuzzies from that company "supporting"(tossing a measly hundredth or thousandth of a percent of their profits to) a cause. Does BMW give a crap about breast cancer? No. Like all the other corporations that support "breast cancer research", they're basically just looking to get women to buy stuff from them.
"Buy ________, we support ______ by donating* to the __________ foundation of America!"
(*1/10th of a percent of the net profit of this product, minus taxes, executive bonuses, kickbacks, and of course some good old fashioned book cooking)
PalmOS is just so much easier to deal with on such a small device.
I love the non-laptop-lookalive Zauruses- except I refused to buy one because it's basically impossible to sync them with Linux. That's pretty damn weak from a company which touts non-stop that the thing runs Linux.
What exactly is the point of a PDA that can't sync with OS X or Linux?
As I mentioned in that Ask Slashdot question a while back about handling this sort of thing, one could VERY easily set up VLANs on managed network equipment.
Joe User plugs in his desktop. His machine starts spewing garbage, which gets detected either at a border or by honeypots. Script runs, switches Joe User's network jack to a secure VLAN which is heavily firewalled and only allows him to get antivirus updates, removal tools, etc.
Of course, this requires you use managed hubs/switches. If you're not already, however, that means you're wasting substantial labor paying some poor schlep to, well, shlep, around campus, managing patch panels in network closets. Also means you can't diagnose connectivity problems very well, etc.
I went to news.google.com to search for the google partner link, but "IBM lawsuit" turned up all this shit about some company called SCO. Who are they, anyway? They say they've got some sort of Unix, but I've never seen or even heard of anyone who runs it.
Must be some two-bit company...wonder why they're getting so much press.
And your problem is you think everything was invented by the british.
Ahh yes, grasshopper, but when that one uber-box dies(hard disk, fan, power supply, whatever), gets powered off by accident, network cable unplugged, yadda yadda- it affects ALL the virtual machines.
Granted in the Big Iron, you've got lovely hot-swap capabilities and such(processors, memory, etc)...but nothing is foolproof or 100% reliable. It's the old joke with pilots about twin-engine airplanes; the door swings both ways and there's no such thing as a free lunch. On one hand, you've got a spare engine if one dies, but you're 2x as likely to have a failure, you've got a lot of added complexity, and sometimes it still won't save your bacon(twin engine planes have an abysmal survival rate for engine failure in part because of the really shitty way they fly with one engine down). This is VERY applicable- because managing this big IBM server is much more complex(the whole point of this article) than seperate hardware.
Best example I can think of in how hot-swap can still not save the bacon is with the Cisco PIX 5-something(The 1U pizza-box one). It has FULL failover- if you've got two, and one shits the bed COMPLETELY, the other one takes over absolutely everything, including active connections; they share ALL state information for what's called stateful failover. Aside from a momentary blip where things stop for a sec...nobody's the wiser that a piece of very expensive hardware just let the Magic Smoke out. The problem is that the PIX OS version we had was buggy and would crash randomly- and because they were sharing connection tables and everything, they'd BOTH die, which was REALLY bad since the boxes didn't have hardware watchdogs(!). We turned off fully-stateful failover, and the problem went away; we'd notice they'd ping-ponged(there's an 'ACTIVE' led to show you which is live) and we'd power-cycle the other.
So ask the tough questions; instead of asking what's N+1, ask what's NOT N+1, and do a very careful breakdown of what exactly it will cost to run this big huge box, and figure out what the 'per [virtual] machine' costs are...
OK, I'm going to burn some of my karma here.
How many of you are not in the slightest bit fooled into thinking this is a legitimate ad, posted probably by the same likes as the geniuses who did that Gateway adver..I mean, uh, story, a few weeks back?
By giving everything to CowboyNeal. Duuuuh! Pay attention!
Such as what?
Well, the story submitter put something there, but we're not licensed to view it. Sorry.
Don't feel bad. In a day or two, he won't be able to view it either.
Or it could hopelessly fragment Wine even further. I've run the commercial version of Wine, and it behaved completely differently from the open-source version, which I found to be massively broken(impossible to get set up correctly). It --appears-- that from a useability standpoint for the end user, none of the commercial stuff has made it back to the open-source project. Why would Aclerex have any interest in fixing the open-source version of Wine to work better? Talk about conflict of interest...
How about the 177 "flight critical" safety failures, or the 723 "critical component" failures? http://www.insidedefense.com/public/special16.asp
That woulod be the "ignored the problems" part. How on earth could to ethically allow someone to use a plane which has such a staggering number of defects? Let's not even get into the gross incompetence aspect.
Bell could have spoken up at ANY time to say "this bird ain't ready to fly"...but as always, greed takes priority over safety.
Your argument is all and well, except that aircraft ARE virtually perfect- it's the ones that are NOT perfect that we hear about. Second, when an aircraft is NOT perfect, you're supposed to fix it. The contractor involved and the armed forces instead outright lied through their teeth and ignored the problems while soldiers continued to die. Lastly, the problems were far more extensive than just one issue with ground effect.
There have also been plans for a gunship version of the V22, with a massive rotary cannon and the ability to fly very slow it's even going to make the A-10 look a bit lightweight
One of the warthog's best features is its heavy armour- some jokingly call it the 'flying bathtub' because of the cockpit reenforcement. I believe most hydraulic and electrical systems are also heavily armoured. It takes more than just a plane to make an effective way to shoot at people. Nevermind that the V22 looks to be completely intolerant of failure in either engine- and as any pilot knows, twin engined planes have twice as many engine failures because, surprise, you've got two of 'em :-) I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how someone would eject from the V22 without standing a good chance of being sliced to pieces.
As for the original poster's comment that this will replace the V22- I hardly see how. Ever notice that 'Ornithopters' in nature don't really exist above a dozen pounds or so? Sure, we had some big flying dinosaurs a while back, but even those weren't nearly big enough to weigh as much as a small plane.
Yeah, Pontiac has a habit for naming cars which are complete pieces of shit after famous races; it's an insult of the deepest kind to some truly great events, since Pontiac, for the last couple of decades, wouldn't have known perfomance if it bit them on the ass(everything after the mid-60's GTO was just downhill, sorry). I know you're making a joke :-), but for those who are interested:
http://www.americanlemans.com/
http://www.lemans.org/2003/24auto/index_gb.shtml
(by the way, the top 4 finishes at LeMans were all Audi cars; the Bentley cars are essentially Audi R8's.Champion Racing was a 'real' Audi R8, AudiSport Japan was also, of course.)
Oh, and so you don't sound like an idiot to any gear-head friends, it's "Lehmoh" with a nearly silent H, nearly an N. Not "Le Mans" :-)
Slightly off topic, but this might be of interest to readers tonight, so what the hell!
This reminded me of the Mt. Washington Auto Road Race. To be a little more on-topic, one year they had a Geo Metro electric car 'do' the race- it looked really funny, because both driver and 'navigator' were required to wear helmets since it was a sanctioned race. Unlike some of the 600hp cars, the starter didn't exactly have to jump out of the way with them).
The hillclimb is the US's oldest motorsport event, believe it or not- however, it's also one of the most troubling. Despite attracting a healthy crowd every year, Audi pulled sponsorship after Frank Sprongl(driving an Audi S2 rally car) stopped winning, despite numerous VW and Audi entries.
The final straw for Audi, sponsorship-wise, was most likely the guy in the Legend car(motorcycle engine, 4 wheels, micro-sized chassis) who went off, clipped a rock, and was pulled from his car by a 16 year old cornerworker, right before the car burst into flames from a severed fuel line(the engine compartment was severed from the car by the rock). Long ago Audi had stopped their factory rally teams after a slew of deaths in the Group B category in various rallies; Piesch, now head of Volkswagon Audi Grouppe, declared at the time that he "never wanted to see rings stamped on a spectator's chest". Audi of America management were probably sneaking the Mt. Washington race under the radar of the parent company, but all that changed with the big crash(the kid even got a medal from the Governor).
Another factor is that Audi now considers rallying a been-there-done-that(Audi dominated rallying in the early 80's with the first Quattro Coupes and Sport Quattros), no-longer-cool kinda deal; their customer base just doesn't care, or so they think; guys who drive A8's don't like hanging out in the rain watching cars go by throwing rocks into their faces; they like sitting in a hospitality tent in cool comfort. So that's why Audi threw themselves into LeMans and ALMS(American LeMans Series), along with the Speedvision(er, SPEED Channel) SpeedGT(S4's, last year) and ProGT(RS6's, this year) races.
Mt. Washington management has given a variety of excuses for not continuing the race; first it was Audi, because they couldn't find another sponsor(rumor was they were looking for 1 million- an ABSURD amount of sponsorship money; it may be the oldest motorsports events, but it's also one of the lowest profile). Then it was because the road needed resurfacing(although honestly, having driven it myself three times as well, it WAS getting really bad). Then it was because the lodge, which had absolutely nothing to do with the race, burned to the ground and was 'behind schedule' on being rebuilt, or some such nonsense.
There are rumors going around that the race will continue next year. The local region of the Audi Club of America might attend(as it has for many, many years- we were the yahoos with all the Audis parked to the left of the starting area). Depending upon how solid the Audi+VW marques are represented, I'll be there- our little sub-event is a great family affair and I've always enjoyed myself; it's pretty gosh darn cheap, and getting there and back is half the fun(there are some GREAT roads in the area). Spectators can do whatever floats their boat- you can go up to any of several points on the mountain via van to watch the races(warning- you're limited as to when you can get back down!), you can hike the mountain(not for the inexperienced), you can watch from the start line and see trap speeds etc...and you can also watch from a nice point that's just a few minute's hike and gives you about 20 second's view per car.
The basic idea, if you're wondering, is simply to get up the mountain as absolutely fast as possible. Frank Sprongl was a regular winner, but his S2 is no longer competitive against some of the cars that started showing up- Jerry Driscoll(sp?) kept building meaner+meaner purpose-built tube-frame cars with insane engines in 'em until he started winning, despite not having all wheel drive(which is a MAJOR advantage, to the point that it's a seperate class in any sanctioned rally).
You mean, say, a society where:
Interesting that in almost every case, the robotics work WITH and ENHANCE the capabilities of the humans that operate them. Not 'take over their jobs'.
The author also makes the asinine assumption that robotic labor is always better- cheaper, more efficient, and so on. Maybe he should take a trip to some third world countries, where for the cost of one robot, you could employ a hundred factory workers for years upon years.
Oh, and all these robots-take-over-the-world philosophers always seem to forget:
Just like computers, robots aren't foolproof, they're not magical, and they're not going to simply save your business a shitload of money. They come with their own entire set of other problems, often many times worse.
The very concept of "machines which just 'work'" goes against the way almost every business in the world tries to keep their revenue stream- by forcing people to buy parts, hire company repair staff, and/or simply replace machines.
Nevermind that we still haven't made machines that can even approach understand human language as well as a human can, read handwriting as well, or move efficiently over ground as well as a human can...
I don't suppose it occured to any of these rocket scientists to put the spiders in seperate cages.
...or better yet, genetically modify the spiders to be nice! Perfect plot for a B-grade movie with LL Cool J; the spiders are only PRETENDING to be nice! Mwuahahahaha...
Yes, but the difference is, to buy one I had to mow lawns for an entire summer, and my parents chipped in the other half.
What's the most you had to do, remember where your pen was, and shlep the PO down to Purchasing?
Ok, so let's get this straight- Apple just screwed 500 customers for the sake of getting their name on some supercomputer top-500 list? I know if I had ordered my G5 and found out my machine was a month further away than I thought it was, I'd be spitting mad; the only people who have that kind of dough are people who really need the speed for business purposes. Not to mention this could be the straw that breaks the camel's back WRT Apple executive credibility with analysts- Steve said the G5's would be shipping by the end of August, and this cute little Virginia Tech deal will push that up almost a month.
I'm a diehard mac fanatic, have been for years- I've bought something like 6-7 Macintoshes over the last 10+ years, and I'm about to buy another in a day or two...but sometimes Apple management just completely stuffs its head up its ass.
As for Virginia Tech, this couldn't possibly be an efficient choice for a cluster; AMD Opertons in rackmount configurations maybe- but not G5's. For about $1k less than the dual G5, you can get a dual opteron system similarly spec'd out, and you can fit a couple of them in the same amount of space as one G5. No, this sounds like a publicity stunt more than anything else...