| Monday
February 18, 2002
President's Day
Chemical Laser on a Spectre Gunship?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?
xml=/news/2002/02/17/wbush217.xml&sSheet
=/news/2002/02/17/ixworld.html
America's laser of death cleared for take-off By
Sean Rayment / (Filed: 17/02/2002) /
AMERICA'S enemies will soon face a weapon, once
confined to the Star Wars films, that can bring death at the speed of
light.
The special operations AC-130 Spectre gunship, whose
conventional weaponry has been used to devastating effect since the
Vietnam War, is to be fitted with a laser that can shoot down missiles,
punch holes in aircraft and knock out ground radar stations.
Despite the successful operations against Taliban
and al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, the emergence of asymmetric
terrorist warfare - attacks such as September 11 where the enemy is unseen
- has led the Pentagon to identify the need for a more sophisticated and
deadly weapons system.
The next generation gunship, codenamed AC-X and
nicknamed 'Son of Spectre' by US defence officials, will carry all the
weaponry already used on the AC-130, including twin 20mm Vulcan cannon
(capable of firing 2,500 rounds per minute), 40mm Bofor cannon (100 rounds
per minute) and a 105mm Howitzer. Its 21st-century addition, however, will
be its biggest punch: a chemical oxygen iodine laser (Coil), capable of
carrying out lethal and non-lethal attacks.
<snip>
Mike Blast
Which is interesting. I saw this at
Kirtland a year or so ago when I was keynote at the Directed Energy
Society annual meeting. There is no doubt that the power of the US grows,
and the cost of getting into the military game at our level is just about
prohibitive to everyone else. Recall that few powers on Earth could defeat
a Roman Legion in the early days of the Empire (although there were
upsets: "Varro, give me back my Legions!") and the cost was high
even for Rome. And with all that, minor actors like Herod could have their
own experiments in genocide.
From Roland on RIAA
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/18/technology/18SONG.html
which is informative, if a bit
disgusting.
I have a lot of mail on "Reveal
Codes" some of which will go into the next column. Here's one for
here"
Hello, Jerry, I saw a recent entry on your web site
about the Microsoft Word equivalent of WordPerfect's "Reveal
Codes". I constructed a search on Google which seemed to point
towards a lot of sources for addressing this issue. Instead of me picking
my favorites I thought I'd leave that for you or your readers to decided
if you choose to pass this along...
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=
"microsoft+word"+wordperfect+"reveal+codes"
Take Care, Dan Geiser <dgeiser13@hotmail.com>
http://bitstream.manilasites.com/
which makes you do the work.
I've always wondered about this.
"The 'magic number' of people needed to create
a viable population for multi-generational space travel has been
calculated by researchers. It is about the size of a small village - 160.
But with some social engineering it might even be possible to halve this
to 80.
Anthropologist John Moore from University of Florida
tackled the problem as part of a combined effort with space scientists to
determine how in future humans might successfully undertake century-long
journeys out into space."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991936
Jonathan Sturm www.sturmsoft.com ---
By the time we have a generations
ship we will be able to carry frozen sperm and eggs, so genetic diversity
won't be a big problem. That could be in under a hundred years if we
decide to do it. It was sort of the premise of Legacy
of Heorot by Niven and Pournelle and Barnes.
 And
an important note from Tim Loeb who is doing the Mac Thing
Dear Jerry:
You wanted it brief (I can't blame you) so I think
I'll just do "good news / bad news" and we can take it from
there.
You may remember the novel ZEN & THE ART OF
MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE from years ago which was really a treatise on
philosophy, not a "how to" book. In it the author posits the
idea of "quality" as a sort of universal truth replacing the
age-old concept of duality, good versus evil, East versus West, yin versus
yang, and so on.
Well the good news is Apple's OS X and the Powerbook
I'm running it on is just such a quality solution. In over a month of
regular use the machine has never locked up or crashed (my Win XP desktop
box crashed 3 times just last week, and it's the best, most stable OS
Microsoft has ever fielded, in my opinion).
Innovation abounds, from the absolutely brainless
syncing of the Powerbook with Apple's terrific Ipod MP3 player (which is
what got me started down this road in the first place) to the wide screen
(1152 by 768) to the screen latch itself: it's magnetic and only
"reaches" up to grab as you bring the two halves of the laptop
together - a tiny detail but indicative nonetheless. I've read the
titanium case scratches easily but that has not been my experience - it's
light, sleek, and very durable.
The included applications are artful and innovative
also; obviously iTunes is a favorite, but so is iPhoto, and a full version
of Internet Explorer for OS X ships loaded on the box; the Internet
sign-up walkthrough was painless and pretty much foolproof, and within
minutes of plugging the Powerbook in I was happily surfing. The Mail
program included is flexible but not quite up to the standard of Outlook
Express - there's no OS X version of that yet.
But the best of the best is OS X itself - it's the
most visually appealing operating system I've ever seen. The screens are
just plain gorgeous, with lots of neat features like varying degrees of
transparency so you can see what's going on underneath drop-down menus and
the like. The Dock is a much more attractive version of Window's Taskbar,
and it's just plain fun to use; icons are photo-realistic and everything
is configurable in terms of size, positioning, etc.
So in short the computer is slim and able, the OS is
a joy to look at as well as being incredibly stable and forgiving thanks
to its Unix core (don't forget when I started I knew nothing and just
clicked and dragged and poked and prodded a whole lot), and many of the
included applications are as good as or better than the equivalent Windows
third-party aps you'd have to pay extra for in the after market.
So what's NOT to like? Unfortunately quite a few
things, starting with the price: at $2999 the Powerbook is over a grand
more expensive than similarly equipped notebooks from Toshiba or Dell,
etc. Apple tries to tell folks that the G4 processor outperforms Intel's
and AMD's offerings in real work done, that clock cycles don't matter, but
it just ain't so I'm afraid, no matter what that one dubious Photoshop
benchmark Jobs likes to trot out indicates. I understand that Unix
"thinks" differently than Windows, that it is doing lots of
housekeeping and other tasks in the background, but screen paints on the
667 Powerbook with a much more capable graphics processor (ATI's Radeon
Mobility) lack the "snap" I get on my aging Thinkpad T21, as
just one subjective example. Applications take longer to load etc.,
although boot up & shutdown are faster than Windows.
The on-board speakers on the Powerbook are an
embarrassment but the sound through quality headphones is as good as any
dedicated CD player I've heard. The keyboard is flimsy feeling with
limited travel, and has some near-useless tiny "chicklet" keys -
there's no "delete" key tho CTRL+D will do the trick. The
machine gets hot enough to be uncomfortable on the lap especially when
ripping MP3s or playing games (otherwise game performance is quite good
but lacking high-end effects like anti-aliasing or bump mapping), and the
lack of "legacy" ports may be a real problem for folks with
older scanners, printers, etc. The one-button Apple mouse is beautiful to
look at, nearly useless in action, but OS X supports most USB 2-button and
wheel mice natively.
But the biggest problem with Apple's computers is
software - or the lack of it. One example: neither Microsoft or Logitiech
have yet released OS X drivers for their keyboards or mice, so
functionality is limited. I have a Minolta Dimage 7 digital camera which
pretty much requires me to pre-process the images through Minolta's Viewer
utility before sending them off to Adobe or whatever and the Viewer is
only available for the Mac Classic OS (currently 9.2.2). So to edit &
print I have to boot into Classic, download & preprocess the images,
and then crank up OS X for further work on them and eventual printing.
Such unhandy workarounds are not uncommon.
The big stuff is all there, though, and the
dual-boot feature is actually kind of neat (that's two, Two, TWO operating
systems for the price of one!!!). Appleworks for OS X is every bit as
capable as MS Works for XP, Office is available (I haven't used it) and
most of the stuff you want to do every day is already built-in, and rather
elegant to boot. On the other hand there is just no way that the selection
of Mac applications compares to what exists in the PC world, and that's a
real negative.
But it's wonderful running a machine that does NOT
crash, that does NOT load Messenger whether I want it to or not, and that
is great to look at and use.
Lots of ink has been spilled on your site about the
search for a viable alternative to MS as Bill & the boys find more and
more ways to dominate the desktop and domineer the market; most often the
suggestion has been Linux, with the caveat that it's not ready for Aunt
Minnie. Well Apple, especially with OS X, IS a viable alternative, and IS
ready for Aunt Minnie, as long as she has some fairly deep pockets. With
the new Imac Apple seems to be addressing the price issue, and looking at
the whole package of included software and hardware they are getting
closer to being on a par with WinTel products all the time. But they still
need to do better; if Apple could wring 20-30% out of their pricing they
would have a compelling, not just an appealing, computing solution, far
more than "good enough" to replace Windows.
I'd kind of like to see them do it, wouldn't you?
All the best (there's far more detail if you want
it, difficult as it may be to believe I've tried hard to keep this
short!),
Tim Loeb
Thanks. I intend to buy a G4 dual
and see what happens; but first I need to revamp my Linux boxes which at
the moment tend to be special purpose systems dedicated to one task at a
time.
I saw the information from Tim Loeb on your site.
I've also moved to a Mac latop recently, the iBook (the first of the
rectangular white ones), though I still use both Linux and Windows for
desktops. My experiences are basically similar and are both more and less
positive.
In contrast to the PowerBook, the iBook is slow,
occasionally painfully slow, but it's quite cheap. The current model sells
for about $1100, which is not bad for a lightweight, robust, laptop with
good battery life.
Mac OS X is indeed wonderful, and from my point of
view has better software support than Windows -- as a statistician I need
some of the standard Unix freeware that can be a pain under Windows. All
the commercial software I need is available for OS X, though this clearly
isn't true for everyone.
There are occasional bugs in OS X -- for example,
the supplied version of ssh [a secure terminal program] doesn't like
connecting to clusters -- but it does seem very stable. There are still a
few inconsistencies in the interface. Some of these are Unix/Mac
compromises -- Unix programs want to use / as the path separator and Mac
programs want :. The most annoying is probably the handling of metadata
about which program owns a file. In Windows (and with some of the
Unix/Linux GUIs) the extension is everything, so that a .DOC file must be
a Word document. In the old days the Mac didn't care what you called the
file -- if you created it with Word it was a Word file. I don't know
exactly what OS X does, but it isn't either of these approaches. I have
.PDF files that belong to Acrobat and others that belong to Preview so the
extension isn't everything, but the extension certainly does matter.
-thomas
Thomas Lumley
Quick response. Thanks.
And a WORD glitch:
Dr Pournelle, I thought that I'd add onother little
Word glitch to your collection. I was recently using it on a networked W98
system and occasionally the network became very slow. Autosave was the
default setting for Word, and the machine then saved to a file on the main
server drive. If it tried to do this at a time when the network was going
slowly, Word would eventually hang. The kicker is that it left the
document in an unrecoverable state. If you tried to open the document Word
would hang again.
Regards, Edward Chambers
A warning from
from Roland on data theft:
Expect more of this, especially as the volume of
information collected about -everyone- grows by leaps and bounds, all in
support of the 'war on terrorism':
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/326
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