Dalgety Bay?

I'm surprised Lewis didn't mention Dalgety Bay in Fife, which is apparently ridden with radium from the instrument dials of aircraft scrapped at RNAS Donibristle. That would presumably make even his luminous watch pale (no pun intended) into insignificance...

Sequent, up-and-coming?

So Sequent were "up-and-coming" in 1999? They started in 1983 and were shipping systems in 1984!

@Kevin Campbell

ISTR the problem in Vietnam was that the US RoE demanded visual confirmation before engagement, so close-range dogfights were inevitable, and the F-4 and its missiles weren't ideal for that kind of thing.

Windows 6.5???

Is that some kind of Vista/Windows 7 hybrid?

Or did someone miss out the word "Mobile"?

Can anyone translate...

"Repartitioned Client Platform Volume Ramp Vehicle" into English please?

@Doug Glass

"the bits that are thrown together sometimes don't work properly." - Brilliant! I think Linus has just managed to describe Linux in a nutshell! :-)

@Alex Hooren

I tried out Chrome when it was first released. Kept using my usual browser (Opera) on my work PC due to the scrollwheel-up problem, but I've been using Chrome ever since on my own laptop. Never really had much cause to go back. Call me a convert!

@Jolyon Ralph

Yes, your browser *is* up to date - 0.2.149.30 is the latest *beta* release. 0.3.154.3 is a *dev channel* release - which is like beta, but more so, it would appear!

And yes, I was confused too, until I clicked on the link...

@it wasnt me

According to

http://sm3a.gsfc.nasa.gov/downloads/sm3a_fact_sheets/advanced_computer.pdf

the 486-based "Advanced Computer" was installed as an upgrade in 1999 as part of Servicing Mission 3A. It appears this is a separate system to the SIC&DH system which contains the failed SDF module.

Like I've always said...

There's a lot to be said for paper: it doesn't crash, is non-volatile, never becomes obsolete, consumes little power, has an intuitive user interface, few interoperability issues, and can be backed up with a photocopier!

"OpenSolaris 2008.11 is on track for November this year"

Well, it'd better be - or else they'll have to call it something different! This is why date-based version numbers (a la Ubuntu) are a Bad Idea - hostages to fortune!

1.4 gigaflops @ 700 MHz?

I make that 2 flops per cycle - the 21164 Alpha was doing that back in '94! And they were nearly hitting 700 MHz two years later!

Hmmm, I wonder how they will compare with Dunningtons...

Never mind...

Never mind the gun-nuttery or Jesus-freakery, anybody who names their offspring "Track", "Trig", "Bristol" (lovely name for a girl, that!), "Willow" and "Piper" is obviously unfit for any kind of public office (even if they *are* American!)

Re: The CX1 Office Toaster

The specs say each CX1 box has up to two (or four for redundancy) 1.6kW PSUs. Yes that's going to be one toasty office!

Not just an Ubuntu problem

Mozilla's licensing terms do seem very restrictive by open-source standards - I can't think of another project that is so paranoid about its "branding". In fact AIUI, *anybody* building Firefox from source can't actually use its name/logo, unless you sweet-talk the Mozilla folks into making an exception for you (like FreeBSD did)... which does seem pretty antithetical to the open source ethos. Does it really help Mozilla's cause if users end up running "Iceweasel" or "Bon Echo" or "Gran Paradiso" or whatever instead of "Firefox"?

@Francis Vaughan

If only Tannenbaum *had* "inspired and influenced" Linus, then the Linux kernel might not be the big messy heap of Unix-reinvented-badly it is today - some trivial details of Linux (plus its early use of a Minix-compatible filesystem format) were "inspired" by Minix, but the architecture of the kernel certainly wasn't!

@Duncan Hothersall

Wrong again! it's the one near the junction with Liberton Road. The one in the centre of this map:

http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll=55.920315,-3.168011&spn=0.002191,0.004651&t=h&z=18

IMHO, it looks pretty smart for a bodyshop. A touch of art deco in the architecture there!

@Duncan Hothersall

No, that's the bodyshop at the bottom of Mayfield Road - nowhere near the New Town!

@Alex

Who said anything about a laptop? The photo in the MoS story shows a Quantum Snap rackmount NAS server. Sounds like a former employee of Graphic Data helped himself to a few "leaving presents" when he went...

Sigh...

The Tornado F3 production run of 170 wasn't particularly excessive for the number of squadrons expected to use it - it was only after the downsizing of the RAF in the 1990s that they started ending up in storage in large numbers. As previously mentioned, both the Tornado and Typhoon were/are international collaborations, in which BAe/BAE Warton played a major part in both design and manufacturing, so I'm not sure what point Lewis is trying to make here.

The current plan for the Typhoon is to rotate the surplus planes through the squadrons to prolong the life of the fleet.... but given that the RAF's Tornado GR4 fleet are around 25 years old now with no replacement programme in place, a bit of engineering work to produce a 2-seat strike-optimised Typhoon variant for Tranche 3 might avoid the GR4s having to soldier on for another 25...

...and anyway, isn't the Cold War starting again???

@Jeff Rowse

RAF Harriers with guns? Doubt it. The Harrier GR.5 was intended to carry a new 25mm Aden gun, but (to summarise) it never worked properly and eventually they gave up trying to make it work... In theory the old Harrier GR.3 30mm pods or the AV-8B's GAU-12 guns could possibly be used instead but don't think there's been any attempt to do that operationally.

Typhoon not just a fighter

Eurofighter/Typhoon was always intended to be a multi-role (air-to-air and air-to-ground) combat aircraft. In fact, the original RAF requirement (AST.414) was for a Jaguar (ground attack) replacement - replacing the Tornado F3 fighters as well came later. For some strange reason the air-to-air role was prioritised, despite the Jaguar squadrons being disbanded ahead of schedule...

And it's worth remembering that the Typhoon is the only RAF fast jet currently in service that wasn't originally designed in the 1960s...

@A J Stiles

NetBSD and FreeBSD (not sure about the other *BSDs) have a policy of keeping GPL code out of the kernel (specifically, GENERIC kernels for FreeBSD).

The BSD licence does *not* allow you to "cage up" someone else's hard work - it allows you to "cage up" your *own* hard work, if you so desire, when that work has been built on top of someone else's. What's suspicious about that?

"next-generation file system"?

AdvFS is hardly "next generation" - it's been around since the mid-90s!

"Proper" carriers

The CVFs *will* be proper carriers, big enough for catapult-assisted aircraft, but the RN still opted for the F-35B and ski jumps. According to the MoD:

...while configured to operate STOVL aircraft, can be altered later in its projected 40-50 year service life to accommodate catapults and arrestor gear to fly conventional CV (Carrier Variant) aircraft.

Also, the F-35B is unlikely to be in service when the CVFs are commissioned - they will probably be flying Harriers for the first few years at least.

1471 RIP?

Presumably all UK telcos will now be informing all their customers that their 1471 service is now useless, and hence will be withdrawn forthwith?

A couple of points...

@Neil Hoskins: The first flight of a Eurofighter was in 1994 and it entered service with the RAF in 2003 - still a fairly long development period.

@Will: you're thinking of the Navy's Merlin HM1s. The RAF's Merlin HC3s are very much meant for "lifting"!

@Iain Waddingham

Was it this Wayne Kerr? Seems to run his own electronics business....

http://www.waynekerrtest.com/

Or...

Or you could do what I did - buy an old Pentium laptop off eBay for a few quid, slap in a new hard disk and a CardBus Ethernet card (also from eBay) and install your favourite Real Operating System (NetBSD in my case). A mobile Pentium MMX will run fanless (5.5W TDP for a 233MHz Tillamook). Plus you get an integrated console device (ie. screen and keyboard) and UPS (ie. battery, if there's any life left in it at all) for free :-)