http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,63782,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

I want one...

In my pants.

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[This message has been edited by DogSRoOL (edited June 10, 2004).]

so that..... makes.........

*mumbles something stupid about a planetary defense ion cannon*

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Saberopus: omfq musical genuis j00 >mozart
Thrawn42689: Mozart = n00b

So what kind of weapon is it really?

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WARNING: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF PEANUT!
----@%

I saw a video with one of these (a prtotype though) a while back. Does look very interesting.

Wow, it's even got a HAL-style light to tell you when it's gone crazy.

Aw, and from the picture, I thought it was hovering...

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«»The Scratchware Manifesto
-¬thoughts from beyond observance

I did too at first, then I eventually saw the things it is hanging from.

Of course it's designed for zero gravity, so it doesn't need to be able to make itself hover in Earth gravity.

all that, and the best they could do was a pentium 2?

It's not 1997 anymore...



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

That's not surprising. That's how NASA works. A lot of the stuff on the space shuttles is 70's and 80's era technology still. I remember seeing an interview with some big head NASA guy, and he explained why they do that. Something to do with since it takes so long for their prototypes to develop, they don't try to constantly update the technology in them to keep them cutting edge. Instead their main goal is just to get them done and working for space. So they don't spend months adding in new technology and then trying to adapt that technology for space.

It makes sense in a way.

Not to mention they don't use a Pentium 2 just like you would use one. This isn't your home user desktop environment. These things are running specialized code set to do few tasks and don't have to worry about the overhead of an operating system and other "bloat" that a consumer processor would be dealing with.

In short, a NASA dude could explain it a lot better than me...

[This message has been edited by Darth (edited June 11, 2004).]

I bet they could give me one hell of a betamax / laserdisc combo player



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

Upgrading hardware for their stuff would work like this...

Specially adapt and test the new hardware to make sure it's stable as a rock. Write all new code that's optimized for this new hardware. Test that new code to make sure it's stable as a rock. Spend years doing this.

Otherwise it'd be "Rush it out, hope it works, and hope no one dies if it messes up." Think of it like any time you see any kind of bug in a program, if someone died because of that bug...

So yeah, it's not simply popping out some old pieces of hardware and popping in new pieces. =)

[This message has been edited by Darth (edited June 11, 2004).]