Posts by Raddimus Voracious

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5970 two-GPU graphics card

That's hot!

I have always said there aren't enough computer rendered female rastafarian models in the graphics card industry.

Sun ditches 'try and buy' program

Try and buy did work...

Try and buy did work however, recently, Sun lost interest in selling anything to the little guy. When I say little guy I mean businesses with less than 10K users and a couple thousand desktops and under a hundred servers. I guess when one thinks about it isn't that really the outer edge of the dart board when there are yahoos and ebays out there? After all those classless slobs HP and Dell seem to have no problem sending out their drooling sales force and engineering teams to club out solutions with the slovenly sort. Why should Sun bother to stoop so low?

Ten of the Best... iPod rivals

Just get a cheepo.

I tried two nice media players: Zune (the 8GB SSD version) and paid $250USD. It had a nice build but I had a couple glitches and had to use MSs decent software to convert and load music. I took it back after a week. I went off and got a Sansa View 16GB I was largely happy it cost $150USD and I didn't need to convert media except for some vids. I set it on the roof of my car one day and was puzzled where my audiable books went. Gone... After that I just figured I don't need the flashy features and choose to replace it with a 4GB Sansa Clip which cost me $60USD. I should have got a clip to begin with. It has a cheep build but it does the job. Zen stone seems very similar but it cost a bit more.

So now I can give a laugh to those smug Mac users with their stone washed tattered jeans and over priced mp3 players. Mine MP3 just works and my jeans are tattered because they're 15 years old, I spent a fraction to get this crap.

Sun saunters into open storage formation

@ Tom

Nexenta looks like a nicely veneered product. Not quite free but it is relatively affordable. We just use OpenSolaris straight. Thanks for the tip.

raid cards optional.

I have experience with the x4500 and there is no issue with sliding the x4500 out while it is running and removing one bad disk. It has a sturdy set of rails and nicely built cable management arm.

In our situation we use ZFS with iSCSI and ZFS with SAMBA, in a mostly Windows environment. I don't think anyone can get a raid card with the storage features of the latest version of Solaris 10. However, there are many ways one can get a full featured SAN without a single RAID card.

Here's a a totally awesome Linux freebie: http://www.openfiler.com/

SANs and NASs today, raid cards optional.

US gov may forbid BAE Eurofighter sale to Saudis

Left for a short moment and now back to reality land.

Hello Anon,

Is was an old DERA study that seems to be largely built to bolster Eurofighter sales, it was released but it was still rated much lower than the F-22. I saw it in Air Forces Monthly a while back.

Do a google search: DERA Eurofighter You will find it at the top of all the crosstalk.

2nd: I visited some forum for Ace Combat 6 - Fires Of Liberation. It was as useful as visiting the Gran Turismo forum when my Supra went tits up. I would suggest a subscription to Jane's Defense Weekly or for fun try Air Forces Monthly or Combat Aircraft for info. But if you prefer your defense info from Bradygames or Prima there's little point in arguing, our information resources are hugely divergent and I don't consider those to be valid resources to the argument.

Think the core issue with this news article is: What are those fishy politicians or contractors doing? My extrapolation is: The writing is in the sand, the traditional procedure for designing and building fighters is being rejected for joint ventures IE JSF and Eurofighter. But the resultant is bureaucratic governments with expectations and differences collaborating with contractors which have been producing based on a very different collaboration model. Imagine dealing with a dozens of departments within in one government before a product is finalized. Now imagine dealing with dozens of nations with dozens of departments and having an expectation to produce a nextgen product at a competitive price. That's not going to come easy on the first try, heck, it may not come at all. A fair portion of the funds will be spent in getting the bureaucratizes to agree on terms and goals. After all these joint ventures it may be the case that the buyers may end up choosing Dassults, Sabbs, Migs and latest US blocks for quantity purchases based on feature/value ratio and buy small numbers of Eurofighters and F-35s. Maybe this joint venture model will be worked out or maybe we will go back to the old model we already know. Until then prepared for the usual excuses.

Back to reality land.

It all seems too simple. A US contractor shouldn't have put controlled tech in to an international contract unless it was with a trusted established buyer and a terms were officially agreed upon. If that is the case then this is all wrapped up. However if this is not the case well I would say that was the US contractors fault. I am presuming the latter. Whatever the case is either someone is trying to cover their tracks and/or pull a swift one.

Oh yeah, stop with all the F22 silliness. 1st off US doesn't sell the latest and greatest: First the new item deployed US only then a international version is targeted for certain buyers and during this the process of unloading the prior generations is happening. 2nd the Eurofighter is widely considered a 4.5th generation fighter for a multitude of reasons but most would consider the Eurofighter to be the king of the hill for 4.5 gen fighters. Without getting into great detail the US 5th gen fighters are very different platforms.

FYI anyone see the overview of the DERA simulated study of modern fighters the F22, Eurofighter, Rafale, and MiG-35 were outfitted with the latest weaponry, however the F-15C, F/A-18+, F/A-18C and F-16C are weak configurations which they choose to configure with weak weaponry. Time to gripe on the defense forums. :P