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The Navy: Try, Try Again (8/16/00)
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And in the "Some People Never Learn" department, faithful viewer Dan Knight of LowEndMac fame tipped us off to a Macworld article called "The Blue Sea of Death." It seems that Federal Computer Week is reporting that the U.S. Navy's "next-generation aircraft carrier" will be run by state-of-the-art onboard computers powered by-- wait for it-- "a futuristic version of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system." Stop screaming, just for a second, because we're not done yet: "Microsoft Federal Systems will help design the ship's IT architecture based on the company's Windows 2000 platform." Okay, now you can scream.
What's particularly galling about this bit of news is not so much that our nation's defense will rely on the same Redmond goofs who shipped Windows 2000 with an admitted 63,000 bugs, nor is it the sobering fact that Microsoft's security strategy seems to be to add so many holes to its products that hackers are overwhelmed by the choices and just wander off to find a real challenge instead. No, what really gnaws at our brainstems is the way that the Navy appears to have completely forgotten about the "Smart Ship" incident that took place a mere three years ago. Remember? The USS Yorktown suffered a divide-by-zero error in the Windows NT system that controlled its every move, leaving it dead in the water for three hours-- until it was towed back to the naval base.
But evidently the Navy has a short memory, because despite the haunting spectre of the Yorktown's humiliating failure, now we face the prospect of Windows-based aircraft carriers introducing a decidedly Three Stooges-style vibe to future Navy exploits. Hey, don't get us wrong-- we're always up for a little slapstick entertainment. It's just when the slapstick involves things that go "boom," we start to get a little edgy. Here's hoping that this so-called "futuristic" version of Windows hails from a future in which Microsoft's products suck less.
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SceneLink (2487)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 8/16/00 episode: August 16, 2000: The rumored specs of the upcoming iBook are enough to make most Mac fans drool. Meanwhile, Motorola is slated to show a GHz+ G4 in October-- by using an IBM innovation, and the U.S. Navy announces that future aircraft carriers will run on Windows, despite the Yorktown Debacle of 1997...
Other scenes from that episode: 2485: Duelling iBook Specs (8/16/00) Rumor check! It's ten o'clock; do you know where your next iBook is? Apple's clamshell consumer portable got its first minor revision way back in February in the form of a hard disk increase and a RAM boost, so it's probably way past due for another feature bump... 2486: Two Months To GHz PPC? (8/16/00) Well, whenever we hear about an upcoming chip improvement from Motorola, we feel a little like someone's trying to sell us some time-share swampland in Florida-- but sometimes the best thing for one's sanity is just to close one's eyes, take a deep breath, and put the pessimism back on the shelf...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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