Microsoft VISTA

[Thermodyne]

El_Phil said:

Oh and Thermy that's a bad argument, as you well know. Different people can invent the same thing, I agree it happened slightly faster because DoD released it but something similar (or perhaps better ) with a couple of years. Lots of people were working in the field, inventors do exist outside of the US you know.

Do you have any idea of the money that was spent to develop TCP/IP? Or how many people worked on it? Only the US or USSR could have done it during that period in time. There are very few people in the world that know everything about what it can do and how it does it. Most people don’t have a clue. How many of you know what is taking place at each of the layers, or what the layers are? I’m not trying to say that Americans are smarter than the rest of the world, and I’m sure that there were foreign nationals that contributed to the project. What I’m saying is the US had the technical foresight and the economic strength to develop it even though the original use was just to connect dissimilar DOD systems on a RWAN, and to insure reliable data transmission. As to having the same idea at the same time, smartest and best funded person usually wins the race. There are 100’s of network protocols, but none have been able to displace TCP/IP. It has just been too robust, too adaptable, and too deployed for any one to give it any kind of a challenge.

[El_Phil]

Sure we wouldn't be where we are today without the money chucked at it (of course as a defence project it could have been done far cheaper by almost anyone else. This isn't a dig at US defence contractors, it's a dig at the Worlds defence projects. ))

I would definetly dispute the technical foresight part. It was a task specific job, nobody involved was planning for any big public use. Oh sure maybe the odd one or two lower down, but I'd bet none of the money men.

A final point, the best technical system regularly loses. Everything from Betamax and Minidisc through to hardware standards and fighter jets (TSR-2 **sob**). Marketing and politics normally determines it.

In this case as TCP/IP was used by the millitary and universites it had an unmatchable deployed base and couldn't lose.

Much like Windows actually. It doesn't matter what the future versions are like, the installed base is so high developers only work on the MS version (others if they have time, which they normally don't) and it's up to bodges and fixes to get programmes to work on other platforms.

[Thermodyne]

TSR-2, been a while since I heard anyone mention that plane. With the advantage of hind sight, it’d probably best that it wasn’t built. By the time it would have entered service, speed was no longer a viable defense, and it was slow by the standards of the day. Lots of countries were caught in more or less the same position at that time. Here, the B58’s were much more advanced, but found to be too expensive to maintain. They were pulled from service after a very short service life. And the B70 was probably 2 generations more advanced, but never saw production partly because of survivability and cost of operation issues. The plane that did fit the specs came a little later, but was not well received. The US fielded a few F111’s and Australia bought a few. England had already purchased F4’s by then, and screwed that up by replacing the engines with units of lower performance. And if ever there was a plane that needed all of the raw power it could get, it was the Phantom II. Then SAC bought a few FB111’s, longer range higher bomb load F111’s, as a stopgap until the B1 rolled out. But then we screwed that up by first delaying the B1 and then scrapping the high speed low altitude intake system which castrated the engine performance.

Another plane that fit the specs and was flying at the time was the A5 Vigilante, but the Navy also found the cost of operation to be more that they could stand. I guess it’s a good thing that Boeing and Avro built some damn good bombers, since their designs have both out lived several generations of replacements. The plane that the TSR-2 was going to replace also lived on for quite a few years. The US built high altitude versions of the Canberra were almost the state of the art for high altitude recon work, second only the U2’s and a hell of a lot easier to fly.

[El_Phil]

Well the RR engine was far better, as always , than any of the ****e GE and Pratt and Whitley tried to call jet engines. The problem was that the F-4 was a brick and bodging a decent engine into it was doomed, especially as it was done on a tight budget.

To quote the designer:
"All modern aircraft have four dimensions: span, length, height and politics. TSR-2 simply got the first three right."

Now maybe I'm crazy, but I do think that supercruise, Mach 2.5+ sprint is far faster than anything else out there. Especially the B-1B.

This, along with virtually everthing any Labour goverment has ever done, is reason enough for the entire lot to be put up against a wall and shot. And their parents just to be sure. Bitter and twister? Damn right! The systematic destruction of most of the UKs heavy industry and f**king the country over totally whenever they were let into power is all the reason I need to have them all killed.