Stefan Viljoen schrieb:

> Isn't this the way it is going? According to what I read on strategypage.com
> recently, F-16s, F-15s and F-18 are wearing out and are not being replaced.
> Additionally, much funding is being "saved" by decommissioning many
> (hundreds, apparently) of these aircraft early as well, in order to spend
> money maintaining the F-22 and F-35?

I'd guess that the number of F-35 to be bought will /not/ be as low as 
for the F-22. And it will not be anywhere as expensive.

>> (A) Besides being able to carry BVR AIM-120 AMRAAMs, the F-22 is
>> designed to bear much cheaper AIM-9 Sidewinders into battle.
> 
> Of which there'll be how many? As far as I know the AIM-9X is not in
> production anymore, and funding is being cut for buying it - again to be
> able to afford "enough" AIM-120's and to feed the budgetary monster that
> the F-22 has become.

Let's see... Wikipedia speaks of some 3.000 or 3.600 AIM-9X already in 
the arsenals (figures vary between language versions of the article), 
and some total of >10k to be purchased in total by American armed forces.

However, the F-22 currently doesn't even support the AIM-9X yet, and 
instead is supposed to use the AIM-9M, which I guess is available in 
stock at even larger numbers already. Not to speak of the other members 
of the AIM-9 family, which I'd suppose the F-22 could fire as well if 
needs be.

> That's damn impressive! No, I didn't know that. That could come in very
> useful in a low and slow situation. Though I wonder what the price is in
> fuel consumption? High-alpha maneuvers like that probably need a lot of
> thrust to be applied to keep from stalling?

Probably so, yes. But when was the last time the U.S. of A. bothered 
about fuel consumption in their armed forces?

> True, but that is a mark against the F-22 in my book. I was thinking when I
> said that of the situation where US ground forces are under attack from the
> air, and need to be protected against MiG strikes. So, the USAF sends the
> F-22. It -has- to go low and slow to get at the MiGs, assuming it is out of
> missiles. Sure, it can outclimb and outrun the MIGs, but it has no choice
> now - it has to tangle with them on their terms, low and slow, to protect
> US ground forces. Wouldn't that obviate its enormous speed and rate of
> climb? (Though the slow maneuver you pointed me to above would obviously
> help I readily agree.)
> 
> Also, that is if they have decommissioned all those F-16s and F-15s by that
> time, of course - which seems to be the way they are going.

... and purchase F-35 instead, which by the way seems to be a totally 
different beast, and shouldn't be mistaken for a smaller copy of the 
F-22 concept.

The F-22 is designed mainly as an air superiority fighter, the concept 
being to suppress any enemy air activity way before they can be a PITA 
to ground forces. Recent conflicts have shown that the US will not even 
think about sending in troops before this air superiority has in fact 
been achieved.

Also, a MiG may be an adversary to reckon with in a dogfight (I have no 
idea whether that is anywhere close to true), but with F-22s out of 
reach of their guns but close enough to make a run any moment, a MiG 
pilot probably couldn't really afford to attack grund targets. I guess 
he'd be eating 20mm Vulcan rounds any moment.


Plus, it's also a question of what you consider the primary threat: The 
world hasn't seen any all-out war between superpowers for >60 years, and 
with the presence of nuclear weapons such a war would be unthinkable 
anyway. Local conflicts have been commonplace however, and the USA seem 
to have made it a habit of entering such conflicts every 10 years or so 
ever since WW2. For such scenarios, the AA arsenals should be more than 
sufficient, and it may also be more efficient to have a small fleet of 
highly superior aircraft with a survivability of virtually 100% per 
mission, rather than a large fleet of lower-class planes with a 
survivability of only 90%. Not only for the sake of material costs, but 
even more so for the sake of morale at home.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> The backup scan ran as an AT job.

I'm assuming you mean it ran at the server to pull files, rather than at the 
client to push files. Might be better to switch that around.

> Every now and then, there would be a 
> network glitch or somebody would turn off the PC or something, and the 
> script would hang with the network drive still mapped.

Why are you mapping a drive to a letter at all? Just use UNC names.

And robocopy can be told to stop copying after some number of failures. You 
can even tell it to resume copying halfway thru a large file if the copy 
failed in the middle.

> script bombs out because the drive is still mapped. 

Unmap it before trying to remap it, of course.

> mapped under the system account which runs AT jobs, 

Why? Tell AT to run it as a different user.

> And don't even get me started on how absurdly difficult it is to write 
> DOS scripts that handle failure properly...

That's what robocopy is for.

> Using the BackupExec agent for Exchange, backing up or restoring 
> mailboxes or even individual emails is no harder than backing up a 
> regular file. Try doing that with a DOS script...

Well, sure. If you have a program that understands the file format, backing 
up part of the file works. No surprise there.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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Invisible schrieb:

> And - sometimes I don't think people get this - you reach Alpha Proxima 
> and radio back to Earth to say "hey, we got here, what next Houstan?"
> 
> IT WILL TAKE CENTURIES FOR THE MESSAGE TO REACH EARTH! >_<

Not really. You'll get an answer in just about 8.44 years.

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>> The backup scan ran as an AT job.
> 
> I'm assuming you mean it ran at the server to pull files, rather than at 
> the client to push files. Might be better to switch that around.

Yeah, that would mean that all the directory scanning would be local 
rather than remote. Probably a lot faster that way.

>> Every now and then, there would be a network glitch or somebody would 
>> turn off the PC or something, and the script would hang with the 
>> network drive still mapped.
> 
> Why are you mapping a drive to a letter at all?

Because that's the only way to specify the logon credentials for the 
remote system. (Obviously, the server's local system account doesn't 
have permission to access files on a remote system.)

>> mapped under the system account which runs AT jobs, 
> 
> Why? Tell AT to run it as a different user.

There are other AT jobs running, of course...

>> And don't even get me started on how absurdly difficult it is to write 
>> DOS scripts that handle failure properly...
> 
> That's what robocopy is for.

Not sure how you figure that out, but hey.

Robocopy can't copy a file, it says "I can't copy this file" and exits. 
Now the script has to do something about this.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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scott schrieb:

> I wonder how much power you need to transmit with to be heard that far 
> away?
> 
> I mean isn't the transmitter on Voyager or whatever about to go out of 
> range, and that's only just left our own solar system!

Well, the mission was /designed/ to cover the solar system only, so the 
transmission system was laid out to fit the bill at the lowest weight 
possible.

It wasn't even designed to last that long, and only technological 
advancements in receiver technology have made it possible to keep 
contact over so many decades.

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scott schrieb:

>> If you look at the emission spectrum of the star and pick a wavelength 
>> where there's little or no emission, it could hypothetically work I 
>> guess...
> 
> "Little or no" emission from a star is probably many orders of magnitude 
> bigger than the biggest ever nuclear bomb on Earth though :-)
> 
> http://homepages.wmich.edu/~korista/sun-images/solar_specbb.jpg
> 
> It may look on there like there is no emission below 100 nm or whatever, 
> but in proportion there is still an almighty amount of x-ray and gamma 
> emission from a star.  Standing out above this "noise" is going to be hard.

Note that the emission of a star is a constant signal to a good degree, 
which probably helps.

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On Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:21:17 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>> Well, it would be file-level backups. I don't know how Exchange stores
>> its mailboxes.
> 
> In a giant database file. (It wouldn't surprise me if it's a JET
> database...)

I believe this is correct; I'd heard at one point that AD was based on 
JET and also derived from Exchange (most directory services are at some 
point derived from technology in mail systems - Novell's eDir product 
uses the same database engine that GroupWise does, and GW has used 
versions of that going back to WordPerfect Office).

Jim

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On Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:44:02 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> No. I'm saying if the file is open, and you're trying to back it up
> while it's changing, you're going to have problems with consistency.

OIC, yeah, that's true.  It's a pretty small window of opportunity in 
most cases, but yes, that circumstance could happen.

Jim

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On Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:59:33 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> The bank
> isn't going to let you stop paying the morgage just because your house
> burned to the ground.

That's what insurance is for.

Jim

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On Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:35:20 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> 2. House prices appear to start at around £300,000 or so. The very best,
> most unobtainable jobs pay £30,000/year. That's a pretty friggin huge
> gap.

Mortgages tend to be amortized over a 15 or 30 year period, at least over 
here.  Ours is about $1500/month.

Jim

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