Quotulatiousness

January 31, 2011

US Army to keep MRAP, speed up development of JLTV

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:48

For your morning dose of military acronyms, here’s a report from Strategy Page on a recent change in US Army planning caused by field experience in Iraq and Afghanistan:

The U.S. Army has decided that the MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) should be a permanent part of their vehicle fleet. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Four years ago, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps were in the midst of spending $20 billion to buy over 20,000 MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles. Shortly thereafter, the terrorist resistance in Iraq collapsed, and so did the need for MRAPs. This resulted in about a quarter of the MRAP orders being cancelled, and others changed to designs more suitable for use in Afghanistan, which had far fewer roads to use them on.

While the troops appreciated the MRAPs, some of the generals saw serious problems in the future. In Iraq and Afghanistan, people in these bomb resistant vehicles were much less likely to be killed or injured if they encountered a roadside bomb. But MRAPs are basically armored trucks (weighing 8-23 tons) that are hardened to survive bombs and mines, and cost about five to ten times more than an armored hummer.

As you can see, the MRAP isn’t a dainty sort of vehicle (this one has the recent overhead wire kit attached):

But now, thousands of those MRAPs will stay in service after the war in Afghanistan has ended. They will be considered armored combat vehicles, not transport, like the hummer and army trucks, and not used on a daily basis. This will keep down the operating expenses, as MRAPs consume a lot of fuel.

In addition to keeping thousands of the MRAPS, the army is developing a heavier replacement for the hummer, using a design with lots of MRAP features. This is the JLTV(Joint Light Tactical Vehicle), which is arriving a little ahead of schedule, as part of a program to massively upgrade army vehicles every few decades.

The JLTV competition is still underway, with three vehicles being tested:


Image from Wikipedia.

In addition to being built to better survive mines and roadside bombs, the JLTV will be able to generate 30 KW of electricity (for operating all the new electronic gear, and recharging batteries), have an automatic fire extinguishing system and jam-resistant doors. Like the hummer, JLTV will be easy to reconfigure, for everything from a four seat, armed scout vehicle, to an ambulance, command vehicle or cargo or troop transport. The hummer will continue to be used outside of the combat zone, where most troops spend most of their time. But the JLTV will be built to better handle the beating vehicles take in the combat zone, including a design that enables troops to quickly slide in armor and Kevlar panels to make the vehicles bullet and blast proof.

Shock! Horror! Wikipedia contributors are disproportionally male!

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

Don’t worry, kids, the New York Times is on the case:

In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than 250 languages? Sure.

But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

And this is clearly evidence of neo-patriarchal oppression, right? If so, the mechanism by which this form of oppression is accomplished is a bit less than crystalline: anyone can sign up to contribute to Wikipedia. If the NYT thinks that this is really a problem, then we can’t have that many serious problems.

With so many subjects represented — most everything has an article on Wikipedia — the gender disparity often shows up in terms of emphasis. A topic generally restricted to teenage girls, like friendship bracelets, can seem short at four paragraphs when compared with lengthy articles on something boys might favor, like, toy soldiers or baseball cards, whose voluminous entry includes a detailed chronological history of the subject.

Even the most famous fashion designers — Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo — get but a handful of paragraphs. And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on “Sex and the City” includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on “The Sopranos” includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode.

Is a category with five Mexican feminist writers impressive, or embarrassing when compared with the 45 articles on characters in “The Simpsons”?

Isn’t it normally considered positive that women are not as inclined to obsessive monomania as men are? Doesn’t this evidence rather support the notion that (some) men devote disproportional effort to topics of interest that (most) women would consider unhealthy?

January 29, 2011

Wired How-to: Get back on the internet after a government shut-down

Filed under: Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:47

A post at the Wired How-to wiki on getting back online after your government attempts to shut down internet access:

Scenario: Your government is displeased with the communication going on in your location and pulls the plug on your internet access, most likely by telling the major ISPs to turn off service.

This is what happened in Egypt January 25 prompted by citizen protests, with sources estimating that the Egyptian government has cut off approximately 88 percent of the country’s internet access. What do you do without Internet? Step 1: Stop crying in the corner. Then start taking steps to reconnect with your network. Here’s a list of things you can do to keep the communication flowing.

This article is part of a wiki anyone can edit. If you have advice to add, please log in and contribute.

January 28, 2011

Egypt goes dark, shuts down DNS servers

Filed under: Liberty, Middle East, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Updates added to the bottom of this post

The Egyptian government is attempting to foil protests by eliminating internet traffic. Renesys reports:

Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

I have seen very little traffic coming to this site from Egypt before the DNS server shutdown (under 40 unique visitors last year, according to FlagCounter), so the following information isn’t likely to be of direct assistance to Egyptians, but hopefully some can be filtered onwards.

The first suggestion (from Shereef Abbas) is to use Google’s Public DNS 2 to change “your DNS ‘switchboard’ operator from your ISP to Google Public DNS”.

John Perry Barlow suggests “more tools to access blocked websites and maintain anonymity”: http://jan25.in/how-to-access-blocked-websites-by-government and https://www.torproject.org/download/download.html.en.

Update: Vice President Joe Biden appears to be missing a wonderful opportunity to shut up.

Biden urged non-violence from both protesters and the government and said: “We’re encouraging the protesters to – as they assemble, do it peacefully. And we’re encouraging the government to act responsibly and – and to try to engage in a discussion as to what the legitimate claims being made are, if they are, and try to work them out.” He also said: “I think that what we should continue to do is to encourage reasonable… accommodation and discussion to try to resolve peacefully and amicably the concerns and claims made by those who have taken to the street. And those that are legitimate should be responded to because the economic well-being and the stability of Egypt rests upon that middle class buying into the future of Egypt.”

Egypt’s protesters, if they’re paying attention to Biden at all, will certainly be wondering which of their demands thus far have been illegitimate.

Update, the second: Live blogging the protests at the Guardian. And several sources are recommending the coverage streamed online from Al Jazeera’s English-language site.

Update, the third: The effectiveness of Egypt’s internet blackout shows why giving the American president (or any national leader) an internet “kill switch” is such a bad idea. To most of us, anyway. I’m sure that to some people it’s an argument in favour.

Update, the fourth: National Post has a graphic showing the locations of the reported activity:


Click to enlarge

Finns unhappy with icy iPhones

Filed under: Europe, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Bill Ray reports on the source of Finnish unhappiness with Apple iPhone performance:

Finnish iPhone users unhappy at the inability of the handset to operate below zero are entitled to their money back, even if the limitation appears in the small print.

The clarification comes from the Finland’s Consumer Agency, as reported by Finnish news agency YLE.fi, in response to numerous questions from concerned Finns who are unhappy that their shiny Apple toys won’t promise to work again until the spring, at best. So unless the shop specifically stated the zero-degree operational limit, then the regulator reckons iPhone-purchasing Finns are entitled to their money back.

Finland, like the UK, requires all items sold new to operate in the way they might reasonably be expected to do. Small print can’t negate those rights, and it’s reasonable for Finns to expect to be able to make phone calls outside, so refunds would seem to be in order. Meanwhile the regulator is preparing a list of questions for Apple about how it trains its staff, and how badly the iPhone breaks down when it gets cold.

US Navy’s “pee antenna”

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Warships have been sprouting more and more antennae for all the various communication equipment on board — more every year, as new devices are rolled out of development and into active service. This creates problems, especially with smaller vessels, as the multiple antennae need to be spaced far enough apart to avoid mutual interference with signals. The US Navy may have come up with a liquid solution:

With an $80 water pump, a $15 rubber hose and a $20 electrical device called a current probe that was easily plugged into a hand-held radio, [Daniel Tam] produced a spout roughly four metres tall from the waters of San Diego Bay. With this he could send and receive a clear signal. Over the intervening years his invention, dubbed the “pee antenna” by incredulous colleagues, has been tweaked and improved to the point where it can transmit over a distance of more than 50km (30 miles).

To make a seawater antenna, the current probe (an electrical coil roughly the size and shape of a large doughnut) is attached to a radio’s antenna jack. When salt water is squirted through the hole in the middle of the probe, signals are transferred to the water stream by electromagnetic induction. The aerial can be adjusted to the frequency of those signals by lengthening or shortening the spout. To fashion antennae for short-wave radio, for example, spouts between 18 and 24 metres high are about right. To increase bandwidth, and thus transmit more data, such as a video, all you need do is thicken the spout. And the system is economical. The probe consumes less electricity than three incandescent desk lamps.

A warship’s metal antennae, which often weigh more than 3½ tonnes apiece, can be damaged in storms or combat. Seawater antennae, whose components weigh next to nothing and are easily stowable, could provide handy backups — and, eventually, more than backups. Not all of a ship’s antennae are used at once, so the spouts could be adjusted continuously to obtain the types needed at a given moment. According to SPAWAR, ten such antennae could replace 80 copper ones.

January 27, 2011

UK government officials implicated in ADE-651 bomb detector scam

Filed under: Britain, Law, Middle East, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:03

Remember the ADE-651? The bomb detector that could “detect elephants, humans and 100 dollar bills”? It now appears that British army personnel and civil servants were involved in the effort to sell the bogus device:

The government has admitted that the Army and UK civil servants helped market so-called “bomb detectors”, which did not work, around the world.

Export of the “magic wand” detectors to Iraq and Afghanistan was banned on 27 January 2010 because of the threat they posed to British and allied troops.

The move followed a BBC Newsnight investigation showing they could not detect explosives — or anything else.

Now Newsnight has learned that they are still being sold around the globe.

You can understand the attraction to potential scammers, as the things cost £11 to make (at most) and can be sold for £15,000 to unsuspecting dupes (or willing accomplices, splitting the profits) representing foreign governments.

January 26, 2011

Be careful with your old, tired URLs

Filed under: Britain, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

The very first domain name I registered ended up getting hijacked: the ISP I was using got taken over by someone else, and they arbitrarily changed all the contact info for my domain to point to them instead. The domain expired (no notice to me), the grace period for renewal expired (again, no word to me), and suddenly the historical society’s domain name is now a porn site (slightly longer original story here).

That’s why I have some sympathy for this British MP who linked to a site promoting a local concern, which then became a German porn site:

Red-faced Tory MP Francis Maude last night denied all responsibility for the content of a German SmutSite — and then quietly removed a link to it from his own personal front page.

The embarrassment seems to have arisen after Francis Maude, the member for Horsham, and Henry Smith, MP for neighbouring Crawley, got together to sponsor a campaign for an acute hospital to be built in the Pease Pottage area of Sussex. The campaign registered and made use of a domain — c4pph.org (NSFW) — which certainly appears at one time to have been a perfectly respectable site campaigning on this issue.

However, as an official spokeswoman for Francis Maude told us last night: “The campaign … no longer owns or operates the c4pph.org web address and hasn’t done so since last year. We understand the domain name is now under new ownership with no connection to the campaign.”

January 25, 2011

More examples of the poor being taxed to benefit the rich

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:42

Gregg Easterbrook isn’t a fan of flying cars — at least, not flying cars that are fuelled on pure government subsidy:

General Motors has emerged from bankruptcy and taken initial steps to repay its federal bailout money — two good bits of news, although the taxpayer remains on the hook for many billions of dollars extended to GM. Specialty electric-car maker Tesla Motors also had a successful initial public offering and is being celebrated as some kind of testament to the entrepreneurial spirit. For Tesla, this is pure PR.

Tesla is capitalized via a $465 million no-collateral federal loan. This means that if Tesla goes out of business, the taxpayer will take the loss, while if Tesla becomes a hit, its management and private investors will keep all the profit. The company bought a factory in Fremont, Calif. The Department of Labor made $19 million in special payments to workers there, federal taxpayers subsidizing the Tesla labor force. The firm’s electric cars entitle buyers to a $7,500 tax credit, plus sales tax exemption in many states, meaning Tesla marketing receives significant subsidies — average people are taxed so wealthy Tesla buyers receive extra discounts. Compared to its size, Tesla is more heavily subsidized than General Motors at the low point. Basically, the company’s existence is a giant raised middle finger to the taxpayer.

And what’s the product? A $109,000 luxury sports car that accelerates from zero to 60 mph in 3.9 seconds, the speed of the hottest Porsches. Such speed has no relevance to everyday driving; rather, it is useful solely for road-rage behavior such as running red lights and cutting others off. Taxes forcibly removed from the pockets of average people now fund a rich person’s plaything. I dread the moment President Barack Obama has his picture taken next to a Tesla, as if throwing the public’s money away on this toy for the Silicon Valley rich were an accomplishment.

The other absurd vehicle in development is the Terrafugia flying car, which just won exemption from a federal airworthiness safety standard. Surely you will feel secure when a flying car exempted from safety standards buzzes your neighborhood, especially when you learn that another federal waiver means the pilot needs only 20 hours of experience before he or she takes off. Maryland, my state, requires 60 hours behind the wheel before receiving a driver’s license. But fly after 20 hours? Hey, wheels up! Surely few of these accidents-looking-for-a-place-to-happen will sell on the free market. So — scan the horizon for a bailout. The Terrafugia company just got a piece of a $65 million military contract to research a flying Jeep-like thing; don’t hold your breath. If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, defense contracting is the last refuge of bad business plans.

Tesla note: The car is well-named, for although Nikola Tesla was an important inventor and a key figure in the development of commercial-scale alternating current (he had one of the basic ideas for getting electricity to homes), he also was a relentless self-promoter, not shy about exaggeration. The famous photo of him in his Colorado Springs laboratory, reading a book as electricity crackles around him, is a double exposure — that is, faked. Tesla’s plan to allow global wireless communication using Earth’s magnetic field was, let’s just say, a long shot — he worked, of course, before satellite-relayed signals were possible — and his claim to be able to deliver electricity to businesses through the air never made much sense. If Tesla were alive today, he’d drive a Tesla.

Terrafugia was last heard from lowering their expected capacity, while raising their prices back in September.

January 24, 2011

Occasional repost: Be careful with those compact fluorescent bulbs

Filed under: Australia, Environment, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:59

Reposted from 2009, but still valuable information:

Andrew Bolt wonders why the Australian government — which has banned the sale of old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs — is not being more pro-active about handling and disposing of the replacement compact fluorescents:

Tens of thousands of Australians will next month be forced to buy these new greenhouse-friendly CFLs without the Government warning them that, unlike normal light bulbs, they contain mercury and are dangerous when broken. What’s more, they shouldn’t just be thrown out with the rubbish.

How many consumers know this?

How many of them have looked up the Environment Department’s website to find what its bureaucrats falsely describe as the “simple and straightforward” precautions to take against poisoning should one of these lamps smash:

– Open nearby windows and doors to allow the room to ventilate for 15 minutes before cleaning up the broken lamp. Do not leave on any air conditioning or heating equipment which could recirculate mercury vapours back into the room.

– Do not use a vacuum cleaner or broom on hard surfaces because this can spread the contents of the lamp and contaminate the cleaner. Instead scoop up broken material (e.g. using stiff paper or cardboard), if possible into a glass container which can be sealed with a metal lid.

– Use disposable rubber gloves rather than bare hands.

– Use a disposable brush to carefully sweep up the pieces.

– Use sticky tape and/or a damp cloth to wipe up any remaining glass fragments and/or powders.

– On carpets or fabrics, carefully remove as much glass and/or powdered material using a scoop and sticky tape; if vacuuming of the surface is needed to remove residual material, ensure that the vacuum bag is discarded or the canister is wiped thoroughly clean.

– Dispose of cleanup equipment (i.e. gloves, brush, damp paper) and sealed containers containing pieces of the broken lamp in your outside rubbish bin – never in your recycling bin.

– While not all of the recommended cleanup and disposal equipment described above may be available (particularly a suitably sealed glass container), it is important to emphasise that the transfer of the broken CFL and clean-up materials to an outside rubbish bin (preferably sealed) as soon as possible is the most effective way of reducing potential contamination of the indoor environment.

“Simple and straightforward”? Peter Garrett’s department not only deceives you about global warming, but about the ease of this useful “fix”.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to foresee a lot of lawsuits down the road, as the majority of folks who need to change lightbulbs won’t have read these instructions, and will try to handle them the same as the ordinary light bulbs they’ve used forever.

A more recent (May 2010) source indicates:

. . . each fluorescent light bulb contains about 5 milligrams of mercury. Though the amount is tiny, 5 milligrams of mercury is enough to contaminate 6,000 gallons of drinking water, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Low level mercury exposure (under 5 milligrams) can cause tremors, mood shifts, sleeplessness, muscle fatigue, and headaches. High level or extended length exposure can lead to learning disabilities, altered personality, deafness, loss of memory, chromosomal damage, and nerve, brain, and kidney damage, as stated by the EPA. There is a particular risk to the nervous systems of unborn babies and young children.

Introduction to NFC, Register style

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

If you’re wondering what the buzz about Near Field Communications (NFC) might be, you’ll want to read The Register‘s Beginner’s guide to NFC:

Near-field communications (NFC) will take off very quickly — once it’s clear who can make money from it.

From the look of it, 2011 is the year that it will all become clear.

Mobile handset vendors are rushing to incorporate NFC into their roadmaps, with several high profile NFC-enabled handset launches pencilled to lauch mid-2011.

RIM recently hinted at incorporating the technology into new BlackBerry devices, the iPhone 5 is widely expected to include an NFC chip, and Samsung and Nokia are understood to be planning several NFC-enabled phones.

Mobile operators are gearing up too. In the UK, for instance, O2 is building out an NFC team and forecasts that near field communications will enter the consumer mainstream in mid-2011. Orange UK is equally bullish, forecasting sales of 500,000 NFC-enabled phones this year.

So what’s the fuss all about?

If they’re right, expect to start seeing this symbol on lots of things in the near future:

The N-Mark standard defines an embedded tag, which can communicate and provide encrypted authentication using power induced by the reader – such a tag can therefore be embedded in a credit card or key fob without needing its own power supply.

An N-Mark device, such as a mobile phone, incorporates a reader as well as a tag, to enabling communication with passive tags and other N-Mark devices. That communication takes place at 13.56MHz, but as the power is magnetically inducted the range is extremely limited – 200mm at best.

January 23, 2011

John Scalzi on Facebook

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:18

John Scalzi has been online for a long time. He even “handrolled his own html code and then uploaded it using UNIX commands because he was excited to have his own Web site, and back in 1993 that’s how you did it.” He’s not excited about Facebook. Not at all:

A friend of mine noted recently that I seemed a little antagonistic about Facebook recently — mostly on my Facebook account, which is some irony for you — and wanted to know what I had against it. The answer is simple enough: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick. It’s a dumbed-down version of the functionality the Web already had, just not all in one place at one time.

Facebook has made substandard versions of everything on the Web, bundled it together and somehow found itself being lauded for it, as if AOL, Friendster and MySpace had never managed the same slightly embarrassing trick. Facebook had the advantage of not being saddled with AOL’s last-gen baggage, Friendster’s too-early-for-its-moment-ness, or MySpace’s aggressive ugliness, and it had the largely accidental advantage of being upmarket first — it was originally limited to college students and gaining some cachet therein — before it let in the rabble. But the idea that it’s doing something better, new or innovative is largely PR and faffery. Zuckerberg is in fact not a genius; he’s an ambitious nerd who was in the right place at the right time, and was apparently willing to be a ruthless dick when he had to be. Now he has billions because of it. Good for him. It doesn’t make me like his monstrosity any better.

[. . .]

I look at Facebook and what I mostly see are a bunch of seemingly arbitrary and annoying functionality choices. A mail system that doesn’t have a Bcc function doesn’t belong in the 21st Century. Facebook shouldn’t be telling me how many “friends” I should have, especially when there’s clearly no technological impetus for it. Its grasping attempts to get its hooks into every single thing I do feels like being groped by an overly obnoxious salesman. Its general ethos that I need to get over the concept of privacy makes me want to shove a camera lens up Zuckerberg’s left nostril 24 hours a day and ask him if he’d like for his company to rethink that position. Basically there’s very little Facebook does, either as a technological platform or as a company, that doesn’t remind me that “banal mediocrity” is apparently the highest accolade one can aspire to at that particular organization.

I have a Facebook account, but only really check it every few days. Twitter, on the other hand I’ve found to be an excellent tool for a blogger: lots and lots of interesting stuff has come to my attention first through a Twitter update from journalists, bloggers, celebrities, and just ordinary folks. And it doesn’t try to worm its way into everything I do.

Some folks felt John was being too harsh on Facebook users, rather than the site itself, so he posted an update later that day:

* In comments here and elsewhere there was interpretation of me saying that Facebook wasn’t for someone like me, but it was for normal people as a) a way to signal that I am awesome and smart and also awesome, and b) normal people are stupid and suck, and that’s why they use Facebook. Yeah, no. It’s not for me because the functionality doesn’t map well for what I want to do or have for my online experience, and “normal” in this case doesn’t mean “stupid people who suck,” it means “people who don’t want to make the time/energy commitment to run their own site.”

It’s always a problem with written work . . . some people will misunderstand or misinterpret what you’re saying — deliberately or otherwise — and it’s difficult to make something so clear that it can’t be twisted. Did I say difficult? I should have said impossible.

Penn & Teller’s iPhone app

Filed under: Humour, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:07

Do watch both videos. One shows the app in operation, the other shows how it works.

January 22, 2011

Russian drama: Defense Minister disses AK-47

Filed under: Europe, Military, Russia, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:06

The Russian Defense Minister just stirred up a controversy that could only be equalled here if the Prime Minister called hockey a pansy frou-frou game:

Apparently, Russia’s Defense Minister, Anatoly Serdyukov, opined publically that the Kalashnikov and Dragunov SVDs sniper rifles, are “morally outdated.” To add insult to injury, he intimated that he’s considering replacing the weapons with something else. Let’s just say this didn’t play well in the Russian equivalent of the Borscht Belt. In fact, “firestorm of controversy” would be a pretty accurate depiction of the ensuing fireworks.

Evidently, Russians are a prideful people. And they take a lot of pride in Kalishnikov’s Greatest Hit of 1947. The AK-47 has withstood the test of time, doing exactly what it’s designer set out for it to do — function as a rugged, all-purpose weapon that was cheap to build, easy to use, and would run even if you filled it full of mud. Accuracy was not really high on the list of objectives, but I understand from people that know far more about the AKs than I, that they are far more accurate than most people believe.

[. . .]

So for Mother Russia, their very own Defense Minister dissin’ the AK would be like Jeff Cooper bitch-slappin’ the 1911, and throwin’ in a little trash talk against John Moses Browning, to boot. But the times they are a-changin,’ and I’m not so sure Anatolovich doesn’t have a valid pointsky.

The venerable 1911 and AK-47 bear more than a passing comparison. They are both well-established, respected designs. They are both manufactured by multiple armories. And they both have several features that are seen in a modern context as design flaws at worst, and in desperate need of an update, at best.

I’ve posted on the reputation of the AK-47 before.

January 21, 2011

If you are finding Firefox to be much slower lately, uninstall the Skype toolbar

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:51

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for a few years, and it generally works well for me. In the last month or so, however, I’ve noticed it being much slower. Some of that problem may have been caused by the Skype toolbar:

Mozilla has blocked a Skype toolbar add-on for its Firefox browser, after blaming the extension for causing 40,000 crashes last week.

The open source outfit said it vastly slowed down webpage-loading times.

The crash-prone add-on downed Firefox 3.6.13 — which is the current stable version of the browser — far too much, grumbled Mozilla.

“Additionally, depending on the version of the Skype Toolbar you’re using, the methods it uses to detect and re-render phone numbers can make DOM [document object model] manipulation up to 300 times slower, which drastically affects the page rendering times of a large percentage of web content served today (plain English: to the user, it appears that Firefox is slow loading web pages),” it said.

I started using Firefox as my default browser around the time they introduced tabbed pages (which every browser has offered for years now). I also use Opera, Chrome, and (unwillingly) IE for specific purposes. If the Firefox performance issues aren’t resolved when they release the new version 4.0 next month, I’ll consider switching to Chrome as my primary browser instead.

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