November 15, 2010
Tomorrows Tomahawk
When Thomas Edison first created the incandescent light bulb, he used vegetable fiber as a filament to actually create light. Today’s bulbs light up our lives with tightly wound tungsten wire. Who knew that the same element that lights our homes could also be used to light up America’s enemies? By retrofitting currently useless ballistic missiles, meter long tungsten rods could be doing just that. The idea is elegantly simple. Replace the warheads of a missile with these tungsten rods, boost them to a suborbital ballistic trajectory, and let physics do the rest. By the power of gravity, the tungsten rods fall to earth with pinpoint accuracy and the force of a small nuclear weapon. Furthermore, the system could be reconfigured to deliver sub munitions like cluster bombs, or even unmanned aerial vehicles. All of this, anywhere on Earth, in an hour or less.
The advantages of this system are incredible, especially with the types of conflicts the United States will be fighting. Currently, the fastest response time the US can muster, without exercising the nuclear option, is 48 hours by way of an Air Expeditionary Force, and heavy hitting can be accomplished in a 96 hour timeframe with a Navy Carrier Battle Group. Prompt Global Strike would reduce one way strike time to just under an hour for anywhere on earth without utilizing a nuclear warhead. Even a low yield device has the inevitable problems of fallout and collateral damage, both of which make even low yield warheads simply unacceptable as a first strike weapon. Prompt Global Strike offers this rapid response time without the astronomically high costs of nuclear weapons. PGS also has the power to punch meters into the ground and through concrete, making it effective against hardened targets like bunkers or missile silos without risking the life of a pilot.
This response time will be absolutely critical as the US continues to fight decentralized threats. Already, US drone strikes in Pakistan underscore the nature of conflict to spread beyond a specific theatre. When a conflict tends to spread, rapid strike capability is necessary to cut off violence before it spills over. PGS also has an incredible advantage in precision. Currently, cruise missiles are the chosen option for a precision strike, but they suffer from the handicap of being subsonic weapons, drastically increasing their response time compared to a PGS weapon. To illustrate the gravity of this shortcoming, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the location of Osama bin Laden had been pinned down to a base in the Tora Bora mountains. Cruise missiles were launched by American naval forces in the Persian Gulf took over four hours to arrive, giving Al-Qaeda forces ample time to evacuate the area, costing the US a crucial opportunity in the war on terror. Prompt global strike would have overcome this waiting problem and permitted the US to capitalize on this opportunity, potentially ending the war on terror years ago.
Furthermore, precise, powerful, and timely strikes would be invaluable when it comes to dealing with potential future nuclear threats in Iran and North Korea. The ability to promptly deal with these emerging threats, especially the ability to destroy missile silos and hardened structures dedicated to weapons production, gives the US an incredible edge in the fight against nuclear proliferation. If properly timed, PGS could even be used to destroy enemy missiles before they are launched without utilizing nuclear weapons, making it an ironic tool of peace.
Granted, no system is perfect. PGS has one major problem: a nasty tendency to set off Russian early warning systems and make Ivan think we’re about to flip one at him. A missile that is, not the bird. The only way to solve this problem would be to broadcast a warning over the hotline, an unbreakable communications link between Washington and the Kremlin created during the cold war to stave off Armageddon. Now, it can be used as a tool to inform the Russian government of a PGS launch. This step could be implemented immediately; the infrastructure is already in place. All that is needed is a change in rhetoric before a tool created to stop a nuclear war becomes a weapon against nuclear proliferation.
Prompt Global Strike is an incredibly powerful tool, and if properly implemented it could give unused strategic missiles new life and purpose in combatting terrorism and weapons proliferation. Doubtless there are hurdles, but the ability to deliver a precise, powerful, and nearly immediate non-nuclear strike is incredibly valuable to the US as well as the entire global community. Clearly, the benefits of this technology far outweigh the easily solvable costs. The US is currently at the forefront of developing this technology, and it is paramount that this development move forward. President Bush shelved the project. As wars become increasingly decentralized and full scale invasions impractical, it is imperative that Prompt Global Strike at least be reexamined.
May 30, 2010
Closed Development Architecture, not just for Apple anymore.
Well its official, the new tablet computer in the works from computing giant HP will now be running Palm’s web OS software, ditching windows 7 in favor of a more touch-friendly, intuitive operating system. Recently, HP bought out Palm in order to acquire rights to the software, and now Web OS is in the process of being tweaked to do exactly what HP wants it to do. HP has been working on their counter to Apples incredibly successful iPad, dubbed Slate, since around January and it’s set for release before the end of the current fiscal year. So, think around mid to late October. Just in time for people to buy them and then give them to other people. Completely counterproductive if you ask me, but I digress.
The reason any of this is worth looking at, writing about, or most importantly, caring about is because of the impact this move by HP will have on software giant Microsoft. I’ll be brief: Microsoft doesn’t make hardware aside from a few keyboards and that cool looking arc mouse that breaks after 3 months. They make windows, office, and a few other useless applications like Internet Explorer. They are nearly entirely dependent of software revenues, mostly from the aforementioned Windows OS and Office productivity suite, to stay in business. That’s where the problem arises.
HP’s move to build its own tablet PC operating system off of Palms Web OS is showing a growing trend of what has been dubbed vertical production in the market for tablet PC’s. When something is vertically developed, everything is done in house by the tablet PC’s manufacturer. So, instead of slapping Windows on a set of hardware specifications, each tablets OS is proprietary. Given that tablets, once they sufficiently advance in size, interface, and performance, are generally being hailed as the future of personal computing, the impacts of this could be huge, and there are two of them.
One, this will serve to break Microsoft’s stranglehold on the computer OS market. Some version of Windows is installed on just under 90% of the world’s computers and I’m writing this on a machine running windows 7. If tablets really are the wave of things to come and tablet manufacturers each write their own operating systems, Microsoft could find itself in a heap of trouble stemming from a severely reduced market share on its Windows operating system.
Even if the company manages to put out its own tablet PC, it will be facing real market competition for the first time in over a decade. Already Apple has the first to market advantage with what amounts to an overweight iPod touch. Soon, Google and HP will be releasing tablets, each running a different operating system. Google intents to run a beefed up version of their Android Smartphone software and HP will run WebOS. As tablets gain market share, and they will, evidenced by the success of the iPad, Microsoft will find itself not only losing OS revenues but also revenues from other softwares that either don’t run on these proprietary operating systems or lose out to lower cost alternatives produced by third parties, like apples writer application for iPad that essentially takes on the role of Microsoft word.
Second, standardization could go out the window. As evil as some people think Windows is and as much butthurt as it can elicit, the fact that it holds such a huge portion of the global OS market gives software developers a standard worth adhering to. If Windows market share drops siginficantly, this set of standards goes away and now developers are being forced to code for Web OS, Android, and whatever else tablet manufacturers cook up. This will lead to specialized software developers and potentially higher prices for applications as developers are forced to specialize. In addition, this lack of standards could lead to the same nightmare that occurred in the early days of word processing: various, incompatible formats. Think about it. Writer for WebOS saves your work in a .word format, an application that does the same thing for Googles Android OS saves it as a .carrot or whatever, and before long nobody can look at each other’s work and we’re all stuck in different, Apple-like closed development cycles. Scary…
Now, I could be wrong about all this and the switch to WebOS by HP will have no real effect and Microsoft, along with Starbucks and Wal-Mart, will continue to rule the world (that’s a joke). However, this is one scenario that could reasonably come to pass. Just saying.
Tl;dr: HP is no longer using Windows 7 on its tablet PC. This could signify a move towards proprietary tablet PC operating systems that would have major implications on both Microsoft and the computing world as a whole.
Nova Americana 