The US Navy has been intercepting and shooting down drones and other missiles shot at them and Israel. It’s very expensive. A few hundred dollar drone shot down by a hundred thousand dollar missile. They have been experimenting with lasers and have been fairly effective. Now Britain has come out with a laser that can shoot down a drone for $13 a shot.
Air defense for $13 a shot? How lasers could revolutionize the way militaries counter enemy missiles and drones https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/13/europe/b ... index.html
The Defense Ministry says the DragonFire can precisely hit a target as small as a coin “over long ranges,” but it did not offer specifics. The exact range of the weapon is classified, it said.
The laser beam can cut through metal “leading to structural failure or more impactful results if the warhead is targeted,” a UK Defense Ministry statement said.
Re: Tech That Is New
Posted: Thu Mar 21, 2024 1:04 pm
by Superbone
Gotta admit. This is pretty cool. And powerful for people like this.
Re: Tech That Is New
Posted: Thu Mar 21, 2024 11:05 pm
by Nodack
That’s crazy!
Re: Tech That Is New
Posted: Mon Apr 01, 2024 9:27 am
by Mori Chu
I didn't know where to put this. Ugh, this is a huge data leak.
Batteries and energy storage is the next leap that needs to be taken. Today, it's just not close to good enough.
Re: Tech That Is New
Posted: Fri May 03, 2024 12:15 am
by Nodack
Yep. They can make all kinds of power during the day. Storing it is the problem. I just got solar. I make all kinds of power during the day. A battery is $20k. Just not cost effective. I almost feel like getting one because my excess power gets bought back from SRP for next to nothing.
Re: Tech That Is New
Posted: Thu May 09, 2024 12:11 pm
by AmareIsGod
Horrifying and depressing
Re: Tech That Is New
Posted: Thu May 09, 2024 12:21 pm
by Superbone
Huh? In what way?
I mean, obviously an iPad isn't going to replace a trumpet or especially a trombone, for that that matter.
Re: Tech That Is New
Posted: Thu May 09, 2024 2:30 pm
by Nodack
Horrifying that all that stuff was crushed.
Re: Tech That Is New
Posted: Thu May 09, 2024 9:04 pm
by Superbone
They could have at least used old stuff.
Re: Tech That Is New
Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2024 9:07 am
by Mori Chu
Didn't know where to post this, but a major piece of corporate software called Crowdstrike pushed out a broken patch update yesterday, which ended up taking out TONS of computers all over the world. It's estimated that up to 20% of all corporate IT computers use Crowdstrike, and the outage is possibly the biggest computing outage in history. It is almost what people feared Y2K would be, before lots of tech workers patched and protected against year-2000 bugs.
Due to a third-party, global, industry-wide issue, certain online functionality may be intermittently slow or unavailable. We’re actively monitoring the issue. Phone services may be disrupted and hold times may be longer than usual.
Re: Tech That Is New
Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2024 4:29 pm
by In2ition
My brother's flight got canceled today because of it.
Re: Tech That Is New
Posted: Sat Jul 20, 2024 8:58 am
by Mori Chu
This made me laugh. (The guy at the computer is Bret "Hit Man" Hart of 1990s WWF fame.) Part of why this is funny is that the bug that caused the Crowdstrike outage is literally caused by dereferencing a null pointer, as Hart says in the video.
Re: Tech That Is New
Posted: Thu Jul 25, 2024 10:14 am
by Mori Chu
This CrowdStrike story is crazy. They apparently never used staged or "canary" deployments before this! (This is a very common industry practice where you push out new releases gradually, to a small number of initial users to make sure it doesn't break, then a few more, etc. until 100%.) That is unconscionable for a security software company.