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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Army/Navy Open Thread

Reader Interactions

64Comments

  1. 1.

    raven

    I thought you were talking about this:

    ILLIAC (Illinois Automatic Computer) was a series of supercomputers built at a variety of locations, some at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In all, five computers were built in this series between 1951 and 1974.

  2. 2.

    JordanRules

    Looking forward to it as well!

    With some wild speculation that Kurt Warner is considering a return to the NFL to play for the Cards a blog I was on just started brainstorming all the QB’s they could call up. It was hilarious. Names like Akili Smith and Bubby Brister came up. Woooo the dustbins and nostalgia had me cracking up!

  7. 7.

    Mike J

    Since my dad was in the navy I sort of cheer for them. He wasn’t that crazy about it, but liked it better than being drafted.

  10. 10.

    mai naem

    I bought a new laptop. OMG. Who the fuck approved Windows 8 in its current form? Were they drunk? Did Larry Page offer them a massive bribe to finally kill MS? I am ready to start looking for a new laptop with windows 7. This is horrible.

  11. 11.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Tommy: What’s not to get? Army/Navy rivalries have existed since there were armies and navies. College football rivalries have existed since there was college football.

    ETA: Go Army! Beat Navy! Fuck the Air Force!

  12. 12.

    dmsilev

    @mai naem: Rumor has it that Windows 10 (they’re skipping ‘9’ for some reason) will dial back a lot of the questionable decisions in 8. The idea of one OS that scales seamlessly from phones to desktops and everything in between is a nice one, but Microsoft didn’t seem to do a good job actually implementing it.

  13. 13.

    Mike J

    @dmsilev:

    Rumor has it that Windows 10 (they’re skipping ‘9’ for some reason)

    The rumor I heard about why 9 is being skipped is because of the amount of bad code that doesn’t use the right api to check windows version number and instead looks at the string of the name, like this:

    String osName = System.getProperty("os.name");
    if(osName.startsWith("Windows 9") || osName.equals("Windows ME"))

    That code was written to detect windows 95 or windows 98, but was very poorly written.

  19. 19.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @mai naem: Well, I tried to post a link to a classic start button freebie, but it disappeared into the bit bucket.

    I use Classic Shell’s start button (free) and Windows Blinds. I tried for several months but just couldn’t get used to the new flat desktop aesthetic.

  22. 22.

    monkeyfister

    Finishing the Navy-side planning on this game this week marked the very last real responsibility for me for the rest of the year. I hope everyone enjoys the toys, the robots, CNO’s moment, and all the goofy video ribbon stuff we sent to Baltimore. The SWCC CCA Boat was a real coup to score for the event. Best– I got to put some of my fellow IATSE Brothers and Sisters to work.

    GO NAVY!!!

  25. 25.

    Mr Stagger Lee

    @raven: When I was in the Air Defense Artillery in the 80’s our symbol was the missile with the cross cannons and the field artillery was just the crossed cannons, iirc. Oh BTW the US Army was one in NATO where we had the Air Defense, everyone else had Air Defense in the Air Force, so eventually my chain of command would answer to an Air Force commander.

  26. 26.

    raven

    @Mr Stagger Lee: Yea, I never knew why they did that. The 2/79th was actually an aerial rocket unit on choppers.

    “Aerial rocket artillery (abbreviated ARA, also called aerial artillery) is a type of armed helicopter unit that was part of the artillery component of the United States Army’s two airmobile divisions during the Vietnam War. Controlled by division artillery and not the aviation group, the 2nd Battalion, 20th Artillery, 1st Cavalry Division and the 4th Battalion, 77th Artillery, 101st Airborne Division, along with Battery F, 79th Artillery, 1st Cavalry Division, were the only ARA units fielded during that conflict. The ARA concept disappeared from Army aviation by the mid-1970s, replaced with more generic attack aviation units.
    “

  28. 28.

    Mr Stagger Lee

    @raven: I remember the home for the Field Artillery was Ft Sill, while Ft Bliss was home to the ADA. I guess now all Artillery training is now consolidated at Ft. Sill.

  29. 29.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @raven: The missile was added to the artillery insignia in 1957. When the ADA branch was split off from FA in 1968, they kept the cannons and missile insignia and FA reverted to its original crossed cannons.

  31. 31.

    PurpleGirl

    @mai naem: Not sure you can still get a laptop with Win 7. I think you’d need to find a computer guy who could uninstall Win 8 and install Win 7 for you. Last year I was looking at new laptops and none of them had Win 7 on them. (On my notebook I’m still using Win XP.)

  33. 33.

    JPL

    My father retired from the Navy so watching the game was a family tradition. My youngest brother retired from the Army and my oldest brother from Air Force. One of my nephews is still in the Air Force.

  37. 37.

    srv

    Burn the emowitch!

    Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) rebellious stand against Democratic leadership – including President Obama – on Thursday’s vote to fund the government has incited a palpable sense of anger in some circles of the party.

    “She is the Ted Cruz of the Democratic Party,” one senior House Democratic aide complained, comparing Senator Warren to Senator Ted Cruz’s hard line tactics last year when he led a caucus of House Republicans to shut down the government in an effort to defund Obamacare.

    “[Sen. Warren is] the purist who may stand on principle, but refuses to be part of the governing majority,” the aide added.

  39. 39.

    Ripley

    @mai naem: Ditto for Classic Shell, very customizable and straightforward. I’ve read horror stories about trying to backload Win 7 on a Win 8 system; Classic Shell solves the problem with little hassle.

    Since you’re using a laptop, make sure to turn off mouse gestures in the preloaded trackpad software (via Control Panel) or the Win 8, ironically named Charms Bar will plague you forever. It ain’t charming.

  40. 40.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @Ripley:

    I’ve read horror stories about trying to backload Win 7 on a Win 8 system

    There are often driver issues when one tries to backload. I’ve managed to work around them in the past, but never without a lot of interesting hair-tearing motions.

  41. 41.

    Roger Moore

    @Mike J:

    The rumor I heard about why 9 is being skipped is because of the amount of bad code that doesn’t use the right api to check windows version number and instead looks at the string of the name

    I’ve heard the same rumor. While I have plenty of bad things to say about Microsoft and Windows, I greatly respect their willingness to bend over backward to provide good backward compatibility.

  45. 45.

    Roger Moore

    @Mike J:

    The example code I gave came out of jedit, not a microsoft program.

    As I understand it, that was the common case. Anyone who actually worked for Microsoft would use the official, correct way of identifying the OS [ETA: or be corrected by somebody higher up]. I suspect, though I’m not sure, that the problem with Java programs from that era is that they were written to be cross-platform, so the authors didn’t want to depend on OS-specific ways of identifying the system. Instead, they’d ask for an OS string and parse it to get the information they wanted. It might have made it easier to write for multiple platforms, but it led to some awful code.

  46. 46.

    max

    @PurpleGirl: Not sure you can still get a laptop with Win 7. I think you’d need to find a computer guy who could uninstall Win 8 and install Win 7 for you. Last year I was looking at new laptops and none of them had Win 7 on them. (On my notebook I’m still using Win XP.)

    Nope, not unless there are still Windows 7 boxes in inventory. They stopped distribution of OEM copies of Windows 7 on Halloween. (I managed to snag one.)

    @dmsilev: Rumor has it that Windows 10 (they’re skipping ‘9’ for some reason) will dial back a lot of the questionable decisions in 8. The idea of one OS that scales seamlessly from phones to desktops and everything in between is a nice one, but Microsoft didn’t seem to do a good job actually implementing it.

    Strictly speaking, what they tried to do was to make the desktop shell look like the Windows tablet shell. Nobody liked it. Win10 is going back to a 7-style shell. (With additions from Metro.) Complete with start button. Any extra customizations needed can be added with Classic Shell.

    That said, they’ve got the write one run anywhere thing going. So this is supposed to be an improvement, sounds like an improvement and the Preview folks say it’s an improvement. It’s also going to be free for consumer boxes.

    max
    [‘It had better be, given that they pulled 7.’]

  49. 49.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Tommy:

    When I was a little girl, I used to love to read a book series about an Army family that had various postings around the U.S. and around the world. When they were stationed at West Point and Governor’s Island, the Army-Navy Game always figured prominently in the plot :-)

  54. 54.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @SiubhanDuinne: It’s a bit funny that, with so many veterans commenting on the site, VDE is one of very few whose military experience bears any similarity to mine. The life and work experience of a military officer is stunningly different than that of an enlisted person.

  55. 55.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Omnes Omnibus: Ahem.

    The life and work experience of a military officer is stunningly different than from that of an enlisted person.

    /Pedantic reflex.

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