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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Deutsche Bahn (DB) and Siemens Mobility have managed to get an ICE test train to 405 km/h (251 mph) on the Erfurt-Leipzig/Halle high-speed line.
While China, with a maglev train hitting 650 km/h (404 mph) in just seven seconds, might regard the achievement as cute, it is a milestone for Germany, where exceeding 300 km/h (186 mph) on the rail network is rare.
The UK had its own attempt at going beyond traditional rail in the 1960s and the early 1970s with the Hovertrain, but the project was cancelled in 1973.
France pushed a steel-wheeled TGV to a record 574.8 km/h (357 mph) in 2007, yet the German achievement will inject a dose of pride into the country's beleaguered network, once an icon of efficiency.
According to a report in the UK's Financial Times, Deutsche Bahn delivers "one of the least reliable services in central Europe," even when compared to the UK's rail system, which is hardly a performance benchmark.
The test ran on a high-speed line that had been in continuous operation for ten years. According to Dr Philipp Nagl, CEO of DB InfraGO AG, no adjustments were needed.
"It is confirmation that infrastructure investments are the foundation for reliable, sustainable, and efficient mobility and logistics over generations," he said.
[...] Thomas Graetz, Vice President High Speed and Intercity Trains, Siemens Mobility, said: "Our goal was to gain in-depth insights into acoustics, aerodynamics, and driving behavior at extreme speeds." Mission accomplished – though what counts as "extreme speeds" seems to vary by country.
Trains on the UK's HS2 railway (whenever it finally opens) are expected to reach speeds of 360 km/h.
An insight into the technology behind Germany's rail network came last year, with an advertisement for an IT professional willing to endure Windows 3.11.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Thursday July 03, @03:37PM (5 children)
Is it a job requirement to have to install Windows 3.11 from a box of floppy disks with multiple reboots during the entire install procedure?
It sounds less like a job and more like a court ordered punishment.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday July 03, @03:46PM
I still have a functional USB Floppy Drive and Windows 3.11 Floppy Disks. Works fine in DOSBox. Had fun with some games and even had a look at 'ye olde Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia. Pretty good for what it was. Some of those DOS games are just plain fun. I would certainly play Solitaire in Win 3.1 as opposed to an adpocalypsed version of Solitaire that you're just as likely to find as not on modern computers. That said, Solitaire was just a side thought. 'ye olde Oregon Trail, Civilization II, and Master of Magic are all good games that don't suffer too much from the nostalgia effect.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday July 03, @04:08PM (3 children)
Win 3.11 wasn't that many floppies. Also it was trivial to trim it down content wise to be even less floppies. The thing that was many many floppies was NT 3.51. Not entirely sure but I think it was 40ish floppies or so. Drawing the number from failing memories three decades old or so.
But if you just had your network up you could copy all the floppies to a harddrive and just call it from that. That was even superior to the eventual CDROM versions. That way you didn't have to go by and change floppy. Or if you had to do a floppy install you did it as a day task where you just changed floppy when you passed by the machine.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 07, @05:40PM (2 children)
There was some version of Windows that WAS that many floppies. But memory fails on which one.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday July 07, @06:12PM (1 child)
There probably was. I think it was Windows NT 3 and forwards. I know NT3.51 had a lot of floppies, as noticed I think it was 40ish+.
Windows 3, from memory, wasn't very large and it still required DOS to run in the background. Last good MS-DOS was probably 6.22 or something, I think that was five or six floppies but you only needed one to boot, the others were extras. But you needed a working installation. So if you want to include the DOS disks and then Windows you might have gotten a few more floppies. But it still wasn't anything extreme. But I don't think there was reboots required during the installation of Win3.11, there might have been one in the end to set the changes it had done in autoexec.bat or something such. But this is just recollections from memory and they could be all wrong.
But I don't see why it would have required any reboots as Win3.11 was essentially just a program you ran on top of DOS. But it might require you to set some paths or so manually. So you could exit Windows and start it and exit and start and ...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 08, @02:47PM
It was so long ago. My recollection is similar to yours. There was some Windows 3 or thereabout that had about a dozen disks (or more?). I remember having to duplicate and label them.
I also remember Windows NT 4 which was horrible to install. It was an enormously long process involving many, and I mean many reboots along the way. And that was before you installed some extras (necessary to our project) like MSMQ (Microsoft Message Queue) (as I seem to recall it), and then other things on top of that.
As for Windows 3 on DOS, that is how I would describe it. The computer started DOS. Then you type: "win' to start Windows. You could exit out of Windows and be right back at your DOS prompt. I don't have factual information, but I believe Windows 95 started up the same way but "hid" the fact of starting up on DOS so you get the illusion that it starts up into Windows 95. I could be wrong about the underlying implementation of that, but I always suspected that is what was going on. A modified DOS that basically launched Win 95.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.