US Navy SEALs buy twin-screen laptops, refuse Vista
Blu-Ray drive essential military kit, seemingly
You know how it is. You're a power user, an alpha nerd. You just aren't happy without multiple screens - a puny one-screen desktop isn't enough for the multiple video feeds, apps and so forth that are essential to your working life.
But that's too bad, because you are also a deadly US Navy SEAL supertrooper. Your video feeds aren't CNN - well, maybe some of them are actually - they're live video from surveillance drones prowling overhead, or from robothopter bat-bugs you have sent into the bad guys' stronghold. You're normally working up to your chest in the snows of the Hindu Kush or the stinking mud of the Euphrates delta, generally resting your ruggedised laptop on the dead body of a terrorist you have just killed in total silence with no more than a piece of string, using a little known Oriental grappling technique.
So no multiple screens for you - or at least, not until now. Because now the era of the waterproof, shockproof, dustproof, dual screen laptop has dawned.
The machine in this case is a ruggedised version of the G400 dual-screen machine from Alaskan startup gScreen, which says the G400 is "the first true dual-screen laptop with identical 15-inch LED backlit displays", though others might dispute that. The G400 isn't actually on sale yet - customers can reserve one from the 25th.
Meanwhile, however, certain privileged customers are jumping the queue. Last week, Naval Special Warfare Group 2 based at Little Creek, Virginia issued a notice of intent to award a small-biz set aside contract for "Titan M1 Dual screen Laptop Workstations". The gScreen corporate blog confirms that "this product is being built specifically to specs requested by the US NAVY for extreme environments".
Apart from dual displays, the frogman-commando IT types will get an Intel CORE 2 Quad QX9300 processor, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive and standard MIL-STD 810F ruggedisation. The SEALs have also specified dual GeForce 8600M graphics cards, Blu-Ray drive, Gigabit networking, WiFi and Bluetooth. It seems they're no fans of Vista - the machines are to come with Windows XP Pro.
It does occur that machines of this sort would also be capable of other than strictly work-related tasks. ®
COMMENTS
Special Services and Special Forces are normally worlds apart.
"///but the best BJ I ever had was from a roided up Navy seal" .... By slack Posted Wednesday 11th February 2009 11:39 GMT
Now there's a novel approach to esprit de corps. :-) Is it compulsory, slack? And I bet you say that to all the boys/bots.
@Snooty, I mean sooty
It's a chicken and egg problem. The apps and the OSes both have to be bought at the same time. I built an 8G system and got 64-bit Vista and 32-bit XP. My apps run fine on the 32-bit XP, but not the 64-bit Vista.
killer machine ...
hi folks,
well, if i would have the money, i would want this cool piece of technology too ..
kind regards MK ultra
killer application ...
hope the terrorists will never get such hightech stuff ...
would be very bad for us all !!!
MK ultra
@Goat Jam
Not supported? Wow. That'd be news to Intel, which has has PAE on every CPU since the Pentium Pro (and it was actually intended for the original Pentium)
>=4G RAM is readily supported by any operating system with PAE support (and that includes XP Pro notionally, but MS artificially limit it to the first 4G of physical space which does get big chunks taken out by the PCI space)
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx
32 bit operating systems can't easily offer more than 4G of space to applications without breaking the programming model and ABI so even though the operating system can map 64G of physical RAM all over the place (ie. into multiple chunks up to 4G for applications, disk cache, whatever), its still not going to help applications directly.
Most Unix based systems "support" PAE for some definition of it (there's sometimes driver issues)
