Cody Taylor

Hugh Pickens writes “With the discovery last year of the first wreck of an Elizabethan fighting ship off Alderney in the Channel Islands, thought to date from around 1592, marine archaeologists are revising their ideas on how the English defeated the Spanish Armada. Replicas of two cannon recovered from the Alderney wreck were recreated in a modern foundry, and tests carried out showed that the Elizabethans were throwing shot at almost the speed of sound. Elizabeth’s ‘supergun,’ although relatively small, could hit a target a mile away. At a ship-to-ship fighting distance of about 100 yards, the ball would have sufficient punch to penetrate the oak planks of a galleon, travel across the deck, and emerge out the other side. Tests on cannon recovered from the Alderney wreck also suggest that the ship carried guns of uniform size, firing standard ammunition. ‘Elizabeth’s navy created the first ever set of uniform cannon, capable of firing the same size shot in a deadly barrage,’ says marine archaeologist Mensun Bound from Oxford University, adding that that navy had worked out that a lot of small guns, all the same, all firing at once, were more effective than a few big guns. ‘[Elizabeth’s] navy made a giant leap forward in the way men fought at sea, years ahead of England’s enemies, and which was still being used to devastating effect by Nelson 200 years later.'”

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An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft executives have been telling the tech industry that if hardware supports Windows Vista, it will support Windows 7, but it now looks like that may not entirely be the case. According to CRN: ‘But after a series of tests on older and newer hardware, a number of noteworthy issues emerged: Microsoft’s statement that if hardware works with Windows Vista it will work with Windows 7 appears to be, at best, misleading; hardware that is older, but not near the end of most business life cycles, could be impossible to upgrade; and the addition of an extra step in the upgrade process does add complexity and more time not needed in previous upgrade cycles.’ And here is CRN’s overview of the difficulties Microsoft faces in asking enterprise users to walk this upgrade path: ‘Across the XP-Vista-Windows 7 landscape, Microsoft has fostered an ecosystem that now holds out the prospect of a mind-numbing number of incompatible drivers, unsupported devices, unsupported applications, unsupported data, patches, updates, upgrades, ‘known issues’ and unknown issues. Sound familiar? That’s what people used to say about Linux.'”

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An anonymous reader writes “The Indian Supreme Court has ruled that bloggers cannot shelter under an escape clause such as ‘Any views expressed are solely those of the writers’ to exercise freedom of speech in discussions and statements online. The ruling comes in response to an anti-defamation case filed against a 19 year old student’s Orkut community, commenting upon the right-wing political organization Shiv Sena. This organization is based in the western state of Maharashtra and has been responsible for inflammatory speeches and numerous attacks upon non-Maharashtrians.” The article does not make it entirely clear whether the student owner is himself accused of defamatory speech, or only commenters posting on his site. His defense that an Orkut community is not equivalent to a public forum was denied.

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