Free Republic

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The Army is spending $2.6 billion on hundreds of European-designed helicopters for homeland security and disaster relief that turn out to have a crucial flaw: They aren't safe to fly on hot days, according to an internal report obtained by The Associated Press. While the Army scrambles to fix the problem — adding millions to the taxpayer cost — at least one high-ranking lawmaker is calling for the whole deal to be scrapped. During flight tests in Southern California in mild, 80-degree weather, cockpit temperatures in the UH-72A Lakota soared above 104, the point at which the...

Advanced Micro Devices wants to pull off the market and replace a series of about 3,000 Opteron x52s and x54s chips which have a high-temperature induced bug which may lead to "inconsistent results" when running floating point (FP) code. The company announced on Friday that single-core Opteron 152, 154, 252, 254, 852 and 854 processors manufactured in late 2005 or early 2006. It seems that the issue was caused by a "test escape" and isn't a manufacturing or design problem. Basically, the fault manifests itself when the processors are running floating point-intensive code sequences and the CPU as well as...