Work Progressing on Army's Future Combat Systems 217
El_Oscuro brings us a Washington Post update on the progress of Future Combat Systems, the U.S. Army's Linux-based operating environment that has been under development for several years. The project, which currently surpasses 63 million lines of code, has received criticism for having a scope greater than that which the Army can manage. Since the program's inception, integration of commercial applications has increased the amount of code, but has also saved the developers time and money.
"Boeing and the Army said they chose not to use Microsoft's proprietary software because they didn't want to be beholden to the company. Instead, they chose to develop a Linux-based operating system based on publicly available code. Boeing's Schoen said that it is designing software so that if soldiers lose their connection, the software will automatically "heal itself," retrieving the information within seconds without rebooting."
Re:Uptime? (Score:5, Informative)
Just ssh user@host uptime.
SSH does not perform a real "login" (in the sense of allocating a pty and writing in utmp) when specifying a remote command to execute. Thus, havin zero users loggged in is normal in that case. Try it yourself.
Re:Born to Kill (Score:1, Informative)
BFT, the other project mentioned in the article migrated to linux five or six years ago. It started (disgustingly enough) on SCO 3. It was ported briefly to SCO 5, then onto Solaris X86 and ultimately onto RHEL.
Re:Licensed to kill (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Army bit is irrelevant.. (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Licensed to kill (Score:5, Informative)
Why?
Take WWII as an example, you've got a whole bunch of Japanese moving east killing 3M Chinese soldiers defending their homeland, murdering 17M unarmed Chinese civilians mainly with swords and small arms. Germans get in on the action, invading Czechoslovakia and Poland. They get bored and ramp up action invading Scandinavia, France and the Soviet Union killing 23M soviets (half civilian) while they were at it. Jews of course were shot on site or sent to an automated death factory, 3M all up. The Germans start bombing the crap out of the UK and the Japanese exploit the distraction and invade Singapore, capturing the defenders then starve or torture them to death in prison camps. This was the bad kind of killing, because they were killing because they desired more power.
But we all know this story and what happened next. The British Commonwealth, U.S. and Soviet Union killed a truly amazing amount of people and fixed the problem. It is completely thanks to violence that German and Japanese people are now nice rather than nasty. The US military helped get the Japanese out of China / South East Asia and the Germans out of the bulk of Europe and thus prevented them from killing any more people while they were there. This was the good kind of killing because they only started killing when they had killers to kill and they always aimed to make peace when the killers were killed. I bet you can't think of any non-violent organisation that cut short such an evil set of events.
This is why violence is only bad if you're violent to the wrong people and why I wholly endorse any of my works to be used for violence against the right people. It's not as if the Third Reich or Japanese empire would have cared about your stipulations. If someone did honour it, they must be the sort of people who care about individual freedoms and intellectual property and thus those who you'd probably want to win the conflict anyway.
Of course the problem is that the military forces of the US and my native Australia spends most of its time invading irrelevant countries to look like it is dealing with terrorists, but that does not mean that its role in the world is wholly a negative one, they beat up a lot of bad people too, like the Taliban who had it coming to them long before they helped hide Osama bin Laden. Our Aussie guys went over and kept away a bunch of armed militia that was trying to stop East Timor from regaining its independence, NATO did some bombing to stop the Serbs from killing the Muslims in Kosovo. When the military isn't killing people you get things like the Rwandan genocide in the mid 90s when nobody got around to killing the aggressors so they were able to kill whomever the hell they wanted.
Thus, killing in general is a completely morally neutral action.
Re:And Appropriately (Score:2, Informative)
Dogs are actually afraid of ostriches.
Number 17, actually (Score:2, Informative)
A notch behind most of Europe & Oceania, but slightly ahead of France and Spain.
Re:Loose tha Connexn (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Number 17, actually (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Insightful? (Score:3, Informative)
Why military computer projects turn to crap (Score:3, Informative)
For anyone who wonders why a lot of military software projects (but not all) turn to crap, as the parent posters allude to, read War Upon The Map [mit.edu].
IMHO, This is the most insightful paper into the deep interworkings of DoD politics and how it influences software design. I've experienced this myself and what the parent posters say does not surprise me in the least.
Re:$9 trillion in debt and they want robot soldier (Score:2, Informative)
Very recent article:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174884/chalmers_johnson_how_to_sink_america [tomdispatch.com]
The radio interview is here:
http://antiwar.com/radio/2008/01/24/chalmers-johnson-3/ [antiwar.com]