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Military Tech: GPS and Networking
king of birds writes "The New York Times has an interesting article on the present military use of GPS. While some units have rather modern system that can graphically display locations of other troops, others rely on 10-year-old 5 channel receivers. Kind of odd when I can 12 channels on my civilian model (with admittedly lower spatial accuracy)." aaronvegh writes "From the Canadian Press, a story about how a US infantry division uses a system of transponders and servers to track friendly and enemy units, from the headquarters to inside individual tanks. Talk about total information awareness! No friendlies were harmed in the making of this story."
Isn't it a little risky to put location transponders on all your military units? If the enemy cracks your transponder codes, they can easily target you.
Kind of odd when I can 12 channels on my civilian model
Of course, your civilian model probably fails 1% of the time, and wouldn't survive a day in a sandstorm, in part due to it's fragile electronics.
The Military version, while only 5 channels, is probably much more robust then your puny little civilian model.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
As the farmer said when asked for directions: "If I was you and trying to get there, I wouldn't start from here."
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
My guess is that it's an X11 Unix application being displayed on a windows box running Exceed to make it into a virtual X terminal.
(Yes Virginia, the dumb terminal is alive and well.)
Said configuration is so common it's almost obscene. My first Job out of college was at one of Lockheed Martin's many branches. All of the REAL work was done on various flavours of Unix (AIX, HP-UX and some other IBM OS in our case, and some projects in the facility were expreimenting with Linux and BSD as alternatives (Main problem being, VA and the like don't exactly build their boxen to MILSPEC, HP and IBM were happy to do so.) Obviously, we needed a Unix environment to program computers that would be rinning Unix in the field. Makes sence, right?
Problem being, as they said on Star Trek: "The buerocratic mentality is the only constant in the universe". And LMCO has a BIG one. Some big muckety-muck, a CIO, an IT director, or somesuch, had chosen Dell as the desktop vendor for our facility, gotten several score truckloads of the things at bulk rate, built an NT-centric IT staff and 'standard desktop configuration', and said "Thou shalt use windows on thy desktop!". No matter that windows is completely useless to engineers. He's got his Dell/windows empire, and he's going to lord over it. So what we had to do, is run Exceed on the things to open virtual X windows onto the real computers, on which our actual work was done. This was supposedly a pretty common situation at the rest of LMCO as well.
In the course of doing latter jobs, and interviewing for others, I've discovered that this is stupidly common within other government contractors as well, and not uncommon outside. So I've little doubt that it's pretty common in the actual military as well.
I can't even BEGIN to imagine just HOW many windows PCs are out there, complete with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, etc. etc. etc., all those licenses doing nothing but burning money; when the only purpose they wind up serving is as a glorified dumb terminal.
(PS. Oh yeah... it's not too hard to change the graphic on the start menu button, startup screen, or most other places, so that's no indication that it's not windows.)
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...