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Inside SAIC
An anonymous reader submits this profile of SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, the behemoth defense contractor/research outfit/spymaster.
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"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
I work for an employee-owned company that is modeled after SAIC, and it is pretty cool. You can clearly see that your work is contributing to the success of the company, which is driving the growth of the stock value, which is putting money in your pocket. And we attract a lot of top-notch people because of that.
If you didn't read too far into the article you might get the wrong impression, though. Twice on the first page they say that it's privately held, and it's only on the second page where employee ownership is discussed.
The "invisible company" angle of this article cracks me up. Seems like you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an SAIC employee. Everyone knows about them. They're everywhere. Finding a person who hadn't heard of SAIC would about as easy as finding someone who hasn't heard of Microsoft. But I guess that's just my world. Good article, tho.
BTW, if you are a java programmer in the DC area interested in doing defense work with a great company, send me your resume.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
I for one have never heard of this company before today and I'm pretty shocked. I've been pretty vocal about worries on TIA issues, but geeze...
On the other hand perhaps it was better "before" when we the people didn't know about everything and just believed blindly in our government to protect us.
intelligence officials say they're pumping new material through SAIC-designed systems virtually around the clock This sounds dodgy: they must be checking everything (text messages etc) to beable to narrow it down to just the ones they're looking for if the terrorists keep changing phones. Surely this is illegal?
Is it a boat?
I worked at SAIC and the oddest thing there was that as an employee you were really dealt with like a contractor. You worked on your project until it was done, and when it was done you were left to your own accord to find a new project to work on. You could hope that your manager would take you with him/her to their next project - but your skillset wouldn't always allow that.
Very strange indeed, having to worry about your job all the time.
joe.
kryzx@jeh.net
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
I almost worked for SAIC a few years ago. I was about to accept their job offer, but then I was turned off when discussing advancement opportunities within the company. Apparently, unlike most of geekdom which is ruled by skills, the only real way to advance in SAIC is to hang a bunch of degrees and certifications on your wall. Regardless of your skill level, degrees and certifications are what count towards promotions and advancement.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've met a ton of people with great credentials who are morons and many non-degreed and non-certified people who are excellent people to work and deal with. IMO, there's no hard and fast rule either way. Degrees don't make you smart and vice versa.
Why do I h8 apple?
I bet at least 20% of /. readers are in the gov't and defense industry. 'Course, they don't have nearly as much time to write comments as all the unemployed dot-commers.
(ok, before you flame me, I can make fun of unemployed dot-commers because I was one back in the day. An awful lot of us landed in the defense world.)
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
Seems like you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an SAIC employee.
That's Scene 24, right?
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
I work for SAIC, and employee ownership is pretty kickass, and the long list of "cool shit" that we do keeps getting larger and larger. My favorite part by far is that since everyone is an owner, the "retard rate" is alot lower - that guy slacking off is costing you money, so everyone busts ass.
The company is VERY conservative, lots of ex-military folks, but even conservative companies understand saving money, so at our division Open Source reigns supreme.
At our office we use Redhat, Debian, PostgreSQL, Bugzilla, and CVS almost exclusively. We all have linux desktops and laptops, even though the "corporate standard" is Exchange. We can get away with this because SAIC acts more like a cluster of tiny companies rather than a monolith. As long as we remain profitable, we can really do almost what we want.
My boss donates space to the local LUG at night to hold meetings, because they recognize the value of fostering professional development, AND it gives them a nice steady hiring pool.
If you ever have a chance to interview for SAIC then do it.
This is one company that i certainly hope never IPO's...imagine taking decisions about secret technologies to the stock holders...
What, like these companies?
Boeing
Lockheed Martin
United Technologies
Being listed on the stock exchange hasn't lead to these companies (and many others like them) being denied defense contracts or them leaking military secrets so why should you expect that to be a problem for SAIC?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
After reading the article through two or three times, I can certainly say it's interesting. What is REALLY interesting though is the message embedded in the article. Didn't expect that, did you?
Seriously, check it out. ROT13 the article, then drop every other character. Finally, use the alphabet backwards starting a S for one char, then A for the next, I for the next, C for the next, and repeat.
VERY clever. The message is certainly worth the effort decrypting.
KIKOMANThe interesting point about SAIC is the "private market" for company shares that the company itself maintains. How well does that really work for employees who don't want to have a disproportionate share of their savings tied to their company's stock?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Now that's the sort of conspiricy theory FUD that slashdot has been lacking for a long time! lol.
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
SAIC is not secretive. It just doesn't a "Investor Relations" dept. whose job is to hype its name on Wall St. and CNBC.
SAIC _has_ bid against itself for government contracts (highly embarassing). This is because the company is very diversified and has little vertical control coordination. Each unit operates like a small business. They are responsible for their own profit/loss. I've known a unit a unit to sub-contract to another company, because they didn't know the capability was already in house.
Employee ownership:
All employees are equal, but some are more equal than others.
SAIC played a huge part in the Venezuelan government-owned PDVSA lockout. SAIC handled all the computer related technologies of the billion-dollar company, and when the strike started all the computer systems where sabotaged (thousands of machines with all the passwords changed, wireless network cards for shutting down the gas-filling plants when tried to be restarted, and a lot more).
...).
How can this be? In a country that has a oil industry of over 40 billion US$ a year, how can a known US defense contractor and spymaster get hold of all the computer systems? Well, some time ago (about six years ago) the president of Venezuela, seeing the inminent election of Hugo Chavez as the next president, hurried a deal between SAIC and PDVSA to create a PDVSA subsidiary called INTEVEP. INTEVEP was the technology provider for PDVSA and, as specified in the contract, it had a monopoly of all technology related operations in the state owned PDVSA. The idea was this: PDVSA gave all the infrastructure and hardware (computers, offices, etc), and SAIC gave almost nothing. At the end they where 50-50 partners (how come, nobody knows
When the oil strike started on december, INTEVEP was one of the first to stop working, cancelling contracts with thousands of independent contractors who, to this day, remain on the streets without a job. Meanwhile, the people who took over the administration of PDVSA and relaunched the operations started to cease the contract with SAIC and decided to liquidate INTEVEP.
Guess what??? The contract signed 6 years ago says very clear that, in the case where PDVSA cancelled the contract, it had to pay (buy to) SAIC for all the INTEVEP properties, which were given by PDVSA as its part of the agreement.
In the end, PDVSA has paid over a hundred million dollars, and a lot more has to yet be paid for infrastructure and obsolete hardware that had been bought by them in the first place.
Union? At SAIC?
Ha!!!
Surely, thou art a troll.
The interesting point about SAIC is the "private market" for company shares that the company itself maintains. How well does that really work for employees who don't want to have a disproportionate share of their savings tied to their company's stock?
Well, for one thing, the 401(K) plan gives you a list of mutual funds/bonds/etc. of varying degree of risk to invest in, pretty much the same as any typical 401(K). You don't need to invest in SAIC if you don't want to (although you certainly can.) SAIC's company match is given in the form of SAIC stock, but that is hardly unusual.
SAIC gives its employees lots of chances to buy company stock (and stock options), and it gives out things like stock options and fully-vested shares as performance bonuses, but nobody is required to invest their retirement savings in it. If somebody's got 100% of their retirement funds in SAIC stock, that's because that's the way they wanted it.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Yeah, just imagine...
I wish I could pull this back up:
2001-03-30 23:34:37 CIA Goes Investing in High-Tech as In-Q-Tel (articles,tech) (rejected)
Whom are the stockholders of the CIA? (rhetorical question)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm a subcontractor at Lockheed Martin along with a number of SAIC subs, and I can't say that I've been all that impressed with all of them. Most of them that I've known have been testers, so maybe that's the low rung at SAIC. Also, they never appeared to be that happy with SAIC.
I'd much prefer to be in my situation, where two guys own 51% of the company and give out stock to exceptional employees instead of everyone. They make sure we get great benefits, and despite our high fringe rate, our overall rates are still lower than most because of our low overhead.
I heard that they are working on a new project called Skynet or something like. Something along the lines of an AI to help protect us...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Read the post you're replying to again. The author is advertising his own employee-owned business, not SAIC.
-Billy
When I was just starting out in the field I worked for SAIC in NewPort, RI. before the days of GPS. They designed a Satelite calibrated Loran system. The best part of the job was going out to sea testing the equipment. We would go out to find a submerged bouy, get to the coordinates, release the bouy to see how close we got. It was a fun job. Ah... but I was young and I wanted my career to evolve and work with embedded controllers. I'd have to say the SAIC partys were pretty cool too.
My question was more geared as to how that market works - since it doesn't use the public capital markets for price determination, how does the price get set in the first place?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I start working for SAIC next Monday - I am actually pretty stoked to see what's up inside the company.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
when you leave you're forced to liquidate all your holdings in the company.
As long as the company size is growing or stable there's no problem here.
What, pray tell, would happen if some big contracts didn't come through and a bunch of people were all let go at the same time?
Seems to me, with the constrained marketplace for SAIC shares, you could get a big drop in the effective share price. The people going out the door would be doubly pissed: once for having been let go, once for getting a pittance for their shares as they depart into the ranks of the unemployed.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I work in a place where we have to justify ourselves by getting projects that bring in money to the department. Its an interesting place to work, and really fast paced if you want it to be. But you can't ever worry about your job, if you can't find another project then its a bitch, but that gets determined by you, not the company finding work for you to do. This kind of approach keeps people there as long as things are interesting, but when they cool down people have a way of leaving, but we get lots of people that come back to do interesting projects even after they have left, so its a interesting model.
That's a good question. :-) SAIC has got a broker/dealer subsidiary called Bull, Inc. that essentially operates an internal market that allows employees to buy or sell shares. The price is determined by a process too complicated for me to explain (based on performance of similar companies, other external market factors, etc.) It sounds a bit unusual (like the fox guarding the henhouse, since Bull is an SAIC subsidiary) but something must be working.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Much of the work may be hidden, but it has never been more vital. SAIC is on the front lines of today's most momentous national security battles. It's not too much to say that the future safety of many Americans rests in the aged hands of a brilliant and quirky septuagenarian and his clandestine army of techno geeks.
A nice piece of prop...writing.
I, for one, would feel safer without top secret companies and organizations, because what you don't know can hurt you.
The problem with companies that deal in security is, they're always trying to convince you that you need them, as it would be counterproductive for them to admit, at any time, that they are not needed. (Also an interesting problem with pharmeceutical companies.)
But that's just my cynical view...
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
LSI is prolly what enables Echelon to process so many faxes and conversations.
Step 1 is an ass-numbing 8-hour indoctrination into the company and how not to harrass people, how to report wrongdoing, yada yada yada. I just went through it a few months ago and boy did it suck. Not to mention that the Human Resources people have the flexibility of a piece of ceramic. Other than that, it's been ok.
Imagine one of those robots (depicted in the article) approaching you with its menacing video camera peering at you. What's the first thing any sane person would do... labotomize it (and in the process gain a free iPAQ).
come on fhqwhgads
I was surprised to see that they were mentioned on slashdot. Ever since working for them, I've rarely met anyone who has even heard of the name. But I guess they don't need to advertise to the general public.
Contracting for them was actually my first professional programming experience, as I had only completed two years of a four year degree when I started. I wasn't working on any of the cutting edge stuff mentioned in the article though, our project was an internal website.
It was a good experience, even though I never really got any ownership of my own...and we had to wear ties.
Yeah, I have a webcomic...
I've got a trackball built by SAIC. It's lasted me for, oh, 5 years? And it still shows NO signs of anything approaching failure. I got it off ebay, the seller claimed it was designed for submarines and I wouldn't be surprised. It's ugly as hell and about 1/3 the size of a 104-key keyboard but with keyboard key buttons instead of lame ass normal microswitch type buttons. I have yet to figure out how to take the ball out to clean it, but then again, it has never been necessary to do so. .45 round right through the middle and keep on working. Pair this up with one of those old IBM "tank" PS/2 keyboards and NOTHING will ever stop you from inputting into your computer.
I have the distinct impression that this thing could take a
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
I have a relative who works for SAIC, and it's not all spooks and defense work. The National Institutes of Health also sub contracts large portions of it's intramural research to SAIC labs, both on the main Bethesda MD campus and sattelite campuses scattered around. As for the quality of the organization, relative to the rest of the NIH, it really depends. The cost sensitivites are a bit different than working for the government proper, and perhaps there is a slightly higher caliber of employees at SAIC, but that may as much be the lack of cushy, sit in the break room and read the paper, job security a government job gets you.
Seems like you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an SAIC employee.
Man, government regulations are getting harsh.
It's downmodded as a troll because likening a labor union to the mafia is considered a bit juvenile.
I can answer this from my own experience.
I was an employee there (1988-1993). When you signed up for a 401(k), the first $2000 of your contributions and all of the companies contributions
went into company stock.
Once a quarter, you could trade out of company stock, but you had to take the initiative.
If you were a high-level manager, I suppose you would have to explain why you kept selling SAIC stock.
But I was just a programmer there and I did sell blocks of stock that were in my IRA.
I would have made more money if I had left it in SAIC stock though.
The article says that they beat the S&P 500 and I can attest to that during the years I was there.
In 20 years of working in the computer business I have never seen more formal project management -- especially on fixed price contracts.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
The city where I live in Canada is the provincial capital. A number of years ago the provincial government created a new health care agency called SHIN whose purpose was to facilitate the development of a provincial health care network. SAIC was awarded the contract to do all the necessary IT work involved to make SHIN's vision a reality.
They have done some really cool things. They utilized the existing Internet infrastructure to allow pharmacists in remote areas of the province to be able to send their prescription data to a mainframe here in Regina. They have also provided doctors with wireless communications using PDAs for appointments, emergencies, etc. The grander picture here is that since the province was wired with fibre-optic cable a long time ago (thanks to the wide-open geography and a telephone company with a lot of foresight) they plan on allowing doctors to view CT scans, MRI scans, etc. real time over a network. There are also plans in place to even have surgeries performed where a general surgeon is performing the operation in one location being guided by a specialist in a different location.
SAIC definately does some neat stuff and as time passes I hope that the work they do benefits the pathetic health care system we have right now.
back when I got my PhD and was job hunting, I applied for a couple of jobs with SAIC. They looked like a good company to work for. I ended up with a job somewhere else before I got interviewed with SAIC, though.
The point of your post is?
Not only are they doing whatever it is that they do at ORNL (it is black stuff I am sure), they are also writing pretty cool Remedy apps for us here.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
That's funny, I used to work for SAIC when my whole division was canned. Now I work in a much more secure job in the private sector. (Insurance Industry)
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
I worked for a compnay that was acquired by SAIC in the late 90's, and there was a lot of concern by some employees about working for "a military industrial complex" company. So SAIC invited all employees to hear about the tremendous non-military stuff they did. One guy spoke at length about SAICs' position in health care research. At the end of his talk, an employee asked "so, exactly what kind of health case research are we talking about here?" The red-faced reply from the SAIC guy: "Uhh... the effects of nuclear radiation on the human body". Sigh.... so close and yet so far....
The last time I wrote code, it was Morse
SAIC can be a great place to work if you are a PM, VP or above. Otherwise, you are just considered contract labor that will probably be laid off at the end of whatever contract you are on. The VP's and project managers move on to the next contract and the worker bees are all let go. Great place to be a boss. ('Course if the PM ticks off the contractor (The Army, in our case), the contract closes even earlier, all the worker bees get terminated, and the PM just goes on to the next SAIC contract. I was the last one out the door of about 70 FTE's.) The weirdest thing about SAIC is that it is so much like it's biggest customer -- Uncle Sam. All the Big VPs used to work in the areas (and Agencies) in which they are now expected to produce contracts. Fancy that.
Okay, they're freaking geniouses, but why on God's green earth did they stop neighboring companies from coming to their cafeteria for national security concerns?
Dr B. give me a break. I'm hungry!
While I currently don't work there, I put in nearly 14 years at SAIC. I could write my own long article about it, but I'll try to summarize:
1. The most important thing to remember is the company is set up to make money through strong cost control measures. This mostly describes the rest of the items.
2. If a contract ends for any reason, you've got 2 weeks to find a job within the company, if you don't you are out of the company. It rarely carries employees who don't have a contract to charge to. They did improve and add programs to make it easier to see what jobs are available.
3. Some employees are more equal than others. These are the few that know somebody that can carry them longer than 2 weeks while they look for a job. They also tend to get paid more for equal or lesser work. The more equal ones tend to be around long enough to really score on the internal stock.
4. The company is a collection of lots of little companies that don't talk well to each other, and fight over all kinds of things. If they don't make money, the managers get removed or the group/division/project goes away.
5. Contrary to the article, a lot more work is done at SAIC in more mundane areas including software testing, maintenance, and other "fun" activities for other companies or Gov't contracts. I know I was on several of them, but I did get to work on some fun contracts also.
That is probably enough for now. If you need a job, SAIC is a decent place to work depending on which little company inside it you end up in. You can also get some decent experience, but as always keep your eyes open.
I have two SAIC stories:
-- A group of developers at my company entered negitiations with the local SAIC Head-Guy to move to SAIC. When negotiations between the group of employees and SAIC broke down, the Head-Guy called my company's HR department and ratted them out. HR was not amused.
-- Two local SAIC offices bid against each other for the same contract. One office got the win, the other the pink slip. Classic!
From the article:
He created a special arm of SAIC called Bull Inc. that effectively acts as a trading floor for the stock, setting a price for the shares based on SAIC's performance and that of peer companies.
It's kind of interesting when people say that SAIC stock is based on peer companies, earnings, and things like that. My dad works for SAIC, and he showed me the formula they use:
(a_bunch_of_really_complicated_math) * K
The bunch_of_math part is what uses the other companies' performance, and most people don't notice the K at the end. K is given some important sounding name, but it really boils down to "whatever we want to multiply everything by." Kind of a dirty way of hiding the fact that they set the stock price to whatever they want.
It's an interesting company, and I like their employee-owned thinking, but this always makes me laugh.
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" - Vroomfondel, H2G2
The funny part about working for SAIC (which I do) is that we (SAICers) read articles all the time about how exciting and revolutionary we are or how we are developing some new and exciting technology to solve some incredible problem and we just say to each other, "Did you know we did that?" Then we go back to our middle of the road technology on our over-managed, over-budget projects and wonder if that group is hiring...
Bureaucracy was the order of the day over there. We were in the same time zone, but inexplicably the roving cast of developers we had to work with would inevitably be out when we had to get in touch with them; any requests for fixes had to be routed through their project managers who couldn't find their own developers until they relented and let us contact the developers which was great until mail started bouncing and we found out that the developers had left. Great communication skills.
For all I know, they could still be using the half-assed bug tracker I knocked out in a day or two (and kept revising and revising) over there. It's why I get a kick out of the black helicopter set who are all doom and gloom about SAIC and the gub'mint - SAIC really is too clueless to do anything more sinister than fuck projects up.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
were awarded a contract to expand the seismic network used to do nuclear testban treaty verification, in competition with a company I do business with. Unfortunately, they were planning to use our equipment, apparently not realizing that we weren't going to produce the equipment unless we got the whole support contract. In the end I heard it turned into a real cluster-fuck.
The official line is : Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a Fortune 500 company, is the largest employee-owned research and engineering company in the United States. We provide information technology, systems integration and eSolutions worldwide.
The important point is that we are very diverse. The best explaination of our corporate makeup is to describe a solar system of companies with SAIC corporate in the middle. The organzation is very flat and transparent.
As much as I like the cuetsy characterizations of SAIC as a spy haven with wizards and towers and stuff, the truth is less exciting. The vast masjority of our constacts are straight meat-and potato development and support work. We do just about anything tech related, and we do it very well. please disgregaurd the SIG below.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
It's no surprise you wrote as an Anonymous Coward, but you may as well wrote as Totally Uninformed Coward. I used to work for PDVSA, and I can assure you there is now way to manipulate the production facilities by any other way than actually being there, at the control consoles. The remote capabilities are for monitoring only, and unless you're a hopeless control freak, you can continue to work without them. As for the 'wireless network card' used for the sabotage, they simply don't exist outside offices. My guess you got you information from the highly unreliable sources close to the goverment, such as a really idiotic woman who said to the ever greater idiot we have for a president (Hugo Chavez) that each valve had an IP Address and by using satellite signals, those valves could be manipulated. Any person with even a basic understanding of oil technologies knows that the said capabilities are at this point, if not impossible, impractical, and they certaily don't exist anywhere in the world. Those reasons were given as an excuse for the disasters cuased by the morons the goverment brought in to replace the legitimate oil workers. How can an mechanical engineer with no experience possibly replace a guy with 20 year experience in a particualr facility? The answer: they can't. And all the accidents happening at the different production sites prove that.
I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
Remember that we have SAIC to thank for the jokers at Network Solutions (now Verisign) having so much power over Internet DNS.
Networking With Spooks by John Dillon
It's Time For ICANN To Go by John Gilmore
This seems very much like a company that's driven mostly by the founder. This is evidenced in simple statements like a flock of geese following the leader as he runs, occasionally dropping a bread crumb for them to consume into their spiral notebooks.
Traditionally, companies like this tend not to fare well after the founder leaves. Infighting becomes rampant, and rarely do any successors have the founders visionary ability.
So what happens when he goes? Is the CIA/NSA/Secret Police going to be stuck high and dry? This seems like a serious case of putting way too many eggs in one basket.
These are the guys that were trying to develop some anti-gravity devices. I also recall hearing that they had some small scale prototypes working.
I also heard that they had something to do with Ross Perot at one time and that all of the top dogs are Illuminati..
Spooks, oh yeah. And there's more than meets the eye..
One of the cuter projects SAIC worked on was remote viewing. A guys named Ed May did some work there under government funding until 1995. Spooky shit but having met and worked with some of these guys (I was on SAIC's software process board for a year or so) I can say the real guys are not very interesting. The science of psi stuff is very primitive -- not because it's not real - but because there's no good theory yet. Quantum "computing" will probably drive developments of theory here more than the empericists. There just isn't an emperical question any more as to whether psi phenomena are real -- it is all down to developing good testable hypotheses that feed theory.
Seastead this.
Whoa,
As UNIX Sysadmin at said office now, I'm willing to make a few guesses as to your name. b)
There is _NO_ career track within this company, at least not within any one department. There are only two ways I've ever seen a promotion after five plus years here:
1. Pull a dogbert
2. Essential quit one division, and get hired elsewhere in the company.
I've heard SAIC described a few ways:
1. It's the world's most diversified privately run mutual fund.
2. Ex Gov't country club.
3. A pyramid scheme.
4. Saturdays Are InCluded
5. HUGE
I find that it's designed to be the BEST second career-job of any established professional. Also happens to be a great way to build XP to get your first one too.
As for conservative: I'm likely to get a phone call tomorrow for posting this.
Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
They run a tight ship, and produce good stuff. It's a cool place to work, but the work can be really hard. IMHO, they spend a lot of time creating workarounds for stuff that's already implemented, but starting from scratch doesn't necessarily guarantee a better product.
stuff |
Quote:
"It's the largest private IT firm in the nation. It's turned a profit for 33 straight years. And it's on the front lines of the war on terror. So why haven't you heard of SAIC?"
Dammit, it's not for want of trying and there were quite a few of us who did a few years ago.
They are quite arrogant, SAIC/CIAS it's where old spokes go to pasture.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I attend UCSD, about a quarter mile from the SAIC headquarters. One of my computer science professors this quarter is a senior programmer for SAIC. He is one of the most dedicated knowledgeable professors I have ever had. Not only does he hold a full time position with SAIC, but he teaches my CS class, holds the discussions (no other class I have had has the professor ever done that), holds all of his office hours, and tutors in the lab until midnight some nights. If this is a representation of the type of people that work at SAIC then I have nothing but respect for that company.
SAIC used to be a big user of the MUMPS (or M) language, and a major sponsor of the M Technology Association.
I wonder if they are still using it and whether any of the big projects mentioned are based on it?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Things that make you go hmmm...
Those who trade freedom for security will lose both, and deserve neither" -- Ben Franklin
Actually it was Unreal (not the game by the same name, though) and Second Reality. I wouldn't say the demo scene has gone underground. I think it is outside the golden age though, when you could do more impressive things in demos than in games. I think these days games are more works of art and coding skill than demos. Recently I picked up a DVD with lots of PC demos you could watch on your TV (video captured). Oh ya, it's called "Mindcandy vol 1. PC Demos" It's actually produced by Hornet (the demoscene ftp server guys) if you remember them. www.mindcandydvd.com So you can watch 2nd reality anytime you want without having to whip out the Gravis Ultrasound and CONFIG.SYS menu editor. :-)
No, it's not INCREDIBLY complicated (although it does sound scary) and the algorithm (or a close relative) is publically available and studied. A google search for that or for "latent semantic indexing" turns up plenty of research lab pages. LSI is related to "latent semantic analysis" (maybe the two terms mean the same thing, I'm not exactly sure).
I'll leave it up to you to judge whether it "processes language in much the same way the human mind". As for my opinion, note that the algorithm ignores the ordering of words in the documents. LSA has been offered as a model of word learning in infants, though.
The algorithm is this:
- Represent your corpus as a matrix, with words as rows, and documents as columns. The number of times a word occurs in a document is the entry in the matrix.
- Apply a certain pre-processing transformation to each cell of the matrix -- this is a scary looking formula but it can be written on one line.
- Take the SVD (singular value decomposition) of the matrix and then throw out some of the lower singular values (set them to 0).
- Multiply the SVD back together again to get a least-squares best approximation of the original matrix, given the constraint that you threw out some of the dimensions (I think that this business of the SVD essentially solves the problem "Gimme a matrix which is of of a small rank, but which behaves as much as possible like the one that I had initially" -- you can sort of interpret "rank" as "simplicity", so you are sort of approximating the original matrix with a simpler one).
- Now you have a vector for each document. Consider the similarity of two documents to be given by the similarity between their vectors ("similarity" between vectors could be taken by the cosine between vectors).
Apologies if I've made any mistakes. Here's one paper that describes the actual algorithm (and gives the preprocessing formula, which I haven't stated here): Landauer, T. K., Laham, D., & Foltz, P. W., (1998). Learning human-like knowledge by Singular Value Decomposition: A progress report."Successful software development" by Scott E. Donaldso and Stanley G. Siegel is one of the ones I've been looking at lately - the authors work at SAIC, and after reading it a bit I looked up the company a few weeks ago - very interesting place, it sounds like.
Energy: time to change the picture.
By the way, SAIC bought Telcordia (Bellcore) a while ago.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
BTW, if you are a java programmer in the DC area interested in doing defense work with a great company, send me your resume.
s topscud.jar
Fantastic...java in the defense industry
"Soldier, there's an incoming scud...fire those patriots...now!"
Click
Grind...Grind....Grind....Grind
exception in thread main, java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError..."No class found called gov.defence.patriot.FindAndStopScud"
"Hang on sir...think my classpath may be pooched"
Export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/usr/java/lib/defence/please
Click
Grind....Grind....Grind
2 weeks, 4 days, 13 hours, 3 minutes later....patriot fires.
oh I could go on forever...haven't even touched on the 40 foot wide security whole that JVMPI would introduce.
Though one good thing...everytime you called System.gc() every U.S. soldier and politician would suddently find themselves miraculously sitting on a boat heading for home..."What tha? How'd that happen"
Speaking as an IT guy about to get out of the military w/ a higher level security clearance, they alway seem to be hiring people like me.
This guy is way out there
the boss is known to toss off as he jogs
wtf?
It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one!
What the hell are you talking about?
You and me both. I work for SAIC and yy entire group doesn't do a thing spy related. We do portals, webpages, and analytical junk on treaty agreements.
United Airlines was employee-owned too. The employee unions kept on voting themselves juicier contracts until it went bankrupt. The total market cap is now less than the price of a jetliner.
I've always had a really bad opinion of SAIC since I ran into them as my first defense subcontractor at my first job with an aerospace manufacturer. Maybe it's not fair to carry a negative opinion after so long (It's been 18 years), but this was so bad that I've never forgotten it.
The setting is a now-merged aerospace company in Southern California. We had a contract from the Air Force to develop one of the stupidest devices I've ever run across - a "flexible" assembly fixture that could programmatically reposition all the "hard points" to support aluminum panels as they are riveted together. Granted, the fixtures aren't cheap - most of them cost at least several thousand dollars, but this was replacing a $10,000 system with a $5 million one. (Oh, and there are dozens in use on any given day in a single plant - the logistics is a pain, but get real...) Anyway, as a young robotics engineer, it seemed like an interesting project, even if it made no economic sense.
SAIC was contracted to do the basic design and preliminary feasibility analysis. (Why we didn't do it ourselves given their demonstrated incompetence, is beyond me...) I still remember how in no fewer than probably a dozen places in the document and presentation, their "brilliant" young engineer (who was actually a couple of years older than I was at the time) kept pointing out how absolutely vital it was that SAIC's design used six bolts (all into the same flat plate) to restrain the device in six degrees of freedom. He really believed you needed one bolt per degree to hold something to a flat plate! The document had been reviewed by SAIC's "more experienced" hands, but when we complained about getting crap for our money, they pretty much said, "if you don't like our design, do it yourself". We did, and I've never been willing to work with SAIC since then. (Unfortunately, on of the worst PHB's I've ever encountered in the real world forced a decision to keep far too much of the SAIC design he had spent so much of the company's money on, so the project was doomed. I transferred to another group, and never looked back...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
When "Randi" went to a monetary challenge without a clearly verifiable -- widely recognized -- objective for acquiring the money, he departed from so-called "science" and entered dispute processing. His failure to allow adjudication via normal dispute processing leaves his definition of "scientific" in dispute just as much as it would if PSITECH were to try to define a panel of retired federal judges as "scientific" -- which they didn't. Rather than rhetorically posture about "my scientists are holier than your scientists" PSITECH just did the honest thing -- particularly given Randi's insistance on (and I'm sure everyone's hope of) avoiding the courts -- and that was what most people do when they avoid courts -- they find a suitable substitute usually via arbitration.
Seastead this.