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Work Progressing on Army's Future Combat Systems

Posted by Soulskill on from the enjoy-debugging-that dept.

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."

49 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Zombie by Krneki · · Score: 2, Funny

    Damn, I was looking forward to zombie soldiers.

    --
    Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
  2. And Appropriately by AndGodSed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes. It does run Linux.

    --

    Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity

    1. Re:And Appropriately by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You guys would be appalled at the bad software that's in this thing. From a bizarrely dysfunctional display system to a completely unstable and ever changing target OS. Yes, it runs linux but Boeing has decided that linux isn't good enough and is rolling out their own operating environment that we're all forced to use.

      Blecch. Blecch. Blechh.

      Oh, and the whole thing hinges on futuristic radios that don't work.

      Yeah, I think I've been working FCS for too long. Sigh...

    2. Re:And Appropriately by VON-MAN · · Score: 2, Funny

      Damn right, and just as my linux computer here it can heal its connection withing seconds without booting! Anybody here use Windows? Loosers!!!

      Now, let's read the article.

    3. Re:And Appropriately by dave1791 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The job of the army is not to "prevent" future combat, but to prepare for it and execute if if needed. The diplomatic job of preventing it falls to... well, diplomats and politicians.

      And I hate to say it, but we do live in a Bismarkian world where military strength, like economic clout, is an asset on the scorecard of diplomatic maneuver. If you are poor and weak, nobody will listen to you. If you are rich and weak or poor and strong, people might listen. If you are rich and strong, your diplomats carry the most clout.

    4. Re:And Appropriately by casi0qv · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm not worried about our diplomats carrying insufficient clout. I am worried about the victims of our numerous pointless wars in the past and present. I do not see the world as a giant game of monopoly where we are endlessly seeking to increase our power and wealth. The world is full of people who all share a common desire to live a happy and fulfilling life, yet millions die for the pointless greedy ambitions of a few powerful men. As people gifted with technical skills we cannot let ourselves be blinded to what is going on in the world, for an opportunity to play with expensive toys and use our skills to develop weapons that kill innocent people. We cannot afford to have a frail grasp on how our actions fit into the bigger picture when a few lines of code can be part of a machine used to murder for political ambition.

    5. Re:And Appropriately by casi0qv · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The United States has a corrupt government, where people are lied to and brainwashed into supporting wars for the personal ambitions of a few wealthy men, not the benefit or defense of the nation. We are ALL responsible for letting this happen, and have a responsibility to stop it. Not just the corrupt diplomats and politicians, as we are electing them and allowing them to do this.

    6. Re:And Appropriately by kong74 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I agree with the first, that it's simply not the job of the army to prevent combat. But if "military strength, like economic clout, is an asset on the scorecard of diplomatic maneuver" maybe it's got something to do with what diplomacy is about? I mean the world is not "Bismarkian" by itself and it simply can't be true that every state is just concerned that people are listening to him. They have their causes for war and they are always prepared, because it's the same causes they have in peace, the only difference is the means. And these causes are: controlling the homeland, be the exclusive force there to use the people by law - force them to produce money. And: controlling other powers, force them to be useful for the very own money-production. It is that simple, and everybody knows about it: the main concern in every nation is "the growth" - how good does the nation produce more money with the money it has. The truth, of course, is that not the money produces the money, they just account their success by comparing money-sums. You need work under the command of capital to do growth, an that antagonism is the reason why an exclusive force is needed in the homeland ... And it gets very complicated until some diplomats are walking around on coktailpartys and testing the mood. So although the cause is very simple, it gets a complicated thing there someone might look at and just be not able to see what it is all about - like Go, very simple rules, but if you look at a game of masters in Go, it's a big riddle.

    7. Re:And Appropriately by kong74 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Money is not a physical thing, it's a political, or a social thing. And that's why physical thoughts on growth don't help with your question. Second: money was not "invented", and it doesn't serve the humans. How comes the money when it was not invented? I try a very short explanation: Money is the inevitable result of a special social relation, the private property. How that comes to be the basis of every social relation, the dominant thing in what humans have to do with each other, is a question far beyond the scope of an internet-forum, it's the whole history. But the important thing to understand is that private property is not the thing that you own, but the relation to others enclosed in that you own the thing: the thing is exclusively under your command, what you want rules the thing, and that you own it excludes everybody else from using it without your accordance. Where everything is the property of someone, the individuals walk around and behave like their volitions living in the things, it's their relation to exclude each other that appears to be the things attribute to be the property of someone else. But that's not the end of the story, because humans need to exchange things, they are not stand-alone systems. And it's not at the beginning of the history, that they begin to compare different amounts of different things under one aspect: what is their value? In other words: what, of the same, are these different things? or: how much property of mine is the same as how much property of yours? Value is the extent of property, regardless of what one ones: shoes, computers, tables, etc. And these things are really the same only in one respect, and that respect becomes effective behind the consciousness of the humans: they are an amount of averaged social, abstract work (or do you say labor? - I'm not native English-speaking). This extend emerges as a result of competition, everything gets compared to everything, always interested to give as few as possible and get as much as possible. But nobody can see any amount of averaged social, abstract work, it's a social amplitude, not a physical thing. Nobody is conscious of that amplitude but everybody is interested in things owned by someone else and has only the means of what he owns himself to get these things. Everybody is interested in setting some things he owns the same as some things someone else owns. So they compare it to a third thing: weed for example. Mine is 2 weed, yours is 4 weed, I give mine for half of yours. That's the beginning of money, in very short terms. And money doesn't serve the humans, most humans know it the other way round: as prices they can't pay

    8. Re:And Appropriately by vbraga · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When the only thing you have is an army, all problems looks like wars.

      Call me utopian, but if you - and the biggest player of our democracy game - keeps acting in a Machiavellian (or Bismarkian, as you say) our future has no space for peace. If you don't keep your ideals in sight, the only thing you're left is the (international) politics game.

      Yes, I understand your pragmatism and having people like you is an asset at any negotiation. But, please, just remember that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is an unalienable rights of man, as your Declaration of Independence states, not a right of the americans, but of man. So, let the other countries do it too.

      The only winning move is not to play. Not to play the Bismarkian game.

      --
      English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
    9. Re:And Appropriately by c6gunner · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The United States has a corrupt government
      As opposed to what nation? North Korea? China?

      This "corrupt government" nonsense really gets to me. The US government is quite possibly one of the least corrupt governments on the planet, yet you act as if you're currently under the boot of the Fourth Reich. Give your head a shake!
    10. Re:And Appropriately by c6gunner · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I do not see the world as a giant game of monopoly where we are endlessly seeking to increase our power and wealth.
      That's your own problem. Why should the government let your naiveté influence policy? If you want to stick your head in the dirt and ignore the rest of the world, fine, but the rest of us will go on seeking to constantly increase our knowledge, wealth, productivity, and power. Maybe you've got some metaphysical touchy-feely answer as to what the purpose of life is, but for me, and billions like me, it's achieving as much as I possibly can today, and improving as much as I possibly can tomorrow.

      The world is full of people who all share a common desire to live a happy and fulfilling life, yet millions die for the pointless greedy ambitions of a few powerful men.
      That's because the world is also full of people who all share a common desire to be the alpha-male, and control what everyone else does, says, reads, eats, fucks, and even thinks. And those people would put a serious hurtin' on sheep like you if you didn't have a military and police force to protect you. Whether you like it or not, it IS a dog-eat-dog world out there. Playing ostrich isn't going to change that fact.
    11. Re:And Appropriately by cshotton · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Be VERY afraid. FCS/SoSCOE (System of Systems Common Operating Environment) is your worst, worst nightmare. It all squats upon an antiquated CORBA infrastructure and is the most bloated, incredibly poorly engineered PoS that has ever been birthed by an aerospace contractor. And I should know. As chief architect for the Common Operating System component of DARPA's J-UCAS program, we fought Boeing long and hard over their insistence that this architecture form the basis of the J-UCAS software infrastructure. While the idea stems from the long-running quest within the DoD to develop a true cross-service network-centric software architecture, it was built by people who completely ignored the last 15 years of lessons learned about large scale distributed systems from the Internet. It has multiple single points of failure baked into the architecture, requires outrageous amounts of RAM and CPU power to run (making it incredibly unsuitable for embedded systems use), and is licensed in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to obtain and modify without Boeing's involvement.

      Furthermore, Boeing has expressed in public on several occasions that they intend for SoSCOE to make them the "Microsoft" of military systems. They are purposefully engineering a system designed to cement their position as a sole provider of OS components for network centric platforms. Nice bastardization of the open source components they are using to say the least.

      Having tried repeatedly to get 2 SoSCOE nodes to communicate, we subsequently replicated 100% of the functionality that J-UCAS required using less than 150,000 lines of code and $2M of budget. Makes you wonder how long we need to support the programmer welfare for Boeing's "software engineers" and their 60 million line monstrosity if it can all be done with 400 times less code than that?

      --

      Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
    12. Re:And Appropriately by Lord+Lemur · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You make a great set of points.
      I would like to ask a question or two that you might have an answer for, and that is pretty f'ing relevant. Didn't anyone stop to think, that maybe it's not the best approach to allow our military logistical communications to be built on an infrastructure of Open-Source parts. Wouldn't that make finding holes much easier for our enemies? How do you classify and protect open-source code, even if you are just using components?

    13. Re:And Appropriately by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2, Informative

      Whether you like it or not, it IS a dog-eat-dog world out there. Playing ostrich isn't going to change that fact. M-M-Metaphor police!

      Dogs are actually afraid of ostriches.
      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    14. Re:And Appropriately by sgtrock · · Score: 2, Interesting

      When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence, and both of these opinions generate hatred.

      ...

      And if it be urged that whoever is armed will act in the same way, whether mercenary or not, I reply that when arms have to be resorted to, either by a prince or a republic, then the prince ought to go in person and perform the duty of captain; the republic has to send its citizens, and when one is sent who does not turn out satisfactorily, it ought to recall him, and when one is worthy, to hold him by the laws so that he does not leave the command. And experience has shown princes and republics, single-handed, making the greatest progress, and mercenaries doing nothing except damage; and it is more difficult to bring a republic, armed with its own arms, under the sway of one of its citizens than it is to bring one armed with foreign arms. Rome and Sparta stood for many ages armed and free. The Switzers are completely armed and quite free.

      -- Niccolo Machiavelli

      Machiavelli understood that true security comes not from relying upon a small cadre of professional soldiers, but through the direct participation of the citizenry in all forms of military service. Too bad most politicians never learn that lesson.

    15. Re:And Appropriately by dave1791 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You are asking for a simple yes or no answer to a complex question. America's worldwide military presence has a complex history. Historically (prior to the second world war), the US had a weak, minimalistic military; essentially just a middleweight navy with hardly much of an army. An enormous driving factor in America's busybody, self-appointed world-police role is the second world war; namely the runup and things like Czechoslovakia being sold out by Western European countries. The conventional wisdom in America is that it was wrong to stand idly by while a bombastic dictator was essentially able to conquer a country with the tacit approval of that Britain and France. This "if we don't play policeman, nobody will" plays a large role in this habit of poking the beehive, if not among leaders (who may themselves have Machiavellian strategic agendas), but among the public; especially the Republican leaning part of the electorate most inclined to support foreign adventures. Disagree with them or poke fun at their naiveté if you want, but these people (the usually working class supporters of a strong military) really believe this. Politicians also tend to believe it at some level. Nobody, no matter how cynical, is completely immune to the prevailing worldview of their nationality.

      To give you a yes or no answer, I'd reckon that the US would be as safe or even more safe of its military presence in the wider world was smaller. In fact, then the US would be able to join the moralistic crowd of rich, but weak nations that lectures others about what they should be doing; a position it has exchanged with Europe since WWII.

      Now I'll counter with a question. Would the world be better or worse off?

      Taiwan would likely have been invaded by now. America's strong military and ambiguous position on defending the island probably helps keep tensions there down. Chinese military planners can neither discount American involvement, nor count on it. If they could count on American help, they could plan for it with certainty as Japan Japan did prior to Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was a move designed to disable the Americans so that they could not interfere with a Japanese takeover of Southeast Asia and Indonesia's oil. The ambiguity of the American position means that Chinese planning such a move against the US raises the possibility of China having to fight an unnecessary war against a powerful foe. The ambiguity of the American position also prevents Tiawan from recklessly proclaiming independence. On the whole, the US acts as a stabilizing influence in East Asia. A China/Tiawan war is far less likely and the possibility that they will eventually come to a mutually agreeable solution is greater.

      On the other hand, the Iraq war would not have happened. Whether peace would be prevailing in the region is hard to say. Wars did not start with America's presence and there are intense rivalries for regional influence; rivalries fuelled by oil wealth. Israel would be much weaker relative to its enemies. The real question is - and I don't think anyone can really answer this - would that lead to a mutually agreeable solution, or to Israel being overrun and an ensuing genocide? Asking that question is just asking for people to come out of the woodwork and ra-ra their side.

    16. Re:And Appropriately by cshotton · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I dunno the genesis of the "open source" meme with this FCS story. The SoSCOE code I worked with wasn't made of very much open source stuff. In fact, the initial versions weren't even aimed at Linux. The crap all ran on SGI boxes. So to the extent that they have aimed the code base at Posix compliant operating systems, I guess Linux can play now.

      In any case, open or closed source doesn't matter much these days when you have countries like China willing to pay 1000's of hackers to reverse engineer all sorts of stuff, source code or not. All they need is access to the system and it'll eventually have all of its holes uncovered.

      --

      Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
  3. Oh please... by drDugan · · Score: 3, Funny

    software will automatically "heal itself," retrieving the information

    Anthropomorphizing technology is rather misleading... especially in this case, "when death is on the line!"

    1. Re:Oh please... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      To top it off, this news comes from a group who actually DID start a land war in Asia.

  4. BSOD tradeoff. by bobdotorg · · Score: 5, Funny

    So by avoiding Windows, no BSOD on the battlefield. But instead we risk a Colonel Panic? (sorry)

    --
    __ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
  5. Re:Game by drDugan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As I recall, the computer very much wanted to play chess, not war. In a beautiful commentary on human stupidity and aggression it was the person who forced the computer to play war. It was the point of the movie.

  6. Born to Kill by clarkn0va · · Score: 5, Funny
    So are we going to see an official logo featuring Tux with "Born to Kill" scratched on his helmet?

    db

    --
    I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
  7. This is great! by Alexx+K · · Score: 3, Funny

    Now the troops can compile Gentoo while on duty. Hopefully, it'll be finished when they get home.

    --
    Don't mind the extra X. Alex
  8. OR by AndGodSed · · Score: 5, Funny

    General: "Where are my tanks!?"
    Tech Officer: "Coming sir, we're having some dependency problems..."

    --

    Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity

    1. Re:OR by XnPlater · · Score: 5, Funny

      Tech Officer: "Anyway, now that we're compiling them with -O3, the enemy won't stand a chance, sir!"

      --
      :(){ :|:& };:
  9. Licensed to kill by drDugan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd love to see a software license that says something to the effect of "This software will not be used to wage war or to kill any humans".

    1. Re:Licensed to kill by unbug · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'd love to see a software license that says something to the effect of "This software will not be used to wage war or to kill any humans". It wouldn't be an open-source license, though. From the Open Source Definition: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.
    2. Re:Licensed to kill by Gilesx · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So what are you saying here? That violence was "pointless" and "ineffective" when dealing with Hitler?

      --
      Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
    3. Re:Licensed to kill by AngelofDeath-02 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You might first consider that Hitler's violence brought down violence upon himself.

      While you imply that violence was effective and valid against him, I say that it never would have been necessary in the first place, were he not out for genocide. Also, a lot of his inspiration was WWI, and Germany's spectacular defeat.

      It's kind of a silly argument, but perhaps the pacifist's realize that while they cannot control other's actions, they can control their own and NOT be Hitler. Not everything is about some evil villain from our history, or about lives lost in battles fought.

      --
      No, I am not an English major. My posts are subject to typos and incorrect grammar. Do not expect perfection.
    4. Re:Licensed to kill by donscarletti · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'd love to see a software license that says something to the effect of "This software will not be used to wage war or to kill any humans".

      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.

      --
      When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
  10. Re:Uptime? by ianezz · · Score: 4, Informative
    I'm just curious how you ran uptime with no users logged in?

    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.

  11. Blame game by Wowsers · · Score: 5, Funny

    If anything goes wrong with the project, they could always say it's General Protection's Fault.

    --
    Take Nobody's Word For It.
  12. hey! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    torrent plz

  13. Re:The Army bit is irrelevant.. by neBelcnU · · Score: 2, Informative

    See www.defensetech.org, search for FCS, and prepare for a long, long read.

  14. Several years of development... by secretwhistle · · Score: 2, Funny

    Perhaps it's time for them to upgrade to Reason 2.0.

  15. Insightful? by HBI · · Score: 4, Informative

    OK.

    The software in question will never see the public Internet because it's all classified Secret and above. Well, the data and operating environment are. The kernel itself will be unclass but FOUO, most likely, so that could conceivably be contributed back out if something interesting were in it. My guess is that there won't be. Military systems, even the classified variety, tend to be very vanilla by commercial standards and rarely have interesting features. It is how they are deployed that makes them redundant or otherwise suitable for their task.

    So expecting contributions back will be kind of ...limited. I'm sure *some* things will find its way back out, but in practice, if a hack needs to be made on the code to make things work in an actual theater of operations, I wouldn't count on it appearing outside in the real world anytime soon.

    This isn't the first military program to use Linux as a basis, btw. Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade and Below (FBCB2) uses a RTOS optimized kernel for its work, having converted from Solaris.

    That said, DA has a huge Microsoft ELA contract which everyone is pushed towards. So I don't expect a lot of OSS innovation from the Army.

    --
    HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
    1. Re:Insightful? by AciDLnx · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >> The software in question will never see the public Internet because it's all classified Secret and above.

      This is incorrect. I've worked on FCS / SOSCOE. Specifically, integrating the current FBCB2 systems into FCS. Nothing was classified Secret. It was all just FOUO.

    2. Re:Insightful? by imtheguru · · Score: 2, Informative

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOUO

      --
      Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
      A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
  16. Lines of Code? by PinkyDead · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Now there's a useful metric. It says so much about quality and reliability.

    --
    Genesis 1:32 And God typed :wq!
  17. Re:Loose tha Connexn by starsky51 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    By the sounds of it, i'd say this was written by someone who sat in on a "Future Combat Systems for Dummies" presentation. I'd imagine the "healing" process is equivalent to services restarting themselves when they fail.

    --
    There are 2 types of people in this world. Those who understand ternary and those who don't.
  18. Re:The Army bit is irrelevant.. by stephanruby · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been hoping for some insightful comments, not being a Linux geek. Can anyone say anything about the wider implications. I'm not US competent. I guess the US Military is essentially a model of a well run business. If you're looking for wider implications that you may already have missed, look up the term "second sourcing" -- an invention of the US Department of Defense. The US Department of Defense has had an history of requiring its suppliers to have a "second source" of critical parts should one supplier/manufacturer fail to deliver for some reason. For instance, AMD wouldn't be where it is today if Intel, its competitor and arch enemy, wouldn't have shared so much information and even crucial training to make sure AMD could keep up as its official "second source" on their Defense Contracts.

    I don't know if the wording is intentional or not, but it seems "open sourcing" is a logical progression on the original concept of "second sourcing", and intentional or not, it should benefit both the US military and the American people as much as that that first concept did benefit the US military and the American people in the past.
  19. Mod parent down... by thrill12 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...ofcourse parent is right, but this type of argument is usually spoken when the discussion is not nearly at that level.
    It quenches any discussion , because no one dares to disagree.
    If parent want's to partake in a discussion, try to counter the argument with something more sensible and wise - on the same level as the argument-giver.

    --
    Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
  20. FCS Should be Cancelled by tjstork · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The thing about FCS is that, when early versions of it have been tried in our present war, soldiers have found that the extra computerization is often not worth the weight of the computer. It seems to me that if the Army is going to be spending billions of dollars developing anything, they ought to be looking for a way to detect hidden explosives. FCS doesn't do a damn thing to aid against insurgencies whose primary weapon is the booby trap.

    --
    This is my sig.
    1. Re:FCS Should be Cancelled by SuiteSisterMary · · Score: 2

      soldiers have found that the extra computerization is often not worth the weight of the computer.

      And back when semi-auto rifles were introduced, soliders didn't think it was worth the extra weight and hassle over their good old bolt-action rifles.

      And back when muskets were introduced, soldiers didn't think it was worth the extra weight and hassle over their good old lances and calvary sabres.

      And back when long swords were introduced, soldiers didn't think it was worth the extra weight and hassle over their good old gladiums and scutums.

      --
      Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
  21. Re:Loose tha Connexn by samkass · · Score: 2, Informative

    We're not talking about being able to save a word document here. In order for the soldiers on the ground to have full situational awareness and ability to command, there is a lot of data that has to get from here to there. If you have a direct link from here to there, great. If that link goes down, but the software detects that sending it over this packet radio, then that fiber, bouncing it off the other satellite and downlinking it to the stryker will get it there, it should auto-reroute it that way. I think that's what they mean by "self-healing". Kind of like the original internet was designed-- on steroids... imagine if it had incorporated routing information for every FIDOnet, HAM radio, telephone, and carrier pigeon in the country.

    --
    E pluribus unum
  22. Why military computer projects turn to crap by Whatsmynickname · · Score: 2, 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.

    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.

  23. Re:Good for them! by ausmusj · · Score: 2, Insightful

    90% of the software you run on windows is not written by MS. Most of the windows crashes are not really caused by windows. I run multiple windows machines that very rarely crash (1-2 times a year?) and my purpose built ones _never_ crash (well, does a power outage count?). The point is that a crappy 3rd party *application* on Windows *shouldn't* be able to make the *Operating System* crash! You run a crappy 4rd party piece of software on Linux, and the app crashes, it doesn't take the system with it. Once in a while it might take X-Windows with it (if it's a *really* crappy app), but, again, advantage Linux, X-Windows is not the Operating System.

    Now, does the Linux kernel never crash? Does it never have bugs? Of course it does, but it's open source, so you get a whole bunch of developers all over the world looking into the transparent inner workings of the operating system to figure out *why*, and fix it immediately.

    Regarding drivers, yes, crappy drivers are a big reason that both Windows and Linux can crash. However, that's why Linux developers (and most Linux users) push strongly for open source drivers - so that they can fix the crappy drivers and make them work correctly.
  24. Re:$9 trillion in debt and they want robot soldier by DeadlyBattleRobot · · Score: 2, Informative

    We have over 10x military budget of the next country, China. This cannot end well.

    Very recent article:

    http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174884/chalmers_johnson_how_to_sink_america

    The radio interview is here:

    http://antiwar.com/radio/2008/01/24/chalmers-johnson-3/