Slashdot Mirror
Work Progressing on Army's Future Combat Systems
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."
Yes. It does run Linux.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
software will automatically "heal itself," retrieving the information
Anthropomorphizing technology is rather misleading... especially in this case, "when death is on the line!"
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.
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.
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
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
General: "Where are my tanks!?"
Tech Officer: "Coming sir, we're having some dependency problems..."
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
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.
If anything goes wrong with the project, they could always say it's General Protection's Fault.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
torrent plz
OK.
...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.
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
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.
Now there's a useful metric. It says so much about quality and reliability.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
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.
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
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.