Slashdot Mirror
Lockheed Snags $31 Million To Reinvent the Internet, Microsoft To Help
DARPA has awarded a $31 million contract to megacorp Lockheed Martin which will, with some assistance from Microsoft, attempt to reinvent the Internet and make it more military-friendly. "The main thrust of the effort will be to develop a new Military Network Protocol, which will differ from old hat such as TCP/IP in that it will offer 'improved security, dynamic bandwidth allocation, and policy-based prioritization levels at the individual and unit level.' Lockheed will be partnered with Anagran, Juniper Networks, LGS Innovations, Stanford University and — of course — Microsoft in developing the MNP. Apart from that, Lockheed's own Information Systems & Global Services-Defense tentacle will work on amazing new hardware."
This makes a lot of sense, the military has unique requirements of all sorts, from security to e.g. their inability to hook up an aircraft carrier to fiber (except while at dock) to their need to carry both operational and personal traffic (the latter to keep their people in touch with home) over necessarily constrained links.
I like the bit about "self configuration capabilities to ... reduce the need for trained network personnel and lower overall life cycle costs for network management". While the current state of the art keeps us well employed, things could be easier. Heck, the more the systems I maintain for my parent self-configure, the happier I am.
... and I can tell you that this sounds like a disaster in the making. LM is so top-heavy with bureaucracy and process-bloat that the company might as well be a mini-Pentagon itself (not so mini, either, now that I think about it). Nothing happens quickly at Lock-Mart, and the things that do happen cost a bloody blue fortune.
If nothing else, they'd better hire in some outside IT guys. If this work gets anywhere near the corporate IT bozos, the military can look forward to a future of XP Pro with daily forced updates, and new hardware every five years or so (which again, is not terribly far away from the way the armed forces IT already works)...
no they wouldn't as you say, 'stuff it up'.
They'd patent the sh1t out of it so it is 'stuffed up' for the rest of us.
Remember that the US Military are exempt from patents awarded for work funded by them.
Then all Microsoft need to do is make 'The Internet V2' standard in Windows 8 and watch pretty well every company fall over backwards to implement it.
They would control who the licensed 'Internet V2' to thus kille FOSS, ORacle and probably Apple in one stroke of the pen from the US Patent Office.
Embrace - Done
Extend - Take IPv6, add a few bells & Whistles, patent it
Extinguish - Message from Steve B to Bill G, 'Looks Good'
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
And that is why a company I used to work for making Medical Office Management software replaced all of thier 5000+ installed desktops with a version of Linux I created for them, and dramaticaly cut their support costs. 3 Customer service types, one System Architect (Me), and two developers were easily able to support 5000+ desktops, and around 200 servers, remotely.
Try that with Windows...and you will need many, many more people!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
How does this affect pr0n?
If I were implementing it in HTB, I'd do it like this:
prio,rate(%),burst(S,M,L): desc
Everything is guaranteed the percentage (relative to peers) given; IE, the queue with SMTP will get 1% (5% * 20%) of bandwidth as a guarnateed minimum (enough to keep connections alive when other things are bursting hard, and eventually deliver email even if higher priorities never relent).
Extra bandwidth is given exclusively to higher priority bands (ie, lower prio numbers): If there are whole bunch of videoconferences going on between officers in bases about non-immediate military needs (prio 1.0), and suddenly 20 drone pilots need realtime video feeds to interactively fly a coordinated airstrike, the pilots get all the bandwidth they need, leaving the videoconferences only 6% (smart codecs will degrade gracefully; fixed bandwidth ones will just have to call back after the airstrike). Similarly, if they need to VoIP about building a bigger mess, your counterstrike game will lag. FTP gets best effort in between your porn page loads (which burst quickly with the medium-size burst; FTP gets a small burst so it's always ready to yield).
The level of detail you get into for the queues depends on how much bandwidth you have, and how much contention there is for it. If there's high contention, more detail helps more. There are also smarter queueing disciplines than HTB, but it's the simplest to describe like this.
Statically reserved bandwidth guarantees per-connection is better for many realtime needs. With RSVP, each drone pilot can reserve a guaranteed 5% slot for their flow, to prevent problems where there was lots of extra bandwidth, and then a lower priority suddenly needs its minimum guarantee, thus screwing up traffic that was flowing before. IE, it's better to tell the pilot from the start that there's not enough bandwidth that can be guaranteed to them, than to have them start flying and then get jitters when a bunch of troops hit push-to-talk, right as their drone was on final approach.
So in short, porn is pretty low on the list, but not the bottom of the stack. :)