Eric Schmidt Gets A Job At The Pentagon (cnn.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Alphabet Chairman and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is heading up a new effort to make the Pentagon more tech savvy. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carton on Wednesday appointed Schmidt the head of a new Defense Innovation Advisory Board, which will help the Pentagon keep up with the latest Silicon Valley ideas and apply them at the Department of Defense. The board will address problems in the way the Pentagon uses technology, and it will be tasked with offering "quick solutions." Schmidt's group will have no access to information about military operations strategy. Schmidt will oversee a group of up to 11 other board members, who also have led large private companies and public organizations.

Comments

Re:WOW...

[serviscope_minor]

I'd love to see them reimplement all the Pentagon's stuff google style.

They could roll out the nuclear counteroffensive system like gmail where it's just continually developed. So one day it would come out as a completely flat interface where it's hard to tell the difference between messge notifications and the "launch nukes" button since they're just blank areas of the screen.

"Hi, we've updated your strategic launching system. [got it!]"

Naturally every day things will move round subtly and some features will break, come back, break again and come back. Soon they'll run some A/B testing and find that no one ever clicks on the "launch nukes" button (not really a button any more, some strange flat menubutton dropdown hybrid, but white on white either way), so it will be quietly retired. Maybe one or two generals will complain, but they're a small fraction of the users of the system, and google targets the common case. Besides, if they haven't needed to launch nukes in the last year, it's not like it'll ever be needed.

But anyway, it's not like any of it would work anyhow. Google have recently taken the flag from Microsoft and decided that clearly they need to keep their web "apps" up to date so they chew up every available bit of CPU on the latest machines. What intel giveth, google taketh away etc... I actually wound up on the "basic" gmail interface due to a slow connection recently. Remember that part: slow connection. HOLY FUCK IT IS FAST! Apparently the basic interface on a slow connection is much, much snappier than the main gmail interface.

Anyway how does this matter? Well, they make stuff slower waaaayy faster than the pentagon upgrade cycle for machines. Unlike the MS of the elder days, you don't have a choice to not upgrade this decade since it's all pushed out on every page load. So you can't have some ancient 386 running Win3.11 for work groups controlling the launches. It'll have to be the latest, well I'd say PC but it'd probably wind up and a chromebook or android device.

They are of course EOL'd every 6 days (a bit less than the DoD's upgrade cycle of 6 decades) so after not very long, none of the computers could run any of the launcher apps anyway. So it's kind of moot if the remove the "global thermonuclear war" button/flat invisible area because even if it was there, no one would have a computer which would be able to operate it.