FWIW, this is also the agency that successfully pulled Dafif, a huge database of periodically updated worldwide aeronautical information historically available for free to the public, off the public Internet. Here's a brief story about it and
where you used to be able to get it. So in a sense this sort of statement is very much in character; this guy is probably "just doing his job". He is a DoD employee, after all.
Now, they will probably have a much tougher time pwning all the satellite images, especially in future, because they aren't the sole provider of such images. The right answer is probably competition, i.e., for more commercial providers to get satellites up... makes it that much harder for any one agent (or agency) to corner the market, anyway. And TFA seems to suggest that that is indeed happening.
It does sort of seem like a basic drawback of so-called open-source intelligence (which has nothing to do with "open source" per se) that everyone else pretty much has the ability to get at it too, if they look hard enough. Perhaps the complaint is that now they don't have to look very hard at all.
What I think this incident really underscores is that high schools, where security is (unfortunately) likely to be lax, should not be using or storing students' Social Security numbers. High schools are perfectly capable of assigning unique ID numbers of their own to students wherever they are necessary; if and when their security is breached, the numbers are not useful for anything beyond the school's own internal databases.
Keeping SSNs around obviously can't be avoided for the school's employees (for tax and other reasons), but employee databases should be separate from student records, and there are far fewer employees than students anyway.
Basically, SSNs seem to have become the knee-jerk instant universal ID number for American firms and institutions of all sorts, which is a pity. It's best if we (as IT professionals) try to encourage the keepers of old databases to transition away from using them, and to strongly recommend that new databases not use them at all, wherever possible.
The UltraSPARC IV processor is also essentially two UltraSPARC III processors on a chip, integrated using chip multithreading (CMT) technology. Here is an article and some marketing blurbs about the UltraSPARC IV.
The current IBM POWER4 and upcoming POWER5 chips are both dual-core chips. Here is a nice presentation(PDF format) about the POWER5; you can see in the die photos where there are two cores. There have also been rumors of a dual-core PowerPC based on it, but nothing concrete yet.
The question should have been "Does Linux need another vectorizing compiler?" Currently, I'd say the answer is yes, because Intel needs some competition. I, for one, am 95% sure that a port of this compiler to Linux would get snapped up by anyplace that is doing high-performance computing.
I do high-performance computing, and I'd love to be able to try out Vector-C on some of our P-4 and Alpha Linux clusters, if I could. Right now, we use Intel's icc or gcc on x86 and Compaq's ccc or gcc on alpha, respectively. Pretty soon we are going to be looking at Itanium as well. Some of the time we are hand-hacking assembly just like the game programmers are, which is kind of sad; we would rather be compiling C. What Mat Bettinson said is definitely the case: "micro based scientific computing is looking more attractive."
Despite what some ppl here are saying, it's not an issue if it can't compile the kernel, or if it's not 100% gcc compatible, because most of the things the high-performance computing applications I've seen don't need to spend a whole lot of time in the kernel. However, you do have to make it work with both 2.1 and 2.2 glibc (please please please). The hacks we came up with to make icc work on our glibc-2.2 RH7 boxes are ugly and fragile.
Language issues: C++ is almost never a big deal
in HPC, but C/FORTRAN support is great. Having at least partial C99 support is best because then you get float *restrict foo, et al. Also, remember that not all HPC codes are fp. Some of us write integer intensive codes and/or memory intensive codes.
It's not an issue if it's not free-beer or free-software, because research grants will probably be happy to pay reasonable amounts for it -- maybe a couple hundred bucks, say -- but you have to remember that Intel is giving icc betas away for basically nothing, so you can't charge too much. This is not a troll, just trying to be realistic here.
Disclaimer: I am not speaking for my employers. I am not a person who gets to decide how grant money is spent (yet). These are just my opinions.
As other people have noted here, this is hardly
the first step toward online monitoring of employees. People like me who work in the
national labs have to deal with this sort of
thing constantly, even if we don't have access
to any classified data and even if we don't have
a security clearance (i.e., even when it's
not worth while to monitor us).
This is what it says when I log in at work. When I first saw it, I thought it was someone's bad idea of a joke.
These guys have a Pentium III-500MHz system which is supposed to run at 5W typically. We have one and have been running some of our code on it (it's actually owned by another group and we're borrowing time on it for a while.)
Their claims would be impressive if they made it work at 8.5W max, rather than 8.5W typical.
A couple of positive experiences I've had in school with computers:
Fourth grade - the class builds HyperCard stacks to learn about the 13 Colonies. The teacher was clued, but not so egotistical that she couldn't take a clue from one of us when we get something right that she doesn't. We got to build things which were unique and our own, which was gratifying. This beat the heck out of Logo, which ended up being a teacher-centered, slow, boring exercise in Turtlegraphics.
Fifth grade - We got to do an intro-to-statistics sort of project involving the collection, sorting and classification of different kinds of junk mail we students received at our homes, putting the info we gathered in spreadsheets (learning to use spreadsheets), and making heavily-hypertexted reports up based on the results, again in HyperCard. Real-world data are fun to work with.
Unfortunately, after middle school began, no one bothered innovating anymore, nor did students have the chance to create anything more structured than a textual document. "Computer classes" focused on application skills and simple scripting, and didn't really teach more than you could learn from reading the manual.
In high school it only got worse; AP computer science classes were Pascal-based (though content-rich by comparison with some of the stuff other people had to go through, apparently) and the administrators started on some insane laptop purchasing binges, resulting in lots and lots of computers running Outlook (then Exchange) and Word and Quake and little else. The faculty avoided innovation like the plague.
A C++ class temporarily instituted my senior year provided a group of students the opportunity to mess around, with fairly little instructional guidance (let alone introduction to OOP.) I used the opportunity to teach myself MFC and BeOS programming, but lots of people didn't do quite as much (one suspects they didn't know how.)
I still miss HyperCard, though; it was a great tool that anyone could use, even fourth graders. I think it would be great if someone could come up with an app that worked cross-platform on web pages as straightforwardly as HyperCard worked on its "stacks" on the Mac. Perhaps a compiler from HyperTalk to Java could be written, to support the really intuitive scripting facilities it supported? -- I am not among the Java "converted", but I recognize the power of the language qua Web platform.
I graduated high school spring 1997, should you wish to frame these comments in terms of a period in time.
At UC Berkeley EECS, we're planning to turn off telnet on all our systems (except for kerberos authentication), and we've already turned off FTP on a lot of our systems. As a system administrator, I think this proactive move has resulted in a sharp decrease in the number of passwords getting sniffed. People who want to log in remotely or copy files over the net now have to use strong crypto to do so.... We didn't turn off anonFTP, obviously. And there are always problems getting good free encrypted login/file-transfer clients out to people who need them, especially for esoteric platforms like Windows.:-) But on the whole it has been a plus for everyone, and as a bonus we don't have to teach people to set their DISPLAY variable anymore when they use X clients.
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FWIW, this is also the agency that successfully pulled Dafif, a huge database of periodically updated worldwide aeronautical information historically available for free to the public, off the public Internet. Here's a brief story about it and where you used to be able to get it. So in a sense this sort of statement is very much in character; this guy is probably "just doing his job". He is a DoD employee, after all.
Now, they will probably have a much tougher time pwning all the satellite images, especially in future, because they aren't the sole provider of such images. The right answer is probably competition, i.e., for more commercial providers to get satellites up... makes it that much harder for any one agent (or agency) to corner the market, anyway. And TFA seems to suggest that that is indeed happening.
It does sort of seem like a basic drawback of so-called open-source intelligence (which has nothing to do with "open source" per se) that everyone else pretty much has the ability to get at it too, if they look hard enough. Perhaps the complaint is that now they don't have to look very hard at all.
Keeping SSNs around obviously can't be avoided for the school's employees (for tax and other reasons), but employee databases should be separate from student records, and there are far fewer employees than students anyway.
Basically, SSNs seem to have become the knee-jerk instant universal ID number for American firms and institutions of all sorts, which is a pity. It's best if we (as IT professionals) try to encourage the keepers of old databases to transition away from using them, and to strongly recommend that new databases not use them at all, wherever possible.
The current IBM POWER4 and upcoming POWER5 chips are both dual-core chips. Here is a nice presentation(PDF format) about the POWER5; you can see in the die photos where there are two cores. There have also been rumors of a dual-core PowerPC based on it, but nothing concrete yet.
Broadcom (which bought SiByte) markets a dual-core, 1GHz 64-bit MIPS chip called the BCM1250 which has a lot of integrated networking goodies.
Finally, it bears pointing out that on the other side of Intel's severed corpus callosum, they're also working on a dual-core chip.
I do high-performance computing, and I'd love to be able to try out Vector-C on some of our P-4 and Alpha Linux clusters, if I could. Right now, we use Intel's icc or gcc on x86 and Compaq's ccc or gcc on alpha, respectively. Pretty soon we are going to be looking at Itanium as well. Some of the time we are hand-hacking assembly just like the game programmers are, which is kind of sad; we would rather be compiling C. What Mat Bettinson said is definitely the case: "micro based scientific computing is looking more attractive."
Despite what some ppl here are saying, it's not an issue if it can't compile the kernel, or if it's not 100% gcc compatible, because most of the things the high-performance computing applications I've seen don't need to spend a whole lot of time in the kernel. However, you do have to make it work with both 2.1 and 2.2 glibc (please please please). The hacks we came up with to make icc work on our glibc-2.2 RH7 boxes are ugly and fragile.
Language issues: C++ is almost never a big deal in HPC, but C/FORTRAN support is great. Having at least partial C99 support is best because then you get float *restrict foo, et al. Also, remember that not all HPC codes are fp. Some of us write integer intensive codes and/or memory intensive codes.
It's not an issue if it's not free-beer or free-software, because research grants will probably be happy to pay reasonable amounts for it -- maybe a couple hundred bucks, say -- but you have to remember that Intel is giving icc betas away for basically nothing, so you can't charge too much. This is not a troll, just trying to be realistic here.
Disclaimer: I am not speaking for my employers. I am not a person who gets to decide how grant money is spent (yet). These are just my opinions.
As other people have noted here, this is hardly the first step toward online monitoring of employees. People like me who work in the national labs have to deal with this sort of thing constantly, even if we don't have access to any classified data and even if we don't have a security clearance (i.e., even when it's not worth while to monitor us). This is what it says when I log in at work. When I first saw it, I thought it was someone's bad idea of a joke.
Their claims would be impressive if they made it work at 8.5W max, rather than 8.5W typical.
would that it worked under Linux... sigh
A couple of positive experiences I've had in school with computers:
Fourth grade - the class builds HyperCard stacks to learn about the 13 Colonies. The teacher was clued, but not so egotistical that she couldn't take a clue from one of us when we get something right that she doesn't. We got to build things which were unique and our own, which was gratifying. This beat the heck out of Logo, which ended up being a teacher-centered, slow, boring exercise in Turtlegraphics.
Fifth grade - We got to do an intro-to-statistics sort of project involving the collection, sorting and classification of different kinds of junk mail we students received at our homes, putting the info we gathered in spreadsheets (learning to use spreadsheets), and making heavily-hypertexted reports up based on the results, again in HyperCard. Real-world data are fun to work with.
Unfortunately, after middle school began, no one bothered innovating anymore, nor did students have the chance to create anything more structured than a textual document. "Computer classes" focused on application skills and simple scripting, and didn't really teach more than you could learn from reading the manual.
In high school it only got worse; AP computer science classes were Pascal-based (though content-rich by comparison with some of the stuff other people had to go through, apparently) and the administrators started on some insane laptop purchasing binges, resulting in lots and lots of computers running Outlook (then Exchange) and Word and Quake and little else. The faculty avoided innovation like the plague.
A C++ class temporarily instituted my senior year provided a group of students the opportunity to mess around, with fairly little instructional guidance (let alone introduction to OOP.) I used the opportunity to teach myself MFC and BeOS programming, but lots of people didn't do quite as much (one suspects they didn't know how.)
I still miss HyperCard, though; it was a great tool that anyone could use, even fourth graders. I think it would be great if someone could come up with an app that worked cross-platform on web pages as straightforwardly as HyperCard worked on its "stacks" on the Mac. Perhaps a compiler from HyperTalk to Java could be written, to support the really intuitive scripting facilities it supported? -- I am not among the Java "converted", but I recognize the power of the language qua Web platform.
I graduated high school spring 1997, should you wish to frame these comments in terms of a period in time.
At UC Berkeley EECS, we're planning to turn off telnet on all our systems (except for kerberos authentication), and we've already turned off FTP on a lot of our systems. As a system administrator, I think this proactive move has resulted in a sharp decrease in the number of passwords getting sniffed. People who want to log in remotely or copy files over the net now have to use strong crypto to do so. ... We didn't turn off anonFTP, obviously. And there are always problems getting good free encrypted login/file-transfer clients out to people who need them, especially for esoteric platforms like Windows. :-) But on the whole it has been a plus for everyone, and as a bonus we don't have to teach people to set their DISPLAY variable anymore when they use X clients.