Look into existing federal (GSA/DoD) and state level programs which provide surplus technology to schools. These programs aren't just for getting military-grade hardware to rural police forces, they can actually be used for the benefit of the public as well. For added bonus, create/participate in a student-run club which discovers, writes, and submits grant requests for student/school needs like this.
To get you started:
GSA Eligibility Info: http://www.gsa.gov/portal/cont...
Find your State Agencies for Surplus Properties: http://www.gsa.gov/portal/cont...
DoD Defense Logistics Agency: http://www.dispositionservices...
I went looking across their website and can't find a download for their server code. Do you know where to get this? If I can get a copy of their server API (to their clients), I can set something up on google app engine or the like....
I was thinking along the same lines, as well. Encryption for real-time video, however, always comes at a cost of increased bandwidth, more equipment (COMSEC modules), and of course, more cost. Not to mention the added points of failure.
Another thing I was thinking about was how easy it would be to become overdependent on technology such as this. Lets look at it like military arms. Country A designs and deploys this new fancy aircraft that is capable of higher altitude flight than Country B's ARCFT and surface to air missiles (SAMs). That aircraft costs $5mil. Country B is able to create a SAM or look-up missile from an interceptor at a cost of $20k. What is to say that if these cameras see large-scale deployment that crooks (smart ones) won't buy some WiFi noise jammers and completly destroy that spectrum. If the police rely on this too much (ie train on it to a point where they are ineffective or severly debilitated without it) than the crooks would have the upper hand.
We should be careful releasing technical information, especially limitations, to our military and law enforcement equipment.
That's probably because disclosing information on military secrets is a violation of Operations Security. Why give your enemies a heads-up to your new equipment, tactics, and methods? I wouldn't say that the US government/military not utilizing pantent procedures is proof that the system is a farce but rather they (believe to) have a better system to prevent industrial espionage. In fact, Lockheed Martian was the chief creator of radar deadening/refracting technologies with use on an aircraft, not (directly) the US government.
While I'll be the first to admit that the US operates covertly no too many situations to count, or at least does not publically announce everything, it is always difficult to have a big-picture understanding of something if you are either not looking for the truth (but only what you want to see) or you do not have access to the other pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to understand what the real picture is.
Within the last year, the Army has reinstated the Anthraxinoculation policy and has re-started their efforts in getting all troops their vaccines. This issue is near and dear to my heart as I'm in the Army and that vaccine is particually painful (not to mention tests that have variable evidence of short term memory loss).
Dugway Proving Ground seems a logical place for these types of biological defense activities to be undertaken. We'll need plenty of vaccines to take care of all the Soldiers and probably Airman, Saliors, and Marines too. I'm not saying that this is definitvly the answer, but it is at least consistant with other Army reporting.
I'd suggest using RTF as an intermediate exchange format and suggesting OpenOffice to your fellow students who would no doubt welcome the opportunity to save a few bucks. Remember- students are the University's customers not the other way round.
Thanks for the advice. RTF as an intermediary is a great idea.
Every computer I build for Soldiers starting college (or otherwise) has Debian and OpenOffice. Hopefully one day these guys will be leaders in the Army and remember back to the inexpensive fully operational programs and adopt them as Army standards. Your suggestions, and your efforts to expand OSS, is at least appreciated by me. Thanks again.
This may turn out to be a problem for students and those of us that work at home. I had a similar problem when I was going to college for CS a few years back. My professor required our C++ to be created in a Windows-only compiler, commented and structured using that editors tools. I was only running Linux, just as I am now, and had to get an exception to policy in order to not have to live in the computer lab.
Now, working on my EE degree while in the Army, I am doing distance learning with a school that requires MS Office formats on papers. So far, it has been working out well but what if they 'upgrade' to a new office version that somehow corrupts or otherwise does not display a file created in OO well? There goes my GPA!
Same goes for my job in that Army. As an NCO I often times complete work at home and bring it to my work terminal (all MS, after the recent Solaris genocide) on a USB stick. Will all my work be for nothing? Will I be spending hours at the office instead of at home where I can at least be with my wife and kids? I guess the same can go for those that tele-commute and use Linux.
Man, I REALLY don't want to have to install Windows or use an emulator just to use Office.
My personal experience with SUN systems is as a US government employee working as both an end user and an Information System Security Officer (glorified title for tier 1 tech support). I also was a system admin for an public/private email encryption system. Although I can't specifically say what agency I was working for ALL of our workstations were SUN systems and the vast majority of the servers we as well. Long up times, data redundancy, and easy (relativly) system and network administration always seemed to be an advantage of the SUN systemes over my experience with Windows or Linux setups. Not to mention the inherent benefits of working on a *NIX OS rather than Windows. Although hardware redundancy is seen more and more in other commerically available servers, my opinion is that SUN has more experience and desire to keep that positive brand recognition than many of the other multi-focused companies like HP. Although I had my share of processors deaths, hard drives go down, and unknown problems that were magically fixed by reseating the CPU or RAM...I would only purchase SUNs if I was elected president of the unlimited-money department. Like you said, if they are going to work on the pricing I may be convinced to upgrade my homebrewed P4 for a sun system (laptop).
Slashdot Mirror
Look into existing federal (GSA/DoD) and state level programs which provide surplus technology to schools. These programs aren't just for getting military-grade hardware to rural police forces, they can actually be used for the benefit of the public as well. For added bonus, create/participate in a student-run club which discovers, writes, and submits grant requests for student/school needs like this.
To get you started:
GSA Eligibility Info: http://www.gsa.gov/portal/cont...
Find your State Agencies for Surplus Properties: http://www.gsa.gov/portal/cont...
DoD Defense Logistics Agency: http://www.dispositionservices...
I went looking across their website and can't find a download for their server code. Do you know where to get this? If I can get a copy of their server API (to their clients), I can set something up on google app engine or the like....
I was thinking along the same lines, as well. Encryption for real-time video, however, always comes at a cost of increased bandwidth, more equipment (COMSEC modules), and of course, more cost. Not to mention the added points of failure.
Another thing I was thinking about was how easy it would be to become overdependent on technology such as this. Lets look at it like military arms. Country A designs and deploys this new fancy aircraft that is capable of higher altitude flight than Country B's ARCFT and surface to air missiles (SAMs). That aircraft costs $5mil. Country B is able to create a SAM or look-up missile from an interceptor at a cost of $20k. What is to say that if these cameras see large-scale deployment that crooks (smart ones) won't buy some WiFi noise jammers and completly destroy that spectrum. If the police rely on this too much (ie train on it to a point where they are ineffective or severly debilitated without it) than the crooks would have the upper hand.
We should be careful releasing technical information, especially limitations, to our military and law enforcement equipment.
That's probably because disclosing information on military secrets is a violation of Operations Security. Why give your enemies a heads-up to your new equipment, tactics, and methods? I wouldn't say that the US government/military not utilizing pantent procedures is proof that the system is a farce but rather they (believe to) have a better system to prevent industrial espionage. In fact, Lockheed Martian was the chief creator of radar deadening/refracting technologies with use on an aircraft, not (directly) the US government.
While I'll be the first to admit that the US operates covertly no too many situations to count, or at least does not publically announce everything, it is always difficult to have a big-picture understanding of something if you are either not looking for the truth (but only what you want to see) or you do not have access to the other pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to understand what the real picture is.
Within the last year, the Army has reinstated the Anthrax inoculation policy and has re-started their efforts in getting all troops their vaccines. This issue is near and dear to my heart as I'm in the Army and that vaccine is particually painful (not to mention tests that have variable evidence of short term memory loss).
Dugway Proving Ground seems a logical place for these types of biological defense activities to be undertaken. We'll need plenty of vaccines to take care of all the Soldiers and probably Airman, Saliors, and Marines too. I'm not saying that this is definitvly the answer, but it is at least consistant with other Army reporting.
I'd suggest using RTF as an intermediate exchange format and suggesting OpenOffice to your fellow students who would no doubt welcome the opportunity to save a few bucks. Remember- students are the University's customers not the other way round.
Thanks for the advice. RTF as an intermediary is a great idea.
Every computer I build for Soldiers starting college (or otherwise) has Debian and OpenOffice. Hopefully one day these guys will be leaders in the Army and remember back to the inexpensive fully operational programs and adopt them as Army standards. Your suggestions, and your efforts to expand OSS, is at least appreciated by me. Thanks again.
This may turn out to be a problem for students and those of us that work at home. I had a similar problem when I was going to college for CS a few years back. My professor required our C++ to be created in a Windows-only compiler, commented and structured using that editors tools. I was only running Linux, just as I am now, and had to get an exception to policy in order to not have to live in the computer lab.
Now, working on my EE degree while in the Army, I am doing distance learning with a school that requires MS Office formats on papers. So far, it has been working out well but what if they 'upgrade' to a new office version that somehow corrupts or otherwise does not display a file created in OO well? There goes my GPA!
Same goes for my job in that Army. As an NCO I often times complete work at home and bring it to my work terminal (all MS, after the recent Solaris genocide) on a USB stick. Will all my work be for nothing? Will I be spending hours at the office instead of at home where I can at least be with my wife and kids? I guess the same can go for those that tele-commute and use Linux.
Man, I REALLY don't want to have to install Windows or use an emulator just to use Office.
I love that episode....
http://renandstimpy.org/sounds.php?id=106
My personal experience with SUN systems is as a US government employee working as both an end user and an Information System Security Officer (glorified title for tier 1 tech support). I also was a system admin for an public/private email encryption system. Although I can't specifically say what agency I was working for ALL of our workstations were SUN systems and the vast majority of the servers we as well. Long up times, data redundancy, and easy (relativly) system and network administration always seemed to be an advantage of the SUN systemes over my experience with Windows or Linux setups. Not to mention the inherent benefits of working on a *NIX OS rather than Windows. Although hardware redundancy is seen more and more in other commerically available servers, my opinion is that SUN has more experience and desire to keep that positive brand recognition than many of the other multi-focused companies like HP. Although I had my share of processors deaths, hard drives go down, and unknown problems that were magically fixed by reseating the CPU or RAM...I would only purchase SUNs if I was elected president of the unlimited-money department. Like you said, if they are going to work on the pricing I may be convinced to upgrade my homebrewed P4 for a sun system (laptop).