No analysis is required to see the many, many open source projects funded by the military. For example, neither UNIX nor the Internet would have come to be without DARPA funding (not to mention OpenBSD, Reiserfs, etc., etc., etc.)
No analysis is required to see the many, many public works performed in the U.S. and world wide by the Army Corps of Engineers.
No analysis is required to see the dozen or two humanitarian aid missions being carried out at any given time by the U.S. military.
No analysis is necessary to see the preferential treatment given by the U.S. military in awarding tens of billions of dollars in contracts (as a matter of policy) to small businesses, minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, and businesses operating in economically depressed communities.
Just because those socially-beneficial activities aren't the kind of sensationalist blather (like "OMG secrit prisonz") that NBC or CNN like to pump into "inquiring minds" like yours does not mean the information is not readily available and widely-known.
It's a limited list of devices, but hopefully more will added with renewed interest. This has been mostly of interest to folks doing clustering (since the this bios doesn't do much, they dont' have to manually deal with thousands of bios nodes to reconfigure hardware initialization of boot attributes). PXE and other forms of centralizing boot, virtualization, etc. have provided alternatives.
Notably, Linux bios can reduce the time to load kernel significantly. I would see this as also useful to builders of embedded systems and users of mobile computers based on pc architecture. Also useful to builders is that it's free.
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No analysis is required to see the many, many open source projects funded by the military. For example, neither UNIX nor the Internet would have come to be without DARPA funding (not to mention OpenBSD, Reiserfs, etc., etc., etc.) No analysis is required to see the many, many public works performed in the U.S. and world wide by the Army Corps of Engineers. No analysis is required to see the dozen or two humanitarian aid missions being carried out at any given time by the U.S. military. No analysis is necessary to see the preferential treatment given by the U.S. military in awarding tens of billions of dollars in contracts (as a matter of policy) to small businesses, minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, and businesses operating in economically depressed communities. Just because those socially-beneficial activities aren't the kind of sensationalist blather (like "OMG secrit prisonz") that NBC or CNN like to pump into "inquiring minds" like yours does not mean the information is not readily available and widely-known.
It's a limited list of devices, but hopefully more will added with renewed interest. This has been mostly of interest to folks doing clustering (since the this bios doesn't do much, they dont' have to manually deal with thousands of bios nodes to reconfigure hardware initialization of boot attributes). PXE and other forms of centralizing boot, virtualization, etc. have provided alternatives.
Notably, Linux bios can reduce the time to load kernel significantly. I would see this as also useful to builders of embedded systems and users of mobile computers based on pc architecture. Also useful to builders is that it's free.