🚀 go-pugleaf

John's disclaimer noted.

In article <1992Jul29.181851.12025@news.eng.convex.com>
jgardner@convex.com (John B. Gardner) writes:
>Namely this;  A very large number of supercomputers purchased by the govt.
>are for military or security operations (note, I don't *know* this, but I'd
>say it's a pretty safe bet).  Relying on a foreign power for support, parts,
>maintenance, etc. of a component that would be critical in wartime would be
>extremely dangerous.

It's an international world, and the US spends a good deal for foreign
technology for its own military from countries like England, Israel, etc.

>Now i hardly expect we will ever go to war with Japan, but lines of 
>comunication and shipping capabilities could be seriously hampered if we
>were at war with _anyone_.

True.

>Imagine if the JEWC operations center,

I missed that talk.  It sounded like (from the Keynote) like it would be
interesting.

>Get the picture?  We (the U.S.), were in fact
>aided in our war effort by U.S. computer parts (printers) which had been
>shipped to Iraq and covertly modified for just such an occurence.

This story has largely been relegated to an April Fools Day joke.
Not to say it can't happen.

>Yes, I work for a U.S. manufacturer of supercomputers, so my opinion is no
>doubt biased, but the above arguement still has merit, IMHO.

Oh, yes it has some merit.

Disclaimer: I speak for myself and not the Agency.
It's stupid to shoot yourself in the foot for political reasons when
good interesting technology exists in the world and you don't get it
for strictly paper reasons.

If and when these manufacturers come up something interesting, we should
make an effort to evaluate it.  While the up-sized, IBM compatible
architectures produced so far are basically just faster versions of
antiquated architectures, future machines do deserve a look see.
Non-technical posts don't help this argument, and limited resource machines
(single machines) make using them difficult [i.e. we'd all have to share,
as well as obscure OSes or languages, etc.], one or two useful ideas
may result from research.  The argument about US jobs is short term.
Our looking at their technology COULD engender new jobs on our turf if
we make our ground fertile.  A similar situation happened about 40 years ago
with the transistor.

Face it, people who are going to post press releases should be plastered
with all the real simple (then hard) technical questions: like numbers
of processors, cooling, packaging, software, new languages and OS
(maybe THOSE should be the FAQs?).
 
--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@orville.nas.nasa.gov
  Resident Cynic, Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers
  {uunet,mailrus,other gateways}!ames!eugene
Second Favorite email message: Returned mail: Cannot send message for 3 days
A Ref: Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning, vol. 1, G. Polya