Well do not forget they are still using computers from the 1980's.
You tell me where the money goes. Throwing more money at anything so antique is a waste of time & money.
Of course the air force has a super INTERNET command center where they (it seems) daily move satallites around to avoid collisions.
Sounds more like hype than anything and never underestimate how old equipment is in the Army. I also suspect that the education is a bit lean in this area. 40 years ago I was told I *HAD* to take proficiency test and was force to take it. The questions they had were not even close to reality. Subtract 30 years and that was the kind of questions they were asking. I had no plans for the Army so I just checked of a b c d e on every 5th
question and walked out.

I cannot speak for other OS's but the two major IBM OS's have been able to handle 31 since the 1970's. With IBM's more current box's the max has been upped to 64. If I remember correctly there have been a few studies done by IBM (on their hardward and software) that somewhere along about 15 CPU's the line goes down. In other words there is more penalty due to overhead and you do not get any more real thruput. IBM's architecture is a lot more stringent than INTELS and a lot of processing is done outside of the CPU so the CPU is not getting charged to anyone for the internal processing that is done. So I am not sure on INTEL does its "thing" but IBM does document the entire process in publically (free) manuals (or PDF's ). I have yet to see how INTEL protects two (or more) different CPU's from updating the same location in memory, IBM does it very swiftly and it really works well. I once worked on a early multi processor from IBM and IBM's code was solid from day one, the other can't be said for vendors as we had to shoot several bugs of that type. Believe it happens quite often (at least in the IBM software side). Ever since day one of IBM's first publically available MP box and the use of the then current OS(MVS) it was written with multiple processors in mind and you could delete and add processors (and storage and channels) dynamically. We needed the feature quite often and would take storage offline and also take CPU's offline. Never ran into issues doing so but IBM did wrtite and test the OS better than anyone else has to date.

This is exactly the same as inviting a friend over for dinner and he brings hs family and then the family decides to stay and they end up multiplying.
Or, to be specific its like expecting politicians to be honest.
Hint it just does not work, that is why we need term limits or somehow implanting an "honest" chip in them.
There are several variations of this of course like introducing mamals to a south sea island. They end up eating the species you are trying to control in the first place.
Humans will never understand that introducing a foriegn predator into an existing eco system will call (not probably) massive, unforeseen problems.

On the surface its "iffy". If there are no other ulterior reason other than gathering info and not disclosing it to anyone (even the parents) I see not real objection.

HOWEVER many many many times an idea like this has been turned around into a highly intrusive scrutinizing and the data is allowed to go out into the wild with asome sort of child ID that is one of the big issues. Of course this always depends on the school and if they are honest and do not disclose anything to any outside interest then it is probably OK, IMO.

I do not know you and from a person that was responsible for being first person to fix a problem at all hours of the night I can tell you that comments do not mean squat unless they actually make sense. I wish I had saved some of the comments over the years but I think you would cry over some of them I have seen. Also (this partly applies to the comments) labels should mean be descritptive not switch-1 or dog3-has-fleas or any of the other impossible names I have seen over the years.

I have witnessed several different coding techniques and while each has it positives and negatives the KISS methodolgy always wins my vote. The more complicated the program the longer it takes to debug, especially if you are not the writer. I have seen code that defies explaination. I have been in more than a few arguments with a programmer on how a machine instruction works. Also when you start programming and find a work around for a problem that either appears to be a bug in the compiler or someother really arcane issue. At the minimum put it in the comments of your code as you never know if down the road the people who created the compiler (subroutine) actually fixes the problem shooting the problem at 0xxx in the AM does not make friends of the person being called in.

I will only repeate #1 comment comment and comment some more. I do not care if you write a book in the comments as long as they are pertenient put them in.

Jefe7777 said:

Do you really know what's on your computer? If you're the average citizen, then there's a high probability that your computer has been or will be compromised at some point. "Hello Mr. Smith, we have some bad news for you. After forensic examination of your hard drive, we found evidence of money laundering, child pornography, and several thousand instances of copyright violation. But don't worry. We're going to make you an offer you can't refuse.

I respond: Please clarify this: you should insert the words" MS operating system" some where in the paragraph.

The problem is that IBM and Intel/AMD do things fundementally different inside their system(s). I am not sure I can explain entirely how INTEL/AMD work. IBM's high speed buffer there are "things" that go on that help out the execution of the instruction before it gets to the point of execution. There is also something else that IBM does is predictive branching and operand decoding and instruction look ahead work that actually stream lines the execution. BTW their code *DOES* work countless billions times a day.
IBM also has a way to serialize storage so only one person (program) can update the same storage location at a time. I do not know if INTEL can do that or not but if they don't I would not trust them at all. Many a time I had to shoot a bug in user code that didn't allow for that and its not fun.

While I was around in that time frame, my memory is a little different (but could be the same). S/38 was an outshoot of IBM's FS system. (Future System). I think I know one person that worked on it and he may be retired, like me.
IBM's FS was (if stories are to be belived) however somewhere along the line reality at the time said CPU's weren't even close to be capable of running it. My memory says it was in the 70's and even IBM's fastest CPU was not fast enough at the time. I have heard stories about it and not knowing anything first hand I would suggest you find an IBM old timer and ask him/her what killed it off.

FYI, if the application was not designed to use the correct time then of course the entire system has to be IPL'd. Granted that people rarely if ever worried about the clock, it only came important when databases became involved and a point in time was really needed. Or in some small number of cases (mostly financial) had to care about it. If the system is running batch then no need to IPL until a point in time that is convienent to everyone can be done.
CSA creap is almost a thing in the past, yes it still happens but if can be planned for. Almost all vendors have fixed that issue although new code does creap into the area. IBM has addressed this in several areas and you can not allow a vendor to get CSA if you choose not to allow it. Anytime there is a system area that people think it would be great to use there has to be careful design of it to make sure when you are done with it you free it, if you cannot guarentee it then you should not be using it. CSA is a limited system resource not to be used at will. IBM will tell you tough luck as if you are responsible for using it you must free it when you are done with it.

I'm betting the code used on these z196 systems is multi-threaded. Shit, if you're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per CPU you can afford some top notch programmers.

Actually I think this mainframe is for getting the last little bit of performance out of thirty year old cobol code. And the original top notch programmers are long dead.

I wish you would take a refresher code as to what the new Z/os systems can do. I think you would be amazed, items such as being capable of running UNIX type system while still run MVS. No emulators all the code is done by the OS (on a single system no real hypervisor either) The hypervisor is only used to partition off different OS's. No I am not talking about VM the IBM hypervisor is buried in the firmware. The workload manager (new with Z/os) had its ancestor that worked very well workload manager is able to fine tune the work distribution a lot better.

I guess you have not worked on any modern IBM mainframe. They are a different beast that say 15 years ago. All modern online systems can and do take advantage of what you call threads but the current people call something else entirely.
While it may be true that some batch processing mostly run under one "thread" (to use your term) they can/do take advantage of multiple CPU's. If they are halfway modernized I suspect they can fully take of multple CPU's.
There is a *LOT* of running one job on mutiple cpu's, mind you its under the covers and the user doesn't really see it, it does happen. As for the interactive side (developement) it was designed from day 1 to run on multple cpu's concurently with IBM's workload management (all Z/os systems run it to some extent or other) was designed to get work out as fast as the system can supply the cpu & storage That is one of the major reasons why Z/os can run at 100 percent cpu utilization 24 hours 7 days a week and pump out more work than most (all?) systems. With the new systems I understand that System Z systems can be gotten with terrabytes of storage. Now I/O is as fast (or faster) than any other system that is available. At one time the biggest bottleneck was I/O and with advances in the OS and faster controllers and large capacity hard drives it gets the work out faster and cheaper than any other PC system out there.
I do not work for IBM I just work on the Z/os and find it steps above any other PC system. The cloud that is the current buzzword in the PC world has been doable for say 10 years (at least) its called GDPS and the systems can be quite a distance from any data center. I wouldn't mind if people would learn the whole story.

Phantomfive said "A year or so ago I came across an article about some protesters who opposed creating garbage dumps in Nevada"

Well the casino's are there, they have already turned it into a dump. If you throw in the other parts of Vegas it will become a nuclear waste dump.

Oh, No, a singularity!

I am guessing here, but it would be reasonable that once a jury heard that the feds refused to place charges they would vote for acquittal. Rightly or wrong that how jurors I believe would react. I do not know if its allowed in the courtroom to say that the feds refused to prosecute but if it is its dead.

Well what is "fun" to one is not fun to another. But one software author has a YAHOO group and asks everyone to test out his beta's.
I am a member and the product is well known for its versatility and the feature number of options that fill probably 50 screens worth of some really obscure options.
The guy quickly investigates any reports and fixes them before general release.
Since everyone is eager to find bugs the email list is lively and can get a bit esoteric as you have to be an expert in the field to understand some of the options.
The beta I installed tonight will b e about the 20th so far this year. I find some(bugs) from time to time and I really test out his product and I do find some bizarre issues.

The author does not speak great English and that adds to the fun(?).