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- #21
Nuclear War: Cold War
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Glider
Captain
Both really.
a) All of us have far more computer power in our phones that a super computer of the time, so what is your definition of Super Computer
b) Its not the machine its the ridiculous belief people have in the infallibility of computers. I used to be an IT Programme Manager and my speciality was projects that had either gone wrong, or were is severe danger of going wrong and the two most common statements I used to get when first reviewing a project were:-
i) It shouldn't do that
ii) The test system is the same as the live
With this bitter experience I always smile when someone says Supercomputer
It's all about in what era you ask the question. The next time you fly into SYR Hancock International, note the derelict cube shaped building just NW of the main runway intersection. Looks like a 1 story cube nestled up against a 3 story cube.
That housed SAGE, a 1955 supercomputer that controlled the entire NE US air defense system, from BOMARC missiles in Bangor ME to interceptors in Dayton OH. It had hundreds of thousands of electron tubes, required an air conditioner 4 times its size to keep it cool, and had about the same computing power as an IBM 386 PC. Now that's a SUPERcomputer! One of my instructors was a retired career interceptor pilot who had done a tour at SAGE as a project officer deconflicting missiles and interceptors.
Cheers,
Wes
I don't know the exact number, but bear in mind, our defense thinking was guided by veterans of 1000 plane raids in ETO. This had to have influenced their ideas. After the collapse we discovered the TU4 didn't have the range or payload we had attributed to it. With no air-to-air refueling capability, even a one way suicide mission couldn't reach the American Midland.
Cheers,
Wes
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- #26
This was before they had nuclear bombs?
I thought they could make Chicago...
I thought the plane was heavier than the B-29...
Wake up, man! The ETO was over months before the first A bomb. But the USAF leadership was well aware of the Soviet doctrine of "P for plenty".
On the last few fumes in the tanks, with a deadstick glide attack, maybe. But consider Chi Town is near the northern border of US. What about all those bases and factories in the American heartland south of there? Remember your great circle routes? The only way they could hope to reach us was "over the top".
A little heavier, a little less horsepower, a little thirstier, it all adds up to "not quite" a B-29. (And certainly not a B-50) It was, however a formidable interceptor target with its 23MM cannon turrets.
Cheers,
Wes
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- #28
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- #29
What does "The test system is the same as the live" mean?
Glider
Captain
Programmes are developed and tested in a test environment which is nearly always described as being ' the same as the live'. However when you switch it to the live environment, guess what, you find it isn't. Often the servers may have slightly different specs. or often don't have all the patches installed. I should explain that operating systems get patches on an almost monthly or even weekly basis and they should be installed as soon as they arrive but invariably don't.
The most common symptom is that it runs a lot slower but if your really unlucky it fails. Where possible I used to insist on taking a live data backup, do a dry test run in the production environment, then clear the test data from production environment, reinstall the original live data and sign if off in live.
A number of years ago I was involved in one very large and public system in the City of London involving a number of agencies, where the press and an entire Industry were watching. We followed the above protocol and to our horror we found that the differences in one agency were so fundamental, the new system simply wouldn't work on the production environment. So we tested to see if the test system would handle the loads involved in running live production volumes, found that by beefing up the servers and infrastructure they did overnight going 'live' on the test system. Definitely not best practice
Yeah, the Tu-4 had its inadequacies in reality, but the scare factor was part of the package as far as the Soviets were concerned. They were well aware it couldn't reach the US mainland and Tupolev in particular put vast amount of energies into using the tech and advancements the Tu-4 brought to the table to develop more capable aircraft. The real value of the Tu-4 to the Soviets was not merely the finished product, but the advancements the B-29 had that the Soviet aviation industry didn't. It was a lesson in catch-up the Soviets learned real quick and took to heart. Almost every post-war big bomber built by the Soviets gained B-29 DNA.
That's not true at all. The Soviets were no better nor worse than the USA intel community at the portrayal of the morally superior faction. Both sides were guilty of the propaganda flag waving exercise. The Soviets knew they couldn't match US technology advances, but quantity and a defensive military doctrine kept the US and the West at bay in their eyes. In reality the fear of being left behind and becoming less relevant drove the Soviet Union - it's a policy that drives modern Russia today. Russia wants to always be the Boorlaki or "strong man" and this was the same in the Soviet Union.
One thing though, the KGB as an intelligence organisation had nothing on the Stasi. The East German intel organism was the most ruthless and feared in the world. The KGB used to send agents to the DDR to train. Most Stasi staffers went straight from the Gestapo and SS into the post-war intel game, just changing uniforms and political doctrine. The Stasi originated from the post-war Soviet run K-5 intel organisation, the German branch of the NKVD, but its Soviet nominal head wanted it to become "the new Gestapo" [his actual words]. The last head of the Stasi, Erich Mielke, a long-time German commie learned his trade through the pre-ww2 German communists, then the NKVD and eventually through the Stasi to become its head, under which he gave the order to shoot on site any East German citizen attempting to breach the wall. He was once named "the most hated man in Germany" by a Munich based reporter and the tag stuck.
Erich Mielke - Wikipedia
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- #33
They seemed more willing to brazenly kill people (assassinations), whereas we seemed to go to greater lengths to conceal the act. That said, the Russians could conceal it as good as anybody if they felt it could have catastrophic consequences.
Just to be clear the USSR had a doctrine that was defensive and relied on superior numbers?
They definitely had a very high ratio of spies/population and were shockingly ruthless. I didn't know they originated from the SS/SD and the K-5 intel organization of the NKVD.
That said, one has to consider the Romanian intelligence service -- they actually put recording equipment in every household. That's gotta take a degree of determination.
I'm amazed he managed to survive Stalin, the East German government (ruthless regimes sometimes purge their intelligence chiefs every few years to limit their power), and the fall of the Berlin Wall (I could imagine a lot of East German citizens would have wanted to mete out the most painful of punishments to him).
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- #34
That sounds like a good thing. The test environment and live environment are the same...
Wait, so they had all the data going into the test system instead of the live one? I'm sorry if I'm wrong, but I'm not an expert on computers...
Glider
Captain
The point is this, they say they are the same and there supposed to be the same, but there not the same. Often there are differences and those differences can count.
Look at it another way. There were three environments, a) Development, b) Test c) Production
In this case it was developed in the development environment and when tested in the Test environment it worked. When we tried to run it to the Production environment it failed, as the Production environment wasn't to the the same standard as the Test environment. When we reviewed the problem, the test system was up to date with all the 'patches' mentioned in my first message and it was the Production environment that was missing some making it less safe from a security and stability perspective.
The admittedly unorthodox solution was to boost the capacity of the test environment so it could take the additional load of the production volumes, and use that for 'production or 'live' running, until we sorted the problem out.
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- #36
Glider
Captain
you got it
swampyankee
Chief Master Sergeant
- 3,971
- Jun 25, 2013
When I did PLM programming, we had problems with programs working well in development and beta test environments but showing unacceptably poor performance in production. This was due to there being about 200 times more users each processing much more complex drawings in production than either development or beta test environments.
The Soviet Union was driven by the Communist ideology agenda formulated in the so-called "Party programs". The core principle of any of the three programs was world domination. It was called by different names, "world revolution" earlier, "world socialist system" later, but the main principle was the same.
One typical mistake of "Kremlinologists" and of many Western politicians (journalists, intellectuals, public figures) was to believe (or to pretend to believe) that the USSR strategy was based on anything else but the principle mentioned above. Churchill made this mistake when he coined his famous phrase "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". His remark could be valid for the Russian Empire or the Russian Republic of 1917 or any Russian (short-lived) non-communist state of 1918-1922. But not for the USSR. Churchill has learned from his mistakes certainly and his vision was soberer in 1946 (Sinews of Peace).
As for the fear of being left behind and becoming less relevant - those were fears of many educated and less indoctrinated people in the USSR. Some of them belonged to "elite" and many - to the opposition, but those feelings did not determine the state policies, internal or foreign. And they had no impact on grand strategy. Some smart military and industry leaders, especially of later generations, were concerned with the technological gap, of course. But the bridging of the gap was never the first priority until the "perestroika". One could always hope to steal or to buy more techs from the West or to use the quantity vs quality advantage. Or simply to relax and say: "Hey, we won that war, we can do it again".
Sorry for the long post. Just a humble opinion of someone who lived in the USSR and excelled in the studies of "Marxism-Leninism" in those days.
As for the modern Russian Federation... This is also more complicated than many scholars of "geopolitics' say. So far, I find some lectures of Tymothy Snyder the most insightful. His concept of the politics of eternity is one of the keys to the current "riddle", in my opinion.
michaelmaltby
Colonel
.. don't ever apologize for great, insightful posts, D.
Thanks
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