Congress cutting budgets of SEI, IDA, MITRE

Congress cutting budgets of SEI, IDA, MITRE

[Gregory Aharonian]

>From the August 9, 1993 issue of Electronic Engineering Times, page 22

	Congress is poised to cut the budgets of Pentaon-funded research
centers.  Both houses have recommended reductions in the $1.4 billion
budgets of the 13 FFRDCs.  The Senate moved to reduce funding by 6 percent
and impose a pay freeze to save another 6 percent.
	Senators were said to feel an "increasing frustration that these
guy's budgets were going up when everybody else's was going down". 
Industry opposition to diversication of FFRDCs focuses on what critics 
see as their expansion into professional and technical services.  
	Major software FFRDCs targeted for budget cuts include MITRE, IDA,
and the SEI.  Officials from those organizations said only that budget cuts
would result in additional layoffs
	"Some of the centers do some good work, but the question is have
they strayed from their original mission", a Congessional analyst asks in
a report released in June.  While generally critical of the FFRDCs record,
the report concluded that they may off some advantages over private
companies since the centers are restricted in performing outside research.
	Senate sources said funding for FFRDCs could be cut even deeper in
the defense appropriations bill expected in the fall.  The only question 
now, Senate sources say, is how deep the cuts will be and how they will be
distributed among the centers.  The betting is that the bigger centers
will absorb most of the cuts, one source predicts.
==============================================================================

   Given that the software-related FFRDCs have shown no initiative in 
raising and examining the issue critical to Ada's health and the hypocrisy
of its non-use inside the DoD, there will be some of us who loose no sleep
seeing the FFRDCs shrunk.  Much of the raw data I have been posting (minus
my obnoxious comments) should have been coming out of SEI, MITRE and IDA.

   I have a suggestion for SEI management.  When you start laying off, fire
all the people involved with the suppression of the SEI report whose data
undermines the rationale for the Ada Mandate, and whose data contradicts and
was ignored in SEI's followon substudy on Ada and C++.  Getting rid of
intellectual dishonest people is a good way to downsize.
-- 
**************************************************************************
 Greg Aharonian                                      srctran@world.std.com
 Source Translation & Optimization                            617-489-3727
 P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178

Re: Congress cutting budgets of SEI, IDA, MITRE

[John Cobarruvias]

In article <CBJryM.554@world.std.com> srctran@world.std.com (Gregory
Aharonian) writes:
>From the August 9, 1993 issue of Electronic Engineering Times, page 22
>
>	Congress is poised to cut the budgets of Pentaon-funded research
>centers.  Both houses have recommended reductions in the $1.4 billion
>budgets of the 13 FFRDCs.  The Senate moved to reduce funding by 6
percent
>and impose a pay freeze to save another 6 percent.

[rest of the article explaining the above deleted]


>   Given that the software-related FFRDCs have shown no initiative in 
>raising and examining the issue critical to Ada's health and the
hypocrisy
>of its non-use inside the DoD, there will be some of us who loose no
sleep
>seeing the FFRDCs shrunk.  Much of the raw data I have been posting
(minus
>my obnoxious comments) should have been coming out of SEI, MITRE and IDA.

Greg, don't be an asswipe. "Raising and examinint the issue critical to
Ada's health etc etc" is probably the last thing the FFRDCs are supposed
to do anyway. Much of the raw data you have been posting (plus your
obnoxious comments) should NOT have been coming out of SEI MITRE and IDA.
They have better things to do. Maybe you should follow their example.

The above may seems like a personal gripe towards you, and it is, but when
you begin to attack other organizations like you are doing, especially
against one which I have had excellent relations with, then you should
expect comments like the above.

>
>   I have a suggestion for SEI management.  When you start laying off,
fire
>all the people involved with the suppression of the SEI report whose data
>undermines the rationale for the Ada Mandate, and whose data contradicts
and
>was ignored in SEI's followon substudy on Ada and C++.  Getting rid of
>intellectual dishonest people is a good way to downsize.
>-- 
>**************************************************************************

> Greg Aharonian                                     
srctran@world.std.com
> Source Translation & Optimization                           
617-489-3727
> P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178
>




*************************************************************
John R. Cobarruvias, Texas A&M Class of '78, 
NASA Johnson Space Center Houston Tx.
(713)483-9357

"Your pain will be legendary" (Hellraiser I)
"And to think..................I hesitated" (Hellraiser II)
"These pins are killing me!" (Pinhead in Hellraiser IV)
*************************************************************

Re: Congress cutting budgets of SEI, IDA, MITRE

[cis.ohio-state.edu!news.sei.cmu.edu!jbg]

In article Congress cutting budgets of SEI, IDA, MITRE of Tue, 10 Aug 1993
14:23:09 GMT srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) snipes: 

> ... fire
>all the people involved with the suppression of the SEI report whose data
>undermines the rationale for the Ada Mandate, and whose data contradicts and
>was ignored in SEI's followon substudy on Ada and C++.  Getting rid of
>intellectual dishonest people is a good way to downsize.

I hope most readers understand that this kind of innuendo is impossible to
reply to -- if there was no such report, how can you prove there wasn't, and
if some data was collected that wasn't used because it didn't have the
relevance that Greg thinks it had, how can you respond without looking like
you are covering up something really bad?   Talk about intellectual honesty!

John B. Goodenough					Goodenough@sei.cmu.edu
Software Engineering Institute				412-268-6391

P.S. It's amazing how the whole tone of comp.lang.ada improves if you put
/srctran/h:j in your KILL file.  It's really a rather technically oriented
and interesting newsgroup under these conditions.

Re: Congress cutting budgets of SEI, IDA, MITRE

[agate!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!u]

In article <CBJryM.554@world.std.com>, srctran@world.std.com (Gregory
Aharonian) wrote:

[Reprint of article from the August 9, 1993 issue of Electronic Engineering
Times, page 22 outlining Congresses attempt to reduce funding for FFRDCs
deleted to save space]

>    Given that the software-related FFRDCs have shown no initiative in 
> raising and examining the issue critical to Ada's health

Which of your "issues" are you referring to?  I can only speak from my
experience at one of these FFRDCs (MITRE), but there many here that have
been involved with Ada both in the language development aspect and in it's
use for real systems.

> and the hypocrisy of its non-use inside the DoD, 

Are you saying that the FFRDCs are responsible for all (or even most) of
the DoD's non-use of Ada?  If so then there a re a number of fallicies with
this view.  MITRE is only an advisor to our customers: we don't make policy
decisions for the DoD, USAF, NASA, FAA, USA or any of our other customers. 
In addition, we cannot "butt into" a program: the customer has to ask for
our involvement and is ultimately free to accept or reject our
recommendations.   I'm sure that there are times when organizations within
MITRE have not been as forceful about using Ada on a program as they could
have been, but in my experience they have always been more forceful about
applying good system/software engineering principles than the other players
(e.g. the customer, acquirer, contractor, etc.)  I have never heard of any
situation where a contractor said that they wanted to develop portions of a
system in Ada v.s some other language, and MITRE disagreed.  Maybe its
happened somewhere, but I've only seen the opposite case.

> there will be some of us who loose no sleep seeing the FFRDCs shrunk.
>  Much of the raw data I have been posting (minus
> my obnoxious comments) should have been coming out of SEI, MITRE and IDA.

I guess what bothers me the most about these comments is the apparent
attitude that our funding should be cut because we haven't completely
adopted your agenda (whatever that is).

[rantings about SEI deleted]

>  Greg Aharonian                                      srctran@world.std.com
>  Source Translation & Optimization                            617-489-3727
>  P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178

                       My opinions, not MITREs.
Kevin Miller
The MITRE Corporation
Bedford, Ma
kjmiller@mitre.org