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• - Highly complex data in many formats that change often and have varying quality
• - Massive amounts of data at high velocity; highly transactional
• - Highly structured data, but multiple and changing schemas

See: http://assets1.csc.com/innovation/downloads/LEFBriefing_MarkLogic_031512.pdf (slide 23)

My two cents:

• When faced with a very complicated software project, use what's been proved to work.
• Why would the CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) dictate this particular less common technology? Very strange.

"delivered nothing but a few PowerPoint slides"

That is not accurate. Sure TrailBlazer had A LOT of contractor issues, such as cost control, overcharging, and typical contractor abuse between BOTH gov't branch heads and execs from private industry. Heck guess where a lot of those TB gov't heads retired to...private industry!

One needs to realize:

a. Thin thread was a excellent proof of concept... you needed to completely change the culture of the community overnight to implement it at scale. It's the typical "new paradigm on a moving train" scenario. Before 9/11, the agency was getting it's budgets slashed and was moving towards COTS. Post 9/11, it panic on solutions and went with COTS... on steroids.

b. Pre-9/11, the agency was panicking as Drake mentioned, BUT there was a lot of competition in-house to develop the right GOTS solution (TT was one of them in some ways). Since it's gov't we're talking about, the politicians thought we were moving to slow and getting expensive since the agency was reducing workforce in the 90's, hence COTS, out-sourcing, and contracting was ideal--heck it worked for DIA, DoD, etc...

c. Since (b) was occurring, the TT team was backstabbed both politically and timely--the contractors took over for instance. I say backstabbed cause basically the contractors took ownership of the problem and wanted their COTS in place... and huge service contracts. That's why we all keep hearing about TT --how about all those other R&D GOTS solutions and other black-projects? Remember the agency had smoke-stack projects, need to know ruled. It wasn't just TT that was successful... at the same mission! Sounds like someone had his lunch stolen.

d. And PPT slides? Sorry but there's a lot of Trailblazer apps being used in the agency, most just got refactored. Trailblazer just didn't promise the holy grail all the leaders were touting, but then again, politics and contractor greed can be blamed for that. Heck even the TT architects wouldn't imagine the amount of data being generated today.

And in the end, we can talk about how TT could have been so great but, we still got him without it.

"banishment" was coined since it was a pain to get to the annex and the facilities (back 10yrs ago) we crap. It's changed over the years AND a lot of stuff is done there now since the agency's outsourcing to Eagle Alliance--most of the IT/IA side is heading in that type of arrangement due to budget cuts.
And a lot of important stuff was done there from time to time. And the real important stuff? Not at the Fort. That was done somewhere else. Though the fort does have the cool (at least to us techies), lower priority projects.


To the op, FYI, annex by acronym maynot be a good idea (when was your or friend's last LS)? ;)

No, CSC is this world's CSC ;-)

XML has tremendous, huge, giant levels of adoption that dwarf its use as XHTML and in XMLHTTPRequest (AJAX) stuff.
WHATWG's HTML 5 and JSON will have no effect on these other uses. It's just that nobody in hangouts like this sees it.

For example, the entire international banking industry runs on XML Schemas. Here's one such standard: IFX. Look at a few links: http://www.csc.com/industries/banking/news/11490.shtml , http://www.ifxforum.org/home , http://www.ifxforum.org/home
But there are other XML standards in use in banking.

The petroleum industry is a heavy user of XML. Example: Well Information Transfer Standard Markup Language WITSML (http://www.knowsys.com/ and others).

The list goes on and on, literally, in major, world-wide industry after industry. XML has become like SQL -- it was new, it still has plenty of stuff going on and smart people are working on it, but a new generation of programmers has graduated from high school, and reacts against it. But it's pure folly to think it's going to go away in favor of JSON or tag soup markup.

So yes, suceess in Facebook applications can make a few grad students drop out of school to market their "stuff," and Google can throw spitballs at Microsoft with a free spreadsheet written in Javascript, but when you right down to it, do you really think the banking industry, the petroleum industry, and countless others are going to roll over tomorrow and start hacking JSON?

"Where are your patient records today?"

if I'm not mistaken, isnt CSC really DynCorp (the DOD Contractor)? Somewhat interesting to see them on the list with all the other companies.

CSC acquired DynCorp a couple years ago. They (CSC) do a lot of DoD work but are heavily involved in healthcare, too (among other things).

Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Accenture, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Computer Sciences have formed the Interoperability Consortium

This part of the summary (lifted from the article, apparently) mentions "Computer Sciences"; the company is actually Computer Sciences Corporation.

As an aside, the printer-friendly (i.e. less cluttered) version of the CNet link is here.

CSC are the incumbants at General Dynamics (now Lockheed Martin).

You aren't seeing Canadian or Irish outsourcing stories because it doesn't happen.

Really? Literally in less than five seconds I found this and this on Google.

It DOES happen, because Canadians and the Irish are not quite as "greedy" as Americans (ie. our salaries ARE lower). Canada is also attractive because of its proximity to the US and similar standards and practices--it makes up for the even cheaper wages in India. I was involed with a little outsourcing myself when I was self employed (I am Canadian--oddly enough with Irish ancestry).

You're right however, it has nothing to do with race. The reason I got the work instead of the Californians is because they wanted forty percent more money to do the same work. Probably becasue I didn't have to make payments on the Lexus or the half-million-dollar condo and they did.

I don't understand why it is that when a company enters into a work contract they are not held to the same standards of the employer.

Back in the mid-90's, I worked for Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) on a project that used the very-cool Rational R1000 platform for development and source-code control. In summary, the R1000 was a custom Ada-oriented development platform (even the hardware was custom-made, I believe). The operating system was fully implemented in Ada and featured a "command prompt" that required you to write snippets of Ada code (expressed as anonymous blocks) instead of shell commands. All errors were thrown as Ada exceptions. The "command prompt" editor even featured code completion and had a built-in debugger. It was even possible to auto-generate custom DOD-STD-2167A design documents (SDDs, IDDs, etc.) by embedding specialized comments in your Ada code (ala Javadoc) and using the built-in document generation modules. It was definitely cool for its time!

It's a shame that JaJa is associated with Tiscali.

This is one of the reasons that 3G is good in Tokya. People there are so densely packed that they were having severe availability problems. 3G is helping with that.

I wrote a paper last year on Code Red and the whole hacking culture, which won its category in my employer's "papers program". Unfortunately the paper isnt available publicly yet, though Im hoping to have it published soon.

Anyway, the conclusion was basically this:

There have been several worms in recent times, CodeRed, CodeRed v2, CodeRed II, and Nimda to name the more obvious ones. All of these exploited bugs in IIS that Microsoft knew about in June 1999 but other than a few knowledge base articles with attached patches, they did nothing about it. The same bug was even reported in beta versions of XP, so they didnt even fix their own development code.

We were lucky in that these worms were mostly an annoyance which did little more than deface a web site, and/or replicate themselves. They could have done a lot more damage, as many /.ers have pointed out.

What they achieved though is an almost global awareness of the dangers, and potential damage that worms like these can do if they wanted to, while reminding system admins that software should be patched/upgraded regularly - particularly when the bug being exploited had been known about and reported by cert 2 years prior to the worms being created! In this regard, they did us a great service. The media hype and predictions of doom got peoples attention in a way that had not been achieved before.

Microsoft, with its marketing machine, got loads of publicity. I remember seeing Bill Gates on the news, standing at a podium with the FBI at his side saying how Microsoft had reacted quickly and provided patches to defeat the evil hackers (remember that these patches had been available for 2 years - what Microsoft was providing was simply a cumulative bundle of these). The publicity was priceless, touting Microsoft as our saviour, yet I believe it was Microsofts lack of action in fixing the problem and making people aware of it that allowed the worms to be created in the first place.

Its not good enough to simply know about a problem and passively make a patch available for download. Its difficult to keep track of all customers, but I would have thought that if you have a large number of very large corporate customers, you should pro-actively send them updates and advisories, and make it widely known that there is a problem which needs attention. Whatever Microsoft did or didnt do, it wasnt enough (obviously).

I said it so much better in the paper, but basically I believe that the guys that wrote these worms did us a service, and although CNN might think it was a big fuss over nothing, I would disagree. It was certainly the bigest event of its kind in the internets history so far.

There was a recent post on regarding security courses. The poster was kind enough to reply back to the list with a list of responses to his question. I've included some of that list below.. my hands hurt from typing all day, so I don't feel like typing out the rest. Maybe I will tomorrow..

http://www.isc2.org/
http://www.brainbench.com/
http://www.robertgraham.com/
http://www.r00tabega.com/
http://www.sans.org/
http://www.csc.com/
http://www.ey.com
http://www.securityfocus.com/
http://astalavista.box.sk/
http://neworder.box.sk/
http://blacksun.box.sk/tutorials.html
http://www.prosofttraining.com/

Don Head
Linux Mentor

The point of that line isn't referring to how powerful Linux is, but how it gets used right now. Linux still requires a significant amount of technical know-how of the Linux system in order to install it. Linux is a "toy" for techies because non-techies can't really use it effectively. The real problem is the lack of good technical administrators.

Some of my co-workers (I work at CSC) may use computers for the entirety of their job, but they couldn't format a disk without help. Some of them even have trouble understanding how to use the graphical file systems in Windows. They'd never understand how to sort a text based directory tree, much less remember any number of commands for use in the system. Point, Click and Type (normal documents) is about all they can handle effectively. Don't get me wrong, CSC is good at what it does. There are some amazing techies here who can handle mainframes and other very large systems very well. Most of them prefer one of the older UNIX systems over Linux.

The point being that until Linux is as easy to operate as Windows, it will remain a techie's OS, and stay out of the main-stream of office environments. Before calling the article uniformed, think about what they're trying to say. Linux is a very good OS with lots of up-time... if you know how to tweak it properly and are using a small computer. But, if we're talking about pure up-time, I've yet to see a Win95 machine here crash while running nomral programs (like MS Word, MS Excel or Lotus Notes), and the mainframes they use for back-ground networking have up-times measured in years (well, as a whole. Sections get turned off for vacuuming and internal checks now and again, but they have to, being room-sized machines). I think a few of the core machines have been on and running perfectly since before Linux existed. And I have no clue what they run, except that it was written in-house before getting bought out by the current owners. Until Linux can mach the usability of Windows, it will have a hard time capturing anything more than servers (run by a good techie who isn't using a different UNIX) and techie's personal computers. But that's just my perspective. Maybe I'm missing something since last time I helped a friend install Linux (I personally use Win98 system, since most of what I do is game related. Thanks mostly to Loki, I may soon switch.)

Just remember, even if you don't like it, it isn't necessarily either bad or false. I've seen Win2000 beta, and I personally liked it as PC OS. I can't vouch for its ability as a server OS, however. And, like Linux, it needs more drivers, but I know those will appear. The Linux ones are more in doubt.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"