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Building The Navy Intranet
wiredog writes "The Washington Post Business section has an article about the ongoing upgrade/integration of the US Navy's computer systems. The $6.9 billion project is the largest Federal IT project ever attempted. The mission is to get rid of, or upgrade, all the old software still in use (including, I kid you not, WordStar), do the same for all the hardware (including, I kid you not, typewriters), and link it all together. There are 100,000 different applications that have to be evaluated, and then either upgraded or replaced. I remember using WordStar. 20 years ago."
I kid you not, wordstar probably NEVER crashes on them. :)
This is something I've never understood about IT upgrades.
If wordstar and typewriters are working, why spend $6b to replace them?
A lot of IT spending seems like "make work" projects to me.
I'm truly amazed that the security of this country relies indirectly on products "that were not engineered for security".
The Raven
The Raven
Vi and EMACS are great, but for word processing, and I don't me lame desktop publishing which is what most programs like MS-Word and WordPerfect do today, for word processing, no one has created a better interface. Once you know the commands, you can virtually fly through editing a text document. Emacs and Vi are good, but they are designed for editing source code, not text.
Wordstar Still rules!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
including, I kid you not, typewriters), and link it all together
Once all the dot matrix printers were replaced with laser printers, a typewriter was the only thing that would work on carbon paper. Remember carbon paper?!!!!
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Exactly what is so laughable about using WordStar and typewriters ? A competent WordStar user (and in the day, Wordstar was THE word processor for power users) could almost certainly outdo the best Microsoft Word or free-software-Word-clone user in 95% of the everyday typing tasks that people need to do.
And typewriters still DO have their place. A good typewriter is still the fastest way to fill out a form, or fill out a label to put on a file folder, or even, sometimes, whip out a quick letter.
Ridiculing tried-and-proven technology is about as arrogant as ridiculing conventional mail.
95% of computer users would be just as productive with a typewriter and a subscription to [fill in the blank] pr0n magazines.
don't be knocking wordstar or typewriters when they get the job done usually just as well.
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
As a former EDS employee, I must say they were the WORST choice for this job and the absolute worst choice as an employer.
If anybody out there decides to work for EDS, may God have mercy on your soul.
So we could use open source software where appropriate, saving the taxpayer a couple of billion dollars (sooner or later it adds up to real money, and all that).
A shame no slashdot readers are fit enough to join the navy.
But seriously... if the costs can be lowered by using OSS, can we influence the choices made before it's too late?
computer games like Doom and music-swapping Napster software. Well considering that the later doesnt even exist anymore, and that you cant even jump in the former its obvious the navy is even further behind than we thought.
Let's face it, if they want a unified system will they be going with UNIX or with Windows? I believe we are looking at a federal bonus of nearly 7 billion for Microsoft.
Are you kidding? ADA was an utter failure.
It was supposed to be an common language for all embedded applications, and it's design goals were object oriented design, orthagonality, and was to promote clear and reusable code. It was to undo the use of dozens of different languages for different tasks.
But the applications were so varied, ADA started being pumped full of hardware-specific and mostly redundant commands, and eventually became a complete bloated mess. So each device had it's own implementation of ADA, and there was barely enough common ground to call it all the same language.
It was supposed to be Java, and it ended up more complicated than the bastard child of FORTRAN and C++, abandoned and raised in the wild by a tribe of assemblers.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Have you ever seen a blue screen on a 2600? Kind of puts the whole "wiping out most of the life on the planet" thing into perspective, doesn't it?
Remember that neophilia isn't necessarily the first criterion when designing systems designed to do things which affect, as you so accurately pointed out, most of the lives on the planet - all while being depth charged.
The project is her in Hawaii now, and is providing hundreds of IT jobs with great pay, 5+ year contracts, and some pretty great opportunities. I am not complaining.
The scary thing is that they want everything standardized to one OS, and one type of software. If you build the whole Navy network on this, and it only takes one exploit to bring the whole thing down. (remember Melissa?) Should we make it so easy for our enemies to shut down our entire Navy, that they could possibly send an e-mail to stop the fleet?
Standardization is good (especially in protocols, standards, and file formats), but 100% homogeneity implementation is bad.
OK, there have been uncountable posts now that discuss the pros and cons of WordStar.
The issue was not that everybody used WordStar and that now they have to switch. The issue was they everybody used a zillion different programs (of which WordStar was one example).
The idea is, as many other have pointed out, to improve communications. A first step is to make sure that applications are standardized. If everybody had used WordStar, they could probably have made this happen with that program, but in reality M$ Word was probably much more common.
Tor
I've tried scanning forms, then editing the scanned files in various tools, but it never worked right.
They may be getting rid of some of those beasts, but the armed forces love forms, so they're going to still need typewriters :)
A friend of mine tells me that the army is trying to go paperless. They now get emailed publications and are specifically prohibited from printing them out -- and they're punished if caught printing them out. Ack!
The problem with government agencies is that they either have so little money that they can't accomplish anything, or so much that they end up spending it in crazy ways. It's the product of a politicians who want to lower taxes on one hand but still shower money on the issue du jour. I can tell you first hand that a lot of the money being spent to procure IT for homeland security is wasted.
Politicians act as if (1) things can happen without money and (2) there is no limit to how much faster something can get done if enough money is poured into it. In reality, things don't go much faster once you've reached the funding level where things are possible but hard, and at some point more resources actually slows things down. Seriously, anyone with any experience working with the government could predict that any IT project this big, especially with such broad goals, is bound to be a disaster.
What makes things worse is that people's careers become entwined with these projects. I once was called to a meeting with an agency that spent two million dollars on what was essentially a web site with a small database attached. The state's internal IT people told me that they would have charged about $40,000 for the site, which seemed about right. We showed software that would have solved many of their problems for a few tens of thousands of dollars, but while they admitted the software was easier to use, they couldn't go with it because they'd already spent two million dollars.
Just because something can be replaced with a shiny new gizmo does not mean that it should be replaced. If the old process is good enough and is well-understood by the crew then what benefit is there to replacing it? It is rather sad that you could not see the whole boat as a large, complicated process and understand the elegance and graceful degradation in the face of component failure that is built-in to these systems. Maybe once you understand the technical challenges of designing fault-tolerance complex systems you will start to appreciate these boats for the marvels of systems and process integration that they can be...
To add to that, another major source of waste is duplication. One agency will spend 2 million for a given web app, another then spend 1 million for another just like it. When approached with the idea of merging, both think theirs is better and since both spent tons of money on it, the merging never happens. This is one major cause of the 100k some different software applications, many GOTS (government of the shelf), in use in the Navy today.
I wrote a program to track all the software for a given command. About half way through, we found out that there were many other such GOTS web apps in other commands. I suggested why not just use theirs or at least share code, but neither happened. Just that project alone had to cost over a million.
If you're comparing the US Navy's antiquated technology to some other country's Navy and wondering how the US, the world's largest superpower can be so ridiculously far behind, consider this.
While FOO may have modern systems now, 20 years ago they probably had no IT at all, compared to how the US Navy was running cutting edge WordStar. Such is the case for financial networks in the US vs. Europe. They're old and crappy here, but we've had them since the 60s, whereas Europe is only getting them fairly recently.
Legacy systems support is a huge bitch. And who the hell are Electronic Data Systems? I swear, all of these companies that work with the public sector have such generic names. Are they chosen just because their names are so generic or what?
Criminy!
Look, I only see a few people in this discussion really hitting the point of this whole conversion: to allow the Navy to communicate between points A and Z without having to going through every site between them. I worked on a Navy project at NAVICP helping the civilian support get an RFP for a demand planning COTS to replace the thirty systems they currently use. Just mapping interaction between systems took me three weeks to complete.
The goal is not to supplant Naval combat systems with Microcrock components, but to fix the communications barrier between Naval systems. In fact I know some folks still coding ship systems from scratch and their work will continue. It's the desktop they're working on. Every Naval site has its own system(s), many hand-crafted code from the eighties or even earlier. Does it work? Sure it does, in fact very well. Will it talk to the base forty miles down the road? Hell no, it won't. At least not without coding up some custom interface for the two systems. But we're not talking about two systems, we're looking at hundreds, not to mention the 100,000 legacy programs spread over the globe.
Is EDS the king of efficiency? Well, no. Are they trying? Probably better than most. Most techno's out there cringe at AD forcing them to use standard issue desktops, screen savers, and browsers. I understand that annoyance, but as an admin, if you let the techies have control, anybody can have control, including the morons who think removing a program is as simple as the delete button. Scale that up to the 150,000 seats on this project and mayhem prevails. It's no secret most major corps use the same tactics on their employees desktops.
You wanna be a code monkey for the military? Then get in a lab and use the proper tools, not the piece-o-crap IBM being doled out by EDS. It's an ego blow that some folks, the non-coders mind you, don't get to have unlimited web access, DVD burners, and play UT during lunch. Well too bad, bucko, welcome to the real world. You don't write the programs, you don't run the network, you don't get the goodies. And if you code the programs, why the hell are you connected to an intranet with the rest of the desk jockeys? It's the govt, so requisition a T3 for the back room.