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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. :)
My pen works fine too, but it isn't recognized on my network.
I mean, the reliability of wordstar and even typewritters is infinitely higher than the one of Microsoft Word/Excel.
If that seems either insightful or funny to you, go try creating some documents on a typewriter. Personally, I'd prefer a word processor with a lousy, cluttered UI, an annoying paperclip that keeps batting its eyelashes at me and a habit of crashing every two minutes over a typewriter any day.
Wordstar, however, wouldn't be so bad. It wasn't so bad, back in the day. Assuming you could get printer drivers for it. That wasn't a problem years ago, but now... (yes, kiddies, printer drivers were once the job of the application, not the OS, or even the printing system. Luckily you could usually just type in a few codes to tell your app how to use your dot matrix printer's italics mode, bold mode, etc. For fancier stuff, though... ugh).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Because the Navy wants everything tied together into one large directory designed for secure communication using standard software.
What a pipe dream. This is what IT companies have been promising for decades and have never delivered . Probably the last time this was accomplished was when an entire company ran off of one mainframe. One set of software, one set of terminals, one set of administrators, etc.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Have you ever seen some of the forms the government uses? Plain text is not going to cut it.
XML, on the other hand, may be just the ticket they are looking for. It would Allow standard interfaces to be made for data entry and specialized for to be printed.
The Military still relies quite heavily on printed papers, signatures, and photocopies - things that can be forged. It would be particularly nice to see them invest a big chunk of that money into digital signatures and encryption, so they could eliminate much of the wasted paper and free up huge amounts of space (one DDS4 tape is alot smaller than 20GB printed data).
Of course, a change this massive would cause the mental collapse of thousands of officials still unfamiliar with technology and unwilling to learn.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit