[geeks] Windows in the DoD

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sun, 02 May 2004 @ 09:57 -0400, Nadine Miller said:

> Having worked in the SGML world for a while, I can speak to this 
> issue a bit.
> 
> The US Gov't is the largest publisher in the world.  SGML (and, 
> as a result, XML) got started because the gov't realized it could 
> force suppliers to give them info in whatever formfactor the 
> gov't desired.

SGML is well over 20 years old now, and I've only recently seen the
government try to make much use of it.  Since computer research was
heavily driven by the DoD when GML/SGML was first created, I'm sure
there was a lot of influence.

SGML came out of IBM from GML, which was created by Charles Goldfarb,
Edward Mosher, and Raymond Lorie.

Hmmm... [G]oldfarb, [M]osher, and [L]orie...

Goldfarb is active in the government XML community:

    http://www.xmltimes.com/

See also:

    http://xml.house.gov/
    http://xml.gov

Historically, US government documentation was typeset manually, or
was done on whatever computer system the local shop happened to have,
if it supported text processing.  That's why you see nroff, TeX, and
minicomputer/mainframe documentation formats.

Now tons of it (literally) is Microsoft Word.  

There is a lot of it out there that was produced on typewriters, and
still has not been converted.

One of my old college professors converted mini/mainframe media and
typewritten manuals to ascii, enough to make a decent living out of it.

> E.g. SGML, which would then massaged into paper (possibly PDFs),
> specialized electronic delivery systems (e.g. training systems or
> full-blown technical manuals w/video, audio, etc.), or simply provided
> in source form.

These are fairly new ideas though.  They have a long way to go, and
right now many shops are going go M$ Word, regardless of wether it
really works or not.

A lot of the current implementation is blindly stupid.

Many shops only have to meet a requirement of producing a PDF,
regardless of wether it is done properly or not, or what the original
format is.

> The drive to reduce the paper on a ship is all about the weight of    
> the paper.  Remove all the repair manuals on a destroyer, and the     
> water line goes down 12 feet.                                         

I'm skeptical, to say the least.  You sure you don't mean inches?  Even
then, I'm skeptical on all but the smallest ships.  Do you realize how
much weight 12 feet of waterline is on a destroyer?  Even a foot is a
lot.

It's interesting too, because precisely this topic has been frequent in
the local area for the last 15 years among local geeks.  Manuals came up
in the last month or so with quite a few people working with local naval
facilities, both civilian and military.

This sounds to me like FUD from a company trying to sell a document
management system, like some of the absolute crap forced on local
military personnel.

Kind of like the NMCI fiasco...



-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Tara is grass, and behold how Troy lieth
low--And even the English, perchance their hour will come!"]