Military Grade

At WhereCamp last week, I saw a presentation in which the presenter described their geolocation algorithms as "military grade". When I pressed about how they determined the algorithm was "military grade", he said "Actually, we just mean really robust." Wish he had just said that...

I was tasked to ask about creating an internal Wiki for the research group I work for at the US Geological Survey. I sent an email to a handful of folks my boss thought would be a good place to start. The response I got was:

In the recent past when someone was wanting to set up a website for information exchange, we were told by our managers to point them to Lotus, using Sametime etc. We were told it was a very robust (and expensive) program and was purchased specifically for scientists and other groups to share information. Have you thought about using this mechanism?

So, instead of using, say, MediaWiki on a Linux box basically for free, I'm expected to use our "military grade" Lotus Notes. To be fair, I logged into Lotus Notes (and changed my password which expired a couple months ago - I use the web client which uses a different password) and tried to explore how to share information. On the Getting Started window, there was a friendly enough link "Learn more about using Notes" which takes you to a missing page on IBM's website.

Beware the moniker "military grade" because, while it may imply a certain robustness, it also implies "very expensive and difficult to use".