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Why not just post them a CD with the database on it. You can always password protect it to keep it safe. I see you work for EDS. Their customers include... http://www.eds.com/about/locations/uk/

HP, it's time to set the Superbowl cat herding commercial free.

The Navy pays Northrup Grumman (through subcontractor EDS) $3,000 per year to LEASE crappy Dell Laptops.

http://www.eds.com/sites/nmci/

You'd think that this would come with a certain amount of priced-in tech support, but that all costs extra, too. The whole system is a giant POS that doesn't do what the Navy really needs and still costs the taxpayers three times what it would be worth even if it did work right. Government contracts being what they are, I'd imagine that any other federal agency would pay similarly inflated prices.

The Navy Marine Corp Intranet http://www.eds.com/sites/nmci/ is controlled by EDS, Ross Perot's old company. It is very restrictive and last I knew only allowed windows on it. Only selected applications can be installed on a computer on this network and it is tough to make the list. This could be good for some software that runs on windows to show it is ready for prime time, but it is going to be tough to get managers to go through the hassle of getting it approved. The Navy and Marine Corps have put themselves in a Microsoft box on this one I think.
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Rent Solar Power, no installation cost: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

I think it's great that EDS didn't make the top 40. Where's the rest of the list? I'd really like to see where they ended up.

Do you have an idea how much it costs to maintain their army of consultants and developers? These http://www.bearingpoint.com/guys, these http://www.accenture.com/guys, these http://www.eds.com/guys and last but not least your little ant army of Indians http://www.wipro.com/. Remember that they travel a lot, have to stay in hotels, eat, etc. This is not cheap. Viva la Outsourcing! Don't work there, but know someone who does. And it's chaotic. Thank God I don't have Bellsouth DSL.

Sorry about the broken link.

http://www.eds.com/about/careers/

Select Apply for Position.
Select Search for Jobs.
Enter Linux as a keyword.

12 Linux positions as of 3/17/06

EDS wouldn't know agility if it bit them in the A$$. From their own website... http://www.eds.com/services/appsmodernization/ and http://www.eds.com/services/casestudies/foxsports. aspx and http://www.eds.com/services/casestudies/eds_instan t.aspx

EDS wouldn't know agility if it bit them in the A$$. From their own website... http://www.eds.com/services/appsmodernization/ and http://www.eds.com/services/casestudies/foxsports. aspx and http://www.eds.com/services/casestudies/eds_instan t.aspx

EDS wouldn't know agility if it bit them in the A$$. From their own website... http://www.eds.com/services/appsmodernization/ and http://www.eds.com/services/casestudies/foxsports. aspx and http://www.eds.com/services/casestudies/eds_instan t.aspx

If I were SAP etc I would be annoyed. SAP and Oracle are both pushing Linux to their customers. All those companies have dozens of other partners as well.

In fact if I were EDS I would be worried. In order to maintain 20% growth Microsoft will eventually have to move heavily into consulting (copying IBMs old form).

My guess is by speaking about Linux he immediately gets better press coverage.

Low-Cost Solution Saves More Than Money

The new Linux environment provides a level of security and stability unavailable elsewhere. Because it is open-source software, it also offers significant cost savings on licensing and allows EDS to provide faster, more responsive support because programming problems can be diagnosed and repaired more quickly.

Pay no attention to the OS behind the curtain.

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.oracl e.com

If you check the Alliance's web site (http://www.eds.com/services/alliances/agility/) you will see that Oracle is indeed a member of that group. As is SAP and Siebel, but, they aren't mentioned in the article either.

The poster is correct.

Oracle is not in the actual linked article.

Oracle is an Agility Alliance partner, though. You could have checked this easily.

It may not be mentioned in the article, but Oracle are mentioned on the Ability Alliance's membership page. The Slashdot summary is completely correct.

Oracle actually is in the Agility Alliance even though the article does not mention it. That is why it is in the snippet; the OP actually did a bit of research

EDS lists both Xerox and Oracle as members of the EDS Agility Alliance.

Mostly correct, though "recently" was 1996:

Perot, H. Ross (Henry Ross Perot), 1930-, American business executive and political leader, b. Texarkana, Tex., grad. Annapolis, 1953. In 1957 he resigned his commission and became a salesman for IBM. In 1962 he founded Electronic Data Systems (EDS), one of the first computer data service companies. In 1984, he sold EDS to General Motors, but retained an interest in the company. Bitterly critical of General Motors management, he sold his remaining interests in EDS to GM for $700 million (1986). He diversified into real estate, gas, and oil and in 1988 started a new computer service company, Perot Systems.

http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0838476.html

On June 7 (96), after 11 years of GM ownership, EDS became an independent company. EDS announced a major restructuring, replacing the Leadership Council with an Executive Council and a Global Operations Council. The new structure was designed to bring smaller, more agile decision-making bodies closer to EDS organizations and clients. EDS also established a new board of directors and named several new corporate officers. GM announced a 10-year service contract with EDS and a similar agreement covering its international operations. On June 10, shares of a new EDS stock began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "EDS." The following day, EDS shares began trading on the London Stock Exchange.

http://www.eds.com/about/history/timeline.aspx

being a british taxapyer I sent them a message to cease and desist:

It seems your firm is costing the British tax payer enormous quantities of cash, predominently through incompetence. Please take any drastic steps necessary to prevent any further IT disasters and consider if your firm deserves the billions of consulting dollars it has already banked.

Yours,

Jim.

anyone else can too:

https://www.eds.com/ssl/forms/contact/index.aspx/

The system isn't 800TB, but will scale to 800TB, according to this EDS press release. In fact, given that they've spent a mere $2.5M (powerpoint!) there's not a hope in hell that they've got 800TB! The powerpoint says it's a 5TB EMC SAN & an ADIC tape library for backup.

An interesting point is that they're delivering the documents using DjVu by Lizardtech, which is GPLd, and developed by the creators of DjVu in conjuction with LizardTech (after a period of LT not-getting-it). The DjVuLibre home page is here. LizardTech still have the best encoders for the format.

Bill Gates and H. Ross Perot; together at last!

hm, according to this link, their CEO is a guy called Michael Jordan ...
this name seems to attract money alot better than mine ...

Posting on EDS site

From the NYSE Site

Really? IT jobs are pretty easy to get in DC if you're a US Citizen and have a pretty clean record. Just get a gig with one of the many government contractors. Good opportunity to pick up a security clearance and have job security.

Yeah but look at their alliancies at the bottom of this page

Case Studies

they do Microsoft too..

According to this, EDS runs UNIX-based systems.

Nice try, though.

Sounds like a troll. The article quoted by the parent is about a small regional airline (Atlantic Coast Airlines) that's doing its IT work internally. The article doesn't mention EDS at all. Moreover, browsing EDS's site, you can see that the solution they implemented for Continental Airlines is UNIX-based.

The Noxema ad? Coke? Were these really aired for the first time during a Super Bowl?

It certainly appears that Pro-E runs on Linux. I believe Unigraphics does as well, but their site was much more difficult to navigate. At least something from them runs on Linux. CATIA doesn't appear to run on linux yet, but with IBM as the main US distributor hopefully that will change soon.

And what choice do they have? It's either take the job or be unemployed and have no money food etc, and hope that your familiy can support you. (Welfare? doesn't exist of course)

What choice do they have? Lets see, they could work for Sun, Cisco, Microsoft, Motorola, Yahoo, Adobe, Hughes, EDS or Oracle, to name a few employers in India.

What makes you think that IBM are even looking for the best talent?

How much bargaining power in the job market do you think these Indian workers have?

you seem to be woefully misinformed about the Indian job market. The number one concern of employers is how to retain their employees for more that 6 months due to aggressive recruiting techniques and incentives from competitors. Check out Monster India, Naukri or Career India for a clue, or just look at the results for this Google search.

Krishna

The Army will be rolling out these computers just like N. M. C. I.. The OS of choice will undoubtedly be Windows 2000 SP1 just as it is in N.M.C.I. Also, Office Pro 2000 SR-1a is standard on all machines amongst a host of other apps. Visio is a part of the standard suite of apps. The contract is being fulfilled by EDS. The $950.00 price tag is not across the board. That is just the baseline. Premiums will be paid for faster machines, laptops, and Science & Technology seats.

The transition has been rough so far as users have found that they cannot abandon their legacy seats in every case. Thus, you see a lot of dual-desktop situations. I hope the Army takes into account the lessons learned from the Navy and Marine Corps' efforts.

Welcome to this decade, EDS has not been associated with Ross Perot since 1986.

Welcome to this decade, EDS has not been associated with Ross Perot since 1986.

I don't think that this point scoring does any good. UNIX and Windows both have major security problems.

I remember a security seminar I attented where the lecturer took a neutral stance toward whether Unix or Windows was more secure. His philosophy was "go with what you know". If you live and breathe Windows, you probably keep up to date with the latest Microsoft news, releases and patches just as well as a Sun/Unix geek might stay up to date with Solaris patches and updates. Knowing network security (gosh, let's protect the potentially vulnerable ports on our server from being publically reachable) is essential to both.

So many new administrators are getting Windows or Linux or other products and implementing them without the experience of security lessons learned from the past. It takes a mass event like this one to re-educate the newbies.

As a reminder for everyone designing, "one degree of separation" architecture, remember that Suki is one of your potential customers.

(Marc Andreesen)
I'm an egotistical, talentless hack who's latest
stupid idea, loudcloud, failed, so I sold off half
of the company to a bunch of Unsuspecting, good old boy rubes, since my status as "Internet Goldenboy" is in question.
(/Marc Andreesen)

I used to work for a rather lame start-up, which was run by a member of the aohell/nutscrape
cronie network of good old boys (that racist, ignorant, sexual harassing homophobic prick, The only person I know of to have a wired article about how much of a jerk he is. Opsware was
crap. It was slow, buggy, and caused us downtime
that wasn't really downtime according to loudcloud's incredible staff of marketing and law
employees. We were a startup with low funding, yet we spent $800k a month for service from them that we could have built ourselves at exodus or equinix for $200k a month.

If anybody wants information on a REAL movement
in automated systems administration, go to Infrastructures.org A movement based on Steve Traugott's Usenix presentation Bootstrapping the infrastructure.

But the $6.9 billion project has turned into a major technology headache for the services and the prime contractor on the job, Electronic Data Systems Corp. (EDS).

Hey, if EDS can herd cats, they can do this job, no sweat.

Belloc

hell, a couple years ago i was working in the it dept of a moderately sized bank and there was a really bad storm that came through and knocked out most of EDS's datacenter and knocked out much of their atm card processing facilities. it was a major hassle as 1) you can't do a damn thing about it and 2) you can't explain to your customers that it isn't your fault their card isn't going through but the fault of your card processors (also one of the biggest companies on the planet, but nobody seems to know who they are). customers blaim the bank and drive off angry.

most people don't know it, but most financial instututions rely on a service like EDS's and if they are down, a key component of your business is down with it. it really isn't a laughing matter...

... as long as the passenger rate is as low as their earnings, it's fine... but...

if they grow and I assume they want to, you can suck Linux or any other Unix compared to the good old TPF, IBMs Transaction Processing Family, scalable like hell, fast like a rocket and secure as you could hardly imagine. And I've recently saw a nice article about SMTP beeing ported to the TPF as well and POP3 is already their, carrying 250 Mio POP Boxes without being slashdotted all the time.... Tux, you better wach your ass in the Rerservation Systems Area of the Airlines around the globe... at least EDS and their client/whatever Sabre and many others are still using it and they won't stop for now ;) Sure, you can port the Tux to the zSeries of big blue but with that you won't get the realtime OS behaviour which TPF is providing.

http://www.eds.com/products/plm/parasolid/portfoli o/supported.shtml I'm eager to see what other high end CAD/CAM (UGS, CATIA) programs get ported as a response to this...

For some information about this, see here, here and here.

Also, it's not just "several million dollars" . . . it's nearly $7 billion.

For some information about this, see here, here and here.

Also, it's not just "several million dollars" . . . it's nearly $7 billion.

Make sure the company you choose does a complete audit. Find someone who will not only audit your servers, but also your network, and physical location. Make sure you find a company large enough to handle this. Smaller firms may not have the personnel necessary to evaluate a very large data center.

Remember, a good security audit is going to point out flaws. Try to make it well known that this audit is going on, and that suggestions will be made for improvement. Try not to emphasize any one problem, and do NOT make anything accusitory. This will soften the blow somewhat.

Getting the boss to pay out can be hard. My best advice is to write up a business cost analysis. Clearly list actions suggested, their costs, what risks they mitigate, and the potential damage of these risks. A good manager may not sign off on everything, but will at least make improvement.

Most state governments and companies I have worked with have an enterprise security division. Does your organization? This group should be independant of everyone else, and should have some power to enforce security policies (you do have a standard security policy, right?)

If you don't have a stated security policy, write one up. This is one thing that a good security firm will want to review, (or help you create.)

Audits should be performed regularly, and should be integrated with the change control process. Any changes to a production system should result in a new security audit of that system. This is another reason it is wise to have an enterprise security group, they can offload that work.

If you have any of this in place, you are absolutely ahead of an unnamed Midwestern State government for whom I am currently working. One company I can recommend is EDS they do a lot of government work, have a massive army of people, and can evaluate not just security, but other parts of your enterprise that tie in. Good luck on this undertaking, you have a lot of work ahead.

I believe its a $6B contract, and its in progress right now. I'm not sure if the consensus is that they're being successful or not, but its the biggest single example of a "managed solution" that I've ever seen.

SuperID

Funny. Some of the EDS guys at my current contract broke the DNS servers (yes, serverS) on Friday afternoon. They have also been unavailable all weekend.
If I cared, I'd use one of the unpatched BIND root exploits and fix it myself, but I'd rather watch them die....

It's still available at EDS's site.

Is this the same EDS tha Private Eye keeps writing about?
And by the way the link in the story should be EDS

SuperID
Free Database Hosting For Developers

SuperID
Free Database Hosting

I saw something interesting in the posting. A proposed boycott of Compaq?

I'm going to make a comparison here.

You go to the corner store and buy a few 5 cent candies. All well and good. For whatever reason you decide to boycott the store that sells them.

A nationwide chain isn't going to be affected by the loss of your penny candy sales. Besides, you couldn't afford their bigger items anyway.

And along comes a company or two. They give exclusive purchasing contracts to this chain of corner stores. Two multinational companies have just destroyed any effectiveness a consumer boycott might have possibly had.

Compaq doesn't care about end user sales. They have at least those two companies providing more revenue than personal sales ever could and buying up new rounds of hardware (bundled with Microsoft Software I might add) every five years.

The plant that's local to me has 2500 nodes in the engine plant alone, all Compaqs. And this is a small plant.

A boycott won't even make them blink.


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