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When IT and Bad Government Meet, Everyone Loses
Cron-os writes "The city of Wilkes Barre, Pa is furiously trying to enter some 25,000 tax records into their new PC network. Their aging AS/400 crashed sometime around April 15, and the city did not renew a maintenance contract with IBM because it cost more than the PC network. You can read the associated articles here, here, and here. I'm so glad I live across the river in a SANE city." I wonder if these bozos run their schools and roads departments with the same level of professionalism.
The computers don't have to BREAK!
I read a story on Happy Hacker once about this kid in school. He knew that the system's network was really really insecure. His way of informing the sysadmins was to print out on every printer in the school system something like "I have hacked your computer. Please fix it."
At least it worked...
Doesn't suprise me. The only good thing that state has done has fixed I-83.
Fucking morons.
They ARE bozos if they're going to trust tax records to a windows PC network. If they had backed up their data (and kept their support contract), IBM could have had them running again in a day or two. The only difference is that city officials would have been unable to play "the sims" in "off-time". :)
Behind all of these things is that while computing power might double every 18 months or so, human efficency does not.
That is (one reason) why we are not living in paradise despite the huge increase in computational power we have seen in the last 20 years.
Scranton, PA, the land of shit. Mentioned (and made fun of) in many movies (Home Alone and Kingpin). The large city of NEPA that no one has ever heard of and probably doesn't want to.
The SANE city which is many millions of dollars in debt, doesn't have enough money each year to cover overtime for city employees past April, and decided to build a mall in the same part of town that was previously owned by the hookers.
From the article:
IBM is willing to provide a maintenance contract for $850 a month.
How much is their PC network worth, anyway?
why are there so many stories on slashdot that were on fark.com the day/night before?
It sounds to me like somebody went and said 'hey it hasn't crashed in 10 years, I want this $10,000 in my paycheck because you already pay me so bad'.
Why does this make me feel that IBM is going to get the flack because they wont fix the computer, and tens of thousands of people will not get the refund checks etc and it wont be blamed on the idiot who decided NOT to renew it.
American Government is getting nearly as bad as American Corporations!
`find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
I wonder if these bozos run their schools and roads departments with the same level of professionalism.
I can assure you that their road department doesn't even have an office building, they just drink themselves to death slowly everyday in a nearby pub. They've had holes in the road up there for YEARS. Maybe the IT staff does something similar?
WestVirginia be damned. I really think PA holds the redneck ethos. I hate this fucking state so bad. There's NOTHING to do here. Maybe thats why old people like to live here.
I can't even leave the forsaken state. I'm stuck living in a house built in the 1600's, with $100,000 debt and a degree from Carnegie Mellon! Fuck the whole idea of an educated poor. Education just makes you more poor.
God spoke to me
To error is human, to really foul up, you need a computer.
You fucking asshole. Wilkes-Barre is a dying town that is desperately trying to recover from their coal mining days. Oh, yeah, my grandparents and parents are from their, go figure- I was lucky enough that my parents escaped before the place crashed. Now the place is living off the backs of thousands of Social Security receiving old folks, and the geography is in the middle of nowhere, PA. This isn't Silicon Valley.
Let me know where you're parents came from so I can make some slurs about them.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
"He said the maintenance agreement was lost late last year when the city "fell behind on payments." O'Donnell also said IBM is willing to provide a maintenance contract for $850 a month."
That isn't too much for a city. Due to all of the extra time spent rifling through reports and such I wonder how much money they are wasting each month that their system is down?
All other rights can be derived from freedom of speech.
Got some dim bulbs running W-B, looks like. Letting their AS/400 die without a path forward for data recovery is dumb enough, but now they're going to put the data into Microsoft software, I presume? Heh, wait until the days and days of typing is all for naught because a Blue Screen of Death leaves them with a correput filesystem.
Mr. Mayor, at what time will you be presenting your resignation speech?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these government officials!
Or, er, something. Maybe it'd be a good way to test some inverse-proportion theories such as "the chain is as strong as weakest link".
This now concludes our broadcast day.
About 6 years ago, our little town in southeastern New England said that the town hall would be late mailing out all our quarterly tax bills because the mouse on the computer in the town hall was broken! (I really should have kept that newspaper clipping!)
If it's going to take two employees six months to type this data into the PC's isn't that going to cost more than to buy a new mainframe?
Or do they employ monkeys?
Ah.
Forget the fucking cost of a new system. Think of those poor motherfuckers who have to sit and type, hour after fucking hour, zillions of fucking names. Their asses must be like a sack of ricotta cheese, and with the carpal tunnel injuries, it's got to be like someone shoving white hot steel rods into ones wrist.
And they call it training? Fucking sadists man. Oh well, one can't be too hard on them. How the fuck did the dude know that his shit would break a mere month after cancelling the service contract?
The city defends its decision to abandon its support contract: He said any expert who suggests the city spend the extra money should realize that "they don't have to pay for it."
Of course, they neglect to mention that any sane proposal to abandon their AS/400 and its service contract would have included being up and running on their "new and improved" PC system BEFORE dropping the support for the old system.
As noted in the article: Since then, because the city doesn't have a maintenance agreement with IBM to repair the computer and retrieve the data, five city hall employees have spent their days typing more than 25,000 names, addresses and tax information onto two personal computers.
Do they think these employees have nothing better to do? What about all the other hassles and pain caused by retraining, PC downtime, and all the other costs associated with their choice.
The government at that city obviously has NOT taken any classes on economics. They sound like my old boss... any hidden cost is not really a cost at all.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
'I wonder if these bozos run their schools and roads departments with the same level of professionalism.'
I think we could expect good things from their clown colleges.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Really
There are about 25,000 names, addresses and tax data that have to be keyed into the PCs. The employees have been typing at a rate of about 200 items per day. At that rate, they'll be typing for the next six months. [...] Well, Renshaw said, training should take no more than a few hours. "You can learn the entire system in two or three days at most."
A case of penny wise and pound foolish.
moral idiots
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I think the way it generally works for IT staff is that they are expected to perform miracles with ageing computer equipment and lack of training.. at least thats what ususally happens. Then they take the flack when it all goes a bit wrong.
:)
Apply the 'mushroom' theory.. kept in the dark and fed on sh*t
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
before you start calling someone a bozo, please consider the complexity, the cost and the frustration of administrative computing. Most of the people who have to work with the system don't know at all what they are doing and usually consider it clumsy, slow, inefficient and way to expensive for what it does (or usually doesnt) do.
Honestly I *can* understand how they are fed up with an aging system that gives constant headaches and is a budget drain. Eventually it would have blown up by a flipped employee. I se ethose situations every day, and when those IBM suppport bozo's arrive, things usually start taking an even worse turn.
That said, they should offcourse have backed up their stuff, and after cancelling support, at least have worked out a phase out of the system, with a phase in of a new, better system. But again don't completely blame them for such a situation. I guess that a large portion of govt IT is in an equally fucked up state, but better covered up.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
....They've had holes in the road up there for YEARS. Maybe the IT staff does something similar?
well, would not be too bad though. any "older" computer/mainframe will still be better than buying new windooz pc's to "replace" the AS/400. maybe i'll get my old C64 out of the cellar and donate it to them, should be more stable than new pcs.
whats $850 per month anyway? i have to pay that for my telephone system in the company to Siemens......
Lord "not Gargamel's Cat!" Azrael
Not that it will matter, but this is not your ordinary suburb or anything. This is a very old town in the middle of PA that was based on coal mining in the early 1900's. They lost thousands in WW2, the coal business crashed in the 50's, and they never recovered. All of the kids (starting with my parent's generation in the late 60's- yes they are from there) have left, leaving very few youngsters, besides Wilkes College. This is not a place where IT folks flock to, and any that are there most likely get paid at least 1/2 of any of you do. The people there are good people, but they couldn't tell a Mac from an IBM mainframe.
So don't go and call them bozos. Call the idiots who work in the IT divisions bozos if you must, but the average person in Wilkes-Barre wouldn't know what the hell the article right-up means, besides the word taxes.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Did all of the drives on the AS/400 die simultaniously? Is all the information on those drives encrypted and the key lost? For less than the cost of paying people to ype in 24/7 the 25,000 tax records they could pay one kid from college to do a little research on how those machines store data and write a perl script to pull out the old records from the drives themselves.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I worked in a government department that lost an entire year of data because they trusted some idiot to setup their database software. By the time they realized and fired him, it was way too late for them to do much but start going back to manual entry.
It's really a problem of how much funding goes into these things (usually not enough) and how much the management staff actually understand the implications of what can possibly go wrong. Blatantly trusting your on-board IT people can lead to serious consequences.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Let's see...
25,000 tax records
2 employees inputing them (into what??)
200 records entered/day
12.5 records/man-hour
2000 man hours later...
at $5/hr... $10,000.
Could have bought a new machine for that. And certainly have fixed the old one. In fact, what about the backups??? Send it away and get it burnt onto a CD! All of the data is likely in a fixed format record anyway.
Although it is likely:
1) The company that wrote the software went belly-up in 1989.
2) The software isn't Y2K compliant anyway.
2) The backups hadn't actually been backing anything up for the last 4 years (just spinning the tape).
3) A single RAM chip ($1.75) would fix the machine.
It appears Ockham lost his razor and grew a beard.
"Anyone else involved with the decision to substitute a PC network for an AS400 for critical data should be killed and then eaten to prevent them from being revived."
I'm up for that. Let's take it to Kitchen Stadium. How will the Iron Chef create a brilliant meal from the flesh of municipal IT morons? One thing is for sure: it'll involve either foie gras or caviar.
These people have jobs and can eat regularly, while other people, such as me, who understand just how crap PCs are, go without eating. Add to that the fact that they put aside their backup contingencies OVER A YEAR before migration could be completed (the second article says they still have 6 months of data entry to go), and I think it's quite a fair plan that they should be eaten. And boy am I hungry.
This is incredible. Really. OK, the town may go through a tough period, but they may actually spend almost as much on re-entering the data as a new mainframe may cost. Not counting the expenses on the PCs, network and PC service/support. These data types are what big iron is made for!
This is not disregarding the struggles of the inhabitants of the town, but uncovering the incompetence of the people leading it. We have had incidents similar to this here in Norway, where a mayor had to go after a scandal when trying to migrate some tax/health care systems. It's just given, nobody fucks up like this and walks!
There are so many sanesoloutions around, you'd think they would pick any of those...
I'm guessing the powers that be are all non-IT types. You know, the kind of people that don't fix anything till it breaks. I can't count the number of executives I used to work with who never backed stuff up because "I've never had a problem before." Of course, it's always the IT grunt's fault when their hard drive crashes and their data is irretrievable.
"What do you mean, 'it's gone'? I NEED that data for this meeting!"
This is something that happens quite often. The suits get a boner from the "sexiness" of Microsoft, and force everyone to abandon perfectly good systems for Windows. For example, I worked in this software company, where one of the head sales people often said that people loved NT because it was Sexy! So, they forced their programmers to build an "NT" version of what normally ran/runs on AIX. This "NT" version was nothing more than an X client (something like Exceed) running on NT, with the real apps still running on AIX. Anyway, point being, until these brain-dead management people realize what crap MS is, this is quite likely to continue.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Isn't there somebody that can convert there data to a PC readable format for less than the cost of typing in 25,000 records?
I mean comeon people. Better yet why haven't they been doing it all along? you can get a card that lets you hook into an AS400 with your pc. Just dumb. I hope they do not try and run Linux with PostgreSQL to replace the AS400. The will never get it working.
...blame the city administrator. Working for a municipality myself, I suspected this was probably the case before I read the supporting articles...they just confirmed my suspicion. Basically, what you've got here is a situation where you've got a city administrator that doesn't know diddly squat about computers. I don't know anything about the guy, but I would guess that he's probably in his 50's and may have an accounting background (if he has any credentials at all). Like a lot of people in that type of position, he was being short-sighted and cheap. He got busted for it; lots of others don't. Their computer guy may have (and probably did) protested the city administrator's decision to let the maintenance contract lapse, but obviously, the final decision wasn't in his hands. If anyone should lose their job over this, it's the city administrator.
... He blamed the trouble on Mayor Tom McGroarty, saying the mayor "has to do things his way. He was supposed to buy a mainframe a few years ago, it was supposed to cost $10,000 or $12,000. I don't know what happened to the idea."
/dev/backup /dev/null" school and going to a "real business" is the transition process involved in changing an IT process. It involves running the systems in parallel for a while to make sure everything reconciles 100%. They had at least a year to do that...
The people of Wilkes-Barre should hang their mayor by the balls on the city square (if they have one) or at the local strip mall (I bet they've got at least one).
The first thing one learns when graduating from "anything goes, ln -s
Having said, could somebody explain why did Wilkes-Barre need an IBM iron in the first place?
And don't forget about timely visits from the BSA.
This sounds like a prime target for them. The city clearly has issues when it comes to being organized.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I work at the Pizza Hut call centre and we use the AS/400 there for taking down customer orders. The machines are quite basic but they get the job done and from my experience the machines are reliable as we haven't had a major crash in the 8 months or I have been working there. If you are after general information on the system you can consult this link.
aus.music.scrapbook
Backup the data and backup the backup. Then have redundant hardware and a service contract.
Its not IF the system fails but WHEN.
The folks at Wilkes Barre are idiots and their mayor should fire their CIO, COO or department head IMMEDIATELY.
No excuses.
An MIS shop is no place for tyros.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
From the second article:
Ray Yancey, a computer specialist from Ohio said City Administrator James Hayward and "anyone else involved with the decision to substitute a PC network for an AS400 for critical data should be killed and then eaten to prevent them from being revived."
I was always under the impression that an AS400 was the computing equivilent of a tank; it took a crew of people to maintain and run, but could sustain lots more abuse than, say, a car (PC).
So what's "crashed"? Does it not turn on? Does it just need a replacement card of some sort (I thought everything was hot-swap on these things)? Are the drives bad and there's no backups? Did the magic smoke come out of it? What?
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
why don't they just fire one of the keyboard monkeys and get the damn service contract?
What did you expect? People got used of getting IT stuff for free so as soon as you ask them to pay for some new hardware or software, they refuse.
Wilkes Barre is right next to Forty Fort and just down the road from Koonsville...
"tax office employees have been entering the tax information in two personal computers."
...
Ok. They said 6 months to re-enter the data. Two people, two computers. Let's say they earn $10/hr.
6months *4 weeks/month * 40 hours/week * $10/hour * 2 employees
= $19,200
That's almost enough for two years of their service contract.
PCs:
$1000 each * 2 + misc expenses puts it over the top I think.
The fact that these employees will be maintaining these PCs ad infinitum doesn't even need to be considered to show the stupidity. Not to mention the BSA audits, the MS support calls, the endless software licence upgrades,
I think what we have here is the ever popular job security plot. We junk the good hardware and buy the bad hardware because we can maintain the bad hardware ourselves and thus we create ourself a job. With the good hardware, all we have to do all day is drink coffee and gossip. We're the first guys on the chopping block when costs have to be cut.
I've seen this time and time again. Junk the $20,000 Unix server that runs the entire company and gets rebooted once a year, replacing it with a network of NT boxes which require 3 full time employees to maintain and crash weekly.
Why don't people get fired for this?
As a city Admin in Australia, I can't believe that a) this guy still has a job and b) that you could be that irresponsible. I vote that he gets _death_ by slashdot.
:)
I guess that he had better get his msce cleaned up and nice and shiny to flaunt around and show how _good_ he is with computers. Maybe this could be one of those migration success stories that microsoft peddle about
I know the moron journalist said it was, but trust me, it's not. It's an AS400 Minicomputer. Mainframes are much larger and more expensive.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
in small towns. But I bet no other small-town-woes have received the attention they'll be getting now.
Knowng that I had 6 months of typing data into PCs would make me want to quit. Know that those PCs had were more vulnerable to crashing and losing the data again would nudge me over the edge.
You would think that small towns with geographic proximity would band together and set up a WAN, or at least pool their resources to keep the human-resources, software and maintenance costs down (as buying in bulk, even for software, can often net significant savings).
Please, do me a favor...
Call them from work on Monday, and laugh at them.
Then encourage as many co-worders as possible to do the same.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
That's nothing. California has just canned the guy responsible for a $95 million 'error' in picking Oracle software, story, the governor is calling for an investigation by the state Attorney General, and it looks like the taxpayers are going to take a hit to the tune of $41 million. I bet they wish they had Wilkes-Barre's problem.
Quote: The employees have been typing at a rate of about 200 items per day.
/shitload/ of information on each and every person, they should be able to manage at least twice that. If they can't, they need to bring in some temps or something--people who actually have some clue how to do data entry properly.
A whole 200 items per day, huh? No wonder it's going to take so long. Unless they've having to enter a
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm sorry Wilkesbarre isn't doing *that* badly. It's a simple matter of someone trying to cut costs without knowing what they are doing, screwing up along the way and then people like these acting like they shouldn't be held responsible. I grew up in a small Lancaster, pa town, but let me tell you, people knew that if they didn't know how to fix something, and it was extremely important. You just have a maintenance contract. In the end it boils down to pure common sense, not "computer know-how" or dying towns. End of story.
If they want morons running their infrastructure, that's their perogative.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I can tell you that, yes, these bozos *do* run their schools the same way.
;))
Don't get me started on Penndot.
Do a google search for the Times Leader or Standard Speaker for more fun, both of their websites should have plenty of amusing stories about the incompetent government officials in Wilkes-Barre.
(Thankfully, up in Hazleton, our officials aren't nearly as incompetent as they once were
To my knowledge, they do not have a real 'IT Staff'..just some general 'superusers'. They call 'consultants' when they need help.
Cron-Os
- IE is the dominant browser on the face of the earth.
- With such dominance, every web site in existence is coded with IE users in mind.
- This dominance is not going anywhere because IE simply does the job better than any other option and most of us like to use the best tool for a particular task.
In summary, you (as in the malcontented Linux dorks), lose again. Again. Don't you ever get sick of being so wrong all the time?
> I wonder if these bozos run their schools and > roads departments with the same level of
> professionalism.
Well, according to Digital City, the county where Wilkes-Barre is located (and of which Wilkes-Barre is the county seat) ranks in only the 61st percentile for adults with college degrees and ranks in the 93rd percentile for auto fatalities. So you would have to say that yes, these bozos run their schools and roads departments with the same level of professionalism as the tax department.
Can we get there AS/400 to run Linux? We could prove that Linux works great and save this city thousands of dollars.
No more need for service contracts, or expensive stuff.
The first article mentions that they had the AS/400 for over 20 years. The AS/400 was not even available 20 years ago. The third article mentions that they were supposed to have bought a new "mainframe" for around $10,000. Where the hell are they going to find a modern "mainframe" for that much ??? I mean one that is not made out of cheese.
If you don't understand anything I post, please accept that I ate paste as a small boy...
Shut down the as/400.
Insert key turn to service,
boot from the other side of the disk.
That wasn't so hard now was it?
DICK-slapping
FUCK YOU!
The argument "we won't do A because B costs less" is only valid if, in fact, you DO B.
I once worked for someone who was, uh, aggressively frugal. He would never buy a service contract for ANYTHING, observing that it was cheaper to buy a replacement if the equipment broke. Well, one day, of course, a vital piece of equipment broke, and I asked him to buy a replacement (with the money he saved by not having a service contract, of course), and, needless to say he wouldn't... he "repaired" it himself...
His PDP-11 was a nightmare of boards with lands pulled away from the circuit board from home soldering jobs... the drawers were always extended because several of the fans had failed and he believed that extending the drawers would improve the air circulation enough to compensate... he would never buy preassembled cables, but made them himself, and nobody had ever told him that it takes a special tool to clamp a connector into a ribbon cable properly. He used Vise-Grips. Almost all these cables were intermittent...
...and whenever he really got in trouble, he would call Digital Field Service on a per-call basis. Of course, he would call them if only ONE thing was broken, so whenever they came in there were multiple failures... meaning that the usual technique of swap-the-board,then run diagnostics never worked because it required more than a single board replacement for it to pass diagnostics.
Then, no matter what the circumstances, AFTER the service call he would ALWAYS call Digital management and complain that the call ought to be free, or at reduced cost, because it had taken longer than it should have...
After a few of these, I really found it hard to look the Digital field service people in the eye...
Oh, he also tried to disposable felt-tip plotter pens by injecting ink into them, and he kept trying to revive printer ribbons by dropping them into various solvents on the theory that "there was plenty of INK in them, they were just DRY..."
And he saved money by buying "refurbished" RK05 packs. The first time we used one of these, it immediately crashed and damaged a disk head, and, on inspection, the disk platter turned out to have a glob of something like dried glue on it. His only response was, "but it was supposed to be REFURBISHED."
The Rush reference should have clued you into the fact that he is an idiot
Why don't people get fired for this?
Because you shouldn't get fired for choosing a specific platform. There are crappy NT applications and there are good ones. It's the same for AS/400 - I have clients counting the days until they throw the AS/400 box out the window.
BSA audits, the MS support calls, the endless software licence upgrades
Audits, as in plural? Come on, one audit over the lifetime of an organization is rare. And AS400 / Red Hat / *nix support grows on trees? As for license upgrades, nobody's forcing you to upgrade.. if you bought the software it's yours to do whatever you like with it.
They are trying to make you believe they are 'hip' to technology, but it's all such a mess. The state web pages are next to useless for any real information. Their 'online forms' end up being a downloadable PDF (better than nothing, I guess).
And this is the same state that is banning mountain bikers from the state game lands. I still can't see the sense in that...where else will they ride?
The 'computer specialist' who wrote that comment about eating people is a little out of line there. I wouldn't hire anyone who'd say "AS400 is always better than a PC network" without knowing any real specifics about the AS400.. the city had a 20 year old system, and their best bet is probably to get rid of it in favor of something based on less lucrative hardware.
If IBM were to go in there, fix the "crash" for free in short order, then sell them a new contract, me thinks that would do a world of good not only for IBM's reputation, but also for the robustness of midrange+ servers...
;)
Or IBM let's them wallow and die and takes MS down a notch in reputation along with the city
Some of the Pennsylvania public schools are in really deep doot at the moment, to the point that the per-student cost of public school in some cities (which is, of course, paid through tax levies) is TWICE that of any private school, and the kids still have abysmal skills. And despite the huge spending, some principals have been reduced to asking parents to donate toilet paper, as they don't have money left in the budget.
I suppose the city administrator could always claim that of course he's a moron, he went to PA public schools....
Ad luna, Alicia! Ad luna!
Many times during a typical week, people call into my employer's tech support line, looking for support on their software. Many of our customers are in the public service industry, and they take top priority because of human lives that are at risk if their paging systems go down. Some IT directors or system administrators get our software working when they first bought it a few years ago, but neglect to renew their support contracts after 90 days. When they call back stating that they bought new computers and their software no longer works, I have to be the bearer of bad news when I need to refer them to sales to renew their support. Some say that this is bad business, but it's their fault because they are trying to get for free needed support that they should have renewed.
Here we have a government that is:
1. Seriously stalling on tax collections and
2. Employing more locals rather than shipping IT money out of town
So you have the best side of Republicanism (1), plus an economic policy that keeps jobs at home just like good Democrats (if there are any left anywhere) want (2) - all in one move. Perfecto!
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Actually, the AS/400 uses some rather funky proprietary shit -- namely the processors. There is a Linux on the AS/400 project that I've been watching for a while now, but it doesn't seem to be moving very fucking fast. Apparently, IBM is not too overfuckingjoyed at the idea. Which is a bit odd, considering they're rushing like gangbusters to get Linux on their high-dollar shit, like the 390s, and throwing money to universities ($20,000+ of grant money where I work) if they can fit the words "IBM" and "Linux" onto a grant application. Hell of a deal, but odd duality -- in the Jungian sense.
So far in his 8 years of office(estimate) he has managed to get 2 government buildings and a telemarketing center in the downtown. Government buildings may look nice but they are basically a resource drain because they don't pay any taxes. There are some other new businesses, but they are in tax free development zones. The one government building is home to the offices of rep. Paul Kanjorksi who as actually managed to a great disservice to the community but he is a senior congressman who will never loose an election due to name recognition and voter habit. Anyway, it looks like Mcgroarty will not be reelected this year so the situation may improve but most likely not.
McGroarty actually looked promising initially because he was very enthusiastic. It turned out that he just craved attention. The problem with WB and all NEPA politics for that matter, is the fact that competent people do not want to run for office. Most of the talented younger people leave the area, and the people who are left that would make a difference are usually tied to a business or career path which prevents them from running for office. I really don't see an end to this cycle unless competent people start getting politically involved in this area.
The calculation you are performing doesn't take into account risk. Sure, if 100% of all companies that canceled support had a system crash within 2 years, your calculation works. But that is not true (as far as I know). What the city did was basically a calculated gamble, one that, based on your calculations, isn't even all that irrational. The problem is that in this particular gamble, they lost.
I even know how to code AI from start to finish. AI like C3P0 AI. www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~sager
Too bad PA sucks such horrendous ass, or maybe I'd have at least a job.
God spoke to me
I distinctly know lots of hot chicks hang out there. I think the place is called wildwood?
:P
What does PA have? Especially SW PA? Um, a lot of houses! Houses, houses and a thriving trucking industry
God spoke to me
Do us all a huge favor and get some motherfucking self-esteem one of these days. Your incessant graffiti all over this site has grown tiresome and, if necessary, I will use whatever means possible to ensure that you no longer tarnish this page with your adolescent behavior. Perhaps if you felt like you were just a tiny bit useful and could possibly contribute something to the human race one day in the future, you would stop lashing out with hatred toward everyone and anything that stands in your way. You're a classic case of someone taking out their own emotional trauma on other people. Do us all a favor and get some help, my friend, and I sincerely hope that you can reform yourself and recongize/admit to your wrongdoings.
Thanks.
What happened is the tax office lost power due to a flooded power vault (that they were in the process of waterproofing). I'm not sure if the article states this - I'm in a hurry, so sorry :P
Watch CKY2K thats where some of thier shit takes place. Pennsylvania is definately one of our nations huge tradgedies. As a resident of another one of PA's coal mine towns (Hutchinson-near westnewton), I must say you're on the money :)
As for jackass... When you have shit else to do, you end up breaking things, yourself, and acting like a fuck head. Everyone half way cool who lives in PA has had the time in their life where they decided to do jackass stuff. Heck my friend even had the idea to do crazy ass stuff, tape it and put it on the net before Jackass became popular... Maybe its just the culture of sickening depression.
God spoke to me
This sounds like it would be a good case study of what happens when cost-benefit analysis is not properly done. You could influence a lot of business school students with a case study like this...
In another case, the city ended up giving amnesty to ticket violaters due to the fact the system that contained the information about them had serious problems and could no longer be trusted (Official word, no idea what really happened, but heard its close).
I'm a CS student at Wilkes, and we're fortunate to have such a good department. The subnet is run by student admins (I'm one of them). We've been using various Linux distros for quite awhile now (long before I was here anyway). The dualboot systems run Redhat (mainly because kickstart makes upgrading 30 boxes really easy). The SLC404 lab runs Slack (on an added note, there is a sign on the door to the lab that says "404 - Food not Found" that of course, nobody obeys, but we leave it up because it's funny, well okay, maybe not *that* funny, ah hell with it...). My personal box in the server room runs OpenBSD (nice perk about being an admin is you can co-lo a box into the server room). We've got a couple Mac OS X machines floating around (with dual head displays and DVD-RAMs which we use to burn... uh... n/m ;-) ). Then there is that bastard Solaris machine (quad node sun arch) we keep around for the database class (runs both Oracle and mySQL, but everyone uses Oracle anyway...).
I'd like to quickly plug Open Source Development at Wilkes University, one of the opensource sites here at Wilkes. It started from a Networks class assignment a year ago and is still being maintained.
The Networks class assignment is definitely an interesting one. For all those concerned about newbies setting up honeypots, don't worry, I keep a tight leash on those kiddies.
The Math/CS Club has seen livelier days, but at least we have a nice webpage, a nice PGP ring of trust, and a fairly well-developed FAQ (though, none of the freshman ever read it first, they always ask the admins first, who then refer them to the faq and immediately knock their quota down 5 MB.)
We're also the only autonomous subnet at Wilkes. All the other departments have had their subnets assimilated by the technology department (who, in my opinion, are basically fucking idiots). The Math/CS faculty gives us (the student admins) pretty much free reign over how things are done. We keep everything running smoothly on the subnet and they fight off the evil administration.
Yea, the city does suck too. Though, the nice thing about living near a bunch of stripmines and old abandoned coal mining villiages is there are some great places to place paintball. My personal favorite is Concrete City, which consists of 14 concrete two story duplex-style houses (some have basements even!). It's a real rush to with such close house-to-house and room-to-room paintball.
Just my 2c. -root@mathcs.wilkes.edu
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
"I wonder if these bozos run their schools and roads departments with the same level of professionalism."
I can answer that....yes!
hypocrite
Having worked for both local and state government in IT, I think that the comment about these people being bozos is a little over the top. State and local governments are suffering huge budget shortfalls with no relief in site in the foreseeable future. While a maintenance contract may only cost $850 a month for this machine, that $850 may simply not be available. Even a local government can't spend what they don't have. And keep in mind that Wilkes-Barre is in the middle of PA and in a depressed area. If the IT department was told to cut something, this may have been the best candidate. I'm sure that they are more professional than you give them credit for and sometimes people have to work within parameters that do not please them.
The whole fucking state has holes in the roads. You begin to hit potholes IMMEDIATELY after crossing into the state in so many cases.
Stump jumpers 4 life.
Well, the state flower is the road cone...
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
This reminds me of that dumb bitch who had charges filed against a blackhole operator because she forgot to update her Notes server.
With all the high quality tech support people out on the balls of their asses from finance, media, advertising & telecom, these incompetent government types should learn how to drive taxis.
Like this pigfucker - the city administrator who thought that $850 was too expensive to pay each month - instead took a mainframe on a high wire without a net. These stupid fucks don't even realize that they can convert their backup to something that can be read by PCs.
Do these shit for brains realize that the cost of manual entry of 25,000 records will cost far more than $11k! Thats what particularly sickening here. The form of data recovery these idiots are using is more expensive then the real deal.
Stupid shit head hicks. They deserve all the problems they will wallow in for the next 20 years!
From reading the comments, it's recoverable, or worst-case, a "duh" to make sure it never happens again.
So why don't the socially responsible, smart, "we told you so" of slashdot go fix it?
There has to be a few of you with the brains, proximity, and free time to help out..... save the taxpayers some $$, show that the geek community cares, get involved in the political process ("gee Mr. Mayor, talk to us before you do something stupid like this again, we may not save your ass next time!") and get good karma (the REAL stuff, not your silly post mods =)
Or are you like most folks who find it all too easy to bitch from the sidelines how the game is getting played?
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
WW2 saved it for a while, as the Mid-Atlantic whore-house ... but after the vein coal ran out (30s), and the 'pillars' were robbed(40s) and the strips went dry (50s) ... lets say 1950-55 is when NE Pa. died : That includes WilkesBarre, Scranton ... basically everything between the NY border to the north and Philadelphia. Now it's a whore-house again, for the NYC refuse trucks. But damn it was a beautiful place ta grow up.
What the city did was basically a calculated gamble
So, by your logic, if the odds are pretty good, then it matters not what the price of losing is? I'm glad I didn't depend on you as a father. Things would've sucked that one month in the year when you lost the paycheck on the almost sure bet.
There are some things that you can gamble on, and some you can't. Financial records, generally speaking, fall into the latter category. Similarly, I don't want "calculated gambles" in air traffic control, nuclear plant, or similar critical systems.
Wilkes Barre is not alone. Cleveland just lost 300 users' email and calendars, including the mayor's. Amazingly, it could cost up to $100,000 to institute a backup system, and the city doesn't even have a person acting as CTO. It appears governmental rectocranial inversion is contagious.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
I worked with a historian, doing a statistical analasys of approx. 25.000 pages of historical, criminal records.
We only took notes of a few things in each record (type of crime, date, age, sentence etc), but it was gruelling work to do.
I had hacked up a data entry form, but didn't make too much out of the data validation. But after examining the data harvest for the first few days, I decided that real anal data validation was needed, since all kinds of data was wrongly typed, or entered in the wrong fields.
It was not because we were sloppy and we actually took an interrest in the job, but hours and hours of turning pages, gleaning information, type and tab just does make you prone to make mistakes.
I read in some old statistical handbook, that in order to gain 97-98% correct data entries, _two_ people should enter the same data.
I guess that this large retyping of 25.000 tax forms, where each form only seems to be typed in and checked by one person, will be full of errors. I wonder how many thousand record that will needed to be redone.
"Bad" and "government" next to each other? Re-read the Liberal Media Handbook, Slashdot editors! That's strictly forbidden!
The goatse guy for president. Win one for the gaper!
Hmmm, no mention of their problems on their website. :)
http://www.wilkes-barre.org/
Are you by any chance a member of the Wings of Williamsport? (I saw the "stump jumpers 4 life"
The problems of Wilkes-Barre, PA became evident when their system crashed; many, many other cities and counties (and countries?) are in similar positions, and it is only a matter of time until their systems meet the same fate.
Recently I undertook a massive project to analyze and redesign the utilities billing system for Allegheny County, PA. The system maintains usage and payment records of all bills for water, sewage, electricity, and gas in county buildings.
Keep in mind that the population of Allegheny County is ~1,300,000, while the population of Luzerne County is ~312,000. Allegheny county certainly has the budget to do things right.
That being said, I was horrified to discover that the Allegheny system responsible for bill payment and other essential tasks was run on an archaic MS-DOS PC. Data entry is performed by two individuals by hand, and they are about six months behind. There are no scheduled back-up measures. Complicated queries are impossible. It gets worse, but I am not at liberty to disclose details.
Granted, the operations of a county are amazingly complicated, but something so important should not be left to a 15 year old machine with severely inflexible software.
It is a great shame that in this day of cost-efficient databases and powerful mini-computers that our government remains two decades behind. I wonder, are our nuclear plants run by obsolete systems as well?
Heed my warning: like Wilkes-Barre, it is only a matter of time.
mize well throw my 2 cents in, if this was linux it would still be up!
You can say you have GNU/Linux installed on every computer. But how many people actually use it on a daily bases? The parent post said that all the computers multi-boot. Are you really producing GNU/Linux savy students or are you just breeding the next generation of VB losers that use windows all day and think there 'leet because they can make a text box?
> I wonder if these bozos
/. has never been down...like I've never clicked on the links and been redirected back to the front page...
Let's not be overly critical here, mmmmmkay? Like
It's not incompetence. They're quite competent, it's just that they're not competent at delivering services. They're competent at keeping their jobs. They're optimizing something else.
Governments (big as well as small) are very bad at committing capital to improve their IT because the cost of a new system will show up in this year's budget as a big number with lots of zeros after it. Far easier to piss away money in small increments over many years, as service gradually degrades and finally crashes, than to make a needed investment that will save money later. Those savings will happen on someone else's watch, so why bother? Better to do something that gets in the newspapers right now, like another teenage-sex abstinence program. That's how legislators think when they vote funding for projects.
They may well be corrupt too, but I think that much of this odd behavior can be explained by short-term thinking and simple cynicism.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
Showing your intelligence through blind distaste for perfectly serviceable computer hardware.
Way to go proving yourself outside the norm, buddy. Clearly, you have a good grasp of the situation.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
It's plain insane to be using an AS/400 to begin with. ANyone that has ever programmed on it will know what I'm talking about. It's a piece of crap and it could easily be replaced by a souped-up PC running some version of linux. It's a lemon, people.
Friends don't let friends use the AS/400.
If you're bragging about being able to tell the difference between your own feces and an AS/400... Well, words couldn't even begin to describe how proud of you we all are.
Stop it. You're making me drool...and I have no need for that kind of horsepower. Just stop talking filet mingon to a guy that hasn't eaten anything but Banquet boxed meals in 6 months.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
From the first article:
He said any expert who suggests the city spend the extra money should realize that "they don't have to pay for it."
With an income tax rate near 3.5%, which is nearly 1% higher than the income tax rate for the state of Pennsylvania, they should be able to afford a reliable system. The life they were sucking out of my paycheck is why I moved across the river, where things are slightly more sane...
A PO Box for "Sallie Mae Servicing" (which if you ask me, is a misleading title... well, they kinda screw me, but not in the way I'd prefer) dude, that's where all my money for student loans goes... you'd think some of that would help the city out via taxes or whatnot...
Same thing happened in my school in rural northwestern PA not only with academic records but with substitute teacher scheduling, accounting, and payroll. The school never fired their MCSE assholes, and they still are fucked up to this day.
They are cutting the state IT department completely? Are they fucking insane?? Do they think the people in each division of state govt are going to point and click their way into keeping the paychecks, benefits, taxes, etc. running? Fuck the damn rolling blackouts, if this happens, a whole lot of shit will hit the fan. Maybe not right away, but eventually it will and it will cost a lot more to fix it than it ever would just to keep things working properly. If I was a Californian, I'd start packing NOW!
That's the wrong question. It's not the hardware that is important, it's the DATA. Which shows how foolish/ignorant Hayward's decision was.
Think about it, if your computer system is destroyed you can get a new one for the same price (think insurance) and it probably runs faster and does more.
But if you lose your personal data (emails, source code, certs, keys), it's going to be hard or impossible to get it all back. Insurance payouts would just be a poor consolation here.
In this case it's probably just access to the data. They should just pay IBM and get back access to the data (or most of it), rather than pay people to type in 25,000 records AND WAIT months for it to be done. Worse if more records are coming in daily and there's a deadline...
Either Hayward is stupid, or there's some other battle behind the scenes.
The information you seem to be lacking is in his vita
near the bottom. I bet you feel like less of a smarty-pants don't 'cha.
Ok, It didn't do it single handedly but it seems he was a big part. And besides even though the poster was obviously exaggerating, the point remains the same. As least far as that guy is concerned that school seems to have a kick ass faculty.
...city did not renew a maintenance contract with IBM because it cost more than the PC network.
7 9.html 0 25445.html)
Considering all cost caused by administration, crashing PC servers, viruses and such things, i'd rather assume, that running an AS/400 box is much cheaper than running a PC network.
Especially database administration (including backup/restore) is much easier on an AS/400, because the database is integrated into the operating system (and vice versa).
Even Microsoft tried to replace 23 AS/400 boxes with 1200 NT-Servers in 1999/2000, and they couldn't make it run, so they are back on the AS/400s now.
(Read the full story, an article called "IBM's Frank Soltis, uncensored":
http://k-lug.org/pipermail/klug/2000-October/0065
http://www.linux.ie/pipermail/ilug/2000-November/
regards,
octogen
I wish this was a joke site. It kind of is, but it's a hell of a lot more truth than humor-
:P
www.penndotsucks.com
Tells the truth nicely. Pennsylvania has some damned shitty roads. Our public education isn't great, and our liquor laws are beyond stupid. Oh, and it's illegal to pratice magic. Perks of being a commonwealth instead of a state.
The Wilkes-Barre Scranton Baby Penguins are an affiliate of the Pittsburgh Penguins, as is the Wheeling Nailers of Wheeling, WV.
:)
Has nothing to do with the tax situation, but at least they have something good to talk about
shawn
Sorry, couldn't resist :->
All-you-can drink special *never* get boring! In fact I think the entire problem with your humourously named town is lack of real drinking. Instead of wasting money on AS/400s the local government should lead the whole town on a week long beer-fest.
I don't know about IE, but in Opera this is constantly getting narrower... ???
:(((
Instead of bashing Wilkes Barre, Pa ...why not contact them and volunteer your services to get their system back up and running. All those smart college kids nearby (or knowledgeable geeks in the area), ...why not lend a helping hand?
...in which case, they would indeed be morons.
The worst they could do is say 'No'
here shows that you are wrong.
Since when is IT about anything other than cutting corners? Now if only every other IT Manager in the world could learn from this.
This is false economy.
They should sack this twit, pay up and move on.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Yeah, AS/400s are pretty crazy. We have a few here at work, a couple of 32-processor jobs with about 1.5TB of storage between the two. The way the PC clients interact with the system is quite fascinating.
They are super slow but rather robust. And as you said, IBM support is top notch. All the hardware is monitored internally, and then the machine can pop up a warning message for the operator who's running it. Then the machine dials out and sends a service request to IBM. I was sitting here when a drive crashed (1 of 108) and I heard the modem dial out, then I swear 4 minutes later IBM called to schedule service.
Of course, this sort of equipment and service costs money. But the system I'm sitting next to right now counts about 900 MILLION dollars a year in revenue so it's worth it--it absolutely MUST be running 24/365. Forget 99.999 or whatever microsoft is touting.
I saw a little 4 proc e-series one on ebay for a half-mil; that doesn't include the service contract..
You see a lot of them in State and Federal government, and as a poster mentioned, casinos and hotels.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
I work as a network engineer for a formerly-major midwestern city.
If you knew one-tenth of what went on you would damage yourself laughing. Our network manager has no idea how anything works but he can expound for hours on any IT topic. It is all complete nonsense. Recently some of his emails made their way to the Internet where they created a positive sensation. He got his job because he was here first. He is a thug and a bully who often comes to work smelling of booze. The people above him lap it up because they don't know anything about it either.
We have wasted more money than you can count in one lifetime.
It is impossible to get good people to come here to work so we use overly-promoted secretaries and clerks. Everyday is a little worse than the one before.
Believe me, these problems in Wilkes-Barre are nothing.
Rinse
Lesson #2: IBM can handle the problem.
Lesson #3: Microsoft and the PC cannot.
The End.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
....sucks. They wasted thousands on our company replacing HDs when the real problem was the power supply.
Conversely, it is also true that when bad IT and government meet everybody still loses.
thus, the real challenge here is to have both good IT and good government.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Tell me about it. PA has the WORST road system anywhere. Afghanistan has a better road system.
Once, a former co-worker of mine had to go from Baltimore to York in a snow storm. Everything was fine & I-83 was clear until he got to the state line. Then traffic came to a screeching halt.
Also, how long would it take to drive from Philly to Pittsburgh if you didn't take the turnpike? 3-4 days?
Ignore the moderator who thoughtlessly labeled you a troll. I got it, and unlike Her Majesty, I was very amused.
Virg
You see, the DeNaples family ownes the whole fucking area. They manage to make millions a year by importing trash from New Jersey and New York. This is why they built the "Lackawanna Valley Industrial Highway". To help truck trash in more efficiently.
_Everyone_ in the area knows this, but the powers in government (mostly elected by the large Catholic population) are political fat-cats taking money from all sorts of groups. The whole political situation there is corrupt. Nepotism is rampant.
What needs to be done, is to have a federal commission investigate and remove the offending officials from public office. It will never correct itself any other way.
BTW, how does the Catholic church explain paying off 5 different families (total: $500,000) to hush them up about the reports of pedophilia? If I was Catholic, I'd be pissed that my donations went to keep priests from going to prison for playing with little boys' penises...
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
Hayward declined to respond to the jokes. His wife, city spokeswoman Shannon Hayward, said "I don't think it's funny."
Holy nepotism! How in the heck does this city manager get to have his wife as the official city spokeswoman?
Lots of interesting comments concerning my home state. I'm from NEPA and I can vouch that it sucked for the most part. I used to have to drive 30 miles into New York (Binghamton) to see a movie. From a Slashdot perspective, the state basically sucks. Scranton/Wilks were both big coal places, and Pittsburgh was a big steal place, and both of those industries died. There is absolutely no technology there, unless you go to Philly. On the other hand, if you lived in Delaware, Jersey, or NY, there is a good chance you ended up in a PA university. There are many of them, and they are good. (I went to Penn State) So you'd think with good schools, PA wouldn't suck as much... Wrong... 90+% of people living in Pennsylvania are 2nd and 3rd generations. Also, 90+% of the people graduating with technical degrees from PSU, were leaving the state.(Myself included moved to AZ) Hence, no one who reads this website would have much to say about Pennsylvania. But in defense of the state, if you wanted a house that was affordable, with lots of land and trees with real leaves, you might like it.
I was curious enough about the AS/400 to do a bit of reading on it. There are a lot of cool ideas behind it, but there's one problem: In order to type a simple 'Hello World' program you have to have a firm grasp of the overall design, which appears almost insanely complex. (I'm sure it's fine once you get to know it).
At least that was my experience. If you can get beyond that, there's much to admire in the design and execution.
Incidently, my impression is that the system itself is blindingly fast, but the ODBC interface many people have to use is really a slug. But I last used it a few years back, so perhaps things have changed.
D
With such dominance, every web site in existence is coded with IE users in mind.
This is a FLAT-OUT LIE, as such the rest of your comment is summarily ignored.
If PA requires it I find it ironic that municipalities aren't required to insure their important data. There are probably other areas where they require CITIZENS to be insured before they will issue something.
This just in:
WILKES-BARRE - A move to replace a mainframe with PCs brings yet more savings.
Thanks to Mayor Tom McGroarty's brillant money-saving move, the town's aging IBM AS-400 mainframe was replaced by a network of two PCs running Windows ME. "The AS-400 replacement cost was about $12,000, much more that the PCs." The savings do not include the cost of three people entering data for 6 months, or about $120,000. "Who cares, said McGroarty, they are the kids of local shopkeepers who would vote for the opposition if their worthless brats, who don't have any marketable skills, were not employed by me. And it's a different budget anyway." He said the PCs also came with Deer Hunter III, a valuable utility.
The AS-400 problems started appearing on April 12th, when a tax data backup failed. McGroarty pointed out that the PC network was already backed up frequently, and for free -- another money-saving breakthrough that he is very proud of. "Last night, while browsing for, hem, golf tips, I found that all the city's tax data was backed up off-site by a bunch of nice guys who have volunteered and did it for free," said McGroarty. "Their web site has all our data, easily available to all visitors. I wasn't even aware of it, but they seem to have installed their backup software on all our Windows machines. It shows as a new wallpaper that says ``0wN3d by r00tKraCK3rz''. Must be a new software company."
"This move also brought new businesses to our town", added the Mayor. "Executives from Anderson are moving into town because they are impressed by the efficiency of the local police.".
By Jolan Redsneck (who spent two hours trying to slalom between triple-parked cars when driving in downtown WB.)
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I go to this site and am redirected to a LONG page about how Netscape sucks and I should use IE. Way down at the bottom is a link back to the regular site. Sorry, Bozo, but my choice of browser is not yours to quibble with (unless it's IE, of course, but that's a morality thing ;-P ). The webmasturbator of that site can blow me.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Yes. I would put an NT4 box, properly secured, on the Internet exposed to the world. With no firewall. A fully patched NT4 installation has no known exploits. NT4 is supported by MS until June 2003, and they will continue to provide security updates after that. You know it's been rated C2 secure for years, right? What you wrote is pure FUD, and it's the reason why nobody listens to most Linux zealots.
Hells yeah dude! It is nice to be recognized for ones work. The web page is all done using PHP and MySQL. Currently all of the listeners can see the current song being played by our automation system as well as the past five songs. This is very helpful to use for us as well as for the listeners to use.
... Wilkes-Barre does fucking suck. I plan on leaving it ASAP.
In about 2 or 3 weeks, I am writing a completely paperless playlist system for the radio station. Of course using all PHP and MySQL. Then listeners will be able to see the songs that the live DJs are playing as they are playing them. Plus the playlist will be generated as their show goes on. It will be kept on our web page until they do their show again which amounts to it being on the web site for about a week. Plus it will bail out the music directors by generating the weekly charts to go to FMQB and CMJ music industry contacts.
All of the DJs are assigned an account and they login to an SSL section of our web site to do updates to their DJ information. All of those profiles on there are directly from the DJs themselves.
I have forwarded your post to the rest of the executive staff. It will be mentioned at our executive staff meeting tomorrow. You are obviously one of our fans so if there is any CDs/posters/t-shirts you want let us know.
Oh yeah
El-Dog
....and not his.
Given your example, and the fact I said nothing about the browser redirect, it's obvious I use IE (classic MacOS version)- for lack of anything better on my platform (NS6/Moz just don't compare for responsiveness).
It's hard enough to build a media-rich site that runs moderately non-ass in a single strain of web browser across multiple resolutions (go to www.starwars.com and jack your font sizing around to see the page break in new and exciting ways).
As a web designer, I want whatever I'm building to look decent and run well. I'm going to develope for the common platform, and test for the common platform. If some little niche browser or fringe elitist browser borks my page to fuck and gone, I'm going to see why... but I'm only going to compromise my design SO FAR before I say "fuck you" and smack a redirect on.
This isn't a problem with users or web designers. It's a problem with fucking browser rendering engines not implementing the spec properly. Minor annoyance. Live with it.