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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.
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.
From the article:
IBM is willing to provide a maintenance contract for $850 a month.
How much is their PC network worth, anyway?
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!)
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)
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 ?
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.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these government officials!
Easy, it's called "Congress"
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.
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!"
I went to school in Wilkes-Barre. My father's side of the family is from Wilkes-Barre. So if that qualifies me to pass judgement, I'll declare that Wilkes-Barre is indeed a festering shitpile.
Going to school in Wilkes-Barre is a soul-crushing experience. See, the town is such a cultural mecca that the McDonald's in public square, the main center of town, closes at 4pm on Fridays. There's nothing to do on the weekends, because all the students go home, and all the students go home on the weekends 'cause there's nothing to do in town. If there's ever a town that could be improved by a 100-kiloton airburst, Wilkes-Barre is it.
And it's not desperately trying to recover from its coal mining days. It already did that, back when the river flooded the town away and a truckload of Federal disaster relief money came pouring in. At that point, basically everyone who could leave town, left town. All that's left is genetically inbred hangers-on. Walk down main street at noon, right through public square, and I'll guarantee you've never seen such a collection of human wreckage in your life. Just about everyone you'll see if missing one or more items from the following list:
a. arms
b. legs
c. teeth
d. a chromosome
e. sanity
Trust me, a PC network intended to replace an AS/400, implemented by a corrupt and incompetent government, is the absolute least of this town's worries. I'd say the raw sewage that gets dumped into the drinking water supply is a bit higher on the list.
...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.
AS/400s have built in RAID-5 hardware. they also have redundant PSUs, built in UPS, the whole nine yards. they store data in EBCDIC not ASCII but its trivial to dump data from the built in DB/2 database into a PC since IBM AS/400s typically come with a PC expansion card that boots a virtual PC with windows which can see the filesystem. .... those things are bloody reliable and multiply redundant. more likely a crashed job or some other simple software error that makes it appear like the system "crashed" (i.e. not responding).
i have a theory that the midrange (its not a mainframe) somehow killed the process (or batch job) running that operated the front end of their data entry system...or the process died on its own. they probably dont know how to login as QSECOFR and restart the batch process to get their front end back and so they think their system crashed. i doubt its a hardware failure
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
"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?
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.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or if they've been really cheap they've had a lapsed contract for a while....
First a power supply died and nobody cared... then a disk crashed and nobody cared... then a memory chip failed and nobody cared. Then thet finally lost redundency and finally somebody cared.
--Rob
When we were looking at an AS/400 to replace our aging System/36 in the early nineties, the models we could afford had a backup tape system and nothing else as far as redundancy goes. We decided to replace it with a PC network.
Of course, I didn't cancel support on either the 36 or the Wang until the network had been up and running for six months or so. Doing it sooner would have been, well, stupid.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
I agree that by and large Wilkes-Barre is a dying town inhabited for the most part by people who can't (or won't) read a stop sign.
But it does have some redeeming qualities, Wilkes University being the foremost among them. Wilkes has one of the top rated schools of pharmacy in the country. The school of pharmacy is so good that it was the primary reason that a huge employer recently opened up shop in the area.
Not to mention that Wilkes has one of the best computer science programs in Pennsylvania. They are so forward thinking it's scary. Every computer that a CS student must use has Linux installed. And in the more general computer labs they have the computers configured to duel-boot so they can have the best of both worlds. If you ever want a poster boy for schools leveraging the power of open-source, Wilkes is it. Heck, even one the assignments for the networking class involves installing Linux. The CS department is staffed with some of the most amazing faculty around. Including John Koch whom solved the century-old Four Color Problem.
It's not just the computer science department either, technology permeates through every aspect of the Wilkes campus. Just take a look at the web page for the radio station and there automation system and tell me it's not cool. Anything that tells you what the name of the song is ,while it's
still playing, is a good thing in my book.
It's just too bad that Wilkes-Barre is run by an incompetent mayor that uses the local collage students as a scape-goat for everything and is inhabited by an elderly populace that is too busy trying to kill the collages to realize that they are the only thing keeping Wilkes-Barre alive.
All in all, Wilkes-Barre is a great place to go to school, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to live here forever.
Communication is about content not presentation.
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!
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"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/