Slashdot Mirror
Australia's Bureau of Meteorology Dumps Water Data Project
littlekorea writes "Australia's weather bureau has racked up bills of $38 million for a water data system, based on Red Hat Linux, MySQL and Java, that was originally scheduled to cost somewhere between $2 million and $5 million. The Bureau's supplier, an ASX-listed IT services provider SMS Management and Technology, did a good job of embedding itself in the bureau, with all changes having to be made by the original consultant that built it."
I've got to say that the initial post on this topic perpetuates one of the paradigms that is sticking in the craws of Slashdot users. We are not an audience. We might be users, we might be members, we most certainly are contributors. But we are not an audience.
If you persist in thinking of us that way, then you're going to get it wrong. You serve an audience differently than you serve contributing members of a community. Most of the complaints hinge on that difference.
If we were an audience, we'd be coming here for the articles. Most of the complaints are about the comment system, how difficult it is to follow a conversation, how difficult it is leave a comment, etc. I come here, most of us come here, to read what my/our fellow slashdotters have to say. The value here is the community, and the most important contributors are other members, not the site or the editors.
If you don't get that straight, then you aren't going to "get" why we're upset, so there's no chance that you'll deliver us something that we can live with. And that community is going to vanish, leaving you with nothing of value.
You can take suggestions and maybe reduce the implosion, but unless you understand *why* we're upset, you're going to be heading in fundamentally the wrong direction.
See you all back on February 17!
Beta is so bad, all of the comments have turned to shit!
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
It sucks when some designers or an agency comes along and takes all your money and then produces utter shite, which you are expected to pay for, because you asked for their advice. Like Slashdot. What an epic mess.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
racked up bills of $38 million for a water data system
for that amount of money they could have secured a water supply for a small town, or provided flood defenses along half a mile of a river.
The kind of information they are trying to stop flowing...by intentionally killing Slashdot .
US5722418
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US5644363
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GoogleGlass
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Acceptance
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If history is any sort of an indicator, any rights we sell today, our children must buy back with blood tomorrow
Hi Folks, /. will obviously die.
It's your regular neighborhood troll magic maverick , and I've got a small couple of requests for you.
1. In the firehose, vote down as offtopic anything that isn't related to the beta. Vote up anything that is related to the beta.
2. Join the boycott from 10th to 17th Feb. Demonstrate that without the commentators,
Cheers,
Now back to your regular scheduled trolling.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
It is rude to randomly redirect visitors to beta.slashdot.
Even more so because beta sucks.
Providing a hard to find opt-out, adding /?nobeta=1 to the url, just upgrades the aggravation level from "rude" to "insulting and infuriating".
The only acceptable option is, as always, opt-in.
I guess you need reminding. a lot.
... that sounds exactly like BETA!
Let's stick with the old layout Mmkay?
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet. (Copy-paste the html from here so links don't get mangled!)
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design. Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta
http://slashdot.org/recent - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
-----=====##### LINKS #####=====-----
Discussion of Beta: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=56395415
Discussion of where to go if Beta goes live: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=submission&id=3321441
Alternative Slashdot: http://altslashdot.org (thanks Okian Warrior (537106))
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
this article seems to imply that linux was the reason for the cost blowout... and not that it was managed by a government agency.
look at any project administered by any government agency around the world... how many are on budget? why is that? it has nothing to do with linux and everything to do with government waste
Sorry will have a go at BETA on my next post
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
This waste of public money illustrate the fact that companies might be "Pushing Open Source" but not wanting to be "Open Source"...
Using "free" software is not really relevant if the company does not integrate a policy of putting software back into to "free" pool...
If they would use best practice, the level of contribution (+ probabley higher reuse) would make sure that they are not the "only player avaiable"...
And of course going over 80% increase of the initial deal should get you axed anyway, how the hell did it grow to 38 in 18 month ?
Somebody willing to "show" his/her code would probably not end up in this situation, additionally even if the deal would be "more expensive than initially planned"
at least the Australian government would have something they could promote, share, sell to other countries....
That way they just have a big hole in the public account (and probably some people who have got a very nice and totally undeserved bonus of some form or another...)
Much like Digg did. How sad.
StackExchange, can you please build us a new Slashdot?
You have most of the code already in place (comments need to be hierarchically structured, though).
You have the servers.
Most importantly, you have lots of sincere users with a background in programming, physics, etcetera.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
This is the way the Slashdot ends
This is the way the Slashdot ends
This is the way the Slashdot ends
Not with a big bang but a beta.
Silence is a state of mime.
FUCK BETA. BETA SUCKS. FUCK DICE HOLDINGS COMPANY. DICE HOLDINGS COMPANY SUCKS.
Dennis Ritchie: I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful, because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided. Linux seems to be the among the healthiest of the direct Unix derivatives, though there are also the various BSD systems as well as the more official offerings from the workstation and mainframe manufacturers.
Dennis Ritchie: My own computational world is a strange blend of Plan 9, Windows, and Inferno. I very much admire Linux's growth and vigor. Occasionally, people ask me much the same question [about Linux], but posed in a way that seems to expect an answer that shows jealousy or irritation about Linux vs. Unix as delivered and branded by traditional companies. Not at all; I think of both as the continuation of ideas that were started by Ken and me and many others, many years ago.
FUCK BETA. BETA SUCKS. FUCK DICE HOLDINGS COMPANY. DICE HOLDINGS COMPANY SUCKS.
Slashdotters unite! Revert to your feral nerd forms!
Fuck BETA, that is all
According to TFA:
So, across four years what should have cost $10M wound up costing nearly $40M. However:
Thus, change orders from a client who changed milestones mid-stream:
Leading to a situation where, "The contract began to resemble a time and materials contract rather than a fixedâfee contract contingent on achieving milestones and deliverables." Meaning that the client kept changing their mind so often the consulting firm was required to baby a system they hadn't thought through to begin with and had thus grown into a monstrosity that served disparate and disorganized goals.
No wonder it went over budget.
But that has nothing to do with open source and everything to do with bad project management. Notice that they've solved the problem by choosing "...a replacement, based on an off-the-shelf software product."
Which, if it meets their needs - bully for them. But is more likely an imposed solution to a problem they hadn't clearly defined to begin with. Thus, it's likely they'll find themselves in the same situation. Not because open source software is bad, or the commercial software is bad, or the consulting firm was probably bad... but because the bureau of meteorology has no idea what it wants to do with this data.
The problem here is with undefined goals set by management. Until they face that fact they'll go round this merry-go-round again and again. And taxpayers will foot the bill.
*In case nobody else already mentioned it, the beta comment layout's flat grey boxes are hard to see if your screen isn't perfectly calibrated, or you want to read without glasses, or your vision generally isn't that great.
*The beta look may be more modern, but this isn't a fashion site, the community prefers function over form.
*Fashion blog themes made by kids on tumblr have better visibility without sacrificing the functionality of the site.
It looks like shit. Where was this designed , a coding bootcamp?
Once the most popular chat and dating site for gays and lesbians, gay.com launched a bad redesign to their site and their subscriber count never recovered. The redesign broke compatibility with all of the third party chat clients and the redesigned on-site chat was so unreliable when it launched that it sent most of their users running to competing chat/dating services. By the time most of the bugs were fixed, it was already too late - a fundamental paradigm shift had taken place, their users had switched to smartphone apps and no longer had much interest in sitting at home in front of a computer.
Had they brought the full functionality of their popular dating site to mobile devices, history may have played out differently. Instead, they launched a horribly broken desktop site and sealed their fate. Dice could learn a lot from this failure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
....point out that Beta sucks ?
But. What could the costs really be other than what they paid for the site? Subtract that, and you got what? 5 "editors" at say $80,000/yr (which is insane for how little they do, should be $30,000) So $80k x 5 is 400k/year total. Hosting should be in house. Bandwidth costs are practically non-existent, and server maintenance should be done by the editors cause they're "geeky". If they couldn't handle something as simple as that, they shouldn't even be here. I don't see the issue. I ran a site that got millions of unique users per month for damn near nothing but my personal time and the cost of an internet connection (~$80/mo). If they're losing millions, they're doing it wrong. Way wrong.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
In other news, a high school co-op student 'working' for Slashdot has racked up an undisclosed amount of semester time designing a new beta site, a site heavily criticized by any user that's pushed into it. Many users are attempting to pool their resources to create an alternative Slashdot site as they feel the owners of Slashdot.com aren't listening to their criticisms since the current site is fine the way it is and doesn't need any the horrid beta design.
lol revenue, amirite DICE?
If enough headline stories are about dumping expensive beta upgrades to things that are not broken maybe BETA can be canned ?????
What has very likely happened is that, at each stage, the contractor has delivered something that sort of meets the specification (which was probably inadequate since the customer did not understand their requirements, let alone the issues and trade-offs), but is obviously unusable - hence the inevitable change order. It is also quite likely that they sold the the customer on the desirability or even the need for changes that lead to the need for more changes. Of course if the in-house expertise is lacking, it is almost inevitable that things will go from bad to worse. One of the perverse things in these situations is that the poorer the quality of the work, more money the contractor will end up being paid.
Since no one seems to have anything to add aside from asinine dump beta comments. Pretty sure that acting like petulant children and spamming f beta isn't going to do anything. How about you just just have your pointless little boycott next week and the comments can actually be useful. I'm posting this comment from beta just to spite the anti-betas.
for pity sake
used to know the leader of this project quite well, personally, and i can assure you the company in question did everything in it's power to deliver an honest specification and work. the problem was the australian government - it's damned near impossible to hit a specification moving at the speed of australian politics at the time.
As an anonymous coward who has had dealings with SMS and others in the past, I can confirm that the attitude of management at times has not been about "how do we get the job done?" but "how do we get more people in on this work?". It seemed that the quest to charge customers extra often overrode the intent to complete a project. The client did not help themselves at all by not managing the situation well from their end.