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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.
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.
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!
I guess you are right. Hereby another reminder: Fuck Beta.
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
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's why everybody's heading to this page to talk about what our options are if DICE refuses to hear us.
AltSlashdot. Because f'k the beta
... 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
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...)
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 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.
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.