Admittedly my experience has been peripheral technical support for these projects. And I would add the caveat that these were both for very large and complex companies (everything needed to be multi-lingual and multi-currency).
But the projects took between three and five years to deliver and employed about 50 people each. And as I had to use some of the front end applications I can attest to the poor quality of the end user interface.
Speaking to the people involved more closely and listening to thier various war stories I got the inmpresion that this was a normal situation.
And if you need more than anecdotal eveidence for this you could look into the eceptionally well documented case of Hewlet Packards implemntation of SAP inventory control. This is extemly well documented as Carly had to explain to her board why they could not take orders or deliver kit to customers.
But your talking java programers here. Look at what the java community has come up with to solve the same problem -- JSP, plus struts, plus JDBC but that proved inadequate so they stacked the whole mighty ediface of J2EE on top of it.
That the Java communuty could come up with a simple clean usable solution for anything is no longe feasable.
If you want to see a Java programmer self-combust just set the following simple task: "Define 'bloat' in less than 9000 words".
I have not much experience with Oracle ERP impelmentations. But my experience of both SAP and Peoplesoft is this:-
It takes more effort and man hours to customise and install these products than is does to write an equivalent system inhouse, and, then you pay license fees.
The main problem is upper IT management are sold on the "we implement best practice you dont have to change anything" idea. Which collides with the real world of "we dont do it that way here" of the business managers.
The only way to implement these products quickly and cheaply^H^H^H^H^H^H for merely outrageous cost is to implement the vanilla package and change the way the business is run to suit. This usually involves sacking/losing half your business management to force the changes through.
I have always maintained that those people condemed to carry a laptop around must have beheaved very badly in a previous life ( think Pol Pot, or, day time TV soap producer). So heres another 1.7 kilos to lug around, which seems somewhat unfair, would it be possable to restrict this improvemnet to members of the legal profession, indeed, it should be made a compulsary accessory for patent lawers.
On a more serious note, why mess around with the CD bay format. Every poratable I have ever owned has a little 12v power socket in the rear.
I am chairman and CEO of SCO company which is large and technicaly high. We have recently moved office to Lagos in Nigeria Africa so CFOs wife can get sun tan and enjoy wonderful weather. But I have small problem. Local law prevents me sending my annual bonus 1,897,766.20 dollar to my poor sick mother in California, USA. I need USA bank account to deposit money in not in my name. I will pay genrous ten percent commision if you help is coming to pay medical bills of poor sick mother and poor sick Venture Capitalist.
The real problem is Microsofts DRM just does not work. It doesn't work with either of my mp3 players even though they claim to support it. It doesn't work very well if you want to burn cd's either. (( You eat up your copy license when the track is converted not when the CD is burned. This causes several problems not least you select a buch of tracks to burn, media player converts them all eating up a "copy" for each track then decides there is not enough room on the CD and bails out -- 16 rights to copy which you bought and paid for are trashed )).
I do not own a single piece of Apple hardware yet I use Itunes for downloading music, or, just buy (or borrow) the CD.
As I remeber it at the time Monteray was more about porting large chunks of AIX to run on Intels Titantic 64 bit processor. SCOs contibution was to be its expertese on the Intel hardware specifics.
IBM has had unix running on various power architectures since the Power instruction set existed, and, was up to AIX release 4.1.. when project Monteray was announced so its difficult to see what SCO could be complaining about.
Incidently back in 1998 Linux was still vieed as a hobbyist OS and no threat to AIX, etc.. The real point of project Monteray was that the three partners could pool resources and be up and running with a viable operating system when Intel swamped the world with 64 bit processors. Little did they know that they could have spent a liesurly ten years on the project.
Its not like a Francophone could ever win but we dont want them polluting our name spaces with le terrible words franglais et le silly technical terms like ordinator, or, those merde language like Eifel.
When a hardware company makes a big deal about how many cpus they can support with SMP, you know the processers are slow.
About 1996 when IBM had trouble ramping up the speed of thier Power chips, all the sales bumf emphasised how good the SMP performance was.
Now the positions are reversed. Solaris has to scale to 128 processers to compete with the competitions 32 processor systems. With the next generation of Opteron chips Linux only needs to scale to 16 processors to compete with 128 processor Solaris/Sparc system.
The presidents office today announced that Zoos receiving federal funding must remove any refreneces to discredited Darwinian theory, but, may be allowed to state on which day God created the Species.
Given that a reasonably useful database system would be several hundred thousand lines of code, and, that Oracle & IBM have a 25 year head start not to mention MicroSofts 10 year head start. I don't think it would make sense for SUN to roll thier own database software.
So the question is who are they gonna buy? IBM has already snapped up Informix. CA has "given" Ingres to the Open Source community. SAP has donated SAP/DB to MySql. MicroSoft is unlikely to sell Access or SQLServer. Which leaves -- Sybase?
If you don't want a fight with management then choose RedHat.
It has a Nasdaq listing and flatering articles have appeared in main line management magazines, so its probably the only linux related comapny they have ever heard of.
Also its one of the distributions recommended by the major server vendors such as IBM and HP.
None of this has anything to do with the technical (de-)merits of the software, but, then you did mention the M-word.
The currentzSeries machines come with 16 cpus and L2 & L1 packaged together on a board. But only 12 cpus are used.
Each "cpu" is actually two cpus and a comparitor. When the cpus come up with a different answer the cpu is shutdown and procesing is taken over by one of the four free cpus on the board.
You will never know it happened until you run one of the mainrneance utilities.
In the way of IBM this technoligy will probaly appear on top end pSeries (AIX/Linux) and iSeries boxes in a couple of years.
This sort of cockup would have been impossable with the ex Arther Anderson crowd. They would still be struggling to get the shrink wrap off the CDs without wrinkling thier suits.
Seriously the problem is government procurement procedures. The contract goes to the lowest bidder and a record of past f****ups is not taken into account.
It is used extensively within IBM java based projects. (WSAD - the websphere IDE come with Cloudscape and works with cloudscape by default).
But its quite difficult to sell for two reasons.
One IBMs database brand is DB2, which these days scales down to small hardware.
Two cloudscapes biggest plus is that it is implemented as a single jar file, but, how do you collect license fees when anyone can copy and use your jar file?
Well one of those heavy hitters seems to be Friedman. Who not only won the Nobel prize but had the opeertunity to test his theoreys in practice -- twice.
The first time was as economic advisor to Pinochet in Chile. This was moderatetly succesful in economic terms -- if you were not one of the n thousand Chileans who were tortured, imprisioned killed or just plain diappeared.
The second time as "Reagonomics" mark 1. ('trickle-down' anyone?) which on the whole was a miserable failure (even the rich got poorer) and was swiftly abandoned for Mark II reagonomics where at least the rich got richer and the middle class got poorer but didn't realise it.
The thing about being a real manager is that you are suppossed to be in control.
I know a lot of supervisor/admin jobs have "Manager" in the title but actually have nothing to do with management - perhaps these are the guys who are whinging?
However as far as real IT managers are concerned. You are in charge, you make the decisions, you manage your bosses expectations. If your workplace is shitty then its your own fault! Do something about it or leave!
Slashdot Mirror
Mmmm your right -- but how often do you get a first post oppertunity!
Check the facts and you lose it.
Next years Intel chip will run faster than last years AMD chip!
Admittedly my experience has been peripheral technical support for these projects. And I would add the caveat that these were both for very large and complex companies (everything needed to be multi-lingual and multi-currency).
But the projects took between three and five years to deliver and employed about 50 people each.
And as I had to use some of the front end applications I can attest to
the poor quality of the end user interface.
Speaking to the people involved more closely and listening to thier various war stories I got the inmpresion that this was a normal situation.
And if you need more than anecdotal eveidence for this you could look into the eceptionally well documented case of Hewlet Packards implemntation of SAP inventory control. This is extemly well documented as Carly had to explain to her board why they could not take orders or deliver kit to customers.
This would be possable in theory.
But your talking java programers here. Look at what the java community has come up with to solve the same problem -- JSP, plus struts, plus JDBC
but that proved inadequate so they stacked the whole mighty ediface of J2EE
on top of it.
That the Java communuty could come up with a simple clean usable
solution for anything is no longe feasable.
If you want to see a Java programmer self-combust just set the following
simple task:
"Define 'bloat' in less than 9000 words".
I have not much experience with Oracle ERP impelmentations. But my experience of both SAP and Peoplesoft is this:-
It takes more effort and man hours to customise and install these products than is does to write an equivalent system inhouse, and, then you pay license fees.
The main problem is upper IT management are sold on the "we implement best practice you dont have to change anything" idea. Which collides with the
real world of "we dont do it that way here" of the business managers.
The only way to implement these products quickly and cheaply^H^H^H^H^H^H for merely outrageous cost is to implement the vanilla package and change the way the business is run to suit. This usually involves sacking/losing half your business management to force the changes through.
I have always maintained that those people condemed to carry a laptop around must have beheaved very badly in a previous life ( think Pol Pot, or, day time TV soap producer).
So heres another 1.7 kilos to lug around, which seems somewhat unfair, would it be possable to restrict this improvemnet to members of the legal profession, indeed, it should be made a compulsary accessory for patent lawers.
On a more serious note, why mess around with the CD bay format. Every poratable I have ever owned has a little 12v power socket in the rear.
Viruses are parasitical organisms which use the RNA mechanism in the cells of "real" life forms to reproduce thier DNA.
Viruses have no cell structure, therfore no cell nucleus, therefore no RNA and therefore cannot reproduce on there own.
So how can a parasitic virus which depends on celled organisms to reproduce be the ancestor of celled organisms.
I am chairman and CEO of SCO company which is large and technicaly high.
We have recently moved office to Lagos in Nigeria Africa so CFOs wife can get sun tan and enjoy wonderful weather. But I have small problem. Local law prevents me sending my annual bonus 1,897,766.20 dollar to my poor sick mother in California, USA.
I need USA bank account to deposit money in not in my name. I will pay genrous ten percent commision if you help is coming to pay medical bills of poor sick mother and poor sick Venture Capitalist.
The real problem is Microsofts DRM just does not work.
It doesn't work with either of my mp3 players even though they claim to support it.
It doesn't work very well if you want to burn cd's either.
(( You eat up your copy license when the track is converted not when the CD is burned. This causes several problems not least you select a buch of tracks to burn, media player converts them all eating up a "copy" for each track then decides there is not enough room on the CD and bails out -- 16 rights to copy which you bought and paid for are trashed )).
I do not own a single piece of Apple hardware yet I use Itunes for downloading music, or, just buy (or borrow) the CD.
Us european (and aussie ) freelancers use http://www.jobserve.com/ to
the exclusion of almost everything else.
The site is well layed out, easy to search and has thousands of jobs.
Plus they sponser West Ham United so are obviously diamond geezers.
As I remeber it at the time Monteray was more about porting large chunks of AIX to run on Intels Titantic 64 bit processor. SCOs contibution was to be its expertese on the Intel hardware specifics.
IBM has had unix running on various power architectures since the Power instruction set existed, and, was up to AIX release 4.1.. when project Monteray was announced so its difficult to see what SCO could be complaining about.
Incidently back in 1998 Linux was still vieed as a hobbyist OS and no threat to AIX, etc.. The real point of project Monteray was that the three partners could pool resources and be up and running with a viable operating system when Intel swamped the world with 64 bit processors. Little did they know that they could have spent a liesurly ten years on the project.
Why not exclude Paris, Geneva, Brussels as well?
Its not like a Francophone could ever win but we dont want them polluting our name spaces with le terrible words franglais et le silly technical terms like ordinator, or, those merde language like Eifel.
When a hardware company makes a big deal about how many cpus they can support with SMP, you know the processers are slow.
About 1996 when IBM had trouble ramping up the speed of thier Power chips, all the sales bumf emphasised how good the SMP performance was.
Now the positions are reversed. Solaris has to scale to 128 processers to compete with the competitions 32 processor systems. With the next generation of Opteron chips Linux only needs to scale to 16 processors to compete with 128 processor Solaris/Sparc system.
The presidents office today announced that Zoos receiving federal funding must remove any refreneces to discredited Darwinian theory, but, may be allowed to state on which day God created the Species.
Only a matter of time
I go to the other extreme. If I find the code unclear or obscure I rewrite the code until it reads better.
Comments are for wimps.
You didn't read the small print:
This card is the property of The Big Bank and will remain so. The Big Bank reserves the right to demand the return of the card at any time.
Given that a reasonably useful database system would be several hundred thousand lines of code, and, that Oracle & IBM have a 25 year head start not to mention MicroSofts 10 year head start. I don't think it would make sense for SUN to roll thier own database software.
So the question is who are they gonna buy? IBM has already snapped up Informix. CA has "given" Ingres to the Open Source community. SAP has donated SAP/DB to MySql. MicroSoft is unlikely to sell Access or SQLServer. Which leaves -- Sybase?
Could be intersting.
If you don't want a fight with management then choose RedHat.
It has a Nasdaq listing and flatering articles have appeared in main line management magazines, so its probably the only linux related comapny they have ever heard of.
Also its one of the distributions recommended by the major server vendors such as IBM and HP.
None of this has anything to do with the technical (de-)merits of the software, but, then you did mention the M-word.
Huh! three 120 degree phases are so much better.
Or am I just being elitist and European?
The currentzSeries machines come with 16 cpus and L2 & L1 packaged together on a board.
But only 12 cpus are used.
Each "cpu" is actually two cpus and a comparitor. When the cpus come up with a different answer the cpu is shutdown and procesing is taken over by one of the four free cpus on the board.
You will never know it happened until you run one of the mainrneance utilities.
In the way of IBM this technoligy will probaly appear on top end pSeries (AIX/Linux) and iSeries boxes in a couple of years.
Because Accenture is the other choice!
This sort of cockup would have been impossable with the ex Arther Anderson crowd. They would still be struggling to get the shrink wrap off the CDs without wrinkling thier suits.
Seriously the problem is government procurement procedures. The contract goes to the lowest bidder and a record of past f****ups is not taken into account.
SUVs may be safer in a collision, but, they rollover at the slightest prompting.
One Brit TV program recently did a test where they recreated a fairly normal situation, trying to avoid a suddenly braking vehicle ahead of it.
The really interesting bit for the "ordinary car" (BMW!) the test was conducted by the TV presenter with no safty gear other than a seat belt.
The SUV test vehicle was driven by a professional stunt man with crash helmet and five point seat belt! They knew it was gonna role!
The SUV rolled on the first test at 70 mph.
Thr BMW was still good at 110 mph.
But then again I dont actually remember seeing a bend on a US highway.
IBM picked this up when they grabbed informix.
It is used extensively within IBM java based projects. (WSAD - the websphere IDE come with Cloudscape and works with cloudscape by default).
But its quite difficult to sell for two reasons.
One IBMs database brand is DB2, which these days scales down to small hardware.
Two cloudscapes biggest plus is that it is implemented as a single jar file, but, how do you collect license fees when anyone can copy and use your jar file?
Well one of those heavy hitters seems to be Friedman. Who not only won the Nobel prize but had the opeertunity to test his theoreys in practice -- twice.
The first time was as economic advisor to Pinochet in Chile. This was moderatetly succesful in economic terms -- if you were not one of the n thousand Chileans who were tortured, imprisioned killed or just plain diappeared.
The second time as "Reagonomics" mark 1. ('trickle-down' anyone?) which on the whole was a miserable failure (even the rich got poorer) and was swiftly abandoned for Mark II reagonomics where at least the rich got richer and the middle class got poorer but didn't realise it.
The thing about being a real manager is that you are suppossed to be in control.
I know a lot of supervisor/admin jobs have "Manager" in the title but actually have nothing to do with management - perhaps these are the guys who are whinging?
However as far as real IT managers are concerned. You are in charge, you make the decisions, you manage your bosses expectations. If your workplace is shitty then its your own fault!
Do something about it or leave!