It's been a while, but the stats I'm familiar with showed that FOSS code had a lower error rate than commecial code - 1 error per 200 lines vs. 1 error per 80 lines in shipping production code. IIRC that 1 in 80 number was originally from Microsoft, about their own Windows code.
From my Software Quality Assurance Workshop that I ran a few decades ago, the numbers for enterprise level, production code using the best practices of the time were in that same ballpark. Interestingly the rate didn't vary with language - Assembler, FORTRAN, COBOL, SQL, etc. - the difference is in what each line actually did. It's possible that something like ADA is better, IDK.
And this all ignores what is an error. From the texts used in my workshop, at that time about 70% of all errors were in the design, not the programming. And in today's world, I would argue that many characteristics of commercial code amount to errors, although the company calls them features - things that improve the company's defense against competitors or "pirates" at the expense of the user's convenience or efficiency; needless complexities and what I call "doilies" - pretty but useless features that just boost the vendor. These types of errors are much less common in pure FOSS software, although very prevalent in a lot of freeware such as phone apps. In a level playing field, all these anti-features, built into the design, should be included in the error statistics.
From my own experience, today, I would say that one way Office fails is that a document written in Open Document Format, which is a standard that MS has signed on to, could not be opened by my boss. I don't know the details in this particular case, but several times with my own work I've experienced a failure where the new MS "security features" prevent opening anything not produced by MS Office, or even by an earlier version of MS Office. I forget what it's called, but it required my to get an upgraded version of MS Office on a machine that was only used to work on one Excel file, one or two days per year.
And then there's Office Open XML, which is Microsoft's successful standardization ploy to prevent ODF to take hold. To my knowledge nobody has ever built a complete OOXML implementation, including Microsoft. And some of the rules in the "standard" are in the form, "do it like Excel 2007 does it." What the H___ does that mean? OOXML was nothing but a scam from the beginning, intended to defend MS against the thrust toward standardization. The classic methodology used in procurement is to define the desired product specification in such a way that only one vendor can meet it, and OOXML is a successful tool for that.
The councilman is right - all government documents _must_ be in a form that can be correctly opened, read, and if necessary edited, by future tools that may have no historical relation to Microsoft or any other present software vendor. Imagine if the land, birth, and death records of Britain from the 1200s were written in a script that nobody understood any more. That is what governments _must_ prevent.
On the other hand it allowed Joe Kennedy to go from well off to rich from smuggling, then very rich from insider trading and stock scams, then after the crash of 1929 launder all his cash and buy stocks at 10 cents on the dollar and become super rich. All that remained was to get appointed by FDR to run the SEC - who knew better how to run a stock fraud? - and buy a Presidency.
Someone I personally knew (or knew) worked at Hanford in the early-mid 1970s. He was in a management job associated with maintaining and monitoring the big tanks of waste. These tanks are about the most nasty things you can imagine - an ungodly mix of radioactive AND toxic AND caustic goop, that spontaneously generates enough heat to keep the temperature closing to boiling point. It also eats through the tank material - I forget if it was concrete, steel or what. The tanks are huge.
He finally quit the _third_ time he discovered and reported a massive tank leak, on the order of 300,000 gallons per day (about one swimming pool?), and the information was suppressed. He had a security clearance so was unable to go to the press with the information.
That material has been slowly migrating through the underground water table toward the Columbia River. I don't recall when the plume is destined to get to the river. Even without this source, the Columbia is the most radioactive river in the US and maybe the world due to natural radioactive materials that are in the granite the river runs through - those mountain streams with the milky white glacial rock dust give a continuing supply of more stuff.
IIRC the LTFR at Oak Ridge ran close to a decade, getting turned on and off on a daily basis, generating electricity (that was dumped to a big heater outside) very effectively. I don't recall reading about any problems of that sort. It was cancelled and shut down (after firing the primary proponent) by AEC in a largely political move tied to the demand for bomb materials, along with some budget constraints.
Also Westinghouse and GE (IIRC), the major suppliers of both nuclear plants and the very expensive fuel rods, have a very strong economic interest in continuing to sell fuel rods. This is analogous to ink jet printers, which are sold at or below cost but the ink is sold at more than 100 times cost. ($5000 per gallon is a typical price.) LTFR reactors threaten their business model. Of course they don't sell the plants at cost, but they do make a lot of money on fuel rods and maintenance contracts.
Somebody in that system could have said "hey let's re-sterilize that $150 plastic tube and re-use it," but nobody had an incentive to reduce the cost. Most patients aren't paying themselves. the ones that do will prefer a more expensive option that sounds better ("Manufacturer part just for you," sounds a lot better then "re-using this other dude's tube, but it's totally ok because we ran it through a dishwasher and then microwaved it"). Insurers have some reason to control costs, but very little ability because if the hospital says "fuck you blue cross," blue cross is gonna lose business. Moreover they don't want to be known as the company that forces customers to re-use some guys tube.
That's the basis of the problem - it's a systems problem, driven by the separation of cost feedback from price feedback, and exacerbated by the tort environment. Once you've paid your monthly insurance, you feel like "I've paid for it, I should get the service I paid for." Meanwhile, if a hospital were to take it upon itself to even buy that tube from a different supplier (for $125, say), they would almost immediately be subject to class action suits that include everybody who has been served, _even if there were no problems_. And the insurance companies have to go along or they'll get sued, or bad press about how they're abusing their customers. So the lawyers - and healthcare executives - can basically take this boat for a long, fast, ride.
I'll just add that back in the 1980s Arthur Deming (the guy who created the Japanese quality "miracle") came out with a book that showed how to cut medical costs in 1/2. The two big items were tort reform - consider that every item in a hospital, and every component of that item, has a liability insurance load of about 30%. So a kidney machine, for instance, uses about one foot of clear vinyl tubing for the blood pump. It has to be discarded after use, mainly for liability reasons. That's exactly the same tubing you can buy at Ace Hardware for about $1 per foot today. But it's been sanitized, inspected, and packaged in a sterile pack. The hospital has to buy it from the kidney machine maker to avoid liability issues. That piece of tubing, back in 1979, cost $150 each. Of that, the maker of the tubing that the kidney machine buys it from has to include 30% for their liability cost, upping the cost to the kidney machine company. Then the kidney machine maker has to insure on that increased cost. So now their cost is up by about 69%. (This is an actual example I was involved with many year ago.)
Then the hospital is paying 30%. And the doctors and staff are paying 30%. (In the late 1980s I knew a heart surgeon who paid over 30% of his gross pay for liability insurance. He was the 2nd most popular one in Arizona at the time. Others may have paid somewhat less.) So the increased cost of everything is compounded over and over.
The second item was paperwork reform. At that time (and mostly still) each insurance company had different paperwork, none of it was electronic. This is the area that the ACA may actually help with - I don't know for sure.
Deming estimated that fixing each of these would reduce overall costs by about 30%, for a total savings of over 50%.
A very strong contributing item today, that is going to get worse before it gets better, is that the ACA has just dumped a huge new cash cow into the healthcare industry's lap, when it was already floating in cash. Someone I know just went to the HIMSS conference in Orlando. He said he'd never seen such a wealthy business crowd. The parking lot was loaded with Lamborghini, Mercedes, the occasional Bentley. These were not the owners, these were the IT heads! The whole industry has gradually evolved into one of those elite clubs where the money just flows without end, and all the vendors have to do is suck up he cash. There's almost no sense of cost limitation - except for lip service of course! These folks have successfully turned "rent-seeking" into an industry lifestyle.
I had a similar plan when I was an independent consultant in OR in early 2000s, and such plans have been around for decades. The company catered to independents. The cost of my plan in MA to the company actually went up almost 20% per year, starting when RomneyCare kicked in. The company mostly just covered it by paying the higher rate (and switching providers), but finally couldn't do that any more. RomneyCare at least didn't make existing plans illegal AFAIK.
I forget what it's called, but there's this syndrome. On almost any given issue, it makes a very tiny difference for almost everybody, but it makes a huge difference for a small group of people. That small group are the ones who pay to "get something done", while the vast group of everyone else isn't paying attention to that one thing. So almost all of the information and lobbying that politicians hear is from the small group.
$100 per month for a high deductible single person is not out of the ballpark, or at least wasn't until ACA. These have been popular among independents for a long time. I had one at my company last year. In high-cost MA, my cost was about $110-120, plus I paid some more for dental. And the company paid another $100+ IIRC. I 'only' had a $1500 deductible so the insurance carrier had to cover a lot of things that the parent's plan wouldn't. The reason these plans work is that by far the largest part by far of that "$8895" cost is for all those doctor visits, labs, etc. for non-catastrophic (non-Major Medical) expenses. When I went to the doctor I got a discount due to being in the insurance program, but paid the entire cost myslf until the $1500 was covered. So most years my out-of-pocket for monthly plus actual medical was probably more in the $2500-$3000 range, plus what the company covered. And, like most people on these plans, I didnt/don't go to the doctor as much so the overall cost to the insurer is less. That $8895 mean is undoubtedly skewed by the Cadillac plans - I suspect the median is closer to $4000.
Interestingly for a few months in 2014 I was uninsured. One Rx I take had a co-pay of $100 per month under my insurance and the supposed "cost" was over $300. But when I paid for it out of pocket, I paid only $120. And most of my doctors gave me bigger discounts for paying cash so it was often cheaper than using the insurance. (Of course I didn't have Major Medical coverage, so that could have been a problem if anything had happened.)
My now ex-wife had surgery back in 2001. It was covered by insurance. The doctor billed $9000 (which was the amount right out of the "code" book), and after two years of going back and forth with letters, threats, haggling, he finally got paid about $4500. They "lost" the paperwork twice. They rejcted it several times for supposed errors. This was all delaying tactics - I found out later that the insurance company was having cash flow problems and was doing this to thousands of patients and doctors - just delay until the end of the fiscal year, and the books look much better!
His office person told us that if she had just gone in with her VISA and said, "I want this" and paid cash, he would have billed us $1200. This one-doctor office had two full time staff people who did nothing but deal with insurance companies so his costs are much higher for anything covered by insurane.
It is unlikely to pass, but I'm watching with interest the proposed ballot measure to split CA into multiple pieces. The state is apparently ungovernable as it is now, and (like many states, even MA) the urban areas tend to drive the politics and leave the rest of the state to grumble. Looking at many 'blue' states, the actual areas that are blue are often less than 1/10 of the area and less than 1/2 the population but election districts tend to be drawn to increase the influence of the more urban parts. Splitting the state would bring government a bit closer to the people in all areas.
Among other things, this would also make the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals much happier. At present the 9th Circuit spends almost all of its time on CA cases and the case load is already much too large. But there's no precedent nor logic to splitting the Court - and its precedents - to cover only part of a state. Imagine if the precedents set for San Francisco did not apply to LA! Splitting CA would allow at least one, possibly two new Circuit Courts to be established.
Splitting states has been done before, but not for about 150 years. I think the last ones were around the time of the Civil War - West Virginia split from Virginia to go with the North.
One small thing you can do - put the various versions of facebook.com in your/etc/hosts file (there's a Windows file that does the same thing). Use 127.0.0.1 or some other non-tracking web server IP for the IP address. This supercedes the DNS request and the browser just thinks that this IP address is facebook.com so sends the request there. It never even goes onto the LAN or WiFi.
On my laptop I have a webserver the serves a blank page so I am not plagued with "can't find website" or 404 errors. This completely prevents any facebook scripts from being loaded, much less talking to facebook.
The only disadvantage I've found is that a few websites seem to implement the facebook scriptlet in such a way that when it isn't loaded, it opens an iframe the size of the entire browser window instead of the little facebook icon. I don't recall which ones. Otherwise, all facebookisms completely disappear. I might do that for a bunch of other beacon sites.
Now I think of it, this would make a good plug-in - more extreme than AdBlock. I wouldn't use it for anything but beacons and tracking. It means you are completely unable to access those domains from that machine.
Ah, I stand corrected. I did a quick google+wikipedia as well, but mistakenly read housing units as population. There are 1350 housing units per sq. mi. in Houston. (I picked Houston because when I lived there it had the lowest density of any US city.) As you pointed out, the population density is closer to 3500.
In any case, my point was that this was the original parent's perception, as it is for most people in the US.
I'll also note that the density in Bangladesh is about 1150. In most (all?) developed countries most of the people live in 'urbanized areas' - the percentages vary radically according to how that is defined. E.g. 1/2 of US residence live in the top 48 'urbanized areas', and 80% in all of them (which includes towns down to 2500 population.) -http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/03/us-urban-population-what-does-urban-really-mean/1589/
I think perceptions like this are largely based on what we see in the media. For my part, I was surprised when I moved from Oregon to Massachusetts to discover that the whole state wasn't basically a suburb of Boston. I presently live six+ miles from the nearest supermarket. That's about as far as you can get in central MA, of course, but considering that MA is about the same size as Harney County in Oregon which has a total population of 7,000 - about the same as the town in MA that I live in - I expected to be living "downtown". I moved from central Oregon, which is a bit denser than Harney - Harney is about one per sq. mi., Deschutes is about 52. and in the part where I lived probably 5-15.
Interesting surprise! I just learned that the population density in the state of MA is about 840. It's about the same as Japan! But in my part it's only 220 and I'm in the most rural part of the town.
Well, actually they've been freaking out about the Japanese debt problem for a long time - 20 years or so. Most economists that I've read now believe that it would have been better to 'bite the bullet' back then and let the banks fail, then pick up the pieces. Instead they've been slowly bleeding to death for 20 years and dragging down the Japanese economy. See Iceland vs. UK and several other Euro countries. Iceland told the banks (and Europe) to F*-off - no "too big to fail" BS. The country went through some hard times for a few years, now they're doing well. But other countries all over Europe are now in the bleeding to death for 20 years phase. And, IMHO the US is going that way as well but we're doing it by inflationary theft.
I read recently that Japan's 'safe' Postal Savings system had been exposed - it had been systematically and secretly looted by successive governments for the last 20 years, to cover up the financial problems and prop up the banks. It was originally a true savings system, but no longer. The money's not actually there any more. It's now financially more like the US Social Security system, where they're paying the present oldsters with money paid in by youngsters.
Unfortunately nobody has ever come up with an economic model that is stable without growth in both population and economic activity. I expect that Japan's accelerated work on advanced robotics may be an effort to create a new model that replaces those people with robots and allows renewed economic growth with a shrinking but ever wealthier population - at least until SkyNet!:P
I think the parent was arguing that it is so dense (at least apparently - all we know here is what we see on the media) that it might as well be. I just looked. The density of Houston is about 1350 per square mile, Japan is about 750 per square mile, more than 1/2 of an actual US city (albeit one with a lot of territory). So the parent isn't completely off base.
Unlikely on two counts: 1) Governments rarely do that. Viz. Obamacare - they were hiding the problems for two years until it just became too obvious. Most government IT failures are just swept under the rug; 2) A large number of government and other organizations have been using it for years, and the number is increasing so whatever its failings, Drupal continues to meet their needs better than any alternative.
While WordPress runs about 16% of the top 10 million sites on the net while Drupal runs only about 2.6%, the number of user logins actually favors Drupal by far. Sites that actually handle a lot of logged in users are much more likely to be running Drupal. IOW WordPress is popular for personal blogs, but for real enterprise-y sites it is by far the most common 'independent' CMS, by which I mean not running commercial tools like IBM or Oracle. I don't have numbers for those but I'm sure they're big.
There is a burgeoning (maybe that's too strong) module certification effort now happening. Top Shelf Modules is one group; I think CommerceGuys does it for things in their catalog, there's another that I always forget. So, progress occurs.
Realize that there are still lots of vulnerabilities in core C libraries - not to mention that C is inherently unsafe and must be handled with care. Many of the vulnerabilities in Drupal, PHP and other tools are really just exposing the failings of C. But not to start a flame war...:)
IANA COBOList, but in fact as I understand it most big banks are still running COBOL for their central ops. It works, it's fast, it's tuned to their needs and their mainframe architecture. While it seems verbose, it's actually much closer to the bare metal (or at least the virtual OS) than almost any language but FORTRAN and C. On the old DEC-10 iron, COBOL was the only high level language that had access to an assembler-language SORT system. It ran rings around every other language, for its applications.
Citibank spent $500 million on Y2K, converting all their old COBOL to... COBOL.;) Most of those old programs are essentially unchanged other than that, for up to 40 years, sometimes longer.
Also, I just read that scientific and numeric programming - the supercomputer stuff, is still mostly written in FORTRAN.
I suppose my point is that, regardless of application, once a language is established for a particular application it is likely to continue being used in that application for decades. If it ain't broke don't fix it. It's been true for classical applications like the banks for decades, now it will be true for web services. Switching a large website from Drupal to some other CMS would involve lots of money, person hours, and most importantly impact on the business logic itself, which nowadays is the basis of the company's actual operations. So plan on seeing Drupal 7 still in use in some places 30 years from now - or at least until 2038 when the Unix timestamp rolls over!
Now I'm curious - what's the oldest program that is still in 'common' use? For a long time the US Social Security Administration was still running Autocoder programs from the 1950s, on 1401 simulators, emulated on OS/360, running in a virtual machine on the 3090 VM system, or something like that. Are they still? The reason back in th day was that they felt it was impossible to write new software that was guaranteed to be completely backwards compatible, down to the last cent on every account under every condition. And folks whose checks were 1c short were guaranteed to write letters to their Congressperson.
That's the thing - it's been in use by a number of *big* government sites (whitehouse.gov, data.gov), and enterprise and academic sites for quite a while so there's been a lot of work on the security for quite some time. From what I've seen Drupal has been much less prone to security problems than, for example, WordPress, not to mention roll-your-own.
A big security advantage of using a well-vetted CMS is that the framework has abstracted much of the vulnerability. If you use the built-in input functions, they are built to prevent most of the classic problems such as XSS, SQL injection, etc. So your newbie programmers are not as likely to leave the front door of your website open by coding a naive input function.
This applies to the various modules as well. They *should* be using those same input functions. There are now at least two Drupal module certification groups, Top Shelf Modules and another I forget. I think CommerceGuys also does this for modules they support. Part of the certification includes code review. This is a level of inspection that few companies can afford to do to their own roll-your-own code (and also an advantage of open source BTW).
Drupal does have a steep learning curve, and especially now with big transitions in the way things are done, it's easy to get lost in the module sea. But it, and the other CMS, provide an amazing amount of functionality without having to write a single line of code. And for a government with dozens or hundreds of departments, having a single CMS standard means a lot of synergy, it allows the central government to establish and *maintain* a common policy for all departments, and it means that IT people can move from one department to another with almost no learning curve.
IDK anything about Silverstripe, this is the first I've heard of it. But if you are having slowness it could be a lot of things besides PHP per se. In my experience many if not most PHP and other applications are actually database-limited, so it could be that. I've had PHP scripts that spent 95% of their time in the database, both in elapsed microtime when wrapping the database calls, and in CPU load. I only occasionally have seen Apache/PHP at the top of the list in "top".
Failing that, there are almost always particular functions that seem to be the ones that take up most of the time, which can be recoded, split up, etc. Anything involving creation of large arrays of objects is a candidate, especially if you are memory limited.
If you have access, try dropping microtime calls into the code, for instance at the top of each class or even each function, and log the results somewhere to see where the time goes. I like to just keep the difference between each step, which shows the elapsed time for each function. But you can also keep the start time and print the total elapsed time at the end of the page.
In my experience slowness is almost always due to these few pathological points in the code. Sometimes it's as simple as some piece of code that needs to do a DNS request (for a curl fetch), or a bunch of NFS file accesses that take a long time.
Once you know it's not just one or two pathological functions, then there are multiple strategies. For database, consider using the MEM-whatever database engine if you have enough memory. I haven't used PHP cacheing, the Zend speedups, nor the HipHop tools but I assume they are pretty useful.
Finally, one thing that all these CMS systems have in common is that they do a lot of work compared to a simple web page - I am guessing that every single web page requires the CMS to open, read and parse as many as 100 files. It's rather amazing to me that they work as fast as they do.
Ah, the good old days. I started with PHP 1.9s - one step past shell scripting.:) Things have come a long way. Nowadays of course I don't do it for my real job, just some side stuff I do to keep my hand in. One of those is manhandling Drupal - not a fun thing for newbies, but having tried WordPress (the other biggie), I would say Drupal is much more robust, more adaptable to real enterprise applications, more secure, and has a more involved community.
I think some of them are serving millions, some 10s of millions per day. I'm not sure if you can count Facebook, since they are running their own engine, but I believe the 'pages' still look like PHP. Whitehouse.gov, data.gov are both Drupal. So are all of the Ivy League schools, soon if not already. Of course, Whitehouse.gov has more than 80 people working on their website but that's not all coding. I would think most of that is content development and other stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been a while, but the stats I'm familiar with showed that FOSS code had a lower error rate than commecial code - 1 error per 200 lines vs. 1 error per 80 lines in shipping production code. IIRC that 1 in 80 number was originally from Microsoft, about their own Windows code.
From my Software Quality Assurance Workshop that I ran a few decades ago, the numbers for enterprise level, production code using the best practices of the time were in that same ballpark. Interestingly the rate didn't vary with language - Assembler, FORTRAN, COBOL, SQL, etc. - the difference is in what each line actually did. It's possible that something like ADA is better, IDK.
And this all ignores what is an error. From the texts used in my workshop, at that time about 70% of all errors were in the design, not the programming. And in today's world, I would argue that many characteristics of commercial code amount to errors, although the company calls them features - things that improve the company's defense against competitors or "pirates" at the expense of the user's convenience or efficiency; needless complexities and what I call "doilies" - pretty but useless features that just boost the vendor. These types of errors are much less common in pure FOSS software, although very prevalent in a lot of freeware such as phone apps. In a level playing field, all these anti-features, built into the design, should be included in the error statistics.
From my own experience, today, I would say that one way Office fails is that a document written in Open Document Format, which is a standard that MS has signed on to, could not be opened by my boss. I don't know the details in this particular case, but several times with my own work I've experienced a failure where the new MS "security features" prevent opening anything not produced by MS Office, or even by an earlier version of MS Office. I forget what it's called, but it required my to get an upgraded version of MS Office on a machine that was only used to work on one Excel file, one or two days per year.
And then there's Office Open XML, which is Microsoft's successful standardization ploy to prevent ODF to take hold. To my knowledge nobody has ever built a complete OOXML implementation, including Microsoft. And some of the rules in the "standard" are in the form, "do it like Excel 2007 does it." What the H___ does that mean? OOXML was nothing but a scam from the beginning, intended to defend MS against the thrust toward standardization. The classic methodology used in procurement is to define the desired product specification in such a way that only one vendor can meet it, and OOXML is a successful tool for that.
The councilman is right - all government documents _must_ be in a form that can be correctly opened, read, and if necessary edited, by future tools that may have no historical relation to Microsoft or any other present software vendor. Imagine if the land, birth, and death records of Britain from the 1200s were written in a script that nobody understood any more. That is what governments _must_ prevent.
On the other hand it allowed Joe Kennedy to go from well off to rich from smuggling, then very rich from insider trading and stock scams, then after the crash of 1929 launder all his cash and buy stocks at 10 cents on the dollar and become super rich. All that remained was to get appointed by FDR to run the SEC - who knew better how to run a stock fraud? - and buy a Presidency.
Someone I personally knew (or knew) worked at Hanford in the early-mid 1970s. He was in a management job associated with maintaining and monitoring the big tanks of waste. These tanks are about the most nasty things you can imagine - an ungodly mix of radioactive AND toxic AND caustic goop, that spontaneously generates enough heat to keep the temperature closing to boiling point. It also eats through the tank material - I forget if it was concrete, steel or what. The tanks are huge.
He finally quit the _third_ time he discovered and reported a massive tank leak, on the order of 300,000 gallons per day (about one swimming pool?), and the information was suppressed. He had a security clearance so was unable to go to the press with the information.
That material has been slowly migrating through the underground water table toward the Columbia River. I don't recall when the plume is destined to get to the river. Even without this source, the Columbia is the most radioactive river in the US and maybe the world due to natural radioactive materials that are in the granite the river runs through - those mountain streams with the milky white glacial rock dust give a continuing supply of more stuff.
IIRC the LTFR at Oak Ridge ran close to a decade, getting turned on and off on a daily basis, generating electricity (that was dumped to a big heater outside) very effectively. I don't recall reading about any problems of that sort. It was cancelled and shut down (after firing the primary proponent) by AEC in a largely political move tied to the demand for bomb materials, along with some budget constraints.
Also Westinghouse and GE (IIRC), the major suppliers of both nuclear plants and the very expensive fuel rods, have a very strong economic interest in continuing to sell fuel rods. This is analogous to ink jet printers, which are sold at or below cost but the ink is sold at more than 100 times cost. ($5000 per gallon is a typical price.) LTFR reactors threaten their business model. Of course they don't sell the plants at cost, but they do make a lot of money on fuel rods and maintenance contracts.
Somebody in that system could have said "hey let's re-sterilize that $150 plastic tube and re-use it," but nobody had an incentive to reduce the cost. Most patients aren't paying themselves. the ones that do will prefer a more expensive option that sounds better ("Manufacturer part just for you," sounds a lot better then "re-using this other dude's tube, but it's totally ok because we ran it through a dishwasher and then microwaved it"). Insurers have some reason to control costs, but very little ability because if the hospital says "fuck you blue cross," blue cross is gonna lose business. Moreover they don't want to be known as the company that forces customers to re-use some guys tube.
That's the basis of the problem - it's a systems problem, driven by the separation of cost feedback from price feedback, and exacerbated by the tort environment. Once you've paid your monthly insurance, you feel like "I've paid for it, I should get the service I paid for." Meanwhile, if a hospital were to take it upon itself to even buy that tube from a different supplier (for $125, say), they would almost immediately be subject to class action suits that include everybody who has been served, _even if there were no problems_. And the insurance companies have to go along or they'll get sued, or bad press about how they're abusing their customers. So the lawyers - and healthcare executives - can basically take this boat for a long, fast, ride.
I'll just add that back in the 1980s Arthur Deming (the guy who created the Japanese quality "miracle") came out with a book that showed how to cut medical costs in 1/2. The two big items were tort reform - consider that every item in a hospital, and every component of that item, has a liability insurance load of about 30%. So a kidney machine, for instance, uses about one foot of clear vinyl tubing for the blood pump. It has to be discarded after use, mainly for liability reasons. That's exactly the same tubing you can buy at Ace Hardware for about $1 per foot today. But it's been sanitized, inspected, and packaged in a sterile pack. The hospital has to buy it from the kidney machine maker to avoid liability issues. That piece of tubing, back in 1979, cost $150 each. Of that, the maker of the tubing that the kidney machine buys it from has to include 30% for their liability cost, upping the cost to the kidney machine company. Then the kidney machine maker has to insure on that increased cost. So now their cost is up by about 69%. (This is an actual example I was involved with many year ago.)
Then the hospital is paying 30%. And the doctors and staff are paying 30%. (In the late 1980s I knew a heart surgeon who paid over 30% of his gross pay for liability insurance. He was the 2nd most popular one in Arizona at the time. Others may have paid somewhat less.) So the increased cost of everything is compounded over and over.
The second item was paperwork reform. At that time (and mostly still) each insurance company had different paperwork, none of it was electronic. This is the area that the ACA may actually help with - I don't know for sure.
Deming estimated that fixing each of these would reduce overall costs by about 30%, for a total savings of over 50%.
A very strong contributing item today, that is going to get worse before it gets better, is that the ACA has just dumped a huge new cash cow into the healthcare industry's lap, when it was already floating in cash. Someone I know just went to the HIMSS conference in Orlando. He said he'd never seen such a wealthy business crowd. The parking lot was loaded with Lamborghini, Mercedes, the occasional Bentley. These were not the owners, these were the IT heads! The whole industry has gradually evolved into one of those elite clubs where the money just flows without end, and all the vendors have to do is suck up he cash. There's almost no sense of cost limitation - except for lip service of course! These folks have successfully turned "rent-seeking" into an industry lifestyle.
I had a similar plan when I was an independent consultant in OR in early 2000s, and such plans have been around for decades. The company catered to independents. The cost of my plan in MA to the company actually went up almost 20% per year, starting when RomneyCare kicked in. The company mostly just covered it by paying the higher rate (and switching providers), but finally couldn't do that any more. RomneyCare at least didn't make existing plans illegal AFAIK.
Reminds me of some religious sects.
I forget what it's called, but there's this syndrome. On almost any given issue, it makes a very tiny difference for almost everybody, but it makes a huge difference for a small group of people. That small group are the ones who pay to "get something done", while the vast group of everyone else isn't paying attention to that one thing. So almost all of the information and lobbying that politicians hear is from the small group.
$100 per month for a high deductible single person is not out of the ballpark, or at least wasn't until ACA. These have been popular among independents for a long time. I had one at my company last year. In high-cost MA, my cost was about $110-120, plus I paid some more for dental. And the company paid another $100+ IIRC. I 'only' had a $1500 deductible so the insurance carrier had to cover a lot of things that the parent's plan wouldn't. The reason these plans work is that by far the largest part by far of that "$8895" cost is for all those doctor visits, labs, etc. for non-catastrophic (non-Major Medical) expenses. When I went to the doctor I got a discount due to being in the insurance program, but paid the entire cost myslf until the $1500 was covered. So most years my out-of-pocket for monthly plus actual medical was probably more in the $2500-$3000 range, plus what the company covered. And, like most people on these plans, I didnt/don't go to the doctor as much so the overall cost to the insurer is less. That $8895 mean is undoubtedly skewed by the Cadillac plans - I suspect the median is closer to $4000.
Interestingly for a few months in 2014 I was uninsured. One Rx I take had a co-pay of $100 per month under my insurance and the supposed "cost" was over $300. But when I paid for it out of pocket, I paid only $120. And most of my doctors gave me bigger discounts for paying cash so it was often cheaper than using the insurance. (Of course I didn't have Major Medical coverage, so that could have been a problem if anything had happened.)
My now ex-wife had surgery back in 2001. It was covered by insurance. The doctor billed $9000 (which was the amount right out of the "code" book), and after two years of going back and forth with letters, threats, haggling, he finally got paid about $4500. They "lost" the paperwork twice. They rejcted it several times for supposed errors. This was all delaying tactics - I found out later that the insurance company was having cash flow problems and was doing this to thousands of patients and doctors - just delay until the end of the fiscal year, and the books look much better!
His office person told us that if she had just gone in with her VISA and said, "I want this" and paid cash, he would have billed us $1200. This one-doctor office had two full time staff people who did nothing but deal with insurance companies so his costs are much higher for anything covered by insurane.
It is unlikely to pass, but I'm watching with interest the proposed ballot measure to split CA into multiple pieces. The state is apparently ungovernable as it is now, and (like many states, even MA) the urban areas tend to drive the politics and leave the rest of the state to grumble. Looking at many 'blue' states, the actual areas that are blue are often less than 1/10 of the area and less than 1/2 the population but election districts tend to be drawn to increase the influence of the more urban parts. Splitting the state would bring government a bit closer to the people in all areas.
Among other things, this would also make the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals much happier. At present the 9th Circuit spends almost all of its time on CA cases and the case load is already much too large. But there's no precedent nor logic to splitting the Court - and its precedents - to cover only part of a state. Imagine if the precedents set for San Francisco did not apply to LA! Splitting CA would allow at least one, possibly two new Circuit Courts to be established.
Splitting states has been done before, but not for about 150 years. I think the last ones were around the time of the Civil War - West Virginia split from Virginia to go with the North.
One small thing you can do - put the various versions of facebook.com in your /etc/hosts file (there's a Windows file that does the same thing). Use 127.0.0.1 or some other non-tracking web server IP for the IP address. This supercedes the DNS request and the browser just thinks that this IP address is facebook.com so sends the request there. It never even goes onto the LAN or WiFi.
On my laptop I have a webserver the serves a blank page so I am not plagued with "can't find website" or 404 errors. This completely prevents any facebook scripts from being loaded, much less talking to facebook.
The only disadvantage I've found is that a few websites seem to implement the facebook scriptlet in such a way that when it isn't loaded, it opens an iframe the size of the entire browser window instead of the little facebook icon. I don't recall which ones. Otherwise, all facebookisms completely disappear. I might do that for a bunch of other beacon sites.
Now I think of it, this would make a good plug-in - more extreme than AdBlock. I wouldn't use it for anything but beacons and tracking. It means you are completely unable to access those domains from that machine.
Ah, I stand corrected. I did a quick google+wikipedia as well, but mistakenly read housing units as population. There are 1350 housing units per sq. mi. in Houston. (I picked Houston because when I lived there it had the lowest density of any US city.) As you pointed out, the population density is closer to 3500.
In any case, my point was that this was the original parent's perception, as it is for most people in the US.
I'll also note that the density in Bangladesh is about 1150. In most (all?) developed countries most of the people live in 'urbanized areas' - the percentages vary radically according to how that is defined. E.g. 1/2 of US residence live in the top 48 'urbanized areas', and 80% in all of them (which includes towns down to 2500 population.) -http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/03/us-urban-population-what-does-urban-really-mean/1589/
I think perceptions like this are largely based on what we see in the media. For my part, I was surprised when I moved from Oregon to Massachusetts to discover that the whole state wasn't basically a suburb of Boston. I presently live six+ miles from the nearest supermarket. That's about as far as you can get in central MA, of course, but considering that MA is about the same size as Harney County in Oregon which has a total population of 7,000 - about the same as the town in MA that I live in - I expected to be living "downtown". I moved from central Oregon, which is a bit denser than Harney - Harney is about one per sq. mi., Deschutes is about 52. and in the part where I lived probably 5-15.
Interesting surprise! I just learned that the population density in the state of MA is about 840. It's about the same as Japan! But in my part it's only 220 and I'm in the most rural part of the town.
Well, actually they've been freaking out about the Japanese debt problem for a long time - 20 years or so. Most economists that I've read now believe that it would have been better to 'bite the bullet' back then and let the banks fail, then pick up the pieces. Instead they've been slowly bleeding to death for 20 years and dragging down the Japanese economy. See Iceland vs. UK and several other Euro countries. Iceland told the banks (and Europe) to F*-off - no "too big to fail" BS. The country went through some hard times for a few years, now they're doing well. But other countries all over Europe are now in the bleeding to death for 20 years phase. And, IMHO the US is going that way as well but we're doing it by inflationary theft.
I read recently that Japan's 'safe' Postal Savings system had been exposed - it had been systematically and secretly looted by successive governments for the last 20 years, to cover up the financial problems and prop up the banks. It was originally a true savings system, but no longer. The money's not actually there any more. It's now financially more like the US Social Security system, where they're paying the present oldsters with money paid in by youngsters.
Unfortunately nobody has ever come up with an economic model that is stable without growth in both population and economic activity. I expect that Japan's accelerated work on advanced robotics may be an effort to create a new model that replaces those people with robots and allows renewed economic growth with a shrinking but ever wealthier population - at least until SkyNet! :P
I think the parent was arguing that it is so dense (at least apparently - all we know here is what we see on the media) that it might as well be. I just looked. The density of Houston is about 1350 per square mile, Japan is about 750 per square mile, more than 1/2 of an actual US city (albeit one with a lot of territory). So the parent isn't completely off base.
Unlikely on two counts: 1) Governments rarely do that. Viz. Obamacare - they were hiding the problems for two years until it just became too obvious. Most government IT failures are just swept under the rug; 2) A large number of government and other organizations have been using it for years, and the number is increasing so whatever its failings, Drupal continues to meet their needs better than any alternative.
While WordPress runs about 16% of the top 10 million sites on the net while Drupal runs only about 2.6%, the number of user logins actually favors Drupal by far. Sites that actually handle a lot of logged in users are much more likely to be running Drupal. IOW WordPress is popular for personal blogs, but for real enterprise-y sites it is by far the most common 'independent' CMS, by which I mean not running commercial tools like IBM or Oracle. I don't have numbers for those but I'm sure they're big.
There is a burgeoning (maybe that's too strong) module certification effort now happening. Top Shelf Modules is one group; I think CommerceGuys does it for things in their catalog, there's another that I always forget. So, progress occurs.
Realize that there are still lots of vulnerabilities in core C libraries - not to mention that C is inherently unsafe and must be handled with care. Many of the vulnerabilities in Drupal, PHP and other tools are really just exposing the failings of C. But not to start a flame war... :)
IANA COBOList, but in fact as I understand it most big banks are still running COBOL for their central ops. It works, it's fast, it's tuned to their needs and their mainframe architecture. While it seems verbose, it's actually much closer to the bare metal (or at least the virtual OS) than almost any language but FORTRAN and C. On the old DEC-10 iron, COBOL was the only high level language that had access to an assembler-language SORT system. It ran rings around every other language, for its applications.
Citibank spent $500 million on Y2K, converting all their old COBOL to ... COBOL. ;) Most of those old programs are essentially unchanged other than that, for up to 40 years, sometimes longer.
Also, I just read that scientific and numeric programming - the supercomputer stuff, is still mostly written in FORTRAN.
I suppose my point is that, regardless of application, once a language is established for a particular application it is likely to continue being used in that application for decades. If it ain't broke don't fix it. It's been true for classical applications like the banks for decades, now it will be true for web services. Switching a large website from Drupal to some other CMS would involve lots of money, person hours, and most importantly impact on the business logic itself, which nowadays is the basis of the company's actual operations. So plan on seeing Drupal 7 still in use in some places 30 years from now - or at least until 2038 when the Unix timestamp rolls over!
Now I'm curious - what's the oldest program that is still in 'common' use? For a long time the US Social Security Administration was still running Autocoder programs from the 1950s, on 1401 simulators, emulated on OS/360, running in a virtual machine on the 3090 VM system, or something like that. Are they still? The reason back in th day was that they felt it was impossible to write new software that was guaranteed to be completely backwards compatible, down to the last cent on every account under every condition. And folks whose checks were 1c short were guaranteed to write letters to their Congressperson.
That's the thing - it's been in use by a number of *big* government sites (whitehouse.gov, data.gov), and enterprise and academic sites for quite a while so there's been a lot of work on the security for quite some time. From what I've seen Drupal has been much less prone to security problems than, for example, WordPress, not to mention roll-your-own.
A big security advantage of using a well-vetted CMS is that the framework has abstracted much of the vulnerability. If you use the built-in input functions, they are built to prevent most of the classic problems such as XSS, SQL injection, etc. So your newbie programmers are not as likely to leave the front door of your website open by coding a naive input function.
This applies to the various modules as well. They *should* be using those same input functions. There are now at least two Drupal module certification groups, Top Shelf Modules and another I forget. I think CommerceGuys also does this for modules they support. Part of the certification includes code review. This is a level of inspection that few companies can afford to do to their own roll-your-own code (and also an advantage of open source BTW).
Drupal does have a steep learning curve, and especially now with big transitions in the way things are done, it's easy to get lost in the module sea. But it, and the other CMS, provide an amazing amount of functionality without having to write a single line of code. And for a government with dozens or hundreds of departments, having a single CMS standard means a lot of synergy, it allows the central government to establish and *maintain* a common policy for all departments, and it means that IT people can move from one department to another with almost no learning curve.
IDK anything about Silverstripe, this is the first I've heard of it. But if you are having slowness it could be a lot of things besides PHP per se. In my experience many if not most PHP and other applications are actually database-limited, so it could be that. I've had PHP scripts that spent 95% of their time in the database, both in elapsed microtime when wrapping the database calls, and in CPU load. I only occasionally have seen Apache/PHP at the top of the list in "top".
Failing that, there are almost always particular functions that seem to be the ones that take up most of the time, which can be recoded, split up, etc. Anything involving creation of large arrays of objects is a candidate, especially if you are memory limited.
If you have access, try dropping microtime calls into the code, for instance at the top of each class or even each function, and log the results somewhere to see where the time goes. I like to just keep the difference between each step, which shows the elapsed time for each function. But you can also keep the start time and print the total elapsed time at the end of the page.
In my experience slowness is almost always due to these few pathological points in the code. Sometimes it's as simple as some piece of code that needs to do a DNS request (for a curl fetch), or a bunch of NFS file accesses that take a long time.
Once you know it's not just one or two pathological functions, then there are multiple strategies. For database, consider using the MEM-whatever database engine if you have enough memory. I haven't used PHP cacheing, the Zend speedups, nor the HipHop tools but I assume they are pretty useful.
Finally, one thing that all these CMS systems have in common is that they do a lot of work compared to a simple web page - I am guessing that every single web page requires the CMS to open, read and parse as many as 100 files. It's rather amazing to me that they work as fast as they do.
Ah, the good old days. I started with PHP 1.9s - one step past shell scripting. :) Things have come a long way. Nowadays of course I don't do it for my real job, just some side stuff I do to keep my hand in. One of those is manhandling Drupal - not a fun thing for newbies, but having tried WordPress (the other biggie), I would say Drupal is much more robust, more adaptable to real enterprise applications, more secure, and has a more involved community.
Which reminds me - I'm going to my first Drupal Con June 2-6 in Austin! Shameless plug: my employer Bright Plaza, Inc. is going public at the conference with its Drupal module for Picture Passwords for the Web! We are going to have a cool special offer for websites that install the module and sign up.
I think some of them are serving millions, some 10s of millions per day. I'm not sure if you can count Facebook, since they are running their own engine, but I believe the 'pages' still look like PHP. Whitehouse.gov, data.gov are both Drupal. So are all of the Ivy League schools, soon if not already. Of course, Whitehouse.gov has more than 80 people working on their website but that's not all coding. I would think most of that is content development and other stuff.