There is no way to distinguish the candidates by quality.
I and other programmer applicants where I work were and are given specs for an interactive program to write and two hours to write it as part of the interview. You would be surprised how much that distinguishes candidates by quality.
When you make a pair of statements like that, you're really saying "We've just taken on more technical risk that we understand".
Which is what he was saying, and he was put on administrative leave for saying it. Which is another way of saying they're going to fire him as soon as they're sure he's not protected by a whistleblower protection law.
At 25 you hardly have any background at all, especially in managing a large scale project such as this!
He was in Training, not even in IT. And for one of their facilities at that. Yet for a 25 year old, he made more sense than anything else said by the company.
I mean, healthcare information doesn't have to be ready and available, like, every minute, does it?
The incidents cited were for several hours, during the day, during which time people didn't have the information to take care of patients, including people sitting in waiting rooms, people callling to make appointments, get prescriptions, etc. Not to mention patients in hospitals.
Technically speaking, how would connecting from 'inside' be any different that outside. it's just packets being moved around.
None, which is the whole point. The implication was that internal users wouldn't be served by Citrix virtual Windows servers, but would run Windows apps directly, while remote users are the only ones getting the Windows screens rendered and transmitted to them instead of needing to be set up like internal users.
On the other hand, reason given for doing this was security, as in people not having access to Windows programs running on their PC.
I recall someone telling me about MUMPS. You ran it off 5 ¼ floppies and accessed the data through direct access to a b-tree.
I've read there is a new Windows version of it. Also I saw there was an open source MUMPS project. The VA's very successful software is in MUMPS, I understand.
What if anything is Citrix designed for but for large scale remote access.
It is the largest scale use of Citrix to date, and they're still trying to finish rolling it out. Citrix says the architecture wasn't set up right for it. If I was the largest installation of Citrix, I think I would listen to them. Perhaps some difficult tradeoffs that keep KP from doing so. Apparently cost isn't one of them.
Thr article quoted Deal as saying it was for security, which is arguably in the realm of deployment, but security was the reason given for using Citrix for both internal and remote access.
Basicly, this entire story you are quoting is bogus.
I don't know what he quoted, I glanced at some mention of it and didn't see oil pipeline and moved on. I read in an historical account recently that the CIA slipped some bad code in a microcontroller design that they were on to Russia stealing through corporate espionage.
The story is that the controllers were used by the Russians for their Siberian oil pipeline and the defective code caused a huge explosion, damaging the pipeline. This was cited as a success in psychological warfare by the CIA in making the Russians distrust what they were stealing.:)
I don't know. Comes from the Reagan era, and knowledgeable insiders are just recently mentioning it. Probably the CIA believed it anyway.
Assuming that the government could create all of those positions, what do all of those people do when the job is done?
The same thing companies do. There is always more software needed, the larger the enterprise, the more needed. That's why companies have software developers like me.
(since career government IT people and the managers that budget and run their projects are essentially unfireable).
But again, you missed his point. These failures are outsourced, not done by unfireable government employees. The corporate successes are done by the corporation who, sure, often bring in lots of contracting help, but it's done by the corporation, not outsourced.
Success requires inhouse people committed for the long term.
IT disasters (and we are talking very large sums of money) will be one of the two sad legacies of this government. Hard to say whether it's down to outright corruption, or down to an amazing level of gullibility when tempted with promises of 'miraculous' technological solutions.
You are speaking of the British government, but it applies just as well to the US government for the last several years. It actually applies to the same large IT consulting companies for both, using the same technology, creating the same failures. I have rarely read of any successful large scale government software system since the era of the web page.
If anything, this is an argument for bringing these projects in-house (a true government project). There is no way it can be said that outsourcing saves money and they couldn't afford to do this in-house - $24 billion buys you a lot of good staff.
Am I the only person who is bored of hearing people whine about the failures of government when it was actually private companies that destroyed the project? We're told by much of the press that governments are wasteful but when a trillion dollars is lost in the dot-com bubble of the private sector, this demonstrates the efficiency of free markets...
No, you're not the only one. I've been posting the same thing, but you said it better.
Hence my citation of UPS (www.ups.com). They DO have millions of customers and hundreds of integration schemes, and it has to work, around the clock.
And thus our many large failed government software systems should be using the technology of successful corporations like UPS, FedEx, Wal-Mart, etc., should they not?
But are they? Do we taxpayers think giant software consulting firms are going to do anything but bleeding edge failures? We taxpayers should know what the cost of that failure is, anyway.
One side effect of a free market is that things get cheaper.
That assumes competition. A market can allegedly be "free" (even free to funnel lots of money to legislators who protect them, otherwise known as protection money, or more politely, large political contributions), but also free of competition.
Here was a crappy, failing hospital system run by the US government that has completely transformed itself in the last couple of years.
The VA successes, especially its very successful software and its pharmaceutical purchasing negotiations, was done long before the last couple of years, or even the last six years. From what I've read, they've fallen apart in the last couple of years in their failures to provide medical service to veterans, undoubtedly overwhelmed by Iraq and not provided anywhere close to what they needed by Republicans.
Well, I recall the FBI's Virtual Case File [wikipedia.org] system that took 2-3 years to develop and costed $170 million to produce [cnn.com] an absolute failure. In the end, they found a "suitable commercial replacement." Probably at a fraction of the price.
The intent is good, but I can't let the impression that a replacement was found for the FBI case system failure fly unanswered. The failure is massive and ongoing, and the details need to be understood by a techically astute group like slashdot. My data comes from the press, mostly technical press and Washington Post.
First, the failure extends from 1999 to 2005, until the plug was pulled for work under the first vendor. That's 6 years, not 2-3. And the failure continues under a new name and vendors. Just last month government auditors warned new system development is still undergoing the same problems.
And while the FBI claims it blew $170 million on this so far, they actually spent over a half billion dollars on it. They are only claiming a loss of $170 million of software, and writing off even less, $104 million. The software was an Oracle based J2EE system they had to trash as unusable.
Their fix is another $425 million replacement design. And that's using "commercially available" technology! (Think a proprietary J2EE, probably Websphere.) If a usable case system is developed in the scheduled next four years, that will be over a billion dollars to replace a 3270 green screen mainframe system they're still using because it works, and none of this crap being developed for the last seven years does.
You can blame it on the federal government, but it's the technology and IT consultants developing it that are failures. If it were wrong, it would at least do something wrong. Wrong, but something.
Instead, it is called "unusable". That means web pages that hang. SQL with results that never return. It does nothing.
Something that is wrong could be blamed on government specs. Something that is nothing is dot com era IT futilty. A billion dollars worth of it.
The real question is: why would Sun not clarify this?
Because they haven't done anything yet to clarify, have they?
In regards to the many points you and others make concerning your take on GPL and its effect on proprietary programs written in GPL'd Java, I am struck by the constant reference to "linking". The distinctions made are eye glazing, but reading this thread I saw no similar references to calling GPL'd programs or API's of GPL'd OS'es, just the linking of Java libraries done when the proprietary program executes.
I think any distinction made in "linking" to GPL'd Java class libraries versus calling a GPL'd program or OS API is so fine of a distinction as to be in the realm of anal. I would view the Java environment as an API, no different than making Linux API calls or executing GNU utilities.
One may have a compiled code viewpoint of it that argues internal calls versus external calls based on process memory space and whatnot, but I think the functional difference is using the Java class libraries as API's versus cheating on the GPL license to include GPL'd code in a proprietary executable without redistributing the GPL source code, and one's allegedly now contaminated proprietary source code along with it.
It makes no sense when the GPL'd Java environment is being used by a proprietary program. One is not using anything hidden and not redistributed. It's already distributed, with the Java environment.
Of course modifying the Java environment would require distributing the source code changes with it, which is the whole point.
From an outsider's perspective, I reject the Java library "linking" contamination reasoning as superficial, substantially well made as it is.
Instead, he chose to perjure himself rather than even admit the truth, much less apologize.
I posted this a moment ago, but he did not perjure hinself. A blow job is not sexual relations, and he answered no when asked if he had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. That constitutes the "perjure himself" that has such offended you.
President Hillary Clinton and Vice President John Kerry
No way Kerry will be her VP. I don't think it will be any of the past presidential candidates, certainly I think Obama could end up there, but my guess would be a distinguished conservative Democrat such as Sam Nunn, possibly a distinguished Republican such as Colin Powell.
President Hillary Clinton and Vice President John Kerry
No way Kerry will be her VP. I don't think it will be any of the past presidential candidates, certainly I think Obama could end up there, but my guess would be a distinquished conservative Democrat such as Sam Nunn, possibly a distinquished Republican such as Colin Powell.
A lying President is a lying President. How do you know Clinton was honest about anything else now?
Anything anyone says, including yourself, requires corroborating information to be believed. No one believed Clinton's denials of an affair at the time, it just wasn't anyone's business. And no, he did not lie under oath. A blow job is not sexual relations.
The Soviet KGB. They have nothing on the Bush neocon dictatorship, "Homeland Security" and all, at least what the neocons do in secret, the way the Soviets did it.
I am hoping this never gets passed, given our current court system I am not sure they would strike it down for the unconstitutional piece of garbage it is.
From what I'm reading here, this appears to be a Department of Homeland Security (who decided to use this Communist style expression?) regulation that will go into effect in a couple of months in 2007, not a law to be voted upon. Although if it were, the Republican rubber stampers would have rubber stamped it anyway.
If the House and Senate have a Democratic majority determined by voters on Tuesday, this type of stealth dictatorship will come to an end. It will at least be aired and discussed by representatives of the people, and stealth dictatorship will not survive the light of day.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no way to distinguish the candidates by quality.
I and other programmer applicants where I work were and are given specs for an interactive program to write and two hours to write it as part of the interview. You would be surprised how much that distinguishes candidates by quality.
rd
When you make a pair of statements like that, you're really saying "We've just taken on more technical risk that we understand".
Which is what he was saying, and he was put on administrative leave for saying it. Which is another way of saying they're going to fire him as soon as they're sure he's not protected by a whistleblower protection law.
rd
At 25 you hardly have any background at all, especially in managing a large scale project such as this!
He was in Training, not even in IT. And for one of their facilities at that. Yet for a 25 year old, he made more sense than anything else said by the company.
rd
I mean, healthcare information doesn't have to be ready and available, like, every minute, does it?
The incidents cited were for several hours, during the day, during which time people didn't have the information to take care of patients, including people sitting in waiting rooms, people callling to make appointments, get prescriptions, etc. Not to mention patients in hospitals.
rd
Technically speaking, how would connecting from 'inside' be any different that outside. it's just packets being moved around.
None, which is the whole point. The implication was that internal users wouldn't be served by Citrix virtual Windows servers, but would run Windows apps directly, while remote users are the only ones getting the Windows screens rendered and transmitted to them instead of needing to be set up like internal users.
On the other hand, reason given for doing this was security, as in people not having access to Windows programs running on their PC.
I recall someone telling me about MUMPS. You ran it off 5 ¼ floppies and accessed the data through direct access to a b-tree.
I've read there is a new Windows version of it. Also I saw there was an open source MUMPS project. The VA's very successful software is in MUMPS, I understand.
What if anything is Citrix designed for but for large scale remote access.
It is the largest scale use of Citrix to date, and they're still trying to finish rolling it out. Citrix says the architecture wasn't set up right for it. If I was the largest installation of Citrix, I think I would listen to them. Perhaps some difficult tradeoffs that keep KP from doing so. Apparently cost isn't one of them.
rd
There are at least two of reasons.
Thr article quoted Deal as saying it was for security, which is arguably in the realm of deployment, but security was the reason given for using Citrix for both internal and remote access.
rd
Basicly, this entire story you are quoting is bogus.
:)
I don't know what he quoted, I glanced at some mention of it and didn't see oil pipeline and moved on. I read in an historical account recently that the CIA slipped some bad code in a microcontroller design that they were on to Russia stealing through corporate espionage.
The story is that the controllers were used by the Russians for their Siberian oil pipeline and the defective code caused a huge explosion, damaging the pipeline. This was cited as a success in psychological warfare by the CIA in making the Russians distrust what they were stealing.
I don't know. Comes from the Reagan era, and knowledgeable insiders are just recently mentioning it. Probably the CIA believed it anyway.
rd
Assuming that the government could create all of those positions, what do all of those people do when the job is done?
The same thing companies do. There is always more software needed, the larger the enterprise, the more needed. That's why companies have software developers like me.
rd
(since career government IT people and the managers that budget and run their projects are essentially unfireable).
But again, you missed his point. These failures are outsourced, not done by unfireable government employees. The corporate successes are done by the corporation who, sure, often bring in lots of contracting help, but it's done by the corporation, not outsourced.
Success requires inhouse people committed for the long term.
rd
IT disasters (and we are talking very large sums of money) will be one of the two sad legacies of this government. Hard to say whether it's down to outright corruption, or down to an amazing level of gullibility when tempted with promises of 'miraculous' technological solutions.
You are speaking of the British government, but it applies just as well to the US government for the last several years. It actually applies to the same large IT consulting companies for both, using the same technology, creating the same failures. I have rarely read of any successful large scale government software system since the era of the web page.
rd
If anything, this is an argument for bringing these projects in-house (a true government project). There is no way it can be said that outsourcing saves money and they couldn't afford to do this in-house - $24 billion buys you a lot of good staff.
Am I the only person who is bored of hearing people whine about the failures of government when it was actually private companies that destroyed the project? We're told by much of the press that governments are wasteful but when a trillion dollars is lost in the dot-com bubble of the private sector, this demonstrates the efficiency of free markets...
No, you're not the only one. I've been posting the same thing, but you said it better.
rd
Hence my citation of UPS (www.ups.com). They DO have millions of customers and hundreds of integration schemes, and it has to work, around the clock.
And thus our many large failed government software systems should be using the technology of successful corporations like UPS, FedEx, Wal-Mart, etc., should they not?
But are they? Do we taxpayers think giant software consulting firms are going to do anything but bleeding edge failures? We taxpayers should know what the cost of that failure is, anyway.
rd
One side effect of a free market is that things get cheaper.
That assumes competition. A market can allegedly be "free" (even free to funnel lots of money to legislators who protect them, otherwise known as protection money, or more politely, large political contributions), but also free of competition.
rd
Here was a crappy, failing hospital system run by the US government that has completely transformed itself in the last couple of years.
The VA successes, especially its very successful software and its pharmaceutical purchasing negotiations, was done long before the last couple of years, or even the last six years. From what I've read, they've fallen apart in the last couple of years in their failures to provide medical service to veterans, undoubtedly overwhelmed by Iraq and not provided anywhere close to what they needed by Republicans.
rd
Well, I recall the FBI's Virtual Case File [wikipedia.org] system that took 2-3 years to develop and costed $170 million to produce [cnn.com] an absolute failure. In the end, they found a "suitable commercial replacement." Probably at a fraction of the price.
The intent is good, but I can't let the impression that a replacement was found for the FBI case system failure fly unanswered. The failure is massive and ongoing, and the details need to be understood by a techically astute group like slashdot. My data comes from the press, mostly technical press and Washington Post.
First, the failure extends from 1999 to 2005, until the plug was pulled for work under the first vendor. That's 6 years, not 2-3. And the failure continues under a new name and vendors. Just last month government auditors warned new system development is still undergoing the same problems.
And while the FBI claims it blew $170 million on this so far, they actually spent over a half billion dollars on it. They are only claiming a loss of $170 million of software, and writing off even less, $104 million. The software was an Oracle based J2EE system they had to trash as unusable.
Their fix is another $425 million replacement design. And that's using "commercially available" technology! (Think a proprietary J2EE, probably Websphere.) If a usable case system is developed in the scheduled next four years, that will be over a billion dollars to replace a 3270 green screen mainframe system they're still using because it works, and none of this crap being developed for the last seven years does.
You can blame it on the federal government, but it's the technology and IT consultants developing it that are failures. If it were wrong, it would at least do something wrong. Wrong, but something.
Instead, it is called "unusable". That means web pages that hang. SQL with results that never return. It does nothing.
Something that is wrong could be blamed on government specs. Something that is nothing is dot com era IT futilty. A billion dollars worth of it.
rd
That's what's behind the linking exception.
:)
Thanks for that explanation. Finally, something that makes sense.
rd
The real question is: why would Sun not clarify this?
Because they haven't done anything yet to clarify, have they?
In regards to the many points you and others make concerning your take on GPL and its effect on proprietary programs written in GPL'd Java, I am struck by the constant reference to "linking". The distinctions made are eye glazing, but reading this thread I saw no similar references to calling GPL'd programs or API's of GPL'd OS'es, just the linking of Java libraries done when the proprietary program executes.
I think any distinction made in "linking" to GPL'd Java class libraries versus calling a GPL'd program or OS API is so fine of a distinction as to be in the realm of anal. I would view the Java environment as an API, no different than making Linux API calls or executing GNU utilities.
One may have a compiled code viewpoint of it that argues internal calls versus external calls based on process memory space and whatnot, but I think the functional difference is using the Java class libraries as API's versus cheating on the GPL license to include GPL'd code in a proprietary executable without redistributing the GPL source code, and one's allegedly now contaminated proprietary source code along with it.
It makes no sense when the GPL'd Java environment is being used by a proprietary program. One is not using anything hidden and not redistributed. It's already distributed, with the Java environment.
Of course modifying the Java environment would require distributing the source code changes with it, which is the whole point.
From an outsider's perspective, I reject the Java library "linking" contamination reasoning as superficial, substantially well made as it is.
rd
Wasn't there a discussion about a draft to military service not too long ago?
As if ordering the National Guard into active service and stop lossing anyone from leaving Iraq, much less the service, isn't a draft?
rd
Instead, he chose to perjure himself rather than even admit the truth, much less apologize.
I posted this a moment ago, but he did not perjure hinself. A blow job is not sexual relations, and he answered no when asked if he had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. That constitutes the "perjure himself" that has such offended you.
rd
President Hillary Clinton and Vice President John Kerry
No way Kerry will be her VP. I don't think it will be any of the past presidential candidates, certainly I think Obama could end up there, but my guess would be a distinguished conservative Democrat such as Sam Nunn, possibly a distinguished Republican such as Colin Powell.
rd
President Hillary Clinton and Vice President John Kerry
No way Kerry will be her VP. I don't think it will be any of the past presidential candidates, certainly I think Obama could end up there, but my guess would be a distinquished conservative Democrat such as Sam Nunn, possibly a distinquished Republican such as Colin Powell.
rd
A lying President is a lying President. How do you know Clinton was honest about anything else now?
Anything anyone says, including yourself, requires corroborating information to be believed. No one believed Clinton's denials of an affair at the time, it just wasn't anyone's business. And no, he did not lie under oath. A blow job is not sexual relations.
rd
The Soviet KGB?
The Soviet KGB. They have nothing on the Bush neocon dictatorship, "Homeland Security" and all, at least what the neocons do in secret, the way the Soviets did it.
rd
I am hoping this never gets passed, given our current court system I am not sure they would strike it down for the unconstitutional piece of garbage it is.
From what I'm reading here, this appears to be a Department of Homeland Security (who decided to use this Communist style expression?) regulation that will go into effect in a couple of months in 2007, not a law to be voted upon. Although if it were, the Republican rubber stampers would have rubber stamped it anyway.
If the House and Senate have a Democratic majority determined by voters on Tuesday, this type of stealth dictatorship will come to an end. It will at least be aired and discussed by representatives of the people, and stealth dictatorship will not survive the light of day.
rd
They said superstar programmer, not superstar.
I just saw their comment that they didn't even say superstar in the ad. Holy cow. Half the posts were oriented around using that term.
rd