It means a bunch of people with no power get to "elect" people with power and then submit to their orders.
Sweden = socialism + democracy is no different than the US = capitalism (actually STATE capitalism) + democracy. Except that Sweden is too weak to attack the rest of the world in the name of "democracy".
There aren't two people on this board who know what freedom is. And I'm the one. The rest of you are punks who just BOHICA whenever someone tells you to and then spend the rest of your post justifying it to yourself.
"By that strand of logic, democracy is mob rule (see France, c. 1790), anarchism is ideal communism (see current countryside Argentinian industry), and Catholicism is a form of execution (Spain, 1481)"
By George, I think's he got it...
Except that there are two forms of anarchism: the left form is "ideal communism", the right is "ideal free market".
And Transhumanism trumps it all by eliminating economics amd politics as issues.
The cyberpunks had it right on. We're right on track for street gangs loaded with automatic weapons, corrupt cops loaded with automatic weapons, politicians run by corporations (when haven't they been, actually?) and the only way to survive is be an expert with both a computer and automatic weapons.
The only difference is it doesn't look like the Japanese will be the ones running things here. Now it looks like it will be the Chinese and the Israelies.
I can't wait. My kind of world. No more bullshit. Anarchy in action.
"can you afford to devote x months, y developers, and z dollars to developing software which could be purchased for much, much less"
Can you afford to spend that much, much less and get software that DOES much, much less than you need?
That's what we're talking about here.
And the issue is NOT "developing in house" vrs. "buying"? That went out in the 1980's.
It's "can you hire someone to build SOMETHING THAT ACTUALLY WORKS" vrs. "buying something that DOESN'T"?
I recently read an article that surveyed a number of large corporations, and in fact (in-house) developed stuff is BACK ON THE RISE for EXACTLY those reasons - the stuff they buy doesn't work and it doesn't reflect their way of doing business or their need to be able to change their way of doing business quickly enough.
While in-house projects presumably still have more failures than successes, the issue is no longer so clear cut as "build vrs buy".
I read about a ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLAR FIASCO with Siebel.
The idiot company hired Siebel, the cost overruns ran a $10 million deal (IIRC) to $100 million, and then the project stalled because NO MONEY WAS BUDGETED FOR TRAINING!
When I read this, I concluded a few things:
1) If Siebel is this incompetent, I can put them out of business. (OTOH, who is the more incompetent? The company who sells a $10 million contract - and makes $10 million? Or the company who sells a $10 million contract - and makes $100 million? Interesting question, no?)
2) Who could be stupid enough to budget $10 million, run it up to $100 million - and not allow any budget for training?
3) If this company hired me for, oh, say, $10 million, I'll solve ALL THEIR IT PROBLEMS! No problem!
"That's what contract negotiations - and ultimately lawyers - are for."
It's calling "screwing the customer after they've committed to your product".
City College of San Francisco is replacing their Integrated Library System with another vendor's. They explicitly wrote into the contract that the new system had to be able to access the SCT Banner college MIS system. This is not a huge technical problem, but software companies don't like having to modify their product.
The vendor proceeded to send them trainers and the like preparatory to migrating to the new system while doing nothing about the interoperability.
Now the vendor says "it wasn't in the contract" to be interoperable - now that the library is within a couple months of their previous vendor's license being up.
I could replace their ILS in 6-12 months with an OSS version for less than one-quarter of the price they paid for this screwing. And then I'd make a bundle customizing, training users on, and installing it for every other college library in the country.
But the college will probably knuckle under to this reaming. Primarily because the college has already knuckled under to SCT who charges them $150K a year for "support", but who have to pay a consultantcy ANOTHER $195K a year for ACTUAL support. This consultantcy also gets to recommend themselves for re-contracting every year. Nice racket.
This is how the software industry works.
And according to the article referenced by the headline article, corporate management is getting tired of it.
Definitely - not having to declare a variable and thus causing a mispelled one to be treated as valid is a problem.
SQR has the same problem, which has bitten me more than once. And it's REALLY hard to visually detect, although you can usually use your editor's search function - if it doesn't find the variable where you expect it to be, you know there's a problem.
The Registration Center at CCSF sent out emails about completed registration to everybody in the campus GroupWise address book last week. Fortunately Groupwise lets you delete emails from other people's mailboxes that you have sent.
I've told them to stop using GroupWise to send out emails, and use the freakin' email list manager they have on the server! That's what list managers are FOR!
I thought Wells Fargo needed that, too, until they informed me I could use any login name I want (which, however, is NOT tested for strength apparently). Check whatever account maintenance screen they give you, maybe you can give yourself a strong login name.
Well, sometimes you DON'T get what you pay for. An IT administrator with no clue can be devastating to an organization regardless of what he's paid.
Case in point: City College bought the SCT Banner MIS system for over a million clams, along with $150K or so a year for "support".
Then, to get REAL support, they hire a consultantcy called SIG, and pay THEM $115K/year - just a couple weeks ago raised by another $85K to $195K just to "finish the conversion to Banner 6".
As I've said before, if the College spent that money on re-engineering an OSS/inhouse version, they would save themselves a million bucks over five years after deployment. (Not to mention license fees for Oracle, HP/UX, etc., ad infinitum.)
Of course, morons on/. have claimed that isn't feasible for a variety of lame reasons.
The point is, colleges are willing to PISS incredible amounts of money away for bogus reasons, then nickel and dime their staff for everything else.
City College spend an ungodly amount of money - MILLIONS - on refurbishing the windows in Science Hall, for Christ's sakes! (And the windows all looked perfectly damn good to me - I suppose the justification was to reduce energy bills or something. Nobody's noticed any difference in the classrooms I've sat in this last semester.)
Now they want to spend a couple hundred thousand on workflow software - with a ton of mature OSS workflow products available.
Meanwhile, the head of the Registration Center can't hire a 20-hour-a-week clerk to help out. And I can't get hired there because my boss says HIS boss says there's "no money" - but he also tells me the college can contract with me for any amount of money!
It's organizational politics and incompetent management at the base of it.
Yes, that WAS true eight years ago. Today City College uses a Student ID number - the SSN has been removed from the Student Schedule/Bill if I remember correctly (I had to rewrite it for the barcode project, but I think it was removed before that.)
They still need to only ask for the SSN during application and issue the Student ID IMMEDIATELY upon completion of the Web application. The problem is the Banner system uses a batch job to stage the Web applications, then move them into Banner later, so the Web application isn't truly interactive with Banner.
A good reason to ditch that incredibly expensive monstrosity that is Banner, in my opinion.
That depends on the password strength, among other things.
The SCT Banner college MIS system, for instance, uses a Student ID and a minimalist six-digit PIN number to control access to the student's account. That PIN number would be trivial to break since most people use 6 of the same number or something like '123456'. If you can get the student id (and some instructors insist on posting it on grade reports tacked to their doors), you've got half the access right there.
If you have a standard system that requires at least eight characters for a password, with a mix of upper case, lower case, numbers, and special characters, that is better.
But then it depends on students keeping their passwords secret successfully - and that is extremely unlikely for any student not in an IT class who has a clue.
As an example, at City College of San Francisco, we issue barcodes on student ID cards which can be used in the college library to check out books and access the library terminals for email and the like. Students "lose" these cards at a phenomenal rate. I say "lose" because most of the time they just forget them at home, then come in to the Registration Center to get a new one - so we had to design the ID application to cancel the old barcode and issue a new one, so that multiple cards with the same barcode could not be used at the library. This is a security issue as well, as students have been known to use the library email access to send threatening emails to instructors - obviously anyone who finds a student's card with a usable barcode could cover his tracks in this regard.
So expecting students to protect their passwords is probably not too realistic.
City College of San Francisco used SSNs up until a couple years ago. They have changed to issuing a Student ID. SSN is still usable, particularly before the student is assigned a Student ID in the application process - something I think is ridiculous. The student should be given a Student ID as soon as he applies over the Web so he NEVER has to enter his SSN subsequent to his application.
We have begun issuing student ID cards with barcodes which are compatible with the college library barcode systems, but a full student ID with picture (and smart chips and RFID and the like) is still too expensive even for the largest community college district in the country.
Well, if they can't read the box when it says "Windows" and they can't read the screen at home where it says "Linux", then they're just as likely to buy an X-Box game or a Nintendo game and be unable to install it as well.
Which means your point is stupid.
If your point was that Linux doesn't have a ton of great games, which is basically true (and irrelevant to a lot of people over the age of 18), then say so.
The US government today requested that Al Qaeda use the same identification chips in their identity documents as has been proposed for US documents.
Osama bin Laden has not yet responded affirmatively to the request. but promised to look into the matter at his next meeting with senior Al Qaeda leaders.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your jobs?
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
My, that was SO funny. Wait while I pick myself up off the floor after ROTFLMAO...
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you upset?
If it's being done by HP in
We're safe! The only way we could be safer is if it was being done by Microsoft in
"so please talk about them there and leave the articles clean."
Are you new here? That goes against the community behavior. "Off-topic" is ALWAYS ON-TOPIC here!
Your sentence structure is wrong, too. You put "badly spelled" before "insightful" but "asenine" before "correctly spelled".
That's just warped, man.
Democracy has NOTHING to do with freedom.
It means a bunch of people with no power get to "elect" people with power and then submit to their orders.
Sweden = socialism + democracy is no different than the US = capitalism (actually STATE capitalism) + democracy. Except that Sweden is too weak to attack the rest of the world in the name of "democracy".
There aren't two people on this board who know what freedom is. And I'm the one. The rest of you are punks who just BOHICA whenever someone tells you to and then spend the rest of your post justifying it to yourself.
Small l libertarianism is freedom everywhere.
Big-L Libertarianism is SOME freedom everywhere.
As Bob Black once said, "Libertarians are just Republicans who smoke dope." Look at Dana Rohrabacher as an example.
"By that strand of logic, democracy is mob rule (see France, c. 1790), anarchism is ideal communism (see current countryside Argentinian industry), and Catholicism is a form of execution (Spain, 1481)"
By George, I think's he got it...
Except that there are two forms of anarchism: the left form is "ideal communism", the right is "ideal free market".
And Transhumanism trumps it all by eliminating economics amd politics as issues.
Yup.
The cyberpunks had it right on. We're right on track for street gangs loaded with automatic weapons, corrupt cops loaded with automatic weapons, politicians run by corporations (when haven't they been, actually?) and the only way to survive is be an expert with both a computer and automatic weapons.
The only difference is it doesn't look like the Japanese will be the ones running things here. Now it looks like it will be the Chinese and the Israelies.
I can't wait. My kind of world. No more bullshit. Anarchy in action.
"can you afford to devote x months, y developers, and z dollars to developing software which could be purchased for much, much less"
Can you afford to spend that much, much less and get software that DOES much, much less than you need?
That's what we're talking about here.
And the issue is NOT "developing in house" vrs. "buying"? That went out in the 1980's.
It's "can you hire someone to build SOMETHING THAT ACTUALLY WORKS" vrs. "buying something that DOESN'T"?
I recently read an article that surveyed a number of large corporations, and in fact (in-house) developed stuff is BACK ON THE RISE for EXACTLY those reasons - the stuff they buy doesn't work and it doesn't reflect their way of doing business or their need to be able to change their way of doing business quickly enough.
While in-house projects presumably still have more failures than successes, the issue is no longer so clear cut as "build vrs buy".
A million dollar fiasco with Siebel?
Is that all?
I read about a ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLAR FIASCO with Siebel.
The idiot company hired Siebel, the cost overruns ran a $10 million deal (IIRC) to $100 million, and then the project stalled because NO MONEY WAS BUDGETED FOR TRAINING!
When I read this, I concluded a few things:
1) If Siebel is this incompetent, I can put them out of business. (OTOH, who is the more incompetent? The company who sells a $10 million contract - and makes $10 million? Or the company who sells a $10 million contract - and makes $100 million? Interesting question, no?)
2) Who could be stupid enough to budget $10 million, run it up to $100 million - and not allow any budget for training?
3) If this company hired me for, oh, say, $10 million, I'll solve ALL THEIR IT PROBLEMS! No problem!
The point of the article is that OSS alternatives like SugarCRM now exist and are likely to erode the non-OSS sales eventually.
It didn't say "right now."
Wonderful article!
And utterly true!
I'm sending it to the head librarian at City College of San Francisco who has just been screwed over by a vendor.
Oh, here we go...
Another guy who thinks a corporate manager is "God" whose decisions should never be questioned.
Bend over, I'm sure there are some people here in San Francisco who'd like to ream your butt, too.
You wouldn't be a vendor, would you? Thought so.
"That's what contract negotiations - and ultimately lawyers - are for."
It's calling "screwing the customer after they've committed to your product".
City College of San Francisco is replacing their Integrated Library System with another vendor's. They explicitly wrote into the contract that the new system had to be able to access the SCT Banner college MIS system. This is not a huge technical problem, but software companies don't like having to modify their product.
The vendor proceeded to send them trainers and the like preparatory to migrating to the new system while doing nothing about the interoperability.
Now the vendor says "it wasn't in the contract" to be interoperable - now that the library is within a couple months of their previous vendor's license being up.
I could replace their ILS in 6-12 months with an OSS version for less than one-quarter of the price they paid for this screwing. And then I'd make a bundle customizing, training users on, and installing it for every other college library in the country.
But the college will probably knuckle under to this reaming. Primarily because the college has already knuckled under to SCT who charges them $150K a year for "support", but who have to pay a consultantcy ANOTHER $195K a year for ACTUAL support. This consultantcy also gets to recommend themselves for re-contracting every year. Nice racket.
This is how the software industry works.
And according to the article referenced by the headline article, corporate management is getting tired of it.
Definitely - not having to declare a variable and thus causing a mispelled one to be treated as valid is a problem.
SQR has the same problem, which has bitten me more than once. And it's REALLY hard to visually detect, although you can usually use your editor's search function - if it doesn't find the variable where you expect it to be, you know there's a problem.
Email errors do happen, you're right.
The Registration Center at CCSF sent out emails about completed registration to everybody in the campus GroupWise address book last week. Fortunately Groupwise lets you delete emails from other people's mailboxes that you have sent.
I've told them to stop using GroupWise to send out emails, and use the freakin' email list manager they have on the server! That's what list managers are FOR!
Check your bank on that login ID.
I thought Wells Fargo needed that, too, until they informed me I could use any login name I want (which, however, is NOT tested for strength apparently). Check whatever account maintenance screen they give you, maybe you can give yourself a strong login name.
Well, sometimes you DON'T get what you pay for. An IT administrator with no clue can be devastating to an organization regardless of what he's paid.
Case in point: City College bought the SCT Banner MIS system for over a million clams, along with $150K or so a year for "support".
Then, to get REAL support, they hire a consultantcy called SIG, and pay THEM $115K/year - just a couple weeks ago raised by another $85K to $195K just to "finish the conversion to Banner 6".
As I've said before, if the College spent that money on re-engineering an OSS/inhouse version, they would save themselves a million bucks over five years after deployment. (Not to mention license fees for Oracle, HP/UX, etc., ad infinitum.)
Of course, morons on
The point is, colleges are willing to PISS incredible amounts of money away for bogus reasons, then nickel and dime their staff for everything else.
City College spend an ungodly amount of money - MILLIONS - on refurbishing the windows in Science Hall, for Christ's sakes! (And the windows all looked perfectly damn good to me - I suppose the justification was to reduce energy bills or something. Nobody's noticed any difference in the classrooms I've sat in this last semester.)
Now they want to spend a couple hundred thousand on workflow software - with a ton of mature OSS workflow products available.
Meanwhile, the head of the Registration Center can't hire a 20-hour-a-week clerk to help out. And I can't get hired there because my boss says HIS boss says there's "no money" - but he also tells me the college can contract with me for any amount of money!
It's organizational politics and incompetent management at the base of it.
Yes, that WAS true eight years ago. Today City College uses a Student ID number - the SSN has been removed from the Student Schedule/Bill if I remember correctly (I had to rewrite it for the barcode project, but I think it was removed before that.)
They still need to only ask for the SSN during application and issue the Student ID IMMEDIATELY upon completion of the Web application. The problem is the Banner system uses a batch job to stage the Web applications, then move them into Banner later, so the Web application isn't truly interactive with Banner.
A good reason to ditch that incredibly expensive monstrosity that is Banner, in my opinion.
That depends on the password strength, among other things.
The SCT Banner college MIS system, for instance, uses a Student ID and a minimalist six-digit PIN number to control access to the student's account. That PIN number would be trivial to break since most people use 6 of the same number or something like '123456'. If you can get the student id (and some instructors insist on posting it on grade reports tacked to their doors), you've got half the access right there.
If you have a standard system that requires at least eight characters for a password, with a mix of upper case, lower case, numbers, and special characters, that is better.
But then it depends on students keeping their passwords secret successfully - and that is extremely unlikely for any student not in an IT class who has a clue.
As an example, at City College of San Francisco, we issue barcodes on student ID cards which can be used in the college library to check out books and access the library terminals for email and the like. Students "lose" these cards at a phenomenal rate. I say "lose" because most of the time they just forget them at home, then come in to the Registration Center to get a new one - so we had to design the ID application to cancel the old barcode and issue a new one, so that multiple cards with the same barcode could not be used at the library. This is a security issue as well, as students have been known to use the library email access to send threatening emails to instructors - obviously anyone who finds a student's card with a usable barcode could cover his tracks in this regard.
So expecting students to protect their passwords is probably not too realistic.
City College of San Francisco used SSNs up until a couple years ago. They have changed to issuing a Student ID. SSN is still usable, particularly before the student is assigned a Student ID in the application process - something I think is ridiculous. The student should be given a Student ID as soon as he applies over the Web so he NEVER has to enter his SSN subsequent to his application.
We have begun issuing student ID cards with barcodes which are compatible with the college library barcode systems, but a full student ID with picture (and smart chips and RFID and the like) is still too expensive even for the largest community college district in the country.
Well, if they can't read the box when it says "Windows" and they can't read the screen at home where it says "Linux", then they're just as likely to buy an X-Box game or a Nintendo game and be unable to install it as well.
Which means your point is stupid.
If your point was that Linux doesn't have a ton of great games, which is basically true (and irrelevant to a lot of people over the age of 18), then say so.
IE is so OVER it isn't funny.
They could put Andrea Corr as the skin and I couldn't care less.
The US government today requested that Al Qaeda use the same identification chips in their identity documents as has been proposed for US documents.
Osama bin Laden has not yet responded affirmatively to the request. but promised to look into the matter at his next meeting with senior Al Qaeda leaders.
My, that was SO funny. Wait while I pick myself up off the floor after ROTFLMAO...
(yawn)
True! And thank you! I was just warning you