You can tell this idiot is neither an Iraqi nor has he ever been in Iraq.
EVERY Iraqi I've seen quoted is concerned about being kidnapped or killed - either by trigger-happy US troops or thieves or kidnappers or the insurgents.
Comparing it to some of the tougher areas of some of the US cities is just ridiculous. A white guy could walk through Harlem or East L.A. and be more likely to make it than he would in Sadr City.
Granted, most Iraqis will still treat a Westerner well whereas most ghetto blacks might not - but most ghetto blacks won't shoot you because there ARE cops in this country - that isn't the case in Iraq. If an insurgent spots you, you are in trouble.
Bottom Line: The college ISN'T running day to day providing essential services to students. They're screwing up regularly. Which is why they need 'trendy Linux' - or more precisely, a properly designed and implemented MIS system based on a cheaper OS and hardware - so they can have the budget money to spend on professional assistance when problems do arise.
And in case you aren't aware, the state supported colleges in California are in a budget crisis with a proposed hike in resident tuition from $18/credit hour (which is already over 50% higher than the previous $11/credit hour last year) to $28/credit hour - which is going to cut student attendance and cut revenues and state matching funds.
Your support for incompetent "decision makers" makes me wonder whether you have any decision making authority in your organization. One hopes not.
Yes, this is all good and true - I've seen the same scenarios at Bank of America in my "career" such as it was.
The problem remains that every day I see some new nonsense in Banner and my boss, who used to be the ITS Applications Manager, tells me the contractors the college hires are the ones who do this stuff.
He also tells me he tried to re-invent the system back when they switched from the one he mostly wrote to Banner and was unable to do so. However, he has not given me a list of reasons why he failed - although I suspect I know.
As for the COBOL programs, I know source isn't available for many of them, but I did convert one that was apparently written for the college by a contractor into SQR in order to put barcodes on the student ID cards - something COBOL was not up to doing without a lot of effort, laser printer font cartridges, and the like. I haven't used COBOL in twenty years and this contractor was not a terribly good programmer, so it took a while to convert it, but the new program is in production now and only one or two very minor bugs have surfaced.
I wasn't suggesting I'd do it in Perl (I'm not that experienced in Perl anyway), although I suspect it could be done. As for batch programs, that might depend on how our CC uses the system.
Which is the point: our CC doesn't use a significant part of Banner because it was designed for larger universities. Which means stuff falls through the cracks like those 400,000 records sitting unused in a table.
As for Federal compliance requirements, that's a basic problem with closed-source programs that only a handful of people know how to modify - you either pay a fortune for contractors like City College does or you go to the vendor who may not be able to provide the necessary update in time - especially after management wastes months arguing over the issue and the budget for the work.
I never said I'd do it in a week - I said it could take years since the college isn't going anywhere and could take the time to correctly design a usable system and migrate to it in a proper phased manner.
As far as using unproven technology they've never heard of - that was my point - they're ignorant of the available technology that could save the college thousands or scores of thousands of dollars (probably more) and provide greater functionality to the end users. I fail to see how I'm supposed to respect management "risk decisions" based on ignorance and incompetence.
Yes, you're absolutely correct: the guys in ITS are ignorant of the available technology that could save the college scores of thousands of dollars a year.
As for "accountability" for a third-party package, I can only respond: "BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"
It proves my point - politics and careerism control the decision making, not technology or the needs of the end users.
The 400,000 records were sitting there totally UNUSED by any application. I know where they came from because I studied the Oracle Forms app that created the table in order to convert an app that used a companion table from Pro-COBOL to SQR.
The DBA, on being informed, removed all of them up to last year - since even he couldn't figure out if anything was using them this year, he was afraid to remove this year's records.
Unfortunately in this case I'm not some "smart-ass kid" - I've been in IT for twenty years.
And even a "smart-ass kid" could tell they have major problems with the software they're using.
In-house development has costs and problems, but in this case the college, as I pointed out, isn't going anywhere and can take all the time it needs to safely and correctly migrate to a better, more user-friendly, efficient and controllable in-house alternative to a closed-source application that is indeed critical to their operation.
It's purely and simply a case of NIH - which is the usual human reaction to anyone who suggests they can do better than the incumbents.
And I've yet to find a manager who understands that REWRITING that fucking piece of ancient shit in Perl or something in five days or whatever is better than trying to keep the stupid thing running forever.
Managers are morons. That simple.
At City College of San Francisco, we run SCT Banner as the MIS system. This thing is a piece of crap from the mainframe days reworked to run on Oracle on HP/UX and PCs. The screens are obviously mainframe crap reworked in Oracle Forms (which is also crap) and the database design is brain dead. The program names are coded like SWOSCHB, the letters of which mean something if you can be bothered to try to find it in the documentation (such as it is).
It's a HUGE system - but it was designed for universities, not community colleges, so large sections of it aren't even used and other stuff must be custom built in house to handle the way a community college works. I found 400,000 records dating back to when the college put the system in sitting in a table which is never used and never cleaned out.
I've offered to rebuild the entire goddamn thing using PostgreSQL on Linux on commodity servers in a couple years for $100K, but nobody takes me seriously. Like it matters how long it would take - the college isn't going anywhere.
The problem is never the technical issues of moving from one system to another - it's the politics and idiot managers - always.
Winer offered to host this stuff for free. He OFFERED (and to be fair, actually did it.)
People took him up on it (braindead though that might be since it should have been obvious to him and them it couldn't go on forever.)
Then he shuts it down WITH NO PRIOR NOTICE.
At best, that makes him an asshole (unless it was literally an emergency that prevented him from notifying anyone at all. Was that the case? Doesn't say so.) At worst, it makes him a major asshole.
Now the morons on/. can self-righteously complain that the people pissed off are "just whiners" - which makes the morons on/. "just whiners" by the same logic - they're whining about someone else's perfectly justified behavior.
Bottom line: You get what you pay for (sometimes) - and you never get what you don't pay for (usually).
Which doesn't justify being an asshole - always.
Being right justifies being an asshole - as I demonstrate here.
Except all the reports I've read show UNIX admins administering several times as many machines as your MCSE point-and-click mouse monkey...so your $80 UNIX sysadmin is actually being paid the same as four or five $50K mouse monkeys...
Oh, wait, you can script in Windows? Wonder why nobody does...
I see you ignored my "try reading a newspaper in it" point and went with the red herring of "hurtful". I never said the rain was "hurtful" - walking around in it without protection ain't gonna kill you (unless you easily get pneumonia and that's more a function of temperature than rain).
As for torrents, yeah, it "happens" in Oregon - it's the norm in Florida.
My points stand - yours are the ones that are pointless. You're just insulted because you don't like it when someone points out rural behavior you engage in is considered backwards by other people.
Maybe it is, maybe it ain't - but getting upset about it is. My original post was mostly for humor - you're the one who got bent out of shape about it.
I'm reminded of the line in the movie "Big Trouble In Little China":
Character: A brave man doesn't mind the feel of rain on his face.
Wise Chinese Magician: And a wise man has enough sense to get in out of the rain.
My point was, yes, you can just walk around and forget about it. But doing so without ANY water protection is braindead, regardless of what you're "used to."
Try reading a newspaper in your "torrents".
And you want to see "torrents"? Go to Florida where when it rains, you have to pull over to the side of road while driving because it floods your windshield and overwhelms your wipers.
Oh, wait, I'm attending City College of San Francisco RIGHT NOW!
Mostly to get money to survive.
But I'm not flipping burgers! Instead, I, anarchist that I am, am taking Pell Grants from the suckers paying taxes in this moronic country.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!!!!
Actually, if you think about how many people eat at McDonald's, the idea of giving every one of them a free Knoppix Live CD would probably wipe out Windows in a couple months.
The only thing keeping me ON Windows is the need to tech-support people who are not OFF Windows.
The only thing keeping me OFF Windows is...Windows.
What kind of slow-news-day/. crap is this?
Let me say it again, S-L-O-W-L-Y:
Windows is CRAP. Linux is ALSO CRAP.
BUT
Linux is FREE crap - both in "beer" and "freedom" terms.
What part of FREE don't you Windows trolls get?
Why don't you just come out and say it: "I WORSHIP BILL GATES BECAUSE HE'S RICH AND I'M NOT! AND I'M A SUCKER FOR A RICH ASSHOLE!"
(I personally couldn't care less how much money he has as long as he produces a decent product - which he DOESN'T - I'm not a socialist, I'm a free-market anarchist.)
Suckers.
Mod this troll! Mod this flamebait!
Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
It's Bill Gates and his corporate culture of 24-year-old computer-history illiterates.
I saw a line recently that said, "The only thing of value passing through a politician's mind is a bullet."
Same applies to Bill.
Get rid of Gates and his toadies like Ballmer and Microsoft might use its 56 billion in cash to amount to something.
As it stands, Longhorn is going to be a disaster and Linux is going to destroy Windows within the next ten or fifteen years - even though Linux really only has one major advantage - it's being worked on by people who at least care a little - people with at least some personal motivation - and it's cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
You can tell this idiot is neither an Iraqi nor has he ever been in Iraq.
EVERY Iraqi I've seen quoted is concerned about being kidnapped or killed - either by trigger-happy US troops or thieves or kidnappers or the insurgents.
Comparing it to some of the tougher areas of some of the US cities is just ridiculous. A white guy could walk through Harlem or East L.A. and be more likely to make it than he would in Sadr City.
Granted, most Iraqis will still treat a Westerner well whereas most ghetto blacks might not - but most ghetto blacks won't shoot you because there ARE cops in this country - that isn't the case in Iraq. If an insurgent spots you, you are in trouble.
Bottom Line: The college ISN'T running day to day providing essential services to students. They're screwing up regularly. Which is why they need 'trendy Linux' - or more precisely, a properly designed and implemented MIS system based on a cheaper OS and hardware - so they can have the budget money to spend on professional assistance when problems do arise.
And in case you aren't aware, the state supported colleges in California are in a budget crisis with a proposed hike in resident tuition from $18/credit hour (which is already over 50% higher than the previous $11/credit hour last year) to $28/credit hour - which is going to cut student attendance and cut revenues and state matching funds.
Your support for incompetent "decision makers" makes me wonder whether you have any decision making authority in your organization. One hopes not.
Another /.'er who doesn't get it, and uses his command of useless detail to point that out.
/.'er running his mouth without any knowledge of the actual situation under discussion.
In fact, the system here is so short of disk space that the entire system came down last week for most of a day while they cleaned things out.
As usual, a
Yes, this is all good and true - I've seen the same scenarios at Bank of America in my "career" such as it was.
The problem remains that every day I see some new nonsense in Banner and my boss, who used to be the ITS Applications Manager, tells me the contractors the college hires are the ones who do this stuff.
He also tells me he tried to re-invent the system back when they switched from the one he mostly wrote to Banner and was unable to do so. However, he has not given me a list of reasons why he failed - although I suspect I know.
As for the COBOL programs, I know source isn't available for many of them, but I did convert one that was apparently written for the college by a contractor into SQR in order to put barcodes on the student ID cards - something COBOL was not up to doing without a lot of effort, laser printer font cartridges, and the like. I haven't used COBOL in twenty years and this contractor was not a terribly good programmer, so it took a while to convert it, but the new program is in production now and only one or two very minor bugs have surfaced.
I wasn't suggesting I'd do it in Perl (I'm not that experienced in Perl anyway), although I suspect it could be done. As for batch programs, that might depend on how our CC uses the system.
Which is the point: our CC doesn't use a significant part of Banner because it was designed for larger universities. Which means stuff falls through the cracks like those 400,000 records sitting unused in a table.
As for Federal compliance requirements, that's a basic problem with closed-source programs that only a handful of people know how to modify - you either pay a fortune for contractors like City College does or you go to the vendor who may not be able to provide the necessary update in time - especially after management wastes months arguing over the issue and the budget for the work.
I never said I'd do it in a week - I said it could take years since the college isn't going anywhere and could take the time to correctly design a usable system and migrate to it in a proper phased manner.
As far as using unproven technology they've never heard of - that was my point - they're ignorant of the available technology that could save the college thousands or scores of thousands of dollars (probably more) and provide greater functionality to the end users. I fail to see how I'm supposed to respect management "risk decisions" based on ignorance and incompetence.
Yes, you're absolutely correct: the guys in ITS are ignorant of the available technology that could save the college scores of thousands of dollars a year.
As for "accountability" for a third-party package, I can only respond: "BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"
It proves my point - politics and careerism control the decision making, not technology or the needs of the end users.
Another /.'er that can't read.
The 400,000 records were sitting there totally UNUSED by any application. I know where they came from because I studied the Oracle Forms app that created the table in order to convert an app that used a companion table from Pro-COBOL to SQR.
The DBA, on being informed, removed all of them up to last year - since even he couldn't figure out if anything was using them this year, he was afraid to remove this year's records.
Unfortunately in this case I'm not some "smart-ass kid" - I've been in IT for twenty years.
And even a "smart-ass kid" could tell they have major problems with the software they're using.
In-house development has costs and problems, but in this case the college, as I pointed out, isn't going anywhere and can take all the time it needs to safely and correctly migrate to a better, more user-friendly, efficient and controllable in-house alternative to a closed-source application that is indeed critical to their operation.
It's purely and simply a case of NIH - which is the usual human reaction to anyone who suggests they can do better than the incumbents.
And I've yet to find a manager who understands that REWRITING that fucking piece of ancient shit in Perl or something in five days or whatever is better than trying to keep the stupid thing running forever.
Managers are morons. That simple.
At City College of San Francisco, we run SCT Banner as the MIS system. This thing is a piece of crap from the mainframe days reworked to run on Oracle on HP/UX and PCs. The screens are obviously mainframe crap reworked in Oracle Forms (which is also crap) and the database design is brain dead. The program names are coded like SWOSCHB, the letters of which mean something if you can be bothered to try to find it in the documentation (such as it is).
It's a HUGE system - but it was designed for universities, not community colleges, so large sections of it aren't even used and other stuff must be custom built in house to handle the way a community college works. I found 400,000 records dating back to when the college put the system in sitting in a table which is never used and never cleaned out.
I've offered to rebuild the entire goddamn thing using PostgreSQL on Linux on commodity servers in a couple years for $100K, but nobody takes me seriously. Like it matters how long it would take - the college isn't going anywhere.
The problem is never the technical issues of moving from one system to another - it's the politics and idiot managers - always.
Winer offered to host this stuff for free. He OFFERED (and to be fair, actually did it.)
/. can self-righteously complain that the people pissed off are "just whiners" - which makes the morons on /. "just whiners" by the same logic - they're whining about someone else's perfectly justified behavior.
People took him up on it (braindead though that might be since it should have been obvious to him and them it couldn't go on forever.)
Then he shuts it down WITH NO PRIOR NOTICE.
At best, that makes him an asshole (unless it was literally an emergency that prevented him from notifying anyone at all. Was that the case? Doesn't say so.) At worst, it makes him a major asshole.
Now the morons on
Bottom line: You get what you pay for (sometimes) - and you never get what you don't pay for (usually).
Which doesn't justify being an asshole - always.
Being right justifies being an asshole - as I demonstrate here.
THIS one - "Worm Developed for Nokia Series-60 Phones" - on the SAME FRAGGIN' FRONT PAGE???!!!
/. oblivious as usual...
/. is now PART of the TIA! That would explain it all...
Yoo-hoo, editors!
LEAVE OFF THE FRAGGIN' POT AND PAY ATTENTION!!!!
Meanwhile, the Total Information Awareness program rolls on with
Oh, wait, I guess
Except all the reports I've read show UNIX admins administering several times as many machines as your MCSE point-and-click mouse monkey...so your $80 UNIX sysadmin is actually being paid the same as four or five $50K mouse monkeys...
Oh, wait, you can script in Windows? Wonder why nobody does...
Maybe it's because it's so "command-line-like"?
I see you ignored my "try reading a newspaper in it" point and went with the red herring of "hurtful". I never said the rain was "hurtful" - walking around in it without protection ain't gonna kill you (unless you easily get pneumonia and that's more a function of temperature than rain).
As for torrents, yeah, it "happens" in Oregon - it's the norm in Florida.
My points stand - yours are the ones that are pointless. You're just insulted because you don't like it when someone points out rural behavior you engage in is considered backwards by other people.
Maybe it is, maybe it ain't - but getting upset about it is. My original post was mostly for humor - you're the one who got bent out of shape about it.
So YOU need to grow up a little.
I'm reminded of the line in the movie "Big Trouble In Little China":
Character: A brave man doesn't mind the feel of rain on his face.
Wise Chinese Magician: And a wise man has enough sense to get in out of the rain.
My point was, yes, you can just walk around and forget about it. But doing so without ANY water protection is braindead, regardless of what you're "used to."
Try reading a newspaper in your "torrents".
And you want to see "torrents"? Go to Florida where when it rains, you have to pull over to the side of road while driving because it floods your windshield and overwhelms your wipers.
Oregon rain? Hah!
Only if Gates is in there with him!
Remember, Tux is our mascot because he BIT LINUS!
Imagine what he'd do to Gates!
It's too horrible to contemplate...
I agree.
Never again for college.
Oh, wait, I'm attending City College of San Francisco RIGHT NOW!
Mostly to get money to survive.
But I'm not flipping burgers! Instead, I, anarchist that I am, am taking Pell Grants from the suckers paying taxes in this moronic country.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!!!!
Actually, if you think about how many people eat at McDonald's, the idea of giving every one of them a free Knoppix Live CD would probably wipe out Windows in a couple months.
I'll buy that for a dollar!
I spent two years in Eugene, Oregon.
You put on a raincoat, a floppy hat with a brim, and some rubber overshoes.
Then you just walk around and ignore the rain.
Everybody does it up there.
It's just the idiots that don't bother with the raincoat, the floppy hat and the rubber overshoes.
'Course, there's quite a few idiots in Oregon.
Ah, Fiorella!
Major babe, she!
Got three pictures of her up on my wall.
The only astrophysicist and radio astronomer who looks like an Italian porn star.
while the one I submitted on the continued existence of the Total Information Awareness Program gets rejected by the editors.
/.
Nice work,
"Stuff that matters"
Right.
Mod this Off-Topic now, morons.
The only thing keeping me ON Windows is the need to tech-support people who are not OFF Windows.
/. crap is this?
The only thing keeping me OFF Windows is...Windows.
What kind of slow-news-day
Let me say it again, S-L-O-W-L-Y:
Windows is CRAP. Linux is ALSO CRAP.
BUT
Linux is FREE crap - both in "beer" and "freedom" terms.
What part of FREE don't you Windows trolls get?
Why don't you just come out and say it: "I WORSHIP BILL GATES BECAUSE HE'S RICH AND I'M NOT! AND I'M A SUCKER FOR A RICH ASSHOLE!"
(I personally couldn't care less how much money he has as long as he produces a decent product - which he DOESN'T - I'm not a socialist, I'm a free-market anarchist.)
Suckers.
Mod this troll! Mod this flamebait!
Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
Well, since Windows trolls think the "average" Linux user is someone to the "right" (whatever that means) of Linus...yes.
OTOH, Windows trolls expect "Grandma" (their OTHER stereotype) to never care that NetGear has an obvious password.
And they think that's wonderful. That's their target market. They think Bill is a genius for pandering to that level of ignorance.
The sixth rule is no sheets, no stickies.
Is this rule anything like "No tickee, no shirtee?"
Or is that Kerboros?
because Longhorn won't be out for another eight!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Mod this troll! Mod this flamebait!
Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
It's Bill Gates and his corporate culture of 24-year-old computer-history illiterates.
I saw a line recently that said, "The only thing of value passing through a politician's mind is a bullet."
Same applies to Bill.
Get rid of Gates and his toadies like Ballmer and Microsoft might use its 56 billion in cash to amount to something.
As it stands, Longhorn is going to be a disaster and Linux is going to destroy Windows within the next ten or fifteen years - even though Linux really only has one major advantage - it's being worked on by people who at least care a little - people with at least some personal motivation - and it's cheap.
I have.
/.
Almost as many idiots as on
Less interesting stories, too.
Another humanist idiot.
Sorry, Bill, the technology is going to be developed whether you like it or not.
And it will be applied according to radical Transhumanist principles whether you like it or not.
Get in its way, you die.
Have a nice day, primate.