"It is an ERP system, the payroll module needs to be heavily customized for any large implementation."
The same can be said for any payroll system, in any environment that doesn't fit some simple, canned model. I know a thing or two about business software, where I've made my living for most of my life, and in particular, I understand the complexity of a university system payroll.
Some of the posters here seem to have no concept of just how mind-boggling a university payroll administration can be. Even with fully functional automation, it is often a full-time effort involving many individuals, just to have the distributions and deposits done on schedule -- the direct deposit slips aren't even in the mail before you're working on the next pay period.
I've worked in that world. Don't even *mention* the rules with state pensions. Or the paycheck for a faculty member who is both a tenure track professor *and* a contractor *and* an executive of an extension department. (That example is real, my last boss before I left academia.)
The university I worked for is heavily involved in the Kuali project (http://www.kuali.org/communities/kfs/) because the fact of the matter is, there really isn't a COTS solution that fully meets the requirements a university system has for business software. And a university budget does not usually even come close to what it takes to get custom work out of SAP or Peoplesoft or whatever.
You can defend the "30-40 year old system" or "COBOL" or whatever, until some event, such as not being able to replace your AS-400, or when the scale has grown to the extent that the system literally cannot produce a paycheck for everybody in the time available before you're making late payments (and then settling summary judgments due to your failure to meet contractual obligations, I've seen it happen) or your accouting capability no longer meets the requirements of the state (didn't stick around long enough to see that, but I think it's coming.)
I honestly don't know whether Kuali is a "dead on the vine" or "promising project", but certain pieces of it have been used as band-aids to take some of the load off a dying system.
None of this should surprise anyone with ERP experience, since ERP systems have been scaled up in a frankenstein manner for as long as there has been business software:-)
18 million dollars is about right for a four year project with 30 professionals in your core organization. (And in a university setting that includes 200 students, office leases and IT infrastructure.)
Examine the requirements of a state university's payroll system and then think carefully before bidding less...
IT Manager has an opportunity to frame the IT function in terms of ROI when talking to the suits. Do not underestimate the value of a perception among suits that your role reduces liability or generates revenue.
>The greatest safety will be when we both realize that we can accomplish more by working together than by fighting with each other.
There are some powerful people in this world who do not desire "safety" or "accomplishment" because they fundamentally believe that the end of the world is a desirable, richly anticipated event, and whose greatest wish is to have the world's end arrive during their own lifetime.
>That warms my heart. I really don't want Iran to get nuclear weapons.
It surprises me more that anyone doesn't have nuclear weapons than that they do.
The physics is undergrad material now, the mechanical tech is within the tolerances of the average aircraft machine shop, and the only real obstacle is the fact that the highly distributed effort of refining fissionable material must be done secretly, but why is that so hard, really?
>Right. After all, Khamenei's vote is "some potion of the votes."
It would be "legitimate", in the sense that it would be consistent with Iran's law, for Khamenei to simply appoint the President setting aside any other considerations (such as elections.)
The Ayatollah's word is absolute law, constrained only by natural consequences -- say, if the protests grow to the point where they represent an actual rebellion.
It is explainable by a "this is a Theocracy and I am the High Priest."
I don't understand why people act as if they expect Iran to conduct an election like a Western democracy.
Where does the assumption come from that Iran, of all countries, is even capable of a "fair election"? I really don't see how you can be surprised about this outcome *at all*, and I also don't understand what anyone thinks can be "done about it", if Iran's own "government" does not take action.
>While I am not sure what kind of plane $150k will get you
You could get a Cessna 182 with about 1000 airframe hours on it.
If you really had to, you could carry about 1,100 pounds including yourself and your passengers. You'd be painfully aware of this load while flying.
>I imagine something deemed a cargo plane
Say, a Boeing 737 for 20-50 million, and a few million a year for maintenance?
>will carry a lot more than even a full-size extended bed pickup.
Of course it will. But $50 million is a fleet of tractor-trailer rigs and a network of warehouses and fuel depots. Not only can you carry more capacity, but you can get your payload between arbitrary points A&B far more efficiently than a plane.
>18-30 year-olds? So in the next EP election, the PP will be the favoured party of 18-35 year-olds.
No, once they are over 30 something clicks and they become more interested in preserving their own wealth than in idealism, so they become conservatives.
You would think that the counterculture generation of the 1960s would behave differently now that they are the dominant force in government and business, but look at the reality.
Don't live on campus. Don't use any on-campus facilities that force you into a category of an on-campus resident. Get yourself into a position where you're using facilities that are provided to staff, faculty, and/or grad students. People who *have* a choice often have a strong opinion on these matters, and the policies tend to be more liberal for them.
All this might mean "get a job", and it might even mean "get an on-campus job in a professional staff" (as opposed to student labor roles.)
Another approach is the time-tested "work in the NOC" and then no matter how bad the network infrastructure or policies are, you're above/outside them, since YOU are the sysadmin.
I did all of the above during my various college careers.
Something like "the total number of traffic deaths per million automobile passengers since 1970 is greater than the total number of air traffic deaths per million aircraft passengers since 1970?"
Why not help dilute the trademark? I "Tivo" shows even on my mythTV. I still say "Frigidaire" and "RadarRange" and I use "Xerox" as a verb. I use Gimp to do my "Photoshopping."
"How can Google be taken seriously in an enterprise environment if their most stable and successful offshoot project takes 5 years to come out of beta?"
Plenty of companies and institutions have switched from running their own mail infrastructure over to the commercial version of GMail. I can't tell you what a relief it was to get to shut down our mail server, to lock down the inbound ports, to stop having to be an admin for a mail server, and to stop having to deal with SPAM or with the gigantic imap folders that accumulate.
Our GMail interface is branded with our company name, and doesn't say anything about it being beta.
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"It is an ERP system, the payroll module needs to be heavily customized for any large implementation."
The same can be said for any payroll system, in any environment that doesn't fit some simple, canned model. I know a thing or two about business software, where I've made my living for most of my life, and in particular, I understand the complexity of a university system payroll.
Some of the posters here seem to have no concept of just how mind-boggling a university payroll administration can be. Even with fully functional automation, it is often a full-time effort involving many individuals, just to have the distributions and deposits done on schedule -- the direct deposit slips aren't even in the mail before you're working on the next pay period.
I've worked in that world. Don't even *mention* the rules with state pensions. Or the paycheck for a faculty member who is both a tenure track professor *and* a contractor *and* an executive of an extension department. (That example is real, my last boss before I left academia.)
The university I worked for is heavily involved in the Kuali project (http://www.kuali.org/communities/kfs/) because the fact of the matter is, there really isn't a COTS solution that fully meets the requirements a university system has for business software. And a university budget does not usually even come close to what it takes to get custom work out of SAP or Peoplesoft or whatever.
You can defend the "30-40 year old system" or "COBOL" or whatever, until some event, such as not being able to replace your AS-400, or when the scale has grown to the extent that the system literally cannot produce a paycheck for everybody in the time available before you're making late payments (and then settling summary judgments due to your failure to meet contractual obligations, I've seen it happen) or your accouting capability no longer meets the requirements of the state (didn't stick around long enough to see that, but I think it's coming.)
I honestly don't know whether Kuali is a "dead on the vine" or "promising project", but certain pieces of it have been used as band-aids to take some of the load off a dying system.
None of this should surprise anyone with ERP experience, since ERP systems have been scaled up in a frankenstein manner for as long as there has been business software :-)
18 million dollars is about right for a four year project with 30 professionals in your core organization. (And in a university setting that includes 200 students, office leases and IT infrastructure.)
Examine the requirements of a state university's payroll system and then think carefully before bidding less ...
Emigrate to a country that does not recognize United States civil asset forfeiture.
>pay tax to the United States Government accordingly
You don't pay tax on fixed assets.
IT Manager has an opportunity to frame the IT function in terms of ROI when talking to the suits.
Do not underestimate the value of a perception among suits that your role reduces liability or generates revenue.
>Just to clarify, Iran is a mountainous and largely forested country inhabited neither by Arabs nor Arabic speakers.
It's fun to post pictures from Iranian ski resorts whenever stereotypes come up. Tends to shut up some of the dumber wingnuts.
Are you suggesting that it would be anything but trivial to obtain and use, say, gpg2 in Iran?
>The greatest safety will be when we both realize that we can accomplish more by working together than by fighting with each other.
There are some powerful people in this world who do not desire "safety" or "accomplishment" because they fundamentally believe that the end of the world is a desirable, richly anticipated event, and whose greatest wish is to have the world's end arrive during their own lifetime.
>That warms my heart. I really don't want Iran to get nuclear weapons.
It surprises me more that anyone doesn't have nuclear weapons than that they do.
The physics is undergrad material now, the mechanical tech is within the tolerances of the average aircraft machine shop, and the only real obstacle is the fact that the highly distributed effort of refining fissionable material must be done secretly, but why is that so hard, really?
>Right. After all, Khamenei's vote is "some potion of the votes."
It would be "legitimate", in the sense that it would be consistent with Iran's law, for Khamenei to simply appoint the President setting aside any other considerations (such as elections.)
The Ayatollah's word is absolute law, constrained only by natural consequences -- say, if the protests grow to the point where they represent an actual rebellion.
It is explainable by a "this is a Theocracy and I am the High Priest."
I don't understand why people act as if they expect Iran to conduct an election like a Western democracy.
Where does the assumption come from that Iran, of all countries, is even capable of a "fair election"? I really don't see how you can be surprised about this outcome *at all*, and I also don't understand what anyone thinks can be "done about it", if Iran's own "government" does not take action.
>Try win 7 - 20 minutes install and everything works. Seeks out its own drivers and codecs are included.
So we give you a Vista DVD and a new SATA drive, and start a stopwatch for 20 minutes.
After 20 minutes, exactly what "works?"
>While I am not sure what kind of plane $150k will get you
You could get a Cessna 182 with about 1000 airframe hours on it.
If you really had to, you could carry about 1,100 pounds including yourself and your passengers.
You'd be painfully aware of this load while flying.
>I imagine something deemed a cargo plane
Say, a Boeing 737 for 20-50 million, and a few million a year for maintenance?
>will carry a lot more than even a full-size extended bed pickup.
Of course it will. But $50 million is a fleet of tractor-trailer rigs and a network of warehouses and fuel depots. Not only can you carry more capacity, but you can get your payload between arbitrary points A&B far more efficiently than a plane.
>Similarly, we've heard nothing from the authors of the Library - you know, the copyright owners, the only ones who have any
>legal standing?
For all we know, they have an undisclosed relationship with Google and are laughing about all this noise.
>So maybe the peanut gallery should shut the hell up already.
You might as well be screaming at city buses :-)
>18-30 year-olds? So in the next EP election, the PP will be the favoured party of 18-35 year-olds.
No, once they are over 30 something clicks and they become more interested in preserving their own wealth than in idealism, so they become conservatives.
You would think that the counterculture generation of the 1960s would behave differently now that they are the dominant force in government and business, but look at the reality.
>Let me equally obviously point out the fact that the Kama Sutra is not what you think it is.
I have read what I believe to be a reasonably faithful translation. What do you "think they think it is?"
Don't live on campus. Don't use any on-campus facilities that force you into a category of an on-campus resident. Get yourself into a position where you're using facilities that are provided to staff, faculty, and/or grad students. People who *have* a choice often have a strong opinion on these matters, and the policies tend to be more liberal for them.
All this might mean "get a job", and it might even mean "get an on-campus job in a professional staff" (as opposed to student labor roles.)
Another approach is the time-tested "work in the NOC" and then no matter how bad the network infrastructure or policies are, you're above/outside them, since YOU are the sysadmin.
I did all of the above during my various college careers.
>For example, we do not know how many fatalities involve long distance trips vs. short in-city driving.
Or the whole "sober pilot / sober driver" and "drunk pilot / drunk driver" correlation matrix. (I'd be willing to be planes still win :-)
"Marine One" is a designation, not an aircraft model, but it's a Sikorsky H-60.
The plans for that helicopter are more "proprietary" than "secret." They are routinely provided to contractors who overhaul them, for a fee.
>I read somewhere that statistically, airplanes are safer than cars, you're more likely to die in a car accident.
"per event" or "per hour?"
Over the past ten years, how many hours have you spent in airplanes?
How many hours have you spent in cars?
Usually, statistics that say "planes are safer than cars" equate these two, very different values.
Statistically?
Something like "the total number of traffic deaths per million automobile passengers since 1970 is greater than the total number of air traffic deaths per million aircraft passengers since 1970?"
>See the picture?
If you really were involved in making that gizmo you wouldn't be blabbing about it here.
Why not help dilute the trademark? I "Tivo" shows even on my mythTV. I still say "Frigidaire" and "RadarRange" and I use
"Xerox" as a verb. I use Gimp to do my "Photoshopping."
>I'm thinking there's going to be a greater push towards getting another language into browsers.
Why do you think of "browsers" and not "business enterprise software" when Java comes up?
Bash SAP all you want, provided you come to the table with an alternative.
"How can Google be taken seriously in an enterprise environment if their most stable and successful offshoot project takes 5 years to come out of beta?"
Plenty of companies and institutions have switched from running their own mail infrastructure over to the commercial version of GMail. I can't tell you what a relief it was to get to shut down our mail server, to lock down the inbound ports, to stop having to be an admin for a mail server, and to stop having to deal with SPAM or with the gigantic imap folders that accumulate.
Our GMail interface is branded with our company name, and doesn't say anything about it being beta.