Agreed - the contract was design for large office complexes where power point, word and outlook meet the requirements. No thought was applied beyond this need and it shows - by being over budget and way behind schedule.
The Navy decided to outsource their entire network (not just the IT component) via the Navy Marine Corp Intranet (NCMI) contract. A 8.9 Billion, dollars which is best described as a system design in a vacuum at the top with no input from the working level, emphasizing centralized control and is centered around Microsoft core products.
Dissension is strictly forbidden at all levels - even constructive criticism. All press releases are rosy. But from the inside the situation is anything but rosy.
Some at the upper end forgot that Scientist and Engineers work for the Navy and need a wide range of tools to do their job and be innovative. Very little open source software is on the approved for use including dangerous software like Apache or Firefox. Strangely we are required to use IE instead of Mozilla or Firefox.
In practice what is see happening is that the old "legacy" netowrk is staying around why everyone just uses the NCMI network to read email and access the web. So in effect the Navy just hobbled its budget by $8.8x 10^9 dollars. Great winfall for Microsoft and Dell though.
A while back Cringely had an interesting article on the comparision of the NMCI venture and the way Walmart does IT. In a protracted war he placed his bets on Walmart winnng.
Since we lost the war on drugs and are losing the war on obesity and are barely holding our ground on the war on terrorism maybe we could win the war on caffeine!
Not quite the advent of the digital camera and expedent digital media conveyance made the Abu Ghraib Prison story different.
I listened to an interview of the guy who broke the Abu Ghraib prison story. He said he could have written pages and pages with all sorts of details concerning the incident and it would have never be noticed. But a single image drove the point lucidly home and made all the difference.
As this case continues into the surreal regions the legal landscape I am inclined to believe that IBM is secretly funding SCO and not MS.
Do you have any idea how much it would cost IBM to get an equivalent amount of goodwill and PR that they are getting out this case? Not only that they are making a very solid point that if you bring a flimsy claim against IBM in an attempt to collect a judgement you will ground into pixie dust and humiliated.
I am glad someone had trouble - I had to clean off my glasses to be sure I wasn't just missing a word or two.
Is the author proposing that windmill will extract the "extra" energy that is the result of global warming? I sure hope not or someone needs to grab their old thermo book and read up on the 1st law.
Thanks for posting this! I have been looking for someway to update a portion of a browser page without refreshing the entire page for an industrial monitoring application.
Yes, but it does scare me a little that China is a country that is a totalitarian regime with no free press or independent reporting/investigation, or accountability!
It took Eastern Europe to alert the world that there might be problem at Cherynobl. Do you think the Chinese govnerment will be seeking public input on were and how to store the waste?
At first I thought you were kidding - but you were not! If this is not abuse of the patent system I challenge anyone to find a better example...
If you read the article to the laughable conclusion they then expand it to include further context.
While the present invention has been described above in reference to a preferred embodiment thereof, those skilled in the art will appreciate that various changes in form and detail may be made without departing from the intended scope of the present invention as defined in the appended claims. For example, the tabbing may work with application programs other than the web browser.
You may as well submit a patent for every key on the keyboard and say it could do something different if used in various combinations with other keys or in different circumstances.
To fair to MS they probably have to do this so that some shady lawyer (such as Boies) does not attempt to sue them for ctrl-alt-delete or displaying a solid color screen (such as blue) when their program crashes.
As a prior poster already commented on CPAN is a paragon of code reusability. I never program anything significant without relying on someone elses work via use of a CPAN modules.
Only assembly rivals perl in incomprehensibility
Uh! Perl is on the other end of the spectrum from assembly.
I place Perl on the same tier as Matlab (or Octave). If you are working with vectors of numbers use Matlab if you working with strings use Perl.
It seems that there is alway a segment of the population that knee jerks about Perl poor maintainability but they never really provide good examples or specifics - it is always their "informed opinion".
Take ubiquitous C for example, please provide several short bullets why you think C is superior to Perl for code reuse or maintainability?
Here are a few why I prefer using Perl over C when possible ( not bashing C as it certainly has its place )
Integrated Hashes
Integrated Regular Expressions. ie
if ( $str =/\s+#/ ) { next } or $str =~ s/this/that/;
Variable interpolation
$str = "Now is the time for all good $gender to come to the aid of the party."
Much nicer than using strcat or the + syntax of Javascript or VB.
Symbolic reference or variable variables. ie.
$var = 'color'; $$var = 123; Now $color stores 123
OO and traditional constructs - use what works for the given problem. If I am doing a global search and replace on a list of file I am sure not going to spend time creating an Object.
Implied loop functions such as grep, map and sort.
Great binary data manipulation with pack and unpack.
Great connectivity to databases
Cpan with modules like LWP, Dumper, Storable, DataManip, DBI, Socket, Find, etc.
I could go on but I would like to hear from your experience now...
Once the 32 Million is billed out I think you will see a quick resolution of the SCO lawsuits. As pointed out in the conference call yesterday several IP legal firms have offered an opinion that the SCO suits have no legs (I think one of the callers adviced them to get a second opinion instead of relying only on the firm you just promised $31 Million). So once the money is gone so will the motivation.
These high rate of expenditures are interesting as quality of legal work so far has been sophmorphic and low quality.
Recently I took apart several old 2.4 gig full height hard drives and recovered the magnets. These guys are extremely powerful and will cause injury to fingers if careless handling two of them at the same time.
Anyways I found them to be very good stud finders as they will quickly locate the screws or nails hidden in drywall and are powerful enough to hold themselves in place.
I have taken two of them and fashioned a small clip on top and pulled a chalk line between them. This arrangment is great for creating a nail line.
Also a placed one in a small pocket in my electrical tool holster. Then fasteners and small parts stay attached to the outside making them very accessible. In fact, when working on something I just throw the small parts in the general direction of the pocket with the magnet and they stick.
I think they should have a modified class olympics where you can do anything you want to enhance the human body - drugs, gene manipulation, steriods, you name it is legal. You could call it the X Olympics.
One problem I could see is that the women sports categories would populated with some very ugly hairy looking women.
Unfortunately I have to keep a windows machine around at our warehouse just because UPS's shipping tool only runs on windows. Strange since this appears to be written in Java I do not know why they don't port a copy to Linux.
Also USPS shipping programs such as stamps.com and endicia.com have annoying poorly design window clients for a function that would be better suited as web-based client.
Blake must be feeling a little down and out now that Rob Enderle is apparently competing with him for the SCO Information Minister position:
Here is one of Rob Enderle jewels from his SCO keynote:
That is why I stood up for SCO; they were being attacked because they were vulnerable. Those that attacked them did so because they could in a clear effort to deny the employees, the stockholders, and the customers of SCO their rights and, as a number of veterans have reminded me from time to time, heroes died for those rights and I believe it is our.... No my, obligation to uphold them.
One can only smirk at the twisted logic of coupling poor vulnerable SCO with the heroes who died for our rights... Not only that, SCO is proud of this address that they host it on their website . If I were them I would take it down immediately and claim I was hacked and the site was defaced.
I once worked with a fellow who wrote software for ICBM's and he commented that one of the worst places to be in the event of a nuclear exchange was at Lat 0, Long 0 because there where several possible failure modes where the missiles would try to find their way here
Slashdot Mirror
Stuff that anti-matters
Time for a sound bite change...
slightly skewed perception
Agreed - the contract was design for large office complexes where power point, word and outlook meet the requirements. No thought was applied beyond this need and it shows - by being over budget and way behind schedule.
This is an interesting article.
The Navy decided to outsource their entire network (not just the IT component) via the Navy Marine Corp Intranet (NCMI) contract. A 8.9 Billion, dollars which is best described as a system design in a vacuum at the top with no input from the working level, emphasizing centralized control and is centered around Microsoft core products.
Dissension is strictly forbidden at all levels - even constructive criticism. All press releases are rosy. But from the inside the situation is anything but rosy.
Some at the upper end forgot that Scientist and Engineers work for the Navy and need a wide range of tools to do their job and be innovative. Very little open source software is on the approved for use including dangerous software like Apache or Firefox. Strangely we are required to use IE instead of Mozilla or Firefox.
In practice what is see happening is that the old "legacy" netowrk is staying around why everyone just uses the NCMI network to read email and access the web. So in effect the Navy just hobbled its budget by $8.8x 10^9 dollars. Great winfall for Microsoft and Dell though.
A while back Cringely had an interesting article on the comparision of the NMCI venture and the way Walmart does IT. In a protracted war he placed his bets on Walmart winnng.
Since we lost the war on drugs and are losing the war on obesity and are barely holding our ground on the war on terrorism maybe we could win the war on caffeine!
"Same story"
Not quite the advent of the digital camera and expedent digital media conveyance made the Abu Ghraib Prison story different.
I listened to an interview of the guy who broke the Abu Ghraib prison story. He said he could have written pages and pages with all sorts of details concerning the incident and it would have never be noticed. But a single image drove the point lucidly home and made all the difference.
Or go get Octave which is an open source Matlab like languange...
As this case continues into the surreal regions the legal landscape I am inclined to believe that IBM is secretly funding SCO and not MS.
Do you have any idea how much it would cost IBM to get an equivalent amount of goodwill and PR that they are getting out this case? Not only that they are making a very solid point that if you bring a flimsy claim against IBM in an attempt to collect a judgement you will ground into pixie dust and humiliated.
I think we need the return of the old western "Wanted Dead or Alive" posters.
Cheers
I am glad someone had trouble - I had to clean off my glasses to be sure I wasn't just missing a word or two.
Is the author proposing that windmill will extract the "extra" energy that is the result of global warming? I sure hope not or someone needs to grab their old thermo book and read up on the 1st law.
I would suspect that a row of wind turbines would be no more disruptive then say a row of trees or forest.
:)
So it would be permissible to put up a wind farm only if you cut down some of your trees
Or turn it around, if you cut down your forests then you must replace it with a wind farm!
Thanks for posting this! I have been looking for someway to update a portion of a browser page without refreshing the entire page for an industrial monitoring application.
Yes, but it does scare me a little that China is a country that is a totalitarian regime with no free press or independent reporting/investigation, or accountability!
It took Eastern Europe to alert the world that there might be problem at Cherynobl. Do you think the Chinese govnerment will be seeking public input on were and how to store the waste?
At first I thought you were kidding - but you were not! If this is not abuse of the patent system I challenge anyone to find a better example...
If you read the article to the laughable conclusion they then expand it to include further context.
While the present invention has been described above in reference to a preferred embodiment thereof, those skilled in the art will appreciate that various changes in form and detail may be made without departing from the intended scope of the present invention as defined in the appended claims. For example, the tabbing may work with application programs other than the web browser.
You may as well submit a patent for every key on the keyboard and say it could do something different if used in various combinations with other keys or in different circumstances.
To fair to MS they probably have to do this so that some shady lawyer (such as Boies) does not attempt to sue them for ctrl-alt-delete or displaying a solid color screen (such as blue) when their program crashes.
Well good example, but look at this way - is harder to understand
@lst = sort { $a $b } @unsorted_lst;
Or the 30 or so lines of code it would take to do the equivalent sort in C?
Only assembly rivals perl in incomprehensibility
Uh! Perl is on the other end of the spectrum from assembly.
I place Perl on the same tier as Matlab (or Octave). If you are working with vectors of numbers use Matlab if you working with strings use Perl.
It seems that there is alway a segment of the population that knee jerks about Perl poor maintainability but they never really provide good examples or specifics - it is always their "informed opinion".
Take ubiquitous C for example, please provide several short bullets why you think C is superior to Perl for code reuse or maintainability?
Here are a few why I prefer using Perl over C when possible ( not bashing C as it certainly has its place )
Integrated Hashes
Integrated Regular Expressions. ie
/\s+#/ ) { next }
if ( $str =
or
$str =~ s/this/that/;
Variable interpolation
$str = "Now is the time for all good $gender to come to the aid of the party."
Much nicer than using strcat or the + syntax of Javascript or VB.
Symbolic reference or variable variables. ie.
$var = 'color';
$$var = 123;
Now $color stores 123
OO and traditional constructs - use what works for the given problem. If I am doing a global search and replace on a list of file I am sure not going to spend time creating an Object.
Implied loop functions such as grep, map and sort.
Great binary data manipulation with pack and unpack.
Great connectivity to databases
Cpan with modules like LWP, Dumper, Storable, DataManip, DBI, Socket, Find, etc.
I could go on but I would like to hear from your experience now...
hmmm... Has anybody cached the cache?
Once the 32 Million is billed out I think you will see a quick resolution of the SCO lawsuits. As pointed out in the conference call yesterday several IP legal firms have offered an opinion that the SCO suits have no legs (I think one of the callers adviced them to get a second opinion instead of relying only on the firm you just promised $31 Million). So once the money is gone so will the motivation.
These high rate of expenditures are interesting as quality of legal work so far has been sophmorphic and low quality.
Recently I took apart several old 2.4 gig full height hard drives and recovered the magnets. These guys are extremely powerful and will cause injury to fingers if careless handling two of them at the same time.
Anyways I found them to be very good stud finders as they will quickly locate the screws or nails hidden in drywall and are powerful enough to hold themselves in place.
I have taken two of them and fashioned a small clip on top and pulled a chalk line between them. This arrangment is great for creating a nail line.
Also a placed one in a small pocket in my electrical tool holster. Then fasteners and small parts stay attached to the outside making them very accessible. In fact, when working on something I just throw the small parts in the general direction of the pocket with the magnet and they stick.
Oh Great! We will just have to use post-modern methods to rage war.
The amount of energy required to deliver a multiple warhead nuclear missle is really quite small.
I think they should have a modified class olympics where you can do anything you want to enhance the human body - drugs, gene manipulation, steriods, you name it is legal. You could call it the X Olympics.
One problem I could see is that the women sports categories would populated with some very ugly hairy looking women.
Unfortunately I have to keep a windows machine around at our warehouse just because UPS's shipping tool only runs on windows. Strange since this appears to be written in Java I do not know why they don't port a copy to Linux.
Also USPS shipping programs such as stamps.com and endicia.com have annoying poorly design window clients for a function that would be better suited as web-based client.
Oh well I will have to wait.
Blake must be feeling a little down and out now that Rob Enderle is apparently competing with him for the SCO Information Minister position:
Here is one of Rob Enderle jewels from his SCO keynote:
That is why I stood up for SCO; they were being attacked because they were vulnerable. Those that attacked them did so because they could in a clear effort to deny the employees, the stockholders, and the customers of SCO their rights and, as a number of veterans have reminded me from time to time, heroes died for those rights and I believe it is our.... No my, obligation to uphold them.
One can only smirk at the twisted logic of coupling poor vulnerable SCO with the heroes who died for our rights... Not only that, SCO is proud of this address that they host it on their website . If I were them I would take it down immediately and claim I was hacked and the site was defaced.
Note how Darl always uses the informal "guys" when referring to a group of people, such as:
those guys talking about incorporating the Unix technology into Longhorn
Are there not any woman that work at Microsoft?
I once worked with a fellow who wrote software for ICBM's and he commented that one of the worst places to be in the event of a nuclear exchange was at Lat 0, Long 0 because there where several possible failure modes where the missiles would try to find their way here