🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 22 Jan 2018 11:18:44 -0800, Anne & Lynn Wheeler
<ly...@garlic.com> wrote:

>Al Kossow <a...@bitsavers.org> writes:
>> "To remain a dominant force in the Information Age, the U.S. military
>> -- all four services -- must create a corps of software developers in
>> uniform."
>>
>> Because civilian contractors can't be trusted to do what they've
>> been doing for decades?
>
>re:
>http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2018.html#69 The Next New Military Specialty Should Be Software Developers
>
>so one scenario it is just excuse for getting more money in their
>budget. another scenario/excuse is they are trying to bypass the
>lengthy/complicated acquisition process (and the "success of failure"
>culture).
>
>enormous uptic in outsourcing after turn of century and the rapidly
>spreading "success of failure" culture
>
>we looked at situation where vendor that had done a website said it
>would be $10M to add two new web pages to the website. It might take a
>year or more.

Must have been using illiterates to make the web pages. It takes about
5 minutes to make an html page. Or they were just money grubbers.

>slightly related, I've done a project or two with somebody that claimed
>he had coined the term COTS for government (primarily dataprocessing).
>We've had lots of discussions about COTS save huge amount of money
>... and may even be higher quality/function ... when the
>consumer/commercial use is similar to government/military use
>... however there have been lots of situations where there are attempts
>to force COTS for things that it was never intended for.

I've seen COTS being used by a civilian company, the vendor took them
to the cleaners. The company could have gotten, in my opinion, the
'additions to make it work the way we wanted it to' cheaper by getting
software written from scratch. Instead, they opted for add-ons... it
almost doubled the price they paid.