🚀 go-pugleaf

JimP wrote:
> 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.

Setting up computing services for mom/pops is still a "new" business
and ripe for ripping off people.  A local butcher (who made the best
sausage links in the world) had his freezers break one weekend
and they lost everthing.  So they hired someone to set upt a system
to alert them if the freezers stopped working.  They were charged
$10K for a temperature sensor hooked to a router.  Absolutely
ridiculous.  A year later they were out of business--the $10K
was the camel which broke the straw.

/BAH