Posts by vinyl1 16 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2007
Back in the 80s at a large US bank - well, Chase Manhattan - one of our application leads left, and she was replaced by another woman. They were both named Alla, although obviously they had different last names.
You can imagine what happened. The data center never updated the numbers of the call list, which listed only first names by systems supported. So when a job failed, they called the wrong Alla in the middle of the night, and she automatically debugged the job without even thinking about it, and went back to bed. If was only when operations talked to the right Alla the next morning that they realized their mistake. They were at least gents about it, and called the other Alla to apologize.
As I have pointed out in several comments, the bulk of the 'social welfare' spending is not actually received by the poor. It goes to social workers, teachers, and doctors who provide 'services' to the poor. The poor are not really in any position to complain about the low quality of these services, because they're not paying cash for them.
The actual money spend on food stamps, EITC, and section 8 housing is a small fraction of the social welfare spending. But even something like food stamps is immediately received by the grocery stores, and adds to their business and profits.
But the teachers who make $90K a year in school districts were the graduates can't read and write, the doctors who make $300K a year treating the poor on Medicaid, the professors at big universities who teach one course for $200K....they all thank you for the money!
...have gone in the other direction. I was at the Chester Group audio show in New York a couple of weeks ago, and there were no systems on display under $100,000.
Of course, it's a show, they're going to show off their best stuff, but things have gotten out of hand. The sound was fabulous, but really.
Not only that, but the best music was private double-DSD rips of analogue studio master tapes, which of course are not available at all to consumers at any price. While 5.6 million bits a second can sound mighty good, there's no point to the equipment if no music is available.
Just charge them what it costs!
We had a web system that tracked data quality issues. It had automated assignment, workflow, tickler emails, very nice. As long as it was free, the users really liked it.
But when we told them they would have to pay the actual cost of the system, $300,000 a year, then they said they'd rather keep track of their data quality problems on Excel spreadsheets.
This is actually historically correct. You won't see any apostrophes in any ancient or medieval Germanic languages, or in Middle English. Why would you put an apostrophe between a noun and its case ending?
I believe the apostrophe was added by folk-etymologists in the 16th century.
Good people are now available from companies that have closed down completely. Some of the surviving places are hiring from this pool, while at the same time getting rid of some of their less desirable employees.
So even if headcount stays constant, that doesn't mean no one is being let go.
Having spent 26 years in IT, I know that the one thing that is absolutely certain is that no matter what disaster recovery plans you have, they will not work when a real disaster occurs.
After 9/11, we discovered that all the copies of the disaster recovery procedures were kept in the building next to the World Trade Center, the one we had just fled.
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