When IT and Bad Government Meet, Everyone Loses 383
Cron-os writes "The city of Wilkes Barre, Pa is furiously trying to enter some 25,000 tax records into their new PC network. Their aging AS/400 crashed sometime around April 15, and the city did not renew a maintenance contract with IBM because it cost more than the PC network. You can read the associated articles here, here, and here. I'm so glad I live across the river in a SANE city." I wonder if these bozos run their schools and roads departments with the same level of professionalism.
Bozos (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Bozos (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bozos (Score:2, Funny)
The real story... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is (one reason) why we are not living in paradise despite the huge increase in computational power we have seen in the last 20 years.
Re:The real story... (Score:3, Insightful)
Less exercise of the body and the brain... hmmmm.
$850 a month (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article:
IBM is willing to provide a maintenance contract for $850 a month.
How much is their PC network worth, anyway?
Re:$850 a month (Score:2)
Re:$850 a month (Score:3, Interesting)
They have five employees entering the data onto PC's. One of the news articles stated that it is going to take 6 months to rebuild the tax database. 2.5 man years times, say $40K per man year (salary + benefits + office space etc) comes out to about $100,000, or just about ten times the cost of that maintenance contract. And that's jsut for the tax data. There are, of course, other municipal records on that computer.
No doubt the personal computers involved are ALSO ageing, probably 386's running MS-DOS 6.1.
Those responsible should be sacked.
Re:$850 a month (Score:2, Funny)
What does couple of NICs and a length of CAT5 run these days?
Wrong question. (Score:4, Insightful)
Think about it, if your computer system is destroyed you can get a new one for the same price (think insurance) and it probably runs faster and does more.
But if you lose your personal data (emails, source code, certs, keys), it's going to be hard or impossible to get it all back. Insurance payouts would just be a poor consolation here.
In this case it's probably just access to the data. They should just pay IBM and get back access to the data (or most of it), rather than pay people to type in 25,000 records AND WAIT months for it to be done. Worse if more records are coming in daily and there's a deadline...
Either Hayward is stupid, or there's some other battle behind the scenes.
Submission to Darwin Awards! (Score:2, Interesting)
It sounds to me like somebody went and said 'hey it hasn't crashed in 10 years, I want this $10,000 in my paycheck because you already pay me so bad'.
Why does this make me feel that IBM is going to get the flack because they wont fix the computer, and tens of thousands of people will not get the refund checks etc and it wont be blamed on the idiot who decided NOT to renew it.
American Government is getting nearly as bad as American Corporations!
Re:Submission to Darwin Awards! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Submission to Darwin Awards! (Score:2, Insightful)
This appears to be a typical case of accountants gone mad, saving money on paper, but ending up costing a lot more in a disaster situation. The fact that they have a reel to reel tape for backup, ( I recall a /. article announcing the end of manufacturing reel to reel tapes just a short time ago), means that you have a situation where accountants have gone mad.
They would also typically have grossly underpaid computer staff who have hit rockbotton in morale as well. IBM would have tried many times to tell them they aren't really saving any money by acting the way they have, but IBM can't actually make them act reasonably. Maybe the accountant is a secret agent for Bin Laden.
I have seen this kind of behaviour many times before. Like when I worked for a major insurance company that had a dinosaur IBM mainframe still chugging away in the corner for the end of month run, when they had much more powerful IBM mainframes running everything else, just because the old machine ran DOS and they hadn't converted the programs to run on MVS yet. There was only one guy left who even knew how to repair it, and no parts.
Or a major, multinational manufacturer, when we upgraded an old machine, some bright spark from the customer had the bright idea of using the old 1GB disks in the new machine and saving one 9GB disk cost. The amount of time it took to work around this imposition, in terms of backing up the old system to the new, meetings, hassles, the disks dying anyway over time, etc, cost more than the $5000 saved.
Having a grandmother who lives in Wilkes-Barre... (Score:2, Funny)
I can assure you that their road department doesn't even have an office building, they just drink themselves to death slowly everyday in a nearby pub. They've had holes in the road up there for YEARS. Maybe the IT staff does something similar?
Re:Having a grandmother who lives in Wilkes-Barre. (Score:2, Insightful)
Apply the 'mushroom' theory.. kept in the dark and fed on sh*t
State Flower... (Score:2)
Well, the state flower is the road cone...
My Town (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My Town (Score:3, Funny)
Wow! Bu kudos to her, for managing to give me the printouts when not having any basic GUI skills....
Holy fucking shit. Talk about RSI (Score:3, Funny)
And they call it training? Fucking sadists man. Oh well, one can't be too hard on them. How the fuck did the dude know that his shit would break a mere month after cancelling the service contract?
But they ARE paying for it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, they neglect to mention that any sane proposal to abandon their AS/400 and its service contract would have included being up and running on their "new and improved" PC system BEFORE dropping the support for the old system.
As noted in the article: Since then, because the city doesn't have a maintenance agreement with IBM to repair the computer and retrieve the data, five city hall employees have spent their days typing more than 25,000 names, addresses and tax information onto two personal computers.
Do they think these employees have nothing better to do? What about all the other hassles and pain caused by retraining, PC downtime, and all the other costs associated with their choice.
The government at that city obviously has NOT taken any classes on economics. They sound like my old boss... any hidden cost is not really a cost at all.
Re:But they ARE paying for it... (Score:2)
I read all 3 articles and it turns out that not only was the tax information on the AS400, but so was a couple of other vital city funtions...like jail records and business liscences. I'll have to re-read the articles to absolutly sure, but there was definately more than JUST tax records on that ting.
well (Score:3, Funny)
I think we could expect good things from their clown colleges.
Re:well (Score:2)
Bart: "I don't think any of us expected him to say THAT."
low brain cell count (Score:2, Insightful)
Really
There are about 25,000 names, addresses and tax data that have to be keyed into the PCs. The employees have been typing at a rate of about 200 items per day. At that rate, they'll be typing for the next six months. [...] Well, Renshaw said, training should take no more than a few hours. "You can learn the entire system in two or three days at most."
A case of penny wise and pound foolish.
moral idiots
hmm... could you do so much better ? (Score:3, Troll)
Honestly I *can* understand how they are fed up with an aging system that gives constant headaches and is a budget drain. Eventually it would have blown up by a flipped employee. I se ethose situations every day, and when those IBM suppport bozo's arrive, things usually start taking an even worse turn.
That said, they should offcourse have backed up their stuff, and after cancelling support, at least have worked out a phase out of the system, with a phase in of a new, better system. But again don't completely blame them for such a situation. I guess that a large portion of govt IT is in an equally fucked up state, but better covered up.
Re:hmm... could you do so much better ? (Score:5, Insightful)
A. The town has no excuse. Hiring a IT + a IS person only 5 years ago for a paltry $50,000 a year each + replacing the AS/400 and it's software with a least cost approach is very doable, and aould have been the minimal approach. 100K a year + 50K a year for department expenses (Yes, you CAN do this with less than $50K a year in department expsenses INCLUDING equipment purchases for a town with a population 60K)
Problem #1 - I'm betting the City/town manager is stuffing his pockets heavily and will NOT hire someone smart enough to A. notice this fact
Federal grants have been available for over 15 years to help city's and towns replace aging computers and actually get technology and tech positions..
Money is not the problem... no matter what they say. The problem is incompetence and FUD. they liked how the 30 year old computer+program worked.. Sally, dan's sister and married to the chief, in the accouning department doesnt like change... we have to keep her happy... and Steve, the brother of dan, knows how to work the AS/400 and is allowed to do that every other thursday unless the hallways need waxing...
THAT is the problem... and all small towns have that problem... morons got voted in, and they keep getting voted in (By the same morons, and relatives).. I spent a year living in my cabin on horsehead lake in Mecosta, MI. A town that if you sneeze when driving through you will miss it.. what is the general population made of? Sociopaths.. people that dont like people and like tons of crap in their front yards, houses that look crappy and they are HAPPY that the town doesn't enforce lawn mowing, not living in a house that should be condemned and 3 cars in the front yard that should be crushed for the steel.
Dont ever expect something smart to happen in small town government (mid-sized either) as the smartest in town is there only on vacation or is trying to get the hell out.. NOT there to be the mayor.
Re:hmm... could you do so much better ? (Score:4, Informative)
There's nothing inherantly wrong with how the program worked. And that IBM was willing to maintain the machine for $850 per month, that means it's not a terribly old one. (Despite the wheeze in the article claiming the AS/400 was 20 years old, that cannot be true if the machine was on a maintenance agreement last year. It's got to be at at least V4R4 for IBM to be supporting the box at all. And none of the CISC boxes can run any of the V4 levels of OS/400, which means the thing is less than 8 years old, and is probably less than 5.) Even the first generation RISC boxes are at the end of the supported life. There doesn't sound like there was any real reason to change, except someone convinced them that the $850 a month they were paying IBM as (effectively) insurance against the AS/400 failing was a waste of money. It turned out differently.
Re:hmm... could you do so much better ? (Score:2)
What they are is separated from a source of learning and knowledge in technology applicable to their problems. Frequently, the people working in city government have other businesses to run as well, and so their attention is split between good governance and business interests. A lot of them are decent, hardworking individuals who have a lot of knowledge in specific areas, but not a lot of time to spend covering broader interests.
Technology related businesses ignore the small town - there is not enough return for the investment, and there is a lack of workforce that is adequately trained to handle even the more common aspects of modern technology. This is not the small town's fault though, there are other more immediate concerns.
I suggest you stop spending money on your computers and instead, use it to buy some therapy, because you, sir, appear to be the moron here, an asshole, and a troll.
Re:hmm... could you do so much better ? (Score:2)
The difference? Training and education. Before we even began thinking about what we were going to do everyone got educated on modern software and how it could help the business. We didn't even look at magazine adds until everyone was on the same wavelength and understood what we were doing and why, and how it would effect them personally. Before the project was over, they were pushing me to go faster.
How did I know to do it this way? I'm a professional -- it's my job to know this stuff. This isn't rocket science: this is Management 101. If the people in Wilkes-Barr can't handle it they should get the hell out. I refuse to blame city administration until someone demonstrates to me that their IT management told them what they needed to do and why they had to do it. If they did do it then it's administration's fault. Either way, it's sheer incompetance whomever is responsible should be fired.
We're all bozos on this bus (Score:2)
"People always get the kind of local government they deserve."
E.E."Doc"Smith
The fact that their city administrator is both still using lame-ass excuses and hasn't been fired yet shows that he is exactly the kind of government this city deserves.
Re:We're all bozos on this bus (Score:2)
ONE carpal tunnel workers' comp claim will probably cost everything the City Administrator claims to have "saved" and more. Particularly if they're stupid enough to fight it, and if this is the guy's usual level of performance, they will.
Fiscal responsibility, my heiney. (Score:3, Insightful)
And $850 a month for a service contract? Ask any four IT employees on the planet if they would pay $212 to avoid a six-month data entry purgatory.
I say dock the mayor's pay get that AS400 back online. And to think it could all be fixed with a phone call and a check...
Info about this city (Score:5, Informative)
So don't go and call them bozos. Call the idiots who work in the IT divisions bozos if you must, but the average person in Wilkes-Barre wouldn't know what the hell the article right-up means, besides the word taxes.
Technotards (Score:2)
Re:Technotards (Score:5, Informative)
i have a theory that the midrange (its not a mainframe) somehow killed the process (or batch job) running that operated the front end of their data entry system...or the process died on its own. they probably dont know how to login as QSECOFR and restart the batch process to get their front end back and so they think their system crashed. i doubt its a hardware failure
Re:Technotards (Score:3, Insightful)
First a power supply died and nobody cared... then a disk crashed and nobody cared... then a memory chip failed and nobody cared. Then thet finally lost redundency and finally somebody cared.
Re:Technotards (Score:3, Informative)
When we were looking at an AS/400 to replace our aging System/36 in the early nineties, the models we could afford had a backup tape system and nothing else as far as redundancy goes. We decided to replace it with a PC network.
Of course, I didn't cancel support on either the 36 or the Wang until the network had been up and running for six months or so. Doing it sooner would have been, well, stupid.
Basic business, basic math (Score:3, Funny)
25,000 tax records
2 employees inputing them (into what??)
200 records entered/day
12.5 records/man-hour
2000 man hours later...
at $5/hr... $10,000.
Could have bought a new machine for that. And certainly have fixed the old one. In fact, what about the backups??? Send it away and get it burnt onto a CD! All of the data is likely in a fixed format record anyway.
Although it is likely:
1) The company that wrote the software went belly-up in 1989.
2) The software isn't Y2K compliant anyway.
2) The backups hadn't actually been backing anything up for the last 4 years (just spinning the tape).
3) A single RAM chip ($1.75) would fix the machine.
Re:Basic business, basic math (Score:2)
at $5/hr... $10,000.
Hey, guess you've never worked for Government before. All human resource expenses are 'absorbed' by their department - aka paid by taxpayers' money. The section head can then write-off any human labour as 'zero-expense' in all computer projects. Those suckers.
Ray Yancey is as hungry as I am (Score:4, Funny)
I'm up for that. Let's take it to Kitchen Stadium. How will the Iron Chef create a brilliant meal from the flesh of municipal IT morons? One thing is for sure: it'll involve either foie gras or caviar.
These people have jobs and can eat regularly, while other people, such as me, who understand just how crap PCs are, go without eating. Add to that the fact that they put aside their backup contingencies OVER A YEAR before migration could be completed (the second article says they still have 6 months of data entry to go), and I think it's quite a fair plan that they should be eaten. And boy am I hungry.
Jumping to conclusions (Score:2)
The 'computer specialist' who wrote that comment about eating people is a little out of line there. I wouldn't hire anyone who'd say "AS400 is always better than a PC network" without knowing any real specifics about the AS400.. the city had a 20 year old system, and their best bet is probably to get rid of it in favor of something based on less lucrative hardware.
Re:Ray Yancey is as hungry as I am (Score:2)
I'm up for that. Let's take it to Kitchen Stadium. How will the Iron Chef create a brilliant meal from the flesh of municipal IT morons? One thing is for sure: it'll involve either foie gras or caviar.
I would agree. Somehow I have a feeling 'off site storage' and 'disaster recovery plan' aren't in their procedures either. As for the chef, I think it'd more likely be a sauce. The French were good at developing sauces to improve the meal when starting with less than quality cuts, and I think this group fits in that clasification, IMHO.
Incredible incompetence (Score:2)
This is incredible. Really. OK, the town may go through a tough period, but they may actually spend almost as much on re-entering the data as a new mainframe may cost. Not counting the expenses on the PCs, network and PC service/support. These data types are what big iron is made for!
This is not disregarding the struggles of the inhabitants of the town, but uncovering the incompetence of the people leading it. We have had incidents similar to this here in Norway, where a mayor had to go after a scandal when trying to migrate some tax/health care systems. It's just given, nobody fucks up like this and walks!
There are so many sanesoloutions around, you'd think they would pick any of those...
Typical.... (Score:4, Interesting)
"What do you mean, 'it's gone'? I NEED that data for this meeting!"
Actually.... MS Marketing Meets The Suits (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Actually.... MS Marketing Meets The Suits (Score:2)
All because some Microsoftie blew smoke up their ass and said "Look at the "cost" of that VMS system! Why, you could "upgrade" to a "faster" NT system for alot less than you are spending per month!"
They never tell them that it doesn't work and they have just been assimilated into the Borg of Windows Licensing Hell.
Argh... I hate seeing something working fine get ditched for crap!
Don't blame the IT department... (Score:5, Informative)
It never IF computers fail but WHEN, fool (Score:2)
Its not IF the system fails but WHEN.
The folks at Wilkes Barre are idiots and their mayor should fire their CIO, COO or department head IMMEDIATELY.
No excuses.
An MIS shop is no place for tyros.
Re:It never IF computers fail but WHEN, fool (Score:2)
i wish they'd define 'crashed' (Score:5, Insightful)
So what's "crashed"? Does it not turn on? Does it just need a replacement card of some sort (I thought everything was hot-swap on these things)? Are the drives bad and there's no backups? Did the magic smoke come out of it? What?
Re:i wish they'd define 'crashed' (Score:2)
The 400 is a tank but bad things can happen. Most notably, they shut themselves down when the run (almost) out of disk space. We had a user write a recursive query that created a file that ate all the disk of one of our 400's. It took most of a day to recover but nothing was lost.
Chances are, they just need someone who knows how to bring it up in a restricted mode and troubleshoot.
Re:i wish they'd define 'crashed' (Score:2)
t.
Re:i wish they'd define 'crashed' (Score:5, Informative)
And maintenance is a breeze, if you have a contract with IBM: the system detects most hardware faults and sends out an SOS to IBM, most of the time before the part actually fails: the first notification most small AS/400 shops have that something is happening is when the IBM tech shows up at the door with spares. As for software faults -- I personally know of one, sorta. Actually that was on the AS/400's predecessor, the S/38, when a file index got corrupted and the system took a week to notice it. We ended up with some truely strange long-hairs from Rochester dissecting the system over a long weekend trying to understand the problem. Never heard of it happening again. These things just don't break very often.
Stop it. (Score:2)
AS/400 (Score:3, Insightful)
They are super slow but rather robust. And as you said, IBM support is top notch. All the hardware is monitored internally, and then the machine can pop up a warning message for the operator who's running it. Then the machine dials out and sends a service request to IBM. I was sitting here when a drive crashed (1 of 108) and I heard the modem dial out, then I swear 4 minutes later IBM called to schedule service.
Of course, this sort of equipment and service costs money. But the system I'm sitting next to right now counts about 900 MILLION dollars a year in revenue so it's worth it--it absolutely MUST be running 24/365. Forget 99.999 or whatever microsoft is touting.
I saw a little 4 proc e-series one on ebay for a half-mil; that doesn't include the service contract..
You see a lot of them in State and Federal government, and as a poster mentioned, casinos and hotels.
FREE FREE FREE (Score:2)
The Math, The Plot (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok. They said 6 months to re-enter the data. Two people, two computers. Let's say they earn $10/hr.
6months *4 weeks/month * 40 hours/week * $10/hour * 2 employees
= $19,200
That's almost enough for two years of their service contract.
PCs:
$1000 each * 2 + misc expenses puts it over the top I think.
The fact that these employees will be maintaining these PCs ad infinitum doesn't even need to be considered to show the stupidity. Not to mention the BSA audits, the MS support calls, the endless software licence upgrades,
I think what we have here is the ever popular job security plot. We junk the good hardware and buy the bad hardware because we can maintain the bad hardware ourselves and thus we create ourself a job. With the good hardware, all we have to do all day is drink coffee and gossip. We're the first guys on the chopping block when costs have to be cut.
I've seen this time and time again. Junk the $20,000 Unix server that runs the entire company and gets rebooted once a year, replacing it with a network of NT boxes which require 3 full time employees to maintain and crash weekly.
Why don't people get fired for this?
Re:The Math, The Plot (Score:2)
Perhaps I need to re-read the article(s) but where did they say they were moving to a Windows solution? If cost is SUCH an issue with this town perhaps they are moving to a Linux solution. If that were the case I'd reckon that a few newtworked PC's configured properly could easily handle the records of 25000 citizens. Now I won't get started on their "migration" strategy, but the artice(s) do seem somewhat lacking in technical details and somewhat bloated in hype and finger pointing.
It would be interesting to know more about the problem and the chain of events that lead to such a tragic meltdown. Perahps then the article (and the
AS/400 (Score:2)
Why don't people get fired for this?
Because you shouldn't get fired for choosing a specific platform. There are crappy NT applications and there are good ones. It's the same for AS/400 - I have clients counting the days until they throw the AS/400 box out the window.
BSA audits, the MS support calls, the endless software licence upgrades
Audits, as in plural? Come on, one audit over the lifetime of an organization is rare. And AS400 / Red Hat / *nix support grows on trees? As for license upgrades, nobody's forcing you to upgrade.. if you bought the software it's yours to do whatever you like with it.
Re:AS/400 (Score:2, Insightful)
It is the people holding the purse strings who should get the boot in this case.
Re:AS/400 (Score:2)
> upgrade.. if you bought the software it's yours to
> do whatever you like with it.
Are you sane? You would really run outdated Microsoft software on any sort of network that was connected to anything? I don't want to hear, "But it's behind a firewall!", either, because that's a terrible excuse. I recently heard someone say that most networks are like a baked alaska: hard on the outside but soft in the middle. Relying on a firewall as your sole defense is madness.
This is not necessarily an anti-Microsoft flame; I certainly wouldn't run *nix software with known exploits, either.
Security _ought_ to be forcing you to upgrade.
Wilkes Barre is not alone (Score:2)
So, by your logic, if the odds are pretty good, then it matters not what the price of losing is? I'm glad I didn't depend on you as a father. Things would've sucked that one month in the year when you lost the paycheck on the almost sure bet.
There are some things that you can gamble on, and some you can't. Financial records, generally speaking, fall into the latter category. Similarly, I don't want "calculated gambles" in air traffic control, nuclear plant, or similar critical systems.
Wilkes Barre is not alone. Cleveland just lost 300 users' email and calendars, including the mayor's [yahoo.com]. Amazingly, it could cost up to $100,000 to institute a backup system, and the city doesn't even have a person acting as CTO. It appears governmental rectocranial inversion is contagious.
I Bet this Happens All the Time... (Score:2)
Knowng that I had 6 months of typing data into PCs would make me want to quit. Know that those PCs had were more vulnerable to crashing and losing the data again would nudge me over the edge.
You would think that small towns with geographic proximity would band together and set up a WAN, or at least pool their resources to keep the human-resources, software and maintenance costs down (as buying in bulk, even for software, can often net significant savings).
Anyone reading who works for IBM? (Score:4, Funny)
Call them from work on Monday, and laugh at them.
Then encourage as many co-worders as possible to do the same.
Re:Anyone reading who works for IBM? (Score:3, Informative)
I actually have customers who I contact informally through back channels when something critical goes wrong, because it's a hell of a lot easier than dealing with all the policital shit.
Having a solid gold service contract is worthless, if the managers of the people running the machines hamstring them at every turn.
Geeks work well together, PHB's work(?) well together, but geeks and PHB's.... watch out.
Re:Anyone reading who works for IBM? (Score:2, Interesting)
As a former data entry processor: (Score:2, Informative)
A whole 200 items per day, huh? No wonder it's going to take so long. Unless they've having to enter a
Re:As a former data entry processor: (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Let em stew. (Score:2)
Pa is furiously trying to enter 25,000 records (Score:5, Funny)
Pennsylvania Government (Score:2)
They are trying to make you believe they are 'hip' to technology, but it's all such a mess. The state web pages are next to useless for any real information. Their 'online forms' end up being a downloadable PDF (better than nothing, I guess).
And this is the same state that is banning mountain bikers from the state game lands. I still can't see the sense in that...where else will they ride?
I see a similar picture (Score:3, Informative)
Stupid like a fox (Score:3, Funny)
1. Seriously stalling on tax collections and
2. Employing more locals rather than shipping IT money out of town
So you have the best side of Republicanism (1), plus an economic policy that keeps jobs at home just like good Democrats (if there are any left anywhere) want (2) - all in one move. Perfecto!
___
Blame the Mayor (Score:5, Informative)
So far in his 8 years of office(estimate) he has managed to get 2 government buildings and a telemarketing center in the downtown. Government buildings may look nice but they are basically a resource drain because they don't pay any taxes. There are some other new businesses, but they are in tax free development zones. The one government building is home to the offices of rep. Paul Kanjorksi [google.com] who as actually managed to a great disservice to the community but he is a senior congressman who will never loose an election due to name recognition and voter habit. Anyway, it looks like Mcgroarty will not be reelected this year so the situation may improve but most likely not.
McGroarty actually looked promising initially because he was very enthusiastic. It turned out that he just craved attention. The problem with WB and all NEPA politics for that matter, is the fact that competent people do not want to run for office. Most of the talented younger people leave the area, and the people who are left that would make a difference are usually tied to a business or career path which prevents them from running for office. I really don't see an end to this cycle unless competent people start getting politically involved in this area.
Flooded! (Score:4, Informative)
So why don't the know it alls from /. fix it? (Score:2)
So why don't the socially responsible, smart, "we told you so" of slashdot go fix it?
There has to be a few of you with the brains, proximity, and free time to help out..... save the taxpayers some $$, show that the geek community cares, get involved in the political process ("gee Mr. Mayor, talk to us before you do something stupid like this again, we may not save your ass next time!") and get good karma (the REAL stuff, not your silly post mods =)
Or are you like most folks who find it all too easy to bitch from the sidelines how the game is getting played?
Errors in abundance (Score:2)
We only took notes of a few things in each record (type of crime, date, age, sentence etc), but it was gruelling work to do.
I had hacked up a data entry form, but didn't make too much out of the data validation. But after examining the data harvest for the first few days, I decided that real anal data validation was needed, since all kinds of data was wrongly typed, or entered in the wrong fields.
It was not because we were sloppy and we actually took an interrest in the job, but hours and hours of turning pages, gleaning information, type and tab just does make you prone to make mistakes.
I read in some old statistical handbook, that in order to gain 97-98% correct data entries, _two_ people should enter the same data.
I guess that this large retyping of 25.000 tax forms, where each form only seems to be typed in and checked by one person, will be full of errors. I wonder how many thousand record that will needed to be redone.
Re:Errors in abundance (Score:2)
Re:Errors in abundance (Score:2)
There were no explanation in the book. But I think that in those dark days, where "data entry" was a fact, and a profession, that a lot of hard data was gathered about errors in data entries. I don't have the book anymore, but believe that a single person would enter data with around 88% accuracy. The number seems low, but most entry data was probably long (for the typist) meaningless sequences of digits, like Fortran code, scientific measurements etc.
I guess that two people would enter data, a third person would compare data, and recheck the original source if any difference was found. This would allegedly produce a 97-98% accuracy. One could probably improve this somewhat by adding a third data entry person, but it would increase costs, even if one got rid of the "rechecker", and automatically selected the "two of three must right" data, since the rechecker would only have to check the discrepencies, not the whole data set.
So all in all, it is probably a cost-benefit analasys, that decides what one should do. (in the case of this story, I guess a IBM service contract would be the best:-)
Total Cost of Ownership (Score:2, Informative)
Considering all cost caused by administration, crashing PC servers, viruses and such things, i'd rather assume, that running an AS/400 box is much cheaper than running a PC network.
Especially database administration (including backup/restore) is much easier on an AS/400, because the database is integrated into the operating system (and vice versa).
Even Microsoft tried to replace 23 AS/400 boxes with 1200 NT-Servers in 1999/2000, and they couldn't make it run, so they are back on the AS/400s now.
(Read the full story, an article called "IBM's Frank Soltis, uncensored":
http://k-lug.org/pipermail/klug/2000-October/0065
http://www.linux.ie/pipermail/ilug/2000-November/
regards,
octogen
The roads ARE worse. (Score:2)
www.penndotsucks.com
Tells the truth nicely. Pennsylvania has some damned shitty roads. Our public education isn't great, and our liquor laws are beyond stupid. Oh, and it's illegal to pratice magic. Perks of being a commonwealth instead of a state.
Tax info on Windows machines... Uh oh... (Score:3, Funny)
This just in:
WILKES-BARRE - A move to replace a mainframe with PCs brings yet more savings.
Thanks to Mayor Tom McGroarty's brillant money-saving move, the town's aging IBM AS-400 mainframe was replaced by a network of two PCs running Windows ME. "The AS-400 replacement cost was about $12,000, much more that the PCs." The savings do not include the cost of three people entering data for 6 months, or about $120,000. "Who cares, said McGroarty, they are the kids of local shopkeepers who would vote for the opposition if their worthless brats, who don't have any marketable skills, were not employed by me. And it's a different budget anyway." He said the PCs also came with Deer Hunter III, a valuable utility.
The AS-400 problems started appearing on April 12th, when a tax data backup failed. McGroarty pointed out that the PC network was already backed up frequently, and for free -- another money-saving breakthrough that he is very proud of. "Last night, while browsing for, hem, golf tips, I found that all the city's tax data was backed up off-site by a bunch of nice guys who have volunteered and did it for free," said McGroarty. "Their web site has all our data, easily available to all visitors. I wasn't even aware of it, but they seem to have installed their backup software on all our Windows machines. It shows as a new wallpaper that says ``0wN3d by r00tKraCK3rz''. Must be a new software company."
"This move also brought new businesses to our town", added the Mayor. "Executives from Anderson are moving into town because they are impressed by the efficiency of the local police.".
By Jolan Redsneck (who spent two hours trying to slalom between triple-parked cars when driving in downtown WB.)
Re:Do you even know where Wilkes-Barre is, Chris? (Score:2, Insightful)
Carbonite
Re:Do you even know where Wilkes-Barre is, Chris? (Score:2)
I just flew off the handle there, due to some personal reasons.
Sorry, Chris.
Re:Do you even know where Wilkes-Barre is, Chris? (Score:5, Informative)
Going to school in Wilkes-Barre is a soul-crushing experience. See, the town is such a cultural mecca that the McDonald's in public square, the main center of town, closes at 4pm on Fridays. There's nothing to do on the weekends, because all the students go home, and all the students go home on the weekends 'cause there's nothing to do in town. If there's ever a town that could be improved by a 100-kiloton airburst, Wilkes-Barre is it.
And it's not desperately trying to recover from its coal mining days. It already did that, back when the river flooded the town away and a truckload of Federal disaster relief money came pouring in. At that point, basically everyone who could leave town, left town. All that's left is genetically inbred hangers-on. Walk down main street at noon, right through public square, and I'll guarantee you've never seen such a collection of human wreckage in your life. Just about everyone you'll see if missing one or more items from the following list:
a. arms
b. legs
c. teeth
d. a chromosome
e. sanity
Trust me, a PC network intended to replace an AS/400, implemented by a corrupt and incompetent government, is the absolute least of this town's worries. I'd say the raw sewage that gets dumped into the drinking water supply is a bit higher on the list.
Re:Do you even know where Wilkes-Barre is, Chris? (Score:3, Informative)
I agree that by and large Wilkes-Barre is a dying town inhabited for the most part by people who can't (or won't) read a stop sign.
But it does have some redeeming qualities, Wilkes University [wilkes.edu] being the foremost among them. Wilkes has one of the top rated schools of pharmacy [wilkes.edu] in the country. The school of pharmacy is so good that it was the primary reason that a huge employer [timesleader.com] recently opened up shop in the area.
Not to mention that Wilkes has one of the best computer science [wilkes.edu] programs in Pennsylvania. They are so forward thinking it's scary. Every computer that a CS student must use has Linux installed. And in the more general computer labs they have the computers configured to duel-boot so they can have the best of both worlds. If you ever want a poster boy for schools leveraging the power of open-source, Wilkes is it. Heck, even one the assignments [wilkes.edu] for the networking class [wilkes.edu] involves installing Linux. The CS department is staffed with some of the most amazing faculty [wilkes.edu] around. Including John Koch [wilkes.edu] whom solved the century-old Four Color Problem.
It's not just the computer science department either, technology permeates through every aspect of the Wilkes campus. Just take a look at the web page for the radio station [wclh.net] and there automation system [wclh.net] and tell me it's not cool. Anything that tells you what the name of the song is ,while it's
still playing, is a good thing in my book.
It's just too bad that Wilkes-Barre is run by an incompetent mayor that uses the local collage students as a scape-goat for everything and is inhabited by an elderly populace that is too busy trying to kill the collages to realize that they are the only thing keeping Wilkes-Barre alive.
All in all, Wilkes-Barre is a great place to go to school, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to live here forever.
Re:Do you even know where Wilkes-Barre is, Chris? (Score:2)
t.
Math/CS Subnet (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a CS student at Wilkes, and we're fortunate to have such a good department. The subnet is run by student admins (I'm one of them). We've been using various Linux distros for quite awhile now (long before I was here anyway). The dualboot systems run Redhat (mainly because kickstart makes upgrading 30 boxes really easy). The SLC404 lab runs Slack (on an added note, there is a sign on the door to the lab that says "404 - Food not Found" that of course, nobody obeys, but we leave it up because it's funny, well okay, maybe not *that* funny, ah hell with it...). My personal box [linville.org] in the server room runs OpenBSD (nice perk about being an admin is you can co-lo a box into the server room). We've got a couple Mac OS X machines floating around (with dual head displays and DVD-RAMs which we use to burn... uh... n/m ;-) ). Then there is that bastard Solaris machine (quad node sun arch) we keep around for the database class (runs both Oracle and mySQL, but everyone uses Oracle anyway...).
I'd like to quickly plug Open Source Development at Wilkes University [wilkes.edu], one of the opensource sites here at Wilkes. It started from a Networks class assignment a year ago and is still being maintained.
The Networks class assignment is definitely an interesting one. For all those concerned about newbies setting up honeypots, don't worry, I keep a tight leash on those kiddies [slashdot.org].
The Math/CS Club [wilkes.edu] has seen livelier days, but at least we have a nice webpage, a nice PGP ring of trust [linville.org], and a fairly well-developed FAQ [wilkes.edu] (though, none of the freshman ever read it first, they always ask the admins first, who then refer them to the faq and immediately knock their quota down 5 MB.)
We're also the only autonomous subnet at Wilkes. All the other departments have had their subnets assimilated by the technology department (who, in my opinion, are basically fucking idiots). The Math/CS faculty gives us (the student admins) pretty much free reign over how things are done. We keep everything running smoothly on the subnet and they fight off the evil administration.
Yea, the city does suck too. Though, the nice thing about living near a bunch of stripmines and old abandoned coal mining villiages is there are some great places to place paintball. My personal favorite is Concrete City, which consists of 14 concrete two story duplex-style houses (some have basements even!). It's a real rush to with such close house-to-house and room-to-room paintball.
Just my 2c. -root@mathcs.wilkes.edu
Re:Do you even know where Wilkes-Barre is, Chris? (Score:2)
So you're saying it's on a Hellmouth?
(There's always been great debate in alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer if Sunnydale had the only one).
--
Evan
Re:Do you even know where Wilkes-Barre is, Chris? (Score:2)
The downtown area of Wilkes-Barre is hardly the center of the area, like any other city in the US, Wilkes-Barre's downtown district has become a victim of sprawl. The McDonald's you speak of went out of business last month but there are many more to take its place outside of the downtown area. As for your other comments, I'm not even going to waste any energy responding to them..
Look on the bright side, we were the first town to have Cable ..
Re:Do you even know where Wilkes-Barre is, Chris? (Score:2)
I did. All-you-can-drink specials, however, tend to get a bit boring after the 10th or so time.
Are you currently in Wilkes-Barre? Did you leave? Do you regret leaving?
Re:Do you even know where Wilkes-Barre is, Chris? (Score:2)
Huh?
I don't think I've ever heard the switch to easily strip-mined-but-dirty high-sulfur bituminous instead of deep-veined anthracite blamed on "Environmentalist Wackos" before.
The Pennsylvania coal industry died because there's lots of cheaper coal out there.
Re:Ob. Beowulf Comment (Score:5, Funny)
Easy, it's called "Congress"
Re:Ob. Beowulf Comment (Score:2)
> Easy, it's called "Congress"
Which we all know is the opposite of progress
Re:Wow. What a city. (Score:2)
This sounds like a prime target for them. The city clearly has issues when it comes to being organized.
-Restil
It's NOT a mainframe (Score:4, Informative)
I know the moron journalist said it was, but trust me, it's not. It's an AS400 Minicomputer. Mainframes are much larger and more expensive.
Re:Errr but.. (Score:2)
t.
Re:knowing and funding (Score:2)
That's what happens when they try to get a jack of all trades, master of none.
Re:Welcome to Pennsylvannia! (Score:2)
I'm going to have to disagree, but -- at the risk of sounding like a complete asshole -- once you drive about 10 feet beyond the city limits of Pittsburgh its just as bad. I love the City of Pittsburgh, but SWPA is a shithole.