[geeks] Liber-fascism

[Nick B.]

You're giving me flashbacks :(
Think I can sue em for PTSD?
	Nick
On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 08:48:59PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Oct 2008, Nick B. wrote:
>
>> I'm curious, do you have any experience whatsoever inside the government?
>
> Mmm, the stories I could tell.  Working for the state for nearly three
> years is what solidified all this for me.
>
> Given what I've said in this thread, this is going to sound very strange,
> but I -very- highly recommend that everyone do a six-month stint at a
> government agency.  It'll give you a view into how things work that will
> make you forever suspicious when some government agency tells you they
> need X dollars to solve some non-problem.
>
> Here's a very short example:  While working for an agency at the State of
> Texas, my primary project was to migrate a core piece of business software
> from an S/390 mainframe onto a bunch of RS/6000 servers.  So that the
> agency wouldn't suffer from vendor lock-in (despite standardizing on IBM
> top-to-bottom), one of the core requirements of the project was that the
> selection of components involved would not impose the requirement on
> maintainers to know any programming language.
>
> That is, an entire state agency was going to migrate its entire business
> onto an app that was mandated to be built from a point-and-click code
> generator.  That application went online in September of 2003, and it was
> a big deal since $agency issued a regulation requiring every doctor in the
> state who was licensed to perform procedures resulting from a Worker's
> Compensation claim to register through this web application.
>
> The stack consisted of a pair of IBM p660 (quad RS64-IV, 8GB memory)
> servers running Oracle with failover, a pair of IBM p630 (dual POWER4, 4GB
> memory) servers running WebSphere AS, and a pair of IBM p610 (dual POWER3,
> 4GB memory) servers running IBM HTTP Server (Apache) with cryptographic
> accelerator cards to offload SSL.  In front of all that was a ciscoSystem
> LocalDirector cluster for load-balancing.
>
> In September of 2003, when the application launched, it could support four
> (4) concurrent user sessions before it fell over and ran out of memory.
>
> The project was declared a resounding success.
>
> -- 
> Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
> Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
> USA               |
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