[Tfug] TUSD Tech Nightmare

[Bowie J. Poag]

I hope it's not like this elsewhere in the country...

Every school's IT department i've ever seen has been, in some facet, 
comically mismanaged. Largely good people, but absolutely helpless 
technologically. It borders on sad.. Dumping tons of money at problems 
they don't understand, for software they dont use, and sold enormous 
amounts of hardware so far beyond their needs it boggles the mind.  One 
place I saw here in town had a dedicated quad processor Wintel box as a 
webserver...serving precisely half a dozen webpages. 6 HTML documents. 
$300 a month if I remember correctly, spent on a dedicated T1 for a 
webserver that saw practically zero traffic. A 56k modem would have been 
overkill for that thing.

Even the UofA has it's issues. I used to *routinely* pick up NeXT 
workstations from the UofA auctions. $10k-$15k Unix workstations who's 
function could have easilly been replicated with a simple X terminal. 
And besides, why NeXT?  When I worked for UofA, there was a woman in our 
department that had managed to get her own SGI o2 gumdrop workstation, 
which, at the time, was about $12k. A massive hot-rod graphics 
workstation. Her justification for buying it? "It looked user friendly, 
like my Mac at home". When she found out it wasn't a Mac, it just 
collected dust in her office. A couple grad students ended up using it 
as an X terminal to contact a bunch of antique RS/6000's I maintained. 
Nothing I could do about it but shake my head in disbelief at how 
financially irresponsible (and occasionally corrupt!) the department was.

Ahhh, the stories I could tell you over a beer.. :)

Cheers,
Bowie






Brad Becker wrote:
> On Sun, 04 Mar 2007 19:15:14 -0700, George Cohn <gwcohn at simplybits.net>  
> wrote:
>
>   
>> LOL!  About 20 years ago, I was working for a health care company that
>> shall remain nameless.
>>
>> They hired a new facilities manager who had a construction background.
>> His first act was to get rid of nearly every facilities person and
>> contract out the work to his buddies.
>>
>> He once told my manager that if he couldn't clear $1 million in 4 years
>> there, he was doing something wrong.
>>
>> After he was escorted out the front door, he went to work for the COT
>> where he worked his magic at the Price Center.  He left there and I
>> believe he went somewhere at the UA.  Don't know where he is now.
>>
>> Trust me, those types are like cockroaches and will survive the end of
>> the earth.
>>     
>
> ---------
>
> Yep, check out the extensive list of clients the firm under investigation  
> (Nvision Networking) has ...
>
> http://nvisionnet.com/nvcustomers.htm
>
> Appears the attorney general is going to keep busy.
>
> For a company awarded millions in contracts their website seems like an  
> afterthought ... or a front :)
>
> Brad Becker
>
>
>
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