[Tfug] TUSD Tech Nightmare

[Bowie J. Poag]

Oh, no doubt... When I was there, there was one guy who was building a 
beowulf cluster from money scrounged together from people in the 
department donating $50 there, $100 there.. Just sad. And for what he 
was doing, he needed it!





keith smith wrote:
> If they were a for profit org they would spend 1/2 as much and expect twice as much from it.
>
> I'll be there are some real brains at the U that could really use some advanced hardware that are having difficulty getting it.
>
> "Bowie J. Poag" <bpoag at comcast.net> wrote: 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   
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
>> Subscription Options:
>> http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org
>>
>>   
>>     
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
> Subscription Options:
> http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org
>
>
>
> Keith Smith 
> A link from my website to yours
> Submit Your Metro Phoenix Website
>  
> ---------------------------------
> Cheap Talk? Check out Yahoo! Messenger's low PC-to-Phone call rates.
> _______________________________________________
> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
> Subscription Options:
> http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org
>
>