Oracle is suing Google, one of the pieces of evidence is a fairly trivial few lines of code. David Boies tried to make it into a big deal, but he had the wrong judge:
I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I’ve written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There’s no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You’re one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?
West Virginia bought $22,500 routers from Cisco, the type of equipment that would be used to connect offices with ~500 computers to the Internet, to connect tiny libraries (a couple of PCs). Their defense?
Strickling says that NTIA looked into the situation and found that the average cost of the routers was only $12,000—not the $22,600 reported by the paper. (The contract for the devices was $24 million and 1,064 were purchased; 1,064 x $22,600 = $24 million. It’s not clear how Strickling broke down the numbers.)
He explained that West Virginia actually got a good deal. “Had they tried to determine the individual router capacity,” he said, “they felt that they would end up spending more money” thanks to Cisco’s package discount. The gear is future-proofed, and it’s also easier for techs to deal with the same router across the state.
“This was the most economical way forward,” Strickling said.
I love it – “future proofed” for the future that will never come. Cisco makes a whole line of routers exactly for small branch offices and the most expensive one I could find is about $1000.
Warren Terra
I’m pretty much a tech ignoramus, but for a couple of computers in a library wouldn’t you use the same thing you buy for $50 for home use?
ETA This was use-it-or-lose it Stimulus money. Dumb as this use was, at least it wasn’t as scary as those hick towns that bought tanks for anti-terrorist purposes with their stimulus money.
MikeJ
Pity the code monkeys are on the bench instead of in the USPTO.
RSA
I came across that statement by Judge Alsup in a different context, a minor online controversy among programmers about the view that everyone should learn to write code. It was great to read, especially given the way software has been mishandled in our legal system.
On the controversy–you’d think that professional programmers would generally be in favor of everyone knowing something about programming, but there are exceptions.
jwb
There is something to be said for standardization of equipment. On the other hand, that seems a pretty stiff premium for standardization in this case.
dr. bloor
This is right up there with Woody Allen pulling Marshall McLuhan out of thin air in Annie Hall.
Keith
I still think Oracle has Google dead-to-rights on stealing Java. Some it can be legally reproduced without license, but Google – as they did with so much of Android – just did a wholesale copying of someone else’s work in order to flood the market. Being a knockoff of other people’s work is basically built into the OS’s DNA.
BGK
Technical wankery ahead regarding the Cisco routers referenced in the linked piece:
Wow. So, the bits I’m slinging right now are routed through a Cisco 3945 high-availability pair on their way to the internets. We bought the 3945 because we wanted an integrated security option, so that we wouldn’t need a separate firewall and IDS. We also have a gigabit fiber uplink over to the NAP of the Americas in Miami; we do this because all our infrastructure is offsite in another Terremark datacenter, and we wanted no bandwidth issues. We have ~150 people whanging away on that connection 12 hours a day. Even then, should I stick my head in the phone closet, I can hear the 3945s snoring lustily for lack of work. Also too, and we’re certainly not a big account by most measures, we paid under $20,000 for the pair, the options, and a year of 8×5 support.
Not only did West Virginia really over-buy, they got cornholed on the pricing.
chopper
@MikeJ:
clearly, because this one judge knows how to code.
WV State Worker
Bear in mind West Virginia is the same state that just hired Jennifer Garner’s sister, an accountant with no technology experience, as its statewide CTO. I can say this because I live here and work two floors above the leftover routers.
Just Some Fuckhead
I remember when “future-proofed” was vaporware. It’s here now and it clearly comes with a hefty price tag.
Gin & Tonic
A Cisco 3945 is a very serious piece of gear. Its expense is not really from “how many” devices you can connect, but from other things it can do, such as telephony or security-related functions, multiple high-speed fiber line cards, etc.
Even if you’re going to standardize for the sake of efficiency and router management, I can’t imagine any public library I’ve been in anywhere that would warrant a piece of gear that big outside of the NYC library system.
Some Cisco sales guy is laughing all the way to Maui.
mistermix
@Keith: I’m not up on all the particulars of the case, but isn’t this a clean room re-implementation of a Java Virtual Machine? I guess the whole thing is “stealing” in a sense, just the way Compaq “stole” the IBM PC by re-implementing it to create the clone market. But it’s a kind of thievery that happens all the time.
Put another way: Oracle bought Java from Sun. Sun always wanted Java to be an “open standard”. They published tons of APIs. Oracle apparently doesn’t want people to re-implement those APIs. I don’t think writing your own implementation of a fairly public API is stealing.
Gin & Tonic
F’ing comment editor doesn’t work, otherwise I’d say “ETA, props to BGK for coming in ahead of me”
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@dr. bloor:
I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@RSA:
It was gratifying to see a judge learning to code in order to be a better judge for the case before him. But that doesn’t mean that I want him to start writing code for airplane avionics or medical equipment tomorrow.
Reversing the fields: How many lawyers have met engineers who were convinced they “knew” the law as well as they did? And how annoying were those engineers, I wonder? Yet most lawyers would have no problem with a private citizen trying to understand the basics of the law, if only to be a better citizen.
giltay
@mistermix: A clean-room reimplementation is really the opposite of stealing. Besides, Java’s been an open standard for a while, now, specifically to encourage reimplementation.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor: I don’t know anything about this particular judge, but I know lawyers who were once software developers. It sounds like that may be this judges experience, given what he said.
No, I wouldn’t want a guy who just picked up a book to write avionics software, but having a judge who can write avionics software be a judge in a technology trial sounds like the right combination.
Schlemizel
There are several reasons those f’ing sales clowns from Cisco drive luxury cars. F’ing over buyers is only one of them.
OTOH it is possible that the routers really did only cost 12k each & the other 10k was for support contracts.
I used to work for an assclown that went to Interop every year (taking all the travel budget so his technical staff couldn’t go) all he could talk about when he got back was how much Cisco had dropped on strippers & hookers for him.
I worked on a huge DoD project once & one of the design engineers came back from a trip to Cisco to tell us they had spent 2k on lap dances for him (I assumed they charged by the square foot of lappage). I dropped a dime on him but he denied it & the investigators dropped it.
jibeaux
Oh, West Virginia is future-proofed, all right.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
that is a nice sales job by the cisco rep, though. probably got paid more than the judge.
Villago Delenda Est
@dr. bloor:
Yeah, my geek friends I hang out with (one is a syadmin/mail expert at the UofO, the other a customer service rep at Symantec) just loved that story…a judge with a clue who just totally pwned Boies’ bullshit.
JGabriel
mistermix:
Seriously. Although, you might want to add two grand for a dedicated Cisco firewall. A $300 5505 could probably handle most libraries needs, but I’m being generous here and speccing out 5510.
That still only costs you $3k per branch.
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Steve
The Northern District of California is a pretty tech-savvy court, owing to all the Silicon Valley cases they’ve heard over the years. With a different judge, though, you might very well be able to sell the argument that copying a trivial nine-line subroutine is a big deal.
It sounds like Google had an expert witness who testified that a high school student could have written that code; it makes me curious what Oracle’s expert possibly could have said to make it sound challenging.
It’s hard to know whether David Boies was trying to pull a fast one here, or whether he simply had no idea. Some very smart lawyers are amazingly clueless about how technology works. Boies’ undergraduate degree is a B.S., but since he graduated in 1964 I’m guessing it wasn’t in computer science.
JGabriel
I Programmer:
Knowing the American political and legal system, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Boies & Partners appeal this judge’s ultimate decision, assuming it goes against them, on the basis that he was unfairly biased by his mathematical and coding experience.
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rlrr
A similar story:
Many years ago I was a witness for the prosecution; a former landlord of mine was charged with violating multiple zoning rules. The landlord’s (who was representing himself) only witness was a Russian immigrant who didn’t speak English. The landlord conveniently acted as translator. When the witness’ testimony and cross examination was over, it became clear to everyone the judge spoke fluent Russian. The look on the landlord’s face was priceless…
Villago Delenda Est
@JGabriel:
“Facts have an anti-Oracle bias!”
Gin & Tonic
@Schlemizel: I’ve been responsible for 6 or 7-digit contracts with Cisco every year for at least the last 10, and have never encountered this kind of behavior.
JGabriel
Steve:
I don’t know either. I can tell you that Boies was the one of the counsel for SCO’s attack on Linux through IBM, one of the most — probably the most — egregious abuses of the judicial system by a tech company ever.
How bad was it? SCO made IBM’s legal team, known throughout the industry as “the Nazgul”, look like the good guys.
SCO lost that one, so, if I had to bet, I wouldn’t know whether to bet on Boies being clueless about technology, or recklessly evil for the sake of billing hours. Though I’m leaning towards the latter.
.
Villago Delenda Est
Well, this is interesting.
Blizzard seems to be totally off the net today. As in you can’t connect to WoW, you can’t got to their webpage, Google can find anything about them.
Tried a tracert to them, and it didn’t go anywhere because the the name battle.net or blizzard.com couldn’t be resolved.
Ooops. This is bad news for you Diablo III players, obviously.
Steve
@Villago Delenda Est: Some of my friends were complaining about connection problems last night. I played till like 5am with no problems, though…
BenA
@RSA:
I’ve made a career out of replacing systems that were built by various accoutants and engineers that “knew how to code” because they took one FORTRAN or COBOL course in college. Engineers create some of the worst crap I’ve ever seen. If I was a CIO the thought of a mechanical engineer and MS Access would keep me up at night. While this has been pretty lucrative for me… I’d rather not think about the ramifications of other people getting in on the act.
EIGRP
@Schlemizel: While I work for Cisco, I have no insight into the WV router thing. The only thing I can add to this comment is… what expense category do those guys use? “Hookers and blow” is not a category I’ve seen.
Eric
Villago Delenda Est
@Steve:
I’ve seen this before…if you’re connected to them and some sort of issue develops while you’re connected, you’re fine. As long as you stay connected.
It’s just that if for some reason you get tossed off, you can’t get back in.
This looks pretty major…if Google can’t find them, no one can.
JGabriel
Warren Terra:
You could … but probably shouldn’t. It’s a government operation, so you want business class equipment and support contracts — but you don’t need the high end stuff, the small office line should be robust enough.
Schlemizel makes a good point above, though, that support contracts will be nearly the price of the purchased equipment, since they usually include configuration and SW tech support plus hardware support up to and including full replacement of the unit for the length of the contract. At least that’s how it was when I was last working in the field. That was a few years ago, but I doubt much has changed as far as support pricing goes.
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elm
@RSA: You couldn’t pay me to click a Jeff Atwood link. I’m sure he’s backed himself into yet another nonsensical contrarian position.
It doesn’t take much effort to learn rudimentary coding (assignments, if statements, loops, and functions). It’s not magic. There’s no reason that couldn’t be part of a high-school science or math course and that would do rather a lot to promote public understanding of how software operates.
Bubblegum Tate
@Keith:
Yeah, they do (all those emails between Google engineers basically saying “fuck this–we just need to use Java” are pretty tough to spin), but this particular point was a definite loss for Google. I’m not sure why they were pushing it, but then again, IANAL.
giltay
@elm: I read that essay a few days ago, and your prediction is entirely correct.
Villago Delenda Est
@elm:
Some of my geek friends love to riff on this particular meme, talking about “the proper incantation” to get some piece of software to do what you want it to do.
Steve
@Villago Delenda Est: I can connect to battle.net in my browser right now, and Blizzard Entertainment is still the first Google hit from “blizzard,” at least for me.
Obviously you can have localized DNS issues, but I don’t see how that would affect Google search results. Very strange…
Bubblegum Tate
@jibeaux:
BOOM! Roasted.
Bubblegum Tate
@Bubblegum Tate:
loss for Oracle, that should’ve said.
RSA
@elm:
Exactly right, and I entirely agree with you that knowing something about computers is a useful thing, even for people who won’t ever become professional programmers. (I’ve even written a book on this topic.)
Villago Delenda Est
@Steve:
Yeah, I’m still getting ??? from Google about anything Blizz related. It’s bizarre.
Perhaps they just like NYC and hate Oregon. Who knows?
RSA
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor:
Me either. Some of the pushback against people learning to write programs runs along the same lines–there’s a risk that bad code will be reused in situations where it will cause damage (not that I think you’re arguing this position). I think of this as a “social technological” issue rather than an issue for individuals. That is, code reuse is really easy, so that by analogy someone can take the design for a tree house and try to use it to build a multi-story building. Of course, the answer in this situation isn’t to prevent people from building treehouses. For software, though, we haven’t yet figured out a good answer.
Roger Moore
@mistermix:
Actually, as I remember the issue, it’s a clean room reimplementation of part of the Java API, and it’s the partial nature of the reimplementation that’s the issue. Sun/Oracle actually published the Java API with the goal of allowing new implementations of the spec because that’s part of being a genuinely open and standard language.
The trick is that they only gave official permission to people who use the API to people who completely implemented the spec. Android’s Dalvik implementation left some stuff out, so Oracle is claiming it violated the terms of the API grant and doesn’t have any right to do anything with any of the API.
I practice, it’s obvious that this is really a money grab, not anything about their intellectual property. Sun never had a good plan for how to make money off Java. Then they looked at Android and decided that it was making a bunch of money, so they’d sue to try to get a piece of the pie.
Roger Moore
@BenA:
There are good and bad sides to having people other than full time programmers producing code. On the one hand, their coding can be awful and need to be replaced by something professional. On the other hand, they often understand the problem and the solution far better than any programmer would, so their code does the job better than nicer code written by somebody who only knows programming.
My experience as a scientist is that I’d rather have a program that was written- or at the very least originally written- by a scientist than one that was written by a programmer. It’s far easier to clean up messy code that solves the problem correctly than add the right solution to beautifully written code that solves the problem wrong.
Fwiffo
I’m a programmer by trade, and I looked at the rangeCheck function… The Oracle lawyer claimed it might take a programmer 1-2 days to produce that function. That’s entirely possible; I’ve known programmers who will spend two minutes writing a function like that, pat themselves on the back and then spend the next two days watching porn before getting back to work.
The judge is correct; it’s a completely common, straightforward piece of code that probably has been written (in some form) by every high school level programmer. It’s the most basic kind of programming problem and the kind of thing that would appear on their very first piece of homework.
If that function can be patented, then carpenters can patent “a method for joining boards securely by using TWO nails instead of one”, political speechwriters can patent the phrase “God bless America” and digital artists can patent the color black.
BenA
@RSA:
I think your analogy is spot on and even in the construction industry you have people who are woefully unprepared to do the kind of work they end up doing. I mean the need for building inspectors, construction codes, and even Angie’s List all point to the same sort of issue. And while there are some certifications and the like in our industry it still really is the wild west in a lot of ways. Of course it’s still in it’s early adolescence. You would think after the expense of having to re-tool so many things over the last 10-15 years management would get wise and start to implement some stronger standards… but I haven’t seen much evidence of it.
I agree that some increased level of technological understanding would go a long way… but there’s just something about coding that makes a lot of people go: “Anyone can do that!” I mean I work for a utility and they would go ape shit if were to walk into a power plant and do something as mundane as tighten a screw… but in the reverse situation they’ve historically had very little problem with a guy they hired to monitor plant functions deciding he can write a program… and in the end the costs end up being very high because of it. I guess in the end I might be validating your point… maybe if people higher up the chain had a stronger grasp on what actually needs to be done… they’d have a bit more respect for those people that can do it well.
Morat20
Function: RangeCheck()
Length: 9 lines of code.
I don’t need to see anything more than that to tell you exactly what it does, how it does it, and affirm that yes — a high schooler could have written it.
I’ve written that function a zillion times in my career, starting in high school Pascal classes. Everyone who has ever written code has done that.
I can’t speak to the merits of any other part of the suit, but if you’re claiming copyright infringement on a check to see if a value is inside a given range, you should be fined for wasting the court’s time. And slapped for being an idiot.
RSA
@BenA:
Interesting! I honestly hadn’t considered that this would be a big problem in other industries, but you make a good case. There’s a general challenge in evaluating people’s expertise.
BenA
@Roger Moore:
I’d agree with you if the person doing the code was actually writing a program that dealt strictly with his domain knowledge. I agree 100%. That’s almost never the case in my experience… what usually ends up happening is that one person in the group can hack something together in Access and he becomes the catch all for anything that comes through… most of the time they actually end up with that as their sole job and never actually do much of the work they were hired for. Especially as things become more complex. That person often gets overwhelmed because nothing really works quite right… and quit or transfer out of the group. That’s usually where I come in. It almost always costs more to redo the work than it would have been to do it right from the beginning.
S. cerevisiae
@Villago Delenda Est: You mean there’s not a magic gnome that lives in my laptop?
JGabriel
__
__
Villago Delenda Est:
Reminds me of a story a friend of mine had about working in an advertising translation shop.
As you can imagine, it was a polyglot mix of people from different cultures, all working on translating ads or reviewing them to make sure no inadvertent obscenities or double entendre sneaked in.
One morning he walks in, and three people from — I don’t remember if they were from Caribbean, Central American, South American, or African cultures, but it was some amalgam from that set — are burning incense on a plate in front of a Mac (it was a Mac shop).
Warily, “What are you doing?”
“The computer. It’s not working. We’re exorcising the demons.”
“No. No, don’t do that. I’ll take of it. Could you put that out before the fire alarm … [Wheep! Wheep! Wheep!] … Shit.”
.
elm
@RSA:
I think baseline education in the relevant field can help with that.
I can use a hammer and nail to fasten a couple of boards together, and maybe I could even build a treehouse, but there’s no way I could build (or even do significant repairs on) a real house without educating myself further.
My minimal familiarity with that area lets me know when I’m in over my head, lets me recognize when people have skill levels similar to my own, lets me recognize when I need to call a real professional, and lets me recognize the value that a real professional brings.
Similarly, if every adult had learned rudimentary programming in high school, there would be less opportunity for flim-flammers and the absolutely incompetent to deceive people.
That’s not perfect, but it should be obvious that a 16 year old student from Mullingar probably can’t create a revolutionary web browser from scratch. Unfortunately, even our tech press isn’t savvy enough to not fall for that.
JGabriel
For the record, that incense-exorcism story happened in the mid 1990s, so computers were still unfamiliar to a lot of people.
.
Ben Cisco
Dude should have been wearing a ski mask when he closed that sale.
elm
@BenA:
I’ve seen that happen as well and I agree that it’s a real problem. To torture an analogy, it’s like trying to grow a treehouse into a real house — it’s not going to work. One part of house-building is the process of banging boards together, but even the world’s best board-banger is never going to construct a habitable house without experience, education, and a plan.
If more people knew the basics of programming, then that would de-mystify it for the general public and more people would recognize that Bob’s in way over his head. The situation you describe can only persist so long as programming remains an opaque subject and people can’t recognize when they (or a coworker) are in over their heads.
Steve
@JGabriel: Here is an updated version of the story about banishing the computer demons… very funny!
gaz
@RSA: I’m going the opposite direction. I know how to code, and often do little projects for local small businesses. There’s a surprising overlap with legal in a lot of the stuff I do, so I’m studying to be a paralegal. I don’t ever want to be a lawyer, particularly trial or anything like that, but having a decent grasp of law makes me a better consultant – particularly for folks that need software that overlaps with medical stuff (which I end up handling quite a bit)
Roger Moore
@BenA:
I’ve been there, too. I wrote a quick hack of an Access database to handle billing for my group at work. It let us do billing and get back to our real work for a few years, but I was perfectly happy when our IT department came in and said they wanted to replace it with a proper system that could be generalized across groups. They actually looked at the thing I produced to help figure out what we wanted and needed, but they sure as hell rewrote the whole thing from the ground up. It does a lot of great stuff that mine could never do, like tie into other organizational databases, but I still miss the ability to write my own arbitrary queries.
gaz
@elm: Disclaimer: Playing devil’s advocate here.
Opacity is good for job security =)
On a slightly more serious note: The last thing I want in my field is for sales guys, marketing guys and mid-level managers to know too much about coding. They already think they know everything. Knowing a little VBA would just make them more dangerous.
gaz
@Ben Cisco: heheheh
gaz
@JGabriel:
I keep a rubber chicken around to wave over my code when necessary, while reciting the proper incantations. It’s not only comic relief – but it doesn’t violate any fire codes =)
Roger Moore
@elm:
I think this is about right. I don’t expect everyone to be a professional plumber, carpenter, and electrician, but I do think most people should be able to plunge a toilet, fix a dripping faucet, drive a nail, attach something to the wall with a drywall anchor, reset a tripped circuit breaker, and understand why it’s important to use a grounded outlet. Similarly, I don’t expect everyone to be a professional programmer, but they ought to be able to understand basic programming concepts and read and understand a standard .bat file.
JGabriel
@Steve:
As far as I know, the story I told above is true. I knew the guy it happened to, and I did some consulting work in the shop where it happened.
I wasn’t an eye-witness, so it’s possible he was merely personalizing an urban myth, but I’ve never had any reason to doubt it — especially after the 3-4 weeks consulting work I did there, which pretty much confirmed the extremely multi-cultural/multi-linguistic aspect of the company.
.
gaz
@Roger Moore: 1986 called. They want their scripting back.
Anyone that still uses batch files should be publicly caned.
That’s what WSH and powershell are for.
Steve
@JGabriel: I was just posting a funny link. I wasn’t saying your story is made-up.
WV State Worker
@Schlemizel: It wasn’t Cisco who sold them the routers. Verizon was the low bidder. The guy who broke the story, a sometimes overeager writer for the Charleston Gazette, contacted Cisco and tried to buy a 3945 for his low-capacity network and they wouldn’t sell it to him. They offered him a more realistic choice instead. Not that small business salesmen and enterprise government salesmen aren’t different beasts entirely, but in this case the blame can’t fall on Cisco.
300baud
Regarding the Cisco routers:
I personally have $50 routers at home, but there is no way in hell I would try to remotely manage even a 5-node network with consumer-grade gear. The stuff isn’t reliable enough, and doesn’t have the right features.
The 800-series router mentioned in the post doesn’t support the T1 lines locations are using now, and only the highest-end model supports the fiber they’re switching to.
I’m not saying they didn’t get screwed on the pricing, but I am saying that amateur opinions on how to run a 1000-node state-wide network are, well, amateur.
gaz
@BGK:
Welcome to government. Your tax dollars at work.
During the clinton administration, some standards for IT were put forth and adopted by various agencies which helped matters somewhat.
Back when I was still technically a teenager I did some work for a washington DSHS office, (right around the time the fed IT standards were starting to be implemented in state offices). They had a NASTY token ring network and used lowest-bidder Madge network cards. At least once a week I had to replace a card that fried, and they definitely cost a lot more than their $15 a piece price tag in terms of supporting them. The TCO on that network was awful. Things are slightly better now (most govt offices use Ethernet now, for example) but they still have a tendency to throw good money after bad. This is our democracy, people. Cherish it.
gaz
@300baud: T1, still? Ouch.
OC connections are SOOO much better. T1s are god awful, and still too expensive when taking TCO and performance into account, IMO. Furthermore, for all of their vaunted reputation for reliability – the hardware that supports them is often tenacious and has a tendency to cost waaay too much.
Mike G
Shorter judge:
I’m not one of those proudly-ignorant tribal wingnuts you associate with, douchebag.
LanceThruster
There’s a lot to be said for that fact that jargon is a feature, not a bug as it helps maintain the inner sanctum of the priestcraft reletively free of intruders.
That being said, it’s clear to me that a new flux-capacitor would have resolved the issue in perpetuity. Then it would have been back-to-the-future-proofed.
LanceThruster
@gaz: I’m not a tech, but you still have to hop up and down on on foot as you wave the chicken around, no? Otherwise the fix won’t set and you’ll require constant reapplications of the hoodoo-voodoo.
J R
@JGabriel:
Come on, everyone knows that the daemons inside are the most important of any piece of digital tech!
And in defense of the W Va purchase of Cisco routers, the guy who made that decision probably didn’t know how to spel Cisko!
;-)
And about engineers writing code, I had to deal with biologists who wrote an Access DB that got so big – well, it was intended to hold all water quality biology data for a whole state. No, it was intended to hold a tiny bit of that data, and then expected to expand w/o end to hold all the bio data in the world. Not gonna happen!
We were lucky they didn’t lose ever bit of that data before they got actual IT people involved.
Which would probably have been my fault, even tho I never even met the biologists, let alone the system.
So glad I’m retired!
gaz
@LanceThruster: Yes. If that fails you must make a sacrifice to the God Of Logic(TM), patents pending.
In that case you’ll need a virgin, a goat, or a virgin goat.
ETA: In IT departments it’s usually easier to locate a virgin than a goat. =)
RSA
@gaz:
Cool. I wish there were more people we might call “exchange students” between professions, developing what Harry Collins describes as interactional expertise.
J R
@Roger Moore:
Roger, you should be able to write ad hoc SQL queries in any DB your IT people would have used.
Have you talked to a head IT guru about getting authority to run read-only queries?
We did a lot of work to provide senior users with that ability, and then no one used it, not even the people who demanded that we provide them the ability to acess the “raw Data”…
The Real Randiego
@300baud: <—THIS! THANK YOU.
Based on what's been posted – most here have no idea whether WVA got hosed or not. Cisco gear ain't cheap, and for a damn good reason.
All you technical experts understand that workstations in a 500-seat LAN don't connect to routers, right? They connect to switches, each port of which has to be installed and hardwired (barring wirelss access – which requires different gear), which are then connected to the Router, and then usually a firewall device of some sort…
So, there are 3 components to the bid:
1. Hardware (routers, switches… possibly other stuff like firewalls and remote-access hardware).
2. Installation (parts and labor)
3. Maintenance Plan (also not cheap)
So then it's very easy to see how this bid is possibly reasonable. Large-scale government IT contracts tend to get pretty sweet deals as well from Cisco.
One further note: Libraries are public-facing, and tend to make a lot more political noise than other Govt enterprises. When they break people scream bloody murder. They therefore require robust networks.
The Real Randiego
@The Real Randiego: I just re-read the article. It kinda looks like they AREN’T connecting a 500-seat LAN., but have stockpiled a lot of these devices that CAN do that, for a network that doesn’t need them.
Nevermind then. Carry on.
AA+ Bonds
Great that the argument “should non-programmers learn to code?” always breaks down among the majority of programmers in the same predictable way:
1) Yes! Because everyone who doesn’t know how to code is stupid! Man, I even work with other programmers who don’t know the basics! They’re so stupid! Let me tell you about this stupid programmer . . .
2) No! Because then all those idiots who don’t know how to code will think they know how to code! Man, I even work with other programmers who don’t know the basics! They’re so stupid! Let me tell you about this stupid programmer . . .
As someone moving from a non-tech background into a field where I’m learning and teaching myself a few languages at once, I can tell you the #1 PROBLEM with the whole business
NOBODY-PROGRAMMERS’ EGOS and generally INFANTILE BOOT-STRAPPIN HEINLEIN-BRAINWASHED SOCIAL INEPTITUDE
I have a select few resources I use for all questions because if I want to ask anything simple from “what should I know about X industry today” to “say, what should I do to handle this array in X way in Y language”, if I go to ANYONE outside of that small group, instructors included, I will first have to sit through a meaningless trivia test and/or some playground-ass attempts to knock me for not knowing already before receiving a monotone torrent of absolutely useless anti-communication to satisfy the fragile programmer ego I am apparently shoring up by asking the question
And forget Internet research – programmers have ruined that too; Q&A sites are flooded with “contributors” perched like vultures to SCREECH and CLAW at each other about how no sensible person would ever use that code in post #3, how it must have come from a real Stupid Programmer, how it should be done using blah de blah de blah which I’d show you if I had time but–
The real side-splitter is that when I present programmers with this problem, they usually work their jaws for a second and come back with: we just get so fed up! because people are so stupid! Man, I work with this stupid guy who always–
The only exceptions I’ve found among the programmers I know are my sister, and my father, and one of my teachers. They all offer variations on the theory that a lot of programmers don’t have any self-worth beyond proving their superiority to each other in the day-to-day and it is a real problem on all team projects
My teacher also offers some stereotyping and says it’s because they got beat up in high school and are always looking for chances to do it themselves but IDK . . . two out of three of the above people didn’t start programming until well after their bachelor’s, which I assume has something to do with it (all of them are either employed by top shops in their field or retired from them with pensions)
. . .I won’t even start on how often these White God stories descend into odious racism or sexism as displayed in some of the comments above and in linked articles
A couple chemists in the private sector are the only people I know who are half as bad about this shit, and it doesn’t seem to eat most engineers even; the civil engineers I’ve met are always thrilled when they find non-professionals who are learning the basics
I used to assume it was my background in customer service that made me cringe at “luser” talk . . . but now I wonder if I’m not just fundamentally different from most programmers on some basic social level
phil
@AA+ Bonds:
Just give it some time. With that rant, you seem to be well on your way…
(only kidding)
Stephen
I wish we had those kind of routers at work. I have to fight to get a couple grand for some of our Cisco routers.
Jason
@elm: These days, there’s a whole bunch of professions that simply have to learn to code. For example, climate scientists work with a notoriously hard to understand and maintain piece of software called GISTEMP. It’s hard to understand because it was written by climate scientists, not professional programmers. You could say they should have hired software engineers, but these are typical research scientists — if they don’t code it themselves, it doesn’t get done. Consequently, it’s vital that today’s scientists have basic skills in writing clear and maintainable code. Most, unfortunately, don’t.
jonas
Sheez. This story reads like the classic Simpsons “Monorail” episode: “You know, a [state] with money is a little like the mule with the spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it.”
DLew On Roids
The router story is the tip of a huge tech iceberg. I have direct knowledge of multiple federal agencies buying the exact same models for similar applications. The waste is in the tens of millions of dollars, and they use the exact same excuses–standardization, future-proofing, VoIP capabilities. Government employees are taught what to say to superiors, service providers, and competitors. It’s not corruption, but it’s mind-boggling waste built on the technical ignorance of government agencies that have been stripped bare of skills by budget cuts and the race to bring in consultants, who are more concerned about their own fees than saving money.
I suspect you’d find the same thing in areas like security services (e.g., Symantec) and cloud apps (MSFT, Google, etc.)