OT: Illinois Officials choose MS over Linux

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Aug 03, 2007, Fairlight wrote:
>>From inside the gravity well of a singularity, GCC Consulting shouted:
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: Fairlight
>> > 
>> > Confucius (Bill Campbell) say:
>> > > 
>> > > You have to remember that the primary objective of government 
>> > > officials is to increase the size of government and their job 
>> > > security.  Efficiency isn't a consideration as that might result in 
>> > > fewer jobs and less payoffs to their supporters.
>> > 
>> > One has to wonder, though...
>> > 
>> > If a company or individual hired someone to do a job, and 
>> > they milked it at great expense, the employer would have a 
>> > fit and fire them.
>> > 
>> > Elected officials are basically employed by the people (in 
>> > theory).  Why should it be any different there?
>> 
>> Mark,
>> 
>> Most people are using MS on their computer systems.  Therefore going with MS
>> is safe.
>> 
>> This was like years ago, IT manager going/staying with IBM a safe decision.
>> 
>> So, if the public, elected officials thin MS is the best, why would an IT
>> person buck this and chance loosing his job.
>> 
>> Or, could Gates and company be donating to the local school systems and the
>> pols elections?
>
>Kinda missing my point, Richard.
>
>I wasn't actually commenting on MS, although my MS-related comment would
>have been "one out of three ain't bad--it's predictably insecure".
>
>I was responding more to Bill's comment about efficiency not being in the
>best interests of the employee.
>
>Take a system...let's say you have to do 'x' task, and get -so- good at
>it that it takes 1/4 the time.  And you're on hourly.  Suddenly it's 4x
>as hard to put food on the table, simply because you're good at what you
>do.  That's an example where it doesn't pay to be efficient--there's no
>incentive, as it undermines income security, basically.

The problem isn't so much a single employee, but the overall system where
it would require 1/4th as many employees, which isn't good for building
empires.  I had an office manager who worked for the Post Office at one
time, and got in trouble with the union because she was working too fast.

In the early '70s I interviewed for a job at the USPS headquarters in
Washington D.C. to do development work.  They offered me a job that would
have paid about a third more than I was making as data processing manager
for a private company.  The head of the department didn't say a word about
what their objectives were, he only talked about how many billets they were
adding and how their department was growing.  I chose to stay where I was
in spite of the extra pay (not to mention the benefits), because I didn't
think I could get anything worthwhile done.

On a related note, the private job I had was with a Navy contractor, aka
``Beltway Bandit'' which worked on CPFF (Cost Plus Fixed Fee) contracts.  I
ran the computer operations to minimize cost, and produce the best bang for
the buck.  We had two people in the D.P. department, supporting about 200
engineers and a Burroughs main frame.  It took me almost 10 years to figure
out that minimizing costs wasn't the object because lower costs meant lower
fees (CPFF right).  I left after a major internal fight to keep them from
replacing the Burroughs system with an IBM/360, which would have required
many more support people, and was far less effient.  I won that fight, but
the person who wanted the 360 became my boss.  That was when I quit to race
cars full time.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of
the collective society that is coming, where everyone would be
interdependent.  1899 John Dewey, educational philosopher, proponent of
modern public schools.