I had a number of pieces of gear from Harris, the company involved in this mess, and they all worked as advertised. They tend to be conservative in design and rugged, but they do what they claim to do in their manual. I have every reason to believe that Harris delivered what was ordered, it just wasn’t what was needed.

The last report on this mess had a statement from Harris essentially saying that they were having trouble staying up with the changes that the Census Bureau was making, which is the reason for the delays and cost overrun. Actually, he was a bit more opaque, as befits the spokesman for a company that would like to just finish the contract and never get involved with the customer again.

Well, first off… Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaa… PMSL!

OK. Had to get that off my chest, though I will be chuckling for days to come! 😀

One of the very first projects I ever managed completely, was a data recorder for the Queensland Electricity Board. Qld is a huge area, and people are scattered all over. Some homesteads are truly huge and have their own substations! It took a LOT of manpower and time to just get information on their power users. Most of the time they had to use the old chart recorders, but there were serious environmental issues with them in Northern Aus, and they had to be frequently replaced or repaired. We replied to a RFT to design a system that could operate remotely in various ways, from hand-held to reading *meters* from a light aircraft. Took a year from concept to production and was a huge success. I believe they still use them, or an updated version. Qld. has one of the harshest environments known, so they had to be designed to last. It was designed to be flexible as we could see several markets for them. Se sold variations on them to various organizations and the Military. That was in the 80’s. I could easily have designed a census system, and know many others who could do it easily also.

Unbelievable, and yet sadly believable today.

The World has truly gone insane.

In my neighborhood the only people you see are the kids and the designated “Mom” as everyone else is at work, or looking for work. The 1950’s “Father Knows Best” scheduling for things like the census is amazing.

Be fair, DC, we’ve onlydone this a little over twenty times in two centuries. It takes a while for the Hedgemony to come up to speed and figure out how the make it work for them.

I’m getting lazy in my old age and switching to the ‘Net-based stuff, because that allows people to use a browser to provide a comfort level. I may not need anything on the browser, other than the viewer, but it breaks down barriers because it’s there.

The number of times people have had “specialty” equipment built that was actually required to do the job is infinitesimal. It is better to have general equipment, especially for something like the Census which occurs once a decade, or elections, which are normally every other year, because then they have other uses, and they are upgraded more often.

BTW, Badtux, I still have a client who has been using a Clipper program I wrote two decades ago, initially as a dBASE application. It is in daily use, and is currently running on Win XP boxes. I keep trying to move on to other ways of doing it, but they still send me money, and don’t want to alter something that works. If you ever go to SoCal, it produces all of the text portions the Coronado Telephone Book, as well as the accounting functions.

The problem is that people don’t understand how much of anything is hardware and how much is software. When you limit the capabilities in hardware with a specialized design, there is no work-around. If you use a general piece of hardware – well, there are a lot of ways to lie to computers, ask HAL.

Sounds to me like one of two things happened. Either managers with the Census Bureau kept piling so much nonsense onto the contractor that the contractor couldn’t deliver. Or the contractor pulled a typical EDS-style contract scam of assigning a thousand Tata H1B’s to the project to pull in megabucks, when a half dozen good DBMS programmers could have pulled it off in one three month requirements phase followed by a six-month coding and debugging stint followed by a three month trial to get the last of the bugs and feature lacks resolved. (And yes, I’ve worked DBMS projects of this scale before, and yes, I know what my teams could have done here… we ain’t talkin’ brain surgery, for cryin’ out loud, we’re talking about technology that was perfected in the nineteen fuckin’ SIXTIES, over forty years ago!).

Sigh. The Busheviks continue to prove that they are the party of incompetence…

– Badtux the IT Penguin

Managers who don’t know how to code programs are just fine with me; in fact, I generally prefer them. Managers who don’t understand the project process, or sometimes even the possibilities and limitations of the technology they’ve chosen, aren’t doing their job.

“plus that doesn’t work for people who use po boxes instead of physical addresses for their mail, …” – hipparchia

Sure it does. Do you think they’ll let you get a PO box in these post-9/11 times without giving your physical address? Even people who already had PO boxes, and had had them for years, were required to refresh the USPS’s info on their physical addresses. Believe me… they know where you live.

Homeless people are a different matter. Wait long enough, in a bad enough economy, and I may have first-hand info on that, too.

Engineers build what the specifications call for. If that’s not what is needed, the specifications are wrong, not the product.

The government never spends the time or money planning a project, which is why they spend so much time and money trying to fix failed projects.