Techno-Wimps
I’m with Chris at Suburban Guerrilla Obama’s technical people can’t be worth much if they are having the vapors over being forced to deal with Windows XP and Office 2003.
They apparently don’t know what software can be upgraded. I would suggest they try this great new innovation called the Internet and find out with a couple of clicks.
They don’t know what machines have what permissions. You sign in as administrator and find out, or better yet, you assign the permissions to the people according to their need and right to know.
As far as the new whitehouse.gov site, great, you clowns hosed thousands of links because you don’t understand directories. By the way, find a real webmaster to create a real robots.txt file before you waste any more storage on search engines with your pathetic offering. If you want to fix it you can try robotstxt.org and then you can use Google’s tools to verify it, just like real webmasters do.
These are probably semi-competent new equipment people, but they aren’t geeks. They want to “slash and burn”, not fix things. Geeks use Macs for things they don’t want to waste time on, but they all have another “bubble gum and baling wire” box that is rarely the same for a month and it usually is running a flavor of -ix.
If the tech guys at the White House wanted to screw with you, they would have updated all of the software before they left. That would have been nasty. There would be no way of telling what crashed the system.
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Geeks use Macs for things they don’t want to waste time on, but they all have another “bubble gum and baling wire” box that is rarely the same for a month and it usually is running a flavor of -ix.
You betcha. My MacBook is what I use for things I don’t want to waste time on. My desktop-cum-household server runs Ubuntu Linux (right now, it has also run Fedora Linux, Mandriva Linux, Gentoo Linux, and FreeBSD at times) and is continually getting updated with new motherboards, CPU’s, hard drives, and such. It is a complete cobbled-together monster that shares no parts other than the actual case with predecessors that lived in that location. Next thing I want to do with it is take out the three old 160GB’s that are RAID5’ed together in it and replace them with three 1TB drives, whee, 2TB of free disk space for, well, anything!
As for Obama’s tech folks, they’re geeks, but they’re junior geeks. Junior geeks don’t understand the importance of keeping a stable business computing environment. They only want to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade to the latest and greatest, always, even if that makes your computing environment a nightmare where nothing works because everything is in flux all the time. I have to continually be on my junior geeks about that kind of mess, they think that just because something appeared on Red Hat’s website or Microsoft’s web site we must automatically apply it throughout our enterprise. Err, no. It only gets applied if it addresses a bug that’ll bite us. For example, we don’t run IPV6. A new Red Hat initscripts RPM fixes a problem in IPV6 bringup? Err, okee dokee, but it doesn’t have anything to do with us, so we’ll pass, thank you very much! Junior geeks, on the other hand, go “bright shiny toys! Bright shiny toys!” and run out to apply it everywhere. Err, except “initscripts” is what does initial system bringup when you boot the system. Apply that patch wrong, and the system is unbootable. OOOPS! It’s a small risk, but even a small risk outweighs zero possible benefit for us. But junior geeks just don’t “get it”…
– Badtux the Senior Geek Penguin
It doesn’t just have to be stable, it has to be secure. They can forget wireless in the White House unless quantum teleportation jumps from a just completed lab experiment to a real product in record time. It’s real easy to get cut when you are out on the “cutting edge”, just ask the people who sank big bucks in a Sony Betamax or the HD DVR.
Ron Paul had some genuine libertarian geeks on his team, but Obama’s team went with the popular flow, like Facebook, and a lot of their e-mail addresses came from Dr. Dean and MoveOn. They hitched onto some existing trends, but they didn’t create anything new or radical, and they have more designers than coders among their crew.
This is the real world, and they need a stable real world system.
My “box” started with a 80286 MB and a full height 20MB, the current board looks lonely in there. I really should buy a new case.
Um. Potentially their machines cannot reach the internet. Mine at work cannot. And the government has to follow licenesing rules and a lot of other accountability issues that normal companies do not encounter.
Don’t judge too fast.
Scorpio´s last blog post..Oh Yes
I worked in the government, Scorpio, and know about technology purchases off of GSA lists, and I was part of NSA in the military. I am very familiar with the designation of the White House communications – they may find they have to go outside to use a cellphone.
It is a secure area and they are going to find out how restrictive that is.
The only place that will definitely have a connection to the ‘Net will be the PR area. Every other office will have to request it and justify the request. Life is different when you work in a secure area.