[PLUG] Requium for HB 2802

[Steven A. Adams]

On Wed, 2003-05-28 at 18:32, Russell Senior wrote:

> Maybe I missed something, but I read his "dog walking" story as
> personal observation specifically countering your claim ("... the fact
> that ODOT is already running leaner than any IT shop that I've worked
> with in my 20 year career."), rather than attack.  Anyway, from my
> reading, it was logically separate from the justification for the
> bill.

None the less, it was really mean spirited to use this sort of example
and it really miffed me that the only observation of government waste
presented here was something that can't be substantiated but is
irritating to all. I think that's probably what torqued me about it.

> Again, I read the reason for the bill as the twice weekly trips to
> Medford and Coquille to fix silly Windows box problems, not the dog
> walking episode.

> At a macro level, I see no rational legitimate public-interest
> justification for opposing this bill as amended.  One argument against
> it here seems to be that it won't save any money immediately.  Maybe
> not.  But the sooner people start converting _the sooner_ the money
> can be saved.  Either in licensing costs or people costs, or more
> likely both.  In "net present value" terms for the future cash flow,
> that is still a win that gets smaller the longer it is delayed.  That
> argues for starting now.  Even if no one gets laid off, there is an
> opportunity cost to having IT staff driving to Coquille twice a week,
> when they could be working on more productive problems and returning
> more public-interest value for the money spent.  And lastly, on the
> savings issue, even if there is none in dollar terms, there is the
> matter of where the dollars that _are_ spent land: in the wallets of
> your neighbor Oregon employees or in the overflowing bank accounts of
> Redmond WA and similar locations.

This is exactly why I do what I do. From the inside it's better for me
to be quiet about the bill but when I'm asked for an honest perspective
of where I see open-source deployment costs at this time I am going to
give it up. I understand that folks are free to beat on me for being
honest all they want but I'm not going to sit back and quietly get
kicked. 

<RELATIVELY_NON-OFFENSIVE_RANT>
ODOT IT folks maintain a network of MS products. In the year that I've
been at ODOT my NT workstation has not locked up once (and I'm a heavy
Visio user), the core infrastructure services have been stable as a rock
and I don't remember the last time I dropped a file share (including the
Windows SMB shares that I mount on my 6 Linux systems). You can't
maintain that kind of stability by being lazy idiots, it's simply not
possible. Even though the FUD is not pointed directly at me it's still
wrong to leave any group with a rotten impression of good folks you
don't even know. 

As for me, I work quietly in ODOT's mainframe group (Mr. Barber, you
were curious about where the hell I worked). In addition to the normal
engine count expected for a production z/800, this mainframe contains a
full-on IFL engine that services nothing but z/VM and Linux, it's
capable of concurrently running more Linux servers in that one small
cabinet than we could fit in a data center at about the same cost as 4
Intel rack-mount servers. I commute from Portland to Salem, put in my 9
hours for you and commute home to crack the books and talk to the wife.
I think you might be able to see now why I take offense to folks
grinding their ax with ODOT in an effort to push a political agenda.
</RELATIVELY_NON-OFFENSIVE_RANT>

BTW; If anyone is still interested in technology, I'm struggling a
little bit with our virtual hipersockets interfaces advertising all
zeros for their MAC addresses. It only seems to be picking up zeros to
Linux (/sbin/ifconfig -a) but the hipersockets network seems to see a
MAC for the connected systems. Since it's virtual to z/VM and only used
for Linux servers it's not exposed to the WAN (yet) but the technology
runs about twice as fast as the OSA IO layer so I would love to use it.
Any ideas folks?

Steve Adams
Workaholic Geek

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