“It was the epoch of incredulity” ~ Dickens
So my fellow computer geeks and I were talking about pointless stuff that geeks talk about when talk turned to the sweet eighteen million dollar deal Smartronix got to upgrade Recovery.gov and how it’s complete crap and thank god we don’t work for THAT company because who in the hell would want that disaster on their resume?
Eighteen million.
For a website.
All of us are veteran programmers. I’ve been in the business for so long myself that I’ve done everything from building computers, motherboard out, setting up networks, database administration, interfacing, programming … I’m fluent in so many programming languages some have actually died out — except COBOL. I think COBOL will still be in use 100 years from now. I actually taught COBOL. Not that I am old or anything. But getting to the point, we know what it costs to put out a site like Recovery.gov and it ain’t anything close to eighteen million. Give us one million and we can make it run social security on the side, guys.
You could buy the servers, the T-3 access for a decade and STILL not reach that magic eighteen million number to justify it. Maybe. MAYBE. They bought a building for the servers.
An organization asked to see the contract. Freedom of information and all that … AND IT WAS REDACTED ALL TO HELL.
You gotta be kidding me. Is it top secret? A contract for a website? Really?
And that was only the first fraud of the Stimulous. It was all a fraud, all of it.
I just went to their website and a search lists two articles related to Recovery.gov – link through fails. How humiliating for them. They are probably hoping no one knows they are the company that took the money for that crap.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 4:29 pm and is filed under General Badness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
In related ludicrous government IT expenditure news, at the end of October Los Angeles announced it was going to spend $7.25 million with Google for 5 years of e-mail service for 30,000 city employees:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/10/city-council-votes-to-adopt-google-email-system-for-30000-city-employees.html
My company was discussing the google email thing and the pitfalls. But that .. that story has got to be a joke, right? Why would they do that?
Oh. And the consensus was that email is dead. We barely do business that way. We have it, but now-a-days it’s fraught with peril as Man-Bear-Pig has discovered.
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2009/11/mann-bear-pig-hockey-stick-creator-michael-mann-implicated-in-global-warming-conspiracy/