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Comment Re:Quit (Score 2) 424

by oh-dark-thirty (#38283790) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Getting a Grip On an Inherited IT Mess?

As someone who has inherited a bowl of spaghetti more than once in his day, I can say definitively that it's all driven by upper management/ownership. You're given a limited set of tools and an even smaller budget to make sure everything not only runs, but runs at peak efficiency. Then, add in incompetent end-users that are allowed, nay, ENCOURAGED to build undocumented, unstructured and barely maintainable "applications", and you're in for some real fun.
Businesses

Submission + - America Doesn't Need More Tech Giants like Apple

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Optimists says that if only America produced more companies like Apple and Amazon and Google and Facebook, the country's problems would be fixed — America could retrain its vast, idle construction-and-manufacturing workforce, and our unemployment and inequality problems would be solved. But Apple's $1 billion new data center in North Carolina has been a disappointing development for many residents, who can’t comprehend how expensive facilities stretching across hundreds of acres can create only 50 new jobs, especially after thousands of positions in the region have been lost to cheaper foreign competition. In fact, Apple actually exemplifies some of the reasons why the US has such huge unemployment and inequality problems: Digital" businesses like Apple employ far fewer people than traditional manufacturing businesses, Apple's 60,000+ jobs are not just in the US — they're spread around the world, and Apple's extraordinary ~25% profit margin means that the benefits of its success accrue primarily to a relatively small group of rich shareholders rather than a broad base of middle-class employees. Companies like Apple "create amazing products and vast shareholder wealth, but they don't spread this wealth around as much as earlier industrial giants did," writes Henry Blodget. "So, yes, we should celebrate the success of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. But we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking they're going to solve our unemployment or inequality problems.""
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Working on Kinect 2 (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "Eurogamer published a piece on a rumored Kinect 2 system that will most likely launch with the next iteration of the Xbox line, which might be sometime between late 2012 and 2014. Eurogamer says this new Kinect won't be hobbled by the limitations of the USB 2.0 port that the current Kinect uses; instead the hardware will be designed to give the new Kinect a faster pipeline to the system's internals. What this means, says blogger Peter Smith is that 'not only can Kinect 2 read finger movements (high on the wish-list for the current hardware) but it can read lips, too. I don't think they mean this in the sense that it can extrapolate what you're saying from your lip movements, but that it can tell who in a room is speaking by matching lip movement to audio input.'"
Businesses

Submission + - Does Open Source Software Cost Jobs? (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "John Spencer, a British blogger and tech educator, is convinced that free and open source software, which he's promoted for years, is costing IT jobs, as UK schools cut support staff no longer needed. But does the argument really hold up? It turns out that the services he's focused on are actually cloud services that are reducing the needs for schools to provide their own tech infrastructure. Of couse, it's also true that many of those cloud services are themselves based on open source tech."
Privacy

Submission + - New Jersey DMV employees caught selling identies (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by phaedrus5001
phaedrus5001 writes: Ars has an article about two New Jersey DMV employees who have been accused of selling personnel information that routinely had access to. The NJ prosecutor's office claim (pdf) their "investigation uncovered that two employees of the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission were providing the names, addresses, dates of birth and social security numbers of unsuspecting residents that they obtained through their employment. They were charging as little as $200 per identity."
Earth

Submission + - Earthscraper Takes Sustainable Design Underground

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The "Earthscraper," a 65-story, 82,000-square-foot inverted pyramid beneath Mexico City takes a new approach to escalating megacity problems like population growth, urban sprawl, preserving open space, and conserving energy and water, promising to turn the modern high-rise, quite literally, on its head. The proposed building will be located at the Zocalo, Mexico City’s major public plaza one of the few sizable open spaces left in the city of 9 million. "It's a massive empty plot, which makes it the ideal site for our program," says architect Esteban Suarez. The Earthscraper concept begins with a glass roof replacing the opaque stone surface of the Zocalo preserving the open space and civic uses of the Zocalo, while allowing natural lighting to flow downward into all floors of the tapering structure through clear or translucent core walls. The first 10 stories would hold a museum dedicated to the city's history and its artifacts. "We'd almost certainly find plenty of interesting relics during the dig — dating right back to the Aztecs who built their own pyramids here," says Suarez adding that the design incorporates a system of gardens occurring roughly every 10 stories, to help generate fresh air. One thing working in Earthscraper’s favor is there are strict laws that prevent building upwards in this part of Mexico City, but no laws for building down. “They will have to develop new laws to stop this from happening,” says Chief Design Officer Emilio Barja. “I hope they don’t [find the] time to do that.”"
Science

Submission + - Five reasons the U.S. tech lead is in danger (computerworld.com) 3

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The U.S. has yet to put in place a plan for building exascale systems, as Europe, China, Japan race ahead. The Europeans are prepared to commit up to 3.5 billion Euros to their effort and believe the race is wide open. "The U.S., Europe, China and Japan all have the potential to realize the first exascale system," concluded the European Exascale Software Initiative, the group that's leading Europe's effort, in a report last month. But in the U.S.: "The bottom line is that the US appears stalled and the EU, China, and Japan are gearing up for the next generation,” said Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at University of Tennessee, and one of the organizers of the Top 500. In 2008, China had 15 systems on the Top 500 list; it now has 74.

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