I can see the filling stations now.

On one pump you have gas with 87 octane, one with 92 octane and then single-malt or blended whiskey...

What about the Americans? Will we develop a fuel based on Budweiser or Tequila?

I speak Jive...

(Love that movie!)

No problem. I hate overspending as much as the next guy... ...well maybe not as much as the City Manager in the City of Bell (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/20/bell-city-manager-scandal_n_653304.html) but as most people.

If I thought the Cloud - or the mainframe - was a better value, I'd be all over it. In fact, I get hit by vendors (HP, EMC, IBM) all the time asking to put their hugely expensive "server farm" in with dozens of VM's. I prefer the Amazon or Google approach, with multiple low-cost servers that can be replaced quickly and inexpensively.

Well, it is simple.
(Trust me I'm not MS fan-boi.)

For the time period 2007-2009, my department spent an estimated $1,100,928 developing and enhancing two primary systems. This included all development and hardware costs. These systems take in between $300M and $400M per year in taxes and fees and are the largest of the kind by number of transactions processed in the US.
Vendor systems in this range have been quoted to us as costing between $4M and $6M outright with $500K to $800K/year in maintenance.
(Our accounting system - which is crap IMO - runs on a shared server and cost $160M.)
Here's how I came up with the figures.
Development Costs for JEDI System November 2007 - January 2009
Software
MSDN $50,000.00
Team Foundation Server $10,000.00
Janis Controls $20,000.00
Atlasoft Controls $20,000.00

Analysts
Specifications $138,622
Documentation $110,856
Training $52,100
Testing $146,178

Programmers
Development: $523,172

Management
Oversight: $30,000.00
Total: $1,100,928.00

Now, you can add in the overhead costs for servers and the personnel to cover the servers. We currently have 89 servers on racks in our server room. These servers must be up 18/6 and are absolutely essential during certain time periods. We have four staff members running the servers and an additional six staff members maintaining our 800+ workstations, LAN and six remote locations.
I’m a taxpayer also, and cannot stand to see money wasted. If I were to move to the cloud – the ultimate in vaporware IMO – we’d be moving to a service level that is set by the vendor and not in our control. We already have some services moved to the cloud. IIRC, the department spent around $1M on a vendor-hosted system that has been less than reliable and very expensive to maintain.

I don't work for LA City. I do work for LA County. I also work *with* LA City. I know the city is in somewhat dire straits financially and can't imagine how they'd be buying into anything.

I am constantly fighting the "cloud" and "shared services" initiatives. They propose to save money, but you have to spend millions and reduce your service levels in order to do so.

Nothing against Google in general, I just can't imagine something like this going well in an organization the size of LA City.

(By the way, I have documented that my in-house development and deployment of servers has saved LA County between $2M and $4M per year in potential vendor and infrastructure costs.)

Looked mroe like someone holding a magnifying glass on a model airplane. Where's the red flash of light? Where's the cool explosion in slow motion??

...run Linux? :)

ROTFL!

You've been reading, "Fast Food Nation," haven't you?

Good comment! Don't know why you were marked as a troll...

Online usually refers to - well - online apps that don't require a client installed on your system.

Sorry, maybe I'm old-school.

File a Freedom of Information (http://www.justice.gov/oip/) request.

I work for Los Angeles County and we do not give out our source code without one. We have given out the source but it involves several legal issues and "hold harmless" agreements that are way above me. (I'm not condoning or condemning the process, just stating what has happened in the past.)

I went to the link. Apparently you have to download a windows executable to make it work. How is that online? Seems like a client-server app to me.

People still use Windows?

My bad. I was thinking of the Darwin Awards (http://www.darwinawards.com/) when I wrote.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting any given Windows system cannot be hardened against attack. In fact, I put in many of the MS-Suggested safeguards when designing major systems back in 2000. They included never running as local admin, not allowing programs write access to any system or program files directories, using strong passwords, and using a firewall.

What I was suggesting is that the single-use of any OS - whether Windows, Linux, Unix or AmigaOS - would make an ecosystem far more vulnerable and expensive to ensure secure against attacks.

If you look at any ecosystem, you'll find that there are pests trying to gain a foothold into that system by exploiting a weakness. If there is only one type of organism, the pests will adapt and exploit the weakness of that organism. This is why you need ever more powerful pesticides when cultivatign monoculture crops such as corn, wheat or even soybeans.

Same goes for ecosystems of comptuers. Given 90% are running Wintendo, you find that the pests (virus and other exploit authors) take adavantage of that monoculture. The weaknesses are then exploited and have to be "patched" in order to ensure survival of data and/or systems.

Given an ecosystem with multiple operating systems - Windows, Linux, Unix/OSX, zOS - you'll find a greater ability to defend against continual threats.

If you're on some very basic sites, that can be done. My home page does not require flash but does have some javascript elements.

This site is heavy with javascript.