All the poor souls who are looking down and reading a text while the shooter stalks... How about a "heads up" policy being instituted at the school? Or a directional gunfire analysis certificate mandatory for all students? Or a "Typing Under Pressure" exam followed by a "How to Use the Illi-Alert System" for all shooting alert writers?

I weep for your corporation.

The Web Standards statement is the one that absolutely freaks me out the most. We don't even need to start talking about CSS. We can talk about really really simple stuff like HTML unordered lists. From what I remember in my testing, IE6 (and IE7) displayed them differently than FF, Safari, Opera, and Chrome (lining up the bullets outside the margin of paragraphs above and below). Why?

Fair enough. The project management we did on our multi-year projects was ALWAYS bogged down by non-technical, non-requirement issues like management changes and other forms of "pushback". Again, in five years, you can accomplish just about anything, even with the most complex myriad of tax laws and internal "one-off" rules about pay scales. But you can't do anything if there is A) corruption, B) willful resistance, or C) utter lack of stakeholder buy-in. Any one or all three of these seems to be at work here.

And you're totally right that no one who's been on the outside can know anything for sure. /. is all about arrogant claims and wild-ass guessing isn't it?

I mean CIBER, not Accenture, the losers they fired.

Having said all I did about the outrageous waste of money, a COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) solution, even heavily modified is probably the way to go (and from other comments it sounds like this latest $12 million will go to a Peoplesoft implementation). Still some pretty sweet coin for Accenture, the consulting company that's doing the COTS implementation.

With agile methods and a multi-disciplinary team ("good coders" is an unfortunate catchall phrase I used to mean people who can gather requirements, write user stories, validate, iterate, manage a burndown list, etc.), five years would be absolutely more than enough time to do all of the steps you mention and more... like change management and getting iterations into stakeholder hands early... and on and on. I am neither a youngster nor naive about the software development life cycle (both waterfall which is what it sounds like you're used to, and agile).

That's what I was thinking. Four good coders could "do-over" a payroll system in five years no matter how complex it was... at the rates the University is apparently willing to pay and the timeline they have settled for, that is $10 million each for five years of work. Not bad.

I wasn't attracted to Shadowbane because I have found player-vs-player games to be usually ruined by ubergamers. However, team-vs-team is a different thing and in reading the farewell, it looks like guilds were a big part of the game. I probably should have taken a closer look. Oh well... too late now.

Google itself is not at all sticky. Did you know that in the early days of search, the people in charge of "portal sites" (remember them) like Excite and even Yahoo were trying to figure out ways to keep people on their site. Google took a different approach: the faster people leave our site, the better job we've done of helping them find what they are looking for.

Sometimes a counter-intuitive approach brings a sea change in an industry. But all people are suggesting is that Google will drive traffic to the site and you have to make your site useful so people will want to return. If that means creating an awesome community like /. has done... then so be it. If that means creating really good unique content (with "related" links)... then so be that too.

If you believe that Google-attracted visitors don't ever stick around, then shun Google and figure out a way to attract a stickier audience. But I think the metrics show that if you can retain just a fraction of the massive audience driven to your site from Google, then you'll be doing well.

No idea why my comment came out anonymously... must have drifted my mouse over the checkbox by accident. (I'm old.)

If viral marketing can rely on cheap distribution of PDFs, and the printed version offers stuff that is simply unavailable in the PDF... maybe they would have a business model. But to make the PDF exactly the same as the printed book, then charge the same amount... it doesn't seem to make sense. In any case, D&D fans tend to be technically savvy so there will always be digital distribution, authorized or unauthorized. Better to come up with a business model that leverages this tendency instead of fighting uphill against it. M:TG cards put Wizards on the map: scarcity and added value were the cornerstones of that whole business model. Without turning D&D into a collectibles game, surely they can take a page out of their own history and add value to materials that people are willing to purchase -- while still offering the viral "word-of-mouth" benefits of a freely distributed digital medium.

Actually, as an advertiser in the 1980s and 1990s I was shocked at how poorly I was treated. Granted I was placing very small 1/8th page display ads but getting to resolutions to my problems from anyone at the big media company was distressing. I have been on the other side too (as an editor at a newspaper) so I believe that it is just OVERALL poor management that has put the newspapers where they are today. Besides, the advertisers are best served if the newspapers deliver a happy, engaged readership -- so annoying any of your "customers" (real, intended, or imagined) is just not smart business.