I love that the website lists OS/2 Warp 4 support then Windows. Great review; thank you.

Consensus over accuracy is one problem. Conflict over accuracy is another. This is a well-known problem in professional journalism today. The "he said, she said" form of "objective" journalism allows for both sides of an issue to be heard, even when one side is a crock of shit. So moderating becomes an even more challenging task than merely allowing minority or fringe opinions to remain.

Rationally, I think the best way to moderate is to allow all polite discourse to continue. If someone gets combative or rude, the quality of the discussion drops, even if they are speaking the utter truth between expletives.

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.)