August 2004 - Posts
Seen this posted on MrDave's Blog. It's about a large project in Colorado that has started in 1995 and that as of today an estimated cost of $199 million. You have to read the whole story in Gazette.com, just hard to believe.
My favorite:
“It is my understanding that the CBMS system as presently formatted still requires counties to ‘make up’ certain data, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, alien status and other personal data in order for some cases to be processed for eligibility,” Louis wrote. “The state is essentially requiring counties to enter false data into the case portfolio.”
That glitch is especially troubling because detecting false information is key to preventing welfare fraud, Drake said.
The state Attorney General’s Office responded Friday, saying concern about false information is unfounded.
“Entering false data into the system is contrary to state policy and rule,” Wade Livingston of the Attorney General’s Office wrote in a reply to Louis. “The state cannot assume any liability arising from a county employee knowingly placing false data in the system.”
Computer programers for the state have established temporary fixes for the problems, McDonough said. In case of a birth date, for example, welfare workers have been instructed to enter Jan. 1, 1851, in some records.
It seems that they have abused of the "Garbage in - Garbage out Design Pattern" ;-)
With a $199 million dollars project that has more than 84 workarounds, one of them being documented on a 300+ pages document, you don't need to find where the fraud is :)
As always, please include the standard disclaimer.
I see a lot of posts about GMail, either people offering GMail invitations, or others who look happy to have gotten one. I just don't get why there is so much excitation about a free webmail service with 1 Gb storage. May be someone can tell me?
Editeurs de Logiciels, Clients finaux et Partenaires Microsoft, nous vous proposons de vous inscrire avant le 30 Septembre 2004 pour participer à un programme de type "Early Adopter" autour de Visual Studio 2005 "Whidbey".
Ce programme - nommé "Whidbey Ascend" - vous permet d’accéder aux bêtas, de bénéficier d’un support technique via un newsgroup privé et également de participer à une semaine de formation début octobre à Paris. En contrepartie, nous souhaitons pouvoir communiquer avec vous sur la disponibilité de vos produits construits avec Whidbey lors du lancement de Visual Studio 2005.
En outre, Visual Studio 2005 est la première version de nos outils de développement à supporter Windows 64 bits, donc si vous souhaitez porter vos applications sur la plate-forme Windows 64 bits, vous serez certainement très intéressé par ce programme "Whidbey Ascend".
Si ce programme vous intéresse, prenez contact avec notre équipe ou directement avec moi.
La division "Développeurs et Plate-forme d'Entreprise" de Microsoft France - ex "Division .NET" - compte un trentaine de personnes réparties en différentes populations, principalement un groupe Marketing et Evènements dirigé par Alain le Hégarat, et deux équipes d'Evangélistes, les Evangélistes Architectes sous la responsabilité de Marc Gardette et le groupe des Evangélistes Développeurs - dont je fais parti - sous la responsabilité de Daniel Cohen-Zardi. Cette division est dirigée par Olivier Ezratty.
Prenez connaissance des bios des membres de ces équipes, et en cas de besoin, n'hésitez pas à prendre contact avec nous...
You do not have an AMD64 laptop yet? Stop by the grocery around the corner and grab one ;-)
In fact, this shop is known in France and Germany as a hard discount food store. A couple of month ago, they had an offering for an AMD64 desktop machine. May be in two month or so they will have a 64 bit Tablet PC ;-)
In the same "dogfooding" spirit as the previous experiments done by some of my colleagues how chose to switch to a Tablet PC, a Windows Server 2003 or running as non "Admin" on their default machine, I will start in September the experience of using an AMD64 laptop running Windows XP for 64 Bit Extended Systems as my default machine.
I have this Compaq Presario R3160US for a couple of months now, and I've installed nearly all what I need on it. It's running a Microsoft internal build of Windows XP for 64 bit Extended Systems, and since this morning, it is also running SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 and Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 in 64 Bit mode. Of course, the Office 2003 suite and Outlook are installed on it since day one, as well as a couple of other tools that compose my prefred toolbox.
First step, I leave on Friday on vacation, and this is the machine that I'll take with me this year. Yes, I dare :)
I'll try to blog on a regular basis to tell you the good, the bad and (hopefully not too much) of the ugly of this experience. Stay tuned.
Oh, by the way, if you actually own an AMD64 machine, chances are high that it is running a good old 32 bit Windows XP. Microsoft has announced an OS exchange program from 32 bit to 64 bit.
More Posts