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Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

arstechnica.com

51–60 of 200 posts

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#51
post #16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He hired Microsoft and what sounds like a Microsoft Partner. No one gets fired for buying Microsoft.

Oh yes, people do get fired for buying microsoft. Switch industries and you'll see. Or try spending 2 years building your company knowledge base into sharepoint and you'll see.

Is sharepoint generally objectionable, or simply unsuited to certain environments/workloads/userbases?

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#52
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A: ungraceful crash under load

Sorry, a database-backed web app works just fine on a Microsoft stack, there are thousands of them out there and I say that as someone who vastly prefers unix but this is clearly a project management fiasco and architecture design fiasco, not a technology stack fundamentally unable to handle the demands.

I agree the MS stack works fine in the dev lab.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#53
post #16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He hired Microsoft and what sounds like a Microsoft Partner. No one gets fired for buying Microsoft.

Oh yes, people do get fired for buying microsoft. Switch industries and you'll see. Or try spending 2 years building your company knowledge base into sharepoint and you'll see.

Sharepoint. Ugh. The mandated use of Sharepoint completely impeded communication on a multi-institution task I work on -- it was clunky when up, and often not up.

The solution? Instead of the project administering Sharepoint, the admin was handed off to the division of the corporation that specializes in administering Sharepoint. (It's a very large company.) Now we have two-factor authentication and double logins to upload monthly status reports. And still nobody can actually communicate.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#54
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management skills and who he hired to run things. Wait, what? There's a difference between people taking responsibility for what their staff do (thus, he should take responsibility for it) and people actually being responsible for what their staff do - especially if those staff are not staff but sub-contracted service providers.

If you don't hire people with adequate management skills to assess risk and take proactive steps to mitigate problems before they become dangerous to the mission, that's a failure at the highest level. Someone should've see this coming, or Romney clearly doesn't know how to delegate responsibility well.

Now let's talk about Eric Holder, Obama, and a dead ATF agent. Something tells me you won't see it the same way.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Windows was a mistake, that's for sure. Good thing for Democrats they didn't know about the open source ushahidi platform.

Why do you choose to throw out an insult at Windows? Is there anything about this story that points to Windows being at fault? How about you think before you flame next time, okay?

Don't take it personal. Inferior products need support, too. You will always be able to find work making IIS sites as long as MS is selling server software.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you choose to throw out an insult at Windows? Is there anything about this story that points to Windows being at fault? How about you think before you flame next time, okay?

I have been a professional webmaster since 1995. I have worked for California's largest privately held webhosting company. I am an MCP in Windows server and have been the only guy on staff willing to support customers with IIS. I base my statement partly on that experience.

Stackoverflow crashes daily

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#57

>"We asked if our laptops needed to be WiFi capable," Dittuobo told Ars. "Dan Centinello went into how the Garden had just finished expansion of its wireless network and that yes, WiFi was required. I was concerned about hacking, jamming the signal, * etc...* This brings up a whole nother can of worms - electoral cyber warfare. What if the Dems, or some sympathizer group, say some local Anonymous, decided to disrup t…

with one webserver they were their own worst enemy; no need to look elsewhere

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Windows was a mistake, that's for sure. Good thing for Democrats they didn't know about the open source ushahidi platform.

Why do you choose to throw out an insult at Windows? Is there anything about this story that points to Windows being at fault? How about you think before you flame next time, okay?

Looks like someone has a bit of an emotional investment on a tool, eh?

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people who make mistakes can still run the entire USA. It has been done before.

This kind of false equivocation is dishonest and intellectually lazy.

I disagree. His point is very valid.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#60
post #4
post #2

From Slate back in July: an interesting background piece about the campaign's approach to staffing for data analysis. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/... What the debacle brings to mind is the consequences of putting "idea guys" in charge of software development when there is a hard deadline. "Orca had been conceived by two men—Romney's Director of Voter Contact Dan Centinello and the camp…

A Web App is actually the right call. It was for volunteers doing GOTV in the field, not as much for people sitting at a desktop. And you would want to be able to issue updates quickly and carefully control access -- things that are much more difficult with an App Store app.

But so much can go wrong with an app, especially in the field. Give every team leader a fax machine, a phone, and some pens.
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