Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router • Hacker News Board

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#71

Post by Spooky23 » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 4:45 AM UTC

cynwoody wrote: post #66

jacques_chester wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One main difference is that public companies are required by law to have independent auditors. Government departments are not. In Australia independent audits rely on the Australian National Audit Office, which is profoundly and deliberately underfunded because of its annoying habit of discovering embarrassing incompetence and wastefulness.

>One main difference is that public companies are required by law to have independent auditors. Also, companies can go broke. Compared to that sanction, independent auditors are a band-aid.

Big companies can persist for decades with endemic corruption.

In public sector, the audit process is incredibly painful, and you're going to end up losing a career and pension over malfeasance. I've seen it happen a few times. Once you start operating outside the lines, you're likely to escalate and will get caught.

More offensive to me are the folks who understand the system intimately and waste time & treasure legally. I've seen cases where a government used a big govt contractor to install PCs -- at cost of $120/hr for two guys and a truck. Offensive? Yes. Illegal? No.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#72

Post by InclinedPlane » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 4:46 AM UTC

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #24

Probably going against the grain here, but what about the operations staff who are charged with supporting these 1,164 routers? What about warranties and parts replacements? There is a price for standardizing on a piece of hardware at such a large scale. When you standardize, sure there is going to be hardware overkill in some places, but in the big picture this is just a price of doing business at this scale. What i…

That's a hypothetical that so far as I'm aware is not reflective of reality.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#73

Post by wilfra » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 4:51 AM UTC

Nice commission for that sales rep.

This is the dark side of enterprise sales. Microsoft and many others have surely done many such deals over the years - and paid out handsome bonuses to the reps/execs who made them happen.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#74

Post by contingencies » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 5:13 AM UTC

nikcub wrote: post #8

I have first hand experience with this, although in Australia. My first job was working for a IT development and solutions shop (this is over 17 years ago) where they won the bid to rollout the internet and network gateways across a large number of Australian government schools. We were doing similar work for private school at the same time, and the process for the public and private school could not be more differen…

Also, the same employer had an extremely low-rent situation going on at the only train station in Sydney I ever witnessed a commuter straight out punch a ticket inspector in the face at. They under paid as well. One learns quickly that in capitalism, it's whatever you can get away with...

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#75

Post by rdl » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 5:13 AM UTC

prawn wrote: post #67

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I agree. I'm just saying I can kind of see where they are coming from.

Who, Cisco? I wouldn't be excusing their actions in a hurry. Everyone in this deal should be advising as though they are spending their own money. You can spend a lot of money, but would you if it were you own and you had other things to consider in a budget?

Cisco was acting in their own commercial interest, which would be fine if their counterparty weren't either corrupt or incompetent.

It's reasonable for an enterprise deployment to try to standardize on some components, which costs something in size-inefficiency. It's ok to spec a 2-5x bigger product for some sites if most other sites are bigger, and if the big/small products are wildly different, etc. But that's clearly not the case here.

Arguably the state should have had in-house competence to spend money on the taxpayer's behalf, or should have engaged a contractor with fiduciary responsibility to design/spec the work (and excluded from bidding).

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#76

Post by scotty79 » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 5:40 AM UTC

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #47

homosaur wrote: post #38

Corruption is awesome when you're on the nipple end of the government tit. Nice work if you can get it, Cisco.

Cisco may not have anything to do with it. It may be down to a salesman in the middle who is on commission. I once saw CCTV cameras deployed with Jena lenses, I guess for similar reasons. The auditors (if there were any) weren't knowledgeable enough to know better. edit: After further reading, Cisco did in fact shamelessly participate in this gigantic boondoggle.

In my country government officials are usually paid to be this stupid. I can't imagine USA government officials are this stupid for free.

I know ... never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by stupidity, but come on! Someone sure got at least a nice car out of it.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#77

Post by MertsA » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 5:59 AM UTC

Just nit picking but there are several places in the article that are incorrect such as

"The West Virginia legislature at peak times can have over 600 internal users and numerous guests accessing "multiple Web servers, up to eight simultaneous live audio webcasts, multiple SQL servers, and multiple Google search appliances located in the Legislature's server farms." Despite all this, the legislature doesn't even use a router but instead runs a cheaper Cisco switch... and it has never exceeded capacity."

It's pretty clear that not only does the author not know networking basics, his sources don't either.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#78

Post by cynwoody » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 6:21 AM UTC

hmottestad wrote: post #42

bluedino wrote: post #14

Remember the wasteful spending back in the UNIX workstation days - a Sun 10 in every administrator's office for e-mail, and nobody ever had the training to use the things?

My high-school admin bought a Mac Pro with dual CPU. It was powerful enough to run all the school servers at once, yet he only used it to remote desktop into the real servers.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach administrate.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#79

Post by cynwoody » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 6:55 AM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #64

tokenadult wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at something where you can compare prices between countries, like per-mile subway construction costs, the U.S. is a huge outlier, with procurement costs much higher than Europe. The higher-than-Europe comparison I had not heard before. The higher than private industry cost of United States government contracting (and contracting by local units of government when they spend federal funds) is dictated by th…

European labor is pervasively unionized, though, and typically well-paid on construction projects, but the total cost comes in not just slightly cheaper, but at small fractions of the price. Other things involved: there are fewer overlapping transit and government agencies involved in European projects, approvals are faster, contractor billing/profits seem to be more carefully scrutinized, and there is less scope for…

Interesting.

According to the Wikipedia[1], the 1318 km Chinese Jinghu High Speed Railway (350 km/h) came in at about $27m/km.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#80

Post by tdoggette » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 7:20 AM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #76

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cisco may not have anything to do with it. It may be down to a salesman in the middle who is on commission. I once saw CCTV cameras deployed with Jena lenses, I guess for similar reasons. The auditors (if there were any) weren't knowledgeable enough to know better. edit: After further reading, Cisco did in fact shamelessly participate in this gigantic boondoggle.

In my country government officials are usually paid to be this stupid. I can't imagine USA government officials are this stupid for free. I know ... never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by stupidity, but come on! Someone sure got at least a nice car out of it.

I chuckled. It is, in fact, quite easy to imagine that American bureaucrats (as a collective) are that stupid. I'm not discounting the other possibility, though.