John Gibbons wrote:

> Hmmm, it seemed like such an innocuous post when I first sent it out.

But very Religious .

> The IT department on the other hand :-(
>
> On the project side, our development budget was 25% of the annual
> maintenance budget of a competing mainframe system (and about 1.5% of their
> development budget). They run on one of the largest mainframe systems in the
> southern hemisphere, we run on a $10000 Compaq PC. They give monthly
> reports, we give live data online with greater functionality and information
> content. We are totally distributed and can scale on a worldwide basis.
>
> In contrast to David Ness, I don't believe that most corporate IT decisions
> are made on the basis of rational analysis. ...
>
> Developing with K/Kdb requires far fewer programmers than with conventional
> languages, and there are fewer lines of code to maintain. As a result the
> systems are more flexible and responsive to change than conventional
> systems, strangely enough this solves yet another outstanding commercial
> computing problem.
> The simplest answer is to pay the developers a large
> sum of money to stay (a large $number multiplied by a small number of K
> programmers is the same as a small $number multiplied by a large number of
> COBOL/C++ programmers) . You will in all probability get a significant cost
> saving.

Reminds me of when in 1976 at the Optical SocOfAmer Psychophysics conference ,
an elder I cited in my paper for having brought ( 1-D ) signal detection
theory into Psych Dept consciousness told me that what I had just presented
couldn`t be done for another generation -
- and damned if they didn`t about succeed .

I see the great challenge for Libertarians to succeed , is to explain how
commodities are alocated when there is so much less work " to go around " -
- when the irrational paperwork backed by Government guns ( to paraphrase
Greenspan ) is gone .

These are people`s whole lives we`re talking about .

--
--- BobArmstrong -- http://CoSy.com -- 212-285-1864 ---

LIBERTARIAN for US Congress (NY-8) : http://www.boba-in-y2k.org
> > > 143 Days to the Election < < <

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