Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Hawaii caps gas prices. Hawaii's Public Utilities Commission on Wednesday released its list of caps on the wholesale price of gasoline, with the price ... [USATODAY.com Nation - Top Stories] If you have not already, then start now.  Put money aside every month for food.  Stop spending unless you need to and get ready for a long cold winter where the most exciting trip you take will be to your basement.  This gas problem is real and the Bush administration has no intention of making things better.  The only thing that is going to happen is the price of everything is going to go up, except the wage you are bringing home and that is going to go down.  We are about to see a recession that will be close to the Depression, if not worse, because it will pull every other nation down with it.  I hope I am wrong.  I am not holding my breath, but I am cutting up my credit cards and taking a long look at all my expenses for the next year, including health costs, cell phone and Internet access.  Everything is on the table. 7:16:16 PM    comment []

US evangelist apologizes for Chavez remarks (Reuters). Reuters - Conservative U.S. evangelist Pat Robertson apologized on Wednesday for calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, saying he spoke in frustration earlier in the week.[Yahoo! News: Top Stories] Two things to note here.  One, the White House and the Republican Party have yet to even voice their disapproval of the statements made by Pat Robertson.  Sorry, but this man is more than a private citizen - he has run for President several times and has a following.  The State Department's condemnation was nice, but insuffient.  Two, Mr. Robertson should not only know better, but he should have kept his mouth shut, frustrated or not.  You do not sit in his chair and call for the assasination of a world leader.  That is just plan dumb because you know one of his followers will try it. It is time for Mr. Robertson to find a nice quiet hole and retire to it, before someone in Venezuela gets an idea. 7:08:23 PM    comment []

Sarbanes-Oxley seen as biggest IT time waster. IBM users expect compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley rules governing U.S. public companies to prove to be the least effective or the most wasteful use of their IT resources, according to the results of an online poll of Share members released late Monday. [Big ol' Network World Fusion feed] This is an interesting article and an interesting set of questions.  Imagine it is 2015.  What are the biggest issues in retrospect that were waisting your time?  According to the survey,  Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, followed by deployment of unproven technologies (23%), purchase of unneeded technologies (19%), and continuing support for outdated technologies (17%). The fifth-rated bugbear cited by 10% of respondents was external consultants, with software upgrades only distressing one percent of those polled. What is interesting is that just yesterday in the Op-Ed section of the Washington Post there was a rant from an individual that went something to the effect that SarBox was not intended to have a return on investment, it was to prevent abuses.  Unfortunately, that is a return on investment if the abuses in the accounting department are reduced, resulting in more funds for projects.  If there is no tangible improvement, then the company, forced to implement SarBox, has lost money that might have been used for other projects. The other thing I find interesting is the amount of legacy software and hardware that is still being used and maintained.  I am not talking about a couple of WindowsNT machines here.  I am talking about mission critical code that keeps finances, office automation and some federal agencies functioning.  And this is code that was originally cut in the late 1980s and is still being maintained, along with the systems that were designed, in some cases, to run only that code.  The people that wrote the stuff are dead (OK, maybe they are not dead, but they are old and have little to no interest in supporting it, no matter how much you pay them) and yet, this stuff is what key decisions are made on and with.  Number one in the emerging trends is still security.  I suspect this is partially due to the problems we are still facing as we try and tie these systems together, breaking more than we fix as we attempt to make them do what they were never designed to do. Take a look at the article.  It is a real eye opener.     7:01:57 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 David Lane.