Alston blows AU$4million on website.
 

http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1107

This actually angers me. It's fucking sickening. That webpage is a pile of shit. I shit you not when i say that any novice web designer could create that page within a day, or a few days tops.

A million dollars for hosting? There is no way that site gets more than a few hundred hits per day. Hell, the only reason it would be getting that many hits is 'cause of people talking about how ludacris it is. Bottom line, there's no way they should be paying any more than about 20 bucks a month in hosting.

Fucking outrageous. What makes you think Senator Alston has friends in the design and hosting business?

$4 million for that pile of shit?

And not even a banner in sight... :eek7

Damn....

$1.2 Million spent on website development
$956,000 spent on hosting and support services
$928,000 spent on software; and
$661,000 spent on hardware.

660K for a server? Must be a good one

Fucking hell!

I believe he has prolly spent the money elsewhere and is claiming it went into the website. Noone could possibly be that stupid.

And here's the actual website haha
http://www.dcita.gov.au/Subject_Entr..._1-2_1,00.html

http://www.dcita.gov.au/ :glugglug

amazing

How the fuck is it possible to spend $4 million on THAT?

I just don't understand. It doesn't make any sense.

4 hundred... yes.
4 thousand... possible.
But 4 fucking million? :1orglaugh

he should have come to GFY, someone would have offered to do it for $200 or free just to have something in his portfolio.

Looks like the fucking logo was scanned from a letterhead and just pasted in there. Gotta love the way governments spends our money.

remeber, its AU money, so thats like $3k usd

there is a small hope he'll be thrown out this year.. Jesus Christ I hope we get rid of the conservatives soon..

he's the biggest retard, biased opinions on certain telcos over here and does nothing to prevent consumers from getting fucked over

fucking faggot wasting our money

"Wasn't me"

http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0...113967,00.html

Your senators are screwing you people right square up the ass.

:)

This is just another fucking great example of government spending and accountability getting out of hand.

This son of a bitch should sit for a crime against the Australian people.

I volunteer to take my 20 cents share of that money out of his ass :Graucho

His internet censorship was worse. Never vote a devout christian into office, he doesn't work for the people - he works for an unaccountable god. You may as well start getting local priests to start running the country.

some design house is laughing all the way to the bank: "I need an extra 200k to create more...spacial tension, yeah thats it":Graucho

fucking pathetic.

Your hard earned tax dollars at work....
They used a US$17.99 template, gotta make you wonder about the kickback from the web developer...

you get the ankles and I'll get the wrists

I could have designed the site for $3.5M and thrown in a year's worth of free hosting.. + a free membership to the pornsite of his choice!

Perfectly thought out. I like it. Maybe I'll buy :)

Maybe he spent $100 on it and pocket the rest =)

exactly what I would have done
people up in the government are so stupid they would actually buy that story... :(

Wow, screw porn, I'm doing Government contracts only now!

Damn that would have built one hell of a porno site ,.
and made him money back , geeeeee got love the GOVERMENT and how they can get away with that kind of bull shit
:BangBang: :BangBang: :ak47:

Thats the biggest joke, that guy should be fired and then routinely ass raped with a broom handle for being such a turd for brains.

$956,000 spent on hosting and support services

Thats just fuckin bullshit, what are they paying? $500 per GB?

$928,000 spent on software

Software? What fuckin software? Apache? MySQL? Dreamweaver? How the fuck could you possibly spend that much on software???

$661,000 spent on hardware.

Hardware? You could run that site on a $2,000 server from Dell no problem. What are they running it on? A Cray supercomputer? LOL

FUCKING JOKE!!!

Australian taxpayers got raped on that one!

Funny you should mention this, after hearing about the $4M for an Australian Government website, I've been reseraching how to get into this - it seems you need to just have a lot of glossy charts and folders and be able to talk the talk.. spin some bullshit.. oh yeah and get ISO certified.. which means producing a 1000 page document on how you plan to manage your coffee breaks effectively.. dunno if it's worth it.. though $4M is a lot of money for a website

Fucking disgraceful.

Alston is a shithead and should be beaten savagely with baseball bats.

I'd have done it for a night with one of his interns.

lol HORRIBLE....

perfect example, its not what you know, its who you know.

I bet the Senator spent the money on beer and whores then built the website with the Geocities WYSIWYG himself.

You need an army of sales people, account managers, sales managers, product managers, information architects, business development managers just to create the facade of corporate respectibility to get these clients - we charged Toyota about 4M and Mars Corp about 2M only a year and a half ago.

They're using Vignette StoryServer. I used that once at my old company and it's incredibly expensive. Spending a million bucks for the software, training (it's difficult to learn) and consultants is nothing.

its like $2.475million USD for anyone who cares... still a fucking outrage.

Storyserver? what the fuck does that do that makes it worth that much money?

Vignette? damn, we were very close to using that, yeah.. very expensive. On one hand I am really outraged at the amount of cash spent because it is public money, but on the other hand I do find it funny seeing a lot of disbelief coming from a forum where most people think 1k is top dollar for a site, and a competition is a valid way of contracting and paying for work.

1k is a half hour meeting at a decent sized corporate design company talking about the proposal to even pitch at the client. Large companies and governmental agencies require an absurd degree of documentation and qualifications to even think about laying the content out as a flowchart let alone notepad html. These design companies aren't college kids photoshopping for beer money, and these client companies aren't like webmasters, webmasters already know how to do most of the stuff and just need a pretty page or two to slap on their backend. These are large businesses that need it done right first time from the ground up and take months and months to complete, not a few days. It's a totally different world, and I don't agree that it's a good one either.

Even so 4M is a fuckload of cash and it's a disgrace. The sales people from the design house who got them to cough up the 4M just saw their market value jump 50%. They'll be in demand.

Yeah, just the software will cost you anywhere from $100k to 5 or more times that. And, since it does just about nothing out of the box, that company makes even more on consulting.
Total bullshit if you ask me, you can have a good piece of content management software developed for $100k easy.