Posts by Bullitt 4 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Feb 2010
If I was the Inland Revenue, I would just publish the tax calculation algo/flowchart.
Within 30 days, all the versions/ports you could possibly want would appear in Github and you'd save a fortune on it.
All we ever really wanted was clear instructions on how to calculate tax. We can do the rest.
I always get a slight tingle in the back of my neck putting a large payload of very important, very sensitive, very confidential on servers. 'Specially when it's not in my datacentre downstairs. 'Specially when somebody else has the keys to the cabinets.
Maybe I'm just needy like that. Yep, that must be it.
In a disaster, whatever theoretical savings were on the Powerpoint slides will go straight up the chimney (along with savings-presentation_final.ppt). In disasters, the incredible, the truly unbelievable, always happens. RBS? Anyone?
As mentioned, they are more than big enough to do massive storage volumes themselves and prolly for not that much money either.
I wish I lived in a world where the public sector was really confident of its skills and was the torch carrier for computer science and engineering.
Having worked in IT for 15 years, I'm always amazed at how little is learned from from the experience of others. Vista is perhaps the worst OS ever deployed and how anyone could approve it I do not know. I would rather deploy XP or Windows 2000 in a heartbeat rather than spend 2 minutes doing the design spec for Vista. Windows 7 is very good and would be the natural choice and it pretty much works on anything.
For the Linux community amongst us, I used to think they were always guilty of over egging how good Linux was on the desktop. Linux servers are hard as nails of course, but desktops? Ubuntu 9.10 changes all that. Check out Sun VirtualBox as well - outrageously good layerware.
It's the first time I'd feel comfortable deploying Linux for servers and workstations for secure use - Linux has really come of age and I won't bang on about how stable it is etc. but I would feel much more comfy with Linux as a tool to build blastproof systems than Windows. I should add that I'm not anti-WIndows as such, I've used it forever, it's just that if it's secure computing you want, Linux has more to offer and better tools to do it with.
Oh yeah, support? Why not do it old-school and have it in house and hire a few bright smart people above market rate to run the show and then you would get the systems you wanted at a price the taxpayer could afford.
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