Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I also have taken part in such projects. I've also seen at least one institutionally incompetent department (and it was incompentent over 50 years ago when I encountered it a s a member of the public). But the critical phrase in what you point out is "well-defined requirements".
"For all the armchair experts who will loudly tell you they knew it would all go wrong"
Slight problem with the tenses here. All along there have been plenty of people saying it will go wrong. Foresight, not hindsight. If the bystanders could see that why couldn't the participants? Wilful ignorance seems likely.
Every week I hear of users who _demand_ to open any email and attachment they receive.
Sign this:
"I request permission to open any email attachment I choose. I acknowledge that I have been warned about the risks this brings to the business which pays my salary and confirm that I understand that warning and those risks. If this request is granted this document becomes my unconditional resignation effective immediately an attachment I open causes damege.
Signed ........................"
Success at delivering parcels depends entirely on having the right systems to control it. Whether they reslise it or not or whether they like it or not they are an IT business.
Amazon are also in the parcel delivery business wnd realised they were an IT business. That's something FedEx seem not to have noticed.
"it appears to cut across many of Waylands founding assumptions about information hiding and security"
Assumptions; never a good thing. Make an early design decision to do something specific and you find you've exluded the possibility of doing several other things.
Long time retired so all I have to worry about are my own files. And, yes, in the last few weeks I have had to reclaim some from the Nextcloud server which is, effectively, the backup for my laptop. And this very day I was checking & decided it needs more disk but that can wait for a couple of weeks.
In the past distant past we had DR contracts with provision for rehearsals which included full backup restores.
When I arrived in QUB in 67 they'd just had a new library. In fact they also had a new science library which is the one I was familiar with There were legends about the internals of the old one. A year or so later a graduate from Trinity arrived and was very sniffy about Queens having a new library with lots of empty shelves, clearly not having worked out that the reason you build a new, bigger library, is to give yourself more shelf space.
"With modern printing facilities, it is easy to order a few extra copies at a sensible price: there is no need to carry a huge stock or to have a huge initial print run."
Maybe you haven't been involved in small scale publishing.
We typically have a print run of 100* which means that the deposit libraries would take up 6% of it. I looked into using print-on-demand services to put our back catalogue back into print. The price we'd have had to sell at would have been at least half as much again as the original prices which had produced a small surplus. We now have several of them downloadable as PDF instead.
I wonder why UK copyright still specifies TCD. I'd have expected it to have been changed to QUB a century ago although the old library would have run out of storage space long before the 1960s.
* The exception was one which had a much larger than normal print run and sold badly. I think it might have been the reason the treasurer subsequently limited to 100. Depositing half a dozen copies would be no problem but it might alert TPTB to our existence.
In the UK the libraries of deposit are the British Library & the Bodleian in Oxford (not sure if Cambridge also gets a copy). I believe TCD library serves that purpose in Ireland.
The libraries might serve a useful purpose for proving publication but it seems unlikely that ant oher proof would be ignored in court. My local history group has published a number of books with a small print run and we certainly couldn't afford to spare a couple of copies; we're out of print too quickly without that.
It's very simple. BoJo won an election*. There were sufficient people who did not, at least at that time, find him embarassing and voted for the party of which he was (and, at time of writing, still is) leader and hence prospective PM. They found him acceptable.
OK, I'm making an assumption here: that the intersect of people who found him embarassing and people who voted for him is a small one. The intersect of people who voted for him but currently find him an embarassment might well be larger.
OTOH many of those who did not vote for him found him an embarassment then and still do now. Unfortunately there were insufficient of us to keep him out but we do not find him acceptable.
* Technically his party won the election but the UK system is that the leader of the party which wins most seats has first dibs at forming a government. The leadership of the parties appears to be a substantial factor in determining the way votes go.
