Posts by Doctor Syntax 42400 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I'm not sure we were reading the same Wikipedia article but the one I read was contrasting consumables with durables. Food and water are given as examples but only as part of a wider range of examples. Just as well really, or else consumer protection legislation would have a very much narrower scope.
I suppose it depends on whether she has established prior expectations of how user interfaces will work.
If you were to design a vehicle control on the basis that the vehicle will turn in the direction in which the lower part of the steering wheel turns then a new driver will learn that and find it natural. Experienced drivers would crash within minutes.
To my way of thinking taking it in-house means that you do it properly and that includes staffing - both in terms of numbers and expertise. There's no actual law that prevents the Civil Service doing that - it's just that the generalists who run it don't really like employing specialists and even less do they like paying them properly.
It's more likely that a directly employed team with a proper career structure will be a less security risk than a churn of expert managers elsewhere (who, BTW, would have to be vetted).
"attention can turn to adjustments in the micron and nanometer ranges in order get the telescope properly aligned"
Stop it! You're doing my head in. Micron adjustments in microscope focussing - fine (literally fine, that's what the fine focussing know is for) but nanometre adjustments on a telescope...
The principle of interfaces when they came into computer science was that the interface, by remaining unchanged* enabled the developer to improve the the implementation behind it whilst not requiring the user of the interface to change in step. What does the I in GUI stand for? That's right - interface. So why is that simple principle not being followed?
What really gets up my nose about this is that Microsoft imposes non-optional GUI changes on its victims supporters who then argue that Microsoft can't be ditched for anything else because of the training costs it would involve. Stockholm Syndrome?
* Of course a new facility could require the interface to be augmented but it shouldn't be broken.
"Weirdly, it's considerably more cost-effective to create one shared workspace that's properly equipped and comfortable than to find some way to create and furnish home offices for each person individually."
But where do you create it? Somewhere convenient to where a number of employees live and maybe another one elsewhere for another group? Or in some city centre only reached by a long and unpleasant commute for all of them?
"Oh, you're doing x ?, do you know you can do it this way?", "You're working on an issue that affects Y? I saw something similar last week and resolved it this way..." "I'm trying to figure out how to do Z. Oh I spoke with someone yesterday, there's an issue with it"
The key is communicating, not communicating face-to-face. I think one of the significant factors in those who find that working at home works is having a good communication infrastructure. That may be no more than email. You can hold a productive conversation over email. I recall one such conversation between myself in Yorkshire and a collaborator in California - I was eating my lunch at the same time (and probably keeping an eye on Bargain Hunt).
Gone are the days when problems would get solved because you happened to take a coffee break at the same time as a colleague etc
Yes, you could never develop anything really complex, such as an OS kernel, without having all the team in one building, sharing coffee breaks, looking over each others' shoulders and so on.
Banks and other financial services are among the stampede of businesses betting the farm on the cloud computing in the hope it can offer "modernisation", flexibility, and reduced cost.
It's always a concern to see modernisation as an end in itself rather than a means to some other, more practical ends.
While they're looking at this perhaps BofE could also consider data sovereignty.
Could you explain in a little more detail how any app promising anonymity, privacy etc. is going to do so without attracting the ire of the Pritti Patels of this world? It's the confidential communication that really gets their attention.
If the code is used without modifications neither permissive nor copyleft licences are going to make much difference. If it is modified then if it's copyleft the distributor has to make the changes available to the recipient but it still doesn't bring payment.
If someone has developed a package and posts it on Github or anywhere else there's nothing that requires them to make any further changes to it. If a corporate user wants something added then either they do it themselves - forking it if necessary - or offer to pay someone such as the original developer to make the changes. Either way the developer shouldn't feel pressured to simply keep on maintaining it let alone make changes without payment.
These situations seem to arise from someone feeling obligated to continue to maintain something without payment and consequently an expectation by others that they will. That doesn't have to happen.
I once, as part of a contract, did some work on an NHS project. It was clear that the data they held was properly structured. It was all to be passed to my client as flat records with several of the fields out of order concatenated into a single field which we then had to rearrange back into order. I pointed out to them that because some of their fields sometimes contained spaces we couldn't take spaces as implied record separators. After a bit of humming and harring they conceded the point. Getting the data in a sensible format seemed out of the question but they would add a flag to hint how it should be rearranged. The flag ended up with 4 values one of which, used in exceptional cases, indicated we didn't need to rearrange it because they hadn't deranged it.
The project covered England and Wales. Part of the fun depended on deciding which national body contained the definitive version at any one time.
"this is yet another failure that is in part due IT pushing their preferred solution to IT's specification"
I don't see anything in the article to suggest that the council even has an IT department let alone one pushing their preferred solution to their specification. A lack of such could well be a reason for failure.
Very likely also (D) the "business users" aren't actually the business users, they're manglement at some higher level who think have no experience of what the current system does day to day, how it's actually used and how the new system needs to work and be used day to day.
