Posts by Smorgo

Carving up the IT contract behind £500bn of annual tax collection is a very risky move

Re: Expensive but worked - when is that a problem for mission critical systems?

"It was Aspire that connected the web forms to the backend systems... :)"

I think you must be thinking of a different generation of online self-assessment. I distinctly remember delivering the GovRules web services to support electronic filing from EzGov while I still worked for EDS, before I moved to Cap. <Checks CV> Yep.

Re: Expensive but worked - when is that a problem for mission critical systems?

"...you didn't have online self-assessment..."

I think you'll find we put that in around 2003. I'm led to believe that the hard work my team and I did to support it is still going strong, too.

Microsoft to make Xamarin tools and code free and open source

Re: Pointless

You may be looking in the wrong places. We've standardised on Xamarin allowing us to use a pretty huge developer base to create native cross-platform Apps.

Xamarin's allowed us to do things that simply wouldn't have been practical any other way and to create products that are unique in their market. So from my perspective, far from being pointless, it's the most significant thing to happen since Microsoft launched .NET.

Your security is just dandy, Apple Pay, but here comes Android

Re: who pays

No, it's not more expensive. Part of the transaction cost is based on the risk associated with the payment. Apple have convinced the banks that Apple Pay is more secure than card transactions, so their cut comes out of this risk element.