London to Introduce Traffic Congestion Charge

Vivek writes "BBC is reporting that Londoners will have to pay a 5 pound "Congestion Charge" starting Feb 17. According to this Times of India article, an Indian software firm called Mastek developed the .NET based software to implement the plan. In the absence of toll booths, it reportedly uses character recognition from 700 surveillance cameras to identify defaulting license plates." See our previous story for background.

Comments

Indian software company

[oliverthered]

ummm..... Bad Idea.
anyone I've ever know to work with Indian outsources work has said.
'You get what you ask for'
So why is that bad.... well you get EXACTLY what you asked for,
didn't ask for security, won't get security. didn't ask for uptime, well it'll crash a bit, but do the job......

Outsourcing to india is cheep in the short term, but often requires a re-write in the long term.
Consultancy, ummm.... what's that, don't you know what you want or somthing?

Now all I have to do is hack the crap software and no charge for me! (IIS, .NET, Indian software should be easy)

Wrong, wrong, and wrong...

[TamMan2000]

continued INFRASTRUCTURE maintenance, ie the trucks that bring food to safeway for you to buy, the trucks that deliver mail to the post office for you, the gas trucks from Chevron that ensure everyone else gets where they are going.

1. Safeway is privately owned, taxes do not pay for their trucks.
2. The post office is affiliated with the federal government, but they fund their own operations with the sale of stamps (the gov kicks in extra money when stuff goes wrong, but this is not the norm).
3. Chevron is again privately owned, you could argue that the government is wanting war with Iraq so chevron can deliver you cheaper oil, but that is about the limit of that connection.