Slashdot Mirror
£32k a Day For Birmingham Council Website
An anonymous reader writes "Birmingham Wired have uncovered that Birmingham City Council spend on average £32,000 a day maintaining a council website that has cost the tax-payer over £48 million to date, while councils nationwide prepare to say goodbye to 26,000 jobs due to budget deficits. Capita, a London based outsourcing company, states on their website: 'To date we've invested £48.4m in a combination of staff training, network upgrades, server replacements, hardware and software — and we continue to drive efficiency through innovation.'"
Yep.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
If you're taking the article at face value, then you should take the fact that the 48.4m is the money to date Capita have invested in something as the truth.
The article is just a bunch of big sounding unrelated numbers thrown together to effect a sense of outrage.
Advanced users are users too!
Yeah, this sounds like the kind of crap normally put out by right-wing think tanks to soften up the populace for brutal cuts to public services. Fact is, Birminghams a big city and its IT services are bound to be costly simply due to scale. The deficit hawks always exploit this fact to come up with big, scary sounding numbers to show government 'waste'. After all, which sounds worse, "Government spends £1 billion on X" or "Government spends £16 per person on X"? Both of course mathematically equivalent.
Massaging the numbers doesn't hurt either. Chav-baiter Jeremy Kyle recently whined in The Sun about there being a £192 billion welfare bill and then starts complaining about people without jobs basically being subhuman - as if the entire £192 billion were spent on jobseekers allowance - the reality is that only £2.9 billion is spent on it, and the vast majority of that bill goes to supporting children, people on state pensions, and the disabled. But don't let facts get in the way of scapegoating the unemployed, Kyle.
There is only one source of our current financial woes, and it lives in the City of London. Right-wing think tanks are constantly putting out this bullshit as a misdirection technique. The bankers want us to blame some defenceless underclass instead of marching on their bonus-bought mansions with torches and pitchforks...
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I have a T-shirt from think geek that sums it up:
"Technical Support: Your ignorance is my job security"
I wonder if this is the employee uniform at Capita?
They're called Crapita by Private Eye for a reason. However public service IT in the last 3 decades is a long story of waste, incompetence and stupidity. Hooray for privatisation - a worse service for a higher cost!
Yes Comrade, fight the power! I haven't worked to earn any of those things either, but damnit I can express outrage towards the people who have! Life isn't fair, so let's hurt other people! Wooo!
that's an old name for the geo tags - you muppet,
I'm betting they're building this in a framework (though "framework" may be too grand a word) that mixes the presentation and logic layer. All that whitespace represents branches in the code (conditionals, database queries, etc.) that weren't executed for that particular page view - or were executed and nothing was output to the screen in that line number. If you don't write your erb tags correctly in Rails, it'll emit spurious whitespace into the source, too. If you weren't writing your logic in your controllers or models (bad!) and not asking erb to collapse whitespace, yeah, you'd get a ton of empty lines.
Oh god. If that's true, this site is an untemplatted nightmare under the covers. Worst case: "Hey, can we change 'Latest News' to just 'news?'" "Sure - just edit line 6643, but don't throw in a syntax error or you'll break the *entire f'ing site.*"
As always, capitalism only works when all sides are peers in the transaction. That means that the person, or, in this case, the government bureaucrat, who looks for private companies to tender on a contract needs to be aware of what they're asking for. They need to understand what the transaction entails, and they need to understand the alternatives (whether hiring someone to do it in-house, or it's simply the competition in the marketplace). Any time you are at an informational disadvantage, you open yourself up to being taken for a ride. There's a reason why government tenders generally include the clause "we reserve the right to go with any vendor, not just the lowest bid" or something like that: so that they can weed out crackpot offers.
It seems to me, then, that the person in Birmingham's city government who decided to go with this outfit was at an informational disadvantage and could thus be duped by incompetent and/or malicious corporations. They apparently took the lowest bid, not the best bid.
> ...its Oracle...
Well, that explains the cost.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
That is £637 per named user. That's great if you are the only person going to be using the application, but if that's the case, you'd probably be better off using sqlite which is £0 per named user.
On the other hand, if your application is going to be used by say 500 people in a local council, it's going to be about £30K worth of named users.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe