Failures in gov.uk IT projects are down to antiquated software development methods.
Only in software development is a 34% success rate (in 2004) considered a vast improvement (100%) over a decade previously.
What are rather ambitious projects are persistently entrusted to the waterfall method of development ; the first problem being that people seem to just smunge the first three steps into one and have subject-matter experts produce a handful of word documents describing what they think is the best technical architecture.
And then wonder why they don't get something that works. The second problem being using the waterfall method at all. I don't think I've yet seen a successful project that used it for anything more complex than a glorified file download service.
I guess waterfall persists because it allows people to get the design phase out of the way and then go back to being terribly busy with their existing non-optimized tools and process. Iterative methods mean those nasty developer people popping up all the time and asking questions that are too hard for a Monday morning ; and you can't even get rid of them when the software has been delivered!
But government likes a process consisting of clearly delineated steps. Heck, they even invented one.
I keep wanting a full keystream to be acceptable as a password - including backspaces and other control characters, which would allow you to define passwords like "type 'tortoise' then move two left and press backspace THEN delete", but I think that would seem a bit too hardass for some people.
The other point being of course, that if you can map someone onto a CGI mannequin, anyone could be a big box-office ; being a successful actor now only requires acting ability and not a fortuitous convergence of acting ability AND looks.
That's just foolish pride ; the license the code is already under explicitly doesn't compel them to give back. BSD licensing is a businesses wet dream - they get to do what the hell they like, and not give anything back.
If they want to throw money around to create some illusion of reduced liability with the source code, let them. And enjoy whatever it buys you.
There is some value in that statement, but it's also true that code is like a map of the problem domain, and that once you have mapped a particular area, there's often a better path through it than the one you originally took.
The real problem? This laptop has one of those horrible chiclet keyboards.
Lenovo argues the new design gives the laptop a more "clean and inviting look"
I don't want to use any keyboard where the look of the thing was given anything more than secondary consideration. I've used chiclet-keys on Powerbooks, and I hate them. And the stupid key layout. I understand that compromises have to be made on a laptop keyboard because of space, but the Powerbook keyboard seems to have been solely designed to "think different" from the standard layout. Thou Shalt Not Move The Slash Keys. Whenever I know I have to support one now, I take my USB keyboard with me, a nice Cherry G80-3000 with a boring, normal, sensible layout, and clicky key switches.
There is evidence to suggest that despite a ban on GMO crops in Mexico, there is genetic contamination in their local crops. The hypothesis is that the corn they import from the USA sometimes gets spilled and germinates, producing GMO plants that cross-pollinate with the locals.
The upside is that it probably won't thrive in the long term. The local crops don't need all the fertilizer and pesticide sprays that the GMO crops do. The BT producing varieties may be resistant to the insects but the experience of cotton farmers in India would seem to indicate that the rest of the plants genome makes it a sickly wuss of a crop.
GMO crops are part of a razor + blades sales model ; buy the crops, buy the chemical package to make sure they work. Which of course a problem - the Roundup Ready® trait is essentially just intended to make the crop resistant to really nasty herbicides that usually kill everything. And now we get megadoses of them sprayed on our crops.
The real threat is the percentage of people who buy into the package. If natural varieties die out, the ONLY way to grow these crops will be to buy seed and sprays from Monsanto. They will literally own our means of survival. Not a comfortable thought.
There is - you have to sign a technology agreement.
In addition, if you don't buy Monsanto corn, you are likely to be investigated. If your field is even partially pollinated by Roundup Ready® corn, and it's probably a virtual certainty by now, they'll set the lawyers on you. Since Monsanto can afford more lawyers than you, and your farm is likely to represent your family livelihood, most people cave in and settle out of court rather than lose their family inheritance. And I'm willing to bet that some of them start buying Monsanto just to avoid it happening again... maybe it even gets written into the settlements.
That's right, Monsanto now makes money out of farmers for NOT buying Monsanto products. The best thing for them about this business model is that it spreads itself - literally, with pollen - across national borders, regardless of consent or trade agreement.
I still have a CRT television - backlit displays are rubbish for my preferred viewing habits, which tend to involve lots of darkness viz ; sci-fi, fantasy, etc. Any genre where significant amounts of screen time is spent in the dark just aren't as good on a display which can't achieve 100% blackness (in a darkened viewing room).
The colour response of CRTs is better also.
For picture quality this is on a direct footing with OLED displays, which are going to be using the same optically-excited phosphor compounds (as mentioned in the article). Field-effect displays should be able to use the tried and tested CRT phosphors as they use electron excitation. All of these should be able to display "absolute" black, unlike an LCD.
The downside to OLED and FED is the complexity of manufacturing the screen which requires a tiny individual element for each pixel. LPD sounds like it has a simplicity advantage in manufacturing terms. If the laser works, it works, no dead pixels. It won't need a shadow mask or aperture grill, it won't need a vacuum so a reasonably sized display won't need 10s of kilos of high-lead glass, it'll never need degaussing, it won't need a multi-thousand volt transformer inside it.
It sounds like it should soundly beat out all of the existing displays in terms of manufacturing cost, have a picture quality better than LCDs, a colour response similar to CRT, refresh rates of at least 100Hz for those of us who hate display flicker, maybe higher for those of us who want 3D (or maybe make the resolution higher and put a polarizing filter on it), and consume 25% of the power of LCDs. The only downside is that it might be somewhat deeper than the flatter displays.
Indeed.. and the value of media doesn't decrease when you share it between more people.
Setting aside the cost of the broadcasting infrastructure, imagine the content that could be had if the BBC had a USA-population sized budget instead of a UK-sized one.....
By the way - it's about $19 a month (about 5 grande latte) and we get
Expect to see something similar to this on you cell phone in about, let's say, 2038.
In 2038, you won't need a camera phone, you'll just need a subscription to the Panopticon Drone Network®, filming everything, everywhere, for your fun and pleasure, since 2031!
As a developer, the only things I pester IT support for are things that I literally cannot influence, like permissions on servers I don't administer, poking holes through the firewall, etc.
Developers probably get into worse scrapes than the average user. Recently I had to have my Master Boot Record restored by IT support because policy forces us to use a full-disk encryption product that has a custom MBR. The average user would not have been booting Linux from an external drive and would not have run a badly-designed update that hosed the MBR on the main system disk instead of the disk the OS booted from.
On the other hand, the amount of time I've saved IT support by advising users, fixing my own problems, and fixing things they just plain broke in the first place, more than makes up for the odd difficult support incident I cause. Hell, I like to think dealing with my problems is a break from the old routine of "Uh, yeah, I forgot my password."
I think a certain proportion of the bad reputation they get is having to enforce the bone-headed policy that the upper echelons think up. But a certain proportion is due to them hiring part-time graduate chair-warmers to man the lines and provide a human interface to the "support script".
It should be character-separated-values ; as usual, the Unix way of doing it is simplest - one field separator, one escape character, one line ending. Excel/MS-CSV messes around with quotes (instead of just escaping the special characters that occur in data), because the rules are more complex, implementations vary. Localised field separators... that doesn't surprise me.
it's not a question of intelligence, it's a question of attitude.
Regardless of whether you are bright enough to handle a four-way stop intersection, if your attitude is "hey, I don't have to be careful, I'm/an excellent driver/driving an armoured car/more important than anyone else/", that's just stupid.
I've seen some of the most intelligent people I know, doing some of the stupidest things... including myself, generally when I think I know best (when I just haven't thought it through).
Governments should focus less on legislating everything stupid out of existence and more on getting people to use their intelligence instead of ignoring it. But they fear a thinking population.
British Telecom are claiming that their ADSL package gives you the best connection... of course, it's the best connection to the local wireless router, and not the connection to the gateway... they have an enormous router with a high gain antenna set (and a phone handset for VoIP).
They can't bring themselves to admit that the cable provider walks all over them in terms of actual bandwidth.
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Failures in gov.uk IT projects are down to antiquated software development methods.
Only in software development is a 34% success rate (in 2004) considered a vast improvement (100%) over a decade previously.
What are rather ambitious projects are persistently entrusted to the waterfall method of development ; the first problem being that people seem to just smunge the first three steps into one and have subject-matter experts produce a handful of word documents describing what they think is the best technical architecture.
And then wonder why they don't get something that works. The second problem being using the waterfall method at all. I don't think I've yet seen a successful project that used it for anything more complex than a glorified file download service.
I guess waterfall persists because it allows people to get the design phase out of the way and then go back to being terribly busy with their existing non-optimized tools and process. Iterative methods mean those nasty developer people popping up all the time and asking questions that are too hard for a Monday morning ; and you can't even get rid of them when the software has been delivered!
But government likes a process consisting of clearly delineated steps. Heck, they even invented one.
I keep wanting a full keystream to be acceptable as a password - including backspaces and other control characters, which would allow you to define passwords like "type 'tortoise' then move two left and press backspace THEN delete", but I think that would seem a bit too hardass for some people.
The other point being of course, that if you can map someone onto a CGI mannequin, anyone could be a big box-office ; being a successful actor now only requires acting ability and not a fortuitous convergence of acting ability AND looks.
That's just foolish pride ; the license the code is already under explicitly doesn't compel them to give back. BSD licensing is a businesses wet dream - they get to do what the hell they like, and not give anything back.
If they want to throw money around to create some illusion of reduced liability with the source code, let them. And enjoy whatever it buys you.
Don't be daft - who do you think's going to be their pool of cheap slave labour?
There is some value in that statement, but it's also true that code is like a map of the problem domain, and that once you have mapped a particular area, there's often a better path through it than the one you originally took.
Obligatory link to story detailing the reduction of humans to a mere servo in the machine.
Urrgh. I see it, now you come to mention it.
That's just wrong. I've always thought if I went freelance I'd go Lenovo... but it looks like HP for me.
The real problem? This laptop has one of those horrible chiclet keyboards.
Lenovo argues the new design gives the laptop a more "clean and inviting look"
I don't want to use any keyboard where the look of the thing was given anything more than secondary consideration. I've used chiclet-keys on Powerbooks, and I hate them. And the stupid key layout. I understand that compromises have to be made on a laptop keyboard because of space, but the Powerbook keyboard seems to have been solely designed to "think different" from the standard layout. Thou Shalt Not Move The Slash Keys. Whenever I know I have to support one now, I take my USB keyboard with me, a nice Cherry G80-3000 with a boring, normal, sensible layout, and clicky key switches.
There is evidence to suggest that despite a ban on GMO crops in Mexico, there is genetic contamination in their local crops. The hypothesis is that the corn they import from the USA sometimes gets spilled and germinates, producing GMO plants that cross-pollinate with the locals.
The upside is that it probably won't thrive in the long term. The local crops don't need all the fertilizer and pesticide sprays that the GMO crops do. The BT producing varieties may be resistant to the insects but the experience of cotton farmers in India would seem to indicate that the rest of the plants genome makes it a sickly wuss of a crop.
GMO crops are part of a razor + blades sales model ; buy the crops, buy the chemical package to make sure they work. Which of course a problem - the Roundup Ready® trait is essentially just intended to make the crop resistant to really nasty herbicides that usually kill everything. And now we get megadoses of them sprayed on our crops.
The real threat is the percentage of people who buy into the package. If natural varieties die out, the ONLY way to grow these crops will be to buy seed and sprays from Monsanto. They will literally own our means of survival. Not a comfortable thought.
There is - you have to sign a technology agreement.
In addition, if you don't buy Monsanto corn, you are likely to be investigated. If your field is even partially pollinated by Roundup Ready® corn, and it's probably a virtual certainty by now, they'll set the lawyers on you. Since Monsanto can afford more lawyers than you, and your farm is likely to represent your family livelihood, most people cave in and settle out of court rather than lose their family inheritance. And I'm willing to bet that some of them start buying Monsanto just to avoid it happening again... maybe it even gets written into the settlements.
That's right, Monsanto now makes money out of farmers for NOT buying Monsanto products. The best thing for them about this business model is that it spreads itself - literally, with pollen - across national borders, regardless of consent or trade agreement.
I still have a CRT television - backlit displays are rubbish for my preferred viewing habits, which tend to involve lots of darkness viz ; sci-fi, fantasy, etc. Any genre where significant amounts of screen time is spent in the dark just aren't as good on a display which can't achieve 100% blackness (in a darkened viewing room).
The colour response of CRTs is better also.
For picture quality this is on a direct footing with OLED displays, which are going to be using the same optically-excited phosphor compounds (as mentioned in the article). Field-effect displays should be able to use the tried and tested CRT phosphors as they use electron excitation. All of these should be able to display "absolute" black, unlike an LCD.
The downside to OLED and FED is the complexity of manufacturing the screen which requires a tiny individual element for each pixel. LPD sounds like it has a simplicity advantage in manufacturing terms. If the laser works, it works, no dead pixels. It won't need a shadow mask or aperture grill, it won't need a vacuum so a reasonably sized display won't need 10s of kilos of high-lead glass, it'll never need degaussing, it won't need a multi-thousand volt transformer inside it.
It sounds like it should soundly beat out all of the existing displays in terms of manufacturing cost, have a picture quality better than LCDs, a colour response similar to CRT, refresh rates of at least 100Hz for those of us who hate display flicker, maybe higher for those of us who want 3D (or maybe make the resolution higher and put a polarizing filter on it), and consume 25% of the power of LCDs. The only downside is that it might be somewhat deeper than the flatter displays.
I think the majority of "high prevalence of corn in processed foods" is HFCS - does this contain significant fractions of the proteins involved.
Not that I think HFCS is a health food. I'm so glad that Iowa corn lobby influence can't reach over here to the UK.
Design it so the switches to disable the safety features are inside the reactor vessel?
The BBC made a miniseries out of it. Alas, you can only get the first season on DVD (possibly due to negotiation over movie rights).
Indeed.. and the value of media doesn't decrease when you share it between more people.
Setting aside the cost of the broadcasting infrastructure, imagine the content that could be had if the BBC had a USA-population sized budget instead of a UK-sized one.....
By the way - it's about $19 a month (about 5 grande latte) and we get
Expect to see something similar to this on you cell phone in about, let's say, 2038.
In 2038, you won't need a camera phone, you'll just need a subscription to the Panopticon Drone Network®, filming everything, everywhere, for your fun and pleasure, since 2031!
Now there's an idea ... freelance coding + firefighting.
Get PAID to cook and work out. Awesome.
You can, as long as you understand the gene sequences are DRMed, and require relicensing for derivative works.
As a developer, the only things I pester IT support for are things that I literally cannot influence, like permissions on servers I don't administer, poking holes through the firewall, etc.
Developers probably get into worse scrapes than the average user. Recently I had to have my Master Boot Record restored by IT support because policy forces us to use a full-disk encryption product that has a custom MBR. The average user would not have been booting Linux from an external drive and would not have run a badly-designed update that hosed the MBR on the main system disk instead of the disk the OS booted from.
On the other hand, the amount of time I've saved IT support by advising users, fixing my own problems, and fixing things they just plain broke in the first place, more than makes up for the odd difficult support incident I cause. Hell, I like to think dealing with my problems is a break from the old routine of "Uh, yeah, I forgot my password."
I think a certain proportion of the bad reputation they get is having to enforce the bone-headed policy that the upper echelons think up. But a certain proportion is due to them hiring part-time graduate chair-warmers to man the lines and provide a human interface to the "support script".
It should be character-separated-values ; as usual, the Unix way of doing it is simplest - one field separator, one escape character, one line ending. Excel/MS-CSV messes around with quotes (instead of just escaping the special characters that occur in data), because the rules are more complex, implementations vary. Localised field separators... that doesn't surprise me.
it's not a question of intelligence, it's a question of attitude.
Regardless of whether you are bright enough to handle a four-way stop intersection, if your attitude is "hey, I don't have to be careful, I'm /an excellent driver/driving an armoured car/more important than anyone else/", that's just stupid.
I've seen some of the most intelligent people I know, doing some of the stupidest things... including myself, generally when I think I know best (when I just haven't thought it through).
Governments should focus less on legislating everything stupid out of existence and more on getting people to use their intelligence instead of ignoring it. But they fear a thinking population.
British Telecom are claiming that their ADSL package gives you the best connection... of course, it's the best connection to the local wireless router, and not the connection to the gateway... they have an enormous router with a high gain antenna set (and a phone handset for VoIP).
They can't bring themselves to admit that the cable provider walks all over them in terms of actual bandwidth.
They already have commercial variants, it's multi-licensed for people who don't like the existing licensing profile.
I didn't see anyone saying the same things about MySQL.. well, not until Oracle bought it.
fans of the BSD license argue that it is "more free" because anyone may do anything with the software
Including... making it non-free again...
Oops.