Charlie Clarke would stand up in Parliament and talk boilerplate, too. It wasn't until the Lords kept on telling him (and most of the Commons) to talk sense that something a little less than catastrophic would appear.
There is no EU 'government'. There is a commission which suggests laws put to it by their good old boy commissioners (a pat-on-the-back job given to them by a national government) who often corruptly attempt to push through their own agendas in the face of opposition by (an unfortunately) almost toothless EU parliament. Most of any EU regulations have bubbled up from your own national government - or at least from the two or three most powerful people in your government.
When EU regs are 'approved', your national government is then meant to legislate those regulations into national law. The country which does this the most efficiently and swiftly is Denmark. The country which is the worst at instituting EU regs. is France.
You can break coops into smaller functional units. The whole "coop movement" can then become quite large. Take a look at Mondragon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragn_Cooperative_ Corporation/, some 70,000 people involved, not necessarily fully involved, not perfect either. But then, neither are the 'standard' sociopathic models of companies.
I played for quite a while getting to know OpenCyc a couple of years ago. The documentation was poor, the software consfusingly buggy at times, the Java interface was just awful. Hey, I've got a life to lead, things to get on with, but I battled with the Java for a while before deciding it was a waste of time until the rest of OpenCyc was fixed. Ok, the weekend looms, the weather's getting worse, what the hell...
And all the airports have been shut down less than a day after Tony Blair flew out on holiday... Hey! Maybe they won't let him back in! (You can always hope).
But then again, anyone think John 'Not fit for purpose' Reid and David 'Blind Man' Blunkett might be plotting a coup? Yeugh, that would be letting the terrorists win...
Nope. I've been on business in Warsaw (Poland) a couple of times, Munich (Germany) many times, Basel/Zurich (Switzerland), and France, Spain, Holland, Belgium etc., and I've never had to leave a passport at the desk. In most cases, they don't even look at the passport, they just want a number. Now, your credit card on the other hand...
I did my Masters on workflows and workflow verification. In defining a workflow you are essentially designing a system that, in the 'old' days, was programmed. The program could be tested, for example, for both syntactic and semantic correctness with compilers, unit and functional testing.
On the other hand, every (commercial and other) w/flow system that I looked at, except for one or two academic systems, had (usually) the same set of major flaws, mostly in terms of verifying the workflow. There could often be logical inconsistencies, they would, for example, easily allow deadlocks and livelocks and, as for defining business rules, there are holes everywhere. Holes which (through robust procedures, training etc.) are minimised in the programming world but which are put into (business) critical systems by people who can barely spell 'progremn'.
Would you, for example, alter the flow based on data output by an activity/action/state (or whatever your BPM system calls the 'blobs' that do most of the work)? If so, what happens when you have a SPLIT object somewhere (the flows split into more than one flow)? Is the data copied across the SPLIT to the multiple output flows? Is it a deep or a shallow copy? Deep or shallow copies can have ramifications to actions/activities/states downstream of the flow.
I came to the conclusion that good, verifiable workflows had to be as simple as possible. No business rules, for example, only simple 'decision points', quite strict restrictions on data and control flows especially through control nodes. No commercial system seemed to follow my conclusions, they seemed more intent on producing pretty graphics and I would be wary of using any of them, especially given the prices they charge...
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Charlie Clarke would stand up in Parliament and talk boilerplate, too. It wasn't until the Lords kept on telling him (and most of the Commons) to talk sense that something a little less than catastrophic would appear.
I, for one, welcome our over Lords...
Patents are supposed to be an incentive for innovation.
And, of course, evidence for this is virtually non-existent.
There is no EU 'government'. There is a commission which suggests laws put to it by their good old boy commissioners (a pat-on-the-back job given to them by a national government) who often corruptly attempt to push through their own agendas in the face of opposition by (an unfortunately) almost toothless EU parliament. Most of any EU regulations have bubbled up from your own national government - or at least from the two or three most powerful people in your government.
When EU regs are 'approved', your national government is then meant to legislate those regulations into national law. The country which does this the most efficiently and swiftly is Denmark. The country which is the worst at instituting EU regs. is France.
Hah! The Slashdot AutoURL trashes the o(accent). Look for Mondragon cooperative on Wiki (or anywhere else).
You can break coops into smaller functional units. The whole "coop movement" can then become quite large. Take a look at Mondragon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragn_Cooperative_ Corporation/, some 70,000 people involved, not necessarily fully involved, not perfect either. But then, neither are the 'standard' sociopathic models of companies.
I played for quite a while getting to know OpenCyc a couple of years ago. The documentation was poor, the software consfusingly buggy at times, the Java interface was just awful. Hey, I've got a life to lead, things to get on with, but I battled with the Java for a while before deciding it was a waste of time until the rest of OpenCyc was fixed. Ok, the weekend looms, the weather's getting worse, what the hell...
And all the airports have been shut down less than a day after Tony Blair flew out on holiday... Hey! Maybe they won't let him back in! (You can always hope).
But then again, anyone think John 'Not fit for purpose' Reid and David 'Blind Man' Blunkett might be plotting a coup? Yeugh, that would be letting the terrorists win...
Nope. I've been on business in Warsaw (Poland) a couple of times, Munich (Germany) many times, Basel/Zurich (Switzerland), and France, Spain, Holland, Belgium etc., and I've never had to leave a passport at the desk. In most cases, they don't even look at the passport, they just want a number. Now, your credit card on the other hand...
Could be a good thing then: "...productivity in France - G.D.P. per hour worked - is actually a bit higher than in the United States." See http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/opinion/29krugma n.html?ex=1280289600&en=3c228241f02da3b6&ei=5088&p artner=rssnyt&emc=rss
I did my Masters on workflows and workflow verification. In defining a workflow you are essentially designing a system that, in the 'old' days, was programmed. The program could be tested, for example, for both syntactic and semantic correctness with compilers, unit and functional testing.
On the other hand, every (commercial and other) w/flow system that I looked at, except for one or two academic systems, had (usually) the same set of major flaws, mostly in terms of verifying the workflow. There could often be logical inconsistencies, they would, for example, easily allow deadlocks and livelocks and, as for defining business rules, there are holes everywhere. Holes which (through robust procedures, training etc.) are minimised in the programming world but which are put into (business) critical systems by people who can barely spell 'progremn'.
Would you, for example, alter the flow based on data output by an activity/action/state (or whatever your BPM system calls the 'blobs' that do most of the work)? If so, what happens when you have a SPLIT object somewhere (the flows split into more than one flow)? Is the data copied across the SPLIT to the multiple output flows? Is it a deep or a shallow copy? Deep or shallow copies can have ramifications to actions/activities/states downstream of the flow.
I came to the conclusion that good, verifiable workflows had to be as simple as possible. No business rules, for example, only simple 'decision points', quite strict restrictions on data and control flows especially through control nodes. No commercial system seemed to follow my conclusions, they seemed more intent on producing pretty graphics and I would be wary of using any of them, especially given the prices they charge...