dreamfactory

Interesting. This is more than I'd have thought but you can't just remove them from the supply/demand picture and say they are driving prices up by their very existence. The OP's point I was addressing was that housing benefits being paid were above market rates (not true as they are capped) and this was pushing the whole market.

Having integrated with these kind of systems, they aren't up to internet-scale traffic. Apart from raw capacity they are usually architected for transactional consistency, not large indeterminate numbers of concurrent users. This is why we have things like ESB's and async enterprise integration patterns.

I'd be surprised if those weren't already in place on this project but bet it's really poorly done. My money is on a totally manual test process which means a deployment misses loads of cases and takes weeks and where a load test is 10 guys in India hitting f5.

I don't know about US gov procurement but I do know a bit about European, which I don't think has a particularly better track record.

On these big gov projects you would not believe how terrifyingly thin the margins are for integrators due to politicians being very sensitive about being seen to be responsible with the public purse strings, particularly given that they don't understand the technology. In addition to the thin margins, you therefore also see extensive offshoring and very low blended rates.

The projects are still incredibly expensive in the end and barely perform because the cheap labour incurs massive technical debt - and the thin margins means that the integrators try to insulate their risk with many layers of project management, and huge amounts of rigid enterprise architecture and planning up front.

Given this mentality of cutting cost to the bone via forward planning, even proofs of concept are hard to get through, let alone investing in 15 prototypes. I think the way to do this would be as part of a gov tech investment scheme rather than attached to a specific project or program.

You're aware that the Obama administration are already strong backers of open source?

The irony is that this is positioned as something that devs want to happen and businesses oppose. The reality is that the large companies want to offshore work as much as possible. This would be extremely bad news for developers in first world countries, if it weren't for the fact that they only have jobs because it works so badly in practise.

> GMG is selling a product. They (the owners, editors, writers) no more believe it than at McDonald's corporate HQ they live on cheeseburgers for every meal.

You know The Guardian is unlike other newspapers and runs at a loss.

"Miller admits that he does not foresee the newspaper earning a profit anytime soon. Rusbridger said, “The aim is to have sustainable losses.” Miller defines that as getting “our losses down to the low teens in three to five years.” But at some point, if the Guardian does not begin to make money, the trust’s liquid assets, currently £254 million, would be depleted."

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/09/guardian-ce...

"... owned by The Scott Trust, a charitable foundation existing between 1936 and 2008, which aimed to ensure the paper's editorial independence in perpetuity, maintaining its financial health to ensure it did not become vulnerable to take overs by for-profit media groups. At the beginning of October 2008, the Scott Trusts assets were transferred to a new limited company, The Scott Trust Limited, with the intention being that the original trust would be wound up.[93] Dame Liz Forgan, chair of the Scott Trust, reassured staff that the purposes of the new company remained as under the previous arrangements.

The Guardian has been consistently loss-making.

...

The Guardian's ownership by the Scott Trust is probably a factor in its being the only British national daily to conduct (since 2003) an annual social, ethical and environmental audit in which it examines, under the scrutiny of an independent external auditor, its own behaviour as a company.[95] It is also the only British daily national newspaper to employ an internal ombudsman (called the "readers' editor") to handle complaints and corrections."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian#Ownership

The idea that housing benefit is driving the rental market is total nonsense. a) it forms a minority of the market and b) the majority of landlords won't let to people on housing benefit.

It's a major battleground already. The Russians are either far ahead or very unsubtle in this - it's particularly obvious with any story about Russia.

Looks like they jumped from too complex - 6 options - to throwing segmentation (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...) out with the bathwater

His product will only take significant business from ST if it is better. Within reasonable bounds, the price of an editor is not going to be a deciding factor in the professional developer market.

This kind of fractal complexity is true per batch. The problem being described here is quite simply large batch sizes, with many projects treated even as just a single batch. The smaller your batch size, the more constant your overall project velocity is.

80/20 is therefore a sign of a poorly managed project (since visibility of true velocity is hidden, planning is impossible at best or based on false data at worst, and overruns are collected and unpacked only at the end).

Unfortunately very few managers involved in planning get this, and as a result don't recognise their responsibility is for delivering the whole at a predictable rate by managing this process. (Instead we often see a sick project management culture of not giving the client what they need and whipping the delivery horses harder, under the illusion that this is just how projects get delivered - always painfully and late, if at all.)

> What is the state of the art in usability in the 3rd party iPad keyboard market these days?

Logitech ultrathin is very expensive but a must buy for ipad productivity. Ergonomics are excellent for dual keyboard and screen driving (iOS doesn't make sense completely from keyboard) and it can be used as a full laptop replacement for a lot of business applications.

Would love to see some screenshots or video of the dashboard itself.

The internet is pretty much ruined in many ways now. Apart from the snooping, public opinion has become an open battlefield. Comments for any political article on any popular site are now full to the brim with obvious shills of all stripes.

It's what many people with a reasonable understanding of web development and limited experience of writing a CMS think.

It's a well-trodden rite of passage for many web developers to end up writing a CMS or three from scratch (which are always limited, clunky, and unmaintainable) - until they get sick of getting caught out by edge cases on things like multiple editors in race conditions, CSRF on forms, scheduled revisions, password reset flows, user synchronisation, localisation etc.

That may be a great learning experience for a developer but expensive for businesses that end up having to migrate and re-platform after a year or two. It's really hard (and dull) to create a good CMS, and even then the considerations go beyond technical as this is a piece of business infrastructure. Why do you think Wordpress has so little competition even though it's a large and valuable market?

To me a controller is just another thin client and models provide an (internal) API. What breaks this and leads to fat clunking controllers is ActiveRecord and 'model as table row' mindset (particularly when a model doesn't handle collections).

The missing part here is turning that API into an external one, which requires a layer in any case to cover things like authorisation, caching, queuing, reporting, QoS, orchestration.

A related approach is client-driven development (just made it up). Write client code (or controller) in the most thin, elegant, and obvious brain-dead simple way, then build an API (or model) to service it.

He talked about them knowing about all his shows, stage name, and about facebook relationships. Translation is sketchy but he seems to be making a wider point that they knew about a bunch of stuff that would only be known by fairly broad and deep surveillance (as per the title of the article) and then applying a distorted interpretation.

Even if this were the case (and there are challenges as outlined by other commenters), it is entirely and obviously disproportionate. Do you seriously find it acceptable for your tax dollars to be spent this way?

Secondly, this all misses what I think was the real point of the story - that this is an outcome of the surveillance dragnet.

So what? Those people are still part of the economy. e.g. if 95% of people had net negative wealth it wouldn't mean that they could be discounted and you'd only look at the remaining 5% for any meaningful view of how the wealth that society produces is distributed.

combined?

I hate this knee-jerk response so many have that copy/paste == bad. You aren't in any position to create a generic API until you have at least 3 implementations, so unless it's a very obvious solution service, or you are practising some kind of extreme waterfall, copy/paste could be the best way to go. I'll hypothesise that most of the architectural problems we have are down to the cult of prefactoring.

Many enterprises will only use RHEL (tooling, support, market maturity etc), hence 'enterprise-grade'.

I know a large established company that did this and turned out to make more from the commercial property letting than their core business, which presents them with an interesting dilemma...

I'll second that the ipad is a great creation device but just not for proper stylus based creation - some paint styles, most drawing, and any handwriting. But it is good for more common creative applications - a lot of photo apps, music, keyboard-based writing. If Apple also made a stylus-based product I'd get it in a heartbeat (because ironically it's weakest as a paper notebook replacement for meetings and sketching ideas), but if I had to choose between those types of creative applications, there's more mileage in the ipad.

I think that's pretty rare, even among big co's that do a lot of government work.

I always did this, it's just how I code. Trick is to keep them short and fixed duration under a day, preferably under half. a) that's where all the value is (longer and you're just going down the rabbit hole), and b) gives you time to quickly write production code based on the spike/prototype.

So tell a big enough lie and everybody believes it but a big enough truth and nobody does...

Which is why I worry about the government moves we are seeing against online anonymity (looks to me like the ground is slowly being prepared to make it illegal).