Re: gets() is dead


"Flash Gordon" <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:7qttg4xbrl.ln2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Malcolm McLean wrote, On 05/05/07 07:29:

"Richard Heathfield" <rjh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:NfydnUSqI-T9VqTbRVnytgA@xxxxxxxxx
Malcolm McLean said:


"Richard Heathfield" <rjh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:NZGdnQKCNLAjD6TbRVnyigA@xxxxxxxxx
Malcolm McLean said:

<snip>

But what if you decrease machine B and C type errors by increasing
errors of type D and E? [See little black bag post elsethread].

No, thanks. I'd rather scrap the whole crappy system and write
something that works. This would involve not using any of the people
involved in writing any of the above systems, since they are clearly
no good at their job.

The example is a little bit silly [...]

Such a machine will be tested extensively and it is unlikely that such
an obvious bug would survive. But what it it were calculating potato
deliveries?

My previous answer stands.

If the customer gets two sacks instead of one then that
means someone has got to get in a van, drive there, and pick it up.
Maybe a fifty pound loss to the company. Clearly if the consequence of
a bug is only fifty pounds, it is not economic to so more than about
fifty pounds worth of testing, and if you have one good programmer and
one idiot, you put the good guy on the insulin machine which leaves
the idiot on the potato program.

The cost to the company of employing an idiot as a programmer far
exceeds fifty pounds. In fact, even if he's on UK minimum wage, the
cost to the company of employing him will exceed fifty pounds *per day*
when you take into account Employer's NI and the cost of any ancillary
benefits.

The normal method of dealing with such people, alas, is to move them
into management or marketing or, if they're astoundingly dense,
marketing management. You certainly don't let them anywhere near a
keyboard.

When idiots are the only programmers to be had, the cost of not employing one is to close the company.

Since there are programmers to be had who are not idiots this is not a problem.

> The art of management, which you
so despise, to extract decent or at least profitable software from such idiots.

Obviously you know very little about management. Unfortunately a lot of managers know very little about management, but there are some that do know about it.

> One technique is to sell the NHS (British state medical service)
a computer system for twelve billion pounds to store patient records which I could knock up in a month for a couple of thousand. All you need is a web server with some encryption over the top. This is marketing mangement at its best.

Well, you have just shown that you do not understand web servers (they have encryption built in so you don't need to add it over the top) or the numbers of people accessing the data which means that you need a server farm not a simple single server, or the amount of data which means even if you bought cheap discs the discs alone would cost more than "a couple of thousand". There are many other requirements which are obvious which also put up the cost of the solution. So your costs would soon spiral or your solution would fail very quickly. Whether the government is being ripped off is another matter, but if you think you could solve it for a couple of thousand you are obviously not qualified to judge. I know this because I'm now involved in some lower volume DB stuff and the cheapest we can get the HW is far more than a couple of thousand, and that is ignoring all the people costs of any work.

Yeah, I know.
Basically the contractors are saying "to get from Bradford to London you need to build a motorway". However the motorway is already mostly there. All you need to do is buy a car, and maybe link up a little bit round the Leeds area.
The number of accesses that medical staff need to make to medical records is far less than total internet usage in the country. All the hardware and software infrastructure is already there, and could be bought at commerical rates, not quite for two thousand pounds, but certainly very cheaply.
The two thousand pounds was my fee for setting up such a system. There's basically a months' work there for someone. Set up a web server with editing capabilities, an audit history, and password protection.
Now granted that medical records need to be secure, but not that secure. It would be embarrassing for Mrs Bloggs if some unathorised person knew that she had a hernia op, but it would take a creative villain to turn that information into cash. Meanwhile if a doctor cannot access the same information in an emergency, because of the security, it might be bye bye Mrs Bloggs. We're talking about ordinary commerical level type security here, not release codes for our nuclear weapons. If you want to spend a hundred pounds per doctor for a little dongle that fits into a USB port rather than raw passwords then I won't complain too much. However this consideration used as an excuse for wasting literally bilions of taxpayers' money.

Incidentally salesmen always say that people offering radically lower bids don't understand the problem, or aren't qualified. It is a standard technique.
--
Free games and programming goodies.
http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bgy1mm

.

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