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On Mon, 17 Sep 2007 11:20:49 +0100 Tom Potts <tompotts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Monday 17 September 2007 09:24, Neil Williams wrote: > > Come on MS, £343m is peanuts - Bill probably has that much down the > > back of the sofa. When the NHS has just spent £5bn on a Windows-based > > authentication system that cannot cope with the existing (pilot-stage) > > demand of maybe 0.5% of the expected workload, £343m is truly > > inconsequential. > Can anyone tell me where I can apply for these NHS contracts - I guess all you > have to do is make up a figure and then get a contract lawyer to pull holes > in the agreement and you can be rich! > Oh hang on - I can actually write software - I guess that will exclude me! > Tom te tom te tom Too right - NHS software isn't written as software, it is packaged using proprietary "toolkits" that don't need anything as taxing as a language. Think of the love child of Glade and Visual Basic. Little wonder the crap doesn't work. I once asked one of the upstream "developers" of a piece of NHS software (used by thousands of premises across the UK) why a certain function didn't work and why the regular expression couldn't simply be tweaked to allow the relevant character. Dumb idea. The whole thing went over his head : "The toolkit doesn't support macros". Huh? He really thought I was talking about Excel macros or similar. Needless to say nobody "developing" the programs has access to the source code of the toolkit so they wait and spend another £1,000 on the "upgrade". Absolutely $%&$£ loopy. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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