http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4267887.stm

"The MPs found American IT giant EDS' =A3456m system was "nowhere near
being fully functional and the number of dissatisfied, disenchanted and
angry customers continues to escalate". "

Two thirds of a billion dollars for a system that takes direct debits,
logs them, and keeps a record of social workers comments about
families.

Four SQL Server Licences =3D =A310000.00
One Windows 2003 server running ASP.Net plus MSDN Universal
subscription, plus connection to cybersource. =A35000.00
One Contract developer for a year =3D =A3180,000.
Eight computers, =A310000.00

One EDS? Two thirds of a billion dollars.

Amount of tax taken by Gay Gordon to (fail to) solve the problem more
than was necessary? =A3455,800,000.00

I'm not joking, I know a hundred developers who could have written a
system to do this, by themselves, in less than a year.

Of these, 75 of them could have actually learned a completely new
operating system, language and RDBMS and still done it in under a year,
by themselves.

Of these, 30 of them could have done it in just Microsoft Office, with
Access on the backend, using VBA.

Of these, 20 of them could have done it, in z80 assembler on CP/M, on
an RM380Z using only 72Kb floppies with text files for datastorage.

3 of those could have combined their solution with a version of
"spacin" for when the social workers had nothing to do. (still in less
than a year.)

What the fuck is Gordon Brown doing? How can anybody, literally anybody
spend =A3456 million on a computer system that does just three things,
log meetings, automate payment computation, and take the money?

This is a worse waste of money than putting Tony Bliar's daughter into
counselling, for fuck's sake. (Mind you I'd be committing suicide if I
had to live next door to Gordon.)



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