Chris Ellis @intrbiz@bergamot.social

@hula @ChrisMayLA6 Indeed.

Clients need to bear the responsibility for driving solutions in the right direction.

I definitely don't see that happening in the public sector.

GDS made some progress in the right direction, that is not sadly all gone.

@hula @ChrisMayLA6 I'd disagree, blaming procurement rules is an easy out.

Having spent time biding on government tenders, the concept that it is an open and fair playing field that the rules meant to foster is laughable.

Split stuff down, award short cheap (less than 200k) statements of work, and you could radically change things.

Stop focusing of cost and focus on outcomes.

Rather than outsourcing to the same small number of companies, offshoring labour and delivering crap.

It's interesting to see so many of the Post Office and Fujitsu staff and execs pleading the Nuremberg defense in the Horizon scandal enquiry.

Havig followed the scandal for far too long, what is interesting is just how many people did nothing. Both in the Post Office, Judiciary and Politics.

As they say, evil prospers when good people do nothing.

@ChrisMayLA6 I've worked in both Local Government and whole range of private sector projects.

Successful technology is driven by small teams who care about what they are building. Often they care enough to understand the needs of there users and stakeholder and deliver a working solution.

Sadly projects in government and big companies are driven by different levers, often focused on inaccurate cost metrics, and thus consistently fail.

Good technology requires empathy and passion, that costs.

@ChrisMayLA6 I feel it's important to point out that it is not technology which failed, but it was people.

Technology is built by people and thus is no more reliable than the people and processes which built it.

Most government IT projects fail not due to the technology, but all the people and politics involved.

The NHS could benefit from good technology and good social change. Except we have no way to make that happen.

@paco I run KVM, Ceph.and a custom control plane / network stack.

Most of my boxes are older IBM kit, since they still offered free firmware. I'd also consider Dell. I avoid HP.

My networking kit is Quanta reference designs and Dell open HW.

The biggest mistake I made was using a bunch of consumer laptop drives for bulk storage. It's far better to pay the extra 20% on used server grade drives, I got a bunch of EMC drives cheap, well worth it.

Also easy now to get good prices on SSDs.

@paco I've got some of that kind of stuff.

I don't have to deal with Flash, just with Java 7, thankfully fairly easy to work around.

However, in reality I have to access the lights-out once every 3 years. Usually when a shitty LSI RAID controller has decided to implode. In these situations it's often easier just to go and visit, since it's usually multiple disks which went pop.

I'd focus far more on making what you run on the hardware tolerant to failure, than managing the hardware.

@revk I find it easier to assume no standards when it comes to I2C.

The oddest one I had was a multiplexer which needed a magic start / ack / stop sequence to put it into advanced more. Which most controllers have no way of sending.

@revk it might make a bit of sense if you wanted to stream / poll a sensor register at a consistent rate.

Other I2C peripheral chips I've used do similar. Can be handy to configure then, just just read the state register out repeatedly.

I2C having a more consistent approach would sure be nice.

@neil as a software engineer. People's belief that computers are reliable always amazes me.

It seems that we all to easily forget that they a programmed by people and therefore are no more reliable than the people and processes who built the system.

We don't even need to go into how complex it is to build software systems. How bad most companies processes are. How unhelpful most clients are.

Computers should not be trusted anymore than a person should be.

@X31Andy early on in the inquiry I watched a number of the impact statements from the victim. Was heartbreaking and anger inducing viewing, hearing how peoples lives where destroyed by bad software, corporate arrogance / ignorance.

Having followed the story for a good few years, it's good that a TV show has managed to garner so much support for the victims.

@ChrisMayLA6 the focus should bot be on her CBE. It should be who at the Post Office perverted the course of justice for so long.

The Post Office and Fujitsu people who caused this horrific mess need to be held accountable.

@X31Andy

Given the MCAS disaster, I'm not sure allowing Boeing to choose profit over safety again is really going to improve things.

I certainly will be going out of my way to avoid flying on a Boeing, until they change their culture.

@alex I've seen them in BT junction boxes / cabs. The little junction opposite my parents place was full of them. Not sure if they are as common since ADSL.