It really comes to something when a website for a type of church can be considered NSFW. I understand though -- in my 10 years in corporate America I sure kept my atheistic head down. Nothing would have finished a career quicker than letting my screaming, wall-thumping, secretary-humping, second-wife-divorcing bosses know that I was not also a Christian.

The idea of embedding a calculation into the system that is automatically updated by underlying data changes -- is that not just a database view?

We use this sort of technique quite widely in a Ruby on Rails app I work on -- complex calculations such as for profitability and cash flow are defined as views in Postgres, and referenced by the app as read-only models. Thus we can: Profitability.where(product_id: 27).group(:month).sum(:value)

Performs monstrously fast, as is extremely flexible. It breaks the whole "for the love of gods don't put business logic in the database" separation of concerns idea, but we have a system to ship right now and we can't wait for RoR performance and flexibility to catch-up that much.

"25 Mega Tons of fire" is an interesting way of quantifying the energy in something less than 600,000 tons of LNG. Considering your estimate of 5 or 10 million deaths, along with overuse of exclamation marks, I think that you might be a little bit unbalanced.

Because only a trivially small proportion of the population cares. Few have even heard about these services.

If you care about free TV in the UK then you could start by not watching or recording live transmissions, and you then have no obligation to pay the TV license -- they only waste it on extra redundancy payments for senior managers, and politically motivated nonsense stuff like moving programming oop north.

I get by on BBC iPlayer delayed transmissions, streaming to my TV through Chromecast. Possibly ITV and Channel 4 have compatible streaming services, but sadly their programmes are not compatible with me.

At the last company where I worked, word processors and voice mail systems allowed them to have zero secretaries and receptionists, as software developers had to answer the door phone and type their own everythings. Of course this did double the number of software developers they needed because they all got fuck all work done, so I guess the article's correct.

If you forget your Adobe password, they send it back to you in plain text.

That's quality right there.

Took me a few reads to understand the last part of that sentence, due to missing punctuation.

This may have undermined your persuasive argument.

That is all true, but the days of "scientific management" are over, and research does not matter.

Managers believe that you achieve efficiency and greatness through gut feeling and tough talk and catchy slogans. They are not interested in learning otherwise, and 90% of them were never taught management, they just got promoted into it.

There are a few companies that will make sensible, evidence-based choices, but the only true fix is to work for yourself.

... and two new gaps created!

Doh.

I think that your response illustrates a very different approach and purpose -- in the US the computerised record is for billing, but in the UK the computerised record could simply be a description of symptoms and treatments.

There's no need for the UK to follow the medicine-as-a-profit-centre approach of the US.

To the delight of many dubious business types, the shredding of paper is very easy though.

I was going to add that it should not be beyond moderately difficult to put in place a secure backup and audit trail, but these guys can't even get the basic system off the ground.

Speaking as a dyed-in-the-wool data modeller and corporate database guy, I wonder what the problem would be with throwing all of that data modeling and medical coding stuff away and just letting people write into the system what actually happened, exactly as they do with paper records. Some tagging for "this was a procedure" or "this was a test", but free text the rest of the way.

At least the information would then be accessible through a computer to far-flung locations (Norwich) in case it was needed there, it wouldn't be in some doctors squashed-spider scrawl, and it would be ultimately flexible. Of course it would not be as amenable to analysis and reporting, but it would be something.

Is this failure just the result of seeking a gold-plated solution?

>> the website has been largely derelict ... the forums overrun with spam ... the project was halted in 2009 ... not clear from the announcement whether the ISO available is the traditional build, or the version rebuilt around Linux.

Sounds great. I'll install it at once.

80kg of water is about 136m^3 (4,800 cubic feet) of steam, so you'd better make sure there's a window open cos that's the volume of a cube with sides of nearly 17ft.

I was a green card holder living in the US for ten years as the spouse of a USAF officer, and you're absolutely right about the immigration people.

My co-workers didn't believe that things were as bad as I said, until I spent a day trying to call the INS in Cincinnati on speaker phone. Nine hours of listening to a recorded message telling me that I was in a queue. I had to take the next morning off to drive down there from Dayton to wait in their office for 75 minutes in order to get a 10 second question answered.

Amusingly, they gave me a different answer to the consulate in Rome a couple of months later, so I ended up paying about $200 for some documents to be replaced there, and when I returned to the US at the end of that vacation I had to wait for two hours in immigration because both the Cincinnati office and Rome consulate gave me the wrong answers.

I'm done with the US -- never going back.