21–30 of 91 posts
The funniest thing about the census debacle is that enough people mistook census for Sensis (a moderately well known brand that publishes our Yellow Pages) in large enough quantities that sensis.com.au completely fell over.
Interesting. Sensis runs on AWS.
In my mind, this kind of fuck up seems consistent with IBM's (and other mega vendor) reputation when it comes to this kind of contract. It's more reflective of poor procurement discipline than anything else -- whomever put out the bid let lobbyists or high level people do their thing without appropriate governance or penalty. It's a relatively small contract, and without clear penalties for poor performance this type…
I'd wager there were other complexities purely from the govt side. When healthcare.gov launched and crashed, it was uncovered that the final definition of the laws and rules were still coming weeks before the launch and had changed dozens of times throughout. From a purely technical perspective, there's no way to know if something "works" if it hasn't been defined or - worse! - is constantly being redefined on the fl…
That is true for oh so many government IT projects. The part that I still struggle to comprehend is "Why on earth aren't the IT companies, like IBM, telling governments that what they're asking isn't actually possible?"
The Danish government have an insane amount of failed IT projects. Most of them fails do to the complexity of laws, rules and requirements. We even know that they'll fail before they even start. Most good developers are able to predict this with great accuracy. So why aren't IBM and other telling governments that what they're asking isn't possible?
My best guess: Because their lawyers will ensure that they're paid anyway, and because they have absolutely no pride in their work.
You can't hurt the reputation of IBM, or at least it won't matter, because their competitors have equally poor reputation, and no one else is going to bid on the jobs they take on.
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Been all over the news last couple weeks, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-25/four-corners-evidence-... https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jul/25/teena... https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jul/26/abu-g... https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/10/the-n... http://www.npr.org/2016/08/11/489584342/claims-probed-of-bru... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_detention_in_Aus…
The youth detention centre issues in the Northern Territory are completely unrelated to the immigration detention centres on Nauru.
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Been all over the news last couple weeks, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-25/four-corners-evidence-... https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jul/25/teena... https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jul/26/abu-g... https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/10/the-n... http://www.npr.org/2016/08/11/489584342/claims-probed-of-bru... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_detention_in_Aus…
The youth detention centre issues in the Northern Territory are completely unrelated to the immigration detention centres on Nauru.
Wait, wait... " "If you think about something like what goes on in Nauru, if a child is injured it's not the government that's responsible, it's Serco, Transfield or whoever else," she said, referring to the private contractors that run Australia's offshore detention centres. " Private offshore detention centers for children? What's going on down there?
Australia essentially pays Nauru to host an immigration detention centre, and sends asylum seekers who tried to reach Australia by boat there, regardless of age or legitimacy of claims or anything else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd wager there were other complexities purely from the govt side. When healthcare.gov launched and crashed, it was uncovered that the final definition of the laws and rules were still coming weeks before the launch and had changed dozens of times throughout. From a purely technical perspective, there's no way to know if something "works" if it hasn't been defined or - worse! - is constantly being redefined on the fl…
>I'd wager there were other complexities purely from the govt side. That is true for oh so many government IT projects. The part that I still struggle to comprehend is "Why on earth aren't the IT companies, like IBM, telling governments that what they're asking isn't actually possible?" The Danish government have an insane amount of failed IT projects. Most of them fails do to the complexity of laws, rules and requir…
$9.6m AUS sounds like peanuts for this — something is surely wrong here.
I agree. The price seems very low to me also, especially since they can't use a cloud provider. I'm assuming they are running this in some already established data center that they own and control. Having to be in a DC alone makes them much more vulnerable to a DDoS (I remember our provider would just cut us off first and then ask questions later is they spotted bad traffic).
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I don't know how much, but that barely seems like enough to pay for the hardware to deal with 10+ million visitors in one evening. (Apparently they aren't allowed to use cloud infrastructure for data safety / privacy reasons.)
> that barely seems like enough to pay for the hardware to deal with 10+ million visitors in one evening. Really? The specs: The online census form was a pretty simple client side app. I'm going to say, I could whack something together in much less than 200k of JS. For each household the site needs to: 1. Serve the client side app. The app had no images beside the ABS header. I'll be generous and say 200k of static a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'd wager there were other complexities purely from the govt side. That is true for oh so many government IT projects. The part that I still struggle to comprehend is "Why on earth aren't the IT companies, like IBM, telling governments that what they're asking isn't actually possible?" The Danish government have an insane amount of failed IT projects. Most of them fails do to the complexity of laws, rules and requir…
IBM is best at writing iron clad contracts that mean precisely that -- no matter the outcome, they get paid.
As an Australian, I hope we can move far away from such contractors. The amount of waste is insane. It reminds me strongly of the initial Healthcare.gov contracting failures.
[1]: http://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-4...