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A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

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Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#71

Post by corin_ »

axod wrote: post #63

The irony is that entering into a debate with them about how much it cost, likely cost far more than £585 in their time spent finding out. Reminds me of the whole "MP's expenses 'scandal'" - the inquiry cost more than was paid out originally in expenses. £585 is nothing in that sort of context.

Assuming you are employing hyperbole I'll skip over the idea of it costing more than £585 in their time to find out.

As to the MPs' expenses stuff, I don't know the figures of how much the inquiry cost, but assuming you're right that it cost more, it doesn't mean they shouldn't have done it.

For one reason, ethics - should police ignore crimes when it appears that the damage caused by the criminal is less than it would cost the police force to pursue it?

For another, the future - If you cut off the problem then it doesn't keep costing money year after year, which would add up to costing more than the inquiry did.

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#72

Post by bad_user »

Groxx wrote: post #59
bad_user wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Behold, the magic of Apache (or pretty much any web server) ... Alias favicon.ico /path/to/your/physical/location/favicon.ico Now please give £300 for selling you this tip.

Here's £150, because you only told me how to do it on one server :P Curiosity: does that work for subdomains with different favicons?

Quick and dirty solution, for each favicon you'll have a different virtual host inside Apache.

And I fail to grasp the situation where you've got multiple subdomains setup inside the same virtual host config (through ServerAlias), but still having different favicons. But even for this case you can probably come up with something based on mod_rewrite.

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#73

Post by axod »

corin_ wrote: post #71
axod wrote: post #63

The irony is that entering into a debate with them about how much it cost, likely cost far more than £585 in their time spent finding out. Reminds me of the whole "MP's expenses 'scandal'" - the inquiry cost more than was paid out originally in expenses. £585 is nothing in that sort of context.

Assuming you are employing hyperbole I'll skip over the idea of it costing more than £585 in their time to find out. As to the MPs' expenses stuff, I don't know the figures of how much the inquiry cost, but assuming you're right that it cost more, it doesn't mean they shouldn't have done it. For one reason, ethics - should police ignore crimes when it appears that the damage caused by the criminal is less than it wou…

I'm not in the least... It probably took them an hour to find out, reply to the emails etc. They probably had to ask others etc. Their salary, electricity, office overhead etc. I'd expect it came to a fair bit more than £585 to deal with the request for information.

The MP expenses thing was always ridiculous. So an MPs husband mistakenly put in an expense claim for £10 adult movie. Sure it sells papers, but £10 is nothing. We spend more on paper cups in a single room of the NHS.

The rules were ridiculously open to interpretation - second homes etc. Couple that with the fact that MPs get paid next to nothing, and it's no wonder they try to claim expenses for everything.

The answer is to pay MPs more - the going rate for if they're in the business world. If you don't want corruption or taking liberties, you must start by paying a fair wage.

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#74

Post by DrStalker »

I've charegd a client over $1000 for a one-line script that used SCP to copy a file from one place to another. I even told them upfront it would be a trivial one-line script, and made no pretense it was not a really simple thing to do.

But by the time you cover quoting, invoicing, documentation for the change control process and arranging the required access there is a whole days effort spent on the task.

Just because something is easy to do in an environment where you have complete control and no need to justify and document changes doesn't mean it's easy to do in a production environment, and that's assuming the icon itself wasn't properly hand-crafted pixel by pixel to get the best result.

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#75

Post by javanix »

At my current salary, it would take me about 10 days of work to reach £585 in straight labor costs.

Honestly, that doesn't seem to be too overly ridiculous to me. There is a lot of work that goes into designing them (and installing them into each page of a website, especially if the favicon was new and not an update). If the company in question didn't have someone perfectly familiar with the site in question, I can see it taking a week or so to get it out the door. What costs would be added by going through the process of taking bids? I wouldn't be surprised if those in themselves ran to £100 - £200.

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#76

Post by WingForward »

axod wrote: post #63

The irony is that entering into a debate with them about how much it cost, likely cost far more than £585 in their time spent finding out. Reminds me of the whole "MP's expenses 'scandal'" - the inquiry cost more than was paid out originally in expenses. £585 is nothing in that sort of context.

Sure, but does it save money by discouraging others from ripping of the public?

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#79

Post by gaius »

larrik wrote: post #18

1) They said that the favicon was not quoted from the contracter separately. Clearly the listed price is from some weird government formula. (Although, the original document DOES list it separately) 2) I'll bet something like Google's favicon cost WAY more than that. 3) 600 pounds isn't all that much when consulting work hourly rates are compared against it, and is practically nothing if they paid an actual designer.…

There's a lot of stuff I can do in 5 minutes. On occasion I've only done 5 minutes "real work" in a day.

What you're paying for tho' is my 20 years experience, and in those 5 minutes I was composing a command line for a tool that I've spent 5 years working on. Bargain?

Re: A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

#80

Post by gaius »

kez wrote: post #61
andylei wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

arguably, the FOIA request cost the government as much money as the favicon, since these employees would have had to dig through old records to gather the information, as well as respond to the emails

You are of course, correct (as ry0ohki states), but this one FOIA request could lead the way to more competitive favicon quotes from contractors in the future, leaving a net saving for HMG. Sounds facetious, but it's this transparency that enables public scrutiny (and outrage). The expenses debacle being one such example.

I doubt that anyone, considering how much overhead there is in dealing with a government procurement process, charging anywhere like a reasonable hourly rate, could do it for significantly less.

Oh what, you wanted to be paid to attend that two hour meeting on diversity? Well sorry...

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