51–60 of 92 posts
The same organization that couldn't be arsed to host some of their historical web properties due to "high costs": http://853blog.com/2011/01/25/pulling-the-plug-on-the-bbcs-i...
Nowhere near as much as the £12Bn the NHS spent on an impossible moving-spec IT system that they also scrapped(1). Oh wait, it's a tenth of the amount. (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health
Real headline: Publicly funded broadcaster makes same mistake most large private enterprises make in more or less the same way. It seems to me that months or years of auditing and hearings and cries for heads to roll are probably wasted. Just like a private company a few mangers should probably get tossed or reassigned and the second version of the same project should get started to address the businesses needs the f…
>Publicly funded broadcaster makes same mistake most large private enterprises make in more or less the same way. Actually large private enterprises don't usually make this kind of mistake. This is a typical big government project. Software development is hard. Building large, complex, poorly defined software systems is hard. //EDIT I should clarify that. I don't think a private enterprise would engage in a project t…
This is very common, I think perhaps the hacker news crowd probably have more experience with real software behemoths like google, facebook, microsoft and/or scrappy smaller start ups. Perhaps in those realms this doesnt occur because software delivery is their bottom line. In run of the mill fortune 500 companies major software projects fail commonly, and CRM and ERP projects fail even more frequently and have price tags in the 10s of millions, and when they fail the company has no choice but to roll out a new one
Every single one of those projects has been a total boondoggle. Always over budget. Always changing scope. Always missing every single milestone and deadline.
Now, I know that this is not a statistically significant sample size, but this sort of thing seems to be more common that I initially thought. It's like the worst-case scenario of design-by-committee.
Nowhere near as much as the £12Bn the NHS spent on an impossible moving-spec IT system that they also scrapped(1). Oh wait, it's a tenth of the amount. (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health
I'm surprised more public projects don't run as bounty-style "build x and get $1 million" type systems. Rather than picking who's going to do what (or worse, building all in-house), having many different small times competing for one pot seems like it might be a better way to get a good starting foundation. Or perhaps that's a crazy idea for something as big as this.
The same organization that couldn't be arsed to host some of their historical web properties due to "high costs": http://853blog.com/2011/01/25/pulling-the-plug-on-the-bbcs-i...
It strikes me that the BBC is hilariously bad at archival. They scrapped dozens of Doctor Who episodes in the name of saving space ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes ).
Doctor Who wasn't scrapped in the name of saving space, it was scrapped because nobody thought it was worth keeping. The shows couldn't be repeated (because at the time, Equity had negotiated limits on repeat rights), and quad tape was very expensive and easily re-used.
More importantly, nobody really thought that Quad was an appropriate archiving format. Programs would be tele-recorded onto 16mm for overseas sale and archive. This is not, in of itself, a crazy idea - try finding a quad tape player today vs a 16mm projector. The problem at the time was there was no mandate for archival, so the engineering department were junking the tapes, and the commercial department (who were selling Doctor Who on to other broadcasters) weren't retaining the 16mm reels.
Even in the 1970s, many people were still not convinced of the value of archiving TV output. It's not totally dissimilar to the early days of the web - it was seen as ephemeral. This was happening at pretty much every broadcaster around the world - Wikipedia has a pretty big list of lost TV programs, most of which were wiped for space.
Note that the content in this CMS is hours and hours of raw video footage rather than the usual snippets of text.