Freesteel Blog » Electronic air miles

Electronic air miles

Wednesday, February 17th, 2016 at 3:02 pm Written by:

I bricked a BeagleBone Black on Monday by plugging a 5Vs into a 3.3V pin while attempting to get it to run a stepper motor (using the exact same installed software that we have for the milling machine tool).

Oh well. I shall have to financially reward the BeagleBone corporation for their easily broken products by getting a replacement. Time to try out one of these cheaper BeagleNone Greens if I’m going to make a habit out of this.

Here’s what my order from Mouser.co.uk looked like:
mouserbbg2
Note: I ordered 2 boards so as to qualify for free shipping.

And here’s the report from Fedex of the route:
mouserbbg

The seamless efficiency is a little bit scary. I drank a whole cup of coffee staring at it. Then I went downstairs and picked it up from the front desk.

I wonder how many local distribution businesses have disappeared due to this fast global distribution network. The computer system running is probably more important than the airplanes. It took vision and software quality to put that together.

Right now I’m reading The Decline and Fall of IBM, which contains stories about how they’ve been sacking and off-shoring all the workforce and choosing to pay contract penalties than get stuff right for the last 15 years. In short, they’ve focused on the money and not on the software, and the two are not compatible, because in this world bad software is often more profitable than something that works. The free market may catch up eventually, but given how much money the executives and managers have taken out of the business in the meantime, you can’t really say it has.

From the sounds of it, IBM and the corporate executives who buy them in (in the hope that they won’t get sacked), don’t even know what a successful IT project would look like. Even when they’ve got an order through Fedex.

This was the case with so many UK government IT contracts, which were going nowhere and costing billions of pounds, because those in charge and those providing the money could ignore the distinction between productive work and unproductive work. And unproductive work is so much easier to organize and get paid for when you don’t have the talent.

Nine years ago I found parliamentary discussions about the NHS IT contracts. And still there is more testimony from 2013:

Mr Bacon: …You bought this non-existent software off paper descriptions — years ago, I did not know what vapourware meant, but now I know that it means that it has not been written yet — from a company that said fairly shortly afterwards that it would be available from 2004 and that it was getting enormous traction, great acclaim across the health care sector and that everybody loved it. Here we are 10 years later, and you are still waiting for it to be written. How did we end up in a position where we contracted with such a company, and didn’t have a way out, or a way to say, “I’m sorry, guv. You’ve had many, many chances, and you’ve completely failed. It’s hasta la vista”? How did we get into a situation where we couldn’t say that?

Tim Donohoe: Decisions were taken originally to enter into this agreement, and over time the software has not been delivered. That is obvious to everyone. Over time, the contract has been reset a couple of times. Effectively the elapsed time to deliver the software did not put us in a position where we had a strong negotiating angle with CSC. Therefore, we got to a position where–

Ms Hodge: Say that again. We didn’t have a strong negotiating —

Tim Donohoe: No, a strong negotiating position because of the contract resets that had been done previously.

Mr Bacon: You strengthened their hand and weakened your hand?

Tim Donohoe: No. When the MPA had conducted their review of NPfIT in 2011, the Department was already in the middle of negotiation to agree a memorandum of understanding with CSC. After the discussions with the MPA it became apparent that that was not a good value for money proposition and there was more to be achieved. It was at that point that we started negotiating towards the agreement.

Ms Hodge: I don’t understand a word of what you are saying there; sorry.

Tim Donohoe: What I am saying is that we have sought over time to reduce our contractual exposure with CSC. We were faced with a position about a year ago where the existing contract had effectively broken down. CSC had the exclusive right to supply systems to 160 trusts. They knew that we could not name 160 trusts and we knew that they could not deliver 160 trusts, so effectively we were in a position where the contract was heading for dispute. Looking at our options at that time, it was clear that options around terminating the contract, either in full or just the Lorenzo part of it, would not have offered good value for money because —

Mr Bacon: You would have had to pay them the full value of the contract for their having delivered nothing.

Tim Donohoe: Potentially, yes.

Mr Bacon: Which says a great deal about your contract management, does it not? The only reason why that could possibly be the case is if you ended up in court and they had their clever intellectual property silks sitting there, and you were to say, “You dreadful CSC, you haven’t done this, that and the other. You haven’t done X, Y and Z or P, Q and R. In fact, there is a laundry list thousands of pages long of stuff you haven’t done.” The problem would be that they would turn round to you and say, “Ah, Mr and Mrs NHS, there is a slight problem there. The reason we didn’t do X, Y and Z is because you didn’t do A, B and C, and the reason we didn’t do P, Q and R is because you didn’t do D, E and F.” That’s right, isn’t it?

Tim Donohoe: Yes. I would not disagree with that.

Whatever. You probably had to go 5 layers down in management before you got someone who knew how to write software.

1 Comment

  • 1. Mark Sims replies at 19th February 2016, 6:20 pm :

    I live in Dallas, about 40 miles from Mouser in Mansfield. One morning I placed an order with Mouser, expecting it to be delivered in a day or two. It arrived on my desk at 4:00 that afternoon. I selected, and Mouser used, standard postal service shipping… no express shipping or special handling involved.

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