• värttinä (unregistered) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    JimM:
    Or has the US completely given up on 'ph' as a phoneme ?
    Foneme.

    ITYM "digraf". HTH. HAND.

  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    This comment has a heavy dose of VBA.
    Reports -- including the monstrous, 100-plus-page water survey --
    Since when is 100 pages a "monstrous" report?

    monstrous, in this case, means extraordinarily great,huge or immense. I would say that a 100 page report to say "The water is good" or "The water is bad" would qualify as monstrous

  • Brent Seidel (unregistered) in reply to Beldar the Phantom Lurker
    Beldar the Phantom Lurker:
    Mappy:
    Lyle can build a .NET Bridge to Nowhere better than you can.
    Lyle cannot work on your project because his current project is better than yours. What do you do?

    Rejoice!

  • grammernarzee (unregistered) in reply to opeadeoye
    opeadeoye:
    Would you read 100 pages happily? I won't.
    Oh come on, this is silly. My Unix manual here is 597 pages and I wouldn't "read it happily" either. But I do need to look in the index, find the bit that's relevant, and read that. If it had fewer pages it would obviously be missing quite a bit. There's no necessary difference between a "manual" which details how something works, and a "report" which details how something is working.
  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to LoztInSpace
    LoztInSpace:
    ogilmor:
    Surprised nobody commented on this WTF. How many of you have heard this prediction? "It will all be web based" "No need for client heavy apps any more."

    Once at an airline I saw a web based monstrosity. Somebody had decided that browser based apps were the thing, so these folks got a demo. When asked what sorts of keyboard shortcuts would be provided, the developers responded "It is browser. No keyboard."

    And like many web based apps it tended to get amnesia when it came to data, forget which window it was focused on, navigate away from unsaved data in the same window (oops, there goes 30 minutes of work!) and other quirks.

    The heavy client isnt' going away. Even the best web based apps, a la google, have some way to go. As they increase in features, they will still use hard disk space to store and install them, and they will be able to do this because fatter pipes are getting more ubiquitous (love that word!)

    I'll second that. What everyone seems to forget is that the web is only an excellent deployment/delivery mechanism. As it stands now, it's completely shit as an application platform for the reasons you mention and many more. Just today I used a site (well Sharepoint, but it's the same thing) that looked quite a lot like a Windows directory explorer. Only trouble was I could not right click, drag & drop, send to, upload or do anything useful or natural to a Windows user despite the best efforts of a Javascript guru. There are things the web currently is simply not good enough at. What is also funny is that, at least where I work, millions of dollars can get allocated to web development without too much scrutiny simply because it is a web app. Everyone gets excited when a window magically appears on top of another one or some other really basic UI technique, even though the developer took 2 months to do it and it still does not work properly on Apples or Firefox. The web is basically a rendering platform and the real work still happens at the back end with 'proper' systems, but the web site gets all the credit. Strange....Yeah, maybe one day it will work, and I recon it will be Silverlight of Flash or something that can give you some useful, pre-written functions.

    I don't understand. The Web is the latest cool thing. Some applications work very well on the Web. Therefore, all future applications should be web-based, and all old applications should promptly be converted to be web-based. You say some applications don't work well on the web? But how can that possibly be true, when the Web is the Latest Cool Thing?

    That's what I was constantly told when I worked for the government, anyway. We had a mandate from the top that ALL applications must be converted to be web-based, and we were required to commit to a date when conversion would be complete.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    Back when I worked for the government, any time someone complained that a project was a waste of money, I replied: Don't worry, it's not like it's real money. It's just tax dollars.

  • Some Wonk (unregistered) in reply to DoctorFriday
    DoctorFriday:
    .NET? Puh-leeze. The consultants should have just created a GUI using Visual Basic. That would have worked.

    oh, come on. That only works when you are looking for an IP address http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni_rAamVP2s

  • (cs) in reply to A water lab chemist
    A water lab chemist:
    cklam:
    Crabs:
    Why didn't they just set up connected sensors around town in the water mains to do all these tests, and hard wire them to the internet to send the data automatically to the central server? ...
    You forgot the Google Maps interface with real time colour-coded display of water quality.
    ... ICP AAS machine for elemental analysis. ... Also, a key part of analysing reservoir health is visual and olfactory. If it stinks, needs looked at.

    Don't forget Professor Farnsworth's Smelloscope! [image]

    Oh, and gloves.

  • ethan (unregistered) in reply to shenanigans
    shenanigans:
    With a two-point font you could only express the state of 8 different characters (which wouldn't resemble characters in the traditional sense anyway), so that would be hard. I guess writing a dot and the letter "i" could be done.

    A point is 1/72nd of an inch. You can still represent every character at 2pt, you would just need a very high resolution printer and a magnifying glass to be able to read it.

    Even if point meant "pixel", as you appear to believe, your comment still doesn't make any sense. Representing 8 different characters requires 3 bits, so I'm not sure what the relation to "2 points" is. Plus 2pt is the height -- you don't necessarily know how wide the characters are.

  • MM (unregistered) in reply to virgil
    virgil:
    Actually, if the "expensive consultants" just did the implementation - they did not necessarily do a very bad job... it was the spec that was severely broken. If "The city" provided the requirements, it's their fault that they haven't figured out what they actually needed.
    If the city's managers who wanted this had been computer experts themselves, they wouldn't have needed to hire those expensive consultants in the first place. Presumably, they were just ordinary guys who thought the system could be streamlined to work easier. It was those computer consultants they hired who were supposed to figure out how best to do that.
  • Anonymous Cowherd (unregistered) in reply to ethan

    "Even if point meant "pixel", as you appear to believe, your comment still doesn't make any sense. Representing 8 different characters requires 3 bits..."

    The OP was assuming that "2pt" meant "2 pixels square" (which, as you said, it doesn't), and printed on regular paper, not graph paper --- giving us eight possible characters:

    o oo 8 8o o8 8&degrees; &degrees;8 88

    because the difference between o, o, &degrees;, and &degrees; is not perceptible on paper, nor is the difference between 8 and 8, or between oo and &degrees;&degrees;.

    captcha: praesent

  • TC (unregistered)

    Seems to me that the major WTFs with this story is the lack of usability testing combined with requirements that were obviously not generated consultation with the users.

    I worked on a project a while ago whereby the requirements were driven by a particular manager with his own - how shall we say "unique" agenda. We figured this out earlier on and began to ignore the requirements and instead went straight to the users. We discovered all sorts of WTFs. As time went on, the other developer resigned - in part due to the aforementioned problems - then the project was outsourced. I will leave it up to your imagination as to how that went :)

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to ethan
    ethan:
    shenanigans:
    With a two-point font you could only express the state of 8 different characters (which wouldn't resemble characters in the traditional sense anyway), so that would be hard. I guess writing a dot and the letter "i" could be done.

    A point is 1/72nd of an inch. You can still represent every character at 2pt, you would just need a very high resolution printer and a magnifying glass to be able to read it.

    Even if point meant "pixel", as you appear to believe, your comment still doesn't make any sense. Representing 8 different characters requires 3 bits, so I'm not sure what the relation to "2 points" is. Plus 2pt is the height -- you don't necessarily know how wide the characters are.

    I haven't used a printer in a while that did less than 600 pixels per inch.

    At 600 ppi, a point is about 8 pixels. Assuming the character space is square, that's 8 x 8, plenty of resolution for a full alphabet. People with poor eyesight could never read it, but that's another issue.

  • (cs) in reply to campkev
    campkev:
    monstrous, in this case, means extraordinarily great,huge or immense. I would say that a 100 page report to say "The water is good" or "The water is bad" would qualify as monstrous
    I understand the meaning of the term, thank you. I suppose it's a matter of context: how big are the reports you are accustomed to seeing? Different occupations generate differently sized reports.

    In my field (health care), a 100 page report can be about one patient. Lab history, allergies, current medications, previous and now discontinued medications, history of admissions to any of our 18+ hospitals and accompanying data regarding the reason for the admission and its result.

    Do you suppose a doctor might find these useful in treating a patient?

  • noes (unregistered)

    I shudder to think of how bad this "solution" must have been when people run screaming for... Word, the second-worst plague behind XML. OMFG.

  • B0ttom D3Cod3r (unregistered)

    Global Const c_strErrorMessage As String = "lack of requirements" ' Human-friendly error message

    Public Sub SubmitResults(r_strResults)

    ' Never allow errors to cause problems, as per management requirements On Error Resume Next

    ' Try to submit results Call SendResults(r_strResults)

    ' If we got here, something bad happened. Inform the user MessageBox ("Sorry, your submission failed due to " & c_strErrorMessage") ' ToDo - cater for other failure reasons. If there are any.

    End Sub

    Public Sub SendResults(r_strResults)

    ' ToDo: figure out how to send the results

    ' Everything done, quit the program End

    End Sub

    Job done, surely. Why does everybody hate VBA?

  • B0ttom D3Cod3r (unregistered)

    Hell, it almost compiles!

    Ship it! Quick!

  • My Name (unregistered) in reply to campkev
    campkev:
    monstrous, in this case, means extraordinarily great,huge or immense. I would say that a 100 page report to say "The water is good" or "The water is bad" would qualify as monstrous

    The report is not only for the average citizen, but it is also a documentation that enables experts to verify that the water is good or bad.

    And the average citizen will probably never request the report anyway, since the news paper will publish the one-line summary itself.

    BTW, here is my solution.

    1. PDA stores result in a local database
    2. Tester can upload the results using the internet later
    3. Results are uploaded into CSV so that it can be imported into Excel
    4. The rest of the process will be done as in the past.
  • xilun (unregistered) in reply to virgil

    So the "expensive consultants" are the one that implement the requirements of their client correctly (indeed they did not even suceeded in that in this story, as the client would hardly have specified "quality: low" while the quality was low - i can't rate it above low when i'm hearing about almost crashing PDA that needs reboot). I guess the "cheap consultants" would just implemented the requierements poorly with lot of bugs.

    hm, so "consultant" is the new word for "code monkey" ? Yeah right I forgot that is the definition of some shop.

    So what is the word in your vocabulary for a "consultant" that anticipate the problems the client could have, does audits, and so over ? A "superman consultant" ?

  • Rob (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that they basically took a working tool (Excel) from the guys churning the data and instead reimplemented a spreadsheet with far less functionality using uber leet Web 2.1 technology.

    You may not particularly like Word/Excel, but they are very powerful tools and can do a lot more than can be easily implemented in a Web app. They should have leveraged the strong data access functionality built right into Excel.. the later versions can even work with live data pulled from web services!

    Web apps are not a golden hammer.

  • (cs) in reply to Code Dependent
    Code Dependent:
    In my field (health care), a 100 page report can be about one patient. Lab history, allergies, current medications, previous and now discontinued medications, history of admissions to any of our 18+ hospitals and accompanying data regarding the reason for the admission and its result.

    Do you suppose a doctor might find these useful in treating a patient?

    That's not a report. That's a binder full of reports.

    I imagine that water is about as complicated as blood. What would you do with a 100 page blood report?

  • wesley0042 (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    This comment was bridged together using a .NET server.

    This comment was briSQL connection error -2147467259 in comment.asp

  • JB (unregistered) in reply to Crabs

    I guess you've never heard of the Brotherhood of Federal, State, and City Workers, Water Testers Local #123 and Numbers Jotters Local #456.

    They don't take too kindly to learning that their jobs are expendable.

  • maple story mesos (unregistered)

    good!

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