Posts by nzlemming
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Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to John Holley,
Jump in here Mark Harris!
You know me too well, sir! :-)
There are many levels of corruption, especially in the procurement process. When Transparency International say NZ has one of the least corrupt governments in the world, they're mostly talking about personal corruption e.g taking bribes, nepotism in employment, special favours for the "in group" etc.
We may still suffer from the corruption of rust, where people do nothing rather than do something wrong, and there's a fair amount of allowance given to certain public figures (mainly sports persons and celebrities) when petty acts of a semi-criminal or actual criminal nature is involved (e.g. speeding, fighting in public).
Imagine a police constable in a small rural town where a former All Black gets pissed one Friday night and trashes part of the pub. Technically, it's a breach of the peace but unless the publican decides to make a fuss, the copper is likely to bundle the AB into the panda and take him home. Said AB will be shamefaced the next day, when he goes to collect his car and he and the publican will come to an arrangement for compensation. Is the police officer corrupt for not enforcing the law? Most of us would say no, he's using his discretion but the problem with discretion is there's a big grey area where people assume they're allowed to make decisions about things that they're not.
Procurement is one of those areas. There's a big difference between what is acceptable in the private sector - flying prospective clients around the world to view 'reference sites', for example, or seats to the RWC in a corporate box - and in the public sector, where any 'gifts' over a particular amount have to be declared and might have to be refused depending on circumstances. I recall one RFP where a telco bidding for the contract sent Xmas boxes including salmon, champagne and other edibles to several of the members of the judging panel, who were most put out when I went around collecting the boxes to send straight back.
MED have guidelines for central government agencies and the Auditor General has Good Practice Guidelines for both central and local agencies, mainly around procurement and managing conflicts of interest. The problem, since 1987 and the State Sector restructures, is the outsourcing of services and the revolving door for consultants brought in to fill knowledge/skill gaps. The outsourcers and the consultants don't read the guidelines, don't have the culture and are given far too much management control of many of the processes. To be fair, most individual contractors I worked with were honest and keen to do the right thing, but every so often you hit one that makes you go "wha?". In my opinion, most IT procurement projects suffer from precisely this problem - too much leeway given to the contractors plus a lack of "public sector culture" in the decision making. (I could, like others, name some names, but I like my house even if Steven Joyce wants to build a fucking expressway over the back fence).
As John notes, clear and transparent governance is vital for fair and effective procurement, and government in general. As others have noted, "clear" and "transparent" don't appear to be words in current usage at the ATA (or NZTA for that matter...sassinfrassinrassun...)
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Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to John Holley,
Perhaps not personal corruption, John, but it seems to me there is a distinct corruption of process.
Also, if any contractor on the ATA side was operating with self-interest, that is^H^H would be corruption of their duty to act as agents of the Crown while in the employ of the Crown. (And local government is part of the Crown, in case anybody wants to go down that “no exit” road)
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Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to Cassandra,
See, now you're just troying with us.
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Hard News: We are all Twitter, in reply to Peter Darlington,
Which of the stages of grief is delusional amnesia?
There's a special 8th Stage just for West Ham supporters
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Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to Steve Reeves,
There’s no corruption in New Zealand!
No no, it's depression that there's none of in New Zealand.
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Hard News: We are all Twitter, in reply to Russell Brown,
How did West Ham go this season?
That's just cruel.
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Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Then how about we go back to ’95? Or, hey, DOS, while we’re at it? By that argument, they must be practically miraculous on “modern gear”.
Actually, they do. Some progs have difficulty with how fast DOS runs, as they’re built with I/O delays to allow for the OS to catch up. I know a few musicians who still have a DOS machine to run MIDI applications that they prefer to more modern stuff. I run a DOS VM on my iMac (with a USB floppy drive) so that I can still access data from the early 90’s that I haven’t migrated yet. And a 3.1 VM, and a 98 VM ;-)
Except…oh, wait, ’98 doesn’t support most modern hardware, because it can’t interface with half of it.
More a marketing decision than a technical one. Once new versions of Windows appeared, manufacturers stopped making drivers for the old versions. It might pose a problem if you were to retrofit, but not if you’ve never migrated past 98.
And if they “beat out all the bugs”, why did Microsoft bother switching to the NT architecture for all the following versions of Windows?
Because one thing 98 was atrocious at was networking – very flaky and inherent in its design. It was a home OS after all and wasn’t meant for major networking. NT was designed for large scale businesses as MS were making a charge at a portable OS (by portable, I mean across platforms rather than the current trend of putting an OS on a USB key) that was easy to network and create enterprise-level systems.
Also, 98 was limited by being primarily 16bit, which constrained the amount of memory you could have in a system, the size of files you could store and the size of disks you could connect.
I will concede that there may be specific situations where ’98 is useful – if you have legacy software that’s incompatible with later versions of Windows, fine. But that’s what virtualisation is for.
Yes, but that’s only one aspect. Part of the drive to upgrade systems is to cope with new software that gets rewritten to take advantage of new hardware, that is enhanced to push new software blah blah blah. If you don’t need heavy duty processing, you don’t need heavy duty equipment.
A local government body running all its systems using a OS over a decade old is just shoddy, insecure, and says pretty bad things about their foresight.
That’s not a clever generalization. Any system can be made secure and new doesn’t always equal better. What is says is more about the budget they had available and how they chose to spend it, but I’m sure the ratepayers of Papakura weren’t too unhappy that their rates weren’t being spent on unnecessary computer upgrades.
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Hard News: Three months after, in reply to Russell Brown,
Especially given the way Danyl’s verging on losing his shit today
Just you get back to your invisible show! How dare you criticize the omniscient Danyl? If it wasn't for him (and Chris Trotter), how would we know what to think at all?
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Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to bmk,
Only if it were actually the original Rodney Hide and not an android
You know, that would explain the sudden fitness jag and weight loss...
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Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to Cassandra,
Fuck you Hill Cone you are palpably the stupidest person who has ever had airtime on Radio NZ.
If you're going to say things like that, Cassandra, you'd better post more often.