Re: uk general election
On 4/13/05, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@verizon.net> wrote:
> In my experience, (tv station, about 45 desktops & several servers)
> I've always found that the most usefull computer systems have all
> been configured and maintained in-house. In every case, farming it
> out has led to systems so tightly locked down (to reduce the
> contractors work time and resultant charges to maintain them) that
> they were effectively useless to the more savvy user. That is not
> productive use of any employees time in any situation.
If you're (that is, Geoff) going to have some of the resources of the
UK government to back this up, then you could set up an official UK
government .deb repository. "In-house" configuration could then be
handled with meta-packages and a slightly customized installer that
presents these meta-packages as the main configuration option.
Setting up a new computer then becomes almost trivial, in contrast to
a centralized post-installation Windows configuration.
Another advantage of this is that all agencies' packages are available
to every other agency, so admins/tech support groups can check out
what others are using and easily add new programs to their
meta-packages. This also allows for a single standardized set of
packages that *every* agency will have to install.
> With the apps written in house according to the usage that agency
> needs, being 'computer literate' at the user level isn't that much of
> a requirement. The coder just needs to know to make it both user
> friendly, and to gently reject the obviously out of bounds entries
> inept operators may input.
I'd expect that a lot can be done with more-or-less standard back-ends
(such as a particular database server) and file formats, coupled with
fairly simple tools to develop locally. Custom Firefox extensions,
for example, can provide interfaces to networked resources.
--
Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh
http://mamarsh.blogspot.com
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