Archive for November 2011
DWP signs ‘unacceptable’ £420,000,000 contract
Chris Chant, at the Institute for Government, Thursday 20 October 2011:
I think it's completely unacceptable at this point in time to enter into contracts for longer than 12 months. I can't see how we can sit in a world of IT, and acknowledge the arrival of the iPad in the last two years, and yet somehow imagine that we can predict what we're going to need to be doing in two or three or five or seven or ten years time. It's complete nonsense.
Reported by Guardian Government Computing, Wednesday 2 November 2011:
The Department for Work and Pensions has awarded a seven year application services contract worth £50m to £70m annually to Accenture, for work including the software needed to introduce its universal credit system.
Or to phrase it another way: something between £50,000,000 and £70,000,000 each year - let's split the difference, and call it £60,000,000 - for 7 years. A grand total of £420,000,000.
Coming up in WordPress 3.3
The next version of WordPress, version 3.3 is on the horizon: a second beta release came out a couple of weeks back, and a first release candidate is due in the next couple of days.
So what is there to look forward to? I'll hand you over to Andrew Nacin, one of the core developers, and the presentation he gave at a recent New York meetup.
There are quite a few incremental improvements to the admin interface, but nothing to stop you in your tracks. The left-hand menu is now based on 'fly-out' submenus, more or less as the compressed view has always done, albeit with a nicer animation. There are tweaks to the Admin Bar (including pointy notifications), the 'Help' area, and the 'welcome' screen you see on an initial install. The file uploader is no longer Flash-dependent, favouring HTML5 where available, and adds drag-and-drop functionality.
Lots of little things, none of which sounds like much; but I'm told that once you've been using 3.3 for a while, going back to 3.2 feels rather dated.
Final release is currently scheduled for the end of November.
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