I am amazed on some basic denial there. There seems to be an unwillingness to admit the basic problem: that the time taken copying files is out of proportion with the amount of time it should take to read and write the bits given modern disk speeds. This doesn't have a damn thing to do with progress bars.

If you liked that show, you'll probably like the book that likely inspired it. Fewer cool pictures but more rigorous detail.

The Jurassic Programmer story is a very familiar one. One thing I learned the hard way is once you are a maintenance programmer, they'll never let you build the new system. Sadly, the failures described are legion as the people with the actual domain knowledge are ignored as the inexperienced with flashy buzzwords get to build "my first system".
----
_{ウセーバラケダ}

I haven't seen a post from him there in years.

Earth First!
_{(We can strip mine the rest later.)}

If you're involved in analysing the success of a solution, you're just sucking budget from the people actually going out there and implementing it.  He's the perfect NuLabour apparatchik.

-
Metus amatores matrum compescit, non clementia.

so much I might actually get up off my arse and do it.

Nicholas Cage is a terrible actor.

Hope everything goes well with your old man. Keep us posted.

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It's political correctness gone mad!

Shame, but perfectly understandable.

I had issues with the first four pages and have now run out of time, I suspect before I got to the meat of what Tilley wanted to say. I'll cut and paste my scratch buffer.

I hit worries on page one about piecemeal, small scale evaluation.

Gun control has a a small scale, with nutters shotting
dozens, and a large scale with governments going bad and massacring their
citizens in there millions. Evaluation had better not drop the latter
issue on the floor.

Page 2 is also scary. It is traditional in education to evaluate a new
teaching method, find it works, deploy it widely, and be surprised
when it fails. This tradition is based on the originators of new
methods being charimatic individuals who can teach really well.
What works with average teachers in average class rooms across the land is
a different matter.

Worse, incentives matter. One tries hard and makes it work to get through the
evaluation. Then one slacks of and rots sets in. Methods that were
originally deployed with sensitivity to their goals degenerate into mere
formalism and stop working.

The world depicted on page 2 is a ruined world in which things don't work
and cannot be fixed because they worked in the evaluation so that's all
right then.

The domestic violence anecdote on page 3 and 4 sucked. My
maternal grandmother had to put up with my grandfathers violent temper.
If he had been prosecuted and convicted he would no longer have been of
good character and would have lost the army pension on which the family
finances depended. Well that is the story I've been told, though I have
my doubts.

The wider point is that getting repeat call out rates down is
a rotten measure. When the cops arrest the perp, how is that understood?
One possible understanding is that the cops will make trouble for the perp
so that he loses his job and their is no money to buy food for the children.
The woman takes the hint and doesn't bother the cops again.

The anecdote wasn't about this kind of problem, but naively accepted that if
the police were not called violence had not re-occurred.

Probably will not read the rest till tomorrow afternoon.