Posts by Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Whilst I'm no lover of Capita...

"a success rate of 7.5 per cent is nothing for Capita and its IT systems to cheer about."

Possibly. But depending on the acceptable candidate qualifications set out by the Army, this also be seen as the first time ever that Capita have actually delivered to requirements?

What you would hope for...

What you would hope to happen is that someone at HMRC now wakes up after realizing that they have now lost two key (and highly visible) court cases in a row; and actually starts to think pragmatically about the pointlessness of IR35 and its complete failure to achieve any of what it set out to do all those many years ago.

But the chances of that happening are zero because that's not the way civil servants think. If they do indeed think at all...

Nice piece of advertising.

"And haggling will help even more, especially at renewal time."

Or cheaper still... just not bothering with it?

Dear Military...

You can have my technical and organisational skills in return for teaching me how to fly an Apache helicopter, on your time, and at my contract day rate.

I can't commit to taking any orders from anyone though, or indeed to turn up when you want to go shoot unarmed brown people at the behest of the US.

Black Mirror

"Sextortion as a term initially referred to a sleazy cybercrime where perverts planted trojans on the PCs of young victims. Youngsters' PCs are often in their bedrooms and the malware was used to surreptitiously turn on webcams and record footage or pictures of victims."

There is a very good episode of Black Mirror that is pertinent to this.

The idea is everything*

* Please refer to Enron for further details.

Not quite sure, but I get the impression that law firm A is going to make law firm B an offer they can't (and probably shouldn't) ignore.

Concrete slippers and all that...

Re : Indiana Jones...

"The rarity of the disease in most countries means long odds that a doctor could identify and begin treatment of the condition before your todger starts acting like it just saw the Ark of the Covenant..."

But surely only if the aforementioned Ark has had the lid lifted, and only if you decide look directly at the pretty lights... and, as an aside, I guess similar to choosing the correct holy grail, you should always be choosing your sexual partners... "wisely"?

Manufacturer : "But it needs to be connected to the internet so it can be patched and upgraded".

Client : "But it works fine as it is; and if it isn't connected to the internet or internal network then it doesn't need further updates. Honestly, it does exactly what we want it to do right now."

Manufacturer : "Yeah but... ummm, errrr, what about our support revenues..."

It might all be in the cloud...

But it still needs physical cables!!!

Yup.

Agree. I still don't get why businesses such as Facebook and Google can be deemed exempt from responsibility as to what content gets posted on it and YouTube etc. Same thing for eBay and such like.

Schadenfreude indeed...

Had overall Ops, Management, Environments, Release and BAU support outsourced from my SAP team to an offshore "partner". We were told to let them drive the scope and agenda for the required KT sessions as they were supposedly the experts. It didn't go well - and by that point we'd lost interest in helping fill in the gaps in even their basic knowledge.

For example, I mean... who knew that failure to do proper analysis and performance testing of changes to internal and external overnight batch could wreak such havoc at an enterprise level ;-)

Indeed...

"There were also concerns that it would dissuade people from peaceful protests"

And I believe that for someone, somewhere, in the shadowy recesses of London or UK Gov, that is this the exact reason why they want this tech implemented.

Something to do with Bitcoins or other cryptocurrency...

Where you lose your memories rather than your bitcoins in a remote exchange heist.

Best of luck Simon.

Thanks for both the laughs this column has provided. Best of luck in your new endeavours.

I don't get the distinction...

This : "Meanwhile, "dumb" wearables optimised for health and fitness tracking had been selling quite nicely"

I really don't get the distinction you are making between the iWatch being a "smart" watch and my Garmin 935 being a "dumb" wearable? There is nothing smart at all about the iWatch, and it does nothing that my Garmin can't.

Can someone explain? Although I think I already know the answer...

Yet...

And yet the scumbag directors and owners just walk away scott free yes?

Re : it’s a very odd move...

"tells world+dog that it thinks all workloads are headed for the cloud."

But the cloud is on-prem. If you are a customer of a cloud provider, then it's just that on-prem is somewhere else. Where is it exactly the author thinks AWS host all of these services they provide? It's certainly not up in the sky on an actual little fluffy cloud. It's across quite a few globally distributed datacentres all of which still ultimately rely on physical infrastructure and networks to operate; ummm... including switches.

When you consider the scale that Amazon continue to ramp up at then it does actually make sense if they can make, operate and maintain them cheaper than they can purchase and maintain them through Cisco. If they can then start selling those to other cloud providers - then they are double quids in right?

Surprised they have any customers left...

I'm surprised they have any customers left. I guess it's just down to laziness that people put up with this crap. How on earth would you trust them with anything after this ongoing shambles...

No deterrent.

Surely a £60k or similar fine will just be on a contractual risk profile somewhere and factored in as part of their cost of doing business?

When are the ICO actually going to start being useful deterrent and going after the directors personally?

"Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?"

I came for the IT angle... ended up unexpectedly learning something interesting about Storks. This is why I like the Register.

Do you know anything about Vultures also?

Corporate logo update...

No doubt his first task will be to bring the corporate logo of the fine rearing stallion into the modern age by re-imagining it as a hogtied three legged donkey?

Ahhh, the youth of today...

Back in my day, a POKE was something that bestowed infinite lives, time, or energy shields. Or perhaps the ultimate output of the from the works Christmas party with the cute secretary from legal.

According to my kids, a poke these days is something that happens on Instaface or Snapbook to garner attention.