* Posts by Dr Who

455 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2007

Page:

City of London Corporation explores options to escape Oracle's clutches

Dr Who

Integrate

SAP - very funny.

Why not pick best of breed SaaS offerings for each of the functions then integrate. That's one thing SaaS services make very easy, either through custom integrations directly via their APIs or more likely pre-built integrations via the likes of Mulesoft of Zapier. The added advantage is that you're not over the contractual barrel for a decade with a single supplier.

The days of the monolithic ERP are surely over, along with the near business death catastrophes that were so often associated with their implementation.

SAP proves, yet again, that Excel is utterly unkillable

Dr Who

SuperCalc

I used to know an accounts clerk who typed numbers into Lotus 123 on and IBM AT, added them up on a calculator, then typed in the total. And she kept a paper spreadsheet as a backup.

I preferred SuperCalc myself.

Airbus and Rolls-Royce hit eject on hybrid-electric airliner testbed after E-Fan X project fails to get off the ground

Dr Who

So ... the shit hit E-Fan then

Microsoft's Teams clocks 2.7 billion minutes of meetings in a single day as April starts to run out for Windows 10 2004

Dr Who

Teams clocks 2.7 billion minutes

Education, education, education

Ever dream of being an astronaut? Now’s your chance. NASA wants new people for the Moon and Mars

Dr Who

Re: Not all good...

If it's Boeing I'm not going.

Fujitsu warns HMRC Projects team that 30% of them could be out of a job come April

Dr Who

A little bit of Schadenfreude maybe

For years the industry bemoaned the move from in house teams to the big outsourcers. Now, the big outsourcers are getting a taste of their own medicine as they lose work to the big cloud providers. Bitter? Me? Just because my small business lost loads of local work to monolithic national framework contracts with the likes of Capita and Fujitsu? Well, yes actually.

Well, well, well. Internet-of-Things speaker biz Sonos to continue some software support for legacy kit after all

Dr Who

I'm 51 and I've got a so called "old" Sonos speaker (I think it's 3 years old).

I also have an amp and speakers I bought when I was a teenager ... and they still work brilliantly ... even with smart TVs and smartphones.

GCHQ: A cyber-what-now? Rumours of our probe into London Stock Exchange 'cyberattack' have been greatly exaggerated

Dr Who

Nothing to see here

A) Massive cover up to avoid tipping off the Russians that we're on to them.

B) A software upgrade gone wrong.

Drawing on all the experience gained over a long career in IT troubleshooting, on balance, having assessed all the possibilities and even though the client tells me the problem is definitely B, I'd still have to say that the most probable cause is A.

Now it's Terrance Dicks' turn to regenerate: Golden-age Doctor Who mainstay dies aged 84

Dr Who

In my view morals started to slip with the introduction of jelly babies, but I don't think Mr Dicks was responsible for that. RIP and thank you.

Yahoo! customers! wake! up! to! borked! email! (Yes! people! still! actually! use! it!)

Dr Who

Bring joy to your inbox

Rabbit?

Don't panic! Don't panic! UK IT job ads plummet as Brexit uncertainty grabs UK tech sector by the short and curlies

Dr Who

Re: And the NHS is doomed

I thought you were joking at first, but suddenly realised you were serious.

No mainstream politician of any persuasion has ever argued with the principle of free at the point of delivery. Ever. Nobody. Where opinions differ is how we might arrive at that point of delivery - and that is a subject for legitimate debate as the current system depends too heavily on the sacrifice, dedication and unpaid overtime of a million odd NHS workers who see the NHS as a vocation, not just a job. If those workers suddenly worked to rule the whole shooting match would collapse. It is an abuse of all of those staff to leave things as they are. Blair/Brown admirably tried chucking vast sums of cash at the existing system but sadly that didn't solve the problem. We need to suspend the ideological dogma and have an open, rational discussion about the options. If we don't we are massively failing patients, NHS staff, and the tax payer.

Not very Suprema: Biometric access biz bares 27 million records and plaintext admin creds

Dr Who

Re: I guess they're off the Christmas list now

Efookinxactly! Nail on the head. If this was oil leaking into the ocean, or toxic gas into the air, there would be monumental fines, cleanup charges and possibly criminal charges (think Deepwater Horizon or Exon Valdez). It wouldn't prevent all incidents, but it would change corporate culture enough to reduce the worst excesses. But as it's "just" our identities at stake, nobody gives a toss. It'll be interesting to see whether a South Korean company can be prosecuted under GDPR given the have a large European client base. That would at least show that the law is moving in the right direction.

PIN the blame on us, says Monzo in mondo security blunder: Bank card codes stored in log files as plain text

Dr Who

Re: All the no's

Monzo provides a great current account service. Opened an account for the sole purpose of a two week train trip with the family through Europe last month because there's no transaction fee or pumped up exchange rate for card payments abroad. Now thinking of switching permanently - it's brilliant. Like someone said transactions, even abroad, ping immediately into the app so you can see whether some dodgy trader has ripped you off while you're still staring them in the face. No more ten day waits until things appear on your account. This is a current account as it should be.

Not too happy about the logging bug, but in the grand scheme of things it's not catastrophic and they've owned up and cleaned up.

The entire holiday was done with booking.com, airbnb, the trainline and heavy use of google maps and translate en route and what could have been a disaster was a triumph. We only pre-booked some of the stuff in advance and did the rest on the fly. We all moan about the cloud on the Reg, but if you just step back and think what's possible now that was either impossible, or at the very least unbearably more complicated, just a few years ago it's pretty amazing really.

OK, so I may have told some Italian waiter that his mother had the face of a pig and he himself was of dubious parenthood, but you know, Google's not perfect - and I probably would have got some instant offline feedback from the waiter.

It's Friday lunchtime on International Beer Day. Bitter hop to it, boss'll be none the weiser

Dr Who

66.5 litres = 117 pints

For once in my life I can safely say I am well above average - by a considerable margin.

Bear insistent on playing tonsil tennis with you? Just bite its tongue off

Dr Who

Need a bigger sample

Does "bear runs away" always follow "bloke bites bear's tongue off" or was the bear actually bored and about to wander off anyway. Need more data. Any offers?

Cloudflare goes big on serverless with new command line, lures devs with free account tier

Dr Who

Re: This will likely end badly

I agree. I still can't get Pine to send HTML messages.

What's a billion dollars between friends? Uber tosses match on mound of cash in first results since going public

Dr Who

Re: So, double the losses of last year ?

I think the sweatiness is largely in the investors' bum cracks.

Ex-student, 52, suing university for AU$3m after PhD rejection destroyed 'sex drive'

Dr Who

Social Sciences - complete and utter Kant

After he'd worked his way through Marx and Engels followed by a course of Durkheim with a finale of Max Weber's famous nail biter "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", it's little wonder his mojo has left him. Case dismissed.

Salesfarce to Failsforce: Salesforce database blunder outage enters day three as fix falters

Dr Who

Re: I never get tired of saying it

Crikey, haven't we moved on from this sort of thing yet?

You might as well ask how that IT thing is going for ya? Abacus, slide rule and paper spreadsheets were just so much more reliable. Never had a power outage with those. Or a virus.

Embrace the new, make it work for you and learn valuable lessons from those who fail to make it work for them.

Blockchain is a lot like teen sex: Everybody talks about it, no one has a clue how to do it

Dr Who

Re: the "Trough of Disillusionment"

Nobody claimed that the blockchain was part of the crypto currency innovation/invention. As you say, Bitcoin uses pretty much bog standard blockchain theory.

Satoshi Yakamoto's contribution was the idea of proof of work which is the mechanism for minting new coins. The proof of work process is a mathematical guessing game whereby the creation of new blocks in the chain can be made artificially harder as more people become miners (creators of blocks). The aim is to limit the rate of coin production. This is an inherently stupid idea as all it does is increase the demand for computing power and therefore energy.

Blockchain is not new, it was just brought to the world's attention by the prospect of unlimited riches, and in a classic gold rush most people are digging in the wrong place. The only ones who'll make money are those selling the picks, shovels and pumps.

Julian Assange jailed for 50 weeks over Ecuador embassy bail-jumping

Dr Who

Re: Look, I'm not against the guy, but...

"like a girl". Seriously? I am not being woke or PC when I say that making cowardice a female characteristic is at best juvenile and at worst obnoxious.

Insane in the domain: Sea Turtle hackers pwn DNS orgs to dash web surfers on the rocks of phishing pages

Dr Who

WTF???

Computer systems within a registry and registrar were infected by tricking employees into opening spear-phishing emails laden with malware from sometime around January 2017, and continuing through the first quarter of 2019.

Really? For two years? In not just registrars but *registries*! Gordon Bennett. We're all doomed.

French internet cops issue terrorist takedown for… Grateful Dead recordings?

Dr Who

Not now Cato you fool! There is a time for censoring and and time for not censoring ... and this is not one of them.

Brit Parliament online orifice overwhelmed by Brexit bashers

Dr Who

With the site going up and down like a yoyo (it's down right now) we will never know how many would have signed the petition had the site been up continuously.

Fret ye not though, I have a cunning plan. What we need is a *second* petition to confirm the result of the first one.

The biggest uptick in demand for software devs by bosses is for... *rubs eyes* blockchain engineers?!?

Dr Who

Blockchain

Assemble a large number of blockheads, link them all together forming a chain of fools, then sit down and count all your money for nothing.

No fax given: Blighty's health service bods told to ban snail mail, too

Dr Who

Hancock's half hour

Once again, encouraging messages from Hancock. Open standards for interoperability of disparate local systems. Nice if it really happens. No more multi-billion failed attempts at monolithic NHS wide systems.

BUT - email for sensitive patient communications. That's got to be taking the piss (if you'll excuse the pun). If you need secure communications with guaranteed delivery then email is absolutely the last tool for the job. A smartphone app with end-to-end encryption giving access to a secure document store - that could work.

What a smashing time, cheer astroboffins: Epic exoplanet space prang evidence eyeballed

Dr Who

My teachers called me Kepler 107c at school. Well, they called me surprisingly dense at any rate.

The outfit where the NHS England Digital boss is headed? Turns out their code is 'not technically suitable' for the £6.4m NHS App

Dr Who

Gibberish

Phew am I glad we've got APIs these days so we don't have to resort to the bad old ways of app-to-app integration. And as for deferred deep links, well who'd want to use those anymore!

Chinese rover pootles about... on the far side of the friggin' MOON

Dr Who

Re: I can just imagine the timeline

There is no dark side of the moon really. As a matter of fact, it's all dark.

The eulogising of The Mother Of All Demos at 50 is Silicon Valley going goo-goo for gurus again

Dr Who

Re: Icon

So in terms of end user perception of computers, not much has changed then.

Expired cert... Really? #O2down meltdown shows we should fear bungles and bugs more than hackers

Dr Who

Re: Acronyms

Beat me to it

Total Inability To Support User Phones: O2 fries, burning data for 32 million Brits

Dr Who

An upvote for that but my theory is it's chinese hackers because everyone is removing their Huawei kit. Hua Wei and the Art of (trade) War.

Peers to HMRC: Digital tax reforms 3 days after Brexit? Hold your horses, how 'bout 3 years...

Dr Who

This is indeed shaping up to be a classic omnishambles.

For businesses not using a package that already supports MTD for VAT, building bespoke links into the HMRC API looks like it wouldn't be too hard, or alternatively for bridging software I've found this solution https://www.btcsoftware.co.uk/mtd-for-vat-software-solutions-2/ which looks pretty good.

HMRC bombard us with info about all kinds of guff, but nothing about this, which actually matters.

Windows XP? Pfff! Parts of the Royal Navy are running Win ME

Dr Who

- We keep it because it works.

- We don't connect it to everything else in the world because it doesn't need to be connected to everything else in the world.

Excellent points which we all ignore daily.

Now excuse me while I go and reboot my IOT immersion heater controller with which I replaced the old electrical timer switch that worked perfectly. I'm not joking either, I'm a moron. It must have been a pissed Amazon purchase but I can't remember.

Silent running: Computer sounds are so '90s

Dr Who

Very funny, but the funniest bit is "a recent wedding reception to which I'd been invited". As opposed to the many he attends where he just randomly turns up I suppose.

Brace yourself, Britain: Health minister shares 'vision' for NHS 'tech revolution'

Dr Who

There is loads of room for scepticism here BUT hidden beneath it all is a crucial change of direction. In the past, and including NPfIT, the strategy has been to build a monolithic, centralised system to which every corner of the vast and disparate NHS would have to mould its operational practices. That, as we all know, is impossible even in a much smaller organisation and is a key reason for the failure of NPfIT.

Now we hear mutterings of data interchange standards, enforced use of the existing unique ID number, allowing local units to build IT systems that suit their operations, yet still be able to speak to other systems on the network.

This is how the internet was built. The "fathers" did not instruct us how to build an email server, they merely defined SMTP and told us that if we want to build an email server, this is how it's going to send messages to other mail servers. This model works and it scales well beyond the size of the NHS.

Ironically, given my example, most people on the planet now just use two monolithic email services, but don't get me started on that - it might lead to violence.

Hancock is clearly not someone who can deliver this, but parts of his plan are a very welcome change in emphasis.

JAXA probe's lucky MASCOT plonks down on space rock Ryugu without a hitch

Dr Who

Swing arm? Fly wheel? Roboteers stand by.

Brit startup plans fusion-powered missions to the stars

Dr Who

On the subject of wildly optimistic deadlines

New York Times 1989 : Dr. Emmett Brown has demonstrated his Mr. Fusion domestic reactor which he claims will be commercially available by 2015 (worst case).

Good news: Sub-surface life on Mars possible, moons from big impacts. There is no bad news

Dr Who

after a powerful collision event

There it is again. It's not a collision event, it's just a collision. Why does everything have to be an event these days. Extreme weather event (storm), seismic event (earthquake) etc... etc... Just stop it everybody.

Fallover Friday: NatWest, RBS and Ulster Bank go TITSUP*

Dr Who

Re: Back now

Agreed that it's good to have an effective rollback procedure. That said, five hours seems like a long time to roll back a firewall change and in terms of PR, the status page seems to have been behind the borked firewall and therefore unavailable and the customer support bods didn't seem to have a clue what was happening either.

Brit airport pulls flight info system offline after attack by 'online crims'

Dr Who

Re: The weakest link....

I'd venture a guess that in this case the displays were attached to Windows XP machines, which have been the weakest link in a majority of the recent spate of ransomware attacks. That would also explain why they could only recover the displays incrementally instead of all at once. Rebuild the PCs driving your most important displays first.

'World's favorite airline' favorite among hackers: British Airways site, app hacked for two weeks

Dr Who

Re: First large scale test of GDPR legislation perhaps?

Data protection and information security are two slightly different things.

A good lawyer will show that BA only stored data it needed for the purposes of transacting its business with the customer and further that BA took reasonable steps to control access to and protect that data. The lawyer will show that this was a particularly skilled compromise of BA's information security measures, but not a breach of its obligations under GDPR.

Thunderstruck: Azure Back in Black(out) after High Voltage causes Flick of the Switch

Dr Who

Someone misread the design spec and implemented clusterfucking.

Excuse me, but your website's source code appears to be showing

Dr Who

at effected sites

Really John Leyden?

Can a script kiddie pwn your SD-WAN? Better check the config, friend

Dr Who

Not really an SD-WAN issue

You will almost certainly find that most of the routers, firewalls etc... in the world are missing crucial software updates. It's a network admin issue not an SD-WAN issue.

I feel a plead... a plead for speed: FastMail naps amid network blunder

Dr Who

Re: nice outage

Running a mail server is relatively easy (although as you say costs a good deal more than $30 per year in time and infrastructure). Where the pain and the cost really kicks in is with maintaining decent virus and spam filtering, and reputation management.

Brit web host biz UKFast gears up to IPO on London Stock Exchange

Dr Who

Something doesn't add up

Turnover £39.6m, profit after tax £9.47m, and they want to raise £350 million from equity investors. Even if they're selling 100% of the company, that's a ridiculous mark up.

Only if you're losing £50 million a year selling Beta versions of IOT fitness monitors disguised as fluffy pink cats can you get that sort of valuation.

BBC websites down tools and head outside into the sun for a while

Dr Who

It's the end of the world as we know it

and I feel fine.

Oracle cuts ribbon on distributed ledger service

Dr Who

The fog has lifted

"for building prototypes for documentation processes in 12-week sprints"

I see. At last it's all perfectly clear.

Dudes. Blockchain. In a phone. It's gonna smash the 'commoditization of humanity' or something

Dr Who

Like many Reg readers I've been around a while and have seen my fair share of hype cycles, but the one surrounding blockchain is the biggest and the worst yet. Never in the field of tech has so much bollocks been spouted by so many. I have it on good authority that things ending in gasm are supposed to get smaller with time, but hypegasms just seem to get bigger and bigger.

PS Mildly bitter as I seem to have managed to miss my ride on the gravy train of pretty much every single tech hype cycle.

Page: