Posts by johnB

Any content in there?

"...yet to deliver operational excellence...", "...create the right platform...", "...achieve out full potential...", "...Looking forwards...", "...leveraging our technology...".

I wonder how he talks to his wife? Or maybe he's run out of cliches by the time he gets home.

No No No

The whole point of Notepad as far as I'm concerned is that it's very, very simple.

No hidden formatting. Or anything else. What you see is what you get.

And it's great for stripping out unwanted formatting.

Keep it that way.

It's payroll, for god's sake!

Payroll is just about the most basic business IT system you can get. It's been done "on the computer" since the 1960's.

How on earth did these jokers get something that simple wrong?

And would you now trust them to be able to do anything???

Automatic "upgrades"?

Why does a printer need to upgrade it's software? It's not as if the alphabet's been reinvented.

AI????

What possible purpose - other than making their bid for the work sound "sexy" - is there in using AI for pension payments, for deities sake?

Pensions are about as simple as it gets: "Pay X the sum of £Y until he / she / it dies".

It's worked for many years without AI.

And it's Crapita. What possibly could go wrong?

They don't want to listen

In Newcastle, Barclays closed three city centre branches & opened a new branch in the middle of the main (Nothumberland Street) shopping street.

The Market St branch, now a restaurant, had a couple of sandstone plaques about 60 X 60 cm that must have been there for many years, engraved with "Barclays & Co, Bankers" & the like.

I suggested to them that they might fit in well if they were installed in the lobby of the new branch - would show continuity, etc, etc.

They referred my comments to their complaints section, who never made the promised response.

Trolley Buses

Seeing the overhead cables reminded me of when, many years ago, Newcastle upon Tyne scrapped their trolley bus fleet for diesels.

The downside was smelly diesel.

The upside was that there was noticeably more light at ground level.

Usual misleading PR

It's not the amount (at least here in the UK) of energy a house uses in a day, it's the amount of electricity it uses. The quote ignores space heating, which is more than that by a factor of about 4.

It's bad enough when media types, bless their innumerate selves, get confused, but in a technical setting this simply shouldn't happen.

Hmmm...Fujitsu

Haven’t I heard that name recently IRO a certain UK calamity (Yes, Post Office, I’m thinking of you).

Nothing to worry about

"Crypto currency billionaire"

Great Stuff

Just brilliant.

Hats off to the guys at NASA.

Shared services - not an encouraging track record

Shared services have an appalling track record - does anyone remember the financial bloodbath in SW England ?

This seems to be a whole order (or two)

more complex.

I predict delays, cost overruns, only partial at best implementation.

It's not all bad

I've spent years ranting about non-metric measurements.

But I've got to admit the American usage of cups in certain recipes is by far easier than using spoons, weigh scales & measurers.

Some recipes are actually more dependent on ratios, not volumes / weights.

e.g. my morning porridge (for two) is one cup of porridge (oatmeal) & two cups of semi-skimmed milk. No scales, etc & washing up simpler.

Otherwise, yup, systems other than metric are simply bonkers. (And far too error-prone).

What could possibly go wrong?

Enormous government project / combine different databases devised for different purposes / very ambitious time scale / unclear objectives.

The Chinese are learning from the West - on how not to do things!

Headline

Best for a some time. In the best El Reg tradition.

Abbreviation

Why is it "EE2E"?

Surely "End to End Encryption" should be "E2EE"?

Crypto currency - Eh?

Every time I read about crypto currency I get more baffled.

Why would I (or anyone else) want to part with real money for an IOU, whether paper or "digital", from someone I don't know, can't find, and have no means of trusting? All I can do with the crypto is swap it for other crypto or hope it's still got some value when I want to change it back to usable currency.

The only use I can see is for nefarious purposes - and even then I'm not so sure. I'd hazard a guess that all the cryptos are under quite close inspection by law enforcement authorities & tax agencies. Surely as soon a swap of real money is made some red flags are set? Especially if our friend blockchain is involved.

In the UK we have the DVLA

Which makes any Frog bureaucracy look easy-peasy to deal with.

Just try to SORN / tax a car after death & before probate.

Compare with Accenture?

Accenture - not an outfit I'd choose for any comparative purposes.

(I've worked with them).

It's' MY printer

If I want to put in cheap cartridges that don't give as good output as the mfr's, well that's my business.

But in fact I put in cheap cartridges that give better output than Epson's at about 10% of the cost.

Floats into the sky

Great plane for passengers - it just seems to float into the sky from takeoff. Amazing given it’s huge bulk. I seem to recall the wingtips rise by something like 2 (or is it 4 ?) metres by the time it takes off.

I look forwards to reflying it once this pandemic is past. (Emirates to Dubai means I don’t have to use Heathrow - a holiday bonus in itself).

Facebook

Just. Say. No.

Swiss cheese

Seems to me to be a typical swiss cheese error:

* IT didn't delete her access at the right time - unclear why

* Aggrieved (ex-)employee

* Ex-employee decides to abuse IT's error / oversight

What's interesting to me is why she was able to delete stuff. As has been said, the data IS effectively the credit union & should be more or less impossible to delete, if for no other reason than compliance with corporate reporting, taxes, etc. Surely deleting critical data shouldn't be an option for someone apparently fairly low down on the food chain?

Alternatively, $10K is peanuts to most companies, esp in the financial sector, so maybe it was deemed an acceptable risk of doing business?

How many Android devices are secure in any case?

As updates for Android only run for a couple pf years I'd guess most Androids are insecure by virtue of running an out-of-date OS.

So running a banking app on Android seems a dubious practice at best. Even if the OS is currently up to date, it'll probably be no longer so by the time the device is disposed of.

Have I worked on a system developed by Accenture? Yes.

Would I ever give them a penny of my money? No.

3.6 million pounds of thrust

I thought NASA were supposedly metric now?

£6,400,000 !

They were robbed.

This is one of the worst public IT sites I've ever come across.

Lipstick on a pig

It's still Heathrow. It's a dump. I've vowed never to use it again.

What support?

"While 98 per cent of Universal Credit claimants make their claim online there is support for people who need extra help. Staff are on hand to help people to claim and we can give support over the phone or through a home visit where needed." ®

Not up here in the NE of England it isn't. Every week we get new UC claimants without IT skills referred to us by the JobCentre. The dialog seems to be:

"Fill in this 28 screen UC application & we'll consider your claim";

"But I don't have a computer & have never used one";

"Go to the library, they'll sort you out. In the meantime until the claim is completed & approved there's a food bank you might want to visit".

Snout, meet trough...

My problem with Google

Is that I just can't rely on them to support their offerings.

For example, I used to find both My Tracks & Picasa simple, easy to use & useful. Google's dropped both. Finding suitable replacements has been a bit of a pain (and so far unsuccessful as far as Picasa's concerned).

They have the appearance of being a company long past it's innovative / growth stage & one now simply concentrating on protecting their market & profits. The story about their massive lobbying endeavours supports this. As is the way with most big US corporations, profits (i.e. bonuses) first, the long-term to be looked after by the next wonderkid brought in to save the sinking ship - Kodak anyone?

Could be worse

Could have a Yahoo account & Talk Talk as your ISP.

It would take more than a marginal claimed increase in battery life to get me to use Edge.

Trust DVLA?

When my step mother died, I had the choice of re-taxing the car or "SORN-ing" it. Neither of which I could do as I wasn't the owner.

After long calls with DVLA I was told to just forge a signature.

And then of course there's the scam where they make you pay an extra month's tax when you trade in your car.

DVLA - wouldn't trust them to get the time of day right.

Yes,

Electronic may be easier to count, but for me doesn't meet the bill of being easily understandable, nor do I trust it.

Paper - a big pile of easily-examined votes for candidate "A" can be compared against the pile of votes for candidate "B", by any ordinary person.

Electronic needs intermediaries to examine the data & compile the results, with the non-expert being unlikely to be able to detect. And, given the pass of a few years, both the hardware & software are likely to be obsolete (think punched cards), effectively meaning analysis by later generations is difficult if not impossible.

HMRC Telephone

I can only hope the poor sods that have to use the telephone won't have to wait the 50 mins it took HMRC to answer my call last week.

Why would anyone

After vowing never to let anything from Adobe onto any machine I was going to use ever again I switched from Adobe to Foxit some years ago. Life just got better.

Then my local public library forced me to use an Adobe product to read their on-line offerings. They haven't got any better.

No way I'd voluntarily sign up for anything from this outfit.

Who benefits?

One point which tends to get overlooked in these discussions is just what is the overall effect of a Corporation Tax (at least as it works in the UK).

If megacorp makes a profit of (say) £/$/€1M, then it pays tax on those profits (not it's turnover, as some politicians would seek to imply. We use VAT to tax turnover.) at whatever rate it's home country charges.

If Corporation Tax didn't exist, then the same profits would still be taxed, only as dividend income in the hands of shareholders

So the net effect of a Corporation Tax is to bring more tax into the coffers of the "home" country, at the expense of shareholders - both domestic & foreign - who have less profits distributed to them. Nothing to do with "fairness", just a pre-emptive tax grab by the local government.

Hidden partitions

I used a thumb drive for years and then when I plugged it into a Linux box I found a hidden partition with executables (and couldn't access the Windows partition).

So even after formatting a new drive, I reckon it's not possible to be secure knowing a drive is "clean". And this was from a known brand name, supplying UK gov't.

All a bit scary.

Mission creep - big government

The middle / senior realms of the civil service are not where I'd look to find people with the skills to oversee such a project (I speak as one who was given a performance bonus for being the only member of the team able to apply a filter to an Excel spreadsheet).

In my experience of a (different) large civil service project, the aims & objectives were under constant review / adjustment, and consultants were able to utilise this lack of precision to pad the project out, giving every input from senior management an answer in the form of "yes, we can do that". Without, of course spelling out the costs & delays inherent. Needless to say, the deadline dates were wildly overshot.

Systems guru John Seddon of the Vanguard Method predicted this likely outcome when the project got underway in 2010, and, sadly but apparently inevitably, he seems to have been proven correct. (In brief, Seddon suggested the system be decentralised to local government and added to the Housing Benefit scheme they run, as they already held all the relevant data. It would have been up & running within a year, but not under the direct control of Whitehall).

ITunes?

Maybe the sheer unpleasantness of iTunes on the PC might be a contributory factor ?