Posts by Doctor Syntax

"Also, in my experience, every company thinks they are unique and that they have special requirements, but they're not."

That's your experience. Others have other experiences.

I had a client in logistics, mostly print logistics and, true enough, that cold be run on an ordinary ERP system. But they also had a few outstations doing reprographics and it turned out that actual print management had a quite different approach. They had a different package just for those. Moved to another client, also in print, and they had a separate print-industry package, basically similar in scope to the previous client but from a different vendor.

OK, so the print job management task is fairly standardised, just different to ordinary order processing/warehousing etc. but still able to be served by standard packages, just don't expect your ERP approach to work without a lot of changes.

Moral 1: there may be scope for ERP packages but their nature can vary between

But client 1 had a contract which required custom printing for which client 2 was sub-contracted. To get the required data in from the customer and then from 1 to 2 required a certain amount of customisation of the ERP system, some from the vendor, some from me. And when the data got to client 2 it was handled by entirely custom software. In fact at client 2 apart from what was, essentially front office functions handled b the bought in package all the production S/W was custom. And none of the custom production print S/W would have been in the least applicable to the ice cream factory gig...

Moral 2: production control is likely to be custom.

Re: FPTP must die

There are some practical difficulties with PR when you're voting for a single post. Do you slice the candidates up and glue the bits together in proportion to the votes or do you operate some sort of time-sharing scheme? OK, I acknowledge the lure of the first option.

Re: Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day

"Next maybe we'll see milk that tastes like milk but doesn't have so many carbohydrates"

Then we'll have the usual health freaks giving it to their babies ignoring the evolutionary reason why milk has so many calories.

Re: Never under estimate the ability of a user to out stupid you

"or never watched/read crime fiction"

It seems that this is where that line of argument really falls down.

OTOH SOCO and fingerprint examiners make their livings from ne'er-do-wells who obviously haven't. One SOCO did send me in a glove-print to compare with a knitted glove. The match of knitting pattern wouldn't have been much good but, oh look, it's also included the odd fibre matching the glove.

One of my prepared lines was to pretend to be "the Microsoft help line for reporting scams" and assume the scammer was a victim reporting a scam, tell him that we work very closely with the police in all jurisdictions in dealing with scammers, it would help if could tell us where he was but not to worry, we were tracing his call right now and the local police would arrive with him soon to check his PC and help detect who was scamming him.

What a pity nobody's rung for me to use it.

Re: Perfect

"Never understood their worth or attractiveness to corporate managers, other than they see them in their own image."

That's all that's required.

Re: Aimless Anglos

"it will take years to show the benefits"

Rehearsing the line for January? I'm sure that one will be trotted out monotonously and all immediate problems will be blamed on Covid.

Re: Does this change explain

I'm not even sure the right hand knows what the right hand's doing. It's quite common to see synopses of the same story several times on the same page, sometimes with different sizes of picture and quite often immediately following each other.

It's a mess.

I'd guess it's aimed at what the voters might understand and support whilst at the same time being the thin end of the case opener.

Re: I'm impressed

We do, however, expect reception not to let people carrying cans of petrol and matches get into the building.

Re: Pretty reckless

"Science isn't sexy nowadays"

In current circumstances biological sciences might be catching people's interest. Make that "should be".

Re: make

Whoosh

Not quite

No blockchain.

Re: They missed the obvious.

Part of the time the package demands as a minimum version x.y.z of some library when it's quite possible an older one would suffice. I've seen this a few times where some application wouldn't build because of such a dependency and then discovered a pre-built version that worked fine.

It seems that in the rush to devise proprietary nostrums an existing approach has been forgotten: install the application in /opt where it can sit with its own collection of libraries.

Re: Agile?

Weren't the Sweeney fairly agile? I suppose that was then & this is now.

Re: prevent key tech?

"The customer list and data were secondary."

Not necessarily. Some of those users (i.e. the product, not customers) managed to piss somebody off and he couldn't find out who they were.

Re: I wonder how this will affect Oracle vs Google?

Allowing for the fact that this was functionality of the software rather than the software itself, I was wondering that. However the judge specifically stated that it applied to this particular case; IOW he's saying this doesn't constitute a precedent.

Re: Sadly, no international jet-settng for me

"a flight from Gatwick to Belfast or Luton to Edinburgh *doesn't* need a passport..."

...yet.