* Posts by Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

2452 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2007

When ERP projects go awry: Surrey County Council incurs £3.2m additional costs in delayed Unit4 project

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: This Must Never Happen Again

It depends. As a public sector programme this would have had to have gone through a regulated tender process where any interested suppliers would have had to have mapped the "point in time" business requirements - against the capabilities of the product being recommended for implementation.

I would be highly surprised if the entire process was IT driven only and had no involvement of the end users or business departments.

What I can believe however is : (A) that due to existing workload, the business users or business analysts didn't really take the requirements / process mapping seriously enough, or get enough time with the key parties to review the new system and discuss those overarching business changes. (B) That data migration is hard if the business doesn't really understand its data, how it is used, and where it is silo'd. (C) That even the tea lady generally wants a say in the governance of reports and reporting.

Snap continues to make a spectacle of itself as it tries to trademark the word spectacles

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: should've

I did a programme of supporting IT work for the Specsavers marketing team in Guernsey about 10 years ago and met the chap that actually came up with that line. Whilst I'm not overly interested in the vagaries of marketing as a profession - at the time it was considered one of the most valuable corporate slogans in the UK.

Awful company to work in IT for though. I originally thought it was due to the limited pot of people they had to choose from on a small island, and the insular mentality; but no - it was just as bad on the mainland sites.

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of fraud: Blood-testing machines were vapourware after all

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

I'm not defending any of them... but I'm not sure "scam" is right???

I guess there are different definitions of a scam but I'm not sure this was one. A major fraud yes. But a scam... I'm not sure.

There was after all : a company, a working lab, a research and a product development division, and a product - albeit that it never worked.

I honestly believe that she set out to try to achieve what she wanted to achieve, but was unable to accept that it wouldn't work - at least in the timescales that she was presenting to investors, and then caught herself up in a web of lies that she couldn't escape from due to her own publicity seeking ego.

I've not read anything to suggest that she was actually trying to scam anyone. She definitely "misled" out of desperation to buy herself some time - but not to con people out of money and then do a runner with the proceeds.

I do however agree that she is guilty of what she has been found guilty of. If nothing else - for the manner in which she conducted herself to protect her own interests.

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: "what sort of person would think about having a child ... possibility of 20 years in jail

" but it does need to be said that this some deeply misogynistic shit going down in this part of the comments"

I disagree. It's not misogynistic at all. If you have been following this case since the start, and have read the book, and watched the documentaries, and read all the reporting - then I don't think it unfair to politely suggest that considering the slippery deceptions and lengths she went to to prevent the fraud becoming fully known; that the timing of having a kid whilst being pursued by the Government COULD be perceived as being a slippery move to put her defence in a more sympathetic light.

Alternatively she could have the kid out of love - and good luck to her. But if she loved Balwani as much as she presented in court - why did she not have one with him? Oh yes, she was spending all the time faking it until she started making it...

Wifinity hands customers bills for Wi-Fi services they didn't want but used by accident after software 'glitch' let 'fixed term' subs continue

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Should be outlawed...

"Looks like Wifinity cut some sort of exclusive deal with the Brass then."

Yes, and no doubt a slime ball MP has his or her hands down the back of Wifinity's pants to take their cut.

All subscription services should be banned from automatically rolling over or having these terms buried on page 56 of the T&C's. It's also happening with insurance. My insurer tells me that automatic renewal by CPA is because they want to "protect" me from driving accidentally without insurance, where in reality its because they are hoping I'll be too lazy to notice that they have hiked the premium on renewal by 25 - 50% and move to another provider.

Never give these f**kers a chance.

Barclays snubs public cloud giants and hardware rivals for HPE GreenLake private cloud

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Alternatively...

"Delivering an enhanced personalized banking experience" for customers."

Based on a number of issues and cases I've read about recently it seems they could have more efficiently improved this by employing and adequately training more front line service staff. In this instance, and similar to other large players "enhanced personalized experience" most likely means more useless chat-bots, web based self-help which never gives you any actual help, and more automated phone routing which will invariably cuts you off just when you think you are getting somewhere.

Humanity has officially touched the Sun (or, at least, one of its probes has)

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

What If?

Randall Munroe covered this in "almost" scientific detail on page 204 of his most excellent and amusing XKCD spinoff book.

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Loading Commander Jameson...

Did it test the fuel scoops?

UK's antitrust watchdog is very angry and has written a letter telling Apple and Google how angry it is with them

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

I kind of stopped reading...

I kind of stopped reading half way through as I knew what the rest of the article would say, but, unless I've missed some context, is this actually true : "that Apple only lets you use Safari on its handhelds"

I have Firefox on both my iPad and iPhone with Safari purposefully never really getting a look in - and have tested many other browsers that I downloaded.

As I said though, I may have missed some context or meaning.

West Sussex County Council faces two-year delay to replace ageing SAP system for Oracle

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: Another important ERP project going off the rails before even going live

As with most failed ERP implementations, it'll be because of the 3rd party implementation partner setting unrealistic timelines and costs in their tender bid, along with a probable lack of functional and technical GAP analysis, current e2e business process mappings and up front technical / integration design.

Yes, Oracle EBS and SAP are complex beasts - but in my 20 years as an ERP Programme manager, the underlying application platform installation is rarely the problem projects like this fail.

YMMV of course.

Meg Whitman – former HP and eBay CEO – nominated as US ambassador to Kenya

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Britain has a Government equivalent to the scum and trash found lurking in free dating apps.

UK and USA seek new world order for cross-border data sharing and privacy

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Did conversations go like this?

UK Gov : We want us to share data responsibly to make us look like we know what we're doing.

USA : We want all your data.

UK Gov : Ok, can we have something nice in return?

USA : No.

UK Gov : Ok, that's lovely then. When can we sign?

Virgin Media fined £50,000 after spamming 451,000 who didn't want marketing emails

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: Wow!

Yes and I'm sure £3 of that will be mine as no doubt they'll once again they'll be hitting all their users for "service improvement" fee hikes.

Shocking: UK electricity tariffs are among world's most expensive

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: Electric should be cheaper, gas more expensive

"We must move away from gas as part of our climate change efforts."

Indeed. I'm contracting currently at one of the 7 UK GDNs and I can assure you that there are significant efforts going into how to decarbonise the gas supply by using Blue or Green hydrogen.

I'm not surprised the UK has highest bills seeing as the prime motivator is short term corporate profit rather than to provide robust social utility at value. Seeing that the gas in your pipes is supplier agnostic, the fact that so many of these 2 bit rinky-dink billing companies have gone to the wall pretty much proves that they are all built on houses of straw using dodgy hedging mechanisms and other unsound mechanisms to offset the lower tariffs they use to entice customers in in the first place.

If you now count "Zog Energy" it's now 24 failures in 2021 alone. Why on Earth they are not regularly stress tested like the banks is anyone's guess - but that would be too much like hard work for Ofgem right? So we're now back to where we were originally with 4 - 5 major suppliers providing billing for the majority of supply. But hey... market competition in the energy sector right : that'll sort it with minimum effort required from the lazy idiot Politcos!!!

What an absolute utter f**king failure. To paraphrase Mr Dryden from Lawrence of Arabia... "all in all I wish I'd stayed at home in Tunbridge Wells."

Dev loses copyright appeal over forensic software after judges rule suite was owned by his employer

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

A Briton... overturned.

In other news, another Briton, one claiming to be King, has failed to overturn the arguments of a man called Dennis and his "good lady" whilst attempting to repress them using the violence inherent in the system. Ultimately the court upheld the argument that Britain is in fact an Anarcho-Syndicalist commune and that a man can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at him!!

UK data guardian challenges government proposals on automated decision-making

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Is it though...?

Is it AI though... or just a refined set of scripted questions with no more complex logic to it than a choose your own adventure book? I.e. IF this, THEN that...

All designed to hit quotas and massage KPI figures than to provide any real public service.

British Airways Executive Club frequent flyers have their airmiles grounded

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: The nice sharp pointy end is on a Concorde

Many years ago I had a commitment that I absolutely had to get back to the UK for from San Francisco. Typically, when I rocked up it turned out that Virgin had overbooked the flight and told me I couldn't check in - why they chose me I don't know because I had a perfectly valid ticket.

Anyhow, after discussing my predicament with the BA desk they managed to get Virgin to transfer my ticket and get me on their flight back an hour or so later - with a free bottle of champers to boot.

Do not try this at home: Man spends $5,000 on a 48TB Raspberry Pi storage server

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Such opportunity. The like of which you've never seen...

I'm going to set up an, erm... "merch" store for my comments on El Reg and then hawk the url when I post comments. Then I'm going to set up a Patreon page so I can try to convince everyone else to pay for my lifestyle. If that doesn't work, then I guess I'll resort to thumbnails of girls in bikinis to try to lure people in. That seems to be the stock clickbait method on YT when a channel needs to up its stats.

When I bought my project sailboat last year I did actually think of setting up a YT channel to document the renovation. Then I remembered (A) how much I dislike Google, (B) how shit and desperate most of the YT stuff is, (C) that I couldn't actually be arsed and didn't want to be a slave to a camera, and (D) that I don't actually need the money (not that I'd have made much TBH).

Amazon tells folks it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

First Direct

That'll explain why all of my VISA debit cards have been replaced by Mastercards then.

Brits complained a bit less about connectivity when they were allowed to go outside and see people in the flesh

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Oh...

Playing devils advocate a little... I only have the bare bones basic VM broadband, and whilst also being at home working full time - I can't remember a single outage or issue with them over the last 18 months.

Vodaphone however obviously decided that the best way to retain a customer was to sneakily keep raising the cost of my business mobile package to an almost eye watering amount; for again, what is a very basic package. I've now happily left them for much cheaper pastures new, and their regular mewing "customer special" marketing emails are almost too pathetic to read. Perhaps they should have thought about that before I left. Wankers.

Northrop Grumman throws hat in the ring to design NASA's next-gen Lunar Terrain Vehicle

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Disappointed.

Northrop have no chance. I've spent a huge amount of minutes (3 of them actually) on my submission which is keenly and somewhat cunningly based on only slight modifications to my Mazda CX5. Yes, there may be a few further problems to overcome but we'll sort those out during the (very) Agile testing phase.

After being in a cramped capsule I'm sure the astronauts will welcome the heated leather seats, the electric windows and the large boot space for carrying explory type space stuff.

'We are not people to Mark Zuckerberg, we are the product' rages Ohio's Attorney General in Facebook lawsuit

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

A Meta spokesperson...

Seeing as this "Meta" spokesperson works for Farcebork, presumably it only came with a minimal set of attributes that describes its capabilities as a human being.

Ofcom slams slammers: Telcos fined for switching punters' phone lines without their knowledge or consent

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

£35k in total?

Yeah... that'll show 'em!!!!!

Brit analysts formed pact to crash Autonomy's market valuation, ex-CFO tells US court

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

I guess you've not been following El Reg's excellent coverage for the last 12+ months or so?

Sheesh!!! Where's your dedication man...

Zuck didn't invent the metaverse, but he's started a fight to control it

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

"Holographic is like in Star Wars"

If so, here's hoping someone can retrofit a restraining bolt onto Zuckertwat.

Nvidia anoints itself a creator of the metaverse

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Not that I'm remotely interested...

But surely if there is to be any "...verse", be that either Meta or Omni or whatever - they should all be working together to make a single all encompassing one, rather than what will be several, all competing with each other to harvest up as much of your user data and ad revenue as possible.

No doubt the other usual suspects will be jumping on this bandwagon very soon. And also no doubt they'll all be trumpeting how clever they are when v2.8 will finally allow you to communicate with the rest of your friends who decided to use the "...verse" that you chose not to build your runaway from life profile in.

And then no doubt when your "...verse" has failed suddenly due to some amateur-hour maintenance fuckup, you'll receive messages such as "sorry, we know how much you rely on our services to escape the misery of your real lives, but rest assured our premium priced cat avatars will be back soon."

Investment app Robinhood: Extortionist tricked our support desk and made off with customer information

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: RobinHood, RobinHood...

But does anyone remember his lesser known historical contemporary DennisMoore DennisMoore?

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: No surprise

Michael Lewis' book Flash Boys goes into all of this at a certain level of detail if you are interested. It's a good read.

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

On the upside...

On the upside to all of your misery and negative comments : I started learning all about Day Trading as a longer-term plan B during lockdown last year, I ended up doing a great trading course with a US provider and I'm currently up over $8k. I'll admit it's not a large amount in the greater scheme of things, and agree that it "could be" high risk - but I'm absolutely clear on what those risks are, how I mitigate them, and what my overall approach and plan is.

Happy to concede though that there are probably lots of people doing it who don't really have a clue, and are losing, or have lost a lot of money.

Super-rare wooden Apple 1 hand built by Jobs and Wozniak goes to auction

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

"These machines are historically important"

Yes, but only to a very very, very small number of people. The real driver for the ridiculous costs attributed to these things is people hoping to make a future profit on it, rather than any overarching altruistic concern to preserve it for future posterity.

Starry starry night? No, it's just more low Earth orbit satellites as BT and OneWeb ink deal

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Hopefully...

Hopefully there will be a low'ish cost option for us offshore Yachtsmen and women. Inmarsat et al are all good and well, but still so bloody expensive that they feel like a premium rather than as a standard safety feature that everyone should be able to afford.

Still, and excuse the pun, but with Starlink et al slowly evolving - the tide does seem to be turning.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it? South Korea makes Google allow rival payment systems in Play store apps

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Oh, please fo f**k off Google...

"White took the opportunity to suggest that those in South Korea who chose an alternative payment provider could be putting themselves at risk."

Yeah right. Similar to Apple - the only real thing you are concerned about is the threat to your market share and profits.

Google's 'Be Evil' business transformation is complete: Time for the end game

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

"You need to keep an eye on that wife of yours..." - Menelaus' court advisor.

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

And one step worse that that is "Beware of geeks baring all"

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: Because Google is actually useful

Sorry to play Devils advocate - but I quite like Google Earth. And I don't need any form of logon or ID to use it.

Infosys awarded contract to replace East Sussex County Council's ageing ERP system

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Or... "and refocus our cheap 3rd party process operators on providing the *cough* best *cough* possible service to our residents... which by the way, is the lowest tracked KPI on their service contracts."

Yahoo! shuts! down! last! China! operations! as! doing! business! becomes! 'increasingly challenging'!

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Who knew...

Who knew that Yahoo were even still a thing...

Google lab proposes solar-powered moisture farming to provide water for billions

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: It's a blue planet...

Yeah ok, point taken... but none of the major industrial countries and cartels seem to have a problem spending billions on oil and gas pipelines where their profits are concerned do they.

With my seers hat on I'm going to predict that fresh water is going to become one of the two most valuable commodities on this planet (if it isn't already) and without it - civilization is going to fall apart a lot quicker than with a few petrol shortages.

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

It's a blue planet...

I'm probably not aware of some large scale industrial limitation of them, but...

Seeing as 70% of the Earths surface is covered with water, why can't they put their many billions of dollars into inventing or building a more efficient industrial scale desalination plant / watermaker? The Schenker one I inherited on my sailing boat makes about 25-30 litres per hour and is perfectly drinkable.

OK, sure... it does draw about 15A amps @ 12v, but my high output alternator and solar array take care of this.

Data-breached Guntrader website calls in liquidators, is reborn as Guntrader 2 Ltd

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

I'm pretty sure...

I'm pretty sure if I had a Directors loan to about a 1/3 of the value of my company, and then liquidated said company to mitigate other liabilities - that HMRC would be all over me like a rash... will be interesting to see how that plays out.

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: A meta universe

"Whos going to be on the outside actually doing stuff...?"

Me for sure. And the billons and billions of other people that have much better things to be doing living real life v1.0 - rather than running away from it.

Do you think you may have lost some perspective..? Your comment feels a bit similar to a lot of online people who's only view of the scale and majesty of planet Earth seemingly comes via a web-browser, Google earth - and the media.

Informatica UKI veep was rightfully sacked over Highways England $5k golf jolly, says tribunal

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: Gift value

I'm currently contracting for a company whose primary line of business is regulated by Ofgem. Here it is similar to yours. No cash or voucher-like things at all. And anything including and above the size or value of a bottle of wine has to be formally declared and approved by internal audit.

Contrary to this, my Ltd co. will happily accept anything. Please... please... anything at all ;-)

UK's ARIA innovation body 'hasn't even begun to happen' says former research lead

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Well...

Well, notwithstanding the fact that a certain pandemic has probably distracted a few people, what did he expect from a Government that is only really concerned with producing short-term meaningless soundbites that are only produced to try to put out the fires on whatever the issue du jour is as raised in the daily press...

Long term strategy or policy commitments? Yes, the Tories heard of them once.

NHS Digital exposes hundreds of email addresses after BCC blunder copies in entire invite list to 'Let's talk cyber' event

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Lol

Stories like these always remind me of the one in El Reg from a number of years ago of the poor girl who accidentally replied to everyone in her office via an instant message as to how much she'd enjoyed giving one of her colleagues (in the same office) - a blowjob.

There are 875 million good reasons why the paperless office won't happen soon

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Similar also. I recently changed my business mobile phone provider to Three and asked if I could get electronic invoices similar to how Vodaphone provided them.

"No" was the answer. No explanation either.

Facebook posts job ad for 10,000 'high-skilled' roles to 'build the metaverse' – and they'll all be based in the EU

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

It's not for the likes of us though is it...

It's not for the likes of us though, it's for the millions and millions of people for whom digital watches are seemingly still a pretty neat idea.

Brewdog might make an OK pint but its security sucks: Flaw opened door to free beers for anyone

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re : Brewdog might make an OK pint

Alternatively though you could say that they produce weak and overly fragrant cats-piss which only catches the eye due to overly shiny marketing to people that wouldn't know a good beer if it bit them in the arse.

Just sayin'... YMMV of course.

Meatballs, Abba, and bork: 3 things Sweden is famous for

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

3 things Sweden is famous for...

I'm not sure I know how to write in the accent of the Swedish chef, but don't forget chocolate moose...

First you get de chocolate, and then you get de Moose... then you put de chocolate on de Moose...

Chiptune to brighten your afternoon: Winning 8-bit throwback music revealed

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: Ron Hubbard?

I can still remember his Monty on the Run theme tune, and the epic remix of it. Surely one of the best ever from the 8-bit era.

That's Rob, not L. Ron BTW.

Surrey County Council faces £700k additional SAP support fees as £30m Unit4 ERP set to miss go-live target

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Was everyone asleep?

But there are standard basic controls to manage this sort of thing. A £30m budget would give a "general" project/programme tolerance of £3m around cost and timeline, and surely the £700k impact and schedule of that risk turning into an issue should have been assigned or captured early on in the contingency against risk budget?

Or does nobody control risk correctly these days? Hope is not a valid strategy.