Re: Ovine Park
Baa...rassic Park
(spent all his dosh hasn't he, he's brassic... but.. in his secret lab..)
[Boracic lint for those ignorant of the argot]
334 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jan 2014
Nope. Once you buy a company you take on *all* their responsibilities.
It's called due diligence.
That Fushitsu sat there 20 years ago and did not say "you know what, we need to fix this at our own expense" shows them to be in it up to their necks.
And WTF were the Japanese board doing when reviewing their foreign ops?
I wonder if Fushitisu have a 'Corporate social responsibility" statement on their websites.
There were far more than that. There were plenty of cases that never got to prosecution because the subpostmaster made up the shortfall with their own money and with it was smaller sums they would often choose to ignore after giving a warning.There were problems even with the test rollout scheme done in the late 1990s.
There is no excuse - and, dammit, the developer's job is to examine those edge cases and figure out where the hell they come from.
The Reg should write a proper piece on the technical details of Horizon. There's plenty on www.postofficetrial.com
For the version in use till c2010 it seems the PO branches wrote to an xml file for each transaction - but a single free text field for date, time, amount, item detail - seemingly not node based.
At the end of each working day that lot of files got parsed and sent over to a central server - a system called Riposte was the intermediary, supplied by another company, Escher Group not Fushitsu.
Who needs experts.
The vendor of a faulty product is only liable up to a point.
When the user carries on using it after learning it's faulty, dangerous and a potential killer the blame moves up the chain.
The PO is in fact owned by the Government trade and industry department. That's right, it's owned by the Government.
When the PO sacked the external forensic auditor - put there in the first place by a parliamentary committee - then the minister would have been informed.
He would then have told his boss of the potential shitshow - and they all looked the other way.
My computer went tits up this week, weird errors and blue screens and then it lost the SSD, all in less than an hour.
I needed to get to the Macrium Reflect backup on my other HD but no SSD meant no Windows, so I had to reinstall from disk while realising the SSD was toast.
At least got the new install onto the SSD but I couldn't believe the flat screen monstrosity of W10 I was seeing, slidey this and that and big buttons everywhere. WTAF.
I must have made so many tweaks I have something that looks like W7 - classic shell of course - but then who knows what else I've switched off.
Realising something was still a bit iffy I opened the case and decided to wiggle all the wires and hey presto everything was working perfectly.
The Macrium Reflect back up worked and I only lost three days of email. I don't even need the spare SSD that's arrived.
I wish could get on with Linux.
Even the Google 'verbatim' button shovels crap.
I end up with the 'verbatim' setting on, then sets of words in quotes and it still shovels crap.
If only I could lock verbatim to 'on' - and yes there used to be a plug in that did that.
Whenever I try DDG it's no better. I've even tried Bing, it's not so annoying but results are even vaguer.
I used to have the VM router in modem mode but when I moved house I left the new kit in standard mode thinking I'd change it when I had time, but it's been fine. There's still some port forwarding oddities but my work around of 'Sleep PC / Wake PC" kicks it back into life.
I hate infinite scroll on Google desktop search, I hate it with a vengeance.
There's an option to disable it but it doesn't bring back paginated results.
So I've been trying DDG and even Bing - but they aren't any better as they lack verbatim search.
Bing results are very odd too.
Done up like kippers by Google we are.
Nerdy comment: if you'd studied classic typography you'd know 80pt is not a regular size. After 72pt the next up would be 84pt.
I used to say it was the Mac that changed my life but really it was postscript.
Illustrator provided my revelatory moment when we needed evenly spaced lines for the background to a logo.
I thought she'd say "ok I can do that tomorrow" but she stopped what she was doing, hit some keys, and sixty seconds later a page rolled out of the printer.
(And about a year later all the photo typesetters started going out of business)
It used to fly directly above my street in Twickenham on take off. Not sure how high by then but the whole damn house shook and car alarms would sometimes go off. Didn't stop me running out to see it, if I had time.
Ordinary jet noise is more annoying as there's never any quiet.
Yes, the same with printed newspapers. It was very easy to read the first few paragraphs before deciding if it was interesting to you - I'd then often read the whole piece. The web doesnt have that appeal. There's so much garbage that we learn to make instant judgements and reject stuff that doesn't appeal before gving it a try.
It's when you see or read stuff that you had no idea you might find interesting that you learn new things.
Sadly BBC documentaries have been pretty weak for years along with a reliance on the presenter. Not Mr Attenborough I might add, but Brian Cox says the same stuff, too slowly, over and over again.
I'd rather see more from Jim Al Khalili or Nick Lane - a whole grown up series on evolution could be quite something.
But the funding, the funding - and the role government plays to grind them into the ground.
I was with an NHS eye specialist recently, she moves from one hospital to another. She wanted to write a prescription for me and forward it on my GP for repeats. She had to call a colleague to help - who was rude and said "you should know this by now". So I looked over and the arcane set of clicks and buttons would confuse anyone not using it regularly.
It looked like it had stepped out of the 1980s. I was in at the dawn of the web and interface design and it looks like the NHS are still there. It doesn't need to be 'Appified' it just needs UX people to be involved.
I remember a boy at school making one for some A level. I saw it working, track was only about 30 feet and 'train' was maybe 18" long. As you can tell it was long time ago - pre-metrication. Yes it was a school with exceptional facilites and teachers but I wonder what the guy did, spend 50 years watching as no one got it to the mass market?
I used to have a plug in for Firefox that forced "verbatim" on every bloody search.
But who knows why it got deactivated and no longer works.
So I have to carefully decide what phrases to put in quotes, or click Tools > All Results > Verbatim - drives me mad, what a lunatic waste of time.
The bastards don't give a flying fart for their users.