Posts by Acrimonius 119 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Dec 2024
Nobody mentions when a company embarks on a unbudgetted overhaul of its complex integrated IT how will it be paid for and how in the meantime productivity will take a dive. One source is EU and Airbus can now simply add the mark-up to the price and extend the schedule under the guise of sovereignty - for the greater good.
Payments withheld are just a way of keeping the press and the select committee at bay. It's usually not a pain point and earlier up front payment adequately covers the riches their business plan is written to achieve. They will recover most at the next paypoint and maintain a healthy cash flow. Each payment also has risk built in for anything withheld so not a train smash. Gov under a delusion that they have a contract with teeth
Not just poor managment blowing all the time but also coders iterating ad infintum and taking their merry time. Coders say we do not need a spec (it is never of much use or even feasible) or a design (always not the way to do it when you start to do it) and it will be ready when it is ready
Once they reecive the rock samples it will be please go back and retrieve from these other locations. Then still not sure please dig deeper and retrieve. Then too ambiguous we need to set up a lab on Mars and dig our selves - will need another rover to remotely play with as well
One key requirement that lay at the heart of the Horizon saga was the need for the software system to detect fraud and be able to bring together evidence for prosecution. Fraud was very real at the time with much handling of cash and millions unaccounted for. The temptations are now greater as Horizon can just be blamed. If this requirement is still there the implementation is likely to be just as half-baked and we may be in for a repeat of the 25 year history with lesson's learnt a dim memory.
I have asked countless of times for a spec and even planned in time for a small study to be carried out, information to be gathered and a spec (at least architectural and functional) to be written but response from dev team has been sorry not done before so we can't do a spec. We will tell you as we go along. So the spec grudgedly arrives at the end (much delayed due to the many headless chickens now) and thus it complies with the design but not with what is required.
False to say Civil Servants are just following orders. There may be an overarching policy but this is high level and there are so many ways to implement and much open to interpretation. Yes Minister aptly showed this. Much is twisted to their own agenda, much to maintain their internal status quo, much about staying within familiar boundaries so minimal additional effort and thinking necessary, and much about following rules and processes to suit and not because they are applicable or strict. This starts at the higher levels and flows down to the lowest say grade 7 where nothing is questioned and anyone with a better way either is supressed or it is more than their job's worth. There are clearly process flaws in a many areas but no one is willing to raise this - no incentive to put extra effort in to change matters. They hide behind trying all to ensure taxpayer gets value for money when in practice it is all about just coasting in their jobs. The civil service is now more a mix of old hands and new recruits from industry but this has not made much difference.
Problem with past performance is that it will always be disputed by the bidders. Who's fault was it really? How are the escalations calculated? How relevant? How far back? Same company? There will also be poor and ambiguous record keeping by all sides. Would just not stand up in court if it came to that which it could very easily do so
Can never do all 3, so what about just 2 and really sacrifice the 3rd. Nope still no can do. Ok, what about just one and forget the other 2. Thanks but never done this before so still can't promise this. Ok, what about none of those. Yeah, now you're talking. As good as done already!
How do you deal with someone who just likes to hear his voice, someone who waffles on, someone on his hobby-horse, someone with a grudge, someone with unfinished business, someone who wants to ram his viewpoint down everyoone's throats, someone just a contrarian etc. Much you would ignore and leave out of the meeting notes. How would the AI know this?
More likely a more expensive British rubbish that only half works and is never completed. In any case, delusionary to think there is such thing as 'Made in Britain'. Bidders will of course claim it and Government will just go along - a path of least further time and energy- thankful that they can now tick the sovereignty box..
I have always used third party software for mounting ISO's and other image formats. Did not know that Windows did this natively now.
Anyway, expecting people to look at extensions (sometimes if the filename is long it may not fully display) and understand what they mean in the course of ones work where you may be inundated with emails and docs to wade through in a short time is just unrealistic. Only solution is not to accept any format (including containers) unless it is dumb, e.g. PDF
So now they realise that the readiness decision was made without all the facts. When have they ever had the facts at any time in the programme history? Do they not realise that hiding facts is an art form that all defence contractors and their counterparts in MoD Procurement and the Services have honed to perfection.
Well, in the time-honoured way for software it was almost inevitably rolled out earlier. Full of bugs and incomplete functionality making the user the guinea pig. So save on creating test cases/environment and more importantly able to surreptitiously claim payment milestone.
We have reached a point, more likely already past it, where IT Security is far too complex and with each measure including holes which no one really has or can test for to fully unearth hitting the hard stop that is human nature, convenience and usability (expected from IT itself without which there is no point).
It says this at the top of the page. There is nothing below. I have already set up a new account and now I have to do it again. Pathetic!
If this is the first time you have accessed the member portal since the 25th of November, you will be required to create a new account (please see below) . Once the new registration process has been completed, please wait a minimum of 15 minutes before attempting to log in. This will ensure your account is fully set up. Thanks for your patience.
My Payslip, P60 and Nominate Beneficiary all say 'We cannot load your data at the moment.Try again later or contact help and support' Clicking the link seemingly did nothing but it was clearly busy finding the page and after about 30sec the page loaded. If it's going to be this slow a popup to say please wait while we load would help. The site seems to have regressed - worse that what is was when it launched
To utter ROI and SAP migration in the same sentence is as incredulous as expecting users to have lived with vanilla SAP - an abomination. They should not have included ABAP - an admission of one size DOES NOT fit all. S/4 is actually no different and has more scope to be an abomination.
I remember SuperCalc and longed for GUI based Excel which came out on the Mac first. Then it with, crucially, VBA became core to everythng I did in Engineering. The ease of VBA automation meant you could create fontends for file I/Os, data parsing/manipulation, conversions and presentation/reports and not have to wade through all the rows and columns of data.
I tried to log in but it would not accept my password. Tried recovery but then email not recognised. Kept on trying but nothing. Realised that you had to create a new account. This should have been in large letters. Why could they not transfer the old database? Not part of the contract but I suspect it would have been a big cock-up. Anyway I went through the re-registration. Found these issues:
Could not paste into or from any of the fields. Ideal when you want to copy codes from your email. A fundamental flaw
It did not check if username and password are similar.
You have to select recovery questions. One was 'Whats your first company'. Apostrophe!
It welcomed me with Welcome B. Was this meant to use my first name?
When typing password and username it validates while typing and so you get the mesage in red that it does comply or match. Annoying!
All my C# amatuer or hobby coding is with an AI now. It can be any AI and not just Copilot where I quickly run out of free tokens. Before my friend was Google, Stack Overflow etc but compared to the AI a tedius search process with many false leads. Now the AI generates the code snippets instantly. Many simple tasks, many tedius ones, many where I can't remember the syntax (becoming a huge problem as I do not code often enough), many showing a better way including the IDE, many invaluably showing best practice rather than my code hacking way etc. The code is usually correct and usually works but not as intended or not when integrated sometimes but this can be ironed out. I am learning less and less but I was not learning much in any case with the previous helpers I had and for a hobby I could never invest the time to become a full coder in any case. So AI is a perfect buddy in my case
Systems have grown far too complex for anyone with a hand on heart to say the system design, the coding and the testing can be relied upon. More reslience and redundancy just adds more complexity that fewer and fewer can grasp or unravel. Buggy software added on top of buggy software. Complexity unfair on coders as they are only human. Will be like headless chickens soon. Cause and effect too deep to analyse. Root cause never found. Fixes become temporary and actually add even more fragility.
