Posts by Shaun Winfield

City council audit trail is an audit fail after disastrous Oracle ERP rollout

Re: What’s going on, El Reg?

I'm a SAP Payroll consultant, so not normally involved in all the stuff that causes a total shit show, but adjacent to. I've also worked directly employed in local government.

Don't want to get ripped off? Know what you want is key, probably hire your own tame consultants so they can check what is in the contract is what you think it is. Not because the vendor is necessarily trying to screw you. But converting technical detail into real life requirements is rife with honest misunderstanding.

But it's shocking how many clients have incredibly vague requirements, so assumptions get made for the sake of contracts / pricing which they never read. When it turns out they meant something else entirely, that's really on them.

I see, why don't all councils just have a standard ERP a lot in the comments, well, none of the different departments in a single council would ever knowingly agree on a process, let alone separate authorities! Efficiency is the enemy and must be stamped out seems to be the normal driving principle.

MoD does everything right for once in Xmas shocker

Merlin V Chinook

If it's any help in the Merlin V Chinook debate my brother is a Air Engineer Tech' in the Commando Helicopter Force out in Afghan.

He's on the Sea Kings at the moment, but they're not looking forward to having the Merlins due to all the composite materials. A lot of their time with the Sea Kings is spent patching up the bullet holes with sheet metal as they tend to attract a lot of small arms fire, won't be able to do that with the fancy pants composite skinned Merlins. Expect to see a hell of a lot of helicopters taken out of the field to have some expensive panel work done! That's got to push the running costs up a fair bit?

Byron review calls for computer game ratings

Takes me back to the 80's - Simpler Times

Back in the 80's it was home video that was making all our kids into murderous little nutters - The result of which was the introduction of the Video Recordings Act 1984 and the classification of home video to prevent kiddies watching Evil Dead and such like (although that one was banned I think - but you get the idea).

Didn't work though, parents bought videos and let kiddies watch them. Cue media frenzy surrounding any psycho behaviour from Children blaming - the videos of course, not the parents that would be madness.

Now the same works for games, I worked in an electronics retailer when Grand Theft Auto 3 (or 2 whatever) was released rated 18. We obviously refused to sell it to 12 year olds who would then grab a parent and make them buy it for them.

Classification is useless if parents can't be bothered to actually pay attention to it. Yet time and time again parents allow children access to violent/disturbing/sexual content (be it film or games) safe in the knowledge that if little Timmy goes out and murders his playmates they can blame the film/game/TV show without anyone ever questioning why he was raised on a diet of Death Whores from Hell 3 for 12 hours each day.

As per usual I blame the parents. Oh and evil Bill.

Ubuntu chief ushers in the age of Intrepid Ibex

@Shaun

I'm glad it's not just me who has trouble understanding where our Anon' friend is coming from.

Personally I can't get enough of the new releases, but I'm easily impressed by new whizz-bang features every 6 months.

RE@One rule for one.

*SIGH* - Oh Anonymous Coward, I feel sorry for you. You're obviously a very angry and confused individual... I'll pick up on just a few of your misconceptions..

"Checking for updates and installing them, regardless of how painless it is is not the same as supporting the version you are running" - So using this logic Windows is in your bad books too? O/S Vendors should support a version by not updating it? Weird.

"Many things I do require the underlying OS to be the same - a solid base to build everything else on, sometimes for years on end." - You really hate updates eh? Once again naughty Windows too with those filthy service packs. I guess you could.. I don't know.. NOT INSTALL THEM!!! Just stop clicking yes to updates.

"My clients would not be happy if something that used to work suddenly stops because the updated kernel screws something in their code up because it acts unexpectedly." - Oh dear lord why would you update the Kernel in the first place then? Just don't do it..

My suggestion to you my confused little friend would be to pick the latest LTS release and to turn off the updates.. or just click no when the nasty machine asks you if you want to update.

There is a difference between providing support and issuing updates to an O/S.

Paris because she like totally gets computers more than you do, even if she has difficulty saying no.