Posts by Barry Mahon 138 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jun 2007
Lynch denies he was aware of the actions of the CFO of Autonomy....but the UK authorities said the company had a case to answer.....How could Lynch not have known??
In the world of information retrieval professionals Autonomy had a very jaundiced reputation. Wall St analysts were very negative about the HP purchase, and HP downgraded the spend for unrealistic 'accounting' reasons
Has it not crossed the mind of the majority of commenters here? These numbers are small in relation to the real quantification of Intel. Just examine the 'down by' numbers in the context of Intel's overall numbers.
Does nobody notice that these are put out to stop the spivs and bookies on Wall St and The City from exaggerating their role in what is called "the economy" which is already totally unrelated to the baseline monetary figures of a number of grossly overvalued and overrated activities, which provide short term and unreal measurement to their actual situation.
Barry
The suggestion that the job was an inside track and involved a tendering process is unlikely.
Much more likely, in the irish 'public service' i.e. computer stuff, is that the db is part of a routine arrangement to outsource "that sort of stuff" as the Gardai has almost no competence, no supervision, no wish to get involved and no staff capable of doing it.
The Gardai have an internal online recording thing which has had so many breaches it is like a spiders web.
At one time there was a requirement to have a Superintendant sign off on queries on drivers, etc. The way that was done was to "put a pile of stuff on the Super's desk as he was going home and he would scribbled the signature on them all"
Apparently, all has been recently 'upgraded' this story is probably a manifestation of that.
If I recall, many of the 600 were from Egypt, were they not?
Egypt has now got a military government, hasn't it? It may not be actual soldiers, but permitted by......
What is their beef? I don't recall many were attacked and killed by the ruler, like the UK trained medic did.
It is a political mess, nothing new there, the UK has had three PMs.....
So, what to do? Stop treating the likes of Egypt and many other countries in that corner of the world as 'friends' and, much more important, stop providing them with arms.
Imagine quoting McArthur in this context.
He was the 'victor' in a war which used a nuclear bomb to end it. A "no-risk" situation? he broke what rule?
The reality of the consequence of the defeat of Japan was that the Japanese stopped believing the Emperor was god.....
That is the best memory, it bears NO relationship to someone who wants to be remembered as an entrepreneur.
The most common French interpretation of entrepreneur is opportunity taker. This 'explorer' took serious risks he was warned about.
I spent a good deal of my working life dealing with the results of suggestions on how to get good information on which to make decisions, starting with science and technology, which was fairly well supplied with publishers and database suppliers who actually checked their material and had good tools to improve the quality of searches.
Of course that was when the quantity of information available was relatively limited and was well organised.
Then came the computer, long before my time I must say, but it's application to information retrieval was generally well invested and genuinely improved quality.
Then came the claims that the computer could solve everything..... we know that wasn't and isn't true, but it didn't stop the claims.
The came Autonomy, out of the brains of Oxbridge, no less, based on the brains of a vicar from the 18th century, or was it the 17th?
The claims were outrageous, unless the datasets were simple stuff, such as names and addresses, and even there there were hiccups. All grist to the Autonomy mill, as long as you paid money to have your dataset massaged to fit the software. Even more outrageous claims were the result.
The funniest part of the story is that HP, the darling of the garage sales, or was it the garage size? paid seriously outrageous money in $ which were worth something at the time, to add Autonomy to their stable. Problem was the horse couldn't run....
The best part, because it doesn't contain any jokes, are the comments. To a retired tech such as meself they are mostly comprehensible.
My takeaway, this is a technically interesting development device. It does some of what it should say on the tin. However, however brave the developers are, they will never satisfy certain Reg nerds.
"On an undecipherable date, due to an unknown calendar, this object bashed a bit of rock off Ryugu.
The fine for this is 1x10 to the power of a million, in the finder's numerical system.
Payment only accepted in Solar Pal to the following SRL sppl://ryugu.universe.1/bashedrock.dontdoitagain.?"
I hope they are not British or ever were.
The last Brit islands in that corner of the world, in the Indian Ocean, are now the largest US base outside the continental bit. Diego Garcia, 'provided' by the Brits after they had unloaded the natives to Mauritius. Even though the UN said that was, and still is, illegal, the Brits have told the UN to f off, presumably 'cos the US told them to.
Maybe after brexit they'll unload a few other places, NI, for example.
The Empire strikes back?
Is it not time we called this for what it is, a throwback to another world, which even then wasn't that important.
There is a sort of omerta about anything which is labelled 'security' In effect it enables certain agencies, with impunity, to do what they like.
There may be certain illegal activities and associations which require investigation, in private, at the time. However, the definition of them is nowhere to be found.
A good deal of what is covered is 'revealed' when the agencies and the police etc., say it is covered by security requirements. One can then conclude that whatever it is is 'security' related. In many cases it is later revealed to be untrue.
A heck of a lot of it is related to previous and current government activities and/or policies.
Very handy....
Exactly, unfortunately, even JPL has to answer to the bean counters.
For me the image near the end of the documentary film Voyager which shows the earth as a miniscule dot in an equally miniscule environment of millions of stars tells the tale of how arrogant we are about ourselves.
We are just that, a tiny dot.
Aha, "drive them away" to where?
If we didn't have handy corners and atolls with no rules we could, and should, have a global tax system.
That way, we could avoid the nonsense of of foundations, false tax 'residency' etc., etc.
I imagine that, if there was a balanced global system then the likes of Dell (and he is not the worst, by a LONG way) would not have the opportunity, and maybe not the interest, in hiding money.
We might need a better way of controlling how 'national' money is spent, to ensure a fair system, now there is an objective to look for.
I always wonder what the super rich do with all the money, after all they can only eat three meals a day, like many of us.....
Autonomy was a piece of software that was supposed to sort out information. Or, more precisely, analyse and organise data to become information.
It required, depending on the raw material and it's format, significant pre-work and sampling, before being "installed" i.e. run with a full or partial data set.
So, a sales invoice for the product was made of several parts. There was a down payment, not necessarily the "price" of the whole package, and a significant x time basis to do the analysis.
Afaik, the charge is that the money element of newly signed contracts was inflated to a significant extent, to take account of the potential effort required to get the product to run properly. The other aspect is that there was a significant % of future income included in the sale announcement, without a dependable basis of the calculation
Didn't I read somewhere that the Irish Gov are shuffling about to get a derogation from the strictures of the upcoming EU data protection stuff?
Ireland needs to offer sub rosa guarantees to big (us) corps that their data in the country is protected from prying. Viz. this issue of the Reg report on MS v the US Supreme Court.
I always wonder what is the story with insurance if you and your car are an Uber "product"?
Any info??
OTOH, this decision, like so many of the ECJ's decisions, reinforces the EU'role as the arbiter of nearly everything. That might be ok, in the sense of creating a common market, but the proposals/decisions on directives are mostly created on the input of vested interests, not the man in the street.
Apropos of insurance, why is it a requirement to have, effectively, a local insurer? You cannot insure a car in Ireland with a French insurer, even if it is an international insurance company.
I tried to get him to come to Europe in the mid 80s, for a conference, but he said he could not "because I know nothing about data in Europe"
I don't know if he ever did come, or if he ever did learn anything about data here. Of course it was in the days of the monopoly, so not many people knew about data here, some still don't.
Bye, JP
I object in principle to paying for a seat except long haul. I buy aisle seats, one in the centre section, one on the side. So, in single aisle, that can be done also.
The result is you have the possibility to get in and out easily, or at least more easily. Biggest bugbear with single aisle is food service, cannot even get to the loo.
When will some smart ass offer food service row by row, at the front and/or back?
All winced out.
Quote from the NYT today -
"Elsewhere shares in Capita, a firm strikingly similar to Carillion, have lost two-thirds of their value since 2015."
In a very interesting commentary on the UK's obsession with outsourcing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/opinion/carillion-privatization-outsourcing-britain.html
Just a point of clarification, eir is now French owned, not sure if that means the HQ will stay in Jersey. However, latest info is that it might be "owned" by a new (legal?) setup, who's directors are lawyers in Dublin.....in a structure designed by the mix of holding companies who seem to have bought eir.
Probably means it cannot be sued at all.....
Due diligence is an oxymoron, both words. Due should mean you do it when it needs to be done; diligence means you do it properly. Accountats don't do either, they are always in after the facts and they are not paid to be diligent, they are paid to be a facesaver.
In addition, the board of HP and their sherpas are supposed to be experienced. If they were when they looked at the deal they should have known that ALL software sellers puff up sales as soon as the contract is signed. That is when the work starts, not when the operation actually works. In the case of Autonomy there was a requirement to spend x months with consultants massaging the software against the data to be managed.so that it MIGHT work.
Interesting that someone mentioned another puffed up outfit that went down the toilet, Enron, they were an autonomy user.
I worked with buyers of Autonomy. There was a very significant amount of consultancy built in to the purchase, but this depended on what Autonomy assessed you needed to make the software work.
The actual amount of work was not determinable in advance but Autonomy publicised sales at revenues based on consultancy estimates, not on actual purchase price. It is this fiction that HP bought.
Hussein is accused of puffing up revenues.....
I still have, somewhere, a collection of Byte + Jeerry on CD. A blast from my past, but his descriptions of adding and installing new hard and software at Chaos Manor were inspirational to me and many others, I suspect. A legend, not a word I use lightly, bye and thanks for the fun Jerry.
Barry
Am I missing something?
Didn't the ECJ throw out the previous e-whatever stuff, or part of it, because it contravened privacy rights? Is this any different?
Also, doesn't that nag about cookies cover some of the territory? Of course these proposals are bigger, but the principle remains.
Couple of things -
1. Don't bother quoting gross revenue of telcos, it means very little.
2. Like the airlines, telcos use a statistical algorithm to analyse quid pro quo revenues. The clearing methodology is designed to balance out ins and outs. Overall, apart from some anomalies identified from time to time, no money is exchanged between companies.
So....
It has been obvious for some time that telco revenues are tending towards a cost+ model. where the + has been reducing. The free loaders offering service based on renting space on someone elses network will be first to go. Already there is consolidation.
The important thing is that the EU or someone keeps n eye on monopoly creation. Under present arrangements Vodafone et al can create separate organisation to offer service in different countries, but there are moves to create "supra country" entities, which allows for fudged monopolies.
@jwg ????
Don't quite see what dirigisted net neutrality would do to stop Hulu, etc.
Congrats on the gongs you got, makes for a preconceived notion of what should be done with technologies, in my experience.
Prior to TCP/ip we had CCITT standard setting, a closed shop of PTT techies, moving at snail's pace. If we hadn't broken the monopolies we would still be using ISDN.
Post Trump FCC will be in line with big business interests, not neutrality, but more opportunities to make money will be the norm.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
