Posts by old_n_grey

Oracle partner gets multimillion top-up after Edinburgh Uni disaster

No doubt there'll be a bit of Oracle kicking but maybe one ought to look at the client.

According to the article the changes are "necessary and largely a result of additional requirements and internal requirements changes,"

As a now retired Oracle implementation consultant I still remember trying to establish what the client actually needed as opposed to what the requirements asked for. All too often those doing the job aren't involved in defining the requirements.

The result was often me trying to convince the client that, because they didn't understand what they needed, they would have to stump up more cash. Obviously the client might think I'm just trying to increase our revenue.

Sometimes they would agree and raise the necessary change requests, other times it was "Implement per requirements!" only for that to cause more problems later on.

Of course Oracle ERP isn't the right option for every organisation (although I implemented Oracle ERP at one public sector client back in 1998 and they are still using it). Sometimes it's the client that causes problems. And sometimes it's the implementor, especially when trying to keep costs low.

Bugger I miss work sometimes

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

> "Nice little printer you got there. Shame if something bad happened to it..." Right out of The Sopranos.

The Sopranos??? Us old wrinklies would suggest something somewhat older. How about from Monty Python, December 1969

Luigi: You've... you've got a nice army base here, Colonel.

Colonel: Yes.

Luigi: We wouldn't want anything to happen to it.

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

"How's that a good deal?"

One reason might be because you could print 100 A4 photos every month for that £5.49. But in the real world, if you do a lot of printing every month, especially if that includes colour graphics, it seems very reasonable to me. Of course, because the sub covers pages printed, it's a real bugger when you print a document and the last page has only a couple of lines on it.

YMMV

HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated'

Re: CD/Bittorrent -> Spotify (no shruggy icon)

I think the HP Inkjet fairy lives nearby. When I bought my first printer about 30 years ago, it was the Deskjet 500C - the one that required removing the black ink cartridge and replacing it with the tri-colour cartridge if you wanted to print anything in colour (you also then had to accept that you weren't going to get proper black). Other than that little foible, and even then the eye-watering cost of replacement cartridges (but not restricted back then to HP), it worked like a charm. So when the time came to replace it, it made sense to stay with HP. And because every darn machine just worked I stayed with HP. As I have said elsewhere, I was an HP employee before my retirement so printers and ink could be purchased cheaply. Although I did buy my current printer post retirement but got 9 free months of ink so it cost me very, very little.

Nowadays I also pay for Instant Ink. It has worked for me and I have never been left without ink. If the printer wants me to waste ink cleaning or aligning, not a problem. If I want to print loads of A4 photos (quite good enough even with a crappy tri-colour cartridge), I don't even think about it. Based on the number of times I used to buy cartridges (in years gone by I tried refilling and non-OEM cartridges but they were always substandard) I'm spending less on ink than I used to.

Just hope that fairy doesn't move for a while ...

Remember when the Hubble Space Telescope was more punchline than science powerhouse?

"I've always struggled to get my head around the fact that HST was built on the ground under laboratory conditions, and all the relative luxury of a ground-based exercise, but still had a fault....yet it was fixed so quickly in the challenging environment of space."

I suppose the one thing they couldn't do under laboratory conditions was to focus on something many light years away without the earth's atmosphere getting in the way. That said, for something that expensive, you'd think everyone would be very careful to ensure that everything was 100% correct.

FWIW "so quickly" required an almost seven hour spacewalk. It also required a more than two year design and build process; again without the luxury of a test environment that was identical to where it was going.

I bet there were an awful lot of fingers and toes crossed back in 1993

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Re: Honestly....

"I know two people whose HP laptop did not last a year before it died. "

First a confession, I had just joined EDS when HP bought them. So was an HP employee for a while then an HPE employee (functional consultant - implemented Oracle! I knew how to enjoy myself). So it made sense for me to get HP printers and ink as I received a very decent discount. Having retired, sorry that should be having taken advantage of the monotonously regular voluntary redundancy scheme, a few years ago I still have an HP inkjet and am one of that small band of happy users that have Instant Ink. If I don't make the most of the monthly subscription (often by printing loads of A4 photos) that's my own fault. Although as the years have gone by the family is definitely not printing as much as we used to. However, the reason for this reply is not to defend HP. Just to mention that this response is being typed on an HP Probook laptop that is at least a dozen years old. Other than the installation of an SSD, it is still going strong, and still useable because it's running Linux Mint.

When the printer finally dies, I will probably buy a Canon with ink tanks. Not sure what I'll get when the laptop dies. Might just restrict myself to my desktop in the study.

Why have just one firewall when you can fire all the walls?

"In this case, a simple spell checker would have caught the mistake."

Unless, like my manager when I first moved from accountancy to IT, you simply add the misspelled word to your dictionary!

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Many moons ago I was part of the team that implemented an ERP system in a leading UK university. I was warned that one particular professor could be very difficult to deal with. It seems that when the existing system was implemented, the in-house IT department trained all of the departmental heads in the system. This particular professor, who was taking his turn as dept head, phoned IT support at 9am on day 1 after go-live. When asked what was the problem, he responded that he couldn't use the system as the menu on his PC was different from the one on which he was trained. The support person explained that the menu on the training course was the standard menu and included many options that he wouldn't need, so the menu on his PC was specific to his department. Alas, that wasn't a good enough excuse and the professor just repeated "I cannot use this system as it is different from the system on which I was trained" and put the phone down. It took a few days for other senior academics and admin staff to convince him to use the personalised menu.

All those brain cells ...

City council Oracle megaproject got a code red – and they went live anyway

"I've never seen or heard of one"

Do you think that might be because no-one ever bothers to report successful implementations? I used to be an Oracle functional consultant and worked at three large system integrators and I can say without fear of contradiction that none of the projects on which I worked went five times over budget (obviously I do realise that the hyperbole was not meant to be taken literally). Did any large projects go over budget? Yep! Sometimes because we, the integrators, got something wrong and others because the client kept changing the requirements - "I know that is exactly what we asked for but it's not what we wanted"! But I also worked on several that went live on time and on budget. But who wants to read about those?

The other thing about Oracle and SAP projects is that they are likely to be the large projects, with complex requirements and so more likely to be problematic.

Mind you, I am trying not to defend Oracle the corporation, who used to be only too happy to agree that the system could do everything the potential client wanted. On one particular project, that cavalier attitude to real life caused me an enormous amount of grief when I had to tell the client that the system really did not do what Oracle said it would. Of course, not all integrators were squeaky clean either. Nor indeed were clients who sometimes preferred a lower initial cost based on a set of requirements that had had functionality descoped that would need to be added during the project via change control. And, unfortunately, change control never comes cheap!

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Re: 3% is actually an enormous number

"3% of global users might be 15-20% of users in developed countries." Except it isn't. I recommend looking at the Statcounter figures for the various breakdowns.

I'm no power user but have always preferred FF to the vested interest browsers, IE & Chrome.

Back in my pre-Linux days I used to get infuriated when installing a piece of software that also installed Chrome, without asking, and made it the default browser. I ran out of expletives when telling Google why I had uninstalled their intrusive browser.

Oracle at Europe's largest council didn't foresee bankruptcy

Sometimes ...

... an ERP supplier tells the potential client what it will cost to satisfy all of the requirements. Potential customer realises that huge amount would never get board agreement. So a compromise is agreed where chunks of requirements are taken out of scope and a much lower initial cost results. Headline news, for example, might be a £20m contract. Next all the descoped functionality is brought back via change control. Costs rocket back to the original figure (albeit maybe not £100m) and inevitably continue to rise. Plus go-live date slips into the distance.

As a retired consultant who worked for (hmmm, 'employed by' might be more accurate) several Oracle systems integrators: been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

Re: Forced-fed???

Have to admit it's many years since I last played with Oracle but I seem to recall that, while one couldn't necessarily prevent someone spending "crumbly roof" money on something else (subject to a number of unless ... or except if ...) what one could do would be to define multiple budgets in the General Ledger. Hence the account for "crumbly roof repairs" would be allocated a budget, as would all specific funding expenditure types. Implement budget control in Purchasing and folk could only spend the funds allocated. Should it be agreed that money from fund A could be used to spend on something else, the organisation would make a virement to transfer the cash, i.e. a budget journal.

As I said, it's all a long time ago but the mush that was once my brain suggests that I designed a system to do exactly that, except the Purchasing manager decided at the last minute that the various departments had to have the ability to use purchasing cards to satisfy an urgent need or to take advantage of a special price or do whatever they liked as the Purchasing Manager didn't think they could stop them anyway!

Out of interest, are you aware of any accounting system that would prevent the "crumbly roof" money from being spent elsewhere? Even further back in time I was a company accountant and I never came across software that would have prevented the situation, other than by the use of budgetary control.

Forced-fed???

" - so why are they force-fed business software?"

Oh, I hadn't realised that the public sector had absolutely no choice in what software they had to implement! Certainly when I was an Oracle functional consultant we were always involved in competitive bids with other implementers (and yes, sometimes some of the competition were also bidding Oracle). I guess much has changed over the last decade.

Having implemented Oracle ERP for several large public sector clients, I admit that standard Oracle wasn't necessarily always suitable for public sector clients; mind you, I could say the same about some of the private sectors clients I worked on. Obviously the core functionality is exactly the same regardless of type of organisation. They buy stuff and have to pay for it; they "sell" stuff/services and have to collect the cash; they have to create income statements and balance sheets; they have staff that need paying. So far, so standard. However, they did all seem to have specific processes and requirements that often required some, or a lot of, custom code to satisfy.

So why did Oracle or SAP win do many public sector projects? Maybe because the client already had some experience of one of the big two. Or perhaps they felt that the alternative applications weren't up to the job. Don't forget, some public sector clients, with their huge budgets, are the equivalent of large companies with complex requirements so genuinely needed large, complicated software. Or maybe they simply believed they were so big and complex that only SAP or Oracle applications would be capable of handling their needs. Or possibly none of the smaller, potentially more suitable, suppliers even made a bid. FWIW I was once part of the pre-sale team on a bid for a university. Initially there were three organisations bidding but the other two withdrew and we ended up as sole bidders. I subsequently implemented Oracle ERP there and they are still using Oracle, albeit having gone through a number of version upgrades, more than 20 years later. So maybe not all Oracle public sector implementations are total disasters.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Re: I got paid to play Colossal Cave

Before I saw the light and moved into IT, I was beancounter (in my defence it was because aged 16 it was the only job available. Plus I never bothered to qualify). In the late 1970s I investigated the feasibility of buying a mini-computer and headed off to be wowed by numerous sales folk. Most minis/financial apps were much of a muchness, as were the companies desperate to flog them. They made the shortlist if they answered in the affirmative to: "Does it play games?" The game was invariably Colossal Cave and so the remainder of the demo was the sales droids and I failing to get very far in the game.

Boris Johnson pleads ignorance, which just might work

Re: @old-n-grey

"tacky, very tacky!

Is it actually possible to be tacky when talking about Alexander Boris Bumboy Piccaninnies Letterboxes Watermelon-Smiles de Piffle Johnson?

I was tempted to comment that it's no surprise that he couldn't remember his PIN. After all, he's seems to have forgotten how many children he has sired

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

I made my first trip to the US late last century, along with my wife and three kids. The immigration officer asked how many nights we were staying and I replied "15 days". A very stern looking officer replied "I didn't ask how many days, I asked how many nights" and waited for me to work out the answer (which I managed without the aid of a spreadsheet or even a calculator).

Every trip since has seen me being very subservient to the humorless (cos they are 'mericans) person holding my passport.

Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

Re: They're not special. They're just big.

"... a salesman saying "You're different and special so need expensive customization"."

First, an admission: I spent the final 21 years of my working life implementing Oracle ERP & HR for three different integrators. It was quite common for a client to insist that they were unique and that they couldn't possibly change their processes to fit the software. Seemed a very prevalent belief in public sector organisations. Sometimes we persuaded them to do so (yes really! Process re-engineering also generates revenue), other times we simply earned more money developing bespoke code (as amended by the many change requests from the client when they realised that what they asked for isn't what they needed - alas, the customer is always right).

Ah, the good old days ...

Even in retirement it appears to be beer o'clock.

Potatoes in space: Boffins cook up cosmic concrete for off-world habitats

Sorry ...

Expect the Martian builders will need a few chippies

The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

Re: "We have fewer asylum applications than we did ten years ago"

" There's at least double the applicants" - true but if you look back twenty rather than ten years ...

Government numbers, see https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-statistics-year-ending-september-2021/how-many-people-do-we-grant-asylum-or-protection-to, show that there were over 84,000 asylum applications in 2002. Looks like 2003 was also higher than 50,000 and 2004 around 50,000.

Thought you'd opted out of online tracking? Think again

Re: Envelopes

"all your data is ours"

Methinks you meant: all your data are belong to us

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

Re: If a mistake is bad enough ...

"Corbyn did achive one thing - without him Boris wouldn't have achived such a majority."

There is an alternate viewpoint that highlights the only real difference between 2017 (when Labour made gains) and 2019 (when they lost loads. Despite achieving a higher percentage of the vote than in 2010 & 2015 they won fewer seats).

Seems the shadow Brexit Secretary decided that Remain would be an option on a 2nd referendum. The result was that 46 of the 47 English seats that Labour lost, the so-called Red Wall, had all voted Leave.

But I guess as party leader Corbyn should take the blame, mainly for not telling the shadow BS to STFU.

Daft really as history has shown that the shadow BS is happy to renege on any commitments made during an election!

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

Re: $110,140 is not much in US...

"The healthcare in the UK is a myth..."

Ah, I love the smell of hysterical hyperbole in the morning

Is the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope worth the price tag?

Re: A qualified success?

"... a scaled back version to fly in 2010. Here it is 2023, and it's finally out there only 13 years late'

You know when you're getting old, time flies by so quickly. Seems it was only this morning that it was 2022

San Francisco cops want real-time access to private security cameras for surveillance

Re: what exactly is the definition of "Historical video footage"?

Have one of these for the Asimov reference. Probably my favourite author as, after 50 years of discovering the Foundation trilogy, I still reread his stuff on a regular basis.

Smart homes are hackable homes if not equipped with updated, supported tech

"Either apply the latest patch or, if there isn't any, get rid of it."

I think it's OK, just saw a patch of blue sky ...

Did Arthur C. Clarke call it right? Water spotted in Moon's sunlit Clavius crater by NASA telescope

Why does Arthur get all the credit?

I always thought that the film and novel of 2001 were developed at the same time. Kubrick worked on the film script, with Clarke's assistance, and Arthur C turned it into a book. So it is possible that it was young Stanley that decided on Clavius Crater. FWIW Clavius does not feature in The Sentinel.

However, according to the infallible Wikipedia, there was a Clavius Base in Erich Dolezal's "Mond in Flammen", published over a decade earlier in 1954.

I'll get my coat, it's the anorak.

UK PM Johnson spins revolving doors, new digital minister falls through

Bojo

Sorry for being a bit po-faced but can we not refer to Johnson as "Bojo". Makes him sound like a loveable clown instead of the self-serving, right-wing, lying (been sacked twice for being a liar -and don't get me started on the £350m per week lie), racist, elitist Old Etonian that he is.

I'll get off the soapbox now