Re: Jason Beer KC
Too true! For a combination of stupidity and malevolence it would be hard to beat Black Shirt Hard Man or Big Specs Woman.
I think he deserves a peerage. Also, it would be good to have a Lord Beer.
2807 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010
Horizon is a Point Of Sale system
It certainly seems to be a POS system, but I don't think that stands for "Point Of Sale".
The problem with using accounting methods to correct errors is that it depends on the recording system being reliable. If, as seems likely, Horizon just makes stuff up, it won't work.
SPM: sells a 50p stamp
Horizon: debits an account by £50
Back-office: creates a correcting journal for £49.50
Horizon: debits the account for £4950
Apparently this code is in Visual Basic 6 which seems where the max int is 65,535
(Reluctantly dredging up past knowledge of VB6)
In the absence of any type declaration VB6 will use a Variant. What the underlying type will be probably depends on the phase of the moon, but it's likely to be a float of some kind. Of course floating point arithmetic is not really suitable for accounting systems anyway.
Since it's a Variant function, you can pass it anything you like - string, date, boolean, object... and it will faithfully return something or other. Unless it errors, in which case the lack of error handling will probably make itself felt.
The judge's summing up in the class action against the PO makes it fairly clear he thought the technical witnesses from Fujitsu and the PO were either evasive or lying.
It also appears likely that the PO lawyers failed in their legal duty to reveal to the other side facts that would harm their case. This is important: a trial is supposed to be a mechanism for establishing truth, not a win-at-any-cost competition.
The unfortunate thing is that the poor old taxpayer will end up footing the bill, as the PO makes no profit and can't be allowed to cease trading. And if the lying bastards get sent to prison we'll be paying thousands to keep them there. But it'll be worth it.
"Did anyone benefit financially from the errors in Horizon or the unauthorized activities of Fujitsu employees accessing terminals remotely?"
It seems the "reimbursements" paid by the SPMs were held in suspense accounts for a year or two, then rolled up into PO trading profit (aka loss).
For reasons I can't recall, I upgraded to Windows 11 a few months ago. It's buggy junk. Several times a day copy/paste stops working, and the only solution is to restart Windows Explorer.
I've been using Windows for 30 years, since 3.1. I've used GUIs on Linux, Mac, and even VMS. The clipboard always just works, and you come to rely on it. How on earth can Windows reach version 11 with instability a fundamental service like this?
The useless Microsoft forums suggest that I look for an application is the cause of the clipboard problems, but give no idea how to identify such an application. It seems unlikely, as the applications I run are far from exotic. In any case, what kind of Mickey Mouse architecture would allow such interference?
The Post Office fiasco has all the hallmarks of an incompetent attempt to take a monolithic legacy system and tart it up to meet requirements for massively distributed transactions. Confirmed when I read that Horizon is basically an old ICL system. Lipstick on a pig.
It says a lot about Fujitsu that they claimed there were no error logs*. Whoever heard of such a thing? And they apparently allowed support staff unrestricted access to live financial data without logging that. Has anyone here ever worked on a serious system where that was allowed?
Quite apart from the morality of using a live system for testing, this doesn't prove anything.
The implication is that the circumstances that cause the dragon code to execute are hard to understand, and probably very rare. So it won't fail on the first release, while you're watching it, but it may fail several releases down the line, when your change is no longer evident.
Healthcare isn't exactly a local concern. Most countries in the world have a healthcare system of some kind. The NHS is only unique in its funding model and in its monolithic structure. The requirements should be much the same everywhere, and the data sharing problems should be, if anything, greater in less closely-integrated systems.
Most of the other requirements of healthcare seem to be filled globally. The NHS doesn't design and manufacture its own equipment, and its staff is notoriously drawn from all over the world. So why doesn't it use IT systems that are in use elsewhere?
It's not that many years since the last attempt to address all the NHS IT requirements in one gigantic project. The only output from that seems to have been a gigantic bill.
Upvoted.
But in most cases the best solution is to refactor the 80 lines of stuff to one or more well-named methods. The only exception I can think of is where it's 80 lines of essentially repetitive code, so there's little advantage in moving it to an 80-line method.
The way that human brains are wired, there is focus on a subject, and negation is not instinctively processed
An interesting related phenomenon:
In streets where pedestrians cross, the words "LOOK RIGHT" are often written on the roadway next to a central reservation or pedestrian refuge, because that is the direction the traffic is coming from when you're in the middle of the road. To avoid confusion, or perhaps just to balance things out, "LOOK LEFT" is written in the roadway at the start of the crossing (i.e. next to the pavement).
When you're getting ready to cross a busy road, you don't naturally look just in front of your feet. Your gaze naturally fixes on your destination, the island or reservation in the middle of the road. So you don't see "LOOK LEFT", but you do see "┴HפIɹ ʞOO˥".
There is no well-established convention that inverted text means the opposite of what it says, and most people can easily read two short words upside down without even registering that it's inverted. So they look the wrong way.
It's obvious various roles could never be done remotely, or are difficult at best.
Less obvious than you might suppose. Here's a story about a GP who lives 250 miles away from her surgery and works from home.
it uses a semi-automated system to link calendars with national holidays to its content creation process
Seems to imply that Kristallnacht (or, as in the message, the even more explicit "Reichspogromnacht") is a national holiday in Germany. Do they have holidays to commemorate all their appalling actions?
we planted cress on the floor of a room and watered it. He was away at the time and came back to a cress lawn
In pursuance of a long-standing* but mostly inexplicable feud between Trinity College and next-door Balliol College in Oxford, a group of Balliol undergraduates turfed the Trinity Junior Common Room with grass from the quad outside**.
* It was long-standing in 1967. I've no idea if it still exists. Today's pranks probably come with trigger warnings.
** I never saw the result myself, and I expect it was elaborated in the telling, with a few sods of grass turning into a wall-to-wall greensward complete with daffodils.
Yes.
At the start of lockdown I was faced with an urgent requirement for a work laptop running Windows. I bought a reconditioned Lenovo from Amazon for about £120. Arrived next day, big, ugly and scruffy, complete with SSD, USB WiFi dongle, numerous USB and video ports, and Windows 10 Pro. Still giving excellent service.
"Please print out this form, fill it in, and send back a scan."
Even worse, "Please print out this 20-page contract, sign the last page, scan all 20 pages back in, and email it to us".
So I try to add a scanned signature to the original PDF. Not allowed.
Maybe I can just print the final page, scan it and replace it in the original document. Not possible.
Libre Office can edit PDFs, but the result never looks quite like the original document.
The only solution seems to be to print the thing to 20 single-page image files, edit the final one to add a signature, then assemble them all into a new PDF. But life's not long enough, so print'n'scan it is.
Why the gratuitous disrespect for the River Ouse*? It's just across the road from my house, and I can confirm that although not fast-flowing, it's quicker than a slug.
*I appreciate that there are several rivers called Ouse, but the other Ouses are generally subject to a geographical qualification. Ours is the Great Ouse, and therefore the defining instance.
… or like everyone else their ability to investigate (and prosecute as required) has been hampered. by Government funding cuts
Not true.
When the original IR35 was introduced in 2000 there was a certain amount of panic among contractors. Then it was pointed out that HMRC (Inland Revenue as it then was) has hardly ever won an employment status case, including the odd one where they tried to prove somebody was not an employee.
No question that £sd was an inconvenient system and nearly impossible to automate.
But there's no doubt that having to spend a lot of time at primary school practising arithmetic in £sd and Imperial units was very good training. Perhaps it was time that could have been better spent on other aspects of maths (though to my limited knowledge the subjects included at O Level, as it then was, were more advanced than those in today's GCSE maths).
There's a regiment of the mealy-mouthed, mostly on the BBC, who insist on calling the delimiter in a URL "stroke". This is apparently because they think "slash" is a rude word. I feel bound to point out that if they haven't heard anything ruder than "slash" on the BBC, they haven't been listening.
I thought that if they don't like "slash" they should call it a solidus, so it's a disappointment to lean that the gods of Unicode consider them distinct characters. That said, I'd be surprised to learn that even the most fastidious metal fonts differentiated them.
"You wonder how they remember to breathe" seems harsh.
"Reforming" the telephone number system implies that there was an old, bad system that was reformed to the new, good system that we shall use for ever more. Phone numbers have been subject to sporadic modification since the phone was invented. The largest change I can remember was the conversion to all-figure numbers, more like 50 years ago than 30. I suppose the 1992 change must have been the additional digits required because of the unforeseen size of the address space.
Who bothers to memorise numbers in the age of mobile phones? I can recall several numbers that I haven't used for 50 years, but I don't know my wife's mobile number.
These days, GNOME Shell itself is written in JavaScript
JavaScript has its strengths, but it's a difficult language to write safe, unambiguous code in. It also suffers the inevitable performance penalty of interpreted script, even when JIT compiled. The reason that's always given for the persistence of JavaScript in web apps is that it's installed on billions of browsers so using anything else will be swimming against the stream.
The idea that a project that installs its own runtime environment and can therefore use any language it wants, would choose JavaScript, has me gasping for breath.
You'd have thought that a company the size of Google would have thought to strip formatting characters out of the data being formatted, but no.
A list of top 10 search keywords might terminate a comma if there are only 9 keywords. If no keywords, it might be all commas.
The thing that's really weird is sending a delimited list in a JSON response, when an array would be appropriate.
Because I live near a road junction, I get to hear a lot of lorries warning people that they are turning left. What puzzles me is why the manufacturers decided to have the warnings voiced by Donald Duck.
Incidentally, I thought Dabbsy lived in France. If so, it's odd that his "neighborhood" is in America.
stale 12-hour old water
I've got bad news for you. That water was probably delivered to Earth by a comet millions of years ago. It was probably zooming around on the comet for a while before that. I don't think an extra eight hours by your bed will make it much staler.
if the copies were good enough - they changed the bank notes to make it even harder
Up to a point....
The average improvement cycle for copiers, taken across all brands, is probably less than a year.
Bank of England notes get redesigned much less frequently.
SuSE looked like it could be a really great Linux bistro
That's a problem when you're looking for a distro.
It's fun to speculate on what a Linux bistro would be like. A menu offering thousands of dishes, many of them similar. If you don't like your food, you are welcome to set up in a corner of the kitchen and start cooking a variant menu. In the middle of the kitchen, a group of chefs are fighting over the right way to make stock.
It's not rocket surgery. A simple plan on one sheet of paper would suffice, even when working with Windows XP.
1. This is how I propose to apply the change.
2. This is how I will verify if the result is as expected.
3. This is how I will back out the change if it didn't work as expected.
Note that the correct answer to 3 is not "Phone the software suppliers and wait for them to send us a reinstallation disk".