Now The Crooks Join In The NatWorst Fiasco
According to ActionFraud, a UK Police web site, crooks have started sending out e-mails purportedly from Stephen Hester to compromise accpounts and steal money. The article is here.
Is This The Truth About the RBS Problems?
The Register also has an article, where it claims a source has told them what happened at RBS and NatWorst. This is an extract.
A serious error committed by an “inexperienced operative” caused the IT meltdown which crippled the RBS banks last week, a source familiar with the matter has told The Register. Job adverts show that at least some of the team responsible for the blunder were recruited earlier this year in India following IT job cuts at RBS in the UK.
The problem isn’t in India, it’s with what haggis-head or collection thereof that decided on the risky strategy. And were they appointed by Fred Goodwin or one of his arse-lickers?
I hope that if you read the article in The Register, you’ll take the only sane action and move to another bank, as soon as RBS or NAtWorst have paid you the compensation, you think you deserve.
Greeks Vent Their Fury on Microsoft
The Greeks have tried to destroy Microsoft’s offices in Athens by fire according to this article in The Register.
It would appear no-one was hurt.
Facebook Tells People The E-Mail Address To Use
If I join a club or a forum on the Internet, I like to decide how I’m contacted or addressed. So I think Facebook is beig arrogant in swapping e-mail addresses to their own system in members cotacts. It’s all here on the BBC.
How dare they!
I think I made a good decision to leave Facebook.
On A Clear Disc, You Can Seek Forever
The NatWorst computer problems have reminded me of one of the truest computer maxims.
On a Clear Disc, You Can Seek Forever
So are there any more we should remember? These are some of mine.
If it takes one man, a year to write a computer program, it’ll take two men, two years to write the program and 256 men will take 256 years.
Computers make excellent slaves, but bad masters.
You never lose any data, by taking too many back-ups. And keeping those back-ups in a fireproof environment off-site.
A brilliant reliable programmer will always be the type of person that the CEO says, shouldn’t ever be hired.
Programming productivity is directly proportional to the amount of real ale consumed at lunchtime.
Apples go faster if dropped from a taller building
For every programmer, you should employ at least one software tester.
The likelihood of a severe failure, increases on the square of the distance between the programmers and the installation.
Happy Programming!
Computer Disasters Inc.
Some years ago, I was discussing, what we might do with someone in Metier, if the whole venture had gone bust. I suggested an idea, which keeps coming back to me called Computer Disasters Inc.
NatWorst now is in need of such a company, which I envisaged as the Red Adair of the computer industry. NatWorst will certainly be paying out fees on a scale Red Adair would have thought reasonable.
Access To Medical Records for Research Purposes
The Times today has an article entitled, NHS red tape ‘is strangling life-saving medical research’, which says it all.
If you consider that Richard Doll, proved the link between smoking and lung cancer using medical records, you realise how important this is, especially as the NHS database is the largest medical database in the world.
I don’t care what any researcher does with my medical records, provided what they do is morally acceptable.
Surely what you do is allow researchers to run queries on the database, provided the research has been approved by the NHS.
The Last Match on ITV
Tonight’s match is last one, that I’ll have to watch on ITV. Yippee!
But I’ll be listening to the match commentary on my laptop.
It’s certainly the best way to watch football with adverts.
I wonder what percentage do it this way or listen to a radio for the commentary?
The Return of NatWorst
Some years ago, I used to do the programming and processing for a company called PressWatch, that rated the coverage of major companies in the UK printed media.
Some time before I programmed the system, NatWest had a string of bottom places and were labelled NatWorst by some financial journalists.
It would appear from its current computer problems, that along with other banks in the RBS Group, it is attempting to claim the bottom place again. Read about it here.
The article says it is a computer glitch. I would describe it as a computer disaster.
A computer glitch is what I’ve just suffered from Nationwide. They said my credit card statement would be ready online on Wednesday. It didn’t arrive until today. But at least, it didn’t cost me any money, although I did worry, that there might have been some illegal transactions, they were sorting out. Especially, as it’s the VISA card, I use for Olympic tickets. But all is now fine.
Codebreaker At The Science Museum
This morning, I went to see the exhibition about Alan Turing called Codebreaker at the Science Museum.
Posters for Codebreaker
it is actually only a small exhibition, but with good quality and some unusual exhibits, including a differential analyser built out of Meccano.
There was also some exhibits and documents on Turing’s personal life, including the Coroner’s report on his suicide.
The exhibition says that his mother thought his death may not have been suicide and in his Wikipedia entry, this is said.
Turing’s mother argued strenuously that the ingestion was accidental, caused by her son’s careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in an ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. Hodges and David Leavitt have suggested that Turing was re-enacting a scene from the 1937 film Snow White, his favourite fairy tale, both noting that (in Leavitt’s words) he took “an especially keen pleasure in the scene where the Wicked Queen immerses her apple in the poisonous brew.”
If you look at others like Turing, such as Newton, you find characters very much on the edge. I used to work with a programmer, who always sang and made strange noises as he coded. He argued that programming was such a logical business, you had to do something mad to balance the mind. Turing wasn’t a programmer in the sense we think now, but he was someone steeped in logic and I suspect the same applied to him.
Sadly, in today’s world, Turing would probably be treasured in much the way Stephen Hawking is.
At least now, hopefully his sexuality would not have been the problem it was in the 1960s.
The Anonymous Widower 