I watched Duel again over Xmas , one of Spielbergs earliest films with the simplest of plots but plenty of suspense to keep you gripped .
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Me too. To show my grown up kids what actual suspense feels like. I followed it with the original ‘Westworld’.
All this CGI ‘Marvel’ crap they watch is completely tension free…imho.
G
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Westworld is superb! They don’t make them like they used to …
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I agree re the anger. Good TV but my blood pressure rose throughout the programme. I followed the saga too in Private Eye but the dramatisation somehow made it more visceral.
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My blood pressure was off the scale during ep2 tonight. The characters are all so familiar to me, senior management, department heads, support teams. Hope I can make it thru the final 2 episodes. Dialling into live systems!!! How familiar is that?
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Mr Bates vs The Post Office - The Real Story
As with a lot of the true ITV drama stuff they do an hour long background programme. A good companion to the ‘drama’ series.
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Any King Crimson fans should check out In The Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50. I found it on Amazon Prime. Had to pay to rent it but a great insight into Fripp and other members of the band. An outfit that has been riven by ego and clashes but Fripp is certainly a driving force. The latest, 3 drummer iteration seems to be a more united group. I saw them in 1980 but watching this makes me want to see them again.
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I worked as a computer developer for a company that supplies software to the car sales community. They had absolutely no test systems/data. They wrote or modified the code, slapped it on a customer’s site and tried it out. I couldn’t believe it. Part of the problem was that no two customers had the same code, so I suppose that the excuse was that they couldn’t have a test site for each customer. Another problem was that the original ‘developers’ (they were car salesmen who thought that they could program) would copy and paste any bit of code from one place to another if it functioned. So if something was wrong with that code, you had to go to every example of it to fix it. It was a nightmare. I was glad to get out of the place.
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It’s this sort of experience that haunts me. The problem in the Post office scenario is probably that Fujitsu employees were doing this sort of thing as a matter of course without the slightest idea of the legal implications to the users and when they found out people were going to prison it was hushed up. The post office themselves were probably being told that there was no problem with the software at the time until it was too late. Who is to blame? Who is accountable? At the time, this sort of irresponsible and reckless ignorance of the consequences was commonplace in software houses. And in my experience it can still exist. Great TV series. Hope something good comes of it in the end.
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From my experience - an effective safety culture (with a legally accountable risk owner in the upper management) and a good product certification process would have trapped this one before it got out of hand. Sadly, many IT organisations are deficient in both areas.
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Just watched the first two episodes. Brilliantly done. Makes you feel so sorry for the postmasters involved, and at the same time so angry and frustrated at the response/behaviour of both Post Office Board and Fujitsu. Can’t understand why some of these people have not been tried and imprisoned themselves.
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Was familiar with the sorry story from the IT trade papers when I was in the industry so watched to whole series and the follow on program. Other than allowing the victims to speak for themselves, there was not much additional information in the documentary. I would liked to have had more details on what Fujitsu knew, when they knew, what actions they took and what they told the Post Office. Also fraud detection rates pre and post horizon roll out would have added context.
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Mr Bates vs Paula Vennells. She should be prosecuted. Maybe with all this fuss, she will. The buck stops with her and almost undoubtably caused by her. When the issues first started, I wouldn’t be surprised if she hadn’t got a clue what was going on. It was that Fujitsu company that was the problem. Once she’s in jail, she should then prosecute Fujitsu and get some of them in jail.
How many peoples’ lives have they ruined? Nasty bunch.
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There was a recommendation in about 1998 to can Horizon but it was over ruled.
If you search (Bentham’s Gaze and Horizon) you will find inquiry material describing a number of fundamental architectural weaknesses that were never really fixed as the system evolved. One of the most fundamental was that double entry book keeping was never fully adhered to. With network failures there was always the chance of a few communication errors with a million transactions a day.
Phil
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Schoolboy error.
Issues started in 2000. Not sure she was there then.
Rhetorical I know - but how on earth do you/can you ever reconcile an accounting system absent double-entry bookkeeping as one of its fundamental control factors?
It’s mind numbingly negligent. Even Nick Leeson couldn’t dodge that.
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The problem with software based double entry book keeping is the software. I’ve see code where individual transactions are added together and written to another database and new control account entries written based on that total. Some of the transactions were actually missing for one reason or another. The bit about comparing the total to the original control account entries just didn’t exist. It only got spotted because I spotted it. They were lucky to have me 
Double entry bookkeeping that balances does not guarantee accuracy of any of the numbers. If course it it doesn’t balance you know something isn’t right, but balancing is a minimum requirement and no guarantee of anything much.
On the additional programme they mentioned breaks in internet communication - so some of the transactions would be missing, or maybe part missing. It seems odd that the errors seem to have universally been deficits. Random errors would likely tend to an average of zero so I don’t understand why nobody had a surplus (of course nobody reporting a surplus doesn’t mean there was no surplus anywhere)
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