25454246
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
The automated undercarriage systems on a Boeing Dreamliner, a new high-tech jumbo jet, entirely failed to work during the landing approach of a domestic Japanese flight carrying 250 passengers this morning.
The news follows a similar incident last week on a more conventional Boeing jet, in which a plane on a flight to Warsaw was forced to land on its belly.
In today’s problem, the automated landing gear did not operate, but the pilot was able to lower the landing gear manually – using gravity – and landed on the plane's second approach to the runway.
It was the first serious operational problem for the new Dreamliner aircraft, which has been in commercial use for only one week. The planes were sold to airlines partly on the basis of their advanced automated systems.
The Dreamliners have an all-electronic cockpit, and an aircraft-wide computer network that links the flight deck to all of the control systems as well as providing real time data to air control staff on the ground. Many of the safety systems, including the brakes, are electronically controlled, with some traditional hydraulic systems taken out.
The pilot of today’s All Nippon Airways flight 651 was warned by on-board monitoring systems, on his approach to Okayama airport, that the landing gear had failed to engage. It is understood that the monitoring screens may have identified a problem with the systems controlling undercarriage hydraulic valves.
Boeing deferred comment to All Nippon Airways, which had not provided more detail at the time of writing on why the automated systems failed to work or how the problem will be prevented in the future.
In 2008, the US Federal Aviation Administration warned that the Dreamliner could be vulnerable to hacking, because of the way critical flight systems are linked with those used by passengers. They said the problems were "critical to the safety and maintenance" of the aircraft.
25451306
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
Anglo American has said optimising its procurement, asset management, knowledge systems and shared services will be vital in making the most from its $5.1 billion (£3.2 billion) takeover of De Beers, announced on Friday.
The metal and precious stones mining firm is taking an 85 percent stake in diamond business De Beers, a move that Anglo American chief executive Cynthia Caroll said would give the company “highly attractive long term supply and demand fundamentals".
In a presentation to investors, Anglo American said simplifying systems and processes was a key part of making the takeover a success.
Both Anglo American and De Beers are extensive SAP users. Anglo American uses SAP enterprise resource planning and SAP Netweaver business intelligence. De Beers also uses SAP, as well as the vendor’s Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence application.
Procurement was vital to the merger’s success, Anglo American said, and the company will structure a global supply chain, and implement system improvements understood to be around the SAP systems. The company will also work to improve asset management processes, systems and best practice.
Knowledge sharing will also form a major part of efforts, with project review, mine planning and exploration knowledge leading the way.
25243840
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
MF Global’s high profile collapse has raised fears over the future of its many IT staff, who have developed and run the complex technology systems it relies on.
Last night, the US broker-dealer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, after failed bets on the European sovereign debt market as well as what regulators called a failure to separate its customers’ money from its own. MF Global’s website still boasts of its “relentless pursuit of market opportunity”.
The company’s filing for bankruptcy sent shock waves through the financial markets, alarming investors and leaving futures traders unable to execute a growing backlog of orders. It also alarmed the company’s technology suppliers.
Computerworld UK contacted MF Global’s administrators, KPMG, to ask what its plans were for IT staff and systems. A spokesperson confirmed that the future of its staff was currently being assessed.
“It is a wind down, so we expect redundancies, but obviously we are still going to need a lot of assistance at the moment,” she said, adding that administrators were at the company today evaluating the options. The spokesperson confirmed that MF Global was “essentially a technology business in many ways”.
IT staff represent a significant portion of the company’s 2,000 employees, a third of whom are based in London. The company offers superfast electronic trading to customers “from start to finish” – order entry through to its own settlement and clearing infrastructure – through the FIX messaging protocol, used by many global exchanges.
“Our goal is to provide clients with superior access to markets using the trading tools and strategies best suited to their needs,” the company claims on its website.
Industry observers are speculating about the wider economic impact of MF Global’s collapse and whether its IT staff and systems may be acquired by rivals.
The collapse has already alarmed some of MF Global’s suppliers, who provide a number of the trading platforms that connect customers to the exchanges.
25057568
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
Security firm G4S is set to standardise systems with ISS, after it announced it was buying the Danish facilities company for $8.2 billion (£5.2 billion).
The company expects to create £100 million of cost savings by 2014, from reduced central and local overheads, with the merger of some technology systems expected to play a part.
It will spend up to £80 million creating shared services centres during the period. These will “share best practice across the group, including common systems and processes”, it said, as well as delivering “global consistency for an increasingly international customer base”.
The combined company will employ over a million people. G4S is already the largest private sector employer in Europe, with over 600,000 staff, and uses a range of systems including SAP enterprise resource planning, also used by ISS; Microsoft management software; and Salesforce.com customer relationship management.
G4S said that through the acquisition it would be able to offer a fuller range of integrated security and facilities services, including for companies that need a single account management structure and “access to the latest technology”.
It said it would draw on merger expertise that includes managers who helped integrate GSL and Securicor into the business in 2008 and 2004 respectively.
25057484
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
James Gorman, the chief executive at Morgan Stanley, has praised the completion of a difficult technology integration, as the bank turned in a $2.2 billion (£1.4 billion) profit for the quarter.
Morgan Stanley has been attempting to get 18,000 advisers onto the same system, since Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (MSSB) was formed in 2009 – through Citigroup selling 51 percent of its Smith Barney unit to Morgan Stanley. The venture, a retail brokerage, holds $1.7 trillion of assets.
The core system covers clearing right through to front office workstations, and is understood to be based on a number of vendors’ systems including IBM.
As Morgan Stanley, the second largest US investment bank, reported $9.9 billion revenues for the third quarter, Gorman praised the wealth management business and the development of MSSB.
“The firm delivered progress across many of our key initiatives, increasing client penetration in equity derivatives and interest rate products as well as achieving a significant milestone in the integration of MSSB with the initial roll out of our new technology platform,” he said.
25053460
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
Network connectivity problems forced the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) offline for four hours, on the day electronic trading’s ‘Big Bang’ reached its 25th anniversary in London.
The ASX has not given further details of the outage, which was solved this morning, but said in a statement that “a connectivity issue” had caused the problems. It promised “further updates” in the coming weeks.
The outage also came days before ASX faced a new specialist electronic trading competitor, in the form of Chi-X – which is due to open in Australia next week.
Chi-X’s Australia chief executive Peter Fowler took the opportunity to tell the International Business Times that if a similar technical glitch had hit Chi-X, it would still trade because of built-in redundancies in its system.
The problem on the ASX was fixed by NASDAQ OMX, which supplies the exchange's technology.
It is not known if NASDAQ’s Genium INET trading platform, which the ASX moved to last December, played any part in the problem, or whether it was other networking technology. Genium, which runs on Linux, using C++ , allows the ASX to provide sub-300 microsecond latency on its integrated equities and derivatives exchange.
24952500
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
Jaguar has recalled nearly 18,000 X-type cars after it discovered a major software fault, which meant drivers might not be able to turn off cruise control.
The problem lies with engine management control software developed in-house by Jaguar. The problematic software is only installed on diesel engine X-Types, which were all produced between 2006 and 2010.
Some 17,678 vehicles have been recalled, as a result of the potentially dangerous problem. If the fault occurs, cruise control can only be disabled by turning of the ignition while driving — which would mean a loss of some control and in many cars also disables power steering. Braking or pressing the cancel button will not work.
"Jaguar has identified that should an error with certain interfacing systems be detected the cruise control system will be disabled and an error message displayed to the driver on the instrument cluster," the company said in a statement.
24952432
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
Jaguar has recalled nearly 18,000 X-type cars after it discovered a major software fault, which meant drivers might not be able to turn off cruise control.
The problem lies with engine management control software developed in-house by Jaguar. The problematic software is only installed on diesel engine X-Types, which were all produced between 2006 and 2010.
Some 17,678 vehicles have been recalled, as a result of the potentially dangerous problem. If the fault occurs, cruise control can only be disabled by turning of the ignition while driving — which would mean a loss of some control and in many cars also disables power steering. Braking or pressing the cancel button will not work.
"Jaguar has identified that should an error with certain interfacing systems be detected the cruise control system will be disabled and an error message displayed to the driver on the instrument cluster," the company said in a statement.
Jaguar said drivers who returned their cars would need a software upgrade to their vehicle. No hardware needed to be replaced, it said.
24806826
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
CSC's chairman and CEO, Mike Laphen, has announced he will retire from his position within a year — at a time the company faces some of the toughest challenges in its history with a major US SEC regulatory investigation, an accounting scandal and legal challenges over a huge scrapped NHS project.
A Danish accounting scandal at CSC has led to US regulator the Securities & Exchange Commission carrying out a long-running investigation, which is ongoing, and yesterday Danish chief executive Carsten Lind resigned without explanation. Tough discussions also continue with the UK government over the company's £3 billion contract on the failed NHS National Programme for IT, currently the subject of a large investor lawsuit.
Anthony Miller, a veteran analyst and chairman at TechMarket View, said the company has undergone several "meaning of life reviews" as key contract margins have slid downwards. "What is the point of CSC?" he said.
"Nothing much seems to have changed from its old conglomerate-style ‘global’ services operations. Margins are now below five percent, well under half of those of its US-based peers".
Laphen said in a statement that the firm’s "dedicated employees and management team have put CSC on a solid footing, and I am confident that the company is well positioned for its next phase of growth and development".
Although Laphen announced his resignation, no successor has been named at the company. Laphen, a 35-year veteran of the company, will stay on until a replacement is found but no later than 31 October, 2012. CSC has formed a search committee to find a candidate.
The 96,000-employee IT services company has been under severe pressure this year, with the ongoing investigation by the SEC. CSC financial statements have indicated the fraud was allegedly carried out by employees.
Laphen's announcement came on the same day as the resignation of CSC Denmark's CEO, Carsten Lind. No reason was given for Lind's resignation either. He is expected to be replaced by John Walsh, a CSC vice president. CSC's Denmark subsidiaries have lost money for five years, and Lind recently said that "we, as a company, are facing big challenges that require the full attention of the management."
24630730
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
Unix mentor and creator of the C programming language, Dennis Ritchie, reportedly died on 8 October at the age of 70 after a long but unspecified illness.
Ritchie's influence on the today's computing world could accurately be described an incalculable.
Born in New York in 1941, Ritchie was from the generation of great minds that made its mark in corporate years of the 1960s, taking a Harvard degree in physics and applied mathematics to his first important job at Bell Labs in 1967.
Ritchie was a major influence the most famous thing ever to come out of that company, an operating system called Unix. First run up by colleague and fellow computing Ken Thompson in assembly language for DEC’s PDP-7 minicomputer, the pair later wrote the founding document of a software movement, edition one of the Unix Programmer's Manual.
Armed with an operating system that was to change the computing world, Ritchie set about creating C, a programming language that could be used to make system and applications for Unix machines.
It would be flippant to say that the rest is history but at the time it certainly didn’t seem so certain to the modest Ritchie himself. Asked why he toiled so hard to create C and Unix, Ritchie reportedly replied that it "looked like a good thing to do."
The C language was later used as the foundation of an object-oriented C++, which abounds in software to this day and of course Linux can be seen as a descendant of Ritchie’s pioneering brilliance.
24576384
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
BlackBerry customers have flooded Twitter, saying their data services are down again today.
So far, manufacturer RIM has failed to offer any explanation for the new outage, or yesterday's lengthy 12 hour problem.
Sam Blake, a BlackBerry user in Birmingham, said she was considering changing her phone. “Argh Blackberry has gone down again! RIM are making my contract/phone decision easier by the day!”
“Blackberry not working again. Ridiculous!” wrote Lloyd-Scott Tyler, of London.
John, in Edinburgh, added: “Thank you blackberry for making my decision alot easier than I expected. I am definitely getting an iPhone now!”
Once again the problem has spread much further than the UK. Tselane Makhetha, a customer in Johannesburg, South Africa, wrote: “so #Blackberry doesnt feel the need to fix their problem-Two days in a row”. Users in Spain, Belgium, France, Germany and the Middle East also complained.
24547056
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
BlackBerry customers globally are suffering from an extensive data outage, cutting them off from email, instant messaging and web access.
The outage began for some UK customers before 10am this morning, with Vodafone customer services saying they had the problem confirmed by BlackBerry maker RIM at about 11.30am this morning. No technical details about the outage are publicly available.
Unhappy BlackBerry customers have flooded the Twitter social networking site with their complaints about the outage, with #BlackBerry now trending on the site as a result.
Vodafone UK customer services told ComputerworldUK they believed the outage was affecting "80 percent of UK BlackBerry users on ALL mobile networks, not just Vodafone's".
This has not been confirmed by RIM, whose spokeswoman in the UK had no official comment to make on the problem as of 1.30pm — about 3.5 hours after the problem started for many.
24458334
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
UBS has insisted its IT systems did detect unusual and unauthorised trading activity, before rogue trader Kweku Adoboli ran up a $2 billion (£1.3 billion) loss on the bank’s derivatives desk.
Interim chief executive Sergio Ermotti, who is running the company following Oswald Grubel’s resignation last month, sent a memo to employees saying the bank is aware that its systems did detect the rogue activity.
In the memo, Ermotti wrote: “Our internal investigation indicates that risk and operational systems did detect unauthorised or unexplained activity but this was not sufficiently investigated nor was appropriate action taken to ensure existing controls were enforced.”
He added: “We have to be straight with ourselves. In no circumstances should something like this ever occur. The fact that it did is evidence of a failure to exercise appropriate controls.”
The news comes as the heads of UBS’ global equities business, Francois Gouws and Yassine Bouhara, also resigned.
24404944
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
CSC is being sued by a group of investors over the failed NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT), the world’s largest non-military IT programme.
The news comes as the company repaid the government £170 million after the parties failed to sign a memorandum of understanding by a 30 September deadline.
The supplier, which after taking over Accenture’s work on the programme had amassed a £3.1 billion contract, was in the summer heavily criticised by the Public Accounts Committee, which said its work on the programme was so disappointing that it may no longer be fit for any other government work.
Last month, the government officially ‘abandoned’ the project, following a Cabinet Office review that delivered a dire verdict. The government remains embroiled in a dispute with another supplier, Fujitsu, which quit the programme in 2008.
The investors suing CSC, led by Canadian fund the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, claim the company “fraudulently concealed” the performance of the contract from them, and that it knew over three years ago that the contract was “undeliverable”. The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
23958836
submission
DMandPenfold writes:
A rogue trader at UBS has been arrested after allegedly circumventing systems and controls and losing the bank approximately $2 billion.
Kweku Adoboli, a 31-year-old trader in the exchange traded funds business, was arrested at 3.30am in London in connection with unauthorised trading. UBS has warned that the trades could lead it to a quarterly loss.
It is not known if Adoboli operated in the City of London, although UBS hold much of its non-Swiss investment banking business there.
The news has led to questions being raised around the Swiss bank's systems and controls, and reminded observers of Societe Generale's rogue trader Jerome Kerviel, who was convicted of circumventing that bank’s warning systems to lose the bank €4.9 billion (£4.3 billion).
"Investment banks normally have systems in place to highlight unusual trading behaviour," said Chris Skinner, chief executive at think-tank Balatro. "It’s like a high level version of the analytics systems that catch unusual transactions on your credit card, and stop any more taking place. But they warn much faster."
Skinner said rogue trading problems such as this often meant "either the systems were not up to scratch, or the management, or both".
