[Mike Fieschko]

giro: a check given by the British government to someone who is unemployed; it can be cashed either at a bank or at the post office.

I think it is used in the article to mean benefits checks in general.

[Cicero]

I wonder if we'll ever get an honest report of what happened? Two paragraphs struck my eye:

A routine software upgrade on a small number of PCs last weekend is believed to have gone disastrously wrong when an incompatible system was downloaded on to the whole network.

It sounds as if someone downloaded and installed the wrong software.

Trade union leaders called on ministers to drop plans to cut 40,000 jobs in the DWP and a total of 104,000 civil servants across the government following the computer crisis.

This could possibly explain WHY someone screwed up the system. If the computerization worked, then 104,000 public-sector layabouts would have been out of jobs. It's understandable that the union might not want that to happen. A lot of jobs and a lot of tax money are at stake.

[stainlessbanner]

Another outsourced monster IT project going down in flames.

[Petronski]

...an internal inquiry into the role of Microsoft and the American contractors EDS...

[WakeUpAndVote]

I wonder if it is Windows XP service pack 2 being delivered via SMS package. I am sure that they are running a proprietary software package to do their Gov work and there are issues with service pack 2 that can hose some software at a network level.

Thats one of the reasons we have not deployed it yet.

[rdl6989]

Somebody's gonna hang for this. I wouldn't want to be a manager in the IT dept. there.

[B4Ranch]

If we ever have an armed conflict with China, we had better be expecting the same thing to occur in our government offices and every major corp in the US.

[tjwmason]

A simple equation.

G+C=F

Where G is government,
C is computer system, and
F is farce.