Posts by FlatEarther

Re: Chip & PIN or Contactless

This is completely wrong. Fraud has gone down to negligible amounts where CHIP & PIN has been introduced (except of course for Card Not Present, where there is neither CHIP nor PIN).

Why do you think the incidence of card present fraud is so high in the USA? It's because they haven't widely implemented CHIP & PIN. They're rushing to implement it now, but meanwhile fraudsters are having a field day.

Also, any issuer (e.g. a bank) must accept a no customer liability clause if they want to issue Visa Paywave or MC PayPass cards.

Re: Never ascribe to malice…

No, its unreasonable of Amazon. That's why they're being sued. Your implication is that Apple are big and Amazon are lazy, so it's OK to screw the little guy

Re: Wavey-wavey cards lead to fraud?

Problem is, it's just not true. Card not present fraud is orders of magnitude greater than kids stealing cards from letterboxes

Re: Turnbull Twitfight - we're backing Mal this time

If you'd ever tried this then you would know it's IMPOSSIBLE to confirm availability. The best you can do is determine the likelihood.

If you go to the Telstra (or any other ISP web-site) then they can tell you if its not available, but can't confirm availability until you've placed an order (i.e. well after you've bought the house).

If you're knowledgeable enough you can go to a site like adsl2exchanges and get an estimate of the line length, whether there is a RIM, the local exchange name and the likely connection speed.

You can then go to the Telstra Wholesale web site and download the spreadsheet with the number of available ports about a fortnight ago (i.e. not when you've settled and moved in) and can therefore get an idea whether any will be available.

If there are any ports, and Telstra don't make a complete balls up of the installation, you'll only know the achievable line speed and throughput once you connect, probably 3 months after you signed the contract to purchase you new property.

So a nice simple process open to every non-technical citizen and business owner - not.

The real fail is that Turnbull is unaware of the byzantine process that normal householders go through trying to obtain broadband. His arrogance shows through, not for the first time. I suppose Sydney's inner north shore is well supplied with broadband.

Re: No sympathy.......

One of the reasons that traditional payment methods cost more is that they do a large amount of work to protect both parties to the transaction from fraud, default, systems failure, exchange rate risk,...

They may make massive profits at your expense, but a lot of the money goes on legitimate activities that you really, really want them to do, even if you don't realise it.

But feel free to go the cheaper Bitcoin method if you want.

Re: Aaaaaaaargh!

Yes, somewhere I've got an email with the my MyGov ID. Once you login it asks you numerous verification questions , asks you to tick multiple boxes and THEN gives you the opportunity to go to the medicare site. Most people have given up by then. The medicare site asks some of the same verification questions and has a few more tick boxes.

Once you get in most of the data is wrong and/or incomplete.

Fixed if for you

Most 'shadow IT' that I've come across exists because the 'official IT' are not informed of the requirement or given a budget, and when notified their legitimate concerns are ignored. The purchaser is often gulled by some slick sales droid and doesn't have any idea of the TCO of the new shiny thing the want.

Investor and Chairman - not founder. Nor did he "run" the company.

LIberals have an uncanny ability to stick luddites into this portfolio.

There, fixed it for you.

Exhibit A: Helen Coonan

Re: Here's a start . . .

Sounds good, but that's what they did with QH Payroll. It's just that the ballsed-up steps 1,2,3,4,5 and 6.

Why will this time be better?

Re: breakdown of payments

IBM - 25 million

HP - quite a few SuperDomes

Other Contractors - a little bit

Public Servants processing the pays - more than 1 Billion

I.e. the headline number is the cost over the next N years (where N is 3 or 4) of all the public servants putting pay variations into the system due to the fabulous system design

Re: Most people will just install or use the apps they like or are most comfortable using.

Yep, I can't understand what the article is on about. I recently received a HTC One XL. It came with a bunch of applications. Some I can uninstall. Some I don't like so I went to the app store and found a different/better one. It has lots of space. If I don't want to use an app I just remove the icons if it can't be installed. They all seem to integrate well enough where I want them to.

By the time it runs out of space it'll probably be worn out and I'll get another.

This is so much better that being told by <Big Corporation of America> that you must use the perfect blessed application that they've selected for you and which their marketing department has decided you need.

What's the big deal?

Training Works

It's not the full solution, it never stops, but it does work. This is analogous to the handwashing campaign conduct in UK hospitals in recent years. People new they had to do it, they new it had benefits, they just didn't do it (too busy, I'm not doing anything critical, it's just the once, excuse, excuse, excuse).

So a training campaign with lots of reminders and reinforcement was implemented, with significant benefits (i.e. less people dying).

Re: Based on his track record

Abbott lacks credibility. I have zero confidence that either scheme will progress as claimed.

There, fixed it for you

Re: Laugh it up...

Wresat, named after WRE, the Weapons Research Establishment. Amongst the fun projects they did was "Airborne Recovery", an attempt to catch missiles in nets dragged behind Beaufort bombers.

Their most successful ongoing activity, in that it made money was, err, sheep grazing on their extensive site.

Re: SAP

Some interesting facts about payroll project

- They had about 80,000 employees to pay

- Because of the multiple awards and hideous complexity of the awards (think "hand washing allowance"), there are approximately 24,000 different possible combination of items on a pay slip.

- Most of the mentioned $450M (or $1.2 B projected cost) is for the clerical support to process pays, not the IT cost

While the IT project was a horrendous screw-up with bad design choices (e.g. award processing is done in SAP AND in the front end WorkBrain scheduling/time keeping software) equally bad was the management of change, business process.

They did many things wrong

- changed the organisation, payroll system, scheduling system, time sheeting system all at once

- went live without adequate testing

- wrote a poor contract with IBM, allowing them to eventually bill twice the original contract value.

- did not change the major weakness in their business process, which was to process pays before they received time sheets, meaning that they were forever having to go back and adjust pays, sometimes up to 2 years in arrears

- decided to integrate WorkBrain and SAP even though it had never been done before

However, while I am no fan of SAP, this implementation does produce the correct result if given the correct input data. The huge cost is mostly in the administration to provide the correct time info. (So it's clearly a bad design, but it does work with herculean effort).

Not everyone came out badly though. HP sold a couple of extra Superdomes. I'm sure the salesman was happy.

No need to find a conspiracy here, when mere incompetence will suffice.

Re: malcolm turnbull is an idiot.

This this is just an extension of the complete screw-up of communications policy that John Howard presided over in his 10 years of government. The key tenets are

- under no circumstances try to discover what end users want

- ensure that large corporations benefit most. Oligopolies where your mates end up with high paid managerial positions are best

- extract all possible funds to use for other government purposes

- do not try to understand the technology

- do not plan for the future

Corollary

- if the solution allows reading e-mail via tablet on Sydney's North shore, it must be sufficient for the rest of the plebs.

Re: previous ice age?

Umm, we are in an interglacial period. For a layman's definition, listen to the aforementioned In Our Time podcast. If there's ice at the poles, we are in an ice age. An Interglacial period is one where there is less ice (i.e. not covering all of northern Europe).

We may be heading out of our current ice age and industrial era CO2 generation may be assisting that, who knows. But we are still in one.