Posts by glen waverley

Re: No marks to the following:

The trick to solve item 2 is to have a password consisting solely of asterisks*

*may not work on some sites with anal rules re character diversity

Re: Fax to email

Possible explanation - the old style faxes that were printed on thermal paper tended to fade / go entirely black* over time. So there is probably some ingrained memory among office-folk that a fax can't be filed. If it is then the audit gods will be displeased.

*depending on yr ambient temperature.

Re: "low and behold"

"Unless the miscreant has edited their post in the mean time"

Would that be greenwich mean time?

Re: Broke the fundamental rule

Of course, if the "do it once" amount is too big, that moves the perp into the greedy category (or sometimes the stupid category) and they get noticed.

Re: Verify / authorise

I used to sleep during the day* in a very large organisation that got itself in a very knicker-twisted situation over the very set of circumstances john latham describes. It was never quite realised that even in the simplest case, ie some customers had a personal accountant (accountant being a sole trader not a partnership), that accountant might well have an assistant of some sort (personal assistant, junior accountant, etc) who might want to contact {org where I worked} to make enquiry. Danger will robinson - strict confidentiality provisions on info held by {org}, but update info surprisingly not so dangerous as revealing customer info. As jl says, who had the virtual credential? The 'owner' of the practice, the practice itself, each case officer in the practice? Each had its drawbacks and complications. A major accountancy or legal partnership had even more permutations of horror once their internal staff turnover got factored-in.

An extra complication - while accountants themselves tended nit to be customers of {org}, if they had a children then their spouses tended to be customers. So we had records of accountant/staff/ etc *in their own right* as well as in their professional role. Keeping those different functions separate was its own nightmare.

My personal solution while working there - avoid anything to do with nominees, powers of attorney, accountants, public trustee etc. Trying to point out the difficulties was like banging ones head against a wall. Providing solutions was not always welcomed.

* some readers may spot the Jerome K Jerome 3 Men in a Boat reference

Re: The project's 600 stakeholders

@ CrazyOldCatMan

A different sort of stake, I think, for this analogy. Comes (appropriately in my opinion) from the world of gambling. One who holds each partys' money until the event is resolved. But agree that 600 doomed the project to failure from the start.

I leave it to the reader to analyse what the gamble is and who wins.

GIGO

Or have their arse dragged around? To match the punishment to the crime!

Re: Success is whatever you define it to be

I used to work in a very large organisation that did all its IT in-house. It was widely understood that the celebrations for getting a new product or an "enhancement" deployed *had* to be held about 9 am on release day.

Because by morning tea time, the phones would be going crazy with fault reports and all the real workers on the dev team would be working on fixes. And all the project managers would be writing briefing papers on why productivity in the wider organisation was approaching zero.

Re: Not just school kids

Ahh. Synners. Have an upvote for mention of obscure melbourne train station

Re: Nothing new

My understanding of the situation in Oz for employees is that any IP developed in the course of your employment belongs to employer. Gets tricky if you work on a private project while you aren.t clocked on.

Contractors are different - they own their IP unless contract says otherwise - which is why contracts written by Megacorp Pty Ltd (other employers are available) claim ownership of IP developed by contractor.

To my eyes, looks like Telstra was covering its bases when it took Tac Eht Xilef off EBA and onto individual contract. EBA = clearly employee. Workchoices contract = better be extra sure.

Re: The 'Nuke it'they track you ...

Agree with AmCt.

Yrs truly once spent an afternoon comparing prices of car tyres for the chariot. Then went out and purchased same, fitted to vehicle. For next month or more, I got ads for tyres on every web site.

Now accept that I let the system down by not ordering tyres via interweb, paying via paypal and having the rubber donuts delivered by amazon drone. How were targetting adverts meant to know i was no longer indulging in my hobby of checking car tyre prices?

Re: This rings too true...

Re the till...

Was once drinking in pub in the northern suburbs of Darwin during the afternoon with a few other thirsty humans. Bar wasn.t busy, given the time of day. Suddenly, lightning hit the power lines in the street, rendering the pub powerless.

As described by Andy A above, beers could still be poured and rums could also be dispensed. But the till was a (back then) new style electronic till. No power meant the cash tray wouldn.t open. Bar manager and barmaid tried to get the tray open while the drinkers offered suggestions like "How about we give you the right amount and you just stick the money in a jug".

Anyway after about 10 minutes of fiddling, the bar manager managed to use a knife to prise the tray open. Service restarted, yrs truly ordered and paid for a round, bar maid takes the money, sticks it in the tray and by force of habit slams the tray shut. As an example of learning curve, manager re-opens the tray using the knife in less than a minute. And puts a glass longways in the till to stop it being closed.

So, yes to battery backup or mini UPS for tills.

Re: But... do people *really*

Accuracy of location data ...

A few other thoughts.

1 Many people live in apartments/flats/tenements. AC's comment re 5 or 10 m accuracy would smear the location across many possible units. So plausible deniability there. Plus, altitude does not seem to be in the dataset, giving much more candidate units if a highrise building.

2 Unless they take lat and long from address, not gps data. Which might well be billing address for the credit card. You know, the one you used to pay the $19 to get rid of that very data. Need address to verify credit card for "card not present" transaction. AM might as well do a quick geocoded address lookup while waiting for the credit card transaction to go thru.

Re: Nah, don't pay them that's the game!

Fine is now around $ A187. Plus a free kicking or broken arm from the authorised officers if yr under about 20 yo. Tho you can opt for an on-the-spot $75 if middle class.

So the economics have changed.

Re: What ?

Plus kids are at school, parents are at work during daylight hours. So not many electrical appliances being run at home. That might be relevant to usage patterns.

Conversely, the households of dole bludgers (TM) who are at home running tv xbox phone rechargers etc during the day tend to be in rentals. Which typically don.t have solar panels.

Icon cos No sh!t Sherlock.

drive on the other side

I remember a news item about an ex British colony that decided to change the cars to driving on the other side.

Worked so well that 2 weeks later they decided to also change the side the trucks drove on.

( IT angle - a phased implementation may not always be the best method.)

Re: Who will be redundant next....

Many commentards over the years have observed that *effective* outsourcing requires that technical expertise be retained in the organisation so that one knows whether or not the wool is being pulled over one's eyes. So the Home Office ought to retain a sizeable technical staff.

Not saying that is the case here. Quite possible that the HO staff are there to pay each and every invoice submitted by the outsourced provider without question or quibble.