Posts by thomasallan80

Lies, damn lies, and KPIs: Let's not fix the formula until we have someone else to blame

Re: Reminds me of two things..

You think that's fun, my brother used to work in a supermarket and as a section manager he would get KPIs run based on what things were sold at (usually). When he was in charge of bakery he really blew his lid because if you made rolls with a total cost of say $0.20 or $0.30 and a retail sell price of $2 if you then discounted the goods to $1 to get old stock out of there the KPI would mark you at -$1 but if you threw the same goods in the bin you were marked at -$0.30.

I'm assuming the business was trying to get everyone to keep everything as close to the ticket sell price as possible because other departments would be totally stuffed if they did that, but loosing 'half' the retail price and making the company some money then gets you penalised for making money but throwing the stuff away and not making any money at all and it looks a lot better on the report?

Since I wasn't involved in those stupid KPI's I don't know what the f they were thinking but I know they scheduled everything (wages for the week/month, the cost of goods being used, cost of facilities shouldn't be too hard to calculate) and then measuring the dollar value of actual goods sold should be easy to compare to estimated cost as another way to double check ANY KPI. Then having a section in the KPI's for total dollar amount discounted, thrown out, etc and compared to previous months shouldn't be too hard to add either.

Not a death spiral, I'm trapped in a closed loop of customer experience

Re: Try losing a 2-factor authenticator key.

That's because your doing it wrong. The QR code that gets generated can be scanned by multiple devices, assuming your doing this from a non-mobile device, and works fine (done that with paypal, etc and both phones unlock the account).

So you can have a current phone as primary and whatever you used as a previous phone as a backup authenticator will work fine. Each device will generate it's own unique code (i.e. two phones with the same source key from the website will each generate a totally different 6 digit code) so the website can say device 1 was used to authenticate on day 1 and device 2 was used on day 2 if they really wanted to go that far.

Battle net (and other independent apps that have some stupid built in authenticators) you can't do jack about since it's an independent app and ages ago when I tried it didn't let me add a second app to the account. But the one time I did 'reset' my mobile I think they sent a code to the accounts email address to unlock it way back when.

Do cops need a warrant to stalk you using your cellphone records? US Supremes to mull it over

Re: Question

Well, first off there is no such thing as 'location' data from cell phone towers. A mobile tower has three arrays that point in different directions and CAN NOT tell you how far away the call was made or do anything anywhere as close as GPS coordinates. Cell site data can say you were in a general direction and that is it.

Phone experts have managed to skip cell towers (i.e. the tower the phone has connected to for a call can have another tower in between it and the mobile due to how busy the middle tower is) especially when mobile phones were first introduced and towers were designed for maximum coverage so saying that cell site x received a signal doesn't mean jack unless all other cell sites in the area have signal data for that same mobile (i.e. they are specifically targeting that mobile). In which case you have 10 towers with different signal values over time and then you can say with 90% certainty (or whatever number it is) that this mobile was in this very small area at this specific time and then you have your 'location' data.

Second as for the word on the street, that can then be traced back to someone who can give independent information (i.e. Leg work brings up a witness who says, I was across the road when the place was robbed....) and can be cross examined. Where as a cop saying I queried a database and it looks like this phone was in the area of all crimes I'm looking at so it must be this person and I didn't look at anyone else because this looks good enough is seriously not on.

The whole point about police work is they first INVESTIGATE and then PROVE not the other way around. Judge, there is a known four man robbery crew in the area which from analysis of height and build could match surveillance data of the crimes and we would like to query the mobile providers to see if these four numbers were in the area of the robberies. Oh shit, it looks like those four peoples mobiles were near every site robbed and there is no reason for them to be there so now I'll have a talk with them at the station and if they don't have a good reason for being there they will be charged.

BA IT systems failure: Uninterruptible Power Supply was interrupted

Re: "With Data Centres, knowledge is power".

I think that's around the wrong way.

Data Centres: With power there is knowledge, internet connection, web services, etc.

Data Centres: Without power there is .........

Google, what the hell? Search giant wrongly said shop closed down, refused to list the truth

Re: What about the postcard thing?

But how can you VERIFY that. I was searching for local chemists recently and went to my local shopping centre with three listed. There was actually only two, one closed down and another chain bought it and then that taken over store moved with in the centre and somehow the closed one is still listed somehow in the original position despite the fact that the new chain must have been running it in the same spot for a while and then moved (and I'm assuming google isn't smart enough to work out that two chemists in the same spot can't exactly happen).

Also if it is a franchise based business how would you manage that? Take the word of a franchise owner that a franchisee has closed down?

Then the second thing is the opening times. The number of times when there are public holidays etc the time displayed is wrong is unbelievable. But I just consider this to be the large businesses not giving one fk about displaying when they are open (apart from a piece of paper stuck somewhere).

In the end google maps can only give crap data because if no business regularly updates google (and when your business closes down the first thing you are going to think of is to update google). Even if google provided a whole range of functionalities to list the standard opening times the special times for half open days (i.e. Christmas morning) and the public holidays, special closures, renovations, etc would that actually be used by the businesses? Large retail chains with their own websites are a pain in the butt to work out when they are open let alone the small businesses.

So in the end google has decided to use user feedback and if a user provides incorrect information that is obviously more than the business itself. Take the business in the article, I bet you if a journalist asked them how often they updated their opening times, etc it would be we setup the account and didn't touch it.

Errors in Australia's Centrelink debt recovery system were inevitable

It's actually worse than that. Each employer has the ability to enter a start and finish date of employment and submit that to the tax office. So lets say your example was reversed where the person was working the first 6 months and then fired but the employer put the entire financial year as the employment period. Then the debt matching assumes that the ATO data is 100% correct and all the other Centrelink data is incorrect (i.e. letter of termination, etc) and you owe everything you have been paid since termination since you were obviously still working and Centrelink employees were too stupid to work that out.

The second part is people studying, since you only have one set of dates to pass to the ATO someone who works at a supermarket at night on and off for a financial year will be flagged at getting a constant amount due to the fact that the ATO data is 100% correct and we shouldn't pay you while you said you were 'studying' so pay it back (and working around Christmas, Easter, etc when there is a lot of cash involved can certainly make it interesting).

Windows 10 pain: Reg man has 75 per cent upgrade failure rate

Re: Acronis could be the culprit

Same here.

My desktop PC is an old ASUS PB5 Deluxe (I think I got it late 2006) with XP pro retail. I then got a Windows 8 Retail upgrade (I unfortunately missed out on windows 7) and upgraded it to that. Then when windows 10 free upgrade came around I got a 2TB drive and consolidated all the OS installs on that so I have windows xp, 8 and 10 on one drive and it runs sweet.

The only issue I had with my desktop when upgrading to 10 was the stupid cisco vpn program completely obliterating all network adaptors (I think that's now fixed with a win 10 iso done about 3 months ago) which I had luckily backed up with win 8.1 partition before upgrading. Afterwards I then did a clean install of the win 10 partition to prevent any future issues since I'm not sure how bloated a machine that has XP SP2 -> XP SP3 -> Win 8 -> Win 8.1 -> Win 10 will operate.