Tram Town
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
| Category: Banks I've just been down to my local servo to get a tank full and, having paid by EFT with my savings account, had the experience of having to wait for the "MERCHANT COPY" to print before the "CUSTOMER COPY". It takes a few seconds but, presumably, at least tens of thousands of these transactions are wasting people's seconds daily. It has been twenty five years since I completed my computer science degree and the state of the art may have changed since then but I would have thought that an IF statement in the software inside the pinpad would have been sufficient to reverse the printing order if the account was not credit??? They can't be strapped for memory in this day and age, surely. I would have thought you could program all of the functionality of those things including the RSA and DES stuff in a few K of tight machine code. |
