On Sat, 20 Jul 2024 13:04:00 +1000, Wayne Bickerdike <wayn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>*Are you suggesting using physical cash because software andhardware >engineers are unable to create a reliable alternative?* > >Absolutely yes. There are myriad reasons, in my case I have a pension paid >into a UK account. Domiciled in Australia it's the best way for me to >access these funds and have cash. > >In Australia there's a push to cashless, however, lots of businesses have >suffered through similar outages and are going back to cash. EFTPOS is a >cash cow for banks and network providers of ATMs. It may seem like a "cash cow", but you need to weigh up the cost of that electronic infrastructure vs the cost of the entire process of chopping down trees to making cash and humans counting the cash etc etc. Those costs are basically being hidden. Maybe they exceed the cost of the "cash cow" and if it is an economic question, then the government should pay those banks etc directly for taking pressure off the physical cash infrastructure and lost productivity. Basically I find it hard to believe that we (hardware and software engineers) can't construct something more cost-effective and even reliable than using dead trees. If we are tasked with doing such a thing. And if we are given budget to fix bugs instead of only being given a budget to add new features. And include the cost of physical cash being lost - perhaps in a house fire - or wallets being lost/stolen. And perhaps include the cost of the drug trade being facilitated (assuming that is a factor). >The PC would be fine Oh - let's start here. You envisage a solution. I'd like to hear it. > if it wasn't trying to do everything and had a myriad >of vulnerabilities in the registry and installation and update processes. So - what specifically needs to be done to eliminate this issue? Someone mentioned OS/2 as a possible solution. I will mention that PDOS and its supporting toolchain exists - not necessarily a solution. Definitely not as sophisticated as OS/2. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. It may or may not be a bad thing - it's an open question I have. We have a tangible problem. One instance of it, anyway. And I saw a couple of people here suggesting that the mainframe was the solution. It may or may not be - open question. BFN. Paul. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
