July 2005 Entries
I was astounded to discover that if something goes wrong while ordering online at www.tesco.com, and you phone up for assistance, the only way for operator to help is to use your username and password to login to your account. Apparently there is no admin facility that the operative can use, they have to ask you for your username and password. Of course you can reset your password, but how many people use the same details for more than one site? Plenty I would venture. Making this at best a major inconvenience and at worst a very low security standard on behalf of the largest Supermaket chain in the UK.
Their official response to me was:
Helpline staff have no access to account passwords or payment card information and without customers providing the password for their homeshopping account we are limited in what help we can offer. We could have reset the password which would allow us access but would then cause added inconvenience for yourself or your wife to change the password after the problem had been resolved.
Is this really acceptable in todays hightened security world?
Ian
Following my last post, the perceived Battle between Microsoft and Google hots up!
Google have apparently poached a Kai-Fu Lee, former corporate VP of Microsoft's Natural Interactive Services Division, well known in the areas of speech recognition and artificial intelligence, and also knowledgable on Microsofts search strategy and its business plans regarding the People's Republic of China
Story here: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/75010/microsoft-sues-google.html
Now it's just getting silly!
http://moon.google.com
(P.S. Don't forget to zoom all the way in!)
Google seems to be on a roll. First they wowed everyone with http://maps.google.co.uk, now they have http://earth.google.com/ - but they have many more interesting products too, take a look at http://labs.google.com/. There is great innovation here, enough IMHO to make Microsoft sit up once more. (In fact Google is the one company Steve Ballmer seems just a lttle concerned about in this video here: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=86097). Moreover MS appear to have speeded up thier Atlas project, perhaps in answer to the success Google has had with their AJAX apps
So I was very interested to stumble across these presentation notes fron Sriram Sankar, who is in charge of Developer Testing at Google. It reveals the Google have adopted TDD, XP and O/R Mapping.
http://www.developertesting.com/archives/month200411/20041117-LiveBlogFromDeveloperTestingForum.html#DTG
Some interesting facts there, and maybe proof that these methodologoies can no longer be ignored by any development team.
Ian