Moving Decimal Bug Loses Money

mario.m7 writes "Poste Italiane, the Italian postal service, suffered yesterday from an abnormal computation in ATM and credit card operations, since the decimal comma was not taken into account. The whole sum was therefore multiplied by 100, resulting in a 115,00 Euro transaction being debited as 11.500 Euro! Thousands of accounts are deep in the red and locked (link pumped through translator), so that no more operations are possible. Poste Italiane is gradually recovering the problem, fixing the error and re-crediting the sum debited in excess. Consumer associations have offered support to clients in case this lasts longer and causes damage."

Comments

You mean 11,500 Euro

[Chrisq]

You mean 11,500 Euro as 11.500 Euro.

Re:You mean 11,500 Euro

[mea37]

You're letting the punctuation confuse you. The computer doesn't use punctuation to represent the number.

The error was essentially that a number of Euro cents was interpreted as a number of Euro.

So if someone entered 11500 euro cents (115.00 Euro using American punctuation, 115,00 using European punctuation - which seems fair since we're counting Euros), and the display showed them that this is what they had entered, but the computer interpreted it as 11500 euros (11,500 using American punctuation, 11.500 using European). Just as TFS says.

"without _moving_ the seperator (or omitting it completely)" ... which is exactly what the summary says happened. Hell, did you even read the headline?

Re:God Bless the USA!

[Duradin]

Look at what those numbers are divisible by:
12 can be divided evenly by 2,3,4 or 6.
36 can be divided evenly by 2,3,4,6,9,12,18.
5280 can be divided evenly by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 20, 22, 24, 30, 32, 33, 40, 44, 48, 55, 60, 66, 80, 88, 96, 110, 120, 132, 160, 165, 176, 220, 240, 264, 330, 352, 440, 480, 528, 660, 880, 1056, 1320, 1760, 2640. The important ones being 2,3,4,5,6,8,10.

Plus metric measurements are generally too small (cm) or too big (m) to be practical for day to day uses.

So if you look at it from a pencil and paper math era perspective having the nice fractions was a plus. (
It's why we (thankfully) don't have metric time. 60 is divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20, and 30. 100 is only divisible by 2,5,10,20,25, and 50. The Babylonians were onto something.)

Re:God Bless the USA!

[Daimanta]

"Plus metric measurements are generally too small (cm) or too big (m) to be practical for day to day uses."

Furthermore imperial measurements are generally too large (inch) or too small (yard) to be practical for day to day users. The fact that the mile exists also creates confusion because every old nations used to have it's own "mile" which either a lot bigger or a lot smaller than the English "mile".

Also multiplication by a number that is not equal to the numberbase(10) is annoying to use.

Out of the top of my head

1000mm=100cm=100dm=1m=0,1Dm=0,01hm=0,001km=0,000001Mm

Try to do that with the imperial system which randomly swaps between 6,2,12 and whatever they feel like.