Viktor Bergman

I have learned something new today (good god ;-)). I have always thought that mainframes were dying dinosaurs on its way out off the market; sure you have supercomputers (but are that really the same thing?). What's cool is that IBM is still manufacturing mainframes (like the Z System) and the demand is increasing incredibly especially in banking and other areas with a high demand of reliability, security and accuracy.

What is even COOLER than the fact that these giant machines are still in production is how they operate. Unlike PCs, or supercomputers for that matter, they are not built to do extreme processing but instead getting the job done rather fast. They pretty much just move data around.
For example, when a transaction is started the job is sent through 2 pipelines and then compared. If the result does not match then the mainframe will try again and if it fails the second time as well the transaction will be moved to another processor, hence making it really reliable. The worst thing that can happen is not that the mainframe crashes but instead that everything will just go much slower.

The modern Z System from IBM can (and are) even operate on code from as far back as the 1960s. So .NET and Java have a lot of roadmiles to go before they can even be compared to Cobol. No matter how fast and versatile the modern systems may be the mainframes are still the back bone of our global economy.

I hate the tax agencies, all of my life I have always owed them money (before my employment at my current employer I had my own company…if you're a swede you know that that means being in constant struggle with the authorities ;-)). But now the table has turned and I actually enjoy finding ways of getting more money back.

The way things work normally is that you get your papers in February and are allowed to make adjustments until they need to be sent back in may for approval. If your subtractions are approved you get refunded in September or at worst in December.

But if you have a e-legitimation you can log on to the Swedish Tax Authorities online service and do a lot of stuff:

• Modify your declaration (like changing your declared income etc)
• Most importantly!!: Enter your subtractions :D
  As time goes on and you are getting older (i.e more responsibilities and income) this can be a really valuable tool. The only stuff I can subtract now is selling of stocks and outcomes for getting to work (1.000 USD in 8 months :P).
• Browse all transactions between you and them. You can also export the transactions to Excel .
• Set what bank account your refunds will be transferred to, if you do that they will give you your money back much earlier.
• Sign and send in your declaration.

All of this is made possible with the nationwide initative called "e-legitimation" which is a digital ID that can be published by the bank, by the tax agency, the Swedish Post Office and TeliaSonera (the semi-state telecom corporation). The basic concept is that your ID shall be recognized by nearly all state and county authorities. Let's say you are moving and need to inform the authorities of this, all you need to do is log on and change the information. No more filling in forms and posting them with snail mail.

I have not yet investigated the technology in depth but I have a digitally signed software from TeliaSonera. I started off by logging in to my bank and filled out a request for the service, the bank then transferred me to TeliaSonera (with SSL ofcourse) that installed the software along with a plugin for Firefox.
What must have happened was that the bank verified me as ME (with my personal id box..looks like a calculator that generates security codes) and then TeliaSonera installed the software and downloaded a certificate. Et voila, it's installed and ready to use.

Information technology gaining the public!