You clearly have no idea how regular do not call lists are used by telemarketers. Companies hire a variety of telemarketing firms to call on their behalf. When you request a telemarketer to put you on the do not call list, they do so for the company they called you on behalf of and that company only. When you continue to get calls on behalf of that same company, it's from different telemarketing firms.
Maybe it's just that you haven't experienced the full force of telemarketing. Before I ditched my land line in favor of a cell phone, my phone rang literally every five minutes. If it ever becomes legal to solicit over a cell phone, I'll do without a phone at all before I deal with that aggravation again.
You assume that transactions can/should be simplified to that point.
Lets consider an overly simplified sales transaction. You can update your inventory before or after you obtain authorization for the credit card. Without a two phase commit, you will have authorize the card before you update the inventory. If the inventory operation fails, you will then have to reverse the authorization unless you want to piss off your customer. With a two phase commit, you perform the inventory operation first but do not commit unless the authorization is successful. Two phase commit is preferable in this situation.
Odds are it's an excuse for him to pay himself obscene amounts of money out of the venture capital. As long as he can keep the burn rate low, he can milk it for a pretty penny.
Maybe some of the other services do things differently. In the Army, if you didn't graduate from West Point, or you aren't a doctor, lawyer, or priest, you aren't guaranteed to be an officer even if you have a 4 year degree.
If you join ROTC in college, your chances depend on how many candidates are graduating that year vs. how many officers the Army needed. Your leadership skills are assessed in a five week evaluation geared primarily towards combat situations. If you don't have what it takes to be an infantry officer but you know technology, well, tough luck.
Your other option would be OCS. Similar situation to ROTC. If you can't hack the infantry, you're probably wasting your time.
So you manage to squeak past the leadership assessment and get commissioned in a non-combat branch. Guess what. If the Army doesn't have any positions open for that branch, you get assigned to a position in another branch that needs officers. Congratulations. You're now in charge of a platoon of airborne infantry.
In other words, if you're going to try this, I suggest picking a different service.
The recruiters want to get as many people into the service as possible, that's their job. They have no input on what you can get except when you already know what you want and they put in a word with the career counselor on your behalf.
The career counselor is there to put you in an occupation you qualify for based on your ASVAB and physical. If what you want is available and you qualify, you get what you want. If it isn't available or you don't qualify, then you have to wheel and deal. Your position is greatly enhanced if you score well on the ASVAB. They will bend over backwards to accomodate you if have a high score and are willing to simply walk away if you don't get what you want.
I just joined the reserves in MD. They tried to offer me stuff like accounting clerk or petroleum specialist because that was what was available. I wanted airborne and/or a hefty bonus. The only bonus they could offer was mediocre because I'm prior service. I said I'd walk away unless I got what I wanted. So they spent 6 hours pulling strings and got me a position on jump status. And I got the bonus too.
It's ridiculous that you have to go to such lengths, the flowery language, the embellishment, just to get promoted. That whole corrupt "look at me!!" self-promotion thing in the military drove me crazy. What the hell ever happened to doing your job humbly, quietly, being "steady eddie," and being promoted on your merits?
And this is different from the civilian world in what way exactly? You want to get promoted? You have to get noticed. The catch is you have to have your shit together. You succeed in a highly visible way, you get promoted. You fuck up in a highly visible way, you're lucky if you're cleaning the latrine for only a month.
I was active duty for 4 years. Airborne Infantry. I received seven(7) Army Achievement Medals in that time. First choice of school slots. All my promotions were after minimum time in grade. You think I got that by being humble and quiet? No. I got that by accomplishing the mission no matter what it took and making sure the right people knew it.
I didn't reenlist because I figured I could support a family better in the civilian world. I started out 7 years ago taking credit card applications over the phone for the largest credit card issuer in the US. Today, I'm a Vice President with the same company. I got there the same way. The only difference was the nature of the missions.
As for the reality being different from what the recruiter told you, I guess it depends on what you want. If you want some cushy 9-4 desk job, you probably have to ask around. If you want to be hard, all the recruiters I've run across will happily tell you how bad life is in the airborne infantry and that you're insane for wanting to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.
True to an extent, but the die-hard players are usually the most ruthless in demanding fun. A bad but beautiful game will get blacklisted by the dedicated gamers while truly innovative games can build up a cult following even without marketting.
I disagree. The dedicated die-hard gamers are the ones demanding for games to be less fun. Unless your definition of fun is much more masochistic than mine. A wonderful place to observe this in action is the SWG forums. A large number of players who post on the forums want the game to be less accessible to the general public. They want grouping to be required. They want uber loot that requires camping for days at a time. They want more downtime. They want death to be devastating. They want everyone to be dependent on everyone else.
Why? Not because it's fun. Because they belong to a large guild/clan/association and by making the game impossible to play without a wide range of characters they feel special. Because they can spend three days straight camping uber loot while the rest of us have to work, they feel special. Because all the casual gamers give up in disgust, they feel special.
Given the that the majority of game players are adults, claims like "She urged game makers to come up with titles that would appeal to a hardcore 15-year-old gamer as well as someone older who just wants to have fun," are just silly.
The developer is dead on the money. The target demographic for most developers is still teenage boys. Adults tend to have much more discriminating standards and less time to play games. You want my money, you have to develop a good game. You want my sons money, all you have to do is convince him it's "cool".
No. Most videogame companies try to make games so that people will buy them. An hour or two of actual gameplay, a couple cool screenshots on the net, twelve hours of incomprehensible cutscenes and you too can have a best selling game like Metal Gear Solid II. Not that anyone will think it's fun, but it will sell as long as you convince the teenage boys that it's cool.
Better yet, look at the online games. They are specifically designed to be as addicting as possible. Fun doesn't even enter into the equation as long as you can keep people paying you $15/mo.
Care to elaborate a bit? The only problem I've encountered between different versions of VBA is rounding. If that's all it is, you could write your own rounding function.
Very unlikely. At least against my databases. The web user only has permissions to run certain stored procedures. The stored procedures require a 128-bit session token generated at login. Application permissions and row-level security are enforced by the stored procedures. Someone could still hack the web server and alter the application pages to perform some operation when a highly privileged user logs in, but that requires much more effort than mangling some form submissions.
The only drawback to this approach is that providing adhoc searches and/or reporting is much more complicated/difficult since dynamic SQL is not an option. A reasonable compromise when the data is not very sensitive is to create views and grant select to the web user. Then the application can create dynamic select statements.
The biggest problem isn't that the web pages aren't coded properly, it's that the databases aren't designed properly. People write a web app with a DB back end but don't know anything about databases aside from a basic knowledge of SQL. The database itself should implement the strictest level of security and integrity checking within the application. It's closest to the data. The other layers should do their own checks but that's just so something doesn't fall through the cracks.
Except that stealing DirecTV only involves hacking your own box. You reprogram the smart card in the receiver to authorize any channel. It is easy/possible to decrypt the signal without using the phone jack. In fact, if you don't want to get caught, you better make sure that phone jack stays unplugged.
Think about it. If 3 million people were dialing up DirecTV and hacking their servers on a regular basis, don't you think there would be a lot more being done about it? Don't you think Hughes would already know who all the pirates are? All they would have to do is match the address the call came from against their billing database.
I first tried Linux back in '95. Didn't much care for it then. When I'm at home, I don't want to spend hours trying to get my OS to recognize my network card, or configure a printer, or get dialup to work properly.
So now years later we've progressed to the point where copy and paste "basically works now, as long as you stick to text"? This is a fucking accomplishment?? This is a reason to use Linux?? I don't care how many times the desktop is buffered or how nice the widgets look if basic functionality like copy and paste isn't quite up to speed. Linux on the desktop is a classic case of form over function. It doesn't matter how bad things actually suck as long as you can put those cool themes on your desktop, right?
Sorry, but my time is more valuable than that. If you're setting up a dedicated server that provides some services, Linux is fine. You only have to worry about installing, configuring, and maintaining a few applications. On the desktop? No. I'd pay Apple's godawful markup before I'd subject myself to that.
You make some interesting points but I think your perspective is from smaller companies. Let me provide a perspective from a much larger corporation.
The company I work for has 100k desktops in North America. No, that isn't a typo. 100,000. Including the rest of the world, it's more like 200k. We have a standard operating environment for desktops. Currently it happens to be Win2k. Every desktop is either running 2000 or is running NT 4 and on a schedule to be upgraded. We have a substantial IT organization in place to support these desktops. They have a lot to do. Every patch or update or new software version has to be tested to ensure it doesn't break any of the other applications in use at the company.
To allow alternate operating systems would increase our IT costs substantially. It isn't going to happen because Joe down in accounting likes Gnumeric better than Excel. It will happen because solid system management software is available for that platform and there is a large enough user population that see a tangible financial benefit to justify the extra support infrastructure.
As an employee, if you decided to run another operating system on your desktop instead of the corporate standard software, the best that would happen is that you would have your machine reimaged. It might not happen for a month or two. It may take that long to see that your machine hadn't posted it's software inventory to the system management server and send someone over to do it manually. Once they found out why, your machine would be reimaged that day. The tech that did it wouldn't be out the door. He's not pushing some personal agenda, he's following company policy and doing his job. If you lost something important, well now you've also ignored the policy for saving work on a network drive that gets backed up frequently. If you're a developer, your code should have been in a source control repository. If you lost critical code because you blantantly ignored several company policies, you would be the one out the door, not the tech.
The companies that process credit card transactions spend incredible amounts of money simply because that's how much it costs to make sure it gets done right the first time.
If the margins were so incredibly high as you seem to to think, someone would undercut the market. Or do you really believe that every institution that offers merchant accounts in the US is in collusion to fix prices?
The banks don't get 3%. The banks have to pay interest to the Fed. The Mastercard and Visa associations also get a cut. Factor in normal operating expense like printing and mailing statements, toll free customer service and the like, and you don't have much if anything left from the clearing cost.
Banks make their money from interest charges on the accounts that maintain balances past the grace period.
If your argument is that banks should subsidize the cost of clearing transactions from interest earned on accounts receivable, that is a seaprate issue. Although in that case I would imagine only the largest banks would truly be able to compete in such an endeavor.
The cost per transaction declines every year as improved banking infrastructure handles more transactions for the same cost. Going rate for a small business is $.25 + 2.5%. A business with a large number of transactions may be able to negotiate somewhat better terms. Apples cost per song to distribute is alomst certainly under $1 even including the transaction fee.
The real cost of credit card payments is not very close to zero.
In house capacity of banks to process transactions is limited by the installed hardware. The installed hardware is not free to purchase, is not free to maintain, consumes power, requires special climate controlled floorspace, etc, etc. A bank can reduce the cost per transaction by increasing the number of transactions but eventually runs out of computing resources long before the cost gets "very close to zero".
If a bank runs short of resources on a given day, it has to outsource some of its transactions. Guess what? It pays per transation. Guess what? It's a lot more than $.01.
Further, banks actually borrow some(most) of the money used to pay merchants from the Fed. This isn't free either. In banking terms it's called "Cost of Funds". Banks borrow the money because they have to maintain a certain amount of cash reserves and the rest is put into investments.
Then there's the fact that you don't pay interest if you pay the bill within the grace period. Then there's the fact that the bank has to pay customer service people to handle your calls and long distance charges on the 800 number and a whole host of other costs related to doing business.
In short, the bank needs to charge somewhere around $.25 + prime per transaction on merchant accounts to break even where prime is the prime lending rate set by the Fed. This makes $.01 payments a losing proposition. It could make $1 transactions worthwhile if you had enough volume.
Storage cost aside, the 100000 $.01 transactions require 1000 times the CPU utilization. CPU time gets expensive when you're a large institution. Banks still use mainframes because servers simply do not provide the same level of redundancy and error detection. Mainframe time (whether you own it or outsource it) is expensive.
Given that a substantial number of people I know or work with have been fraud victims, I'd say the likelihood is significant. The question is whether or not the one-time cost of a $40 shredder is justified. The potential time and hassle of tracking down and closing fraudulent accounts amounts to far more than $40. If you don't value your time at all, then don't buy a shredder.
This isn't designed for the consumer. It's a business desktop. From the article it would appear that they are specifically targeting the customer service and telemarketing industries. Trusted hardware is a big step forward. Particularly for customer service desktops. It doesn't have to be beneficial to the consumer, because consumers aren't going to buy them. Businesses will buy them in droves. The corporation I work for would probably seriously consider buying around 20k of these once they hit the market.
As for spreadsheet performance, you obviously have not worked with any large spreadsheets. Some of the capacity planning and budgeting workbooks used in my workplace have hundreds of worksheets with tens of thousands of formulas. You change one cell and the workbook takes 2 minutes to update itself on a P4 1.4Ghz. Sure, the spreadsheet design isn't optimal. The people who created it aren't professional programmers. They are regular people just trying to get their job done. Tell me again why a faster CPU and more memory won't make these spreadsheets run faster?
I'll give you fewer physical enclosures. Not necessarily fewer monitors and keyboards. KVM switch or KVM over IP takes care of that.
I'm on the fence about desktop integration.
Someone who buys an Apple for video editing, graphic design, or publishing should have all the tools they need available without resorting to PC software. If there is a need for some specialized software only available for the PC, it's not clear to me that it would run as well on a card as opposed to an actual PC. If there isn't such a need, why buy the card in the first place?
If you absolutely positively have to be able to run both Mac and PC programs and space is at a premium, why not an XServe and a Dell PowerEdge? Stick them in a closet. KVM over IP to a flat panel, keyboard, and mouse. Don't even need to run Cat5 if you set up a wireless bridge.
The real problem is the proliferation of passwords combined with increased complexity requirements. To access the systems I use on a daily basis at work, I have six separate passwords. To access systems I use a few times a month I have seven or eight more. Then there's five or six more for the systems I access a few times a year. Toss in complexity requirements and the need to change them every thirty days to a password I haven't used in the last year. I'm left with the option of using the same password for everything or writing them down somewhere.
Both options are bad practice from a security standpoint but the reality is that most people do not have a good enough memory to keep all those passwords straight. There are a few efforts in the corporation to migrate to a single-signon but that's really just the same as using the same password for everything. Just don't have to keep them in sync.
What's the solution? The best bet is probably biometrics. Many of the problems encountered with biometric authentication can be mitigated through a trusted hardware platform. Regardless of your feelings on Microsoft's TCPA initiative, there is a real need for a trusted computing architecture in the business world. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be better than what we have now.
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You clearly have no idea how regular do not call lists are used by telemarketers. Companies hire a variety of telemarketing firms to call on their behalf. When you request a telemarketer to put you on the do not call list, they do so for the company they called you on behalf of and that company only. When you continue to get calls on behalf of that same company, it's from different telemarketing firms.
Maybe it's just that you haven't experienced the full force of telemarketing. Before I ditched my land line in favor of a cell phone, my phone rang literally every five minutes. If it ever becomes legal to solicit over a cell phone, I'll do without a phone at all before I deal with that aggravation again.
You assume that transactions can/should be simplified to that point.
Lets consider an overly simplified sales transaction. You can update your inventory before or after you obtain authorization for the credit card. Without a two phase commit, you will have authorize the card before you update the inventory. If the inventory operation fails, you will then have to reverse the authorization unless you want to piss off your customer. With a two phase commit, you perform the inventory operation first but do not commit unless the authorization is successful. Two phase commit is preferable in this situation.
Odds are it's an excuse for him to pay himself obscene amounts of money out of the venture capital. As long as he can keep the burn rate low, he can milk it for a pretty penny.
Maybe we need lower the age requirement to join the Military. Get kids like these off the streets and put them where they can be useful.
"I killed 15 of the bastards, sir. Back 'ome they'd 'ang me. Here they give me a fuckin' medal."
The other way around, the graphics might not have been nearly as good. Graphics sell games. The better the graphics, they better the game sells.
Maybe some of the other services do things differently. In the Army, if you didn't graduate from West Point, or you aren't a doctor, lawyer, or priest, you aren't guaranteed to be an officer even if you have a 4 year degree.
If you join ROTC in college, your chances depend on how many candidates are graduating that year vs. how many officers the Army needed. Your leadership skills are assessed in a five week evaluation geared primarily towards combat situations. If you don't have what it takes to be an infantry officer but you know technology, well, tough luck.
Your other option would be OCS. Similar situation to ROTC. If you can't hack the infantry, you're probably wasting your time.
So you manage to squeak past the leadership assessment and get commissioned in a non-combat branch. Guess what. If the Army doesn't have any positions open for that branch, you get assigned to a position in another branch that needs officers. Congratulations. You're now in charge of a platoon of airborne infantry.
In other words, if you're going to try this, I suggest picking a different service.
The recruiters want to get as many people into the service as possible, that's their job. They have no input on what you can get except when you already know what you want and they put in a word with the career counselor on your behalf.
The career counselor is there to put you in an occupation you qualify for based on your ASVAB and physical. If what you want is available and you qualify, you get what you want. If it isn't available or you don't qualify, then you have to wheel and deal. Your position is greatly enhanced if you score well on the ASVAB. They will bend over backwards to accomodate you if have a high score and are willing to simply walk away if you don't get what you want.
I just joined the reserves in MD. They tried to offer me stuff like accounting clerk or petroleum specialist because that was what was available. I wanted airborne and/or a hefty bonus. The only bonus they could offer was mediocre because I'm prior service. I said I'd walk away unless I got what I wanted. So they spent 6 hours pulling strings and got me a position on jump status. And I got the bonus too.
It's ridiculous that you have to go to such lengths, the flowery language, the embellishment, just to get promoted. That whole corrupt "look at me!!" self-promotion thing in the military drove me crazy. What the hell ever happened to doing your job humbly, quietly, being "steady eddie," and being promoted on your merits?
And this is different from the civilian world in what way exactly? You want to get promoted? You have to get noticed. The catch is you have to have your shit together. You succeed in a highly visible way, you get promoted. You fuck up in a highly visible way, you're lucky if you're cleaning the latrine for only a month.
I was active duty for 4 years. Airborne Infantry. I received seven(7) Army Achievement Medals in that time. First choice of school slots. All my promotions were after minimum time in grade. You think I got that by being humble and quiet? No. I got that by accomplishing the mission no matter what it took and making sure the right people knew it.
I didn't reenlist because I figured I could support a family better in the civilian world. I started out 7 years ago taking credit card applications over the phone for the largest credit card issuer in the US. Today, I'm a Vice President with the same company. I got there the same way. The only difference was the nature of the missions.
As for the reality being different from what the recruiter told you, I guess it depends on what you want. If you want some cushy 9-4 desk job, you probably have to ask around. If you want to be hard, all the recruiters I've run across will happily tell you how bad life is in the airborne infantry and that you're insane for wanting to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.
True to an extent, but the die-hard players are usually the most ruthless in demanding fun. A bad but beautiful game will get blacklisted by the dedicated gamers while truly innovative games can build up a cult following even without marketting.
I disagree. The dedicated die-hard gamers are the ones demanding for games to be less fun. Unless your definition of fun is much more masochistic than mine. A wonderful place to observe this in action is the SWG forums. A large number of players who post on the forums want the game to be less accessible to the general public. They want grouping to be required. They want uber loot that requires camping for days at a time. They want more downtime. They want death to be devastating. They want everyone to be dependent on everyone else.
Why? Not because it's fun. Because they belong to a large guild/clan/association and by making the game impossible to play without a wide range of characters they feel special. Because they can spend three days straight camping uber loot while the rest of us have to work, they feel special. Because all the casual gamers give up in disgust, they feel special.
Given the that the majority of game players are adults, claims like "She urged game makers to come up with titles that would appeal to a hardcore 15-year-old gamer as well as someone older who just wants to have fun," are just silly.
The developer is dead on the money. The target demographic for most developers is still teenage boys. Adults tend to have much more discriminating standards and less time to play games. You want my money, you have to develop a good game. You want my sons money, all you have to do is convince him it's "cool".
No. Most videogame companies try to make games so that people will buy them. An hour or two of actual gameplay, a couple cool screenshots on the net, twelve hours of incomprehensible cutscenes and you too can have a best selling game like Metal Gear Solid II. Not that anyone will think it's fun, but it will sell as long as you convince the teenage boys that it's cool.
Better yet, look at the online games. They are specifically designed to be as addicting as possible. Fun doesn't even enter into the equation as long as you can keep people paying you $15/mo.
Care to elaborate a bit? The only problem I've encountered between different versions of VBA is rounding. If that's all it is, you could write your own rounding function.
Very unlikely. At least against my databases. The web user only has permissions to run certain stored procedures. The stored procedures require a 128-bit session token generated at login. Application permissions and row-level security are enforced by the stored procedures. Someone could still hack the web server and alter the application pages to perform some operation when a highly privileged user logs in, but that requires much more effort than mangling some form submissions.
The only drawback to this approach is that providing adhoc searches and/or reporting is much more complicated/difficult since dynamic SQL is not an option. A reasonable compromise when the data is not very sensitive is to create views and grant select to the web user. Then the application can create dynamic select statements.
The biggest problem isn't that the web pages aren't coded properly, it's that the databases aren't designed properly. People write a web app with a DB back end but don't know anything about databases aside from a basic knowledge of SQL. The database itself should implement the strictest level of security and integrity checking within the application. It's closest to the data. The other layers should do their own checks but that's just so something doesn't fall through the cracks.
Except that stealing DirecTV only involves hacking your own box. You reprogram the smart card in the receiver to authorize any channel. It is easy/possible to decrypt the signal without using the phone jack. In fact, if you don't want to get caught, you better make sure that phone jack stays unplugged.
Think about it. If 3 million people were dialing up DirecTV and hacking their servers on a regular basis, don't you think there would be a lot more being done about it? Don't you think Hughes would already know who all the pirates are? All they would have to do is match the address the call came from against their billing database.
SCO is acting in the best interests of the SCO executives who want to cash in on their stock before the company goes under.
As far as the SEC is concerned, they can't do much if the dump is a planned sale filed months ago.
Where they may get into trouble is civil cases filed by the shareholders for not acting in their best interests.
I first tried Linux back in '95. Didn't much care for it then. When I'm at home, I don't want to spend hours trying to get my OS to recognize my network card, or configure a printer, or get dialup to work properly.
So now years later we've progressed to the point where copy and paste "basically works now, as long as you stick to text"? This is a fucking accomplishment?? This is a reason to use Linux?? I don't care how many times the desktop is buffered or how nice the widgets look if basic functionality like copy and paste isn't quite up to speed. Linux on the desktop is a classic case of form over function. It doesn't matter how bad things actually suck as long as you can put those cool themes on your desktop, right?
Sorry, but my time is more valuable than that. If you're setting up a dedicated server that provides some services, Linux is fine. You only have to worry about installing, configuring, and maintaining a few applications. On the desktop? No. I'd pay Apple's godawful markup before I'd subject myself to that.
You make some interesting points but I think your perspective is from smaller companies. Let me provide a perspective from a much larger corporation.
The company I work for has 100k desktops in North America. No, that isn't a typo. 100,000. Including the rest of the world, it's more like 200k. We have a standard operating environment for desktops. Currently it happens to be Win2k. Every desktop is either running 2000 or is running NT 4 and on a schedule to be upgraded. We have a substantial IT organization in place to support these desktops. They have a lot to do. Every patch or update or new software version has to be tested to ensure it doesn't break any of the other applications in use at the company.
To allow alternate operating systems would increase our IT costs substantially. It isn't going to happen because Joe down in accounting likes Gnumeric better than Excel. It will happen because solid system management software is available for that platform and there is a large enough user population that see a tangible financial benefit to justify the extra support infrastructure.
As an employee, if you decided to run another operating system on your desktop instead of the corporate standard software, the best that would happen is that you would have your machine reimaged. It might not happen for a month or two. It may take that long to see that your machine hadn't posted it's software inventory to the system management server and send someone over to do it manually. Once they found out why, your machine would be reimaged that day. The tech that did it wouldn't be out the door. He's not pushing some personal agenda, he's following company policy and doing his job. If you lost something important, well now you've also ignored the policy for saving work on a network drive that gets backed up frequently. If you're a developer, your code should have been in a source control repository. If you lost critical code because you blantantly ignored several company policies, you would be the one out the door, not the tech.
The companies that process credit card transactions spend incredible amounts of money simply because that's how much it costs to make sure it gets done right the first time.
If the margins were so incredibly high as you seem to to think, someone would undercut the market. Or do you really believe that every institution that offers merchant accounts in the US is in collusion to fix prices?
The banks don't get 3%. The banks have to pay interest to the Fed. The Mastercard and Visa associations also get a cut. Factor in normal operating expense like printing and mailing statements, toll free customer service and the like, and you don't have much if anything left from the clearing cost.
Banks make their money from interest charges on the accounts that maintain balances past the grace period.
If your argument is that banks should subsidize the cost of clearing transactions from interest earned on accounts receivable, that is a seaprate issue. Although in that case I would imagine only the largest banks would truly be able to compete in such an endeavor.
The cost per transaction declines every year as improved banking infrastructure handles more transactions for the same cost. Going rate for a small business is $.25 + 2.5%. A business with a large number of transactions may be able to negotiate somewhat better terms. Apples cost per song to distribute is alomst certainly under $1 even including the transaction fee.
The real cost of credit card payments is not very close to zero.
In house capacity of banks to process transactions is limited by the installed hardware. The installed hardware is not free to purchase, is not free to maintain, consumes power, requires special climate controlled floorspace, etc, etc. A bank can reduce the cost per transaction by increasing the number of transactions but eventually runs out of computing resources long before the cost gets "very close to zero".
If a bank runs short of resources on a given day, it has to outsource some of its transactions. Guess what? It pays per transation. Guess what? It's a lot more than $.01.
Further, banks actually borrow some(most) of the money used to pay merchants from the Fed. This isn't free either. In banking terms it's called "Cost of Funds". Banks borrow the money because they have to maintain a certain amount of cash reserves and the rest is put into investments.
Then there's the fact that you don't pay interest if you pay the bill within the grace period. Then there's the fact that the bank has to pay customer service people to handle your calls and long distance charges on the 800 number and a whole host of other costs related to doing business.
In short, the bank needs to charge somewhere around $.25 + prime per transaction on merchant accounts to break even where prime is the prime lending rate set by the Fed. This makes $.01 payments a losing proposition. It could make $1 transactions worthwhile if you had enough volume.
Storage cost aside, the 100000 $.01 transactions require 1000 times the CPU utilization. CPU time gets expensive when you're a large institution. Banks still use mainframes because servers simply do not provide the same level of redundancy and error detection. Mainframe time (whether you own it or outsource it) is expensive.
Given that a substantial number of people I know or work with have been fraud victims, I'd say the likelihood is significant. The question is whether or not the one-time cost of a $40 shredder is justified. The potential time and hassle of tracking down and closing fraudulent accounts amounts to far more than $40. If you don't value your time at all, then don't buy a shredder.
This isn't designed for the consumer. It's a business desktop. From the article it would appear that they are specifically targeting the customer service and telemarketing industries. Trusted hardware is a big step forward. Particularly for customer service desktops. It doesn't have to be beneficial to the consumer, because consumers aren't going to buy them. Businesses will buy them in droves. The corporation I work for would probably seriously consider buying around 20k of these once they hit the market.
As for spreadsheet performance, you obviously have not worked with any large spreadsheets. Some of the capacity planning and budgeting workbooks used in my workplace have hundreds of worksheets with tens of thousands of formulas. You change one cell and the workbook takes 2 minutes to update itself on a P4 1.4Ghz. Sure, the spreadsheet design isn't optimal. The people who created it aren't professional programmers. They are regular people just trying to get their job done. Tell me again why a faster CPU and more memory won't make these spreadsheets run faster?
I'll give you fewer physical enclosures. Not necessarily fewer monitors and keyboards. KVM switch or KVM over IP takes care of that.
I'm on the fence about desktop integration.
Someone who buys an Apple for video editing, graphic design, or publishing should have all the tools they need available without resorting to PC software. If there is a need for some specialized software only available for the PC, it's not clear to me that it would run as well on a card as opposed to an actual PC. If there isn't such a need, why buy the card in the first place?
If you absolutely positively have to be able to run both Mac and PC programs and space is at a premium, why not an XServe and a Dell PowerEdge? Stick them in a closet. KVM over IP to a flat panel, keyboard, and mouse. Don't even need to run Cat5 if you set up a wireless bridge.
If you've already spent 15k on a workstation, what's 700 more for a PCI card?
Someone who has spent 3k on an Apple is more likely to spend that 700 on a Dell and stick it on the network.
The real problem is the proliferation of passwords combined with increased complexity requirements. To access the systems I use on a daily basis at work, I have six separate passwords. To access systems I use a few times a month I have seven or eight more. Then there's five or six more for the systems I access a few times a year. Toss in complexity requirements and the need to change them every thirty days to a password I haven't used in the last year. I'm left with the option of using the same password for everything or writing them down somewhere.
Both options are bad practice from a security standpoint but the reality is that most people do not have a good enough memory to keep all those passwords straight. There are a few efforts in the corporation to migrate to a single-signon but that's really just the same as using the same password for everything. Just don't have to keep them in sync.
What's the solution? The best bet is probably biometrics. Many of the problems encountered with biometric authentication can be mitigated through a trusted hardware platform. Regardless of your feelings on Microsoft's TCPA initiative, there is a real need for a trusted computing architecture in the business world. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be better than what we have now.