I think that it is really disgusting that the third party processor in this whole mess was sheilded by the credit card companies.
I would like to think that it should be an inalienable right to know exactly who bent you over when you weren't looking and poked you in the bottom.
Having worked for a POS company at the start of my IT career I had the *ahem* privlege to work with a great deal of these carriers and it was hard enough for us to get hold of these companies, nevermind people who actually knew anything. And that was just to see why certain cc batches did or did not post etc.
They are way to secretive for my liking. There was the occasional time where a customer had to call them themselves for one reason or another and it was even harder for them. Most of them thought that the banks actually did the processing themselves.
The other thing is that in that business there is a bad case of small fish gets eaten by big fish. So many times have the companies changed ownership, merged or folded. Some lients were required to deal with several processors so that they could take the whole range of cards.
One of the most frustrating things is that out of the, say 15 companies we dealt with, I think around 10 had 0 as the button to push to disconnect rather than to get an operator. Bastards. Everyone knows to push that for an operator.
Another thing is that now I work for a Managed Service Provider in professional services. We have many, many clients in the financial services field. I vow that I will never, ever do business on-line when it comes to my finances. I don't think we have a single client that has a really solid, efficient code-base. Most of them have a large, bloated application, spread over several platforms that started as a smaller application. They have developers who would prefer to do the wrong thing rather than look stupid.
Favorite episode has to be the one with guest voice Robert Stack as the FBI agent in charge of enforcing the prohibition laws in Springfiled and Homer becomes the mighty Beer Baron!
Robert Stack: "I'll get you Beer Baron!"
Homer (from far far away): "No you won't"
Robert Stack: "Yes I will"
Homer (from far far away): "Won't"
Also the medical marijuanna episode was hilarious and thats from last season.
Another of my favorite quotes: Homer to himsef: 'Dear Homer, I owe you one emergency donut, signed Homer'.....Bastard! He's always one step ahead!
I am so sorry to say this about a community that I respect so much but get a life! Its freaking Super Bowl! I know we are geeks but the anti-jock (exercise) attitude is so sterotypical of geeks that it is no longer funny.
Go out and get some exercise, talk to a real girl and play a game that doesn't involve a mouse or controller. Oh yeah, and discover one thing you didn't learn on the internet.
Man, it really peevs me because I see posts all the time that tell people to get a life yadda yadda then you get a thread like this where no one knows ANYTHING. (I apologize for anyone that said something intelligent in this thread, I am not talking about you)
AT LEAST GET EXCITED ABOUT SEEING SOME CHEERLEADERS! My WIFE gets excited about seeing the stupid commercials.
No need to dump all the anti-corporate conspiracy theory bullshit on the poor joe who gets payed 10 bucks an hour to hookup peoples homes.
Well I am not sure about where you live but where I live TFR's (technical fields reps) love getting the Internet installs. They make $30 per install. That can add up to a lot of money. When S**w Cable was doing a serious push to get their broadband into homes a friend of mine was doing 15 - 20 of these per day. Thats a lot of payola. I wouldn't feel too sorry for them. Why should we compromise our PC's just to make someone whose job it is to do this easier. We all know there are people who are less than savvy when it comes to how their PCs work but thats what they get paid for....just like I get paid to write software and explain it to the dumb marketing people. Same difference.
This has been done before
on
Airborne Mouse
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
My cousin had a really kick ass TV/Stereo Surround Sound system before everyone else did. His Sony TV used a gyroscopic mouse that was shaped like an egg. It did the exact same thing on his TV. Worked as a remote....and this was 6 years ago.
I had been looking for a CMS when I was tasked with building a site for a non-technical company to do news syndication, forums, user management and content delivery. Of course, why re-invent the wheel when someone has done the work for you? That was 10 months ago and I have been working almost exclusively in this field of web development every since. I was able to deploy a modified version of PostNuke for my client in several weeks and they are very happy with it.
While I was searching for the right tool I came across about a million OS CMS systems out there....PostNuke, PHP-Nuke, myPHPNuke, Slashcode, ezCMS, just to name a few.
The only thing at this time that keeps me from going mainstream into this arena is the lack of standards. There seems to be a new release every week for some of these systems and they are seldom backwards compatible (with themes, modules, etc.). How can a company take this kind of fragmented development seriously? If they want to stay current with the latest features they have to redo their entire site. Oh wait a minute thats good for me, or so I thought at first. But the truth of the matter is that if you don't stay up witht the CVS and the release notes and actually continually test the code you could be working with a completely different system.
I personally love PostNuke. I use it on my own site and I have built many sites with it. But there are differnt forks starting every week. Sometimes due to a legitimate need for a specialized version of the system. Most of the time it is due to infighting amongst the developers and petty squabbles and power struggles.
John Cox, the former PostNuke Project manager left the project for some reason akin to this. Check out his reasons here. I won't try to speak for him.
As such if I were a CEO trying to choose a CMS, or any other software for that matter, I would go for the system that has solid goals and a unified vision and sets some standards that are proven throughout the development history, even if I had to choose...yuck...MS crap to do it.
Its not about the cost so much as I want things that worked in this version to work in the next version. I want my development cycle to be shorter and the support better because people know how the system is supposed to work and the new features are just that...new features. Not a new core every few weeks.
I think that if you are going to go buy a game like this then it is up to YOU to level that character. The only thing that I believe is good about it is that it deflates the character economy selling on eBay and such. I think this is just as bad. Nothing makes me more angry than someone thinking their characters are worth money. They shouldn't be worth anything except to the player. This takes the wind out of the whole thing.
I was planning on becoming a JBoss Group Authorized Consultant. I use JBoss/Tomcat on my 700 mhz laptop with either Oracle or mySQL when I go on-site to do any J2EE development. It is a really great piece of LGPL software. I really would hate to see them go south, although they have quite a following now. That price however...Thats pretty steep. I got Oracle certified twice for not quite that much.
I use a lot of Open Source software in my work. I want clients to know about their alternatives. I always give a tithe to project after the fact. It's only fair, especially when a client's project completely revolves around the Open Source project.
I don't get that much business out of JBoss to spend that kind of money though. At least not without some serious support and value added extras that they haven't mentioned yet.
The flip side of the coin is that application servers are big business. BEA Weblogic, Oracle iAS, Sun ONE....how much do they cost? I think this is a great opportunity for businesses to train their own staff and then implement JBoss. If they can implement it themselves and support it in-house, I think the 5K is trivial. Plus they can sell those services to their clients. Couldn't do that with BEA, Oracle or Sun.
I live in Canada and pay about $32 Canadian $$ for a cable connection. I think it is shameful that the US has to pay about the same rate in US dollars. If you take the current exchange rate that means the US pays about 50% more than Canadians for the same type of service. The true North strong and free.
Get one of those very small (and yes somewhat expensive) USB drives. You can purchase them without the need of a driver and of course it is universal. I always have one on me. That is way easier than any networking aggrevations.
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I think that it is really disgusting that the third party processor in this whole mess was sheilded by the credit card companies.
I would like to think that it should be an inalienable right to know exactly who bent you over when you weren't looking and poked you in the bottom.
Having worked for a POS company at the start of my IT career I had the *ahem* privlege to work with a great deal of these carriers and it was hard enough for us to get hold of these companies, nevermind people who actually knew anything. And that was just to see why certain cc batches did or did not post etc.
They are way to secretive for my liking. There was the occasional time where a customer had to call them themselves for one reason or another and it was even harder for them. Most of them thought that the banks actually did the processing themselves.
The other thing is that in that business there is a bad case of small fish gets eaten by big fish. So many times have the companies changed ownership, merged or folded. Some lients were required to deal with several processors so that they could take the whole range of cards.
One of the most frustrating things is that out of the, say 15 companies we dealt with, I think around 10 had 0 as the button to push to disconnect rather than to get an operator. Bastards. Everyone knows to push that for an operator.
Another thing is that now I work for a Managed Service Provider in professional services. We have many, many clients in the financial services field. I vow that I will never, ever do business on-line when it comes to my finances. I don't think we have a single client that has a really solid, efficient code-base. Most of them have a large, bloated application, spread over several platforms that started as a smaller application. They have developers who would prefer to do the wrong thing rather than look stupid.
....If I say "Office Space" do I get an automatic +5 Insightul rating?
There are four, yes count them four, books in the Rama series...Rendezvous with rama, Ramma II, Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed.
Isn't this supposed to be some sort of news site?
Favorite episode has to be the one with guest voice Robert Stack as the FBI agent in charge of enforcing the prohibition laws in Springfiled and Homer becomes the mighty Beer Baron!
Also the medical marijuanna episode was hilarious and thats from last season.
Another of my favorite quotes: Homer to himsef: 'Dear Homer, I owe you one emergency donut, signed Homer'.....Bastard! He's always one step ahead!
I am so sorry to say this about a community that I respect so much but get a life! Its freaking Super Bowl! I know we are geeks but the anti-jock (exercise) attitude is so sterotypical of geeks that it is no longer funny. Go out and get some exercise, talk to a real girl and play a game that doesn't involve a mouse or controller. Oh yeah, and discover one thing you didn't learn on the internet. Man, it really peevs me because I see posts all the time that tell people to get a life yadda yadda then you get a thread like this where no one knows ANYTHING. (I apologize for anyone that said something intelligent in this thread, I am not talking about you) AT LEAST GET EXCITED ABOUT SEEING SOME CHEERLEADERS! My WIFE gets excited about seeing the stupid commercials.
Well I am not sure about where you live but where I live TFR's (technical fields reps) love getting the Internet installs. They make $30 per install. That can add up to a lot of money. When S**w Cable was doing a serious push to get their broadband into homes a friend of mine was doing 15 - 20 of these per day. Thats a lot of payola. I wouldn't feel too sorry for them. Why should we compromise our PC's just to make someone whose job it is to do this easier. We all know there are people who are less than savvy when it comes to how their PCs work but thats what they get paid for....just like I get paid to write software and explain it to the dumb marketing people. Same difference.
My cousin had a really kick ass TV/Stereo Surround Sound system before everyone else did. His Sony TV used a gyroscopic mouse that was shaped like an egg. It did the exact same thing on his TV. Worked as a remote....and this was 6 years ago.
I had been looking for a CMS when I was tasked with building a site for a non-technical company to do news syndication, forums, user management and content delivery. Of course, why re-invent the wheel when someone has done the work for you? That was 10 months ago and I have been working almost exclusively in this field of web development every since. I was able to deploy a modified version of PostNuke for my client in several weeks and they are very happy with it.
While I was searching for the right tool I came across about a million OS CMS systems out there....PostNuke, PHP-Nuke, myPHPNuke, Slashcode, ezCMS, just to name a few.
The only thing at this time that keeps me from going mainstream into this arena is the lack of standards. There seems to be a new release every week for some of these systems and they are seldom backwards compatible (with themes, modules, etc.). How can a company take this kind of fragmented development seriously? If they want to stay current with the latest features they have to redo their entire site. Oh wait a minute thats good for me, or so I thought at first. But the truth of the matter is that if you don't stay up witht the CVS and the release notes and actually continually test the code you could be working with a completely different system.
I personally love PostNuke. I use it on my own site and I have built many sites with it. But there are differnt forks starting every week. Sometimes due to a legitimate need for a specialized version of the system. Most of the time it is due to infighting amongst the developers and petty squabbles and power struggles.
John Cox, the former PostNuke Project manager left the project for some reason akin to this. Check out his reasons here. I won't try to speak for him.
As such if I were a CEO trying to choose a CMS, or any other software for that matter, I would go for the system that has solid goals and a unified vision and sets some standards that are proven throughout the development history, even if I had to choose...yuck...MS crap to do it.
Its not about the cost so much as I want things that worked in this version to work in the next version. I want my development cycle to be shorter and the support better because people know how the system is supposed to work and the new features are just that...new features. Not a new core every few weeks.
I think that if you are going to go buy a game like this then it is up to YOU to level that character. The only thing that I believe is good about it is that it deflates the character economy selling on eBay and such. I think this is just as bad. Nothing makes me more angry than someone thinking their characters are worth money. They shouldn't be worth anything except to the player. This takes the wind out of the whole thing.
I was planning on becoming a JBoss Group Authorized Consultant. I use JBoss/Tomcat on my 700 mhz laptop with either Oracle or mySQL when I go on-site to do any J2EE development. It is a really great piece of LGPL software. I really would hate to see them go south, although they have quite a following now. That price however...Thats pretty steep. I got Oracle certified twice for not quite that much.
I use a lot of Open Source software in my work. I want clients to know about their alternatives. I always give a tithe to project after the fact. It's only fair, especially when a client's project completely revolves around the Open Source project.
I don't get that much business out of JBoss to spend that kind of money though. At least not without some serious support and value added extras that they haven't mentioned yet.
The flip side of the coin is that application servers are big business. BEA Weblogic, Oracle iAS, Sun ONE....how much do they cost? I think this is a great opportunity for businesses to train their own staff and then implement JBoss. If they can implement it themselves and support it in-house, I think the 5K is trivial. Plus they can sell those services to their clients. Couldn't do that with BEA, Oracle or Sun.
I live in Canada and pay about $32 Canadian $$ for a cable connection. I think it is shameful that the US has to pay about the same rate in US dollars. If you take the current exchange rate that means the US pays about 50% more than Canadians for the same type of service. The true North strong and free.
Get one of those very small (and yes somewhat expensive) USB drives. You can purchase them without the need of a driver and of course it is universal. I always have one on me. That is way easier than any networking aggrevations.