(I do have one of those - it makes wearing ties somewhat bearable because it's funny)
I do think that you can look presentable without a tie - they're just ways of allowing the non-technical population to oppress the technical population:)
Reformats don't require you to be at the computer 100% of the time. In reality, they only require like an hour of actual work. The rest of the time is just waiting for the OS to install, etc.
But that is time that you've got a machine occupying a slot on your bench that you could otherwise be doing else that is billable.
Having said that, I keep track of all time and currently bill it at $30/hour - but then discount back to where I think the final bill should about be.
Along with the bill, I hand them a copy of what I call the "computer maintenance document" telling them step by step how to run AdAware and Spybot weekly, and to check for windows updates and to make sure that the antivirus software is functioning. If they follow that, they shouldn't need to bring a machine back for a cleanup.
Wearing a tie would be a signal that your are not an alpha-geek and may not be able to fix their problem. Be presentable, but try not to wear a tie if at all possible (unless, of course, you're working on IBM equipment - then the white shirt and navy tie are requirements of the uniform).
If your state department of revenue allows this (and if you are actually purchasing for business usage), you can file for a refund on sales taxes paid for business computers.
I also know ACH isnt quite the same thing as a 'wire transfer', but (at least for domestic transfers, Im sure anything going international is more involved), the ability for a customer to initiate a transfer of money via ACH seems to obsolete the previous concept of 'wire transfer', and even the name seems to predate the modern banking system.
Wire transfers do predate ACH, but they are a different animal entirely. A wire transfer is an instant transfer of funds from one bank to another where ACH items are next day at best. Different information is required to initiate the two transfers (wire transfers require much more information than ACH transfers) and the cost to process them is different.
Bill pay can route via ACH, but does not necessarily always do so. I no that the transfer to another institution function is an extra cost feature for the online banking site and is not offered at all banks.
Wire transfers are another thing altogether and having them online is typically done through a "cash management" system aimed at business customers for a cost - not something that is given away to your typical retail customers.
Given the right circumstances (and the desire of the bank of first deposit), a bank can receive a check over the counter in the morning and actually have it presented to the account holder's bank that same day - but this is only economical for large checks.
Large scale Check 21 implementation (and therefore changes in the availability of funds rules) is probably a year or two away. The Fed has the charges backwards - if I want to send check images, I will need to stand the cost of all substitute checks printed to all of the banks that don't receive images. The incentive to move electrons instead of paper is backwards for now.
If you've got a name on the card of "Helga Olafson" and the person using it is a 6'9" African-American gentleman, you may want to ask a question or two about it.
What annoys me the most about these stories is that there's no way for the customer to take proactive measures to disable problematic services.
If he was able to initiate a wire transfer or an ACH transfer, that is not part of your vanilla online banking application - he's probably running as a business under a "cash management" site so he can do those things - this is typically a service that you sign up for so that you can explicitly do these things and not your typical give-away consumer online banking site.
Although it's not the same thing, I've heard of criminals that have placed a box near a bank's night depository and a sign on the night depository saying that it's broken and to please leave your deposit in the box.
ATM fraud is covered (in the States, at least) by Reg E which limits the amount of money that a consumer is liable for, no matter how poorly they decide to protect their debit card.
A year ago Microsoft released a patch CDROM for Windows 98/Me/2000 and (I think) XP that had cumulative updates for the operating systems up to that point. The CDROM was available free for the asking (and is real nice if you need to reinstall a machine)
It would be nice if they released another one this year.
It's even more surprising to see the number of people who think a bank's domain "kind of looks like their own bank" and go ahead to register for online banking (giving SSN's, addresses, and account numbers) to the wrong bank - often in the wrong country.
I used it at a job about 8 years ago. Decent language that made some things easy and some things not so easy.
I was working as programmer at a hospital and one of the things I looked at was the program the printed the HCFA forms (that's a medicare reimbusement deal, if I remember right) that was printing an X in the wrong box sometimes. Yuck.
Having said that, it's a decent language and makes communicating with the AS/400 database easy, and does make generating reports easy as well.
I programmed in RPG for a couple of years - it's a decenct language for what it was meant to do - and (much like most other languages) has grown as the years have progressed.
RPG makes accessing the native AS/400 database trivial, and laying out reports is very easy, as was green screen terminal programming. Just like any other language, it does some things easily and other things take some doing.
I've not programmed in RPG in 8 years, so I'm sure that it's changed and advanced since then, but it was a decent language when I was using it.
A degree means nothing---absolutely nothing---in determining whether someone can do a job. Educational experience means nothing in determining whether somone can do that job, either (unless said job is Education, but then how many Profs have you had that couldn't teach their way out of a web paper sack? I thought so).
I don't disagree - but using a false degree to obtain a job is fraud and does say something about the character of the holder.
Yup, most businesses would rather have an IT consultant that takes twice as long (and three tries) to solve a problem than one that won't return phone calls for days.
In other industries, this is called "customer service" and it is something that is sorely lacking in IT.
I do some of this on the side after hours and have been told that "being available" - even just returning phone calls and e-mails in a semi-timely manner - has gained me many customers and kept the ones I've got happy.
How about several additional dollars per online customer - on a product that we are giving away. The price of the new download deal is proportional to the size of the bank - so economies of scale don't apply until you get to a very large institution.
We've got a good deal (online banking + bill pay for free for any account) for our customers - and I'd like to maintain that. I don't think I could if I added the support for Quicken 2005.
My initial reaction to this is to say "screw Intuit," but I'm not sure that there is a good replacement for the software available.
The older products do function normally. It's the newer ones that don't and that do require extra expense on the banks' end to support.
I don't think that we have a coincidence in the amount of Quicken 2005 marketing going on - they're trying to get as many people as possible to upgrade their software. Once they do, and then attempt to download transactions - they'll find that it doesn't work - they're attempting to force banks into purchasing a much more expensive add-on to their websites to support the new downloads.
This would be like Adobe changing the PDF format in Acrobat [future version number] so that it couldn't read anything created by older versions of distiller or whatever. Upgrading the reader is free and not a big deal - but it would cost those who create PDF's for distribution some money to allow their customers to read their documents.
Extortion is probably the wrong word - but whatever you call it, it's a slimy business practice.
The market will determine if Intuit's move was right or wrong, but there is no reason to believe Intuit had some kind of ethical obligation to do otherwise.
I agree with that and didn't mean to imply otherwise. Our bank has made it's decision and I suspect most will make a similar decision - support MS Money (man, that pains me to say that!)
The problem is that Intuit does make some good products. We use their LaCerte software for tax preparation. It's not cheap, but it is good at what it does.
QuickBooks is nice too - especially if you don't do payroll and therefore don't need to participate in the forced upgrade march.
But that extortion that they are attempting with the transaction download is just plain wrong. One could argue that they are recouping costs that were spent to develop the new protocol (it is not supposed to duplicate transactions) - but they didn't bear the entire costs! I spoke with our online banking vendor last week - the new protocol basically tacked on a transaction identifier (they forced the website to track another field in their database) to prevent duplicates - that's it and it's not worth the cost to the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
I do think that you can look presentable without a tie - they're just ways of allowing the non-technical population to oppress the technical population :)
But that is time that you've got a machine occupying a slot on your bench that you could otherwise be doing else that is billable.
Having said that, I keep track of all time and currently bill it at $30/hour - but then discount back to where I think the final bill should about be.
Along with the bill, I hand them a copy of what I call the "computer maintenance document" telling them step by step how to run AdAware and Spybot weekly, and to check for windows updates and to make sure that the antivirus software is functioning. If they follow that, they shouldn't need to bring a machine back for a cleanup.
Wearing a tie would be a signal that your are not an alpha-geek and may not be able to fix their problem. Be presentable, but try not to wear a tie if at all possible (unless, of course, you're working on IBM equipment - then the white shirt and navy tie are requirements of the uniform).
You can do that too, but if you don't want to do so ahead of time, you can always get the refund.
In Iowa: http://www.state.ia.us/tax/forms/22009.pdf
Wire transfers do predate ACH, but they are a different animal entirely. A wire transfer is an instant transfer of funds from one bank to another where ACH items are next day at best. Different information is required to initiate the two transfers (wire transfers require much more information than ACH transfers) and the cost to process them is different.
Wire transfers are another thing altogether and having them online is typically done through a "cash management" system aimed at business customers for a cost - not something that is given away to your typical retail customers.
Large scale Check 21 implementation (and therefore changes in the availability of funds rules) is probably a year or two away. The Fed has the charges backwards - if I want to send check images, I will need to stand the cost of all substitute checks printed to all of the banks that don't receive images. The incentive to move electrons instead of paper is backwards for now.
ACH transactions batched in the volume that PayPal can generate cost essentially nothing versus the 2-3% interchange from credit cards.
If you've got a name on the card of "Helga Olafson" and the person using it is a 6'9" African-American gentleman, you may want to ask a question or two about it.
Yes - but only if this causes the bank to fail. FDIC insurance is only excercised upon the failure of the bank.
If he was able to initiate a wire transfer or an ACH transfer, that is not part of your vanilla online banking application - he's probably running as a business under a "cash management" site so he can do those things - this is typically a service that you sign up for so that you can explicitly do these things and not your typical give-away consumer online banking site.
ATM fraud is covered (in the States, at least) by Reg E which limits the amount of money that a consumer is liable for, no matter how poorly they decide to protect their debit card.
It would be nice if they released another one this year.
It's even more surprising to see the number of people who think a bank's domain "kind of looks like their own bank" and go ahead to register for online banking (giving SSN's, addresses, and account numbers) to the wrong bank - often in the wrong country.
I was working as programmer at a hospital and one of the things I looked at was the program the printed the HCFA forms (that's a medicare reimbusement deal, if I remember right) that was printing an X in the wrong box sometimes. Yuck.
Having said that, it's a decent language and makes communicating with the AS/400 database easy, and does make generating reports easy as well.
RPG makes accessing the native AS/400 database trivial, and laying out reports is very easy, as was green screen terminal programming. Just like any other language, it does some things easily and other things take some doing.
I've not programmed in RPG in 8 years, so I'm sure that it's changed and advanced since then, but it was a decent language when I was using it.
I don't disagree - but using a false degree to obtain a job is fraud and does say something about the character of the holder.
In other industries, this is called "customer service" and it is something that is sorely lacking in IT.
I do some of this on the side after hours and have been told that "being available" - even just returning phone calls and e-mails in a semi-timely manner - has gained me many customers and kept the ones I've got happy.
We've got a good deal (online banking + bill pay for free for any account) for our customers - and I'd like to maintain that. I don't think I could if I added the support for Quicken 2005.
My initial reaction to this is to say "screw Intuit," but I'm not sure that there is a good replacement for the software available.
I don't think that we have a coincidence in the amount of Quicken 2005 marketing going on - they're trying to get as many people as possible to upgrade their software. Once they do, and then attempt to download transactions - they'll find that it doesn't work - they're attempting to force banks into purchasing a much more expensive add-on to their websites to support the new downloads.
This would be like Adobe changing the PDF format in Acrobat [future version number] so that it couldn't read anything created by older versions of distiller or whatever. Upgrading the reader is free and not a big deal - but it would cost those who create PDF's for distribution some money to allow their customers to read their documents.
Extortion is probably the wrong word - but whatever you call it, it's a slimy business practice.
I agree with that and didn't mean to imply otherwise. Our bank has made it's decision and I suspect most will make a similar decision - support MS Money (man, that pains me to say that!)
The problem is that Intuit does make some good products. We use their LaCerte software for tax preparation. It's not cheap, but it is good at what it does.
QuickBooks is nice too - especially if you don't do payroll and therefore don't need to participate in the forced upgrade march.
But that extortion that they are attempting with the transaction download is just plain wrong. One could argue that they are recouping costs that were spent to develop the new protocol (it is not supposed to duplicate transactions) - but they didn't bear the entire costs! I spoke with our online banking vendor last week - the new protocol basically tacked on a transaction identifier (they forced the website to track another field in their database) to prevent duplicates - that's it and it's not worth the cost to the bank.
They collecting from both ends - the consumer and the bank - with this gambit.