Many places don't even have a Visa network. Where I live (African country), there are only (I think) two or three ATMs in the city.
I've travelled to many places in Asia, Europe and America.
When there are no ATM's, travellers cheques are usually harder to cash. In this case, I'd take a wad of USD, EURO, GBP or AUD slightly larger than I intended to use but I've been to very few places with no ATM's and they are normally stupendously cheap to live (A small island off the cost of Thailand, nearest ATM was a 2 hour boat ride away. I lived there on less than 20,000 THB for a month and I didn't live frugally, in other spots in Thailand (Bangkok) I can burn 20,000 THB in 2 nights without even trying).
Where ATM's are common, travellers cheques are a bother as some places refuse them all together and those who dont have a processing fee.
Also, all a thief has to do with TC's is forge your signature. This is why a lot of places flat out refuse to accept them.
Now, whatever you do, don't get one of those stupid traveller's Visa cards. They will cost more than you think they will, and you'll invariably have a problem you wouldn't have had with an ordinary credit card.
This cannot be understated. Those "travellers" cards are huge fee traps. In Oz, 1% of the amount loaded on is instantly taken, 4-6% for foreign currency transactions and I've even seen one with a A$40 money retrieval fee when terminating the card.
An American judge order the splitting of the HONG KONG SHANGHAI BANK OF CHINA? Yes, that's what HSBC means.
The last "C" stands for "Corporation", actually, but close enough.
HSBC was created when Hong Kong and Singapore were territories of England. They moved their headquarters to London before the English handed back Hong Kong to the Chinese (end of the 99 year lease). HSBC, despite being named Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation are a UK company and realistically, always have been.
Now it feels odd using this argument FOR the United States but...
HSBC do business in the US, so they are subject to US laws and judgements.
Things to take:
A spare battery for your laptop. (And encrypt your laptop, and have a decent backup solution.)
Power adaptors for your things.
A lock for your bags, a lock for lockers in hostels, and a bicycle lock to tie your bags to your bed (or park bench) when you don't have a locker.
This is essential
A powerboard, hostels often only have one or two powerpoints.
This too, but try to get one with universal outlets in case you end up buying some local electronics like kettles or toasters. Forget USB charging plugs, waste of money, just make sure their universal outlets. This way you can get away with 1 power adapter for everything.
Oh, and a voltage converter thing.
Only if you come from a nation that isn't 240v. If you're going from 240v to 110v you dont need to worry.
An unlocked mobile phone.
More specifically a cheap Nokia 6110 or equivalent. You dont want to take a smartphone as there's no gaurantee it will work with local telco's and are huge theft magnets (not just in thrid world nations, expect it to be stolen in western nations). Trust me on this, only having to charge your phone once a week will be better than getting email and cat videos on your phone, especially as you cant leave a charging phone unattended in a hostel.
If you must have a smartphone, get a cheapie. That way you're not out $400 if you lose/break it.
Fewer electronics (no music player, no recorder, etc., let your phone do all that).
Actually, more but cheaper electronics are less likely to be stolen. Iphones, Galaxy S4's and other high end phones are worth money and are likely to be stolen. A $50-75 audio player/recorder is worth $2 to a pawn shop, theives wont bother.
A backpack (a suitcase will really piss you off).
This. Cases are slow and unwieldy. Avoid bags with wheels as they only add extra weight and stick into your back when you end up having to carry them anyway (this is a when, not an if).
I travel with a 70L backpack on my back and a 35L backpack on my front. I can be last to alight and first to the customs desk.
Water bottles. Plastic travel cutlery maybe (it's cheaper to buy bread and cheese separately than it is to buy them together as a pre-made sandwich).
Just beware with knives, some countries get very, very paranoid about them. Even in your checked luggage.
Travelers Checks
Worst advice ever.
TC's are not widely accepted any more, easy to lose and signatures are easy to forge. Add to this that many banks charge a ~$1 fee per cheque to cash them.
Take two VISA cards from different providers. MasterCard is also acceptable but I've been to places in deepest darkest Cambodia where my Visa worked but my MC didn't. AMEX and Discover are useless, leave them at home. Make sure your cards are from different banks, that way if one doesn't work, the other probably will.
My advice.
- Scan your passport, drivers license (or another form of photo ID), travel insurance contact details, bank card any visas and emergency contact details into one email and send it to yourself. If you lose everything you still have this email.
- Use your card to get cash out of an ATM, use cash to buy things. Credit card fraud is rife in many nations and foreigners are more often targeted.
- Get travel insurance.
- Get travel insurance. I know this is only one point but you dont want to get hit by a bus in Uruguay and be unable to pay for medical care.
- Make sure someone else knows your itinerary.
- Register with your nations Foreign Affairs department (if they have such a service) so they know to evacuate you in case of fire, floods or civil war.
- Learn a few words in the local language (I.E. Hello, Goodbye, Excuse me, Sorry, how much and no thank you). It'll take about half an hour of practice (being able to say "no thank you" is more important than hello).
- Call your mum once a fortnight, seriously, she worries about you.
- Just use some common sense and you'll be fine.
As long as you understand that you will very likely get robbed, or have your laptop stolen at some point,
OK, this only happens if you're stupid.
If you take basic self preservation measures like keeping things locked up when out of your sight you'll be fine. The only advice on minimising theft I'll offer are:
1. Don't take theft magnets. A high end Dell looks cheaper than a low end Macbook. Same with Iphones and so forth (take a Nokia 6110, no one will want to steal it, it'll work everywhere and battery life is 1 week+).
2. Don't wave your fancy gadgets about. I once was dumb enough to put my Galaxy Nexus down on the table in a bar in the Philippines, I was lucky that the only things that happened was the waitresses syphoned off some of my credit, flattened the battery taking selfies and added themselves to my facebook.
Use some common sense and it's not very likely you'll get robbed.
More importantly, Facebook has money and the bullies are probably broke. It's also highly likely that the bullies are kids, and can't be sued because they're under legal age.
So the parents are going for whatever money they can get.
Shame on them. Begging for blood money from an organization that's not at fault.
Couldn't agree with this more.
The parents dont want justice, they just want cash.
Whilst the original comment is wrong in that it's not "much bigger", Wikipedia also states that you are, unfortunately, wrong as well. USA @ 3,794,101 sq mi vs Europe @ 3,930,000 sq mi
Either way, they're both big enough to have vastly different cultures and lifestyles depending on where you visit.
Europe goes from the Atlantic coast all the way up to the Ural mountains, from the top of Norway to Yemen and Oman. The European maps missing half of Russia are horribly wrong.
Besides bigger does not necessarily mean geographic size, Europe has a much higher population and a much, much, greater economic and cultural diversity.
I doubt it. I worked in R&D for the Aussie government for many years and we were not supposed to accept so much as a free coffee from vendors. There is a very strict set of tendering and purchasing protocols and general sense of paranoia about showing any kind of favouritism or cutting deals. That's not to say it never happens, but for something on this scale I would say it is highly unlikely.
This is very, very true.
Govt IT workers need to get permission just to attend vendor events on the off chance they will receive a free bag and/or pen.
However govt departments who already have the software in will use these tactics to lower licensing costs. It's not unusual for them to present the costs of switching to a competitors product to a vendor in order to get them to lower their prices (I.E. they'll tell Microsoft that a SQL Enterprise license is $10,000 more than the cost of switching to PostgreSQL until MS drops the price by $10K).
and I still blame the parents. where were they when their 14 year old daughter was out getting drunk??? Does no one believe in taking responsibility for themselves (or their kids) anymore?
And you never did anything wrong as a teen, never did anything your parent's didn't want you to?
The problem here is that facebook was not the cause, facebook was the medium. The problem here is older than facebook, the internet and wireless communications. The problem is something society has continually refused to blame, yet alone act against for generations.
It wasn't facebook who put the video up, it was facebook that tormented the girl... it was the bullies.
So the parent's are suing facebook when they should be suing the bullies and their parents. But then again, bullying is permitted and facebook is the root of all evil according to social Norm (Norm's a bit of a wanker it seems).
The problem is not a lack of standards: even in the last generation, game makers managed to paper over that with cross-platform engines. The problem is that HD has made games inherently too expensive to produce. Even shovelware on the Wii turned out to be more profitable than even most of the blockbusters, which is why companies (most notoriously Ubisoft, but others as well) used it to fund their unprofitable HD development.
No amount of standardization will fix this, because while standards do fix a problem, it's not the right problem domain. The art department is incurring the big costs nowadays, not the code. This is like performing micro-optimizations in the wrong loops.
Not really, high end graphics for the PC are cheap to produce. It should be cheaper on consoles.
It's marketing budgets that have ballooned out of all proportion. Even in the back end of the western world (Perth, Western Australia) there is saturation marketing whenever a new COD or Halo is released. this costs millions. Add to this a per unit license fee, contractual obligations to produce DLC (paid for updates) and high costs of development kits and the art department isn't so bad.
Quite a bold statement that the console market isn't profitable, where is your source for this? MSFT posted Q1 2013 earning for the Entertainment and Devices Division:
"generated revenues of $2.53 billion for the quarter, up 53 percent from the same period a year ago. The division includes the Xbox business and Microsoft said there is now 46 million people signed up to use its Xbox Live online service, up 18 percent from the same period a year ago."
Seems pretty damn lucrative to me...
That assumes that MSFT have not costs.
It took MSFT 3 years for the Xbox360 to stop being a loss leader (each console sold for less than what it cost MSFT to make it), it took Sony 5 years for the PS3 to stop being a loss leader. Neither have paid back the initial R&D costs.
Sure Sony and Microsoft have lots of nice shiny revenue, but anyone in business will say "Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity". The PS3 and Xbox360 have been huge money sinks for MS and Sony.
But I feel we're forgetting someone.... Someone who made a lot of money...
Oh hai NINTENDO.
Nintendo made a metric buttload of cash, paid off their R&D very quickly and never sold the Wii as a loss leader. More than that, the Wii was hugely successful. Released last and outsold Microsoft and Sony's combined console sales for 3 years. Why, because they didn't pretend the console was a PC. They made a console that for the first time since the Super Nintendo was actually fun to play. That's how you make money in the console world. Sony and Microsoft need to learn it's not about how powerful your console is, it's about how fun and accessible it is. It seems the PS4 and Xbox One have given this generation to Nintendo by default (as the Wii-U is a mediocre console).
To say that "consoles" are unprofitable is really to say "Microsoft and Sony consoles" are unprofitable. Nintendo consoles were very profitable.
"Germany's national railway company, Deutsche Bahn, plans to test larger, armed drones to try to reduce the theft of small drones introduced earlier. The idea is to use airborne infra-red cameras to collect evidence, which could then be used to prosecute vandals who steal property at night. A company spokesman said drones would be tested at rail depots soon."
Fixed that for ya.
Germany's national railway company, Deutsche Bahn plans to build bunkers and rally the survivors after the introduction and subsequent rebellion of armed drones.
Not yielding an inch, are they? Imagine the impact it would have on Subway.
Over here in Metric land they still refer to it as a Footlong(TM) despite multiple photos measuring a subway sub and the total length amounting to less than 11 inches.
Not to mention that the imperial system is also from europe:)
I'd also like to point out that the US is not even that advanced.
The Imperial system was first defined in Britain in 1824 (weights and measures act of 1824), well after the US's independence. The US is still on pre-imperial measurements called US customary units.
That sure explains why they ask you for your phone number, email address, rewards card, and whether you want to apply for a new credit card (while 5 more people are waiting in line behind you) every time you check out...
That's not the POS system, that's the store management.
POS back ends are designed for fast transactions, it's the human and networking elements that tend to slow them down.
I always thought that, even if there is server-side protection for it already, the final "click this button to pay" button should get disabled when you click it the first time, preferably with a processing icon or the like. That way you provide a visual clue that something is happening if they are on a slow connection.
Nope,
The server is handling 100 transactions a second or more. All through SSH sessions, or worse yet a proprietary protocol. Front end terminals are usually connected to a server in another location over VPN (or worse yet, a WAN link with an open port at the server side) and this server may be across the country. In almost all of the Point Of Sale software I've seen error checking is done locally and there is next to fuck all of that happening anyway as the goal of POS systems is to move as fast as possible. The customer hates waiting for the cash register to do its job properly.
For the merchants accepting the payments, because they'll have to bear the cost of chargebacks on transactions that were otherwise perfectly valid but cannot be proven to have been authorised by the cardholder.
In addition to the fees for accepting the transaction.
Yes, a merchant pays a fee for accepting payment via card. Fees for accepting a credit card range from 1-5% of the transaction amount. Paying with debit (your own money) is usually under 1% of the transaction.
sometimes paying twice when they have used another payment method.
Why is the software even accepting a new payment? Shouldn't the balance already be 0 by then?
Because the software is shit.
Having dealt with a few Point Of Sale systems I can say that the acronym POS is no accident.
A lot of systems are just Windows systems with a program like Pronto Xi running on top. It's not unusual for these terminals to be running Windows XP. The back end is usually pretty good but the software really suffers on the front end and the front end is where we tend to get most of the errors.
I think "Makr Shakr" might not be the right name for an alcoholic beverage-related product. It sounds vaguely Arabic, and the Arab world still has Prohibition.
That's OK, we're planning to sell them the militarised version of this robot, the Mastr Blastr.
Slashdot Mirror
I've travelled to many places in Asia, Europe and America.
When there are no ATM's, travellers cheques are usually harder to cash. In this case, I'd take a wad of USD, EURO, GBP or AUD slightly larger than I intended to use but I've been to very few places with no ATM's and they are normally stupendously cheap to live (A small island off the cost of Thailand, nearest ATM was a 2 hour boat ride away. I lived there on less than 20,000 THB for a month and I didn't live frugally, in other spots in Thailand (Bangkok) I can burn 20,000 THB in 2 nights without even trying).
Where ATM's are common, travellers cheques are a bother as some places refuse them all together and those who dont have a processing fee.
Also, all a thief has to do with TC's is forge your signature. This is why a lot of places flat out refuse to accept them.
Now, whatever you do, don't get one of those stupid traveller's Visa cards. They will cost more than you think they will, and you'll invariably have a problem you wouldn't have had with an ordinary credit card.
This cannot be understated. Those "travellers" cards are huge fee traps. In Oz, 1% of the amount loaded on is instantly taken, 4-6% for foreign currency transactions and I've even seen one with a A$40 money retrieval fee when terminating the card.
An American judge order the splitting of the HONG KONG SHANGHAI BANK OF CHINA? Yes, that's what HSBC means.
The last "C" stands for "Corporation", actually, but close enough.
HSBC was created when Hong Kong and Singapore were territories of England. They moved their headquarters to London before the English handed back Hong Kong to the Chinese (end of the 99 year lease). HSBC, despite being named Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation are a UK company and realistically, always have been.
Now it feels odd using this argument FOR the United States but...
HSBC do business in the US, so they are subject to US laws and judgements.
I had a Fiat once, total crap.
Fix It Again Tony.
I much prefer the Gold(wing) standard
Things to take:
A spare battery for your laptop. (And encrypt your laptop, and have a decent backup solution.)
Power adaptors for your things.
A lock for your bags, a lock for lockers in hostels, and a bicycle lock to tie your bags to your bed (or park bench) when you don't have a locker.
This is essential
A powerboard, hostels often only have one or two powerpoints.
This too, but try to get one with universal outlets in case you end up buying some local electronics like kettles or toasters. Forget USB charging plugs, waste of money, just make sure their universal outlets. This way you can get away with 1 power adapter for everything.
Oh, and a voltage converter thing.
Only if you come from a nation that isn't 240v. If you're going from 240v to 110v you dont need to worry.
An unlocked mobile phone.
More specifically a cheap Nokia 6110 or equivalent. You dont want to take a smartphone as there's no gaurantee it will work with local telco's and are huge theft magnets (not just in thrid world nations, expect it to be stolen in western nations). Trust me on this, only having to charge your phone once a week will be better than getting email and cat videos on your phone, especially as you cant leave a charging phone unattended in a hostel.
If you must have a smartphone, get a cheapie. That way you're not out $400 if you lose/break it.
Fewer electronics (no music player, no recorder, etc., let your phone do all that).
Actually, more but cheaper electronics are less likely to be stolen. Iphones, Galaxy S4's and other high end phones are worth money and are likely to be stolen. A $50-75 audio player/recorder is worth $2 to a pawn shop, theives wont bother.
A backpack (a suitcase will really piss you off).
This. Cases are slow and unwieldy. Avoid bags with wheels as they only add extra weight and stick into your back when you end up having to carry them anyway (this is a when, not an if).
I travel with a 70L backpack on my back and a 35L backpack on my front. I can be last to alight and first to the customs desk.
Water bottles. Plastic travel cutlery maybe (it's cheaper to buy bread and cheese separately than it is to buy them together as a pre-made sandwich).
Just beware with knives, some countries get very, very paranoid about them. Even in your checked luggage.
Travelers Checks
Worst advice ever.
TC's are not widely accepted any more, easy to lose and signatures are easy to forge. Add to this that many banks charge a ~$1 fee per cheque to cash them.
Take two VISA cards from different providers. MasterCard is also acceptable but I've been to places in deepest darkest Cambodia where my Visa worked but my MC didn't. AMEX and Discover are useless, leave them at home. Make sure your cards are from different banks, that way if one doesn't work, the other probably will.
My advice.
- Scan your passport, drivers license (or another form of photo ID), travel insurance contact details, bank card any visas and emergency contact details into one email and send it to yourself. If you lose everything you still have this email.
- Use your card to get cash out of an ATM, use cash to buy things. Credit card fraud is rife in many nations and foreigners are more often targeted. - Get travel insurance.
- Get travel insurance. I know this is only one point but you dont want to get hit by a bus in Uruguay and be unable to pay for medical care.
- Make sure someone else knows your itinerary.
- Register with your nations Foreign Affairs department (if they have such a service) so they know to evacuate you in case of fire, floods or civil war.
- Learn a few words in the local language (I.E. Hello, Goodbye, Excuse me, Sorry, how much and no thank you). It'll take about half an hour of practice (being able to say "no thank you" is more important than hello).
- Call your mum once a fortnight, seriously, she worries about you.
- Just use some common sense and you'll be fine.
As long as you understand that you will very likely get robbed, or have your laptop stolen at some point,
OK, this only happens if you're stupid.
If you take basic self preservation measures like keeping things locked up when out of your sight you'll be fine. The only advice on minimising theft I'll offer are:
1. Don't take theft magnets. A high end Dell looks cheaper than a low end Macbook. Same with Iphones and so forth (take a Nokia 6110, no one will want to steal it, it'll work everywhere and battery life is 1 week+).
2. Don't wave your fancy gadgets about. I once was dumb enough to put my Galaxy Nexus down on the table in a bar in the Philippines, I was lucky that the only things that happened was the waitresses syphoned off some of my credit, flattened the battery taking selfies and added themselves to my facebook.
Use some common sense and it's not very likely you'll get robbed.
More importantly, Facebook has money and the bullies are probably broke. It's also highly likely that the bullies are kids, and can't be sued because they're under legal age.
So the parents are going for whatever money they can get.
Shame on them. Begging for blood money from an organization that's not at fault.
Couldn't agree with this more. The parents dont want justice, they just want cash.
Whilst the original comment is wrong in that it's not "much bigger", Wikipedia also states that you are, unfortunately, wrong as well. USA @ 3,794,101 sq mi vs Europe @ 3,930,000 sq mi
Either way, they're both big enough to have vastly different cultures and lifestyles depending on where you visit.
Europe goes from the Atlantic coast all the way up to the Ural mountains, from the top of Norway to Yemen and Oman. The European maps missing half of Russia are horribly wrong.
Besides bigger does not necessarily mean geographic size, Europe has a much higher population and a much, much, greater economic and cultural diversity.
I doubt it. I worked in R&D for the Aussie government for many years and we were not supposed to accept so much as a free coffee from vendors. There is a very strict set of tendering and purchasing protocols and general sense of paranoia about showing any kind of favouritism or cutting deals. That's not to say it never happens, but for something on this scale I would say it is highly unlikely.
This is very, very true.
Govt IT workers need to get permission just to attend vendor events on the off chance they will receive a free bag and/or pen.
However govt departments who already have the software in will use these tactics to lower licensing costs. It's not unusual for them to present the costs of switching to a competitors product to a vendor in order to get them to lower their prices (I.E. they'll tell Microsoft that a SQL Enterprise license is $10,000 more than the cost of switching to PostgreSQL until MS drops the price by $10K).
and I still blame the parents. where were they when their 14 year old daughter was out getting drunk??? Does no one believe in taking responsibility for themselves (or their kids) anymore?
And you never did anything wrong as a teen, never did anything your parent's didn't want you to?
The problem here is that facebook was not the cause, facebook was the medium. The problem here is older than facebook, the internet and wireless communications. The problem is something society has continually refused to blame, yet alone act against for generations.
It wasn't facebook who put the video up, it was facebook that tormented the girl... it was the bullies.
So the parent's are suing facebook when they should be suing the bullies and their parents. But then again, bullying is permitted and facebook is the root of all evil according to social Norm (Norm's a bit of a wanker it seems).
The problem is not a lack of standards: even in the last generation, game makers managed to paper over that with cross-platform engines. The problem is that HD has made games inherently too expensive to produce. Even shovelware on the Wii turned out to be more profitable than even most of the blockbusters, which is why companies (most notoriously Ubisoft, but others as well) used it to fund their unprofitable HD development.
No amount of standardization will fix this, because while standards do fix a problem, it's not the right problem domain. The art department is incurring the big costs nowadays, not the code. This is like performing micro-optimizations in the wrong loops.
Not really, high end graphics for the PC are cheap to produce. It should be cheaper on consoles. It's marketing budgets that have ballooned out of all proportion. Even in the back end of the western world (Perth, Western Australia) there is saturation marketing whenever a new COD or Halo is released. this costs millions. Add to this a per unit license fee, contractual obligations to produce DLC (paid for updates) and high costs of development kits and the art department isn't so bad.
Quite a bold statement that the console market isn't profitable, where is your source for this? MSFT posted Q1 2013 earning for the Entertainment and Devices Division:
"generated revenues of $2.53 billion for the quarter, up 53 percent from the same period a year ago. The division includes the Xbox business and Microsoft said there is now 46 million people signed up to use its Xbox Live online service, up 18 percent from the same period a year ago."
Seems pretty damn lucrative to me...
That assumes that MSFT have not costs.
It took MSFT 3 years for the Xbox360 to stop being a loss leader (each console sold for less than what it cost MSFT to make it), it took Sony 5 years for the PS3 to stop being a loss leader. Neither have paid back the initial R&D costs.
Sure Sony and Microsoft have lots of nice shiny revenue, but anyone in business will say "Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity". The PS3 and Xbox360 have been huge money sinks for MS and Sony.
But I feel we're forgetting someone.... Someone who made a lot of money...
Oh hai NINTENDO.
Nintendo made a metric buttload of cash, paid off their R&D very quickly and never sold the Wii as a loss leader. More than that, the Wii was hugely successful. Released last and outsold Microsoft and Sony's combined console sales for 3 years. Why, because they didn't pretend the console was a PC. They made a console that for the first time since the Super Nintendo was actually fun to play. That's how you make money in the console world. Sony and Microsoft need to learn it's not about how powerful your console is, it's about how fun and accessible it is. It seems the PS4 and Xbox One have given this generation to Nintendo by default (as the Wii-U is a mediocre console).
To say that "consoles" are unprofitable is really to say "Microsoft and Sony consoles" are unprofitable. Nintendo consoles were very profitable.
Which is the bigger threat:
China spying on Austrailia now that it knows the floor plan of the intelligence agency?
Or them using the blue prints to rebuild it in China
That would be a really silly idea, as enemy countries already have the plans they know where all the vents and shitters they can hide in are.
Next move is to install some of the "other" Rheinmetall products on the drones and the grafitti problem will be solved fully automatically >:->
Me thinks the smallest Rheinmetal products would be far to heavy for small drones. Maybe you were thinking of Gloch.
We still dont know what you're on about.
"Germany's national railway company, Deutsche Bahn, plans to test larger, armed drones to try to reduce the theft of small drones introduced earlier. The idea is to use airborne infra-red cameras to collect evidence, which could then be used to prosecute vandals who steal property at night. A company spokesman said drones would be tested at rail depots soon."
Fixed that for ya.
Germany's national railway company, Deutsche Bahn plans to build bunkers and rally the survivors after the introduction and subsequent rebellion of armed drones.
Not yielding an inch, are they? Imagine the impact it would have on Subway.
Over here in Metric land they still refer to it as a Footlong(TM) despite multiple photos measuring a subway sub and the total length amounting to less than 11 inches.
Reference here
BTW, distances are measured in centimetres, metres and kilometres, exaggerations can be measured in inches and miles.
Not to mention that the imperial system is also from europe :)
I'd also like to point out that the US is not even that advanced.
The Imperial system was first defined in Britain in 1824 (weights and measures act of 1824), well after the US's independence. The US is still on pre-imperial measurements called US customary units.
That sure explains why they ask you for your phone number, email address, rewards card, and whether you want to apply for a new credit card (while 5 more people are waiting in line behind you) every time you check out...
That's not the POS system, that's the store management.
POS back ends are designed for fast transactions, it's the human and networking elements that tend to slow them down.
I always thought that, even if there is server-side protection for it already, the final "click this button to pay" button should get disabled when you click it the first time, preferably with a processing icon or the like. That way you provide a visual clue that something is happening if they are on a slow connection.
Nope,
The server is handling 100 transactions a second or more. All through SSH sessions, or worse yet a proprietary protocol. Front end terminals are usually connected to a server in another location over VPN (or worse yet, a WAN link with an open port at the server side) and this server may be across the country. In almost all of the Point Of Sale software I've seen error checking is done locally and there is next to fuck all of that happening anyway as the goal of POS systems is to move as fast as possible. The customer hates waiting for the cash register to do its job properly.
Bad idea for whom?
For the merchants accepting the payments, because they'll have to bear the cost of chargebacks on transactions that were otherwise perfectly valid but cannot be proven to have been authorised by the cardholder.
In addition to the fees for accepting the transaction.
Yes, a merchant pays a fee for accepting payment via card. Fees for accepting a credit card range from 1-5% of the transaction amount. Paying with debit (your own money) is usually under 1% of the transaction.
Personally I feel that people who are willing to contest traffic convictions should put their own car on the line.
Wow... if you can't see the problem this would cause in such a massively corrupt system, you are hopelessly lost.
And if you cant see that letting bad drivers go due to a technicality is bad, someone is already dead.
sometimes paying twice when they have used another payment method.
Why is the software even accepting a new payment? Shouldn't the balance already be 0 by then?
Because the software is shit.
Having dealt with a few Point Of Sale systems I can say that the acronym POS is no accident.
A lot of systems are just Windows systems with a program like Pronto Xi running on top. It's not unusual for these terminals to be running Windows XP. The back end is usually pretty good but the software really suffers on the front end and the front end is where we tend to get most of the errors.
I think "Makr Shakr" might not be the right name for an alcoholic beverage-related product. It sounds vaguely Arabic, and the Arab world still has Prohibition.
That's OK, we're planning to sell them the militarised version of this robot, the Mastr Blastr.
As long as it understands "Keep 'em coming".
Leave Bottle?
(Abort | Retry | Fail | Ignore)
so how does it know that that drink you just ordered did not get handed to your new friend?
It pre spikes it for you.