I once saw Gosling in an airport terminal waiting for a flight. He was consuming a large hot dog. I considered approaching him but decided to respect his privacy. When he finished his hot dog, he threw the messy wrapper directly onto the carpet. It was not a missed shot at the trash can, it was just blithely dropped on the floor. That's when I realized his work on automatic garbage collection had gone too far. I can't prove this, but I suspect that Bjarne would have discarded his own trash properly.
I stand corrected. The point of sale devices, the card association IT systems and networks, the bank IT and networks (a worldwide network that predated the 'net), the whole departments of people who support merchants, the fraud prevention measures, the training, the government and card association rules compliance--all integral parts of "the payment networks" are cost free. I should have reasoned backwards from a company's profit margins and realized that these infrastructure costs don't exist, and operating costs are an illusion. I should have also realized that the move into chip cards, the use of heavy-duty encryption, the rapid adoption of contactless payments products, the support for e-commerce in a world where identify verification can be a challenge, exposing the bank to untold risk, all are not innovations, they're just the cost-free hobbies of some rich bank persons.
Thank you for the enlightenment, you smecking genius.
I will now hang my head in shame for speaking out of turn after actually working on these systems for a quarter century and not realizing that it was so inexpensive.
The main issue banks are dealing with is the Congressional move to limit debit card interchange fees. I have spent a good part of the past 25 years working on systems that allow acquiring banks to claim the lowest interchange fee. It's not a trivial process, and acquirers and merchants make significant investments to improve things at the point of sale. They expect to recoup some of that investment by paying lower interchange fees. For a simple example, one of the earliest (circa 1985) distinctions was between electronically-capture and paper-keyed transactions. Electronic qualified for a lower fee because it was more secure, more accurate, and more timely. Then within electronic-capture, the networks began rewarding quicker deposits--deposit within 7 days and pay a lower rate, then 3 days, then 1 day. Now there are many, many (perhaps 100's) of fee programs worldwide, with each card network having its own rules and technologies. By crudely limiting fees to an unrealistic 0.12/transaction, Congress is destroying the marketplace effects that drive innovation in the networks. Banks are justified in an equally crude reaction: you take away our ability to price a service realistically over here, so I guess we'd better raise another price over there.
There is a stigma attached to middle-aged job hunters. Why hasn't he found his dream job by now--is he fickle and hard to please? Why isn't he already rich? Why does he need to work for me, the youngish owner/manager, instead of me working for him? Why can't I find any significant contribution to computer science in his background? How many sick days is this old dude going to take? Why doesn't he add /her after every him? How old IS that cell phone he's wearing in a belt holster? Is he sitting there thinking in COBOL while writing PHP for me? Will he infect my codebase with some alien thoughts from 1975? Why hasn't he affected a clipped accent so he can talk more quickly and hiply? Why is his irony hidden whereas ours is not? That's a lot of stigma to wade through on the way to finding out he's probably pretty good.
Ah, my mistake, I didn't notice the difference in name spelling. It was indeed John Harrop, not Jon Harrop, who appeared to vanish from Clojure after the licensing discussion. I should have made my point without reference to individuals.
"heavyweight" was my opinion of him based on his education, demonstrated ability, and publications, not anything to do with his way of representing himself. I found his comments very interesting, informed as they were by his extensive work in other languages.
From what I've seen, Rich does things to end controversies quickly rather than talk them to death. There was a religious war developing in the user group some time ago over licensing terms of products that were developed in Clojure. Rich didn't take a side, as I recall--he simply intervened after a few days and asked people not to carry on this discussion but to focus on technical issues. At least one heavyweight (Jon Harrop) seemed to disappear from the user group upon being asked to cut out the licensing jibber-jabber, but peace was restored.
Given Clojure/core potential earnings and the bigger bang for the buck of corporate sponsorships, requests for individual donations are not worth the ill-will that they apparently cause. I like his techniques for time management and choosing his battles carefully.
True. The black eye and split lip idea was wishful thinking. Perhaps a number of people showing up and glaring at the bully, or at least getting between him and the victim, would suffice.
I'm sure this will sound sexist as well, but the chivalrous guys far outnumber the jerks. If someone crosses the line, by all means call the cops but also consider making an immediate and loud protest, and you might get help from an ad hoc group of temporary big (or little) brothers. A black eye and split lip might be the quickest way to teach some of these guys the right way to act.
I worked for a bank long ago. Realtime authorization requests and responses went through an IBM Series/1 box--at the time a stack of computing power in a 6-foot cabinet. It locked up occasionally, choking off communications to/from our auths system. Back then computers lived in a secured super-cooled room and we programmers were forbidden to touch anything but the keyboard. SOP was to call in a tech to "fix" it, meanwhile Visa and MasterCard would "stand in" on our auths, at great expense and greatly increased fraud exposure. After a few late-night emergencies I realized that the tech couldn't even do diagnostics without rebooting the Series/1. And he never found a problem after rebooting. That was at least an hour of stand-in time down the drain, mainly spent waiting for the tech to get in there at 2:00 AM. So I developed the revolutionary technique of hitting the forbidden Blue Button myself instead of reporting an outage. Worked every time, and we almost never went into stand-in after that. Management thought a firmware upgrade had fixed the S/1, when it was just the ol' finger on the kill switch.
My employer allows napping, but it takes a bit of work to fit it into our agile development style. Obviously, it's poor form to nap during a scrum. You might miss something important, or you might awaken refreshed but with your name on all the crappy assignments. Most problematic is pair napping. What if they other guy/gal isn't sleepy? We try to pair based on skill level and circadian rhythm, but not all employers go to that length. When done correctly, pair napping is much more productive. The other day I was having a pre-nap daydream and my partner (I'll call her "Lisa" so you won't think it was a dude) suggested that I close my eyes. I did so, and I fell asleep a lot sooner. Sometimes a quick suggestion like that will spare you minutes or hours of wasted wakefulness.
Actually my first small, fast program used only the 360 command set because that's what my tech school had taught me. It had lots of moves of variable length data, but my "mentor" at work didn't clue me in about MVCL so I rolled my own variable moves by modifying code in flight. Yikes. Before writing the 2nd program I read more code and more books and learned the right way to do it. Both programs are still actively maintained 25 years later, and that first gets a lot of WTF responses when a new guy lays eyes on it:-)
Sheesh. I interrupted myself with my parenthetical expression and didn't finish the tantamount thing. Worse, now I don't remember what it was tantamount to.
IBM/370 Assembler with command-level CICS, probably because I used it early in my career on an app where every program had to be small and fast. Nothing since then has approached the sheer fun of all that bit-diddling.
COBOL is used quite heavily for all kinds of online apps using messaging (MQSeries and others), any big database you care to name, TCP/IP, and interfacing nicely with Java (among other languages). The apps are only as poor as the programmers who write them--COBOL is not inherently limiting, and is in no way stuck in a batch record niche.
Another bank/plastics mishap in my yute: one of my colleagues had a PIN pad on her desk. I ran my own credit card through it for a $1.00 charge, and it was approved. I tried a few more times, approved each time. Finally I got a "pick up card" response. I said, "Hey look, the test system wants to pick up my card." My co-worker: "That's connected to production, not test." Oops!
When I was a junior programmer at a bank, I had an assignment to change some reports in the plastics issue/reissue system. I used made-up cardholder names, such as Malaguena Splunt, Maxie Terwilliger, and all the Beverly Hillbillies. I ran my test, checked the reports, and thought I was done. Then a phone call from security informed me that my cards were ready. That's when I found out that running a test would actually result in test plastics being created. Since fraudsters could get hold of plastics, the person who created them was required to go to the plastics area (located in a vault with armed guards) and fill out a form for each plastic, including the name on the card and the purpose of the individual test plastic. I spent a very uncomfortable half day writing up forms for my cast of stupid names, under the watchful eyes of the security guards.
The guy making over $250K can easily wind up just as bankrupt as Scalzi's sad sack who stumbles around dropping his mac 'n' cheese on the floor (grip the bowl firmly, people). Saying the higher income folks just have a money management problem is just plain wrong, unless you want to also admit that the sad sack guy has a population management problem because he's gone and had kids he can't afford to feed/clothe/educate properly. Both have made choices they can't support, and I think both are entitled to bitch about the end result (briefly; and then go do something about it).