Smart cards or Stupid?

[CaddmannQ]

. . . They charge you for the new hardware, charge you for the new software, and still found a way to charge you for choosing not to "upgrade"...

Your industry must be a bit behind the engineering industry.

In order to even get our major software now you have to be a "licensed subscriber", and you pay by the hour, by the month, or by the year, per user, depending on your situation and what you can afford.

You can't actually buy the software anymore and use it forever. You buy a license & and unless you become a subscriber it just expires. Unless you are a subscriber you can't update at all.

We've got eight guys and we're paying aproximately $30,000 a year for software licenses.

Now the government can't require us to buy any particular brand of software, but they can specify the format of data they will accept. (Most of our work is checked & approved by the state of California.) Therefore you must use the software that makes that format or by translators you generate that format from another program.

Translators are notoriously unreliable and out of date when you need them. We have suffered Financial losses because clients sent us translated data that did not all come through in the correct form.

 

[LAZY EYED SNIPER]

It was a roll-out issue for us. The regs changed overnight and it took some time to implement the changes on site in 1300+ locations...

 

[CaddmannQ]

I thank God that I only have to support eight users!

 

[Daryll]

Lucky you... I'm a System Manager for a multinational research company, and the data collection software I manage has 750 users across Europe, the Uk and the US.

We pay $350,000 annually to the US software company for maintenance support..!! (calculated by number of licenced users and which software modules we have active)

 

[CaddmannQ]

Up until last year, each of my eight users had admin permissions on the whole network, except the payroll and accounting machine.

Every one of them got some very personal Hands-On training too. This made my life easy and I actually spent most of my time doing engineering and not managing the system.

 

[Scoop]

The question in my mind was "what happens if I pull my chipped credit card out too soon" which I typed into the Google entry box.
The following site contained a paragraph that totally surprised me:
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2015/07/credit_and_debit_cards_with_em.html
What if people take their chip cards out of a payment terminal too soon?
Best case, the transaction won't go through and they'll have to try again. Worst case, if the transaction is already in process and the card is removed, it could damage the chip in the card or the card reader in the payment terminal.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
The banking system can be damaged by pulling my credit card too early????!

Well, I'm getting closer.
I checked out at the grocery store w/ my chipped card. At the end of the tally I put my thrust my card into the slot and keep my hand on it waiting to hear the "beep" and see the words "Remove Card" on the screen. I notice on the checkout screen that the discount I had asked for had not been applied so I asked the clerk about it. She said "Oops, I forgot... I'll enter it now."
So automatically [not maliciously] I pulled the card out so I wouldn't get double charged. The screen on the reader changed to "System Error" for a couple of seconds and then went blank.
I figured, @John A. , this is what we've been waiting for! But alas, no. She did some sort of reset and the screen prompted me for another insertion and the transaction was completed

I'm getting closer.