If I read this article (Settlement Seen as Changing Ways Consumers Use Debit Cards) correctly, after the settlement between retailers and Visa/Mastercard takes effect, retailers will be free to choose whether or not to accept debit cards at all, and if they accept them, whether to require a PIN as the “signature” or an actual signature.
By using a PIN, the retailer pays mere cents for the transaction, by accepting a signature the retailer pays much more.
On the other end of the transaction though, the banks that hold the cards apparently are charing consumers up to $1.50 per transaction if they use a PIN to sign the transaction, instead of a signature.
So, even with the settlement, the banks get their $1.50 (or more), only now the retailer isn’t forced to fork over the money.
So, why would anyone who’s minding their money use a debit card?
If you put the purchase on a credit card, and pay that card off every month, you end up getting a little interest on the float in your account between when you made the purchase and when you pay your credit card bill (assuming your credit card has the typical billing grace period).
e.p.c. posted this at 10:54 GMT on 2-May-2003 .
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About me...
I am a thirty-something I/T hack.
I’ve been doing Internet stuff since the late 1980s and computer stuff since the late 1970s.
That’s not supposed to impress you, you’re supposed to take pity on someone who’s spent far too much time playing with computers.
I went to "Allegheny College"
(where I studied Arthurian Literature and Pascal) and
"Carnegie Mellon" (where I studied technical writing, interface design, and comp.sys.mac.*).
From 1990 through 2001 I worked at "IBM".
From 1994 through 1999, I ran www.ibm.com.
No, really I did.
Honestly.
Look, I can see you don’t believe me, so dig up your copies of InternetWorld from 1995-1998 and look for the Fortune 500 webmaster survey...I’m in there.
No, really.
Ok, well, you can look for my old ibm.com/~epc page at Archive.org (there’s something weird going on with Javascript and images on that page that I don’t understand, nor care to debug).
While at IBM I did all sorts of interesting things, ranging from writing some books for MVS, RACF, and CASE/390, and, well, helping to put IBM on the Internet and world wide web.
I worked on a few Olympic Games web sites (Atlanta, Nagano, Sydney) and the Deep Blue web sites (still smarting over that).
I designed some pretty nifty web hosting infrastructures if I do say so myself.
Really.
Ok, fine, write me off as another .com dropout.
See if I care.
Phhhthttbtbt.
In 2001 I took a sabbatical since I was, well, rather burned out.
I returned in September 2001 as a “consultant” (meaning: they had no idea where to place me).
After spending two months flying around the East Coast and sitting in rooms playing Snood (because they didn’t want me to do anything either, just bill your time to the customer please), I decided I had better things to do with my life and left for netomat, inc. where I ran the technology and software development team.
I left netomat in 2002, because, you know, the worst job market in a century is the best time to quit a paying job.
I currently do some consulting and take care of "Frisket", our Golden Retriever
(I have to admit this, Frisket’s web site gets far more traffic than this site).
Interests
These are in no particular order:
- Wireless technologies (bluetooth, wifi)
- web logs and ideas derived from them (content syndication, things you can do with XML,).
- Complex I/T problem analysis and solutions
- Web site infrastructure design and operations, problem management, etc.
- emerging technologies and their impacts on communications
Current projects
- Writing So you want to be a webmaster? (hey, it’s a working title, ok?).
About my time served as webmaster of www.ibm.com and "IBM" in general.
- Writing a novel.
Everyone should try to write one.
If you’re lucky, this one won’t get published.
- Exploring "Bittorrent"
- Exploring RSS and RDF
- Reacquainting myself with the BSD variants of Unix
- Some light Java work
This site
This site is geared towards friends and family and other colleagues.
If you don’t fall into one of those categories then you are a welcome guest, but don’t complain that this doesn’t meet up to some self-inflated standards of what a weblog is supposed to be.
This site is the follow-on to http://epc.editthispage.com which in turn was a follow-on to both http://bluelogs.webahead.ibm.com/epc and http://ibm.com/~epc (bluelogs died out of non-participation by IBM employees, ibm.com/~epc died when I left ibm.com in 1999).
This site is currently run using "Radio Userland", however I plan to change over to "Moveable Type" soon.
Radio was kind of interesting for awhile, until I tried customizing it.
I couldn’t for the life of me figure out the most simplistic scripting (you can see the result in various “macro” errors throughout the site).
The markup is supposed to be "XHTML" compliant, though I haven't verified it lately.
The CSS is based on a Radio version of a "Moveable Type" style, though I've completely rewritten the "HTML" gorp and modified most of the "CSS" to my own taste.
I don’t have comments enabled intentionally...If you want to let me know what you think, send me a note (the little envelope icon thing at the top of each day) or add a comment to your weblog (the catch being that radio.weblogs.com doesn’t run a "trackback" server).
e.p.c. posted this at 12:07 GMT on 2-May-2003 .
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