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Search - "monthly fee"
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client: the math on this investment calculator you made is wrong.
me: ok, how is it wrong?
client: one of our salesmen sais it not calculating correctly.
me: that's fine. i just need an example, or the corrected formula to use.
client: on this other website we put in the same information and it comes out different.
me: ok, let me investigate... this other site adds a fee every month so the output is different. If i turn that off the calculations are the same. would you like to add a monthly fee field?
clients: no, the calculator is working how we want then.
repeat 5 times at 3 month intervals.
client: the interest calculator is broken again. didn't we just fix it?
me: it was never broken. your people just can't math.3 -
I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.
So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..
So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.
In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.
Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.
At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.
Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.
As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.
Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.
This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.
My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.
During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.
For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;
He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.
I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.
Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.
The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.
Fuck customers.6 -
more buzzword translations with a story (because the last one was pretty well liked):
"machine learning" -> an actual, smart thing, but you generally don't need any knowledge to use it as they're all libraries now
"a bitcoin" -> literally just a fucking number that everyone has
"powerful" -> it's umm… almost working (seriously i hate this word, it really has a meaning of null)
"hacking" -> watching a friend type in their facebook password with a black hoodie on, of course (courtesy of @GeaRSiX)
"cloud-based service" -> we have an extra commodore 64 and you can use it over the internet for an ever-increasing monthly fee
"analysis" -> two options: "it's not working" or "its close enough"
"stress-free workplace" -> working from home without pants
now for a short story:
a few days ago in code.org "apscp" class, we learnt about how to do "top down design" (of course, whatever works before for you was not in option in solving problems). we had to design a game, as the first "step" of "top down design," we had to identify three things we needed to do to make a game.
they were:
1. characters
2. "graphics"
3. "ai"
graphics is literally a png, but what the fuck do you expect for ai?
we have a game right? oh wait! its getting boring. let's just sprinkle some fucking artificial intelligence on it like i put salt on french fries.
this is complete bullshit.
also, one of my most hated commercials:
https://youtu.be/J1ljxY5nY7w
"iot data and ai from the cloud"
yeah please shut the fuck up
🖕fucking buzzwords6 -
Hello again, everyone. I've been busy with all the paperwork at my ship (will make a post about it later) but for now, I'll bore you with another story (not navy one, fortunately) to justify my slacking off.
And this story... is the story on how I got into ITSec. And it is pretty damn embarrassing. It all began when I was 16. I was hooked on battleknight.gameforge.com, a browser game. My father had just had ADSL installed at our home, and the new opportunities before me were endless. Well...
After I've had my fill with the porn torrents and them opportunities dwindled to just a few dozens, I began searching for free games, and I stumbled on that game. I played a lot, but as a free-to-play game, it was also pay-to-win. I didn't have a credit card, so I paid for a few gems with SMS messages. Fast forward a couple of years, I got into the Naval Academy. A guy came in to advertise something (I think it was an encyclopaedia or something - yes, wikipedia wasn't a thing back then) and to pay for it, we could apply for a credit card. So I applied. And I resisted the temptation for a year.
Note: prepaid wasn't that known where I live, so using credit cards was the only way for online transactions.
So I made 1 transaction. Just one. After a couple of months my monthly report from the bank came, showing a 2.5$ (I think) transaction on Paypal. I paid no mind, thinking that it was some hidden fee. Oh boy, I shit you not, I was THAT much of an idiot. Six months later, BOOM!
600$ transaction to ebay via paypal. You can imagine all those nice things that came to my mind. In any case, the bank accepted my protest that I filed at their central offices and cancelled the transaction. I promptly cancelled my card, destroyed it right there for good measure, and got to thinking... what the fuck just happened?
As many people here, I am afflicted with a deadly virus, called curiosity. I started researching the matter, trying to figure out how. And, because I didn't like black boxes and "it is just like it is" explanations, I tumbled down the rabbit hole of ITSec. I soon found out that, not only it was possible, but also it was sometimes EXTREMELY easy to steal credit card info. There are sites, to this very day, that store user info (along with credit cards info) IN FUCKING CLEARTEXT. Sometimes your personal, financial and even medical info are just an SQLi away.
So, I got very disillusioned on many things. But I never regretted it. It may cause me to age prematurely and will kill me of stroke or heart attack one day, but as I still tumble down the ITSec rabbit hole, I can say with confidence that
I REGRET NOTHING
Plus, my 600$ were returned, so look on the bright side :)1 -
Can someone help me understand?
I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!
An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.
But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.
Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.
Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.
"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.
"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.
"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)
This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!
"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.
"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!
"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...
The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.
Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!
I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...12 -
I wouldn't be here on GitHub everyday if it wasn't for these green tiles that attracts not only employers, but yourself. Wish the monthly was still a little bit cheaper for us outside the US.6
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The company that I work for has recently recruited a team for Web Development, so they don't have to pay a monthly fee to the previous team who designed their website.
They have over 3000+ products in the old website, and no logical way to import them to the new website. The old team was asking for 300$ to give them an API which would return the product details in an XML format.
Obviously, paying that amount of money wasn't logical for a dying website, so the manager decided to hire someone to manually copy the content from the old admin panel to the new one, that is until I stopped him.
My solution? Write a simple web scraper to login to the old panel and collect data. Boom! 300$ saved from going to waste.
Now, the old team found about this and as much as my manager was happy, they were quite angry. So they implanted a Google reCaptcha to prevent my bot from scraping the old panel.
I spent about 20 minutes, and found out once you're logged in to the old panel, the session is saved in a cookie and you are no longer greeted by a Captcha.
So I re-written a small portion of my bot, and Boom! Instant karma from manager. We finished publishing the new site, and notified the old team, only to see the precious look on their face. Poor guy, he thought I was a wizard or something 😂😂
That's what you get for overcharging people!
TL;DR: Company's old website team wanted to overcharge us writing an API to fetch 3000+ records.
Written a basic web scraper to do the same job in less than an hour.3 -
300 global variables.. THREE HUNDRED FUCKING GLOBAL VARIABLES?
Are you for real?
Now let me check the line numbers again..
hmm.. line 97 to .. yep line 410, just a few new lines to seperate some of them or.. group? Idk, I've given up on trying to understand those.
Now you may ask "But ThatPerlDeb, where did you see this and what was the intention?"
Low and behold, take a chair and I may explain this to you.
First of all: Fuck the dev that wrote this!
Second: Fuck all the devs that kept up with this practice or whatever you want to fucking call this!
Now, the application is our POS system that our customers can use for a monthly fee (That this piece of garbage even requires payment is disgusting) but anyway..
The global variables sometimes are declared for labels, sometimes for some frames, sometimes just for random values to be there.
We're using Perl for the POS system and Perl ain't the best at OOP, so in the dev's defense I can understand why you'd use a few global variables, but not fucking 300!! FUCK OFF WITH THIS BULLSHIT!!
So now I'm going through this torture slowly but surely deleting globals and putting them into some sort of scope and always MANUALLY test if something broke. Again, this company sucks ass and there's nothing that could even be considered a "unit test" or something like that, so fuck that, too.
After two hours I've brought down the count of global variables to about 260, so there's progress being made..
But then, there comes more!
"But how???" you may ask, and you're right, I've asked that myself.
Now to resolve the global stuff in each file some of the initial globals are used, we got about 20-30 files which do different stuff, all fair and square, at least there was an attempt at seperating functions but god this mess is so fucking fucked up. So in order to "safely" delete a global variable I have to check if any of the variables are used in another file, and if so, in which scope and how they are used.
Spaghetti would be a compliment for this fucking disgusting piece of utter bullshit.
Let alone the code quality of this "code"
Indendation? Dafuq is dat?
Scope? Nah, we got everything global anyway
Function size? Well, some are 5 lines, some are 900 lines, who cares anyways, right?
I'm so fucking glad once I leave this shithole, for real.6 -
I think up dumb shit too. I should be a CEO...
https://msn.com/en-us/news/...
Logitech is my favorite mouse vendor. This is a stain on their reputation. This and the AI shit they are marketing. Why the fuck do companies ruin their products? I actively avoid subscriptions and companies that offer them.12 -
Why do payment portals never work correctly?
I just wanted to pay for a service (monthly fee, but you can pay manually), and after the very last step, the fucking site just got stuck at a loading circle. 🤨 Now I have no idea if the payment got through or not.5 -
I need you guys' help.
As mentioned earlier in one of my rants, I trade stocks part time, make a little money. But I am too tired from my full time work. So it is badly affecting my health. My broker is providing us with an API and docs at a monthly fee to develop software to automate trades.
I posted a job on Upwork, a few freelancers bid but their price was way beyond my budget.
Hence I decided to take up programming.
I was initially inclined towards C#, but seeing as how complex it is, I was thinking of going for python. Do you think it is a reasonable decision?8 -
Continuation of: https://devrant.com/rants/2784730/...
So, the potential client was in contact with me again, after our initial discussion ended with "okay, we'll try to figure out more clearer requirements", and then they procrastinated (as they confessed).
Now, they want a "simple portfolio type website with testimonial videos, a contact form and a hidden section with more videos for logged in customers"
... Okay, why don't you just... I basically linked them a bunch of service providers who have ready templates that they can just subscribe to for some monthly fee and have even someone at those providers' make the work for much less than I'd do it from scratch. My suggestions were ignored... and when I told them my best estimates of how long I'd take me and hoe much it would cost, the eventual reply was:
"Our CEO's going to think about it. He knows some dude who'd make a WP site for free.."
... well, that's going to end well.
Tbh, my correspondent did add that the "dude" is known to be extremely unreliable, so I might end up with this project after all.
I'm already ruing my decision to try my hands at some freelance work. I hate dealing with clients, so why do I even...?4 -
I think another intriguing job asides programming is engineering (*for some*). A week has past and I've been on the hike assisting my beloved brother on his contracted engineering job while I am less occupied. The job is based on 🗼Tower analysis and It's quite risky as you'd have to climb up to 56 meters high just to take readings of antennas, and fix some other stuffs. The only thing I find intriguing about this job is his love for it, funny enough he also thinks I love the job too and I guess I'm guilty for his thoughts (*Sorry bro, I love the job for you not me*).
With my little experience so far on my *new brotherly job* I noticed the most hectic task isn't going up and down the tower taking readings but at the end of all operations, he'll have to gather the values and snapshots he took while on the tower to prepare reports on msword & excel for the other buttwags at the office (or home I guess)
then archive and sends via mail. Seeing this lengthy process I was forced to ask why he wasn't using any reporting tool like Jotforms or any other equivalent and I was willing to look up some recommendations for him, his reply was: "I'm already used to this form of reporting, its what I was trained with and what the company provided, nevertheless a friend of mine suggested something of such weeks back but I would have to pay monthly fee for its usage which is quite on the high side and I don't think I'd prefer that."
Sounds convincing but not enough, okay here is another deal: You use an android phone right? and at my office we work on system automation (*basically does not know what I do for a living probably thinks I'm a hacker the illegal one*), how about i design you an android app for you to capture the tower data and a PC software for you to auto generate the msword & excel reports, I can get this ready for you in less than 5 nights (*I've got less task on my desk, and was willing to take the timeout to prepare the solution that he needed, all I needed to hear for a kick start was an "Okay" just to be sure he wants it*) I suggested and re-assured but up to this point he still declined my offer and is willing to stick with his current reporting pattern (*Me died*).1 -
Question: How do you guys charge your clients? I have had an hourly rate for quite sometime now, but never have I been able to use it since I do not know how to calculate it.
What I usually do is charge a fixed fee and charge on top of a feature is requested,
or I charge a monthly fee for long term contacts and charge on top if any additional feature is requested.
I want to try out hourly charge but since most of my clients are online, I do not know how it will work since the client can believe that I am simply adding additional hours or delaying work causing the hours to increase. (Most online clients are new to my services, unlike clients I meet offline, online can be less trusting)8 -
Why doesn't WordPress add membership system by default. It is frustrating to keep adding plugin after plugin to achieve something in WordPress. In the early days of WordPress plugins used to be free. Then developer started to charge for it per install, then they made it monthly fee which is just rip off.2
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Just a thought, would you pay a monthly fee to manage your domains? I've been using DNSimple for about 2 years now, hands down, one of the best I've used but just recently they started charging 5 USD per month for the basic plan :/1
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Prediction:
1. Broadcast (free) TV will consist 100% of live programming
2. All series will be bought and available on streaming services like Amazon, Netflix, Disney+
3. Cable channels or TV episodes can be bought individually (iTunes, Google Videos, etc), basically they will be their own streaming service (it actually that already exists, IPTV? just not in the US?)
Why:
Everyone will use DVRs to record TV shows so can skip all advertisements
Therefore only way to get viewers eyeballs for ads is live programming where you need to cast votes which affect the outcomes (supposedly)
Streaming services obviously don't have this problem and don't need to run ads since there's a monthly subscription fee that more then covers cost.2