Yeah, great point. There's lots of assumptions here from American posters.
This depends heavily on the country where the processing is being made and in the bank that issued the card to the customer. The data is (in the cases I saw) passed down to the card issuer via an API and the issuer gets to decide what to do.
In Europe for example, CVV seems to be required, except when the merchant requests an exception, or when a pre-auth token is used. In Brazil I've had my card rejected because of a typo in my name, although "forgetting" the middle name was alright.
It's not as clear cut and as insecure as in America or as people are making it seem here.
Were you also using a third party credit card like in this case? Are you really 100% sure this freelancer would do the same that the person in your example did? Were you also doing months-long transactions totalling 12k? If this were with me, it would definitely raise red flags.
If the client is really speaking in good faith ("there was someone else's card in my UpWork account"), all this wouldn't have even happened in the first place, and the client would have noticed it himself.
And even if the same thing happened with Upwork, in this case the choice of verifying was completely taken out of the freelancer's hand entirely. There was zero possibility of him checking a name on a credit card.
If it were a direct transaction, the credit card company would be entirely out of the picture in case of fraud. A credit card company is not an intermediate in the same way Upwork is. Also, are we 100% sure Upwork is not trying to collect the amount from the client at the same time? Have them forfeited the fees?
> If the freelancer had taken a credit card directly, he would be in the same situation as now
Point is: it is impossible to claim that one thing or the other would have happened if the situation were different.
If the freelancer had taken a credit card directly, they would have been in the position to check with the card holder for proper authorisation beforehand, or to deny in case it looked shady.
Plus, the freelancer would be able to just sue the person they were working for directly, rather than having to sue Upwork, risking his ability to continue working there. If the freelancer didn't know client personally, it would have been impossible.
Back when people used checks, it was common for companies to either deny third-party checks or ask for the buyer sign the check over to someone else. This would put the buyer on the hook in case anything bad happened.
Marketplaces just removed all those protections that sellers could implement, while taking none of the risk.
Mostly public feedback (for only the good things, of course). Put their "good" code on code samples, documentation, code guidelines, tell the team "look everyone please do it like person X did here". It will surprise them in a positive way.
Also on PRs try to point to their own work as sample of how to do things better. This doesn't hurt the ego much, because the role model is themselves.
Also, I feel like most of the time this is an impostor-syndrome/perfectionism issue that also happens with other workers too, so HR can give tips on how to deal with those issues in a more sensible way and tell you what you can or can't say.
Amen to that too. That's probably the most complicated part of being a manager or tech lead. You have those amazing junior-almost-senior engineers that could be way more productive and yet deliver better code, purely by "doing less", but the over-engineering gets in the way. You know they could be top-contributors, so you don't want them to leave. But at the same time it's very tiring!
I noticed that they put a lot of their self-worth in the sophistication of their code, so it's difficult to criticise without making them feel bad. You need alternative methods of getting them to "see the light" and write code that's more understandable and maintainable by others.
Good points. But there's still the possibility to decompress during installation, which shouldn't be too hard even for 2-core computers, and is probably faster than downloading.
Also, according to the article they're packing all the locales. To me this seems like a bigger issue.
> You’d be surprised how under powered the consoles are in this regard
As another commenter mentioned, these games shipped with compressed audio for consoles. Also that generation of consoles have pretty good hardware codecs for audio (320 channels in the Xbox).
And MP3 was just an example of what I had here at my disposal. But as an exercise I converted my 4 minute MP3 to Vorbis. Decoding it converting to WAV took the same amount of time as before: about half a second on a very old and underpowered MacBook Air. Most of this time is spent writing 50mb to disk.
Not really: The Xbox has 320 independent decompression channels according to its marketing material, which is kinda powerful. The PS3 had similar tech in its Motion Decoder, but they didn't disclose how powerful it was.
And even if it had just a single decoder, there's always the possibility to pre-decode audio. Or just decode the music/film.
That doesn't really compute. Audio decompression is pretty light on CPUs these days.
It takes about half a second in a single core to decompress a 4 min MP3 to WAV in my 2012 MB Air, including writing to disk. In a gaming machine it will be way less. If anything, the audio could be decompressed and cached on demand, when loading levels, or even during installation.
Also sound cards do not participate on the decompression process. It's been CPU from the start, baring rare exceptions. Sound cards just receive raw PCM. There used to be hardware codecs but they're not really common, especially in consumer/gamer-grade soundcards.
This depends heavily on the country where the processing is being made and in the bank that issued the card to the customer. The data is (in the cases I saw) passed down to the card issuer via an API and the issuer gets to decide what to do.
In Europe for example, CVV seems to be required, except when the merchant requests an exception, or when a pre-auth token is used. In Brazil I've had my card rejected because of a typo in my name, although "forgetting" the middle name was alright.
It's not as clear cut and as insecure as in America or as people are making it seem here.