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Magicband Charging down WDW Wide
- Thread starter kverdon
- Start date
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
Trust me those computer systems are even more fragile than you think, Let's just say I'm one of the guys who gets the call when everyone else has failed to fix the issue.
EDIT: Fixing broken IT infrastructure systems is the business I'm in.
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GhostHost1000
Premium Member
As fragile as their websites? God help us all
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
I've been in so many enterprises who almost needed to close their doors because of IT failures, Yes god help us all in many cases the businesses needed to sell out to competitors because their IT infrastructure was beyond repair.
There is a cynical quote attributed to Eric Raymond 'If Carpenters built buildings the way programmers write programs, The first termite to come along would destroy civilization' Unfortunately that's all too true with many systems across all industry verticals.
I'm more likely to trust old mainframe code written in the 70's and 80's because it was indeed designed to run for decades and is usually coded in COBOL which while EXTREMELY verbose is actually fairly easy to understand and usually was well documented by the team which built that,
Compare that to code written by the Agile method by a 'virtual team' there is generally little or no permanent documentation produced.
Yes I've led agile teams but I've always had scribes documenting what the team was doing and documenting the modules so that later the system could be maintained/debugged by others because my teams always had in mind licensing the code to others with the same needs.
GhostHost1000
Premium Member
I work in IT for a Fortune 500 company as well so I feel your pain. Lots of pressure to save money and IT is usually most affected with cuts etc.
AEfx
Well-Known Member
To be fair, it's not much different than when it used to go down with KTTW. When this happens, aside from the charging the big problem is the Meal Plan users. So basically, they record the info and put it through later. They just let the guests go about their day.
It is theoretically possible for someone to be able to "scam" more with the magic bands, I guess (as they don't have printed info on them like the KTTW cards) - but just when they let people go before without knowing if they had enough meal credits or not, it would have to be an incredibly lucky person who planned on a scam ahead of time that just happened to coincide with a system outage. In any case, that's the "chance" Disney takes when it happens.
While there are many reasons to dislike the Magic Band system/mentality/wastefulness, again - this really isn't much different than what has always happened with their in-house systems and how they affect guests.
Now, what would suck out loud would be if the "use the band to open your room" thing happened - that would be a PITA, given how far so many rooms are away from help at the front desk.
AEfx
Well-Known Member
It's sooooo true...for some things, the good lord invented a command line interface and F-keys for a reason...
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
Plus systems like IBM's RACF allowed system security down to the keystroke level
GUI's are great for the naive or infrequent user, a 'green screen' system allows an experienced user to work much faster a GUI tends to limit productivity on data entry operations.
JoeCamel
Well-Known Member
Maybe they are "upgrading the system" during operating hours. Stranger things have been done.
TheGuyThatMakesSwords
Well-Known Member
Good Lord.... BOTH? All I can say - this is why we carry cash, and one (unsigned) blank check in our wallets (both wife & husband) ....
Poor back end system....
. You can slap an HTML interface over it - it's still the same poor, non-integrated 1979 stuff, SCREAMING for an honorable death .
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
Holy Carp! - Normal CC systems down after a MB+ failure not long ago!
Sonconato
Well-Known Member
So those that did have cash, did they have to pay? If so, something doesn't seem right.
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
Agree, However it's largely Disney's fault for pushing a cashless payment system and many guests take Disney at their word and DONT have cash - what is Disney supposed to do when they cannot accept payment in forms guests are encouraged to bring?, What Disney SHOULD have done is comped everyone - But it's Disney so they took the only payments they could and comped the rest.
As to my previous post where I said the outage cost REAL money, This one certainly cost millions as Disney was unable to accept CC's bet a lot of people abandoned purchases today. Not Good Disney, Not good at all.
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
The switch from the legacy reservation system to LILO the week before christmas one year immediately comes to mind...
Doesnt it seem like they could eliminate soooooooo many issues if they made it all a cash only system? Since they love eliminating jobs, they could easily chop off a few hundred if not thousands. All the money and time saved on transaction fees, processing, IT, billing systems, etc. And the best part of it all....they would have the money right then and there! All the ridiculous junk that Disney guests put up with, I dont see how announcing that you must pay with cash only would stop people from going. I know it will never happen. Just sayin'
JoeCamel
Well-Known Member
You are right, never gonna happen. That is not how money for goods/services is exchanged today. I like a card, wish it had to have a PIN to go along with it.
Mad Stitch
Well-Known Member
Are computer networks so taken for granted that the credit card processing backups are no longer around? I cant remember the last time I saw one of these.
Are computer networks so taken for granted that the credit card processing backups are no longer around? I cant remember the last time I saw one of these.
It is becoming rare(if not already) to find cards with raised lettering on them, so this method became obsolete.