Happy birthday, Microsoft Money: Here's a cashpoint calamity for Windows and .NET Bork – our column of reader-submitted unhappy displays – is celebrating 30 years of Microsoft Money this month with an example of why Windows, .NET and ATMs do not make good bedfellows. Spotted by Register reader Sam Thompson in the delightful UK city of York (home of the Jorvik Viking Centre and the excellent National Railway …
I still use MS Money to this day to manage my finances across lots of accounts.
Although I have to say, I only use it for the bare minimum downloading statements from banks and showing upcoming bills and balances, so I can plan a month in advance.
The only problem I have is that banks interpret the ofx file incorrectly and has resulted in me complaining multiple times for them to fix it. It seems each new internet banking version they come up with, they break it as they have no idea how to test!
That's no joke.
My local bank had an OS/2 based ATM for a long time, then they switched to an ATM that looks much like the borked one in the article.
The fancy "new" ATM has an unpleasant metallic clink feedback sound in response to button presses. Unfortunately, the beep is delayed by about 300ms, which is jarring.
Transactions take much longer on the "new" ATM. I don't know if that's by design to encourage me to look at the pretty ads for longer, or if it's just incompetence. The old ATM was: walk up, insert card, enter PIN, hit "fastcash", wait about 3sec for money to spit out, grab cash, grab card, walk away. Took about 20-25 seconds max. New machine takes at least twice as long.
Interesting that you should mention the 300 milliseconds - it's a very important time interval, it seems, in brain processiong and recognition. Presenting a sound linked to an event older than 300 ms puts a strain on one brain's processes and leads to all sorts of complicated distraction and unnecessary cognition responses. In other words, it not only brings no positive effect, it's distracting in most unfortunate way, when one should be concentrated and oriented in their dealings. Shame the ATM people have no idea about it.
If you're interested in this topic, search for "event related potentials", "P300" and "bci" (or brain-computer interface). While it was very interesting to do my bachelor thesis on early cognition and detection of remembered images, to this day I envy those whose research concentrated on measuring the influence of blood levels of alcohol on one's brainwaves. They seemed much more enthusiastic about their, ahem, measurements.
We used to use one or other of these a decade or so back to keep our household accounts. (Or to be precise Mrs 6 did). Then the respective companies killed them off. I guess they didn't make any money for them.
MSMoney posed a problem. The version we had needed an update to read the files produced by a slightly later version. Which seemed to have downloaded from the MS site. Once we lost the ability to d/l that the programme couldn't transfer to a new PC. (And I have no idea why we didn't, or whether we could save that patch locally and install it as required.)
Still a bit cross about this though.
I have to say that I never used MSMoney's "advanced" facilities, such as investment planning, etc., but I still use it even now, on Windows 10.
When the software was discontinued, MS issued the 'sunset' edition, which I downloaded & installed - and it fulfils my requirements completely.
These days, I'm seriously considering switching over to Linux and ditching Windows completely, so I'm looking around for a reasonable alternative that will be able to take on an MSMoney database stretching back to 1996...
(That last bit is predicated on me being able to install Linux on my PC at all. I keep hitting BIOS problems at this stage.)
Still using Money 97 for the basics for which it excels (sic) at.
Just using an XP virtual machine on OSX/Linux and it runs fine. Data file is visible to the VM through a shared folder from the host OS - which will back it up automatically via time machine/dropbox etc.
I did look around for something similar and even with the advanced stuff I never found anything that came close to it's functionality and ease of use.
I wrote an app for my Palm III... which I then ported to my Nokia N810, and have now ported to my Android phone. The earliest archived transaction is dated 1999.
The cool thing is Android uses Sqlite3, so it's all in a SQL database.
(edit: I guess for values of "ported" which is actually "totally rewritten" but keeping the same data.)
It looks as is maybe they are working to make it look like when you've won at Solitaire (the animated bouncing cards).
Question is, what event(s) will instigate the animation when they have perfected it? Simply withdrawing money? Emptying the carousels? Or a Jackpot hack of the machine which displays when you are frantically catching all the money in your briefcase?
Having once carried out first-line maintenance on ATMs in the UK as part of a past job, you'd be surprised (or perhaps unsurprised) how many of the machines out there to this day still run Windows 2000 or XP (for Embedded Systems). Not so much of an issue since they aren't connected to the public Internet but still clearly a great source of bork.
Was in the industry. In the old days many ATMs used OS/2 1.3 well into the 2000's. That thing was rock solid. You could beat it with an Ugly Stick and it would stay up. Got a little long in the tooth and they upgraded most to all these fancy ones with their newfangled features. And wobbly legs.
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