Hey! What's up?

Hi Everyone.
I am currently studying TOEFL and plan to SAT together so that I can give them both together.
I was thinking I might have to fully concentrate on these two and leave any other work.
I will be searching for some Engineering. I want to go there from beginning.
I need some information on how you people managed their housing?

History of Credit Cards


These Days Credit Cards are getting popular day by day. I was researching about credit cards. And the history of credit card is really very interesting. Here I have collected few information about the history of Credit Cards.

History
The concept of using a card for purchases was described in 1887 by Edward Bellamy in his utopian novel . Bellamy used the term credit card eleven times in this novel.

The modern credit card was the successor of a variety of merchant credit schemes. It was first used in the 1920s, in the United States, specifically to sell fuel to a growing number of automobile owners.

In 1938 several companies started to accept each other's cards. Western Union had begun issuing charge cards to its frequent customers in 1914. Some charge cards were printed on paper card stock, but were easily counterfeited.

The Charga-Plate was an early predecessor to the credit card and used during the 1930s and late 1940s. It was a 2 1/2" x 1 1/4" rectangle of sheet metal, similar to a military dog tag, that was embossed with the customer's name, city and state (no address). It held a small paper card for a signature. It was laid in the imprinter first, then a charge slip on top of it, onto which an inked ribbon was pressed. Charga-Plate was a trademark of Farrington Manufacturing Co. Charga-Plates were issued by large-scale merchants to their regular customers, much like department store credit cards of today. In some cases, the plates were kept in the issuing store rather than held by customers. When an authorized user made a purchase, a clerk retrieved the plate from the store's files and then processed the purchase. Charga-Plates speeded back-office bookkeeping that was done manually in paper ledgers in each store, before computers.

The concept of paying different merchants using the same card was invented in 1950 by Ralph Schneider and Frank X. McNamara, founders of Diners Club, to consolidate multiple cards. The Diners Club, which was created partially through a merger with Dine and Sign, produced the first "general purpose" charge card, and required the entire bill to be paid with each statement. That was followed by Carte Blanche and in 1958 by American Express which created a world-wide credit card network.

Bank of American created the BankAmericard in 1958, a product which eventually evolved into the Visa system ("Chargex" also became Visa). Master Card came to being in 1966 when a group of credit-issuing banks established MasterCharge. The fractured nature of the US banking system meant that credit cards became an effective way for those who were travelling around the country to move their credit to places where they could not directly use their banking facilities. In 1966 Barclaycard in the UK launched the first credit card outside of the US.

There are now countless variations on the basic concept of revolving credit for individuals (as issued by banks and honored by a network of financial institutions), including organization-branded credit cards, corporate-user credit cards, store cards and so on.

In contrast, although having reached very high adoption levels in the US, Canada and the UK, it is important to note that many cultures were much more cash-oriented in the latter half of the twentieth century, or had developed alternative forms of cash-less payments, such as Carte bleue or the EC-card (Germany, France, Switzerland, among many others). In these places, the take-up of credit cards was initially much slower. It took until the 1990s to reach anything like the percentage market-penetration levels achieved in the US, Canada or UK. In many countries acceptance still remains poor as the use of a credit card system depends on the banking system being perceived as reliable.

In contrast, because of the legislative framework surrounding banking system overdrafts, some countries, France in particular, were much faster to develop and adopt chip-based credit cards which are now seen as major anti-fraud credit devices.

The design of the credit card itself has become a major selling point in recent years. The value of the card to the issuer is often related to the customer's usage of the card, or to the customer's financial worth. This has led to the rise of Co-Brand and Affinity cards - where the card design is related to the "affinity" (a university, for example) leading to higher card usage. In most cases a percentage of the value of the card is returned to the affinity group.

Now I have a New Game?

Well Guys The GameSpot Scored it 9.0
The Good
  • Absolutely amazing atmosphere and visual design
  • Lots of character customization options to play around with
  • The best thing I enjoyed was the fish.
  • The Waters are really amazing.
  • Great voice cast really sells the storyline.
The Bad
  • Suffers from some fairly nasty technical issues on some PCs, up to and including a total lack of in-game audio
  • Sometimes same kind of lot of enemies makes boring.
  • Lack of death penalty keeps things fun, but also keeps things a little too easy.

Well Guys its Bioshock. First When I first heard about Bioshock I thought it was some kind of boring sci-fi game and usaully there are zombies like enemies and I thought that its better not to have such game. Then few of my friends who had already completed playing Bioshock recommended me to play. Then thinking that it will be a waste of money I bought it!

At first there were some quotes and all. And What a game? The game starting point is a mysterious plane crash later, you're floating in the water, apparently the lone survivor, surrounded by the flaming wreckage of the aircraft there is a big light house on a tiny island just at the edge of your view. Well we have to swim to that light house and there is a big door there. Well first what I thought was I would have to climb to the top to call for help. But AMAZINGLY we have to go down. The place was really very spooky. Down to a hall there's a small submersible called a bathysphere waiting to take you underwater.

After catching a breathtaking view of what's below, you're sent into the secret underwater city of Rapture. Masterminded by a somewhat megalomaniacal businessman named Andrew Ryan, this city is driven by its own idea of total freedom, with capitalism completely unhindered by governmental meddling and science unhinged from the pesky morals of organized religion. Sounds like the perfect society, right?

Its story is a sci-fi mystery that manages to feel retro and futuristic at the same time, and its characters, who convey most of the story via radio transmissions and audio logs that you're constantly stumbling upon as you wander around. All of it blends together to form a rich, interesting world that sucks you in right away and won't let go until you've figured out what, exactly, is going on in the undersea city of Rapture.

That's all that I know now. I will post more about it when I will know it myself.

Ads Link