online lottery

[luxiana]

just wondering: gambling is prohibited in Singapore (for now)

what if gambling is free?? no financial risks for the participants.

[sundaymorningstaple]

just wondering: gambling is prohibited in Singapore (for now)

what if gambling is free?? no financial risks for the participants.

sorry luxiana, just think about what you wrote.lllllll

If it's free with no financial risk then it's not gambling. If it's a lucky draw and they have to pay for a phone call or pay for an sms it's gambling. If it costs nothing at all then how long would it last? If someone just wants to give away money for nothing just give it to me!

[luxiana]

hi SMS,

I am perfectly sane
i am working on another website and we'd like to promote a lottery (free) for some customers. no money at stake for them. we'd give away a couple of prizes only.

[dingsea]

sounds like luck draw?

[luxiana]

yes: online lottery but free to the user so no financial risk

[dingsea]

then should be ok
just curious, have viewed ur blog, i remember in my previous company they were using Excel, seems it's powerful, ur working on this?

[luxiana]

been working in a bank for a couple of years.

Excel is the backbone of everything there...

structurers build there products using excel,
marketers import data from bloomberg/reuters into excel
all calcualtions are made using excel

it's a versatile and flexible tool that you can use in combination with a database.

the only limitation I know that is a problem is the number of lines/columns you are allowed to use. the new version has tackled the problem as now you can use 65k columns and 1 mio rows...


looking for a webdesigner that can program in php so my excel skills are not relevant now

[dingsea]

why don't try oursource the programming to others

[luxiana]

did that on my website: outsourced to india.
a disaster.

then I wanted to hire someone in singapore. I was amazed by the price they asked for the job to be done (as I know what it implies to program as I used to program myself a couple of years ago).

maybe this was the "white boy factor"

funny story: I approached a guy, NUS alumni. he told me he started a company 2 years ago with another student of NUS. pricing seemed fair and timeline was ok.

Then I asked a couple more questions (and I wanted to meetup with the programmer) until he admitted he wanted to outsource the job to some Indian programmer (telling me that he managed to find the "right one"...)


It's pretty hard to find good webdesigners / programmers here...

I found 2 kinds:

- those who think that, when they know how to store/retrieve data from the database and manipulate pictures on photoshop it is enough for being a "programmer"
- those who think that because they know a bit more, they are unique and ask for thousands for stuff that they have already done. (like selling a session script for $500 when it takes 10 minutes to write. even better you can download a free one on internet)

[Winxkid]

Singaporean mentality:

There are good ones but do not commit to their work or care about Company's interests. They just wanna get job done, get paid, and that's it. Well-fed and spoilt by Government. They knew that as long as they had good working record, they would have no problem getting another job even if current job blew up.

unless....

You are able to find companies whom designer/s are bosses themselves or big big company who will probe into poor production quality.


Cheerz - the balls are round

[dingsea]

Well-fed, haha, yaya agree:)

luxiana why don't u try outsource to china?

[luxiana]

already been dealing with india and vietnam...
bad experience in both cases. so i'll wait a while before I try my luck with china.

outsourcing a website also leaves you the problem of the maintenance and the upgrades.

and rare are the companies using programming/coding standards (even in Singapore apparently)

this is pretty amazing because now there are tools to code nicely like Ruby on rails or Cakephp. the job of a programmer shouldnt be messy nowadays.

and yes: loyalty to your company doesnt seem to be a value that is well spread here (not just singapore). but what can you expect from people who know that they can find another job in case the milk turns sour?