Costa Rica Expertise LLC

Workplace conversations waste time and money

By Garland M. Baker
Special to A.M. Costa Rica

Give an inch, and they’ll take a mile.

Offer a hand, and lose an arm.

These management axioms also have to do with cellular telephones. Cell phone abuse is rampant among employees.

Even someone who still does not have a cell phone is not immune from the increased numbers of them. In a movie, a restaurant, a church, or a meeting, people are using the technology and being a disturbance.

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By Garland M. Baker
Special to A.M. Costa Rica

Everyone knows what a test pilot is. How about a technology tester? In this day and age, it is almost the same thing. "Pilot program" is the term used today.

In Information Technologies, development stage engineering is broken down into three parts: The alpha stage is the beginning stage of a technology when it is in a very rough form. The beta stage is an active debugging or problem-solving phase, when a technology is heavily tested in preparation for its market introduction. The stable stage is when a technology is ready.

About five year ago, GrupoICE was looking for testers for advanced Internet also referred to as ADSL, short for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line, a technology that allows more data transmission over existing copper telephone lines than is normally possible. ADSL supports data rates from 1.5 to 9 Mbps when receiving data (known as the downstream rate) and from 16 to 640 Kbps when sending data (known as the upstream rate).

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By Garland M. Baker
Special to A.M. Costa Rica

This article is about SINPE. No, it is not a new virus, disease, or pill. It is what is happening to online banking in Costa Rica; a new system that lets anyone transfer money into any account in the country.

SINPE, or Sistema Interbancario de Negociación y Pagos Electrónicos is the main payment system for the central bank. It translates into English as the "interbank electronic payment system."

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Accounts are open book to investigators

By Garland M. Baker
Special to A.M. Costa Rica

This is a scary story about a phantom called Transparency that is creeping secretly into everyone’s life. Thanks to Transparency, individual and corporate bank accounts are becoming open books for tax investigators from all over the world.

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Superfast Internet in limbo for weeks

By Garland M. Baker
Special to A.M. Costa Rica

The phrase "Internet Hell" is a slogan to give fair warning to users of the Internet in Costa Rica.

The phrase also offers consolation to all who experience difficulties with the Internet here. Most expats in this country could write this piece themselves, each with his or her own twist.

High technology is wonderful. The Internet is wonderful. But there is a dark side. Computers and the Internet play with basic physiological buttons in everyone. They are very similar to nasty additive drugs.

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