if I had a support line to call the first few days I was trying it out for the first time, I would have burned through the price of a cheap laptop in no time trying to get a few of my odder doo-dads to connect. I mean, honestly, when was the last time their support department had to tell a Windows customer "please apply these five patches to your kernel source v.xyz and recompile?"
Well, I would assume Dell selling a laptop with Ubuntu on it will have all the native devices working. That leaves connectivity to USB / cardbus. I agree that they could run into a lot of issues with wireless cards, but most laptops sold these days have wifi built in. Beyond that, 99% of drivers don't require kernel patches - drivers can be built as modules, and don't even require a reboot to install. Some drivers are even user-space (libusb).
Some devices you are just screwed with such as scanners / webcams. Yeah, I may be able to ebay a 5 year old scanner, or find a $1000+ scanner that works, but I think you would be hard pressed to find a current model 95% of the market for scanners.
If you have had 0% and actually got charged prime, you got ripped off TOTALLY. I have had several true zero percent car loans over the years (which is the only kind I'll take.)
If you can work a deal, by all means do so. Gerry's Furniture Mart may be happy to do such a deal, but you will be hard pressed to find a national retailer like Home Depot that will. They WANT you to do the zero percent deal because their experience and history shows that enough bozo's pay late to result in a very tidy profit.
Whitelists allow certain calls to go directly through. Non-whitelisted calls get additional processing which may or may not allow the call to go through depending on a number of variables.
If you are running asterisk and don't want to be disturbed at night, use time based routing. It's quite simple. Between 9pm and 7am, I have it setup so you have to press 5 to get through unless you are on the "family" whitelist. This allows emergencies to get through, and zero automated calls. I also require non-whitelisted calls to press 5 at all times. This has stopped all automated calls. The wording of the message strongly discourages non-personal calls from continuing. End result is that I have peace and quiet when I want it, zero wrong number calls, etc. It's easy with *99 after a call to add a new callerID to the whitelist.
Furthermore, Dell business support and consumer support are TOTALLY different groups. It's quite probably that the business group has no ability (training, etc.) to support Ubuntu boxes.
Are you high? Even a pidling SAVINGS account would make you money on a zero percent loan. It's very simple here... Let's see if you can keep up.
Let's say I am buying product X, which costs $5,000. The store is offering zero percent financing for a year. The product costs $5000 no matter if I take the financing or pay cash. Instead of paying $5000 up front, I take the offer. I take that $5000 and invest in a 1 year CD that has a 5% return. At the end of the year, I have earned $250 from the CD. I pay off the $5000 owed to the store. I net $250.
Why does the store offer this zero percent financing? Couple of reasons...
There are dullards out there that won't pay it off in a year and then end up paying the 21% finance charge and end up paying ~$6329 for that $5000 product. There are enough dullards out there to make up for me not paying a dime to get that $5K loan.
Second, Store A gets my business instead of Stores B, C, or D. It can be a difference between sale and no-sale. Think of autos. Toyota may offer me 0% so I buy a Toyota instead of a Ford, GM, or Nissan product. Of course if you are swift, you negotiate price before you negotiate financing... End result is that you pay the same amount for the product, you just don't have to pay all at once with the 0% loan and can instead invest.
Zero percent means that I am paying NO INTEREST AT ALL. What is it that you are having trouble understanding? The zero percent part???
If I buy anything under a few grand I'll pay for it then and there instead of using store finance or a loan, because in a year it will have already cost me less.
Except when stores / loans are offered at zero percent. When they are offered at Zero, this allows me to invest what I would have paid and actually make money. Zero percent loans / credit is awesome - I'll take free money any day. What bites people in the ass on these things is NOT paying off in time. If you fail to make the timely payment, you can get dinged for 21% or whatever the rate is.
The OP eventually wants a mortgage. He will get a shit rate unless he has an established credit score, which means that he MUST USE credit. If you are trying to build a credit score, you need revolving history (credit card) and you need installment loan history (like a car loan.) For a mortgage, you need several years worth (at least 5) to get that best rate. It's not enough to have a card and not use it. You need to use it. One of the thing that shows up on the credit report is your available credit line, AND the highest amount you have had as a balance. You can't get your credit line increased unless you use the card. I use one of my cards for business travel. It is "normal" to charge up $15K or so in a month, which gets paid off every month. That card has a credit line high enough to buy a house.
So back to my original statement - use those zero percents. The old saying that "It takes money to make money" is Very Very true. You can easily earn 15% or more by wisely investing what you would have spent.
Indeed. iMac's start at $999, mac Mini $599. iMacs are ready to go, mac mini needs a mouse, keyboard, display, which you can probably use your old PC ones. IMHO the iMac is a better deal (built in iSight too.) Claiming it costs $2K though is disingenuous - especially since that is twice what it really costs. While you can buy a cheaper dell, when you start comparing specs the Macs are quite competitive.
You are comparing Oranges and Sherman Tanks. IBM delivered REAL hardware that costs real money to make and Microsoft delivered, um, exactly nothing. IBM lost real money. Microsoft MAY have lost out on some profit, if the buyer would have purchased windows anyways. That's why software "piracy" isn't theft, it's copyright infringement.
God your lucky. Every time I change my underwear, my apartment key stops working and I have to call the landlord to reactivate my lease and get a new key... Plus any time I flush the commode, it does an anal probe to validate me to ensure that I am a Genuine Tenant. Now talk about a PITA!
I'd also like to see weight on the chart. All fit in a pocket just fine unlike the phones of yester-year, but some phones are just bloody heavy and don't sit well in a pocket.
Talk time is great and all, but if you can swap batteries it's not all that important. If you have sacrificed features such as a keyboard (I prefer a slide-out keyboard), memory card slots, replaceable battery, etc. for the small size, then you have also sacrificed usability and utility.
Different release model. MS calls incremental updates "new operating systems" and simple changes the GUI and make some other incremental incompatible changes. They do so less often, so that old OS's get REALLY stale, but it's really no different.
Think of Windows NT as OS X 10.0-10.1 Win2000 as 10.2-10.3, XP as 10.4, and Vista as the "yet to be released" 10.5.
Exactly. I have no interest is seeing a whole documentary on the problems with healthcare. We already KNOW that there are problems with healthcare and we know what those problems are. We even know how to fix most of them. The problem is that we (and congress) need to be WILLING to fix it. With the influence that the entire healthcare industry has (which includes insurance companies, providers, the legal industry (malpractice), pharmaceutical companies, and groups like AARP) on politicians, I don't expect the problem to go away anytime soon. It will just get much much worse.
It's a joke son... But seriously, once you have been married for a while and socialize with other married couples, the women generally congregate separately from the men. This isn't a universal truth, but seems to happen more often or not. Also, it is generally regarded as inadvisable to hit on another mans wife especially while yours is with you, and her husband is there too. I have never EVER been to an adult party where the guys sit down and play video games...
Bullshit. Verizon is not just selling residential lines, they are selling the entire wireline business. Read the press release. Yes, part of NH has FIOS (not sure what the hell that has to do with Maine, but whatever...) and there have been questions but no answers as to what will happen to NH FIOS customers...
Maine does have a pretty good fiber backbone, but the last mile is the issue. Please show us the press release or any other info for Standish or any other FTTP effort.
Ah, but you see, this company has a product, and therefor there MUST be a need. I am sure that they will spend millions convincing easily swayed politicians to buy it and pass the legislation needed.
Keep in mind that Maine has NO next generation broadband. No FIOS. And it won't get it, EVER. Verizon is selling off it's Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine lines to Fairpoint, whose motto is "128K DSL is the wave of the future." The closest FTTP type deployment in Maine is in Lewiston / Auburn via Oxford Networks, who's idea is to use fiber to deploy 2M MAX service (which is slower than available cable / DSL). Business users only have a 1M option. The brilliant Oxford Networks execs are running around wondering why nobody is buying...
So yeah. Go Maine. Unfortunately it doesn't mean jack shit because the available broadband is pathetic.
Maybe because sending / receiving messages / pictures is a costly thing to do with most plans in the US - especially if the other person is on another network. It's insane that most plans still charge you for incoming calls!
On the other hand, you could offer 3G service in every town with a population greater than 2000 in the US because the population density allows it. In the US however, it's rare to have 3G coverage in cities smaller than 100K. I don't expect 3G coverage in the middle of nowhere. I do in population centers with greater than 2K people though.
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if I had a support line to call the first few days I was trying it out for the first time, I would have burned through the price of a cheap laptop in no time trying to get a few of my odder doo-dads to connect. I mean, honestly, when was the last time their support department had to tell a Windows customer "please apply these five patches to your kernel source v.xyz and recompile?"
Well, I would assume Dell selling a laptop with Ubuntu on it will have all the native devices working. That leaves connectivity to USB / cardbus. I agree that they could run into a lot of issues with wireless cards, but most laptops sold these days have wifi built in. Beyond that, 99% of drivers don't require kernel patches - drivers can be built as modules, and don't even require a reboot to install. Some drivers are even user-space (libusb).
Some devices you are just screwed with such as scanners / webcams. Yeah, I may be able to ebay a 5 year old scanner, or find a $1000+ scanner that works, but I think you would be hard pressed to find a current model 95% of the market for scanners.
If you have had 0% and actually got charged prime, you got ripped off TOTALLY. I have had several true zero percent car loans over the years (which is the only kind I'll take.)
If you can work a deal, by all means do so. Gerry's Furniture Mart may be happy to do such a deal, but you will be hard pressed to find a national retailer like Home Depot that will. They WANT you to do the zero percent deal because their experience and history shows that enough bozo's pay late to result in a very tidy profit.
Whitelists allow certain calls to go directly through. Non-whitelisted calls get additional processing which may or may not allow the call to go through depending on a number of variables.
If you are running asterisk and don't want to be disturbed at night, use time based routing. It's quite simple. Between 9pm and 7am, I have it setup so you have to press 5 to get through unless you are on the "family" whitelist. This allows emergencies to get through, and zero automated calls. I also require non-whitelisted calls to press 5 at all times. This has stopped all automated calls. The wording of the message strongly discourages non-personal calls from continuing. End result is that I have peace and quiet when I want it, zero wrong number calls, etc. It's easy with *99 after a call to add a new callerID to the whitelist.
Furthermore, Dell business support and consumer support are TOTALLY different groups. It's quite probably that the business group has no ability (training, etc.) to support Ubuntu boxes.
Are you high? Even a pidling SAVINGS account would make you money on a zero percent loan. It's very simple here... Let's see if you can keep up.
Let's say I am buying product X, which costs $5,000. The store is offering zero percent financing for a year. The product costs $5000 no matter if I take the financing or pay cash. Instead of paying $5000 up front, I take the offer. I take that $5000 and invest in a 1 year CD that has a 5% return. At the end of the year, I have earned $250 from the CD. I pay off the $5000 owed to the store. I net $250.
Why does the store offer this zero percent financing? Couple of reasons...
There are dullards out there that won't pay it off in a year and then end up paying the 21% finance charge and end up paying ~$6329 for that $5000 product. There are enough dullards out there to make up for me not paying a dime to get that $5K loan.
Second, Store A gets my business instead of Stores B, C, or D. It can be a difference between sale and no-sale. Think of autos. Toyota may offer me 0% so I buy a Toyota instead of a Ford, GM, or Nissan product. Of course if you are swift, you negotiate price before you negotiate financing... End result is that you pay the same amount for the product, you just don't have to pay all at once with the 0% loan and can instead invest.
Zero percent means that I am paying NO INTEREST AT ALL. What is it that you are having trouble understanding? The zero percent part???
If I buy anything under a few grand I'll pay for it then and there instead of using store finance or a loan, because in a year it will have already cost me less.
Except when stores / loans are offered at zero percent. When they are offered at Zero, this allows me to invest what I would have paid and actually make money. Zero percent loans / credit is awesome - I'll take free money any day. What bites people in the ass on these things is NOT paying off in time. If you fail to make the timely payment, you can get dinged for 21% or whatever the rate is.
The OP eventually wants a mortgage. He will get a shit rate unless he has an established credit score, which means that he MUST USE credit. If you are trying to build a credit score, you need revolving history (credit card) and you need installment loan history (like a car loan.) For a mortgage, you need several years worth (at least 5) to get that best rate. It's not enough to have a card and not use it. You need to use it. One of the thing that shows up on the credit report is your available credit line, AND the highest amount you have had as a balance. You can't get your credit line increased unless you use the card. I use one of my cards for business travel. It is "normal" to charge up $15K or so in a month, which gets paid off every month. That card has a credit line high enough to buy a house.
So back to my original statement - use those zero percents. The old saying that "It takes money to make money" is Very Very true. You can easily earn 15% or more by wisely investing what you would have spent.
I'm sorry, you have to wait longer in a discussion before you invoke Godwin's law. It's too early to degenerate!!!
How about writing to your PUC instead? You will have better luck there than whining to a magazine or here.
Indeed. iMac's start at $999, mac Mini $599. iMacs are ready to go, mac mini needs a mouse, keyboard, display, which you can probably use your old PC ones. IMHO the iMac is a better deal (built in iSight too.) Claiming it costs $2K though is disingenuous - especially since that is twice what it really costs. While you can buy a cheaper dell, when you start comparing specs the Macs are quite competitive.
You are comparing Oranges and Sherman Tanks. IBM delivered REAL hardware that costs real money to make and Microsoft delivered, um, exactly nothing. IBM lost real money. Microsoft MAY have lost out on some profit, if the buyer would have purchased windows anyways. That's why software "piracy" isn't theft, it's copyright infringement.
I would be VERY surprised if IBM didn't write this off years ago anyway.
That has to be done at time of delivery. You can't accept the shipment, wait a few months, then decide you don't want it.
God your lucky. Every time I change my underwear, my apartment key stops working and I have to call the landlord to reactivate my lease and get a new key... Plus any time I flush the commode, it does an anal probe to validate me to ensure that I am a Genuine Tenant. Now talk about a PITA!
I consider the Palm Treo to be on the heavy side, and yeah, I don't really care for holsters in general.
I'd also like to see weight on the chart. All fit in a pocket just fine unlike the phones of yester-year, but some phones are just bloody heavy and don't sit well in a pocket.
Talk time is great and all, but if you can swap batteries it's not all that important. If you have sacrificed features such as a keyboard (I prefer a slide-out keyboard), memory card slots, replaceable battery, etc. for the small size, then you have also sacrificed usability and utility.
Different release model. MS calls incremental updates "new operating systems" and simple changes the GUI and make some other incremental incompatible changes. They do so less often, so that old OS's get REALLY stale, but it's really no different.
Think of Windows NT as OS X 10.0-10.1 Win2000 as 10.2-10.3, XP as 10.4, and Vista as the "yet to be released" 10.5.
Exactly. I have no interest is seeing a whole documentary on the problems with healthcare. We already KNOW that there are problems with healthcare and we know what those problems are. We even know how to fix most of them. The problem is that we (and congress) need to be WILLING to fix it. With the influence that the entire healthcare industry has (which includes insurance companies, providers, the legal industry (malpractice), pharmaceutical companies, and groups like AARP) on politicians, I don't expect the problem to go away anytime soon. It will just get much much worse.
It's a joke son... But seriously, once you have been married for a while and socialize with other married couples, the women generally congregate separately from the men. This isn't a universal truth, but seems to happen more often or not. Also, it is generally regarded as inadvisable to hit on another mans wife especially while yours is with you, and her husband is there too. I have never EVER been to an adult party where the guys sit down and play video games...
Bullshit. Verizon is not just selling residential lines, they are selling the entire wireline business. Read the press release. Yes, part of NH has FIOS (not sure what the hell that has to do with Maine, but whatever...) and there have been questions but no answers as to what will happen to NH FIOS customers...
Maine does have a pretty good fiber backbone, but the last mile is the issue. Please show us the press release or any other info for Standish or any other FTTP effort.
Ah, but you see, this company has a product, and therefor there MUST be a need. I am sure that they will spend millions convincing easily swayed politicians to buy it and pass the legislation needed.
Keep in mind that Maine has NO next generation broadband. No FIOS. And it won't get it, EVER. Verizon is selling off it's Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine lines to Fairpoint, whose motto is "128K DSL is the wave of the future." The closest FTTP type deployment in Maine is in Lewiston / Auburn via Oxford Networks, who's idea is to use fiber to deploy 2M MAX service (which is slower than available cable / DSL). Business users only have a 1M option. The brilliant Oxford Networks execs are running around wondering why nobody is buying...
So yeah. Go Maine. Unfortunately it doesn't mean jack shit because the available broadband is pathetic.
Maybe because sending / receiving messages / pictures is a costly thing to do with most plans in the US - especially if the other person is on another network. It's insane that most plans still charge you for incoming calls!
On the other hand, you could offer 3G service in every town with a population greater than 2000 in the US because the population density allows it. In the US however, it's rare to have 3G coverage in cities smaller than 100K. I don't expect 3G coverage in the middle of nowhere. I do in population centers with greater than 2K people though.